Poems on Ekushey Theme
Note: There is hardly any Bangladeshi writing in English, creative or academic, prose or poetry, on Ekushey. All outpourings on this theme remain exclusively in the domain of Bengali. This fact is not surprising, given that it happened at a time when English creative writing was relatively unknown in these parts, and the truth is it is only lately that English creative writing is also being nudged by popular emotions and themes. English writing tends to remain aloof and cerebral, at a distance from the nation's teashops and streets, and the passions that can ignite and rule the streets. It is only with time and an enlargement of the subjects and topics that Bangladeshi English writers deal with will it engage with the nation's popular imagination and furies. Till then on topics such as Ekushey one has to turn to the English publications translations and criticism - of the Bangla Academy, which has creditably tried to preserve some of the passions of that now distant day. It should be noted that while these writers may not quite live up to the standards now demanded of in Bangladeshi English writing, and that the language at times may be mechanical and atonal, it is also indisputable that such critical reading and sensitivity to the poets and the poems is deep and profound. As for the poems themselves, if today they read as the direct, primal, unelaborated expressions of a simpler age, it is because they are. These poems, with their roots in anger and traditional similes, worked around simple rhythms, not only recorded feelings and the immediate events, but also functioned as a call to arms--a function that necessarily kept their movement, diction and tone, to an extent deliberately, straightforward and direct. Not for them the oblique, complicated utterance, play of forms, the nuanced exegesis, the, so to speak, Latinate, multisyllabic line. As editor M Harunur Rashid writes, "This is poetry of intense emotion. Emotion of this kind is to be come across over and over again in these poems. Love for man, love for one's mother tongue, love for one's country--all these go to make these poems unique in their own way."
Ekushey is not an isolated phenomenon in the history of Bengali nationalism. Abul Hussain another veteran of the nineteen forties, emphasized the same as he goes on investigating into the 'games' played with the language since time immemorial: Hossain uses the device of cataloguing while narrating the intrigues of the history of language. His reference to time (1948 or 1952) and places (Calcutta, Navadwipa, Gauda, etc.) serve as pointers to how and when the language fell victim to ominous designs of various quarters and interests. Tols, maktabs and Fort make us aware of three different influences that the language had to absorb in the course of its development. 'Tol' stands for the Sanskrit pundits who held the key to early Bengali, 'maktab' stands for the subsequent Muslim influences on it and finally 'fort' represents the Fort William College established and run by the Christian missionaries who played a pivotal role in shaping the up-to-date version of the language. Hussain also brings home the episode of Michael's (Madhushudhan Dutta) leaving home and coming back again. Stalwarts like Nazrul and Jibanananda are also remembered. In fine, he equates the language with his human existence, the country and countrymen. Abul Hossain
(translated by Mohammed Nurul Huda) All games are played only with you.
Not only today, not tomorrow
Not in some '48 or '52,
Not even on that immortal Ekushey,
Not in Dhaka or Karachi
Calcutta Navadwipa
Or in Gauda,
Not in Tols or Maktabs
Or in the 'Fort',
Not those people of today,
Not only they, but also you and I,
And our parents
And their parents
And their parents, too;
For thousands of years
Thousands and thousands of games
In fields
Riverfronts
Villages
Markets
In huts made of paddy stalks,
In the mopped courtyards,
In luxurious sofas,
In winter and in summer. All games are played only with you
In many ways, for many years.
Michael left home
And came back again,
The truant came back with a world title,
Himself a rebel, Nazrul
Made the whole country revolt,
Jibanananda Das discovered the face of Bengal,
Taking you to Barisal
Fazlul Huq sobbed near the crumbling graves
And inundated the whole land,
Shishir Bhaduri1 lent his sobbing to
The ears of Bengal for all times to come
As he called out 'Sita, Sita',
And my daughter, in the recent days,
Plays with you and engages
Herself always in rehearsals
To hold you in her thrall.
I, too, play with you
As long as I am awake,
I don't know what I do while sleeping,
But if in you in my dreams,
Sometimes I beseech you like a child
For a word, toss about like one demented,
All through the night.
I know the depth of man
Because I have tasted the flavour of your body,
I have seen your face,
And so I love my country and countrymen,
And favoured as I am by you
I bake my words like puffed rice
In the hearth of my own heart.
