I will never forget the day I met Syed Shamsul Haq at his residence. It was a warm morning in August 2013 and my heart was full of anticipation. I felt like I was going to see the largest tree I had ever seen. After all, here was the polymath whose equal Bangla literature had not seen in ages. He wrote magical verse plays, straight-from-the-heart poems and novels and stories about love and honour, pity and pride, compassion and sacrifice and peace and war.
With words he could take the dark out of the night as well as paint the daytime black. His deepened awareness of his time in the depiction of the human condition won him every major literary award of the country. He was analysed, categorised, defined, dissected, detected, inspected, and even rejected by a few, but never completely figured out.
I asked him why he wrote. There was a valid reason behind this seemingly simplistic question. Great writers have different motivations for writing. Orwell identified four explicit motives: sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. Hemingway's aim was to put down on paper what he saw and what he felt in the best and simplest way. Writing was 'the supreme solace' to Somerset Maugham.
At first Syed Haq looked at me as if to see if I understood the meaning of the question. Then in his sonorous voice he said, “I write for myself. I have things to say. I respond to my surroundings and my time. Words come to me. They come to me in the form of a poem, a story, a play or a novel. If I don't write, I don't feel well. If you like it, keep it in your heart. If you don't, forgive me. I will still go on.”
Why should we read poems at all? I wasn't prepared for his reply which came in the form of a counter question. “What difference would it make if newspapers stopped publishing poetry for six months? Will people march to the streets and demand the return of poetry?” he said casually, sipping from a cup of coffee. “Once in Chandrima Uddyan I saw a boy reciting a poem of mine while a girl sat transfixed listening to him. That's the power of poetry. It can bring two people together.”
I wasn't satisfied with the answer. I wondered if that's all there is to poetry. Aren't poems like love, expressive of something greater and yet mysterious? Then he gave me the answer I was expecting. “It gives shape to your experience and unformulated words. It gives you wings to fly. You understand yourself and the world a little better. Or, you get another perspective of looking at things.”
Did he think poets were becoming silent? “I do not think so,” he said in an unswerving tone. “Poets have always been in the centre stage in Africa and Latin America. And it is very much so in Bangladesh as well. They are always in the front line of protests against social injustice. One example is the national poetry festival where poets share their political opinions and views loudly defying the softness that is often labeled to them. Now you can say that a great voice in poetry is not emerging. You cannot order a great poet from a tailor shop. You have to wait.”
Now with him gone, who knows how long we will have to wait for another one like him.
His timeless work—much has been written and talked about them in newspapers and the electronic media—has made him immortal. But his greatest strength probably lay in the immense faith he put in humanity. The Liberation War remained a central theme of his plays, novels and poems. “In every conflict we see some people siding with the oppressors. But I know that people will choose the right path once again. I say this with a conviction that comes not from my imagination but from history.”
Syed Shamsul Haq walked taller than many of us. That's because he left no room in his heart for anything but the old verities of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any work of art is ephemeral and doomed. Even cancer could not kill his desire to express himself. He still had a lot __more to say. “I am in great spirit. I am writing,” he said over phone a few days ago, from his hospital bed. He, in fact, finished translating 'Hamlet' while receiving treatment in London.
After being diagnosed with cancer, Syed Haq went there for treatment in April but returned in September to spend the rest of his life in his beloved country. His mother is long gone but must be immensely proud of his son.
So is his country, a higher mother.
The writer is a member of the Editorial Team at The Daily Star.