Yasmin Jahan Nupur: Time could not be kept at bay

Overview

With this pandemic, I have become more sensitive. When I receive news of someone’s illness or death, I feel fear and pain and have difficulty breathing. The silence all around me seems as if I am living in another world in which everything is frozen, but for everyone else, time flows. Our days are uninterrupted and full of bitter experiences. When it comes to describing the times I live in now, the past and the future seem to merge together. I see the days go by very fast, within the blink of an eye. I have come to see the existence of everything— time, sound, space, behaviour…  I know why I have started to look closely at every object in the house— the loom, and the yarn on the floor, the cleaning items, the vase, flowers, and even the activities of my daughter. Not that I had not seen these before, or that I had not had contact with these objects. All of my attention has been focused on language, sentences, poems, prose, and reminiscences. After a long time, I started writing, with each sequence or scene arriving in front of me. I have just converted them into images, like a still poem or a moving image.