Five Faces of Eve by Rumana Siddique; Dhaka: Writers.ink; 2007; pp. 80; Tk. 400

Five Faces of Eve is a collection of poems by Rumana Siddique, who teaches in the English department of Dhaka University. The book's blurb informs us that the poems “have been written over a span of twenty-five years.” They have been arranged in the volume in five sections, beginning with 'The Girl', then going through 'The Lover', 'The Wife', 'The Mother' and lastly, 'The Woman', thus to an extent, but not wholly, sequentially depicting the multiple roles that women's lives evolve through.

The blurb, though, is confusing in a couple of ways. It pronounces that “Women's art, whether literature or painting, is a means of sharing their experiences with the world” which begs the question: what does art by men (or even those who claim to be in between the two 'privileged' genders in our age) represent, and is art's function determined by gender. Equally, it goes on to inform us that “the volume aspires for a collective voice by drawing lines from women poets of different countries and ages.. .which is complemented by paintings of women artists from Bangladesh”. And indeed while the paintings reproduced at the beginning of each section are top drawer, and make for an unusual effect in a book of poems, one notes that among the “lines drawn” from such convent school staples as Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, there are also a couple of males, and showy ones at that, with their bogs and fens and sprung rhythm: Milton and Marvell.

Going through most of the poems is a genuinely pleasant experience, since Rumana Siddique has staked a definite claim to a certain expanse of a Bengali woman's (but one whose childhood was spent abroad, in East and West Africa and England) experience. Though she crafts her poems from the familiar raw material of a woman's life, with the poems abounding with references to rings, relatives, 'salty fears', 'letter of passion', miscarriages, 'contagious giggles', bangles, motherhood, cold waters and hot skillets, etc., and speaks in everyday tones, Rumana is far less a poet of the moment than how that particular moment imprints itself on her mind. The poems provide less a view than the angle of the view, the portrayal--an unveiling if you like--of a consciousness comfortable with its habitat:

The conversation meanders

As conversations do

From the general to the me and you In between shared parathas Sugar-free coffee and laughter She ponders, “Is there really No happily ever after?”

Or:

I love cupping my coffee mug

Close to my face

Looking at its colour

Feeling warmth, savouring smell Intoxicating fumes, wafting up. I'm addicted to coffee

Overwhelmingly so

But you?

I guess I just didn't know.

Here the easy, unpretentious rhythms of the short sentences (the lines coinciding firmly with the sentence) calmly chiming in with the movement of the thoughts reflect a woman registering Dhaka in an uncomplex way, with the steadiness of a

woman of a certain class, diction, upbringing and manners. Even when she writes:

Reds of rage and passion

Blacks of death and depression Greens of innocence and envy Whites of purity and fear.

no particular feeling of strain, no sense of unease is produced in the reader, though the “over-permeable belles” in referring to present-day English lasses (in the poem 'Twenty Years On') may make some readers wince. Rumana is really a poet of equanimity and ease, whose better poems confidently reflect a small dance of light and shadow, of the interplay of everyday matter and sensibility. Even in the three poems where she is critical about men (as faithless lovers, as chauvinists and macho bipeds) the poems' temperatures do not rise above a certain level and the poetic register remains unruffled. In the poems where she departs from her usual form, as in the concrete poems, the quality is uneven, and at times unconvincing.

Given our local constraints, the production standards of writers.ink publications are demonstrably high. A distinct pleasure in this volume was seeing “complemented”--in the blurb quoted in the beginning paragraph of this review--correctly spelled, a true rarity in Dhaka, where in its myriad English language productions it's always 'its', 'complimented' slips in as 'complemented' and vice versa, and 'lose' eternally weighted down with the extra vowel as 'loose'.

Farhad Ahmed is a free-lance writer/translator.