OH TO BE IN PARIS

My French Connection

It's over half a century since France – its thinkers, writers, artists, film-makers – became an object of fascination with me, and yet I was well into my sixties before I visited it for the first time.

The most exciting intellectual event of my teens was the award of the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature to Jean-Paul Sartre. It was a hot topic with our language and literature teachers; they brought it up in class. Of course the Prize is given every year, but that year was special because the winner turned it down. Most of us were impressed because the prize money was a princely sum. But there was something else told by our teachers that intrigued me. Sartre was the proponent of a mysterious philosophy called Existentialism. What did this philosophy teach? Our teachers couldn't explain.

Sartre's books were nowhere to be found, but when I finished the SSC at St. Gregory's High School, a classmate revealed that he had bought a copy of Existentialism and Humanism. I begged him to lend it for a few days, with the warning that Sartre was a notoriously difficult writer. Difficult or not, I was determined to devour it. And I did, with relish. A little later my friend also bought, and passed on, Nausea. My Sartrean phase was well under way.

Another friend introduced me to another mysterious Francophone thinker, featured in Newsweek: the Rumanian-born Emil Cioran, supposed to be even more pessimistic than Sartre. His books were even harder to get. It was another dozen or so years before I could find his books. But once I began there was no stopping.  

The same was the case with Margaret Duras, whom I first discovered in a corner of the bookshelves in the English Department Seminar at Dhaka University. These three – Sartre, Cioran, Duras – became my special French connection, over and above all the others whom we all read, from Baudelaire and Flaubert to Barthes and Foucault. In my imagination Sartre's haunts, the Café de Flore and Deux Magots became hallowed institutions; the Luxemburg Gardens where Cioran took his constitutional was sacred ground.

And yet I made no effort to visit Paris. As a fresher at Dhaka University, a friend and I enrolled in the elementary French course, taught by a gentleman from Mauritius, only to drop out after a few weeks of truancy. My French connection was a thing of the mind, nurtured in solitary communion with a few great minds through the medium of English translations.  

As for French people, I had met one or two, no more, and briefly. For instance, one day in the mid-eighties, a young Frenchman who taught French at the Alliance Francaise and was working on a doctorate in English literature turned up at the English Department of Dhaka University to enquire if anyone could lend him Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism. I didn't have it but I gave him copies of Form, a literary magazine I was associated with.

Twenty years later, at a British Council party, I was told that the new director of the Alliance was looking for me. We wouldn't have recognized each other, but when he introduced himself I exclaimed, 'You are the young Frenchman who came looking for Anatomy of Criticism!' It was the beginning of an extraordinary friendship.

Paris at Last

Olivier Litvine, for that was the Frenchman's name, began translating my poems into French; placed one in La Regle du Jeu, the French journal founded and edited by Bernard-Henri Levy; and put up the translations as they were done on a website. He told me of a prestigious residency at Les Recollets in Paris and egged me on to apply. As a result my family and I spent three interesting summer months in Paris in 2013. Olivier and I gave a reading at a public library; and subsequently I gave two more, one at the Place des Poemes in Ivry, an attractively designed centre for poetry-related activities, and another at Sete, at the Musee de Paul Valery, a unique institution dedicated to the poet, overlooking the Mediterranean and the Marine Cemetery that inspired his most famous poem, and in which he lies buried.

At Olivier's urging I met Bernard-Henri Levy, who surprised me by declaring at once that he had a soft corner for Bangladesh; and further, that 'Sheikh Mujib is one of my heroes.' He had covered our independence war and worked as an economic advisor to the Bangladesh government for a few months in 1972. He would revisit Bangladesh in 2014, when a Bengali translation of his first book, based on his experiences in 1971, was released. At one point he invited me to join the Editorial Committee of La Regle du Jeu. This would play a role in my second visit to Paris.

Olivier's translations of my poems would make a tidy little volume, especially if they accompanied the English originals. He showed them to Florence Noiville, novelist and literary editor at Le Monde; she put him in touch with Editions Caracteres, who readily accepted the manuscript. My friend Hamiduzzaman Khan, the sculptor and painter, contributed a couple of lovely drawings; and Erik Orsenna, novelist (prix Goncourt, 1988) and member of the Academie Francaise, contributed a charming postface. When the book – titled Combien de Bouddhas -- came off the press in mid-2015, Florence Noiville gave it a gratifying review in Le Monde (10 July 2015).

Paris Again

But for unavoidable reasons the formal launch had to wait till March this year. On 20 March, under the aegis of La Regle du Jeu, a reading and discussion of the book took place at the Cinema Etoile in Saint Germain des Pres, chaired by Levy; with me reading the English poems; and Olivier, Erik and my publisher Nicole Gdalia reading the French translations and commenting on the poems. I think Erik's is the most impassioned commentary on my work I have heard so far. The entire programme can be accessed at <Kaiser haq-rencontre-lecture-la regle du jeu-dailymotion>.  

Three days later there was a smaller, more intimate do at the offices of Editions Caracteres. To my (very pleasant) surprise, Nicole had found a Frenchman who had learned to play the sitar in Kolkata; his sitar provided a sweet accompaniment to the reading. A talented young Chinese-French violinist came and played an intricate piece by Vivaldi: purely as a sign of goodwill.

Editions Caracteres, interestingly, specializes in publishing poetry and has an impressive list. It is worth mentioning that it would not have been possible for such a venture to survive if it weren't for a subsidy from the ministry of Culture. I wonder how many countries have such a support system for literary publishing.

My second visit to Paris lasted exactly one week. More than two years had passed since the previous visit. During this time several terror attacks had shaken the city. While I was out walking my wife phoned to tell me of the latest terror attacks in Brussels. Naturally, I was anxious to learn about the inevitable impact of the violence on the collective psyche. I was staying with generous friends of Olivier's, Alain and Muriel, now my friends as well; both are schoolteachers. We spoke of the attacks. Muriel said sadly, 'There is a subtle change in people. Now if people see a stranger they wonder if he might be carrying explosives. It's very unhealthy.'

Yes, it is unhealthy. And the problem is global, and by the look of things will not go away soon. I tell myself the world was never a very 'healthy' place; there has always been one thing or another to make it 'unhealthy'. Meanwhile, we get on with our lives, pursue activities we value. It was a delight to chat over lunch with friends, Laetitia Zecchini, Bruce and Adele King, Philipe Benoit (a new friend), all of them fine scholars and critics; to meet France Bhattacharya, the grande dame of Bengali studies in France; to travel to Normandy with Olivier and spend the day with Gilles Perrault, journalist and social activist extraordinaire, and his charming wife Therese; to have an evening adda at Florence Noiville's. 'Only connect', as Forster said? Yes, though history will always present ruptures and fractures as well.