Women around the world are out in so many different positions; some are empowered, some are beaten when they speak out of line, and others are just seen as men’s property or invisible if not married. Bangladesh is one of those places where women are more like a man’s property instead of being a man’s “better half”. Tarifa Faizullah went and told the story of how women were affected by the Liberation War in Bangladesh. But to better understand the cultural and historical significance of the Tarifia Faizullah’s poem “Interview with a Birangona” you have to understand the religion and language in that region and how that affected the women in the Liberation War.  

 Throughout “Interview with a Birangona” you see a common theme of another language besides English being spoken. The language that you see is Hindi, it is used multiple times and the concept of language is also brought up in the poem. This is because the Liberation War was a war of differences. It was a war between East and West Pakistan; now known as Bangladesh and Pakistan, the war was over a difference in language, religion, and culture in general. Some of the differences in language were because of the religions being practiced as people who practiced Hinduism spoke Hindi as seen in the poem. The most common Hindi word spoken was “Kutta” or dog. This is significant because most likely the men raping them were not practicing Hinduism, instead the spoke in Hindi because they wanted the girls to understand. As the men were raping and torturing the girls and women they would call them dogs, lowering them below human, they were just dogs. They were dogs and before their gods as they were told they were dogs in their religious language. Hindi was not the native language East Pakistani people because Bangla was and just like the Hindu religion was overlooked and not respected, Bangla was too. You see this in the poem as one of the girls says that as she passed a banner she read the words “Free Our Language”. The language she was speaking of here was Bangla. Later on the word Bangla was actually used when they said “badgirl, goodgirl, littlebeauty—in Bangla there are words for every kind of woman but a raped one” (Faizullah) What you have to understand here is she knew her language, she knew also how what was happening to her would permanently affect her. Her own language didn’t have a name for what she is now, she was not good, she was not beautiful, she was raped and that was something her language like her people wanted to recognize. You have to understand the language in this region to understand the poem because without knowing the language history, 

“The process of combining political issues with moral ones began when the founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, tried to impose the language of less than 7% people of the country over the majority only because according to West Pakistan leaders, the Urdu dialect was the language of Islam as it had an alphabet similar to the Arabic language” (Hossain) 

and you wouldn’t understand that the language that the East Pakistanis spoke was one of the reasons these women were getting tortured. The language was one of the pieces of culture that the East Pakistanis refused to give up, they wanted to speak whatever language they wanted, they didn’t want to be forced to speak the langue only 7% of the people spoke. Language is an element that connects people and language in this case was something to fight for, something to fight about, and also a way for the West Pakistanis to hunt out who was friend and who was foe. 

Like language, Religion was something worth fighting over and in the poem you see traces of religion talked about and religion is what angered the men in this poem more than anything else. The best example of this in the poem is “—are you Muslim or Bengali, they asked again & again. Both, I said, both—then rocks were broken along my spine, my hair a black fist in their hands, pulled down into the river again and again” (Faizullah) In this region it was one or the other to the West Pakistanis but the only problem with that was that in East Pakistan you really could be both. In East Pakistan you knew both the Muslim and the Hindu culture it was not one or the other because both made up the region, you knew of both religions and you knew of the languages and the cultures that went along with them. “Bengali Muslims were also considered to be ‘Hinduized’, ‘half Muslims’ and ‘impure’” (Mookhrjee) Like it is stated this co combining of religions was seen as impure to the West because it was not them and it was not what they wanted. These women were asked whether or not they were Muslim because the West wanted to know if they were like them or different and by answering with the word “both” she became very different from them, so different they were angered because she was already impure to them. What is interesting about that mindset in now a days Bangladesh is that to them these women were not impure, they were just part of the people but because the West saw them as impure they actually unpurified them by raping them and then their fellow Bangladesh people saw the women as impure too. You see in other scenarios in the poem where the women proved to be also Muslim but still tortured because they were from East Pakistan “I ask for Allah’s forgiveness” (Faizullah) Allah’s forgiveness not one of the Hindu gods but Allah’s, she herself was a Muslim yet she was seen as a tarnished Muslim to them. But the most important thing to realize about how the religion in this region is important to this poem is how religion ruined these women. Men raped and tortured women and girls because they weren’t pure Muslims and these women were named Birangonas or war Heroines yet because of religion these women were tortured again but this time not by West Pakistan but by the East. The people of Bangladesh outcast these women because they were now dirty, unclean, unworthy, and impure just like how West Pakistani soldiers saw them, the problem is that they were made that way because they were sticking up for their people the people who were now letting them down. Religion didn’t just add Allah into a line in a poem but in this poem religion becomes the center if you look close enough. Religion changed every Birangonas life twice and if you don’t understand that you don’t understand the beginning of the poem where the women where being raped because you don’t understand why. Without religion you don’t understand the end of the poem where women and children born of those women are seen as nothing but dirty because you don’t understand how someone can be called a hero yet trusted like dirt. 

All in all Tarfia Faizullah’s poem shows you how the women of the Liberation War were tortured and raped and how the practices of language and religion help you understand why that even happened and why heroes aren’t always treated as such. The language was a hard fought battle and the religion was the battle that kept on hurting people even after the war and even after freedom came. History and culture are different in every place and every time so to catch a glimpse of why and how something happened is incredible even when the actual story is sad and unacceptable. Faizullah allowed readers to feel for the women and hurt for them then research allows for the reader to understand the women, how their culture changed their history and everyone’s.  
