 February, 2007
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Daughter of
A Golden Age
Mahfuz Sadique talks to Tahmima Anam, whose upcoming novel A Golden Age, set against the backdrop of Bangladesh’s War of Independence, is making headlines in the literary press across continents
photos by Andrew Biraj
History is in a position to state a rather objective truth. I had the privilege of trying to speak of its essence – the “spirit” of it,’ Tahmima Anam says. Her debut novel, A Golden Age, out this March from John Murray in the UK, is about that ‘spirit’ and the ‘truth’ that became Bangladesh. Tahmima uses history as the ‘scaffolding’, not ‘looking glasses’, as she narrates the bloody birth of Bangladesh, weaving it with the life of a woman caught between collective glory and personal loss. The novel draws heavily from the troubled past of the author’s own family, her personal journey from an ‘imagined motherland’ to ‘trying to embrace an identity that one didn’t grow up with,’ no less intriguing than the novel itself.
‘For me Bangladesh — other than the two years I spent in Dhaka during my high school days — has been one known through yearly vacations, sometimes even twice a year, that my parents took while we lived in many corners of the world. Be it Paris, New York City, or Bangkok, they always reminded me of where I belonged,’ recalls the soft-spoken 31-year-old Tahmima, choosing her words candidly but carefully.‘Childhood vacations playing on the lawn of my grandparents’ house in Dhanmondi Road 5 or taking a rickshaw ride to New Market to buy amshattya are my memories of Bangladesh. Sometimes we also visited my father’s ancestral home in a village called Dhanikhola in Mymensingh. I have fond memories from those visits.
‘While as a child or teenager, they were nothing more than memories of Dhaka, now that I look back it is not that easy anymore to frame them. They were more than just childhood memories. My homeland is part dream, part reality.’ Tahmima says with a smile. ‘I have always had to make an effort to fit in, to belong.’
What is home? Dhaka or London — where she presently lives — or any of the many cities that she has grown up in throughout her life.
‘I really don’t know. My idea of a home, or rather a homeland, is not as concrete as others. I have ambivalent notions of “belonging”. I am a Bangladeshi, living in London, having grown up in different corners of the world. So where do I belong?’ asks Tahmima. ‘In a way, I probably like it that way. I like the intimacy of family in Bangladesh, a place where everybody knows my name and believes that I am one of them. I like that sense of belonging. But then again I also cherish the other state of existence where I am just another person on the street, and I am only my own.’
The central character of A Golden Age, Rehana, is not unlike Tahmima herself, at least in her sense of identity. ‘Rehana comes to Dhaka from Calcutta, and can only speak Urdu. She doesn’t belong to the place,’ Tahmima says. Greater bindings than border and language bind Rehana to those around her. ‘To me, “human events” are far more inspiring than historic ones. How Rehana loves Bangladesh and those who fight for it because her loved ones belong to this land is not just a marvellous tale, it’s inspiring.’ Tahmima explains.
In fact, in a way, the novel itself is Tahmima’s personal journey into the stories she was told as she grew up. Growing up in the shadow of a generation that fought and lived with the pain and glory of the War of Independence, she regularly heard stories from the days of war and revolution.
‘I have heard innumerable stories about the war from my family. Be it my mother, my father, relatives or family friends, each had a different take on the same incidents that took place in 1971. Now that I think of it, the variety of what each of them experienced in their own ways might have been confusing at some younger age, but they add to the richness of my own telling of those experiences,’ reflects Tahmima.
A Golden Age is not a tale of many. It revolves around the personal tragedy of a widow, Rehana, who loses custody of her children to her brother-in-law, Faiz. But as each chapter of the novel unravels, personal loss is transposed by collective struggle. As the backdrop of history sways with the upheavals of time, according to Tahmima, ‘the story of my grandmother, who was also taken to court for custody of her children, slowly osmoses into the story of Rehana in my novel. Surrounding Rehana are characters that are somewhere in the many memories that have accumulated over the years’.
