The Wounded Land: A Reflection on today's Bangladesh

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M A Toimoor

What strikes first in Rashid Askari's book is the title – The Wounded Land. It imparts an air of sadness somewhat like Shamsur Rahman's Dukhini Barnamala (Poor Alphabet!).We tend to enquire about the things that our motherland finds deeply wounding even about four decades after her liberation. Professor Rashid Askari has very well taken us to them. We have known Professor Askari for quite a long time now who has by now established himself as an author of outstanding merit. Among the Bangladeshi writers after mid nineties, Dr. Rashid Askari is easily on par with the major ones who obtained an identical and fantastic mastery over both Bangla and English.

When it comes to themes pertaining to the emergence of Independent Bangladesh, the author seems to be as veritably iconoclastic as a Doctor Muhammad Zafar Iqbal on Prozac. He is one of those who were born in then-East Pakistan but grew up in Bangladesh with a murky memory of the War and the days that went awry after Bangladesh won freedom. His dispassionate (although the author has been modest to diagnose his discourse ‘as pregnant with emotion,’ the text advocates otherwise) approach to dealing with pressing national and global concerns like dogmatism, political intolerance, religious militancy, terrorism, and the like is the outcome of a marriage between his passion for freedom and a quest for finding the spirit embedded in opaque memoir of the Liberation War(1971) and the disappointment, heartbreak and betrayal amidst incidents that followed via acerbic assessment of the current and a vast reading of the past. This book is a compendium of many essays, which Professor Askari wrote in a time frame, spanning over a decade. What then should we consider as a spine that clasps these ribs made out of multiple subject matters? I would recommend his love for people of the land, which plunks him on such a plane where he feels called to come up with such a book. If latent messages of his essays are all synthesized and poured down through prism then at the focal point of the beam we will find the dream of a nation like one envisaged by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, a vision of a group of people living in a landmass free from all social, theological, and political bias. Dr. Askari’s greatness of writing is this that he could cross Bangladeshi boundary line by merit of what we may call ‘the negative capability’—the topics he touched are homemade yet the implications, the inherent issues, the very nature of mode of action and the thought process that formulate them, as he demonstrates, are continental. The book has been titled The Wounded Land aka the bleeding Bangladesh, which in my opinion, is like a cow over-milked and under-fed for centuries while its innocent inhabitants, the calf, remained devoid of rightful claim. This skinny cow is now left with small flesh and a saggy hide, which is what the enemies, the author, and we live with. As the author has advised, these adversaries appear in multitude in many colors and shapes with a solo mindset: in his language, “dissect” the Cow, domesticate the calf. Orbits of all isms: terrorism, fanaticism, anti-secularism revolve around a single core: International Consumerism, the heart of all darkness, which the author has ubiquitously hinted at in page after page throughout the whole book. There is a postcolonial undertone in the author's approach by way of debunking the ugly faces of the petty-colonial power in the saddle after 1947, and awakening his people to the realization of their own legacy as well. The book is an eye-opener. 

Muhammad Alamgir Toimoor Asst. Professor, Dept. of English Shah Jalal University of Science & Technology Sylhet 3114. Currently working on his doctoral dissertation in 7 Chatterson Street, Whitby ON, L1R 0B1--Canada

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