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I met Tahmima Anam at a café, near the buzzing Spitalfields Market, a few miles away from Brick Lane, the street made internationally famous by Monica Ali in her Booker nominated novel. Anam — a model of patience — was calmly drinking tea when I arrived late (and flustered) owing to an erratic signal failure on the Metropolitan Line.
“We might as well have met in West London,” she said with a laugh when we discovered that we lived fairly close to each other and had travelled right across London to meet in Spitalfields Market, her publishers’ favoured spot for interviews. However, location is everything, some may say. With Anam’s debut novel A Golden Age being billed as the next Brick Lane and Anam as the next Monica Ali, likely to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, it made sense to be at the centre of the action, or at least close to it.
Less than a mile away lay the sprawl of the East End, home to the large Bangladeshi community in London, where street names are in Bengali, shops sell ilish, rui and pabda flown in from Dhaka and the language spoken is almost certainly Sylheti rather than English.
The soft-spoken author smiled when I brought up her fellow Bangladeshi writer. She confessed she had never met Monica Ali. “It must be highly irritating for her (Monica Ali) to be linked with me. She has achieved so much,” she laughed. “But my book is different. I didn’t write an immigrant novel. It is about Bangladesh and a part of Bangladesh history. The canvas does not shift to the West. So in that sense it cannot be compared to Brick Lane.”
Instead, Anam preferred to be compared to authors who have written about war and conflict like Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of the critically acclaimed Half of a Yellow Sun.
However, she was happy to admit that the comparisons with Ali triggered a media buzz around her book, which had a positive effect. “Maybe no one would have noticed the book without it,” she laughed. “Monica put Bangladesh on the literary map in the West and for that we have to be grateful,” said the 33-year-old writer.
A Golden Age is the story of a widow, Rehana Haque, and her struggle to bring up her two children, Sohail and Maya, against all odds. Set against the background of the Bangladesh liberation struggle, the book is a novel about an age of idealism, heroism and romance, and a people’s struggle against oppression.
For Anam it was the most obvious thing to write about. It gave her the chance to “look at the past through rose-tinted glasses.” She was brought up on stories of the liberation struggle by her parents. Her father, Mahfuz Anam, editor of the English daily, The Daily Star, was involved with the struggle. A well-known orator, he toured India, raising awareness of the plight of the Bangladeshi people in the years before the war. Friends of the family were guerrilla fighters and revolutionaries. Anam was born in 1975, four years after the Liberation.
Later Mahfuz Anam joined the UN and his daughter grew up in Paris, New York and Bangkok, eventually completing her PhD in social anthropology from Harvard. Despite having spent most of her life abroad, Anam said she felt totally Bangladeshi. “I have a Bangladeshi passport and identify myself as a Bangladeshi writer. I have never thought of myself as anything else.”
Her strong attachment to her country comes out clearly in the novel and in an angry article she wrote in the New Statesman early this year about the present state of politics in Bangladesh, where she declared: “I want my country back.” The article provoked a flood of responses.
“We are torn between corrupt governments,” said Anam feelingly. “It is a disgrace that we know who killed (slain Bangladeshi leader) Mujib-ur-Rehman and the murderers are still free. They were posted as diplomats and given ministerial posts. One former agriculture minister was a known collaborator and a member of the Jamaati. These people did not believe in Bangladesh. It is a slap on the face of anybody who died for the independence struggle.”
At Harvard, she chose to do her dissertation on people’s memories of war — “Fixing The Past: War, Violence and Habitations of Memory in Post-Independence Bangladesh” — for which she interviewed hundreds of people in Bangladesh about their experiences in the war. It gave her the material for her novel.
“I knew I had my subject, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted to structure my thoughts,” said Anam, clearly focused from a young age. In between her PhD, she took creative writing classes in New York, and followed it up with an M.A. in creative writing from the University of Holloway in London where one of her tutors was the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion.
A Golden Age took two years to write. Anam wrote it in London, surviving on an Arts Council grant and doing freelance work to support herself. One assignment included a series on Bengali literature for BBC Radio Three, where she was amusingly mistaken in the studio by presenter Clive James for Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen.
She has chosen to make London her home for the moment — “I am lucky I could become a full time writer straightaway” — and is clearly enjoying the buzz of the London literary scene and its eclectic mix of young writers. She showed me a large ink stamp on her hand, which she had acquired the night before at a night club, where she had gone for a Book Slam event to listen to Gautam Malkani, author of Londonstani.
“It’s a combination of book reading, poetry, music, and it’s held in a night club, so it’s good fun,” said Anam.
She plans to visit Calcutta soon to research her next book which will be a prequel to A Golden Age, focusing on the story of Rehana’s father, who was a wealthy aristocrat in Calcutta, but lost his entire fortune. It is based on the real life story of Anam’s great grandfather.
“I am finding some wonderful stuff, and have even met a family that remembers him,” she said. “Apparently he had a Jewish mistress and slept on a golden bed!” I asked her if she has seen Satyajit Ray’s Jalsagahar on the subject of decaying aristocracy. She hadn’t, but said she would make it a point to do so. Her favourite Ray film was Charulata, she volunteered.
We talked about her favourite Bengali writers — she lists Rabindranath Tagore, Mahasweta Devi, Rokeya Sakhawat Hussain and Nazrul Islam — and her literary influences — she likes novels from the American South (they remind her of Bengal). I asked her if she had been following the success of the Bangladesh cricket team at the World Cup.
Anam lit up immediately. “It was fantastic when we entered the Super Eights,” she said ecstatically. “Everybody in Brick Lane marched spontaneously to the Altab Ali Park which has a replica of the Shahid Minar (from Dhaka) and there was a huge celebration. There is such little good news from Bangladesh ever that something like this unites everyone! Normally it’s either floods or fatwas!”
The rose-tinted glasses that she wore to write A Golden Age and look at the past are back on. Maybe Shonar Bangla can rise again, with eleven men on a cricket pitch showing the way. Tahmima Anam is ever optimistic.