[Reader-list] Taslima Nasrin: Woman Alone 20 Years Later (by Shabnam Nadiya)

[Naeem Mohaiemen]

DAILY STAR's Eid Literary Issue has come out, and there are great
pieces by a few friends and allies.I wanted to highlight Shabnam
Nadiya's text on Taslima Nasrin, which is the most nuanced piece on TN
I have read in a long time. Combines rational analysis with sorrowful
memory-- and reminds us of the original, fiery, bull in chinashop
Taslima that was actually a huge impact on the 1980s feminist movement
in Bangladesh. Before the Quran and the cigarette and the "revision"
and the BJP and that whole hullaballoo circus that swallowed Taslima
alive. And before she lost her way and stopped caring about people
around her and only cared about continuing to burnish the legend.
-Naeem

Related Links:
Star Literature Eid Special
http://www.thedailystar.net/suppliments/2008/eid_special/

http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2007/11/25/taslima-nandigram/
http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2007/08/09/taslima-nasreen-attack/
http://www.drishtipat.org/blog/2005/09/30/and-victory-for-taslima/
http://readerlist.freeflux.net/blog/archive/2007/09/11/re-reader-list-on-indocentrism-taslima-nasreen.html


Woman Alone
Shabnam Nadiya

The first time I was sexually molested I was about six. I remember the
incident precisely; I can even smell the petrol fumes in the air. It
was by the filling station at Nilkhet, beside the row of lep-toshok
shops, where we used to wait for our Jahangirnagar University bus.
Most of the shopkeepers knew us and would even offer us stools to sit
on if the wait got too long. I was with my father that particular day.
We had just crossed the road from New Market where I'd had a cupcake
slathered with purplish-pink frosting from Lite Bakery. The crossing
and then the petrol pump were a bit traffic-mad as only Nilkhet can be
and my dad had to be careful negotiating them with a child. We had
just climbed onto the slightly raised pavement when it happened. It
wasn't much of a molestation actually as these things go, just an
intrusive hand that forced itself into the crack of my butt over my
printed-denim skirt very briefly and was gone. I did not tell my
father what had happened.

The second time was years later, on the Jahangirnagar bus. I was with
my mother. It was the 8 o'clock trip from Dhaka. It was probably a
"community bus", because there were both students and teachers on the
bus and it was very crowded. Usually students weren't allowed on the
"teacher buses". My mother found a seat for me at the end of a
three-seater and then went to the back of the bus, certain that as she
was a teacher someone would vacate a seat for her. On my right sat a
female student. The drivers habitually turned out the lights during
the nighttime trips as the light inside bothered their vision, so it
was almost dark in the bus. It was very hot, I remember -- the warmth
of too many bodies in too small a space. There was hardly room to
stand for those unluckies who had no seats -- students naturally. They
stood bent over the seats, grabbing onto the seatbacks to maintain
balance. At some point I felt a hand on my left breast. A skinny
little runt, I hardly had any breasts at 14, but the hand seemed to be
satisfied with what it found since it decided to remain.

The trip was usually around 70 minutes. The long, mostly uninhabited
stretch of road between Dhaka and Jahangirnagar was the darkest. The
hand explored my breast for about half an hour in that darkness,
possibly more. It seemed an eternity. Several times I tried twisting
away my torso, to shield myself with my shoulder or my back, but that
didn't work. My movements made my adult seatmate turn to me with a
warm smile, "It's so crowded, are you uncomfortable?" Like a fool, I
blurted out, "That guy's touching me." The swiftness with which she
whipped her head away would've made Muhammad Ali proud. I realize now
that she herself was barely an adult then, that back then one didn't
acknowledge in public that these things happened -- to oneself or to
others. For the rest of the trip she didn't turn to look at me once.

I don't remember how I felt at six, but that evening I remember taking
a l-o-n-g shower when I got home.

***


Before I read Taslima Nasrin, I read bits and pieces of Beauvoir,
Millet, Friedan and Greer. A compilation of excerpts from their work
was one among the hundreds of books in our household. The book also
included Wollstonecraft, Mill, Woolf. My version of Feminism 101 came
from a secondhand bookstore in a cheap, slightly soiled, old-fashioned
green paperback. It would be years before I would actually manage to
get hold of copies of The Second Sex, The Feminine Mystique, Sexual
Politics. Added to all this was the deceptively gentle subversion of
our own Rokeya. But before I got to those classic tomes, blessedly I
discovered Taslima's NirbachitoKolum.

