This Valley of Death is Not My Country

The father who fears identifying his child’s corpse,

I despise him—

The brother who remains shamelessly indifferent,

I despise him—

The teacher, intellectual, poet, and clerk

Who do not demand justice for this murder in public,

I despise them—

Eight bodies

Lie sprawled across the path of consciousness.

I am losing my sanity.

Eight pairs of open eyes watch me in my sleep.

I scream.

They call to me at odd hours, in gardens, always.

I will go mad.

I will commit suicide.

I will do whatever I want.

Now is the time to write poetry—

On proclamations, on walls with stencils,

With my own blood, tears, and bones, collaged together,

Now is the time to write poetry.

In the sharpest agony, with torn mouths,

Face-to-face with terror, under the blinding headlights of a van,

With steady gaze,

Now is the time to hurl poetry.

Denying everything—the ’38 and all else the killers claim—

Now is the time to recite poetry,

In lock-up cells, in frigid chambers,

Under the flickering light of forensic investigations,

In courts controlled by murderers,

In institutions of false education,

Within the machinery of exploitation and fear,

In the chests of military and civilian authorities—

Let the protest of poetry resound.

Poets of Bangladesh,

Be prepared like Lorca,

For the day when bodies vanish after strangulation, stitched by bullets from Sten guns.

Even so, poetry must encircle the rural heartlands,

And surround the cities with its power.

This valley of death is not my country.

This executioner’s stage of triumph is not my country.

This vast cremation ground is not my country.

This blood-soaked slaughterhouse is not my country.

I will reclaim my country.

I will pull it close to my chest—misty evenings, dew-drenched kashta fields, floating villages.

I will embrace my body with fireflies, hills upon hills alive with crops, fairy-tale flowers, women, rivers.

For every martyr, I will name a star as I wish.

I will summon ponds shimmering in sunlight and shadow, their surfaces like fish eyes.

I will bring back love—from which I’ve been exiled light-years away since birth—

To stand beside me on the day of revolutionary celebration.

A thousand watts of light in my eyes during endless interrogations—

I reject it.

Needles under fingernails, chunks of ice pressed into wounds—

I reject it.

Feet tied and hung upside down until blood drips from the nose—

I reject it.

Boots stomping on lips, burning matches searing flesh, wounds doused with alcohol—

I reject it.

Naked bodies subjected to electric shocks, vile sexual abuse sold as entertainment—

I reject it.

Beaten to death, skulls cracked with revolver butts, bullets fired into corpses—

I reject it.

Poetry accepts no chains.

Poetry is armed, poetry is free, poetry is fearless.

Look, Mayakovsky, Hikmet, Neruda, Aragon, Eluard—

We have not let your poetry falter.

Instead, across the entire nation, an attempt to write a new epic unfolds.

All ornaments are being crafted in guerrilla rhythms.

Let the drums roar!

Villages of indigenous tribes like coral islands,

Fields red with blood under the blue sky,

The Titas River foaming with venomous snake poison,

Kuchila thirsting with toxic death,

The sun blazing like a blind Gandiva bowstring,

Arrows sharp and deadliest—

War axes, spears, swords flashing in tribal uprisings,

Roads reclaimed by char lands,

Bloodshot eyes of tribal totems marching to the beat of war drums.

Guns, sickles, machetes, and heaps of courage—

Such courage that knows no fear.

There is more: cranes, bulldozers with jagged teeth parading through forests,

Moving dynamos, turbines, lathes, engines,

Methane collapsing coal mines, hard as diamonds in the dark,

Miraculous steel hammers,

Thousands of hands raised toward the skies of dockyards, mills, and furnaces.

No longer do I fear.

How strange unfamiliar faces look when gripped by fear,

When I know death is nothing without love.

If you kill me,

I will scatter as flames in every earthen lamp of Bengal.

I cannot be destroyed.

Year after year, I will return from the soil as green hope.

I cannot be destroyed.

I will remain in joy, in sorrow, in childbirth, in funerals—

As long as Bangladesh exists,

As long as humanity exists.