POETRY

Following is a sample of Taslima's work. She writes in Bengali, and her work has been translated by Carolyn Wright and others. Warren Allen Smith has edited each of the following, which may not be used without requesting permission from the publisher or the author.

PRISONER'S POEMSthe poems Taslima wrote when she was forced to live under house arrest

My mother's eyes, at the end, became yellowish, egg-yoke like.
Her belly swelled rapidly like an overly full water tank
ready to burst at any moment.
No longer able to stand, or sit, or even move her fingers,
she just lay there.
She, at the end, did not look like Mother any more.
Relatives came each morning, every evening,
telling Mother to be prepared,
to be ready to die on the holy day, Friday;
uttering la ilaha illallah, Allah Is One, warning her not to disappoint

Munkar and Nakir
when the two angels arrive to ask questions;
asking for cleaning the room, cleaning the yard,
be sure that shurma and atar are on hand
when he finally arrives, the death.

Now the hungry disease danced over Mother's body,
sucked her last remaining strength,
made her eyes emerge from their sockets,
dried her tongue,
stole the air in her lungs.

As she struggled to breathe,
her forehead and eyebrows squeezing with pain,
the whole house asked her, shouting,
to send their regards to the Prophet.
None doubted that she would go to Jannatul Ferdous, the best heaven,
would walk hand-in-hand with Muhammed
on a lovely afternoon, soon, in a garden.
The two would lunch--bird meat, wine.
Mother dreamed her lifelong dream:
she would walk with Muhammed in the Garden of Paradise.
But now, at the very time for departing Earth, what a surprise,
she hesitated.
Instead of stepping outside,
she wished to boil Birui rice for me,
to cook fish curry and fry a whole hilsa,
to make sauce with red potatoes,
She wished to pick for me a young coconut
from the south corner of her garden.
She wished to fan me by hand-fan,
remove a few straggly hairs from my forehead.
She wished to put a new bed sheet on my bed,
to sew for me a frock with embroidery.
She wished to walk barefoot in the courtyard,
To support the young guava plant with a bamboo stick.
She wished to sing sitting in the garden of hasnuhena,
"Never before, had such a bright moon shone down,
never before, night was so beautiful.. .."

THE UNRUNG RING

So many things ring,
    the cells of the body,
    the ankle bells as they dance,
    the silver wrist bangles.
As the monsoon rains fall on the window
     the glass panes musically ring.
As clouds clash with clouds
    lightning rings out.
Dreams ring, keeping time to their beats,
    and, making a havoc internally,
    loneliness rings.
Only an intimate bell on my door does not ring.

                 CHARACTER

                 You're a girl
                                  and you'd better not forget
                                  that when you cross the threshold of your house
                                  men will look askance at you.

                 When you keep on walking down the lane
                                  men will follow you and whistle.

                 When you cross the lane and step onto the main road
                                  men will revile you, call you a loose woman.

                                 If you've no character
                                  you'll turn back,
                                  and if you have
                                  you'll keep on going
                                as you're going now.

HAPPY MARRIAGE

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.

His goal: to control my heart
so that I would love him;
in my lonely house at night
sleepless, full of anxiety,
clutching at the window grille,
I would wait for him and sob;
tears rolling down, I would bake homemade bread,
would drink, as if they were ambrosia,
the filthy liquids of his oleaginous body
so that, loving him, I would melt like wax,
not turning my eyes toward any other man.
I would give proof of my chastity all my life.

So that, loving him,
on some moonlit night
I would commit suicide
in a fit of ecstasy.



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ANOTHER LIFE

Women spend the afternoon squatting on the porch,
                  picking lice from each other's hair.
They spend the evening feeding the little ones,
                  lulling them to sleep in the glow of the bottle lamp.
The rest of the night
                  they offer their back to be slapped and kicked by the men of the house
                  or sprawl half-naked on the hard wooden cot.
Crows and women greet the dawn together,
                  the women blowing into the oven to start the fire,
                tapping on the back of the winnowing tray with five fingers
                 and, with two, picking out the stones.
Half their lives women pick stones from the rice.
All their lives stones pile up in their hearts,
                  no one there to touch them even with two fingers.

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."

