Opening Bangladesh to the world: a conversation with four contemporary writers.

Shook, David

Following the 2012 Dhaka Hay Festival, I had the opportunity to sit down with five prominent English-language Bangladeshi writers, editors, and boosters: Tahmima Anam, Farah Ghuznavi, Mahmud Rahman, and K. Anis Ahmed. Our conversation took place at Red Shift, a coffee shop and cultural center that has done much to support contemporary Bangladeshi art and literature. We planned to talk for just under an hour, but our excitement extended our conversation significantly. Here it is in a much-abridged state.

David Shook: Why has it taken so long for Bangladesh to come into the English-language world-literature scene like India and Pakistan?

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Tahmima Anam: That's a very interesting question. I think that what happened in Pakistan was particularly notable because it wasn't just that one or two writers started coming up; it was that they had this sudden explosion of really excellent writing in English. The Pakistan edition of Granta is by far the best-selling issue in the history of Granta. It was a moment geopolitically when people wanted to read more about Pakistan and get sort of an insider's view. In Sri Lanka, for instance, there are, maybe, four or five writers, but it's not like India or Pakistan. There hasn't been that kind of link.

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Farah Ghuznavi: I think there was also a sort of backlash, in a way, in 1971, what colonists referred to as a sort of nationalism, but I think it was almost like an active step backward because Bangla was brought in and it became such a political issue--I say this because I was kind of the family sacrificial lamb who was sent to Bangla-medium school because my parents grew up in British India speaking English as their first language, and my brother had already started going to school as he's eight years older. He was very set in English. It was such an experiment to send me there, and there was no help for my learning in Bangla. So I think it was a political decision in the immediate post-liberation, but I think it came at a very real cost in terms of the development of English. If the use of English had continued unbroken, I think it would be further along that route than normal.

DS: Do you think that writing in English today is a political decision?

Farah Ghuznavi: I think necessarily; I think it leads to a lot of accusations of elitism and so on, and I think realistically that's partly true. Most people, the vast majority of people who write in English or are comfortable with English as a first language, would have come from privileged backgrounds. But I don't think that you're necessarily making an active political statement by doing that. For me, this question came up at last year's Hay Festival because I studied in the Bangli medium until the age of sixteen, so the question was, "Why do you write in English?" And I think the short answer to that is basically because we lived in Britain for almost a year just after the first half of the 1971-72 war, and I was there with my brother and my mother, and that was my first school experience, that's where I learned to read, actually, and to write; and so my first exposure in that sense came in English. By the time we came back, I was five and a half and I had forgotten all my Bangla, and after that my interests in terms of reading were in English--there's a lot of stuff in translation in Bangla available now from Tintin to far more serious things--but at that time, there wasn't.

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Mahmud Rahman: I want to say something about Bangla writing. Actually, the high point of Bangladeshi writing was in the 1960s and '70s. We've actually kind of crested, and contemporary literature is in a little bit of a holding pattern. And I think some of that is, again, because of the evolution of the Bangla Muslim middle class. A large part of the writers--some of the best writers from East Bangladesh--were Hindu and went off to India. And then modern Bengali prose from the Muslim side began to show up. Mahmudul Haque once told me that we went to the newspapers trying to learn how to write and speak in Bangla. We were late in the game. And the 1950s and '60s essentially became a period of apprenticeship, and again, the linguistic nationalism in this case provided a boost because we had this kind of voice and there was a vibrant literary community during that period of time. Even the police had a magazine called Detective that published fiction and poetry.

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K. Anis Ahmed: Exactly. What Mahmud just said--that writing was very strong in the 1960s and '70s, and it's been kind of in a slump the last few decades--is actually a very unpopular thing to say, and I think it is a courageous thing to say openly, being an English-language writer in a Bangladeshi context, and I think that will probably get a lot of flack. But it is high time we talked about these things with some honesty and forthrightness.

