I, Whore; I, Birangona

Would it be too grotesque if I tell you

My crumbly, cracked insides turn into

Mushy, gooey mud

Yearning to ooze out of me

Through my scars

And cover my shriveled frame in its brown earthiness

Every time I imagine you caressing my ravaged body?

Would it be too strange if I tell you

After I killed that unwanted, half-formed haramzada²

I thought of myself

As the ephemeral, feathery, white kaash-phool³

Masquerading as a pretty thing,

By the river bank, blowing in the Sharat⁴ breeze

Dying, decaying, withering away in truth

And yet I dreamt of your gentle hand picking me up

Making me want to live on, as though in a painting?

Would it be too much to ask you

To forgive me for the carnal sin I did not commit?

Unwanted; no one to turn to

The Father⁵ is gone too

I remember your empty, lovely promises

On days my soul feels too bland, too bleak.

Would you hear me out if I tell you

I am tired of this stuffy room

Not too different from the Pak bunker⁶ that had me trapped

A room that smells like cheap powder and sex

I am tired of being served as a meat dish

To be eaten, to be ravished

Just so I can eat fistfuls of rice till I die

And kill my two titles with me

Whore, Barangona⁷

1 Birangona means war heroine, and is the title awarded by the Government of Bangladesh to women raped during the Bangladesh Liberation War, 1971. It is estimated that 200,000 to 400,000 women were raped by the Pakistani army and their local collaborators. Despite the honorable title given to the victims in an attempt to make them socially acceptable to the masses, most of these women were turned away by their families and ostracised by society. As a result, some of them turned to prostitution.
2 an illegitimate child.
3 "kans grass", which is native to the eastern part of the Indian Subcontinent.
4 one of the 6 seasons of Bangladesh
5 Father of the Nation, Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. He was assassinated in 1975. Birangonas were asked
to consider him to be their father, since their own families had shunned them.
6 Pakistani bunker; girls and women were abducted and confined in Pakistani military barracks where they were
raped repeatedly.
7 A distortion of the original "Birangona", "Barangona" has come to mean prostitute.

Noora Shamsi Bahar is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and Modern Languages, North South University, and a published researcher and translator. The poem was first published in University of Lucknow's literary journal Rhetorica.