Tarfia Faizullah, a fellow Fulbrighter and beautiful poet who was based in Bangladesh for the past year, is working on a long-term project on women who were raped during the Liberation War. Out of her project has emerged a series of poems, which she has so wonderfully agreed to share here today.
Following the end of Bangladesh’s Liberation War on 16 December 1971, forty years ago today, all women who were raped were given the honorific term birangona by the first president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. The term, which is often translated to war heroine, was meant to pay respect to the women for their sacrifices during wartime. Yet it soon became a mark of shame, with many of the women rejected by their families and ostracized by their communities upon their learning of the assault; rape was, and largely still is, seen as an enormous source of shame in Bangladesh for the assaulted woman.
In working on “A Woman’s War,” I actively chose not to speak to women who had been raped, with the idea that the vast majority of the coverage of women’s role in the 1971 war has centered on women as victims. Instead I wanted to highlight ways in which women had participated, but were often only attributed to men – to collect stories of women who had fought, spied, smuggled weapons, trained, and so on – stories that would challenge the notion held by some that women were only passive and unwilling participants in the fight for independence.
Yet in late August, I had the opportunity to speak to nine women who had been raped during the war and who were currently living in and around Sirajganj, in western Bangladesh. These women are part of a larger group of rape victims who have remained close since the end of the war, supporting each other in ways that their families and the government now refuse to. They have been outspoken against the social stigma associated with rape in Bangladesh, and maintain that they should be called mukti juddha, or freedom fighters, as those who fought in the liberation struggle are, rather than birangona.
They all receive support from Sirajganj Uttaran Mohila Sangstha (SUMS), an organization founded and run by Safina Lohani. During the Liberation War, Safina provided food, shelter, and medical aid for mukti juddha who were receiving training in preparation for battle. Following the end of the war, she established SUMS and began seeking out and providing care to those women who had been sexually abused during 1971. SUMS received government backing until 1975 and the assassination of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, at which point the new government cut off all financial support and forced the organization to disband and the women under SUMS’ care to scatter. Over the course of the next year, Lohani and her husband personally sought out the women previously under their care, brought them back together, and reestablished SUMS independently. Since then she has been maintaining and running SUMS unaided, with only the support of private donations.
What became clear in speaking with these women is that the line between mukti juddha and birangona is often much more blurred than mainstream narratives will allow. That many women were captured and raped precisely because they were fighting for their country, spying within West Pakistani army camps, collecting information to relay back to fellow Bangladeshi guerrilla fighters. Yet they are not remembered as fighters. They are remembered as victims. In the words of Asiya, one of the women at SUMS:
We hear lots of bad comments; when I cross road people call me wife of the Pakistani military. They tell us that they will not bury us after we die. Why do we bear this sorrow? How can we go to the government?
During the Liberation War, there was a bridge in front of my house, and all of the freedom fighters’ weapons were in our house. On the day that the freedom fighters blew up that bridge, I was with them. I passed all the weapons with my own hands from our house. The freedom fighters who are still alive told the government that I was a mukti juddha, but people not call me mukti juddha they call me birangona. What can I do? Where can I speak? Razakars [traitors to Bangladeshi guerrilla fighters] now have freedom fighters’ certificates; they stay in houses and buildings now, and we stay under the banana leaf. I cooked rice for the freedom fighters, I hid all the time, brought them their weapons. Now, I am not a mukti juddha, but they [razakars] are? Twenty days after the war started I went to the Pakistani military’s hospital, gathered information – where the Pakistani army’s weapons were, where they were planning to go – all that information I gave to the freedom fighters.
Now I don’t want tell any more. I talk about my experience time and time again, but nobody has done anything. The government has not given us freedom fighters’ certificates, but razakars have those certificates. I have proof that I was a fighter. But now, I have nothing to show for it. It would be better if we were dead. Take me in front of the government, I will tell them to kill us by shooting us. It would be much better than how we live now.
§
What follows is a series of Tarfia’s poems inspired from conversations with a number of women who were raped during the war, including the group of SUMS women from Sirajganj, coupled with a few of the images that I made while working with the SUMS women. Tarfia’s work needs no introduction, other than to say – give yourself time with these poems. They tell the stories of these women in a way that allows you to reach past words like rape and victim and trauma in order to begin to feel their experiences with them, and her.
