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The last laugh

Rubana Huq
He taught Romantic poetry at the Dhaka University, got his doctorate degree from Indiana, worked at Claflin University in South Carolina, had three books of poems published by Writers Workshop in Kolkata. That is all I know of him. After all, 1 had met him only through his poems.
Syed Khwaja Moinul Hassan's first Writers Workshop volume of verse. Inner Edge, was in 1987. The book is dedicated to an 'Estella', his "Gateway to Xanadu". The book’s introduction is by Margaret Moan Rowe, Graduate Studies director in the English department and Hassan's dissertation supervisor. She credits him as a poet having an "active vision” with which he honoured his readers.
Hassan's vision had a clarity that could only breed hurt. No ‘TajmahaT: "the myth of a moth-eaten civilization" bound him; no Partition set him free:
“I have always been taken for somebody else
At Allahabad, right after the War,
They wouldn't let me in...
At Multan they wouldn't finalise a deal
Taking me for somebody else...
For how long can one afford to lose himself
Be taken for somebody else,
Rendered nationless on pretended realities..."
Hassan's second collection of verse, Ashes and Sparks, published by Writers Workshop in 1989, has a foreword by Professor Jacob H. Adler at Harvard University - who did mistakenly call Hassan an Indian and appreciated his poem 'Pakistan':
"My heart bled and I could not see
By raising walls how a people could be free.”
A second introduction in the book is by Professor Timothy A. Brennan,Columbia University, who compared Hassan to the young Brecht: Some I am told eat to live, some live to eat/and some I haye , seen eat the living."
Hassan s third WW book, published in 2003, is a collection of his poems from his two earlier WW books plus selections from Between Barbed Wires (Provincial Books, Dhaka, 1977), Burning the Olive Branch /Ankur Prakashani, 1995). This book is dedicated to his wife, Labiba, and three children who have just suffered the severest of blows.
While his family and friends will have memories to hold on to, readers like me will accidentally and occasionally read him, cherish him, and know that the poet at the end indeed had The last Laugh:
"He was a deserter running away
From a war he could no longer believe
Into a neutral country
But there was none,
Now he could not speak even if he wanted to
Nails all over his tongue
Made words heavy.
Sick of telling the truth
Afraid of fighting
He dies in a second crossover.”
( The last Laugh : Ashes and Sparks, 1989)
Rubana Huq is a poet and researcher at Writers Workshop. Kolkata