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

In July of 2013, Patricia Lockwood wrote the decade’s most immediate and pressing poem, “Rape Joke”. Already by then Lockwood had amassed prizes and praises enough to fill a few cabinets.

We barely see cross-disciplinary initiatives that try to understand our media, culture, society and politics. In this wake, Dr Ratan Kumar Roy’s Television in Bangladesh: News and Audiences (Routledge, 2021) offers a rich ethnography of television news practices in Bangladesh, with a foreword by Marcus Banks, Professor of Visual Anthropology at Oxford University.

In the 1890s, many South Asians were brought to Uganda by the British Empire for administration and development purposes.

I am a songstress with

Are you reading this or just staring at what is written?

My body is not my own.

Here is a door stopper for the lingering period of hibernation. All 522 pages provide ample literary support for long-term homebound inmates.

Last week, I decided to pen a tribute to my favourite authors of science fiction, a love letter, really, that has long been in the pipeline.

Hellfire is at once a book about patriarchy and the toxic strand of matriarchy that supports it. Through the lives of sisters Lovely and Beauty, both kept from socialisation and even attending school deep into middle age, the novel captures near perfectly the convoluted blueprint of life for South Asian women.

It wasn’t until my 20s that I realised I had read less than 10 Bengali women authors in my childhood and adolescence.

The publishing and literary world in Bangladesh have considerable visibility of women: some are authoritative figures in the literary and academic world, some run their own establishments and bookshops; others occupy senior positions in many of the local publishing houses and literary committees. However, like the systems and society we currently operate in, this industry is also influenced by the larger patriarchal structure.

There is a paradox to literacy in our contemporary societies.

“How does Tagore intoxicate a growing young man . . . .? How has Dhaka transitioned through the Partition of Bengal and the birth of the University of Dhaka? . . . . how does one remember-- with nuance, with style-- icons of history and culture . . . .?”

Binod K Chaudhary, the chairman of the CG Corp Global conglomerate group, is Nepal’s first billionaire and possibly the most successful industrialist in his nation.

The River Tales (2021) is a series of graphic novels for children, commissioned by Asia Foundation’s ‘Let’s Read Asia’ digital library project and produced by HerStory Foundation in an effort to raise awareness about Bangladesh’s heritage and culture. Sarah Anjum Bari, editor of Star Books, speaks to Katerina Don, curator at HerStory Foundation, writer Anita Amreen, and artist Sayeef Mahmud about their processes of research, writing, and graphic designing for the series.

Abdus Selim, a noted Bangladeshi translator, playwright, essayist and educationist, has, of late, come up with a collection of five plays in Bangla translation titled Panch Manchanubad (Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, 2021).

“The thing was that everyone knew Julita’s parents hadn’t died in any accident: Julita’s folks had disappeared. They were disappeared. They’d been disappeared”.

Bill Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft and the world’s fourth-wealthiest person, has written a new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster (Knopf, 2021) in which he cites the looming catastrophe of radical global climate change and sets out an incredibly ambitious goal that he argues is the only possible path for our species’ survival: achieving zero.

The 156-page hardback edition will be available in Bangla, English, and German.

A solemn tribute to mothers and to our nation’s unrelenting humanity, Hussain’s novel shows us the people and the Bangladesh we could more often be.