Feminist Reading of the poems of Taslima Nasrin



Feminist Reading of the poems of Taslima Nasrin

Dr Sigma, Faculty at Salalah college of Technology, Oman

Abstract

Taslima Nasrin is one of the most controversial living feminist writers in the world because she has consistently engaged in Consciousness Raising. Almost all Nasrin’s major works can be read as feminist texts. Taslima Nasrin has attained global attention as a poet also. She calls them “poems born from the tears and sighs of my depressed soul” (“My Poems” 7). In her poems Taslima Nasrin speaks of her loneliness, its pangs and sometimes she generalizes her feelings because, through Consciousness Raising, women move collectively from the victim position. The neglect of love and the indifferent male attitude are expressed in Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin. This is also of interest to the researcher in that it opens to scrutiny the ambience of unfulfilled desire, both physical and metaphorical that characterized the society in which Nasrin grew up. Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin lays bare the heart-rending pain and the heavenly ecstasy experienced by a young girl in love, with the emphasis on male superciliousness and indifference.

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Key words- A Feminist Reading of the Poems of Taslima Nasrin

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Introduction

Feminism is one of the most popular concepts in academia today, particularly in emerging societies. Women in such societies have, long after the political liberation of their nation, awakened to the fact of their lack of other freedoms such as economic, social and gender-based freedom. As a result these hitherto-suppressed women are up in arms, demanding all the freedoms that they have been denied for centuries. In fact it is universally accepted that real liberation of woman can be achieved only when women themselves stand up for their rights, This feminist reading of the Nasrin poems focuses primarily on how Nasrin raises consciousness among the reading public against the sad plight of women in the Indian subcontinent in general and in Bangladesh in particular.

Love not only seems to be a conspicuous theme in Taslima Nasrin’s poems, but it is also instrumental in bringing out the incompetence in the man-woman relationship in general and the outrageous and extraneous overpowering of the patriarchal superiority in any household whether it is in Bangladesh or in a more sophisticated civilized country like France.

According to her, almost every woman is alone; longing for her man’s company and her love is rejected. But when it is expressed, the information about personal life is shared and it creates consciousness raising among others. “In exchanging information about their lives and experiences, participants throw light upon the cues, expectations, remarks and reactions that are formed and then reinforced ,correctly female, that is feminine behavior”(Milkman 36). There is no woman who is sure that she has found her way to the real purpose of life and then there are cases and situations in which a woman would say that it is the same story which has been heard and experienced a thousand times before. She excels in writing love poetry, especially poetry which expresses the fragility as well as the stasis of interpersonal relationships. She depicts the loneliness of a woman in a gripping manner. She has enriched the poetry of the subcontinent with poems in which she expresses unreciprocated love and its impact on her and the distress she experiences which gradually she universalizes through the process of Consciousness Raising. She obviously feels much perturbed by the stubborn males, their rejection of the women and the destitution of women .Her work finds a clear and emphatic expression in her poems and fiction.

The poet persona’s experience as expressed in Nasrin’s poems is evidently based on her man’s indifference or his inability to respond to her love. This is why the poet indicts the typical behaviour of men, who feel superior to women and who have assiduously cultivated the art of diminishing their vulnerability to emotions, and also the traditional weakness of women, who have been encouraged from childhood to be attuned to the emotions of others. Nasrin’s womanly intuitions and her ability to empathize with the predicament of other women spring from a genuine female heart whose expression is powerful poetry.

The poet persona logically takes the emotions from within the self to the outer world where there are many who suffer without the power to express themselves. The poet questions the psyche of her own self and that of other women who wallow in the mire of love, knowing full well that it is a social trap from which they can never come out. The poems may suggest that the poet shares information about her personal life and personal experience. However, she also identifies with the personal and idiosyncratic problems of all women around and this falls into a pattern that characterizes her poetry. Being extremely personal, the poet persona of Nasrin’s poems is none, but the author herself, striving to universalize her own experience. By doing so Nasrin consciously tries to raise consciousness among her women readers.

Consciousness Raising is, as Juliet Mitchell writes, “what they thought was an individual dilemma a social predicament and hence a political problem. The process of transforming the hidden, individual fears of women into shared awareness of the meaning of them as social problems, the release of anger, anxiety, the struggle proclaiming the painful and transforming it into the political-this process is Consciousness-raising (61).

The authority of experience and social conciousness are exuberant in Nasrin’s poems. This intensely personal and confessional quality of Nasrin’s work recalls in some ways Anne Saxton and Sylvia Plath, who attempt to work out their traumas in their poetry. Both Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, among other things, work out in their poetry traumas in relation to their parents, particularly their fathers. The sense of betrayal is evident in their poems is vividly realized in Nasrin’s lines as her father betrayed her mother. It is he who is projected as the lover who is adamant in not responding to the overtures of the poet persona, who is, in fact, the poet in the robe of her mother.

The phenomenon love is a wonderful feeling, but according to Shulamith Firestone, it is a “pivot of women’s oppression” (The Dialectic of Sex 126). It is this confrontation with the pain in relation to love and family that gives readers a point of contact with Nasrin’s intensely subjective poems and in consequence the readers are moved by them very deeply. Nasrin’s favorite theme has always been the pangs of ‘aloneness’ and lack of fulfillment in love. There is no one either to feel for her or to cure her love disease:

I go wherever my eye takes me.

