Boxing Days

The women of the AUW Boxing Club will not be erased. I don’t have permission to post their actual photos, but I did witness their ferocity, their determination, their joy.

Last week I attended the inaugural meeting of the Asian University for Women’s Boxing Club. I took some photos of the veteran boxers, the two coaches (one of them male), and the novice members, many in bright red hijab, but I couldn’t capture the exhilaration that carried the event. I also didn’t have permission to post these photos, so this will have to do:

Faculty sponsor with bespoke and outspoken tee-shirt.

Most of the women in this brand new club are Afghan. Some were celebrated boxers in Kabul before the most recent takeover by the Taliban. One speaker, the president of the club, alluded to the obliteration of women’s boxing–good lord, of women’s civic participation–in Afghanistan after the US forces left. She chose her words carefully, apparently aware that even from the safety of the AUW auditorium she shone as a fiery rebuke to the Talibs. Over the exuberant cheers of her classmates and the pounding bass of the looped club music, she whipped up the crowd with exhortations to take control of their own lives, to stand up to the threats of men. At the end of her speech–and before the thrilling demonstrations–she stared at the audience and said: “Suffering makes your life beautiful.”

A club with grit and heart and POWER.

Quite a declaration. From the comfort of my front row seat and my privileged male gender, I could think of a thousand ways suffering makes life ugly; even in a beautiful country like Bangladesh, all you have to do is step outside to be confronted with the debasing reality of poverty and hunger and sexism. But I don’t think the Boxing Club president was pawning off some “When-life-gives-you-lemons” pabulum on the student body. She and her “lady boxers” (her words) kicked and punched and pivoted with such laser-sharp intensity that whatever the driving force that motivated them might be–anger, excitement, despair, self-defense, vengeance–these women used it to transform their suffering into something extraordinary. Beautiful, even.

I walked home, grateful as could be to have been in the presence of such perseverance. Even the (insert expletive) humidity couldn’t dampen my spirits.

Two clubs sponsored Pride at AUW: The Queer-Straight Alliance and the Art Club. Evidence of their vibrant collaboration above.

That very same week, AUW held a second Pride event. As the resident psychology instructor, I’d been asked to facilitate a conversation in which students wrote their “confessions” on an index card. Once these cards were collected, I was to pluck them from a fishbowl and read them aloud. I said I thought this was a bad, potentially unethical idea. Where were the resources in case a student revealed something desperate? Confession implies sin; do we want to conflate LGBTQ concerns with sin? (No.) I’d been double-booked and would have to run to another workshop at the other campus before the hour ended; what if I left a student in the lurch?

My concerns were duly noted and then dismissed.

Awaiting the LGBTQ deluge.

Fortunately, the faculty turnout nearly matched the students’ attendance and so my leaving early wasn’t a problem. The balloons, a nice touch, outnumbered the human participants; they exploded at random from the heat, insuring that no one dozed off. My ethical concerns also deflated after I figured out a way to screen the “confessions” before reading them aloud. The context differed from LGBTQ life in the West, but the worries expressed on the index cards sounded familiar: Most students feared rejection by their families and their friends. In Bangladesh, religion, culture, and politics all conspire to make gay people ashamed of themselves on a deep, fundamental level–not so different from the American Right’s cynical strategy to revile gay folks with insinuations about “grooming” and “psychic crises” in children who happen to find out that some of their classmates have two moms or two dads.

(A cruel, narrow-minded strategy, if I do say so myself. Suicide rates for LGBTQ teenagers in the US have increased over the last three years, due in part to the relentless hectoring by religious fundamentalists and their political bootlickers. Some stats from The Trevor Project and NPR: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/05/1096920693/lgbtq-youth-thoughts-of-suicide-trevor-project-survey.)

Think about it.

A perennial question arose: In light of these students’ bravery–the fact that they showed up in a room to discuss identities and behaviors that are illegal–how should this faculty facilitator address his own identity? More questions followed: Does my coming out model courage or does it crowd out the students’ experiences? Does it make the discussion all about the teacher and his need to self-disclose? What are the legitimate risks to sharing one’s homosexuality in Bangladesh? Which boundaries should remain in place?

I blanched and, instead, used the pronoun “We” (i.e. “How do WE address the judgment implied in the statement, ‘You don’t look gay'”?) as if I were straight out of the House of Windsor (pun intended). Not that Bangladesh needed another royal family member to call the shots, but there We were, dispensing noblesse oblige with our fingers in the fishbowl.

We found this on Wikipedia: “Throughout his life [King] James had close relationships with male courtiers, which has caused debate among historians about their exact nature.” Indeed. (And, yes, King James was from the house of Stuart. I looked it up.)

While we’re on the subject of royalty and its post-colonial after-effects, Bangladesh inherited its criminal laws against homosexuality from the British Indian Government in 1860. These anti-gay laws are still on the books, to devastating consequence.

Xulhaz Mannan, editor of the Bangladeshi LGBT magazine Roopbaan, was killed in his apartment in Dhaka along with activist Tanay Fahim by religious fundamentalists in 2016.

Coming out as LGBT–or even as an ally–for a Bangladesh citizen involves terrible risks. Imprisonment, estrangement, violence and murder (see above), suicide: Bangladeshis face these threats daily if they try to live openly. Coming in and coming out as a know-it-all-Westerner overlooks that reality. I wanted to defy the shame that can keep gay people like me in the closet, and I also wanted to tread carefully before running to my next event.

What a tightrope. And a compromise. Here’s to the brave LGBT students and their allies, both in the US and–especially–in Bangladesh.

Thanks to Bonni Allen for the headshot and to Nabila Afroz for the poster and the mid-session tea. I made it on time to this really enjoyable workshop.

I can’t exactly vouch for my mental health here (it’s hot and that makes me fussy; did I mention that?), but the improv workshop after the Pride event was an unmitigated blast. Here’s hysterical proof:

Modeling contemplative mindfulness with some students.

Time winds down. I’ll be in Dhaka for the Eid al-Adha holiday and, the following weekend, in Cox’s Bazar to give another improv presentation. Been feeling torn in two. I’m excited to return to summer in Saint Paul and I finally feel useful and connected here. People have faced worse conundrums.

Places and portraits, while I’m still in Bangladesh:

The entrance to Shilpakala Arts Academy, where I’ve seen plays about Che Guevara, post-partition East Pakistan, the liberation that turned East Pakistan into Bangladesh, the origin of the Bangla language, and gift-giving gone awry, courtesy of O. Henry. All of it in Bangla.

Monsoon approaching Chittagong. Photo from the roof of Thames Towers.

Early morning construction worker in Chok Bazaar.

Same morning, different profession.

Kindly gentleman at the former British Railway offices.

Coconut vendor, just before the rain.

I took too long trying to get the iPhone to focus.

Knife sharpener, stopping on his daily rounds through the neighborhood.

Friendly AUW canteen worker. He won’t give me seconds, but he does so with a smile.

Buddhist monk and Pali professor. He moved the footlight to create these shadows.

This gentleman invited me to join him in calisthenics at a nearby park...

…and so I did. (Hello to Karen Connelly who has taught me the benefits of bilateral stimulation and to Katy McEwen who has worked thanklessly with my midline dysfunction.)

Aquarium storefront on a Monday evening in Chittagong.

Eid al-Adha approaches. A doomed fate for this poor creature; his sacrifice will feed a few. When I left the building this morning, the only other animal on our street was a goat. By this afternoon a huge bull and two more goats had joined them. Lowing and bleating behind every garage gate, now. Haunting.

Beautiful Bengal.

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