Discovering One's Own (Her)story

The irony, for me, is that I had to discover much of this history while I prepared to teach a course on these women, our foremothers, in a University course in the West. The inception of my research into colonial, anti-colonial and postcolonial work, especially of women, had its roots earlier during my graduate studies. That too was in the West. Yet growing up, the heroes or heroines I had encountered within the school curriculum were not from around me.

The English books I had encountered in English schools introduced me to Florence Nightingale, Bonnie Prince Charles, the wise men of Gotham, and later, the writings of the English greats. I knew nothing about Begum Rokeya, Nawab Sirajuddowla or the great litterateurs of Bangla. In history classes I remember being taught some history of the subcontinent in the very early stages. But it is literature that affected me and molded my imagination.

My first poem that got printed in the children's section of a national daily was titled 'Autumn' and was about harvest and ripening of crops with, now I realize, Keatsian sensibilities. I was only twelve and already imbued with cultural nuances of an imposed culture to which I physically did not belong. Postcolonial scholars agree that the very recitation of such literary texts becomes a ritual act of obedience. How many of us read Wordsworth's "The Daffodils" and have imagined the flowers swaying in the breeze without ever having set eyes on one single bloom? In his essay "Wordsworth in the Tropics," Aldous Huxley poses the question: "What happens when Wordsworth is exported to the tropics?" As a fixed feature of English Romantic poetry, Wordsworth's work has become deeply implicated in the project of curricular indoctrination. My little poem, of hay mowing and yellowing leaves, instead of ripening paddy and winter fogs, was part of such indoctrination.

What pains me now is how ignorant I had been of my own history, especially in terms of the social history of Bangladeshi women. I was never aware of the restrictions that women like Begum Rokeya had to overcome. Without something to weigh against hers, or of others like hers, achievements, the actual magnitude of their accomplishment never really became real for me. Looking nearer home, I now realize what a singularly remarkable figure my own grandmother was. Ever since I can remember, I have seen Dadu reading Bangla books, either religious or biographies. I saw nothing significant in the fact that she read so much. Surely, I had figured as a child, everyone reads. The fact that she also wrote poems I took for granted. Now I know what tremendous achievements those were. Born in a remote village in the early part of the last century when girls were only provided knowledge of the Arabic alphabet so that they could read the religious scripture, I don't know how she learnt Bangla. I never asked. And to this day I regret that I didn't find out. I am guessing that she must have had very enlightened parents to have been allowed to be thus educated.

I believe it is the parents' contribution to a large extent that goes a long way in shaping the next generations' future paths. I am grateful to my grandparents for shaping ours. My grandfather, an educationist and a lawyer in British India, was nothing short of spectacular. But then, he was a man and things must have come easier for him. It is my grandmother of whom I am in awe, now that I know how against the grain she had been.

I regret not knowing more about her early life. I can only surmise. I wish I had paid more attention to her writing. At my wedding, already frail and with poor eyesight, she wrote a poem on behalf of my younger cousins and sibling, framed it and added it to her list of gifts. I wish I could have collected all her poems, those irreplaceable family mementoes, now lost forever.

English education is thus often attributed to alienating children from their own culture. With colonials gone their residues remain in the shapes of legislature, administration rhetoric and of course, education. Seeing language as a means of both communication and culture, Kenya's Ngugi wa Thiongo questions: "How did we arrive at this acceptance of 'the fatalistic logic of the unassailable position of English in our literature' in our culture and politics?"

Yet, a language need not be the harbinger of alien culture. It depends on how one chooses to utilize and learn from the language. Compared to Ngugi, Chinua Achebe is more pragmatic. Achebe contends: "The British did not push language into my face while I was growing up." His choice was to learn English and eventually to write in English as a means of "infiltrating the ranks of the enemy and destroying him from within." Acknowledging that others may choose to write in indigenous languages, Achebe adds: "But, for me, there is no other choice. I have been given this language and I intend to use it."

There is certainly no denying the fact that a language develops soaking in cultural nuances such as proverbs, myths and sounds. Whereas Ngugi rightfully contends that a foreign language would never replicate such cultural nuances, Achebe has developed a way of working around this dilemma. The simple syntax of Achebe's novels, replete with local sayings and stories point towards his success in bridging the divide between an alien language and an indigenous culture. Long before Salman Rushdie made writing the Indian experience in English fashionable, Achebe had remarked: "So my answer to the question, Can an African ever learn English well enough to be able to use it effectively in creative writing? is certainly yes. If on the other hand you ask: Can he ever learn to use it like a native speaker? I should say, I hope not. It is neither necessary nor desirable for him to be able to do so."

While I do not see anything amiss in learning other languages or cultures--indeed it broadens one's horizon)--I strongly feel that children in English schools should also be taught their own history to learn about people they can rightfully be proud of, of the seasons, myths and fairy tales. While I grew up with Grimm's fairy tales, Archie comics, Enid Blyton, P.G. Wodehouse, plus some unsavory writers I would rather not mention, my mother, a repository of stories, filled us in with the local colour. But I never really read about such; indeed for the early part of my childhood I did not posses the tools with which to decipher such literature.

Coming back to my South Asian class, as I go through the history of the nationalist struggles, early women activists, writers and poets, both Hindus and Muslims, I feel cheated that this was a history I did not get to know while I was a student in Bangladesh. By the same token, I also acutely feel the sorry lack of literary items from Bangladesh to teach. Mahasweta Devi, writing in Bangla, is a regular staple in postcolonial literature classes mostly because Gayatri Spivak chose to translate her work as part of her oeuvre in Subaltern theory. Not for the first time, I wish there were more translations of the excellent work being done in Bangla literature in Bangladesh. For the time being, however, I do intend to use some of such collections that I have accumulated.

Rebecca Sultana teaches at Concordia University, Canada.