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The Black Coat | Neamat ImamNeamat Imam
The Black Coat
The Black Coat will Reinstate the Missing History of Bangladesh
I started keeping notes for The Black Coat back in 2005, when I was living in London. Although I had already attained the highest academic degree by that time, and my employer in Bangladesh was asking me to return to my post, I decided not to.
I found myself in poor living conditions and poor employment conditions in London. At some point, I had to work in the kitchen of a Bangladeshi restaurant just to keep alive. But I had a dream. I was planning a completely different life for myself.
In 2009, 3 years after moving to Canada, I started giving my notes the shape of a novel. It was the 10th year that I had been passing outside my country. I was living alone and after my day-job, I had a lot of time left for myself. I read Bangladeshi newspapers almost every day, and tried to understand why our society was so different from the democratic societies of Europe and North America. We were failing tremendously in creating a culture based on the value which mattered most: tolerance. When did it all begin? – I asked myself, and, at one point I strongly believed I knew the answer.
It took me over 18 months to produce the first draft, which was a 114,000-word manuscript, and another several months to edit and re-edit it, polish it, rewrite its passages and chapters, destroy chapter after chapter upon the recommendations of various editors and assessors, before creating an 86,000-word final draft.
I started talking about the novel in private conversations with my friends and well-wishers in Bangladesh only after September 2012, when I signed a contract with Penguin.
My friends were students, housewives, university teachers. They were farmers, shopkeepers, bankers, immigrant Bangladeshis. Some of them were policemen, journalists and political activists. A few of them worked for the government and are still doing the same.
I told them that the book had two distinct levels of meaning.
First: It was embedded in a significant political event in Bangladesh: the famine of 1974, which claimed no less than one and a half million lives. By exploring the political environment of the time, and by analysing Sheikh Mujib’s premiership, I thought I would be able to pinpoint the pitfalls of our political culture which had demoralised the whole nation in the last four decades.
Secondly: Sheikh Mujib’s story was also relevant to any society in Asia, Europe, Africa, in the Americas, where people were oppressed by their governments, where leaders, political parties, did not honour their citizens’ rights, where a society stayed undeveloped or under-developed decade after decade because their leaders simply did not have a proper strategic vision to advance it forward, where people’s hearts became hard because the society as a whole was corrupt from top to bottom.
Obviously, as a writer I gave more importance to the second level of meaning than the first level. But my friends drew my attention to the first level and to the first level alone. The famine of 1974 is a taboo political event in Bangladesh, they said; talking about it will embarrass a whole lot of people; are you sure you want to publish this book?
A friend, who was my mentor during my student life, and who is also a renowned scholar in Bangladesh in his own right, said I should be worried about my personal safety. He is old now but clearly remembers the atrocities that the Rakkhi Bahini ushered upon opposition leaders and activists during Sheikh Mujib’s time.
Awami League workers today are not as vicious as the members of the Rakkhi Bahini were during Mujib’s rule, he told me, but they are still vicious and won’t tolerate any criticism of Sheikh Mujib’s legacy. They may consider the book a serious threat to the present day popularity of the Awami League and consequently come after me, he warned.
Another friend, a public servant, spoke with obvious disgruntlement. It was not Sheikh Mujib’s fault that there was such a huge flood in the country during his time, he said, which caused the famine in the first place.
I said I agreed; the flood was not Sheikh Mujib’s fault.
Why do you blame Sheikh Mujib for the famine then? What had he to do with it?
I reminded him of the cyclone storm of 1970 off the coastal region of Khulna and Chittagong. That cyclone claimed as many as 300,000 lives. Sheikh Mujib said that the emergency response of the Pakistan government, which was based in West Pakistan, to the sufferings of East Pakistan people, was not adequate. That was why in the election that came only a few weeks after the cyclone, he won so many seats.
If Pakistanis were not considered a good government for Bangladesh for failing to handle the devastation of a natural disaster efficiently and adequately, I argued, why should Sheikh Mujib be considered good when he failed on an even larger scale? The victims of the famine were five times greater in number than the victims of the cyclone!
Now we know that there was no scarcity of food in the market at that time, but people couldn’t afford to buy the food. People couldn’t afford it because Sheikh Mujib’s administration did not intervene in the market effectively enough to stop a price hike. Renowned experts had predicted that a severe famine was coming months before it finally came. But Sheikh Mujib’s government did not accelerate the food distribution process efficiently; most of the aid stuff was either passed to the black-market or stolen by selfish and corrupt administrators and distributors.
