i want my body back

I feel out of control of my body here. Sickness tears at your insides, searing pain in your gut, pollution clogging your pores and your lungs and your nose, the grime of dust and diesel like an oily layer of sweat. It stings your eyes, as do the pungent almost-wrongness of scents, be it spices or sickly-sweet decay of litter. You know nothing of what is being put in your body; even when you are ill and need medicine, the names are written in a foreign alphabet, housed in unmarked sachets that bear no resemblance to their chemical counterparts in western allopathic medicine. The food is strange and tastes like the jungles and marketplaces and stalls on the roadside, everything mashed or boiled and spiced so that it is unrecognizable from its original form. You don’t know what it is or where it came from, or whether it is safe. Even water, the most translucent of liquids, has microscopic lethal dangers hidden in its wetness. Safety and peace are simply unwelcome in this region of the world—most especially, if you are a woman. The stares of men brutally rip off your clothing (already so ensconcing that their folds preclude any suggestion of curvature or anatomy) with their eyes…I have never seen such hungry stares in my entire life. And it is not a gentle lust. I have no idea what has been done to my body in their imaginations.
This is the worst part of it. When they actually do grab at you with their sweaty-palmed small and scarred hands, the fingernails yellowed and dirty, towards coveted white and vulnerable skin. This happened to me on the bus to Dhaka; I fell asleep with my leg up on the seat, and he grabbed me through the window. At the national monument of all places, a man ejaculated when he saw that I had noticed him masturbating to me. Yesterday, a rickshaw driver snuck behind the alleyway of the university, and was accosted there; he was frantically pulling at himself, watching the girls go into the dining hall. What is sexual about students laughing with their friends, coming from class? My favorite of the cleaning staff, and spunky and stunningly beautiful girl of fourteen or fifteen (she doesn’t know her own age) was gang-raped by four men three days ago. She was walking to work, and has now lost her job because she was afraid to walk home that day, and asked if she could spend the night in the university…obviously, against protocol, and she is from the slums and doesn’t ‘deserve’ accommodation. This university stands for the protection and empowerment of women—regardless of ethnicity, socio-economic status, or familial background—and yet this child was denied shelter. And she has denied that it occurred, because in this culture, it is the woman’s fault no matter what. She cannot face the shame it would bring to her family, and it would dash any chance of marriage she has. An unmarried woman is viewed the same as a prostitute, and it is likely she would end up that way; so one act of sexual violence results in enslaving her to a lifetime of compulsory sex. She is ripe for the taking at her age, it is the most common time for women to be snatched off the street and sold into brothels, never to be heard from again by family and friends. Bangladesh, and Chittagong in particular, is one of the capitals of human trafficking in the entire world. I heard a woman say the other day, “Well, if you live here long enough, you are bound to get raped—incest, in matrimony, or on the street.” I have never felt such anger in my entire life. I’ve never hated men, no matter what my experiences have been, no matter what I have seen happen to my friends or read about in articles, no matter how many feminist or queer theory classes I have taken. Yet this place makes me bitter every time I look up and seeing them staring at me. You can’t fight back because you risk being marked out and having acid thrown in your face. You can’t be docile because then they get bold. They don’t stop when you shout at them, instead they leer and laugh. I don’t understand how this happens…are they not taught that it is wrong? Is it because Islam so represses them that they become like animals? I cannot imagine human beings treating each other in this way. It saddens and infuriates and frightens me, haunts me in my dreams and when I am awake. As long as I am alive and able, I will not forget these things, and I will not stay silent while hundreds of women are raped every day. If this trip has shown me anything, it is that I need to work towards alleviating these problems, if only by educating these young women that they are not guilty for the abuse wreaked upon them. Over half the girls at AUW have experienced sexual abuse, and yet all of them do not recognize that it was not their fault. I cannot protect them from it in the future, and I cannot change their pasts, but I hope I can at least free them from their own self-recrimination.