• Amar Meybela
This ground-breaking book throws open a window on a world unknown to most Westerners. TaslimaNasrin revisits her early years — from her auspicious birth on a Muslim holy day to the threshold of womanhood at fourteen — in a small rural village during the years East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
Set against the background of the fight for independence, Nasrin’s earliest memories alternate between scenes of violence and flight and images of innocent pleasures of childhood in her extended family.
A precocious child, Nasrin’s acute awareness of the injustice and suffering endured by her mother and other Muslim women cause her to turn away from the Koran in early adolescence, and to begin a journey to redefine her world.
Her growing …show more content…
It begins, moreover, not with Nasrin's birth or with her family history, but with the freedom struggle in Bangladesh, when she was only nine years old, for this was the moment that she first became aware of her selfhood, and of her identity as a female. The movement for political Independence, fought out by adults, was thus replicated in her own life, and hercontinuous personal and female struggle for emotional and intellectual independence. Her family's flight from the violent city into the villages of Bangladesh was the beginning of a series of traumatic childhood experiences that shook her childhood acceptance of things as they are and opened her eyes to a new consciousness of the reality behind social andinterpersonal relationships; the differences between the city and the countryside underlined for her not the pastoral simplicity of rural life that Bengali male poets and novelists had celebrated but, rather, the burden of the social, emotional and psychological oppression which women everywhere have to bear. The first volume is written from a child's point of view or, rather, from the point of view of the adult who relives the pain and the horrors that the child experiences as she represents …show more content…
It ends with her painful rejection of the 'nesha', addiction, of her relationship with her husband and fellow-poet Rudra (his full name, Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah, is never mentioned, and he is not clearly identified as the other characters in the autobiography who people her world), and her realisation that she could no longer sacrifice her life and her selfhood for anyone else. There is no overt comment from the adult narrator, who simultaneously relives the past and looks back at it with the cool detachment of an observer. Narrating the past becomes an act of interpreting the present, and the autobiography a kind of endless prelude, a beginning without middle or end.
Amar Meybelaalso talks of the sexual abuses she went through during her early adolescence days. And also states that no man can be trusted – specially ones from the
This ground-breaking book throws open a window on a world unknown to most Westerners. TaslimaNasrin revisits her early years — from her auspicious birth on a Muslim holy day to the threshold of womanhood at fourteen — in a small rural village during the years East Pakistan became Bangladesh.
Set against the background of the fight for independence, Nasrin’s earliest memories alternate between scenes of violence and flight and images of innocent pleasures of childhood in her extended family.
A precocious child, Nasrin’s acute awareness of the injustice and suffering endured by her mother and other Muslim women cause her to turn away from the Koran in early adolescence, and to begin a journey to redefine her world.
Her growing …show more content…
It begins, moreover, not with Nasrin's birth or with her family history, but with the freedom struggle in Bangladesh, when she was only nine years old, for this was the moment that she first became aware of her selfhood, and of her identity as a female. The movement for political Independence, fought out by adults, was thus replicated in her own life, and hercontinuous personal and female struggle for emotional and intellectual independence. Her family's flight from the violent city into the villages of Bangladesh was the beginning of a series of traumatic childhood experiences that shook her childhood acceptance of things as they are and opened her eyes to a new consciousness of the reality behind social andinterpersonal relationships; the differences between the city and the countryside underlined for her not the pastoral simplicity of rural life that Bengali male poets and novelists had celebrated but, rather, the burden of the social, emotional and psychological oppression which women everywhere have to bear. The first volume is written from a child's point of view or, rather, from the point of view of the adult who relives the pain and the horrors that the child experiences as she represents …show more content…
It ends with her painful rejection of the 'nesha', addiction, of her relationship with her husband and fellow-poet Rudra (his full name, Rudra Muhammad Shahidullah, is never mentioned, and he is not clearly identified as the other characters in the autobiography who people her world), and her realisation that she could no longer sacrifice her life and her selfhood for anyone else. There is no overt comment from the adult narrator, who simultaneously relives the past and looks back at it with the cool detachment of an observer. Narrating the past becomes an act of interpreting the present, and the autobiography a kind of endless prelude, a beginning without middle or end.
Amar Meybelaalso talks of the sexual abuses she went through during her early adolescence days. And also states that no man can be trusted – specially ones from the