Dedicating to my Favorite Poet Shamsur Rahman knew him very closely.

Imageless

I miss something today, I miss someone today,

May be I miss a part of me which went away

Along with you, you whom I cannot frame

Anywhere now, you who is without an image,

But you still exist. How is it possible?

Imageless but still living at some corner of my heart,

When I feel you are no more you make a sound

Which wakes me up in the silence of the night?

And I walk into the lanes of memory,

There is lot of mist there, I cannot make out

Where you are, but yes, I can feel you,

Silently walking around me,

And when I turn towards you,

There is nothing there, absolutely nothing.....

Blank screen where I only see my shadow,

Is it mine or yours???

Are you still walking along with me silently?

I have no answers. I miss something today.

Qwest as Sur

A Wish

Shamsur Rahman

If I live for more than four decades
I'll be writing.
If I live for less than two decades
I'll be writing.
If I live for one more decade
I'll be writing.
If I live for two or four years
I'll be writing.
If I live for one more year
I'll be writing.
If I live for another month
I'll be writing.
If I live for one more day
I'll be writing.

Translation: Fakrul Alam

The Little Magazine SALAM
South Asian Literature Awards for the Masters
and
New Writing Award

Bronze sculpture by K.S. RADHAKRISHNAN

South Asia is about to brush aside language and political boundaries, and have its own literary award for the whole region. The Little Magazine SALAM (ie South Asian Literature Award for the Masters) is a lifetime achievement award for literary stalwarts of South Asia. This is the first and only professionally chosen honour to treat South Asia as a single cultural region without borders.

The Little Magazine, India's only professionally produced independent publication dedicated to literature, art and social concerns, is instituting two new awards for literature which may change the way we look at creativity. These are

1. The Little Magazine SALAM, and
2. The Little Magazine New Writing Award.

1. The Little Magazine SALAM (South Asian Literature Award for the Masters)
The pre-eminent figures in contemporary fiction, poetry and drama from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan will be honoured by their peers and readers. Unlike international awards like the Commonwealth Literature prize or the Booker Prize, awards in India honour writers only within the country. And the Commonwealth and Booker have their limitations - they consider only literature in English, which is a small though important segment of the literatures of their regions. TLM SALAM rectifies both these biases of nationalism and power language, and pays tribute to pure merit in the literature of the region.

Literature spills over boundaries. Urdu or Punjabi literature spans India and Pakistan, Bengali literature straddles India and Bangladesh, Tamil literature bridges India and Sri Lanka. These Awards will erase the artificial borders that divide our region and honour literary greats in an inclusive and responsible way.

Stalwarts from various South Asian language literatures will be honoured in three categories: Fiction, Poetry and Drama & Other Genres. This is an attempt to celebrate literature without borders and express our debt of gratitude to the frontrunners in literature who have enriched South Asian culture as a whole.

The nominations from the 30-odd languages of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal came in from TLM's resource people, including readers, writers, editors and independent publishers. This year's jury consists of respected South Asian literary figures: U.R. Ananthamurthy, Gulzar, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Mrinal Pande, K. Satchidanandan, Selina Hossain (from Bangladesh) and Zaheda Hina (from Pakistan).

The award is a personalised composition in bronze for each awardee by the noted sculptor K.S. Radhakrishnan and is accompanied by a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh each.

This year, the awards have gone to the following literary personalities:

1. Vijay Tendulkar for Drama (Marathi). Tendulkar was unanimously chosen by the jury.

2. Kamala Das for Fiction (Malayalam). Though Das is better known to readers outside Kerala for her poetry in English, she is celebrated in her home state for her Malayalam fiction, which she writes under the nom de plume of Madhavikutty.

3. Shamsur Rahman for Poetry (Bengali). The unofficial poet of the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, Rahman is the greatest living poet of his country.

2. The Little Magazine New Writing Award:
The first award for new writing in any South Asian language, this aims to encourage emerging talent across the region. While new writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka have been very successful in the West, in South Asia there is no tradition or method of rewarding new writers. The Little Magazine New Writing Award introduces the concept of recognising young writers as part of South Asia's literary continuum.

TLM sorted through the several thousand submissions that it has received over the last six years, and made a shortlist with the help of a small selection committee consisting of young independent publishers. This year's final jury for New Writing consists of the eminent authors Keki Daruwalla, Upamanyu Chatterjee and Lakshmi Kannan.

This award is also sculpted by K.S. Radhakrishnan and is accompanied by a cash prize of Rs 30,000.