I'm wasting my days getting up and sitting down.
If I'm dying right now, they speak up, "Live."
If they see me living, who knows when
they'll say, "Shame on you. Die!"

In fear, I secretly go on living.

MOSQUE, TEMPLE

Let the pavilions of religion
    be ground to bits,
let the bricks of temples, mosques, guruduaras, churches
     be burned in blind fire,
and upon those heaps of destruction
let lovely flower gardens grow, spreading their fragrance.
let children's schools and study halls grow.

For the welfare of humanity, now let prayer halls
be turned into hospitals, orphanages, universities,
Now let prayer halls become academies of art, fine art centers,
          scientific research institutes.
Now let prayer halls be turned to golden rice fields
          in the radiant dawn,
Open fields, rivers, restless seas.

From now on, let religion's other name be humanity.

AT THE BACK OF PROGRESS

The fellow who sits in the air-conditioned office
        is the one who in his youth raped
        a dozen or so young girls,
        and, at cocktail parties, is secretly stricken with lust,
        fastening his eyes on lovelies' bellybuttons.

In five-star hotels,
        he tries out his different sexual tastes
        with a variety of women,
        then returns home and beats his wife
        because of an over-ironed handkerchief or shirt collar.

In his office Mr. Big puffs on a cigarette,
       shuffles through files,
       rings for his employee
       shouts,
       demands tea,
       drinks,
       and returns to writing people's character references.

His employee speaks in such a low voice
        that no one would ever suspect
        how, at home, he also raises his voice,
        is vile to his family
        but with his buddies on the porch or at a movie
        indulges in loud harangues on politics,
        art, literature, and how some female -
        his mother, grandmother, or great-grandmother -
        committed suicide.

Bidding goodbye to his buddies,
       he returns home,
       beats his wife
       over a bar of soap
       or the baby's pneumonia.

Next day, at work, he pleasantly brings the tea,
       keeps the lighter in his pocket,
       receives a tip of a couple of taka,
       and tells no one that he divorced his first wife for her sterility,
       his second for giving birth to a daughter,
       his third for not bringing a sufficient dowry.
       Now, with wife number four, he again has someone:
       To beat over a green chili or a handful of rice.

SAD GIRL

Sad girl, forget your sorrow.
You are only sixteen.
All life lies before you.
Willfully embrace sorrow now
       and what will you do later,
       what will you do with your tears?

Sad girl, forget your sorrow.
Throw open all the windows
Dance as you please in the whirlwind of light and air.

Sad girl, live!

GIRL FROM SWITZERLAND

At the dinner party everyone
Held a glass of champagne or
White wine in their hand.

All in a row, the big guys came up
To shake my hand and greet me.
Some came to hear about my experiences,
How I came out alive
From the troglodyte’s den.
Some came to get my autograph,
Some to look at me with wide-eyes admiration,
Some to kiss, some to offer flowers.

In the midst of all this
A girl with golden hair came up.
Not extending her hand.
Not wanting to hear my sad stories,
She said she had come
Just to weep with me for awhile.
And I felt that the entire Bramhaputra
Was rising in my eyes, eroding
The embankment of my heart.

I. from the east,
and she, from the west,
had pains that were equally deep.
I was dark, she a rosy white,
But our sorrows were equally blue.
Before we wept we did not have to
Hear about each others experiences.
We knew them too well.

BORDER

I’m going to move ahead.
Behind me my whole family is calling,
My child is pulling my sari-end,
My husband stands blocking the door,
    But I will go.
There’s nothing ahead but a river.
    I will cross.
I know how to swim,
    but they won’t let me swim, won’t let me cross.

There’s nothing on the other side of the river
       but a vast expanse of fields,
But I’ll touch this emptiness once
       and run against the wind, whose whooshing sound
       makes me want to dance.
I’ll dance someday
      and then return.

I’ve not played keep-away for years
        as I did in childhood.
I’ll raise a great commotion playing keep-away someday
        and then return.

For years I haven’t cried with my head
         in the lap of solitude.
I’ll cry to my heart’s content someday
        and then return.

There’s nothing ahead but a river,
        and I know how to swim.
Why shouldn’t I go?

I’ll go.

