Letter from London

Prefatory Note:

Looking at Salgado's photographs I realized that behind each of them lay a tale of great existential significance. The significance could be sensed, perhaps as an aura, though the tale itself might be irrecoverable beyond the bland details of a news report. However, my experience of the 1971 Bangladesh war of independence fused with the nightmarish tale of the madwoman from Indo-China in Marguerite Duras' novel 'The Vice-Consul' to provide me with a miniature narrative that reflects the extreme situation of so many of Salgado's displaced persons.

Duras' anonymous character utters only one word in the novel, the name of her native village: Battambang. For me this awkward-sounding name symbolizes the home all exiles have left behind, as well as the home they seek to create for themselves wherever they have fetched up: this explains the title of my poem.

Needless to say, the identification of Duras' madwoman with a madwoman who haunts the corner of Dhaka where I live is purely fanciful.

BATTAMBANG

Out of this tangle of texts and things and beings
she springs up like a weed
uprooted, cast
to the winds, propelled
by hunger through flat spaces, across fetid swamps,
rivers porridge-thick after the rains,
towards the straight line of sky
and earth meeting edge to edge,
towards hills and valleys with romantic names,
eating young rice shoots, begging for bones,
stealing salted fish
(secreted between scraggy breasts),
always where she halts
someone turns up to shoo her away.

Sometimes, if a man following her about
asks her name, where she is from,
in a language she scarce understands,
all she says is, 'Battambang'.

One, two, three....she'd count the days
out of home. Now, all sense of time
(or numbers) gone, she only knows a gnawing inside
as her belly, infected with life, rises like dough
stretching skin till it cracks.
(It's only to die quietly that the child is born.)

Hair, pulled in despair, comes off in clumps
leaving her looking like a grubby Buddhist nun.
Lying in a gravel pit she gazes mesmerised
at distant stars, nearby town lights
where thousands like her huddle in corridors of wind.
In dreams she turns into her dead child
walking through mountains and city walls.

Ten years from home, she comes upon ragged millions
thronging the Jessore Road towards Calcutta.
Air like the inside of a rotten egg: monsoon.
The tortured city smells of sweat, saffron, stagnant water.
Perhaps our paths crossed: hers and a burly, bearded poet's
and mine, as I headed for a theatre of war. They say
she once pulled a live fish from between her breasts
and with delirious shrieks bit off its head,
but on party nights devoured
foie gras sandwiches from embassy bins.

The war ended. Like women dancing in a trance
to shake off the spirits of war-dead spouses
I chucked half a life into the bin
till,
one clear autumn morning I see her
it can only be her, with her crazy eyes, her tatty sarong
by the overflowing skip in front of the British
Council in Dhaka, boiling rice in a battered pan.
The scent spreads as vapour rises skyward
and she bursts into song
a joyous song of Battambang.

Sebastio Salgado is the prize-winning photographer of migrants, the dispossessed and refugees worldwide. Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.