'Hartal' and Other Poems, by Iftekhar Sayeed
The Birthday Cake
The birthday cake has come to Bangladesh
Among the westernised elite consumers:
The majority don’t know their birthdays!
“How old are you?” you ask. “Ten,” she replies.
Next time you ask, she’ll be fifteen, then twenty...
“When were you born?” “During the great flood!” or
“At the time of the war”. They share milestones
With everybody else along the way.
They don’t know when the country was born, or
The last one died. Nationalism means nothing.
Neither does individualism the
Birthday cake celebrates: last year’s accounts
Of failures and achievements yield no thought.
The chocolate-flavoured cake tastes better when not eaten.
The Agora
In a terrain where Man usurps His place,
How welcome and refreshing is this market,
Its uncertainties and awful freedom
The tantalising, terrible, tomorrow
That We create together, separate
In our Imagination, sharing our
Memories, that unite to disunite
As Novelties usurp the Throne of Time.
The tribe is an eternity of shared
Imagination with no memory
I could have called my own; the agony
Of genius, of pure imagination,
Was mine, my non-inheritance
Kept captive in my sure inheritance.
Hartal
‘Politicians are not human,’
Observed the brother of
Salahuddin, a fisherman,
Who was killed in a skirmish
Between two student wings
Of the political parties
In a hartal.
Two rickshawpullers –
One of them unidentified,
The other Badaruddin –
Were bombed while they
Were pulling their rickshaws
During hartal hours.
It took them 24 to
48 hours to die.
An auto-rickshaw was
Burned to ashes, and
When the driver
Tried to put out the flames,
He was sprinkled with petrol,
And burned to death.
It took him more than
Two days to die.
Truck driver Fayez Ahmed
Died when a bomb was
Thrown on his truck.
And Ripon Sikder,
A sixteen-year-old injured
By a bomb, died after struggling
For his life for eleven days.
Why can’t the word hartal
Be translated into English?
The western media call
It a ‘general strike’:
A mistranslation that is
Not an accident.
The hartal is the instrument
Used by parties in opposition
To bring down the government
By forcing traffic off the roads
By means of violence.
A ‘strike’ connotes a right,
A protest, but hartals
Kill and maim -
Deliberately.
The populace acquiesce
Through terror. The idea
Of protest has not travelled
Very well from the west:
Words are deadly, and reflect
A way of life which cannot
Travel, unlike words.
Our western-educated elite
Brought the innocuous word
‘Strike’ to Bangladesh where
It became the sinister hartal.
Several other words travelled
In the luggage to similar
Effect. Now, western
Newspaper readers don’t
Know what’s going on here
During a hartal, and we don’t
Understand what they mean
By a ‘general strike’.
Of two mutually
Incomprehensible
Civilisations, one
Dominates the other
And transmits, like bullets,
Expressions that kill
Salahuddin, the fisherman,
Badaruddin, an unidentified
Rickshaw-puller,
An auto-rickshaw driver,
Truck driver Fayez Ahmed,
And sixteen-year-old
Ripon Sikder...
Deserter
I wanted you to inherit the earth
Not just a piece of it.
They say the rich, because they’re worth
More than men like me, should have
Children and heirs to love.
Yet I felt that when I’m dead the sunset’s wrath
Of colours, my child, will be your treasure trove.
You can’t bequeath a thunder-clap,
So I ran from her -
Your mother deserved a better chap,
Better at breaking bricks and bread
Which she’s doing instead,
To bring you up; our love gave to life a shape
Fancying the earth our tombstone when we’re dead.
At the Village
Here, at the village, where the paddy fields
Used to be, stands my factory today;
A harvest of young men and women, green
With inexperience, pour out at dawn.
The muezzin calls out to prayer, to remind
Me of the early dawns of childish days;
But I have no memory, or, rather,
A sieve where memory ought to have been.
The impotent old men stand by to watch :
They know their sand is sinking, and to them
I am an hourglass, retributive Time,
Who have changed the face of Nature here,
But even more, have taught that Change is Time,
That novelty shocks those who play at God.
Photography by Tarikul Raana