Hate culture

Muslim fanatics hate almost everybody. They hate Jews, Christians, Hindus, Pagans, Atheists and many other communities. They even hate Muslims. If they happen to be Sunnis, they hate Shi’ites , Ahmadiyyas, Baha’is etc. They hate Buddhists too. In Bangladesh, Muslims and Buddhists usually live together peacefully. But Muslims get already angry with Buddhists this year because Buddhists in Myanmar tortured Myanmar’s minority Rohingya Muslims. When Hindus in India demolished an Indian mosque in 1992, Muslim fanatics in Bangladesh demolished the houses and temples of Bangladesh’s minority Hindus. Quite a weird revenge! [Read more…]

Some famous male writers in Bengal are worse than Muslim religious fanatics.

”It is discouraging how many people are shocked by honesty and how few by deceit.”— Noel Coward

Religious fanatics issue fatwas and demand the book banning of the writers who challenge them. Their demonstrations and processions end to a cul-de-sac or to a mosque.

But megalomaniac, misogynistic, macho male writers and their male dominated media are able to go far beyond mosques and can ban you, blacklist you, and banish from your land if you ever dare to challenge them. They are much more influential than moulavis and mullahs, much more clever and dangerous than idiot ignorant zombies.

Islamic fundamentalists in the Indian subcontinent can not ban books. It is the government who ban books to please the fundamentalists. They often fulfill the demands of fundamentalists for their own political interests. We know about politicians. Don’t we? But we expect writers and intellectuals to protest against banning and censorship. They do, but not always. If you are not submissive to big male writers and if you do not follow all the patriarchal rules of literary world, your life will be hell. They could not tolerate that me a much younger writer selling more books than them, and I was not scared to challenge their male dominated fake literary world full of lies and hypocrisy. They are powerful, because they control male dominated media and keep very good relation with corrupt corporates and people in the power.
They are lords. They can do anything they want. One of them was Syed Shamsul Haque, an abuser and a liar. He not only banned my book, he filed a million dollar libel case against me. What was my crime? My crime was I wrote what he told me about his emotional relationship with his sister-in-law and how he dishonored me. He knows very well that I will not be able to defend myself, the government does not allow me to enter Bangladesh and there is no one in the country who has courage to stand beside me, and he is in the land where no democracy but idiocracy rules, and in this situation, it will be very easy for him to file case against me and ban the book. He committed crime by banning the book in 2003. It’s 2012, the book is still banned. It was not banned by the government but was banned by the high court because of the law suit of SSH, the famous hypocrite writer, the supporter of banning and censorship. No trial took place. Only the heinous crime against the truth took place. What have the local human rights activists or women’s rights activists been doing? They love to keep silent. They are mostly power worshipers, anti-feminists, pro-religion.

Another famous writer from the West part of Bengal took initiative to ban my book. He is Sunil Gangopadhyay, a famous Bengali literary guru and the president of Sahitya Akademi. He was behind the banning of my book Dwikhandito in 2003 and was the supporter of my banishment from West Bengal in 2007.


It seems people in the media forgets what they wrote about the role Sunil Gangopadyay played to ban my book in 2003. Some proofs are here:

Sunil Gangopadhyay said to Inter Press Service, “The book has passages of tirade on religion which could incite riots. It is not literature. . . it is almost pornography. It should be banned as it misuses freedom of expression.”

‘Author Sunil Gangopadhyay, one of those who support the ban said, ..people who bother to read it will be disappointed.’ Another Indian newspaper wrote, ‘Several noted authors including the poet Sunil Gangopadhyay, the novelists, Dibyendu Palit, Nabanita Deb Sen, and Syed Mustafa Siraj, the Bangladeshi novelist, Sams-ul Huq, the singer Suman Chatterjee, as well as the Trinamul Congress leader and Kolkata mayor, Subrata Mukherjee, among others, have come out openly against the book and have supported the decision by the state LF government to get the book banned.‘ They just copied the news from CPI(M)’s mouthpiece People’s Democracy (07.12.03).

And a whole book (Nishiuddho mot, Dwikhandito poth) was published with all the historical documents related the banning of Dwikhandito, Government’s ban order, Sunil and other writers proposals to ban the book, and the High Court verdict to lift ban on the book. The book is available in Bengal. .
It was all over Bengali media how the writer Sunil Gangopadhyay insisted to ban another writer’s book. He was a very good friend of former West Bengal government who finally banned the book. In his interview in Aajkal, a Bengali newspaper, he said in details how he played an active role to ban the book. aajkal1 , Aajkal2

Everybody knew how Dwikhandito, the 3rd part of my autobiography was banned. Here the journalist says, ‘Writer Sunil Gangopadhyay says that he finds the sexual content of the book “distasteful” but supports the ban only on account of two pages that harshly indict Islam. Commenting on Taslima’s discussion of her sexual relationships with eminent writers, he says, “Everybody knows that adults enter a sexual relationship on the basis of an unwritten pact, which is why they close all doors and windows. If someone breaks that trust then it is a breach of contract and confidentiality which is not only distasteful but an offence”.

