Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature

A Writer of Hope, Humour, and Resistance: An Interview with Saad Z. Hossain

2023-12-19T23:48:48+08:00

In this interview, Bangladeshi Anglophone writer Saad Z. Hossain (1979–) addresses several important issues involving his works, worldview, and writing career. First, he explains when he began writing, what inspired him to write, why he chose to write in English, and whom he writes for. He also discusses his writing and reading habits, his favourite authors, how he negotiates between his seemingly opposite interests as a businessman and a writer, and his view of the present state of English writing in Bangladesh. Moreover, Hossain talks about his narrative techniques, how his fiction has evolved over the years, how he works out a plot from his multi-thread narrative, his predilection for characters over plot, and how he compares his experience of writing prose fiction in different forms: novels, novellas, and short stories. Finally, the author reflects on his themes, use of humour, view of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and what he is currently writing.

Retnaningsih the Dreamer

2023-12-20T00:04:12+08:00

Writing in the Time of Mass Murder

2023-12-19T23:11:16+08:00

Unbearable scenes of cruelty and human suffering challenge the tendency of a section of academics to overlook the reality of everyday life and to remain detached from the wider world that they are supposed to serve intellectually. The recent episode of prolonged genocidal killings of Palestinians by Israeli forces has brought this question again to the fore. Given the ongoing human tragedy in Gaza, in this essay I seek to advance the ethos of writerly commitment to promoting equity and justice, drawing especially on the works of Edward Said and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.

Mohammad A. Quayum (Ed.), Rabindranath Tagore’s Journey as an Educator: Critical Perspectives on His Poetics and Praxis

2023-12-19T23:52:11+08:00

Fayeza Hasanat (Trans), The Voices of War Heroines: Sexual Violence, Testimony, and the Bangladesh Liberation War

2023-12-19T23:55:33+08:00

Jatin Bala, A Life Uprooted: A Bengali Dalit Refugee Remembers

2023-12-19T23:58:32+08:00

Mitra Phukon (ed.), The Greatest Assamese Stories Ever Told

2023-12-20T00:00:39+08:00

Vaasanthi, Breaking Free: A Novel

2023-12-20T00:02:28+08:00

The Poetry of Abdul Hai

2023-12-20T00:09:40+08:00

Dawn of Resilience: A Tribute to Gaza’s Children

2023-12-20T00:11:43+08:00

We Stand with You in Love, O Palestine!

2023-12-20T00:14:04+08:00

O Palestine

2023-12-20T00:15:41+08:00

Palestine: The Pearl of the World

2023-12-20T00:17:34+08:00

Lament for Watermelon

2023-12-20T00:19:10+08:00

What is Your Color? A Study of Najdi Bedouin Greetings

2023-12-19T23:16:25+08:00

This study investigates the greetings of the Bedouin speakers of the Central Najdi Dialect in Afif, Saudi Arabia. It analyzes the greetings used by the subjects and examines the impact of the contextual factors of age, social status, social distance, period of absence, and formality of situation on their choice, and it also identifies the politeness strategies they opted for. The study uses a discourse completion test, interviews, and fieldnotes to collect its data. The study involves 50 subjects randomly chosen from the area. It shows that the subjects use the Islamic greetings, phatic questions, welcoming greetings, temporal greetings, and expressions of longing. It also demonstrates that the subjects use individual and group greetings that are differentiated by the second singular and plural pronoun inflections. Moreover, it shows that the subjects utilise some greetings the reference of which is made to the third singular and plural person pronouns. Also, it reveals that some of the greetings used take the present and past tense markers.

Precarity and Resilience in Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Not be Told

2023-12-19T23:19:21+08:00

In the wake of rising precarity, the pressing question that confronts thinkers is how to formulate a new form of a social contract that recognises, legitmises, and promotes systems of social infrastructures. By focussing on Kavery Nambisan’s The Story That Must Note Be Told (2010), this article highlights the precarious class of people living in a slum area. The crux of Nambisan’s account is that few lives matter more than other lives, and few spaces need more supply of resources than others, and the task of government and corporate agencies is to render agential measures to the elite class. It is a precarious tale of a place where the vulnerability and death of the marginalised feed off the privileged class. In the light of the precarious conditions rendered by the neoliberal regime, this article analyses Martha Albertson Fineman’s theory of human vulnerability, underlining the urgency to recognise human dependency on social institutions inherently linked to their resilience and survival.