I’m so honored and humbled to be able to bring my photographs together with Tarfia’s words. Collectively, we hope to be able to tell a piece of this story in a new light, a story forty years removed, yet one that is still so present in the lives of these women, their families, and their country.
Interview with a Birangona, by Tarfia Faizullah
In 1972, the Bangladeshi state adopted a policy to accord a new visibility to the 200,000 women raped during the War of Independence by lionizing them as birangonas (war heroines), though they were frequently ostracized by their families and social circles.
1. What were you doing when they came for you?
Gleaming water sweeps over
Mother’s feet. Bayonets. Teeth.
My green and yellow Eid sari
flaps damply between two palm
trees. Grandfather calls to me:
mishti maya. Girl of sweetness.
Aashi, I call back. I finish braiding
my hair, tie it tight. I twine a red string
around my thigh. That evening,
a blade sliced through string, through
skin, red on red on red. Kutta, the man
in khaki says. It is only later I realize
it is me he is calling dog. Dog. Dog.
(originally published in Ploughshares)
2. Where did the Pakistani military take you, and were there others there?
Past the apothecary shop, shut
down, burned flat. My heart
seized, I told it to hush. They saw
its shape and weight and wanted
it too. Past the red mosque
where I first learned to touch
my forehead low, to utter
the wet words blown from
my mouth again & again. Past
the school draped with banners
imploring Free Our Language,
a rope steady around my throat
as they pushed me toward the dark
room, the silence clotted thick
with a rotten smell, dense like pear
blossoms, long strands of jute
braided fast around our wrists.
Yes, there were others.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
Interviewer’s Note
ii.
I walk past white high-rises
split with mold. Past a child
wading through drowned
rice fields, one pink blossom
tucked behind her ear. Past
myself rippling a storefront
window. Victim: (noun), one
that is tricked or duped. Past
a woman crouched low
on a jute mat selling bangles.
One that is injured, destroyed
under any of various conditions.
Was it on a jute mat that
she gave birth to the baby
half-his or his or his? Victim:
a living being sacrificed. Past smoke
helixing from an untended fire.
Past another clothesline heavy
with saris: for hours they
will lift into the wind, hollow
of any bruised or broken body.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
3. Were there other girls there? Did you get along with them?
Between us: a dark metal
bucket, our hands touching.
We pulled water together
from the muddy river we
used to sit beside before
we belonged to the smoke-
watered world missing brothers &
husbands & fathers. I ask for
Allah’s forgiveness: I didn’t know
I would cherish the vermilion
streak she drew into the seam of her
parted hair. I didn’t know my body’s
worth until they came for it. I held
her as she shook at night: pondwater
scored by storm. She held me
as I shook at dawn. Don’t you know
they made us watch her head fall
from the rusted blade of the old
jute machine? That they made us
made us made us made us made us?
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
4. Would you consider yourself a survivor or victim?
Each week I pull hard
the water from the well,
bathe in my sari, wring
it out, beat it against
the flattest rocks—are you
Muslim or Bengali, they
asked again & again.
Both, I said, both—then
rocks were broken along
my spine, my hair a black
fist in their hands, pulled
down into the river again
and again. Each day, each
night: river, rock, fist—
the river wanders this way,
breaks that way, that is
always the river’s play.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
Interviewer’s Note
iii.
I listen to the percussion
of monsoon season’s wet
wail, write in my notebook
badgirl, goodgirl,
littlebeauty—in Bangla
there are words
for every kind of woman
but a raped one
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
5. Who was in charge at this camp? What were your days like?
All I knew was underground: bodies piled on bodies,
low moans, sweat, rot seeking out scratches on our thighs,
the makeshift tattoos he carved on our backs to mark us.
Over milk tea and butter biscuits, the commander asks
what it feels like to have dirty blood running through our
veins. There were days we wooed him, betrayed each other
for his attention—now he turns me over on burlap.
Outside, bundles of jute skim the wide river. I turn
my face away. Kutta, he says. You smell. Tell me anything
you know about the body, and I will tell you how
it must turn against itself. Now I’ve seen a savage
girl naked, he says. How my body became an eddy,
a blackblue swirl. Don’t cry, he says. How when the time
came for his choosing, we all gave in for tea, a mango,
overripe. Another chance to hear the river’s gray lull.
