Song of Our Swampland

Manzu Islam

ISBN 10: 1845231708 / ISBN 13: 9781845231705

Verlag: Peepal Tree Press Mär 2011, 2011

Beschreibung

Neuware - Staring into the hideous face of evil and illustrating the fragility of courage, this tale centers on Kamal, an East Pakistani who is born without a mouth and tongue. Rescued and educated by Abbas Miah, his village's schoolteacher, he soon learns to keep his ability to read and write a secret from those who condemn him for his disfigurement. When news of West Pakistan's genocidal campaign in the East reaches his village, he hesitates in joining the resistance, bringing to light the gap between how he is perceived by others and his true abilities, which proves both his torment and his salvation. Liberal-minded and pacifist, Abbas Miah soon decides to take his family and a few select villagers into the distant flood plains of Bangladesh to wait out the conflict. Before they can set sail, Miah's wife and hundreds of villagers are slaughtered and the boat instead departs with Kamal, Miah, and a motley crew of survivors. Gritty and heartfelt, this novel explores the capacity for true community amidst a religious obsession with purity and the urgent need to define who is kin in the creation of a new nation state.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 9781845231705

Bibliografische Details

• Titel: Song of Our Swampland
• Verlag: Peepal Tree Press Mär 2011
• Erscheinungsjahr: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN-10: 1845231708
• ISBN-13: 9781845231705
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Zustand: Neu

Über diesen Titel

Inhaltsangabe

When the killing starts in Dhaka, the villagers know the army from West Pakistan will soon be in their area, but unlike the other young men, and his beloved step-sister Moni Banu, Kamal cannot join the resistance. Born with a hole for a mouth, most people, except Abbas Miah, the teacher who adopts him, his friends and Moni Banu, regard him as the village idiot.

With Abbas Miah, Kamal embarks on a Noah's ark journey, with the motley survivors of the massacre that inevitably comes, to find refuge in the distant floodplains until the war is over. Along with a bombastic old actor, the village mullah, the village cut-throat, two Hindu boatmen, a foul-mouthed old woman, and a pious Islamist, who might just be a collaborator, Kamal discovers that there can be no escape from the war and the issues it raises.

As our guide to the painful emergence of the new nation of Bangladesh, Kamal is forced both to observe the face of evil, the complexity of betrayal, and look within to discover whether he has the capacity for true community, whether he can follow the injunction:

'If someone knocks on your door, you don't ask who it is. You don't even look at their face. You just do everything you can for them.'

Syed Manzurul (Manzu) Islam was born in 1953 in a small northeastern town in East Pakistan (later Bangladesh). He has a doctorate and was Reader in English at the University of Gloucestershire, specialising in postcolonial literature and creative writing

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Manzu Islam was born in Bangladesh where he lived through the 1971 war, walking the swamps for weeks to reach the refugee camps in India, then returning to fight as a freedom fighter. He came to England as a political refugee and, after studying for a degree and working as a racial harassment officer in East London, he became interested in writing. He has written four earlier books including The Mapmakers of Spitalfields (1997), an anthology of short stories set both in Bangladesh and the East End, Burrow (2004) about an illegal immigrant in East London and The Song of our Swampland (2011).