Did you get confirmation of the Bangkok-Dhaka flight?
If so, forward the info to me. This
portion of your trip still makes me nervous. Mom
Mother’s language arrives
only when I can connect to a wireless local area network. For a few weeks,
Phnom Penh is my local area. Then the local area pivots. To Kampot, to
Battambang, to Bangkok I go, mother’s language apprehending me always. Before
my flight to Dhaka, I forward my mother the details:
NAME
LENHART/LAWRENC
FROM
BKK
TO
DAC
FLIGHT
BG 0089
SEAT
NO. 12C
GATE
C5
DATE
21 JAN
BOARDING
TIME 17:40
It is exactly one month
before Ekushey February, or International Mother Language Day. While it is a
worldwide observance meant to “promote the preservation and protection of all
languages used by people of the world,” it stems directly from Bangladeshi
history. On this day in 1952, student protestors at Dhaka University were slain
as they rallied to promote Bangla to an official state language of the bygone
East Pakistan.
In an email, my
correspondent Dr. Fakrul Alam reminds me that my stay coincides with
Bangladesh’s largest book fair, the month-long Ekushey Boi Mela. Also known as
the Book Fair of Immortals of the 21st, the day is dedicated to
those who were martyred by the Pakistan Army. I think of how, when flying to
the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference each spring—to
Chicago, to Boston, to Seattle—I am inevitably seated among other writers. We
chat about our lives as writers, about our thoughts on genre, the projects
we’re working on, the projects we’re not working on. We muster personal
anecdotes about this year’s keynote speaker. At 600 miles per hour, we converge
giddily on this conference devoted to the written word.
I wonder if anyone on my
flight to Dhaka plans on attending Ekushey Boi Mela. I speak to the man beside
me, a contractor from Eastern Europe. “I have directives to build another
floor,” he says. He works for his brother-in-law who owns a garment factory. “I
have attempted to build,” I had written in the first draft of my aesthetic
statement (April 2013), “a narrative about Bangladesh that cannot be found
elsewhere.” Two weeks after I submitted my MFA thesis to my mentors, the Savar
building collapsed at Rana Plaza, killing 1,130 Bangladeshi garment workers. In
Bangladesh, I have attempted to build where there is often collapse.
Green auto-rickshaws with
black leather roofs are lined up on the airport’s curb. A driver selects me, clenching
my wrist, escorting me to an open cage door. I utter my destination aloud,
“Asiatic Society of Bangladesh?” Without affirming whether or not he knows the
place, the door clangs shut. Only after he’s accelerated toward the dim
megacity, he asks for a snack. “Do you have any chocolate?”
It takes an hour to find
the guesthouse. We pass a city sign that forbids public demonstration. There are no
words, just a megaphone with a line through it. The driver circles the Shaheed
Minar (Martyr Monument) several times. It appears and reappears. Its columns
are well-loitered. This is Shaheed Minar at its shabbiest, and it’s not too
shabby. In one month, the columns and dais will receive their annual washing.
Bangladesh has an online newspaper you may want to check
out: bdnews24.com
It
talks of torching of vehicles--not sure if it was bus or train. Bomb threat on
a politician's home. Closing of a university because of violence. Please
check with… the professor [about] some of these issues in order to ensure your
safety.
The
Islamic meetings have started (Jan 9-11) and (Jan 16-18). Sounds like this is a
religious/congregational meeting, but the number of people is just
scary. It is called the Bishwa Ijtema, World or Global Islamic
Congregational Meeting.
Mom
On my first night, I
listen to explosions from my bed. Molotov cocktails screech and burst, landing
indiscriminately in vacant bus windows. Elsewhere, groups of protestors lug
rubble onto train tracks with hopes of future derailment. Indeed, across the
country, men have taken it upon themselves to do the bidding of the opposition
leader of the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), Khaleda Zia, imposing a
nationwide transportation blockade by firebombing buses, lorries, and boats.
