Face to Face
Selina Hossain: Rediscovering the past
ONE OF THE FINEST among our contemporary novelists, Selina Hossain combines past and present and delicately sews them in her works to give them what she says a 'parallel reality' to understand and reflect upon the present through the mirrors of the past or vice versa and thereby rediscover the present. Born at Hazipur village in Laxmipur, Rajshahi on June 14, 1947 to A. K. Musharaf Hossain and Mariamnessa Bakul, she has always been sensitive to the gender issue and her sentiments have found expression in the twenty-odd novels she has to her name. She is also a brilliant writer of children literature. Her works have so far been translated into Hindi, Marathi, Russian, French and English. Two of her novels - Japita Jiban and Nirantar Ghantadhani - are incorporated into the syllabus of Rabindrabharati University and Jadavpur University.
Q: The very word 'feminist' conjures the image of a man-hater. Your concern for women's rights has always found expression in so many memorable characters that you have created. What we would like to know from you is how do you look at the issues and concerns of the feminists and where should women stand in their relation to men?
A: I strongly believe that the feminists should direct their efforts to facilitate development of women's personality. They should understand that hating men would not bring about any change for womenfolk. As a woman, I would like to win the dignity and respect to be able to work hand in hand with a man. Nature has made us man and woman and we should not forget that. If men think that their prosperity and development would come only through oppressing women then they are wrong. Women's emancipation is possible only when they would be economically solvent and psychologically strong to make decisions on their own.
My novels and short stories highlight women's status in our society and reflect their dreams and aspirations at different stages of life. In Hangor Nadi Grenade, for example, I have shown how a feeble old lady can make important decisions if she has a strong personality. Very often we talk of women's empowerment now. I feel the old lady of my novel can be illustrated as a case of women's empowerment for I believe one of the fundamental elements of being empowered is to have the moral strength to make important decisions. Think of the old mother of a deaf son in Hangor Nadi Grenade who wants to do something for the liberation struggle but she can neither send her son to the war nor contribute to it any other way. As it happens, two freedom fighters with Pakistani army hot on their heels take refuge in her house. To ensure their security, she decides without hesitation to hand over son to the army. As the marauders happily return with her son thinking they have got what they have been looking for, she lets the freedom fighters go and urges them to win freedom for the country. What I have tried to say through this incident is without strong personality women will never attain the power to make their own decisions and secondly formal education does not always make a person wise enough to make great sacrifices. Even an unlettered woman can make significant contributions to her family, to the society and to the nations.
You know that Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman used the word Barangana to honour those women who were raped during our war of independence. But later on the connotation of the word changed to mean something that would hurt the dignity of a woman. In my novel Juddha I have spoken about it. The two protagonists of the novel are lovers. During the war the lady is dishonoured by the marauding Pakistani force and her lover who participates in the war loses his leg. After the war when they reunite the lady says, "You have lost your leg in the war and I have been raped. Both of us have sacrificed for the liberation struggle of the country. So I consider myself a freedom fighter as well." If you read my novels carefully you will see they are replete with issues of women's self respect and dignity; and finally I have spoken about women's personality, the element, I think, makes a woman stand on her own in this world governed by the laws set by the male patriarchy. Take for example my novel Padashabda where a daughter raising her voice against her father who embodies the ideologies and contradictions of the ruling male patriarchy. To me feminism does not essentially mean hating men, it is rather a woman's periscope to look at the world she lives in. And I strongly believe that unless women work closely with their male counterparts, the society would not be rid of sexual inequality.
Q: In Bengali literary tradition, it has been observed that the literature produced by women writers has not really acquired women-centred perspective which, feminists say, is mainly because women unconsciously internalise sexist attitudes and desires. In your novel Hangor Nadi Grenade you had the opportunity where you are portraying the life a woman from her adolescence to old age. It seems that in Bengali novels, particularly those written by women, women do not have any personal life. How do you look at it as a woman writer yourself?
A: In my novel I have depicted the whole span of life of the protagonist - from teens to old age. If you mean sexual life by the expression 'personal life' then I would say the story did not permit me to do so or to put it in another way my story-line did not demand that. Coming to the point why woman writers never shed light on their personal life I would say our society is very sensitive to the issue. Taslima Nasreen wrote vividly about her childhood in her Meyebela where she wrote about the sexual life of her parents. Do you approve of it? Should we go against our cultural and moral ethos?