A friend, who is a retired banker now, but who was a mid-level student leader of the Chhatra League, student wing of the Awami League, during his graduate years, made his questions straightforward. Can Sheikh Mujib be called an autocrat? he asked. Should the man who inspired an oppressed nation to gain independence in a bloody war be accountable to anyone for his actions, whatever they were?
Sheikh Mujib freed our country but also strangled it, I replied. Whether he would lead our nation to independence was entirely up to him. But whether he would rule the nation with might was not at all up to him, it was entirely up to the people of the nation.
Sheikh Mujib should be accountable for his actions, I said.
My friend was not happy with my answer. So I explained the matter in this way:
He ran a corrupt administration from the beginning, which became more corrupt with time, and when he became terribly unpopular because of the incredibly high toll of the famine, he introduced emergency.
Within two years of his ascension to power, Sheikh Mujib truly became a villain. He kept a 200,000-men strong private militia who could beat or hit or kill anyone that they did not like. They were like Hitler’s SS and were loyal only to Sheikh Mujib. He banned all opposition newspapers and opposition political parties, kidnapped, tortured and killed opposition party leaders and workers, and ordered all civil servants to join his party. He suspended the constitution of the country, ditched the parliamentary system of government to embrace presidential system to consolidate his power. He ran a corrupt administration from the beginning, which became more corrupt with time, and when he became terribly unpopular because of the incredibly high toll of the famine, he introduced emergency.
All this matches only the actions of a deadly dictator, I said, and we should remove Sheikh Mujib’s pictures from all schools and public places, so that we can protect our children from mastering wrong values and from making a wrong meaning of politics. Every institution and organisation in the country that believes in the democratic future of Bangladesh should remove Sheikh Mujib’s picture from display because he simply does not fit the bill of a democratic leader.
My banker friend did not consider me a friend any longer.
Another friend, who does not understand the complexity of our politics, but who understands that Sheikh Mujib is loved by a huge number of people across the country, told me there was a chance that I would be hated by Bengali people for the rest of my life for writing this book.
People are emotionally involved with Sheikh Mujib’s achievement and history, he said. Anyone or anything that tries to undermine him as a person or as a ruler will be considered a threat to Bangladesh’s independence. He hoped that I understood what I was doing.
I told him that I did not mind being hated by people when I was right and they were wrong. I told him my concern was not how many people would hate me and my book, it was rather that one or two people might like the book and then their lives would change forever. They would begin to look at our history with reason, with a sense of emotional detachment from Sheikh Mujib, and would make it his or her life’s goal to democratise the country in the real meaning of the word. But they would suffer a lot because Sheikh Mujib had taught us not to tolerate any political opposition, not to allow disloyalty, not to permit our newspapers to carry critical views of citizens against oppressive rulers. But I believed, as Nur Hussain believes inThe Black Coat, that one or two people would be enough to change the lot of a nation and the lot of the Bangladeshi nation too would change one day. The people of Bangladesh would understand that a simple territorial independence from Pakistan was not enough to create a truly independent society; it needed rather a holistic approach to our politics and values.
The Black Coat is out in the market now. If you think your government is cheating you, wherever you are, this is the book you want to read. If you think your government has a role to play in your life but it is not playing that role adequately, adequately seriously, or it has forgotten you, abandoned you, marginalised you, or punished you for your voice, disloyalty and insight, this is the book you want to have in your hand. Remember, there is no society that entertains questions about its ways, and there is no society whose ways cannot be questioned and challenged, and also no question that cannot not be asked in any society.
