Some Reflections About Bengali Culture and Traditions from the Feminist Perspective, Part II

An interview by Wiola Rebecka, PhD with Shumu Haque, feminist, activist, poet, and a voracious reader

Wiola Rebecka: Dear Shumu you were already sharing publicly your own traumatic childhood experiences; do you feel comfortable enough to talk about that?

Shumu Haque: I was sexually abused by a cousin’s husband from the time I was 5 years’ old until I was 11 years’ old. The abuse went for years in front of everybody’s eyes. My Mom eventually caught him red-handed one afternoon as I was asleep, threw him out of the house, only to invite him back a few years later. A son-in law is to be treated with so much love and care and should be cherished no matter what hell he put my cousin through!

My mom never stood by my side, in fact she always blamed me for provoking him and would taunt me for years that my behavior and ways of dressing is improper and its no accident that men would want to try to do nasty things to me!

After studying the subject obsessively, I have come to suspect that my mom has had experiences of abuse herself, and yet no matter how much I tried to justify her behaviors to my teenage self, the brutality and the insensitivity of it was overwhelming. I had tried killing myself for the first time when I was 8 years old, and then when I was 14 years old, and finally, when I was 27 years old again. Although third time the trigger wasn’t directly the abuse, deep inside, its that abuse that left its marks and has made me who I am today.

Why you are a feminist? How do you understand this description and when you decide to start support other women as a feminist?

I became a feminist out of necessity.

For me, anyone who believes in creating a world where all human beings will be free to reach their full potentials and works towards that goal is a feminist.

Growing up, I saw a lot of abuse in my family. My mother was being abused by my grandmother and my father and she was in turn abusing me. So, from the time I was 12, I had started to fight. I fought against my father and my grandmother for my mother, and I fought against all three of them for myself, because if I didn’t, there was no one else who would. It started with something as basic as stopping my mom from strangling me (it was a common occurrence back in those days) because so and so had said something nasty to my mom about me and ended with me fighting for and achieving something extra-ordinary like wanting to study Journalism and getting my way.

Tell us what we can do to support South Asian women and do you think that it is important to do it?

South Asian women in North America has two challenges, first, the barrier of language, and secondly, difficulty accessing the available resources.

A lot of the South Asian women do not speak English that well or are not given the opportunity to learn the language by their husbands and in-laws because language is power. For those women, you need to ensure that your resources are available in the major South Asian Languages. So that when a woman finally gathers up the courage to seek help, she does not get disheartened because of her lack of understanding of the language. If you need any assistance in translating the materials in Bengali, I am willing to volunteer.

Secondly, it is very important to ensure that these women can access the help wherever they can visit without raising the suspicion of their families. In the past, I have met women, who were terrified to dial 911 or visit a police station because their families would find out and get even more mad at them and suffer additional consequences. Instead, you can have booths or flyers available at local libraries, community centers, temples, mosques or even grocery stores, so that these women can contact you or access the information without raising the suspicion of their families.

Part I of this interview was posted in the January 26 blog.

Shumu Haque is a self-proclaimed feminist, activist, poet, and a voracious reader who started writing from her high-school days. Born in Sri Lanka and brought up in Bangladesh, she has spent more than half of her life in Canada and calls Toronto her home. She works in the Canadian Not-for-Profit Industry. Shumu has studied Humanities and Communications at York University before prior to completing her diploma in Print and Broadcast Journalism from Humber College in Toronto. She is fluent in Bangla, English, Hindi/Urdu, a little bit of Gujarati, and has a special interest in issues pertaining to international human rights and equality. Her experience of growing up as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse and fighting to cope with it on her own without any support from those around her made her aware of the necessity to create a support system for other survivors like herself in the South Asian Communities across the globe.

It also made her understand the complexities of the trauma that comes as a result from such abuse and the obstacles that they can create for the survivors unless they receive the necessary support to help them heal and rebuild themselves as strong, independent individuals. It is from this necessity that Shumu got involved in her activism and it is also this desire to see justice done to the survivors of unjust violence that she has been focusing most of her writings around such issues. Shumu has been writing on the portal Women Chapter since 2014 and has been one of the Founding Directors of Women Chapter International. In WCI, she is in charge of the Communications.

Wiola Rebecka, PhD completed psychoanalytic training at the International Psychoanalytic Association London, and later the clinical training program at WTCI. She created and implemented the project "Rape: A History of Shame" and authored the book, Rape A History of Shame--Diary of the Survivors. Her areas of interest and expertise include complex trauma, war-rape survivors’ syndrome, and transgenerational trauma.