Remembering to Forget: Wartime Mothers in Tahmima Anam’s A Golden Age

This essay calls for a deeper engagement with the portrayal of wartime motherhood in literary and cultural representations of the Bangladesh Liberation War. Focusing on Tahmima Anam’s critically acclaimed novel A Golden Age, we delineate the simultaneous valorization and erasure of wartime mothers in the context of the dominant nationalist discourse on the Liberation War. The novel traces how the protagonist Rehana navigates the pressures of valiant motherhood thrust upon her and emerges as the celebrated male freedom fighter’s mother through her sacrifices for her son. But as the mother par excellence, Rehana also validates normative codes of gender performativity and effectively inhibits the memorialization of other mothers in the novel. Our analysis illustrates how the novel effectively marginalizes and erases from the narrative plot, and, in turn, from nationalist remembering mothers and women like Sharmeen who is a rape survivor and Supriya who is a Hindu refugee mother displaced from East Pakistan. Our hope is to interrogate the emphatic telling of the glorious birth of the nation made possible by the freedom fighter’s mother and open up spaces for the exploration of the multifaceted contributions by wartime women-as-mothers, who are routinely left out of national commemoration and public mourning.