Writers Abroad Magazine Issue 3 September 2015 | Page 22

WRITERS ABROAD MAGAZINE

What are local attitudes to writers?
Bangladesh has a proud literary history, claiming the great Rabindranath Tagore, the
first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913 as one of their own.
Bangladesh’s national Poet, Nazrul Islam, is a household name and poetry is part of
life here in a way that it no longer is in the west. At the end of a training course for
farmers, it is common for someone to have written a poem to celebrate the event, or
for young people to recite poems of the great Bengali poets at any event. So… writers
are admired and I get very positive reactions to my poems. Bangladeshis are also very
conscious of how outsiders see their country and are always very touched when they
hear that I write poems about Bangladesh.
Swapping cultures will always present new aspects to moral conclusions and
assumptions. Does this reflect on your writing?
In Bangladesh you cannot help being conscious of the position of women and the way
men dominate and own the public space. Although things are changing for the better,
there are also forces trying to reverse those changes. This is something I feel strongly
about and it comes up regularly in my poems. I have learnt to love many things about
the various religions here, and being non-religious myself I have learnt to respect the
importance of religion in other people’s lives, and take the good with the bad.
What have you learnt from living in Bangladesh?
I have learnt a lot of practical things about surviving in a huge city and living in Asia
and in a Moslem country. I learnt to find nature in small spaces—to get up early so I
have the footpath with the old t ɕ