Fiction

42 WLT JANUARY / FEBRUARY 2016 Limits of the unknown self The feeling that “life is elsewhere” is not unique to future writers; it is what turns so many of us into travelers , itinerants, or expats–and so many others into readers, books serving as an access to heightened realities . But the problem for the young artist growing up in late 1970s and ’80s Dhaka was of another kind: looking back, I now realize, to a large extent my readings were an exercise in seeking not just models of engagement but the right to engage at all on an elevated plane. Ideally, a writer should be such a free soul that he doesn’t need to seek permission to engage. I, however, was a naturally dutiful and well-raised South Asian child. As such, I excelled at following rules, some perhaps even of my own imagining. Whether true or the product of my own personal neuroses, nonetheless I felt hampered by the lack of any Bangladeshi books that spoke to my reality. Most Bangla novels regaled us with either the cruel struggle of poor farmers or the heroic tales of socialistic revolutionaries. The more bourgeois narratives focused on the debauchery of zamindars (colonial land barons). But my life afforded no real scope of either the nobility of perishing in floods, or war, nor the refined agony of losing a great inheritance in an alcoholic haze. Dhaka in those days had recovered from the ravages of the 1971 war and was yet to be brutalized by breakneck growth. It was a sleepy city, low-lying with ponds, with soft-serve ice cream shops run out of small garages; and hardly any book reflected that life, caught in the gentle snares of that slowly unfurling city. There was no single event or book that set me free from my constrictions. License also didn’t come in the form of a single postcolonial voice—an Achebe or a Rushdie—who echoed my subjectivity. What had I to do with African tribal machismo or the nostalgia for a Bombay far more ample than my town, my life? Rather, it came in undetected bits from Camus and Kafka, who spoke of alienation and anxieties so deep, so universal, that they made sense even to my teenage self. It came in the guise of Greene and Naipaul, who showed me that half-baked places like mine, too, were worthy of thoroughly modern treatment, free from colonial nostalgia or provincial prudery. It came as well from Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay, whose bildungsroman protagonist, Apu—made world-famous through Satyajit Ray’s unforgettable trilogy—came across not only as a portrait of the artist as a young man but also the young man as an aspiring cosmopolitan. What else I have learned by now is that the quest to reach one’s real material is an unending one. Often that subjective core of one’s being, and thus deepest material, is so tender or so terrifying for the author that we circle around it for a lifetime without really getting to it. I live in a culture where external censorship by both the state and extremists is a real problem. Yet it is overcoming one’s internal censors that has been the deeper struggle for me as a writer. So, in my readings I am always specially keyed to decoys and deflections that help one slip past the cordon of internal guards. In this respect, I continue to draw inspiration from more contemporary voices. Early McEwans and late Coetzees would be an example of such writing. A more Fiction A Transgressive Art by K. Anis Ahmed A Bangladeshi writer traces his quest to dodge the external and internal censors and considers what fiction at its best can do: “sail past all censors to uncover the tender and transgressive core of what it is to be human.” the Puterbaugh Essay series What makes DeWitt’s novel work, with discomforting brilliance, is the very fact that its outrageous premise is quite literally played out to its absurd ends. decisive one is the strange, obsessive rants of the great Austrian misanthrope Thomas Bernhard; he showed me how to set myself free in areas where

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