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Saturday, June 4, 2016

Arts & Letters

PHOTOS: Arif Hafiz

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lays scripted and performed in English are a rarity in this country. So when we heard one such play was going to be staged in the city, we were curious. Our curiosity only increased when we came to know

Editor’s note that it was an adaptation set in the present-day Bangladesh. This issue features a review of the play which seeks to understand if English plays have a future in this country.

May 27-28 also saw the confluence

of a number of our writers, poets, translators and academics in a very interesting literature conference where they dissected the presence of magic in literature in all its dimensions. While some argued that the return of magic

and occultism in the narratives of fiction and film has to do with the rise of fundamentalism, some highlighted the fact that magic in the form of supernatural and unreal happenings has attracted writers and playwrights

for thousands of years and that, in many cases, it has served as the writer’s defiance of exploitative social norms and systems. This issue covers the twoday event and offers readers the key points that speakers highlighted. l

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Arts & Letters

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T H E AT R E R E V I E W

The death of a garment worker When word spread that An Inspector Calls would be staged in the city by actors known to us, many ventured to ask: Is an English play written in 1945 and originally set in 1912 Edwardian England at all relevant for an urban audience in Dhaka in 2016?

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any are already familiar with the play, An Inspector Calls, widely considered to be one of the classics of 20th century English theatre. Written

by J B Priestley at the close of the Second World War, the play is a trenchant critique of the capitalist system and the class-based values it promotes, and is known for representing Priestley’s own socialist political views.

When word spread that the play would be staged in the city by actors known to us, many ventured to ask: Is an English play written in 1945 and originally set in 1912 Edwardian England at all relevant for an urban audience in Dhaka in 2016?

Now that I have seen the performance, the answer is: Yes, it is as relevant today, without a doubt.

Produced by Jatrik Productions, the play was staged to huge acclaim at Gulshan Club on May 27 and 28. Famous actor Naila Azad (who acted in the critically successful film Crossing Over, among other films and plays) directed the play.

In this adaptation by Azad, who also designed the production, the play was set in a fictional town (named Bonobagan) in Bangladesh, at the house of Mr Borhania, a garment-factory owner, and Mrs Borhania. The proud couple are hosting a lavish party to celebrate the engagement of their daughter Sheila to a rich business tycoon’s son Jawad. Everyone at the party is immensely pleased, except Ejaj, the moody and rebellious son of Mr and Mrs Borhania.

The celebrations are soon interrupted by the sudden appearance of Inspector Jinnah, a mysterious and imposing character who starts interrogating everyone about the gruesome suicide of a young garment factory worker named Abha Alam. Through his investigation, it is eventually revealed that each person present at the party, although not criminally responsible, took certain actions and decisions that put the young woman in the most hapless of situations and drove her to take her own life.

While the set was not elaborately designed, it was a clever idea to have Abha’s

That’s why the most splendid artistic moments were when Abha stood silently in the corner of the stage while her tragic story of exploitation and powerlessness was related by other characters

little room (and sometimes her workplace) next to the Borhanias’ richly-furnished drawing room.

Actress Shormymala was excellent in portraying the silent suffering that Abha had gone through while the other characters simultaneously talked about their run-ins with her.

Abha’s troubles are slowly unveiled to the audience by Inspector Jinnah, played by Ariq Anam Khan, who nicely captured the gravitas and imposing stature of the role. A bit patronising at times, the inspector still does an excellent job in questioning the family -- pronouncing judgment on their selfishness in one act, only to soothingly coax information out of them in another.

As the story progresses, the audience learns that Mr Borhania triggered the chain of events when he had fired Abha from his factory for asking for higher wages. Kazi Toufikul Islam portrays him as a smug, self-satisfied man and a rather one-dimensional character, who shows no remorse for the part he played in Abha’s suicide and whose only focus is on taking his family wealth and power forward.

Mrs Borhania is similarly unmoved. While Munize Manzur’s portrayal of Mrs Borhania as a high-class, pearl-wearing, charity subscription-collecting “Aunty” is stereotypical at times, her moments of pure love for her children against the stark hatred she feels for Abha, who she dismisses as one of the undeserving poor, was commendable.

Sheila, played by Afia Rashid, added a different dimension to the characters. While she is clearly spoilt and used to having her way, she is the first to repent her spiteful anger towards Abha for Abha, she had felt, was prettier than her. This led to Abha losing her second job at a clothing store.

