I’ve been taking a short break from thesis readings to take in some literature loosely related to my topic. Besides the 1947 dissolution of the Raj, I’m also interested in partitions across South Asia more generally, so I read Seam (2014) by Tarfia Faizullah. Her poetry collection focuses on the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War, a conflict that saw Bengali nationalists fight against East Pakistani forces to establish the independent nation of Bangladesh. There are so many parallels between 1971 and 1947, especially within the way women are enshrined in literature as a form of collective remembering of mass rapes otherwise absent from the historical archives.
In my second blog post, I briefly touched upon how a word for “rape” does not exist in Urdu:
“In the context of my own research, there is no equivalent word for rape in Urdu; works translated from Urdu into English (an attempt to translate the subaltern) are forced to use figurative language or visual representations of silence—things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak’s question in the context of women and Partition narratives, the subaltern definitely cannot speak on sexual violence if a word for rape does not exist.”
This same phenomenon is true for Bangla. With this absence of language to describe the rupture of the self due to sexual violence, literature becomes a tool to express the complicated issue of creating a historical record of women’s experiences: in this sense, fiction becomes a method for remembering the events of 1947 and 1971. To pay attention to the use of figurative language, em dashes, and ellipses in these narratives is to listen to a historical truth that has previously gone unrecorded. Faizullah highlights this phenomenon of the inadequacy of language to describe sexual violence as a historical truth in the poem “Interview with a Birangona” (note: birangona is a Bangla term created by the Bangladeshi government to describe women who experienced sexual violence at the hands of the Pakistani army; it roughly translates to “war heroine” and is part of a larger effort to reintegrate these survivors into society and reduce stigma). Not once in this poem is the word “rape” explicitly mentioned. Faizullah interviews a survivor of rape who describes her unborn daughter: “She grew whole inside me/ like a lychee, my belly a hard shell” (Faizullah, lines 9-10). This simile comparing her stomach to the shell of a lychee is highly illustrative of the nature of her pregnancy carrying a war baby. To eat a lychee, there is an inherent act of violence that must be committed in forcibly ripping through the rough—but thin—peel of the fruit. Without explicitly mentioning rape, she communicates the sexual violence that conceived her daughter and the violence of childbirth. The gap or silence left by the untranslatable experience of sexual assault is filled by a culturally-specific simile. The woman’s comparison links her womb to a product of the land meant to be torn open to reach the fruit: here, the children born from the creation of an independent state. Furthermore, the newborn daughter is inferred to be the fleshy, edible fruit of the lychee. Whereas her mother is meant to be torn through and discarded, this war baby is meant to consumed by the men of the state. In this regard, women become objects during these two conflicts, a position that directly correlates their bodies to the state.
Works Cited
Faizullah, Tarfia. Seam. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.
This is simultaneously so interesting and devastating. I particularly found the use of punctuation as an act of erasure and expression so fascinating, as the presence of abnormal punctuation is often anticipatory of a deeper meaning that’s meant to be uncovered. Its dual-use of being both indicative to certain populations of something deeper and traumatic, and purposefully left on the page by others just shows how when looking for shared experience, it’s sometimes found and expressed in unexpected ways. The use of punctuation is also interesting because the physicality of it on the page enacts a physical violence forced onto a human body, and both human and textual bodies carry that expression in hidden, subversive ways.
I have a number of uncollected thoughts about this post, so I’ll just focus on the term “Birangona.” This is a really interesting and beautiful term in that it recognizes, in some ways, the struggle of those that faced sexual violence. I’m not sure that I can think of an English parallel. Survivor in some ways suggests a similar kind of strength that “War Heroine” does. Though I think Birangona goes one step further, rather than just referencing general strength as in “survivors have strength” or “it takes strength to survive extreme violence.” Birangona, and specifically the “heroine” aspect connotes bravery, especially with the extremely violent implications that are intrinsically tied to “war.” I’m not sure about the broader implications of this other than that I think “Birangona” is an elegant term.