Essay
Of lights going out, of cherry trees . . .
A friend writes about Mozart. It is his birthday, she tells me. Yes, I remember. I remember too the chaos in which this pre-eminent of composers was buried by his friends. He died young and poor, almost bereft of everything beautiful that life could offer him. Having spent a lifetime, albeit a brief one, showering happiness on the world through his music, it was his fate to be thrown hastily into his grave because a storm threatened to disrupt the last rites. You could say his remains were swiftly deposited in the grave, in unseemly manner. And then his friends moved off.
I looked out the window, at the grey sky, at the leaves swaying in the bitter, cold wind of winter in London. And I remembered. When you reach middle age, there is that certain consciousness in you of the twilight approaching fast, of the reality of the greater part of your life having passed you by. And twilight, in that literal as also figurative sense of the meaning, is a moment for you to go back in time, to the ages as it were, and reflect on the world of men, on the thoughts that have shaped their politics and their literature. When the dark shadows of winter pelt the window panes with their insistence of purpose, you cannot but think back on Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary who on an evening like the one you happen to be passing through, peered through the greying daylight even as the world moved toward war. It was a moment immediately prior to the breaking out of the hostilities that would come to be known as the First World War. Grey intoned, to no one in particular: 'The lights are going out all over Europe. We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.'
You have the stuff of literature here, the imagery of desperation you are liable to associate with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights. And what indeed is literature? It is life as you live from one day to the next. And yet, paradoxically, literature is not life. But it could well translate into the chronicle of the life you lead, of the lives you see rise and crumble around you. Think here of love, of the ardour that comes into it. There was Tennyson for us. He it was who thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. As you go crisscrossing the region of English literature, you stumble into truths that may have come barging into your life or your surroundings. William Butler Yeats, in Ireland, did not belong to the Romantic era and yet romanticism drips from his poetry, those that he especially forged in the quiet, sad niches of his soul for Maud Gonne. 'When you are old and grey and full of sleep and nodding by the fire', he tells her, 'take down this book and slowly read, and dream of the soft look your eyes had once and of their shadows deep.'
The sheer poignancy of the poetry cannot be missed here. You stand at that window as the bitter winds howl in the trees and think of the pained beauty that sustains your tortured land across the seas and the mountains. Love, you tell yourself, can spring up in your soul as much for a loved one as for the country that loves you. Ah, yes, it is the country that calls, that called, back in 1971 through all the bravery of its young Mukti Bahini soldiers, through the songs you heard on Shwadhin Bangla Betar.
There was the substance of literature in the songs; and they complemented the pathos of the dying and the almost dying on the fields of battle. In 'bhebo na go maa tomar chhelera harye giyechhe pothe', you spot the sublime in literature. You might then be tempted to hark back to the pains Tolstoy voices in War and Peace. You wonder why the beauty of literature cannot make inroads into politics and save the world from the ravages it goes through again and again. To listen to Tagore sing 'O amar desher mati tomar pore thekai matha' is in essence to express gratitude to the spirituality that defines your heritage. In much a similar vein, you hear Iqbal sing, in the silence of a soft evening, 'saare jahan se achha ye Hindostan hamara', and you know how literature can translate into patriotism, how it enriches the sensibilities in you, how a yearning for a lost, once indivisible land can remind you of wounds yet raw and festering.
Literature sharpens the sensibilities. You read Shamsur Rahman and Rafiq Azad and Abul Hasan and Sukanto. "Asader Shirt" gives you a newer dimension in your understanding of literary perspectives. Time was when Nazrul reshaped the literary canvas for us with his songs. He makes you soar, all these decades later, with 'jago onoshon bondhi uthore joto'. And then he causes the heart in you to ripple out in knowledge of the love taking shape inside you with 'amar aponar cheye apon je jon khunji tare aami aponaye'. There is Nirmalendu Goon with his elegies on Bangabandhu, to have you remember the imagery which literature shapes around the great individuals who forge the destiny of a people. Move on and come to Saadat Hasan Manto. The partition of India was a tragedy our parents lived through and continues to be a nagging pain we in our times go through. And Manto gives it a permanence of meaning through his heart-wrenching stories of common men and women, people like you and me, walking through fire and blood, in their attempts to find a sanctuary away from the home which bad politics and worse men have stolen from them.
Which makes you reflect instinctively on the modernity, in that lugubrious sense, that T.S. Eliot brought into poetry in the early years of the twentieth century. The Wasteland could be the apocalyptic world you imagine will shape up before you. And Prufrock could be you, in the gathering darkness of your twilight: 'I grow old, I grow old / I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled . . .' Pain, as you will have noticed, is the foundation of literature. Nothing that is not sad can be literature. There is nostalgia, there is the ache of not coming by the stars you reached out to touch. Buddhadev Bose, whose place in Bengali literary history lies in his polite refusal to be in the shadow of Rabindranath Tagore and indeed to stay clear of it, gives you nostalgia in his reflections on Purana Paltan, that area in Dhaka where a decisive phase of his boyhood was spent. Read his letters. Read Mourid Barghouti's I Saw Ramallah and Isabel Allende's My Invented Country. The tales are all about lost countries. They are also about the throbbing way in which those lost countries live on in the hearts of those who do not forget the old fragrances that once wafted along their breezes and their winds.
Pablo Neruda, one of the defining voices of literature in the twentieth century, comes back to you in the way that Chekhov and Dickens do not wish to let go of you. He plods through life, even if he is tired of being a man. And then he cheers himself through causing love to arise in him for the woman who reminds him of cherry trees. Pause awhile and pass through the coruscating charm shining through the song: 'I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.' And then plant yourself in Barkis' shoes as he passes on, in plaintive fashion and through the boy David Copperfield, the simplicity of love's ardour to Peggotty: 'Barkis is willing.' Gabriel Oak goes in for a more direct approach in his wooing of Bathsheba Everdene in Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd.
Yes, literature is all. Men who have struggled to free their nations of colonial domination have taken courage from poetry and have then gone on to shape their own literary imaginations. Mao Zedong composed poetry on the peaks of the mountains he crossed in the course of the Long March. Leopold Sedar Senghor led Senegal to freedom and governed it wisely, alongside the profundity of his intellectual reflections. Forget, for a time, Stalin's purges of the 1930s, but remember that he was one man who read voraciously and recalled images and verses and statements in elephantine fashion. Robert Mugabe grew into adulthood reading everything he could lay his hands on. Julius Nyerere, Tanzania's Mwalimu, translated Julius Caesar and The Merchant of Venice into his native Kiswahili.
In the depths of a descending monsoon dusk in Bangladesh, as the rising winds run riot across your courtyard and all over the ancient cemetery and through the village where life and death have kept faith with each other for generations, it is literature you go back to --- to explain the commotion in the heavens. And you wait for your own tryst with the stars.
Dag Hammarskjoeld put it in perspective, days before he perished in an air crash in Africa in 1961:
"Others have gone before,
Others will follow."
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