Taslima Nasreen, The Game in Reverse translated by Carolyne Wright (New York: Braziller, 1995), $14.95
Reviewed by Joe Auciello
Taslima Nasreen wants her readers to "know somewhat too much." And, with that knowledge, never again accept or perpetuate the social and religious traditions that exploit and degrade women. Although hers are intensely personal poems, sometimes even cryptic, they all refer to a larger cultural context — contemporary life in Bangladesh. To read the poems well, one must keep in mind the social relations of her country which form an essential feature of her work. Nasreen is often the immediate subject of her poems, but not as a woman removed from place and time. Bangladesh itself is her deeper subject; the lives of people there, especially the lives of women, is the focus of her anger, impatience, and sorrow.
While she had been writing and publishing for several years and was already an important figure in her country, Nasreen first came to the attention of Western readers in 1993. A novel, Lajja (Shame), that highlighted Muslim intolerance against Hindus in Bangladesh, coupled with statements about the need to revise the Koran, resulted in a "death sentence" from religious leaders — and demonstrations by tens of thousands of aggrieved Muslims who burned her books and demanded her death. As a concession to the fundamentalist Muslims, the government brought Nasreen to trial on the grounds of offending religious sensibilities, allowed her bail, and arranged for her to leave the country in voluntary exile. She found refuge in Sweden and won the European Parliament's Sakharov Prize for freedom of thought. Currently she resides in Germany.
The Game in Reverse, Nasreen's first volume of poetry in English, is a compilation from five of her books published in Bangladesh. Nasreen's style is not what would usually be termed "poetic"; she takes little delight in the play of words and makes little use of descriptive or elevated language. She uses few poetic techniques: juxtaposition, irony, occasional parallelism, sometimes an extended metaphor. Instead, her poems are written in plain language and are structured around blunt statements. Since her poems explore and protest the plight of women in Bangladesh, her style is well matched to her content. Nasreen's work reminds Englishspeakers of the feminist poetry of the early 1970s; her simplicity and directness will remind some readers of Langston Hughes or the recent political poetry of Allen Ginsberg. Consider for instance, the opening lines of the poem that gives the book its title: The other day in Ramna Park I saw a boy buy a girl. I'd really like to buy a boy for five or ten taka, a clean-shaven boy, with a fresh shirt, combed and parted hair... I'd like to grab the boy by his collar and pull him up into a rickshaw -tickling his neck and belly, I'd make him giggle; bringing him home, I'd give him a sound thrashing with high-heeled shoes, and then throw him out -"Get Lost, bastard!"
The strength of the poem lies in the calm, matter-of-fact assumption that it is entirely fitting for women to treat men as men treat women. In writing this poem Nasreen has presumed, has seized, equality of the sexes, jarring the thinking of both her male and female readers. Nasreen's writing can project a cold, detached tone. At times her poems sound like clinical reports, befitting her work as a physician for a government clinic. However, beneath the veneer of objectivity are angry injunctions and implicit accusations: "Look at this! See what happens!" Left unsaid but sharply felt are a set of questions for a reader: "Do you approve of what you see? Do you accept it? What will you do, now that you know?"
At least one poem makes such connections explicit:
"They're throwing stones at Noorjahan, those stones are striking my body....
from the quiver of their cruel eyes, arrows speed to pierce her body, my body also.
Are these arrows not piercing your body?"
Many of Nasreen's poems delve into relations between the sexes where bitter experience produces a bleak vision. Men in these poems are "bad dreams," "monsters," and are compared to dogs and vultures. Little in the way of sensual pleasure, emotional warmth, hope, or joy is to be found here.
Yet, loneliness and longing drive the women toward men who are inherently unappreciative and unworthy of gifts received. In Nasreen's poems, sexual relations become a debasing act, a sign of weakness, like an addiction:
Everyone Knows about your lechery, but even so it's the fault of loneliness I go
Knocking again at your door.
People mistakenly think this is love.
Not surprisingly, marriage is perceived as a trap, a dungeon, or a kind of prostitution in which women exchange their freedom for food and trinkets.
"Even the mangy cur of the house barks now and then, but over the mouths of women cheaply had, there's a lock a golden lock."
Worse still, in marriage women give over their minds: "My sister used to sing wonderful Tagore songs, / She used to lovereading Simone de Beauvoir," but now "... she's a smart shopper, bringing home/ porcelain dinnerware, fresh carp, and expensive-looking bed sheets." Conversely, an image of freedom that appears in several poems involves a woman stepping past the threshold, going beyond the home and out into the world.
As a spokeswoman, Nasreen is sometimes at her weakest as a poet. The poems too frequently include vague references to the oppression women suffer
International Viewpoint n° 276 7
Fighting the mullahs' fire with her own"
Joe Auciello asks Carolyne Wright about her translation of The Game in Reverse
* Book notes from "society." Her writing is far more effective when exploitation is precise and personal, when everyday cruelty wears a human face. For instance, the poem "At the Back of Progress" tells of a lowly clerk who is humble at his job but who is master over his wife at home. Faulting "society" in general terms is more suitable for an essay. In poetry it is flat rhetoric, at best an exasperated expression of frustration not yet fully realized inverse.
