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Inspired by the revolutionary activities of her parents and grandmother, Tahmima Anam drew on accounts of the Bangladeshi war of independence from Pakistan to write A Golden Age.
Photo by Zahedul I. Khan |
In the aftermath of the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan looms large in the news. The tumult in this modern nuclear nation is complicated by the memory of a brutal war and major military defeat 36 years ago.
Apart from Beatle George Harrison’s haunting call to relieve the suffering of the people of Bangladesh, it’s likely that most Americans recall little of the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, when the people of East Pakistan triumphed over West Pakistan (now Pakistan), and brought forth the new nation of Bangladesh.
The war left over a million dead and as many as 10 million displaced. The U.S. sided with Pakistan, and a U.S. diplomat risked his career when he called Pakistani army actions “genocide.”
In the first novel in English on the Bangladesh Liberation War, A Golden Age, (Harper, 2008) author Tahmima Anam tells the tale of Rehana Haque, a young widow who struggles to protect her children in this time of terror and violence.
Anam was born in Bangladesh and educated in the U.S. and Great Britain. She earned a doctorate in social anthropology at Harvard, and later a master’s degree in creative writing from the Royal Holloway in London, where she studied with British poet laureate Andrew Motion.
Anam’s novel is informed by her doctoral research on survivors of the 1971 war, as well as the story of her grandmother, a young widow and mother who harbored freedom fighters, and her parents, who fought for the liberation movement.
A Golden Age has been acclaimed internationally, and was honored with a starred review in Publisher’s Weekly. The novel is the first installment in a trilogy on Bengal.
Tahmima Anam recently spoke from London about her writing and her new novel. She spoke at Elliott Bay Book Co. on Jan. 22.
What inspired your novel on the 1971 independence war?
I was living in America, doing a Ph.D., and I went to Bangladesh to do research on the war. The novel is inspired by the stories that I heard [from] people of all different social classes, from very poor women to high army generals.
But the main character is inspired by my grandmother who was a widow at a young age. Her children were nationalist freedom fighters, and her house became a safe house for the resistance. It’s all the more remarkable that she participated in the war because [Bangladesh] wasn’t her home to begin with. She did all the things that the character Rehana in the book does. She sheltered resistance fighters [and] hid them from the army. She sewed blankets for the refugees.
My parents were both in the war as well. My mother was in Dhaka [now the capital of Bangladesh], participating in the resistance, and my father joined the liberation army. He didn’t actually fight in the war, [but] he was the all-Pakistan debate champion, so they sent him to India to raise awareness about the war. He now edits the biggest English-language newspaper in the country, and my mother runs a human rights aid organization. They’re still interested in giving back to the country, and I think that goes back to their participation in the war.
What were the casualties in the war?
The estimates are between one and three million killed, but many were poor villagers who didn’t have birth records, so there aren’t firm numbers.
That’s staggering. You also describe the massive refugee crisis.
We don’t have exact figures, but there may have been up to 10 million refugees who crossed into India. That story about the people living in cement pipes is true. There are photographs of families in these giant cement pipes. It’s very poignant.
The war was a clash of two majority Muslim regions.
East and West Pakistan were one country after the partition of India [with] predominantly Muslim populations in both regions, but religion was not enough to bring the country together. People’s ethnic and cultural identities ended up mattering more, and that’s why it was a war of liberation for an ethnic group and a linguistic and cultural identity.
Was the war comparable to Iraq now, in terms of the Pakistani army fighting an insurgent movement?
There are many parallels. Basically, West Pakistan had the military might, but Bengali officers and regiments in the Pakistani army defected to Bangladesh [and] formed an army. Some were commissioned officers with proper training, but there weren’t many, so they had to recruit a lot of people. Many unnamed freedom fighters we will never know of because they were poor villagers conscripted into the army.
And there are some parallels to other campaigns of ethnic cleansing, as we’ve seen in Darfur and Bosnia. In fact, Arthur Blood, the American envoy to Bangladesh, sent the famous “Blood Telegram” to the State Department saying [he was] witnessing a “genocide.” Because America supported Pakistan, his diplomatic career ended, but he witnessed the genocide and spoke out against it.
By focusing on Rehana, a mother devoted to her children, your novel captures how war affects civilians.
