During May and June 2002 I had the pleasurable, fascinating and
inspiring experience of working with a group of young people and a small group of adults from Leicester's Bangladesh Youth and Cultural Shomiti. I had been asked to lead and facilitate a short series of poetry workshops.
The adult group had members who had already published their poetry in
Bengali. One of the exercises we did involved taking one of their
existing poems (in English) and changing each of its words into synonyms, antonyms or related words - for example a line like the glistening stars sang could be changed into a dull moon groans. This process can give some very interesting new material to work with. It was fascinating to see this ‘translating’ process takes place with material that had already been translated from Bengali to English. There followed much enlightening discussion about the whole idea of translation. Between us we discovered ways, that were new to us, of thinking about the ‘poetic spaces’ that can occur between 2 different languages. All this only makes me regret even more my being only able to speak English, although simply imagining the possibilities a different language has for poetry has been most beneficial to my own work. I_d like to thank Bashera, Alauddin and Pravin for a most pleasant and enlightening poetic experience.
I was most struck by the enthusiasm and talent of the young people I
worked with. They had not been told at all before that they were going to be working with a poet. They turned up at BYCS one May morning expecting to receive their usual lesson in Bengali - instead they got me and poetry. At first they were a little bemused; I suspect they expected that soon they would be dissecting some poem in the same way they might have done at school. They were certainly surprised to find that after an hour or so they had all produced a lot of unusual writing of their own (stuff such as they had never written before), and they were having fun! We were all delighted toward the end of the workshops to realise, despite having not consciously planned it, just how much of their work was full of water (a substance of considerable stature in Bangladesh), and also just how much of their work connected and worked as one piece when read out all together.
The workshops culminated in a reading at Highfields Youth and Community Centre on stage, given by both the adult group and the young people as a contribution to ‘everybody’s Reading’. They also gave a repeat performance at New Walk Museums Leicester on 27th Oct 2002. This was in an event to mark the launch of Shomiti_s latest publication ‘Rabindranath Tagore Selected Songs Beyond Melody’- translated by Syed Mujibul Huq.
The young people put on quite a performance: someone reading a short poem, followed by someone else reading something longer, then a single line from someone else, and all of it flowing together. It came across as a stream of consciousness, played out through different young voices, connecting Bangladesh and England.
The audience and adult poets were amazed with this little band of young poets. People had not expected quite that amount of confidence and creativity. I was absolutely thrilled to have been involved with them. So my thanks to Abu, Ahsanul Salam, Salma, Samiul, Jaheedul and Arafath. And I hope you, the reader, enjoy as much as I have the following work. |
