A graduate student of English tries to read Gayatri Spivak’s by-now-famous essay ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’

One day that student approaches me and says, ‘I’ve read Spivak’s essay thrice. Fucking hard! I simply can’t figure out what Spivak is up to. Weird syntax, allusions to Foucault-Deleuze-Derrida, unpredictable leaps from ideas to ideas, all kinds of technical terms like ‘subject-effects’ and ‘epistemic violence’, convoluted arguments!’ The student thus goes on and on. And I cannot come up with any helpful suggestions, really, although I end up saying half-heartedly, ‘Maybe, read the essay again? Then see what happens.’

Of course, Spivak is notoriously inaccessible and incomprehensible or even simply unreadable to many. But Spivak’s own arguments have already been circulated: that style itself is political; that her own style challenges our conventional habits of reading and writing; that her style resists the Western politics of accessibility and easy appropriation. Oh well, that’s Spivak — one who resists, as she says, conceptual and linguistic spoon-feeding.

The student disappears. But I see him at a restaurant after a couple of months, and I ask, ‘Are you still battling with Spivakese?’ He answers, ‘The battle is over. I think I’ve thoroughly understood Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”’

‘Really?’ I ask. ‘Oh yes,’ asserts the student with utmost enthusiasm, with a sparkle in his eyes.The student continues, ‘I can give you even a summary of that essay in a single sentence, trust me!’

‘Summary in a single sentence? Wow!’ Thus I respond.

‘Okay, then,’ says the student, ‘here is my summary: No, the subaltern cannot speak, simply because Spivak keeps speaking all the time.’

It seems almost everyone in the US likes--or, let me put it this way, almost everyone WANTS to like--Martin Luther King, Jr., or MLK. Cool. But what does it mean to like MLK, really? If one really, really likes MLK--or, for that matter, MLK's work in its totality--one is then likely to combat racism and imperialism and the worldwide terrorism of the US government itself as well as economic injustice that is so aggressively prevalent in our society and in the world under capitalism, to mention but a few issues here, and one is even likely to be committed to fighting for nothing short of a revolutionary social transformation and even building a world free from all forms and forces of exploitation and oppression. Is liking MLK then an easy thing? The MLK with his revolutionary agendas? But it seems MLK is more fashionably liked--and even fetishized--than actually understood and taken seriously, while white liberals in particular--among others--have by now thoroughly de-historicized and de-politicized him by notoriously pitting MLK against another revolutionary--Malcolm X. Damn!

P.S.: Last year in January, I was at the Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Center in Havana, Cuba, where we discussed--among other things--certain connections among MLK, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and other third-world revolutionaries vis-a-vis the question of revolutionary politics.

Today--December 09--marks the birth anniversary and death anniversary, both, of the great Bengali thinker, writer, and feminist activist Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain (1880-1932). And December 09 is also known as the Begum Rokeya Day in Bangladesh. Here are just some quick thoughts about certain aspects of Rokeya's oeuvre, otherwise remarkably massive as it is.

I think _Sultana’s Dream_--written in English and later translated into Bengali by Rokeya herself--is more than just a subversive and satirical intervention in the genre of what I wish to call "political dream-fiction." Of course, some--mostly male critics--have meanwhile reduced this work to a mere symbol of protest, or even to a work overdosing on fantasy and abstraction. But "there is no such thing as an innocent reading." Admittedly, I am "guilty’" of reading _Sultana’s Dreams_ in a particular way.

And I read _Sultana’s Dream_ as a work offering a forward-looking social imaginary--one that looks forward to, or even creates in the imagination of the writer and the reader, not only a space and a place in which patriarchy spells out its own death but also a space and a place in which science, political economy, ecology, and the forces of nature and the forms of justice remain adequately responsive to one another in the best interest of living beings themselves, thus of course remaining opposed to the destructive and oppressive configurations and logics of colonialism, militarism, and masculinism, profoundly interconnected as they are.

And one can read _Sultana’s Dreams_ as even an "eco-feminist" work, a work that obviously precedes the birth of what has come to be known as "ecofeminism" today. To see this, one simply needs to chart out the ways in which Rokeya deploys her network of images in _Sultana’s Dreams_ to render what she calls the "Ladyland"--a land in which women enjoy freedom in a radical reversal of the patriarchal or male-dominated order of things--visually concrete. Also, _Sultana’s Dream_ is the first work of its kind--thematically and stylistically--in the entire history of Bengali literature.

