Periods, commas and a poem
Poetry was floating in midair one bright afternoon. There was sunshine, and the soft voice of a child from afar, perhaps coming from one of the slums outlining the high rises, “Amar ma'r shonar nolok, hariye gelo sheshe, hethai khuji hothai khuji shara Bangladeshe.†He repeated the lines once, twice, nth time, memorizing the periods and commas, just like we all once did, when we too were young and our voices were more merciful.
The open pages of Amader Boi lifted the alphabets up, they shook hands, stood side by side, forming rhythms and rhymes. They exchanged places and one poem became another, forming all the ones we needed to know, for school or because our parents thought we must. Sukumar Roy, Rabindranath, Nazrul to Jasimuddin.
I never thought of asking as a child why, unlike most races, Bengalis must learn poetry. Why we must be exposed to it beyond learning just the children's rhymes. Even the most unromantic individual of Bangladesh must have a poem memorized that he can recite, if he was ever put in a situation to.
Is it because our country is full of emotional stimulants, and there are visual sensory overloads at every moment, with negative and positive images, in between the chaos? Is it because we are all emotionally more productive than we give ourselves credit for? Or is it because we like shorter verses, full of passion, evoking feelings, thoughts, and then ending quickly, just like many of our lives do here in Bengal.
If you were to stand in the middle of a busy street any given day, and listen to the expressions thrown from one mouth to another in anger, happiness, dissatisfaction, humour, or just random reactions to whatever calls at that moment, you would realize, expressions roll out of our tongues easily, and we have many mini explosions throughout the day. In the west people have “talksâ€. Here we have addas, we have debates, there is passion, there are high and low pitches, there is no holding back, there are numerous followers and even more leaders. There is the rawness of open hearts, bleeding wounds and there are layers. It is not just talking, it's more than that, perhaps poetry, if not at least one or two haikus? Is poetry then used as an excuse to evoke emotional responses, the ones which are always on the surface ready to explode?
If one looks up the definition of poetry one would read about ambiguity, symbolism and irony. One would read about metaphors, and the birth of poetry through folk tales and songs created by the ones who lived long before us for the sake of oral history and romanticism. In the context of Bangladesh, isn't all of those only appropriate, the ambiguity and irony? The Bauls creating a culture of spreading the words of the lone boatman and the melancholy Rakhal, and their hard and soft philosophies, so many, so true, so fitting even in our modern way of living?
Late one night in Russia, I met a few who could recite Pushkin and Sergei Esenin with tears in their eyes. It was surprising to see so much passion coming out of the hard exteriors of my Russian companions. The hardship of communism, the dictator's rules, and the freshly bleeding poems, hungry and powerful. Is poetry about not eating a full plate of food, when you have known the many names of misery, not through someone else's experience but your own? Like the Russians, Bangladeshis also have their own individual wars, their own struggles, the bleeding nation, the many rulers, and the rebels. Does it then mean we have a part of Sukanto hidden inside many of us? Creating, writing, committing suicide every few days?
Or maybe it's none of these, and the reason why poetry matters to Bengalis is something as simple as the fact that we thrive to be perceived as learned. We still have our bourgeois mentalities carried on from our parents, no matter which part of upper, lower or just middle class we come from. We know Bengali culture demands refinement and knowingly and unknowingly, understanding or not comprehending, we make poetry important, and we judge and assess each other accordingly.
The reason why poetry matters to Bengalis cannot be determined, cannot be put in one box. It cannot have a conclusive answer. But what really matters is, that poetry is here, everywhere in Bangladesh, even with the half built houses staring with their missing windows and doors, construction workers crawling in and out of the concrete skeletons, traffic noises, and mud on the street.
There is poetry here...and you and I are the commas, periods and ironies of the poem called Bangladesh.
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