South Asian Review

ISSN: 0275-9527 (Print) 2573-9476 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsoa20

Remembering Bangladesh: Tahmima Anam and

the Recuperation of a Bangladeshi National
Narrative in Diaspora

Antara Chatterjee

To cite this article: Antara Chatterjee (2014) Remembering Bangladesh: Tahmima Anam and the
Recuperation of a Bangladeshi National Narrative in Diaspora, South Asian Review, 35:3, 131-148,
DOI: 10.1080/02759527.2014.11932991

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/02759527.2014.11932991

Published online: 08 Dec 2017.

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 131

Remembering Bangladesh: Tahmima Anam

and the Recuperation of a Bangladeshi
National Narrative in Diaspora

Antara Chatterjee
Dum Dum Motijheel College, West Bengal State
University, Calcutta, India

[Abstract: This essay will investigate some of the new ramifications of

South Asian nationalisms in the current world, being inflected by
global phenomena like diasporas and transnationalism, with reference
to the fiction of the British-Bangladeshi author, Tahmima Anam. I
argue that Anam's Bangladeshi national affiliation motivates her
fiction, which arises out of a desire to assert its distinctiveness from the
rest of South Asian identity. I argue that Anam's recuperation of a
Bangladeshi national narrative from a position of displacement is an
enactment of "long-distance nationalism" (Glick Schiller and Fouron),
a form of national and cultural belonging connecting her indelibly to
the country of her birth and having a powerful agency in her writing.]

I n Nation and Narration, Homi Bhabha explores the interface

between the nation and narration, identifying the textual
ambivalences as signifying the ambiguities of the nation (2). Bhabha
wonders, ''If the ambivalent figure of the nation is a problem of its
transitional history, its conceptual indeterminacy, its wavering between
vocabularies, then what effect does this have on narratives and
discourses that signify a sense of 'nationness"' (2). This article intends
to examine the fiction of the Britain-based Bangladeshi author
Tahmima Anam, to uncover this intersection between nation and
narration in her writing, and to investigate how the "indeterminacy,"
and the "transitional" and "ambivalent" position of the nation is
South Asian Review, Vol. 35, No.3, 2014
132 Antara Chatterjee

articulated in her narratives attempting to write the nation or, in

Bhabha's terms, to"signity a sense of 'nationness'" {2). The sense of
"nationness" we find embedded in Anam's writing, revealed in her
engagement with ideas constitutive of nationhood, national space and
identity formation with reference to her own native country
Bangladesh, is complicated by the fact that she is a diasporic
Bangladeshi, who has lived most of her life outside Bangladesh.
Though she maintains close ties with the country of her birth, Anam
grew up mostly outside Bangladesh. Yet it is Bangladesh, and not any
other location, that figures persistently in her writing. The "narration"
that I will focus on consists of her two published novels -A Golden Age
(2007) and The Good Muslim (20 11 ), forming part of a purported
Bengal trilogy, both of which are narratives about Bangladesh. Anam's
investment in and recovery of her Bangladeshi-ness from outside the
physical boundaries of the nation-state is crucial in my understanding
of what the ''nation'' as a conceptual category means in the current
debates.
A Golden Age is a fictional retelling of the 1971 liberation war
which created the new nation of Bangladesh from erstwhile East
Pakistan. The Good Muslim, a story employing the characters of A
Golden Age though of advanced years, evokes the disillusionments and
disappointments of Independence, expressing some of the urgent
problems that plague Bangladeshi society in the years after
independence, like political violence and religious fanaticism. Both
novels, therefore, articulate a distinctly "Bangladeshi" narrative and
identity, constructing a national narrative of Bangladesh from its
creation to its later travails. This persistent focus on Bangladesh by an
author long absent from Bangladesh, yet laying claim to it, calls for
some probing. Analyzing diasporic responses to the Partition by
authors "who did not live through the period[ ... ] who have spent little
of their lives in South Asia," Louise Harrington observes that "place
fundamentally impacts ourselves;'' so these diasporic retellings raise
questions about "choice of subject matter and [ ... ] location" (2). In my
analysis, authors like Anam raise significant questions about the
deeply-entangled issues of location, nation, and affiliation. In the
current climate of globalization, increasing diasporic communities and
transnational lives and their networks, the limits of identitarian
categories like the "nation," or the "national," are increasingly
interrogated, the relevance of the nation being contested with the
prospect of "post-nation." In this global scenario, the nation is being
reconfigured , experienced, and articulated in new ways. It is inflected
by global phenomena like diasporas and transnationalism, which are
challenging the territoriality of the nation state and the legitimacy
deriving from this territoriality through increasingly flexible and porous
 Remembering Bangladesh 133

