Arts & Letters

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Arts & Letters

JAMINI ROY

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

EDITOR’S NOTE

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amini Roy was drawing his free-spirited deer while Tagore was writing his lyrical poems and plays about an uplift into a realm where knowledge unites people rather than dividing them. It was still an undivided India under British rule. Roy decolonised his art by abandoning western forms and rejuvenating indigenous motifs.

More outraged voices such as Nazrul loudly demanded freedom without resorting to symbols and allegories.

But Tagore envisioned a deeper reality where freedom of the mind would be pursued more diligently than administrative freedom.

Otherwise, he knew, the shadow of the British administrators would continue to haunt us like a ghost.

Almost seven decades after the British had left, that ghost has become more real in our life, making its presence ever so strong. Our

INSIDE

Tagore envisioned a deeper reality where freedom of the mind would be pursued more diligently than administrative freedom education system, which produces and disseminates knowledge, retains the colonial structures initiated by the colonisers for their own financial and cultural gain.

This issue of Arts & Letters explores different aspects of this legacy through an interview of an intellectual whose work and activism make us hopeful about an alternative platform where the mind can be freed of a colonial past.

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Where the mind is valiant Rabindranath Tagore Where the mind is valiant and the head held high Where knowledge flows; where walls of homes Won’t create fences and split the world into enclaves, Confining people to cubicles in their backyards; Where words stream from the depths of the heart Where currents reach their channels naturally Where in realm after realm, here and everywhere, Incessant endeavour leads to attainment of goals— Where the sand dunes of petty rituals Won’t block paths of justice permanently And split one’s manhood into smithereens; Where you always guide thought and action And lead all into the realm of happiness;

Interview with Azfar Hussain

O Lord, striking fiercely with your hand— Let India wake up to such a heavenly land!

Translated by Fakrul Alam

Fakrul Alam is professor of English at Dhaka University. He is an eminent translator, writer, literary critic and researcher. He is the editor of The Essential Tagore (Havard Univeristy Press, 2011).

His translation of Jibanananda Das’s poems was brought out by University Press Limited (1999).

At present, he is translating Tagore’s Gitanjali.

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Book Review

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

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16

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

Arts & Letters

INTER

Alternative education for trans n Rifat Munim

So in the US, if you want to get an education you have to be in debt.

The burden of student loans in the US is massive; it’s a nightmare for students.

So, we thought we should start something that will run counter to the ways education has been commodified. We consider this resistance education; like resistance literature this is resistance education.

We have so far offered many courses at both undergraduate and graduate level, some of which were offered free and some at the minimum cost so students from all over the world could enrol.

There are different kinds of lectures and seminars that GCAS organises. All of these lectures and seminars are on topics that actually matter to students and that bring out the question of oppression and resistance.

But the most interesting aspect of this organisation is that it is a movement. All the seminars and lectures and other activities that GCAS organises are part of the movement against an unjust society; it’s a radical research organisation and a coalition of writers, activists, philosophers and theologians who are on the left and who believe in the possibilities of transforming the world. Activism is the key to our organisation.

Azfar Hussain is a prominent Bangladeshi theorist, critic, poet, translator and activist who writes in both Bangla and English. He is vice president of the Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) and GCAS Professor of English, World Literature and Interdisciplinary Studies. He is also associate professor of Liberal Studies/Interdisciplinary Studies at Grand Valley State University in Michigan, USA. He has published hundreds of academic and creative pieces, including translations from several non-western languages. He has written on a wide range of topics in such areas as “third world” Marxisms, critical theory, cultural politics, political economy and theories and practices of interdisciplinarity.

This is also an era of unprecedented crisis of capitalism.

Dialectically speaking, capitalism is not having a very easy time either

In a recent interview, he talked at some length about why an alternative platform for education, such as GCAS, is of utmost importance to challenging the capitalist system which, in the United States, has turned education into a commodity. As the talk shifted to Bangladesh, with a focus on the colonial practices still ingrained in the country’s education system, he put the scene in perspective and called for a critical engagement with the way English as a language and English studies as academic subjects are used and taught. Excerpts:

How did you get involved with GCAS and why do you think it is an important platform for alternative education?

