Fighting For Freedom Of Speech In Bangladesh's Capital

Everyone warned me to avoid Bangladesh. Regardless, there I was at departures, nervously awaiting my second flight, at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport. Eighteen hours later, I landed at Shahjalal International Airport in Dhaka—the capital and largest city in the south Asian country— eager to attend the 2017 edition of the city's Literary Festival.

As I waited for the other invited writers to join us at arrivals, I glanced out at the impenetrable tangle of buses, bicycles and auto rickshaws crawling along. "How many people would actually show up?" I thought to myself. It was a fair question given that over the past five years, several dozens of writers, journalists and activists had been harassed or jailed in the region, caught between an increasingly authoritarian state machine all too willing to oppress them and bands of religious terrorists out for their blood.

While the Dhaka Literary Festival (DLF) had been up and running since 2011, the organizers are no strangers to sudden cancellations and in 2015, 19 participants had dropped out of the festival in response to the slaying of five Bangladeshi secularists that year (including Avijit Roy, a blogger who'd been murdered while visiting a book fair with his wife). The 2016 edition of the festival had unfolded under even worse circumstances: In April of that year, a law student had been hacked to death by Islamists at a traffic junction in Dhaka, and July had seen a group of gunmen open fire on a bakery in the upscale neighborhood of Gulshan, killing 29 people (including many foreigners, most of whom were from Italy and Japan).