Carolyne Wright's translation has succeeded in bringing Nasreen's poems into the English language; no awkwardness obtrudes to disrupt their sound or sense. Some poems were translated with Nasreen herself, while others were completed with the assistance of Bengali collaborators. As a result, the poems read smoothly, forcefully, and naturally. Quite properly, the poems do retain their specific references to Bengali culture, but these, when not clear from the context, are concisely explained in end notes provided by the translator. At their best, there is an undeniable quality to these poems which is to be found in the uncompromising voice of a poet who does not flinch from writing strong statements of a terrible reality. While the purpose of her work is to expose and change social conditions that deaden the lives of women, the poems are not simply pamphlets in verse. These poems reveal the thought and spirit of a woman fighting for her life against the political and religious systems that would smother her.
The emotional truth Taslima Nasreen describes has its parallels in the West, though the specific physical conditions differ. Women, especially, may well recognize aspects of personal experience in these poems. The Game in Reverse can strengthen and stimulate the consciousness of its audience, even as readers admire the courage of a poet who knows somewhat too much" and who, despite the safetyof silence, is determined to speak. * 8 International Viewpoint April 1996
• What are your personal impressions of Taslima Nasreen? She was raised in a conservative family. As soon as she reached puberty, she had to cover her head even in the house, so that nothing immodest or female showed. It made her see the world with resentment. You see that resentment in the poetry and in her columns. Actually, have found her to be very reserved, very quiet. Even though she was soft-spoken, she was also very direct. When she would call me on the telephone there would be no pleasantries; she got right to the point, whether it was to arrange a meeting or say what was on her mind. That quality is also in her writing. • Do Nasreen's poems present any particular problems for an English language translator? A.: Her work is much less "literary" and much more hard-hitting and outspoken than most other poets I have translated in Bangladesh and India. Her poems remind me very much of work that had been written within the women's movement in the late 1960s and early '70s. It was easier to translate because of that. It didn't have a lot of literary subtlety — like rhyme or meter - the kind of style that is difficult to translate. Bengali has certain metrical forms which are much like Romance language syllabics. It is a rhyme-rich language, like Italian, so almost everything rhymes with everything else. That's very difficult to replicate in English, but those problems did not present themselves in Taslima's work. All of her poems that I translated, except one, are in free verse. • Don't Nasreen's poems exaggerate the oppression of women somewhat? Clearly, a poem like "Happy Marriage" is full of bitter hyperbole: "if he wishes he can chop off my hand, my fingers. / If he wishes he can sprinkle salt in the open wound." This is true, but exaggerated. We accept hyperbole in poetry; it's the "willing suspension of disbelief." Taslima generalizes based on her own experience, as writers do. She picks particular incidents and highlights them. She would never say "although most Bangladeshi men are good and faithful husbands who treat their wives and children well, there are some men who are very abusive toward their family." That kind of writing puts people to sleep. That would not be a Taslima Naseein sentence. She would say: "Bangladeshi men abuse their wives. Bangladeshi men beat their wives. And even if they don't, they can. No one is going to stop them." Her critics would say that she is one-sided and unnuanced. • In 1994 a Calcutta newspaper misquoted Nasreen as saying that "the Koran should be revised thoroughly." I think she really meant to say the Sharia, the family law, should be revised thoroughly. When you're going back and forth between one topic and another, it's easy for such a slip to happen. • In Bangladesh, who is Nasreen's audience? The 30% of people who can read and write. Much of what she writes about in her columns concerns the problems of middle class women. She herself is from an upper middle class family; her father is a physician. She herself was a doctor. She has written about villagers, mainly in terms of going out to villages and providing health care for rural women. Doctors, lawyers, professors and writers read Taslima's work. But do their maids, and the people who cook for them?! don't think so. Most of these people do not read, and if they could, they wouldn't have the money to buy books Most of the people who have criticized her have not read her work. They are reacting to her as a symbol on whom they can project their own agenda. • Why should a Western audience read The Game in Reverse? Taslima's work has generated great controversy in Bangladesh and become a focal point for a major political crisis in that country. She is a symbol of the dangers to free speech and so has gained a wide following all over the world. Her poetry gives a glimpse into the culture that she comes from.She has held up to Bangladeshi men a mirror of their own attitudes toward women; she has fought the mullahs fire with fire of herown. She is a writer of powerful poems, and, to many, an embattled Carolyne Wright is a visiting research scholar at the Wellesley College Center for Research on Women. She has been an Associate of Harvard University's Department of Sanskrit and Indian Studies. In 1993-94 she won an Award for Outstanding Translation from the American Literary Translators' Association. She is currently at work on a book of translations of Bengali women's writing from India and Bangladesh.