Q: Are you hinting at a situation where writers will never go against the persisting values even if they do not approve of them?
A: In my view as a writer one should have respect for the values of his/her society for it is ultimately the society to which a writer is committed to. Coming back to personal life, I would say sex is part and parcel of our life but the Freudian biological essentialism, that is, all behaviour can be reduced to inborn sexual characteristics is pure nonsense. Will you be able to successfully write a 200-page novel on someone's sex life? For me, if I am convinced that my character's sex life needs to be highlighted for the sake of the story then I'm going to bring out her sex life to focus. If it does not and still I am interested to portray my character's sex life, where would you draw the line between pornography and literature.
Q: Going through your novels one would be greeted with experiences aplenty. What I am trying to say is you portray different strata of life and do not restrict yourself to the portrayal of the Dhaka-based middle-class sensibility. To be more specific, you set your story on a wider canvas, which is epic in nature.
A: Not that I deliberately avoid middle-class sensibility. It is there in one or two of my short stories and one of my novels is on the middle class. But I truly believe that life in all its riches and variety exists in our rural Bengal where 90 per cent of our total population resides. So if you want to feel that vastness of life you have to go to the villages. On the contrary, a middle-class life is for me dull and drab. Also as I want to trace the life in all its variety and colour, I look for my subject in rural characters and setting. I go about the past in its modern parallel. If I had approached the past as past my novels would have turned into historical ones. No one has ever branded my novels as historical. I only select those elements of the past to which I can punctuate the present and see them in a new dimension. My novel Kalketu-o-Fullora is based on the long mediaeval narrative poetry Mangal Kabya. In the mediaeval poetry Kalketu was a benevolent king. What I wanted to say in my novel is if that benevolent king becomes a despot (like Ershad) a great misfortune befalls the subjects. I call my approach the renewal of tradition.
Q: Would you please specify what actually you mean by 'renewal of tradition'?
A: If you go through Kalketu-o-Fullora you will see that one chapter is set in the sixteen century where King Kalketu and Queen Fullora reside, the next chapter also revolves around Kalketu and Fullora; but set in a different time and space. What I am trying to do is creating a modern parallel to the past and thereby constructing a new dimension to see the present through a different spectacle.
Q: Parallelism if that can be said was there in great Indian epics such as Mahabharat and Ramayana. In contemporary Bangla literature Sunil Gangopadhaya and Shamaresh Basu adopted parallel story-telling brilliantly in their novels. And Salman Rushide also did a brilliant use of it, particularly in The Satanic Verses.
A: You are right. In Neel Mayurer Jauban I set the story in the tenth century in the time of Charyapad. I tried to capture the time when Bangla language was at its embryonic stage. But the way the story has been told it does not take long for the readers to understand that under the veil I am also trying to recreate our language movement of 1952. The protagonist of the novel is a poet who writes in his mother tongue, Bangla, the language of the marginalised people that has no access to the court.
The court language Sanskrit is now a dead language whereas the language of the untouchables in the tenth century is the modern Bangla. When the king asks the poet Kanupa to compose poems on him he refuses to do so, saying that he would only write about the dreams of his own people in his poetry.
Q: Can this be termed allegorical?
A: This is neither allegorical nor metaphorical. I am sewing the past into the present. To put it in another way, creating a parallel flow of the past and the present where both are very much alive, corresponding to each other in a meaningful way.
When the tyrant king sets Kanupa's house on fire an obnoxious odour of burning corpse emanates from there. The protagonist of the novel, meanwhile, dreams on about a time when his mother tongue would be the court language. This is a dream that the nation carried through centuries. And my novel ends there. I write about a history that does not end in the past rather it is a moving history continuously shaping the present. I want to look at my tradition putting it into a proper perspective. For me without placing the past into the frame of the present, renewal of tradition would never be possible.
Q: Myths and legends play a significant role in shaping the stories you tell.
A: I search for my inspiration in the abundance of myths and legends of Bengal. They provide me the variety I look for to get out of the typical middle-class sensibility. I always want to set my story in a wider canvas and myths and legends are excellent epic elements that give that opportunity to go about my story the way I want them to be plus I don't want to bore my readers with the worn-out middle-class stories. Not that middle-class cannot be a subject for a grand narrative but not at this moment. If I feel one day that the middle-class is going through radical changes and has come out of mingy mind set an epic would be written about them.
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments