Burning Roses in My Garden - Brossura

Nasrin, Taslima

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0143449567 ISBN 13: 9780143449560

Casa editrice: India Penguin, 2023

Riassunto

Have I not, having kept a man for years, learnt that it's/ like raising a snake?/ So many animals on this earth, why keep a man of all things?' writes one of the world's most celebrated writers, Taslima Nasrin, in her first-ever comprehensive collection of poetry translated from the original Bangla into English.

The poems get to the heart of being the other in exile, justifying one's place in a terrifying world. They praise the comfort and critique the cruelty of a loved one. In these are loneliness, sorrow, and at times, exaltation.

Relying almost entirely upon the free verse form, these poems carry a diction which is at once both gentle and fierce, revealing the experiences of one woman while defining the existence of so many generations of women throughout time, and around the world.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Living in exile, Taslima Nasrin is a writer and a secular humanist who has been subjected to forced banishment and multiple fatwas. Her writings have been deemed controversial time and again because of their unflinching preoccupation with gender, community and identity. Her widely celebrated books include Lajja, Split: A Life, My Girlhood, Exile and French Lover and others.

Jesse Waters is director, Bowers Writers House, Elizabethtown College, Pennsylvania. His poetry as well as fiction and non-fiction work have been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes and have appeared nationally and internationally in such journals as 88, The Adirondack Review,Coal Hill Review, The Cortland Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Review, River Styx, Slide, Story Quarterly, Southeast Review, Sycamore Review. His books include Human Resources as well as So Let Me Get This Straight.

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I N T R O D U C T I O N
In the spring of 2010, I had been at Elizabethtown College,
Pennsylvania, US, as a visiting assistant professor for
approximately two years. But I’d just been told that I would
be brought on full-time as director of the Bowers Writers
House, a new interdisciplinary venue which I had helped
design for the college, and that I would become the chair
of the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow committee on
our campus. As you probably know, this is a programme
sponsored by the Council of Independent Colleges, and
enables smaller, private liberal arts colleges to bring amazing
world-renowned scholars, politicians, artists and other
personalities akin to the liberal arts experience to their
respective campuses. That autumn of 2010 I’d been told our
visiting fellow would be someone named Naslima Tasrin, a
woman with a fascinating past and an amazing catalogue
of experiences across the globe. But no matter how much I
researched initially, I couldn’t find anyone by that name—
until one of my colleagues set me straight: our visiting fellow
was named Taslima Nasrin, not Naslima Tasrin. I smiled for
a moment at the apparent interchangeability of those first
letters, a certain malapropism I’ll address in just a moment.
So, on a mid-Monday morning in the middle of
September, I found myself waiting at the train station
just a few miles from our college in anticipation of the
week’s worth of activities Dr Nasrin would spend with us.
I had arranged classes for her to visit, meals with faculty
and staff, student groups with which she could engage,
and two campus-wide events open to the community:
one, a reading of her poetry, the other a discussion of her
life’s work fighting for those who have neither voice nor
champion.
I was proud of the schedule I had built for her. Our
campus communities would have a rich set of engagements
with someone involved in the kind of work, writing and
life force that amplifies our college’s mission of ‘Educate
for service’. And after a bit of investigation, I’d found a
community of Indian and Bangladeshi expatriates living in
Lancaster (about 20 miles from our college) who were very
excited about Dr Nasrin’s visit to our community, a group
of about fifteen men and women for whom I had arranged a
dinner with our guest. I walked to the platform and helped
my guest gather her bags, and as the rest of the departing
travellers made their way to wherever it was they were
going, we briefly introduced ourselves to one another as we
walked to my car.
‘I think you’ll be excited,’ I told my guest as we were
about to reach my vehicle. ‘I’ve organized a dinner with
some folks in Lancaster from India and Bangladesh who are
excited to meet you.’
Dr Nasrin stopped in her tracks and gave me a look I
will never forget: ‘Why did you do that?’ she asked softly
but insistently, and intently. Reading this, one might ask
themselves why a simple invitation to dinner would be met
with such a reaction, but when the greater part of your life
has been spent hearing cries of the fatwa from the streets
below your apartment, hundreds of thousands of people all
over the world literally marching in the street demanding
your execution, it can be difficult to find even the smallest
moment of tranquillity.
Taslima Nasrin. Naslima Tasrin. What does it mean
to create a new identity for yourself, to reinvent yourself
because of a need you see in the world? What does it mean
to feel as if going back to the person you were before would
kill you . . . and yet the life you’ve chosen could mean that
very same thing for you each waking day?
To truly understand the voice behind the poems
collected in this book, we have to understand what it
means to both desire a new self and to be forced by your
community to then reject that self, we must prepare
ourselves to look into the heart and soul of a woman
brilliant enough to know what she is capable of, yet
compassionate enough to offer it to the world. A person
under these kinds of duress—personal, political, familial,
romantic—needs to be a chameleon, a master of voices
and appearances, a person who can speak equally to kings,
clan leaders and kinfolk. That person is my friend, the
incomparable Dr Taslima Nasrin.
Burning Roses in My Garden is an apt title for this
collection. Whether we’re reading about a woman losing
her mother or walking down the streets of her hometown
as a young person witnessing the strange and, at times,
monstrous differences in the way men and women are
treated, and treat one another, we’ll find within these
pages a voice breaking free, or just about to. Dr Nasrin’s
experiences, intelligence, sensitivities and global vision
are all presented here in these poems with equity and
precision. The voice here demonstrates experiences,
actions and engagements which reveal bravery and
individuality, yes, but also loss. And who among us hasn’t
been in these places, who of us hasn’t wondered if the path
we have chosen is truly the one we should be walking? All
of us have seen both sun and rain, gain and subtraction.
And what victories and losses are here! Within these
pages, you will feel as if you are intoxicated with the same
loves, curious about and, at times, frustrated with the same
cultures, broken in these same hearts, and willing to step
into a challenging future. In translating these poems, I
have attempted to stay as true to that vision as possible,
refusing to embellish or change ideas for the sacrifice of
rhetoric. If I have added the occasional image or included
any poetic perspective here, it is only to amplify the voice
of the author, whose work and person I have known for
twelve years.
This book is special not only because it has collected
here the poems of one of the most significant global
female figures of the early twenty-first century, but
also because of the way it presents those poems. From
memory to impassioned plea to precise and determined
explorations of gender and socio-religious issues all the
way to intimate sexual identity and what terrorism truly
looks like, this collection presents a stunning and perhaps
perfect reflection of exactly what the world needs today: a
powerful voice irrespective of gender that can cogently and
personally examine the most important issues concerning
mankind today. Call her Taslima, call her Dr Nasrin, call
her woman-warrior—no matter the title given, her poems
are a voice the world needs right now.
Jesse Waters

