WOMEN AS SECOND SEX: INTERPRETING TASLIMA NASRIN'S POETRIES FROM FEMINISM AND POSTCOLONIAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

In the last three decades, innumerable literary corpus has been published on Bangladeshi writer Taslima Nasrin (25 August 1962-). These narratives mainly exhibit the subaltern, marginalization, suppression, oppression and desubjectivization of non-existent women in the male-dominated Bangladeshi society which allows no autonomy, status, agency as well as identity of females. As far as the research works conducted on Taslima Nasrin are concerned, we can notice that her novels, interviews and religious stance have been explored to a great extent but her poems lack in-depth analysis. I study her sixteen poems critically, applying feminist and postcolonial theories. In this regard, I have used Bengali writer Taslima Nasrin’s poems from her book All About Women (2005) in order to study how women of Bangladesh are suffering under patriarchy. How her poems elucidate the concepts of colonizer, colonized, Eurocentrism, subaltern, and othering as the colonizer (men) control on women who act as the second subsidiary gender is researched in this article in succinct details. Thus, the first chapter begins with the different approaches towards Nasrin’s writings followed by the second one which studies Feminism and Postcolonialism as Theoretical Framework on whose light her poems are analyzed in the next section and the concluding section focuses on the women as other dehumanized abused peripheral sections of South Asian country Bangladesh.