Tahmima feels that being of the post-1971 generation, and growing up outside Bangladesh, has given her a unique perspective to look at both the country and the war. ‘There is a distance that I have always had to overcome. I had to fill in the gaps, which can always be a daunting task, given that my immediate reality was not Bangladesh,’ she points out. She feels that given the historic myopia of the war that has given rise to petty squabbles over ‘truth’, writing fiction has liberated her. Referring to the ‘indifference’ that has taken grip of the post-1971 generation, Tahmima states that her political statement in A Golden Age is a simple one: ‘A testimony to the reality of the war; to make sure that no one can ever deny that a genocide took place in earning our independence; to state the obvious reality, so that it doesn’t one day be considered an exception.’
Almost offering pre-emptive defence against any criticism of the novel being ‘biased’ in historical reference, Tahmima says, ‘Some might argue I have not humanised my Pakistani characters enough, or the sporadic events of Bihari killings by Mukti Bahini have not come up enough. But then again, this is not history. It is subjective, and my obligation is, as I said earlier, to a higher truth — the “spirit” of Bangladesh!’
But how do whispers of memory and thought become a writer’s words?
‘You just know. I knew I would write something, someday. I never sat down and decided to become a writer anytime before this. In fact, I have never written any fiction before this. Ever since I read One Hundred Years of Solitude [by Gabriel Garcia Marquez] in my early teens, and through the discovery of Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Vikram Seth, I have wanted to write,’ recalls Tahmima. But she feels most influenced by the greats of the American South. ‘William Faulkner, Carson McCullers are writers who write of human lives, the fate of which are dictated by the land. Somehow I feel an underlying string that binds their work to the realities of Bangladesh. Latin American literature is also somewhat the same,’ she explains.
Having a lineage that has literary stalwarts did play its part in building an appetite. Tahmima’s grandfather, Abul Mansur Ahmed, was one of the foremost satirists of the Bangla language and is still widely read on both sides of the border. Tahmima is also the elder daughter of Mahfuz Anam, editor of The Daily Star. ‘In my teens, my father pestered me to read Nehru’s letters to her daughter. So, I did,’ she laughs.
An anthropologist by training, Tahmima’s doctoral work was an interesting prelude to her present work. Her doctoral thesis, at Harvard University in the US, titled, ‘Fixing the Past: War, Violence, and Habitations of Memory in Post-Independence Bangladesh’, takes ‘a subaltern look into the history of Bangladesh’s War of Independence’.
Tahmima feels that her detailed research from that time and the tackling of the many issues that evolved from and revolved around such a defining event of a nation gave her more precise tools to construct the world that the characters of A Golden Age inhabit. ‘It’s in the details, I suppose, where my doctoral research can be considered a cornerstone. What clothes people wore, what they ate, how they spoke — all of this came out through my research, and became the details of my novel.
‘In the spring of 2000, while I was doing my PhD, I spent a semester at Columbia University in New York and took some creative writing courses. That is when the conception of the novel started coming to my mind. But it was after I started my masters in creative writing at Royal Holloway, London that I was starting to find my own words. In a way, it is wrong to think that one cannot be taught to write. You can be taught to write!’ Tahmima says, all praise for her writing tutor and mentor, British poet laureate Andrew Motion. ‘In that small writing programme, nine of us were slowly made to discover our voices.’
Eventually, it was a UK Arts Council grant that enabled her to take time off for a year to write her novel. ‘Many writers write while still working. But I am really fortunate to have been able to sit back and work on it uninterrupted. Now that the novel is coming out, I wonder whether I’ll have to go back to a nine-to-five job,’ Tahmima says.
Of the several British books highlighted at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2005, Tahmima’s ‘The Fasting Month’ (the title was changed subsequently) was one. The publishing house John Murray picked up her book, with a two-book deal. Tahmima in fact plans to write a Bengal trilogy. ‘A Golden Age is actually the middle part. After this, I plan to write the first part, which tentatively will be based on the partition of Bengal.’ The January issue of Granta — the reputed literary magazine — carries the first chapter of her new novel titled The Courthouse.
Though touted by the UK Observer to be the next Monica Ali or Zadie Smith, Tahmima objects to this view. ‘My novel is not set in an expatriate experience, but is grounded in Bangladesh,’ she explains. ‘It is nice to be thought of that stature, but definitely being misrepresented by genre is something that is hard to reconcile with.’
It is not every day that you get to tell the tale of your nation’s birth. Tahmima knows that. For she also knows that while the words of her telling maybe her own, the lives and times they sprout from belong to the soil and souls of a golden age.
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