I also think Rokeya as a politically engaged satirical poet has not received much attention--a poet whose apparently playful wit and sarcasm could be devastating at times. Some of her remarkable poems include "Banshiful," "Nalini o Kumud," "Saugat," "Appeal," "Nirupam Bir," and "Chand." And her poetic but satirical interventions at various levels keep making the basic point about praxis itself: your silence is not going to protect you. Notice, then, a stanza in a poem she wrote as a response to those sell-outs, those middle-class bhadralok collaborators of the Raj, ones who not only chose to remain silent, but who were also nervous about losing their damn "honorific titles," in the face of the anti-colonial movement gathering momentum in 1922:

The dumb and silent have no foes
That’s how the saying goes
All of us with titled tails
Keep so quiet telling no tales
Then comes a bolt from the blue
Passes belief, but it’s true
All of you who did not speak
Will lose your tails fast and quick
Come my friends and declare now
In loud and loyal vow
Listen, ye world, we are not
God’s truth, a seditious lot
(quoted in Bharati Ray’s _Early Feminists of Colonial India_)

Last, I think reducing Rokeya to a mere symbol surely obscures the possibilities of building a mass movement against such systems of oppression as patriarchy, colonialism, and, of course, capitalism, profoundly interconnected as they are, to say the least.

From my "Pedagogy Notebooks" (2013):

Yes, poetry and music and even mathematics! My students in my creativity class today stimulatingly explored certain connections among poetry, music, and mathematics, while even choreographing some lines from Dante's _Divine Comedy_--lines that deploy geometrical images and metaphors with superb effects! Our conversation surrounding the metaphor of "squaring the circle" led to a fascinating discussion concerning numbers themselves--numbers that are rational, irrational, algebraic, and even transcendental (and I was continuously thinking of Pablo Neruda's famous "Ode to Numbers" side by side with Alain Badiou's _Number and Numbers_), while we also talked about the effects of what are called "logarithmic spirals." And, finally, the class as a whole, I thought, experienced the sheer beauty of mathematics itself, as we watched and discussed a few videos about the infinite geometry of doodling itself, making the point that to doodle is to produce an infinite number of beautiful spatial patterns--patterns that can sing, dance, and act. Is geometry itself music spatialized? The answer in the class was in the affirmative. And we were left with the idea that, to misquote Anton Chekov, mathematics--like Vodka--can do crazy things!

II

As I was re-reading Jacques Attali’s provocative book _Noise: The Political Economy of Music_ and Sal Restivo’s brilliant work _The Social Relations of Physics, Mysticism, and Mathematics_ side-by-side, a few ideas started haunting me once again.

To begin with, as it has been said, poetry, after all, is inspired mathematics. For both poetry and mathematics do not necessarily deliver "truths" as such, but continue to suggest and provoke all possible combinations and configurations of symbolic and tropic phenomena, which, however, remain anchored in the material world in the last instance.

And, of course, music and mathematics—as many musicologists in particular have shown—speak to one another in various ways. But their exchanges do not merely reside in how they symbolically represent our world, but also lie in the ways in which both ‘make’ and mobilize abstractions that—however heightened and ‘pure’—can by no means transcend the material world itself.

Thus a political economy of music at this point must pay attention to how music produces and reproduces itself in either a contradictory or a complementary response (depends!) to the capitalist law of value itself. And as far as mathematics in particular is concerned, it can function rhetorically as it does in more ways than one.

Think, then, of the ways in which mathematics, like poetry and other allied discourses, uses analogies, homologies, contiguities, substitutions, equivalences, and so on—or, say, simile, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and so on—while also mathematics, like music in particular and other allied discourses, uses refrains and repetitions, and even improvises so many different kinds of syllogisms (‘ratiocination’ has also to do with ‘ratio,’ for instance) in its attempts to persuade.

But all mathematical ‘tropologics’—if you will—finally remain anchored in the material world insofar as the act of making connections and combinations—an act that is of course common to mathematics, music, poetry, and rhetoric all at once—cannot operate in vacuo, but certainly needs a base. And this very base is the actual, material world.

And poetry, music, mathematics, and rhetoric all—anchored as they are in the world—can play a politically significant role in bringing about even radical changes in the world itself, if not just by transcending it.

I think I’ve always loved mathematics in my own ways.