This year, the award goes to Jayant Sankrityayana, an automobile designer based in Pune, for a short story in the fantasy and science fiction genre titled 'Tsunami'. His first published story, it appeared in The Little Magazine in 2004.

The jury's choice for both these awards will be announced on Sunday, 26th March. The Little Magazine Awards ceremony will be conducted by Girish Karnad at 6:30 pm on Monday, 27th March, at the Stein Auditorium, India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. Awards will be given away by Amartya Sen, Gulzar and others. The ceremony is open to the public.

Since its birth in May 2000, The Little Magazine has focused on literary excellence in South Asia, bringing translations of quality fiction, poetry, drama and filmscripts from its various languages to a wider readership in English. It is also the only regular platform in the print media for new writers, seeking out new talent among first time poets, fiction writers and playwrights. These awards, which publicly recognise achievement in these two areas, are a logical extension of The Little Magazine's work

Tribute to Shamsur Rahman
Yes to Shamsur Rahman, no to death!
Azfar Hussain

Shamsur Rahman -- our foremost poet -- struggled to write against death even when he was sure that death was approaching him. He died on August 17. But the spirit of Rahman's struggle for life stubbornly refuses to die. For that very spirit comes to characterise Rahman's own poetry. Although some of his early works do not range beyond a certain kind of romanticism, Shamsur Rahman hardly romanticises death itself. Rather he tells us unequivocally and even repeatedly: "I don't like death."

That pronouncement reminds me of Eduardo Galeano, the Uruguayan writer, whom I had the opportunity of discussing with Rahman himself more than a decade ago. In his piece called "In Defense of the Word," written at a time when military dictatorships in Latin America were threatening the freedom of the word itself, Galeano asserts: "One writes in order to deflect death and strangle the spectres that haunt us."

And Shamsur Rahman writes (let me keep using the present tense, yes!) in order to deflect death. In fact, he keeps telling us that life is far more significant than death itself, and that death is uninteresting, unattractive, and always unwelcome. Of course, the word and the world Rahman has offered us keep lending credence to that very message, while making the point that poetry can be a material force, a life-giving force, if it comes to grip the people.

And the people -- known by their struggles against death that ultimately prove their humanity -- are always there in the work of Shamsur Rahman. Certainly, out of a need "to communicate and to commune with" the people, to use Galeano's words again, Shamsur Rahman relentlessly wrote for more than half a century. His first poem appeared in print in 1949. But one had to wait until 1960 to see his first volume of poems published -- Pratham Gan Dityio Mrittyur Aagay (The First Song Preceding the Second Death). As a poet he had been active since then. He had produced more than fifty volumes of poems, including selected and collected works, among other works in prose, accounting for his own diferentia specifica or even carving a distinctive Rahmanism in Bangla poetry. Also, I feel tempted to say that no other living poet in the 'Third World' has been as prolific and productive as Shamsur Rahman. And his productivity, one might say, is probably at once his weakness and his strength. Perhaps it is more strength than weakness. For Rahman's productivity eventually helps the poet bring out the best in him.

Now, given the range and magnitude of his oeuvre, it is impossible here to even touch upon, let alone evaluate, all aspects of Shamsur Rahman's work. However, I intend to raise a couple of questions about certain kinds of critical works hitherto produced on Rahman, while making some observations regarding a few aspects of his work: observations that are admittedly vectored by my interest in the interplay between the aesthetic and the political, or in the dialectic of struggles that bring to the fore what I wish to call -- invoking some politically engaged poets and theorists -- "poetry in the flesh."

One pet assumption of some traditional Rahman critics, then, is that Shamsur Rahman inherits his 'modernism' from the poet of the thirties. It is true that Rahman in his early life enthusiastically contributed to the poetry journal called Kabita edited by none other than Buddhadev Bose himself -- one of the foremost Bengali modernists of the 1930s. It is also true that like those Bengali modernists Rahman was -- at some point at least -- interested in certain canonical motifs and themes: Baudelairean Ennui or Laforguean irony or Hopkinsian-Eliotesque intertemporality or even in a certain Mallarmean predilection for the asemantic, to name but a few. But I'd argue that even the early Rahman evinces productive transactions and tensions with the thirties, while his work -- by and large -- exemplifies almost equally creative tensions and transactions with the entire lyrical tradition in Bangla poetry from Charyapada to the medieval lyrics to Biharilal to Tagore to Jibanananda Das.

