Enticed by Words

Claire Chambers is a Lecturer in Global Literature at the University of York, where she teaches twentieth and twenty-first century writing in English from South Asia, the Arab world, and their diasporas. Claire has also published her works in journals such as Postcolonial Text and Contemporary Women's Writing, and is Co-Editor of the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

When asked to share her first-time experience visiting Bangladesh, Claire describes some of her memorable moments, "So far my experiences have been wonderful. My first day I had an adventure when I was caught in the monsoon rain and then watched a pickpocket get chased by his irate victim down the main road. I was delighted to be given a jute book bag by the conference organisers, since I have read so much about Bangladesh's jute industry. Having said that, I've never seen such traffic jams – sometimes purely of cycle-rickshaws!"    

Claire has authored the works 'British Muslim Fictions' and 'Interviews with Contemporary Writers', which featured the young Bangladeshi writer and novelist Tahmima Anam. Claire had been researching about South Asia and its diaspora for years but when she learned that 3 out of 4 of the 7/7 terrorists were from the city of Leeds, she was surprised to find out how little she had been learning about her own city. "A desire to bring my research home led me to the trilogy of books about Muslims in Britain with which I am currently engaged. I felt that since little had been done in this area before, I needed to speak to the authors themselves before writing about their fiction. Tahmima Anam was one of only two writers I interviewed over the phone. Both of these women writers were so eloquent and erudite that I learnt a lot from our conversations."

Recently Claire appeared as the plenary speaker at University of Liberal Arts, Bangladesh. Her discussion topic was 'Banglaphone fiction', in her words "English-language literature from writers based in London from across the Bengaliyat." Claire mentions that "The Sylhetis' great contribution to the fabric of British life is recognised, for example, in their association with Brick Lane, a popular road of curry houses in East London. However, too often their contribution to literature is reduced to one novel, Brick Lane, Monica Ali's novel about the famous street and its denizens." In her paper Claire, endeavoured to broaden the scope of her discussion by including works such as Sake Dean Mahomed's 'The Travels of Dean Mahomet', published in 1794. "The lives of Mahomed and his family illustrate how settled, how integrated in British life Muslims have been for several centuries, and what huge contributions they have made to the fabric of this nation," she says. 

It is intriguing to find a scholar who is so interested by another culture as to study it in-depth and to base their life's works on it. "My interest in this region and its literature was sparked by the gap year I took before going to university in the mid-1990s. I spent the year working as an English language teacher at a mixed-gender school in Peshawar, at least a third of whose pupils were Afghan refugees. It's by now something of a cliché to say that such an experience was 'life-changing' and 'character-building'. In my case, if nothing else the year away handed me my career." 

Claire went onto study English Literature at Newcastle University in the UK and found herself deeply fascinated by Post Colonial and Indian Literature. She hopes 2010 will be a decade of success for Bangladeshi writers. "They certainly deserve it!" she concludes.