Tarik Sujat, You Must Stand

You Must Stand is a poetry collection rooted in Bangladesh’s political memory, collective trauma, and moral resistance. What does it mean to stand when everything urges you to bow? How does a nation remember without mythologising? What survives when justice is delayed but memory refuses to die? Tarik Sujat writes from within history, not as an observer but as a witness shaped by Bangladesh’s post-1971 trajectory: the Liberation War, the assassination of the nation’s founding leader, cycles of political violence, erased memories, and the recurring betrayal of democratic ideals. The book takes its title from its openingpoem, a direct yet restrained call to moral courage in times when silence becomes complicity.