The New Nation - Internet Edition

Tragic heroes of Shakespeare

Md. Ismail Hossain

William Shakespeare, the Bard of Avon, is the greatest dramatist in the world: He is famous because of his objectivity and having a deep insight into human nature. He has created a 'galaxy' of tragic heroes:

Among them Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear and Othello are the main. To depict the character of his tragic heroes he has followed the theory of Aristotle. According to Aristotle, "The hero of a tragedy should be a noble person but he falls from his prosperity to adversity only because of a certain flaw in his character. His fall will create pity and fear in us for his helplessness". Though Shakespeare has followed the theory of Aristotle, each of his heroes has individual characteristic features.

Macbeth was a man of high position who was a general of the army of Duncan. He was a heroic soldier whose noble qualities have won golden opinions from all sorts of people. His bravery was rewarded, by the King giving him the title "Thane of Cawdor." Even, Macbeth, "The bridegroom of Bellona", did not lack in the softness of heart.

He who was very loyal to the king loves also his wife very much. He was a man "full of the milk of human kindness"·. But soon he fell from that elevated position to that of a villain and traitor.

It was because of his high ambition, the flaw in his character. His craving for power made him lose all the noble qualities in him. So, he killed King Duncan who was in great safety sleeping in his (M) house. He murdered the guest breaking the time honoured ideal of hospitality. Thus he became the king of Scotland. He was swept on to destruction thus causing many lives to be wasted and the whole nation brought to anarchy, Being dragged into crime, he lost faith in man and became utterly distrustful.

But his realisation of his vices constantly caused a kind of pain in him. By his own word he revealed that he was suffering a living hell in the midst of fears. Since he had started his crime, he did not know any rest. After killing the king he experienced an acute mental conflict. In the final scene we find that acute mental suffering has made Macbeth's life meaningless when he said, " Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player". When Macbeth died we feel pity and fear for him because he was a brave and noble general but faced tragedy because of driving ambition.

King Lear is not an exception to Aristotle's theory. He had a flaw in his own character like all other tragic heroes of Shakespeare. It is his own whim of knowing how much his daughters loved him. The King knew very well how much his daughters loved him. Besides, he had already divided his kingdom into three equal portions with equal natural gifts for his three daughters.

But at the time of conferring these portions on his daughters, he wanted to know how his daughters loved him. How childish his desire was! Gonerill and Regan expressed their love for the king in the most flattering language but Cordelia, the youngest, could not be so pretentious like her elder sisters and she spoke the right, the truth that she loved him so much as he deserved.

The King also knew that she loved him most and he had decided to live with her in his old age.

Yet the true words failed to satisfy the moody king. In a state of anger, he deprived Cordelia of her share and even withdrew her filial love and duty. So, he failed to discern between the real and the unreal. As a result he had to suffer.

The dishonour he suffered at the hand of his own daughters, Goneril and Regan, is really heart rending.

It rends our heart but Goneril and Regan are so cruel that they drive away their father into the storm bare headed. The words he speaks to the storm strike us very much:

"Here I stand, your slave,

A poor, infirm, weak and deposed man".

Even, he goes mad. Finally, for the greed and cruelty of Regan and Goneril, he had to die with Cordelia. His death with Cordelia creates pity and fear in our mind.

Othello fell a victim to jealousy that brought his tragedy. He was a noble Moor in the service of Venetian state. He was a born soldier, a brave and noble able General who had distinguished himself by his deeds of valour. He was noble, frank, honest and brave.

There was no one else in Venice to match him as a conunander and General. So, the Duke of Venice put him in the charge of the defence of Cyprus.

But, this man of high quality misunderstood his loyal, naive and honest wife Desdemona because of lago's conspiracy lago, the ancient of Otello, told him that Desdemona had an illicit affair with Cassio, the Lieutenant of Othello. Othello is of so trustful and confiding nature that he believed lago. So, he was required to face the problem which demanded logical and calm thinking and a keen knowledge of human nature.

