Soliloquies from the village of Orphans and Widows

During the Liberation War of Bangladesh in 1971, collaborators led the Pakistani army to Sohagpur village. In one day, they killed 164 men. Fifty-seven women survived the atrocities, only to live out life as widows. Sohagpur (Village of Love) was renamed Bidhoba Palli (Village of Widows).

The army killed every male in the village, every male. When the army was gone, there was not a single man left to bury the dead. We had to drag the bodies ourselves and bury them.

-anonymous

Tarfia Faizullah is a Bangladeshi-American poet. The piece was first published in her second book Registers of Illuminated Villages (Graywolf Press, 2018).