Sheila’s character also serves as a foil to Abha’s -- both are young women in the city, but while Sheila’s wealth allows her to chastise and scold her unfaithful lover and even her parents, Abha’s poverty means that a justified demand to live a life of dignity is met with indifference, scorn and even outrage.

The play also reveals that both Ejaj and Jawad had relationships

with Abha at different times and although they both argue about their chivalrous intentions, it is soon understood that she was sexually exploited by them.

Shaan Rahman really shone in the character of Ejaj, grabbing the audience’s sympathy with his rebellion against his father and the system he’s a part of; but he, too, slowly reveals his weaknesses.

One could also sense his disconnect with the real world in the play -- while he argues that the repressed classes will soon rise up against their oppressors, he can’t understand the principles that led Abha to refuse stolen money from an alcoholic like him.

Nafis Salman, by no means a weak actor, did not come across with plausibility in his role as Jawad, however. Furthermore, there did not seem to be enough space for directing a critical glance at his sexual exploitation of Abha.

Last but not least, Shakil Ahmed played the Borhania’s domestic help Dino and a few other minor roles alongside Shormymala.

The play ends with a twist that causes the family to question whether Inspector Jinnah was

actually a real person, or an “avenging angel” brought to question their conscience. In the end, we see Sheila and Ejaj are the only two who are truly shaken by the consequences of their actions.

The fact that an English play, adapted to the setting of presentday Bangladesh, was staged in front of a jam-packed audience was proof enough that plays scripted in English do have a future in this country.

About the adaptation, director Azad said, “Because I love literature and the language of the play, I tried to bring in as much of the original language as possible, but obviously I had to dilute the 1912 England background. So for example, in the original play we see the mention of Titanic as the unsinkable ship and we all know what had happened. So from there, we had Mr Borhania refer to Rana Plaza as this amazing, modern factory, and we all know of the tragedy that followed.”

While some have considered Priestley’s original play to be a bit too preachy, his critique of the ruling clique is still relevant to this day. That’s why the most splendid artistic moments were when Abha stood silently in the corner of the stage while her tragic story of exploitation and powerlessness was related by other characters.

The story of how the voices of the poor are silenced and how workers are exploited is as relevant today as it was 71 years ago. l Shuprova Tasneem is a journalist and writer.

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BOOK REVIEW

An Indian writes a novel in the US that’s not about immigrants

MAN BOOKER INT’L 2016

Han Kang and translator share prize Chaitali Sen’s novel is a universal exploration of how political violence tests the n Arts & Letters Desk

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Anu Kumar

n our times, it does seem a book needs a category to fit into, a neat label for itself.

But Chaitali Sen’s novel, The Pathless Sky, isn’t just another work of immigrant fiction; that would be far too pat and casual.

It’s intriguing in the many themes it explores, and raises – especially in how violence, its memories, and its reach, leaves an impact on everyone, especially two people involved in a relationship.

Political violence, in reference to recent decades, has figured in recent fiction by Indian American writers. The violence spawned by the Naxalite movement shadows the relationships that appear in Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland – Udayan’s death, for instance, never allows things to settle between Gauri and Subhash.

In Karan Mahajan’s An Association of Small Bombs, a terror attack has implications on even those tangentially affected.

Its scars linger and manifest themselves much later in life. And in a somewhat more oblique way, Ranbir Singh Sidhu’s Deep Singh Blue is set in north California, but some of its protagonists are drawn to the conflict raging in 1980s Punjab.

A fictional world of conflict

The Pathless Sky was published in the US in late 2015 by Europa – which has in recent years also won acclaim as the publisher of Elena Ferrante’s celebrated novels, including the Neapolitan Quartet.

Sen sets her work and characters in a totally fictional world. It is a conceit intriguing in many ways; raising questions of plausibility, for instance.

John Merchant, when pressed on the matter, doesn’t know where he is really from for “no one is really from Alexandria” – which is not the Egyptian city as the reader might automatically assume. It is in college in Mt Belet that John meets Mariam from Sulat, a region where a conflict has raged even before her time.

The one conflict Mariam does know about is more immediate – the quite evident division between her parents, one that has in many ways led Mariam to resent her father.

