A Haven Of Peace And Quiet

13/10/2024

Congratulations 🎉

“Within that white, all of those white things, I will breathe in the final breath you released.”
- the closing words from Han Kang’s 흰 (2016; ‘The White Book’, 2017)

In 흰 (2016; ‘The White Book’, 2017), Han Kang’s poetic style once again dominates. The book is an elegy dedicated to the person who could have been the narrative self’s elder sister, but who passed away only a couple of hours after birth. In a sequence of short notes, all concerning white objects, it is through this colour of grief that the work as a whole is associatively constructed. This renders it less a novel and more a kind of ‘secular prayer book’, as it has also been described. If, the narrator reasons, the imaginary sister had been allowed to live, she herself would not have been permitted to come into being. It is also in addressing the dead that the book reaches its final words.

작별하지 않는다 (‘We Do Not Part’) from 2021, is in terms of its imagery of pain closely connected to ‘The White Book’. The story unfolds in the shadow of a massacre that took place in the late 1940s on South Korea’s Jeju Island, where tens of thousands of people, among them children and the elderly, were shot on suspicion of being collaborators. The book portrays the shared mourning process undertaken by the narrator and her friend Inseon, who both, long after the event, bear with them the trauma associated with the disaster that has befallen their relatives. With imagery that is as precise as it is condensed, Han Kang not only conveys the power of the past over the present, but also, equally powerfully, traces the friends’ unyielding attempts to bring to light what has fallen into collective oblivion and transform their trauma into a joint art project, which lends the book its title. As much about the deepest form of friendship as it is about inherited pain, the book moves with great originality between the nightmarish images of the dream and the inclination of witness literature to speak the truth.

The 2024 Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded to the South Korean author Han Kang “for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”

Learn more about her literature: https://bit.ly/3Y0TL3o

13/10/2024

Thanks dear African Poetry Gaint for the certificate given to me.

09/09/2024

[Great -line]

08/09/2024

A Land Never Forgotten

In the depths and corner of my heart
Collection of griefs and pains like tear
Red like tears rolling down my cheeks
For the land I born and raised where.

In my dream the mind is filled like before
With the memory of love, you showered me
Or when I get up, I find nothing but absence
Start counting the day, you'll hug me again.

I don't regret wheather you hate me
I find solace in your heart and peace
Never think, I can forget you a second
Forever you remain alive in my heart.

© Shofiqure Rahman
08/09/2024

05/09/2024

05/09/2024

05/09/2024

Everlasting Echoes Of Arakan

Arakan is the land I born and raised
Where the sunsets fill the sky with warmth,
Where the fields carry the stories of our people,
And the wind brings back memories of my youth.

Your affection in my heart 'n' beauty
More the sun and the moon at night,
In my face, that casts massive gloom ,
Oh dear! How can I forget you ever.

Flawless smile from whom I learned
Warm love like mother and tenderness,
Shades and affection from whom I saw,
Oh dear! How can I forget you ever.

Your pretty nature everything within
Of birds sweety songs enter in my ears,
Like the first light of day touching the earth,
Oh dear! How can I forget you ever.

Beneath the blue and charming sky,
Where the mountains rise in quiet strength,
Where rivers create paths through the land,
And the horizon seems endless and full of promise.

Seeing the flowers in the green meadow,
Dancing and smiling with the melody of air
Makes me wild with joy and tears in eyes,
Oh dear! How can I forget you ever.

©Shofiqure Rahman
05/09/2024