[Reader-list] Taslima's Pilgrimage by MEREDITH TAX

Harsh Kapoor aiindex at mnet.fr
Sat Nov 2 19:45:24 IST 2002


The Nation (New York)
November 18, 2002
Review
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20021118&s=tax


Taslima's Pilgrimage
by MEREDITH TAX

Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim
World
by Taslima Nasrin; Gopa Majumdar, trans.

"A war was about to start. Knots of wide-eyed people gathered in
courtyards, in open fields, on street corners.... Others were
running...clutching bundles under their arms and children on their
shoulders. Running, they were running away from cities to villages.... The
sound of bullets echoed against the restless fluttering of pigeons' wings."

So begins Taslima Nasrin's memoir of her childhood. It is 1971 and
Bangladesh is fighting for its independence from Pakistan. Nine-year-old
Taslima is bundled into a carriage with her mother, grandmother and other
children to hide out with relatives in the countryside. But soon terrified
women refugees appear: The "Punjabis" are coming, and the family must flee
further into the countryside to another relative, then another. Finally a
truck rolls into the village full of young men with rifles, crying, "Joy
Bangla!" Bangladesh is free! The family heads back to their home in
Mymensingh, only to be greeted with fury by Baba, Taslima's father: "Why did
you return? The war is not over!" But it is too late to go back that night,
and then the soldiers come.

Chhotku, as always, was fast asleep.... It was a good thing, for on that
fateful night had he awakened and cried they would have shot not only him
but also Yasmin and me, who were sleeping in the same bed. Not that I was
asleep. I was simply pretending to be asleep, traveling the land of dreams,
playing with fairies, swinging on a high swing, no longer a part of this
world. Pretending that I did not know that men wearing heavy boots had
entered the room and were walking about, a rifle dangling from every
shoulder.... little girl, never mind what those heavy boots do in your room.
You must continue to sleep. Make sure your eyelids do not flutter, your
limbs do not move, your fingers remain still. Your heart must not
tremble--if it does, hide that tremor from these men when they lift the
mosquito net and look at you, lust and desire pouring from their eyes,
flames shooting out of their mouths as they speak in a language you cannot
understand. Keep absolutely still when they flash a light on your face, your
chest, your thighs. They must see that you are not yet fully grown, you are
not even an adolescent, your breasts have not yet appeared!

Thus we are plunged into the drama of a large extended family living in
close quarters, seen through the candid eyes of a little girl whose memory
records everything, even if she can't make sense of it at the time. There is
no adult consciousness in Meyebela; the voice is that of the child Taslima,
and while we see what she sees, we know that her fears and imagination may
be coloring events. Sometimes this is clear, as above, sometimes not. Since
her household is in a constant state of turmoil, Taslima finds it hard to
get her bearings, and the reader has the same problem: The narrative voice
and time frame seem to tremble from time to time, like a lantern flickering
in a room where a child is being beaten--for it soon becomes clear that
soldiers will not be the main source of violence in this story. We see it
all, every beating and injustice, every thwarted love and forced marriage,
every hysterical fit and religious excess, in a household so dysfunctional
no soap opera could do it justice, a household that is like a funhouse
mirror, reflecting the features of society in a way that emphasizes the
distortions: religious repression, female illiteracy, cruelty toward
servants and the sexual abuse that descends without warning upon children,
so that home is no refuge but a place of fear, and the ground is constantly
shifting under their feet. And thus we begin to understand the anger that
drives the author.

I kept thinking, as I read the first few chapters of Meyebela, what does
this book remind me of? Then I realized: In reading Maxim Gorky's My
Childhood, or watching the movie version by Mark Donskoi, one experiences
the same violence, the same illiteracy and emotional underdevelopment, the
same brutality toward children, the same lack of solid ground under one's
feet so that, because of the capricious actions of unreliable adults, a
child can lose everything in a moment. I believe that like Gorky's memoirs,
Meyebela will become a classic and a school text in many countries. This
will enable discussion of important issues, because Nasrin's memoir is about
the dark things that happen in families in every part of the world, like
other disturbing texts now taught in US schools: The Bluest Eye, Oranges Are
Not the Only Fruit, Bastard Out of Carolina. But, because it is such a
powerful child's-eye presentation of a particular, rural Bangladeshi
variation of Islam, Meyebela will be problematic as an educational tool in
the United States today, where people are constantly being told that Muslims
are evil. In a society that knows little about any variety of Islam, the
dark picture painted by Nasrin may be universalized, and welcomed all too
eagerly.

