Here I'll stay

Kaiser Haq's poems and the impact of being at home

Bibliographic Data

ID2179602
AuthorsKathryn Hummel (0000-0002-8041-5737)
Year2022
Volume58
Issue6
Pages758-772
Publication date2022-11-02
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Postcolonial Writing (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1744-9855 • E-ISSN: 1744-9863
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/17449855.2022.2106651
OpenAlexW4297826649
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited19

This article examines the choice of celebrated Bangladeshi anglophone poet and scholar Kaiser Haq (b. 1950) to remain in, rather than migrate from, his home country, despite significant career-related travel abroad and an international literary presence. In Haq’s poem “Published in the Streets of Dhaka”, the speaker declares: “I was born and live here”, an assertion of “staying” in Bangladesh that reflects Haq’s positionality and guides the explorations in this article. Through an analysis of selected poems from the 1970s to the present day, the discussion highlights the sensory, sociopolitical, and postcolonial detail that arises from Haq’s continual close interaction with his place as a dynamic milieu, rather than a remembered or physically distant ancestral land. This sense of his presence, which involves an observational approach here compared to that of an anthropologist, enhances the nuances of Kaiser Haq’s identity as a “local” to and in Bangladesh and his concurrent transnational gaze

Aesthetics · Art · Assertion · Identity (music · Literature · Observational study · Poetry · Sociology · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · Medicine · Postcolonial and Cultural Literary Studies · Socioeconomic Development in Asia · Gender Studies · History

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