Nafisa A. Iqbal’s winning poem, “Louis Kahn’s Ghost: National Assembly Building, Dhaka, Bangladesh,” is a dimensional piece that examines the unresolved questions of democracy and power. There is so much meaning between the spaces in this work, and we invite you to sit with it, and then read our conversation with Nafisa.
Rebecca Paredes: You submitted this piece for our Checks and Balances challenge, which invited writers to explore the tilting dynamics of power and systems. How did that prompt inform this poem?
Nafisa A. Iqbal: This prompt felt complementary to my work as someone whose writing frequently addresses (im)balances of power and personal and political apparatuses of oppression. As a Bangladeshi writer, the July Revolution of 2024 that my country lived through is still fresh in my mind since February the month this challenge was held—marked Bangladesh’s first national election since the toppling of the fascist regime. I wanted to approach these themes obliquely through the lens of architecture, an art form I’ve grown intimate with through my life partner who is an architect.
RP: This poem is grounded in a distinct historical moment, but so clearly interacts with notions of accountability and absolution that remain relevant today. Why Louis Kahn, and why this building?
NAI: The National Assembly Building, or the Jatiyo Shongshod Bhobon, as it is known in Bengali, is a monumental piece of architecture known to every Bangladeshi, operating for us as an emblem of democracy. The story of its construction is profound. Louis Kahn was initially commissioned to design this project in 1962 by the Pakistani government, who, at the time, ruled Bangladesh following the Partition of the Indian subcontinent by the British. While the project was being built, Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan and became its own sovereign state. This shifted the significance of this project from a legislative complex in a region that was politically marginalized in Pakistan to becoming the symbolic heart of the infant nation-state of Bangladesh.
There is also the fact that Kahn died in 1974, eight years before the project was completed. To me, there is something haunting about this. This is a building designed before its country existed and completed after its architect was no more. In my poem, I wanted to draw the connection between the unfinished business of a major project and the unresolved questions of democracy that still haunt Bangladesh today.
RP: One of the reasons this poem stood out to me is that it turns the gaze on the artist—how what we support, and what we participate in, can also perpetuate larger systems of power. The em dashes, and the white space they create, contributed to that gaze. How do you view the em dashes functioning in this piece?
NAI: Kahn often spoke of light as a fundamental design element of this project. The building uses the strategic placement of voided shapes to bring in natural light. Monumental geometrical openings become apertures that choreograph the experience of this space. I wanted the em dashes to function in a similar way: as apertures in the body of the text, with the white space as light. Meaning is meant to accumulate in these pauses. I wanted the reader to feel the weight of what isn’t said. The fragmentation caused by the em dashes also mirrors the jagged history of the space I am dealing with, one that cannot be told in smooth or straightforward syntax.
RP: Is there anything else you’d like to share about this piece, or anything you’re working
on now?
NAI: Currently, I am working on a deeply personal project: translating the poems of my late grandmother, Rahila Islam, a poet who lived through British colonial rule, the 1952 Language Movement, and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War. Although she published two poetry collections in her lifetime and published prolifically in well-known publications in Bangladesh, her work remains largely unknown to a wider audience despite engaging adeptly with these major historic moments. I am drawing on my grandmother’s poems, our family archives, as well as oral histories held by the women in my family to challenge the erasure of her work, and in a broader sense, that of women’s voices in Bangladeshi literary history.
Lastly, I would encourage anyone reading this poem to look up a photo of Kahn’s project. It truly is a masterpiece of Brutalist architecture! Readers can find me and follow my work on Instagram: @the_monafisa.