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাংলাদেশী লেখক নেয়ামত ইমামের প্রথম উপন্যাস। শেখ মুজিবের শাসনকাল নিয়ে ইংরেজি ভাষায় লেখা এই উপন্যাসটির কলেবর ২৪০ পৃষ্ঠা। এটির প্রকাশক পেঙ্গুইন গ্রুপ এবং প্রথম দক্ষিণ এশীয় রাইট ক্রয় করে পেঙ্গুইন বুকস ইন্ডিয়া।
ভারতীয় সংবাদ সংস্থা ‘পিটিআই’ জানুয়ারি ১৭ তারিখে প্রকাশিত এক ফিচারে বইটিকে ২০১৩ সালে ভারতে প্রকাশিতব্য ‘অবশ্যপাঠ্য’ বইগুলোর অন্যতম বিবেচনা করেছে।এছাড়া উপন্যাসটির এককালীন সম্পাদক টরন্টো-ভিত্তিক আলিথিয়া স্পিরিডন এটিকে মিলান কুন্ডেরার কথাসাহিত্যের সাথে তুলনা করেন। লন্ডনস্থ ‘লিটারেরি কন্সাল্টেন্সী’র রিডার ও ‘ঠু এশিয়ান, নট এশিয়ান এনাফ’ গল্পগ্রন্থের সম্পাদক ম্যানচেস্টার-ভিত্তিক ইংরেজি ভাষাভাষী ভারতীয় লেখক কবিতা ভানট উপন্যাসটির ভূয়সী প্রশংসা করেন এবং নেয়ামত ইমামের সাহিত্যকর্মের প্রতিনিধিত্ব করার জন্য বইটি ডেভিড গডউইন বরাবরে পাঠিয়ে দেন।
‘নেয়ামত ইমামের উপন্যাসটি পড়ে আমি যার পর নাই আনন্দিত,’ কবিতা লিখেন, ‘আমি মনে করি এটি একটি সময়োপযোগী ও শক্তিশালী উপন্যাস। আমি এমন খুব বেশি উপন্যাসের নাম করতে পারি না যেগুলো এতটা উচ্চাকাঙ্খী পরিসর নিয়ে লেখা, এবং যেগুলো রাজনীতি ও সমাজ বিষয়ে কঠিন মন্তব্য করলেও পাঠকের হৃদয় ছুঁয়ে যায় কারণ এগুলোর সাথে ওতপ্রোতভাবে জড়িত রয়েছে তাদের লেখকদের সহানুভূতি, অভিজ্ঞতা, জ্ঞান ও মনস্তাত্ত্বিক গভীরতা।’
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটির প্রেক্ষিত স্বাধীনতাযুদ্ধের পরের কয়েকটি বছর। আরো সূক্ষ্মভাবে বললে, শেখ মুজিবের শাসনকালের শেষাংশ, যখন বাংলাদেশ একটি ভীষণ রাজনৈতিক ও সামাজিক সঙ্কটের মধ্য দিয়ে এগিয়ে যায়। এই সঙ্কট প্রকৃতই এত গভীর ও বিস্তৃত ছিল যে একথা নির্দ্বিধায় বলা চলে বাংলাদেশের বর্তমান রাজনৈতিক অস্থিরতা, গণতন্ত্রের সমস্যা ও দুই দশক আগের দেড় দশকের সামরিক শাসন এগুলো মুলতঃ এরই সৃষ্টি।
শাসক হিসেবে বাংলাদেশের প্রতি শেখ মুজিবের কোন মমত্ব ছিল না। তার ব্যক্তিগত বিশাল রক্ষী বাহিনীকে হিটলারের নাৎসী বাহিনীর সাথে তুলনা করা হয়। কিন্তু আজকের আওয়ামী লীগ বাংলাদেশের নতুন প্রজন্মের কাছ থেকে তার সব দুষ্কর্মের ইতিহাস কৌশলে গোপন করে রেখেছে এবং তাদের ওপর চাপিয়ে দিয়েছে এক ভিন্ন শেখ মুজিব।
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাংলাদেশের ইতিহাসের জোর করে হারিয়ে দেয়া অংশটি এর জাতীয় ইতিহাসের সাথে সংযোজন করবে। বাঙালি জাতীয়তাবাদের প্রচারকারীরা তথ্য গোপন করে বাংলাদেশের জনসাধারণকে আর বিপথগামী করতে পারবে না – এই প্রত্যাশা থেকে উপন্যাসটি লেখা।
নেয়ামত ইমামের সাহিত্যকর্মের এজেন্ট হচ্ছেন বুকার প্রাইজ খ্যাত লেখক অরুন্ধতী রায় ও অরবিন্দ আদিগার এজেন্ট ডেভিড গডউইন। লন্ডনে বসবাসরত এই বৃটিশ এজেন্টই ‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটি পেঙ্গুইন প্রকাশনীর কাছে পেশ করেন। ডেভিডের স্ত্রী হেদার গডউইন, যিনি একজন খ্যাতনামা বই-সম্পাদক, ‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটির প্রাথমিক সম্পাদক হিসেবে কাজ করেন।
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাজারে আসে ২০১৩ সালের মে মাসে।
The Black Coat
The Black Coat will Reinstate the Missing History of Bangladesh
I started keeping notes for The Black Coat back in 2005, when I was living in London. Although I had already attained the highest academic degree by that time, and my employer in Bangladesh was asking me to return to my post, I decided not to.
