A&L Nov_2018

DLF 2018
When the author is
both dead and alive
• Rifat Munim
The first thing that strikes the reader who encounters the stories in
this collection is the narrator’s role: how he talks to readers and
plays with their expectations, dropping frequent hints in the process
that this is a story he is a part of, or has received in a dream, or
heard from a friend, or witnessed in his community. The narrator rarely pretends
to be omniscient; he is often confused and can’t seem to locate his place
in the narration. He is familiar with all the major players in a story. Irony and
humour are inseparable traits of his stories, as in “The Two Assassins.” Yet his
narration has conspicuous resemblance with Bengali oral narratives wherein
fairies and winged horses are as real as anything else in the material world.
The narrator’s intention is all too clear: he is not offering reality as it is—
he’s offering a world that defies reality or, to be more exact, manipulates it, to
re-create fresh new possibilities and new realities for his characters.
His characters come from all walks of life, from workers to abused women
to those belonging to the middle class. Only their actions and reactions surprise
us. They are victims of real life but refuse to give in to societal pressures.
Sultana, the female protagonist in “Parapar Hotel,” had been forced into prostitution
by a certain police officer and was privy to many secret crimes committed
by the city’s political big guns. They feel threatened by her and want
the police officer to get rid of her. Sultana, however, senses this well before
and turns the table on the officer in such a way that he and his cohorts end up
getting wasted instead.
Magic plays a vital role in the narrative. In “Living Dead,” the soul of a young
man is released from his body
while he’s been in a coma to find
out how he is missed, but what
he experiences is hard truth:
everyone has just forgotten him,
and even his mother eventually
forsakes him. In the title story,
“The Merman’s Prayer,” a man
steals a large sum of money from his employer and escapes to a seaside town
to hide. But there he is enchanted by a mermaid. When the real world is about
to close in on him, he turns into a merman and swims away into the sea in his
search for eternal solace.
Syed Manzoorul Islam, in his three-decade-long literary career, has mastered
a style that sets him apart from many of his Bengali contemporaries.
While surreal experimentation is not rare in Bengali literature, his open-endedness,
self-reflexivity, and blend of pathos and humour have given a solid
foundation to postmodern tendencies in Bengali fiction.
This is Islam’s first collection of short stories in English. A professor of English
at the University of Dhaka, he himself has translated all the stories, which
makes him, perhaps, the only bilingual Bangladeshi author writing today. •
Reading Khademul Islam over the years
• Rifat Munim
Sometime in 2004 I came across an issue
of Six Seasons Review when it was published
by University Press Limited. While
browsing through the list of fiction, my
eyes caught the title of an English translation of
selected excerpts from Pratibha Basu’s Jiboner
Jolchhobi. It was and still is my most favourite
autobiography written in Bengali. So I sat down
to get a sense of the translation. It was impressively
impeccable. Part way along the translation,
I went back to steal a look at the translator: Khademul Islam.
Those were the days of cultural studies and literary theories. Whether or
not you could make any sense of Foucault, Derrida, and Bakhtin, they were
the real stars and Fukuyama’s The End of History had dislodged modernism
(with its vestiges living in Kristeva, Spivak and their likes) from the literature
departments in favour of post-structuralism. So, leaving Marx and Freud far
behind on the dusty shelves, the lot aiming for good grades were cramming
in the university’s central library to photocopy pages from Grammatology, the
Archaeology of Knowledge, and Can the Subaltern Speak?
I was not much different except that my previous reading experience drew
me to the shelf that housed other old or recent issues of SSR. I opened at the
contents page and was ecstatic to find out the name which was my new obsession.
This time it was an original short story: “An
ilish story”. I read it and went out for a smoke.
I came back and read it again. I had never read
anything as powerful as this one coming from a
Bangladeshi author. The narrator casually talks
with her grandmother about 1971 and she, while
scaling and sawing a hilsha fish, says, “It was
1947 all over again.”
Then I came to know this writer was looking
after the literature page of The Daily Star where
I read his review of VS Naipaul’s Among the Believers.
I became a total fan. It comes as a shock,
however, that he’s always spent more time as a literary editor than a fiction
writer and translator. Which explains why he has only a few books to his credit.
The Daily Star Book of Fiction, which he edited, remains the best anthology
from Bangladesh. His translations include On the Side of the Enemy (BLB,
2014), a collection of Bengali short stories, and On my Birthday and Other Poems
in Translation (BLB, 2016). Editor of Bengal Lights, a literary magazine
from Bangladesh, currently he’s working on his book, Shooting at Sharks, to
be published from Bloomsbury UK.
Many generations of fiction writers and translators working in English owe
their growth solely to Khademul Islam who’s is the best translator, best fiction
writer, and best essayist and reviewer at the same time.•
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ARTS & LETTERS
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2018 | DHAKA TRIBUNE