Non-Fiction
Of journalism, of literature
I happen to be one of those individuals who, having found themselves in the dilemma that on a prosaic basis we call a search for a livelihood, went through university dreaming of life as a pedagogue, indeed as an academic in the hallowed corridors of a public university. It was not to be, for reasons we often choose to push away or under the rug because they are too uncomfortable to remember. And then I drifted off into journalism, but not before I had burnt a few bridges to what I had once thought would be my future; or before the immanent will, to borrow that meaningful turn of phrase from Thomas Hardy, let it be known that my future was not in my hands. It was a truth I was not aware of when I proudly lifted my head (and it was a full head of hair in those days, back in 1965) before a bowing Field Marshal Mohammad Ayub Khan (all men gifted with the majesty of height must nevertheless defer to those condemned to be short and therefore more compact in form if not in substance) and told him that I would like to be President of Pakistan. He was impressed and asked my teachers to take good care of me. For the next week or so, I was Pakistan's future president. I wallowed in the limelight.
But that was fantasy, a child's daydream. My ambitions changed over the years. My parents were not overly happy when I informed them I would like to take up medical science as a future career. Neither were they happy when I had second thoughts, told them I was going to be a lawyer. My father, having missed out on the opportunities that came to other men in the 1940s and 1950s, had, unbeknownst to me, already chalked out my future. I was to be part of the Pakistan civil service, be a CSP officer and retire someday as secretary of some ministry. Maybe one day you will be foreign secretary. Why not foreign minister? I asked him. I did not appreciate the scowl coming all over his face, but there was the elegance I associated with Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Someday, I thought, I would speak before the United Nations Security Council, go back home and discover, to my pleasant surprise, that I had turned into a national hero. That was not to be. But then came a damp, drizzly evening in Dhaka in the early 1970s when I unabashedly informed Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman that I would appreciate being part of his government once my education was behind me. He gave me a quizzical look. Go home and study rather than wait to see me every day, said he. We will see about that job later.
And then he died. So many dreams, so much of idealism collapsed for all of us when he was taken away from us. I who had spent my entire school life under a military ruler found, to my chagrin, that it was now my entire university life that had the shadow of yet another military ruler etched all over it. The shadow passed. My old college from where I had qualified for higher secondary took me in as a lecturer. And then there was the English medium school where I taught English, into which school one day stepped a bright young woman who, the principal told me in all her gaiety, would do the same job in the junior classes. Would I help her out at times? I did, we fell in love and decided we would marry. Nothing doing, said her family, unless your beau proves his intelligence through appearing at the Bangladesh Civil Service examinations. You can go ahead and marry, said my father, but how about doing a BCS first? I did not get to be a CSP, but that thought of a BCS took hold of my father. He smiled a lot. The bright young woman, resplendent in her beauty, met me at the end of my exams everyday. We took long rickshaw rides before parting in the descending gray of twilight. I qualified for the civil service and decided not to take the job. Everyone was devastated.
And then I drifted off to journalism. The poet Shihab Sarkar, magazine editor at the New Nation, the man who had graciously published my articles every Sunday, or almost, one day asked me if I would like to join the newspaper as assistant editor. The opening was there because one of the editorial staff was leaving to join Dhaka University. He took me to Waheedul Haque, who took me to Hasan Saeed, who took me to Motahar Hossain Siddiqui. All three of them gave me a subject on which to prepare an editorial. In fifteen minutes, in longhand, the editorial was ready. They were happy. A beaming Motahar Hossain Siddiqui, the editor, took me to see the chairman of the editorial board. It was Mainul Hosein, the barrister. He issued an appointment letter. I was officially a journalist. Since that day, I have been in the profession, with a break of three years, when the state packed me off to the United Kingdom, to man the press wing at the High Commission in London. But that is another long, intriguing, seductive story. Since 1983, in TS Eliot's words, with slight variations, I have grown old, I have worn the bottoms of my trousers rolled. There have often been the times when I have felt like a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Journalism is electrifying. It is often a lonely place to be in, if you have once been part of literature. It is a forbidding place, if politics has been replaced by authoritarian rule.