There’s another one that’s revealed

to her only later; this relates to her grandfather, his escape to Germany, and his subsequent suicide: a revelation that leaves Mariam conflicted in certain ways.

It may be hard in the beginning to place this fictional universe on a map. Sulat is in the north, where we learn only gradually of the conflict between Catholics and Muslims. Alexandria, John’s home, is where the elite largely lives. The military outpost John leaves for when he is called up is eighteen

emotions: a book that follows almost in the fine traditions of novels such as The Plague.

Rebels in the northern province of Sulat, where Marian is from and where she returns after her father’s sudden illness, have engaged militarily with the government; the army has a strong presence in the region. Reports of atrocities and casualties only grow in the period when John and Mariam find themselves away from each other.

This novel is more about how conflict and everyday violence shapes and moulds human behaviour and everyday emotions

hours away by train, making the country almost as big as India.

Other characters feature with names (sometimes with just first names), like Vic Arora, Nina, or John’s professors Malick and Nehemia – that can be easily placed but then are also universal.

The scenes and reports might remind us of graphic newspaper accounts – an innocent family killed for no reason, a survivor’s anguish, the censorship, the suspicion, the suppression of crucial war information.

But the attempt to draw analogies doesn’t really matter after a while. For this novel is more about how conflict and everyday violence shapes and moulds human behaviour and everyday

Metaphors of the earth

The campus at Mt Belet is a politically neutral place. It offers a benign environment, and descriptions of the library, dorms, even of the falling snow, evoke in some ways the film Love Story. But it is when Mariam is forced to return home to the English Canal in Sulat, and John is called up for military service, that the conflict intrudes.

From then on, it will shadow their lives and the decisions they make – relating to careers, having a family, and even routine ones like making a journey out of the country. Weighed against such wider forces of political violence, individual choice takes on a poignant turn, making blame difficult, and betrayal and

resentment, dangerously easy.

Letters and documents have a role to play as well. Mariam’s letters, for instance, never reach John. He learns afterwards that they have been confiscated. Later, Mariam’s attempts to secure a passport for herself, a vital document granting identity, and one that will help her out of the country, prove frustratingly elusive.

Along with the wonderful passages on John and Mariam’s lovemaking, this book resonates

with some powerful lingering imagery. For instance, roads like x-rays that cut through land claiming it. And on another page, blue is the colour of oceans and the sky, but also, as Mariam says, the colour of twilight and sadness.

As it happens, she is wearing a blue dress (inadvertently, it’d appear) when she and John meet again after long years apart.

The world of geology that John inhabits works as an effective contrary metaphor. It is his work of understanding earth formations, the evidence hidden away below the surface for centuries, that intrigue him. It helps him belong in a way he otherwise finds difficult; almost in the same way, that Anil, the forensic pathologist in Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, tries to painstakingly reconstruct a recovered skeleton and its story, in the hope that this will enable her to understand the Sri LankanTamil conflict. l The Pathless Sky, Chaitali Sen, Europa Editions. This is a truncated version of an article that first appeared in scroll.in.

South Korean author Han Kang has won this year’s newstyle Man Booker Int’l prize for her fiction The Vegetarian.

She will share the £50,000 prize with her British translator.

The South Korean writer beat José Eduardo Agualusa and Elena Ferrante to scoop the award for foreign works translated into English The Vegetarian is a dark novel about a woman who becomes vegetarian -- something that is extremely uncommon in South Korean society -- and the way this affects her relationships with the people around her, including her sister and her brother-in-law, an artist who becomes obsessed with her.

This is the first time that The Man Booker International prize has been awarded for a single book, rather than for a body of work. It follows the prize’s joining together with the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

The prize follows the recent success of several acclaimed foreign works by authors such as Norway’s Karl Ove Knausgaard and Italy’s Elena Ferrante - published in English.

Ms Han competed with Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa with his novel A General Theory of Oblivion and Elena Ferrante’s final Neapolitan novel The Story of a Lost Child.

Ms Han’s translator, Deborah Smith, shares the award for her translation despite only having learnt Korean just a few years ago.

Ms Smith said she had only spoken English until the age of 21 but decided to move to Korea after completing her English Literature degree to immerse herself in the language after she noticed there were few EnglishKorean translators.