I was a teenager when Nirbachito Kolum first came out in book form.
I'd heard of her of course, and even read a few pieces here and there.
But to me, back then -- rabidly in love with words -- Taslima was more
the radical poet Rudra's ex-wife than a feminist writer. It was the
book that exploded her into my life.

As much as I had tried to absorb the Western feminists, the history of
the suffragettes, second wave feminism, even Rokeya's words -- their
writing was consumed, judged and digested at some intellectual level,
connected to but not truly part of what it meant being woman in
Jahangirnagar, in Dhaka, on the bus, in rickshaws, in school, at home
everyday. But Taslima! Taslima was the real thing, she was the ashol
chini for me and countless others of my generation. We might not have
agreed with everything she said, but that she said those things at all
was, for then, enough.

There were those of us who stood hours waiting at Boi Mela to get a
glimpse of her. And not just girls either -- there were the Notre Dame
boys who searched out her house to knock on her door on a winter's
morning to say, "Apa, we read your book, we wanted to see you, just
once." Boys who admitted that if Taslima had asked they would
cheerfully have jumped off a building. We would have done the same.

I wept when I read Taslima describing a young man burning her arm with
a cigarette in public. Or when I read, "Women who emerge from the home
to set foot in the street; those women -- not only me -- are all
prepared to bear silently any obscene remark in the streets." This was
the first time I realized that what had happened to me on that bus and
later as well, happened to others, and was NOT MY FAULT. I cannot
begin to describe what that meant to a guilt-ridden teen, who lacked
the knowledge that sexual harassment or molestation was not an
isolated incident, that it happened everywhere everyday, that it could
happen to anyone. Twenty years ago -- these were not things discussed
in bhodro society.

***

The literary quality of Taslima Nasrin's oeuvre has been discussed and
questioned by many. For me, as a reader, Taslima's strength has always
been her non-fiction: her topical columns intertwined with her
personal experience is what granted her writing such visceral power.
Her discussions on religion -- apart from several choice quotes from a
number of religious texts -- lacked the depth and reflection necessary
to germinate impetus towards interrogation and examination. However,
when she writes about the soon-to-be-abandoned young wife made
infertile because her husband had her first pregnancy terminated, or
the poetry-quoting friend of her youth lost to a bad marriage, or when
she speaks of her aunt (one of the countless women raped by the
Pakistani soldiers) who committed suicide, for her return from war was
a matter of shame and sorrow unlike the triumphant return of Taslima's
guerilla uncles -- it is our hearts she holds in the palms of her
hands.

These days it seems that a lot of her non-fiction is over-generalized,
catering to certain audiences. She remains strangely silent on certain
issues that should arouse a writer worth the calling, and then overly
and needlessly voluble over others. Some of the choices she has made
over the years remain open to question.

I met Taslima last year at a colloquium of women writers, in Delhi. I
was disappointed. The self-preoccupation, the endless recounting of
the same saga (which most of us knew anyway), the insipid
regurgitation of her victimhood was not what I wanted to come back
with. Where was the belly-cleansing fire? Where the searing empathy
for our bee-stung hearts? I wanted that other Taslima, the Taslima of
the Nirbachito Kolum. The one who could make the radical proposal that
all men be tested for syphilis prior to marriage, who knew that the
"kick of manmade laws" descended on both the women of the slums as on
the women "empowered" through education, who called upon women to
become "hungry" enough to attack their aggressors, who declared that
she had thickened the soles of her shoes because she would have to
traverse the long path of this life by herself, who questioned an
actor who had committed suicide when her husband divorced her, "Why
should this rough terrain assail you so, when the rest of us women are
used to this roughness, grow speedy and lively upon it?"

