Dhaka-born poet Mir Mahfuz Ali was shortlisted for the prestigious Picador Poetry Prize 2010. What made this one-time model and tandoori chef find meaning to his strife-torn life through poetry is the stuff that would tempt movie moguls to make millions from. Sunday MiD-DAY engaged this freedom child in plainspeak about poetry and politicians
Dhaka-born poet Mir Mahfuz Ali was shortlisted for the prestigious Picador Poetry Prize 2010. What made this one-time model and tandoori chef find meaning to his strife-torn life through poetry is the stuff that would tempt movie moguls to make millions from. Sunday MiD-DAY engaged this freedom child in plainspeak about poetry and politicians
When last Wednesday, Picador announced the 10-name shortlist for the Poetry Prize 2010, it included a 52-year-old poet from Bangladesh, who acts, dances and knows what it's like to be a model and tandoori chef in the United Kingdom. Mir Mahfuz Ali's poetry is stirring, rustic and laced with a realistic vibe.
"I did not choose it; circumstances did. The kitchen heat nearly cooked my brain," says Ali of his stint as a tandoori chef, in an email interview from London. As for modelling, it was his friend James Dawson who encouraged him. "He thought I had the face of a model. So I had a go. I was partially successful but I didn't quite like the ethics and the routine of that industry. Modelling went against a poet's sensitivity."u00a0u00a0u00a0
Ali moved to the UK as an adolescent. In fact, his rich, throaty whisper that audiences enjoy during poetry readings is thanks to a Bangladeshi policeman back home who in an attempt to silence the singing of anthems during a public anti-war demonstration in January 1973, shot him in the throat. Mir left for London that same year.
Fourteen-year-old Mir was abandoned by his relatives, leaving him with no choice but to find a job at a Bangladeshi restaurant. "Nobody wanted to hire me because I couldn't speak, and wheezed through a tube. I was too young, and looked ill," he says of his struggle with tracheotomy.
Being the son of freedom fighter Mir Mahboob Ali who edited several newspapers including the Bangladesh Times, was hardly a plus. "My relatives said I had asked for trouble, and got what I deserved."
Learning to cook and peel
A friend of his father offered him the restaurant job. "I was in shock. I had to peel onions, chop vegetables and meat, and clean toilets. I slept in a sitting room on an uncomfortable sofa, with one soiled bedsheet. In the first week, they paid me 50 pence. I told my boss I wanted to quit. He gave me a sounding but eventually agreed to pay me ufffd15 a week," remembers Mir, who later joined Essex University in 1991, and continued to work to pay the fees. In 1997, things changed for the better when he met James Dawson. Despite writing intermittently, Mir was too exhausted to produce anything good.
In 1998, he met with an accident while working at a pub, leaving him bedridden before he could get back on his feet after three years. "In 2000, my English teacher Sarah Snell sent me a leaflet, asking me to join Exiled Writers' Ink (EWI). That changed things forever."
When poetry found him
But Mir's first true brush with poetry was earlier, as a 13-year-old in strife-hit Bangladesh (then, East Pakistan). "I was war-wrecked and riddled with intense emotions, but unable to express it in words. I knew I'd go crazy if I didn't put my anguish on paper. One day, in late December 1971, I stitched up a few loose ledger papers and bound them into a notebook, sat by an unused well with a pencil in my mouth. I felt I was going to faint and fall into the well. Just then, words began to pour out like the monsoon rain. I was surprised because I never believed in God, and yet the moment felt like it was God-given."
Those were also the days when his father would read him Rabindranath Tagore and Jibananda Das. "The more I read other poets, the more I realised how great Tagore was."
Liberated but disillusioned
Eleven days from now, Bangladesh will celebrate Victory Day, a day that saw the end of the nine month-long Bangladesh Liberation War. Mir lived through the period of conflict, watching as his uncles and father plunged headlong into the freedom movement.
Midnight, Dhaka, March 25 1971 is a poem that emerges from first-hand experience. "It upsets me today to see how shamelessly religious and anti-Indian sentiments are used in Bangladeshi politics to achieve political and religious ambitions. Politicians in Bangladesh are as polluted as its rivers. My father died a broken man. His sacrifice was never recognised. I've washed my hands off Bangladesh," he says.
He doesn't visit Bangladesh often, a land he finds "repressive, chaotic".
"Not a single masterpiece has been written in Bangladesh since its birth. Journalists can't speak, writers can't write. My mother and father are gone. Nobody except my journalist brother, Plato appreciated my writing."
Eventually, Mir found a window of expression. He is an active member of EWI, which he joined in 2000. "I found a new home and felt secure with the right mix of writers and support. It was a revelation to see how many exiled writers Britain has."
Mir has been part of readings and performances at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and at several Refugee Week festivals. His poetry has appeared in London Magazine, Poetry London and Ambit, and he was also shortlisted for the New Writing Ventures Awards 2007.
The Picador Poetry prize will be announced in January 2011.
The Picador Poetry Prize 2010 recognises the best new, previously unpublished poetry in the UK. It is awarded for a representative selection of a poet's work, and not just a single poem. The winner (to be announced in January) will receive an advance and the collection will be edited by Don Paterson and subsequently published by Picador.
Midnight, Dhaka, 25 March 1971
I am a hardened camera clicking at midnight. I have caught it all ufffd the screeching tanks pounding the city under the massy heat, searchlights dicing the streets like bayonets. Kalashnikovs mowing down rickshaw pullers, vendor sellers, beggars on the pavements. I click on, despite the dry and bitter dust scratched on the lake-black water of my Nikon eye, at a Bedford truck waiting by the roadside, at two soldiers holding the dead by their hands and legs, throwing them into the back, hurling them one upon another until the floor is loaded to the sky's armpits. The corpses stare at our star's succulent whiteness with their arms flung out as if to bridge a nation. Their bodies shake when the lorry chugs. I click as the soldiers laugh at the billboard on the bulkhead:
GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU SIX MILLION DRUNK EVERY DAY.
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