Source: www.independent.co.uk

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L i te r at u r e C on f e r ence at U L A B

The meaning of magic in literature A literature conference sought to understand the underlying meaning of magic in literature

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iscussion on magic in literature started in the 1980s. But much of that discussion was about “magic realism” as it was being practised and used by Latin American Boom writers and some others writing in English. Many critical writings on the subject in blogs, magazines or journals sounded as if magic in the form of unreal events or happenings came into use only after the publication of One Hundred Years of Solitude.

The Bangladeshi literary scene has seen even a more lasting interest in the subject with a number of contemporary writers regularly and dedicatedly using the craft of magic in their works.

One would have thought that the literature conference “Magic and Literature” that was held at the University of Liberal Arts on May 27-28 would merely offer a recapitulation of the above discussions in a formal and academic ambience. While the panel discussions and papers covered many aspects of “magic realism”, they, considered together, made a holistic approach to the idea of magic in literature, making it crystal clear at the very beginning that magic has always attracted writers, playwrights and artists for thousands of years now and that it is not an exclusive literary property of Latin American writers.

According to the organisers, magic is rather an ancient phenomenon in the arts that takes different shapes and dimensions in different ages, depending on the cultural and economic tides of the time.

“Through this conference, we sought to understand if magic is only a form of ancient art for mastering our limitations or it has some bigger implications. We also sought to understand if the recent increase of magical elements in literary and film narratives has anything to do with the rise of fundamentalism,” said Professor Shamsad Mortuza, the conference convener.

The department of English at ULAB organised the event and what made it very different from typical conferences was the lively participation of young academics and numerous students from both private and public universities.

The spontaneity in their response was evident from the fact that a total of 87 papers, written by both

(Clockwise)ULAB VC Prof Imran Rahman handing over a crest to Dr Subir Dhar; Prof Azfar Hussain moderating the Bangla session in which Razu Alauddin, first from left, Mohammad Rafiq, second from right, and Shamim Reza spoke; Dr Subir delivering his keynote speech Photos: Farzana Akter students and academics, were presented in two days.

The keynote speech was given

by Professor Subir Kumar Dhar of Rabindra Bharati University. Other highlights of the two-day event included a plenary speech by Dr Azfar Hussain of Grand Valley University in Michigan and USbased Global Center for Advanced Studies; a panel discussion on “Magic in Bangla Literature” by poets Mohammad Rafiq, Shamim Reza, and Raju Alauddin; and a plenary discussion on Caribbean, African, Latin American and Native American literature by Dr Joshua Yu Burnett, Prof Mortuza and Mashrur Shahid Hossain.

In total, seventy-two academics from Bangladesh and abroad presented their scholarly works.

The conference also featured a magic demonstration by Prof Dhar,

a digital artwork by Zaki Rezwan Rahin and a video art installation by renowned artist Laila Sharmin.

The keynote speaker Dhar mentioned how belief in magic, specifically in the performance of supernatural or paranormal deeds and actions by certain skilled, talented or learned individuals, has existed as a staple in world literature since the dawn of civilization and how in traditional literary criticism and theory there appears to exist a major disregarding of the role of magic in literature. He proposed to analyse literature through the contradictions of our times that on the one hand demand the presence of magic and on the other occlude any serious discussion on it.

The panel on Magic in Bangla Literature was moderated by Azfar Hussain who in his opening gambit

framed the discourse by looking at the history of Bangle literature from the Charyapada through the middle ages to our contemporary times. Noted editor and translator Raju Alauddin traced magic in Bangla literature with reference to Latin American literature while indicating that the term “magic realism” has lost its original power and resonance. Poet Shamim Reza offered an impressive survey of literary works in Bangla that incorporated magic either as a metaphor or a material condition.

Finally, Mohammad Rafiq—one of the leading and internationally recognized poets—closed the session making a few interesting observations. He said that colonialism had destroyed our knowledge system including magic and that magic “can be a site

of anti-colonial resistance.”

The main attraction on the second day was a plenary session featuring Azfar Hussain. In his speech titled “Marx, Money and Magic”, Hussain explained how, under the shadow of the capitalist mode of production, money attains both supernatural and magical power. Drawing on from a vast range of literary and cultural materials, while bringing Shakespeare and Marx together, he made the following observations: “Although we are all aware of the magic of money, we seldom think of this magic and power from the standpoint of its victims, from the standpoint of those who are systemically kept without money and property, and, of course, whose labour is systematically exploited.” l