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Mother Before “Time”: Pregnancy, Sexuality, and Oppression in Taslima Nasrin’s Getting Even

Motherhood, fertility, and sterility are some of the primary material conditions that significantly contribute to women’s embodied experiences in the Indian subcontinent. The socioeconomic and cultural implications of these conditions, although influential, are not always commensurate with a woman’s individualized perception or experience as either forms of enrichment, liberation, and fulfillment or bondage, oppression, and gendered violence. Psycho-sexual and emotional wellbeing of a woman is determined by her ability to bridge or overcome the gap between the “public, social knowledge and private and personal lived experiences” about being and not being a mother (Miller 8). The cultural narrative surrounding motherhood and fertility of women in countries like India, Bangladesh, and Pakistan highlights “an embodied experience, culturally located feelings of responsibility ... [with a] profound implication for a woman’s sense of self” (Miller 14). Although in these nations motherhood —or fertility—is socially constructed as a positive attribute and an assurance of fulfillment as a woman, there lies a subtext underneath, what Tina Miller has appropriately called, the authoritative knowledge about sterility and fertility of women. Miller defines “authoritative knowledge” as “socially sanctioned” and “culturally marked ... recognizable and accepted practices that are continually reinforced, and through their practice given legitimacy” (29). This knowledge determines a woman’s acceptance as a mother or rejection for not being able to conceive according to sociocultural and familial expectations. But the subtext shows that Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi women’s oppression in the context of fertility, sterility, and pregnancy are not simply limited to bearing and not bearing offspring or bearing offspring of desirable sex. The subtext constitutes of context-specific deviations from and conformity to the authoritative knowledge for the sake of male convenience. Ironically enough, in spite of the enculturation of motherhood and fecundity as a glory, in these nations, they can give way to occasions for the violations of women’s reproductive rights, bodily integrity, and