Tahmima Anam Research Articles

The Good Muslim as a Quest for Jus Post Bellum in a Nation in Transition

This paper explores the search for justice after the war in Tahmima Anam’s novel, The Good Muslim. The novel deals with the aftermath of ‘the Liberation War of Bangladesh’ in the 1970s and early 80s, when the country was gravely suffering from famine, consecutive murders of their prominent leaders, political upheavals, natural disasters, and paralyzed democratic norms in the hands of a Dictator Hussein Muhammad Ershad. In such a context, Maya Haque, the protagonist of the novel, and an erstwhile freedom fighter continues writing and fighting for modern education, justice for the rape victims of the war, and democracy in the country. The study analyzes narrative data from the novel to see how the female characters struggle for justice after the war. For this purpose, it uses Larry May’s insights on ‘jus post bellum’. May has proposed six criteria for post-war justice, including ‘reconciliation’ and ‘rebuilding’, to maintain lasting peace in a post-war society. The novel entails these conditions and brings transitional justice to the fore of discourse through the literary creation. The paper claims that the protagonist is not only raising her voice for certain characters in the novel, rather she is constantly contributing to the broader issue of jus post bellum, which has been the most important, yet the most ‘neglected’ topic in just war theories. The article concludes with the idea that a fictitious work like The Good Muslim can be a good voice for the voiceless and a loud and clear advocacy for justice after the war. It can contribute to maintaining law and order and build up lasting peace preventing further violence in a postwar society.

Decoding Pacifism in Contemporary Diaspora Literature: The Anti-War Message in the Novels of Khaled Hosseini and Tahmima Anam

In a world where war and destruction are passions, it is truly important to realize that violation is not the ultimate solution to any problem. The true answer lies in resorting to the understanding of Pacifism. Inspired by Jane Addams as a key proponent in criticizing the war, the researchers use Daniel Diederich Farmer’s approach to show how the theory of Pacifism posits that human interactions should be governed by peaceful means rather than resorting to violence or aggression. It advocates the use of arbitration, surrender or migration as methods to resolve wars. In this paper, the researchers use the qualitative method by comparing the novels of two diasporic authors, Khaled Hosseini and Tahmima Anam, which focus on war's consequences on individuals who are displaced from their homeland. The researchers also compare authors' portrayal of the relationship between war and diaspora in their literary works. Additionally, the article emphasizes the importance of the Pacifism theory by examining examples of marginalized characters in Hosseini and Anam's novels who experience displacement. The result of the study reveals that the theory of Pacifism, which is present in the novels of the select authors, underscores the value of seeking peace and migration as practical solutions.

Exploring the Bangladesh Liberation War: A Study of Tahmima Anam's Select Novels

This paper attempts to enunciate the Liberation War of Bangladesh, its history, and the occurrence of the events that led to the War as present Bangladesh is essentially the outcome of the sacrifice, loss, and bloodshed of millions of people involved in the war of 1971. It marked the creation of two nations separating East Pakistan from West Pakistan and forming a new nation called Bangladesh on 16th December 1971. The East Pakistanis wanted to preserve their culture, ethnicity, and identity as Bengali Muslims which was not possible in United Pakistan and this led to the Liberation War of Bangladesh. The 1971 war has a great impact on the creation of an independent identity for the Bangladeshi people. The stance for an independent national identity created the zeal to fight for their rights and self-recognition. The effects of war have always been engraved on the minds of the survivors as it is engulfed with human suffering, emotions, and violence. The paper will explore the Liberation War of Bangladesh, the struggle, pain, and hardship portrayed through the characters in Tahmima Anam’s select novels namely A Golden Age and The Good Muslim.

