Arts & Letters

SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 2016

Of Carnage and Krishnachuras

EDITOR’S NOTE

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n this issue, Arts & Letters pays tribute to Rudro Mohammad Shahidullah who had left us, much before his time, on the 21st June in 1991. His poetry immensely inspired the generation that successfully brought about the democratic revolution in 1990. To commemorate the 25th death anniversary of the poet, we print excerpts from an article that make an apt assessment of the power of Rudro’s poems.

Apart from snippets and news bites, this issue offers a very timely article by fiction writer Mahmud Rahman who argues how the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act, if it comes into effect, will impinge on the imaginative freedom of fiction writers.

There’s also a short story by Junaidul Haque, the conversational style of which, we believe, will strike a chord with many readers.

INSIDE

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n Khondker Ashraf Hossain

The optimism that was born out of the ashes and the blood is recorded in the poems written by the younger poets of the seventies. The best representative of them is Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah, from whose poem ‘Swajaner Shubhra Harh’ I quote : I will build my home here at this golden time.

Here the Aghraan fullmoon will shine all the year round The long night of sorrow over, The bloodshed of destruction over, We meet again on the coral reef of woe.

The dear earth is awash with blood White bones of the dear ones are abloom like bright flowers.

Shahidullah wrote with anger and disgust about the widespread carnage of the war of liberation, the decomposing corpses strewn everywhere, the outcries of the widows and the orphans. But the waning of the values of the liberation struggle as was manifest in the infinite greed of the power-mongers and the resurgence of the anti-liberation communal forces immediately following the birth of Bangladesh saddened him all the more. Rudra’s language is emo-

Mahmud Rahman writes on Liberatin War Denial Crimes Act

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tional, unadorned, direct and piercing: Even today I smell the corpses in the air, Still I watch the naked dans macabre on the earth; I hear the outcries of the raped women in my sleep; Has this country forgotten that nightmare, that bloody time? ...

The same old vulture has clutched the national flag.

Forty years have elapsed; forty summers and winters have heaped up the dust of oblivion on our memory. The generation who fought the war is fast dwindling in the natural course of time. The ‘Muktijuddho’ now lives on in the memories of those who still live and in the myths and metonymies ensconced in literature. The latter will ultimately be the place for any future retrieval, of those fires and tears that had once surged in millions of hearts in this land where krishnachuras bloom. l Khondakar Ashraf Hossain was a poet and professor of English Literature at Dhaka University. His collections of Bangla poems include Partho Tomar Teebro Teer, Jibaner Saman Chumuk, Sundari o Ghrinar Ghungur. On Behula’s Raft is the collection of his selected poems in English. His doctoral thesis was on Western influence on Bangladeshi Poetry.

FICTION Friendship

Send your submissions to: anl@dhakatribune.com

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Arts & Letters

L I B E R A T I O N W A R D

What will it mean for fiction writers? n Mahmud Rahman

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t was either 2007 or 2008.

While browsing the bookstalls at the Ekushey Book Fair in Dhaka, I came across one featuring books on the liberation war.

Some of the titles were familiar, others new to me. I asked a man behind the display why they didn’t carry Shaheen Akhtar’s novel Talaash. He replied that they did not consider the book to be pro-liberation war.

I could not elicit any details.

I found his remarks ironic since around the same time, a writer in Shaptahik 2000, a weekly magazine, had listed Talaash as one of ten significant books on the war.

I’m wary of such lists, but I do agree that Talaash is a vital novel about 1971 and its aftermath. I have read this book more than once, translated part of a chapter, and also helped edit the English translation published as The Search by Zubaan Books India.

The novel opens before the war. After a scandal in the village, a young woman named Mariam is sent off by her parents to attend college in Dhaka. She falls in love with Abed, a student leader, who scorns her for her lack of politics but doesn’t mind sleeping with her as often as he can. When the war breaks out, Mariam joins thousands of others who flee the city.

Unfortunately, the Pakistani army captures her and for the duration of the war she is held in a school building where she and other women are tortured as sex slaves. The end of the war brings release from captivity but a fate far from liberation. Though the new government declares women like Mariam as Biranganas, they are scorned by society. Some of Mariam’s peers commit suicide, some leave with the Pakistani soldiers, and others survive selling their bodies. Talaash is the story of Mariam’s struggle to refuse any of these fates over the next thirty years.