I found myself in poor living conditions and poor employment conditions in London. At some point, I had to work in the kitchen of a Bangladeshi restaurant just to keep alive. But I had a dream. I was planning a completely different life for myself.
In 2009, 3 years after moving to Canada, I started giving my notes the shape of a novel. It was the 10th year that I had been passing outside my country. I was living alone and after my day-job, I had a lot of time left for myself. I read Bangladeshi newspapers almost every day, and tried to understand why our society was so different from the democratic societies of Europe and North America. We were failing tremendously in creating a culture based on the value which mattered most: tolerance. When did it all begin? – I asked myself, and, at one point I strongly believed I knew the answer.
It took me over 18 months to produce the first draft, which was a 114,000-word manuscript, and another several months to edit and re-edit it, polish it, rewrite its passages and chapters, destroy chapter after chapter upon the recommendations of various editors and assessors, before creating an 86,000-word final draft.
I started talking about the novel in private conversations with my friends and well-wishers in Bangladesh only after September 2012, when I signed a contract with Penguin.
My friends were students, housewives, university teachers. They were farmers, shopkeepers, bankers, immigrant Bangladeshis. Some of them were policemen, journalists and political activists. A few of them worked for the government and are still doing the same.
I told them that the book had two distinct levels of meaning.
First: It was embedded in a significant political event in Bangladesh: the famine of 1974, which claimed no less than one and a half million lives. By exploring the political environment of the time, and by analysing Sheikh Mujib’s premiership, I thought I would be able to pinpoint the pitfalls of our political culture which had demoralised the whole nation in the last four decades.
Secondly: Sheikh Mujib’s story was also relevant to any society in Asia, Europe, Africa, in the Americas, where people were oppressed by their governments, where leaders, political parties, did not honour their citizens’ rights, where a society stayed undeveloped or under-developed decade after decade because their leaders simply did not have a proper strategic vision to advance it forward, where people’s hearts became hard because the society as a whole was corrupt from top to bottom.
Obviously, as a writer I gave more importance to the second level of meaning than the first level. But my friends drew my attention to the first level and to the first level alone. The famine of 1974 is a taboo political event in Bangladesh, they said; talking about it will embarrass a whole lot of people; are you sure you want to publish this book?
A friend, who was my mentor during my student life, and who is also a renowned scholar in Bangladesh in his own right, said I should be worried about my personal safety. He is old now but clearly remembers the atrocities that the Rakkhi Bahini ushered upon opposition leaders and activists during Sheikh Mujib’s time.
Awami League workers today are not as vicious as the members of the Rakkhi Bahini were during Mujib’s rule, he told me, but they are still vicious and won’t tolerate any criticism of Sheikh Mujib’s legacy. They may consider the book a serious threat to the present day popularity of the Awami League and consequently come after me, he warned.
Another friend, a public servant, spoke with obvious disgruntlement. It was not Sheikh Mujib’s fault that there was such a huge flood in the country during his time, he said, which caused the famine in the first place.
I said I agreed; the flood was not Sheikh Mujib’s fault.
Why do you blame Sheikh Mujib for the famine then? What had he to do with it?
I reminded him of the cyclone storm of 1970 off the coastal region of Khulna and Chittagong. That cyclone claimed as many as 300,000 lives. Sheikh Mujib said that the emergency response of the Pakistan government, which was based in West Pakistan, to the sufferings of East Pakistan people, was not adequate. That was why in the election that came only a few weeks after the cyclone, he won so many seats.
If Pakistanis were not considered a good government for Bangladesh for failing to handle the devastation of a natural disaster efficiently and adequately, I argued, why should Sheikh Mujib be considered good when he failed on an even larger scale? The victims of the famine were five times greater in number than the victims of the cyclone!
Now we know that there was no scarcity of food in the market at that time, but people couldn’t afford to buy the food. People couldn’t afford it because Sheikh Mujib’s administration did not intervene in the market effectively enough to stop a price hike. Renowned experts had predicted that a severe famine was coming months before it finally came. But Sheikh Mujib’s government did not accelerate the food distribution process efficiently; most of the aid stuff was either passed to the black-market or stolen by selfish and corrupt administrators and distributors.