(originally published in Ploughshares)
Interviewer’s Note
iv.
Today there is no drinking
water today there is no
light today there is only
kerosene the hmm hmm hum
of a generator pulsing deep
into the exhausted darkness
I write the word shame—
It is possible to live without
memory Nietszche said but
is it possible to live with it?
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
6. After the war was over, what did you do? Did you go back home?
I stood in the dark
doorway. Twilight. My grandfather’s
handprint raw across my face. Byadob,
he called me: trouble-
maker. How could you let them
touch you? he asked, the pomade just
coaxed into his thin hair
a familiar shadow of scent
between us even as he turned
away. Leave. Don’t come
back, he said. I walked past his
turned-away back. Past fresh-plucked
lychees brimming
yellow baskets. Past Mother
on the doorstep sifting through rice flour,
refusing or told not
to look up, though the new
president had wrapped me in our new
flag: a red sun rising
across a green field. You
saved our country, he had said. I said
nothing. The dark rope
of Mother’s shaking arm was what
I last saw before I walked away.
No. No. Not since.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
Interviewer’s Note
v.
If burnt, she said, I’ll turn to ash,
and I wondered if she meant, Who
will touch me as though they never
did? She said, When I remember,
my being shatters, and I thought of dusk
candling into small flames in dark
canteens across the city, flagrant
across faces of beggars, their gaunt,
atrophied arms they set swinging
to garner the little pity the rippling
glimpses of our faces offer through
each tinted, glossy window. You
tell me, she said, am I not also your mother?
And I thought of the shapla lily ensnared
in the film of filth laminating the pond—
her teeth, rotten with betel, blood-red.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
7. Many of the birangona had children by Pakistani soldiers. Did you have a child as well?
Besides, I did not have the right
hands to hold her close. The blood
spilled from within me out onto
the bamboo mat, a red shroud.
Besides, she could not feed at my
breast: unwilling hollow of flesh
veined like our country’s many
rivers. My country, yours—was it
hers? She grew whole inside me
like a lychee, my belly a hard shell
broken open by her soft, wailing
flesh. Besides, I did not want his
or his or his child inside me,
outside me, beside me. Never
will she know that I cupped her
head and began to press hard, but
stopped. That I laid her between
cotton and dirt floor, placed the tip
of my finger over her beating heart.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
vi.
But wasn’t it the neat narrative
I wanted? The outline of the rape
victim in a sari standing against
the many-winged darkening sky,
shadow flurrying across shadow?
They tossed me into that river
but the river wouldn’t kill me,
she said yesterday—I want
that darkness she stood against
to be yards of violet velvet my mother
once cut me a dress from. Rewind. Play.
Rewind. They tossed—me—river—me—
I wanted the splayed heart of another’s
hand inside mine. I want to know
if cruelty exists, or if it is only love’s threadbare
desperation—river—me—river—me—me—
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
8. Do you have siblings? Where were they?
On a thin lavender evening
like this one, we sisters sat
and waited until we were only
the listening for them to come.
We became these four walls:
corrugated, twilit. On a thin
lavender evening like this one,
we were each other’s world
entire: both the woodrose as well
as its tangled stem. When they came
for us on a thin lavender evening
like this one, we tried to pull each
other’s saris out of their rifle-black
hands. We tried to scream through
fingers ripe with our own rivers. On
a thin lavender evening like this one,
she was not yet the ripped bandage
the night turned into the crimson
moon under which I did not know
I would stumble gasping, alone.
We had held each other’s hands
but did not promise not to let go.
(originally published in Mid-American Review)
If you’re interested in donating to or learning more about the women of SUMS, please contact me.
About the poet
Tarfia Faizullah was born in Brooklyn, NY on June 21, 1980 but grew up in Midland, TX. A Plan II Honors student, she received a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin and an M.F.A in creative writing from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Her poems have appeared in Mid-American Review, Connotation Press, New Ohio Review, Copper Nickel, diode, Passages North, The Cincinnati Review, The Missouri Review, Massachusetts Review, The Nepotist, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, Notre Dame Review, Bellingham Review, Nimrod International Literary Journal, The Southern Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, Memorious, Makeout Creek, Harpur Palate, Green Mountains Review, Adirondack Review, and Poetry Daily. Her prose has appeared in Nashville Review and diode.
