Poetry
বন্দী শিবির থেকে
Not translated into English
Shamsur Rahman · 1972
Synopsis
Poems of the 1971 war, written in an occupied country. “Pather Kukur” sets against the inhabitants of a house, frozen in a mourning silence, a stray dog that runs after an army jeep and that the poet would like to be; “Guerilla” shows the liberation fighters as a subjugated people sees them; “Tomake pawar jonyo, he swadhinata” says all that ordinary people sacrificed for freedom, and “Swadhinata tumi” describes it through a series of images.
Context
After the repression of March 1971, the author took refuge with his family, for a month and a half, in his ancestral village of Narsingdi, where he wrote “Tomake pawar jonyo” and “Swadhinata tumi”; he then set down his poems in a notebook that he kept hidden. Abu Sayeed Ayub had them published in Calcutta in the journal Desh under the pseudonym Majlum Adib, the persecuted writer; a first selection appeared in volume form in Calcutta in 1972, under a cover by Purnendu Patri, and the definitive edition, prefaced by the author, in Dhaka in 1997.
Who it is for
Poems in free verse; one needs to know what happened in Bengal between March and December 1971 for the allusions to land.
Prizes and reception
The critic Kaiser Haq sees in it the most masterly poetic response to the war of independence; several of its poems have entered school textbooks.