A book review from the Washington Post Wednesday, September 11, 2002; Page C04

'Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim
World' by Taslima Nasrin

By Nora Boustany, a diplomatic correspondent for The Post, who has covered the Middle East and Islam extensively as a foreign correspondent


MEYEBELA
My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim World
By Taslima Nasrin
Translated from the Bengali by Gopa Majumdar
Steerforth. 308 pp. $26

Taslima Nasrin, the fiery feminist from Bangladesh who angered the Muslim
clergy in her country by questioning the Koran and writing about sexuality,
has written a brutally honest and brave memoir of her childhood to the age
of 14. In "Meyebela," Nasrin depicts with horror the inequality between men
and women; the verbal, emotional and physical abuse heaped on female
relatives; and the exploitation and humiliation of lower-caste servants.

By the age of 7, she tells us, she had been sexually molested by a maternal
uncle and repeatedly raped one afternoon after a paternal uncle lured her to
his bedside with magic tricks. Nasrin was a spirited little girl in shorts
who played hopscotch and yearned to follow her older brothers and their
friends to the river or climb onto the roof of the house to engage in war
games and watch passersby. She was constantly pushed back into the shadows.
Her mind was irrepressible, however -- especially as she sought to come to
terms with the hypocrisy around her, masked by religion and tradition.

"Ma," Nasrin's affectionate yet seemingly clueless mother, unattractive with
her dull brown eyes, hollow cheeks and puffy nose, was an embittered woman,
driven to blind faith and mindless rituals. She became the devout follower
of a religious figure, Amirullah, to soothe her wounded ego after Nasrin's
father, Baba, entered into a liaison with a beautiful mistress and flirted
with Ma's prettier sisters. Ma used her expert knowledge of Islam to upstage
Baba in front of the children, thus reclaiming some of the power she had
lost to him.

Ma's domestic struggles help to flesh out, in the smaller compass of family
life, the appeal of Islamic authority in much larger settings and struggles
over power -- a dynamic that still eludes many commentators in the wake of
the terrorist attacks that occurred a year ago today. As a religion of
empowerment, Islam can place a believer facing seemingly insurmountable odds
on an equal footing with an adversary -- or any target symbolizing that
enemy's strength. In the end, Ma has an affair with Baba's brother, but her
retreat into an often unreasonable and always passionate piety affords the
most constant remedy for her pain.

Baba, better educated than his wife, moved up in the world and became the
family tyrant. A doctor and pharmacist, he caned his children to make sure
they studied hard. He sat next to little Taslima at her desk at night as she
grappled with English grammar, primed to strike her whenever she yawned or
made a mistake. He doted on her when she performed well -- especially after
one brother ran away with a Hindu girl and the other dropped out of medical
school to earn a psychology degree. But owing to his brutal methods, his
daughter grew to despise him -- and his constant urging that she make
something of herself amid the poverty and uncertainties of postcolonial
Bangladesh. "All I had seen so far in my life was his arrogance; all I had
heard were his roars," she writes.

Torn between her mother's unquestioning faith and her father's rigid
dictates, the precocious girl set about unraveling some of her mother's
mystifying and dubious assumptions. According to Ma, saying a prayer, then
standing at the door of each room of the house and blowing was supposed to
drive away all trouble. But when a storm broke without warning, neither Ma's
wailing and pleading to Allah nor her conservative Islamic garb, simulating
that of the prophet's wives, was of any use in stopping the raging winds and
rains. That incident, and many other of Ma's unverifiable beliefs, such as
"the moon has its own light" and "the earth always stands still," brought
the girl to the fundamental question fueling her rebellious childhood:
"Which was true? Science or the Koran? . . . As far as I knew, the earth did
not stand still. It moved around the sun."

Nasrin's memoir offers a rare look at a little-known country cramped by
poverty as it struggled to come of age. She sheds light on this large
subject through an engaging string of anecdotes about her relatives, as well
as discussions of how many traditional cultural and culinary habits survived
the war that split Bangladesh from Pakistan. "I had never seen so much grief
in our neighborhood. It was as if the entire neighborhood had decided not to
eat, or laugh, or play or sleep," she writes of one especially grim period.
Later, she observes: "It did not take us long to get back to normal. Human
nature is like that -- people cannot carry the weight of grief for very
long."

The theme of injustice toward women in Islam has become routine, but here it
gains fresh currency, thanks to the fervor with which the author looks,
through the inquisitive eyes of her younger self, for the truth behind
seemingly innocent family incidents. Her condemnations can sound repetitive
and sophomoric, but they come from within a Muslim society emerging from the
puzzling contradictions of postcolonial South Asia.

Ultimately, Baba's beatings and bribes failed with Nasrin, although she did
fulfill his expectations by becoming a doctor; today, living in exile, she
is a novelist and poet. Doubtless some of the confidence she has shown later
in life was forged in the adversity of her childhood; even as she took blows
on her back she steeled herself for life as a free agent. "I, in my corner,
I continued to grow," she writes.

This moving memoir attempts to demonstrate how it is possible for young
women to reach within themselves and nurture their own spiritual life in
spite of the physical and emotional pain that men -- and tradition-bound
societies -- can inflict upon them.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company