+ The difficulty with the Taslima Nasreen case is that there are a lot
of people out there standing ready to strike her down, physically, if
she sets foot in her own country. The result of that fear or threat
has been a long period of wandering for the young woman whose writing
has always been a breath of fresh air to a generation of men and women
eager for a demonstration of intellectual courage. It is immaterial as
to whether or not you agree with her. The broad masses of her readers
do, and then there are the handful who do not. But that surely is no
criterion for anyone to judge the quality or content of her writing.
Do not let go of the thought that a writer is not a politician and
therefore is not taking part in a popularity contest. If Nasreen were
ever tempted to judge her position through ratings on the opinion poll
scale, she would find that she left a lot of people disturbed or
feeling uncomfortable. The good thing about her is that she has never
fallen for such histrionics. More importantly, from our point of view,
it is only when a writer creates a disturbing or upsetting sort of
situation for his or her readers that he or she is truly fulfilling
the demands of writing. +
Nasreen, writing and deep crimson
Badrul Ahsan
The question relates to writing â and being able to write without a
mob or the ancient laws of statecraft hounding the writer out of town.
Now, there is a whole array of views, or points of view, over which we
disagree with Taslima Nasreen. But that certainly does not take away
from her the right to be able to express her thoughts in the way we
expect such thoughts to be articulated in a democratic atmosphere. For
the past eleven years, though, Taslima Nasreen has been in exile. That
is a most unfortunate part of a writer's life. It does not have to
happen that way, unless of course the one who writes chooses
voluntarily to stay away from her own country. There are plenty of
examples around us to demonstrate the nature of exile lurking in
writers' souls. Ernest Hemingway, though not in exile in that proper
sense of the meaning, nevertheless chose to spend a very significant
portion of his time abroad. In the years of the Cold War, a wide
swathe of intellectuals from eastern Europe simply made their way to
the West, where they prospered and became famous. In 1974, the Soviet
authorities bundled Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on to a plane and sent him
off to the West, for he had become a very troublesome thorn in
Moscow's side. Twenty years or so later, the author of the Gulag
chronicles returned home.
The difficulty with the Taslima Nasreen case is that there are a lot
of people out there standing ready to strike her down, physically, if
she sets foot in her own country. The result of that fear or threat
has been a long period of wandering for the young woman whose writing
has always been a breath of fresh air to a generation of men and women
eager for a demonstration of intellectual courage. It is immaterial as
to whether or not you agree with her. The broad masses of her readers
do, and then there are the handful who do not. But that surely is no
criterion for anyone to judge the quality or content of her writing.
Do not let go of the thought that a writer is not a politician and
therefore is not taking part in a popularity contest. If Nasreen were
ever tempted to judge her position through ratings on the opinion poll
scale, she would find that she left a lot of people disturbed or
feeling uncomfortable. The good thing about her is that she has never
fallen for such histrionics. More importantly, from our point of view,
it is only when a writer creates a disturbing or upsetting sort of
situation for his or her readers that he or she is truly fulfilling
the demands of writing. For what is writing if not the boldness to
tell people that what they have believed in so long may not actually
be true or logically acceptable? More to the point, it is the
responsibility of a writer to induce fresh bouts of thinking, or
reflection, in their readers. That precisely is what Nasreen has been
doing since the early 1980s, when she moved into this risky territory
of writing. And how has she been different? Let us just say that she
has always had her own point of view on offer, in contrast to others
who have generally fallen for a ceaseless repetition of clichÃs. In a
world where bravery is fast receding from the life of the writer,
Taslima Nasreen has in her lonely way kept our faith alive in the
power of writing to bring about change in people's intellectual
dimensions.