SELF-PORTRAIT

I don’t believe in God,
I look upon nature with wondering eyes.
However much I move forward grasping the hand of progress
           society’s hindrances take hold of my sleeve
           and gradually pull me backwards.
I wish I could walk all through the city
          in the middle of the night,
          sitting down anywhere alone to cry.

I don’t believe in God.
From house to house the religion mongers
         secretly divide us into castes,
          segregate the women from the human race.
I too am divided,
            defrauded of my human rights.
The crafty politician
             gets loud applause when he rails about class exploitation,
But he cleverly suppresses all the terminology
             of women’s exploitation.
All those people of supposed good character, I know them.

Throughout the world, religion has extended its eighteen talons.
In my lone brandishing, how many of its bones can I shatter?
How much can I rip discrimination’s far-spreading net?

WOMEN AND POEMS

With as much pain as a human being becomes a woman,
That much pain makes a woman a poet.
A word takes a long year to be made,
a poem an entire life.

When woman becomes a poet, she is totally a woman.
Then she is mature enough to give birth from her suffering heart,
Then she knows how to care for a word.

You have to be a woman first if you want to give birth to a poem.
A word without any pain is fragile, breaks when touched.
Who knows more than a woman all the lanes and alleys of pain!

THE WOMAN BREAKING BRICKS

The woman, breaking bricks and sitting on a sidewalk,
wears a red sari as she breaks the bricks, under the burning sun, breaks the bricks,
the bronze coloured woman breaks the bricks.
Twenty-one? But she has seven children back home, looks forty up,
and all day for ten taka, not enough to buy food for one, let alone seven,
she breaks the brick. every day, breaks the bricks.

Seated beside her, resting under an umbrella, a man is breaking bricks,
all day long breaking bricks,
a shaded man who earns twenty a day breaking the bricks.
Of what does he dream, the man breaking the bricks,
the man sitting under an umbrella, breaking the bricks?

And of what does she dream, the woman breaking the bricks?
She has a dream, a dream of having an umbrella,
of breaking the bricks veiled from the sun,
of becoming a man one fine morning,
earning double for breaking the bricks.

Her dream is her dream,
but in the morning she is still a woman breaking the bricks,
no umbrella, not even a torn one, breaking the bricks under the burning sun.

New roads and tall towers are built with the bricks she broke,
but the roof on her house was blown away in last year's storm,
the water drips through her tent, and she has a dream about buying a tin roof.

Her dream is her dream,
but in the morning her tent is soaked with water.
So she shouts out to her neighbors, to the world,
I have a dream, I have a dream. But still no umbrella, still no tin roof.

Look, neighbors spit on her and say, her seven children are hungry,
she needs oil for her hair, powder for her face !
Her skin colour darkens daily,
her fingers harden, harden like the bricks they are breaking.

So with her hammer she continues, continues breaking the bricks,
becoming herself a brick, a brick that cannot be broken
by the sun's heat, an underfed stomach, a dreaming heart.

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Poem for Taslima Nasrin

AMELIA WALKER

Information from Wikipedia:

In his 1821 play, Almansor, the German writer Heinrich Heine — referring to the burning of the Muslim holy book, the Qur'an, during the Spanish Inquisition — famously wrote:

“Where they burn books, so too will they in the end burn human beings.” (“Dort, wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen.”)

One century later, Heine's books were among the thousands of volumes that were torched by the Nazis in Berlin's Opernplatz in an outburst that did, in fact, foreshadow the blazing ovens of the Holocaust.

Taslima, your image floats across newspapers and magazines
like smoke from a distant blaze:
a sooty whisper, an SOS signal
-or the last gasp of a funeral pyre?

“Don’t read that book”* said the man at the café,

“it’s all lies and filth about violence and rape”.

He wasn’t talking about the pages in my hands.

Those pages mentioned rape, among many horrors,
but the main thing I read was a story,
a story about a young man,
an idealistic young man who died
not physically, but within himself,
who turned to religion because he’d lost all faith,
who burned his books and with them his humanity,
who became extremism, became all the things he’d feared.

The young man’s father died too
when he agreed to leave the land that was his life;
his mother of slow suffocation,
forced to change her name, her style of dress,
in brutal silence, unable to muffle out her most basic of desires.

