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‘Yes, you will leave this place,” the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam’s incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance, Uprising. “This story will save your life,” we were told three times in Deepa Anappara’s 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, also featuring precarious children dwelling in the margins. What is the distance between imagination and action, lived realities and dreams? How can solidarities be forged in such circumstances? Uprising holds within its pages some answers and a deep conviction – for a better life, a more just world – and then reaches out and fights for it.
As a journalist, Anam visited the infamous “floating brothel” Banishanta in Bangladesh; her new novel, set on an isolated island “at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea”, fictionalises the island’s community and ecological precarity. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work – “we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies” – and wish a different life for themselves. The women are controlled by the cruel Amma, who was once herself sold into sex trafficking. The victim becomes the perpetrator – and the children are discerning enough to know that their mothers are “not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them”. The first lesson of the island? No one is coming to save you – and living here changes you, as inexorably as the rising tides.
The island is a prison. The mothers are ghosts of their former selves. The children, witnessing the “sexing”, are all too grown up, stripped of their innocence. By the time they are born, their mothers’ memories have faded “like paint in the sun”; they live on the island “tied to” their daughters. What, or who, will it take to break free from these chains?
When the waters rise, customers stay away. The mothers speculate: “the swirling river was keeping the smaller boats from making the journey”; “the land was cursed”. In a last-ditch attempt to lure men back for business, Amma sends for a new girl. Little does she know that Kusum Khan’s arrival will signal the beginning of the end. A girl from the city with a history of participating in protests against the Dictator, she doesn’t acquiesce to the island’s rules, as the others have been conditioned to; instead, she sows the seeds for what will grow into a life-altering act of resistance. The children start to believe that she is their saviour – maybe even Bon Bibi, a legendary guardian of the forest. A different life seems graspable, just beyond the island’s shore. When the titular uprising at last arrives, it summons an all-consuming storm, washing over the island. And the reader, too, is ready to join the revolution – their fist in the open air.
Uprising is a feminist novel (“here they were: a wall of women”) and a protest novel (“The moment Kusum entered the protest, she felt as if she was becoming a small organ in a living, breathing thing”). It is a coming-of-age novel, and a response to the climate crisis; a story of sisterhood protecting, and failing to protect; of structural inequality and the rotten core of patriarchal corruption; of unlucky women in an unfair world. “When the men came to reclaim the island, we stood rooted in place with our eyes closed, unable to watch. We stood rooted in place with our eyes open, unable to stop watching.” While the mothers and daughters in Anam’s fictional world are victims of specific generational violence, this observation can be applied to humanity at large: we are all watching – frozen, complicit – as injustices rise the world over.
Through her unwaveringly political and unflinchingly forthright novel, Anam shows the power of rage and radical hope. A new world can burn bright from the fires of injustice – and here, it’s the mothers that hold the match.