But that Taslima seemed to have disappeared in a confused welter of
self-pity, the essence of her words consumed by a careful crafting of
columns and essays redolent of repetitious expediency, a
simplification of issues that are complex and intertwined. The
machinations of a fearful government bent on placating
ultraconservative forces in the trash-pile of Bangladeshi politics led
to her exile; Taslima's dismissal of what she derisively calls
"tactics" isolated her further, not only from the land of her birth,
but from the heartland from which her writing emerged. Not for her the
full flowering of her intellect, the free flow of thought and ideas
that contain the possibility of rebirthing known reality on alien
soil. The resulting disconnection from language, culture and community
has muted the thunder of Taslima's eloquent rhetoric. I find it
tragically ironic that she had once written, "…I am not growing.
Sometimes I feel so suffocated within these tiny confines that even if
I make the rounds of this city seven times, this city, this country
seem as miniscule as a matchbox." The exiled Taslima traveled to
distant and vast metropolises, but what borders were crossed in the
landscape of her imagination?

Exile for an artist can be soul-sapping in many ways. To the extent
that Taslima's writing seems to be a rollercoaster ride spiraling
inwards, it seems that the mollas have, unfortunately, won after all.
The sharp blade of her rhetoric has transformed into a blunt weapon of
intent; where she had stormed onto our consciousness, the enforced
cloister of exile has snapped the thread of continuity with her land
and her people.

Taslima opened a lot of doors for the likes of us. It's a pity that
she has become a travesty of who she used to be.

***


As I reread Nirbachito Kolum today, I am struck by the datedness of
some passages and this, I think, is a good thing for a book of its
kind. It indicates that some areas that she wrote about have
progressed, moved ahead; that these issues demand a reappraisal in the
altered landscape of our social, political and cultural reality.

At the same time it's true that the revolutionary way of looking at
ourselves, our bodies, that we learnt from her, the exigencies of the
good girl-bad girl divide, is still, I think, as appropriate and
needed in today's Bangladesh as it was two decades ago when I was a
teenager. Women still chat on shallow shangsharik issues, girls still
judge each other, themselves and boys at levels superficial such as
clothes, appearance, money -- and men continue to remain boys (too)
late into life. But here, perhaps, I over-generalize.

Yet those are the kinds of over-the-top statements which made me both
adore and disagree with Taslima Nasrin so strongly. Taslima's writing
then and now is not the place to seek sociological analysis,
intellectual conceptualization, a true representation of the state of
things or the state of womanhood in Bangladesh or South Asia. Her
value resides in how jubilantly she flung open doors that had been
shuttered by genteel conservatism, by niceness, by ignorance and
denial, to clear the way for understanding and discussion of issues
that so desperately needed to be addressed.

Yet the question begs to be asked: is that enough anymore? For someone
who has gained Taslima's stature, someone who had come to represent a
certain face of Bangladesh, she seems curiously oblivious to the
nuances or the politics of her situation. Her pop-shot remarks,
"Before me, women would write love stories or advice on childcare and
cooking." (interview with Irshad Manji, 2002); "I don't find any
difference between Islam and Islamic fundamentalists." (interview with
'Free Enquiry' magazine), her not acknowledging how her warped
upbringing in a severely dysfunctional family shaped her as a person,
her discounting the efforts of countless men and women within
Bangladesh who hid and spirited her out of the country during volatile
times, who protested at the mindless injustice of her exile -- none of
these attributes serve to heighten our sense of her dependability and
veracity either as a writer or as a social reformer. Not to mention
the allegations of pandering to certain tastes in the marketing of her
books (can one not think of Amar Meyebela being translated/re-titled
as Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a
Muslim World by her Western publisher?), a charge which she dismisses
offhand.

Are these instances of naiveté or artifice? The banalities with which
she faced Karan Thapar in last year's Devil's Advocate interview,
especially in her evasion of his succinct questioning of her personal
ethics in "compromising third parties" gives one pause. In this
interview -- as well as in others -- this woman who is so soft-spoken
in person bulldozes her way through discussion and debate through
simply stating a monosyllabic positive or negative, or a single
sentence that is essentially no more than sloganeering and sticking to
it no matter what.

In some respects Taslima seems as uncompromising and rigid as the
mollas she opposes. But does this ideological inflexibility come
across as strength of purpose? Or as a stubborn refusal to take into
consideration a viewpoint that differs even slightly than her own
version of truth? Her truth seems to have lost it's Bengali small town
beginnings in recent years; despite her claims to the contrary, her
truth seems to have acquired a capital T, transforming itself into an
inalienable, transfixed Truth.