The Missing Person in a Story about Kashmir: A Reading of Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field

2023-12-19T23:22:17+08:00

This article examines the trope of the ‘missing person’ in the literature about Kashmir and argues, by taking Madhuri Vijay’s The Far Field (2019) as an example, how the trope allows the examination of a multilayered history of violence. The article problematises the idea of visibility and invisibility of the missing/abducted/hidden/underground people during conflict and suggests that these figures can be read as metaphors for personal and collective trauma and loss. By triangulating three coordinates in Kashmiri context – violence, trauma, and invisibility – the essay argues that a missing person can be emblematic of memories of trauma, negation of humanity, violation of body, and public complicity in institutional violence. By foregrounding Shalini’s journey to recover the missing people, the novel underpins the “rot remains” of a society afflicted with violence and state apathy. Within the framework of trauma theory in the postcolonial context, the essay shows how the focus of Vijay’s narrative of Kashmiri people’s trauma is shifted from speech to body. The emphasis on the body contributes to a compelling narration of trauma by conflating land and people.

Women’s Sartorial Freedom and Educational Rights in Shelina Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf

2023-12-19T23:26:02+08:00

The position of Muslim women is much debated, as they are often perceived as oppressed, subjugated, and victims of patriarchal society. However, Islam ensures women’s dignity as equal human beings. Nevertheless, cultural expectations and the multiplicity of interpretations of Islamic teachings lead to various conventions, practices, and beliefs that limit women’s rights. Based on this observation, this paper explores Muslim women’s sartorial liberty and right to education as depicted in Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s Love in a Headscarf. It emphasises the distinction between the Islamic faith and Muslim cultural practices, and examines the ways in which the text supports and develops what Islam has given women.

Precarious Migrancy, Community, and Resilience in Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam

2023-12-19T23:28:58+08:00

Literary narrative provides a new perspective of looking at the historical past, often questioning the credibility of representation. Interrogating what Hayden White calls history’s tropic prefiguration, the prominence given to key historical figures, the erasure of subaltern individuals or communities, literature foregrounds the role of narrative in constructing the way one understands the world, meaning, and truth. A postcolonial writer, in their critical re-interpretation of the historical archive, creates a hybrid text that combines historical evidences and imaginative reconstructions, and historical as well as invented characters. With this interplay, history is stripped of its objective quality. This article seeks to explore how Debendranath Acharya’s Jangam presents the precarious condition of the migrant Burmese Indian peasants during World War II and the manner in which they establish a community during their historically forgotten long march to Assam. What Acharya attempts to reconcile in Jangam are the “analytical” histories through utilising the rational categories of modern historical thought and the “affective” histories which account for the plural ways of being-in-the-world.

Narrativised Historicity in Arif Anwar’s The Storm

2023-12-19T23:31:01+08:00

With five different plotlines over a prolonged course of sixty years in British Bengal and East Pakistan, Canadian-Bangladeshi writer Arif Anwar’s debut novel The Storm (2018) captures historical ethos through a series of micronarratives. An occupied Burma during WWII, a 1965 pre-Partition Calcutta, and a devastated Bhola after the 1970 cyclone — all these feature in this historiographic metafiction. Each character contributes as an independent narrator for the greater geopolitical mise-en-scènes of their times, rediscovering a forgotten past. This paper aims to identify the narrativised version of historicity that Anwar considers “authentic” in his novel. The findings propose a reciprocal commitment between narration and history on the basis of lived experiences or memories, phenomenological recurrences, and intersubjective surroundings.

Making of Nooses: Accentuating Vulnerability, Resilience, and Violence in K.R. Meera’s Hangwoman

2023-12-19T23:33:45+08:00

Contemporary descriptions of female embodiment are rife with images of violence, domination, and subjugation. Often bracketed as vulnerable, women are constantly subjected to patriarchal and gendered violence. Vulnerability, however, is an ontological condition of humanity and can yield multifarious responses – abuse, love, disarray, violence, generosity, and contempt – making human life precarious. This precariousness, when situated in the Indian context, exposes humans to varied practices of violence enmeshed in vicious systems of caste, class, region, and religion as demonstrated in K. R. Meera’s Hangwoman (2014). Owing to their centuries-old lineage of hangmen, Grddha Mullicks began making nooses right away in their mother’s wombs. Chetna, the first hangwoman in her family, is staged as the successor to her familial duty to the Nation only because of her brother’s tragic amputation of limbs. Subjected to a shrewd media lens and patriarchal manipulation, the struggle of constructing a new-feminist-styled ‘angel of the house’ depicted in the novel whirls poignant questions to corporeal vulnerability. This article scrutinises the societal treatment of vulnerability and explores physical, interpersonal, and epistemic violence haunting the book’s pages. It further adds nuances to the engagement of media and identity while examining the precarity of the novel’s characters.