I know for a fact that there are award-winning Bengali writers at the moment who are not comfortable reading in English, and who have not read a lot of world literature. And this is something that's happened partly because of a certain way of moving into the Bengali medium, where a lot of perfectly intelligent people just don't have that level of comfort in English, so they were getting a little bit stymied by the kind of access one needs to a wider culture in this day and age and the kind of stimulus that comes from that. And when you see these things, you become very upset about them. The truth is, this is not something uniquely Bangla; it's not that you become a good writer once you write in English. English writers don't become good writers if they've not read something from Spanish or Russian or French, and so on with every culture. You know, if you look at all the great writers such as Joyce and Woolf, so many of them have always learned from other languages. Garcia Marquez's biggest hero is an American writer, William Faulkner, and so on and so forth. We need to repeat that kind of cosmopolitan culture from the 1930s to the 1970s.

Mahmud Rahman: I talked to a younger Bangla writer a couple of years ago--very prominent. He admitted that the writers of the 1960s and '70s were exposed to world literature in a much bigger fashion. Partly, they read English. Mahmudul Haque told me once that it would take him a year to read a book. But he read. And then there was translation. Because of the Cold War, the Americans funded translation, the Russians flooded the market with Russian classics, the British Council stocked more contemporary fiction. I mean, I was amazed when Mahmudul Haque said that one of his novels was inspired by an article in "Deja Vu" in the New Yorker in 1965. I actually found that article. And so there was that kind of exposure to things and stimulation. That scene is gone. Translations into Bengali are even poorer now.

DS: Really interesting. Anis and Mahmud, both of you are talking about a certain type of insularity that the Bangla language suffers from as a medium of literature, not being in dialogue with world literature. That seems like one of the most valuable aspects of the Dhaka Hay Festival. I read it in the Daily Star, so I know it's true: the Hay Festival was a great success. Tahmima, I'd like to hear what it means to you personally, as its organizer, to bring the Hay Festival to Dhaka.

Tahmima Anam: Well, with the idea of the Hay Festival that my co-producer Sadaf Saaz Siddiqi and I had initially, we did a little pilot festival last year, which was about one-tenth the size of this year's festival in terms of the number of panels and the number of participants. That was just to get a sense of who was writing and who was reading. So it was about the audience as well as the writers. And what we discovered, to our great joy, is that there was a huge enthusiasm from the audience, but not just because they had read some of these writers. In fact, the writers we brought from the UK came at the last minute, and they were chosen by the British Council, and practically no one here had even heard of them. But the audience really enjoyed the opportunity to sit and watch writers talk to each other and to get to ask them questions. And it's really a challenge to the way that literature is perceived. Often in Bangla literature, the writer is held in a kind of sacred place, and you get to read him but you don't really get to engage with this person. That intimacy really touched people.

At the stalls where we gave free space, booksellers sold more copies of books during those two days than they had throughout 2012. They made a lot of money. So there's an audience, there's a readership. They can buy books. One of my main purposes for doing this is for the people of Bangladesh to recognize that we can't just rely on our rich literary tradition. We can't just say, "Oh, we're Bengalis. We're such cultured people. Look at Tagore. Look at Nazrul Islam. Look at all the great writers before." They need to say, "Oh, this is what we produce. This is a conversation that we're still having today."

I think of things like Bengal Lights as well as all of the book deals that were made during the festival, and there were many. We made a commitment to invite publishers. We paid for HarperCollins, Penguin, Random House, Bloomsbury, and others to come to Bangladesh. None of them had ever been to Bangladesh. Most of them don't have Bangladeshis on their lists. And they said to everyone, "Send us your manuscripts, we want to publish you." Khademul [Islam] got signed by Bloomsbury--I'm sure he would have been published anyway.

So it was thinking about all the parts of the equation. The publishing, the bookselling, the writing, the reading, and the conversation. We tried to bring all these things together, and it worked because the audience loved it. The people who organize the Hay Festival globally were completely bowled over by how the festival had grown from last year to this year and the degree to which people really loved it. The third thing that they absolutely loved about it was that they had never had a Hay Festival that's so young and that has more women on panels than men.