It was while working on a book about education that I heard of the

One aspect of global capitalism is to reinforce the colonial agenda through the education system.

Pedagogies in the countries with a colonial past retain the colonial structures initiated by the colonisers. What is your take on this?

GCAS. I came to know that it was not just a school but also a movement. I learnt that its aim was to oppose the commodification of education and offer the kind of education that would enable students to think critically about the world we live in and how to change it. So the philosophy and the mission of the school attracted me. At that time I was teaching at the University of Michigan and got involved with education-oriented activism against racism and capitalism. So at one point I was invited to serve as a faculty member of GCAS and later on, as its vice president.

I should also point out that this organisation is relatively new, experimental and still evolving. By now it has been able to attract quite a number of students who are com-

mitted to the cause of justice and the rights of the oppressed in the US and also outside of the US.

In an era when capitalism is extending its grip more and more every day, do you think an organisation like GCAS can survive and evolve?

This is certainly an era of unprecedented expansion of capitalism as also of unprecedented commercialisation of education. At the same time, however, this is also an era of unprecedented crisis of capitalism. Dialectically speaking, capitalism is not having a very easy time either. There have been resistance, movements, riots and uprisings against capitalism throughout the world in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008.

We at GCAS believe it was not only a financial crisis but also a crisis of capitalism as a system. The history of capitalism is not only a history of its expansion but also a history of its crisis. So, we are living in a time when capitalism is afflicted and ridden with crises, and one of the fundamental crises is the crisis of education.

Now it’s very clear that education in the advanced zone of capital, namely the US, is becoming very expensive. Just look at the budget cuts the US has been experiencing continuously over the past 20 years. Education has been commercialised to the point that it is no longer a right but a privilege.

One of my former students wrote a brilliant article whose title was “To be an American is to be in debt”.

Without addressing the core structure of oppression and domination, such as capitalism, imperialism/ colonialism, racism and patriarchy -- which are profoundly interconnected -- we cannot have a meaningful and transformative education that aims at bringing about changes in the world.

Colonialism has a history and that history has not stood still. We nonetheless think that one cannot talk about colonialism without talking about its relationship to other structures of domination like capitalism etc.

In the United States, the commercialised model of education is, in one way or another, directly or indirectly, colonialist. There is always this idea that the US is superior. Although there is this thing called multiculturalism, it basically underlies an assimilationist approach that others will assimilate into their official cultur-

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Arts & Letters

SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

RVIEW

sforming the world al paradigm. We have challenged this idea of multiculturalism.

Although multiculturalism emphasises the need for bringing together and respecting all cultures, it does so not by addressing but by erasing the existing, unequal power relations which are already obtaining among different cultures. If you do not really address these unequal power relations, then you are basically reinforcing the status quo and we challenge the status quo. So basically, colonialism and racism inform and inflect the current educational practices in the US and for that matter in “the first world”.

As far as decolonisation is concerned, I personally take Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s work very seriously. As for the other GCAS members, each in their different ways is alive to the issues of colonialism and how it affects the education system. Furthermore, GCAS organised a very significant lecture by Ngugi; it also sponsored a lecture by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak who is one of the GCAS members.

Now I’d like to shift the focus on Bangladesh. You are familiar with the cultural, social and political dimensions of this country where education has been commodified in much the same way as the US. The colonial practices, ingrained as they are in the education system, are more visible here.

How would you assess the Bangladesh situation?

There is no doubt that Bangladesh has been fully integrated into the world capitalist system. But then, we should not overlook the fact that capitalism has not evenly developed all over the world. So despite its unprecedented and aggressive expansion, capitalism has remained unevenly developed across the world and to speak of Bangladesh is to speak of this uneven development of capitalism. In Bangladesh, the war-ravaged economy got further devastated by the ruling class’s continuous plunder of people’s resources. In other words, our economy has not so much been production-oriented as it has been pillage-oriented. This is a result of the unevenly developed capitalism that I’m trying to call attention to.

Now if we look at the education system, what we see is a system fraught with division. We have three streams of education -- the English medium, the Bangla medium public education and the madrasa system, and there

are unequal power relations and exchanges among them. Taken together, they produce and legitimize and intensify this already class-divided society. In the context of Bangladesh the question of education is a class question as people have asymmetrical access to education and lots of poor children have no access to education at all.

