{"id":1545,"date":"2024-11-08T19:11:32","date_gmt":"2024-11-09T00:11:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=1545"},"modified":"2024-11-08T19:11:32","modified_gmt":"2024-11-09T00:11:32","slug":"what-is-left-unsaid-interview-with-a-birangona","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2024\/11\/08\/what-is-left-unsaid-interview-with-a-birangona\/","title":{"rendered":"What is left unsaid: “Interview with a Birangona”"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve 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\u2019m also interested in partitions across South Asia more generally, so I read Seam<\/em> (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.<\/p>\n

In my second blog post, I briefly touched upon how a word for \u201crape\u201d does not exist in Urdu:<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 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\u2014things along the lines of ellipses and em dashes. To answer Spivak\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u2019s 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 \u201cInterview with a Birangona\u201d (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 \u201cwar heroine\u201d and is part of a larger effort to reintegrate these survivors into society and reduce stigma). Not once in this poem is the word \u201crape\u201d explicitly mentioned. Faizullah interviews a survivor of rape who describes her unborn daughter: \u201cShe grew whole inside me\/ like a lychee, my belly a hard shell\u201d (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\u2014but thin\u2014peel 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Works Cited
\nFaizullah, Tarfia. Seam<\/em>. Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois University Press, 2014.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve 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\u2019m 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 … Continue reading What is left unsaid: “Interview with a Birangona”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5502,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145914],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1545","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2024-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5502"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1545"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1545\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1545"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1545"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1545"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}