Writing the Woman's Life

A multi-genre biography on the life and works of Taslima Nasrin

Writing The Woman’s Life

 

"Who can measure the heat and passion of a poet's heart when it is caught and tangled in a woman's body"?�"

Virginia Woolf : “A Room of One’s Own”

Reading Virginia Woolf back in the late nineties at the British Council library in Calcutta was something I had looked forward to after my literature classes on Friday afternoons. There in the huge, solemn reading hall of the library, I, a young graduate student of English had been coaxed from my shell of the feel-good romances of intelligent, charming heroines of Jane Austen, the Victorian works of fiction and poetry where women wrote about their love for their husbands. I started to discover the world back then in the early twentieth century, a heavy suitcase of patriarchal morals as I had my first encounter with these lines in her phenomenal collection of essays A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is going to write fiction”.

In later years, exploring more of her fiction, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway introduced my young, fiery mind to her intense insights into the world of feminism. I gradually knew how, trudging the path carved by Ann Finch, the Countess of Winchilsea and Charlott Perkins Gilman, the utopian feminist of the late nineteenth century, Woolf pointed fingers at the small, almost negligible place of women in the estate of fiction. I learned to adore the stunning courage and wrath of Woolf as she openly stated the life of disorder and struggle that women as artists have to endure in their journey to establish themselves as the ‘shining beacons’ of humanity.

Fresh out of university, basking in the glory of these ‘shining beacons’ and my own spirit of rebellion, I have often felt the ‘heat and passion of a poet’s heart’ as I have read Woolf in these lines: “There is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of the mind”. All these years, as a student of English literature, as a writer silently, secretly adoring my cherished privacy of writing, adoring the ‘room of my own’, I have worshipped the life of fire and passion that Woolf had embraced in her lifetime. I have given myself time to ponder  Woolf’s observations on the mental stimulation that women would need, and the freedom to escape the monotony of their spiritually confined state, of which she had so strongly spoken in her work. 

In all these years, when I have looked beyond the Western literary world, when I have looked, with fondness and admiration at my own Bengali roots, I have found the closest corollary of Woolf’s ideologies in Taslima Nasrin. Hers is the forbidden name in Bangladesh, living in anger, desperation and terror in various exiles--in Sweden, France, Belgium and the United States. How many times in these two decades, from 1994, when she came out with her novel Lajja (Shame), has she fallen foul of the country’s law? How many times has she been threatened to death and fled her country to stay in exile, for writing seething, bitter accounts of her own life as well as the lives of her fictional female protagonists crushed and battered in abuse behind locked doors and humiliated in the burqua? In almost all her poems, novels, autobiographical works and her fiery, undaunted collection of essays, it is the voice of a bruised, dismayed soul of a woman who questions the Koran, explains her disgust for the religious hypocrisies inflicted on her since childhood. With rapt attention and a feeling of shock running down my veins, I read her banned memoirs Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood), Utal Hawa (Gusty Wind) and Kaw (Speak), and saw through her eyes how her perceptions of Allah, the Almighty God transformed from the quintessential savior that her religious mother taught her to worship to an entity she could blame openly for the stupidities, endless cruelties inflicted on the women in Bangladesh, including herself.

 

BBC World News: November 23 2007

Taslima Nasreen: Controversy's child
Ms Nasreen  Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasreen has been forced to leave her adopted city of Calcutta in India after riots by Muslims there. Her writings have made her a controversial figure for more than a decade.   The doctor-turned-writer first made a name for herself with her feisty newspaper columns, picking up a prestigious Bengali literary award in India for her book, Nirbachito Kolam (Selected Columns) in 1992. She has since written nearly 30 books of poetry, essays, novels and short stories in her native Bengali language, mostly in exile. Ms Nasreen fled her home country Bangladesh in 1995 after Muslim extremists called for her death following her most controversial book, "Lajja" (Shame). The book was banned for offending Muslim religious sentiments.  Come what may, I will never be silenced  Taslima Nasreen She was reported to have told  an Indian newspaper that Islamic religious edicts should be changed. Her comments enraged some militant Muslim Islamic groups.