Who’ll come and stand

like a rock before me

and stretch out his hands?

There are so many diseases in my heart.

Who’ll cure them? (“Aloneness” 1-6)

The strength of Nasrin’s exploration of the love theme comes from her irresistible compulsion to articulate and understand the workings of the feminine consciousness. Her best-known poem in this category, “I don’t feel up to love these days” is concerned with the question of human identity but it effectively uses the rhetorical mood in order to pose pertinent questions relating to a woman’s or Her best-known poem in this category, “I don’t feel up to love these days” is concerned with the question of human identity but it effectively uses the rhetorical mood in order to pose pertinent questions relating to a woman’s or a woman poet’s identity:

My heart aches for those who love

as if they are dead.

It aches all day,

And needles poke me,

am I mad that I’ll leap at love?

First I’ll have to help those who’re floating,

first I’ll have to stretch my hand

towards those who’re drowning.

After that, if I live, I’ll live,

if I love, I’ll love. (“I don’t feel up to love these days 7-16)

The word love, as it is generally used in relation to personal life and literature, means an emotional attachment which makes a man and a woman feel that their separation from each other would be the greatest catastrophe or misfortune in their lives and would ruin their happiness and life for ever. The desire for sex is undoubtedly an essential ingredient of love, but both the man and the woman treat it as something secondary, at least in theory. “Firestone argued that the concept of love was a kind of ideological cover-up or disguise of the relations of power that cover-up or disguise of the relations of power that prevailed in heterosexual relationships. In this sense, the emotion of love, as experienced by men and women alike, served to disguise the actual political meaning of sex by putting it within the context of a confusing and misleading set of expectations”( Milkman 13). Nasrin too regards love as an emotional attachment, and a deep one, between a man and a woman; she too regards the sexual relationship as something natural and essential, but secondary. However, her longing is only for the man whom she could identify with his after shave smell and she avers that her search is not after thousand men to give her pleasure--not an escape, but an aftermath of dedicated love, which could arouse the woman in her:

Do I love your after shaved smell

More than you? I wonder.

Like her Indian counterpart Kamala Das, Nasrin also comes to consider sexual relationship an essential part of womanhood. Kamala Das does not think it is indecent or vulgar or indelicate or even undignified to speak about the need of the sexual relationship in explicit and specific terms. Kamala Das avers that a woman’s sexual activity is a very important part of her physical and mental make up. Nasrin also sincerely feels the need for love culminating in sexual relationship. She wants herself to be subjected to such an ecstasy, which she has been denied. So, if only her beloved could arouse the woman in her that moment of bliss will be eternal:

I wonder now you’d look without your shirt on;

if somebody undid her forest of hair

on your wide chest and caressed it a lot;

when you suddenly woke up at dead of night

and drowned yourself in the waves of a woman-river

in a fit of wild love-making.

I’m dying to see one day

how a woman’s body thrills

when your fingers touch it.

I want so much to be a woman once. (“Castles in the air”12)

The feminine disappointment and the abhorrence at the thought of being cheated by the man whom she held great in her heart make her voice her protest in unambiguous. This is not only her personal experience but many women suffer the same fate. A woman is expected to give everything for her man and family but a man need not reciprocate. The existing social customs approve of this difference. She protests against this social discrimination and wants other women to follow suit:

You’ve given everything--to the last morsel

Though you’ve got nothing in return

You go hungry, but they gorge on your wealth

Nasrin finds the neglect by the beloved a universal phenomenon torturing women. Though a woman wants to overcome her grief at the neglect and indifference shown by her beloved, she fails miserably to forget this insult. Nevertheless she feels pride in waiting for him and this worthless sentiment hurts her. So the poet persona exposes the futility of the deceptive expectations of women in general. This is Consciousness Raising:

Once spoken aloud, women’s private experience could become the stuff of public campaigns, and the basis of political organization around the issues thus exposed. In this sense the transition from the personal to the political had two facets. First, the facts of individual oppression came to be perceived as political and social, that is, as the effects of the forces operating in the society at large to perpetuate the subordination of women as a class. Second, these facts could then become elements of political organizing. They could become the substance of the women’s movement. (Milkman 35)

In conclusion Nasrin has rendered a valuable service to the woman by being frank and expressive of her true love and the conflicts and confrontations that it led to. She meets nothing but neglect of her unselfish love. In her poems Nasrin has successfully raised the consciousness of the female readers that their waiting for men and being servile to them has no meaning, but will bring only sorrow and suffering. Realizing the futility of the reward less waiting for a selfish man, the poet regrets having waited so long. And, looking around, she recognizes that there are millions of such women who are neglected and rejected by the males of their choice. So she feels that it is her obligation to society that these women have to be made to realize the challenges ahead and to be taught to extricate themselves from the mire of love.

Bibliography- Love poems of Taslima Nasrin. Trans. Ashim Chowdhury. New

Delhi: Rupa, 2004.

Firestone Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist

Revolution. New York: Bantam, 1970.

Milkman, Ruth. Contemporary Feminist Thought: Consciousness

Raising. New York: Pantheon, 1980

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