From Publishers Weekly
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Bangladeshi doctor-turned-writer Nasrin (Shame) has
been living in exile since 1994, after Muslim clerics issued a
wa 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 her 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.
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From School Library Journal
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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 ins 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
accled human-rights activist. Though readers may question the
portrait Nasrin paints of her society, the madness of a death
wa 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.
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