Winds of
change blowing far too fast have a singular message - Iconoclasm is the new
religion. This irksome routine of playing God at the cost of a hostaged
citizenry obliged to mindlessly ‘wah-wah’ the select has crippled
truly radical aspirations of the society at large. A society whose unheard
and deliberately suppressed pulses wish to demolish the many ‘sanctioned
pretensions’ of the so-called powerful, at the first opportunity. If Taslima
is an opportunist, she can rightfully claim credits for seizing an
opportunity at age 40 (when some get naughty), a ‘mid-life’ crisis sort of,
to take up once for all, many unspoken matters concerning ‘reproductive
organs’ sitting pretty in the mid-sections of the Bangladeshi male and
female species! For the physician Taslima, it ought not to be any other way.
Something never to hazard is
judging a book by its cover, or forming an opinion based on reviews of the
same. However in the case of Taslima Nasreen’s latest offering “Caw”,
Bangladeshis faced a virtual blitzkrieg of deft excerpts of the books being
blazed across cover stories in front pages of tabloids and serious
newspapers. Reaction ranged from angst to the angry. In any event, most
people commenting on “Caw” have actually read half or quarter baked
newspapers accounts, analysis or opinions than the book itself, and by look
of things a storm most unwarranted has hit the sanctified sanctum of
Bangladesh’s cultural literati, the repercussion’s and reverberation to be
felt, for a very long time to come.
Importantly a debate on sex and
sexuality and what ideally constitutes morality, is hopefully the net gain
if at all, in the process. It is yet left to be seen if the parochial
Bangladeshi middle class, uncomfortably shuffling between outmoded terms
such as ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ will garner the stamina or ‘vitality’ to
carry this debate forward, to effect any imminent or meaningful change in
our mindset.
Abjectly “Caw” is about what
Taslima does best: a bruising ‘tell all’ and it is not as if, this is the
first time she has done it. Her previous offerings have been titillating
tales of her apparently insatiable sexual ‘appetite’. It wont therefore be
an unfair assessment to say that being ‘long and hard’ at it, she has
reached a nirvanical point in her career where terms like ‘slut’ or ‘whore’
lashed most rudely across her, are terms she has crossed the threshold of
worry, and has probably learnt not to take too seriously at heart. No
crusading warrior can or should bogged down by terms that are meant only to
shift the focus, and what is surprising is the Kolkata ‘duh-duh’s who
championed Taslima all along are the ones foul mouthing her the most today.
Some fall, but perfectly desirable fall from favor!
A self proclaimed ‘Wasted Women’,
where she probably went wrong in “Caw”, is a failure to realize that not
many in Bangladesh’s so-called egalitarian ‘civil society’, the ones
mercilessly brutalized this time around i.e. writers, thinkers, poets,
pressmen, politicians and other good-for-nothings et al, while privately in
agreement with her rights to free speech and actions as to ‘do’ whatever she
thinks fit to do with her body, are unwilling to make that fine transition
of a PUBLIC stand to the whole gamut of sex and sexuality. The pain,
humiliation, hurt and feelings of betrayals, and the incessant hee-haw start
rights here!
In all honesty, and in some
perverse way Bangladesh’s meandering journey into the realms of a ‘Global
Thought Process’ to charge the imagination of the most enlightened of our
times have had sordid pitfalls. “Caw”’ is unprecedented, because it goes
beyond what may be termed bad precedence. It is a glove-off, knuckles bared,
hell hath no fury than a women scorned, demolition derby. It signals a
wake-up call, that a new generation of men and women will provoke and
whiplash society, ask uneasy questions, and will gore no-holds-barred, till
such time we have gotten rid of a hypocritical and conceited bunch of
shamans who masquerade as ‘image leaders, role models’ while shamelessly
beguiling themselves honorific of ‘conscience of the nation’, ‘do-all-ers
and know–all-ers’, and the buck simply doesn’t stop there.
It permeates civility when gray
haired monoliths churn out their fossilized ejaculations in pages after
boring pages of newspaper columns, lay siege to all TV channels, and hob-nob
with the political hierarchy of every political party in and out of power in
Bangladesh’s destiny, without realizing that they are only contributing to
collective societal hatred of their known, yet unaccounted for impropriety.