A Kundiman fellow and a two-time Ruth Lilly finalist, she is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, a Fulbright Fellowship, a Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Margaret Bridgman Scholarship, a Ploughshares Cohen Award, an Academy of American Poets’ Catherine Joan Byrne Prize, an AWP Intro Journals Award, and a Pushcart Prize nomination. A former associate editor of blackbird: a journal of literature and the arts, she lives in Richmond, VA where she teaches creative writing and edits the journal trans-portal.
Samira Ibrahim: her journey through Tahrir
Samira Ibrahim - Images by Elizabeth Herman
In honor of today’s ruling in Samira Ibrahim’s favor against the Egyptian military, which officially ordered the Egyptian military to stop the use of ‘virginity tests’ on female detainees, here’s a photoessay I worked on this past October while at the GlobalPost/Open Hands Initiative Covering a Revolution Fellowship in Cairo, Egypt. Many thanks to Kristin Deasy, Deena Adel Eid, Julianna Schatz, and Laura El-Tantawy.
If you’re looking for more information on Samira, be sure to read Kristin’s profile on her and Deena’s report on the details of her case.
Samira’s Journey through Tahrir
On March 9, 25-year-old Samira Ibrahim was arrested in Cairo’s Tahrir Square while participating in a protest. Along with 172 other demonstrators, including 17 women, she was forcefully removed from the protests and brought to the Egyptian Museum on the edge of the square, where she and the others were bound and tortured for seven hours before being loaded onto buses and eventually brought to Heikstep, a military detention center.
There, she and the other women were forced to break themselves into two groups: virgins and non-virgins. Samira, along with six others who also identified as the former, were then subjected to ‘virginity tests’ in which they were made to strip naked in a room where soldiers watched through an open window and took photographs on their cell phones. Afterward, she was brought to a separate room where a man in a military uniform who identified himself as a doctor proceeded to examine her vagina for five minutes for the presence of an intact hymen.
Samira filed an official complaint with the Egyptian military prosecution. The only woman in the group that was taken such action, she says she received phone calls with death threats on a near-daily basis since filing her case on July 1.
Yet she did not desist, continuing to pursue her case despite the danger that comes with it, and even though her lawyers and human rights experts said that the outcome did not look promising. Now, nearly five months after beginning this process, an Egyptian court has ruled in Samira’s favor, officially ordering the Egyptian military to stop the use of ‘virginity tests’ on female detainees.
These images trace her journey through the square on that day back in March, as told in her own words.
Full Captions
1. The headscarf of Samira Ibrahim.
“I used to print posters and go and paste them outside schools at night. I would throw rocks at lampposts to put them out so I can paste the posters in the streets and no one would see me, because obviously, if they caught me I’d be in big trouble…When they took me to prison [at age 16], they couldn’t believe I was the one responsible for all the posters. They thought somebody put me up to it.”
2. Tahrir Square in the early morning.
“I had spent the night [of March 8] in [Tahrir] square. Do you see that tree over there? That small one? That’s where I was sleeping. On the lawn.”
“People were all over, but I used to like to sit under this tree. I didn’t have a tent, so I sat in the shade of the tree…I was kind of surveying the situation, seeing what was happening. They [the Egyptian soldiers] were attacking us [the protesters]…They were over there and they would come, and go back, come, and go back, but then suddenly, they attacked…They came onto the square with tanks, running people over. Of course, all of us had to run.”
3. A reflection in the window of a shop in Tahrir Square.
“I was really scared when I saw the number of officers arriving… People were running here and there in opposite directions. But for me, I felt if I ran here, there’s the American University of Cairo and the Interior Ministry and I wouldn’t be able to escape, so I ran in the opposite direction, towards the city center. I thought, for sure, if I go there the people will protect me.”
4. A car sits parked in Tahrir Square.
“I think about 60 people were after me. All of them were the military…They came, they had weapons, machine guns. You know, it was almost as if they were there to arrest Al-Qaeda itself.”