War Trauma in Second Generation: Suffering of Zaid from The Good Muslim

This study investigates the long-lasting effects of war trauma over multiple generations, focusing on the analysis of Tahmima Anam’s novel The Good Muslim. The narrative centres around the suffering experienced by Sohail, a Bangladeshi revolutionary combatant dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder, guilt, and religious extremism in the aftermath of the 1971 conflict. Additionally, it explores the unintended consequences of his little son Zaid, who becomes a victim of the second generation without his knowledge.
 The paper examines the transformation of Sohail from a carefree young person to a disturbed individual who strongly adheres to fundamentalist Islam. This highlights the profound psychological scars caused by the brutalities experienced during the conflict—his adherence to rigorous religious practices and emotional detachment from family showcase hallmark PTSD symptoms. Nevertheless, Sohail’s trauma has profound repercussions for Zaid, a six-year-old who is deprived of parental affection and normal childhood freedoms due to his father’s rigid rules. Zaid experiences social isolation and receives cruel treatment in a religious school, leading to episodes of violent outbursts, a tendency to steal, and repetitive recitations that indicate a possible anxiety problem.
 Through the lens of psychoanalytic theory on childhood trauma, the paper argues that Zaid represents the ‘silent victims’ of war - a second generation forced to inherit the suffering borne of their parents’ anguish. This comprehensive depiction highlights the broader event and serves as a sombre reminder of the human toll of violence. Achieving reconciliation requires addressing invisible wounds that perpetuate across generations.

The poetics of identity making: precarity and agency in Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim

ABSTRACT Bangladesh experienced a massive surge in humanitarian crises after the 1971 Liberation War due to the systematic use of violence at both public and private spheres. Fictional accounts of the post-conflict period depict women as subjected to institutionalised sexism and aggravated physical and mental violence. Critical studies on such narratives often reiterate a stereotypical and essentialising discourse surrounding women’s identity, characterising them as helpless and passive victims of discrimination and exploitation. Drawing upon Judith Butler’s notions of precarity and agency, we argue that the Bangladeshi-born British writer Tahmima Anam’s The Good Muslim transcends victimhood narratives by creating a more nuanced image of woman as vulnerable victims and resisting subjects at the same time. The novel is preoccupied with notions of vulnerability, violence, religious zealotry, and family estrangement. The findings reveal that the precariousness of women in the post-war period is caused and aggravated by violence and oppression perpetrated at political, social, and religious spheres. Female characters like Maya and Piya are presented as empowered agents of transformation when it comes to vulnerable situations that render them as insignificant and precarious. The study concludes that the novel contests and alters the stereotypical representations of women embedded in normalising and hegemonic discourses.

Tahmima’s Utopia in The Startup Wife: The Existential Feminism in a Male Tech World

Tahmima Anam's newest novel, The Startup Wife (2021), represents a debacle of a female utopia. Since the modern world humans live in nowadays is science-oriented and focused on technology, the novel deals with the significance of courtship and female entrepreneurship. Tahmima uses Asha Ray as the main female character in the novel. By analyzing certain instances from the novel that depict the entire journey of Asha Ray as a female scientist, the paper primarily focuses on the role of women in science. This young woman, with her natural programming abilities and self-assurance, comes up with an algorithm for a brand-new social media company that has the potential to transform an entire society for the better. It is critical to realize that before determining one's essence by existentialism, one must acknowledge his existence. The paper concludes that with her feminist fervor, Asha Ray is forced to recognize the importance of upholding what she views as hers. Having Asha Ray as a female in a male-dominated industry turns her into a subsided woman. The suffering of women in the startup world to be heard is at the heart of Asha's work. Women in a technologically male-dominated world can use Tahmima Anam's The Startup Wife as an example to examine existential feminism, which this paper aims to demonstrate and deliver to readers.

Precarious Lives and Resisting Women: A Butlerian Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Precarious Lives and Resisting Women: A Butlerian Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Resilient women: transnational homes and identities in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

ABSTRACT Foregrounding theoretical expositions of the home and identity, this paper examines historical novel by Bangladeshi author Tahmima Anam entitled A Golden Age (2007), which explores gendered roles within familial separation during political unrest. Using a transnational lens, it addresses shifting meanings of home and identity amidst nation-fragmentation during the politically fractious period of Bangladesh liberation war. Deploying a historico-literary imagination, the novel's emphasis on women's intimate struggles to keep family intact offer insights into meanings of home in terms of mother–child ties and geopolitical tensions that shape new borders within domestic and national spaces. As a point of departure, Kuah-Pearce's concept of transnational identities is applied to make sense of private and communal selves of female characters whose articulations of (un)homely affiliations in times of transnational crises are a means to redefine their resilience, and critique the practices of discrimination and segregation that disrupt the space of the home.