Zia is confined to her office with security forces forming a cordon at all
exits, insisting that she reverse the hartal.
As far as I can tell, I
am the only visiting scholar staying at the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh. In
the bathroom, I fill a mint-green bucket full of cold water and drench myself
bowl by bowl. I wash and shiver, noticing that a few floors beneath me a group
of university students is playing badminton on a dirt court. The rhythm of
their play is comforting. I lean my elbows against the marble edge of the
iron-barred windows and air-dry. I watch them for at least an hour, listening
to the taut plink of the rackets, listening to their taunting and tallying, to
alternating hilarity and exasperation as bombs detonate nearby. One of them
shouts at the bombers in Bangla. His response is so automated that it must be
idiomatic. He cracks his friends up.
I watch as the teams
reconstitute, altering the group's chemistry and revealing the most talented
player. He is tall and quiet, his name repeatedly called out: Sahib! Sahib!
Sahib! Sahib! I am entirely dry and entirely nude when I hear the security
guard ascending the stairs. Wrapping the towel around my waist, I feel like
I've been a reverse voyeur. I thank the guard for checking in on me and assure
him everything is satisfactory, that I’ll be going to bed shortly. Before
visiting with Dr. Fakrul Alam, I reread his last email to me.
As for the protests, I have encountered political unrest
of one kind [or] the other for most of my life, and feel that you will have to
factor in the unpredictable in any visit to our part of the world, although
nothing can affect you adversely for long if you are determined to come!
And till now, no foreigner has been attacked in our country's long history of
unrest!
I arrive at his apartment
on campus, drink tea and eat rice desserts. His wife tells me to tell him he
should retire and write a novel of his own, but he deflects. “You should send
an excerpt for us to publish in Six Seasons Review.” He leaves the
room and returns with a literary journal, Bangladesh’s only one in the English
language. “I will send something,” I promise. Before leaving, Dr. Alam draws
directions to the nearby (on-campus) grave of Kazi Nazrul Islam, the national
poet of Bangladesh.
There are flowers on
Nazrul’s grave. I stand alone with the “Rebel Poet.” I am perpendicular to him.
_|
I can’t say why, but for
those first moments, I suspect his grave is empty. I read to him to prove he is
there. Opening the only text I have with me (Six Seasons Review, Volume
1, Issue 2), I read Seema Amin’s line over and over: “Everyone on earth blew
the whistle / Everyone on earth blew the whistle / Everyone on earth blew the
whistle / Everyone on earth blew the whistle.” When traveling alone, it is a
guilty pleasure to inflict my out-loud voice on private pockets of public. Near
the end of the issue, I encounter an enigmatic poem by Sudeep Sen that reads:
“I am hungry… / for a story essaying endlessly—words.”
Of all the
questions asked during my thesis defense, Manuel Muñoz’s was most difficult.
“Why fiction?” I realized immediately how I had taken genre for granted.
Even as I fabricated the answer, I knew that this was my novel’s biggest flaw:
it was not yet an essay.
I know I
have found Dhaka University's Jagannath Hall because of the preponderance of
bindis and monastic robes. A residentially segregated campus, Jagannath Hall
houses all minority (non-Muslim) students. Three Hindu students sit on a
concrete wall and gesture for me to join them. Vivek, who has just purchased a guitar,
asks if I’ll teach him to play something. I’m not sure how he knows I play
guitar. I take hold of his index finger and slide it along the fret board while
I pluck the ‘E’ string for him. In no time, he’s playing The White Stripes’
“Seven Nation Army” on his own. I ask if the students if they intend to go to the book fair
next week.
Rather
than RSVP for himself, one student discusses the possibility that
Bangladeshi-American essayist, Avijit Roy, will be in attendance. Roy’s name
doesn’t sound familiar to me, but when the student says Mukto-Mono—the
name of the secular blog Roy founded in 2000—I become aware of the significance
of the student’s comment. After the 2014 book fair, Roy faced death threats;
now, this student is speculating about whether or not Roy will return in
2015.