But that contribution of Nasreen's is these days carefully being kept
under the rug, even by those who have regularly claimed, with
justification, fidelity to liberal intellectual beliefs. Taslima
Nasreen has complained that Bangladesh's progressive intellectual
society has never displayed any great enthusiasm about her return to
the country. She has lived in Europe, moving from place to place as it
were. And she has spent time in America. Feeling the urge to be home,
she has come closer to home, staying just outside its political
parameters. In West Bengal, she has tried savouring something of the
Bangladesh she has been compelled to stay out of in the past eleven
years. And yet no one in this country, either from political as well
as intellectual expediency or a fear about upsetting sensitivities,
has ever made a public call about the need to have Nasreen come back
home. Newspapers in Bangladesh have in most instances reported on her
work and her travels, through making sure that she is described as a
controversial writer. It makes you feel that Taslima Nasreen is a
being from outer space. Or that she is one individual whose very
presence on earth is detrimental to the future of the human race. But
have you ever reflected on just what people mean when they describe
individuals as controversial? Fundamentally, in our times the term
'controversy' has gone through much abuse. Controversy implies setting
into motion a process of thought over which people do not agree or
have a whole range of sharply divergent views to express. That is fine
with us. But look a little deeper. A controversial writer is, more
than anything else, a courageous writer. She is one who relates to us
what she sees, which is that she observes the emperor for what he
actually is. While the rest of us think that the emperor is wearing
new clothes, people like Nasreen inform us, bluntly, that in fact the
emperor is wearing no clothes at all. Small wonder, then, that our
middle class minds go looking for sand to hide the face in.
Let us go back in time a little. Some of the biggest damage done to
free thought came from Rajiv Gandhi when in the late 1980s he decreed
that Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses be banned. Gandhi's act was of
course motivated by the fear that the work could ignite a communal
bloodbath on a scale unimaginable. He was not about to forget the
carnage that was the 1984 murder of Sikhs in the aftermath of his
mother's assassination at the hands of her Sikh bodyguards. But it was
clearly a short-term view he was taking through banning Rushdie. The
long-term idea should have been for the book to be displayed and sold
in the open market in order for people to debate the contents and
style of it. You will not find very many people who will appreciate
Satanic Verses. It is a roguish book written in language that is
meaningless and using images that do not enhance the state of
literature. You can say the work is blasphemy. But is it not enough to
say that it is bad, extremely bad literature? And yet this bad
literature, thanks to Rajiv Gandhi and then Ayatollah Khomeini, turned
Rushdie into an unlikely celebrity. Let us make something clear here
first, which is that Salman Rushdie is and has been a good writer. But
Satanic Verses remains one of the worst examples of modern literature,
if indeed it is literature. The bigger point here is that Rushdie
should have been in a position where we could all have challenged him
academically on his knowledge of the Islamic faith, through much
intellectual debate and discourse and thereby demonstrated to
ourselves that there are good people, Muslims among them, who do not
simply wish to end an argument through putting someone's neck through
the guillotine or the noose. But when Khomeini decided, in the
infinity of his anything-but-wisdom, that the author of Satanic Verses
deserved to die, he actually gave all Muslims around the world a bad
name. That was unfair.
And today it is unfair to think that Taslima Nasreen, by any stretch
of the imagination one of the foremost writers in Bangladesh, must go
on being a fugitive from her land. Politicians, including those who
profess to be in the secular camp, have condemned her. The rabid right
wing is of course still out there baying for her blood. It is all part
of a pattern, this uncouth way of keeping a writer out of her land.
When people of the progressive mould begin to think that a problem
will simply go away only through ignoring it, when they reach somewhat
the bad conclusion that writers in exile are individuals whom history
will soon forget, they are engaging in a bout of beautiful delusion.
They do not remember that in literature, in the wider territory of
aesthetics, it is always advisable to let a hundred flowers bloom. You
simply cannot stamp out one of the flowers only because it happens to
be a deeper crimson than all the others around it.
It is time for a serious rethink on Taslima Nasreen in exile
LINK
http://newagebd.com/edit.html#2
--
Dak Bangla is a Bangladesh based South Asian Intelligence Scan Magazine.
URL: http://www.dakbangla.blogspot.com
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