boundaries. In this global context where the national is being devalued

in many ways, Anam focuses predominantly on a national
consciousness of Bangladesh, a nation that she is linked through by
birth, though displaced from, "now living the transatlantic writer's
circuit" (Kabir 45). Her narratives appear to be firmly entrenched in a
"Bangladeshi" consciousness, with a simultaneous absence or elision
of her own diasporic position and experience.
Anam's co-opting of a Bangladeshi affiliation and identity, despite
her or perhaps because of her location in diaspora and her distance
from the actual physical space of Bangladesh (a point that I will return
to later), thus raises crucial questions about the continuing valence of
national identities and categories in diasporic lives and identity
constructions. The national, instead of being an inadequate or even
irrelevant register in the transnational or diasporic experience, is
reinforced as a paradigm for apprehending that experience. This
privileging of the national over the trans-national or inter-national, of
roots or location of origin over the multi-locationality of diaspora, the
inter-national routes or trajectories of exchange, reveals forms of
allegiance and belonging which interrogate and challenge widely
perpetuated notions that the contemporary world is increasingly
becoming post-national. This reaffirmation of the national in a so-
called transnational writer problematizes established models of
transnationalism and globalization to understand identity and belonging
in the contemporary world. Anam's fiction therefore encourages us to
revisit the question of whether and how nationalist tendencies or
agendas are really being challenged by transnationalism and diaspora,
or is it that these tendencies are only being reformulated and reshaped.
In an interview after her first novel in 2007, Anam had explained
that part of the motivation for the novel came from the fact that "there
have been so many novels to come out of India, and there are noted
writers from Pakistan, but no one has told my story" ("PW Talks with
Tahmima Anam"). This emphasis on "my story" (as a counterpoint to
stories from India and Pakistan) is significant, underscoring not just the
interlinking of the personal with the national and the subsuming of the
individual in the collective ("my" being seen as Bangladesh's), but also
the interface, in Bhabha's co-ordinates, between nation and narration,
signalled in Anam's need to articulate her "nationness" by telling the
nation's story. I want to argue in this article that it is Anam's
Bangladeshi national affiliation that motivates her fiction, which
locates itself in a desire to assert its distinctiveness from the rest of
South Asian identity. This, ultimately, inscribes an underlying move to
disrupt the hegemony of Indian and Pakistani nationalities in South
Asian cultural subjectivities. Resisting dominant Indian and Pakistani
narratives in South Asian literary constructions, Anam's fiction
134 Antara Chatterjee

foregrounds a Bangladeshi voice emerging from South Asia. The idea

of the nation is a crucial concern informing her mappings of identity,
community and belonging. My intention is to unpack this construction
of the nation in her writing.
In a personal conversation with me, Anam had asserted that she
viewed herself not as a diasporic but only as a Bangladeshi national,
emphasising that she still carried her Bangladeshi passport with her. 1
Anam's diasporic position is, thus, effaced both in her fiction and her
personal interviews and conversations, with a simultaneous privileging
of her Bangladeshi identity. Anam's literary repertoire thus raises
compelling questions about the mobilization of particular identities by
individuals and communities, and about an author's construction of
him/herself as being aligned with or affiliated to certain groups and
identities. Her metonymic substitution of the passport for identity
(Bangladeshi passport for Bangladeshi identity) is an interesting use of
a metaphor of travel and crossing of national boundaries to signify,
paradoxically, a stable national origin and identity. Passports signal and
confirm national identity only when travelling outside the territorial
boundaries of the nation-state. Contrapuntally, and maybe even contra-
intentionally, Anam's metaphor of originary certainty or stability --the
Bangladeshi passport--signifies "routes" and "practices of crossing,
movement [... ] that [... ] unsettle the statist metaphor of 'roots', of[ ... ]
assumptions of cultural coherence, continuity and authenticity"
(Gabriel 206). This counterpoint of "roots" and "routes" in Anam's
writing, revealed in the tension between her investment in her
Bangladeshi national roots and her disavowal of the routes of diaspora,
merits further attention.
Recuperation of History and the Construction of a National Self
In the context of a different Bengal from Anam's (both spatially
and temporally), Bankim Chandra Chatterjee had famously exhorted,
"We must have a history." 2 This need to have a history inscribes, in
Partha Chatterjee's opinion, "an agenda for self-representation," a
setting out to claim a past for the nation (76). This claiming of the
nation's past is a powerful tool to mobilize a national consciousness or
identity; an "engagement with history" is an "integral component" of
political self-making (Morey and Tickell xii). For a relatively new
nation like Bangladesh, formed through two successive partitions in
1971, a national history is locatable primarily in the history of the
nation's origin. The liberation war of 1971 is the moment that
crystallized a national consciousness for the Bengali Muslims of the
Bengal Delta, the moment that created a separate nation-space for
them, marking the transition from Pakistan to Bangladesh. 1971
therefore constitutes the pivot of the national narrative of Bangladesh.
 Remembering Bangladesh 135

