I’m feeling unmoored and unable to ground myself in anything Brooklyn right now, maybe because the energy of NYC feels tense. I did go to my comfort place at Prospect Park today and meditate on some Prospect Park people and also the lovely weirdness of there still being greenery in December. My mind shifted. The lake fowl were still chilling.
But mostly today I’m grounding myself in the words of Tanaïs’ upcoming book (which can be preordered!) today. I’m grounding myself in the practice of dreaming. In the dreaming words of our foremothers. In the practice of not just survival, but something beyond that, something like transcendance.
What follows is a section of In Sensorium - Notes for My People by Tanaïs.
SCIENCE FICTIONS
"For some time now, our masters have considered us akin to valuable ornaments. Our beloved jewelry, these are nothing but the badges of slavery." - Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, "Amader Abanati," "Our Downfall," 1904
As a geography student in Eden College, Ma lived in an all-women's dorm called Rokeya Hall, named after the writer Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a Bengali Muslim writer from the early part of the twentieth century who started a Muslim women's school in Kolkata, India. She believed that women should wait until age twenty to marry. She wanted Muslim women to be as educated as their Hindu and Christian counterparts. She believed that living in zenanas, the inner sanctum of a home, secluded from society, not allowed to see anyone except family members, kept these women from their intellect and hurt Muslims as a community. She rejected men’s interpretations of Islam, calling for education, jobs, and literacy among the women in her community.
“Sultana’s Dream,” her feminist utopian science fiction short story, is written in English, the fifth language she knew, after Bengali, Arabic, Farsi, and Urdu. She was born in Rangpur, Bangladesh, in 1880, to a family of landowners, zamindars. Her father forbade education, but her sister, a poet named Karimunnesa Khanam, taught her Bengali. As a young girl, Rokeya grew up observing strict purdah, the word for curtain, veil, cover — and the practice of purdah forbade women from being seen by any men outside of the family. Muslim women wore burqa in public spaces, and mostly stayed inside their homes. Only her husband — no other man — could gaze at her body, her bare face.
Rokeya wrote “Sultana’s Dream” in 1905, the year of the first Partition of Bengal, the first splitting of the Muslim-majority East from the Hindu-majority West.
The story open, One evening I was lounging in an easy chair in my bedroom and thinking lazily of the condition of Indian womanhood. I am not sure whether I dozed off or not. So begins “Sultana’s Dream.” A Bengali woman named Sultana dreams that she’s transported to Ladyland, a futurist utopia where women rule. The Queen - less royalty and more of a prime ministerial figurehead — deems that all women should be educated. The state religion is Truth and Love. The surviving population of men surrender their power and are sequestered away in zenanas, the inner quarters of the home, the same way women in India lived at the time.
In Rokeya’s story, the women of Ladyland are free to be scientists, gardeners, free of veiling and free to use their minds. They were no longer ghosts. Her work — revolutionary and ahead of its time — smashed the patramyth that women should believe in the innate superiority of men.
They were no longer ghosts.