 

In her memoirs, Nasrin recounts the harrowing stories of her emotional, physical and spiritual journey of gradually discovering herself and her sexuality amidst the tyrannical Islamic world of male domination in the war-stricken post-independence Bangladesh. In her poem, ‘Happy Marriage’, she writes: “My life, like a sandbar/has been taken over by a monster of a man
Who wants my body under  his control/so that, if he wishes,/He can spit in my face /slap me on the  cheek, /Pinch my rear; so that, if he wishes,/ He can rob me of the clothes /take my naked beauty in his grip;/So that, if he wishes/he can chain my feet,/ With no qualms whatsoever whip me /chop off my hands, my  fingers,/ Sprinkle salt in the open wound /throw ground-up black pepper in my eyes, With a dagger can slash  my thigh /can string me up and  hang me (Translation into English: Carolyn Wright).”

 While the females she grew up with�"her mother, grandmother, aunts, sisters and cousins�"spent their days in the oven fire, cooking for their fathers, brothers, husbands, feeding their babies and lulling them to sleep, the men, in their turn, always came home with stomachs full of hunger, bodies full of beastly lust; all their lives, their women offered their backs to be slapped and kicked by the men of the house, doing menial household chores with unquestioned servitude.

Most of her poems center around the world of endless isolation, despair and thankless compromises the woman makes as a survivor in the patriarchal Bangladesh. In almost all of them she sees her own life, her trials, tribulations, the execution threats inflicted upon her by Islam extremists time and again as metaphors of the suppression of her wishes, the regulation of her steps, as she states in her other poem Aggression:

“Human nature is such/That if you sit, they’ll say, "No, don't sit."
If you stand, "What's the matter? Walk!
And if you walk, "Shame on you, sit down!    
If you so much as lie down, they'll order, "Get up."
If you don't lie down, no respite, " Lie down.……………”

 

Blog post of Taslima on Tumblr.com: 

 

The reign of silence, terror and slavery of women that pervades the Islamic world in Pakistan, Afghanistan and other Islamic countries in Asia has found its voice in other dynamic female writers of the Diaspora. Fatima Mernissi’s work Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood stands as one of the finest examples.  For that matter, Taslima has not been the first one to have pried open doors locked on shattered girlhoods. In the post 2^nd World War literary domain of the west, writers including Dorothy Allison and Alice Walker had already made their foray into their harrowing journeys of racial and sexual discrimination in their memoirs. They had already shown how women, irrespective of race, class and society, can reach within themselves and nurture their own unique spiritual lives in spite of prevalent religious traditions, and the tremendous physical and emotional pain they were subjected to within the gamut of those traditions. While Bangladesh in its most brutal era of post-partition, racial riots and rule of anarchy was gradually being overpowered by the cruelty of war, pronounced sexism and the dictates of the Muslim clergymen, Bengali literature was yet to witness the stunning courage and ire of a woman writing her world and struggling to free herself from the clutches of religion.

Almost a century back, Charulata, the intelligent, demure Bengali bride of the aristocratic family in Rabindranath Tagore’s short story Nashaneer (Broken Home) started writing and publishing poems on the beauty of the countryside and her long forgotten childhood in the secrecy of her bedroom. Tagore, the writer and poet himself had once sought answers to the questions that lurked in his mind regarding the spiritual freedom of women (his famous rhetorical question: “Will no one give the right to a woman to conquer her destiny?”). In the course of the century, women have started to break the barriers of traditionalist family set-ups, gain financial and psychological independence. In the 1970’s and 80’s, a number of literary works and films have been testimony to this evolving independence of the middle class Bengali woman. In the 1980’s, Aparna Sen, the Bengali woman filmmaker had stepped ahead to depict in her film Paroma the blooming sexuality of a woman that was to find ways of expression outside the constraints of her home and her marital ties. 