All games are played only with you
Played by them
And played by me alike. After much blood sacrifice Bangla came to be recognized as one of the state languages of Pakistan. And this spirit of the Ekushey did never die out. With the advent of every new 21st February, people trod the streets of Dhaka and other cities in mourning processions commemorating the martyrs and gathered at the altar of Shahid Minar and renewed their pledge regarding various problems and crises pertaining to national identity. The Ekushey, thus, got converted into a broader platform. This was aptly transformed into poetry by our poets. Sikander Abu Jafar could truly read that imbibed with the spirit of Ekushey, the history of the land was preparing to take a newer course. To him 'February 21 is a fearless journey on the road to consciousness.' Sikander developed a progressive outlook since the very beginning of his make-up as a poet. So unlike many of his contemporaries (Ahsan Habib or Syed Ali Ahsan), he hardly took refuge (in) poetic hide-and-seek in expressing his views. His role was more of a poet-worker than of an accomplished devotee of aesthetic excellence. Sikandar Abu Jafar
(translated by K Ashraf Hossain) All the people get united in a second,
They anointed their sinews, ribs and muscles
With a new-born pledge.
The history of the land pulsates on the horizon
of time. February 21 is a fearless journey
On the road of consciousness,
February 21 is a united being
Of million men. February 21 is written with the sleepless terror
Of the conscience stricken egos,
Who starts at the sound of falling leaves. February 21 is the tearing explosion
Of rage, of hatred,
With her black flags, posters and blood-red
scribbling of tears. She is much changed now, alas!
The unseen magic hands of treachery
Stifles her; the black vampire of prudence
spreads its wings;
a shrouded giant stalks the stage of sorrow
every year! (his name is foresight)
A great popular upstage
A strong faith in life
Is now February 21 is a mere silent memory
Of the past,
A misspent tear of people's pride,
A pale history of an atrophied urge. Sanaul Huq, belonging to the 1940s, subscribes to similar views as he too looks at the issue in historical perspectives. His emphasis is on the chain of changes, on sum(ming) up history in a few words referring to creation and disintegration of Pakistan, partition of Bengal and Bangladesh War. Huq deliberately uses the names of some seasonal red flowers like Krishnachura and Palash symbolizing the blood-smeared sacrifice of the martyrs. Sanaul Huq
(translated by Syed Najmuddin Hashim) At times someone writes a poem
Spends the livelong night
Searching in letters of the alphabet
The leaves with which to weave
The names, the sound, the glow of words,
Like the sparkle from the glow-worm's womb
Sheltering in the dimple of the Akanda flower;
How long ago was it
When our favourite artiste
Suchitra Mitra's voice
Would enunciate Tagore songs
To arouse words in the heart of music?
Even before that
The flowering Flame of the Forest,
The blood-soaked alphabet
In the cloistered haven of blackbirds–
As if the starry night
Echoes the uttered words,
as if the solar universe
echoes the cadence of classical Dhrupada,
in the opera of words
amidst the monsoon's rumble.
One recalls Ustad Alauddin,
The maestro in our immediate neighbourhood;
So many changes since–
The making and unmaking of states,
The motherland suddenly foreign,
In the sudden parting of blood-relatives
The turmoil
Kashiram Das suddenly deceased,
Barkar and Salam departed,
All dead and gone.
The rudely awakened words
Crow like a cock,
The bright-red coxcomb flowers
Bind the pages of our book,
The letters of the alphabet
Are a cascade of pearls–
O, my beautiful Bengali language;
At home and abroad
It attains immortality
By its time-conquering march,
The orchestrated multiple voices
Chanting in unison;
What a wondrous spectacle
Like the blessed rain
At the month's end in Magha,
The names of poems
Blazing like the flaming blossoms
Od Kingshuka and Pasha,
Like the Kabori's bunched flowers
That stand sentinel
At my mother's grave'
Classical times these–
Like the nectar of grapes,
Pots of honey,
A floral offering of words–
O, my beautiful Bengali language!
Abdul Latif's famous song They Want to Snatch Away the Words of My Mouth is a lyric of tense emotion. The very beginning line and title brings home the issue of language and condemns the ones who want to snatch away poet's mother tongue. He argues that one can never desert the language one has inherited from his ancestors. His way of presenting arguments as well as coinciding words and images is directly derived from the tradition of Bengali folk songs. The language he uses shows no trace of foreign influences; rather, he coins words from various dialects of Bangladesh. He also refers to great folk poets who have enriched the language over the ages. Abdul Latif
(translated by Mohammed Mirajul Quayes) They want to snatch away
The words of my mouth.
They chain my hands and feet
For sheer fun.
What my grandfather spoke
That too my father spoke
And now tell me, brother mine
Can any other tongue adorn these lips? We won't have ti, no we won't
We won't speak in an alien tongue
We'll lay down our dear lives if need be
To hold high
The honour of the tongue of my forefathers. Wehre else but here in bangla can you find
Songs dear like my mothers
And heart soft like hers.
How can I forget, brother mine,
My mother's honeyed words?
Those whose songs still call
The flood to a dead river,
How can I afford to forget them
Their peerless gifts through the ages? Mukund Das, Pagla Kanai
Hason, Madon and Lalon--all;
Their voices are also muzzled
Can this sorrow be borne? To uphold the honour of these gifted souls
Who is ready to give his life?
