nwasianweekly.com
Jan. 19, 2008

‘A Golden Age’ worth its weight in gold

By Stacy Nguyen
Northwest Asian Weekly

People see something worthwhile in the act of reading versus watching movies or playing video games, even though all of the aforementioned activities are the same in the sense that they all contain some sort of narrative and plot. We aren’t proud when our children spend eight hours in front of the TV; some of us actually consider video games the main source of degradation and violence in our society.

However, we are very proud to tell our friends when our kid reads books — voluntarily — outside school. We even make it our New Year’s resolution to read more. Yet, what is it that differentiates a book that contains wartime violence from a video game where the hero kills with machine guns, for the love of his country?

In Tahmima Anam’s debut novel, “A Golden Age,” she writes the history of a war that many of us are unaware of. “A Golden Age” is a war novel with a woman, Rehana, as its protagonist. She is a widowed mother of two. Having briefly lost her two children early on in their lives, she is fiercely protective of them, a trait that becomes very important when East Pakistan declares independence from Pakistan and calls itself Bangladesh, country of the Bengal people. She is eventually separated from her children, but Rehana still manages to do everything in her power to keep her children safe in the midst of violence, genocide and guerilla warfare.
There is no simple way to summarize this novel because it can be many things. It can be a novel about how self-definitions of one’s identity create opposing sides in war. It can also be a novel that explores the complexity of what it means to be a patriot. But what is probably the most valuable summary of the novel is that it is a story about a mother’s conflicted and desperate love — it is a story about her guilt and atonement, and of the unconditional nature of her devotion to her children.

With the awareness that there are not a lot of, if any, English-language novels out there on Bangladesh’s independence, Anam is brave and makes no allowances in her writing. She doesn’t fall into the annoying trap that many other authors do when writing about another culture — she doesn’t over-explain. When terms and customs of different cultures become over-explained to an American reader, the novel’s audience is essentially an ignorant reader, which in turn makes it all too easy to establish the new culture as the “other,” weird, not-yet-accepted culture. In the end, we learn nothing. We are happy that we aren’t weird. We are assured of our superiority.

Yet in Anam’s novel, straight from the first paragraph, we are bombarded with names and words in another language. They are never differentiated with italics, and they are never defined. It is as if she is telling us that this is your new world now—not a supplement or a comparison—but this is it. Oh, you don’t know why East Pakistan broke away and declared independence? You should.

Anam doesn’t cater to ignorance. Rather she expects us to already know about Islam, Hinduism, Karl Marx and Che Guevara in order to understand their significance in this novel. We either come in with an incomplete knowledge and a desire to know more, or we stay in our own dim purgatory and feel ashamed that we are not more aware of places outside our immediate microcosm. And if we care enough, some things require no explanation or definitions. Some concepts are just universal, such as the oftentimes illogical love of a mother for her children.

Violence is not frivolous and empty in our stories when it has a purpose. In video games, it may be a bit stupid. In Anam’s novel, the violence and brutal awareness of genocide is not just some cautionary tragedy — it’s a detailed reality. And this is what differentiates really great books from TV, games and not-so-great books.

“A Golden Age: A Novel,” by Tahmima Anam. HarperCollins, Jan. 8, 2008. $24.95.

Tahmima Anam reads at Elliott Bay Book Co. Jan. 22 at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.elliottbaybook.com.

Stacy Nguyen can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.

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