Letter From Montreal
South Asian Literary Conference
I should not have spoken ill of winter in my earlier dispatch. Old man winter continues to wreck havoc - especially on the West coast. The Pacific coast, known for its balmy weather, was taken by surprise when they were dumped with snow of the amount many have never seen in their entire lives. Life literally halted. The most affected by this recalcitrant weather pattern were the holiday travelers as their travel plans went haywire with cancelled flights, delays and re-routings. Television news replayed pictures of sleep-deprived travelers anxiously waiting for a lucky break that would transport them from the no-man zone of the airport to their familiar abodes. Then there would be others, who would camp out in the waiting area, oblivious to the rest of the world. When I had booked a flight from Montreal to San Francisco five months ago, I had no idea I would be caught up in this travel frenzy myself.
I started out on December 25th uneventfully enough. As I waited out the three-hour break at Dallas/Fort Worth airport I ached to go out and roam the familiar places I had once called home for seven years. But things were starting to get interesting. After three terminal changes that sent me scuttling all over the massive airport, the airlines people finally decided which one I was to finally board. The return part was where things really got exciting. My itinerary was precarious enough with only a half-hour break allowed to catch the connecting flight back to Montreal from JFK-New York. When my flight from San Francisco was delayed an hour I was sure I would miss my connection. I was right. The next flight was seven hours away.
Already sleep deprived because of an overnight flight, further sleep eluded me. I was already starting to feel like Tom Hanks in Terminal. Come to think of it, he was in this same airport! After an eight-hour wait the Montreal flight was finally announced. Hallelujah! Home was just fifty minutes away. As the plane hovered over Montreal, the flight attendant suddenly announced that the pilot was not being permitted to land and we were being re-routed to the nearest airportBoston! Unbeknownst to us, a ninety-kilometer wind was raging below which could have easily knocked the tiny aircraft clearly out of the runway. We flew to Boston in shocked silence. We alighted at Boston airport, were instructed to take a seat, even though there was none empty, until further instructions. By then, I had had enough and was ready for a good cry. Suffice it to say, I did finally reach home.
The occasion for my travel was the annual South Asian Literary Association conference. This year's theme "Gender and Sexuality in South Asian Literature and Culture," meant my paper was a comparative study of Tahmima Anam's novel and Jahanara Imam's Ekatturer Dinguli. Both narratives valorize motherhood in keeping with traditions where they become iconic national symbols. Yet, absence of similar literary representation of another group is glaringly conspicuous. Totally obliterated from the patriotic rhetoric of celebration, these women do not fit the accepted mold of mothers or sisters. The public space of agency remains exclusive to maternal or rural women who parallel the feminization of the land purely for an aestheticizing purpose within a nationalist discourse. My co-speaker, a Sri Lankan, echoed similar concerns within her country's framework. My friend Paulomi Chakraborty initiated a stimulated discussion as she drew on her readings from Neelima Ibrahim to Nasreen Akhter. Originally from Kolkata, Paulomi is finishing her PhD at the University of Alberta and has a keen interest in Bengali women's narrative of violence, with particular attention on the Partition. It was gratifying to see so many scholars interested in this part of our history, yet apart from those who speak and read Bangla, others depend on translations or wait for a Diaspora writer to pen an English novel on the topic. Bangladeshi literature and culture, rich as it is in Bangla, remains elusive to many.
In my three semesters of teaching South Asian literature at Concordia University, I had tried to be as eclectic as I could in representing the literary richness of English writing from the region. Yet apart from valorizing Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and including some translated short stories, I could not highlight Bangladesh's history until I got hold of Noor. Ironically, Noor is a Pakistani novel. Described as the first Pakistani English novel to break "a long literary silence...to focus on East Pakistan during the war of 1971" and come "to terms with its brutality," the very first page flabbergasted my students as they tried to comprehend figures in the millions of the dead. That a brutality of such magnitude had taken place in such recent past they found to be disconcerting.
As a companion piece to the novel I had used a documentary film called "War Babies," where a young Canadian named Badol returns to Bangladesh in search of his birth mother. Badol is one of many war babies adopted by Westerners. Met by resistance from all in Bangladesh, he is unsuccessful in his mission. Throughout the documentary, Badol narrates the violence that women like his mother had to face, about 25, 000 of them. Although we never get to see Badol's mother, a brief interview by Ferdousi Priyobhashini provides a first-person account of the horror many women endured. Priyobhashini offers to be Badol's mother in case he does not find his own. More statistics follow, numbers that boggles the mind. I looked on silently, being already familiar with the history of my country. As the tape ended, I bent down to turn off the DVD player while asking my first question regarding the film. Silence. As I stood up, forty pairs of stricken eyes looked back at me. Next came an avalanche of questions. Mostly "how" and "why." I added my own story, being very young yet remembering the horror when my father, an army doctor, was picked up by Pakistani soldiers just as we were about to sit for dinner at our home. My father was one of the lucky ones as he was let go after thirteen agonizing days when we had no news of his whereabouts. My students asked more questions. Why couldn't Badol find his mother? Why didn't anyone cooperate with him? Simon Dring, in the tape, answers the question in a talk with Badol, probing into what Badol had hoped to gain from his search. What would he have asked his mother had he found her? One student, well aware of the silence surrounding women during Partition, wanted to know about the repercussion following Priyobhashini's recounting. Later, on the course website, I detected a flurry of activities as students discovered old news-reels on You Tube and shared their findings. In April, the Canadian print of Anam's novel came out and many were interested in reading the book.
During all my teachings of South Asian literature, Partition by far takes on the monumental position of a traumatic event-- the birth pain of emerging nations. The sheer number of conference papers echo this continued interest, followed by the Sri Lankan conflict. Bangladesh's war remains understudied to a large extent mostly because of the paucity of material written in English. Paulomi commented as much - that it took a Diaspora writer to make this history known to many whereas there are such excellent writings already filling libraries in Bangladesh. And since literature is such a potent medium to bring up the stories of the otherwise voiceless, women and minorities, there are pressing needs for such books.
Rebecca Sultana lives in Montreal and teaches at Champlain College-St. Lambert.
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