Redundant Acronym Syndrome in Indonesian News Articles: A Corpus Analysis Approach

2023-12-19T23:36:46+08:00

The aims of the study are to explore the occurrence of Redundant Acronym Syndrome (RAS) in Indonesian news articles and examine its implications by employing corpus analysis approach. The main source of the data from the Indonesian news corpus, which consists of 150,466 articles from Indonesian news websites over a six-month period spanned from July 2015 to December 2015. The data analysis was conducted by using Antconc software version 4.02. The analysis reveals a systematic and recognisable structure in acronym formation, highlighting cultural or organisational conventions such as initial phoneme retention, retention of syllables + letters, and retention of syllables and syllables, and retention of initial phonemes and letters. The findings of this study revealed a total of 40 Redundant Acronym with 5730 occurrences identified in the Indonesian news corpus, covering various fields such as the name of football clubs, banks, political parties, educational institutions, government-related terms, and commonly used phrases. This research also discussed that that RAS in news articles can have both negative and positive impacts. It negatively impact readability by making repetitions and potentially confusing the reader. In contrast, RAS can also improve clarity by emphasising certain aspects or reinforcing associations in acronyms, so that readers can instantly recognise and understand them. The findings provided valuable insights for news writers and editors, emphasising the importance of a balance between readability and clarity in news articles.

Unearthing Ecological Identities: An Exploration of Place/Self in Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay's Aranyak

2023-12-19T23:40:51+08:00

The notion of place-attachment establishes a place-based identity, forging connectivity between place, psychology, and ecology. Exploring this tripartite connection, the paper conducts a comprehensive analysis of the novel Aranyak (1939) by acclaimed Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay. The paper demonstrates how an individual manifests place attachment, sense of self, and identity in relation to the forestscape of Purnia, Bhagalpur, and Labtulia. Therefore, incorporating Lawrence Buell’s idea of place attachment and Arne Naess’s concept of ecological self, the paper attempts to unveil a sense of self-embeddedness shaped by an individual’s lived experiences and attachments with the ecology of the forest. The essence of a place ecology retains its impression upon the subconscious of the central character, Satyacharan. His comprehension of Aranya or the forest stems from the mycelial attachment of his psyche with the psyche of the place. This cultivates a profound sense of belongingness, echoing the notion of Dasein or being in the world in relation to forest ecology, central to our ecocritical exploration.

Dalit Women as Outsider Within: A Standpoint Exploration

2023-12-19T23:44:15+08:00

Owing to the graded inequality inherent in Indian society, Dalit women lie at the bottom of the hierarchy with no power to execute. In short, one can say that they are “Dalit of Dalits.” The present paper looks at the challenges and exclusionary practices faced by the Dalit women with reference to the works of Bama’s Sangati (2005) and Baby Kamble’s The Prison We Broke (2008). Delving into the concepts of gender and caste, the paper aims to demonstrate how both writers portray the idea of the outsider within the identity of Dalit women. It will also deal with how this outsider within identity gives them a standpoint of their own. In its entirety, the paper highlights the challenges and haplessness of Dalit women because of their identity and their zealousness in fighting the oppressive forces.

An Overseas Chinese Author on Chineseness: A Study of Catherine Lim’s Novels

2023-12-21T09:20:44+08:00

The objectives of this documentary research are to study Catherine Lim’s concept of Chineseness in the Chinese diasporic context as well as to investigate the identity and existence of the ethnic culture of the Chinese diaspora in the Straits Settlement. This study is analyzed through Lim’s three novels: The Bondmaid (1995), The Teardrop Story Woman (1998), and The Song of Silver Frond (2003). All the novels present stories of the Straits Chinese or the Chinese diaspora in the Straits Settlement, the territories under the British occupation in the age of colonisation. The findings reveal that Lim’s cultural and social upbringing in Straits Chinese society helped mold her as a female diasporic Chinese. Straits Chinese society in Lim’s novels is one that adheres to Chinese beliefs and cultural norms as well as their cultural roots. However, Lim still reflects how the context of displacement from the motherland becomes an important factor to dilute the sense of Chineseness among the Straits Chinese. Moreover, Lim also interestingly presents the images of Chinese diasporic women in various dimensions in her novels.