Stroke II Stroke: Women Empowerment

By Reza Sattar

As we are roughly two decades into the twenty-first century, women’s rights and the rise of female empowerment has become a fundamental issue in countries around the world. When discussing the issue of women’s rights however, sometimes it can be a difficult subject. For example, discussing the dangers of prostitution and whether it should be legalized or not legalized is a controversial subject that many mainstream media outlets are afraid to touch. The discussion of rape in cultures and third world countries is not the nicest subject to speak of either yet is still a fundamental problem that few are willing to explore. There are a variety of socio-professional or family-based situations wherein females are oppressed in roles subservient to the male such as in a stripper’s life, as a domestic slave, and as a slave wife. These are all not the easiest subjects to talk about nor are the solutions to them easy but it is important that they are discussed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9780995852006

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Author

Ma’s life

My mother was married at the age of 13. Her father was a lawyer. My grandfather always told me that during the British period, he was one of the three people in Faridpur (a small district in Bangladesh) who paid tax. He had a big house in that district, which was probably the second largest building in that city at that time. The locals called it the ‘Ship’ building. At that time, zautuk (royalty money that had to be paid to the husband during marriage) was a highly practiced custom in Bangladesh. After my father graduated, he was planning to do his Master’s degree while trying to find a job. He was also planning to get married. Hence, my father’s relative brought a marriage offer to him. My mother was married off to my father without any options given to her.

In those days, most marriages were arranged and women had no say in their choice of husband.

We had a big, plump family of six brothers and sisters. I left home at the age of 18 and went off to Europe. I had lived away from my mother for many years. It’s only over the last eight years that I have sponsored her and she is with me now in Canada. Only now have I started to understand her pain. It is a deep pain, a pain that no one will understand. It’s a deeply hidden cry, one of incomparable pain, which has gone on for an eternity. She does not want to share this pain with anyone. Nevertheless, I shall share it with all.

My mother didn’t have a childhood, when young girls climbed up trees, ran around catching butterflies, and were carefree. She never had a preteen life, when young girls eyed young boys, and giggled. She missed all that.

She didn’t even have a teen life, the most exciting part of our lives, when the whole world becomes colorful. The street we walked, the fields, the birds or the sky… everything becomes colorful. She missed that. Her world was always in black and white.

She also didn’t have a youth, when anything you touch becomes powerful and explosive, when love enters your life and you need to love someone. It is a time when the flame of love burns inside you, when you need to love someone even though it is forbidden, when you want to steal moments together because you love each other. You share a love that has no boundaries and you do not care about the world, nor about what people have to say. You just love! It is a time when you wait for someone to come and meet you secretly. She did not have that life. She missed all of that.

The next phase in one’s life is when you go to university. It is that time when you fall in love with the real world. It’s an unforgettable part of our lives. She did not have that either. She also missed that.

All that time she had to take care of children, all six of us. When she became a mature woman, when she was ready to understand her sex life at around 35 years of age, she lost her husband. She became a widow. To this day, she hasn’t had a sex life. When she had a husband, she spent her time looking after her babies and when she finally had time, she lost her husband.

Owing to social issues, we could not get her married. She requested of me many times to get her married but I could not do so because of societal pressures and the stigmas attached to them. Now, all her children are married. They have families, but she has no one. She seeks refuge with each of her children’s families, one by one. She is unable to stay with anyone. She is all alone now. Even her property has been snatched away by others. She does not have a place to call her own.

Due to her early marriage and then having spent several years taking care of her children, she had hardly any time for education. Thus, she remained uneducated and ill equipped to fight for her rights and property. I do not blame my father. He was a nice person. He loved her a lot and they made a good couple. They had a 15-year age difference.

My mother could never get a career. I tried to get her to take up a job a couple of times but she was unable to do so. When someone has been a homemaker their entire life and hasn’t worked outside the home for more than seven years, then it’s possible that they’d never be able to return to work. If one asks what my mother got from her life on Earth, the answer would be ‘Nothing’.

God bless that she was not born into a ’traditional Hindu’ family because if she had been, she may have been burnt along with my father when he died. But perhaps that would have been the better fate!