Rehana’s world is quite small. She’s in a house and worried about her children. There’s a lot of food and cooking in the book. You see the war through her eyes, and you don’t see battlegrounds, and you don’t witness the genocide, but you sense it [through] her children or the freedom fighters in her house, so the outside comes into her home.
Rehana is an ordinary character, and not particularly heroic when the book starts. She’s a mother thrown into this situation and changes into a revolutionary. It’s about normal people and how they survive with their families intact.
Is the title, A Golden Age, in a sense ironic?
I’ve never thought of it that way. Actually, the title is very earnest for two reasons. One, because Bengal is often associated with the word gold because it’s the color of the rice paddies when they are ripening, and the national anthem of Bangladesh, “My Golden Bengal,” refers to the color of the landscape.
Also, even though the war was a terrible tragedy, for a country like Bangladesh, which has so many political, economic and social problems, people look back on the war as a moment of possibility. I wanted to capture that spirit. It’s the Golden Age both for Rehana, because she falls in love and becomes a revolutionary, and also for the country, because it was a moment of possibility, a moment of hope.
And it was a time of global social unrest.
Vietnam [antiwar protests] and the civil rights movement and strong student movements — so many happened simultaneously. In Bangladesh, the student leaders and politicians were reading the same books, listening to Dr. Martin Luther King’s speeches, and protesting Vietnam in the same way American students were protesting. There was a sense that the people who fought for Bangladesh were not just fighting for political emancipation, but also for a social and economic revolution that didn’t take place.
What was it like to talk with the survivors of this brutal conflict?
It’s a very emotional issue, even though it’s been 35 years. Partly that’s because we didn’t have a truth and reconciliation process like South Africa, and none of the war criminals were brought to trial. There wasn’t a way to process all the people had witnessed, the deep tragedies and violence they had been part of.
Old wounds came up. When the book was released in Bangladesh, people called me crying. I think there is a collective sense of grief that has yet to be addressed or healed.
Is there a movement to try war criminals now?
Absolutely. Some are campaigning for trials. Pakistani army officers were not the only ones who perpetrated war crimes. People who collaborated with the Pakistani army occupy positions of power in Bangladesh today—members of the far right Islamic party—[who] actively campaigned against the war and identified freedom fighters and handed them over to the army. We all know who they are, and it’s a shame they’re able to be active, prosperous citizens in a country they never believed in in the first place.
Did you always want to write a novel like this?
I did want to be a writer, but until you do it, you don’t know if you can. Then, when I became interested in the war, it seemed the novel I had to write because no other subject seemed as interesting or dramatic.
Did you plan to work in anthropology or teach until the novel hit you?
No. I always wanted to write. I wasn’t sure how I would do it. I thought if I was doing a doctorate, it would give me a few years to think about that. It turned out academia was not the direction I was heading. One of the great things about [Harvard] was that my teachers were not distraught when I said I really wanted to be a writer.
You also studied with the former poet laureate of Britain, Andrew Motion. Did you write poetry?
No. Actually Prof. Motion taught our fiction workshop. He was a wonderful tutor, and made us pay close attention to our images and the sentence level of our work. That MA in creative writing had several uses: to get me to write better, to work hard, to edit and to revise, revise, and revise.
Who are some writers who inspire you?
One of my favorite group of writers is writers of the American South: Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, and more recently, Toni Morrison. The South reminds me of Bangladesh. There’s something about the environment being a character. Carson McCullers’s The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is one of my favorites. Willa Cather’s My Antonia about the pioneer west is one of my all-time favorite novels.
Your book has been well received in Bangladesh, but what was the response in Pakistan?
Pakistanis have said appreciative things to me. It got a couple of good reviews there. Younger Pakistanis acknowledge what happened in the war and are eager to know that history. It’s been written out of the history books in Pakistan, and people now are beginning to come to terms with what happened.
You must need to educate audiences on Bangladesh as you discuss your novel.
Absolutely. I’ve been able to educate a lot of people who didn’t know much about the war. Many Americans remember only the Concert for Bangledesh with Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. There are also a lot of immigrant children in the UK and the US who don’t know much about their own history. Because a lot don’t speak Bengali, it’s the first time they’re finding out about the past of the country they came from.
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