True, given the kinds of options that were available in our high school in Faridpur (Bangladesh), I enthusiastically opted for what then used to be called the “Humanities Group.” But I opted for that group–and later majored in literature–not out of my fear or dislike of mathematics though.

In fact, very early on in my life, I used to look at mathematical symbols–or, say, at certain mathematical “compositions”–as I would look at a painting or even at a poem with a sense of awe and wonder. The symbols arranged in certain order on a page simply looked beautiful to me. Once in my dream–one that, oh yes, I vividly recall now–I saw how an entire Shakespearean sonnet morphed into a mathematical composition right under my eyes! Indeed, way before I began to read the French philosopher Alain Badiou–whose love of mathematics is unmistakable–I had realized–in my own naive way–that mathematics is more than just logical proofs; that mathematics cannot simply be reduced to logic; and that mathematics does not even have to do with accuracy but it surely involves the power of our imagination. As I recall, I even told a mathematics teacher during my Dhaka University undergrad days that there’s poetry in mathematics. He laughed out loud, thinking I was crazy or even wondering if I was stoned on pot.

But I was surely high on the poetry of mathematics itself.

Shit matters.

It's because of the scatological Chaucer and Shakespeare and Swift--and others of course--that it has been increasingly possible for some literary critics in the West to speak of "fecopoetics" and even "shiterature" today!

And I can't help mentioning Peter J. Smith's 2012 book _Between Two Stools: Scatology and its Representation in English Literature, Chaucer to Swift_, one which is fecopoetically engaged with the shiterary. But what about James Joyce, not to mention our own Gopal Bha(n)r from Bengal?

Apart from those letters of Joyce to his wife Nora that have been variously called "dirty" and "pornographic" and "erotically charged" (and of course that are hypermasculinist and effortlessly scatological), Joyce's own literary oeuvre, by and large, almost stubbornly evinces his almost-Swiftian interest in the scatological as such. Also, as Gordon Bowker's admirable new biography reveals, Joyce's imagination was fired just as much by scatology and soiled bloomers as it was by Ibsen, Homer, and Skeat's Etymological Dictionary.

Rabindranath Tagore visited the Soviet Union--in 1930--six years after Lenin's death; but isn't it interesting that it was in the very year 1917--the year of the Russian Revolution--that several volumes of Tagore's _Gitanjali_ appeared in Russian translations, including one edited by the well-known Russian writer Ivan Bunin?

Some Russian literary historians tell us that Tagore was widely read even in pre-revolutionary Russia, and that the attempts to translate Tagore into Russian continued with a vengeance in the Soviet Union at a time when the Western world--by and large--began to lose interest in his work. (Remember Yeats--one who somewhat promoted Tagore but was later totally disgusted at Tagore's English translations of his own poems, even going to the extent of saying, "Tagore does not know English, no Indian knows English?")

While, earlier, Tagore was enthusiastically read and even actively promoted by the Russian symbolists, the poet Boris Paternak translated Tagore in the mid-to-late 1950s and the poet Anna Akhmatova did the same in the 1960s. And the Soviet government itself published his collected works in 1926. But, in his famous _Letters from Russia_, Tagore remained quite modest about the reception of his written work in the Soviet Union, while he remained deeply interested in the Soviet Union--his later criticisms of it notwithstanding--until the very last day in his life.

But don't get me wrong, folks: This is a quick note, and my purpose here is not to turn Tagore into a Leninist or something or even into a socialist; but I'm simply struggling to figure out why he was so well-received in the Soviet Union at that particular point of time in history.

A Short Note on Marx on His Death Anniversary Today (March 14):

No, Marx ain't no alien to the indigenous tradition of storytelling, as the leading Native American storyteller Leslie Marmon Silko suggests in her massive, epical novel _Almanac of the Dead_. I

In fact, in that novel, Silko devotes an entire chapter to Marx himself and goes to the extent of asserting that Marx is "a storyteller" like tribal people and even likens him to a "tribal shaman"--one who feverishly, as Silko further maintains, tells us stories of exploited workers and even exploited children. To quote Silko then:

"Marx understood what tribal people had always known: the maker of a thing pressed part of herself or himself into each object made. Some spark of life or energy went from the maker into even the most ordinary objects. [...] Marx [...] understood that nothing personal or individual mattered because no individual survived without others. [...] Marx, storyteller; Marx with his primitive devotion to the workers' stories. No wonder the Europeans hated him! Marx had gathered official reports of the suffering of English factory workers the way a tribal shaman might have, feverishly working to bring workers a powerful, even magical, assembly of stories to cure the suffering and evils of the world by the retelling of stories. [...] In the repetition of the workers’ stories lay great power [...] the power to move millions of people."