But if Taslima Nasrin had worried about such things, she would not have
become a human rights case. She tried to knock down every taboo in her
society, writing about religion, ethnic violence, sex, all at the same time,
crash! And she is still doing it. Nasrin did not have to flee Bangladesh
merely because she wrote a novel about the persecution of its Hindu minority
or told an Indian reporter the Sharia (Islamic law) was outdated and should
be left behind. Other Bangladeshi writers, male and female, have said such
things; some have also been threatened by fundamentalists; but most are
still there. Nasrin combined the violation of those taboos with an even more
daring transgression: She opened the closet door on a whole world of
subterranean sexual experience and feeling, much of it abusive, and none of
it considered fit to be discussed. She wrote about sex and religion and
state politics all together, and she did it at a bad time, when
fundamentalism was on the rise. The combination did her in.

Nasrin's problems began when her newspaper columns were brought out as a
book, Nirbachitha, and won an important literary prize given by Ananda
Bazaar Patrika, a newspaper published in Calcutta. In January 1993, when she
tried to board a plane to Calcutta, she was denied an exit visa on the
grounds that her occupation (she is both a physician and a writer) was
listed incorrectly on her passport. As a result, the government confiscated
her passport.

The next month her novel Lajja (Shame) was published. Nasrin wrote Lajja in
a white heat in 1992, after Hindu nationalists of the Bharatiya Janata Party
(BJP) destroyed the ancient Babri mosque in Ayodhya. This act led to
terrible communal riots in India, with many deaths on both sides. (The same
BJP is now running the Indian government and trying to erect a temple on the
site of the destroyed mosque, which they believe to have been the birthplace
of the god Rama.) In response to this provocation by Hindu extremists in
India, Muslims in Bangladesh attacked Hindu families and businesses,
resulting in terror, destruction and confiscation of property. Lajja, which
showed the sufferings of one Hindu family, was a sensation, selling 50,000
copies in Bangladesh in its first six months of publication. It was also
widely promoted by the BJP in India, in pirated editions.

The BJP's use of Nasrin's book to encourage anti-Muslim feeling in India
angered many in Bangladesh, while its content enraged religious extremists,
who pressured the government to withdraw it from circulation. The party in
power at the time was the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP), which banned
it in July 1993. The ban was publicly protested by writers and human rights
activists, who saw it as a sign of the growing influence of the religious
right.

It was not the only sign. Ain O Salish Kendra, a Bangladeshi women's human
rights organization, had been documenting a noticeable increase in crimes of
violence against women in the countryside, as religious zealots had begun to
take the law into their own hands, returning to punishments that were
sanctioned by Sharia but outlawed under the Bangladeshi civil code. In
January 1993 a newly married couple in Sylhet was buried chest-deep and
stoned for zina (adultery) because the woman had previously been divorced;
in May, a woman in Madhukhali was burned at the stake, also for zina. In
response to such events, Nasrin's newspaper columns became more militant. On
September 1, 1993, a tribunal in Kaligani, led by the superintendent of the
local madrassah (religious school), condemned a 16-year-old girl to a public
flaying with 101 lashes; she had been accused of having an affair with a
Hindu boy. After the beating, the girl died, allegedly a suicide. Nasrin
wrote a newspaper column about this incident, calling upon the government to
indict the mullahs involved for premeditated murder.

The backlash was swift. On September 16, 500 members of the Bangladesh
Sahaba Sainik Parishad, or Council of Soldiers for Islam (CSI), a militant
group based in a madrassah in Sylhet, held a rally calling for Nasrin to be
executed for "blasphemy and conspiracy against Islam, the Holy Koran and its
prophet." On September 23 they offered a bounty of $1,250 for her death
within fifteen days. On October 2 they staged another march, this time
threatening a general strike unless she was arrested by October 7. Though
political strikes are common in Bangladesh, they are not normally aimed at
individuals.

September 11, 2001, shows these events in a new light. Wahhabism, the
extremely strict form of Islam practiced in Saudi Arabia, had not only
penetrated the countryside in Pakistan and Afghanistan (where the Taliban
captured Kabul in 1996) but was also gaining a foothold in Bangladesh,
carried by migrant laborers and spread by modern communications. Sylhet had
been a center of emigration since the 1950s; thousands of young men went
abroad each year to settle and send money home to their families;
increasingly, they went to the Middle East. The money they earned there
enabled them to come back and become landowners and leaders in their
villages, and to set up madrassahs that taught the Saudi variation of Islam.
The fatwa put on Taslima Nasrin in 1993 must now be seen as an early warning
signal that this globalized, politicized form of Islamic fundamentalism was
growing more aggressive and looking for an opportunity to test its strength
in Bangladesh.

