Bangladeshi-American writer Iffat Nawaz’s debut novel Shurjo’s Clan is a personal history shot through with magic realism, one where the real world and the otherworldly collide and entwine to give us an evocative exploration of grief, loss, displacement and identity. For some, grief and the horror of the past prove to be all-consuming — they can run, but can never hide from it — while for some others, the journey, though freighted with lingering darkness and trauma, may end in redemption and light.
Bangladesh’s war of liberation in 1971, when the country came into being, hangs like a pall over the novel. Shurjomukhi, the story’s protagonist, wasn’t born then, but that is when her two freedom-fighter uncles, Shoku and Bhiku, were shot dead in one of the many massacres that preceded the birth of the new nation. The death of the two brothers overwhelms the family. But one evening they come back from their spirit world and join their parents, brother Babu and his wife Bela at the dinner table in their house in Dhaka. And from then on, the family’s evenings become a joyous gathering of the living and the dead.
Behind the earthly curtain
Shurjomukhi, which means sunflower in Bangla, grows up between these two worlds — or the “Known” and the “Unknown”, as the family calls them. In the “Known” world there is daylight and school, where she is often taunted because her family does not have their roots in this land. Shurjo’s grandparents came from Calcutta to what became East Pakistan after the subcontinent’s Partition in 1947.
In the “Unknown” realm, though, there is comfort and conviviality, and the joy of togetherness. Shurjo swings between the two worlds, and despite her sun-favouring name, she prefers her family’s surreal evensong, when her two departed uncles come by and so does her grandmother Shantori, who committed suicide when her mother, Bela, was an infant.
Shurjo’s unusual home life comes to an end when her father decides to take his wife and daughter and emigrate to the U.S. Nawaz does not explain immediately why Babu makes the drastic move. But we slowly realise that perhaps he felt that the presence of his spectral brothers was keeping alive his psychological wounds over their violent end — he is the one who found their bodies and buried them. He also wanted Shurjo to grow up free from the inherited sorrow, and their betwixt and between existence in Dhaka.
Shurjo’s Clan
₹599
But though Shurjo and Bela settle into their new American life with ease, Babu continues to be haunted by whispers from the past. They eat into his soul — his mournings and yearnings, his guilt at leaving his homeland, his martyred brothers, his bereft parents, and most of all, his overwhelming feeling of a colossal sense of loss at multiple levels. It is finally left to Shurjo to realise that the ghosts from the past need never be laid to rest; you just need to make your peace with them.
Focus on the unspoken
The novel’s autobiographical elements are obvious, as the trajectory of Nawaz’s own life is similar to that of her protagonist. But the author refrains from making this into yet another immigrant experience memoir. Instead, Shurjo’s Clan is almost entirely focused on the family’s unspoken, unassimilated grief, their disjointedness from each other but a reflection of the chasm that seems to separate them from their true moorings. However, that often makes the story seem too folded around itself, as if it exists almost entirely insulated from its backdrop, be it in Dhaka or in the U.S.
And there are times when Nawaz picks at the scab of her themes of grief, loss and the underlying search for a reconciliation with the past with such obsessive repetitiveness that she ends up introducing a sort of fuzzy monotony into her work.
That said, there is a sense of magic in Shurjo’s Clan. Nawaz has an engaging writing style, lyrical and lambent, and this is an author to watch out for.
The reviewer is a journalist and author.