Another crucial aspect of our education is its colonialist nature.

It is possible there are some oppositional currents as colonialism is not absolute. But our education system is predominantly colonialist in nature and so are our bureaucracy, army, police system and judiciary. So colonialism remains to be a fundamental question economically, politically and pedagogically. The history of colonialism has not come to an end, you can call it neo-colonialism, but it is colonialism all the same.

Just mark the ways in which we approach history. There is tokenism in the way school textbooks approach history. When it comes to the Liberation War, students learn about some middle-class individuals and heroes.

This is precisely the colonialist way of talking about history; colonialism celebrates the heroes at the expense of common people. Students hardly learn about the women and the working class people who had contributed to the war. Thus history itself is incomplete and distorted. There have been frequent interventions in the writing of history. So I don’t think that our children have access to the kind of education that will make them well versed in our history.

This is an interesting critique of the mainstream, Bangla medium education. But in English medium schools and madrasas, the curricula do not include anything about our ancient or modern history or the Liberation Struggle.

Indeed. In our English medium institutions and madrasas, students do not learn anything about native history. They know more about others than they know about themselves. I think this is extremely dangerous. This is the typical colonialist approach -erase native history. If you want to cripple and paralyse a nation, then make them forget their history. To quote Frantz Fanon, this is the perverted logic of colonialism -- empty the natives of their brain.

So this emptying process is visible in these two mediums. This is a

GCAS AT A GLANCE

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I’m not against learning the English language.

I believe we need to learn English. But at the same time, I believe, we need to be critically aware of the politics it entails. To say that English is an international language is not enough

serious problem.

As far as English medium schools or studies of English in colleges and universities are concerned, English is emphasised to the point that other languages are ignored. Hardly any teacher in English medium schools, barring a few exceptions perhaps, knows or is aware of how English continues to be the language of the powerful, the language of money, the language of capital.

Now this is a very serious issue surrounding language and before going any further, I must clarify my position that I’m not against learning the English language. I believe we need to learn English.

But at the same time, I believe, we need to be critically aware of the politics it entails. To say that English is an international language is not enough. We already know that English is an international language and hence, we should learn this language. But I’m also interested to know what this international language does in Bangladesh. It creates and intensifies the divide among our people. So we have to be critically aware of English in order to be able to use it significantly.

So, do you think a restructuring of English vis-a-vis our education system is necessary?

It is absolutely necessary and it is possible too. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o provides us with some directions in this regard. In his article “Teach me to be me” he says we can reorient ourselves towards English. We should not start with “English national literature” and then come to native culture and literature; we should rather start from our literature and then relate our literature to the outside world.

I personally think comparative literature can substantially help us in restructuring English stud-

ies in Bangladesh. While we teach British authors, we should always discuss their work in relation to our land and literature so that students can relate their works with ours. For instance, while teaching Wole Soyinka, I find it more relevant to compare his poems with Kazi Nazrul Islam’s. So I think a politically engaged comparative literature can help us.

We have become used to a Eurocentric mode of comparing our writers to the European ones. For example, we cannot talk about Nazrul unless he is compared to Byron, among others. In so doing, we overlook how our own cultural resources are misappropriated. So I think we should politicise comparative literature, not by following the Eurocentric method but by initiating a new method that will continuously call attention to the unequal exchanges that are there between “the first world” and “the third world” literary productions. In other words, this is a move in the direction of decolonising comparative literature. We also need to decolonise English Literature and indeed, the English language itself. l [Azfar Hussain’s books include The Wor(l)d in Question: Essays in Political Economy and Cultural Politics (Dhaka: Samhati Publications, 2008) and The Politics of Sites, Subjects, and Scenes: Micronarratives and Essays (forthcoming).

He is currently working on several books that include Towards a Political Economy of Land, Labor, Language and the Body; Decolonizing Comparative Literature.

