Khadija Shahjahan's forbidden dreams
Khadija Shahjahan, poet, travel writer and social worker, died in London on 9 May 2009. Syed Badrul Ahsan pays tribute to her through reproducing an article he wrote on her earlier on the occasion of the publication of one of her many works of poetry.
Khadija Shahjahan, my friend and good soul, has a kind of laughter that brings up in you a sense of how she must have been as a child. There is sometimes that twinkle in the eyes which comes across as something of the childlike. No, I have not known her since she was a baby or since I was a child. But back in the early 1990s, when she turned up at my workplace with a poem composed by her teenaged daughter, I think I saw in her the makings of a writer. In all these years that have gone by, I am happy to report that Khadija Shahjahan has done well for herself. She has been travelling, she has been writing and she has been dealing with the world in the way it should be dealt with. That, of course, means she has been spontaneous about the way she has related to it.
Khadija has just come forth with a new collection of poetry, this time in English. It is basically a compilation of her earlier poems in Bangla; and the translations into English, as they happen to be, have been rendered rather remarkably by her daughter, yes, the same who was once a teenager. That is perhaps a sign of how children take pride in their parents and the other way round. In With Love (and that is what Khadija calls her newest offering), you will go through something of an experience, of the trajectory the poet has been travelling along all these years. Khadija's earlier works of poetry made a good deal of impression on people who have gone through them. It happened to be my good fortune to be present at the launch of one such work in London a few years ago, a point at which I realised rather belatedly that she ought to have been part of the Bangladesh Festival organised in Britain in July 1999. But then, Khadija was present at a special poetry reading session where the stars happened to be: Syed Shamsul Huq, Shamsur Rahman and Nirmalendu Goon. Around that time, Khadija travelled to the United States (she keeps doing that, seeing that she has set up permanent abode in London) to participate in a poetry festival. When she came back to London, she surprised me with the news that she had come by a copy of Eugene McCarthy's poems. McCarthy, if you recall, was the man who forced Lyndon Johnson into renouncing any claim to a second term in the White House after New Hampshire 1968. A few days after Khadija spoke of McCarthy to me, she sent me a copy of his poems. It is one of the books I have always treasured.
But let me go back to Khadija Shahjahan's new work With Love. One of the earliest entries here, Motherhood, has something of the fascinating about it more because of the excitement the poet goes through in the first flush of motherhood than anything else. I had conceived / And my life changed that very day / People swarmed to me. The sheer thrill of motherhood, of assuming the completeness of woman, is what you peer at in these lines. Prosaic? Maybe. But look for the throbbing heart beneath the expressions. But if the birth of the woman in her is what Khadija spots in the birth of her child, it is the end of life she broods on even as the twilight descends around her. In Beside the Sea, a woman waits in anticipation of the end of day: The last scarlet sun rays seemed to take away / The ecstasy and emotional flurry of the day / And in my heart / I wonder why I feel so alone / Why so alone and unfulfilled / On this magnificent ocean shore? In Yellow Rose, Khadija the poet finds time to bore into the thoughts of another poet: The poet walked around my garden / 'You say it's hot but I can't stand this cold / It's definitely not like summer back home!' / Still he adjusts his chair and sits down. The sense of romance in Khadija, that element of love she has demonstrated in her earlier poetry, comes alive in the manner of a gust in the pretty evocative You are Here. It is the lover she speaks to:
An appealing side of Khadija Shahjahan is her natural refusal to be part of a pattern she is not comfortable with. Her entry into poetry, into travelogues (she has a very readable work she calls Europe-a Bangali Meye), was rather late in the day, after she had married and watched the birth and growth of her children. But when in the 1990s she simply decided to be a wordsmith, it was for me a huge reason to be happy. I have watched her enjoy life with enthusiasm here in Bangladesh; and I have had cause to observe the flutter in her gaze as she pointed out the manifestations of winter beauty to me in Doncaster (she was driving beautifully, and she always does that). In Britain, she has been an activist, in that very selective manner of speaking, in organisations where she has felt she has contributions to make.
When my friends take it upon themselves to explore the universe of thought, of imagery, something of lunar charm makes its way into their world. One of these days, Khadija Shahjahan, the poet, the woman who throws her head back and laughs as she shares pieces of humour with those in her company, could be walking in the deep woods, in the fitful rain, and re-emerge with fresh clumps of verses as an offering to nature
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