Exile in Pittsburgh
Bengali poet Tuhin Das makes us appreciate our freedoms
As an American citizen who has taken many a U.S. president as well as the Lord’s name in vain, I worry more about writing deadlines and rejection slips than a visit from the Secret Service or a lightning bolt being hurled my way.
Reading the Bengali poet-turnedwriter-in-exile Tuhin Das’ latest book, “Exile Poems: In the Labyrinth of Homesickness,” will give readers pause to appreciate their First Amendment freedoms as well as separation of church and state, however imperfectly these ideas may play out in real life.
Das, a writer whose advocacy and organizing for minority communities and women’s rights in his native Bangladesh brought attention from the wrong people, is now a resident in the sanctuary program for City of Asylum on the North Side.
He was forced to flee his homeland in 2016 after landing on an Islamic militant’s death list. He had hoped the matter would blow over. After reading his answers from an interview included as an appendix to this needed collection, it’s easy to see how fraught with peril being a free thinker can be in a country where numerous writers have been persecuted and killed by an Islamist government with a low threshold for “heresy.” There’s even a law that can imprison writers who “hurt somebody’s feelings.”
Translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, these 65 untitled poems are less pedantic and more accessible than readers might expect because Das focuses on adapting to his Pittsburgh environs amid looming memories of people and places in his hometown of Barishal.
In “Poem 8,” he writes of a coming Pittsburgh winter, “Gazing into the distance, / icy frigid, full of self-confidence. / the silence suits my writing life. / Where is the person who spent all summer / setting off fireworks in the sky? / At two a.m., standing by the window, I jump at the sound of them going off. / I keep looking for him / A human life is like fireworks!”
It’s a reflective metaphor that lets the rough jewel of a scene shine as the speaker relishes so much of what we yinzers take for granted.
In “Poem 29,” irony abounds as he crosses paths in a supermarket meat section with a middle-aged asylum seeker and former philosophy professor still getting the hang of the language. The speaker asks him to “Make some time one of these days…/ for us to go watch a movie. / He wanted to know/ whether the film would include bloodshed. / Apparently he breaks into sobs when he sees blood / and yet, to earn a living now, / he has to slice meat.”
It’s a keen eye for moments like this, taking place perhaps in our own neighborhoods, that make these mostly short poems crack with insight and discovery.
Another, the longer “Poem 35,” allows readers some access to the feeling of being on the run as Das and his brethren fear their own countrymen, pondering how “A mournful clock by his bed / rings out suddenly, / he wakes up. / His eyes bulging in terror, / one word escapes his lips, ‘assassin.’/ yet he is a poet. / He could have spoken of the stars, / which show us the way even in the dark. / He could have spoken of a singing bird / nesting in a tree by his house / searching for a companion.”
The poem pivots in a delightful memory of his own time in hiding from “fundamentalist machetes,” recalling “A singer lived in the room next to mine. / I
would hear him sing at dawn every day / across the wall / like the bird at the tiny prison window / who perches on the sill to whistle … / the song would make me think how beautiful the world is.”
As Das writes in the preface to “Exile Poems”: “Writing is my sanctuary, my home … Pittsburgh is also my home now.”
Welcome to town, my friend.