Remembrance: Khondokar Ashraf Hossain
On Behula's Raft -- Allure of Myth and Metaphor
In his volume of collected poems written in Bangla and translated into English by the poet himself, published under the title On Behula's Raft, Khondakar Ashraf Hossain has artistically blended the poetic traditions of English and Bangla literature. The title captures in lyric and symbolic imagery the myth of Behula's agonized quest in the Gangetic flood plain and her long arduous riverine journey. Ashraf Hossain poetically inverts the fabled Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. Orpheus goes to Hades to rescue his beloved Eurydice without whose presence Elysium would be bereft of music. Behula, on the other hand, as we all know, sang and wailed to the gods for the revival of the corpse of her mate.
There are thirty-three poems in the book. Some autobiographical, some feminist, some love songs, some about the human condition, and one paean (to Sheikh Hasina). Professor Khondakar Ashraf Hossain is not only a poet; he is a translator, translating from Bangla into English. He has also translated from German and English into Bangla. Among other books, Professor Hossain has translated Selected Poems of Paul Celan, Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, David Abercrombie's Elements of General Phonetics, Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, and Euripides's Medea and Alcestis, and Edith Hamilton's Mythology into Bangla. Besides these, he has edited Selected Poems of Nirmalendu Goon. He was awarded the Alaol Literary prize for poetry in 1987 and the West Bengal Little Magazine Award 1998 for editing the magazine for poetry and arts, Ekobingsho. His poems have been translated into English, German, French, Telegu and Hindi. His doctoral thesis, Modernism and Beyond: Western Influences on Bangladeshi Poetry, is currently under print.
The first poem of On Behula's Raft is "Man." In this poem, there is a complex blend of metaphor and metonymy, irony and paradox: man, God's finest creation, just below 'air and angels,' given a mind to reason with and a heart for emotion, nevertheless is bent on self-destruction. The concluding lines of the poem are, "I love Man because one day/ he will roast himself in his own fire."
"Estragon and the Camel," the second poem, alludes to Beckett's classic existentialist play Waiting for Godot. In this poem, Professor Khondakar Ashraf Hossain traces life's journey as a painful "oblique line along the Milky Way." However, his pen has been his succour, his excaliber: "A hand in white samite rises from my bosom."
The scented tree, 'sandalwood' is a favourite metaphor for Professor Khondakar Ashraf Hossain. He uses it in two noteworthy poems, one titled "Sandalwood" and the other, titled "The Woodpecker." In the first poem, the poet laments the plight of the woodcutter, who is locked in an 'internecine duel' with life and death:
'The woodcutter looks for sandalwood in the forest.
It gives out a sweet smell when burnt.
People yearn for it when they are cremated.
The woodcutter knows he too will die one day.
But now a fistful of rice entices him like a whore;
he's obliged still to preside over a pageantry of grief.
. . .
The fire of hunger smoulders in his hut;
he looks for the wood that would chop the axe,
while his axe looks for the white hands of deaths.'
"The Woodpecker" is an autobiographical poem. It is clearly celebratory: his family is a family of poets – an art handed down from grandfather to father to son with Hossain's own daughter now taking up the torch. Poets never die; they live on through their memorable lines. As Shelley said, in "Adonais", his classic elegy on the death of Keats, the souls of great poets are immortal inspiring stars twinkling in the 'firmament of time.' Hossain, in his poem, expresses the same idea when he passionately declares, 'We'll never be buried in the sandalwood grove.'