However, all of this was happening in Calcutta, West Bengal, the seat of intellectuals, creative individuals, feminists and pathfinders of creative, intellectual and spiritual freedom. In the other part of the once undivided Bengal, the post-colonial Bangladesh, the gynecologist-turned writer Taslima Nasrin was writing novels and memoirs ending in death-threats, making her seek refuge outside of her own country. In Lajja (Shame), she portrays the public stoning of a Muslim woman buried waist-deep in a pit for seeking spiritual and physical redemption in a second marriage. In her memoirs Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood), Dwikhondito (Divided), later renamed Ko (Speak), she writes about the mindless arranged marriages and the attempts of compromises of women she witnesses, the deaths of the women she witnesses after botched abortions, and above all, her endless encounters with sexual abuse in her own family. She repeatedly questions the validity of the Islamic Shariyat (laws) based upon the clergy’s readings of the holy Koran. It is the holy Koran that tells her that redemption outside the institution of marriage, outside the long built pillars of patriarchy is a forbidden thought for women. It is a legacy of lies, discrimination and violence nurtured through centuries that her writing challenges, and then, is eventually deemed apostasy�"an offense punishable in Islam only by death. In her novels and memoirs, she focuses mostly on the agony and pain of being a woman�"whether it is about communal hatred rearing its ugly visage in Bangladesh, the mindless slavery of women sanctioned by Islam, about her own relationships and abuses, or about her emotional struggles when she tries to step into the Bengali literary domain ruled by men.

 

 

A blow up of the cover page of ‘Lajja’ (Shame) by Taslima Nasrin:

 

 

 

The cover page of her novel ‘Lajja’ (Shame) carries yet another poem, ‘Shashon’ (Censuring), where she uncovers the mindless indictments imposed on the woman, cherished by a society that sees her as a sub-human. Her fearless, radical statement in the poem, “Ashole bhool jonmo niye opobitro deshe” (My birth is wasted in a corrupt, tainted nation) is born out of sheer wrath at her own vulnerability of surviving as a woman in a land infested with beastly, violent men. “Ora amar sudol baahu, kobji kete nebe/ Ora amar jiwbha kete udor fere upre nebe chokh/ Konthonali chepe amar shiraa-y debe bish/Oder ami chini oder manush bole naam” (They will cut off my tender arms, my wrists, they will cut off my tongue, rip off my womb, pluck open my eyeballs, they will fill my veins with poison, choke my neck with their inhuman hands. I know these ghastly creatures, they are men).

Again, in another poem “Mosque, Temple”, Taslima wishes all religious sites, “the pavilions of religion” may be “ground to bits” and on their ruins, flowers of humanity may bloom. Ironically, these words of extreme religious disgust are born from the pen of a woman who did never breathe in a truly secular world. When I go through the pages of her memoirs, what is most stunning is not particularly the ruthless extremism of the Mullah’s (clergymen) world subjecting the women, children, the ethnic and religious minorities to brutality and terror, but the attitudes of several women who join in the ruthless effort to perpetuate fear and violence against other females. In Amar Meyebela (My Girlhood), she provides the gripping account of how she in her early adolescence, with her dissenting voice, her rebel mind that revolted against the dictates of the scriptures, was attempted to be reformed or purged by her own mother. Days went by and she remained as unrelenting as ever--in her contempt towards the Islamic dictates in which she grew up. The publication of her books became synonymous to waging a never-ending war�"the war against the tyranny of absolutist thought, the thought that overpowered her mother, her grandmother, her family and female friends for centuries.

