Note of Fakhrul Alam

Neelima Ibrahim played an important role in establishing a Bangladesh government organization called the Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation Board in July 1972 (it was renamed Bangladesh Women's Rehabilitation and Welfare Foundation in July 1974). It was the work she and other women activists did there to rehabilitate traumatized rape victims of the war that led them to meeting them repeatedly in Dhaka Cantonment and helping them later in their lives. Neelima Ibrahim resolved then to note down their stories and retell them for posterity so that the horrors they had survived could be recorded, not only to depict what they had gone through, but also so that they could serve as cautionary tales that would move readers towards compassion and active involvement in improving the lot of women victimized not only by war criminals but also by unfeeling members of a still patriarchal and intolerant society, unwilling to give rightful honor where honor is due and preoccupied with false notions of honor.

There are quite a few constants in the narratives of the varied experiences of the seven women she had met and interviewed after the war: the horror of rape and abandonment, the sense of ruin of victims in the immediate aftermath, their hopes of being accepted, shock at being looked down upon, and (in some cases) their return to a secure place in society. But while some of the women do manage to claw back to some sort of normalcy, the stories they tell make clear that even for the luckiest of them, the road out of the mess their life had become because of the events of 1971 was long, winding and full of thorns.

The stories themselves are told in a matter-of-fact style and the reader is taken in immediately by details that seem completely believable even when horrible. Each story is narrated by a different narrator-victim; but in quite a few of them Neelima Ibrahim is present, either as a silent or a concerned interlocutor, or as someone who would like to reach out to these suffering women along with her fellow volunteers, give them something to hope for, and help them to the best of their abilities. In a couple of them she steps into the chapter as the narrator at crucial moments but in a manner that is unobtrusive. The narration seems artless, but no doubt a lot of thinking as well as passion went in the presentation of the chapters and the shaping of the book.

An important aspect of these narratives is that they are concerned not merely with the wrongs done to the women in 1971 but the way they try to rebuild the lives afterwards, sometimes abetted by a few humane people they come across, but sometimes slighted and insulted by some unfeeling ones. Some of the narratives are set outside Bangladesh, for fate takes at least a few of these Biranganas to other lands. Almost all the wronged women pay tribute to the vision and compassion of the great leader of their newly created country, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, and most of them record how he had been brutally assassinated and how his assassins and a few subsequent leaders made them shudder again at the prospect of another round of violence committed against them and the country they loved. Almost all the narrators display what we can call now a feminist consciousness, a sense that life for a woman is made incredibly difficult by social codes that favor men, exploits women, and devalue them or debases them one way or the other again and again. As Meher Jan, one of these women puts it, "O the life that we spend as women! How is it that every woman has some secret story of pain and suffering"? All of the women would like to be acknowledged for the sacrifices they made for the sake of their country and received by its people with love and respect, and were bitter when such acknowledgement was not forthcoming.

A War Heroine, I Speak, Fayeza Hasanat's deft English translation of Aami Birangana Bolchi presents for the first time to readers in that language the stories of the violated Bengali women of 1971 and the moving narratives of the diverse roads they took to survive and go ahead in life, despite the wrongs done to them during and after the war. The translation is flowing and has captured the narrative pace and the undercurrent of the feeling that characterized the original appreciably. By translating a work which has already become a classic in Bengali and which needs to be read everywhere, so that the violence done to women in war- torn countries and the ostracism they have to suffer unjustly and due to the insensitivity of patriarchal attitudes can be taken note of yet again, Fayeza has done all of us-Bangladeshis and/or readers overseas who will read her translation-a great service. We need to know about such lives and such traumas, for only such knowledge, a lot of compassion and acknowledgement of the rights of violated humanity can prevent us from succumbing to the heart of darkness in us that can resurface in times such as the ones these women experienced in 1971 and in post-war Bangladesh.

Fakrul Alam

Professor of English

University of Dhaka, Bangladesh