A friend, who is a retired banker now, but who was a mid-level student leader of the Chhatra League, student wing of the Awami League, during his graduate years, made his questions straightforward. Can Sheikh Mujib be called an autocrat? he asked. Should the man who inspired an oppressed nation to gain independence in a bloody war be accountable to anyone for his actions, whatever they were?
Sheikh Mujib freed our country but also strangled it, I replied. Whether he would lead our nation to independence was entirely up to him. But whether he would rule the nation with might was not at all up to him, it was entirely up to the people of the nation.
Sheikh Mujib should be accountable for his actions, I said.
My friend was not happy with my answer. So I explained the matter in this way:
He ran a corrupt administration from the beginning, which became more corrupt with time, and when he became terribly unpopular because of the incredibly high toll of the famine, he introduced emergency.
Within two years of his ascension to power, Sheikh Mujib truly became a villain. He kept a 200,000-men strong private militia who could beat or hit or kill anyone that they did not like. They were like Hitler’s SS and were loyal only to Sheikh Mujib. He banned all opposition newspapers and opposition political parties, kidnapped, tortured and killed opposition party leaders and workers, and ordered all civil servants to join his party. He suspended the constitution of the country, ditched the parliamentary system of government to embrace presidential system to consolidate his power. He ran a corrupt administration from the beginning, which became more corrupt with time, and when he became terribly unpopular because of the incredibly high toll of the famine, he introduced emergency.
All this matches only the actions of a deadly dictator, I said, and we should remove Sheikh Mujib’s pictures from all schools and public places, so that we can protect our children from mastering wrong values and from making a wrong meaning of politics. Every institution and organisation in the country that believes in the democratic future of Bangladesh should remove Sheikh Mujib’s picture from display because he simply does not fit the bill of a democratic leader.
My banker friend did not consider me a friend any longer.
Another friend, who does not understand the complexity of our politics, but who understands that Sheikh Mujib is loved by a huge number of people across the country, told me there was a chance that I would be hated by Bengali people for the rest of my life for writing this book.
People are emotionally involved with Sheikh Mujib’s achievement and history, he said. Anyone or anything that tries to undermine him as a person or as a ruler will be considered a threat to Bangladesh’s independence. He hoped that I understood what I was doing.
I told him that I did not mind being hated by people when I was right and they were wrong. I told him my concern was not how many people would hate me and my book, it was rather that one or two people might like the book and then their lives would change forever. They would begin to look at our history with reason, with a sense of emotional detachment from Sheikh Mujib, and would make it his or her life’s goal to democratise the country in the real meaning of the word. But they would suffer a lot because Sheikh Mujib had taught us not to tolerate any political opposition, not to allow disloyalty, not to permit our newspapers to carry critical views of citizens against oppressive rulers. But I believed, as Nur Hussain believes inThe Black Coat, that one or two people would be enough to change the lot of a nation and the lot of the Bangladeshi nation too would change one day. The people of Bangladesh would understand that a simple territorial independence from Pakistan was not enough to create a truly independent society; it needed rather a holistic approach to our politics and values.
The Black Coat is out in the market now. If you think your government is cheating you, wherever you are, this is the book you want to read. If you think your government has a role to play in your life but it is not playing that role adequately, adequately seriously, or it has forgotten you, abandoned you, marginalised you, or punished you for your voice, disloyalty and insight, this is the book you want to have in your hand. Remember, there is no society that entertains questions about its ways, and there is no society whose ways cannot be questioned and challenged, and also no question that cannot not be asked in any society.