Taslima's discounting of her writerly lineage, of collectivity in the
context of Bangladeshi feminism and -- more hurtful perhaps to women
not directly related to either academia or the writing community --
the impassive denial of any experience that belies her own diminishes
her. Yes, abusive, transgressive sexual practices are often the lot of
girl children, brutalizing fathers/father figures are not rare, nor
are women who find aberrant religious practices the only recourse to
the crises of life. But are these the only norms of Bangladeshi
society? I myself grew up in a fairly liberal family, my mother a
professional woman, my father not given to deciding our lives for us.
Yet if I extrapolate my own experiences to pronounce on the "normal"
lives of all middle-class Bangladeshi families, I do a disservice not
only to myself but to others as well. And if my stated aim of writing
is to "change society," I place myself in an even more contentious
position.

***


And yet I cannot help but remember. I remember walking through the Boi
Mela gate arm in arm with other young girls so would-be molesters got
no chance to jostle and molest us at the overcrowded gates. I remember
the anger shaking me as I held a college friend weeping as she
described how her old chacha had raped her for years and her parents
had refused to believe her when she told. I remember marching in
rallies at Dhaka University to support the anti-rape movement in
Jahangirnagar. I remember walking into Boi Mela, Gausia market,
Gulistan with opened up large-size safety pins to stick into male
hands daring to come near our breasts, our buttocks. I remember
staying up late munching chanachur-makha, trading stories and laughter
on how we had and how we could deal with remarks, leers, invasive
hands in public and private places.

There were others who helped, other writers, other activists, other
women -- women who worked, walked the streets, who cooked, cleaned,
and taught us what it meant to be female, what potential that word
had. And there was Taslima. Who stormed the barricades of bhodro
feminist discourse, with her graphic detailing of abuse, her
unflinching depiction of the eternal exile of being an articulate,
affirmative woman, who suffered no injustice gladly. Taslima was right
when she said "woman has no country" -- this was true for her perhaps
even before she was forced into exile; at some level, true for the
rest of us as well.

***


This essay is not just about Taslima Nasrin. This essay is about me.
This essay is also about Farah, who I am honored to call my friend
because she once grabbed and displayed a male hand in a crowded London
tube to ask, "Does anyone know who this hand belongs to? Because I
just found it on my tit!"; about the tiny but wonderfully feisty
Shilpi from Bangladesh-Kuwait Maitree Hall who once took her shoe off
and jumped up repeatedly to smack the cheek of the tall old man who
had touched her butt on the New Market overbridge; and the young women
who organized the "stoning" of a man who would come to stand on the
boundary wall at the back of Bangladesh-Kuwait Maitree Hall to flash
the residents. This essay is about the beginnings of courage, the
glimmerings of hope, of understanding that although for some of us
gender is destiny, gender need not be all of destiny.

Books have always been very important to me -- too important some
would say. There were books that I read and reread simply for the
beauty of what they had to say, for the sheer joy of the words; books
that opened my mind and my heart to new ideas, different ways of
thinking, to the very process of thinking itself. I felt such
admiration for these, that they spawned within me a lifelong ambition
to be a writer myself. And there were books that impacted me so deeply
as a person that what they aroused within me was simply a sense of
abiding personal gratitude.

Nirbachito Kolum set off fireworks at various levels, in spaces both
public and intensely private. For me it was a connection between my
reading and my everyday lived life -- a bridge spanning the wild
waters of tradition, culture and community and the relatively rational
shores of a mind that rejected unexamined acceptance of
conventionalities. It was from that book that I -- and so many others
my age -- first learnt in terms that we could relate to that our
bodies and our urges were not things to be ashamed of, that the words
we spoke, how we related to the world and the world to us were
gendered down to the minutest detail. Taslima Nasrin wrote in
Nirbachito Kolum, "I know that my path is not smooth. I have to walk
removing stones in the way. Not only me, so does every woman." Despite
our disenchantment, disappointment and dashed hopes, there are those
of us who forever hold close to our hearts the moments when Taslima
helped us remove some of the stones littering our paths.
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