I would not have reminded him about his role to ban my book if he did not lie that he was against the banning of any book and he protested against the banning of my book Dwikhandito.

While I was thinking of his lies, I shared my painful experience that he sexually exploited me once, and also many other girls and women. I was a well established feminist writer, if he did not spare me, then whom did he spare? Even though he said, ‘.. if she has been sexually harassed by me, which must happened long time ago. ‘, some media and some men try to blame me for ‘lying against the saint’. They are definitely angry with me. I must not accuse a famous male writer of any abuse or anything no matter whatever his crime is. The media financed by the political party that stands against his political ideas using my statement against him, for their own political interests. Does the anti-Sunil media supports me? Not at all. They are very much against my thoughts and ideals. Sex abuse issues are human rights issues, but human rights activists are silent as usual, they are silent because it is not politically correct to support me, who challenges patriarchy and religion, especially Islam. It is an unforgivable crime to speak against the status quo in the Indian Subcontinent.

Defenders of abusers are now asking why I am complaining now, why did not I do then when it happened? As if, if I don’t share my painful experience within a certain time,I should be disqualified. As if, if I complained then, something different could have happened, as if people could have blamed him! No, the same thing would have happened. I would have been harassed again by media and men for telling the truth.

For telling the truth I was thrown out of Bangladesh, my country. For telling the truth I was bundled out of West Bengal, where I settled to live for the rest of my life. For telling the truth I have been banned, blacklisted, and banished from the lands I was born and brought up or I chose to live. I am a social and political pariah, because I tell the truth. The male dominated Bengali literary world has been so far successful to blackout me. My crime is I have told the unpleasant truth about religion and I disclosed the secrets of those sex-abuser gurus who pretend to be philosophers and intellectuals, defenders of human rights and freedom of expression.

They want us to shut our mouth. If we don’t, they get very angry with us, and they say all the bad things about us, and all the lies about us. But thousands of silent women know that I am telling their untold stories. They are not coming out of the closet. But one day they will. I will not see that to happen in my lifetime, but I am trying to create an environment for them. In the meantime I will be violently abused, I will be deported, I will almost be killed by influential and powerful misogynists.

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Religion Divides (Warning: Graphic Images)

India was partitioned in 1947. The partition of India is one of the greatest tragedies in human history. More than a million people were killed. 12 million people were uprooted from their homeland and crossed the boundaries between India and Pakistan.

But not all Muslims left their homeland India and not all Hindus left their homeland Pakistan.



A Pakistani soldier was inspecting whether the man had circumcised penis during Bangladesh war in 1971. If circumcised, you may survive, if not , you are dead.


Muslim fundamentalists killed Gopal Krishna Muhuri, Principal of Nazirhat College in Bangladesh.

‘The rise of religious fundamentalists and terrorists under state patronage in Pakistan has made their growth smooth as is the case of India, which has become a threat to the existence of the Hindus in Bangladesh and Pakistan.’

In 1951, Hindus constituted 22% of West Pakistan (Pakistan) and East Pakistan (Bangladesh). Today, the Hindus are only 1.7 percent in Pakistan, and 9.2 percent in Bangladesh.

Hindus are persecuted in Pakistan. They are forced to convert to Islam.

Hindus have been leaving Pakistan. Religion kills and divides people. It always does.

‘Lost in translation’

I am not an academic scholar. I am just an ordinary writer from a poor country called Bangladesh. I studied medicine. Literature was not my subject in the universities. But I loved literature, and I was called a book worm when young.

I started writing poetry when I was 12 years old. While studying in a medical college, I edited a poetry magazine. While practicing medicine in the public hospitals, I began writing columns in some national newspapers. My columns were about the rights of women. My message was that of raising consciousness in a male-dominated patriarchal society where women are treated as sexual objects and slaves and child-bearing machines. Translation was not an issue for me until my books were published in Western languages.

In 1993, when a fatwa – which is a religious decree – was issued against me in my own country, I had to live under police protection. And when the government filed a case against me on the charge of blasphemy, I had to go into hiding. The news spread around the world. Western publishers immediately showed interest in publishing my book. Here was a writer who was facing a death threat – the Muslim fanatics were demanding her execution by hanging and had set a price on her head. Publishing my books meant instant business. The Western world thought it had found a female Salman Rushdie. But by no means should I be considered a female Rushdie. From the beginning, I have been a socially committed writer, one writing about a cause.

When the fatwa was issued, I was living in Bangladesh. Western journalists were keen to locate the book for which the fatwa had been issued. However, the fanatics had issued the fatwa not for any specific book of mine. Rather, I had incurred the wrath of the fundamentalists because of my ideas about women’s rights and my criticism of Islam. But inasmuch as the journalists had gathered information that one of my books was banned in Bangladesh by the government, right away they assumed the fatwa was issued for my having written Shame, the book that was banned in July, 1993.