Indeed, Marx's flair for storytelling was genuine and unmistakable, and he became quite a storyteller very early on in his life. Eleanor, Marx's daughter, recalled in later years: "He [Marx] was a unique, unrivaled storyteller. I've heard my aunts say that as a little boy he was a terrible tyrant to his sisters, whom he would 'drive' down the Markusberg at Trier full speed, as his horses, and worse, would insist on their eating the 'cakes' he made with dirty dough and dirtier hands. But they stood the 'driving' and ate the 'cakes' without a murmur, for the sake of the stories Karl would tell them as a reward for their virtue."

And it's not for nothing that Marx read to his children the whole of Homer and of course _Don Quixote_. And guess what? Marx loved the _Arabian Nights_, stories from which he also used to read aloud to his children at bedtime. Although Marx deploys here and there in his own works some images from the _Arabian Nights_, I'm yet to learn fully what other specific uses he makes of the _Arabian Nights_.

Of course, above all, Marx is a revolutionary, one whose work and vision have to do with nothing short of the "universal human emancipation," to use Marx's own words. The declarations of the many deaths of Marx notwithstanding, he keeps returning with full force! So his life is way truer than his death in our struggle for the emancipation of humanity in its entirety.

1
Today—February 12—marks the birth anniversary of the major Bengali novelist and short story writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias (February 12, 1943 –January 04, 1997), who was also my close friend, comrade, colleague, and mentor, one whose massive, even monumental, works of fiction--novels such as _Chilekothar Sepai_ [ The Sepoy in the Attic] and _Khoabnama_ [Dream Book]--continue to make me think of such material-discursive sites as land, labor, language, and the body as the profoundly significant sites of class struggles as well as anti-colonial struggles and struggles for the emancipation of humanity in the broadest sense.

Given the range and rigor and richness of his novelistic and fictional engagements, Elias can be placed in the company of such writers as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Ghassan Kanafani, for instance, while Elias's dialectical and historical imagination enables him to forge connections between what has been, what is, and what is yet to be in a language that is decisively Eliasian and perhaps even inimitable. Elias was also a Marxist public intellectual, for whom theory, activism, and creative writing—poetics and politics and praxis—went hand in hand, variously enabling and enhancing one another. Indeed, it is true that although Elias is acclaimed rhetorically and otherwise, his work is yet to be explored in its fullest aesthetic and political dimensions, to say the least.

2
I fondly recall many of my conversations with Akhtaruzzaman Elias at the office of Lekhak Shibir--an organization of writer-activists on the left in Bangladesh. Elias was the organization's Vice President and I was its General Secretary. I recall how Elias bhai used to call attention to the ways in which human beings make history but always under the shadow of determinate constraints. I don't know if he was reading Gramsci at that point, but one of Elias's fundamental concerns in the early 1990s was the articulation of the intellectual's hegemonic vocation. And he characteristically grounded the historical, the political, and the popular in the realm of everyday life, of "common sense," however inflected or even distorted by unjust and exploitative social relations. Thus he did never evade the question of religion, as many on the left in Bangladesh continue to do, and was critically aware of the conditions for the country's refulgent religiosity, for instance, although he didn't get to write much about the question of religion as such in a "third-world" site like Bangladesh.

Always attentive to the materiality of ideology and its specific modes of inscription and appropriation by social groups, Elias also wanted us to heed those initiatives originating from even the petty bourgeois stratum that may morph into progressive movements. Deeply interested in revolutionary politics, he had a characteristic predilection for exploring possibilities in those areas that remain otherwise uncharted. And, of course, he always thought of our "liberation" movement as a decisively unfinished project, while accentuating the need for making connections between "national liberation" and class struggle as well as between democratization and decolonization in a peripheral formation like Bangladesh in the era of what Eqbal Ahmad called "re-colonization." I miss Elias bhai so much, to say the least.

