Waging a Worthy War
Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing Up Female in a Muslim World
By Taslima Nasrin
Steerforth Press (2002) 308 pp. $26 Translated by Gopa Majumdar

Book Review by Lili Tan

With “A war was about to start,” Taslima Nasrin’s first memories of her courageous life began. Her story—vivid, moving, and fascinating—opens with the Bangladeshi fighting for their independence from Pakistan in 1971. Though Nasrin’s country gained its independence early in her life, her struggle for female equality was only beginning.

Girlhood—there is no word for this in Bengali. So, Nasrin invented the word “Meyebela” so that Bengali women could finally have a word for what they were robbed of, and Bengali girls could have something to look forward to. Though female inequality may seem distant to the common Westerner, there are many parts of the world where our female counterparts are not so lucky.

And this is where Taslima Nasrin steps in.

She is the most infamous Muslim feminist who has been in hiding and in exile, has had multiple fatwas—orders for death—on her head, and has enraged hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshi people enough to march against her. If her countrymen want her dead, you know her writings must be exceptionally good, must be enormously powerful, and must be terribly threatening to the existing institution of male domination and patriarchy.

“Meyebela” is a poignant story about a young girl constantly shoved into the shadows; but time and time again, she emerges, for her mind is absolutely irrepressible. “Taslima Nasrin, the fiery feminist from Bangladesh who angered the Muslim clergy in her country by questioning the Koran and writing about sexuality, has written a brutally honest and brave memoir of her childhood to the age of 14,” wrote Nora Boustany, diplomatic correspondent for the Washington Post. Born into a traditional Bengali patriarchal family, Nasrin grows up watching her mother being treated as a slave and her father acting as an indelible dictator. “All I had seen so far in my life was [Baba’s] arrogance; all I had heard were his roars,” she writes. Nasrin’s observations of female subservience were unnerving for her, and made her question her family and her religion.

She grows up having to watch her mother, aunts and female neighbors endure being brutally beaten and wholly humiliated by men. Not only did she have to see female figures around her fall victim to men, Nasrin, herself, endured sexual molestation from a maternal uncle and rape from a paternal uncle. At the time, Nasrin was too powerless to fight the ostensibly indestructible, but she still knew enough to understand how things were and how things ought to be. “This moving memoir attempts to demonstrate how it is possible for young women to reach within themselves and nurture their own spiritual life in spite of the physical and emotional pain that men—and tradition-bound societies—can inflict upon them,” wrote Boustany. Nasrin came to realize that the hypocrisy surrounding her was masked by the Muslim religion and patriarchal tradition. “Meyebela” ended with Nasrin writing, “I, in my corner, I continued to grow.”

And, so she did.

Since the tender age of 14, where “Meyebela” ends, Nasrin has fought furiously for the liberation of women in Bangladesh. She wrote various columns for progressive daily and weekly newspapers about women’s oppression, and criticized religion, traditions, and oppressive cultures and customs that discriminate against women. Unfortunately, her fierce pen stirred many campaigns against her. Because she began to influence Bengali women, Islamic fundamentalists issued fatwas against her. When Nasrin wrote the book “Lajja” (Shame), documenting atrocities against the Hindu minority community by Muslim fundamentalists, the government banned the book.
Fourteen different political and non-political organizations united in a 300,000 man march and demanded her execution by hanging. “Some of my uncles were in the march against me and demanded that I be hanged,” explained Nasrin in an interview with the Village Voice. When asked why she thought she was so singled out by fundamentalist groups for such immense protest, Nasrin said, “The real reason…was that women were reading my work.” To avoid execution, Nasrin quickly went into hiding. Later, the government forced her to leave the country. She is now living in exile in Europe, and has written 24 books of poetry, essays, novels, and short stories in Bengali, which have been translated into 20 different languages.

Her fight continues, and her words will not be suppressed. She courageously writes, “Human rights for some is not enough. We must work for the human rights for all…Come what may, I will continue my fight for equality and justice without any compromise until my death. Come what may, I will never be silenced. My pen is my weapon.”