In the psyche and schema of the average transnational Bangladeshi, rape is visible and legitimate only when it takes spectacular forms—violent, brutal, deadly.
The link between the structural and personal is continually at risk of getting obscured in favour of an individualist reading of interpersonal violence.
Our classist sensibilities cannot handle a Hero Alom singing Tagore songs and getting attention for it.
Before the elections, a five-year-old boy asked his mother, my friend, if he would ever be able to be the President of the United States because of the colour of his Brown skin. This is a question that American girls, too, have been asking their parents forever.
I don’t remember exactly when I heard about the 2019 version of coronavirus, Covid-19, but I do know it was during my travels in Asia this past January.
Over the past few weeks, I have heard variations of “I don’t know why but I don’t think Bangladesh will be affected by Covid-19 in the way that other countries have been.”
Every single day, a rapist is reported. Every. Single. Day. Let that sink in.
Election Day in Bangladesh is usually a festive occasion. The weather is wonderfully crisp. We are in our Friday best. With friends and
SOMETHING remarkable happened this week. Babul Mia of Habiganj—who had raped Beauty Akhter (16) earlier in the year—had her raped again and killed for not withdrawing the rape case pending against him, surprising no one.
Rupa Khatun was raped and murdered on a bus near the Tangail-Mymensingh road in Tangail's Madhupur upazila last August.
Each year begins with a ray of sunshine, as did 2017, oblivious to the chaos that was inevitably unleashed onto the world when some of the world's leaders took centre stage to change the world as we know it.
SOMETIMES the paths that the oppressed choose to take are and have to be subversive, says Fanon. Neocolonial structures have to be decolonised by weaponising whatever they have.
Maleka (not her real name) found herself in a whirlwind relationship in which she felt she has no control. She got pregnant because she couldn't negotiate condom use with her partner and then her partner blamed her for it, even though they both had a role in it.
But, being “that” man is problematic, even harmful, for men.
The year was 1988. My uncle was going to the United States for his undergraduate degree. He was the first family member to do so. The trend in those days was England. And, not just England, but Oxford and Cambridge.
What do you do when someone infantilises you because you're a young(ish) woman? There were men in that room with the same credentials as I. Did anyone ask them if they were teaching assistants?
When I “talk back” (bell hooks, 1989) at institutional and personal oppression I am labelled an angry woman. As if my anger is not just. Justified.
It is not a coincidence that Bangladesh survived Cyclone Mora with few casualties while a landslide in the Chittagong Hill Tracts caused by torrential rains has left over 150 dead. Deforestation and hill-cutting are known causes of “natural disasters” like landslides, but illegal land grabbing in the CHT is at the root of deforestation and hill-cutting in the first place.