The significance of this epochal moment of 1971 is explained by the

historian Willem van Schendel:
A national narrative of the delta was constructed to give meaning and
legitimacy to the new state. Not surprisingly, its heroes were those
who had died [... ] in the Liberation war [... ] In both India and
Pakistan the Partition of 194 7 remains the pivot of national
consciousness and the bedrock of nationalist historical understanding.
In Bangladesh it has been resolutely displaced by [... ] 1971 [... ]
[ 1971] [... ] legitimises the Bangladesh state and [... ] challenges the
hegemony of Indo-Pakistani understandings of modem South-Asian
history. (189-90)

(Re)claiming history is thus a crucial strategy for self-formation. And,

while national historiography constructs a legitimate national narrative,
literature can also claim, or mobilize, history as a space wherein the
national self is constructed. My contention is that this co-optation of the
nation's history, reclaiming of the nation's past, is an important
strategy used by Anam to fashion a Bangladeshi national consciousness
in her fiction.
Anam' s recovery of history to construct the nation raises questions
about access, mediation, and memory, individual and collective. What
mediates her access to the history of the nation? How does memory
function in retrieving and reclaiming the past? Having been born after
the creation of Bangladesh and having grown up mostly outside its
territorial landscape (though often asserting being shaped by its
emotional landscape), Anam did not personally encounter or witness
most of what she fictionally recreates to construct the nation. She,
indeed, belongs to what Ananya Kabir significantly terms the
"postmemorial generation" of South Asia (62). Taking her cue from
Marianne Hirsch who, in the context of the Holocaust, talks of the
"experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that
preceded their birth, whose own[ ... ] stories are evacuated by the stories
of previous generations shaped by traumatic events" (22), Kabir
identifies this generation of South Asian writers who ''grapple with the
persistent meaning of events anterior to their lifetimes yet mysteriously
influential in the formation of their identities" (46). The "compulsive
revisiting of an earlier generation's foreclosures" in Anam's writing
(Kabir 60), can thus be read on such a trajectory of postmemory. The
point here is not merely that she chooses to write fiction set against
historical backdrops, but that she tries to make sense of her identity as a
Bangladeshi writer through recounting the nation's traumatic past. The
convergence of my and the nation 's stories that Anam had highlighted
in her interview, affirms this postmemorial terrain posited by Hirsch
and Kabir, contoured by "stories of previous generations shaped by
traumatic events" (Hirsch 22).
136 Antara Chatterjee

Anam has acknowledged the enormous affective influence of 1971

on the collective memory and cultural consciousness of the nation, and
the influence that this cultural memory has had on her evolution as an
author. She has recalled feeding on stories of the liberation war as a
child. In the acknowledgements for A Golden Age, she mentions her
gratitude to her parents, "My mother and father who told me so many
stories about the war that I couldn't help but become a writer" (A
Golden Age 276). Anam's memorialization of the liberation war and
the birth of the nation in her fiction can thus be seen as an enactment of
transgenerational memory-- testimony to how the "homeland" persists
in and is recreated in the memories of generations of people tied to that
space. Talking about the public reconstruction of the national narrative
in Bangladesh, she says: '' [Y]ou would be surprised at the willingness
of people [ ... ] to talk about the Muktijudho. [ ... ] I really didn't have to
do a lot of reconstruction. 1971 is what people remember the most. It's
almost more real than the present" (Amin). Apart from the narratives
received from her own familial and personal sources, and the people
she interviewed while writing the book and during her Ph.D. on the oral
history of the war, many other kinds of cultural texts also contributed to
this collective cultural memory to create a narrative about the nation's
birth. 3 These different cultural interventions in various ways
contributed to a national discourse surrounding the war and the creation
of Bangladesh. Anam's fiction seems simultaneously to draw upon and
participate in this national conversation about the past and how the
nation is remembered. Her reclaiming of the nation's past, both
transnational and transgenerational, is mediated through spatial and
temporal displacement.
The question of cultural memory and collective consciousness also
brings us to another very significant co-ordinate in the construction of
the nation and that is the role of trauma in nation making. Traumatic
events which mark a nation's history remain a powerful and looming
presence within the memories and imaginations of populations tied to
it. Trauma offers the possibility of finding a shared identity for a nation
or community. The reminiscence, over generations, of traumatic events
which have shaped the nation is a crucial way of remembering that
space. Commenting on the memorialization of war by governments,
institutions, and organizations through the construction of war
memorials, Nayanika Mookherjee observes that, "[t]he mobilization of
the dead in various nationalist contexts in Bangladesh brings together
the nation through pain rather than victory" ("The 'Dead and their
Double Duties"' 272). We are reminded of Ernest Renan's argument
that, "having suffered together" brings people close, despite
differences; indeed common suffering is greater than happiness (81 ).
Veena Das has also argued that nations are brought together by pain,
 Remembering Bangladesh 137

