A Revealing Hunt for Books

Book Review of

Mukti Juddho Rachanasangraha

By Hasan Azizul Huq

Prologue: A Revealing Hunt for Books
March 18 Sunday. I am on a hunt, for books, only three; their titles, authors’ and publishers’ names are written on a piece of paper that has already become dirty from touches of too many hands including my own. All the three books are on Liberation War published in last month’s annual book fair. Now at 5:05pm, it seems I have been walking for miles looking for them. From noon in the hot spring sun I have been going in and out of bookstore to bookstore asking for them. I asked all the booksellers in New Market and then in Aziz Super Market. No one, including the attendant at a shop which belongs to the company that published one of the three said, ‘Sorry, you have to wait five to seven days more to get them’. Why, I wonder, has the history of Liberation War become so obsolete for market that they were locked up in some museum? And, you know, I have guessed right. I shopkeeper becomes sympathetic and advises me to go to the Liberation War Museum if I want to buy them. And I again take to the street. When I turn up in front of the museum, I find its wrought iron main gate padlocked, manned by a guard. He tells me Sunday is weekend for the place, unlike other offices, institutes, etc in the country. The only consolation the kindhearted guard tells me they are having an exhibition on Liberation War open from March 22 and so they have brought many new books for display and sale, and that if I come tomorrow I may find what I am looking for. After six hours of hectic search, I head for home empty handed and with a heavy heart, for the bookshelves I found full of popular fictions published this February but not the ones that deal with the Liberation War, except a 4-volume history of the war by Afsan Chowdhury and a collection of short stories by Hasan Azizul Huq in only one shop, in a month when this nation proclaimed its independence. It seems to be a callous act on the part of our publishers and booksellers, and may be readers too, because, after all, demand is supposed to drive the supply in an open economy. On my way home, I lament the extent to which we have neglected and are ignoring our past, the history of our emergence as an independent nation.

1. Mukti Juddho Rachanasangraha
By Hasan Azizul Huq
Edited with a preface by Abul Hasnat
Cover by Quayum Chowdhury
Charulipi Prokashan, Dhaka
First Edition February 2007, Page 215
Price: Tk 200, ISBN 984 598 100 3

Hasan Azizul Huq is a man who in physical stature may be slightly shorter than the average Bangali but his genius as a littérateur would dwarf any high-rise any race or nation could ever built. That is a fact which Abul Hasanat, the editor of the book, Mukti Juddho Rachanasangraha, reminds us by compiling 14 of Hasan’s write-ups on the Liberation War in it, of which the first 11 are pure short stories, the 12th is the writer’s memoir of 1971, the 13th is Hasan’s own introduction to his stories that the editor would have done better by placing after his own introduction instead of as an annex, and the last number is an epitaph to a Saontal freedom fighter as well as an eulogy of this aborigine people who fought hard for the country’s independence but since has been suffering the oppressions of the majority population.

Except Bangladesh: Paliye Bedai Dristi Edai, Hasan’s introduction to his stories, all the entries including Ekattor (Karotoley Chhinnomatha), or 71 (the severed head in my hands), the account of the his own experience of those traumatic yet glorifying nine months of the war, are not merely literary works, they are far, far, more than that; they are 13 sharp, sagacious, beautiful, truthful, and vibrant aspects of the very dynamic and colourful life. As a whole they are an epic portrait of the very womb, the Earth, which creates, sustains, and devours the life. His characters -- really actors, since, like a true maestro, Hasan remains a void in his short stories that leaves no medium between the readers and the characters -- are the very black, fertile, warm soil of Bangladesh which takes on the shapes of mostly ‘anarya’, ‘a-shushil’, simple peasants, who carry the multidimensional souls of this land. The stories are literary sculptures of the rustic people moulded out of this black mud, who relentlessly toil on the black soil to feed themselves and the people. The book reveals these peasant souls of the south-western Bangladesh who fought for the soil, for the family, the people, and of course themselves in 1971 and also the disillusionment they face on returning home or the fury born out of frustration and desperation at the ways things turned out within a few months, a few years.

How harsh can be the disillusionment of Alef, the freedom fighter who has just but returned to his poverty-stricken home from the war, we realise when we read in the second story Fera (return): Alef answers his mother’s enquire about why was he going to a nearby village thus: ‘There was a lad with us. Bullet hit him in the thigh. They tore off his leg in hospital. Within three days the boy died with his flesh turning gangrenous and fetid. His mother needs to hear the news.’
Alef’s mother asks breathlessly, ‘Did the lad get the soil.’
‘You throw it on the soil and it turns into soil,’ Alef says.”

Incidentally, the 10th story Keu Aseni (none came), is really the predecessor of Fera, in which Alef takes on the name Gafur and the lad is named Asaf Ali, and which narrates how Asaf Ali wounded in the thigh, loses his leg and than life to gangrene. The editor would have done better if he placed the two stories in sequence. We also find a small part of Ekattor (Karotoley Chhinnomatha) in the story Matir Tolar Mati (the earth under the ground), which however is a complete story by its own right.

The artistry of Hasan is apparent everywhere, but the dispassionate view with which he looks at life, at terrible events, sometimes terrorises the mind, sometimes takes it to magic reality. Such is a seen, when in the story Namheen Gotraheen, a nameless, identity-less, and apparently schizophrenic man at the end of a long somnambulistic search digs and finds the bones of his or may be someone else’s wife, Mamata, and his or may be someone else’s child, Shovan. When he finds the white, eye-ear-nose-less, and smiling skull of the woman, he looks at it intently and says ‘Mamata’, which means empathy as well as sympathy: Here Hasan’s strokes are that of a master painter. A reader sees mamata turned into skull; he realises the skull is but an idol of mamata which is now dead and has turned ugly and cruel. The man puts it down beside him and ‘starts digging the ground afresh. He will tear out the innards with the intestines of the earth’ are the finishing words of the story -- forceful, furious, stinging, and mesmerizing words.

The entries of the book, each of which is like a painted wall or a floor or a part of a ceiling, when joined together bring into reality a three-dimensional monument of the Liberation War this nation once built with the cement made of lives, rapes, bloods, and miseries of the uprooted and hunted masses. But Hasan also indicates how crumbling or tilting perhaps the walls, floor and ceiling have become now from lack of nourishment and access of abuse, especially in Fera, Ghar Gerasthi, Amra Opekkha Korchhi (We Are Waiting), Bangladesh: Paliye Bedai Dristi Edai, and the epitaph for Lada Hembrom, the Saontal martyr. In these pieces, he shows that though the war from March to December 1971 achieved independence from Pakistan as a state but ultimately failed to liberate the masses from the millenniums of indignity, insult, slavery, and, above all, inhuman poverty. The characters in the post-1971 period although feel cheated but are too feeble and friendless to start another fight to recapture the victory they achieved, rise again to the height they reached in 71, except in Amra Opekkha Korchhi, in which two communist freedom fighter continue the war to gain that liberation and, after eight years, one of them gets hit with bullet and both are captured by the soldiers of their own country. The title of the story comes from the last words the two comrades think, surrounded by soldiers and about to be captured: ‘The air is chilly. The ground is cold. This place has no river. Wind blows through the fields, freezing. We are waiting.’

A must read for every Bangladeshi who wants to learn about his or her roots.