Indeed, Shamsur Rahman ranges beyond the aesthetic zodiac of the thirties, particularly, if not exclusively, because Rahman enacts a fiercely animating dialectic not only between the lyrical and even the utterly prosaic as such, but also -- and more significantly -- between the aesthetic and the political in such a way that the separation between the two turns out to be a false one. In fact, Rahman ably evolves a poetic language capable of negotiating a fruitful interface between the two -- evident as that interface is from his second volume of poems Roudro Korotite onwards, and certainly fully orchestrated in such works as Nij Bashbhume and Bandi Shibir Theke.

It is also customary to assume that Shamsur Rahman progresses from the lyrical and empirical 'I' to the historical and political 'we'. One usually refers to the poem "The Manuscript of an Autobiography," including his first volume of poems, and to his later, proverbially famous, poem "Freedom You Are," in order to account for a linear, sequential movement from the presence of the 'I' to its absence in Rahman's poetry. I think this is a misleading characterisation of Rahman's own dialectics of thematic and stylistic struggles. For Rahman's 'I' and 'we' remain differentially responsive to one another in such a way that one's presence cannot be seen at the expense of the other. Certainly Rahman is never a so-called 'classicist' in a way that he would 'annihilate' or eliminate the 'I'; nor is his 'I' ever romantically celebratory of the 'egotistical sublime' as such (ah, egotistical sublime!); nor is his 'I' confessionally exposed in bare or cubic detail; nor is his 'I' immensely dwarfed into even a tiny spek of dust in an existentialist fashion. And his 'I' by no means can be taken as an example of what some have come to call 'self-fashioning.'

In fact, Rahman's 'I' resists fixity and closure, although it is possible to say that his 'I' remains variously alive to and active in the world -- or variously opposed to death -- by renewing and re-energising its contact with the living beings or people themselves, as can be seen in his works ranging from at least Nij Bashbhume and Bandi Shibir Theke, through, say, Deshodrohi Hote Icche Kore and Buk Taar Bangladesher Hridoy, to his very last poem. His 'I'/eye and his works -- taken together -- then seem to be exemplifying what Galeano says: "What one writes can be historically useful only when in some way it coincides with the need of the collectivity to achieve its identity. In saying 'This is who I am,' in revealing oneself, the writer can help others to become aware of who they are."

And Shamsur Rahman makes us aware of who we are -- particularly who the middle-class folks are, insofar as Shamsur Rahman specifically, if not exclusively, gives voice to middle-class experiences on different registers. Some Rahman critics have already characterised him as a poet of middle-class Bengali nationalism. It is true that some of his works explore and mobilise not only nationalism itself, but also its anti-colonial character and content; and that almost his entire oeuvre remains rooted in the past, present, and even future of Bangladesh. But by no means does Rahman underwrite and advocate the kind of chauvinist, self-fetishising nationalism -- let alone reactionary indigenism -- that Edward Said critically interrogates and even fiercely contests in Culture and Imperialism. In a number of ways, Shamsur Rahman is also an internationalist -- responsive as he remains to different forms and forces of creative human interventions and to various social movements at both local and global levels.

In closing, let me quickly sum up a few -- only a few -- of Rahman's numerous contributions. In the first place, he decisively shapes diction in post-Tagorean and post-Jibananandian Bangla poetry. Also, Rahman offers us the kind of poetry that effectively traverses a wide range of middle-class experiences, while making some politically significant inter-class connections in the interest of animating and inspiring broad-based struggles against oppression and injustice, although his perspective remains inflected by a progressive and robust version of liberal humanism. "If events are the real dialectics of history" -- as Antonio Gramsci once put it -- then certain crucial events like our Language Movement of 1952, our Liberation Movement of 1971, our anti-Ershad movement in the late eighties and early nineties, and other movements of the people -- including many apparently small incidents constituting and characterising our history of struggles and life -- all forge a particularly significant dialectic in Shamsur Rahman's work that in the final instance asserts and celebrates life and humanity against the forces of destruction and death. In fact, what my favourite poet Audre Lorde says about poetry can be applied to our foremost poet Shamsur Rahman: "Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of life within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought."

And Shamsur Rahman's work can certainly be taken as a vital example of poetry-as-praxis and of a struggle to name the nameless in the Lordean sense. Above all, Rahman's work inspires us to see how it is life that is more abiding and more powerful than death. Yes to Shamsur Rahman and his poetry, no to (his) death!

Dr Azfar Hussain taught English and comparative ethnic studies at Washington State University and Bowling Green State University in the US before his recent move to North South University where he teaches English