When silence speaks louder than words

In talking about cynicism and Postmodernity, Timothy Bewes (1999) mentions how the postmodern cynic is prone to flights of introspection and interiority, and a refusal to actively engage with the politics of the times, thoroughly disillusioned by it. Mohammed Shafiqul Islam's slim volume of poetry On the Other Side of Silence, tries to wade through the general environment of shock, betrayal, and overall moral degeneration to focus on the necessity of artistic endeavour, especially when silence is chosen or enforced. The epitaph by Adrienne Rich on silence as the enabler of creative impulse, which is thereafter used to break the broader silence, is something which seems to govern the poet's own writerly ethos. This book, as the poet mentions in the afterword, is mostly based in South Asia and especially Bangladesh, but the issues that are dealt with can be true anywhere. This book is very much a product of its times and is aimed at exploring the predominant silences that the present human experience subsumes.

Broadly categorised, the poet tries to talk about three kinds of silences—the hegemonic, the complicit, and the writerly silence. The most vociferous silence in this book is the silence of complicity. The present world is drowning in noise, plunged into complete disarray and entropy by warring nations, factions out to get each other's throats to solidify power in the name of faith, and bodies pile up in silence, brought on by a collective stance of 'understanding' such that language, history, and memory lose their meaning. In the very first poem, "The Central Jail of Silence", the poet talks about this enforced silence, birthed in fear and misinformation, oppressing the very subjects that are meant to be the truth bearers: "Artists committing crimes through words / Or images or voice become jailbirds".

But an artistic life itself can be a point of hubris as the artist runs the risk of placing himself on a higher plane than his fellow citizens, gazing down from his jail of silence. The poem talks of the hegemonic silence in a cacophonous world that isolates and alienates. He affirms the need for a certain degree of interiority to be able to use language consciously in a world where language is weaponised to alter histories, erode entities—

You don't pretend as you know
How they set fire on trains of thought,
On the asylum of ontologies—
In the library of longings
you explore an archive of silence.

Modern life is beset by the challenges of the corporate rat-race, the need to be ahead of the curve, and the naked terror of violence which births complicity in the common man. Nothing at present is sacrosanct and that has diminished freedom of expression. The world has become a place where the living shares an ambivalent relationship with death—death is neither an escape route for the living nor is it a finality for those dead as they carry an inchoate urge for life. In such an environment, grief becomes a verb, a consistent performance, a slow devolving dissolution of selfhood. 

In carrying this cycle of complicity further, the poet talks of the city of Dhaka in "A City of Cynics" and ruminates on how the desire for comfort breeds silence and the modern malaise of selective observation, selective anger:

Nothing lasts longer than how we perceive
Things around us, for we do not look
Beyond zones where we calculate our comfort
Always keeping tallies of loss and gain.

In a poem reminiscent of Shakespeare's King Lear, the poet highlights how the fear is transmuted and transmitted as politicians use the common people as pawns in the global game, as we look on in silence—

Still vultures wait for the scent of death. We see
How humans are shot down, like birds.
Statistics probably fails to count you and me.
How many graves, then, turn a country into a graveyard?

In "Cartography", the poet, however, tries to undercut the overall cynicism in a subversion of the traditional pastoral. The poem is an ode to Bangladesh, its verdant beauty, and the poet longs for simpler times in his childhood where people of different religions coexisted in harmony. But not all hope is dead inside him—

I still dream because I am not a nihilist piping a flute of anxiety
But my songs are in danger of extinction, my music in peril.

In "The Return of the Wasteland", the poet not only pays homage to his poetic inspiration but also highlights how the present world, teetering on the brink of another world war, is no different from Eliot's world a century ago, perhaps only harsher, more vicious. He sees the darkness of the Thames's underbelly dwell in Sylhet's Surma river, where the Anthropocene greed and disregard takes the water bodies for granted— "Its banks filled with / Plastic bottles, polythene, and chip packets".

In fact, the poet, in talking about the patriarchal greed for power in the name of globalisation, highlights the injustice it doles out to nature and women, in many of his poems—

Grabbers are erasing from our map
The dense and verdant woods—
The leaves no longer stir in the breeze
Unable to breathe, we stare blankly.

This anthropocentric lust silences livelihoods and alters the course of lives like those of the weavers who live close to the earth in perfect symbiosis. These entities, though oppressed, are no more silent victims, they rage, rage against the chains that bind them. 

There are a few poems such as "Beauty Shines Brighter in Solitude", "Before the Last Breath", "Love at Second Sight", and "A Paradise of Silence", where the poet talks about silence in its truest and most literal sense. These poems serve as interludes in the unrelenting miasma of modern grief, that talk of purpose, and existential meaning. Memory occurs here in its most organic sense. These are poems where the ambivalence of the poet's writerly self makes an appearance. While the poet finds glory, stillness, and calm in nature or in a woman figure who most often is an embodiment of nature in the midst of overarching turmoil, he is also careful to show that often forgetfulness can be a recourse for survival—

But when you want to obscure your past memories with the ink of forgetfulness,
When you tell stories of the innocent confined in the cell of eternal gloom,
I swim in the river of sorrow.

On the Other Side of Silence is a thoughtful volume of poetry, not just because it summarises every existential crisis that visits contemporary life but also because it engages, unlike a postmodern cynic, with the issues that plague the world. This engagement is wrought in vivid imagery and in various experiments of poetic style and form that will find resonance in readers of modern poetry. 

Rituparna Mukherjee is a writer, translator, and editor based in Kolkata, India.