Note that there was no connection between the banned book and the fatwa, which was issued later that year. The publishers wanted to publish one book – Shame, in which criticism of Islam ironically is not found – because they had read in newspapers that it was the book for which a fatwa had been issued against me. I told them repeatedly that Shame had been banned by the government but that the fatwa was not, repeat not, issued because of the book.

Shame was not about Islam or women’s rights. It was a documentary novel based on describing atrocities that were perpetrated by a government and Muslim fanatics on Hindu minorities. It was not the Muslim fanatics that shouted for banning Shame – it was the government. Its leaders were keen on banning the book because I had criticized the establishment for having failed to protect the religious minority community at a critical time when they needed it the most.

The book’s documentation was for the people of the Indian subcontinent or for the scholars who do research on atrocities committed by the hate-mongers in the name of religion. Shame was not particularly for Western readers, I told Western publishers. But they chose to publish it – they didn’t want to receive any advice from me on publishing my book. I even told them that they would find no criticism of Islam in Shame. I requested them to publish the books that Western readers would be interested to read and for which I was hated, attacked, and punished by the fanatics and misogynists.

I advised the publishers to publish my books on women’s freedom, but no publisher wanted to publish those books. I told the publishers that the government, as well as the fanatics, filed court cases against me on the charges of blasphemy for writing those books. Mullahs issued several fatwas for those books in which I declared that religious scriptures are out of time and out of place, where I said that we need a uniform civil code based on equality – we need no religious law. In those books, I pointed out that, like other religions, Islam is not compatible with human rights, women’s rights, democracy, and secularism. But the Western publishers did not trust me – they trusted the misinformation that journalists had published in the newspapers. They just wanted to publish my documentary novel Shame. And what happened afterwards? Shame was published in the West, but the readers were disappointed, because they could not relate to the contents of the book, and also the translation was not good. I was heavily misunderstood. Not many publishers thereafter took any interest in publishing my other books, and this can lead to destroying any writer’s life. Most of the publishers in the West published Shame but did not contact me afterwards. This is the fate I was awaiting and had warned the publishers about. I am an unfortunate writer who became not only the victim of religious fundamentalism but also a victim of misinformation by the media and by the commercial mindset of the publishers. Among the Western publishers, it was only a French publisher that was not afraid to publish books of mine other than Shame.

Most publishers show little interest in my creative writings. Just as language rules, the powerful media of the dominant languages also rule. You can be a popular writer overnight by the blessings of the media. And again, you can be thrown out of the publication scene if the media ignores you and spreads negative propaganda against you. Because of media reports, I was translated in the West. And because of a lack of good translators I was not properly read. Ultimately it is readers who decide. The problem I have had is to be able to reach my readers. If a translation is not good, it is the writer – not the translator – that is blamed.

A few of my books were translated into English and French by Bengalis who knew English or French. But their translations are not good either, because their mother-tongues are neither English nor French. So, those books of mine were translated either into bad English or into bad French. Worse, most of my books have been translated, either by a Bengali man or by a Western man who happened to know Bengali. Knowing a language does not mean that he or she has a good writing skill. As a result, critics who read such translations deduce that I am not a good writer.

Even though the Western publishers were eager to publish my book, it was difficult for them to find a translator who could translate my book from Bengali into Western languages.

Bengali is a language of a poor country. Who in the West wants to learn a language of a country where 80% of the population is illiterate and more than half the population lives under the poverty line and natural disasters are the only news they read about concerning that country? It is not worth it to learn such a language.

This is not my language’s fault. My language is beautiful, and I love it. But my language is not one of the dominant languages. Languages in poor countries and of tribes in the world are rich and beautiful, but they remain in the back yard of contemporary history. They are dying. At least half of the world’s 6,800 languages, and perhaps as many as 90 per cent, face a similar fate. Bengali could be dead some time from now. Maybe only a few languages eventually will be spoken and used on Earth. Maybe in the future there will be no problem of communicating with others or translating their thoughts. Maybe in the future nothing will be lost in translation. Would that be Utopia? I say no, it would be Dystopia.

Bengali, even though it is one of the sixth largest spoken languages in the world, is the language of a poor country. Bengali, however, has been the mother tongue of notables, for example Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore and Satyajit Ray, who in 1992 won an honorary Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in Cinematic Art. And it is spoken by Sitar player Ravi Shankar; by Amartya Sen, who got the Nobel in Economics in 1998; and by Mohammad Yunus, who was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2006.

I was in Iceland when my book came out there. How on Earth, I wondered, did they find an Icelander to translate the book? Was there anyone there to translate Bengali into Icelandic, and could I meet the person? No. The translation was from the Norwegian version. And the Norwegian book was translated from the Swedish. The Swedish version was translated from French and the French from English. Only the English version was from the original Bengali. Are Icelanders aware that they are not reading my book?

Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa’s well-known 1950 film, Rashomon, tells the story of an actual event witnessed by four, all of whom report widely different memories of what happened. Analogously, readers of my books have widely different understandings of what I wrote. I believe, admittedly without facts, that prose loses 50% and poetry loses its 80% of its essence/originality because of translation.

The Russian-born linguist Roman Jakobson declared that “poetry by definition is untranslatable.” I don’t totally agree with him. If a translator himself or herself is a poet and makes the translated poetry sound like the original, there is nothing better.

The title of my first poetry book in French is ‘Une Autre Vie’. As I do not know French, I could not check whether the translation was OK. The poems were translated by a French women who was a professor of Bengali language at Le Sorbonne. I was happy to see that the book get translated. But when one of my friends translated one poem from that book into English to me, I was shocked. Two lines of my Bengali poem was, ‘tomake anchole git diye bhalo bedhechi, din din tobu tumi tumiheenotay kNedechi’. It means ‘I have tied you well with the cloths I am wearing, but I have cried for day and night for not having you with me.’ Sari is a htraditional Bengali dress for women. It is common in the Indian subcontinent to tie the sari-end or one corner of the cloths of both men and women during romantic love and marriage, so that they can be near each other all their life. I expressed that idea and tried to say that you are so near to me, actually you are not near to me. I cried being without you. Physically you can be beside me, but your heart is somewhere else – That was the poem. But the translator made a big mistake. She did not understand sari-end, the word in Bengali sounded similar to another word in Bengali, that is hair. She translated my Bengali into French as ‘I have tied you with my hair’. What is the translation of next line? Instead of ‘I have cried for day and night for not having you with me’ she wrote ‘You are so mean that I have cried for day and night.’ In Bengali, ‘tumiheen’ is ‘without you’ or ‘your absence’. But if you separate the two words, then it means ‘you are mean’. Even though I did not separate the words, she did not understand the meaning of two words when they got together and carried a different meaning. The translator did not ask me any question while she was translating my poem. I have noticed that the translators do not try to discuss with the authors when they do not understand the words and sentences the authors wrote. Probably they are afraid of asking, because it might show that they do not know Bengali well, or they think the author is too busy to co operate with them. The readers are still reading the poem in French that sounds nonsense. I was afraid to check other poems of mine that are translated in French, I am afraid I would find this kind of grave mistakes in many of my translated poems. I have a fear of translation.

My second poetry book in French, Femmes, is the fruit of a literal translation. The translator is not a poet, she is not even a writer, she is French but knows English – no other criteria was considered by the publisher. She translated my poems from an English version of my Bengali poems into French. Several months ago when I read my poems for an hour in Maison de la Poesie, Theatre Moliere, in Paris, I read my poems in Bengali and a French actress standing beside me read the translation. The theater was full, and the audience was French who knew no Bengali. Surprisingly, I received the most applause after I read the poems in Bengali. The talented actress, however, did not get applause when she read the word-for-word translation which sounded, I imagine, unlistenable. Sometimes it is better to hear the sound of beautiful poems in a language that you do not know, rather than hear a bad translation in a language that you do know.

There are some particular problems in the translation process: problems of ambiguity, problems that originate from structural and lexical differences between languages and multi-word units such as idioms and collocations. Another problem is grammar, for there are several constructions of grammar poorly understood, in the sense that it isn’t clear how they should be represented, or what rules should describe them.

The words that are really hard to translate are frequently the small, common words, whose precise meaning depends heavily on context. Some words are untranslatable when one wishes to remain in the same grammatical category. The question of whether particular words are untranslatable is frequently debated.

For example, it isn’t easy to translate poetry because you need to analyze the words and meaning in the work’s flow and rhythm or rhyme. Most translations of poetry are bad. This is principally because the translator knows the foreign language too well and his or her native language too poorly. Some English poetry translations, particularly if they are robotic, do a great disservice to the originals.

Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore’s poems were translated by W. B. Yeats, an eminent poet who understood another poet’s feelings. But knowing the language is not enough – one preferably needs to be a writer or a poet to translate a writer or a poet. In the past, writers translated the works of other writers. Nowadays, we hardly see this phenomenon. French poet Charles Baudelaire translated American writer Edgar Allen Poe, leading some bilinguals to prefer Baudelaire over Poe. Ezra Pound edited T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland, the work that got the American poet the 1948 Nobel Prize in literature. Edward FitzGerald, the English writer, translated the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (1859), which achieved its Oriental flavor. Long before that, in the 14th century, the first fine translation of Italian into English was made by England’s great poet, Geoffrey Chaucer, who adapted from the Italian of Giovanni Boccaccio in his own works. Chaucer began a translation of the French-language Roman de la Rose, and he completed a translation of Boethius from the Latin. Chaucer founded an English poetic tradition on adaptations and translations from those earlier-established literary languages. Adaptation, which formerly was common, changed over the centuries, probably since the 19th century. Instead of adaptation, literal translation or word-for-word authentic translation became a norm.