On October 21, 1993, leaders of the CSI held a press conference in Dhaka to
announce they were spreading the campaign against Nasrin throughout the
country. They demanded that she be executed and said that if the government
did not oblige, they would try her themselves. They also announced the
inauguration of a new campaign to institute the death penalty for blasphemy
and other crimes against Islam, the Prophet Mohammed or the Koran. Members
of the group had already brought charges against two of Nasrin's books in
private legal suits, on the grounds that they questioned Islamic law and
offended religious sentiments.

A brief item on this press conference went out on an AP wire and was picked
up in England, and the London office of International PEN notified me, as I
was then chair of its Women Writers' Committee. I obtained Nasrin's contact
information from Ain O Salish Kendra and began a regular correspondence with
her by fax.

International PEN and Amnesty International wrote the Bangladeshi government
about returning her passport, which it did in April 1994. Nasrin left the
country in May to speak in Paris. On her way home she passed through India
and gave an interview to a reporter from the Calcutta Statesman, who asked
provocatively if she would support changes in the Koran. Nasrin's
affirmative reply, which she says was misquoted, created a great furor in
Bangladesh, and she wrote the Statesman to clarify her views on May 11,
1994:

I do not hold the view that "the Koran should be revised thoroughly,"
because I think it is impossible to revise the Koran.... Why should we try
to change a religious text which is held as sacred by many? My view on this
issue is clear and categorical. I hold the Koran, the Vedas, the Bible, and
all such religious texts determining the lives of their followers as "out of
place and out of time." We have crossed the sociohistorical contexts in
which these were written and therefore we should not be guided by their
precepts. The question of revision, thorough or otherwise, is irrelevant. We
have to move beyond these ancient texts if we want to progress. In order to
respond to our spiritual needs, let humanism be our new faith.

A leading Bangladeshi cleric told the press that her retraction was worse
than her original statement and more filthy than The Satanic Verses by
Salman Rushdie. Another called Nasrin "an apostate appointed by imperialist
forces to vilify Islam," put a price of $2,500 on her head and called for
her immediate death by hanging. The following week, 5,000 members of the
extremist Muslim party Jamaat-e-Islami staged a demonstration in Dhaka
calling for Nasrin's execution. This was an alarming development; the
campaign against her was no longer confined to an obscure rural sect but had
reached the capital.

And why did the government of Bangladesh not act against these extremists?
Then as now, it was led by the BNP under Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia,
and Jamaat-e-Islami, which then held a number of seats in Parliament, was a
member of its coalition. If the Prime Minister had moved against the
Islamists in 1993, Jamaat might have withdrawn from the coalition and her
government might have fallen. So Prime Minister Zia sacrificed democracy to
party expediency and gave in to the fundamentalist agenda. On June 4, 1994,
the police chief in central Dhaka filed a case against Nasrin under Section
295A of the Penal Code, which provides for two years' imprisonment for
"deliberate and malicious acts intended to outrage the religious feelings of
any class of citizens by insulting its religion or religious beliefs." A
warrant was issued for her arrest, and she and her family went into hiding.

At that point Taslima Nasrin became an international press sensation, the
"female Rushdie," a poster girl for the oppression of Muslim women. Such
international press interest was unprecedented for a writer who had not even
been translated into one of the "power languages"; of course it was a good
story, with an appealing heroine who could be presented as a damsel in
distress, but despite the fact that the Western press was sympathetic, I
soon came to see their coverage as a double-edged sword. Many of the
reporters I talked to seemed to want to use the story as a stick with which
to beat Islam; I would talk about the rising tide of all kinds of religious
extremism, Christian, Jewish and Muslim; but none of that ever got into a
story. The Western press tended to portray her solely as a victim and symbol
of the oppression of Muslim women, downplaying her courage and ignoring the
work of the Bangladeshi women's movement. And, worst of all, every new
Western article or broadcast about Nasrin seemed to create a more vigorous
desire to kill her back home; her persecutors reveled in the publicity. Huge
crowds of bearded men marched in the streets of Dhaka, holding up her
picture and shaking nooses for the TV cameras. There were
counterdemonstrations by feminists and human rights supporters, not only in
Bangladesh but all over the world.