3
To the extent that cities are "places" (and more than places), and to the extent that those places are what stories traverse, organize, select, or even render spectral, and invent and re-invent, one would do well to look at Akhtaruzzaman Elias’s Dhaka in his novel _Chilekothar Sipai_. Elias’s Dhaka--in its different ways--is fictional, historical, real, and re-created, but it is also a site that produces, and is produced by, interlinked configurations of subjects and scenes and signs themselves, ones that are politically engaged. One can then catch all kinds of devils in the details of Dhaka. Also, places themselves, at least occasionally, play their roles as characters in Elias's novels. Places speak characters, and characters in turn speak places, in Elias's works in a number of ways--ways that have remained hitherto relatively uncharted in contemporary Bangla fiction criticism, I reckon.

4
Now Akhtaruzzaman Elias's lines from his _Khoabnama_(in my, admittedly, quick, functional translation, but mark how Elias takes up the question of the land as the site of struggle in the shadow of his novelistically mediated "land theory of value," if you will):

But landless farmers have meanwhile gone out of bounds. Their agitation has already begun in town and it seems that the wave of protest may soon reach this eastern part of the village across the Korotoya River. Farmers in Khiyar are now insisting on two shares out of three, wanting to give only one to the landowner. Of course you can always demand whatever you want--you don't have to pay taxes for speaking out.

But the farmers argue that one important fact remains unchanged: the landlord cannot command the land to walk into his courtyard and deliver the crop. Or does he suppose that land is a heron that it can fly in a flash from that monstrous Arjun in Kamarpara to the tree overlooking the mansion of the Mondols? What the hell does he know about the value of land? Does he know that plowing even a tiny piece of land costs at least a pound of human blood, oozing from the body like salt?

Guerrilla Semiotics in James Joyce's Ulysses: A Quick Note
I keep returning to James Joyce's Ulysses. Despite what the massive industry of bourgeois aesthetics and poetics has hitherto done to the canonization of Joyce (Derrida, too, loved Joyce, as Derrida even loved Marx or at least some of his ghosts!), I find this Irish tropester and trickster--James Joyce-- politically active and significant on more scores than one.

For instance, after having read a pop manual called _Guerrilla Marketing_ by Jay Conrad Levinson, an undertaking in which he provides a cartography of hundreds of guerrilla marketing strategies, I once returned to _Ulysses_ and thought that _Guerrilla Marketing_ might be read as a random, right-wing bricolage of watered-down paraphrases of Joycean tropes, tenors, and texts--ones that, on the other hand, constitute Joyce's own brand of what I wish to call "guerrilla semiotics."

What, then, is this damn thing called "guerrilla semiotics?" I'll give my own spin. "Guerrilla semiotics" for me enacts and mobilizes as well as defers and withdraws cycles of the production, exchange, distribution, and consumption of signs to launch attacks on received or hegemonic assumptions, meanings, metaphors, or signs at unpredictable moments.

And signs? With V.N. Volosinov--author of that groundbreaking Marxist semiotic work called _Marxism and the Philosophy of Language_--I, too, would submit that signs are not neutral; that they are material and ideologically inflected.

Now let's think of Bloom's (Joyce's character in _Ulysses_) theory and practice of advertising. Bloom does not merely work for an ad company but he also designs ads. His designs seem to be responding quite well to the tenor of his own discourse that re-inscribes his attachment to figures of circulation, exchange, cyclicity, and renewal. I recall his bicycle poster. It condenses both bicycle and the spectator into twin synecdoches, while his ad for Keys appropriates the political and religious metonymy of keys and re-anchors it to another semiotic register. Both stimulate the refiguration of the viewer and instigate an exchange of symbolic currency.

While enacting this exchange, however, Joyce also suggests how both the bicycle and the key are more meaningful for consumption than otherwise, when they all "fall" outside the logic of capital. I know this needs more elaboration, but I'm trying to make a point at a very rudimentary level here. Then Bloom enunciates his theory of motion: "good ads" should arrest attention, convince, and decide, and an ideal "ad" should even stop time despite the "velocity of modern life."

Stopping time? Which time? What time? Where? Joyce tangentially points to the temporality of money (or money-time)--one that carries within it the blood of laborers globally and locally. Finally, in _Ulysses_, when the sign (or the "Ultimate Signified?") "God" slips into a combination of letters which one begins to read backwards as in a retroactive reading (say as "Dog"), one immediately comes to have at least a feel of Joyce's guerrilla semiotics. There are of course numerous instances of this kind in Joyce, ones that trigger signification at some odd, unexpected, and unpredictable moments that an entire range of capitalist strategies--their remarkable resilience notwithstanding--cannot immediately appropriate or assimilate into their own circuits of signs.