The young man’s sister was kidnapped,
her physical death presumed, never confirmed,
never given a shape, weight nor colour,
no date to mark and mourn.

In this sense she was the only one who did not die,
but passed into a state of limbo
-not gone, just missing-
in this death she became more than life; she became hope,
the only one the family had.
Not gone, just missing: the same lie they whispered about themselves.

The family were called Hindus
though this was not what they called themselves.
They called themselves human before all else
and offered the same compliment to those who would not take it.
The family could have easily have been called Muslims or Christians
or Jews or Blacks or Women or Men or Un / Educated or Poor
because it was not a story about any of these things
but about extremism: one path given many names by those who tread it.
Religion is to faith as flames to a glacier.

Taslima, Kolkata is burning;
Buddha-Nero pats his belly and dreams of oil.
The heat makes my head heave, my lungs seize
as truth burst open like a Nandigram sunrise.

I choke on the stench of books burning, bodies burning.
Meanwhile, empires are built with bricks of charred bone
and I wonder, at what temperature does human blood boil?

Now it is you who has been chained up inside names,
you who has been kidnapped, severed
from your land, your language, your life,
you who is forced to fight slow suffocation.

You are dangerous, Taslima, so sublimely dangerous,
you who have fired not one gun,
set not one fire. Those things are trifles
in comparison to what you’ve set alight:
all the weapons on earth cannot shoot down an uprising in thought.

Taslima, I was a traveler, choking on the strangeness
of this charred city. Starved and disorientated,
I drank your words like the purest, coolest water:
honest words, brave words, unembellished, unrefined,
written not for glory but from throbbing, explosive need.

Let literature be the mother river that floods out all flames of extremism;
that nourishes cracked, drought-stricken minds and makes them lush.
Let words of all languages be the oceans,

streams and tributaries that join us all over this earth;
books, magazines and translations the boats
in which we sail to trade not material wealth but culture, philosophies and thought.

Taslima, you are neither missing nor gone:
you have written yourself upon me like a tattoo, a life-saving scar.
You remind me of what I have not lost, but could,
what I have not achieved, but could;
remind me I am human, before all else,
remind me why I read, why I dream, wake, walk, breathe,
why I pick up this pen.

* ‘Lajja’

Kite

(in solidarity with Taslima Nasrin)

Graceful as a knife, though the opposite of violence;
shining, light as silk, though the fabric is plain: a small kite
is trapped in the tree outside my window,
arcing, diving through the morning air.

A ragged wren: black gone grey, tangles and tears
it sports not as marks of shame, rather trophies
of how far it has flown – and through what storms!

Ordinary kite, extraordinary kite.

It must have been a child’s toy, seemingly destined
for parks on sunny weekends, the cupboards otherwise;
for clear skies, a charted course, string held taught,
no suggestions of grey.

But at some point, somehow, circumstances cut
or forced this kite to cut its own string; to jettison the green
of parks and weekends and cupboards; to soar beyond
beyond; to become a sculptor, carving nude forms in the air.

Such a small kite, such infinite sky, yet it danced
a dance none had dared dream possible,
built its new home on a gust of defiance, romanced cyclones,
turned tempests into art.

Painting shapes of pure motion-emotion, arching like flesh,
spinning stanzas of idealism like gold from gall, this kite

sewed the severed patches of humanity’s truth into a quilt
so hideously beautiful it burned the eye.

Now it is caught again, snagged by branches,
yet with what small string it has it keeps on dancing,
keeps on daring; even in breezeless moments, it jiggles
its head as if to say no, as if to laugh.

It will not stay trapped long, will not wither like the leaves.
Any moment, this kite will corkscrew up!up!up!
will dance more wildly than ever before,
carve its gleaming red stanzas into the pale blue flesh of thought.

Lines scribbled on 21st February in remembrance of a banished writer...........

Sujal Bhattacharya

Twenty-first February,
special supplements, rallies and processions....
Hush! Eulogy for a trusted pen forbidden,
Languishing in safe house
or the dungeon of darkness?

Hunger misinterpreted
Breakfast, lunch and supper
soaked in tears of solitude.
Ban food for thought
Next, freedom of expression.

Heark! The starving soul whispers
Long live democracy, long live secularism.

Who cares!
The masses,
Her readers.