His forthcoming Bengali books include Samrajjobad o Sanskritik Rajniti (Imperialism and Cultural Politics); Pothon: Shobdo o Noishobder Rajniti (Readings: The Politics of Sounds and Silences); and Chinho Bhashey Obosheshey (Signs Float At Last)]

he Global Center for Advanced Studies (GCAS) is a fully licensed, non-profit and privately funded institute of higher education in the State of Michigan. Located in Wyoming, Michigan, it is governed by a board of directors consisting of the founder/director, a vice president, a treasurer, a researchers’ union representative and a director of student affairs.

It was founded in 2013 by Creston C Davis (currently professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at GCAS) as an institute of higher learning based on critical theory and the concept of a “debt free education grounded in the principles of democracy and the commons”.

In 2014–15, Alain Badiou took up the role of honorary president at GCAS. Azfar Hussain joined GCAS as its vice president in 2013 and is still working in that capacity. On July 16–19, 2015, a GCAS conference called “Democracy Rising World Conference 2015” took place in Athens.

In autumn 2015, GCAS partnered with two institutions of higher education in Europe -- the Alma Mater Europaea and Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis (ISH).

The GCAS has already opened a number of institutes: Critical Philosophy; Critical Media and Cultural Studies; Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences; Policy Studies; Critical Theology; Psychoanalysis; Global Studies; Political Economy; and Critical Pedagogy.

The GCAS academic structure consists of both online and in-residence courses. The faculty features some of the most prominent academic professors in the world including Joan Copjec, Simon Critchley, Enrique Dussel, Arif Dirlik, Henry Giroux, Richard Kearney, Antonio Negri, Jean-Luc Nancy, Avital Ronell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Gianni Vattimo. Former faculty members include Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, among others.

Link to GCAS organizing body: https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/administration/ Link to GCAS faculty list: https://web.archive.org/ web/20150415191255/https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org/faculty/ Link to the Democracy Rising World Conference 2015: http://www. transform-network.net/calendar/ calendar-2015/news/detail/Calendar/-5ba2dfc47f.html Link to Creston Davis interview: http://www.critical-theory.com/ inside-the-global-center-for-advanced-studies-a-chat-with-crestondavis/ Official website: https://globalcenterforadvancedstudies.org

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Arts & Letters

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SATURDAY, APRIL 2, 2016

BOOK REVIEW LETTER FROM LONDON

Poems of Impropriety n Ahsan Akbar

BIGSTOCK

When The New Yorker wanted to interview Gil Scott-Heron just a year before his death, he reluctantly agreed. He treated the interview with his usual irreverence, openly smoking crack in his Harlem apartment, and making incendiary remarks about the music industry. He lived up to his reputation.

What, perhaps, came as a shock to the readers of the piece was his complete dismissal at labeling his seminal work The Revolution Will Not Be Televised as a militant message against mass media and the consumerist culture. Scott-Heron reminded us he was only interested in satire and he went about stating the irony, mocking the State’s corrupt practices and quite simply, letting the audience laugh.

Thumbing through the pages of The Bangladesh Poet Of Impropriety, a collection of poems

by Maqsoodul Haque, one could hardly miss some resemblance to Scott-Heron’s works. Haque, too, is interested in satire and much more: it is no surprise Scott-Heron is cited as an inspiration in the book. The socio-political messages are elevated by Haque’s gift for clear-eyed, stimulating poetry.

More importantly, in a country ruled by the bourgeoisie, his willingness to ‘name and shame’ with no sugarcoating or euphemistic masking, is refreshing. This makes the collection not only ‘improper’ but also exceptionally bold.

Pulling no punches, right from the opening number in the collection, Haque chooses to unzip both our political and popular culture. “Limits of Our Limitations: A Failed Foreword” does not fail to expose certain unsavoury truths about the degradation of nature and the other overlooked (and rather, condoned) ugliness: exorbitant rates of interest associated with micro-finance, the lending

only poem in English that speaks of the strange fetish we developed for decorating our homes and cities with aluminium, which was preceded by bathroom tiles, and which – as pointed out in the poem – was a pathetic step-up from plastic! In other poems, Haque refers Dhaka as the “concrete urban jungle”, and does not spare the culprits behind the “beautification” of our capital.

In Dear Daisy, a satirical homage to the wife of our former dictator HM Ershad, he hits the nail on the head:

scheme whose practitioners purport to “make poverty history”.