Later that
day, I take an auto-rickshaw to Gloria Jean’s Coffee in Gulshan Circle. It is
the most reliable local area network I’ve been able to find in the city. I sit
among NGO workers and Bangladeshi elite as I read through Roy’s posts on Mukto-Mono.
A few months after my trip, the Center For Inquiry publishes
an essay in which Roy discusses the Islamic fundamentalist backlash to his
book, Biswasher Virus (The Virus of Faith) in an
eponymous article:
As soon as the book was released, it rose to the top of the [Ekushey Boi Mela] fair’s best-seller list. At the same time, it hit the
cranial nerve of Islamic fundamentalists. The death threats started flowing to
my e-mail inbox on a regular basis. I suddenly found myself a target of
militant Islamists and terrorists. A well-known extremist by the name of Farabi
Shafiur Rahman openly issued death threats to me through his numerous Facebook
statuses. In one widely circulated status, Rahman wrote, ‘Avijit Roy lives in
America and so, it is not possible to kill him right now. But he will be
murdered when he comes back.’
Roy is self-aware of his
provocation. For example, he opens the essay with an epigraph from Salman
Rushdie, which reads, “Religion, a medieval form of unreason, when combined
with modern weaponry becomes a real threat to our freedoms.” Roy explicitly
draws upon Richard Dawkins’s Selfish Gene for metaphorical
inspiration. He even goes so far as to compare lines of the Holy
Qur’an to the parasite that hijacks a grasshopper’s brain (Spinochordodes tellinii), making it
suicidal.
Roy recalls an incident
in which the online bookseller, Rokomari.com, withdrew Biswasher Virus from
its virtual shelf because the same extremist, Rahman, incited his “Islamist
friends” to attack Rokomari's office. Roy defends his prose from this
unwarranted commercial withdrawal by stating, “Most of my writings deal with
modern science and philosophy and include proper references to journals,
newspapers, and academic literature.” He echoes Rushdie’s diction by calling Rahman's influence on Rokomari “medieval.”
At this year’s AWP
Conference in Los Angeles, I attended panel F243, “Who Reads Us?”.
Deconstructing the panel's title, one panelist dubbed it an existential
question, one which we (as writers) must ask ourselves from time to time. My
colleague, Nicole Walker, claimed that she renamed her blog "Nikwalk"
because she did not want to face professional punity for the original name,
which featured the word "butt." "I feared my butt wasn't
professional," Walker said. During the Q&A session, my friend Stacy
asked the quartet of panelists if they feared they might ever “blog themselves
out of an essay.” It was a compelling question, implying 1) how precious, how
perishable experiences are to essayists and 2) that the essay has more capital
(artistically and professionally) than a blog post.
The book fair sprawls
across the grounds of Bangla Academy. With nearly 500 publishing houses in
attendance, their stalls overstuffed with new releases and backlist stacks, not
to mention the makeshift stages constructed for dialogues between important
cultural critics and a placid corner memorializing Nazrul, Ekushey Boi Mela
makes the AWP book fair feel comparatively sedate. Because of limited space in
my backpack (already stuffed with still-unread books I’d purchased in Cambodia,
plus the copy of Six Seasons Review), I limit myself to just one
purchase. I stumble around the academy like I’m at the State Fair at the Cal
Expo, unsure if I’ve already slalomed this aisle of vendors, or this one. I buy
my book: Essays on Ekushey, the Language Movement, 1952. Hugging
it to my chest, I yield to throngs of ecstatic readers who ripple taka notes in
booksellers' faces. Mehul Kamdar, Avijit Roy’s associate at Mukto-Mono, has
written that the biggest impediment to free thinking in Bangladesh is the
“major problem of illiteracy which makes it easy for fundamentalists from
outside the region to spread hatred and false propaganda. When people cannot
read critical texts questioning this propaganda,” Kamdar writes, “they are more
easily deluded.” While I know illiteracy persists in rural Bangladesh, I can’t
help but think that Dhaka’s month-long love affair with literature is at least
an urban antidote. Though it does seem problematic that an individual like
Rahman can bully a bookseller like Rokomari into preventing the sale of certain
critical texts.
