TOM CLARK: Nasima Sultana: Dear Sadness / shah toufiqur rahman ovi: a falling flower / new Bengali poets / "¿Está muerto?"

Thursday, 20 April 2017

Nasima Sultana: Dear Sadness / shah toufiqur rahman ovi: a falling flower / new Bengali poets / "¿Está muerto?"

ic-7058: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 13 April 2017

Azfar Hussain: Microcanto III

Mirpur to Mohammadpur: You stink.

And you stick such that your use-values and exchange-values and aesthetic values and erotic values all lure natives and foreigners alike.

And you attract foreign direct investment that makes Mao and Microsoft sound alike in this era of “tele-techno-hydrocarbon capital,” as they name their game.

And you have your electronic shamans, your dotcom cultural tourists, and your syntactical apologists.

And then there are those who stage a return from the land of dollars and dreams to study your dark hovels of poverty to get sentimental about you and even write a feel-good epic or an anglophony—oops—anglophone novel about your exotic underlife.

And then there are those who buy and sell you on a daily basis, turning you into the middle term of that obstinate circuit mobile at once in the algebra of Das Kapital and in the ritual of your everyday transaction.

And then there are those who even mortgage your moon and dedicate love-songs to the “free” market.

And, sure enough, I, too, wrote a poem that made the same point: when they quibble about the ultimate signified, I say cash cash cash. When they complain that I wax political-economic on every goddamn issue—the Kamasutra included—I say cash cash cash. When they say love and cough cannot hide, I say cash cash cash. When they say “love loves to love love,” I say cash cashes to cash cash.

Does my refrain bother your Board of City Directors like a stubborn itch in the ass?

Azfar Hussain: Microcanto III (translated from the original Bengali by the author), from Dhaka and Dirty Dialectics: A Nocturnal Prose Poem in Seven Microcantos, in Drain Vol. 10:1, 2013

ic-2440: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 16 April 2017

#2: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 30 March 2017

Nasima Sultana: Dear Sadness

Dear Sadness, take the bright handkerchief
I gave you and go home.
As of today, we depart
From each other forever.
I will smoke cigarettes tonight sitting in the dark with three men.
Whisky does not suit me,
My doubt burns in brightened fire.

I, too, have hope in my heart! . . .
Terrible hot water
And the salt of the Bay of Bengal . . .
Will my hopes fully tumble down onto me
If the raven cries out at noon?

You are the sadness of no letters for a month and a half.
You are the sadness of no poetry for a month and a half.
You are the sadness of the ambitious funerals
For a month and a half.
You are the sadness of the fade out immortality
For a month and a half —
And, as of today, we depart from each other forever.

Take this bright handkerchief I’ve given you
And go right home.
I will smoke cigarettes tonight
Sitting in the dark with three men.

I will rip off a cool and calm and abstract afternoon
From the day:
For myself in absence of the dead people,
And say, "See, how beautiful life is!"

Nasima Sultana (1957-1997): Dear Sadness, translated from the Bengali by Hassanal Abdullah, in Shabdaguchha: The International Poetry Journal in Bengali and English, Issue 39, January-March 2008

IMG_7281: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 31 August 2015

#17: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 4 October 2015

#25: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 25 January 2016

[Untitled]: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 26 September 2016

IMG_1013: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 9 March 2016

2: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 11 August 2016

Dilruba Ahmed: Snake Oil, Snake Bite

They staunched the wound with a stone.
They drew blue venom from his blood until there was none.
When his veins ran true his face remained
lifeless and all the mothers of the village
wept and pounded their chests until the sky had little choice
but to grant their supplications. God made the boy breathe again.

God breathes life into us, it is said
only once. But this case was an exception.
God drew back in a giant gust and blew life into the boy
and like a stranded fish, he shuddered, oceanless.

It was true: the boy lived.
He lived for a very long time. The toxins
were an oil slick: contaminated, cleaned.
But just as soon as the women
kissed redness back into his cheeks
the boy began to die again.
He continued to die for the rest of his life.
The dying took place slowly, sweetly.
The dying took a very long time.

Dilruba Ahmed: Snake Oil, Snake Bite, from Poetry, 2013

[Untitled]: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 11 December 2016

#3: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 9 April 2017

"...few hours back, during my evening walk, I saw this doll, hanging lonely from the wall...": photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 15 March 2017

[Untitled]: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovitoufiq_ovi, 11 August 2016

[Untitled]: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi toufiq_ovi, 11 August 2016

[Untitled]: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovitoufiq_ovi, 11 August 2016

ROOO1906: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 26 February 2017

#20: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 2 December 2016

Azfar Hussain: Microcanto II

I swear by my dark-skinned mother’s milk that Dhaka has three-thousand-and-three-hundred mysterious names, and that everyone from Ginsberg to Günter Grass has misspelled Dhaka at least once.

I swear by my black father’s blood that everyone—from the Sena Kings of Vikrampur and the rulers of Sonargaon, to the Turks and the Pathans, to the Mughals and the British and the Pakistani—sweated the dark details of your three-thousand-and-three-hundred contours and curves, never figuring out who the hell you were, Dhaka, although many of them sized you up, and even measured your black chest, waist, hips, and height.

I swear by the black village of my birth that, digressed by the smell of London, Paris, and New York, your urban poets misread your motives and distort your profile, losing sight of at least eighty-five thousand villages that keep sticking out like night-black veins and arteries all over your body, your snazzy suit and pointed shoes and silk socks notwithstanding.

I swear by my black grandfather’s prayer-mat that parables and paradoxes make up your anatomy and your allegory alike. You run run run on your three-thousand-and-three-hundred legs and leap faster than those horses galloping away in action movies or fairy tales. Yet you often run out of steam, your eyes glaze over with boredom, and you keep limping like Kallyanpur’s Kanu Fakir beat under the burden of a begging day.

I swear by my black uncle’s black beads of sweat that your black slums and your white skyscrapers together keep writing your favorite epigram: “progress is history’s dirty joke.”

I swear by my black teacher’s black umbrella that a bearded man obsessed with unmasking capitalism—Karl Marx or plain Charlie, as some call him—wrote a missive on your tragic “muslin” to make the point that London is fat and overweight because you are skinny and underweight. And words burst into black flames as Charlie rubbed his conceptual blocs.

I swear in the name of black land and black labor, in the name of your fifty-two bazaars and fifty-three lanes multiplying for twelve-hundred years since your Kamrup days, in the name of Raja Ballal Sen’s Dhakesshwari temple, in the name of Islam Khan’s Jahangirnagar, in the name of 1952 and 1971, in the name of those dead metaphors only the dull prose of daily living can resurrect, in the name of those stories my grandmother told me, and in the name of my ancestral blood soaking the kernels of your paddy, that your admirers and detractors alike take advantage of your monuments and massacres, your moods and mythologies, your processions and posters, and your three-thousand-and-three-hundred wounds—whether you conceal them or reveal them.

And I swear in the name of your wounds that they keep bleeding and catching the color of black fire from Lakshmi Bazaar to Tanti Bazaar, from Gulshan to Gulistan, from Mirpur to Mohammadpur.

Azfar Hussain: Microcanto II (translated from the original Bengali by the author), from Dhaka and Dirty Dialectics: A Nocturnal Prose Poem in Seven Microcantos, in Drain Vol. 10:1, 2013

#16: photo by shah toufiqur rahman ovi, 9 October 2016

"¿Está muerto?"

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