I Remember Abbu by Humayun Azad: book review

I Remember Abbu (1989, English edition 2019) is set in Bangladesh in 1971.

This is partly the history of the birth of Bangladesh as a county: before 1947 as part of India; between 1947-1971 as part of East Pakistan; and after 1971 as independent Bangladesh. It is mainly about Abbu, the narrator’s father.

In 1971, the narrator is a two-year-old girl child, her father’s daughter – the one he calls fool, aged one, genius, thou, son, and her highness. Writing as an adult in 1987, she does not remember Abbu. She looks at the beautiful handwriting of his diary on the day she was born – and subsequently as he writes about the birth of Bangladesh.

Her father’s diaries tell of the deaths, the jubilation at Bangla’s declaration of freedom, and the birth of a new flag ‘entirely green, with a bright red sun in the center’ flying in celebration at the University of Dhaka where he was a professor. He writes of the acts of revolution and of people fleeing Dhaka during the war of independence from Pakistan.

The narrator writes of her father, of learning to walk and talk and all the things she learns from him: mostly his quiet dignified determination.

Then there is a long, long period of absence. Her father is gone. He has gone to war.

Bengali author Humayun Azad (1947-2004) died in Munich, Germany, in 2004. This is the first time his book has been translated into English. The translation is by his son, Ananya Azad. It is actually a novella of 127 pages: brief and impactful. It’s a beautiful book. I loved it from its first page, its first sentence.

MARTINA NICOLLSis an international aid and development consultant, and the authorof:- Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom(2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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