Initially, my mother was a slave to the decisions of her father, then to the life provided by her husband, and finally to the choices of her children. She had no choice in matters, no freedom. She was not able to stand up for her rights as she was uneducated and probably knew no other way of life, other than what the society had to offer. The men around her dictated the life she should lead and how she should lead it. Even though she was the ‘Lady of the House’, she was nothing short of being a hired slave. A slave to do the bidding of the men in her life.

Lifetime in slavery

There is nothing worse in this world than loving a man who is a bad partner — a man who abuses a woman, who treats a woman as if she is his property and who hurts her. There is no love there. This kind of man is an enemy of a woman. A husband/friend/partner who does not love will slowly make life hell for a woman and eventually make the woman his slave for the rest of her life. A man of this nature will not want a woman to have a job, to have her own friends, and to be her own person, to be independent of him.

Slowly but surely, a man like this will kill a woman’s inner strength and dominate her. A man who loves a woman will want her to be her own person, to have a job, and to develop as a human being. A man who loves a woman only if she agrees to all his whims and fancies and does as she is told is a man who does not love.

Many men out there are of precisely this nature. This is no secret. These men want females just for sex, to be the objects of their desire and to be their house slaves. Sex, or having a house sex slave, is very important to these men. This type of man does not love the human being — they just love sex. It is important not to confuse the two. This type of man will give the woman many gifts, take her out, and woo her in many ways, but their goal is to use her for sex alone and make her a slave. After the sex is over, these men become cold. What happens if a woman refuses to have sex with such a man? He will hurt her. If the woman refuses to have sex, then sometimes the man may even kill her, or he may go to a prostitute, or choose to make another woman his sex slave and keep her as his mistress. There was a recent case where a young girl had acid thrown on her face and who was permanently scarred because she refused to have sex with her boyfriend.

Any woman who is in a relationship and who has a partner who doesn’t really love her, or if she thinks that he may be just be using her for sex, then it is important for such a woman to break up with that person and to get as far away as possible from him. She needs to protect herself. A man who does not love a woman simply for being herself and who uses her for the sole purpose of sex will slowly but surely take all the sunshine out of her life.

A man may marry and have a family. He may do this to show society that he is capable of having a nice wife and family. He may consider it as social prestige. In public, things may seem happy, but in private, things may be quite different. He may not treat his wife fairly or may consider her to be just a ‘trophy’ wife. This kind of man only loves himself and no one else. The reason he has a wife and children is to show society that he was able to conquer a woman. This man may think he is great, but he is in fact a very small and insignificant man and barely a man at that.

Domestic animal

My father once took me to an entrance examination for Grade 3 at Khulna Zila High School. At that time, we had to write English essays on various subjects like jute, cows, and the Nobel Peace Prize. In our school, they taught us that jute is the golden fiber of Bangladesh. I was a student of St. Petersburg State Technology Institute in Russia when I first came to England, in1985. I recognized that, in England, they taught English children that jute is a colonial product and not the golden fiber of England, also that Alfred Bernhard, the founder of the Nobel Peace Prize, was a good person. But in St. Petersburg, where I studied for my Masters, I came to know that Bernhard’s father took asylum in this city from Sweden, that he was from a beggar family, and that he was a weapons dealer and manufacturer. Bernhard was a Merchant of Killers. He also had a factory to produce weapons in St. Petersburg. This is not a secret, yet it was never mentioned in England’s public education system. I saw this as a travesty and a form of corruption. At the time, we had to write the cow essay. So, we wrote that the cow is a domestic animal. At exam time, there was a cow in the Khulna Zila School playground. That cow was eating grass. For maybe more than half an hour, I wrote and wrote. Very few students were accepted into that school at the time, but I was one of the lucky few.

I went to Dhaka for admission into the Dhanmondhi Government High School, getting a transfer from Khulna Zila School. This was due to my father’s job transfer from Khulna to Dhaka.

I remember that my English teacher from Khulna Zila School always used to carry a thin, bandy stick in his hand. One day, he pulled me up to the bench. It’s important to know that the benches had two stages – on the first stage you sat down and on the second stage you kept your school books. He pulled me to the