The Bird Catcher and Other Stories

By Fayeza Hasanat
Jaded Ibis Press, 2018, 164 pages

Buy the book

With poetic and often searing language, the stories in Fayeza Hasanat’s début collection, The Bird Catcher and Other Stories, illuminate the struggles of Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-American women—struggles that are often rooted in misogyny or other forms of prejudice. Throughout the stories run threads of resistance: a necessity of living with lasting, systemic oppression, and cause now and then for glimmers of hope.

In “Bride of the Vanishing Sun,” two daughters in two generations of a Bangladeshi family are born with dark skin that makes them all but unmarriageable, given prejudicial standards of beauty. Yet the color of their skin, and their lack of marriage prospects, doesn’t seem to be a problem for the young women—until others make it so.

Aandhi, the older-generation daughter, actually embraces darkness of all kinds, but not marriage:

Still, her family pushes her toward an arranged marriage, and the groom’s father agrees to it only after being granted such concessions as tuition payments for two sons and construction of a new house for himself. After the deal is made, Aandhi’s mother expresses frustration about the groom’s family’s reaction to her daughter:

Years later, a daughter of Aandhi’s, Shila, is also born with dark skin and, consequently, finds herself in a similar predicament. Although Shila wants a master’s degree and a career, not a marriage, Aandhi and her husband, Nizam, don’t listen. And near the end of the story, Nizam is on the edge of making a deal for Shila’s marriage with another “opportunistic” man.

In the wake of all the rejection Shila has faced during her parents’ efforts to find her a husband, her sister tries to comfort her, saying, “I don’t need the sun or the moon or the stars to tell me how pretty you are.” Shila’s response:

These words convey a sort of defeatism, but also fortitude and resistance. Although we can’t know what ultimately will happen with Shila, and whether she will enter any marriage arranged by her father, we get the sense that she has developed a kind of strength that no one can take away from her. In this story and others, Hasanat captures this sense of determination, this private sort of defiance, vividly and with feeling. It is in these moments that I found glimmers of hope.

In “Darkling, I Listen,” a Bangladeshi woman, Daisy, faces the consequences of not being able to have children due to a life-saving hysterectomy. Her mother-in-law hates her for being unable to bear grandchildren. And following suit, her husband wishes to leave Daisy for a fertile woman. Trying to reassure Daisy, he says, “You’re an attractive woman, and you can easily remarry and start a new life.”

Daisy is having none of this. In her thoughts, she offers this reply:

Later, Daisy gives a far-from-silent response to an insult from her mother-in-law, with words that got me cheering. In both cases, Hasanat perfectly captures the power of defiance.

Yet the story ends with a tragic choice that is nonetheless logical given the circumstances Daisy finds herself in. It seems a reaction to a reality that her beloved father never seemed to face. “[H]e thought women were real people,” Daisy observes. But she has come to realize that “in his country, his daughter is not even a woman, let alone a real person.”

In the story “When Our Fathers Die,” the action shifts to the United States, where a Bangladeshi-American professor of English is teased regularly by a student, Daniel, for the way she pronounces certain words, like the famed surnames Barthes and Balzac:

For the professor, Daniel is a cause not only of embarrassment but also annoyance. For example, he seems to almost brag over his ignorance about her native country. Yet when he emails her the news of his father’s death, she feels connected to him by loss—in particular, the loss of her own father.

Through vivid writing about the professor’s father, Hasanat makes it clear why he was so beloved. Here is just one of the professor’s memories of him:

Other reflections on her father, this one in relation to his burial, read like poetry:

By interweaving the professor’s memories and reflections with stories Daniel has shared about his own father, Hasanat movingly conveys the universality of grief and loss and shows how they can bridge even considerable divides between people. Here, and throughout this fine collection, she thoughtfully explores the most difficult and transformative moments in characters’ lives.