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Taslima Nasrin gave this lecture in April 26, 1996 in Cambridge, Massachusetts
(USA). Never previouly published, it is about women who want to be writers and
poets. It is about herself and her problems as a writer in Bangladesh nowadays.
These difficulties are both due to Islamic fundamentalism, and to the general
idea that the education of women would ruin the family. Educated girls would
forget their rituals, neglect their husbands and their families. In a reaction
to the initial attempts to educate girls, the idea was spread that women, if
educated, would become widows, which means their husbands would die. Another
common idea is that the educated women would lose their virtue. There is a
saying in Bengali to the effect that if women put on shoes the lunch is
spoiled. Working women are still very rare in Muslim middle-class families;
some of them work for wages but mostly in the informal sector like private
tutoring, or they are teachers at schools, colleges, hospitals and a few other
types of institutions.
In this situation one can hardly expect hundreds of women to take up the pen.
There are women among the authors and journalists in Bangladesh, but there are
few in number.
The problem grows up when a Bangladeshi woman wants to do some really creative
writing. As long as a woman writes about males, stories or poems, as long she
imitates the style and subject matter of male writers, as long she follows the
beaten track, and as long as she remains conformist, she will be all right. But
if someone starts saying what she really means, editors and publishers are
bound to raise their eyebrows. Indeed, the moment a girl in Bangladeshi society
starts writing, the first reaction of men is that there must be something wrong
with her. Why should a happy housewife want to write? Men think girls with
problems usually end up in a mental asylum, become prostitutes, or commit
suicide. And those who cannot do any of thse things, pick up the pen and
shamelessly intrude into the men's world. The paper continues with questions,
comments, and speculation regarding herself. Nasrin describes her career and
problems she has being a free, atheist woman writer in a Muslim patriarchal
country. The talk is followed by her reading of poems, and by more than an hour
answering the audience's questions.
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This is a report of two evenings I spent with Taslima Nasrin in April 1996 in
Cambridge (USA). Nasrin is a poet and writer; she was awarded the 1995 Sakharov
Prize for Freedom of Thought. Nasrin came to Cambridge to deliver lectures.
Especially during the first, informal meeting and dinner, I approached Nasrin
as a woman and a friend, trying to understand her, and to delve into her
public, dramatic persona as a controversial and criticized writer and polemist,
and as a symbol of freedom for thousands of women writers in the world.
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