Bangladesh Literature

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The Bones of Grace (Bangladesh #3) by Tahmima Anam

Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace can easily be read as a standalone novel, however its central character Zubaida Haque, is the third generation of the family we met in her earlier novels.  

A Golden Age was set mostly in 1971 during the Bangladesh War of Independence when the territory split from West Pakistan and was seen from the perspective of  Rehana, widow and mother of Maya and Sohail, actively involved in the events that transpired during that time.

The Good Muslim was set in the years directly after independence and the impact on the family, seen mostly from Maya’s perspective.

In the Bones of Grace, life is lived far from the effects of war, by a generation looking for meaning in less noble and more personal pursuits. Zubaida is educated abroad and more interested in the fossils of the Ambulocetus ‘walking whale’ and the implications on evolutionary belief than the politics of her own country. She is unsure – but follows it anyway – of the path leading her towards marrying her long-term boyfriend, whom her family approve of, after a brief encounter with Elijah, a man she met at a classical concert in Cambridge.

Bones GraceThe novel is predominantly a second person narrative addressed to Elijah, long after she has lost him, narrating the events of their meeting, her pursuit of the dinosaur fossils straight after meeting him, her return to Dhaka and then her escape from her family to Chittagong, to work alongside a female film-maker interviewing workers on the ship graveyards, beaches where enormous liners are dismantled and parts recycled.

The narrative also gives voice to Anwar, a man she meets in Chittagong who in narrating to the two women the events of his life that brought him there, reveals a connection to Zubaida’s past, a history that haunts her and perhaps goes someway towards explaining her confused behaviour.

It is a novel of profound and often neurotic reflections, as we only ever hear Zubaida’s version of events, in a lament to her lost lover, whom we don’t spend enough time with to sympathise or consider what his perspective might have been, her address to him might well be actually to herself, for its purposes appears more to be an attempt to find and understand herself, requiring her to be far from everyone to do so.

It’s a worthy follow-up to the first two novels, written in quite a different style, which demonstrates the growth and confidence of the writer. I read the three books back to back and enjoyed them all, though I would say that the first novel was the more powerful, perhaps not surprising as it was inspired in part by many of the events lived through by Anam’s grandmother.

I reviewed this book for BookBrowse,  if you click on the link you can read their latest reviews.

Click to Buy a Copy of The Bones of Grace via Book Depository

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The Good Muslim (Bangladesh #2) by Tahmima Anam

In A Golden Age, the first novel in Tahmima Anam’s Bangladesh trilogy, the focus is on Rehana, the mother of Maya and Sohail and most of the book takes place from March to December 1971, during the Bangladesh War of Independence. It shows how families, neighbours, ordinary citizens coped with war, how they got involved and the effect it had on them all.

Now, in The Good Muslim it is some years after the war and Maya has just returned to Dhaka, to the family home and over the course of the novel we discover her reasons for leaving, her disenchantment with how the war has affected her brother, who is not the same person as he was before. Looking for inner peace and more of an understanding of life, he becomes religious and inaccessible to her, any attempt to influence him, futile. She resists his path and throws herself into a more active, immersive role.

It is the same family, but Rehana is more of a background figure, the home has been taken over by women wearing the burka, there are sermons on the roof and Sohail’s son Zaid runs around the place looking and acting more like the son of a servant boy (there is one scene where Maya takes him shopping for sandals and though his neglect is obvious, she is insulted when the shoeseller assumes he is the child of a house servant).

Once she had given everything for her children. Now she was in retreat from them, passively accepting whatever it was they chose to do: turning to God, running away, refusing to send their children to school. There was nothing of the struggle in her any more.

17th century Mughal fort, Dhaka, Bangladesh

They are living in the newly independent Bangladesh, under a Dictatorship, the shadow of war hasn’t left them. There are men living among them who the population wants tried for war crimes. Then there are the young women shamed by having been made one of the spoils of war, viciously raped, many of them pregnant and unwanted, put on flights to Pakistan, banished, out of sight, out of mind.

Bangabandhu had promised to take care of the women; he had even given them a name – Birangona, heroines – and asked their husbands and fathers to welcome them home, as they would their sons. But the children, he had said he didn’t want the children of war.

Maya has become a doctor, putting her own personal life on hold, she has seen too much and doesn’t feel capable of fulfilling any other role. She helps many of these women and wonders if she would ever be capable of love.