My foray into journalism has in these long years lengthened itself into experience straddling the serious and the comic, the plainly tragic and the hugely amusing. I have written much; and have done so in the fond belief that the language of journalism is surely enriched by a fair dose of the literary in it. My articles have generally been suffused with thoughts I have built on literature. Journalism was bringing me into closer, deeper touch with the world. It was affording me an opportunity to meet men whom I had studied from a distance. Those were days of dictatorship, intensified by a plethora of flunkeys and hangers on, made fascinating by the underlying play of good against evil. I watched them, for they were men who were playing havoc with the land. And yet, the very next instant, it was literature that I brought into play as I studied these men. Richard III, Macbeth, Caliban, and so many others came into my field of vision as I tried interpreting their personalities. They were men of politics but literature took them a step further and explained the human nature that separated them from the human nature which defined other men.
There have been the times when the prosaic quality of journalism threatened to mar the poetry of literature I had learnt at university. The closure of a university somewhere in Bangladesh demanded an immediate, no-frills language response. And, paradoxically, with that came the meeting of a deadline for a write-up that sought to uphold the magnificence of poetry. And thus it was that I wrote of Aparna Sen's marriage (it was not her first) on the banks of the Shenandoah. The years went by. Youth, in me, gave way to advancing age. The hair grew thinner and grayer. As the ayatollah prepared to return to Tehran, my editors asked me to write on the revolution that was consuming the monarchy in Iran. I tried spotting a second storming of the Bastille in that uprising. I could not. But I did see history repeat itself in the flight of the Shah in early 1979. He was not Aeneas going to Dido. He and Farah Diba came close to emulating Mussolini and his mistress in World War II-riven Italy. Then, some years later, came the evening when I swiftly prepared an editorial on the imminent fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in Romania and rushed out for a pretty evening with a prettier woman I called Urvashi. Halfway through dinner, as I watched television, I saw Ceausescu fall and try to flee. It was a pathetic sight, demanding a literary interpretation, a definition that would be seen in the context of poetic tragedy. I went back to my office, to write a fresh editorial on how the corrupt and the power-hungry fall from grace. It was something I had done earlier for Ferdinand Marcos. But, yes, beautiful was that moment when, at Waheedul Haque's prodding, I brought journalistic jargon and poetic imagery to explain the woman that was Indira Gandhi. It was an October day in 1984.
But that is not an easy job. Much as you may have learnt of literature, you discover, once you are in the world of the newspaper, that you need to cut back on your linguistic exuberance, that you need to cut out the fat as it were and go for the lean part of it. There are two ways of looking at this condition. In the first place, journalistic writing brings you in touch with manifest reality and compels you to observe things as they are. You cannot go beyond what you see. But, to be sure, you do have an opinion which can find place in the editorial or op-ed pages of the newspaper. That is hardly any signal for you, though, to step out of the straitjacket of reality. You cannot stray from facts; you can embellish your language but you cannot stretch facts. In the second, if you have been a student of literature, you will feel a trifle disappointed, your heart breaks, once you stumble on the truth that the poetic skills, the sheer rhetorical power you once thought was your password to the wider world is no more a requirement for you in your journalistic career. What used to be poetry and frequent stabs at fiction soon dwindles into mundane editorials and banal articles.
Yes, writing for newspapers, especially on current affairs, deadens the sensibilities somewhat. It also does something else, in countries where democracy is generally a tentative affair. Having lived through a multiplicity of dictatorial regimes, media people in Bangladesh have understood the insidious nature of censorship. Martial law has always and spontaneously led to the rise of Big Brother, to use that Orwellian phrase, to the making of the pygmy in the journalist. When it is not martial law, when military rule has tried insinuating itself into its own version of democracy, there is the euphemistically put 'advice' reaching newspaper offices in the middle of the night, suggesting what news should go and what should not. Yes, it is advice, but advice that you can ignore at grave peril to yourself. Think of the consequences, to you, to your newspaper.
And yet, at the end of the day, your work as a journalist and your background as a student of literature add good substance to what you write, indeed to the way you reflect on conditions around you. Men who would be gods are images you dismantle as you go along. You expose the powerful for the philistines that they are through your ability to recall the myths and the mythologies of old, to be able to relate them to the world of contemporary men and women.
Thus come the pitfalls. And thus we go looking for promise in what we write. Often, as a well-known columnist in the West discovered, to his and his readers' delight, journalistic writing must come trippingly on the tongue, or tongue-in-cheek, if it is to be received in rapture. When a reader berated him for his obsession with writing on loaded, serious subjects, he decided on a rethink. The next week, he had something new on offer: his new article carried the intriguing heading: 'The sex life of a mosquito.'
The letters column of the newspaper was submerged in letters. The article turned out to be cathartic for everyone --- for the writer, for his readers, for innocent bystanders.
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