Asking around, I found hints of why some people objected to Talaash. There were people who thought the book maligned student leaders. One reader had trouble with the fact that Mariam was not a virgin. Approaching the novel from the standpoint that the Pakistani military had destroyed ‘the honour of our women’, it didn’t sit well with him that the novel’s protagonist was someone already having sex.

All signs suggest that the Parliament will soon pass the Liberation War Denial Crimes Act. This law will give anyone the right to file a complaint with the police or the courts. While history is defined

QUAMRUL HASAN

Of course there will be critical debate over works of fiction. On any book you can find a range of opinion, and in reading fiction, taste can be highly personal and subjective. Until now, most criticism about 1971 fiction has remained verbal or on the page. But what happens when writers fall under the shadow of the proposed law? as settled, the law’s clauses about history are vague, and it goes on to consider it a crime to be “representing the liberation war history inaccurately or with half-truth in the text books or in any other medium” (italics mine).

Other writers have expressed anxiety about what this means for the freedom to research the complex and polyphonic history of the entire movement for independence.

I share those concerns but as a writer of fiction, I also fear for the burden this will impose on creative writers.

Ordinary people learn about history not just from text books but also from stories, novels, plays, and films. I am haunted not just by what I saw and heard in 1971 but also by narratives I have read in books. My sense of the texture of 1971 is rooted in personal experience but it has also been enhanced by the efforts of many writers.

Bangladesh owes an immense debt to such writers.

Of course there will be critical

debate over works of fiction. On any book you can find a range of opinion, and in reading fiction, taste can be highly personal and subjective.

Until now, most criticism about 1971 fiction has remained verbal or on the page. But what happens when writers fall under the shadow of the proposed law?

What if someone who feels that Talaash is not sufficiently pro-liberation war decides to file a case that the book “represents history inaccurately or with half-truth”? In our highly litigious society, it is not unknown for random individuals, either with personal axes to grind or the desire to curry favour with the powerful, to file defamation cases. The proposed law is setting the stage for malicious “denial of history” cases. Given that the law is written with vague references to “events” and “truth”, it opens the door to abuse and harassment.

Consider another scenario.

Mahmudul Haque’s novel Jibon Amar Bon is one of the most

significant works of fiction from Bangladesh. It was first published in a magazine in 1973, not long after the country became independent. When I first read the novel, I was struck by its unsentimental approach to the liberation movement. The story is set entirely in March 1971, during the upheaval that led to the breakout of the war.

In Translation Review, Shabnam Nadiya wrote this about Jibon Amar Bon: “Post-war disillusionment is perhaps inevitable; but Khoka’s prewar apathy was the first attempt to capture a consciousness that ran counter to the glorious nationalist narrative being constructed. With the world around him exploding in the passion of protest against Pakistani domination, Khoka remains disdainful. He justifies his detachment saying that the same mob once welcomed the military dictator Ayub Khan. Seemingly oblivious, Khoka fits in nowhere and his choice is to remain enmeshed in his life of friends

(whose impassioned debates make him think of the futility of humans); his beloved sister Ronju; Neela, the woman of his desire. Yet hinted through the mirror of this detachment is a dire imagining of post-war Bangladesh of easy money, elaborate corruption, a burgeoning middle class bent on grabbing opportunities provided by ‘public sentiment’.

“Khoka’s detachment is destroyed when he loses his sister to war; life leaves none untouched, despite our illusory distance. We don’t know how Ronju dies, for Khoka’s recall lacks clarity. All we know is Khoka’s mistake: ‘All he had wanted was for Ronju to survive…His sad country could never have given Ronju the right to live.’”

Nearly a decade ago when Mahmudul Haque was still alive and I was in Dhaka, I had many conversations with him about everything under the sun. I had asked him about reactions to Jibon Amar Bon. He said that it had been well received by some, criticized by others. “One day,” he told me, “I was stopped while riding in a rickshaw. A man stepped out of a car and asked me to accompany him. I asked, ‘Why do I have to come with you?

You know where I live and work. I’m going to work now, you can meet me there.’ The man was from an intelligence agency; someone had brought the novel to their attention.”