MESTIZA AS SPEAKING SUBALTERN IN TAHMIMA ANAM’S A GOLDEN AGE IN NEW HISTORICIST PERSPECTIVE

By drawing a nexus between Gloria Anzaldua’s notion of mestiza consciousness and Gayatri Spivak’s conceptualization of speaking subaltern, this article discusses that how the protagonist, Rehana Haque in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age raises her voice, struggles for survival and achieves mestiza consciousness in the backdrop of 1971 war and therefore can be named as speaking subaltern in new historicist perspective. Haque is resilient, brave and courageous who not only challenges the societal norms but also sets a precedent for oppressed and marginalized women. She relishes a hope despite hardships to get a country of their own; irrespective of their religion, language and multiple culture. Anam in A Golden Age has brought into limelight the struggle of resilient female figure and the hurdles she faces while achieving mestiza consciousness. The study is qualitative and hence implies concept of Mestiza Consciousness and Subaltern stance. Key Words: Mestiza Consciousness, Speaking Subaltern, 1971 War, New Historicism

Off-Shore Aesthetics and Waste in the Ship-Breaking Literature of Bangladesh

Ship-breaking is a flourishing industry in Bangladesh where thousands of decommissioned ocean-going vessels from developed nations such as the USA, Britain, and France are broken down at relatively cheap prices. This causes marine pollution, poses serious challenges to coastal management, and risks the lives of shipbreaking laborers. In the last decade, literary and cultural texts have responded to the environmental crisis of waste generation in the ship-breaking industry of Bangladesh. I read two literary texts, namely Tahmima Anam’s novel The Bones of Grace (2016) and Cameron Conaway’s poetry collection Chittagong (2014) to show how literary texts adapt their formal properties to communicate the dialectic of recycling and disposability of shipbreaking in language. I coin the term “off-shore aesthetics” to signal a set of narrative, poetic and visual practices in the literature on ship-breaking in Bangladesh that makes the site visible and illustrates the material impact of waste on the laborers. This reading of ship-breaking offers “off-shore aesthetics” as a model of literary criticism that captures the fragmentary nature of the off-shore as a place while providing an opportunity to reflect on the function of shipbreaking labor in global capitalism through form and poetics.

Toxic grace? Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace and the pollution trade

ABSTRACT This article explores how Tahmima Anam’s 2016 novel The Bones of Grace responds to the notion of development as understood with reference to the transfer of pollution from rich to poor countries in an age of neo-liberal globalization. It argues that by bringing together the past experiences of environmental subalterns, their deplorable present, and macabre future, Anam constructs temporal relationality that resists the tendency of the western discourse on the pollution trade to naturalize the cumulative economic effects of neocolonial power in developing countries. While this discourse creates a singular reality around economic growth by carefully concealing the concomitant risks, Anam, by invoking different political, cultural, historical, and ecological associations, invests each aspect of reality with multiple meanings. She thus creates plural and complex realities around inequity, injustice, and poverty resulting from the pollution trade and enables the reader to see beyond mere economic growth brought about by such trade.

Breaking Gender Stereotypes in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

Breaking Gender Stereotypes in Tahmima Anam's A Golden Age

Moulding Lives, Shaping Destinies: Motherhood and Nation in Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam

Female narratives hold an important place in literature as it tells stories from women’s perspectives, spatially and temporally. In Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, the female characters play a significant role in determining the outcome of the story as their personal narratives run parallel to the history of Oman and Bangladesh in the 1970s, respectively. The paper examines the intersectionality of gendered narratives through the lens of motherhood and individual lives within a nation in both texts with the aim of uncovering its manifestation in both Omani and Bangladeshi societies. The methodology adopts the theory of parenting as a lens to examine the textual depiction of mothering within the two socio-cultural contexts of Oman and Bangladesh with a specific focus on Diana Baumrind’s categorisation of parenting styles. The findings suggest that the mothering styles portrayed in the two novels, namely authoritarian and permissive, are present in two distinct yet overlapping manners: one, within mother-daughter relationships grounded in cultural engagement, and two, through participation in nationhood. In addition, mothers in Celestial Bodies serve as witnesses to the cultural changes in Oman, creating intra-gender generational conflicts. In contrast, the mother figure in A Golden Age functions as the backbone of the youth’s participation in Bangladeshi liberation. Many of the choices made by the mothers in the two novels implicate the lives of the youth, society, and consequently the nation-states. The implication of this comparative reading shows that the mothering roles in women’s fiction are rich and multi-faceted as they partake in the pursuit of nationhood within and without the family institution.

