New Lines in Bangladeshi Writing in English:

The Poetry of Shamsad Mortuza

Abstract

For a country like Bangladesh, which emerged as an independent nation only in 1971, the coming into being of a fully definable national literature in English may understandably take a little more time. Nevertheless, Bangladesh does have a significant number of new writers even in the field of poetry written in English. The first Bangladeshi English poetic voices began to be heard in the mid-1970s with Feroz Ahmeduddin’s Handful of Dust (1975), Razia Khan’s Argus Under Anaesthesia (1976) and Cruel April (1977), and Kaiser Haq’s Collected Poems: 1966-2006 being early productions (Askari). Other poets who published their poetry in English were Nadeem Rahman (with Politically Incorrect Poems, 2004), Rumana Siddique (Five Faces of Eve:Poems, 2007), and Syed Najmuddin Hashim (Hopefully the Pomegranate, 2007) (Shook). Monica Ali, with her 2003 debut novel Brick Lane, put Bangladeshi writing in English on the map of the New English Literatures, and, in this light, it may be appropriate to read and appreciate the output of Shamsad Mortuza who is a comparatively new talent in the field of Bangladeshi English poetry.