VENGEANCE
I picked up a Nobody off the road, a Nobody, and sharing
random stories
Slept with Nobody.
He was in my bed the whole night,
His chest swollen with pride.
My feet did not touch the ground, my skin quaked—
My lips were pearls, breasts diamonds, my vagina the gate
to Heaven—
That is how he touched me.
The Nobody did not sleep the entire night. Nobody gave me
All that I wanted and more.
You left promising you’d be back, promising you’d be back
Tomorrow or the day after,
With just a kiss, a dry kiss on the lips in the middle of
the night.
Leaving behind a body wracked with thirst, set adrift,
You never returned, it’s been three months, or is it four?
Who doesn’t want more time?
Why did I think you were good for so long?
I wish I could return to that time, that time when I
thought you were good.
If I could get it back, I would give it to the man from the
road, the Nobody
So much better than you . . . perhaps because you
Were not from the road.
When the man from the street touched me—
Kissed me from head to toe,
From shoulder to shoulder,
His kiss and his storied swim
Did not bring me pleasure.
The only thing that meant knowing
Was knowing it wasn’t your kiss,
That the hands touching me were not your hands,
that you
Would never swim in the lakes of heaven.
That is pleasure.


T H E L A S T K I S S
Let’s assume the girl was Girl and the boy was Boy.
That time when Boy came out of nowhere and
kissed her suddenly,
Kissed the surprised and petrified Girl,
Without love, without a ‘See you tomorrow!’ or
‘Day after then!’
That time when he kissed her deeply, shattering her
into fragments,
Broke her, tore her down
In a room swimming with light,
That time when he abruptly and breathlessly kissed her,
Since then, Boy is nowhere to be found.

Girl doesn’t know who he was, or where he was from,
She had only seen his eyes, the two shiny marbles in them
Like a pair of those from childhood games,
It’s been years since youth was in such a rush,
Never was there ever such a restless breeze in
someone’s gaze . . .
‘Was it him?’ the girl cried out in sudden surprise.
Then she kept saying to herself,
‘Wasn’t it him who used to bring her a spinning top
every day?’
As long it would spin, it would seem her palms held the
entire world.
Her body would tremble as he looked at her
with amazement,
His eyes would sparkle with the light
Shining off the marbles on the playground,
His stunned eyes were like marbles too.

Was Boy then that boy from the playground,
This Boy who had kissed her?
He who used to bring her the spinning top,
Was he the one who had kissed her all of a sudden?
She did not know if he would return again,
If he would kiss her again.
She did not know he had kissed her
Because there had been no one else to kiss that night,
So, on that stormy night, that quiet night, without a
second thought,
He had kissed whoever he had found at hand.
The next day, once the high was gone,
He had forgotten all about it as well.

Girl’s husband returned over the weekend
To perform his marital duties,
But when her husband tried to kiss her,
She turned her face and lips away,
I give you my body, ravage me all day if you will,
All night, taste me from head to toe,
Just don’t kiss me.
She keeps the memories of that last kiss alive.
The kiss that brought an entire world within her grasp,
The kiss that brought her a rush of youth,
His kiss was becoming more than him,
Her youth was becoming more than the kiss—
The dream of youth bigger than youth itself.
The dreams were so bright they made the marble-eyed boy
grow dim—
His nightly addiction, his willingness to kiss whoever—
His forgetting, and not returning.

Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: India Penguin
• Data di pubblicazione: 2023
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0143449567
• ISBN 13: 9780143449560
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 185
• Redattore: Waters Jesse
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: Terminal Video; n.pederzini@terminaldistribuzione.com; ; Via Bruno Buozzi, 24/26,; Granarolo dell'Emilia BO,; Italia