By Maya Palit
As far as harrowing experiences in exile go, the chronicles of the Bangladeshi author Taslima Nasrin in her book Exile: A Memoir are pretty much as dire as it gets. Living alone without protection, fleeing death threats, negotiating house-arrest, being ushered in and out of a stream of countries, all with a Rs 5,00,000 price on her head: we may be familiar with the facts of her battle against religious fanaticism ever since a fatwa was issued against her for her critique of Islam in 1993, but excerpts from her diary in this book reveal the excruciating uncertainty and despair that she had to wrestle with every day in the late 2000s. The book was written almost five years ago, but Mamata Banerjee prevented a launch of the Bengali version that was meant to take place at the Kolkata Book Fair in 2011, and last week the English translation with a new Preface was published.
The most compelling parts of the memoir, though, are Nasrin’s reflections on her persecution by an appallingly sexist literati. Although she recognises the ubiquitous silencing of intellectuals around the world by both dictatorships and democratic governments, in her case several fellow writers spewed much of the vitriol against Dwikhandito, the third part of her autobiography. The author Samaresh Majumdar’s infuriatingly judgmental diatribe, for instance, compared Nasrin’s candidness about her sex life to Nandarani, a prostitute in Kolkata, who was reticent about hers, concluding that “Taslima Nasrin, unfortunately, has been unable to partake of Nandarani’s sense of self-respect. She has changed her men like women change clothes, valorized sex over a more mental connection.” The poet Subodh Sarkar, scathing in his descriptions of Nasrin’s book as a “sexual bomb”, demanded from Nasrin an explanation for why she did not produce a “righteous” book that provided subaltern women with the voice they never had. The poet Mallika Sengupta echoed this division between the sort of upstanding, good feminists in the struggle who “keep literature safe” and trouble-makers like Nasrin who reveal too many salacious details about the bedroom. Other apparently measured appraisals of Nasrin’s work proclaimed that they did not have an objection to her owning her sexuality but that there was, after all, “… the fine line between literature and obscenity.”
Nasrin does not respond separately to all of these critiques, but she does wonder who draws these lines, and offers her take on why all seven volumes of her memoirs were banned in Bangladesh and caused such an immense uproar West Bengal: her sexual autonomy was too unsettling for the intelligentsia to handle. If she had couched her narrative in a fictional form, she says, none of the reactions would have been as savage, and declares that being called a “shameless slut” for being vocal about her sexual relations makes her feel that she has successfully packed a punch at the patriarchy: “Till date, of all the awards that I have won, it is this epithet, that of the ‘whore’ or the ‘prostitute’ that I cherish the most. I have earned this award because I have truly been successful in delivering a crippling blow to the filthy body of patriarchal power.”
Musing on the fact that the long tradition of male authors boasting about their sexual exploits has not attracted a tenth as much attention, she sums up the restrictions that she feels are serious obstacles for women writing about sexuality: “As a woman, I must be demure and guarded. I must not dare to write like a man because they have the exclusive rights to a woman’s body, her breasts, her arse, her vagina — be it in literature or in real life.” Perhaps most poignantly, Nasrin meditates on how all the other aspects of her narrative — her dreams, her strictly monitored childhood, her fights with patriarchal conditions, the betrayal that led to her almost resorting to suicide — were sidelined because of the anecdotes about her sex life.
At times, her writing does come across as being a little sulky and self-absorbed: for instance, she doesn’t stop at noting the irony of being ignored by a seminar on freedom of expression in New York, where Salman Rushdie was the chairperson, but deliberates on the several possible reasons for this, “Did the American Pen Club, the organizers of the event, not know about me? Were they not aware that I was in New York?” In a book that lists the painfully long incidents of excommunication, displacement, accusations and isolation Nasrin has faced, however, this is hardly the most significant feature. Nasrin’s uneasiness with the double standards within the writing community, expressed at several points in the book, is reasonable enough and there is no disputing her argument that the convenient backtracking that the Left in West Bengal (which banned Dwikhandito) did on its position on her book is outrageous: “One would assume writers would stand behind writers and speak out against the injustice of banning a literary work. The more I see the scholars of West Bengal and Bangladesh, the more it amazes me to realize how selfish and opportunistic most of them are, how dependent on being in the government’s good graces.”
Although Nasrin’s tendency to polarise communal debates and make sweeping statements about issues like terrorism is an undeniable part of the book, Exile is a powerful narrative of a life shattered by intolerance, whose pieces were put back together, courageously and defiantly. The poetry, diary excerpts and memories in the book produce a sense of the writer who has been occluded by all the furore, the one who asks “Did I become a writer only to have to fight for the freedom to write?”