Where Do I Belong

Rummana’s writing is thoughtful, heartfelt and encompassing of ever-widening experiences and a deepening knowledge of the human condition. This volume, Where Do I Belong, takes the reader on a journey that involves a thematic stream stretching from the shores of the Padma to Lake Ontario. There is nostalgia and longing in such a journey, brought out in such pieces as ‘Hot Apple Fritters and Hot Roshogollas’, a prose meditation on the manner in which Canadian apple fritters evoke the earlier experienced pleasures of roshogollas from a sweet shop in Noakhali, Bangladesh, and the shores of Lake Ontario conjure up early layers of the Padma, Meghna and Jamuna, while listening to jazz resonates with the earlier folk music of Bengal.

The imagery in ‘Radhachura Kathalchapa and Bogainvillea’ contrasts the snow and frost of an adopted northern country (admittedly along with the compensating cherry blossoms of spring and autumn colours) with the warmth and breathtaking beauty of the radhachuras at dawn in a ‘long forgotten ethereal unbelievable bliss of my birthplace’—the only place where it is possible to have total relaxation.

Themes of displacement, discrimination, oppression and the violence of war are worked out in cultural specificity in such poems as ‘Blood Road’ ‘Solitary confinement’ and ‘The darkness of the night pulled her’. Others such as ‘The rat race’, ‘From captivity to captivity’ and ‘Wrong address’ concern the universal human condition and struggles that transcends race, colour and linguistic differences.