When we cease to have rhythm, we are dead. And we cease to have poetry, we are spiritually dead, one way or another.
To speak of place is to speak of the topical, the toponymical, and the topographical.
There is far more to be said about Serajul Islam Choudhury's significance as an intellectual and literary-cultural critic.
Today – June 23 – marks the 87th birthday of Serajul Islam Choudhury.
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976) has been customarily characterized as a rebel poet, particularly, if not exclusively, because of his 1922 poem called “Bidrohi” (the Rebel)—a poem that fiercely stages his political, linguistic, even metrical rebellion all at once.
The question was already raised by some: Did Shakespeare write mainly for children? So-called "pop" Shakespeare criticism answered that question in the affirmative.
Today—March 14—marks the 46th death anniversary of Jasim Uddin (1903-1976). Popularly called “palli kabi” (folk poet), Jasim Uddin is also considered a major Bangla poet.
Our Bhasha Andolan—the Language Movement—was undoubtedly a major event in our political history.
Jibanananda Das (1899-1954) is widely regarded as one of the greatest poets in the Bengali language. His poetry in particular has already made possible a staggering range of interpretive adventures and hermeneutic excavations, although he wrote 21 novels and 110 short stories that were discovered after his death.
I, an itching palm? —William Shakespeare
Life is all about enjoying work,” said Serajul Islam Choudhury on his eightieth birthday. Widely acclaimed as our foremost intellectual and as our leading literary and cultural critic, Choudhury exemplifies nothing short of phenomenal productivity. Today—June 23—
I am a poet of the present, and not a prophet of the future. […] My birth in this country and this society does not mean that I shall remain constricted and confined to them. No, I belong to all countries and to the entirety of humanity. —Kazi Nazrul Islam
He confronts, challenges, and combats the world with words. But his words become more than words. They morph into weapons in our struggles against oppression and injustice. For him, of course, writing is fighting. But, then, he is more than a combative writer.
In his voice we continue to hear the cadences, inflections, and accents of resistance and even revolution.
You taught me language, and my profit on't
But, Dhaka, I hear your sepoy in the attic say, as he fashions his life after the size and shape of a solitude more tenacious than my
Mahmudul Haque wrote and remained silent equally remarkably in his lifetime. And when he wrote, he wrote productively, even intensely, with a peculiar passion untrammeled by momentary vicissitudes. He wrote most of his novels at one stretch, taking a week or two. He wrote one novel even in a single day.
If “life is lived forward but understood backward”—as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once put it—Choudhury can look back and easily say in the words of the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet: “This is how you must love the earth/so you can say 'I have lived.'”