pos1tmg that pain is a medium through which society establishes

ownership on individuals ( 181 ). Though official memorialization
processes of the state have a political instrumentality in bringing the
nation together, cultural discourses like literature, cinema, and music
also have a significant affective agency in nation-making. By
remembering the trauma and violence, agencies constitutive of nation-
states, particularly in postcolonial societies, works of art harness the
emotions produced through such trauma. The most obvious case in
point is the cultural recollection of the trauma and fragmentation of the
194 7 Partition and of its powerful agency in mapping the emotional
terrain of the postcolonial nation-spaces of South Asia. I would locate
Anam's fiction on a similar trajectory of writing the nation through
trauma.
The trauma of the nation, though, is enacted through the trauma of
the family. The political and the historical are apprehended through the
personal in Anam's fiction, capturing history through the interiority of
home and family. The impact of larger political events on personal and
domestic levels is communicated through the prism of the family.
Kamila Shamsie noted in her review of A Golden Age: ''Throughout
the novel, Anam deftly balances the story of nation against that of
family" (2007). Anam has herself asserted that her fiction attempts to
depict how historical events can affect people in very intimate and
personal ways. The family as a metaphor for both the nation that
becomes a site of trauma as well as the fragmentation that the nation
undergoes in the wake of divisive nationalist events like partition, has
been invoked in literary texts to convey the dislocation and
displacement of such political upheavals, and their materiality and
emotional repercussions. 4 Anam too uses the family as a site of trauma
and rupture to indicate tumultuous and disruptive events in the public
space of national politics. War takes on a very personal meaning in A
Golden Age by showing a family in the throes of war, the disruption of
the family space and its later restoration corresponding to the curve of
East Bengal's fortunes, devastated first through war and then coming
together through trauma as Bangladesh.
In The Good Muslim, the larger ruptures within the Bangladeshi
national identity in the disillusioning years after the euphoria of
Independence, when the country witnessed political dictatorship and
overall degeneration of the values they had fought for, are evident in
the disruption of the Haque family in the aftermath of war. This is
especially revealed in the fragmentation and distance between the
siblings, Sohail and Maya, in the wake of Sohail's "finding God" and
taking up the path of religion by joining the Islamist movement of the
Tablighi Jamaat, while "Maya remains loyal to the secular, Marxist-
inflected nationalism that provided a sense of solidarity during the war
138 Antara Chatterjee

years" (Chambers, "Tahmima Anam's" 142). Sohail's inflexibility,

rigidity and inaccessibility, especially towards his family and, in
particular to his son Zaid and his sister Maya, and their inability to
communicate through a shared language, replicate the rigidity of the
contemporary repressive political regime. The divide between the
siblings becomes a cipher for Anam to express the disruptive pressures
on the new nation, while the implied violence of inflexibility, evident in
both Sohail's dogmatism and Maya's "secularist myopia" (Chambers,
"Tahmima Anam's" 152), signals the violence of dictatorship. The
disruption of the space of the family becomes a way of suggesting the
ruptures of the nation space. Cara Cilano argues: "A Golden Age
sacralizes the domestic sphere through violence[ ... ] reifying [ ... ] [the]
moment of national creation as the myth of nationalist origins" (122),
evident in the novel's very title hinting at a nostalgic rendering of that
epochal moment. In The Good Muslim, however, violence becomes a
means to suggest not a sacralization but a rupture of the domestic
sphere, disrupting the very nationalist myth which, according to Cilano,
the earlier novel had reified.
Memory and "forgetting"
Cultural texts, therefore, mediated through collective
consciousness and public memory, contribute to the construction of
nationhood in discursive and epistemological ways. These cultural
discourses act as an alternative cultural archive, by offering alternative,
non-official narratives that reveal complications and uncover
contradictions suppressed or elided in official discourses and
institutionalized history. And it is here that Anam's fiction, though
retrieving history, is to be distinguished from historiography. Though
recovering history, it also occupies the spaces of slippage, silences and
elisions of history. Anam has herself underlined the distinction. She has
said "I feel a little like a Bengali ambassador. I always emphasize,
however, that this is a novel [ ... ] not a history book" ("PW Talks").
She has emphasized that history often has to operate through inevitable
processes of censorship and institutional silencing and eliding. It is
such elisions or slippages of history that fiction has the potential to fill
and illuminate. 5
One example of Anam's excavation of familiar cultural tropes in
public memory about the war and the nation's birth, is her mobilization
of the emotive connotations of the figure of the mother in a nationalist
context through the character of Rehana in A Golden Age, the person
who provides a narrative perspective for the novel and is the mother of
revolutionary children - Sohail and Maya. There has been a strong
tradition of the mobilization of women, particularly of the figure of the
mother, in Bengali nationalist discourse. As Jasodhara Bagchi observes,
 Remembering Bangladesh 139

motherhood was always a culturally-privileged concept in Bengal;