Come in groups all of you
Or else you'll have forever
Courted your own disaster. Don't be misled by their words.
Brother, I forbid
Don't dumb, you have your tongue
Or be blind when you have eyes.
They befriend you, brother
And want to make you a washerwoman's mule
That is why in meetins galore
They whisper soft and sweet words. Two centuries have you slumbered
Bengalees, sleep not any more!
Rise, there' sno more time now
Heven't you yet understood
Without Bangla there's no way out?
Apart from the largely acclaimed martyrs (Barkat, Salam, etc.), an unknown number of militant processionists laid down their lives during the Language Movement. Unidentified and unnoticed, they are like forgotten heroes killed in war. Humayun Choudhury refers to such martyrs ("But none ever engraved my name…"). Why are they so banished? The reason is not far to seek. During the peak hours of struggle, police used to take away the bodies of fatally wounded processionists and gave them back only after claims by relatives or their fellow comrades. But, at times, some of them remained ever unclaimed be cause of intricacies involved in the situation. Some even went either unnoticed by or they had no near and dear ones. Police often kept silent about them in order to reduce the number of official casualties. Such corpses were dropped by police at some convenient place where people could hardly trace out their identity or the cause of their deaths ("The fugitive light of the speeding police van/left my body unnoticed…"). But the fact is that their sacrifice did not go in vain. It is largely because of such selfless sacrifices that the battle of language was won by the Bengali people. More to it, such unnoticed sacrifices during various stages of the Bangladesh Movement crowned the entire process of the Liberation War with glowing success. Humayun Choudhury presents a surrealistic description of how those unidentified corpses began to swell, growing bigger and bigger into a trembling shape and size of Bangladesh ("Thereafter the corpse began to swell…") In this poem Humayun Choudhury allegorically brings home the pervasiveness of Bangladesh War that was won at the cost of lakhs of innocent lives, most of whom, buried in mass graves, still remain unnoticed and unidentified. So the spirit of Ekushey also presaged the Liberation War that created Bangladesh. Humayun Choudhury
(translated by AZM Mustafizur Rahman) I am waiting
And waiting I will be. For each traditional Ekushey engraves anew
On faded bouquets three over-used names.
Mute processions and thousands of toofprints
Obliterate our quest for the cherished address
Of a free and accomplished motherland and
In the first light of dawn ushered by the
Morning procession
Are vainly uttered the songs,
The songs of a sensuous life seeking to
Conquer the enveloping darkness.
But none ever engraved my name.
I am banished,
I have been ereased
From the footnotes of the historians of the liberation war.
I have no place, no address.
No polular song meriting the medal of Ekushey
Was ever composed in my name.
I have always been banished
From the marches and processions
From the noisy stages of stormy debates
Resounding from microphones of growing thunder
Or from the unending monotony
Of a hundred chirping poets beneath the banyan tree
Of Bangla Academy;
For an ill-tempered bull has chased
And kept me out of the orgy of Ekushey's carnival
For more than three decades;
And frightened and restless as I am,
For three decades I have sheltered the red lotus
Of my heart
I am not Salam, the tired clerk of the High Court,
Whose hands are ink-stained
From the ravages of piles of ledgers.
I am not even Barkat, the bright youth of the
University
Whose clenched fist pierced the firmament.
Or Jabbar, the plain rickshaw-puller
Who hid his face deep in the full bosom
Of his youthful wife. Yet I was there,
I was present there under the scorching heart of Ramna
Like melted lead in the bubbling noon smitten
By the bullets of '52
In an incredible Phalgun
Smeared with blood, bullets and Krishnachura. The fugitive light of the speeding police van
Left my dead body unnoticed,
And till now I am unidentified
Even after thirty-two colourful Ekusheys. Thereafter the corpse began to swell,
Its shape changed, growing bigger and bigger.
It spread from the courtyard of the Medical
College to the Race Course,
From North to South,
From East to West
And tearing the stinking cloak of
Belief and knowledge
Passion and indecision
And piercing through the worn-out and old
Perception of time and land,
It is not the trembling map of Bangladesh.
Now the coiled Bay of Bengal hisses
under its feet.
The head withstands the weight
Of the Himalayas swaying in a terrible snowstorm
And like an anchor the right hand grasps
The warring plains of South Asia,
And the Sundarbans gripped by its left hand
Awaits an inevitable conflagration.
Now it lies leaning downward
On the sharp-edged knife
For the pleasant time shall surely approach
When that last throb of inarticulate pain
Penetrates its heart,
As ninety million grenades
Detonate simultaneously in ninety million breasts. Turning my face towards that final hatred,
And my ears to that sound heralding the doom's day
I wait
And waiting I will be.
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