Before leaving the
country, I stalk the rectangular terminals of Zia International Airport, past
small prayer rooms, a coffee stall with a massive decal of a Bengal Tiger, and
an unmanned bookstore. I read the backs of the books written in English,
including one well-stocked title written by a leading Muslim cleric. At this
store, I purchase my last book abroad. Edited by Rifat Munim of The
Daily Star, Bangladesh’s largest newspaper, Bangladesh in
Wikileaks is a compendium of diplomatic cables articulating U.S.
policy toward Bangladesh. The cables “generally expose the rife-strewn local
political scene. And quite a good number of them lend valuable insights into
our political realities,” Munim writes in the introduction. Here, the editor
seems to welcome U.S. perceptions of Bangladesh. I read the “Classified” and
“Secret” cables, each by each, nearly finishing by the time my flight lands for
the layover in Abu Dhabi. Collected together, the cables start to essay.
Following Henry Kissinger’s presumption of Bangladesh as a “basket case”
(1971), the diplomats of the cables recycle certain political themes, weaving
them throughout these files spanning 2004 to 2010. The tone trends toward
paranoia with occasional inflections of condescension.
I return to California
just before International Mother Language Day. Not long after, I awake to a
text message from my mother who informs me (via a link to an article), on
February 26th, freethinking essayist Avijit Roy was hacked to
death by meat-cleaver-wielding Islamists at the Ekushey Boi Mela. His wife was hacked too, but survived. I feel an incredible weight of grief as I imagine the book fair
attendees dispersing from the meditative Nazrul corner. It is five days after
Ekushey February, two days before the end of Ekushey Boi Mela. What bothers me
most is that the text message itself feels like a casual way for my mother to
say, “I told you so.” I also sense she means, This could have been you.
A few days before Roy was
slain, Mukto-Mona suddenly went offline in Bangladesh. The
blog hackers and body hackers worked in concert to snuff the writer and his
words, knowing them to be effectively coextensive.
I reimagine Stacy’s
question—not for AWP, but for the makeshift stages of Ekushey Boi Mela. “Are
you ever afraid that you might blog yourselves out of a life?” What if the
answer to the question of "Who reads us?" is simply: the people who
will murder you.
A few weeks after my trip
to Bangladesh, Dr. Alam reminds me to send an excerpt of my novel for
consideration for Six Seasons Review, and I oblige. On April 9th,
the editor responds with two edits. The first is small. “And secondly," he
continues, "the editorial board would like to change the spelling of the
[novel’s title] to ‘Assalamu Alaykum.'"
I am not one to resist a
hard-working volunteer editor, but this was not some small thing. This was
about the title of the novel I had been working on for the past four years. I
wrote back:
... As for [Asylum Alaykum] vs. [Assalamu Alaykum],
the former spelling reflects the title of my novel. It's a lyric double
entendre relating to my protagonist's experience with immigration. He
arrives in America as a political asylee/climate refugee and is forced to
grapple with his Muslim identity… due to American Islamophobia
(which drives him mad).
I never
hear back from the editor. Instead, an email from Dr. Alam.
Dear Lawrence,
An appeal--please agree to the Arabic spelling for the title.
Keep the title for your novel but what we have to worry about in Bangladesh at
this point of time is the militancy that can make any change in the Arabic look
like an insult. Our publisher, I should add, does not want to get into trouble
with fundamentalism. I hope you will understand and allow us this change,
although I consider it unfortunate that we have to request you thus.
With all best wishes,
Fakrul
Nazrul once wrote in a
quasi-chorus to a poem, “Don’t be afraid, O human soul!” In a third
iteration of her question, I imagine Stacy asking, “Are you afraid it will
never be sated: your hunger for a story that essays endlessly?” In a fourth,
“Are you afraid, at all, of language?”
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