Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood [Hardcover]

Taslima Nasrin (Author), Gopa Majumdar (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1586420518 | ISBN-13: 978-1586420512 | Publication Date: June 1, 1998

This groundbreaking book throws open a window on a world unknown to most Westerners. Taslima Nasrin revisits her early years — from her auspicious birth on a Muslim holy day to the threshold of womanhood at fourteen — in a small rural village during the years East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Set against the background of the fight for independence, Nasrin’s earliest memories alternate between scenes of violence and flight and images of innocent pleasures of childhood in her extended family.
A precocious child, Nasrin’s acute awareness of the injustice and suffering endured by her mother and other Muslim women cause her to turn from the Koran in early adolescence, and to begin a journey to redefine her world. Her growing awareness of the class discriminations, gender disparities, and growing religious orthodoxy and intolerance in her family and her rural village parallel the broader social and cultural upheaval emerging in the new nation, and foreshadow the growth of a feminist dissident courageous enough to defy the fundamentalist Muslim clerics.

“Nasrin’s voice is the voice of humanism everywhere.”-- Wole Soyinka

“I am sure you have become tired of being called ‘the female Salman Rushdie’ . . . but please know that there are many people in many countries working to . . . defend you against those who would cheerfully see you dead. . . . In the West, there are too many eloquent apologists working to convince people of the fiction that women are not discriminated against in Muslim countries or that, if they are, it has nothing to do with religion.”-- Excerpt from an open letter from Salman Rrushdie to Taslima Nasrin

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Bangladeshi doctor-turned-writer Nasrin (Shame) has been living in exile since 1994, after Muslim clerics issued a fatwa against her for her criticism of Islam's repression of women. In this moving but uneven memoir, (seized when it was published in Bangladesh in 1999), Nasrin writes hauntingly of a childhood of confusion and pain. During the violent 1971 war that created Bangladesh, she and her family fled to the countryside, where she was introduced to the limits on her freedom that would only increase as she grew older. As a girl in a Muslim family, Nasrin was not allowed to go to the store to buy candy; she could not even play outside. The memoir shows the young Nasrin trying to make sense of taboos (why isn't her mother allowed to go to the movies?) and the mysteries of adulthood (why doesn't any grownup seem happy?). Married to a man who openly cheated on her, Nasrin's mother finds solace in religion: she visits a spiritual leader so revered that women fight over his partially chewed betel leaf, hoping his spittle will help them get into heaven. Nasrin's father beats her and her siblings to exhort them to do well at school. But Nasrin's tale consistently heartbreaking and sometimes gorgeously written grows disorganized as it progresses: the chronology becomes confusing, anecdotes get repeated, and the abrupt ending leaves many questions unanswered.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Adult/High School-"Meyebela" means "girlhood"; Nasrin coined the word because Bengali lacked an equivalent term. Here, she remembers her life from early childhood in the mid '60s to adolescence in Bangladesh, a society bound by class, colonialism, religious extremism, and the terrible social disruption of civil war. In the author's dysfunctional extended family, physical and psychological abuse, including rape, incest, bullying, lying, superstition, and religious fanaticism, are the order of the day. Nasrin sees it all, but she is powerless to alleviate her own suffering or that of those she loves, and her experience is circumscribed by the boundaries of her family, with only brief forays beyond the home. Events are seen from the sometimes odd perspectives of a child's incomplete comprehension; developing insights are layered into the narrative and revealed in a roundabout fashion, as the author follows one theme in her inner life, then doubles back to another, with repetitions as the years go by. By the time she enters adolescence, still in possession of her judgment, one can see how she might grow up-as she in fact did-into a doctor, writer, and internationally acclaimed human-rights activist. Though readers may question the portrait Nasrin paints of her society, the madness of a death fatwa and mass demonstrations calling for her public execution serve to confirm the authenticity and continuing timeliness of her account. Readers who appreciate Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things (HarperCollins, 1998) will be sympathetic to Nasrin's girlhood, and hope for another volume of her memoirs.
Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 300 pages
• Publisher: Steerforth (June 1, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586420518
• ISBN-13: 978-1586420512
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.2 x 8.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #607,280 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A sad account from an important voice, September 20, 2002

By 

stackofbooks "stackofbooks" (Walpole, MA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood (Hardcover)

Taslima Nasrins is a strong competent voice from Bangladesh. She has been in exile ever since her controversial book "Lajja" or "Shame" about Muslim persecution of Hindus in Bangladesh caused a fatwa to be issued against her. Meyebela, My Bengali Girlhood: A Memoir of Growing up Female in a Muslim World is Nasrins heart-wrenching account of a desperate childhood in Mymensingh, a relatively small town in Bangladesh.

In this memoir (one of two volumes), Nasrin openly questions her religion, Islam, and its discrimination against women. Her sad and depressing childhood was an unfortunate byproduct of a unique combination of cruel elements, one of which was a repressive society where "I was simply supposed to acceptwithout asking questionswhatever the grownups decided to bestow on me, be it punishment or reward." Taslima was treated like a second-class citizen all throughout and horrifically abused by her uncles. Add to these, Nasrin had very unstable parentsa mother who was driven to religious extremism by a philandering father and a father who was extremely harsh yet very insistent on education. Having had his first two sons fail his "expectations", he pinned all his hopes on young Taslima and her sister, Yasmin. The girls were denied all social interaction (Nasrins father had high walls built around the house so the girls could not look beyond it and get distracted) and the books were made to be their only focus.

Nasrins memoir, which is set against the Bangladesh war for independence, makes some very important points about religion and a girls role in an oppressive society. Like a flood of memories though, her memoir seems to shift out of focus occasionally. Towards the end, parts of her statements get to be repetitive.

Taslima Nasrin did become a doctor and lived up to her fathers expectations. In that sense, he "won". But eventually Nasrin did manage to find her own voice-- one that continues to speak powerfully on behalf of oppressed women all over the world.

Nasrin in her memoir tells us what life truly is like for many girls around the world. It is our duty to listen. It is sad though that we can often do little more than be outraged.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good biography and nothing more., May 12, 2004

By 

D. Riley "Written-vs-Spoken" (San Francisco, Ca, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood (Hardcover)

I'll be brief since one reviewer elucidated my points quite well.

There's no doubt that Taslima Nasrin will go down in history was one of the greatest writers the south Asian community has even produced. She has clear vision on contemporary issues within the south Asian world. Her recent novel is of course a "magnum Opus"that will be remembered by many. My only contention is that she tends to have a rather fervid tendency to over-generalize excessively. At times her statements about Islam in the book contradict her statements in speeches and other prints. Her critique of religion regurgitates old-fashioned arguments that stymies the reader( at least this reviewer). A good biography indeed. However, don't use it as a critique or religion.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful book, September 29, 2010

By 

Q. Zeng (chestnut hill, Ma United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Meyebela: My Bengali Girlhood (Hardcover)

I read the book on a recent business trip and found it beautifully written. It maybe just one instance of a female muslim childhood, but as long as it is truthfully told, there should not be any objections. THe narrative voice is clear and poetic. The characters in this book come across as vivid and complex. Even though some very painful and ugly incidents are described, the book does not try to shock. Rather, there is a sense of humanity and love in the way the stories are relayed...