“In every birth and rebirth, I shall always return to Bengal”

The poet so many of us felt so close to as we grew up reading him and a few others is no more. He had been ailing for the last year and had been given six months to live after diagnosis. But he lasted barely a month after that prognosis. He died in his beloved motherland.

Does it matter when poets and writers die early or leave late?

They go when they choose, in a metaphorical sense. For Haq was one of the chosen ones who sat at the head table of the literary monarchs of his era. Reputations crumble and die, but he was part of a select few for whom death has only ended a physical life and now the legendary life can begin.

Welcome, Haq bhai.

Syed Shamsul Haq was part of a moment in time when poetry was supreme lord in the assembly of kings.  Few bestrode all the branches of literature like he did and he was successful in almost all of them. That is rare indeed. But he was always hungry for more and that is what made him so special. He began as a short story writer, moved on to novels and ultimately arrived with his iconic poem, “Boisakhey Rochito Pongtimala” in the late 1960s.

It was perfectly timed as the country was on its way to becoming a new state and the middle class which nursed it were on their way to asserting their identity through the nation’s birth in 1971. And he anticipated that birth in his poetry and other literary works.  Although he was always the most urbane writer of the 1960s, consumed by images of urban life, it was when he chose to look at his own journey from Rangpur to Dhaka that he reached his poetic zenith. It was his ID card.

He documented the newly emerging aspirant middle class of the 60s in several of his works, particularly in a collection of stories, “Anonder Mrittu”, which Prof Munier Chowdhury described as a landmark achievement. He was narrating a new world struggling to be born in a hostile sea of nationalist politics. But even in this narration, he was anticipating some of the chaos of the classes that have come across so much wealth but not enough sense of purpose. “Khelaram kheley ja” (Play on, player) was one such example. Perhaps he did anticipate the kind of decadence of the Baudelairian variety that so many of his generation romanticized, but he also foresaw with the power of the literary observer.

In the post-1971 world, he truly became the voice of history, even if that history is a denied one, in the literary genre. The two plays, “Payer Awaj Paowa Jai (Footsteps can be heard)”, which celebrated the struggles of 1971, and “Nur-al diner Shara jibon”( The Life of Nur-al din)  on the anti-colonial peasant struggle of Rangpur immortalised his contribution to the understanding and imagination of history like few other works have and few writers have been able to do so.

Sheikh Hasina visiting Syed Haq at hospital

Working on themes using multiple formats, using his experience as a film maker, novelist and poet, he became both the literary and the visual in a single creative activity on the stage. It made him a public writer as a playwright and also gave him the space to take theatre arts to its most literary level.  It brought the private writer and the public creative into a common space, making them perhaps his most memorable achievement.

Yet he was also an organiser, a public poet and finally a cultural activist who walked on the edge of politics even.  One may not find entirely satisfactory answers for such participation, but he was not one to deny his world, his environment, his history.

The poet was not a transplanted writer from a rural world, searching for space in a migrated urbanity. In his collection of poems written in the Rangpur dialect, “Poraner gohin bhitor (from deep inside the heart)”, he presented a startlingly beautiful bouquet which showed how deep rooted he was to his own “home”. He once told me, “As soon as the vehicle reaches the northern shores and the dialect becomes familiar, I start to feel I am nearing home.” It was this home that he took as a gift of his birth and gave it to an entire Bangladesh to cherish.

Minister Asaduzzaman Noor reduced to tears

Grieving Anwara Syed Haq

Yet his death is not a time for sadness for us, for a writer like him always celebrates life in all his forms. For me he shall always be the poet, who had overcome the problem of death and dying long ago in one of the greatest passages written on Bangladesh, our shared motherland.

“I shall not write for long, and then I shall rise again in a fiery summer, as an island in your Padma.

Carrying the soul of the swift current in my curls, I shall walk into the sea of memories.

In every birth and rebirth I shall return, a poet, to Bengal.”