Through one of his friends, Mahmudul Haque met Sheikh Mujibur Rahman in the Prime Minis-

DENIAL ACT

ter’s office. The prime minister was informed that the author had been receiving some flak over a novel he had written. When he asked what the book was about, Mahmudul Haque had replied, “To answer that properly, you would have to read the book but where could you find that sort of time?” He related to me that Mujib had replied, “We freed the country. We are an independent country, people will write what they will. If someone harasses you, let them know that we have spoken.” Nothing further happened after this meeting.

If the Denial Act comes into place, a hostile critic could demand Jibon Amar Bon be banned because it’s guilty of “denying events that were for the preparation of the liberation war between 1 March 1971 to 25 March 1971’ and that it represented the war ‘inaccurately or with half-truth.”

I have written several stories related to the 1971 war that appear in my book Killing the Water. In the story “Kerosene,” a liberation fighter is part of a mob burning down a warehouse filled with women and children belonging to a minority community of whom many had collaborated with an occupying army. The story is allegorical, set in an imagined place, but readers familiar with 1971 will recognize that it’s written about our own atrocities towards the “Biharis”. There are many who would like to deny this shameful aspect of our history.

When I wrote this story, I recalled a story I had heard when I stepped over to Agartala in 1971, a story of shame that refused to let go and sank itself into my being. “Kerosene” was an effort to use fiction to come to grips with that experience.

People can like or hate my stories. Just as some might consider Talaash or Jibon Amar Bon or a dozen other published narratives as insufficiently patriotic. But literary dis-

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Arts & Letters

SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 2016

SNIPPET

agreement, even when laced with emotion, should not spill over into police attention or criminal courts.

Laws must not burden writers with shackles that prevent them from freely imagining history in their writing. I fear that the proposed law will come down as a restraint on writers, preventing them from exploring the complexity of our history through stories and novels. This will not serve the country well at all. *** Fiction has a complicated relationship with history. Those of us who are fiction writers do not pretend to be historians but our fiction can draw on history and interrogate history in ways that historical texts cannot. In fiction, writers often seek to explore truths in unconventional ways.

Some writers prepare for their historical fiction with detailed research. Others draw from experience or start from an impressionistic view of events and rely more on their imagination. In each case, an author searches for truths through the tools of fiction: characterization, description, narrative, imagination.

History cannot be reduced to a mere chronicle of events. Behind events lie the actions of human beings. Behind those actions, or passivity, lie a complicated mix of consciousness, will, accident, reaction, emotion, thought. Historical researchers can try to unravel that blend, seeking threads, answers, and patterns, but there is a large area of the unknown – what goes on in the minds of humans? – that fiction writers can use imagination to probe more boldly than others.

What if in the course of writing fiction, we enter into the minds of heinous people like Pakistani military men or collaborators? What if we make efforts to build such characters not just as embodiments of

evil but as fleshed out characters?

What if someone takes offence at such examples and interprets these as misrepresenting History?

What if we enter the minds of those we may consider on “our side” but who reveal in their interiority a complex mix of emotions, not just courage and resolve but also shame, cowardice, small-mindedness?

The tool chest of fiction writers is vast. It may not even be constrained by fact. Some, for example, explore alternate histories.

What if a writer chooses to write a novel imagining a history where it was the Pakistanis who won? Or one where the Indian army decided to stay and maintain an occupation? Or where a radical regime came to power? Any of these scenarios would be factually untrue, but fiction writers can use scenarios like these to tell stories about the multifaceted time that Bangladesh had gone through in 1971.

Yet, if the denial law comes into effect, someone daring to take on these imaginative challenges would be targeted by those who only see a simplistic story line for 1971. Then the police and courts would wade into this territory, mostly unfamiliar to them, to determine judgements and sentences. Is that where the legal system, already pressed hard to deal with crime, should devote its resources?

It’s hard enough when Islamic fundamentalists have created an atmosphere when every writer has to watch what they say about religion. It would be an additional burden when lawmakers, driven by a different kind of rigid mindset, pass a law that may penalize writers for writing about 1971 in unorthodox ways.

