Last Sunday we watched Her Own Address, a Bangladeshi movie that deals with the lack of choice faced by South Asian women.

Without having any real say in the decision, the chief protagonist moves from her father's house to her inlaws' house. There, under the watchful eye of her mother-in-law, she has to become a "good housewife". She enjoys a brief spell of something resembling autonomy when she and her husband move to the city. But then he dies, and she's forced to move in with her brother.

When her son wants to start a business, she has no choice but to sell the land she inherited. The business thrives, they move to a nice flat, and the relationship with the daughter-in-law is good. But then the daughter-in-law's pushy mother arrives, and she's driven out again.

We don't know where she'll move to next. As she steps off the train we saw her boarding at the beginning of the movie, we wonder whether she's heading back, or heading for a new life, or heading under the wheels of the next locomotive.

On the downside, the telling of the story is a little slow. And neither of us liked the device of the narrator. His manner was pompous; his explanation mostly obvious. Perhaps it was a deliberate irony, but as Nigel pointed out, he was also male. She's not even allowed to tell her own story...

But it's a poignant story; it's beautifully filmed; and the soundtrack is lovely. And what the movie does very well is to highlight the systemic nature of sexism. Yes, it's a patriarchal environment, and the men call the shots. But on a day-to-day level, the people who are nastiest to women are other women... The mother-in-law, the sister-in-law, the daughter-in-law's mother -- they all perpetuate the servitude that they themselves experienced.

So... Flawed but thought-provoking, and wonderfully reminiscent of Bangladesh.



Later in the week I listened to a talk by Dr Kee Yong from McMaster University. His research focuses on a community of Malay Muslim market women in Thailand's conflict-plagued deep south.

What I took away was a profound impression of courage. "Where do you go when you have nowhere to go?" wondered one woman interviewee. What do you do when conflict is "biasa" (normal)?

Well, you "embrace the difficulty of reality". You are grateful for the conflict-inspired solidarity of the market women. Unaided by any of the (mostly unemployed) male members of your family, you carry on your business, because your family depends on your earnings. You rent a room in town that you share with your market-mates, because dusk and dawn, the times you would normally be travelling, are "waktu gerila" (guerrilla time). You miss the life of your village, but you do what you have to do.

You learn to live with limitations over which you have little control. Many women worry that stricter interpretations of Islam will mean the market will have to close on Fridays. Some women divorce, but they don't meet with widespread approbation even among the women.

What do you do? Where do you go?