5. Tahrir Square reflected in the window of a tourist agency.
“First I was standing, watching what was happening, and then they arrested me… Right underneath that tourist company. They said, ‘get her.’ They pointed at me. They arrested me, but you know how they arrested me? They pulled me from my hair. They dragged me on the ground and my stomach was kind of showing. Since then I’ve been wearing a swimming suit under my clothes so if that happens again it won’t happen. “
6. A woman walks through a side street in Tahrir Square.
“I gave myself up and they started to drag me from my hair. It wasn’t just one soldier, it was a number of them, some were beating me, some were pulling me…It felt like a whole infantry was after me. “
7. Men are silhouetted while sitting in Tahrir Square.
“They dragged me this whole way, all the way to the museum, from my hair. They dragged me on my back, they pulled me….Lots of people were being dragged with us… You know, just imagine, look at this distance. Even if someone was running, they’d need a break. but they were dragging me, calling me names, kicking me.”
8. Guards stand outside the Egyptian Museum, on the edge of Tahrir Square.
“Near that gray post, there was a military general and he started to accuse me of being a prostitute. I was extremely surprised, thinking, why is he accusing me of that? I was still being dragged this whole distance.”
9. A sign reading “WELCOME” greets visitors on the fence outside the Egyptian Museum.
“In the beginning, during the early part of the revolution, I used to stand there in the front, near that statue…Near that fence. That’s where they tied me, from the outside, the side near the street. Then they started to pour water on us, and electrocute us, and call us names…My hands were tied, I was being humiliated, they poured water on me, electrocuted me, insulted me, the whole time during those seven hours. People on the square kind of had an idea of what was happening, but there was nothing they could really do.”
10. A bus loads passengers in Tahrir Square.
“Then they took us and loaded us on buses and the buses left in that direction…The buses were all military buses. When we were on the buses they didn’t blindfold us, but they did more than that, they were beating us on the face while we were on the bus. They really beat us very badly. So even, you know, boarding the bus already you’re exhausted, but even on the bus they continue to beat you.”
“We spent the night on the buses at C-28 [detention center] on March 9. March 10 they took us to prison. The prison is in District 10. The next morning we switched cars; they moved us from the buses to these sort of detention trucks used by the military. The trucks moved with us, we moved a long distance and suddenly I found we were on a desert road. I looked at the sign on the road and I saw Heikstep [prison]. So I thought, have we reached Heikstep? Did they really take us that far? I had never heard of Heikstep until March 9 events and that’s when I found out it was a military prison.”
11. Samira at a guesthouse looking out over Tahrir Square. She has come to the city unaccompanied from her hometown in Upper Egypt to file her testimony for her pending complaint against the Egyptian military.
“They took us straight to prison…it was about 10:30 in the morning and they were already laying accusations against us, they had their weapons pointed at us. They threatened that they would just shoot us and bury us in the sand, so of course we were scared and didn’t want to ask for anything. We’d already been beaten and tortured, so imagine what would happen if we’d asked for something.”
“So of course when I appeared in front of the prosecutor I didn’t have an attorney, and I was surprised, you know, how could I be here without an attorney? My whole body was exhausted. I couldn’t talk…you know, no matter how much I tell you I can’t describe how exhausted I felt. Even to this day there are marks on my body, right here on my shoulder there’s a mark. They’re still there.”
“It occurred to me to ask for an attorney, and when I first went to the prosecutor I asked for an attorney and he sort of looked at me and said, ‘You ask for an attorney? You all deserve to be shot.’”
12. Samira in her room at a guesthouse in Tahrir Square.
“I know that to violate a woman in that way was considered rape. I felt like I had been raped.”
13. Samira in her room at a guesthouse in Tahrir Square.
“All my energy and my thought now is focused now on violations that could happen against women. I’ve reached a stage where, for me, it’s about me being persistent. And it’s about me standing alone and facing up to what happened to me. Because if I don’t, this could happen to somebody else. It could happen to you, to her, to any other girls. To any other Egyptian girls.”
“If any woman is violated and she files a lawsuit against her perpetrators, then this is going to eventually stop, and they’re not going to put pressure on political activists by threatening to violate their wives or daughters. I’m turning the tables on them and telling them, ‘what you did to me, I’m going to use against you’ to prove what they’ve done’…I have to get my rights back”
Dec 27, 2011 | Categories: all, commentary, photography, portfolio, recent works | Tags: arab spring, cairo, egypt, egyptian revolution, globalpost, ibrahim, jan25, open hands initiative, photoessay, photography, samira, samira ibrahim, tahrir, tahrir square, women's rights | Leave A Comment »