Nasrin remained underground for six weeks, and the situation was very
problematic. So many organizations were involved that coordination was
difficult; the press was all over everything, and the cost of a mistake
could be a person's life. There were also issues of conflict of interest,
since some of the human rights people involved were also journalists writing
about her case. In arguments over strategy, the journalists, most of whom
happened to be men, increasingly lined up on one side, urging ever more heat
from the international press, while the rest of us, mainly women, wanted to
hold back. Two guys, one Swedish and one French, actually declared they
would go into Bangladesh and rescue Nasrin personally, despite her lawyers'
request that they do no such thing; one responded to my incredulous
questions by saying, "Does a lawyer in Bangladesh know more than a European
journalist?" Several of us concluded that there had to be a better way to do
this kind of human rights work and, in the fall of 1994, founded the Women's
World Organization for Rights, Literature and Development (Women's WORLD) to
develop a more feminist approach to helping besieged women writers.

Taslima Nasrin remained in hiding until August 1994, when her lawyers, Dr.
Kamal Hossain and Sarah Hossain, with background pressure from several
states, reached an agreement with the Bangladeshi government. She was
offered a visa to attend a conference in Stockholm, made a brief court
appearance, was given bail and left immediately for Sweden, where she
received political asylum. Although she has moved around quite a bit since
then, she is unable to return to her own country. She tried in 1998, when
her mother was dying of cancer, and was immediately greeted by the same mob
scene she had fled in 1994, somewhat reduced in size but still virulent. Her
father is now old and she would like to see him, but the same thing would
undoubtedly happen again. In fact, in mid-October of this year, she was
tried in absentia by a rural court in Gopalganj, about sixty miles from the
capital, in a case brought by a local extremist leader; the magistrate found
her guilty of offending religious sentiments and sentenced her to a year in
jail should she return to Bangladesh. In addition, three of her books,
including Meyebela and its sequel, are still banned in Bangladesh.

Meyebela, which has been excellently translated by Gopa Majumdar, is
dedicated "to my mother, who suffered all her life," and much of the book
centers on Ma, who loves learning but whose father pulled her out of school
at a young age and married her off to a poor student from the countryside
whom he picked up in the street. Most of the marriages in this book are that
arbitrary. Baba, a handsome man who is always criticizing Ma for being too
skinny and too black, is a philanderer; in one memorable scene, Ma takes her
young son by the hand and they walk across town to the home of Razia Begum,
whose love notes she has found while doing Baba's laundry. Razia Begum's
ancient husband is standing guard, but Ma gets past him, finds the two
lovers in bed and drags her husband home. But his womanizing is a constant
theme; frequently she finds him in bed with servants, whom she immediately
attacks and sends out into the streets crying, with no job and no money.

Denied education and thwarted in love, Ma has nowhere left to turn but
religion, and she does so with a vengeance, joining the cult of the holy man
Amirullah, her sister's husband, whose female devotees are so obsessed with
getting into heaven through his agency that they fight over who will wash
his feet, who will massage his legs and who will lick up his spittle. Ma
drags her young daughter Taslima with her so that she too will be saved by
hearing Amirullah describe what will happen to those who go to hell, to be
racked by unbearable heat, stung by snakes and scorpions, and fed boiling
water and pus. The child Taslima's distaste for religion grows from such
encounters:

I sat silently behind Ma, the prayer beads still in my hand. I was sorry to
see her cry. Her whole body was racked with sobs. It surprised me greatly to
see so many people crying in fear of being burned by a fire. It was exactly
like frightening a child. Perhaps I ought to cry, too, just like the others.
I waited for tears to gush, but my eyes remained completely dry. Having
heard how Allah might roast people alive, He began to strike me as someone
cruel and heartless.

Baba, a doctor, wants Taslima to study science, not religion. He wants all
his children to study, setting them impossibly long hours with no time for
play and beating them if they don't do well. His wrath at those who fail him
is terrible. When his son Chhotda drops out of high school to marry a Hindu
girl, Baba and an uncle kidnap the boy and shackle him in the living room
with heavy chains. Baba proceeds to beat him half to death, then locks him
in his room without food or water until the boy is a walking corpse. When
Chhotda will still not agree to leave his wife and go to college, Baba
disowns him and throws him out of the house. Then he locks up his daughters,
determined not to let anything romantic happen to them.