The fact is, the real truth is, that the women have performed really exceptionally. There were a lot of subjects that were discussed openly that people thought, Oh, you would never in Bangladesh have a literary panel with a big audience talking about sex, talking about, you know, sexuality. All of these things were enjoyed--these conversations were thrilling. They were groundbreaking. They were sort of surprising. And that was the great thing about it.

DS: Who today is writing in Bangla that deserves to be known outside the borders of Bangladesh? What do you guys think it'll take? Are you translating anybody incredible? Mahmud?

Mahmud Rahman: I still think there are many novels from the 1960s and '70s that have not yet been translated that deserve translation. Shaheen Akhtar is one writer here that I do translate that I am interested in translating more of. She's one of the more careful novelists. She takes time with her work. She's doing interesting things right now with her historical fiction, which is kind of a departure for her. [Editorial note: Visit WLT online to read an excerpt from Akhtar's Beloved Rongomala.]

DS: As a translator, I wonder if there are emerging literary translators, and what do you think could be done to encourage translators?

K. Anis Ahmed: That's one of my projects. I think the translation scene in both directions is pretty weak here in Bangladesh. In the last twenty years, Indian translations have become extremely good. I mean, if you read the translations from MacMillan in the 1950s and '60s, they're quite poor themselves.

Mahmud Rahman: You need some familiarity with English. So there's that. Taking on the commitment to translating novels or book-length projects is a big project. I was able to do this because, you know, I was off work and living on savings and had time. Most people cannot. I would like to see somebody sponsor some sort of translation grants where you could actually get people to submit samples, submit proposals, tie in with publishers. I know the Indian publishers are interested and would tie in. I talked to some of them this weekend. And then you could encourage people and also find out who are the best translators right now in both directions. I think if it should be done, it should be done in both directions.

Tahmima Anam: One of the things that we really haven't seen in Bangladesh is the culture of editing. One of the great pleasures of writing is the developmental editing. People need to approach their writing with humility and the idea that I may not be the best person to know how to shape this novel. Obviously, I'm going to be the captain of the ship, but I need somebody that's going to be having an intimate dialogue with me about what works and what doesn't. We assume when we write something that that is how it is supposed to be published. It's not just in Bangladesh--I think some great writers in the West stopped being edited at a certain point in their careers; their novels get longer and suffer for it. So, in fact, one of the things I think we really need to think about in Bangladesh is identifying talent that may be a little bit raw and finding editors who are really going to shape their novels and short stories and engage with them about how to find their voices.

November 2012

K. Anis Ahmed is the author of Good Night, Mr. Kissinger, a collection of short stories that was a special feature at the Hay Festival in Dhaka 2012. He is the founder of Bengal Lights, a new English literary journal from Dhaka. He is also a co-founder of the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh. He lives in Dhaka with his wife and son.

Tahmima Anam's first novel, The Golden Age, won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Her second, The Good Muslim, was a New Yorker Book of the Year and was also nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize. She's currently working on the third novel in her trilogy about Bangladesh.

Farah Ghuznavi won the 2010 Commonwealth Short Story Competition. Her short stories, which often draw inspiration from her work as a development professional, have been widely anthologized. She recently edited Lifelines, an anthology of short fiction by Bangladeshi women.

Mahmud Rahman is a Bangladeshi writer and translator now based in California. His collection of stories Killing the Water appeared in 2010, and his translation of Mahmudul Haque's Black Ice appeared in 2012.

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Bengal Lights , edited by Khademul Islam and published in conjunction with the University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh, showcases original prose, poetry, and art from around the world, with a focus on emerging writers from Bangladesh and the subcontinent, presented alongside more established writers from around the world. The magazine's website publishes regular web-only content, with special attention to younger writers like poet Ahsan Akbar, who employs and exploits the varied Englishes used by Dhaka's elite.