Farewell not my friend

In Shamsur Rahman the nation has lost a poet and I have lost a friend and a close co traveller in our literary journey. With poet Hasan Hafizur Rahman, Sayeed Atiqullah and Abu Zafar Obaidullah gone long before Rahman, I now feel icily alone as the sole surviving member of a generation of poets who took up pens in the early fifties of the twentieth century. After being in the writing business for over half a century, at the passing away of Shamsur Rahman I find myself lost for words even to record my tears for him and for the valiant time, when by writing in Bangla that was handed down to us, we successfully stood against the threats posed by the then Pakistani authorities to our language itself. Also, in the then East Bengal, we found that most of our people's literary and artistic sensibilities were still rooted in the middle ages, so to speak. A great historical responsibility to hitch our people to a modern and contemporary mindset fell on our young and green shoulders. Shamsur Rahman played a large part, along with some of us, in setting the standard for 'modern poetry' in Bangladesh. It is not easy to say adieu to such a poet and a friend.

Shamsur Rahman was the foremost interpreter in poetry of our people's dreams. His was an inspiring voice in the struggle, which is still continuing, for our total emancipation from all kinds of bondage. He was one of the most sensitive recorders, in verse, of our agonies and anguish in dark days, and of our struggles and triumphs. He is no more. Man may go but art lives on. In his large oeuvre of poetry Shamsur Rahman will ever be with us as long as the Bangalee, Bangla language and Bangla literature are there.

Shamsur Rahman, in his earlier days, appeared to be a product of Bangla poetry of the thirties, but soon, to be precise in the mid-sixties of last century, he was able to find his own forte and his distinctive voice emerged by the end of the decade. That decade coincided with our struggle for political emancipation leading to the genocide unleashed by the army junta of Pakistan, and then to our War of Liberation. These historical turns over time brought about a radical change in his poetry. Shamsur Rahman became one of the finest political poets of our time.

Perhaps he is the greatest political poet in the history of Bangla poetry so far.

But I am still in mourning for him. I need a little more time to accept a world sans Shamsur Rahman. Memories are still fresh and with his passing are rushing in full flood. I remember the days of our growing up, the endless addas in various restaurants and street corners and in his house at Asheq Lane where his mother would never fail to offer us, starving young poets, mouth watering and belly-filling snacks of chilli peppered parched rice, bakarkhani breads and sutli-kebab delicacy of old Dhaka.

And the long midnight walks with Shamsur Rahman on the Nababpur Street! We returning from our adda on the Stadium gallery still raw with freshly laid concrete, or at the fashionable Kashba restaurant if by chance, on a particular evening, we were rich from our honorarium for poetry published, a meagre ten taka perhaps; returning at midnight to our respective residences, saying goodnight at the corner of Victoria Park to meet again next morning, perhaps at Beauty Boarding or at Govinda Dham, actually a coal-hole but serving tea on deferred payment; but not taking leave yet, we are not yet ready to leave, wish the night would be longer, still lingering on the street, still reciting poems in full throat delivery. If I would recite some lines from Jibanananda, Shamsur Rahman would join in with lines from Budhhadev Basu, and if Shadid Quaderi was around on a particular midnight, he would supplement the recital with Amiya Chakravarty to the stars of night sky and the bunch of street dogs silently following us from Stadium to the Park, the whole length, amused perhaps with our lot but expecting some food that they thought we were carrying in our pockets. If only they knew that it was only poems and slim volumes of poetry with us. Nourishment for us, but barely even chewable to them.

Ah, Shamsur Rahman, let us take to the streets again. Let there be midnight walks again to our holes and hovels. Hovels they may be but are they not made with the golden bricks of poetry? Wake up, my friend. Time is still for us, with us, and made by us.

I am waiting for you still on the road as you are nestling close to your Mother at Banani, whom you laid to rest with your own hand.

Farewell not my friend. If farewell at all, then let it be to the darkness of the moon; in your later poems a persistent imagery of the time we are passing through as a nation.

The author, poet and litterateur, may be contacted at [email protected]