Rescuing the Repressed: Emancipatory Possibilities of “Everyday” in Anjum Hasan’s Street on the Hill

Abstract

In an interview with Sumana Roy, Anjum Hasan told, “The lyrical expression of the ordinary attracts me.” (Hasan) In poem after poem of the anthology Street on the Hill (2006), we find Hasan exploring the solitary and ordinary lives of the people, which go unnoticed most of the time. Hasan seems to rescue the routinized landscape of everyday life, replete with a deadening force of familiar boredom, from the sea of oblivion in her anthology. Marxist philosopher Henry Lefebvre, in 1947, came up with a prophetic note saying everyday life was being colonized by the commodity, by a “modern” postwar capitalism. The present paper aims to assess everyday life as portrayed by Hasan along the Lefebvrian line of arguments and thus explore if there lies any emancipatory possibility from the clutch of capitalist colonialism. By referring to every “insignificant” detail of ordinary life in the poems, the paper would go in search of the epic in the ordinary current study.

Keywords

• everyday
• urban space
• capitalism
• festivals and gender