| Milosz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980, was born in Poland and bore witness to the Holocaust; Azad was born in 1947, witnessed the birth of his country, Bangladesh, and was a fiercely outspoken critic of what he saw as a rising tide of fundamentalism threatening to swamp the freedoms he held dear. |
| They were connected only by the common language of poetry. Azad was prolific, packing a vast body of criticism, fiction writing and poetry into his 58 years. Milosz came to poetry early and made it his homeland, though the book by which he is best known is The Captive Mind, an examination of the ways in which communism warped intellectual freedom. |
| They wrote from very different perspectives, but they shared a fierce love of freedom, the urge to question the world around them, the need to investigate the dark side of humanity. Humayun Azad's first novel, Fifty Six Thousand Square Miles, is regarded as a landmark in Bangladeshi fiction writing because of the manner in which it explores the idea of a nation subsumed by the imposition of martial law. |
| He was an outspoken critic who suffered for his outspokenness. Nari, an exploration of the condition of women under Islam, was banned in Bangladesh, which didn't prevent Azad from continuing to castigate what he saw as indefensible. |
| In one memorable interview, he said: "The people of Bangladesh are busy with domestic religious blindness, political blindness, those returning from the United States are religiously blind; bearded or veiled doctorates in physics return from America, use prayer mats, give money to relatives to perform hajj and build mosques in and around the country." |
| In November 2003, Azad published Pak Sar Zamin Saar Baad, an unblushingly open critique of contemporary Bangladesh. (The title is taken from the first line of the Pakistani national anthem.) Conservative critics in Bangladesh have often been incensed by Azad's attacks on regimes in power and on blinkered and backward clerics. |
| This February, as he was leaving a book fair at Dhaka University, Azad was attacked; his assailants stabbed him repeatedly in the neck and on the body with butchers' knives. He was in coma for a week and then made a slow and painful recovery over the next few months. His health appeared to be stable, but fears that he and his family were still at risk were exacerbated when an attempt was made to kidnap his son. |
| A few days ago, Azad died in Munich. Given the levels of danger they've experienced in the last year, surviving family members have asked for an enquiry. But PEN International confirmed that Azad's death, at 58, seemed to be the cause of nothing more sinister than a heart attack. His assailants may not have actually driven the knife in, but the stress he'd been under, medically and otherwise, must have contributed to his relatively early death. |
| In Shob Kichu Noshtoder Adhikarey Jaabe, a poem that I might translate very, very loosely as And Everything Will Be in the Custody of the Damned/the Ruined, Azad listed the aspects of his world that he saw as being threatened by the destructive, the evil, the ruinous, the terrible. |
| Some of his images were simple: black clouds, a red sari, the white moon""these too would disappear, be swallowed up by those who fear beauty. Some were specific: temples, mosques, synagogues, these would all disappear too. |
| It was a remarkable poem, an elegy and a defence rolled into one. But ultimately it was he who paid the highest price of them all, whose heart gave out under the strain of having to fight constantly for his beliefs and for the country that gave him his sense of belonging in the world. |
| Milosz' death came as less of a shock, it was inevitable, given his age. He had witnessed a century's worth of horror; he had fought against the labelling of the Holocaust as just a killing of Jews, reminding the world ceaselessly that others, too, died at the hands of the Nazis. |
| At the age of 90, he was still trying, he said, to shape his world in words. His assistant said, of his death on Sunday evening at the age of 93, "It is just death," meaning that his natural span of years had been lived to the full. |
| And if Azad railed against the blindness of religion, Milosz, who had seen into the darkest abyss of human nature as a young Pole growing up in a Nazi era, found an enduring comfort in the idea of the Kingdom of Heaven. |
| In his Nobel speech, in 1980, Milosz said: "It is possible that there is no memory but the memory of wounds." He was speaking of events that he feared would be forgotten, or mis-remembered, but also of the importance of remembering: "Memory thus is our force, it protects us against a speech entwining upon itself like the ivy when it does not find a support on a tree or a wall." |
| Coming from two points on the earth so widely separated, Poland and Bangladesh, these two poets still seem to me to represent what I love most about poetry: its refusal to forget, or to let you forget, its ability to praise, to collect and dog-ear those parts of the world most precious, most fleeting, most worthy of preserving. |
| One of Milosz' poems, "And Yet The Books," has become for many reasons something of a personal talisman for me. Those lines carry a gentle reminder that books will outlive us and outlast the destruction we seek to wreak on their pages, and I have turned to it every time I need a justification for my trade as a literary footsoldier. |
| But in memory of both these poets, Azad and Milosz, perhaps it is better to quote from Milosz" "Dedication." The poem was written in Warsaw in 1945; these are the last two stanzas. |
| "What is poetry which does not save Nations or people? A connivance with official lies, A song of drunkards whose throats will be cut in a moment, Readings for sophomore girls. That I wanted good poetry without knowing it, That I discovered, late, its salutary aim, In this and only this I find salvation. They used to pour millet on graves or poppy seeds To feed the dead who would come disguised as birds. I put this book here for you, who once lived So that you should visit us no more." |
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