Not everyone is a Gilbert Adair, George Perec’s translator into English of his 300-page French novel La disparition (1969), a work which Perec wrote as a lipogram (a lipogram, for example, is a work in which the author never uses the letter “e”). Adair translated Perec’s work without using an “e” in English and it remains as magical as the original. Same as in Swedish. Perec was a magical writer, and any translator needs extra-ordinary talents to avoid one of the most commonly used letters of the alphabet. This would preclude the use of words normally considered essential such as je (“I”) and le (masculine “the”) in French, and “me” and “the” in English. The Spanish version contains no “a,” which is the most commonly used letter in that language. His novella, Les revenentes (1972), is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter “e” is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelled Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three. Look at all the e’s he used!

It is my understanding that English has had three periods: Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. I have enough problems understanding contemporary English, of course. I realize I cannot understand Beowulf in the original, although the translations of stories about the 11th century epic warrior are of real interest. I cannot fully appreciate Chaucer’s Middle English, but I smile at his critique of life around the time that America was discovered, when priests sold bones of animals and pretended they were the bones of saints.

Shakespeare is the one in the 17th century who helped straighten out English from that previously spoken and now spoken differently by Angles, Saxons, Normans, and Celts. His sonnets about love I need more time to understand: in English, not in someone’s translation of what he wrote. When I was much younger, I read Shakespeare translated into Bengali. The translation into Bengali by a non-poet was really not readable. Buddhadev Basu, a fine 20th century Bengali poet, translated poems of Charles Baudelaire and, after reading those poems in Bengali, I developed not only an interest in reading more Baudelaire but also I became desperate to read more French literature. A good translator has the capacity to create a hunger among readers. But it is not always the same. Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet, translated many of his own poems into English. They were not, of course, up to the mark. But when William Butler Yeats translated these works, he drew Westerners’ attention and helped Tagore to get the Nobel Prize. Tagore failed to create a great literature in his second language.

Many famous Bengali poets have translated English, French, German, and Spanish poets’ work. However, it is extremely rare that English or French poets translate works by famous Bengali poets. It is not that they are not good writers or not good poets, but the Western publishers are not interested in their work until they start writing in a language of one of the major powers.

I depend on translation. I do not have enough knowledge to write in any other language than Bengali, my mother tongue. We know that many talented writers wrote their books in their second language. They did not need any translator to make them understood to the readers. Irish writer Samuel Beckett’s best-known novels are the series of three novels written in French. He translated his own novels into English. Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote in French, his second language. Joseph Conrad, a Polish man, wrote his novels in English – Conrad was a master prose stylist who brought a distinctly non-English tragic sensibility into English literature. Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov wrote his famous book, Lolita, first in English and then he translated Lolita into Russian. Nabokov, even though he wrote excellent English once said and I quote, “My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody’s concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammelled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English.”

Although Nabokov was dismissive of his second language, he is regarded as perhaps the stylist of the century. John Updike commented that “Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.”

If I could write English like Nabokov, I would never complain about my English. But writers are never satisfied with their writings. Satisfaction is like poison – it indicates that death lies ahead. As long you remain unsatisfied with your work, you will continue to improve.

Would we wish that translations of works not be necessary, that we all could understand each other’s language? Would it be better if everyone on Earth spoke the same language? I can’t possibly think of that horrible situation. I can’t deny that many languages and cultures make the earth beautiful. Communication might be a problem now, but not having diversity would lead only to the sound of monotony.

As for meta-phrase, or literal word-for-word translation, I don’t give it a good mark. I am an unfortunate writer, most of whose works have been word-for-word translations. But this does not take into account context, grammar, conventions, and idioms. Sometimes there are no problems with grammar as such; all the difficulties are with the choice of words or the use of words.

Language is not a mere collection of words and grammar rules – it is the expression of a culture. It embodies the efforts of a language community to conceptualize and interpret the world, as well as human experience and relations. As a result, language reflects the complex “personality” of such a community. Therefore, language can only be interpreted and learned with reference to a specific cultural context.

When I was growing up, I read translations of Russian literature. Then I read translations of French and German literature. I enriched myself with a knowledge of different cultures. Also, of course, I read Bengali literature as well as Bengali translations. Some of my friends didn’t like to read translations at all, but I did. I wanted to read books in their original language – French, Italian, German, Russian, and others. But I found life is too short to learn so many languages in order to read so many literary works. I did not wait to learn the Russian language to read Russian literature. The translation may have been perfect or not, but it touched my heart. I even cried when I read the translation of Maxim Gorky’s My Childhood or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. I don’t remember how the Bengali translation of those classics was. I knew I was reading a foreign classic, so I accepted that the behavior of the foreign characters would look strange to me, their way of life being different from my way of life, their way of saying things entirely different. But that was not at all a problem for me. I learned the differences. But I felt so emotionally involved with the characters.

