Red

‘Red’ is an autobiographical trajectory which envisions the psychological catastrophe from familial trauma.

The extent of domestic violence in Bangladesh has been widespread and has been exacerbated by the socio-economic status of women being subjugated to men in combination with the socially constructed gender role of men being superior to women. These violent acts are so alarmingly prevalent where two thirds of women in Bangladesh, around 66%, have been victims of domestic violence and 72.7% of them have never disclosed their experience to others.

Homogeneitically, mother never unveiled to anyone about her tormentous psyche but at a time when patience and endurance exceed the extremity, mother divorced my father after 22 years of their physical and psychological abusive relationship.

Though their separation was inevitable but till now mother never fully recovered from the shock of having to separate. Nor even I could get out of that trauma of witnessing and absorbing such parental violence at home which had immense impact on my sentimental and behavioral state of despair.

I often remember those violated days when I used to stand in front of my parent’s bedroom and stare at the locked door; the muffled sound of my father screaming with anger and mother howling with pain travelled through it to me which I still hear in my dormancy. Concomitantly, father used to lock me up in my room and beat me with my cricket bat which felt cold and disdain towards him that it unnerved me because I loved him.

And uncontrollably the days after their separation were acutely agonizing. Oftentimes mother's trauma took her to some unknown distant while I crawled over the city, going through all its nooks and crannies, looking for her; the city seems massive through the eyes of a young consciousness.

When all is said and done, mother often mumbles to me that I remind her each day of my father; even the hair on my knuckles is identical to his. When she says it, I can see the mirror of fervour grapples for dominance inside her; one of longing and the other of great abhorrence. Thereby our cries yet linger unknowingly.

Metamorphically, this work is disorientating yet paralleled with an impetuous odyssey of a legacy of abuse; certainly creates an ambience of buried trauma slowly coming to luminescence, alternately receding and then growing in intensity.