But, he did not have the ability. So, he suffered inwardly so acutely that he decided to kill Desdemona.

At last, he killed Desdemona and finally himself. It is clear that he acted rashly when instigated by the person whom he trusted absolutely. But, his tragic death rends our heart and for this reason he stirs in us a passion of mingled love and pity.

Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is a, great tragic hero of Shakespeare. We find him in gloomy state because he thinks over the death of his father.

After that the ghost of his father, informed him that he was killed by Claudius, the present king and uncle of Hamlet. It also suggested to take the revenge of his father's death. So, Hamlet had to do his filial duty but he could not overcome the indecision and hesitation of his mind.

So, he suffered much. He could not find rest for a moment because of his procrastination. He utters the great speech when it was unbearable to bear his suffering:

To be, or not to be: that is the question; Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a sea of troubles.

It is his heart rending crying. In the final scene he died facing the outcome of his tragedy. But, the death of such a noble hero creates pity and fear in us. To surri up, we should differentiate the tragic heroes of Shakespeare from each other though all of them possess the same characteristics of real tragic hero according to Aristotle. We may argue that the criminal activities of Macbeth diminish his tragic grandeur and like Hamlet, King Lear and Othello he is not a true tragic hero. But here we must remember that Macheth is the maturest product of Shakespeare and in this play he does not create an ideal hero who cannot be real human being. Rather he tries to make such a hero as to be found in every society of every time.

From this point of view, Shakespeare created tragic heroes or a character. But it may be said that Lear is different from other tragic heroes. He brought misery upon himself because of trifling matter, filial duty or love.

Between Othello and Hamlet, Othello has not the meditative or speculative' imagination of Hamlet but in the strictest sense of the word he is more poetic than Harnlet.

He is the greatest poet among the heroes of Shakespeare who could argue before the Duke on the way to win Desdemona's heart.

Indeed, he is the most romantic figure among Shakespeare's heroes. Emotion excites his imagination but it confuses and dulls his intellect. On this side, he is the very opposite of Hamlet. Hesitation is almost impossible to him like Hamlet. Though, all of the tragic heroes of Shakespeare are depicted according to the theory of Aristotle, they deserve individuality. Allardyce Nicol is quite just in his remark when he says regarding the tragic heroes of Shakespeare : "All his heroes', by their greatness, stand alone".

Let Nawab Salimullah be included in school textbooks

M.T.Hussain

Nawab Khawja Salimullah born in 1871 on the 7th June in Dhaka (then spelled Dacca) being the offspring of Nawab Ahsanullah in the illustrious Nawab family with silver spoon in his mouth and passed away quite mysteriously prematurely in 1915 January 16th at only 44 had a life of historic importance and heavy weight for the people of Bangladesh.

Having had the best Muslim and English education, he took not long to realize the misfortune of the people of this region along with the Muslims of the British Indian subcontinent. Worries he had in elevating from the miseries and misfortunes of the average people that he need not have had to care for being born into one of the richest families in the region, he left off soon not only his own job of the British colonial government of Deputy Magistrate but also similarly inspired a well educated British job holder Maulvi Fazlul Haq to quit his job as well and join works for liberation and emancipation of the people having had no leadership in the field to do the difficult task in the Indian British Empire, particularly in Bengal almost solely dominated by the high caste Hindus mainly based in Calcutta ( now Kolkata).

At only 35 he ventured to undertake a uphill task in recreating awareness lost by then for the step-motherly treatment of the Muslims by the British Raj through colonial oppression in forming and organizing the All India Muslim League having initial base at Dacca, the historic Muslim city though but by then nearly 250 years old and had already lost the past shine and glamour.

One may wonder that Nawab Salimullah alone all on his own borne all expenses of the 1955 member delegates and observers assembled in late December 1906 at Dacca from all over the Indian subcontinent including some from the princely states for founding of the All India Muslim League. The pioneering task had not only been conceived by him to maintain the new province of East Bengal and Assam created in late 1905 but also to raise the awareness level from backwardness and relieving out from century old frustration of all people in the region.

