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Mein the spring of 2024, I may go to Banishanta, an island in southern Bangladesh that has haunted my dreams. When I arrive, I find that there is a little gray mud, and there are many houses on the beach that don’t look good. Thirteen years earlier, I was on a boat to the Sundarban rainforest when the guide casually pointed out the island and told me it was a state-sanctioned brothel dating back to the British era.
When I went home, I didn’t want to think about Banishanta, because if I did, I would have to think about the horrors that the women there endured while I was living an ordinary life. However, the women knelt in my mind, refusing to leave. I decided not to write about them, because they would say things about the world that I didn’t want to know. That’s when I thought I could write a book, which was on a fictional island, about women’s rebellion, that I let them in.
Women’s protest fiction is often set in fictional worlds. Think of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, or more recently, Naomi Alderman’s The Power, in which women are suddenly given devastating powers, thus disrupting gender roles and practices. They often start with women of a stricter, often religious nature – as well as Atwood’s Gilead, there is Miriam Toews’ Mennonite group in Women Talking. The protagonists then challenge these conditions through group action. They give us, in fiction, what we crave in life – a great change of fortune. If I could do that, I thought I could write about the island. It would be about the potential of such a place. It can be a book of survival, a way of thinking about liberation – not just for women – but for all women.
Perhaps the most famous assault on women in literature occurred in 411BC in the pages of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. The famous wise heroine is determined to end the 20-year Peloponnesian wars by advising the women of Sparta and Athens to “avoid deep love”. In other words, they should refuse to have sex with men. Eventually, the men gave up, ended the war and reunited with their wives. Although it is not a feminine way – women are depicted as horny, drunk and dry – it is surprising that Aristophanes wrote boldly about the strength of men, creating a plan of the kind of hit that would be shocking, even today.
We live in an age of totalitarianism, which permeates every aspect of our lives. It’s nothing new: Lysistrata’s friends wonder if their husbands will hold them because of forbidden sex.
What has changed is that, having grown up with the hope that women’s rights will continue to grow, we are now witnessing a time when our freedom and security are at risk, where power is beaten, judged and used over women’s bodies.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Banishanta, where women’s bodies are sold for a pittance every day. But as I angrily wonder if I will spend the rest of my days under the dark shadow of male dominance, I ask if this could be, as Walter Benjamin would say, a moment of emergency that is also a moment of revelation. And if we make such a moment, then it would be because of protests and actions together. And so I set myself the task of creating a fictional protest, if only to give me hope in the darkest of times.
It is difficult to get around Banishanta, even with the help of my mother. The bottom of my feet is soft, the sun is beating down, and there is no gap between the fence and the damaged structures that stick. These women are very old and very young. They are tired but seem like children in their enthusiasm. We shake hands and he hugs me, immediately warmed up, asking about my life, my husband, my children. Farzana dresses plainly and makes her presence felt, unlike her best friend, Asha, who is soft-spoken. While we were talking, an elderly woman arrived carrying two small plastic bags of food. “Auntie cooks,” Asha whispers. In a narrow room with a window covered with mud on the floor, a single bed, clothes hanging on the walls, no cooking space.
The 4B movement in South Korea is the modern concept of Lysistrata. 4B refers to rejecting parental authority by rejecting the four things it serves: courtship, marriage, sex and procreation. While Han Kang’s The Vegetarian isn’t exactly a 4B look, the main character, Yeong-hye, makes the shocking decision to become a vegetarian, and follows through on a series of confusing, impossible protests. Described by her husband as “unremarkable in every way”, she gradually transforms herself into someone who doesn’t live up to society’s expectations. Her husband and family abuse her constantly, but she makes herself “unknown at all,” and it is because of this unknown that her strength is strong. In the end, even though his body is destroyed, he produces another way to sleep as things have turned out.
In the 1980s, republican women imprisoned in Armagh Prison joined their male counterparts in a “disgusting demonstration”. Four hundred men at Long Kesh Prison have been smearing the walls of their cells with excrement since 1978, but when women join in, their displays are considered obscene, even by their peers. A journalist who visited both prisons said: “I found the smell in the girls’ rooms worse than in Long Kesh, and several times I found myself having to control my feelings of nausea. Her story prompted a sociologist, Begoña Aretxaga, to ask: “What could make 30 dirty women more offensive than 400 black men?”
Inside Banishanta’s hut, Komola is cutting leaves and telling me how well the girls are now. He arrived with a huge debt to the man who sold him, while Asha and Farzana are free to come and go as they please. I wonder what this means, since Asha has left her son in her village, and no one knows where he is. A very well-groomed woman walks by and looks at us. That is my husband, says Komola. They don’t explain what a man means in this context, and I don’t ask. What do I mean, I wonder, living in a world without men?
Sultana’s Dream, written in 1908 by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, is considered to be the earliest depiction of a feminist utopia. In Ladyland, women rule, and men live in purdah, a reversal of the strict gender segregation Sakhawat himself grew up with. Under the command of a gentle queen, they will end the war using modern technology; they have endless food because their world is run by scientists, and the men “don’t do anything, sorry, they shouldn’t be for nothing”. In this world, much of human progress is achieved when men are in prison and women are free.
Sakhawat’s vision of a world without men, Han’s vision of a woman without desire and Aristophanes’s picture of a society where women have taken a great test. They show us that we can refuse to be women who get married, bear children and live in the ways we have inherited. We must be able to consider these alternatives if we want to change our economy.
As for the women on my fictional island – I couldn’t help but give them the ultimate villain, and I made them do a protest where they refuse to have sex, refuse to even bathe and yes, smear their menstrual blood on their foreheads. And I said to myself, if those women can say no to the world, so can we all. I see them as medicine to help us beat the male power every day. I think of them spitting in the eye of evil and declaring, with Lysistrata, “no threat can make us grow”.