Baba and Ma fight like dogs over Taslima, one pushing study, the other
religion. Terrified of her father, she loves her mother but is a born
skeptic and has gone to school, where she learned the scientific method. She
finds a Bengali adaptation of the Koran, meant for women, which says the sun
moves around the earth. This was not what she learned in school. What the
book says about women is even worse. "So, even Allah was not prepared to
treat women equally? Was Allah no different from Getu's father? He used to
beat Getu's mother because she did not obey his every command." One day,
while everyone in the neighborhood watched and did nothing to intervene,
Getu's father beat his wife nearly to death with a burning log because she
didn't put enough salt in his food. Then he divorced her by saying he gave
her talaq three times. That was all he had to do, and Getu's mother was left
with nothing while he married a teenage girl the next week. Thus the
thoughts of the child Taslima. In a culminating scene, she goes poking
around in her mother's holy books and finds them riddled with termites,
because the house is damp and the books are never aired. She is infuriated
by what she reads about the position of women.

Now that I knew, I did not wish to delve any deeper. I knew that it was
useless to search for pearls or diamonds in a pot of shit.... I thought that
the Koran was written by a greedy, selfish man like Uncle Sharaf, or the man
who grabbed my breasts by the river. If the hadith was the words of Prophet
Muhammad, then he was definitely like Getu's father: nasty, cruel, an
abuser, insane.... Even after I had put the book back, millions of termites
remained deep inside me, silently eating away all the letters and words in
my head, and who knows what else.

These words, are, of course, shocking and will be profoundly offensive to
many. But Nasrin believes in being shocking, in throwing herself against the
bars of culture rather than trying to dismantle them bit by bit. Her methods
have been criticized by many people, including Muslim feminists who call her
approach simplistic and say it is necessary to see Islam, and other
religions, as historical and social constructs that have been modified in
the past and can be again. They say she generalizes incorrectly about Islam
from the variant she experienced in Bangladesh, and that anyway you can't
change culture by attacking it head on. But Nasrin is not convinced. As she
said in a 2000 interview:

People often tell me it is a question of tactics...but I do not believe in
tactics. I am not a diplomat or a politician, I just want to say whatever I
believe in. That means abolishing religion.... Because religion and freedom
of expression, religion and human rights, religion and women's rights,
religion and democracy, religion and freedom cannot coexist.... Using
tactics takes too long; it will take too much time to establish secularism
this way.... What I want is a revolution--for women's freedom, for humanism,
and to throw out unnecessary things like religion.

Such fervent anticlericalism sounds strange to me, like something out of the
eighteenth century. But of course I live in Multiculture Central, where
vehement atheism is likely to be criticized more on the grounds of
tactlessness than of blasphemy. Nasrin thinks attacking religion will bring
about a world change in consciousness. I have my doubts; perhaps the anger
in Meyebela distracts me from its message. I keep wondering how much of this
story can be reduced to the unresolved furies of a mistreated child.

And then, since I am American, I think of the blasphemy of Huckleberry Finn,
who was taught that slavery is sanctioned by the Bible. Huck believes he is
committing a deadly sin by helping his friend Jim, the runaway slave. He is
actually writing a note to inform on Jim when he realizes that, even if it
means he goes to hell, he can't betray his friend. "All right, then, I'll go
to hell," he says, in words that still resonate through the American school
system, where Huckleberry Finn is taught in countless English classes--and,
over a hundred years after it was written, is one of the most frequently
censored books in the United States.

I believe Nasrin's Meyebela will, like Huckleberry Finn, become a classic of
controversy, hated, loved, banned, made a school text, removed from the
schools and fought over as long as people read. But there is an important
difference between the two books. Huckleberry Finn is a novel, and, though
it has a first-person narrator, there is a clear distance between Huck, the
character, a believer who will do what's right even if it means he has to go
to hell, and Twain, the secular-humanist author, who is using Huck to show
the hypocrisy of religion. In Meyebela, there is no authorial stance
distinct from that of the narrator; the voice is that of the young Taslima
as she comes to hate religion and blame God for the cruelties of man.
Because all the author's stories, and all her conclusions, are told in the
voice of an angry, rebellious, imaginative child, some may feel they are
simplistic. But even those who long for more distance must recognize that
Meyebela's bravery, vividness and groundbreaking subject matter make it a
remarkable achievement, and one that will live.



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