His philanthropy did not end in founding the Muslim League alone but went into many other human welfare areas including establishing Madrassahs, schools, Yatimkhanas, social welfare organizations etc. so much so that he died in huge debt.

He was failed by the Reactionaries of the high caste Hindu community

The new province that indicated some window of opportunity for the backward people of the region was bitterly opposed by the reactionaries based in Calcutta. He was thus failed by the reactionaries much superior in strength and supported by the older and mature Congress party than the newly established Muslim League in their annulment of the 1905 partition and doing away with the new province of East Bengal and Assam in about five years in 1911 thus once again relegating the millions of backward Muslims and other disadvantaged people of East Bengal and Assam to utter frustration.

Salimullah's defeat and frustration and of the Muslim League's inability in preserving the new province had a consolation prize by the British Government in making a promise to establish a residential university in Dacca that was though realized in 1921 not until six years of his passing away.

The other consolation and possibly the still bigger one, not seen during his life time but 32 years after was the re-emergence of the provincial entity lost in 1911, but in the different framework of independent Pakistan in 1947. For the Muslim League founded by Salimullah spearheaded the founding of the new country, possibly, not exactly foreseen in geographical terms by the Nawab when he initiated the Muslim League but realized in essence for uplift and welfare of the backward Muslims and other disadvantaged people of this region. The post 1971 independent Bangladesh is in fact what the idea had been in 1905 in the shape of a different entity of the province of East Bengal and Assam.

It is pity that the present progeny of Bangladesh hardly know that short of the struggle initiated by the Nawab 102 years ago in Dacca for upholding identity and entity of the people of the geographical area, there would have been nothing what is now known as Bangladesh. Instead it would have certainly been the integral part and parcel of the Kolkata based province of Bangla or Banga Pradesh of Indian union. Bangladesh could have independence in 1971 as because it could have had broken away from Pakistan with India's armed help. Who would come to help Bangladesh to become independent had it gone in 1947 as the integral part of the Indian Union following the end of the British rule in the sub-continent?

The Bangladesh progeny should be told and taught well that if there would be anyone to be placed as the fatherly figure of Bangladesh, it must only be Nawab Salimullah and none else. That is how the learning contents in school and college textbooks of this country should be planned and implemented in classroom situation without fail for setting the past history right.

Book Review

Madonna of the Rain (a poetry collection) by Rabiul Hasan. Rockford, Illinois: Rockford Writers Guild Press, 200B, pp. 6B. Price US $ J 5.95. Reviewed by Munir Muztaba Ali.

Does anyone like a fit of the blues? The answer is probably no, but we must admit that we all have a little bit of them in us and do not mind feeling melancholy once in a while, especially if the source of that melancholy is a good piece of literature with a tinge of dejection in it. Poet and storyteller Rabiul Hasan's (whose work is widely published in Bangladesh and the United States) first book of poetry in the English language, Madonna of the Rain, is imbued with notes of melancholia. Love is an enduring theme in his poems, but his love is an elusive love, love that is beyond his reach, love that will never be in reality, and that seems to make his life drift away to despair and desolateness. Hence, though Hasan does not seem to be altogether indifferent toward life, he does seem to be relishing the thought of after-life. These two important aspects, elusive love and the thought of after-life, are all pervasive in Hasan's poems, and they got superbly portrayed by a skilled poet who knows how to use the right word at the right place to evoke an emotion and stir a tragic feeling in the reader without necessarily showing any hamartia on the part of his persona.