Those writers who experienced 1971 are passing. There are yet many stories to be written about the times of war and the country they bequeathed. It will mostly fall on younger writers, those who didn’t directly experience the war, to draw from historical research and their own inclinations and imagination. What burden is the state putting on those who would want to write on the canvas of 1971? Do we really want to impoverish the literary possibilities about 1971 or for those who refuse to conform, do we want to send them to jail for their creative efforts? l Mahmud Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer and translator based in the US. He is the author of Killing the Water: Stories, published by Penguin India, and Black Ice, a translation of Mahmudul Haque’s Kalo Borof, published by HarperCollins India.

JK Rowling nominated for crime novel award Career of Evil is one of six titles now in the running for the Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year award

n Arts & Letters Desk It is no news that JK Rowling has taken up writing a series of crime novels under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith. Her alter ego Robert Galbraith is one of six novelists to be nominated for the title of Theakston Old Peculier crime novel of the year.

Galbraith’s Career of Evil is the third novel in the adventures of private investigator Cormoran Strike who, in a mysterious package, receives a woman’s severed leg and a note which links to Strike’s past.

“The new writing identity that Rowling has forged for herself is not only utterly unlike that of her fantasy endeavors, but quirkily different from most of the already established confrères she is befriending in the crime writing world,” a review in the Independent declared.

Also on the shortlist are former TV documentary maker Renee Knight’s debut Disclaimer, often heralded as the new Gone Girl; former police officer Clare Mackintosh’s first thriller, I Let You Go; 2005 and 2009 winner Mark Billingham, here with his 13th novel in the popular Tom Thorne series, Time of Death; Northern Irish writer Adrian McKinty’s Rain Dogs; and Eva Dolan’s Tell No Tales, which focuses on murdered migrants and racial tension.

The award ceremony will be hosted on 21 July, as the opening night of the 14th annual Theakston Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival in Harrogate. According to an Independent report, Gemma Rowland, Operations Manager at Harrogate International Festivals, the arts organisation that delivers the festival, said: “2016’s winner will join the list of game-changing authors who have won one of the most coveted awards over the last decade, including Denise Mina, Lee Child, and Sarah Hilary. The public’s vote is incredibly important as ultimately readers decide when it comes to judging a book’s worth, so I’d encourage everyone to make their voice heard – it’s free and simple to vote online.”

The winner will be decided by both a panel of judges, and the online public vote; with voting opening on 1 July and closing 15 July. l

‘The new writing identity that Rowling has forged for herself is not only utterly unlike that of her fantasy endeavors, but quirkily different from most of the already established confrères she is befriending in the crime writing world,’ a review in the Independent declared

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SATURDAY, JUNE 18, 2016

FICTION

Friendship This is the first installment of a two-part story. The final installment will appear in the next issue Hi, Sonia, how are you? How is your Jilibi?

Fine. Jilibi? He is fine too.

(Smiles) How come you remember his nickname even after all these years?

Boys are not like girls, Mrs Sonia Fletcher. They don’t forget easily.

(Smiles) Thanks for looking slim and beautiful. I was dying to meet you before getting old. I have been telling friends about you all these years. See, boys remember. Sincerity and loyalty are basically masculine qualities. Pogos remember even more.

Pogos! Hearing the word after such a long time! You would call half-mad people pogos! The sad, sensitive, unsuccessful kind. “Paji Pogo” sounds even better. It was my nickname for you years back.

Righto! You would address me as Paji even in your letters. My collection of Indo-Anglian novels contains a few such letters. Very polite, decent letters. Girls love to remain safe. They are not madly romantic like us.

You are wrong, Mr Rahman. Always criticising girls! They are sincere, Sir! They are romantic. But they are not crazy like you. (Blushes) Like boys or pogos they don’t chase married friends and forget to marry the right person at the right time.

Pogos are none else but Eliot’s Prufrock, Camus’ outsider. A story

BIGSTOCK

n Junaidul Haque

You are wrong, Mr Rahman. Always criticising girls! They are sincere, Sir! They are romantic. But they are not crazy like you.

(Blushes) Like boys or pogos they don’t chase married friends and forget to marry the right person at the right time

by Kolkata’s Shirshendu Mukherjee also had a character named Pogo.

You were talking about marriage.

Pogos are not fated to do the right thing at the right time. I remember that once you had praised the pogos a lot. You smilingly said that the pogos were a surprising species.

They were gentlemen who could make dangerous demands to their married friends and effortlessly get away with it! Sonia, didn’t I admire you with the simplicity of a boy at the height of youth? You won’t get many people with pure emotions like me in this cynical world.

