| Mohammad Rafiq Mohammad Rafiq resides in Dhaka and teaches in the Department of English at Jahangirnagar University in Savar, Bangladesh. Rafiq was born in Baitpur, a small village in the Bagerhat district of pre-Partition Bengal in 1943 (the year of the historic Bengali famine). During his student years at Dhaka University, Rafiq was involved in the political turmoil of his country (then East Pakistan) and was jailed twice for protest activities. Although he was sentenced to ten years of hard labor by a Pakistani martial law court, he was released to continue his university studies. During the war of independence, Rafiq served as a Sector-1 officer motivating freedom fighters and then with the Radio Center of Independent Bengal. Through Mohammad Rafiq's dozen volumes of poetry, Bengali readers have witnessed not only the evolution of a distinctive personal vision and style but also a reflection of the changing fortunes of a homeland—all against a backdrop of folk tradition (a typically Bengali mix of Hindu and Muslim lore) and timeless images of water and sky, sun and rain, clouds and dust. This is not to say that Rafiq's poems tend to be predominantly "political" (other poets of Bangladesh more regularly respond to specific events and issues). Rather, an awareness Bangladesh's freedom struggle, the time of idealism and hope after independence, and the long dark period of military rule after the assassination of the new nation’s first democratically elected leader, Sheikh Mujib Rahman, should help readers from less turbulent parts of the world understand the potentially explosive impact of a particular literary work and the extraordinary risks that a writer may take in writing and publishing it. When Hossain Muhammad Ershad—a dictator who fancied himself a poet—seized power in 1982, the people of Bangladesh had to endure crushing repression from his regime and from the growing forces of communalism. “Open Poem” was Rafiq’s response, first published as an underground pamphlet, later included as the title poem of Khola Kobita (1983). Thousands of clandestine copies of the poem circulated throughout the country—it was the first voice raised against the military autocracy and became a rallying point, especially on university campuses, where students held processions and then staged the poem, in song and dramatic performance. Rafiq was summoned before a military board of inquiry and interrogated, and, after a period of harassment, a warrant was issued for his arrest. Although he escaped, he was forced to live in hiding for months, never staying long in one place. I have been told that villagers would ask to hear his poem when they became aware of his presence; one hearing. for the predominantly illiterate listeners, was enough to guarantee his safety in their midst. “Open Poem” is directed not only against a particular dictator but against all forms of repression, including middle-class complacency and political greed. Drawing on slang, swear words, colloquialisms, as well as fairy-tale images of pomp and grandeur, turned to satiric purposes, "Open Poem" is less a "political poem" than poetry's natural expression of freedom in an opposing voice and provocative form. Carolyn B.Brown
Carolyn B. Brown Carolyn B. Brown, an editor and translator living in Austin, TX, was for many years the staff editor of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, where she also published the magazine 100 Words. Her translations from Bengali and other languages have appeared in Modern Poetry inTranslation, Paris Review, Exchanges and elsewhere. Most recently she co-translated a selection from Amiya Chakravarty’s poetry as Another Shore (Kolkata, 2001).
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Selections from Bishkale Sandya
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