The most important book that I read in translation, the one that changed my life the most, is the Koran. Had I not read it, I would not have become the person I now am. Like Muslims in the non-Arab world, I do not know Arabic. Like them when growing up, I read Koranic verses as if I was a parrot, repeating the sounds but not knowing what they meant. Once I read a translation of what I was parroting, I became an atheist, for I found that Islam is not a religion of peace and that it discriminates against women. I didn’t find that God was kind and merciful, and I saw no reason to be fooled. In fact, it was clear that the words had been written by a man or a group of men for their own social and political interest.

Thousands of writers who write in regional languages remain unknown. Writers who came from the Indian subcontinent and write in English – like Salman Rushdie, Amitava Ghosh, Arundhuti Roy, Jhumpa Lahiri – are praised by Western readers. Do they write better than other writers in the subcontinent? I do not think so. It is the language that makes them understood and praised by the readers. You can be a famous writer all over the world if only you write in a dominant language. You can be an excellent writer, but if you use a little-used language you likely will not become well-known. No Booker Prize, no Pulitzer, and no Nobel will come your way.

Our men throw acid in our faces, destroy our lives but we never stop loving men. (Warning: Violent images)

Men throw acid on us with the intention of injuring or disfiguring us. Men throw acid on our bodies, burn our faces, smash our noses, melt our eyes, and walk away as happy men.
Acid attack is common in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Afghanistan, Nepal, Cambodia, and a few other countries. Men throw acid on us because men are angry with us for ending relationships and for refusing sexual harassment, sexual exploitation, proposals of marriage, demands for dowry. They throw acid on us for attending schools, for not wearing Islamic veils, for not behaving well, for speaking too much, for laughing loudly.

India

She was 18, a college student. Three of her neighbors sexually harassed her for more than two years and then threw acid on her. Her skin on the skull, face, neck, chest and back were melted away. After nine years of that attack Sonali Mukherjee is now blind in both eyes and partially deaf. Her father spent millions of rupees for her treatment. They have now no money. The attackers got bail from the High Court, continued threatening to kill her. She is now asking the government to help her or allow her to end her life.


Cambodia

The face of Sokreun Mean, who was blinded and disfigured by an acid attack.

Carsten Stormer, a German journalist & photographer said,

“Acid attacks deprive people of more than their looks and sight. Families are torn apart. Husbands leave their wives. Children are separated from their parents. Jobs vanish overnight, turning professionals into beggars. Many victims cannot get through a day without constant assistance, becoming burdens on their families. All bear the mark of the pariah.
“What remains is a traumatized society in which domestic disputes, unhappy love affairs, and professional rivalries are nearly always resolved through violence. Hardly a family without its members lost to the ideological battles of the Khmer Rouge – a curse that is passed on from parents to children. Battery acid is known to be most uncomplicated way of causing lifelong suffering. A dollar will buy you a quart of acid on any street corner. The perpetrators are seldom punished. Their targets become outcasts.”


Pakistan

Fakhra Younus was attacked by her husband Bilal Khar, ex-MPA of the Punjab Assembly and the son of Pakistani Politician Ghulam Mustafa Khar. He threw acid in her face after they split up. Tehmina Durrani, the author of ‘My Feudal Lord’, the former step mother of Bilal Khar tried to help Fakhra. She was sent to Italy for treatment. After having 39 re-constructive surgeries, Fakhra committed suicide.

The stories of the girls, from left to right:
Ten years ago Shahnaz Bibi was burned with acid by a relative due to a familial dispute. She has never undergone plastic surgery. Najaf Sultana is now 16. At the age of five Najaf was burned by her father while she was sleeping. Her father didn’t want to have another girl in the family. Najaf became blind. Shameem Akhter (20) was kidnapped and raped by a gang of men who then threw acid on her 3 years ago. Kanwal Kayum, now 26, was burned with acid one year ago by a man whom she rejected for marriage. Bashiran Bibi was burned at her husband’s house just after her marriage. Nasreen Sharif was a beautiful girl. When she was 14, her cousin poured a bottle of sulphuric acid in her face. He did it because he couldn’t stand boys whistling at her when she crossed the street. Her skin melted away, her hair burned away. She is now blind, she has no ears and she has no sense of smell.


Among others, there is Shaziya Abdulsattar, an eight-year-old girl. Shaziya’s father threw acid on her and her mother Azim last year after the mother refused to sell their two boys to a man in Dubai to use as camel racers.

Bangladesh
It is very easy for a man to get sulphuric acid if he wants to attack a woman he does not like. The country has become a hot spot for acid attacks. A disfigured woman is not able to get married or get a job. She becomes a financial and social burden on her family.