Exploring Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Literature: A Study of 'A Golden Age' by Tahmima Anam

Exploring Cultural Identity in Postcolonial Literature: A Study of 'A Golden Age' by Tahmima Anam

Stories of Mothering in Selected Muslim Female Narratives

Stories written by women writers hold an instrumental position in literature as they highlight the female perspectives and worldview, spatially and temporally. In Celestial Bodies by Jokha Alharthi and A Golden Age by Tahmima Anam, the female personal narratives include important details concerning the history of Oman and Bangladesh in the 1970s, respectively. This comparative study seeks to reveal images of motherhood in both novels and uncover the nature of the representation of mothers in Omani and Bangladeshi societies. The methodology adopts intersectionality as a lens to examine the images of mothering within the two socio-cultural contexts. The two novels revealed images of motherhood that are layered with complexities and tied to the culture they belong to. The narratives are also monumental as they reveal multifaceted themes of motherhood that lead to profound implications in the lives of the next generation.

Reading Tahmima Anam’s Postcolonial Fiction- A Golden Age in the Light of Fredrick Jameson’s Concept of ‘National Allegory’

Tahmima Anam’s postcolonial fiction- A Golden Age is such a novel that can be called a narrative of the liberation war of Bangladesh. Despite having good art of characterization and universal theme with global appeal, it is plausible to dissect the thought and action of the characters as well as different events of this fiction with the argument of Fredrick Jameson that all the Third-World texts are actually ‘National Allegory’. He asserted that even a text of Third-World seems to contain private feelings and emotions; the underlying meaning is different since the author’s main purpose is to demonstrate the collective state of a nation where individual part matters less. That A Golden Age is a ‘National Allegory’ is the prime concern of this article in which it will be shown how Anam, a daughter of a freedom fighter, has portrayed her characters mainly to articulate the saga of 1971 in Bangladesh (the then East Pakistan).

Writing Feminist Hermeneutics through Liminality: A Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Writing Feminist Hermeneutics through Liminality: A Reading of Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Contribution of Women in the Formation of Bangladesh: A Critical Appraisal on Tahmima Anam's novels A Golden Age and The Good Muslim

Contribution of Women in the Formation of Bangladesh: A Critical Appraisal on Tahmima Anam's novels A Golden Age and The Good Muslim

Formation of Identity through the Presentation of Motherhood in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

Tahmima Anam is the first Bangladeshi novelist in English who draws international attention to the Liberation war of 1971 of Bangladesh through the publication of her first novel A Golden Age in 2007. The Liberation war is replete with the incident of genocide, rape, inhuman torture, abductions etc. The war has instilled a kind of horror into the psyche of Bangladeshi people. During the war the Muslim majority of people of East Pakistan are in an acute identity crisis. Pakistan was formed on the basis of religion Islam. But even religion cannot unite the two wings of Pakistan. Therefore people are in an identity dilemma between religion and nationalism. They are also in a fix as to whom to support- East or West Pakistan. Anam captures this particular complexity in her novel through the protagonist Rehana Haque. In this paper, I will bring forth the complexity of identity formation through the depiction of motherhood of Rehana Haque from feministic standpoint.

Deixis used in the novel entitled the good muslim by tahmima anam

This research investigated Deixis used in the novel entitled The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam.This study was conducted to find out; (1) types of deixis contained in utterances of the novel entitled the Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam, (2) types of deixis were used most in the Novel entitled The Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam. Therefore, it gived significant to the author herself, the learners, other researchers and english teachers. The writer used levinson’s theory in analyzing the data. The methodology of this research was qualitative descriptive study. The technique used to collect the data was documentation. The data was taken from 1.972 utterances of the novel entitled the Good Muslim by Tahmima Anam. From the data have been analyzed, it was found that there were five types of deixis, they were person deixis occured 1.723 times (87.4%), place deixis occured 53 times (2.7%), time deixis occured 68 times (3.4%), discourse deixis occured 83 times (4.2 %), person deixis occured 45 times (2.3 %). The most commonly used types of deixis was person deixis occuring 1.723 times (87.4%).