Love, Violence, and the Unseen Knots of Intimacy: A Reflection on Nadine Shaanta Murshid's Intimacies of Violence

Several years ago, as I immersed myself in the works of Syed Shamsul Haque, particularly his London-set novels—Balikar Chandrayaan, Onyo Ek Alingon, Mrigayay Kalokhep, Doodher Gelashe Neel Machhi, and Tumi Shei Torobari—I became fascinated by his portrayal of the existential struggles and romantic entanglements of Bangladeshis in Western society.

These narratives, exploring themes of dislocation, love, and cultural assimilation, sparked an idea to create a contemporary story that captured the shift in intimacy in our digital age.

I began working on a web series concept that would explore how Dhaka's emerging urban class and the Bangladeshi diaspora in North America, Europe, and Australia engage in intimate encounters through audio and video communication. To shape this narrative, I reached out to people, collecting personal stories that revealed both tender and volatile dynamics. These accounts mirrored the romantic and violent undertones Haque examined decades earlier, yet with the added complexities of digital connectivity.

It was during this process that I met Nadine Shaanta Murshid. She shared that she was researching how violence intertwined with intimacy in transnational lives—a subject that resonated strongly with my project. Over several conversations, her insights enriched my understanding of these themes. When her book, Intimacies of Violence, was published, I eagerly read it. This reflection captures my engagement with her work and its intersections with my ongoing creative and intellectual explorations.

Nadine's interpretation of Octavio Paz's exploration of intimacy captivated me, particularly as I had explored Paz's writings to understand his perspective on Marcel Proust. Nadine employs Paz's concept of love as a "knot" intertwining fate and freedom to elucidate the paradoxical nature of love in the lives of transnational Bangladeshi women. For these women, love often becomes a battleground of resistance and unfreedom.

Love, as Nadine shows, is not an innocent escape from societal constraints. Instead, it exists in tension with cultural norms that dictate women's worth by the status they confer upon their male partners. Romantic love, while offering a semblance of agency, is also rife with control and surveillance, particularly through the refrain of "Manush ki bolbe" ("What will people say?"). This phrase governs women's bodies, behaviors, and desires, rendering their experiences of love as sites of both liberation and oppression.

Through interviews with transnational Bangladeshi women, Nadine highlights the complex interplay of home and migration. Women often find solace in relationships with partners who share their cultural backgrounds, yet these same relationships become fraught with the burden of fulfilling conflicting expectations. Romantic partners may embody freedom but can also become the sole anchors in a life shaped by isolation and limited social networks. The yearning to be seen, understood, and loved persists, even as women resist or redefine traditional norms.

Intimacies of Violence moves seamlessly from love to sex, unraveling the silence and stigma that shroud this subject in Bangladeshi communities. Nadine's exploration of sexual agency delves into the ways patriarchal norms obscure the boundaries of consent and coercion. Women's sexual desires are often mediated by shame, their agency constrained by the ever-present gaze of respectability.

Nadine captures the ambivalence of sexual encounters that fall short of violence yet lack enthusiasm or mutual fulfillment. She introduces the notion of "unjust sex," reflecting the lived experiences of women who feel obligated to engage in intimacy without deriving pleasure or agency. Such encounters, though normalized within patriarchal frameworks, illustrate the pervasive inequality embedded in intimate relationships.

For transnational women, sex becomes a complex negotiation between cultural expectations and personal desires. Long-distance relationships, surprisingly, offer some women emotional and sexual fulfillment, highlighting the ways intimacy evolves in diaspora contexts. Yet even here, the specter of shame and honor looms large, silencing discussions of pleasure and consent. Nadine's work underscores the need to despectacularize sexual violence, shifting the focus from extraordinary acts to the mundane inequalities that permeate everyday life.

In Desire, Nadine interrogates how women's longings are shaped and constrained by cultural narratives, racial hierarchies, and class dynamics. Women are often positioned as objects of desire, their identities mediated by the male gaze. This construction of desire not only regulates women's bodies but also clouds their understanding of what they truly want.