In Hasan's title poem, "Madonna of the Rain", he seems to be excited about his lady love (his ma donnamy lady), " t and through the rain! I will walk straight to the other end of the hamlet! To visit MariaJme, who like an undinel Holds her water-filled breasts toward the invisible sun", but he knows her to be "like the dreams I have not dreamt" of realizing his love for her, although Marianne, having lacked a soul, seems to be waiting like an undine for a mortal to come and mate with her and give her a soul. In "After a Busy Week", Hasan writes, "She would call me, she would not call me. I She would come, she would not come. I Am I waiting for someone? Carmen, Carmen t ./ Sometimes I love this aloofness-this strange solitude." This vacillation between hope and despair is the upshot of the persona's many experiences of his love being elusive. In "I Am Drifting Away, Marianne", he writes, "I am rotten like moth-eaten apple, I And wasted, pining into the grave, you can seel I need you, call you, and cry for you: I Marianne, do you hear me?" The question seems be a rhetorical one, and we know the answer that Marialme won't show up. We can feel the pinch of despair here, and the despair gives way to the thought of after-life in "Leaving" where he writes, "The earth is leaving me. So are you. And I am/ Leaving all: flowers, woods, love, my roots-myself. I am leaving all. Hear me, Miriam. Hear me well.1 can die, you kindly bury me beneath the earth, I or hurl me quietly into that eternal black river in Hades."

Pastoral elements and natural sceneries abound in Hasan's poems since most of his poems are set in the U.S. country side, but we see mostly the gloomy side of nature. "Rain yesterday. Rain today. More rain tomorrow. I Roads dark, half-sunk. No grass. Grasses deep under streams", "Madonna of the Rain" opens with these lines, which divulge nature's pensive mood. "Madonna" sets the melancholic mood of many other poems; the melancholia only gets deeper. Even if we see the bright luslmess of nature here and there once in a while, it is immediately juxtaposed with its gloomy opposite. In his "On a Moonlit December Night Near Charleston, Mississippi", he seems to enjoy the view of night "Majestic fields for miles to see the earth straddled with stars, I And the moonlight break(s) out in the orchards by the Tallahatchie" river but his night is also "dipped into ashes of snow" when he swims through the "long, empty, winding road ending up nowhere" and hears the "distant thuds of landslides, the fringy, muffled snow". In "After the Rain", we see "Roads glaze-wind through the swollen fields", but everything around is "gray, vapor, I t the faces growl Thin as daylight fades toward the dimming west". In "December Snow", the snow is compared to "the velvet shroud thick on the ground" where the grasses are "stiff under the serge of white." Hasan's treatment of nature reminds us of two English romantic poets-Byron and Shelly. He successfully fuses the wild and stormy aspects of nature as seen in Byron with the shifting and changeful aspects as manifested in Shelley.

Hasan's feeling of melancholia reaches its pim1acle in poems such as "Depression" and "The Call" in which his detachment to earth transcends his attachment to it, and he seems to long for his final journey into eternity. In "Depression" he writes, "One or two stars know what I feel when I cross my fingers. I Some day I will jump into the river and drown". And the final call for that journey into eternity seems to have corne from his poem "The Call" in which he asks, "Who calls me from the lonely, dark place?" He knows the answer, so do we.

Does he respond to that call valiantly? Does he subscribe to the wisdom of Lord Buddha who says, "From attachment comes grief; from attachment comes fear. / Whoever is free from attaclm1ent knows neither grief nor fear?" Just find out. Hasan's Madolma of the Rain is an excellent read for the poetry lovers who like to feel, as the poet feels, a little bit of lugubrious at times. To purchase a copy, contact rabiulhasan@hotmail.com. Rabiul will be in Dhaka during the months of June, July, and August when a signed copy could be acquired.

(The reviewer is an associate professor of English at Southern University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, USA.)

WFUNA's review of the book 'O United Nations’

'O United Nations' is an interesting take on the creation of the United Nations, its role in the world and its future influence. Split into three parts, Sinha M.A. Sayeed offers a modern take on prosaic poetry delving into the many issues which shape the United Nation's agenda.

Sayeed delivers an honest portrayal of the problems that the United Nations faces in carrying out its work coupled with solutions and ideas for progress in the many areas of concern for the international community.

In the first part of the poem, Sayeed details the beginning of the United Nations and some of its global activities. Although a more factual take then the rest of the book, it is a valuable background to the rest which is much less pragmatic.

