![]() The initial one or two poems have now evolved into a much longer sequence. "In the course of researching these women, I began to wonder what a birangona might say if asked about her life as a sex slave years after the liberation of Bangladesh. I continue to be stunned by how little discussion there seems to be about what surely is a devastating war crime not dissimilar from what happened to the comfort women in Korea during World War ii. Though I thought I was familiar with the War of Independence and its aftermath, I had never heard about these women before. "My interest in this landscape collided with learning about these women, the birangona, a few years ago at a panel of South Asian writers reading from their work. On the other hand, the Bangladeshi landscape and its people continue to be both beautiful and strong-willed. On one hand, it is a young, third world country struggling with natural disaster and socio-economic strife. I have always marveled at the complexities of the culture there. I"ve also been working on a longer poem about my childhood and adolescence that is interwoven with passages about Mata Hari"s life."Ībout "from Interview with a Birangona," Tarfia Faizullah writes: "My family is originally from Bangladesh, and my parents gave me the rare gift of taking me to Bangladesh almost every year since I was a child for sometimes three months at a time. "Postcards to the Other Brown Girl in My Weight Lifting Class," "To the Bangladeshi Cab Driver in San Francisco" and "Telegram to Auntie Neelam at Zahra Salon" are example titles. She"s currently working, she says, "on a loose sequence of epistolary poems to different South Asian figures one might encounter in day-to-day situations. She was recently a recipient of the Academy of American Poets University & College Prize. ![]() "There," she says, "I was fortunate enough to have been part of a thriving, supportive community composed of both peers and faculty members, particularly David Wojahn, Gregory Donovan, and Claudia Emerson, who taught two classes there as a visiting professor."įaizullah"s poems have recently appeared in The Southern Review, and are forthcoming in Nimrod, Bellingham Review, Notre Dame Review, and Copper Nickel. "I was a pretty good student," she says, "though easily convinced by fat novels to neglect my schoolwork." A rigorous humanities education at the University of Texas at Austin led her to graduate work at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she recently completed her M.F.A. Later, in college, I read this quote by Gunter Kunert in Stephen Dunn"s memoir Walking Light: "That"s why I write: to bear the world as it crumbles." That struck an incredible chord with me."įaizullah was educated at Trinity School of Midland, an Episcopalian private school, from the time she was five years old until she graduated high school. I used to copy poems I had read in volumes of Encyclopaedia Britannica for Kids into my journal. It was through that act of immersion in someone else"s attempt to describe the world that I felt a strong compulsion to do the same. I think it was reading that ultimately led me to writing. I wrote as a child, both poems and short stories. I also avidly read everything by Madeleine L"Engle, Cynthia Voigt, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, to name a few. "My father often had Highlights magazine in the waiting room of his clinic," she says, "which I read from cover to cover. The daughter of a doctor with a private practice that her mother manages, Faizullah"s early love of reading started close to home. Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1980, and raised in Midland, Texas, by parents who had immigrated to the United States from Bangladesh in 1978. Tarfia Faizullah for her poem "from Interview with a Birangona" in Winter 2008-09, edited by Jean Valentine. The 2009 Cohen Awards for work published in Ploughshares in 2008, Volume 34, go to Tarfia Faizullah and Steven Schwartz. Finalists are nominated by staff editors, and the winners-each of whom receives a cash prize of $600-are selected by our advisory editors. Cohen Awards Each year, we honor the best poem and short story published in Ploughshares with the Cohen Awards, which are wholly sponsored by our longtime patrons Denise and Mel Cohen. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |