Questions and Answers. 1^st woman: I admired your speaking out, and your poetry is very beautiful, but, in my experience of Bangladesh, features of your country that you gave in the beginning was not quite fit. I haven't been there now for seven or eight years, but I visited Bengal till the sixties. I think it is important to give credit to other women, the women who founded the first feminist organizations in Dhaka, Women For Women, authors like [...], the literary scholars who worked with me to publish this story, [...] [...] [...]. I think it's important to speak of the women teachers in Universities people like, University teachers like [...] who was with me together organizing the conference on Women and Development in 1975. It's important to speak about women activists like [...], the wife of the lawyer who defended you [...]. I think one has to mention lawyers like [...] who has worked for a legal education of village women and city women in Bangladesh. It's important to speak about school teachers like [...], people like [...] who teaches political science. So there are women in Bangladesh who attend the Universities, women who teach there, women who take their courage in their hand. I don't doubt for a moment that the persecution to which you were subjected was real and I don't want to detract from it at all but I like to see other women other courageous women also in the picture not only the highly educated ones that I have named because I have known them but also the village women who have spoken up. I have no question there is prostitution and extreme degradation I have no question about the description of the evils of the increasingly Islamized state but I think credit must be given to other courageous women who have made their voices heard for longer than the statements of they were activists before creation of Bangladesh and they still are and there are younger women who continue their work. They too have to be brought up.

Taslima: [no answer]

2^nd woman: The last issue of index of censorship which is devoted to publishing in the world and... I have read your article about exile... how do you feel uhm... abroad... so my question is really how do you feel abroad? How do you bear that situation because I have had feeelings from your article you do terrible wrong for your country and that you feel very uncomfortable...

Taslima: Sorry my English is really bad but I am trying to give answers... uh... here I feel lonely I miss my country I want to go back to my country, this is, I think it's very hard to live in exile. Sometimes I can't concentrate on my writings and because I don't speak in my language... uh... I always... I speak in English that I really don't know very much. So, I can't find books I want to read in Bengali so I miss my culture, my language, my country. That situation improves when I go back to my country.

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