Content Warning: discussion of violence and sexual assault.

‘You are strong enough’ Mahabuba Rahman writes to her readers in the short story To All the Women Who Do Not Have a Place of Their Own. It is a statement that connects every piece in the English submissions of My City, My Home, an anthology of women’s writing. The collection connects female voices from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Birmingham, the South Asian Arts and Heritage charity Sampad providing a space for women of these places to not only share their stories but also their languages with sections for English, Bangla and Urdu submissions. Within this space, each woman creatively showcases female experiences, emotions and lives through poetry and short stories, some autobiographical and some fictional but all connecting women across the world.

The global connection between women becomes apparent in Reena Arshad Khan’s Pakistani entry My City when she writes ‘people walking on the streets scare you, they’ve always scared you. You look at them and see another headline, another cup of acid beneath those rose-coloured shirts.’ For most of us, it is a painful reminder of the fear we feel walking in the streets wondering if the next man to walk past is going to abuse you, rape you, murder you. It is a painful reminder of the headlines following Sarah Everard’s murder and the fear we all felt reading story after story of the violence men inflict upon women. This collection makes clear this is not a fear exclusive to us; the fear we feel walking the streets of Selly Oak is a fear felt in women of Pakistan, of Bangladesh of every country where men view women as targets.

It becomes only more apparent in Opshori Nandana Khan’s poem Durga of My City submitted from Dhaka, Bangladesh. ‘They saw me as a mere weak girl,’ she writes, ‘screaming for help which I didn’t get… took me and tore my clothes’. Inspired by a friend who was sexually assaulted at Durga Puja, a festival celebrating Durga, the goddess of womanhood in Hinduism, Nandana Khan explores the violence men inflict even in times of female celebration, how men who ‘worshipped Maa Durga’ violated a girl, ‘only ten’ years old. It parallels the men we see in the west claiming to be allies with women or ‘not that kind of guy’ yet inflict violence when our backs are turned. Durga of My City is a reminder that pain is lurking in the places we least expect it, that collectively we are ‘screaming for help’ no matter where we are.

The Female Jogger, submitted by Saima Kama from Pakistan, is another reminder of the pain we collectively feel through the protagonists’ apprehension to walk the ‘lonesome lane’ alone, the sexual assault committed against her by a man on a motorcycle with his ‘penis [in] his hand… masturbating vigorously.’ The protagonist refuses to ‘bow [her] head and let [him] go about [his] business,’ faking a video that threatened to expose his exposure. In showing his weakness, the protagonist shows her strength, the strength many of us must muster in the face of assault, many have mustered in the face of the Selly Flasher. 

There are moments when the anthology highlights the starks differences between experiences in one city to the next. We in Birmingham shut ourselves behind locked doors with warm heaters at the first sign of snow yet Pracheta Ahana Alem describes in her short story When in Dhaka, having ‘floated in shit strewn Utara floods.’ The strength of this collection, however, lies in its connections between women across continents, whether it be the universal truth that the world cannot ‘accept an independent, established woman’ as Rahman says, or that we are conditioned to question ‘Why did I wear this T shirt?’ in the face of sexual assault. Whatever we think, see or feel, this anthology showcases that another woman somewhere will have thought, saw or felt the same thing, that we are a collective, ‘strong enough’ to overcome and fight the violence we face.

My City My Home is available for purchase here.

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