Femmes, manifestez-vous !

by Taslima Nasrin

Taslima Nasreen a écrit, à ce jour, plus de trente livres de poésie, essais, romans, nouvelles et mémoires, et ses oeuvres sont traduites dans plus de vingt langues. « Je fais devant vous le serment de poursuivre mon combat pour la liberté des femmes, la libération des femmes, leurs avancées et leur essor. J'ignore si mes poèmes sont poétiques, si mes écrits sont littéraires et mes romans de bons romans. Ce que je sais, c'est que je n'ai pas écrit seulement avec ma plume mais avec mon coeur, en le coulant dans chacun de mes mots. J'ignore si ces mots iront droit au coeur des autres. Mais il y a une chose, une seule, dont je suis sûre, c'est que les femmes muettes de mon pays savent que j'ai écrit pour elles. » T.N. (Discours devant le Parlement international des écrivains à Lisbonne, septembre 1994)

106 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Taslima Nasrin (Bengali: তসলিমা নাসরিন) is an award-winning Bangladeshi writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. Early in her literary career, she wrote mainly poetry, and published half a dozen collections of poetry between 1982 and 1993, often with female oppression as a theme. She started publishing prose in the early 1990s, and produced three collections of essays and four novels before the publication of her 1993 novel Lajja (Bengali: লজ্জা Lôjja), or Shame. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. Since fleeing Bangladesh in 1994, she has lived in many countries, and lives in United States as of July 2016. Nasrin has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh.'

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 3 out of 5]

For me it is a nice read. Not as useful as the Journal of Ma Yan. But I appreciate the effort and most probably the risk incurred to write the included articles.

The thinking is quite weird. Take the page 91 Racism micro article. Yes, skin color has much to do with racism. Yet, Taslima Nasreen misses a point: men can be just as oppressed by the arranged marriage as women even if men get the upper hand. So from her report that has nothing to do with racism, but with finding an argument out of a miserable life. And the author ignores the simple line of reasoning: if the man who can do all the things enumerated in this book is unhappy, than the woman is going to suffer badly. Still, both the article and my read of it say precisely nothing about the state of racism over there. But I think it would have been a far better argument to counter the islamists who paint a pink islam by pointing out their hypocrisy.

[Raphaëlle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lire pour enrichir sa culture féministe, les problématiques du Bangladesh de 1994 restent malheureusement toujours d'actualité en 2018.
Quelques difficultés à me plonger dedans avec les nombreuses références aux sourates.