The grapevine in a sexually repressed republic is often cause for more
undoing than do die-hard facts: a sore case of the bad breath in that – the
one having it is usually the last to know that he/she has it!
Winds of change blowing far too
fast have a singular message - Iconoclasm is the new religion. This irksome
routine of playing God at the cost of a hostaged citizenry obliged to
mindlessly ‘wah-wah’ the select has crippled truly radical
aspirations of the society at large. A society whose unheard and
deliberately suppressed pulses wish to demolish the many ‘sanctioned
pretensions’ of the so-called powerful, at the first given opportunity. If
Taslima is an opportunist, she can rightfully claim credits for seizing an
opportunity at age 40 (when some get naughty), a ‘mid-life’ crisis sort of,
to take up once for all, many unspoken matters concerning ‘reproductive
organs’ sitting pretty in the mid-sections of the Bangladeshi male and
female species! For the physician Taslima, it ought not to be any other
way.
So there we are – in the do we DO
IT or DON’T we flux?
The average Bangladeshi ‘bhodroloke’
will have one ejected from any company solicited, when the slightest hint
dropped is a desire to discuss matters of the ‘below the belt’ category, or
SEX.
For the Bangladeshi male however,
he may wishfully have a coterie of ‘like minded’ chums, rollicking in
laughter when the term AIDS for easier understanding means, ‘Ass infected
don’t screw’, to tongue in cheek inquiries of the Maal or the ‘new
game in town’ – and how to make a bee-line to her cell-phone, with
opportunities for a ‘rollicking romp’ at a friends apartment in a desolate
afternoon. As Taslima will tell you, in selection of a makeshift
‘love-nest’, men have barged in on her privacy to use her bed, and by that,
it was not as if, it was always her they wanted to ‘use’!
For females indulging in such ‘nongramee’
(read filth) is only to have aspersion cast of being ‘cheap’ or ‘horny’, as
also the hazardous possibilities of otherwise docile males, to turn into
predatorial hyena heat, and in the first opportunity, go for a ‘plunge’,
when on the advantageous flip side it becomes difficult to determine the
term consensual sex and really if there is as such a ‘guilty party’ in the
two? Date rapes – Bangladeshis haven’t even heard about it.
The discussion of sex between the
male and female species in Bangladesh by the way is taboo, and you certainly
don’t need a mullah to enforce orders. Our ‘enlightened’ lots
(bidhogdojohn’s) wield the same powerful yet identical ‘sword’
of authority!
In all probability the above
paragraph is drawing a brush far too wide, because what we have here is a
common parameter of the man-women relationship in any society, especially
ones as sexually repressed as Bangladesh.
To our utter dismay are terms
like ‘progressive’ or ‘enlightened’ being played about with wanton
recklessness when the issue in question is religion, specially Islam. It was
after all fair, to lash out at myopic mullahs when
they viewed Taslima’s opinion with contempt, when her attack was against
the religion she was born into, and caused her ultimate exile from
Bangladesh in the nineties. Tragically none were seen to be more vocal in
support of her alleged ‘blasphemy’ than the ones Taslima has set to socially
murder in “Caw”.
After all it was the proper thing
to do, everybody has a right to free speech, but then the vicious cycle of
‘what goes around – comes around’ also has this uncanny tendency to hit back
mercilessly when it is least desired. It was for instance, perfectly all
right for our ‘progressive literati’ to support Taslima’s right to free
speech and expressions, when debates revolved around the sexual life of
Muhammad (PBUH) and have the mullahs screaming for her
blood.
What more can we possibly expect
from such moron-ized ‘fun-da-mentalist’ i.e. those foolish and ‘intolerant’
enough to scream themselves hoarse about a ‘mere Prophet’ who died some 1400
years back, and is physically unable to defend his reputation or the lack of
it, or take Taslima to a Court of Law for slander – how illogical? Yet on
the flip side the mentality is: it is NOT perfectly all right to slander a
‘renowned poet’ happily alive and able to defend himself, without an
injunction being served on the sale of “Caw”, with pains of a lawsuit of
nearly 100 million Takas hanging like a chopper over the publishers and
publics collective head – very logical? Spoilt sport and party poopers
those.
