Creative nonfiction / Growing up with a new nation: The Dhaka we once knew

And then it rained flowers, then it rained flowers emptying the trees.

The world grows dim and dimmer with feeble eyes. Youth turns into a broken wheelchair; Let’s walk through the desert together, you and I.

Because of the pandemic, this year FOSWAL went for an online conference in collaboration with the Sahitya Akademi. The 4-day long programme titled, “South Asian Online Literary Conference” took place between 15-18 March, 2021.

Selected Poems on Love, Environment & Other Difficulties (Chitra Prokashani, 2020) is a collection of poems by the late Rafiq Azad, one of the most prolific poets of Bangladeshi literature, translated from Bangla by his son Ovinna Azad.

It’s party time in the animal kingdom. A turtle just happens to be in charge of making a birthday cake. He’s small and he’s slow but he has a plan. He started early because he knew speed wasn’t his strength.

One of 2020’s more positive highlights was Daisy Johnson’s stunning sophomore effort, Sisters (Riverhead Books). The novel, a Gothic-domestic drama, starts with siblings September and July in the backseat of a car, on their way to the “Settle House”.

Having graduated from the University of Dhaka’s Faculty of Fine Arts, Sabyasachi Hazra’s work first gained momentum in 2005 and today, is a mainstay during the Ekushey Boi Mela.

The longlist for the prestigious 2021 International Booker Prize was announced on March 30, 2021. Nominees stem largely from Europe, with a few entries from South America, Africa, and Asia rounding out the list.

American children’s book author Beverly Cleary, who responded to a young reader’s plea for realistic characters by bringing rare insight and humor to the lives of Ramona Quimby, Henry Huggins and the other children who populated her more than 40 books, has died at age 104, publisher HarperCollins said.

During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, collaborators led the Pakistani army to Sohagpur village. In one day, they killed 164 men. Fifty-seven

Solayman rolled off his bed in terror. Twisting his body, he dived under the bed stand and lay flat. His whole body was trembling. The freedom fighters must have surrounded his house!

“Did you see the dead bodies over there?” a little wizened old woman bursting out from nowhere asked, fixing her lackluster eyes on them.

“Once there was a severe flood in the month of Magh.

I was in the middle of a hectic shift at Dhaka Medical College Hospital a few days ago when I heard a close colleague was down with fever and severe body ache—symptoms typical of COVID-19. By the next day, his whole family had been critically affected. It is not very likely that his family will come out of this wrath unscathed. Instances like this do not shock me or my colleagues anymore; this has been routine for the last year.

“Muktishongram-e ami jog diyechhilam bishuddho ekjon biplobi hishebe”.

After half a century from where we began, Daily Star Books will spend all of this year—the 50th year of Bangladesh—revisiting and analyzing some of the books that played crucial roles in documenting the Liberation War of 1971 and the birth of this nation. In this sixth installment, we revisit both Khadim Hussain Raja’s A Stranger in My Own Country (Oxford University Press, 2012), in which a retired general gives often problematic views from West Pakistan’s perspective, and Pakistani journalist Anthony Mascarenhas’ The Rape of Bangladesh (Vikas Publications, 1971), a pivotal book in changing world opinion on the then-underreported genocide of East Pakistan.

The Ekushey Boi Mela, which was inaugurated on March 18, 2021, is stretching out across an expanded space of 1500,000 sq ft to accommodate the 834 stalls allocated to 540 organisations this year.

It took Dr. Nilima Ibrahim 25 years to publish the narratives of rape victims of 1971 whom she interviewed almost immediately after the war.

Essentially a people’s hero, the most unique “disruptive leader” of Bengal, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (1920-75) solved a number of the “wicked problems” that the West Pakistani feudal-colonial overlords orchestrated and let loose on his nation before its independence in 1971 “by challenging the existing cultural hegemonies that fail to serve communities through concentration of power and the marginalisation of stakeholders” (Ryan, Christian N 2016, 108). Under his charismatic leadership subaltern Bengalis fought their glorious war of liberation, subverted the power structure, and liberated themselves through a nine-month long bloody war which claimed three million lives.

When searching for literature covering the role of the Mukti Bahini in the victory of 1971, a noticeable dearth of objective analyses is apparent.