The poem, as evident throughout the collection, comes infused with a dose of self-deprecating wit:

‘sponsored’ and bonded ‘free thinkers’ to unholy nit-pickers,

as also rubbished Poet wannabes like me, down to that idiot writing Daily Star Commentary, I wonder why there is a dire necessity in this country for such a wasteful luxury – the toilet-paper industry!

Guys – save some water, save some trees, save the Butterflies and the Bees’ or self destruct to make Ecology like Poverty: History or is it going to be a Free Masonic Nobel Prize – so Hail Usury?

Haque is perhaps not known first and foremost as a poet, though earlier signposts were either missed or ignored by us. He is a celebrated musician who fronted popular bands such as Feedback and Maqsood O dHAKA; he is also known for his radical columns and blogs, and for being the founder of the Bangladesh Musical Band Association (BAMBA). He wrote some of the best lyrics in Bangla band music since the 1970s. In 1994 when Haque penned the first two parts of Gitikobita(Musical Ballad), he

staked a claim in the pantheon of contemporary Bangla poetry.

In the late 1960s, when second-wave feminism in the United States was rallying for the much-overdue reforms, student movements used “The personal is political’” as a slogan that soon became inseparable from pop culture. It is no surprise that for Haque, a male-feminist, much of the personal has always been political. Beyond the usual framework of friends and family, Haque’s poems extend to celebrate his relationship with Dhaka:

Love it, Live it or LEAVE IT, Dhaka has a subtle romance attached to its very ‘being’ – one of a continuous flirtation where romances are about sodium light filled nights, cloned high rises and condominiums, that has just the right mix of marbles, bathroom tiles and your guess is as good as mine… ALUMINIUM.

The above quoted from “Dhaka: Ode to Aluminum” is perhaps the

A tribute to real world heroes n Anne Marte Roas Pettersson A cold winter morning I found a book on my table with a small note from a very good friend. Later that evening my reading journey began; a journey into a book filled up with small glimpses of everyday life in Bangladesh. It is also a travel in mind to places and situations that made me think and rethink, questioning and searching for answers.

Whether it is for describing a woman’s work day in the countryside or for some snippets of world famous

microfinance -- it is done in a precise language and from the perspective of lower class people who, in the author’s eyes, are the real world heroes. The stories or chapters often end with a rhetorical question or a statement, perfectly formulated for feeding your mind to consider and reconsider (in) human behavior. In the book you will meet Hamid, a blind tailor, working in a ‘not-so-fair’ factory.

The photos in this book complement the texts as they reflect the real life of people.

The book I found on my table that day is called Bangladesh -- flooded by change, published by Agamee Prakashanee in the Ekushey Book Fair 2016. It is written by Bosse Kramsjö, a young Swedish backpacker who first went to Bangladesh in 1972. He has since involved himself in development works with several organisations, and the photos in it are taken by Tuhin Islam who spent a good deal of his life in villages of Bangladesh for a better understanding of countryside life.

Both are magicians in expression and

presentation, by words and photos, for the heart as well as for the brain.

I wish you a pleasant reading journey! l The writer is guest teacher, Boras University, Sweden.

Bangladesh—flooded by change Publisher: Agamee Prakashani Page: 227 Published: 2016 Price: Tk 500

K.Z. Islam and his Nirman contractors, big ugly road and Islamic arches and dividers, the embankment of Metropolitan Dhaka, to save the city from floods,

There is of course the personal in every one of us that is not, and will never be, political. About half of the book, aside from the socio-political messages challenging the status quo, is intensely focused on one’s relationship with god, with nature, finding solace in solitude. There is a recurrent theme articulating the joys (and pains) of growing up and growing older. This review has focused on the other half, because Haque got it right when he writes about the personal poems,“This book could do best without a review”. In my opinion, they are best left for readers to interpret and any amount of dissection by any reviewer would be a disservice to their emotions and sensitivity.

The Bangladesh Poet of Impropiety by Maqsoodul Haque (RodelaProkashoni, 2010), and 2nd edition e-book by Smartmux Limited (2015). Illustrations by Harold Rasheed. l Ahsan Akbar is the author of The Devil’s Thumbprint, a collection of poems published by Bengal Lights Books in 2013. www.ahsanakbar.com