She had told herself many times that marriage could not be for her. Or children. She saw them coming into the world every day, selfish and lonely and powerful; she watched as they devoured those around them, and then witnessed the slow sapping of their strength as the world showed itself to be far poorer than it had once promised to be.

bangladesh map

It’s a sad picture of post-war trauma and the difficulties people have in returning to family life and love after all that they have experienced.

Though an equally easy and immersive read, it’s not quite as engaging as A Golden Age, which was the novel of action, deep in the daily situation of revolution and war.

This is the novel of aftermath, a much more sombre undertaking and a reminder that even in victory, the consequences of war on families are ever-present in their lifetime.

 

Links:

Book One: A Golden Age

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A Golden Age (Bangladesh #1) by Tahmima Anam

A Golden AgeDear Husband,
I lost our children today.

What an opening line. Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age plunges you right into the twin events that form the basis of Rehana’s character as a parent, fiercely protective and determined to have them near her.

Dear Husband,
Our children are no longer our children.

The death of her husband and her fight to keep her children, when her dead husband’s brother and his childless wife claim they could take better care of them.

The first chapter begins with that day in 1959 when the court gives custody to her brother and sister-in-law, who live in Lahore, (West Pakistan) over 1000 miles and an expensive flight away from Dhaka (East Pakistan).

The novel then jumps forward and is set in 1971, in Dhaka, the year of its war of independence, when East separated from West Pakistan and became Bangladesh (when you look at the area on a map, they are geographically separate, with no common border, India lies between them).

East West Pakistan 1971

In 1971, Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail are university students and back living with their mother after she discovered a way of becoming financially independent without having to remarry. Despite her efforts to protect them, she is unable to stop them becoming involved in the events of the revolution, her son joining a guerrilla group of freedom fighters and her daughter leaving for Calcutta to write press releases and work in nearby refugee camps.

He’ll never make a good husband, she heard Mrs Chowdhury say. Too much politics.

The comment had stung because it was probably true. Lately the children had little time for anything but the struggle. It had started when Sohail entered the university. Ever since ’48, the Pakistani authorities had ruled the eastern wing of the country like a colony. First they tried to force everyone to speak Urdu instead of Bengali. They took the jute money from Bengal and spent it on factories in Karachi and Islamabad. One general after another made promises they had no intention of keeping. The Dhaka university students had been involved in the protests from the very beginning, so it was no surprise Sohail had got caught up, Maya too. Even Rehana could see the logic: what sense did it make to have a country in two halves, posed on either side of India like a pair of horns?

Rather than lose her children again, Rehana supports them and their cause, finding herself on the opposite side of a conflict to her disapproving family who live in West Pakistan.

As she recited the pickle recipe to herself, Rehana wondered what her sisters would make of her at this very moment. Guerillas at Shona. Sewing kathas on the rooftop. Her daughter at rifle practice. The thought of their shocked faces made her want to laugh.She imagined the letter she would write. Dear sisters, she would say. Our countries are at war; yours and mine. We are on different sides now. I am making pickles for the war effort. You see how much I belong here and not to you.

Anam follows the lives of one family and their close neighbours, illustrating how the historical events of that year affected people and changed them. It is loosely based on a similar story told to the author by her grandmother who had been a young widow for ten years already, when the war arrived.

When I first sat down to write A Golden Age, I imagined a war novel on an epic scale. I imagined battle scenes, political rallies, and the grand sweep of history. But after having interviewed more than a hundred survivors of the Bangladesh War for Independence, I realised it was the very small details that always stayed in my mind- the guerilla fighters who exchanged shirts before they went into battle, the women who sewed their best silk saris into blankets for the refugees. I realised I wanted to write a novel about how ordinary people are transformed by war, and once I discovered this, I turned to the story of my maternal grandmother, Mushela Islam, and how she became a revolutionary.

It’s a fabulous and compelling novel of a family disrupted by war, thrown into the dangers of standing up for what they believe is right, influenced by love, betrayed by jealousies and of a young generation’s desire to be part of the establishment of independence for the country they love.

It is also the first novel in the Bangladesh trilogy, the story continues in the books I will be reading next The Good Muslim and the recently published The Bones of Grace.

Tahmima Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, but grew up in Paris, Bangkok and New York. She earned a Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University and a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway in London. A Golden Age won the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book and was the first of a planned trilogy she hoped would teach people about her native country and the vicious power of war.

In 2013 she was included in the Granta list of 20 best young writers and her follow-up novel The Good Muslim was nominated for the 2011 Man Asian Literary Prize.