As for me, I belong to the clan of her urban Bengali readers who, with all their intellectual sensibilities, stuff their book shelves with Shakespeare, Romantic English poetry, along with classic Bengali literature. I keep half a dozen of her once bestselling, later banned books, unassumingly, in the same shelves where they do not always demand attention. Off and on, in the two decades she has been read, hated, threatened, ridiculed�"I too, have read her, in different times, places, contexts. I have strived to know what made the intellectual circle of Bangladesh and India create an uproar about her life and her works in the same vein as those of the religious extremists who, on a periodic basis, threatened to execute and kill her. Until today, I reach out for the shelf to read her first literary work Nirbachito Kolaam (Selected Columns), and the fire of wrath that burned inside her dissolves into my own being when I read her referring to the Holy Koran’s lines: “One of the bones in a woman’s neck is crooked. That is the reason why no woman thinks straight, or walks on a straight path.” I feel it again, when she refers to thoughts depicted in the Koran like: “If a woman is disobedient, her man can beat her…” or “Men can have four wives, and they can divorce any of them simply by uttering the word talaq (divorce)�"three times”, while on the contrary, “women must stick to the institution of marriage, no matter what”. When I come across references in her personal essays in the collection, in which she openly states that the Shariyat (laws) of Islam does not permit independence of the women in any form, including divorce, second marriage and economical liberty, I lose myself in the perilous sea of rebellion that she could articulate in her quest to find her place in a world of extreme religious anarchy.

I have asked myself, what the writer in her could do, with all the colossal bitterness and wrath the scriptures had transmitted in her. The rebel in her never hesitates to debunk myths about the woman maintaining her propriety, to state the reality of her abuses and the fragility of her interpersonal relationships with men through the use of radical descriptions and graphic language. I have pondered quite a number of times over the hard-hitting depictions of her sexuality that even some other women writers, her male contemporaries and the media had criticized for years. I have tried to think of my Indian writing in English class as a graduate student in India, taking me back to the memories of knowing the uncanny honesty of a woman poet’s voice, the exploration of womanhood and love in the poems of Kerala-born poet Kamala Das. I shiver thinking how I had secretly enjoyed reading in Das’ poem “Looking Glass”, lines like “the musk of sweat between breasts/ the warm shock of menstrual blood”, lines through which she had celebrated the female sensual passion and eroticism in the company of her partner as well as shown her humane desperations, vulnerabilities and ruthlessness in the context of passionate love. There was the same feeling of redemption in the thought that Taslima, a Bengali woman, stifled within the claustrophobic walls of a patriarchy in a small Bangladesh township was striving to explore all these, racing with her mind, body and spirit, and with the world in which she found herself. 

Taslima depicted as the outcast feminist in the cover page of ‘Desh’, the renowned literary magazine published from Kolkata, India, December 2003:   

 

 

It is the same old township of Mymensingh in Bangladesh which features in Taslima’s writing, where decades ago, my own grandmother, an early adolescent, had to peek through the window pane of her own room to get a glimpse of what the men of the house had to say about the world outside, to find out stealthily what wonder and glory that world had to offer her father, her uncles and brothers. Today, all these decades later, I think about my tryst with my family exerting their own orthodoxy on me for years. I think about how I had been nearly crumbled into dust trying to fit into the archetypal female mold my family, my neighbors, my relatives and my in-laws wished me to believe in. When I think today how, with all my sincere passion, I wished to all but deny them, when I have thought how desperate, how vulnerable, how open I have been when I have sought love and fallen for men, I have stealthily, hungrily sought kinship with this woman and her banned books.

Writers and Intellectuals For and Against Nasreen (Excerpt from Taslima Nasreen’s page, Wikipedia.org)

“Nasrin has been criticized by writers and intellectuals in both Bangladesh and West Bengal for targeted scandalisation. Because of "obnoxious, false and ludicrous" comments in Ka, "written with the 'intention to injure the reputation of the plaintiff'", Syed Shamsul Haq, Bangladeshi poet and novelist, filed a defamation suit against Nasrin in 2003. In the book, she mentions that Haq confessed to her that he had a relationship with his sister-in-law.^[52] A West Bengali poet, Hasmat Jalal, did the same; his suit led to the High Court banning the book, which was published in India as Dwikhondito.^[53]

Nearly 4 million dollars were claimed in defamation lawsuits against Nasrin by fellow writers in Bangladesh and West Bengal after the publication of Ka / Dwikhandita. Writer Sunil Gangopadhyay, with 24 other intellectuals pressured the West Bengal government to ban Nasrin's book in 2003. Taslima answered why she wrote about known people without their permission when some commented that she did it to earn fame. Taslima defended herself against all the allegations. She wrote why she dared not to hide her sexual relations, she said that she wrote her life's story, not others'. Yet Nasrin enjoyed support of Bengali writers and intellectuals like Annada Shankar Ray, Sibnarayan Ray and Amlan Dutta.

