Rebellion by Tahmima Anam review – a fiery book of women’s rebellion | Fiction

‘Yyes, you they will get out of this place,” says a chorus of promiscuous children at the beginning of Tahmima Anam’s satirical misogyny, Uprising. they will save your life,” we were told three times in Deepa Anappara’s 2020, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Linewhich also has vulnerable children living along the coast. What is the distance between thoughts and actions, reality and dreams? How can an agreement be formed in such circumstances? Riots have solutions and deep passions – for a better life, a just world – and then reach out and fight.

As a journalist, Anam visited the notorious “floating prostitute” Banishanta in Bangladesh; his new book, set on a remote island “at the end of the world, in the middle of a river that flows into the sea”, describes the island’s culture and nature conservation. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers caught in sex work – “we knew that the work was paid in money, and in bodies” – and want a different life. The women are ruled by the cruel Amma, who was once sold into prostitution. The victim becomes the perpetrator – and the children are aware enough to know that their mother “is not here because she did something wrong, but because she did something wrong to them”. The island’s first lesson? No one is coming to save you – and being here will change you, no doubt like a rising tide.

The island is a prison. Mothers are the ghosts of their former selves. The children, witnessing “sex”, are all grown up, shedding their innocence. When they are born, their mother’s memories are gone “like the color of the sun”; they live on the island “tied” to their daughters. What, or who, would it take to break free from these chains?

When the water is high, customers stay away. Mother thought that: “The crooked river was preventing small boats from traveling”; “The world is cursed”. In a last ditch effort to persuade the men to return to business, Amma sends a new girl. They don’t know that the arrival of Kusum Khan will mark the beginning of the end. A girl from the city with a history of participating in protests against the Dictator, does not accept the rules of the island, as the others did; instead, they sow the seeds that will grow into life-changing resistance. The children begin to believe that he is their savior – perhaps Bon Bibi, the guardian of the forest. A different life seems possible, behind the island’s shores. When the titular attack finally arrives, it summons a devastating storm, destroying the island. And the reader, too, is ready to join the revolution – their fist outside.

Rising is a feminist book (“here they were: a wall of women”) and a protest book (“When Kusum joined the protests, she felt like she was becoming a small part of a living, breathing thing”). It is an upcoming book, and a response to the climate crisis; the issue of protecting sisters, and failing to protect them; of structural inequality and the rotten core of patriarchal corruption; about less fortunate women in an unjust world. “When the men came to retake the island, we stood there with our eyes closed, unable to watch. Although the women and girls in the fictional country of Anam are subjected to a different type of violence, this can be applied to all people: we are all watching – immovable, affected – as injustice increases throughout the world.

Through her unflinchingly political and unflinching novel, Anam shows the power of rage and steadfast hope. A new world can burn from the fires of injustice – and here, it’s the women holding the matches.