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাংলাদেশী লেখক নেয়ামত ইমামের প্রথম উপন্যাস। শেখ মুজিবের শাসনকাল নিয়ে ইংরেজি ভাষায় লেখা এই উপন্যাসটির কলেবর ২৪০ পৃষ্ঠা। এটির প্রকাশক পেঙ্গুইন গ্রুপ এবং প্রথম দক্ষিণ এশীয় রাইট ক্রয় করে পেঙ্গুইন বুকস ইন্ডিয়া।
ভারতীয় সংবাদ সংস্থা ‘পিটিআই’ জানুয়ারি ১৭ তারিখে প্রকাশিত এক ফিচারে বইটিকে ২০১৩ সালে ভারতে প্রকাশিতব্য ‘অবশ্যপাঠ্য’ বইগুলোর অন্যতম বিবেচনা করেছে।এছাড়া উপন্যাসটির এককালীন সম্পাদক টরন্টো-ভিত্তিক আলিথিয়া স্পিরিডন এটিকে মিলান কুন্ডেরার কথাসাহিত্যের সাথে তুলনা করেন। লন্ডনস্থ ‘লিটারেরি কন্সাল্টেন্সী’র রিডার ও ‘ঠু এশিয়ান, নট এশিয়ান এনাফ’ গল্পগ্রন্থের সম্পাদক ম্যানচেস্টার-ভিত্তিক ইংরেজি ভাষাভাষী ভারতীয় লেখক কবিতা ভানট উপন্যাসটির ভূয়সী প্রশংসা করেন এবং নেয়ামত ইমামের সাহিত্যকর্মের প্রতিনিধিত্ব করার জন্য বইটি ডেভিড গডউইন বরাবরে পাঠিয়ে দেন।
‘নেয়ামত ইমামের উপন্যাসটি পড়ে আমি যার পর নাই আনন্দিত,’ কবিতা লিখেন, ‘আমি মনে করি এটি একটি সময়োপযোগী ও শক্তিশালী উপন্যাস। আমি এমন খুব বেশি উপন্যাসের নাম করতে পারি না যেগুলো এতটা উচ্চাকাঙ্খী পরিসর নিয়ে লেখা, এবং যেগুলো রাজনীতি ও সমাজ বিষয়ে কঠিন মন্তব্য করলেও পাঠকের হৃদয় ছুঁয়ে যায় কারণ এগুলোর সাথে ওতপ্রোতভাবে জড়িত রয়েছে তাদের লেখকদের সহানুভূতি, অভিজ্ঞতা, জ্ঞান ও মনস্তাত্ত্বিক গভীরতা।’
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটির প্রেক্ষিত স্বাধীনতাযুদ্ধের পরের কয়েকটি বছর। আরো সূক্ষ্মভাবে বললে, শেখ মুজিবের শাসনকালের শেষাংশ, যখন বাংলাদেশ একটি ভীষণ রাজনৈতিক ও সামাজিক সঙ্কটের মধ্য দিয়ে এগিয়ে যায়। এই সঙ্কট প্রকৃতই এত গভীর ও বিস্তৃত ছিল যে একথা নির্দ্বিধায় বলা চলে বাংলাদেশের বর্তমান রাজনৈতিক অস্থিরতা, গণতন্ত্রের সমস্যা ও দুই দশক আগের দেড় দশকের সামরিক শাসন এগুলো মুলতঃ এরই সৃষ্টি।
শাসক হিসেবে বাংলাদেশের প্রতি শেখ মুজিবের কোন মমত্ব ছিল না। তার ব্যক্তিগত বিশাল রক্ষী বাহিনীকে হিটলারের নাৎসী বাহিনীর সাথে তুলনা করা হয়। কিন্তু আজকের আওয়ামী লীগ বাংলাদেশের নতুন প্রজন্মের কাছ থেকে তার সব দুষ্কর্মের ইতিহাস কৌশলে গোপন করে রেখেছে এবং তাদের ওপর চাপিয়ে দিয়েছে এক ভিন্ন শেখ মুজিব।
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাংলাদেশের ইতিহাসের জোর করে হারিয়ে দেয়া অংশটি এর জাতীয় ইতিহাসের সাথে সংযোজন করবে। বাঙালি জাতীয়তাবাদের প্রচারকারীরা তথ্য গোপন করে বাংলাদেশের জনসাধারণকে আর বিপথগামী করতে পারবে না – এই প্রত্যাশা থেকে উপন্যাসটি লেখা।
নেয়ামত ইমামের সাহিত্যকর্মের এজেন্ট হচ্ছেন বুকার প্রাইজ খ্যাত লেখক অরুন্ধতী রায় ও অরবিন্দ আদিগার এজেন্ট ডেভিড গডউইন। লন্ডনে বসবাসরত এই বৃটিশ এজেন্টই ‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটি পেঙ্গুইন প্রকাশনীর কাছে পেশ করেন। ডেভিডের স্ত্রী হেদার গডউইন, যিনি একজন খ্যাতনামা বই-সম্পাদক, ‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ উপন্যাসটির প্রাথমিক সম্পাদক হিসেবে কাজ করেন।
‘দি ব্ল্যাক কোট’ বাজারে আসে ২০১৩ সালের মে মাসে।