Recently she was supported and defended by personalities such as author Mahasweta Devi, theatre director Bibhash Chakraborty, poet Joy Goswami, artist Prakash Karmakar and Paritosh Sen. In India, noted writers Arundhati Roy, Girish Karnad and many others defended her when she was under house arrest in Delhi in 2007, and co-signed a statement calling on the Indian government to grant her permanent residency in India or, should she ask for it, citizenship. In Bangladesh Kabir Chaudhury (writer and philosopher) also supported her strongly.”

 

In Bengali literature, while male writers have openly written about their sexuality in biographies and travelogues, while the backbone of some classics happened to be the beauty and voluptuousness of female bodies and the desire they generated in men, women never dared to write about their feelings of lust, their bodies and their quest for consummation of love. As for Taslima, she dares to write about her uncles sexually abusing her and promising secrecy for a lifetime, about the violence perpetrated by her father at home and the marital disharmony of her parents, about the numerous emotional and sexual relationships she encountered and their engrossing physical details. For the first time, the Bengali literary landscape sees a Muslim woman writer from Bangladesh decoding the paradigms of virginity, of promiscuity, washing her ‘dirty’ linen in public, and above all, renouncing and even challenging the dictates of religion. For the first time there is this Bengali woman writing about the sexual organs of her protagonist as a weapon of rebellion, making no qualms about mentioning the ‘forbidden’ while scripting her physical and emotional journey to womanhood, and her journey as a woman writer. 

For hours, I read these rebellious texts of blasphemy, of exploring the flesh-and-blood humane desires to live life, of asserting the spiritual freedom of a woman in a land infested with prying vultures. I read and view the pictures and reportage of Taslima’s dramatic escape from Bangladesh in the nineties, her subsequent writings while in exile in different countries and the censoring acts on them, the public assaults she has been subjected to in India and Bangladesh and the stance maintained by the Government and the bureaucracy regarding the freedom of her literary expression.  I keep thinking at times, whether it would have been different for her, perhaps a little less of a battle to find a permanent place for her to live and keep on writing, had she been born in the more liberated west. I come across celebrities, writers and activists in India, some of whom I have strongly admired for years, openly criticize her stupidity, her literary merits, most of them questioning if she has any at all.         

Taslima Nasrin: Awards and fellowships

 

 

Only a couple of years back, while I looked up on the internet for Taslima’s current literary works and accomplishments, I came across her website, which along with other information, had a photo archive. In the photos, I saw her visiting American and European Universities, delivering lectures and receiving honorary fellowships, all oblivious to the media of Bangladesh and India, the media that had once made her the Goddess of rebellion , the ‘fallen woman’ and the apostate.

While browsing the photos in which she was shown to deliver talks about her works, about the dominant theme of feminism in her writing, I have thought of the Western landscape of intellectuals that have embraced her. But isn’t it the same world in which only some decades back, poets and writers like Sylvia Plath had experienced extreme marginalization as a female? Isn’t it the Western landscape where Plath, wife to the celebrated poet Ted Hughes, an intellectual in her own right, experienced sexual objectification in her marriage and wrote poems, letters and prose, voicing her isolation, her agonies in the garb of language and rhetoric? Why is it that while she battled with severe depression, conjugal disharmony and alienation for a significant period of time, so little has been known of her mental state, other than the posthumous research of her biographers? Why is it that after so many years after her suicide, the publication of Plath's unabridged journals and unrevised version of her book of poems Ariel, forwarded by her daughter Frieda, suddenly called attention in the literary world, contextualizing Plath as a woman fighting the western patriarchal culture of the 1950’s? Didn’t her poems, the earlier ones in her career focusing on death, redemption, the sense of imprisonment and personal trauma, and the ones that follow her separation with Ted Hughes, replete with rage and despair, reveal the intensity of the love-hate relationship she had with Hughes, and the world around her? Didn’t she, like Esther, the female protagonist in her only semi-autobiographical novel Bell Jar, go through living hell, day in and day out, in the face of tremendous domestic isolation and marginalization she could explain only through the suggestions and imagery of her literary work?

