October 5 2002

Canada 

Memoir

Rebel Writer tears off her burqa

Meyebela

My Bengali Girlhood –

A Memoir of Growing Up Female In a Muslim World

By Taslima Nasrin

Reviewed by CHRISTINA MAIRIN

Taslima Nasrin was in hiding in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in preface to the English translation of her incendiary novel Lajja( shame), a work of uncompromising literary activism. Opposition to her humanist-feminist writings had been growing for some time. She met it with unbroken defiance. A fatwa was issued against her and religious fundamentalists clamoured for her head. She was 32, a doctor, poet, writer and thorny dissident. Religion, she believed, was the great oppressor and should be abolished. In the preface, she wrote:

    ‘For myself, I am not afraid of any challenge or threat to my life. I will continue to write and protest persecution and discrimination. I am convinced that the only way the fundamentalists forces can be stopped is if all of us who are secular and humanistic join together and fight their malignant influence. I, for one, will not be silenced.’

Taslima Nasrin had intimate knowledge of her adversary. Unlike Salman Rushdie, to whom she is often compared, she did not write from the safety of exile or without foreknowledge of the consequences. She was weaned on the particular brand of fanaticism taking hold in post-war Bangladesh. She had grown up clutching the skirts of her increasingly pious mother, who dragged her to the colony of a local charismatic teacher where, with cult-like devotion, women would taste the contents of his spittoon. And she would herself be forced into the cage of the burqa when the maturing body robbed her of what little freedom she enjoyed as a girl.

       Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood, written following her escape to Europe after months of hiding, is a memoir and another political act. Nasrin tells the often harrowing story of her journey from birth to adolescence. It was necessary for her to create new language to denote this passage, as none existed in her native tongue. The Bengali term for childhood is chelebela, boy-time. Meyebela, an act of radical linguistics, means girl-time.

      There is a female character in this haunting memoir  who has no name at all. When Taslima asks this woman’s daughter why her mother has no name, the daughter answers, ‘so what if she doesn’t have a name?’ What would  she do with one? What does it matter whether a poor woman has a name or not?’ In a place where there are women without names, what does it matter whether girlhood has a name or not?

      Taslima Nasrin was born into a middle-class household, in the town of Mymensingh, in 1962. Her father, the son of farmers, had been helped through medical school by an impulsive restaurant owner given to spontaneous acts of charity. Taslima’s tall, handsome father would surreptitiously watch his benefactor’s small, skinny daughter intent on her studies each evening. When he asked for her in marriage, he was not denied. His bride, Taslima’s mother, was 12. ‘ The dark, snub-nosed girl was married to a fair, sharp-nosed boy.’ Their troubled marriage, defined by infidelity of every conceivable kind, straddled two modes of thought—that of her father’s modern, scientific mind and of her mother’s world of mystical tradition. This uneasy alliance did much to shape the girl who would be their third child. Hers was a world of irreconcilable contradictions.

     ‘Everyone on our house was passionate about the moon. When the moon  came out, mothers carried their babies out in the courtyard and chanted a little rhyme: ‘Come, come, Uncle Moon, put a dot on my love’s forehead!.’ When an uncle visiting from the big city witnessed his mother greeting the moon, he barked, ‘ Ma, Neil Armstrong has gone and pissed on that moon.’

     While men walked on the moon, evil spirits (Jinns) inhabited the trees in her garden, terrifying ‘spooks’ haunted the paths she had to walk at night and the ghosts were as plentiful as the living. When her lovely and gregarious aunt Fajli was married off and began to suffer periodic bouts of unruly, manic behaviour, the offending  jinn  was named and beaten out of her. ‘The Jinn Sharafat often took over aunt Fajli. When she was very devoted to Allah, very devoted to her husband and father-in-law. She did not laugh; her veil did not slip. But sometimes the beatings left black bruises on her back. Black marks on fair skin, like the ugly spots on the beautiful moon.’

        Meyebela covers a scant 14 years in the life of Taslima Nasrin. War, riots, revolution and famine burst from its pages. One must be forgiven the occasional, momentary thrill when the story takes a surprising and terrible twist, as it is easy to forget that this is not a novel; its swift, entwined politeness deliver punch. Then reality hits. Her cousin, an extremely religious young girl, dies suddenly following a secret abortion. Her brother’s best friend goes out in a beautiful day and is shot dead in a riot.

        There is only one thing of which Nasrin can be sure: Human life must be precious in Bangladesh, because it can so quickly be snatched away.

        Innocence is so fragile luxury for children the world over, and some readers will find their own experience of sexual abuse echoed here. The painful questions that plagued Taslima following rape by an uncle, when she was just 7, are, sadly, too widely shared. When warned to tell no one, she was suddenly aware that she had been involved in something not just traumatic, but shameful. She is unable, even as a woman, to understand the silent girl who kept this terrible secret: Was she ‘in charge’ of protecting her uncle’s good name? Was she protecting her own belief that they were good people, ‘as if what happened was just not true, was a lie from start to finish, no more than a night mare?’ Could she hope to be believed or would she be branded a lier, mad, possessed of evil spirits and then beaten to erase the shame?

She feels ‘split in two.’ ‘Thousands of miles separated this lonely girl from all others. When she stretched out her arms, she could not touch anyone, not even her mother. When she tried, her hands only grasped emptiness.’

       Faced with seemingly capricious suffering and hypocrisy, with parents who embraced or abandoned faith and reason as it suited their needs, and always in opposition to one another, she became an increasingly mute witness to her life. She would dutifully study beneath the threat of her father’s whip, would pray, distractedly with her devoted yet fanatical mother( to whom this book is dedicated), but her sense of isolation was all-consuming. She was a prisoner of reason.

       I asked a Bangladeshi friend, who translated the title for me, what she had thought about Taslima Nasrin when they were both living in Dhaka in 1994. She became quiet. How could she explain the layers of complexity? There were other feminists, she told me, who had been working for decades without a fatwa being issued, that there were many ways to be a Muslim woman in Bangladesh.

     I had been in Dhaka myself at that time, with a video crew, recording the lives of poor women. I was taken from my guesthouse late one night by armed men. Following an impressive display of intimidation, I was told I would be arrested if I tried to find Nasrin. To this day, I feel some shame that I did not attempt to do so.

      The reality for most in Bangladesh is grinding, relentless, brutal poverty, precisely the despair upon which fundamentalism thrives. Nasrin came of age as one of the most disadvantaged people on the earth: a girl in Bangladesh. When she found her voice, she decided to take on religion—all of it, everywhere. And, amazingly, she’s made a tiny dent in it. That’s extraordinary.