The poem Exile appears in the Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin It expresses the emotional pain of this exiled writer and her yearning for her homeland. Exposing her innermost vulnerability and loneliness, the poet addresses her country as would a pining woman in a letter to her beloved in a distant land. Nasrin’s pain and anguish as an exile are expressed through the idiom of unrequited love in a style that does not fail to evoke the humility of one totally surrendered to the fire of longing.
Simple yet eloquent and tender in tone, the poem comprises three stanzas. The function of the first stanza is more than just phatic, as the poet initiates a direct inquiry and interrogates the homeland to find out about its well-being. Each verse poses a question; rather, each verse rephrases the same question: “Are you keeping well, my country?” The repetition of “my country” in each line suggests a sentiment of closeness and belonging that the poet feels toward her country and indicates a bond that has obviously not been severed or weakened by events, distance, and time. The homeland comes across as an idée fixe that the poet cannot shake off.
In the second stanza, the poet informs the homeland that her heart yearns for it and asks whether this yearning is mutual. The message carries a sense of urgency, with the poet informing the homeland that her life is running out in the process of thinking and dreaming about the homeland. Once again, the poet does not relinquish her gentle but persistent questioning and invites a response from the homeland, her blank understated queries opening a space of ambiguity, hinting at a tacit sense of betrayal:
“My life is running out thinking of you / and yours? /
I die dreaming of you? / And you?”
The third stanza develops a negative romantic tonality that deploys the imagery of shattered and silenced womanhood. The poet communicates to the homeland the devastated state to which she has been reduced in the language of a discarded (female) lover and describes the symptoms of her inner wounds and psychological damage:
“I hide my wounds in secret / my sorrows / my tears /
hold back in secret / my unruly hair / flowers, sighs.”
The final verses evoke the magnanimity of the female in the role of unconditional lover and eternal well-wisher when the poet concludes by blessing her country despite her own misery:
“I am not well / you keep well, my beloved country.”
Though the poem is an expression of the personal anguish of the poet as an exile, it may also be read as a muted and symbolic testimony to the violence and abuses against women that are the explicit subject of so many of her other poems. From a feminist perspective, the symbolic power of this poem is better appreciated when read in conjunction with poems such as Happy Marriage, Noorjahan, The Game in Reverse, Garment Girls, At the Back of Progress, and Edul Wara (Official Home Page), which most readers are likely to find shocking and disturbing for their depiction of forms of unmitigated female victimization involving acts of oppression, violence, and terror.
For a reading concerned more with issues of uprootedness, Exile may be read in conjunction with The Exile’s Poem (Love Poems), in which the poet elaborates a discourse on food, grief, and nostalgia and attempts (seated in her “air-conditioned room in Scandinavia”) to recuperate her native land through a primordial act of eating rice and fish curry by hand.
Bibliography
Nasrin, Taslima. Love Poems of Taslima Nasrin. Translated by Ashim Chowdhury. New Delhi: Rupa, 2005.
———. Nasrin / Nasreen, Taslima. Official Home Page. Available online. URL: http://taslimanasrin.com/. Downloaded on April 28, 2025.
Categories: British Literature, Literature
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