In the early Twentieth Century, when Virginia Woolf had spoken for the need of women to own “a room of their own”, it was the same isolation, the same sense of propriety to remain within the social fabric and the same marginalization that women writing their world had to live with. Today, at least in these fifty years, whether it is Sylvia Plath unfolding her female wrath, ambivalence and grief through the objects of her everyday life--a cut, a bruise, a kitchen bowl, a candlestick, or Taslima Nasrin writing about her experiences of abuse, it is the world of that very isolation, that very sense of damage and emptiness of their lives that find a meaning, a purpose in their revelations.

I beckon the hapless soul of Sylvia Plath seeking relief from the same marginalization, the same isolation that Taslima writes about years later, more graphically, more fearlessly. I wander in the literary garden of Virginia Woolf, calling out for all her Mrs. Dalloway’s and Sally Seton’s, women who had thrived on being passionate and independent, women who had to embrace the social expectations of being the perfect housewives and mothers, being allowed to show their distinctions in self-arranged social parties. I beckon all of them--I am haunted by the image of all of them, I secretly smear my face with the venom of their hidden bruises. I remember my mother, my aunts, women in my in-law’s house detesting the transparency and the quest to express the sexuality of women in literature, films and life; in their eyes, any form of rejection of the ideal, pure image of woman still remains sinful.  I have seen my own mother and aunt idealizing their seamless traditions of compromise, the endless rituals of burying whatever little creative freedom they wished to explore before getting married.

Nine years back, I had been married off into a house in the narrow alleys of an old Calcutta where every day, I had to pour my desire to write, my craving for creative freedom into tea cups, into aluminum bowls of lentils and vegetable broth. Today, my desire to write and paint, to study and research the literary gems, to discover my inner being with my pen remains a distant rainbow that I often see along with the misty sky, through the window blinds of the room where I sit and write, contemplate and reminisce. Each day, I crave for these silent moments of words and phrases after I have changed soiled diapers, fed the babies, cooked food, prepared the bed, washed baby clothes. Each day, I secretly wait for the chill, sharp kiss of my muse who comes to see me, to enliven my fire at the end of the day.

Today, as I sit down to write about the pitiless path of life which I have ventured with literature, my one and only anchor that has given meaning and purpose to my own life, I realize how Woolf, how Taslima, how Sylvia Plath, trapped and tangled in a women’s bodies, have suffered the heat and passion of their literary selves. As I sit alone with the computer and books piled up in the dinner table, groping for words and wisdom at the twilight hour, waiting for my husband to come back for dinner and some light conversations, I think of my secret ambition to get published, to let the world know my stories, my inner sojourns, to release the pent up thunder that my folks back in India have never known I had, hidden under this well-nourished cloak of anonymity. I wish someday I too can write how I have craved intellectual freedom, how I too have been abused as a child, molested in my journey to womanhood and hated the ideal, pure image of woman which my Hindu, middle-class, Bengali faith had once taught me to believe in. For once, I wish to walk in the clouds of time, hand in hand with these women, inheriting the despair, rage and free will that kept them alive.

 

           

Author's Note

A tribute to the relentless, fearless Taslima Nasrin, to Virginia Woolf and her fictional women and how reading about Nasrin and Woolf has changed my psyche as a woman permanently.