nationalism borrowed from "the prevalence of mother cult" to effect a
''mythicizing of the concept of motherhood'' which was mobilized as a
"sacrosanct space" during the colonial phase (WS 65, 66). The
emotive rhetoric of the land as mother was one of the cultural legacies
that East Bengal inherited from undivided Bengal. This is expressed
most aptly in the song 0 Amar Sonar Bang/a (My Golden Bengal)
which is a romantic, nostalgic portrayal of mother Bengal with her
fertile and prosperous lands and rivers and her peaceful harmony
between nature and humans, a song that Bangladesh adopted as its
national anthem in 1971. Mookherjee, analyzing what she calls ''the
gendered symbolization of the nation through the rhetoric of the
'motherland' and the manipulation of this rhetoric in the context of
national struggle in Bangladesh,'' observes that ''the ideology of
woman as mother is a dominant symbolic imagery through which the
position of the woman becomes visible in national projects"
("Gendered Embodiments" 157).6 In this nationalistic exercise, she
reads a "feminization of the land, which enables the body of the
woman as mother to be available for the aestheticizing impulse of the
project of nationalism in Bangladesh" ("Gendered Embodiments"
157).
Anam's protagonist in A Golden Age, Rehana, can be located
against the backdrop of this cultural discourse surrounding the
gendered embodiment of the nation and the mobilization of
motherhood as a site of agency in the nationalist project. Her
construction of the nation through the agency of the mother in this
novel therefore reveals a kind of intertextuality, enabled through her
recuperation of collective cultural discourses, thereby demonstrating
my earlier point about how the reclamation of the past in her nation-
making project is mediated through collective memory and cultural
consciousness.
While the violence of memories necessitates remembering the
nation through trauma, there is also the need and the pressure to forget.
As Kabir says, "[m]yths of national origin invariably entail forgetting
and remembering" (56, italics in original). This space of silence,
suppression and forgetting, particularly of institutionalized narratives of
the past, can be filled up, as I said, by literary or cultural texts, thereby
becoming a site of resistance to official narratives and histories. Michel
Foucault (1969), Hayden White (1973) and others had analyzed the
intimate relationship between history and fiction, commenting on the
construction of history as a discourse. Dipesh Chakrabarty famously
posited the possibility of "other pasts," of what he calls "History 2"
contesting "History 1" - the "history posited by the logic of capital"
(250). Fictional spaces can be aligned with these "other pasts" which
140 Antara Chatterjee

resist or rewrite official narratives by revealing the gap or slippage

between different kinds of remembering and forgetting. Anam's fiction
too can be posited as a site of resistance to official narratives and
sanctioned modes of remembering and recovering the past.
One example of where she resists and rewrites institutionalized
narratives, problematizing the whole discourse of remembering and
forgetting, is her writing back to the discourse of the raped or violated
woman, which was very much a part of the discursive background of
violence in the war in Bangladesh. The liberation war, like most wars,
had witnessed a very high incidence of sexual violence against
women. 7 In 1971, the new nation of Bangladesh was confronted with
two hundred thousand women raped in a span of nine months. Bengali
Muslims being considered "Indianized/Hinduized" and only "nominal
Muslims," "rape was seen as a means to[ ... ] populate Bangladesh with
a new breed of 'pure' Pakistanis" (Mookherjee, "Gendered
Embodiments" 160).
The perpetration of sexual violence as part of organised warfare
has shown that the "gendering of women's bodies as female constitutes
them as political signs, territories on which the political programmes
that also affect the nation, community and family get inscribed"
(Mookherjee, "Gendered Embodiments" 160). Rape, during political
violence, thus becomes an "explicitly political act, a ritual of victory,
the defilement of honour and territory of the enemy community"
(Agarwal, qtd. in Mookherjee, "Gendered Embodiments" 160). The
body, particularly the female body, like the family, thus becomes a site
of violence during political turmoil. This history of uncontained, or
even "transgressing," sexuality becomes problematic because it
threatens accepted social codes and cannot be easily reintegrated into
societal expectations of gendered roles. In Bangladesh, these raped
women were given the epithet of "birangona" (war-heroine) by the
new state, attempting to confer an honourable status on them as
heroines of war. The intention was to alleviate their often ostracised
position and to reduce the stigma of rape, revealing that ''the state
predominantly wanted to restore the raped women to their
essentialized, normative spheres" (Mookherjee, "Gendered
Embodiments" 160).
This attempted restoration of the violated woman into normative
spheres ultimately inscribes a desire to forget the violence, as its
memory is problematic, being disruptive to normative social codes
upheld by the state. The "unease and ambiguity surrounding the [... ]
transgression of 'female virtue' in Bangladesh," eventually led the
birangona to disappear from public discourse to be "shrouded in zones
of silence" (Mookherjee, "Gendered Embodiments" 161). The tension
between public memory and official forgetting of rape and sexual
 Remembering Bangladesh 141

