Tribute
Abdul Mannan Syed: His literary mystique
Abdul Mannan Syed's sudden and premature demise on September 5, 2010, at 67 appears to have occurred with the wattage and force that had stunningly accompanied his emergence on the Bangladesh literary scene about forty-six years ago.He was below-twenty at that time -- an age when average Bengalee writers just pussy-foot around the mainstream literature. But Mannan Syed was free of all kinds of awkwardness during his literary debut. Self-confidence distinguished the poet from the very beginning. The 'early bloomer' with his first creative piece, an experimental short story, set his foot on Dhaka literature with a flash, the dazzle that also lit his final exit. Syed strode across the length and breadth of our literature with aplomb, mastering a unique style that eludes many. He had achieved all this for his being gifted with an enviable creative genius.A born writer as he was, he kept immersing himself in the fathomless joy of literature, producing a massive corpus that included poetry, short stories, essays (Probondho),fictions, verse plays, assorted prose and myriad of other creative works. Until his death, he has published over 160 books. He also loved to call himself a literary activist as he edited a few little magazines. From the very start, Syed displayed his distinctive literary character and temperament. Cliches and conventional expressions were anathema to him. Unlike many of our poets and prose writers, he had an innate aversion for shibboleths,i.e, anything hackneyed. Mannan Syed's first collection of poetry 'Jonmanho Kabitaguchcha' (1967) spoke profusely of the freshness he had been endowed with. As he progressed with poetry and short stories, apparently under a spell of creative trance, Syed went on publishing books, one surpassing the other, displaying an exceptional artistic vibrancy. By the early nineties, we found the writer securely placed at the zenith of his career.He was the author of over seventy publications then. Those included some of his major research works, notably his pioneering tome on Jibanananda Das. By that time the great Jibanananda had already began passing into a kind of oblivion. It was Abdul Mannan Syed's vision and tireless efforts that brought the poet to light again, long after the end of Buddhadev Bose era. In fact, Mannan lifted Jibanananda Das and his works out of a twilight zone. The publication on Jibanananda titled 'Shuddhotomo Kobi' in 1970 indisputably was a phenomenal event in the whole expanse of Bangla literature, for this single book in no time sparked a renewed interest of Bengalee readers and researchers in the fading presence of the poet. It may not be an hyperbole if we liken Mannan Syed's rediscovery of Jibanananda to TS Eliot's, in which the great English poet presented before the readers the long-lost Metaphysical Poets. In the following years, Mannan Syed, employing all his artistic zeal and scholar's insight, concentrated on Jibanananda and his works.He discovered hundreds of unpublished poems by the poet and included them in the volumes containing Jibanananda's poetical works. Syed has also brought before readers dozens of unpublished (in the form of handwritten manuscripts)short stories, fictions etc by the poet, who is now acclaimed as the greatest Bengalee modern poet. Another remarkable aspect of Mannan Syed's literary scholarship was, undoubtedly, his in-depth research on Kazi Nazrul Islam, the Rebel Poet.Through his arduous analysis, Syed has attempted to offer us a total portrait of Nazrul, thus nullifying the many myths that at times distorted the poet's real image. Upon reading Abdul Mannan Syed's evaluation of Nazrul, we came to learn that Nazrul was not just a Rebel Poet, but a poet of colossal height, whose many-splendoured genius eventually made him the greatest literary figure after Rabindranath Tagore. Mannan Syed also shed light on the works of the Kolkata-based poets of the decade of the thirties, especially the group of the Great Five comprising Buddhadev Bose, Sudhindranath Dutta, Bishnu Dey, Amiya Chakraborty -- and the earlier mentioned Jibanananda Das. His researcher's focus spotlighted our Shamsur Rahman, Al Mahmud, Shaheed Qadri, and almost all the major poets of the sixties and the seventies. In fact, no poet of note in Bangladesh belonging to the decades ranging from the forties to the first decade of the 21st century escaped his scholar's attention. Of lale, Syed has especially focused on the works of Tagore. In spite of his penchant for scholarly studies, Abdul Mannan Syed was quintessentially a poet. His exuberant style and content coupled with an evocative diction has singled him out in the Bangladesh poetic landscape. A firm believer in the principle of 'art for art's sake', he had been developing a romantic, and somewhat arcane, poetic self since his early career as a poet. Most of his poems take a tour of his subterranean world interspersed with the real, the quasi-real and the absurd -- which he called the Surreal. Syed spent a major part of his over four-decade literary career composing verses tinged with surrealism. In short, Abdul Mannan Syed was a fully charged writer. Literature turned out to be his lifelong passion. Shutting out all earthly engagements that 'gag a pure artist's soul', in the semi-classical sense though, Abdul Mannan Syed chose the life of a virtual hermit in order to retain his artistic perfection.
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