The second part of the book offers a critical take on the United Nation's actions and suggestions on how the United Nation's role in the world should be formulated. Calling on the United Nations to stick by its roots and original goals, Sayeed offers little leeway on the United Nation's current proceedings.

Concluding, the third part of poem ends with a call for Ban Ki-moon to fulfill the aforementioned goals and commit to his intentions as the Secretary-General. An interesting and informative view of the United Nations, 'O United Nations' is both eccentric and modern, an interesting twist to the often dry world of non-fiction literature.

We also have included a link for the book in our last issue of UN Connections which you can find on our website wfuna.org.

Poem

Own Shadow

Shaheen Rezvy

When I come back

You aside with depressed

Gradually the heat of sun increased

I was laughing in mind

And resolved

Your sleep is dead,

Dreams are sorrowful.

When I return at home

Earth lives lonely

the smell of wind becomes old

Dews hide their faces under the grass.

Oh! life, Oh love,

Unknown rains come again and again

Touch your wounded windows glass.

Lost postman knocking doors

And said; Earth is not lonely,

Summer is not gloomy

exude of a few flowers.

Just one time

I Look at past and

see a wounded shadow hunting his own body

over the face of sorrowful night

May also come back behind the shadow

and keep my eyes on lonely moon's eye

for hunting aboriginal dreams of love.

Undying utterances

Rafiq Hasan

From the undying realm comes this utterance, folks

Numbered are your quickly dissipating days.

Bells have tolled the hour of your departure.

Billions of years ago, on this earth-

Green and grassy and soft, sprang forth life

Once full of grains and fruits and flowers all over,

Now lies shattered - ruined by a monstrous biped.

Soon will you hear the claps of thunder,

The terrifying hiss from the horns of Israfil

A tumult to burst the seas and skies,

The stars to split asunder like popcorn.

The earth will abort all her treasures from her bowels

Lofty hills will flow through the air like cotton whiffs,

Shattered and shattered again, this earth will fall

Down to a heap of dust.

Children of Adam, have you not warned afore?

Hadn't Abraham told you of the undying realm?

Hadn't Jesus, Moses and the last messenger?

Hadn't the sages and poets shown you how

You could build heaven on the dusts of the earth?

Deaf were your ears to the eternal voice

As you heaped your montane sins on pristine earth.

Protect you did not women's dignity, trades you did

Like ordinary goods of the market for flesh;

Feeding wines and meat to the bodies,

Naught were your quest for the soul.

Translarion : Dr. Osman Gani

The rain of love

Ibrahim Mandal

Today drought in the brain

Drought in the body and mind.

In every part of the body.

In the moonlight in the planet and star.

In the severe sunshine there is barren lands.

Cropless fields are crying with empty feeling.

In severe dried fields and cultivated lands

No where there is green.

Only gray yellow.

There is mourn everywhere

In Iraq, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Palestine.

Where looks go blooming flowers destroying

Life is hell by droughting

Seldom crying.

Chatak Bird is looking up, waiting for rain.

Want rain, just for a drop of rain.

Today thousands, crores of lives are helpless.

Helpless the green forest, true beautiful.

Only "the rain" is the solution of this.

0, merciful Almighty' give "the rain"

The "rain of love"

History

Delwar Hasan

Independence of Bangladesh in seventy-one

War fought also at earlier stage,

India, Pakistan in forty-seven two-parted,

Kamaljan of Kazla village

In sixty years what she had to get?

Humans being killed in Nandigram

Arunachal burning in drought,

Bangladesh people in groups

In waters of flood see float.

Monga is still in Gangachara

Scarcity in villages,

Autocracy in Pakistan

To kill people camouflages.

Earned India when independence

Hindu-Muslims flew from home,

Thirty lakh lives sacrificed

For Bangladesh's freedom.

Husband-less Kamaljan

Beg and run life-span.

Translation: Main Uddin Ahmed