DIGGING UP SKELETONS
Tahmima Anam’s Bangladesh trilogy ends in a discomfiting quest for roots
Bangladesh, unlike India, is a monolingual country. An overwhelming percentage of its people speak Bangla; its independence from Pakistan was already an inevitability when Urdu was declared the sole national language in 1948. The Language Movement of the early 1950s was an assertion of Bengali pride, of a principled refusal to be subjugated by an alien language and its separate cultural heritage.
“In Bangladesh,” the English-language novelist Tahmima Anam told the Wall Street Journal in 2011, “people publish write and consume books in Bangla.” Back then, Anam had been ploughing a desolate furrow, writing in English when none of her compatriots could be bothered. There was, Anam had noticed, a “global conversation about South Asia in English” and Bangladesh, unlike its neighbours, was underrepresented. Anam aside, there was Monica Ali, whose debut novel Brick Lane (2003), was a bestseller. Named after the East London street famous for its Bangladeshi, principally Sylheti, immigrants and its immigrant-owned curry houses, Ali’s novel was about a migrant community making, or failing to make, new lives in a new country. Anam is doing something different, she is using the language of Bangladeshi migration to tell the story of Bangladesh.
Ali and Anam now have company. A number of Englishlanguage novels and short story collections from Bangladesh have recently been published; their unifying theme, to make sense of the country that has emerged from the chaos of liberation. Anam’s trilogy, nine years in the making, beginning with A Golden Age (2007) and culminating with The Bones of Grace published a month or so ago, is a national bildungsroman. In its pages, Bangladesh comes of age, from the country created by the idealistic young people who fought in the bloody liberation war of 1971, through to the curdling of revolutionary ideals into religious zealotry, to the Bangladesh of today—a country that appears to have lost its way; in which the children of the revolutionaries are casting around for an identity, for solace in material accumulation or in the Manichean certainties of religious extremism.
The Bones of Grace takes the form of a novel-length letter written by Zubaida Haque to Elijah, her American lover. It is both an apology and an assertion of self. Born in Bangladesh, Zubaida is training at Harvard to be a marine paleontologist. She meets Elijah the night before she leaves for Dera Bugti in Balochistan where she is participating in a project to piece together a fossil, a complete skeleton of an ancestor of the whale. The ambulocetus lived some 45 million years ago and, as its name suggests, was an amphibian, a transitional creature somewhere between a dinosaur and a whale. It serves here as a metaphor for in-betweenness, for Zubeida’s feelings of being neither fish nor fowl. “Amphibian,” she writes about finding a point of connection to her roommate at Harvard, “was our code word for people like us .... ‘Amphibian’ signalled people in between, people who lived with some part of themselves in perpetual elsewhere.”
It is the cosmopolitanism of the privileged—different from migration because economic privilege means this international set can live anywhere in much the same way; a smaller apartment in New York, perhaps, than in Karachi, or Delhi, but a roughly equivalent lifestyle. Zubaida, though, wasn’t to the manor born. She was, as she reveals early, an orphan, adopted by upper middle class Bangladeshi freedom-fighters who had become prosperous in their new country, millionaires with a social conscience. Cocooned by her parents, their only child, Zubaida means to live up to the life they’ve envisioned for her: a marriage into the Bangladeshi business elite and a future of blithe, vacuous comfort.
She tries. But an encounter with another Bangladesh, working class and destitute men working to break ocean liners with their bare hands, or building skyscrapers in Dubai with a modicum of safety equipment, snaps the somnambulant Zubaida awake. Anam seeks to bolster the pallid romance at the centre of The Bones of Grace with melodrama, but the hard, ugly story the novel cannot skirt is the betrayal of the subcontinent’s poor by its rich.