I would like to call my friendly love for you quite heavenly.

Mr Pogo, you give quite good speeches. You have learned to praise yourself quite well. Once

you used to praise others only. Hey, how is your Mermaid, your Ilish Machh?

You haven’t forgotten! You gave her those names. Ilish Machh alias the mermaid lives in London with her husband. She is married to a microbiologist. She is quite happy. It makes sense that she didn’t marry me! I have made her suffer a lot. She deserves her present happiness and peace. As a young man I would think that she had caused me more suffering. With the passage of time I could detect my own mistakes and forgive hers. I wish her well. I proudly remember that you would always call her pretty.

(Smiles sadly) Why not? If she is not pretty, who is? It was you who didn’t un-

derstand how precious she was!

I did understand, Sonia. My heart bled a lot for her. But I understood her true worth only after losing her. When is Mark going to return? Why are you spending such a lot of money and staying in Hotel Sonargaon?

Not spending our money.

UNICEF is keeping us here. I too have joined UNICEF a few years back. Mark has always been there.

You know that. Mark has gone to meet a friend of his. He will be coming now. Let’s go on talking.

Good. You will be able to keep a better watch of your Jilibi now. Is he still slim like you? Or is he getting heavy like me?

He is not heavy but he has very little hair left on his head. Are you

still angry with the Americans?

(Smiles) No! What is the use?

How is your brother Humayun?

Your bhabi Sandhya? Your parents?

Mother-in-law? Ah! We have met after such a long time!

Wait.

I am telling you everything. Humayun is fine. He is your age, forty plus. Assisting my father in his legal practice. He is in Mumbai for almost the whole year.

Sandhya Bhabi is fine too. They have two lovely children.

Is Sandhya saying “Hari Om” in the evening even now? You would say that she was saying ‘Hurry home!’ to her husband.

(Smiles again) You really remember everything! Dad and Mom are fine. Mark’s mother is in Houston and is quite strong. She has crossed 75. Really we are in Dhaka after such a long time. I am fortunate that I could meet the great chicken-eater of Bengal again. You were very fond of chicken legs.

Yeah. And you were very fond of Biroi rice of Mymensingh. Your Dad is very handsome. You resemble him more than your mother.

You liked both of them but I guess your father was dearer to you. I am also fond of girls who dote on their father. I wish I had a daughter myself. Your brother married in a Hindu family to strengthen secular India. You married Mark to promote international solidarity. How big are your children?

I don’t have children!

What do you mean? We then have a similar fate!

You don’t have children too?

Yes. Doctors still give us hope.

Didn’t you seriously want children?

(Smiles sadly) You are such a nice soul! I don’t want to make you feel bad. Please tell me about your wife.

(Looking unhappy) I told you fifteen years back and I am telling you now. You deserve a hundred children. We need as many copies of you as possible. (Stopping for a while) My wife is a nice person. She has seen your photograph a lot. And she has always called you pretty.

I feel proud of that. I used to think that only boys made good friends.

I don’t regret that a beautiful, extremely intelligent, thoughtful tomboy proved me wrong. (Smiles) .l Junaidul Haque is a fiction writer.

Lit competition for young writers n Arts & Letters Desk GolpoKotha, a performance-based bilingual literary group, has organised a creative writing competition for emerging writers and poets. What makes this competition different is that submissions will be accepted both in English and Bangla.

The submissions will be judged by eminent writers Syed Manzoorul Islam, Kaiser Haq and Fakrul Alam. Selected writers or poets will get the opportunity to get published in a bilingual literary anthology.

Rules and guidelines for submission are as follows: A writer can submit a maximum of

3 poems or a short story not exceeding 1500 words.

Submissions should include a very short biography of the writer (not more than 100 words).

All submissions should be typed and double-spaced.

For English entries the font is New Times Roman and the size 12.

For Bangla entries the font is Bijoy.

Entries have to be Microsoft Word documents.

Subject lines are to be written in the following format: GolpoKotha, Poetry/ Story, Bengali/English, title, name of writer.

No plagiarised submission will be accepted.

The deadline for submission is on 15th of July.

Those who are interested to take part should send their work at golpokotha.emk@gmail.com. To know more about the event go to: https:// www.facebook.com/MíK_v-Golpokatha.