Lecture (from the tape) Carolyne Wright: I want to thank you all for coming today and for the Bunting Institute's effort to organize this particular talk on rather we begin to talk... rather in the last week or so, it all came together... so, I am very glad that those of you that went out and everybody has been able to...to come... Now uhm I'll say a little bit about Taslima Nasrin first. She's been writing for many years, and I first met her more than six years ago when I was in Bangladesh on a Fulbright Fellowship translating the work of Bengali women poets and writers, and actually the situations that brought her... what brought her to the world's attention took place after she departed Bangladesh and... but I was hearing about it in the press as well and in much the same way that other people were learning about it through articles in New York Times and Washington Post, etc. Uhm... what you would have heard about Taslima is that her first novel which is called Lajja in Bengali and Shame in English had been published in early 1993 uh... in Bangladesh, and several months later in the middle of that year was banned by the Bangladeshi governement. It has been selling very well but it was banned by the Bangladesh government on the grounds that it's sometimes inflammatory - quote unquote term - has heightened tension between Muslims and Hindus but in uh... but even before this novel had been published, Taslima Nasrin had been very well known in Bangladesh for her very powerful poetry and essays which were also somewhat provocative in the Bangladesh context and in which she talked... uh... you know she raises the issues of domestic violence against women, social seclusion and sexual abuse that women have had to suffer have endured in Bangladeshi Muslim society.

Uh... she went into hiding in the middle of 1994 after an arrest warrant was issued by the Bangladesh government and uh... she was basically forced to escape from some of the death threats from Islamic fondamentalist groups in Bangladesh and also because the governement had issued the arrest warrant for her. In August of 1994 she was able to depart Bangladesh, and is now living in Europe, specifically now in Berlin, on a felloship for artists, and last year she also received the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought and the talk that she is giving today will be on her own writings and on the situation for women... uh... women writers in Bangladesh uh... actually in terms of the number of books she's written and she's a loaded author in Bengali she's published several novels several books of poetry and several collections of essays but I think it adds up to about 20 books... Uh... I haven't yet seen a complete full list because it keeps changing and it keeps been more books so without any further ado... Oh... Let me just say that there are a couple of titles of most of her work at this point if... you know... is available in Bengali and two books that had been translated into English so far one is the novel Lajja or Shame however it's really a only has distribution in India where is published by Penguin India and also there is some European distribution. It's hard to receive, to get it in this country because the distribution in North America is not very... Uh... I think it's available through mail order... And the other book is the Game in Reverse. Poetry of Taslima Nasrin published by George Braziller last year, and those are the translations that I had done of her poetry along with two collaborators, Farida Sarkar, Mohammad Nurul Huda, and Subharanjan Dasgupta. So those two books are available or actually the poetry book is the one that's more readily available. In any case I'd like to have Taslima speak now for you and she will give her talk on the situation of women writers in Bangladesh. So... Thank you very much... [applause]

Taslima: I'd like to express my heartful gratitude unto the Bunting Insitute for having invited me. I'd like to say something about poetess women who want to be writers. Uhm... even among the educated gentlemen of Bengal the idea that women should be given modern education was once generally unacceptable. The fear that women education would ruin the family was that educated girls would forget their rituals, neglect their husbands and their families. In reaction to the initial attempts at educating the girls, some of the Hindu gentleman spread the idea that women if educated would become widowes which means their husbands would die. Some others held that they would loose their virtue. There is a saying in Bengali to the effect that if women put on shoes the lunch is spoiled. It means that if women go out of the home there will be nobody to look after the family and the members have to go without food.

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