Neela was forced to marry when she was 12 years old. Her husband threw acid on her face when she was 14. He was angry with Neela because her family was unable to give him the dowry money he asked for.

Nepal


Akriti Rai, 22, was attacked by her husband, a Nepali soldier.

Iran

Ameneh Bahrami rejected the offer of having a relationship with Majid Movahedi, a fellow student at the University of Tehran. He then threw a bottle of acid in her face.

Zambia


A man threw acid on a 13-year-old girl’s face to take a revenge. The older sister of the girl said: “You have to grow crocodile skin to clean the wounds of an acid survivor. The worst ordeal was while in the hospital, as the skin kept peeling off. I didn’t realize that the tongue skin was also peeling off. The young girl was pushing something in her mouth. I opened her mouth to see and found that almost the whole tongue had come off. I had to pull it out like you do with a cow and only a little red thing (tongue) remained.’

Nitric acid, sulphuric acid, hydrochloric acid are today’s weapons of choice for criminals who hate women. These acids are easy to buy, easy to hide, easy to carry, and easy to throw. A person who witnessed many acid attacks , said, ‘in a less than a minute the bone under the skin can start to be exposed. If there is enough acid, the bone itself can become a soft mass of non-distinguishable jelly. Internal organs can dissolve. Fingers, noses and ears can melt away like chocolate on a hot day.’

Ethiopia


Twenty-one-year-old woman Kamilat Mehdi’s life was changed forever when a stalker threw sulphuric acid in her face. Ismail, Kamilat’s brother said: “The man who attacked her stalked her for a few years. He gave her a hard time but she didn’t tell the family for fear that something would happen to them. He was always saying he would use a gun on them.” Ultimately the stalker’s weapon of choice was not a gun, but a bottle of acid. He used it on Kamilat and destroyed her entire life in one second.

UK

Her lover did it. Richard Remes threw sulphuric acid on Patricia Lefranc. Her nose and eyelids were melted away, she lost sight in one eye and hearing in one ear, she also lost a finger. She came close to death, as the corrosive substance nearly burned through her heart and lungs.The horrific attack physically and emotionally scarred her for life. What was her crime? She ended her relationship with Richard Remes, a married man.


We are more abused, harassed, exploited, kidnapped, raped, trafficked, murdered by our lovers, husbands, fathers, brothers, uncles, cousins, friends, or men we know well than by strangers. Whatever happens to us, we never stop loving men.

Rape in War

“War provides men with the perfect psychological backdrop to give vent to their contempt for women. The maleness of the military—the brute power of weaponry exclusive to their hands, the spiritual bonding of men at arms, the manly discipline of orders given and orders obeyed, the simple logic of the hierarchical command—confirms for men what they long suspect—that women are peripheral to the world that counts.” –Susan Brownmiller

“There can be no security, without women’s security. Rape is not a lesser evil in the hierarchy of wartime horrors, it is not a crime that the world can dismiss as collateral damage, or as cultural, or inevitable.” -Margot Wallstrom

Throughout history, rape has been the least condemned and most silenced war crime. Sexual violence increases during times of war, it is often dismissed as being an inevitable part of conflict.

Gloria Steinem answered to some questions about rape in war. I just could not resist to republish the interview.

Q: What are some of the reasons rape is so prevalent in war?

A: First, it’s important to note that rape and war didn’t always go together. For instance, European colonists wrote astonished letters home about how “even these savages”—by which they meant the residents of this continent they were invading—didn’t rape, not even their women prisoners. But those were wars of self-defense. If you’re going to get groups of men to risk their humanity, health, and lives in wars of offense, the traditional way is not to pay them a lot, but to addict them to the “cult of masculinity.” You have to convince them they’re not “real men” unless they kill and conquer. And, at its most basic, “masculine” means not being “feminine.” On a continuum, it means controlling women, conquering women, raping women, even with objects: bottles and broom handles in “peacetime” here, and gun barrels and knives in Bosnia or Congo. There’s a reason why it’s a truism that rape is not sex, it’s violence.

Nanking 1937

It’s also true that men may rape in groups out of social pressure to prove their “masculinity”—in peacetime, too—but gang mentality is a way of life in war. Military officers sometimes order men to rape as proof of loyalty and shared culpability. Some men express regret and say they wouldn’t have raped without group pressure. Also the group hatred war requires means humiliating enemies by raping “their” women, implanting sperm, taking over their means of reproduction, wiping out the enemy race or ethnicity. Cultures that put all “honor” in the purity of “their” women—and keep women weak—are actually setting them up as targets.

Even in peacetime, the “cult of masculinity” is so powerful that men commit crimes in which they have absolutely nothing to gain and everything to lose: “senseless” killings like those in schools and post offices, serial murders, domestic violence, stalking, killing their wives and children and then killing themselves. They’re not hate crimes because they don’t hate the people they kill—but those people symbolize their lack of control, and so are killing the “masculinity” on which their whole sense of self depends. In interviews, such men often describe themselves as victims because they believe they should have been allowed to have control. I think we should call such crimes “supremacy crimes.”