violence during the war is revealed in Anam in the figure of Piya in The
Good Muslim. Piya is a rape survivor whom Sohail encounters in the
barracks after the retreat of the Pakistani army. She has nowhere to go,
being disowned by her family, and comes to stay with the Haques.
Noticeably, the text is also largely silent about Piya and there are no
explanations about why she comes and why she disappears again as
suddenly as she had appeared. Much of Piya's textual significance is
thus through elision, perhaps replicating the state's silence on these
women. Yet Piya's very presence, her disowning by her family, her
reluctance (as recounted later by Rehana and Maya) to subscribe to the
state method of erasure and forgetting through abortion of the expected
child, and her final disappearance since there is perhaps no way of
accommodating her presence in society, is a rupture of that very
forgetting. Rehana too, when Sheikh Mujib meets the family as part of
a felicitation for all families involved in the war, decides to write him a
letter highlighting the plight of these women, many of whom did not fit
into the official scheme of erasure promoted by Mujib, as they were not
accepted back into their earlier roles within family and society, and did
not want to abort their children. But her letter ultimately remains
unwritten, her words lost in the silence that shrouded these women.
Anam's text, through registering Piya's presence, through
remembering her, resists the institutionalized forgetting and officially
sanctioned absence of these women in official narratives. Even through
the figure of Rehana in A Golden Age, Anam writes back to this
discourse of problematic female sexuality in Bangladesh in the context
of war, as Rehana too becomes involved in a "transgressive" sexual
relationship with the Major, the liberation fighter, whom she harbours
in her home during war. What is significant in Rehana' s relationship
with the Major, is that though it can be located within this context of
uncontained and hence problematic female sexuality, Rehana is not a
raped woman and her transgression is a wilful one, thereby investing
her with choice and agency. Through Rehana in A Golden Age and
through the presence of Piya in The Good Muslim - powerful, despite
the text's silence surrounding her - Anam disrupts the official
construction of the raped woman in Bangladesh, writing back to this
discourse of problematic sexuality and the state's desire to forget it.
Fictional works like Anam's, can thus fill the space of silence and
slippage of official narratives and institutionalized historiography.
The De/Reterritorialized Nation
Anam's reconstructing the nation's past through remembrance of
not just the heroism and the sacrifice of War but also its violence and
trauma, raises the significant question of whether her diasporic distance
from the physical space of Bangladesh helps her to recover a painful
142 Antara Chatterjee

past of difficult and traumatic memories. This raises once more the
question of Anam's diasporic location and her resurrection of a
Bangladeshi consciousness from a position of displacement. Her
recreation of a Bangladeshi narrative could perhaps be located on a
Jamesonian model of national allegory (Jameson 65-88), but that
straightforward logic is problematized by her being located in diaspora
and not within the national boundaries. This, in tum, prompts a probing
of what exactly constitutes the space of the nation and its boundaries.
Anam's premium on her Bangladeshi identity, with a simultaneous
disinvestment in her so called diasporic position, is evident in her
writing as well as in her construction of herself as an author, as
revealed in her interviews and conversations. This shows her claiming
membership in a community and collective national identity, claiming
ownership of a space over which her claim can only be emotional and
cultural, as it is a space from which she has been physically absent.
This leads to the very significant premise that the nation space is
ultimately an emotional and memorial terrain, over which individuals
displaced from it but having emotional and cultural ties with, can claim
cultural ownership.
Benedict Anderson had famously posited nations or "nation-ness"
as "imagined communities," as "members of even the smallest nation
will never know most of their fellow-members [... ] yet in the minds of
each lives the image of their communion" (6). Anderson's theory of
nations as "imagined" communities has particular relevance in the
current world where fluid and mobile identities are replacing more
rooted communities situated in particular physical locations. His idea of
the nation as an imagined construct can be extended beyond the
physical boundaries of a nation-state to encompass global communities
physically removed from it but forming part of imagined national
communities through complex modes of national and ethnic belonging.
If nation-making is an imaginative project, then participation in that
project would not be limited to subjects within the physical boundaries
of the nation but would be available to those beyond the boundaries as
an emotional exercise of affinity and identity construction. Thus
Anderson's argument that the nation is "limited" having "finite, if
elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations'' (7), might stand
modified in the current global scenario as these "finite" boundaries are
getting more fluid and indefinitely stretchable to include imagined
communities beyond the physical location of the nation-space.
To elaborate this thesis of the nation as extending beyond its
physical boundaries, I would like to use the concept of "long-distance
nationalism," posited by Nina Glick Schiller and Georges Eugene
Fouron, as a "potent contemporary [... ] ideology" (17). In this kind of
nationalism, "the concept of a territorial homeland [... ] remains salient,
 Remembering Bangladesh 143

