“Here I’ll stay”: Kaiser Haq’s poems and the impact of being at home

ABSTRACT

This article examines the choice of celebrated Bangladeshi anglophone poet and scholar Kaiser Haq (b. 1950) to remain in, rather than migrate from, his home country, despite significant career-related travel abroad and an international literary presence. In Haq’s poem “Published in the Streets of Dhaka”, the speaker declares: “I was born and live here”, an assertion of “staying” in Bangladesh that reflects Haq’s positionality and guides the explorations in this article. Through an analysis of selected poems from the 1970s to the present day, the discussion highlights the sensory, sociopolitical, and postcolonial detail that arises from Haq’s continual close interaction with his place as a dynamic milieu, rather than a remembered or physically distant ancestral land. This sense of his presence, which involves an observational approach here compared to that of an anthropologist, enhances the nuances of Kaiser Haq’s identity as a “local” to and in Bangladesh and his concurrent transnational gaze.

KEYWORDS:

• Kaiser Haq
• Bangladesh
• local
• poetry
• transnational
• postcolonial writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. On December 9, 20,212, 24-year-old Biswajit Das, “proprietor of Amantron Tailors in the capital’s Shakharibazar, was hacked to death on his way to the tailoring shop during a countrywide road blockade” (Khan 2017, n.p.). The blockade, instigated by the 18 Party Alliance led by the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, drew protest from the opposition party Awami League and its student activist wing, the Bangladesh Chhatra League (BCL). Members of BCL from Jagannath University attacked Das “with machetes, iron rods and hockey sticks” (n.p.), reportedly mistaking him for a supporter of the right-wing strike. Das’s murder was captured by reporters and broadcast on live television (Moneruzzaman and Kazi Nasir 2020).

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Kathryn Hummel

Kathryn Hummel is an associate professor in the School of Law, Ajeenka DY Patil University, Pune. She holds a PhD in social sciences (communication and information studies) from the University of South Australia and researches at the intersection of sociology, ethnography, cultural studies, and the arts. The author of numerous creative and scholarly works across disciplines and media, her latest book of poems is Lamentville (Singapore, 2019).