Vietnam 1968

Q: What do you say to people who assert that sexualized violence is a “natural” part of conflict?

A: I try to think of something from the past that was also thought to be “natural,” and wasn’t. For instance, violence was once a “natural” part of childrearing, as in, “Spare the rod, spoil the child.” It was also “natural” in marriage, as in, “Wives and bells must be struck regularly.” It was “natural” in religion, as in flagellating and starving the flesh to free the spirit.


Bangladesh 1971
Or I quote Olof Palme, the great former prime minister of Sweden, who said that gender roles are the deepest cause of violence on earth, and it’s up to governments to humanize them. Gender roles may give us our first idea that it’s okay for one group to eat and the other to cook, one to talk and the other to listen, one to order and the other to obey, one to be subject and one as object. The most shared characteristic of original societies in which violence was only for self-defense, not armies—and of the most egalitarian societies now—is that gender roles are fluid and not polarized.

So you might say it’s the reverse. Conflict is not the only or even the primary normalizer of the extremes of “masculine” and “feminine.” Those roles at home are the normalizers of conflict.


Bosnia 1993

Q: Why use the term “sexualized” violence?

A: Because there’s nothing sexual about violence. Sex is about pleasure. Violence is about pain. Nature tells us what’s good for us by making it pleasurable, and what’s bad for us by making it painful. To get those things mixed up usually requires a childhood in which people we loved and depended on inflicted pain, and we came to believe we couldn’t get one without the other.

It also works the other way around. People, especially men addicted to “masculinity,” may think that inflicting pain is the only way they can get sexual pleasure. For instance, I didn’t learn there was a mammoth concentration camp only for women—it was called Ravensbrück—until the end of the 1970s when my friend Konnilyn Feig included it in her book called, Hitler’s Death Camps. Nazi doctors there performed a higher proportion of so-called medical experiments there — they simulated battle wounds and amputations, practiced surgeries and forms of sterilization; endless horrors — and their subjects were mainly young, beautiful women. The other women in the camp called them “rabbits” because they were used as lab animals. They tried to protect them. This was the slow sexualized violence known as sadism.


Rwanda 1994

Q: Sexualized violence is frequently underreported. Why do you think this is?

A: Yes, I do. To say otherwise would be to excuse them as human nature. We know there have been societies in which such crimes were rare or absent; they are not human nature. And even if they were, the most significant characteristic of humans—the one that allows our species to survive—is that we’re adaptable. Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street and in foreign policy. Because we genderize the study of childrearing as “feminine” and the study of conflict and foreign policy as “masculine,” we rarely see that the first causes the second. Of course, the goal is to stop war altogether. If we raised even one generation of children without violence and shaming, we have no idea what might be possible. But at least we can limit war to those who want to fight it.


Afghanistan 1995

Q: Do we need both men and women involved to stop these atrocities?

A: Yes, we do. There is more responsibility where there’s more power. Though women have a responsibility to speak up for ourselves — to reverse the Golden Rule and treat ourselves as well as we treat others — men have more power and so are responsible not only for their own behavior, but for creating an atmosphere in which men are penalized for violence toward women and rewarded for treating women as equals. It’s parallel to the fact that I, as a white person, have more responsibility for white racism than do the people of color who suffer from it.

Men also can show each other the rewards of full humanity. It’s been said that the woman a man most fears is the woman within himself. Men are punished by being cut off from human qualities denied to them as “feminine.” I think one element in men’s punishing and killing of women is an effort to do away with what they fear within themselves.


Congo 1998

Q: Do you think it’s ever possible to bring these atrocities to an end or at least significantly curb them?

A:Yes, I do. To say otherwise would be to excuse them as human nature. We know there have been societies in which such crimes were rare or absent; they are not human nature. And even if they were, the most significant characteristic of humans — the one that allows our species to survive — is that we’re adaptable. Violence in the home normalizes violence in the street and in foreign policy. Because we genderize the study of childrearing as “feminine” and the study of conflict and foreign policy as “masculine,” we rarely see that the first causes the second. Of course, the goal is to stop war altogether. If we raised even one generation of children without violence and shaming, we have no idea what might be possible. But at least we can limit war to those who want to fight it.

Q: What do you say to people who believe that this happens far from home, in societies beyond repair? In other words, that there’s nothing we can do.

A: I say, Open your eyes, watch the news, talk to the women in your families and neighborhoods, listen to our women soldiers who were raped by their own comrades. The difference is only one of degree. No society is beyond reproach or beyond repair.

This project is not trying to create a competition of tears. It’s wrong whether men or women are suffering. It’s just that the suffering has to be visible and not called inevitable or blamed on the victim before we can stop it.