A wide canvas of literature
Barnali Talukder celebrates a bunch of essays
It is really difficult to solve the puzzle of how a book of essays could make me so spellbound that I couldn't even think of letting go of it before finishing reading it. I think Olosh Diner Haowa by Syed Manzoorul Islam really has a magical quality that can mesmerize any reader. The book is a collection of essays written in the decade of the 1980s, published in the daily Sangbad. In this work, Syed Islam incorporates essays on those writers who represent particular geography or genre. There are some other essays containing the generalized views of the author on a particular few subjects.
What Syed Islam seeks to provide the reader with in the essays is to give them a platform to step into the wide canvas of world literature. From Rabindranath Tagore to Shakespeare, from Milan Kundera to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, everyone finds a crystal clear depiction of the fundamentals of how these writers think and how Syed Islam considers their role or contributions. It is like constructing a basement for each writer, on which his or her writings can be modeled and facilitated into soaring up. On such issues as how Kundera seeks Nirvana through a process of creation or in what way he ultimately chooses to go beyond the labyrinth of pain and struggle, Syed Manzoorul Islam dives deep to resolve this enigma in a very individual way. In two other essays regarding Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, we find an inquiring Syed Islam trying to unfold the mystery of the obsession in their married life and to find out whether in their poetry such obsession bears anyhow any reflection of it. Such individual depression contrasts very vibrantly with another essay, where Syed Islam brings forth the context of South Africa. He goes into a serious discussion of how writers like Nadine Gordimer and J. M. Coetzee articulate their aversion to racial exploitation. Along with this racial predicament, Coetzee also takes the existential crisis of the individual and his isolation into account, a reality which one cannot be rid of. Another writer who experienced a sense of exile throughout his whole life, even though he was on his own soil in America, is James Baldwin. Syed Islam observes his childhood as it passed through great depression. Baldwin can be metaphorically represented as fire that burnt all his lifetime so that he could give some light to his fellow blacks.
My interest in Latin American magic realism has been quite pronounced. So when I found an essay on that particular topic, I just wanted to finish it at one go. Syed Islam defines Latin American literature as a mixture of self-consciousness and social consciousness, but rooted in a new dimension. And Islam thinks, in a very unconventional way, there is a new relationship between self-consciousness and non-existence. According to him, magic realism is a fundamental tendency of Latin American literature which features the lives of those beings who never know their destination; but their restless movement appears to be the ultimate source of pleasure to them. In contrast with such a magic realistic context of Latin America, Syed Islam also confronts a purely real world of African poetry. The inviolable passion which African poets feel for their history, past and culture, prototypically characterizes their poetic repertoire.
Syed Islam observes an unshakeable commitment which black African poets consistently patronize to restore their hereditary identity. And this very commitment is what Bangladeshi poetry lacks to a great extent. Syed Islam reflects on that aspect as well. From such grand discussions on different geographical traditions of literature, Syed Islam shifts his focus to technical aspects, the role of the narrator in post-modern novels for instance. There he discovers the distinctions which the narrator experiences in different types of novels. In traditional realistic novels, the narrator can only reach the conscious level of the human mind; but in another kind of novel, the human being goes through a change of mind from one second to another and sees his control over consistency slacken. Such characteristics are well portrayed in the novels underlined by a stream of consciousness. However, in post-modern novels the narrator appears from different perspectives and ignores any type of centralization.
There are many other subjects and literary individuals Syed Manzoorul Islam deals with in this book. While going through the book, any reader can easily understand the depth of Syed Islam's exploration in the domain of world literature and the yearning on the part of the reader for him to come up with such works more and more. Syed Islam combines his aphorisms and captivating language in such a manner that the book cannot but take extensive hold of the reader's imagination.
Barnali Talukder is a student of English literature at Dhaka University
For all latest news, follow The Daily Star's Google News channel.
Comments