Two films by Bangladeshi director, Mostofa Sarwar Farooki recently released on Netflix. I wrote a review essay on present-day Bangladesh as seen through the prism of these films.
Read the full story in The Wire.
Talk in whispers
But make them so low-pitched
That no one can hear
Them. Not even the person
You whisper to.
Clever one-liners are
Good. Check your
Ambition in using them, though.
Satire works well, too. It’s
Always safer to quote a dead or
Well-known writer.
Post music, lots of it,
Songs of protest and of
Love. Also post jokes and
Photos of food, cats, your
Toddler. Who doesn’t
Deserve a break from Aleppo’s
Bombed Children and India’s
Suicide-committing farmers?
Hide. Behind symbols
With multiple metaphors. Open-ended
Totems of ambiguity.
Amid the word-pelleting
From different camps, watch
Out for “Nation building,”
“Anti-national,” “Greater good,”
And “Patriotic.” Loaded missiles
Before which your feeble,
Weightless humanity must
Shiver in defeat.
What is left when a place dies a thousand violent deaths?
A million stories sprout over the graveyard. Each narrator is a Scheherazade (of One Thousand and One Nights), except none of them is compelled to tell a tale for fear of being killed. Some of them have already crossed over to the other shore and even the 
ones living know death to be staring them in the face. Yet the emotive force — mind-bending and magnetic — of the voices echoing through Hassan Blasim’s short stories forces the listener/reader to be pulled into their universes — macabre and enigmatic as they are.
I felt the sharp stab of Blasim’s storytelling knife in The Corpse Exhibition — the very first story in the collection. Written in the backdrop of the Iraq War, the story puts a chilling spin on the practice of displaying executed bodies in public. The narrator, evidently the boss of an organization curating the corpse exhibitions speaks in a clinical tone to a prospective new hire. The emphasis on the aesthetics of displays — one of the top pieces the boss cites is that of the corpses of a breastfeeding mother and her child both naked placed under a dead palm tree with not a trace of wound — layers the story with a degree of perversion that’s so disturbing it is riveting.
Read the rest of the review here.
Bhaswati Ghosh 