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Literary Review
Not a good girl
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My Girlhood is told from a child's point of view and it has the immediacy of personal observation as well as a clinical detachment, says RIMI B. CHATTERJEE.
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HONESTY is always disconcerting. Children are good at it, until they learn deceit from their elders. The child remains in the woman, but the woman soon internalises the message that being a good girl means not talking about certain things.
Taslima Nasrin, in the consensus opinion of those who presume to judge her, is not a good girl. She talks about those certain things, with both the immediacy of personal observation and the clinical detachment of a doctor. While this is an autobiography told from a child's point of view, the voice is cool and detached. It must be, for, many of the events Nasrin describes must have been excruciating to experience and witness.
She talks of her father's dissatisfaction, his affairs and her mother's shrill pieties. Her own traumas, too, receive the same treatment. Sexually abused by two of her uncles before the age of seven, she says of the second rape: "After that incident, I felt myself split in two." While a part of her continued to live a "normal" life, the other part became the silent watcher, the recorder of all that was done and said around her, the part that, finally, has found its voice in this book.
Yet the story of her youth leaves one vaguely unsatisfied. Her relationship with her father, a doctor, is largely adversarial, with the children determined to undermine his authoritarian manner by deliberately failing in their studies, but she did ultimately go on to qualify as a doctor, just like him. We are given only glimpses of the complex reasons that must have powered such an achievement. Reading between the lines, we can see how the child's view of her father's adventures with women was one of fear and loathing (though the adult Nasrin would have had a different perspective) and also how he saves her, sometimes against her will, from the idleness and servitude that await her as a girl child.
Nasrin's father, with all his faults, yet represents freedom to his two daughters; he is bent on preventing their femaleness from standing in the way of their lives — a knowledge that the two girls must have placed beside his treatment of their mother. It is this which preserves Nasrin and her sister from the fates that are casually visited upon the many other girls in the book — married off to old lechers, kicked and burned by loutish husbands, sexually abused and impregnated under the cover of religion, to die of a failed abortion.
Rebellion for the girls who want to be different is largely sexual — denied the life of the mind, they derive pleasure from flouting the norms their society has laid down for them. The sad thing is, both lose in the end — the timid "good" girls and the tomboy "bad" ones. The timid ones become domestic slaves like Nasrin's mother and aunts, the tomboys are fair game for the lechers. And for those who find the burden of such a world and its injustices too great, there is always the solace of religion. Denied fulfilment in most aspects of their lives, the most apathetic of these victims try to console themselves with ersatz love for the pir Amirullah, another of Nasrin's plenitude of uncles.
This is a world where physical violence — by both genders, to women and children, but never to men — is an everyday reality. Most things are said with skin in this world: even Nasrin's relations with girl classmates and servants have a physicality which would make most of today's parents rush her to the psychoanalyst's. But in the hothouse atmosphere of domestic relations here, where maximum prohibition coincides with maximum opportunity, it is quite understandable.
This is not a book for those who believe in the inviolate privacy of the home; they will only be shocked, not that these things were done, but that they were revealed. For the rest, they must read and judge for themselves.
My Girlhood (Amar Meyebela), Taslima Nasrin, translated by Gopa Majumdar, Kali for Women, Rs. 350.
Rimi Chatterjee teaches English Literature and has translated Mahasweta Devi's writings from Bengali into English.
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