but national borders are not thought to delimit membership in the

nation. Long-distance nationalists [... ] [assert] that people living in
various disparate geographic locations within different states share a
common identification with an ancestral territory" (20). The
"transborder state", or the oxymoronic "transnational nation-state"
(Glick Schiller and Fouron 21) are, thus, formulations appropriate for
the current world that registes this shift in modes of belonging and
identity formation from earlier models that prioritised the territoriality
of the nation in constructing national imaginaries. Arguing for a
deterritorialized understanding of the nation and national belonging,
Glick Schiller and Fouron contend that "in a new age of migration as
well as a renewed [... ] period of globalization, long-distance
nationalism is reconfiguring the way [... ] people understand the
relationship between populations and the states that claim to represent
them" ( 18-19). This kind of reconfigured nationalism is a significant
concept in my analysis of Anam's writing.
Anam's construction of herself as a Bangladeshi author, in my
reading, can be located on such a trajectory of national belonging. She
has herself corroborated this by saying that "[m]y desh-prem [love for
my country] is a long-distance affair, full of passion and
misunderstanding" (New Statesman), elaborating, "It's much easier to
have a relationship of nostalgia with a place if you don't have to live
with all the complexities [... ] and limitations. [... ] Sometimes having a
distance helps me write" (Chambers, British Muslim Fictions 171 ).
Harrington suggests a ''natural and understandable relationship
between the silent and silenced Bengal Partition [compared with the
more visible Punjab in literary and critical works on Partition] and[ ... ]
the marginal space of the diaspora" (2), a space that she calls "an-
Other space" (3), after Edward Soja's concept of the "Thirdspace"
(qtd. in Harrington 3). While I would not posit, like Harrington, an
inherent connection between the Bengal Partition and diasporic
expression, notably because there have been several diasporic
recallings of the Punjab Partition as well, I would nonetheless identify a
causal relationship between the distance afforded by the diasporic
location and recalling traumatic pasts, as attested by Anam.
I would posit that Anam's position does not conform to a
conservative diasporic dialectics of loss and nostalgia as the one
envisaged by William Safran, for example, whereby diasporas are
characterized by a continuation to relate personally or vicariously to the
"homeland," a self-conscious construction of one's identity in terms of
this homeland and the retaining of a collective "memory, vision or
myth" about the homeland (83-84). Her subscribing to a Bangladeshi
identity, rather than to a range of other possibilities, like British-
Bangladeshi or British-Asian, is not based on a trajectory of loss,
144 Antara Chatterjee

negation, or alienation. It is rather a positive formulation, one of agency

and choice. A reading of Anam's background--of her growing up in
several countries while travelling with her father (a media adviser in
UNESCO), her education at world's leading institutions like Harvard
University --signals towards a position of privilege and access to
capital, economic, cultural and intellectual. One could presumably
hazard then that Anam does not belong to a diasporic community
characterized predominantly by dispossession and marginalization,
thereby relying on the homeland to construct her identity to combat
these experiences. For such an author to construct herself as
Bangladeshi, instead of subscribing to a more hybrid diasporic identity,
is an assertion of a position of choice, rather than the Safranian model
of inherent powerlessness.
Coming back to my original thesis, the nation therefore, in
transnational writers like Anam, is not an irrelevance or absence. As
my study of Anam's fiction has demonstrates, it is certainly a strong
presence in her configurations of identity and her negotiations with
memory and the past. The nation has not become an irrelevant and
obsolete register in the current world of globalization and
transnationalism. It is now a modified and reformulated category whose
territoriality and physical boundaries remain challenged but which is
still prioritized as a significant formative aspect of identity
constructions in people or communities physically displaced from it.
Encouraging a reconsideration of current notions that the contemporary
world is post-national, Anam's fiction posits the nation as being
differently experienced and articulated in contemporary configurations.
The nation thus is no longer territorially restricted to a physical location
but is an affective and emotional space. It can thus be experienced
across different locations outside the boundaries of the nation-state.
The nation, in Anam's fiction, therefore, is not just deterritorialized but
reterritorialized as an imagined space which can be reclaimed by
individuals from a position of physical displacement but emotional and
cultural affinity. As Amitav Ghosh, analyzing the relationship between
India and its diaspora has asserted, "the links [... ] are lived within the
imagination [... ] this relationship is so much a relationship of the
imagination" (75). Anam's Bangladeshi-ness is also experienced and
"lived within the imagination."
Anam's recuperation of a distinctly Bangladeshi narrative and
identity from a diasporic space is an assertion of cultural ownership,
affinity and identity, because the "nation" is a space that she can
reclaim and thereby rewrite from a position of absence. The emotional
and cultural ties to the country of her birth, Bangladesh, have a
powerful agency in her writing. Her narrative of Bangladeshi-ness is a
way of reclaiming that space, the Bangladesh vivid in her imagination.
 Remembering Bangladesh 145

