Kaiser Haq: A Bangladeshi English Poet Writing Dhaka Inside Out

Abstract

This paper seeks to locate Kaiser Haq's poetry in the spatiality and temporality of Dhaka, the capital city of Bangladesh. Kaiser Haq, the foremost Bangladeshi English poet, was born and brought up in Dhaka and saw the rise of this capital city from a polis to a metropolis. Hence the city Dhaka, both as setting and subject matter, is firmly grounded in his whole corpus of poetry written during his long almost sixty years career as a poet. To his longtime Dhaka University colleague Alam (2007), Kaiser Haq's poems are "immersed in the landscape and cityscape of Bangladesh/ Dhaka. "The poetic persona that is often seen in his poems is a city dweller, more specifically an inhabitant of Dhaka who is fraught with the aspirations, desires, frustrations, loneliness and ennui of an urban man. Like a city flaneur, this persona is a ubiquitous observer and explorer of the mystery of Dhaka. In this way, like Baudelaire's Paris, Eliot's London or Ezekiel's Bombay, Dhaka is the epicenter of Kaiser Haq's personal and poetic self. This paper is based on the critical analysis of Kaiser Haq's representative poems on Dhaka. Here attempts will be made to examine these poems to discover the Dhakaite sensibility present in them.