The illogic’s of the logic here
is it really boils down to the question of who will judge our ‘intellectual’
judges?
In some roundabout way, the
public at large has been reduced to accepting whatever the ‘great’ amongst
us decide is the RIGHT thing. The media remains entrapped within the
trivialities of boon the ‘great’ endorse: commercial contracts, soap-script
manufacture, NGO affiliations and commissioned works – and importantly to be
savaged by their repetitive ‘presence’ in all matters of our lives, as if
they are the end all and know all, of our very existence. The rut that has
set in needs a thorough overhaul – a regular dry and wet-wash of the “Caw”
variety and possibly even a purge is the demand of the hour. Mere expiation
will not help for our ‘great’ have no clue to the existence of the word
retirement, neither do they see the wide open door with the sign EXIT marked
clearly! Change of eyeglasses?
In breaching the fine line
between the private and the public, Taslima unfortunately capitulated to the
male status quo. Her ‘feminism’ as such is a product of the male chauvinist
establishment. Detailing sexual libidos of the male as much as her own,
demonstrates an eagerness to play to the gallery, when a more mature,
reasonable and realistic approach would have been worthwhile on her take on
sexuality in Bangladesh. A take that would have had academic consistency and
weathered the tides of time, instead of being destined to a long list of
cheap thrillers.
The US University that has
Taslima as a willing student will have nothing to offer a free world, other
than an unreliable and peripatetic whistle-blower. A Joan Collins in the US
did not change the perspective of sexuality, it degenerated to the concept
of ‘selling sex’ to a point, where people started wondering if the next
‘great’ offer would be for her to bottle and sell her own excrement. Taslima
clearly seems to have exhausted her stock of what may titillate readers in
the future, and even if it does, the more important aspects of meaningful
and responsible discussion on sexuality will have been lost.
Not to be outdone, a news story
in a Dhaka tabloid suggest a poet spared the murderous ignominy in “Caw” is
so upset about this ‘oversight’ that he has all set detailing into hard
words his many sexual exploits with Taslima. As if that is not enough, he
claims to have images of Taslima in the flesh, captured in candid camera!
Acceptability of poor taste is
set to be the next big Bangladesh middle-class haute couture.
Having said that, in matters of
drawing the fine line between what is private as opposed to public, Taslima
seems to have gone dangerously overboard. In blasting those with whom she
certainly enjoyed her sexual tryst and in naming them while she might have
committed a ‘great service to society,’ her insinuations of a poet having an
affair with his youngish sister-in-law (which if true is non of her business
in the first place), is devised to wreck havoc and cause immense and
irreversible mental agony. Taslima has every right to punish whoever she
feels needs punishing, but the consequence of it all on women in our society
less well known that her, and the vulnerable children they may have, should
have been fathomed with some degree of respect and compassion. Suicides more
often than not, is an alternative choice for those humiliated.
Finally the greatest
misconception about Taslima is this impression of her being ‘courageous’.
Courage becomes a misnomer when
people have to resort to fleeing than face up to their actions and deed. It
is an insult to the imagination of those that are standing their firm ground
and fighting fundamentalism or sexuality in Bangladesh, to have somebody
create a furor and then disappear. The word agent provocateur is never a
term of endearment or respect.
For all practical purpose Taslima
should have the temerity to come to Bangladesh, face a Court of Law that
jailed her and fight her way out or about, as much as she owes it to the
poet that sued her this time around and the people of Bangladesh a clear
explanation of what really transpired in a motel room in Rangamati – and to
what extent did the ‘alleged tryst’ really go, or was she gripped by
paranoia of her own making, or was she plain LYING?
Unwillingness to answer any of
the above in a Court of Law is indication of blackmail most foul.
End of the day; disrespect for
the law is not an enshrined credo in the laws of any state. Freedom of
expression does not preclude the absence of civility nor does it permit
wanton recklessness, and unless Taslima mends her way, it wont be long
before she is either booted out of the US, or rubs somebody so bad on the
‘wrong side’, that deportation proceedings may logically be effected against
her.
Caution is a peripheral freedom
that must be exercised.
©
BangladesherDak, Editorial. MH.17.11.200303
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