We need, yes, guerrillas of different kinds--among many other things, of course-- to produce "short-circuitings" within systems of appropriation and domination themselves. I'd re-read Joyce further, then.

Our comrade Mike Marqusee--writer, journalist, left political activist--died today (January 13, 2015) at 61 after a long and fearless struggle against cancer about which he wrote a beautiful, oppositional, life-affirming book _The Price of Experience: Writings on Living with Cancer_. It was just last month when I talked to Mike and enthusiastically told him how much my students and I enjoyed, and benefited from, his book on Dylan that I used in my class on Bob Marley and Bob Dylan last semester, a book that I even wrote about in my mother tongue. But Mike is surely more than his work on Dylan. In fact, his work on health issues (in defense of the National Health Service), on politics, on different aspects of popular culture, on the Indian subcontinent, and on cricket remains an inspiration to us. It's not for nothing that our comrade Mike Davis once described him thus: "Both in the eloquence of his writing and the deep humanism of his vision, Mike Marqusee stands shoulder to shoulder with the spirits of Isaac Deutscher and Edward Said."
Indeed, his principled, dignified indignation at the arrogance of power and his consistent anticapitalist-antiimperialist-antiracist voice continue to echo near and far with apt resonance. In other words, although Mike Marqusee is no longer with us physically, he'll continue to remain alive in his words and works--and in our words and works--as well as in our struggles against all forms and forces of oppression and injustice.

A few months back I had the pleasure of sharing with him a poem by the Salvadoran communist poet Roque Dalton--a poem that he loved. I think I'd do well to post that poem in his memory here:

Like You
by Roque Dalton
[Translated by Jack Hirschman]

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don't end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Yesterday (January 12, 2016) I spent quite an evening--charged and vibrant as it was--with none other than Badruddin Umar at his own residence after nearly half a decade.

The poet Alfred Khokon generously accompanied me to Umar’s place. The country’s foremost Marxist thinker and most uncompromising militant activist--one who has been fearlessly speaking truth to power for nearly six decades now--Umar is the author of countless articles and more than a hundred books, some of which, including his monumental multi-volume work on our language movement, is groundbreaking. Indeed, we are yet to assess the entire range--staggering as it is--of Umar’s contributions to such areas as politics, the politics of culture, and historiography, among others. I had the privilege and honor of working with Umar quite closely for several years in the 1990s, as I worked as the Acting General Secretary of Bangladesh Lekhok Shibir (a national organization of writers, artists, and activists on the left), an organization founded by Umar, among others.

The evening yesterday was full of Umar’s energetic and spirited presence, accompanied by his unflagging verbal zest. He told Khokon and me many stories of his life, including the ones that are not covered in his multi-volume autobiography published now. Even at 84, Umar continues to "rub his conceptual blocs together in such a way that they catch fire," to use Marx’s own words. Although I worked quite closely with him, I did not know until yesterday that Umar could recite so wonderfully well! And he recited to us--at one point--verses first from Madhusudhan Dutta and then from Rabindranath Tagore. And finally from--guess what?--Ghalib and Faiz Ahmed Faiz. His memory and enunciation are both phenomenal at 84.

And speaking of Faiz, Umar fondly recalled his meetings with Faiz, while telling us how he felt when he received a lovely letter from Faiz at a time when Faiz was visiting Algeria, as Umar also fondly recalled his several conversations with the Marxist Ernest Mandel, the author of _Late Capitalism_ as well as his (Umar’s) exchanges with the American Marxist political economist Paul Sweezy, both of whom, so far as I know, respected Umar a lot for his work. It’s not that Umar always agreed with them, but his appreciation of their committed political work, by and large, appeared evident.

Our conversation with Umar was a freewheeling one. We talked about numerous things—way more things than I can possibly recount here. At one point when we asked him about his pathbreaking book on Iswarchandra Vidyasagar, he told us how it went almost unnoticed in our own country. But he gratefully acknowledged the enthusiastic responses to his work on Vidyasagar he had received from such figures as Kazi Abdul Wadud, Annada Shankar Roy, Abu Sayeed Ayub, Bishnu Dey, and--of course--the filmmaker-activist Ritwik Ghatak, some of whose "drunken" moments Umar joyously and humorously recalled in our conversation yesterday.

