Hasan Azad

Red and Green Oil on Water Hasan Azad

Red and Green Oil on Water is the story of Bangladesh - the story of her heritage. It is the story of a nation cut from swathes of people, young and old, past and present, future...and not yet imagined. Their lives, like Anjum's - the pseudo-intellectual, soon to be turned terrorist - cut across time. He seeks to liberate Bangladesh in the present, from shackles of the past. Lives like Kadin's, the British-Bangladeshi boy who wants only to belong, who expresses his pain the only way he knows, through longing. Julie, the girl, woman, the object of the male gaze, who has been cursed from birth, who must contend with not feeling the despair ploughed into her by the one with the globe eyes. Josephine, the half-brown, white, English woman, who bears the guilt of her colonial past, who becomes Muslim, who travels to Bangladesh, to only have her past inflicted on her. The varied characters of Red and Green Oil on Water face anger and pain, helplessness and longing, despair and hope. Their lives are snapshots, each photo, strangely connected with the next, mysteriously merging into the mists and out again. The people are the story of Bangladesh, and Bangladesh their mother - her subtle fingers placing each one in just the right place, as everything teeters on a precipice.