Shards of beauty: Poems of a lifetime

Shahid Alam and I go back a long way, though we had both half-forgotten it until recently. He was two years senior to me at St. Gregory's High School. I didn't know him personally, as I did several of his classmates. At Dhaka University he studied Economics, like many of my schoolmates, and I'd see him bustling about in connection with the departmental rag, titled Optima, that he edited. My friend Taqi Sudderuddin assisted him in the venture, rather lackadaisically, if I remember rightly, but he was full of admiration for Alam's dedication and discipline. The two became friends, and, I suspect, talked more about their shared interest in literature and philosophy than about economics. Indeed, both had taken it up somewhat reluctantly, Alam under parental pressure, for economics had a certain cachet among the Social Sciences. Once he had bowed to his parents' wishes, he didn't stint in his commitment to his academic discipline, and came out First in the First Class in the BA Honours examination of 1970.

I do not remember how the variations unfolded, nor do I know if the poem was among the 50 Alam supposedly destroyed—or among others mysteriously lost. But it's more than likely that a few of the poems in the sheaf I glanced at are here: the poet's Preface informs us that the collection includes work from his late teens to his seventies, i.e. from the late sixties till the book's publication last year.

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He was active in the departmental student body as well, successfully contesting for General Secretary on a Leftist student party ticket. He was halfway through his MA when his life was sadly disrupted by the military crackdown. His family had moved from Calcutta to Dhaka in 1947, his birth year; now, he had to relocate in Karachi to finish his studies and take up a university position. He'd take a PhD from a Canadian university and, in the late eighties, move to the US, where he had a distinguished career at Northeastern University, and is now an emeritus professor.   

His poetic pursuits continued throughout, on the side, but for that reason with no little seriousness; his Gregorian classmate (Professor) Shawkat Hussain, an English Literature student in the late 60s, recalls visiting his home in Mohammadpur and being shown samples of his translations of Ghalib; these efforts found eventual fruition in the publication of Intimations of Ghalib (Orison Books, 2018), reviewed by Ahrar Ahmed in The Daily Star of June 8, 2019.

Taqi showed me a sheaf of Alam's original poems that the poet had given him to read when they had met, ostensibly to talk about the departmental magazine. "Shahid Bhai quickly took care of magazine matters and began Pounding away," Taqi reported in his characteristic humorous conversational manner, punningly alluding to Alam's enthusiasm for the poetry of Ezra Pound. It made an impression on me, for Pound was part of my bedside reading. I had a quick look at Alam's poems too. There's little I can recall after 55 odd years except that the poems were short and carefully crafted, like Pound's early poems. One poem, perhaps the very first one, remains etched in my memory because of its peculiar blend of passion and playfulness. All in lowercase (if I remember rightly), it repeated a one-line statement a dozen or so times, each time with slight changes in the configuration of words and letters. The opening, signature line, went (I'm sure) thus:

go tell her i love her

I do not remember how the variations unfolded, nor do I know if the poem was among the 50 Alam supposedly destroyed—or among others mysteriously lost. But it's more than likely that a few of the poems in the sheaf I glanced at are here: the poet's Preface informs us that the collection includes work from his late teens to his seventies, i.e. from the late sixties till the book's publication last year.

Of more moment is the aesthetics expounded in the Preface. In Urdu and Persian, there exist in distinguished profusion both long and short poetic forms. Allama Iqbal's Asrar-i-Khudi (1915) is a well-known example of a long philosophical poem in Persian; Hali's Musaddas-e-Hali of a long narrative poem in Urdu. But the most popular and impactful form is undoubtedly the relatively short Ghazal, which is typically between five and a maximum of 15 couplets in length. Alam models his poetry on the Ghazal, whose distinctive traits are highlighted in the Preface: the self-contained character of each couplet, and of each of the poems, which are arranged with no reference to the date of composition, but rather in the alphabetical order of the repeated phrase called the radeef.

These are not mere dry technical details, though. Each shehr or couplet is an epigrammatic unity wittily blending observation, emotion, and ratiocination, and in consequence achieves the unified sensibility that Eliot identifies in Metaphysical poetry and upholds as a desideratum for the modern poet. The Ghazal also transcends another kind of dissociation of sensibility that F. R. Leavis diagnoses in modern culture as a consequence of the divergence of highbrow and popular taste; the Ghazal appeals to the sophisticate as well as the common man.

13 of the poems in this volume are labelled "Ghazals", though Alam takes liberties with the form. Some have only four couplets, and not all are rounded off with the Takhallus or poet's name or nom-de-plume, which is a convention also seen in Bengali as the Bhanita in Vaishnava and Bawool lyrics. Poets naming themselves before concluding add a touch of personal drama, heightening overall impact. The final couplet of the first ghazal resonantly alludes to Sura Al-Alaq, and reveals a deeply felt religious vision:

Shahid, you were a clot.

Remember and recite.

Alam's declared aim is to capture "precious moments", which may be equated with the Joycean concept of the epiphany, a cornerstone of modernist aesthetics. Alam ends the poem, "Goldenrods", by charmingly conflating the natural and the aesthetic realms:

In the bee, beauty

makes honey: in man

it becomes epiphany.

But modern man's hunger for beauty is fed by corruption—a somewhat Baudelairean corruption, as in the "Circe":

Men thrown here by rare

Mischance, delight in her

Incurably, interrogating her

Icy flesh & marble bones

For shards of beauty.

Precious moments do not preclude pain; his departed son Junaid, the book's dedicatee, is movingly memorialised in "Uncommon Care" and "Mary".

Alam is sensitive to the poetic potential of everyday domestic settings and events, like William Carlos Williams, whose poem "This is Just to Say" is called to mind by "Birthday", which deserves to be quoted in full:

Happy birthday!

I fixed the light switch

inside the fridge.

Sorry, I took

so long to fix this.

I would not do it

on any ordinary day.

The collection has a Foreword by Guy Rotella, emeritus professor of English literature at Northeastern University. Generally speaking, I regard introductory pieces in poetry collections by anyone other than the poet as excrescences, but not in this case. Professor Rotella not only gives a useful overview of Alam's work but highlights an aspect that readers might overlook; for Alam is a committed postcolonial intellectual and activist, and "in three overtly political poems," "Genghiz Khan", "America's Past", and "Holding the Center", he exposes "the tricks by which rulers or nations reify their hegemony as if it were inevitable and natural."

The thought has crossed my mind that Alam writes Urdu poems through the medium of English. Even if the reader agrees, I'd hasten to add that the poems are no less successful as English poems. Steeped in the traditions of Urdu and Sufi poetry, Alam successfully infuses the sensibility they embody into English verse. No wonder the poem "Translation" meditates on the importance of cross cultural transactions:

All poetry translates

from buried scrolls, from

vanished hieroglyphs, from

the concerto of feelings

to the poetics of discovery.

Translation is not treachery.

Alam is a translingual and transnational poet whose life has been divided between Dhaka, Karachi, and North America. He can therefore be claimed by Bangladesh, Pakistan, and the South Asian diaspora in America.

Kaiser Haq is a Bangladeshi poet, translator, essayist, critic and academic. He is the Dean of the School of English and Humanities, University of Liberal Arts Bangladesh (ULAB).