Dear Moderator:

 

I am forwarding an excellent review of an excellent book by Shaheen Akhter, Talash,by my friend and colleague Chinmoy Banerjee. The novel depicts the plight of women in Bangladesh, including the rape victims of 1971.

 

Prof Banerjee is a fellow activist of SANSAD, a radical organization of South Asian Diaspora in Canada.

 

Hope you would publish this in your forum

 

Warm wishes,

Taj Hashmi

 

 

Talash (Bangla). By Shaheen Akhter. Dhaka: Mowla Brothers, 2004.

A review by Chinmoy Banerjee.*

 

Talash, by Bangladeshi novelist and human rights activist, Shaheen Akhter, is a remarkable novel on a number of grounds. First of all it is a powerful exploration and condemnation of the condition of women within the patriarchal nation in its everyday state, under stress, and in the state of national liberation. The everyday condition of oppression is exasperated in the state of war, the used, abused, and betrayed, and derided woman being subjected to the extreme violence of rape and sex slavery. But liberation of the nation brings no relief because despite the empty slogans of the new rulers, the female victims of war’s atrocities continue to be victimized; they are objects of derisive curiosity, held responsible for their victimization, treated as prostitutes, and denied any real opportunity of rehabilitation either through marriage or through jobs. They are rejected by their families and forced to wear the badge of shame unless by some good fortune they can hide their identity and their past. The book powerfully raises the question: what is national liberation to a woman? After the liberation of Bangladesh, when the Governments of India and Pakistan negotiate the return of the Pakistani prisoners of war, several Bengali women who had been kept by the Pakistan military as sex slaves decide to go with the Pakistan army, presumably to serve as prostitutes in Pakistan. This is forecast by Anuradha, a sex slave and seer, who interprets this action as the most appropriate act of “revenge” against patriarchal nationalism. The voluntary embrace of prostitution in Pakistan is the only way the women can show their contempt for the nation and its liberation: there is no escape for the woman from prostitution. Anuradha herself, an extremely intelligent and educated woman, will remain in Bangladesh with a different name and choose a life of prostitution.

 

The book is made all the more powerful by its technique of breaking down the barrier between social science and fiction and its rejection of a seamless fictional narrative for a fragmented tangle of multiple narratives presented in a variety of modes: direct third person narrative that remains close to the experience of the protagonist, Mariam/Mary, the narrative of Mariam as it emerges in interviews with a human rights researcher, Mukti, other narratives that emerge through Mukti’s interviews, the narrative of Mukti’s search for the women who had been victimized by the Pakistan army, including her interviews with social workers, a fictional conference of voices of these women, oral history of the war as recovered by Mukti during her search (talash), Mukti’s visits to brothel districts with local NGOs, and a self-consciously fictive, dream like ending as a substitute for the gap left in the narrative by Mariam’s sudden disappearance after hearing of Anuradha’s death. The narrative then is not a consumable fiction of unbearable oppression, producing aesthetic pleasure by evoking and resolving emotions and by its formal completeness. It is discontinuous, fragmented, diverse in format, and incomplete. It mixes the mode of realistic fiction with that of social science research, interview, conference, oral history, journalism, dream, and fantasy. In so doing it does not resolve but raises questions. Nothing is closed off. What has been closed by history, by the ongoing oppression of patriarchy for its victims, by the defensive silence of the victims, and by the turns of opportunistic politics in the newborn nation is opened with all the difficulty of such recovery. The reader is left to ponder questions. There is no satisfaction but knowing that a much needed and disturbing question has been asked.

 

The technique is a valuable instrument for the presentation of an individual’s story within the history of the nation.  How does one write a historical fiction about a suppressed history, recovering lost and suppressed stories that are enmeshed with the larger, public stories of the nation’s birth trauma? How does one find the individual subject within the generalized object of social science and the fraudulent euphemism of a nation’s term (“Birangana”) for those who have paid the heaviest price for its liberation?

 

The novel follows the history of Mariam, whose misfortunes begin when, as a fifteen year old she is taken to a movie by a distant relative who is staying with her family in order to take his school final examinations. He is seen by neighbors to hold her hand during the movie. As a result of the scandal Mariam is compelled to stay with the young man for three days, after which she is abandoned by him and returns home to disgrace. She is sent off to the anonymity of Dhaka with her younger brother as chaperone, where she goes to college, falls in love with a student leader who impregnates and abandons her in the name of his commitment to nationalism, and is raped by Pakistani soldiers and imprisoned with other sex slaves during the war. After the war she struggles to pick up her life in the face of the hostile curiosity and contempt of society for her condition as a “Birangana” (literally ‘a heroic woman’ but in actual usage ‘a sex slave/whore of the Pakistan army’). A man engaged in a shady business marries her to rehabilitate himself and keeps her as a sex slave of his own. Though the marriage legitimizes her and reconciles her parents to her, she escapes from it and has to face ostracism once again. Her mother takes the radical step of leaving her husband to help her set up as a seamstress in Dhaka but despite some success the work becomes another unbearable slavery. Her mother returns to her village and Mariam finds a job in a series of travel agencies, in all of which she is treated with extreme harshness except one in which the owner is kind to her in exchange for fellatio. Miriam gives shelter to a distressed young man she meets through her work, whose dream of joining his friend in Germany is shattered by the information that he has got married. She lets him stay in a spare room but he begs to sleep on the floor of her room because he is fearful. This scandalizes the neighbors, who, invoking the shariah, force her to marry the man, whom she knows is gay. Miriam’s life turns even bitterer when her “husband” brings his lover to stay with them. It is after he leaves because his lover is jealous that Miriam meets Mukti, the human rights researcher who has been trying to find her for her investigation. The novel ends with Mariam’s disappearance following Mukti’s revelation to her that a prostitute she had met in a brothel district, who fitted the description Mariam gave of her friend in sex slavery, Anuradha, had either died of a heart attack or been poisoned. Mariam’s story is only one of many others that are woven with hers.

 

While the novel directly raises the question of the significance of the nation in the life of the women victims of patriarchy, it is critically grounded on the profound question of how one can represent in art the suffering of the oppressed without making the representation enjoyable. It shows the victims of sex slavery becoming objects of curiosity, of people coming to look at them, of interviewers asking how often they were raped. The reader of a book or the audience of a film that represents oppression is also in the position of the curious spectator whose objectification of suffering continues the victimization of the oppressed. In watching suffering, however horrified we may be, we also enjoy it. And in representing the suffering, however noble the motive, the representer can hardly avoid being complicit in producing this enjoyment, of being a kind of pornographer of suffering. How, then, can we recover the suffering and use it for raising critical questions toward change without at the same time being complicit in enjoying it? The novel succeeds in dealing with this question. It enables us to sense the suffering without spectating it, to think about it without seeing it, to be troubled by it without any sense of comfort or certainty.

 

 

 *  Dr Chinmoy Banerjee is an emeritus professor of English at the Simon Fraser University, Vancouver. He is the Secretary of the South Asian Network for Secularism and Democracy (SANSAD).