Preface

I forget, therefore I log.

This book gathers poems, prose poems, and field notes I wrote between 2015 and 2020. Almost all of them first appeared on Facebook. That was the age of the feed: status, comment, like, share. The short reel had not yet arrived.

It is not documentary poetry. I was not recording events for the record. I was encoding a lived condition, what Bangla calls যাপন: living through, day after day, inside a discipline. The escape was never from film itself. It was from the heavy discourse I carried as a maker, a teacher, and an organizer, and from positions I had held for years without asking whom they served.

Read it as poetic inquiry in autoethnographic form. The poems are the field. The dates, sources, and later notes are the method. Together they ask one question: what remains of a self when the identity “filmmaker” is set down?

The numbers (১০১.১ through ১০৪.২) are not page numbers. They are logbook releases, the order in which I escaped, cycle by cycle. Read them as a slow descent: rehearsal (মহড়া), then masks (মুখোশ), then Covid (মড়ক).

After the numbered logs comes মজমা: texts called পালানোর ইশকুল, written in 2016 and 2017 to gather filmmakers around Biralpakhi Cine Club, the school it never became. I lineated them in 2026. মার্জিন gathers field notes from the same years. বাড়ি কোথায়, a field note from 2015, opens the book.

The Bangla stays in its own register: colloquial, guruchandali, deliberately “incorrect.” That register is the voice, and I have not standardized it. English versions and notes will come slowly, as a second reading.

I keep the original dates and sources. Where I edited in 2026, I say so. I cut the promotion, the results, the applause. What remains is for future me, who forgets, and for anyone unsure whether a creative life has to stay inside one name.

— ইশতিয়াক জিকো, ২০২৬