And, of course, we talked about Bangladesh and the future of revolutionary politics a great deal. I cannot go into the detail of that part of our conversation here, but I intend to write at some length about that part for Bidhan Rebeiro's magazine soon.

But one last thing: At one point when I impersonated my favorite writer and thinker and activist Ahmed Sofa bhai--who was, of course, a great admirer of Umar and who once ardently maintained, "I feel proud of being alive in the time of Umar"--my teacher and comrade Badruddin Umar couldn’t stop laughing. Umar knows how to laugh with his comrades and laugh at his enemies. Indeed, our evening yesterday was full of love and light and laughter.

Photo: Alfred Khokon

The Latin American revolutionary poet Roque Dalton's "Ars Poetica" is a poem of three lines--"Poetry/ Forgive me for having helped you understand/ You're not made of words alone." As Claire Gebeyli, a Lebanese writer, puts it: "Of what use is the pen if it forgets to press down on people's chests? If the words it pours forth are mere particles sewn and resewn on the body of language?" On a somewhat different register, the Black feminist poet Audre Lorde underlines the task of a poet as being one "to name the nameless so it can be thought." Dalton, Gebeyli, and Lorde--their differences notwithstanding--converge at least around the idea that poetry is more than "word-making," more than even a clever play of words.

Is poetry, then, a kind of world-making? The worlding of the word and the wording of the world? Isn't the poet an Orphic singer who brings things into being for the first time? Isn't poetry also the letting go of language itself? And another, somewhat different question: What can thinking learn from poetry? These questions are not merely Heideggerian questions, as some of those Heideggerians would love to have us believe. Such questions, among many others, were already prompted by Lalon Fakir's own lyrical theories of the body and language, although in different contexts. This morning I was looking at the following "song-text" by Lalon, one that doesn't itself specifically ask the questions I ask above but one that surely prompted those questions for me:

দেহের খবর বলি শোন রে মন।
দেহের উত্তর দিকে আছে বেশি দক্ষিণেতে আছে কম।।
দেহের খবর না জানিলে
আপ্ততত্ত্ব কিসে মেলে
লাল জরদ ছিয়া ছফেদ
বাহান্ন বাজার এই চারিকোণ।।
আগে খুঁজে ধর তারে
নাসিকাতে চলে ফেরে
নাভিপদ্মের মূল দুয়ারে
বসে আছে সর্বক্ষণ।।
আঠারো মোকামে মানুষ
যে না জানে সেহি তো বেহুঁশ
লালন বলে থাকরে হুঁশ
আদ্য মোকামে তার আসন।।

This blood which has disappeared
without leaving a trace isn't part
of written history: who will guide me to it?
--Faiz Ahmed Faiz

The above lines by Faiz make me think of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's _One Hundred Years of Solitude_--of that moment of unwritten history when the actual event of killing three thousand workers was brutally and institutionally denied and erased! Garcia Marquez speaks of that moment thus:

"There must have been three thousand of them," he murmured.

"What?"

"The dead," he clarified, "it must have been all of the people who were at the station."

The woman measured him with a pitying look. "There haven't been any dead here," she said.

And Garcia Marquez adds:

[...] and by a decision of the court it was established and set down in solemn decrees that the workers did not exist.

I've always been interested in the question and history of what's called "labyrinth," whose origin is customarily traced back to Greek mythology, although, in the Indian epic _Mahabharata_, something resembling a labyrinth called the "Chakravyūha" or Padmavyūha" appears. It's described as a multi-tier defensive military formation--one that looks like a "chakra" (disc) or even a blooming lotus when viewed from above. The epic character Dronacharya used this formation in the famous battle of Kurukshetra and baffled the shit out of his opponents. The two writers I used to read quite a bit--Borges and Umberto Eco--have used the images of the labyrinth a great deal in their work, although they don't seem to be familiar with the epical "Chakravyūha." A Chinese Maoist once laughingly told me that Mao himself was familiar with it, although he forgot to talk about it in his pamphlet on guerrilla warfare. Hahaha! I don't mean to aestheticize the labyrinth, but Patrick Conty's book _The Genesis and Geometry of the Labyrinth: Architecture, Hidden Language, Myths, and Rituals_ made me realize how a labyrinth may offer a staggeringly wide range of both beautiful and baffling patterns--and patterns within patterns--while challenging geometricians of all kinds (although I gotta tell you that some of those poststructuralist textual labyrinths can be most uninteresting).