From Gilead to Ladyland: how the rebellious women of literature offer hope in dark times

Banishanta in southern Bangladesh appears as grey mud with flimsy huts along a craggy shore. A guide previously identified it as a state-licensed brothel operating since British times. The narrator avoids thinking about the women there because imagining their suffering conflicts with distant casual entitlements. Women persist in the narrator’s imagination, leading to a decision to write a novel set on a fictional island. The novel centers on women’s collective rebellion and survival, aiming to offer a manual for liberation. Fictional women’s protests are framed through extreme patriarchal systems and dramatic reversals of power, including references to Lysistrata and other works.

"When I arrive I find it is little more than a long patch of grey mud, with a string of flimsy huts lining a craggy shore. Thirteen years earlier, I was on a boat on my way to the Sundarban mangrove forest when a guide casually pointed out the island and told me it was a state-licensed brothel that had been there since the time of the British."

"When I went home, I didn't want to think about Banishanta, because if I did, I would have to imagine the terrible things the women there were enduring while I lived a life of casual entitlements many thousands of miles away. Yet the women squatted in my imagination, refusing to leave. I resolved to never write about them, because it would say things about the world I didn't want to know."

"It was only when I decided I could write a novel, set on a fictional island, about a rebellion of women, that I allowed them in. Fictional representations of women's protests have often been set in speculative worlds. Think of Gilead in The Handmaid's Tale, or more recently, Naomi Alderman's The Power, in which women are suddenly given the power to inflict pain, thus subverting gendered roles and dynamics."

"They often begin with women under extreme, often theocratic forms of patriarchal structures as well as Atwood's Gilead, there is Miriam Toews's Mennonite community in Women Talking. The protagonists then challenge these conditions through collective action. They give us, in fiction, what we yearn for in life a dramatic reversal of fortunes. If I could do that, I thought, I could write about the island. It would be about the possibility of such a place. It would be a manual for survival, a way to imagine liberation not just for those women but for all women."

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