Alternative narratives of trauma

Nayanika Mookherjee's The Spectral Wound: Sexual Violence, Public Memories, and the Bangladesh War of 1971 is a much awaited ethnography of trauma, rehabilitation and survival from the violent birth of Bangladesh. While there is an abundance of literature, particularly memoirs, fiction and personal essays written about the Bangladesh Independence War, most of these remain within the circuits of Bengali readership, and to a large extent are framed within a nationalist lens. In relation to such works, Mookherjee's book is groundbreaking at many levels: it placesthe Bangladesh Liberation War among the annals of modern South Asian and world history, provides thoughtful and nuanced accounts of survivors' articulations of their experiences, conceptualises violence and its consequences beyond the spectacular and the singular, situates women and gender as central to nation formation and building, and complicates the landscape of humanitarianism claiming to serve victims of war. Perhaps, one of the greatest contributions of the book is its central argument that there is no singular story of the birth of a nation, neither is there an iconic survivor who represents it.

Recognition and reintegration of birangonas – an honorific bestowed by the government of Bangladesh to women survivors of sexual violence - into independent Bangladesh continues to be a contested issue, and Mookherjee delivers an incisive analysis of state, activist, scholarly and literary efforts to that end. She locates the recognition of birangonas by the state within "respect"and"expectation" economies. These are simultaneously mired in hierarchy and contestation. The repeated rituals of invoking martyrs and muktijoddhas shape the 'respect' economy (although women are omitted from this recognition beyond a sacrificial role), whereas they raise hope that the state will recognise and provide for the survivors, creating the 'expectation' economy. Not ascribing to either, Mookherjee details how the survivors wanted not only monetary compensation but also and more importantly recognition. As a birangona puts it herself, she seeks an opportunity to meet with the Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and "to cry with her and feel a bit light in the heart."

The newly formed nation saw rehabilitation as a sign of modernity, where sovereign power was dispersed among social workers as agents of state institutions. In the effort to absorb large number of raped women into the fold of the nation, institutionalised subordination of forms of femininity became the strategy. While older feminist activists saw the declaration of birangona status protected women from the backward rural religious communities and their ideologies, the younger feminists thought it was a way to correct the middle class hypocrisy surrounding female chastity. All efforts, however, led to the invisibilising of the birangonas (absorbing into nation), whereby their suffering is covered (or "combed over", i.e., searched and obscured).

 Rehabilitation programmes perpetuated conventional social norms of gender by disciplining women into roles of "productive workers" and "useful citizens." These very programmes, nevertheless, at the same time defied the orientalised ways of knowing and telling stories of sexual violence, which articulated a singular focus on third world patriarchy at work in the women's sufferings.

Within the framework of suffering and agency, the activists only see the resistant (masculinised) birangaona as subject of history. Tape recorded accounts freeze them orally while iconic film, print, television and photographic images perpetuate a certain "authentic" telling of their experience. The testimonial/speech act is unequal and exploitative and Mookherjee's informants ask, "Are they doing business by us?" The commodification of the written and spoken word lead to women being suspicious of human rights narrations. Even feminist stories reinscribe personal trauma into testimonial cultures seeking to transform birangonas' experiences as "truth" in public memorialisations of war's glory. It befits the saviour paradigm of human rights culture alive in the middle class urban activist community in Bangladesh. The cautious conclusion is trauma ought not to be understood as homogenous; we need alternative narratives that do not freeze, normalise, make extraordinary or comb over survivor stories. Glimpses of these alternative narratives can be seen in Tarek and Catherine Masud's film, Women and War, or a bhatiali song composed by a birangona.

As a scholar of gender violence and human rights narrative, I found the chapter on literary and visual representations of the birangona particularly fascinating. The title of the book, Spectral Wound. . . is befitting to the discussion of the absent presence of the birangona, wherein in many of these genres she is called into presence, harbour erotic attraction and/or revulsion, and then made to exit from the narratives altogether. The spectre of the birangona remains in her absent presence as she has to be harkened, yet she cannot claim an autonomous space in society; thereby the script reaffirms patriarchal nationalism. Mechanical reproduction and circulation of this genre adds to the presumed authenticity of the dishevelled, listless, mad, unstable, suicidal, muted birangona. Curiously, no reference is made here to Kaberi Gayen's study of representation of women in Muktijuddho films, which traces this gendered discussion of war cinema within the vicissitudes of the market for commercial films in Bangladesh, and its evolution over decades. Also surprising is the author's comparison of the "eroticised birangona" in Rubaiyat Hossain's film Meherjaan and Yasmine Kabir's A Certain Liberation, given the two characters – one an actual birangona and the other fictional – represent very different experiences. Can one imagine a birangona, who is a sexual subject, exercising sexual agency without being rendered available/eroticised? Recent writings of women of colour feminists, including Jennifer Nash and Triva Lindsey have dealt brilliantly with such conceptualisations with regard to gendered agency of enslaved African American women in the US, and their legacy in contemporary renditions of black women's sexuality. I would nudge the author to take another look at Shameem Akhtar's film, Itihaash Konna, where admittedly birangona Konika is removed from the plot by way of suicide, thereby, aligning the film with the exit narrative, yet at the same time integrating a second birangona, a Hindu woman named Konok, into the script. It is Konok who raises Ananya, the war child in this film. Is there a hint of reconciliation in this rendition that is a signal to yet another alternative feminist vision and practice?

Critical, reflective, breaking new ground in our understanding of gender violence, memory and recuperation, Nayanika Mookherjee's extraordinary ethnography is essential reading for students of feminist theory, Anthropology, Bangladesh and South Asia Studies.

The writer is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Women's & Gender Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.