The most powerful poems in this volume are about the women of Bengal, hence the iconic position of Behula in Ashraf Hossain's art. The most famous is the ringing "Noorjahan," the tragic tale of Noorjahan, a young girl from Sylhet, Bangladesh, who was stoned to death by religious fanatics. The crazed zealots buried half her body in a pit before ferociously pelting the living flesh with heavy rocks and stones. Hossain's wrath at this barbaric crime is fierce, but his consolation is that one day the girl will get her revenge in heaven:
'That girl will one day be an 'ababeel'
and stone to death the king's hordes"
The allusion is to 'ababeel', a flock of small sparrow-like birds that threw stones on the army of King Abraha, who had attacked Mecca, killing all his elephants. The event is referred to in the Holy Quran. This potent solitary allusion signifies the poet's belief in the ultimate victory of good over evil, a belief fundamental to the strength of visionary optimism in times of chaos and anarchy. The poet, like a true seer, provides light to people struggling against the black fog of despair, against the "mind-forged manacles", as symbolically depicted in Blake's "London" in The Songs of Experience.
In the dirge "The Ballad of the Gravedigger's Daughter", Ashraf Hossain appropriates the vehicle and tenor of Coleridge's famous ballad "Christabel." The ballad, as we know, is primarily an oral folk-song, sung by minstrels or 'scop,' and has a refrain that reinforces the central motif of the poem. In this case, the unifying motif is the "wild shimul" flower which waves its leaves in the strong breeze. The grave-digger asks his daughter to name the person for whom he had dug the grave the night before. At first, 'silence is in the girl's two eyes.' As in "Christabel," where Geraldine, the evil enchantress comes in the garb of a snake to destroy the innocent virgin princess to win the favour of her father, the king, the grave-digger's daughter's hallucinatory answer alludes to similar corruption in the Garden of Eden, the Serpent in Paradise, reinforcing thus the full symbolic implications of post-lapsarian Adamic intrusions into the lives of women.
'A clever snake did creep into this
Fresh Eden-like bower of mine,
He showered on me a thousand kisses
And wrapped in soils serpentine.'
Violated thus, the grave-digger's daughter 'hangs herself among the wild shimul trees.' Poetically, ironically, emphasis is given to the fact that the grave dug by the grave-digger is meant to be his own daughter's final resting place, his eternal judgement of condemnation and wrathful punishment for his offspring's supposed moral sin. In a different form, using new metaphors, Hossain is reiterating the theme of the earlier poem "Noorjahan"
In "Woman and Witchdoctor," which is the final poem in this volume, a woman lies in the yard of a hut 'Snake bitten, dying or already dead," lying like 'bereaved Behula,' as the 'charmer chants his mumbo-jumbo.' But the venom spreads quickly through her veins and, as the 'charmer's hands play 'Tabla' rhythms on the woman's body, her 'vibrant youth turns purple and cold.' This poem is the poet's strong indictment of superstition, ignorance, and bigotry, which have for generations kept the women of rural Bengal physically bound in space and spiritually confined in imaginative sterility, without scope for expression of autonomous voice in work or pleasure.
As a Bangladeshi and as Witness to the gruesome genocide perpetrated by the occupying army during our Liberation War, poet Khondakar Ashraf Hossain has left us his legacy in the form of a record, a living document of the horror of the period. In "From the Mass-Graves", the camera of his eye cinematically films images of the slaughter, of the muddy bloody killing fields in East Bengal. He pays due homage to the "severed heads", to 'The Yoricks' ( alluding to poor 'Yorick's skull' in Hamlet). The poem is his tribute to the shaheed who died so that we could be born. In this poem, like Buddhadev Bose before him, he chants an invocation to Kankabati—epitome of Bangla womanhood – to come and 'inspect' the 'Bones of humans' stored on 'endless shelves.'
The Bangali woman, in Ashraf's poetry, becomes the legendary Behula, carrying humanity on her raft through the currents of the winding river of life, weeping in sorrow, but never in surrender, seeking to revive, to sustain life forever.
In the Foreword to On Behula's Raft, Khondakar Ashraf Hossain writes with deep emotion, with great love for our nation. He says, "Bangladesh is my Behula, on whose raft I have been afloat for eons, forever dying and forever resurrecting into new life under a resplendent, tropical sun. The poems in this volume are representative of my work of nearly three decades.'
The writer is Professor and former Chairperson (2009-2012), Department of English, University of Dhaka. This essay is a revised version of an earlier review.
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