This is evident in the title of her first novel. When asked about her
choice of title, Anam had explained:
The national anthem, "My Golden Bengal," comes from a song
written by Tagore. It refers to the color of rice paddies when they are
ripe. I wanted to evoke a moment in which peoples' imaginations
were very extensive. Before you have a country you can be very
idealistic [ ... ] Now [ ... ] people look back on the war as a time of all
sorts of possibilities - a golden age. (Acknowledgements, A Golden
Age 276)
In the acknowledgements section of the novel, she says that her writing
is what it is "only because of the place that inspired it. And so to my
beautiful and bruised country, to Bangladesh --my gratitude and love"
(276). Anam's recapturing of Bangladeshi-ness through remembering
the nation and evoking its past in her fiction can thus be read as a
tribute to her "golden Bengal," and an acknowledgement of its
influence in her own life and art.
Notes
I. Since that conversation, Anam has received British citizenship, in 20 I 0,
but she still asserts that her "main political and emotional ties are to
Bangladesh" (Chambers, British Muslim Fictions 171 ).
2. This notion of consolidation of a collective national identity through
mobilization of the past is taken up most powerfully in Bankim Chandra
Chatterjee's nationalistic novel Anandamath ( 1882).
3. Apart from some seminal works in Bengali like Anisul Haque's Maa
(Haque, Anisul. Freedom's Mother. Trans. New Delhi: Plimpsest, 2012. Print.),
Jahanara Imam's famous memoirs Ekatturer Dinguli, (Imam, Jahanara. Of
Blood and Fire: The Untold Story of Bangladesh's War of Independence.
Trans. Mustafizur Rahman. Dhaka: University Press Limited, 1990. Print.),
Nilima Ibrahim's Aami Birangona Bolchhi, translated as I am the War Heroine
Speaking (Ibrahim, Nilima. A ami Birangona Bolchhi. Dhaka. 1994. Print.),
some Bangladeshi writers in English, apart from Anam, who have fictionally
recaptured the War include Adib Khan (Khan, Adib. Seasonal Adjustments.
Sydney: Unwin and Allen, 1994. Print.) and Syed Manzurul Islam (Islam, Syed
Manzurul. Song of our Swampland. Leeds: Peepaltree Press, 20 I 0. Print.). Non-
literary cultural texts include Tareque and Catherine Masud's Muktir Gaan
(Songs of Freedom), containing Bengali nationalist songs by Rabindranath
Tagore, Mohshaad Ali, D.L Roy and others, used extensively during the
liberation movement to mobilize nationalist sentiment, and its sequel Muktir
Katha (Storiess of Freedom). See Muktir Gaan (Songs of Freedom). Dir.
Tareque and Catherine Masud. Audio., Muktir Katha (Words of Freedom). Dir.
Tareque and Catherine Masud. Betacm, 1999. DVD. Other films and
documentaries include Yasmine Kabir's A Certain Liberation (A Certain
Liberation. Dir. Yasmine Kabir 2003. DVD.), Tanvir Mokammel's Chitra
Nadir Paare (Chitra Nadir Paare/Quiet Flows the River Chitra. Dir. Tanvir
Mokammel 1998. DVD.), and Tareque Masud's Maatir Moyna (Maatir
146 Antara Chatterjee

Moyna/The Clay Bird. Dir. Tareque Masud. Audiovision, 2002. DVD.) and
Noroshundor (Noroshundor!The Barbershop. Dir. Tareque and Catherine
Masud. 2009. DVD.)
4. For Amitav Ghosh in The Shadow Lines, though, the family and the
home are cosmopolitan sites, not aligned with essentialist modes of belonging
like the nation. In a correspondence with Dipesh Chakrabarty, Ghosh asserted:
Two of my novels [ ... ] are centered on families. I know that for myself,
this is a way of displacing the "nation" [... ] [W]riting about families is one
way of not writing about the nation (or other restrictively imagined
collectivities). ( 147, italics in original)
5. Anam discussed her writing in a conversation with the Pakistani author
Kamila Shamsie, as part of the "Arthur Ravenscroft" memorial public lecture,
"History and the Storyteller: A Dialogue" at the University of Leeds, U.K, on
27 October 2009 (heard by the author).
6. Other sociologists arguing that motherhood becomes a crucial space of
symbolic public agency in national mobilization processes include Ardener,
Macdonald and Holden, Yuvai-Davis, Werbner and Anthias. See Ardener,
Shirley, Sharon Macdonald, and Pat Holden, eds. Images of Women in Peace
and War: Cross-Cultural and Historical Perspectives. Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1987. Print., Yuval-Davis, N., and Pnina Werbner, eds. Women. Citi=enship
and Difference. London: Zed, 1999. Print., and Yuval-Davis, N., and F.Y
Anthias, eds. Woman-Nation-State. London: Macmillan, 1989. Print.
7. For more on the rape, violence and victimization of women in the
Bangladesh war, see the work of Yasmin Saikia. See, for instance, Saikia,
Yasmin. "Beyond the Archive of Silence: Narratives of Violence of the 1971
Liberation War of Bangladesh." History Workshop Journal 58 (2004 ): 275-87.
Print., "Listening to the 'Enemy': The Pakistan Army, Violence, and
Memories of 1971." Crisis and Beyond: Pakistan in the Twentieth Century. Ed.
Naveeda Khan. London: Routledge, 2009. 177-209. Print., "Overcoming the
Silent Archive in Bangladesh: Women Bear Witness to Violence in the 1971
'Liberation' War." Women and the Contested State. Ed. Monique Skidmore
and Patricia Lawrence. Ohio: Notre Dame Press, 2007. 64-82. Print., and
Women. War and the Making of Bangladesh: Remembering 1971. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 20 II. Print.

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