Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s Poems Symbolize How Quietude Becomes More Eloquent Than Sonority

 

Poet, translator and pedagogue Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is back once again with another cluster of mind-blowing poems put together in a compilation titled “On The Other Side of Silence”. This poetry collection is rather difficult to review, something like a young lady with surpassing beauty whose glamour is hard to describe. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam has added a number of quotations from different authors and bards from ancient Turkish literature to contemporary western creative schools which makes the book so compact and illusory that I was initially puzzled to figure out wherefrom to start.

The crux of the book’s title is located in the word “silence”. Mystic philosopher Mawlana Jalal Uddin Rumi once said “Silence is the language of God. Everything else is its poor translation”. This maxim from a perennial think-stock like Jalal Uddin Rumi speaks out volumes of cogitations on the glory and astuteness of silence. Ancient Persian theologian Sheikh Saadi once said “One who cannot penetrate the meaning of your silence, won’t be able to interpret your verbal expressions either”. When I look at these axiomatic things said by Jalal Uddin Rumi and Sheikh Saadi, I find it rather obligatory to excavate the bedrocks of Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poems to illuminate myself with the implication of silence that the poet offers in this book which resembles Olympian fables in a versified form.

Let me start off with a few lines from the poem “The Central Jail of Silence” which bears a stunning reflection of Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s power to juggle with metaphors and imagery. The poet has put silence inside prison with the words “You don’t pretend as you know how they set fire on trains of thought, on the asylum of ontologies”. We first got introduced to the term “ontology” while reading metaphysical poetry long back in university classrooms. The application of this word putting it in close accompaniment with another few evocative epistles like “asylum” and “train” catapults us on to the ravaged maps of some countries devastated with war and screams from ordinary masses. Carrying along an Ivory Tower mindset is too big a luxury right at this moment while bombs, missiles and gunshots are taking away tender lives of men, women and children in Ukraine, Israel, Yemen, South Sudan and another few countries. The silent woes that affect Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s heart are illustrated movingly in the above lines.

Simultaneously, silence is sometimes imposed on freedom of expression by authoritarian rulers. The voice of media professionals and newspapers are at times strangulated by tyrants. History abounds with such instances.

Another phrase “The disappearance of the rainbow” in the same poem calls back to my mind the resplendent English pararomantic poet William Blake. Rainbows are beautiful things that make nature around us colourful and relishable but when rainbows vanish, only clouds and darkness dominate the desolate horizon. A sad tune jingles in these words which in one way or another get into a bond with the idea of loss of innocence in William Blake’s poetry from my plain and neophytical viewpoint. I could dare to evaluate rock-solid poet Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poems in so cosmic terms leaning against the template of deconstruction which enables readers to infer or work out meanings of texts standing on their own thinking turf. Two antonymous words “calmness” and “chaotic” at the closure of this poem strikingly put a theatrical end to the poem “The Central Jail of Silence”.

Another poem headlined “A City of Cynics” allegorically alludes to different sorts of degeneration taking place around us. The words “Misrule and vice screech from wires and veins making the populace stare at void” need to be noted in this context. The hollowness and the decline in moral values that resonate in this poem can’t be skipped. We can only silently witness the catastrophes and apocalyptic circumferences enclosing us with no tools in our hands to fight back.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam puts me on a wistful and celestial flight sending me back to TS Eliot with the poem “The Return of The Wasteland”. TS Eliot was a Nobel Prize winner in the literature category in 1948. Another Nobel Prize winner author and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Award in 1964. Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his memoirs afterwards “I could not get myself around to receive the prize standing on an arid landscape cluttered with ashes, debris, skulls and bones”. Jean Paul Sartre talked about the devastation caused to lots of countries and deaths of millions of people across the planet during the Second World War which daunted him from accepting the coveted prize. “Sex is traded in cities at a cheap rate”—these words shock us to the bone marrow with the dilapidated social scenario that prevails around us in the current era. Picking up words like “despair” “miseries” “devils” etcetera are strong underpinnings of the message that humanity is drastically at stake under the jackboot of all out decadence. How insensitive and callous we all have become—this painful undertone becomes louder in Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s another poem in which we find these lines “Breaking news doesn’t break hearts anymore. Eerie wind creeps into the room beating windows”. Human beings in the present world have become so highly self-absorbed that sad news items no longer moves them or no longer makes them feel compassionate with their fellow citizens.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s poem “Summer Song” drew my attention with these words “Miasmic flowers hit our nostrils hard, damaging smell sense, diffusing odour”. In thematic terms these words are very close to TS Eliot’s poem once again that begins with this line “April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land”. These discernments from TS Eliot and Mohammad Shafiqul Islam persuade us to look at the bleak and nosediving world in a destitute way devoid of mirth and deprived of ethical rectitude. In other words, both TS Eliot and Mohammad Shafiqul Islam come under the umbrella of postmodern literature when we view their rhetoric and figurative approaches.

Graveyards and shooting down humans like birds in another poem in this anthology once again tell us that Mohammad Shafiqul Islam is highly aware of the ongoing ruthless and inhuman predicaments that have jeopardized the entire globe. This is one kind of poetic stream of consciousness that becomes all the more vivid from selecting the exclusive word “silence” in the book’s title.

The poems “Meaning of Love” and “Lamp of Grief” make Mohammad Shafiqul Islam analogous to classic 17th century English poet Andrew Marvell. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam cited the word “song” in a couple of poems which profoundly sounds an echo of American cynosure Walt Whitman’s poems that frequently allude to grass, leaves and wildflowers.

Mohammad Shafiqul Islam celebrates silence according to another poem furnished in the same book. He continues to write poems tirelessly serving his readers with delight and ethos both, which need to be blended in literature according to Aristotle’s book “Poetics”. Mohammad Shafiqul Islam’s deep leaning towards humanity, peace, love and fraternity is stitched with almost every line in his poems in “On The Other Side of Silence” which was published by Red River in June 2025. To add a few words about his professional career, Mohammad Shafiqul Islam, PhD teaches English language and literature in Shahjalal University of Science and Technology, Sylhet.

While winding up this article, I find it pertinent to borrow a few words from French author Victor Hugo who once said “Poetry expresses that which cannot be put into prose and that which cannot remain silent”.  


Mahfuz Ul Hasib Chowdhury
is a contributor to different
English newspapers and
magazines.