Alluding to the nervous petty-minded censorship exer¬cised by the military rulers of her country, Fahmida Riaz writes in a burst of revolu-tionary opti-mism:
the rising sun
cannot be hidden
when the day
breaks the world will see
Metaphors apart, this may or may not be true. Certainly, the melancholy spectacle of today’s world furnishes enough examples of pathetic tin-pot tyrants holding back, with conspicuous success, the sun, the day, the tide…. Fahmida Riaz’s image of the rising sun, the irresistible dawning of the day, neverthe¬less does indicate the kind of insistent awareness which the poet—indeed, by her moral nature, her intransigent integrity—is condemned to articulate.