Source: Kazi Tahsin Agaz Apurbo

The world of literature has always been filled with unique storytellers, those with the extraordinary ability to imagine and take chances. Professor Deena Forkan believes that she has, unknowingly, been a part of such a world from a very young age. "I have been a story teller since I was a child," she says. "I remember making my cousins and the slum kids I used to run around with, listen to me mesmerized, awestruck at the stories I made up to tell them. Some true, some fabricated. They were fascinated at the way I used to tell the stories."

Popularly known as DF by her students, Forkan is an established writer and has published a book of short stories 'The Fire in the Hills' in 2013. "The book can be found at Bookworm," she informs. The stories have been an inspiration and a source of strength for many, especially young women trying to figure out a balance between the do's and don'ts in contemporary Bangladeshi society.

Deena Forkan won the second prize in the all state story writing composition while studying at the Toledo University, in Ohio, USA, where she did a second Master's and eventually a PhD. "My story was about the tidal storm that occurred in Sandeep and other coastal areas of Chittagong in 1988 where a school teacher let go of his daughter to save his son," she says. "All the stories in 'The Fire in the Hills' are true stories, which had touched my life and left me disturbed."

As a child, Forkan was a tomboy, playing with the slum boys rather than girls of her community. "I would regularly collect leaves with all the 'tokais' of my area," she remembers. "My father was a high government officer then who saw his daughter happily collecting rubbish with a bunch of slum kids and freaked out! He gravely told me to sit in his office which I did, afraid of what he might do, though I did not know what crime I had committed. He got some rasgollas and told me to eat some. I learned later that my mother had to listen to his tirade for not being a more careful mother."

Born in Jamalpur, in a family who valued education much, Dr Deena Forkan is Associate Professor, English Department at the North South University. In fact, she has been teaching English literature for over two decades now, and many of her students are pursuing careers in different parts of the world. She attended the Holy Cross High School and College and then Dhaka University, followed by Toledo University. "My PhD was in Comparative Literature and my subjects were Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and their feminist philosophy which they depicted in their utopian novels-- 'Sultana's Dream' and 'Herland'," she says. "Both writers claimed that economic independence of women was the only way to liberation and emancipation of any kind."

"The inspiration to do my PhD was first my late Uncle who inspired in me the love for literature and reading. Also my husband, who believed in me," she says. Because of her full time teaching job, writing and taking care of a family, Deena had to take a break from her PhD. "A comment made by one of my colleagues at NSU, who said that it was too late and I would not be able to finish my PhD studies any more, made me think," she says. "I took that as a challenge. I was not one to let a challenge go by, be it to play 'dung-guli' with the toughest boy in the slum or a revered senior colleague. That is who I am."

Forkan's next publication will be a collection of all the articles she has written on social problems, looking at them from a feminist point of view. "I am at present working on a novel, also touching on my life experience," she says. "I hardly find time with the hectic schedule at NSU, but if I don't write I might go crazy! So I write between classes, when ever I am upset, whenever I am sad, whenever I am disturbed by anything. Therefore my writings are not sporadic but in ragged random pieces. Ideas come out of me when I have the least time."