Book Review by Mudassar Javed Baryar
Title: The First Jasmines
Author: Saima Begum
Publisher: Hajar Press
In the literary cartography of the Global South, fiction has often been pressed into the service of nation-narration. From Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, canonised as the novelistic metonym for India’s tumultuous post-independence history, to Tahmima Anam’s celebrated Bengal trilogy, received as a fictional appraisal of Bangladesh’s birth pangs, critics have persistently sought foundational texts that can emblematise emergent nation-states. Bangladesh, a nation forged in the crucible of a 1971 war that violently severed the geographic and ideological construct of Pakistan, occupies a distinctive position within this literary ecology. Its fiction emerges from a fractured genealogy of linguistic and political resistance, one that inherently unsettles monolithic, linear narratives of statehood.
Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines provides not as a supplement to a pre-existing history, but as an epistemological correction. It radicalises the project of narrating the nation by relocating the locus of meaning from the birth of a state to the structural, gendered violence its delivery both requires and represses. In doing so, the novel demands that we rethink the very relationship between fiction and national history, turning away from the monumental icon of the “tree” toward the unseen, divergent “branches” of women’s testimony.
The novel situates its inquiry not in the heroic theatre of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaigns, but in the circumscribed, carceral space of a military camp where women are held as spoils of a genocidal war. The protagonist, Lucky, is introduced as a figure of radical ordinariness, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband works in London, whose life is violently unmoored during a journey to visit her ailing mother. Abducted alongside her sister Jamila, she is thrust into a temporal and spatial parenthesis where historical time collapses into the cyclical horror of daily violation.
Begum’s masterful narrative choice is to dwell in this atemporal zone, resisting the teleological pull of rescue and nationhood. The novel insists that the truth of national formation is to be found not in the climax of independence, but in this interstitial, nine-month duration of captivity—a dark, inverted gestation of the state. The narrative voice meticulously records a reality where agency is atomized into the smallest of sensory perceptions: “A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight.” The prose transforms the scene into a spectral image of beauty and abjection, a visual field where the women are reduced to a single organic mass, their subjectivity merging with the material textures of their prison.
Begum’s aesthetic project hinges on her refusal of graphic spectacle. The violence is rendered not through an unveiling of the wounded body, but through an immersive phenomenology of trauma and a choreography of survival. A dialogic exchange between the two sisters becomes a profound meditation on the ontology of endurance. Jamila’s counsel, “Close your eyes… The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave…” and Lucky’s retort, “What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open…” stage a dialectic of memory and presence, of protective dissociation and sensory assault. When Jamila counters Lucky’s terror with the sacred identity of “A praying mother,” Begum constructs what can be termed a fragile counterforce; an affective and spiritual armature that stands against the physical machinery of the camp.
These whispered philosophies, born from the collective precarity of womanhood, elevate conversation into a mode of existential resistance. The female prisoners emerge not as silent victims but as vernacular philosophers whose dialogue constitutes a parallel archive of wisdom, a repository of insight into the patriarchal logics that subtend the spectacular violence of war.
The novel’s metaphorical architecture is anchored by the recurring, titular motif of jasmine, “a flower that blooms at night, alluding to the possibility of survival and beauty in darkness.” This is not a simple consolatory figure. The jasmine operates as an olfactory and mnemonic counter-symbol to the visual regimes of state power and historiographic documentation. It is a scent that persists where light, the Enlightenment metaphor for knowledge and liberation, fails. In the novel’s most formally striking passage, the dehumanising violence is refracted through a complex simile of capture: the soldier grabs Zoleyka’s braid “like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.” The comparison is devastating in its precision, momentarily stripping the character of human subjecthood to figure her as catch, as non-human resource within a predatory political economy of bodies.
Yet, the meticulous catalogue of her braids, “Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid”, preceding this act of violation is a testament to a life of self-care and cultural practice. The text thus inscribes violence not as an isolated event but as a systemic logic that weaponises what women have tended with love. Begum’s narrative eye, however, is unremittingly dialectical, and in a chillingly audacious shift, she turns the omniscient gaze onto the hyper-sensory paranoia of the soldiers: “Tasted sugar when they bit into the flesh of bloodied girls.” This perspectival haunting refuses a Manichean simplicity, exposing the perpetrators’ psyche as a landscape corroded by superstition and a barbarity that recoils upon the self. It suggests a war that consumes both the captured and the captor, albeit along radically asymmetrical axes of consequence.
This bifocal vision culminates in the novel’s central epistemic maxim: “God must’ve given us different eyeballs, men and women, they only seem to see the tree and never the direction of its branches.” The folk aphorism articulates a gendered scopic regime. The masculinist, state-centric gaze sees the singular, monumental “tree”—the nation, the war, the linear narrative of liberation—while women’s perception traces the divergent, lateral, and unseen “branches”: the capillaries of care, the trajectories of trauma, the lived experiences that the grand narrative cannot integrate.
The novel’s own form embodies this branched perception. It intersperses harrowing depictions of suffering with moments of startling levity born from collective wit: “Never marry a man who needs to make a mistake to learn.” “Look at your mother-in-law’s hair.” This rhythmic oscillation between the visceral and the light is not a tonal inconsistency but a profound formal mimesis of the survival strategies of the captive women. Humour and gossip become technologies of selfhood, momentarily reassembling a world of intimate sociality within the zone of annihilation, proving that the unsayable can only be approached through a dance between testimony and the sustaining grace of the mundane.
The final act of the novel delivers a liberation that is no liberation at all, structurally executing a terminal critique of the nation-form. The Mukti Bahini liberates the camp; the state, in a gesture of political commemoration, confers the title of ‘birangona’ (war heroine) upon the violated women. Yet, as Begum’s paratextual note devastatingly clarifies, societal excommunication transmutes the honorific into its homophonic, pejorative other: ‘barangona’ (prostitute).
The state’s promised apparatus of care—rehabilitation, vocational training, social reintegration—evaporates, revealing a patriarchal compact that allows the nation to valorise the violated female body as a symbol of its own violated territory while violently disavowing that body’s living, breathing claim to dignity. This post-war abandonment constitutes a second, more insidious violence, a form of slow death by social prescription that exposes the nation-state’s liberation as a gendered event, incomplete by design. The women are granted a symbolic place in the national epic while being denied a livable place in the nation’s society, a schism that The First Jasmines identifies as the founding lie of the postcolonial settlement.
Published at a critical historical conjuncture, as Bangladesh navigates a new landscape of political turmoil following the 2024 mass uprising and the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, The First Jasmines performs an urgent act of archival retrieval. It excavates the foundational, suppressed memory of gendered violence as the unspoken condition of the nation’s emergence, an inheritance that successive governments have refused to fully acknowledge or redress.
Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their “humanity, resilience and heart,” depicting them as “architects of family and community.” To return to the novel’s governing metaphor, Begum abandons the vertical, central stem of the “tree”, the official history of the nation-state, to follow the rhizomatic directions of the “branches.” In doing so, she reframes the project of national literature not as the celebration of a fait accompli, but as a witness to its hidden costs. The novel ultimately insists that the nation cannot be received as an uncomplicated patrimony. True liberation, like the late-blooming jasmine, is a fragrance that unfolds only in the darkness, a promise whose truth is recognised only when we find the courage to sit with its scent long after the fanfares of dawn have faded.
Mudassar Javed Baryar is a scholar at the University of Faisalabad, Pakistan.
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