essay
ESSAY / On the national anthem of Bangladesh: An apologetic discourse
The recent attack on “Amar Shonar Bangla” stems from this type of attempt to categorise the national anthem, leading to further allegations against it
ESSAY / Falling through the cracks of the ‘normal’
There is something to be said about the innate process of otherising a person with disability, and pushing them out of the group of the ‘norm’ and into the group of the ‘exception’.
ESSAY / William Blake: Pioneering psychoethnography in art and poetry
As we continue to grapple with questions of identity, meaning, and societal change, Blake's visionary oeuvre serves as a guiding light
ESSAY / Intertextuality in Shahaduz Zaman’s ‘Prithibite Hoyto Brihaspatibar’
Shahaduz Zaman stands out prominently as a significant figure in the contemporary Bangla literary landscape, utilising intertextuality throughout his works, and infusing various texts and genres into his narratives.
ESSAY / ‘The day begins wrong’: Mastering tension and suspense in fiction
In my creative writing classes, whether at the University of Toronto or the Hermitage Residency in Bangladesh, I emphasise that any student of fiction must first master suspense
ESSAY / The English-Bangla conundrum continues
When my literature professor heard I had been delving into Bangla literature and cultural media in pursuit of a self-undertaken project to finally learn Bangla, she suggested I see the 1970 film Jibon Thekey Neya.
ESSAY / To read as an academic: The transformative journey of a reader turned student
I became curious as to how the experience of reading might change for someone who studied it for a living, and how the lens of a literature student might differ from that of a creative writing one
ESSAY / Between falling and failing
Although there is much merit to the representation of women’s pain, the evolution of the heavily aestheticised “sad girl” trope in popular culture has started to make a mawkish caricature of real women’s suffering
ESSAY / The promises and pitfalls of decolonial thinking
The craze that once prevailed in academia over postcolonialism no longer seems to hover around there anymore.
T.S. Eliot and on living in unreal cities
I once again find myself drawn to "The Waste Land"—though this isn’t about just the one poem, not really—where so much of the old world exists in motifs in a tattered landscape.
RRReading
Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.
The alterities of hunger
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
Dining at Oxbridge: “Formal”, please
I was a little anxious. It was only the second day of my life at the University of Cambridge, and I was already bombarded with instructions on how to dine.
What I mean when I say “listening to books”
Listening is stretching beyond ourselves and another, and if we were to listen to printed words on paper as non-verbal cues of communication, it too emits lower frequencies that moves us, beyond the I, towards new modes of knowledge.
Climate fiction and the fictions we tell ourselves
There is an element of the unexpected in the twinning of fiction and ecology. A sense of unease of sorts exists in the pairing together of fiction, a form of narrative that is untrue, with the imminent ecological disaster, an environmental inevitability that is true.
‘Monstrous fancies, misshapen dreams’: My ambivalence with ‘Dorian Gray’
“How tragic it would be if you were wasted”, made me smile in a melancholic way. I know moments when “unnecessary things are our only necessities”. And I’ve not been hesitant to give “rebellion its fascination” and “disobedience its charm.”
Where are indigenous women’s stories?
Indigenous women are read even less. There are multiple root causes–lack of editorial support for indigenous authors writing in their mother tongues, the predominance of oral traditions, gender inequality and bias.
“A well-read woman is a dangerous creature”. Is she really?
It concerns me that Tate’s apologists range from impressionable boys in my grade 9 classroom to 30-something-year-old single dads. My own mother calls me a ‘feminist’ with such chagrin in her tone, it begins to feel like a slur.
Finding myself in Orhan Pamuk books
It is also etched in the corners of multiple pages of the notebook I am writing this draft in. It is on my passport, also on my pajamas. It is the word the world knows me by—my name. Specifically, my last name, Nuri.