The chapter highlights the impact of white beauty standards, which continue to influence perceptions of desirability within Bangladeshi communities. Beauty, far from being an innocent concept, becomes a currency of power, tethering women's self-worth to their physical appearance. This preoccupation with beauty exacerbates anxiety and self-esteem issues, further complicating women's ability to navigate their desires.

Despite these constraints, Nadine's interlocutors assert their agency, often at great personal cost. Their pursuit of desire, though fraught with social ostracization, represents acts of resistance against the structures that seek to confine them. Desire, as Nadine shows, is not simply a matter of longing; it is a contested space where women negotiate autonomy, intimacy, and identity.

Aunties, as Nadine's work reveals, occupy a dialectical role within Bangladeshi communities, acting as both enforcers and subverters of social norms. These figures are the "veritable containers of social norms," wielding the refrain of "Manush ki bolbe" as a tool of surveillance and control. They monitor behavior, disseminate gossip, and police boundaries of respectability, class, and gender, ensuring conformity within the community.

Yet, aunties are not monolithic agents of oppression. Nadine's interlocutors describe them as complex figures who simultaneously enforce and resist patriarchy. While many aunties uphold traditions that restrict women's autonomy, others act as co-conspirators, shielding young women from the punitive gaze of society. They offer emotional support, advice, and even protection, creating spaces where resistance becomes possible.

This duality is particularly evident in their relationships with women. Aunties may perpetuate the same control and violence they once endured, yet they can also facilitate agency and defiance. Their roles vary across class lines; affluent middle-class aunties often wield more power, while working-class women face distinct forms of control and limited resources for resistance. Nadine's analysis highlights the contradictions inherent in these figures, whose actions reflect the broader tensions between tradition, patriarchy, and the desire for change.

The aunty, therefore, is a microcosm of the societal forces Nadine examines throughout her book—a site where power, resistance, and care intersect in unpredictable and deeply human ways.

Chapter 5, Birangona: The Blueprint for How Rape Is Viewed, examines the legacy of wartime rape survivors and its enduring influence on societal perceptions of gendered violence. The Birangona, celebrated as a national symbol, occupies a paradoxical position—simultaneously honored and stigmatized.

Nadine critiques how the state's recognition of the Birangona framed rape as a spectacular, brutal act, rendering other forms of violence, such as marital rape, invisible. This focus on spectacular violence creates a hierarchy of victimhood, where everyday experiences of sexual violence are dismissed as less significant. The Birangona thus becomes a blueprint for understanding rape, one that reinforces harmful binaries between "real" and "mundane" violence.

The chapter also interrogates class dynamics, challenging the notion that wartime rape was confined to poor women. While middle- and upper-class survivors were often rehabilitated and erased from national narratives, their children were marked as "tainted," perpetuating cycles of stigma. The rhetoric surrounding the Birangona ties women's bodies to notions of honor and shame, reinforcing patriarchal control and silencing survivors.

Through this analysis, Nadine calls for a despectacularization of sexual violence. By shifting the focus from extraordinary acts to the pervasive inequalities that shape intimate and communal spaces, she emphasizes the need for a more inclusive understanding of violence—one that recognizes the humanity and agency of all survivors.

In Intimacies of Violence, Nadine Shaanta Murshid exposes the intricate ways in which power operates within love, sex, and desire. Her critique of cultural norms and systemic inequalities challenges us to rethink intimacy as a site of both possibility and oppression. The book's call for transformative justice underscores the limitations of retributive frameworks, advocating for approaches that address structural roots while centering healing and community.

Nadine's work is a testament to the resilience of transnational Bangladeshi women, whose stories illuminate the fragility of systems that perpetuate violence. Through their resistance, she offers a vision of hope—a hope grounded in the possibility of undoing the knots of intimacy that bind fate and freedom, oppression and agency.