Uprising by Tahmima Anam review a fiery novel of female rebellion

"Yes, you will leave this place, the chorus of child protagonists in a community of sex workers say at the start of Tahmima Anam's incantatory and fiery new novel of female defiance, Uprising. This story will save your life, we were told three times in Deepa Anappara's 2020 debut, Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, also featuring precarious children dwelling in the margins. What is the distance between imagination and action, lived realities and dreams? How can solidarities be forged in such circumstances? Uprising holds within its pages some answers and a deep conviction for a better life, a more just world and then reaches out and fights for it."

"Anam visited the infamous floating brothel Banishanta in Bangladesh; her new novel, set on an isolated island at the end of the country, in the middle of a river that emptied into the sea, fictionalises the island's community and ecological precarity. Here, a generation of daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work we knew that the work was something that was paid for in money, and also in bodies and wish a different life for themselves. The women are controlled by the cruel Amma, who was once herself sold into sex trafficking."

"The victim becomes the perpetrator and the children are discerning enough to know that their mothers are not here because they had done something bad, but because something bad had been done to them. The first lesson of the island? No one is coming to save you and living here changes you, as inexorably as the rising tides. The island is a prison. The mothers are ghosts of their former selves. The children, witnessing the sexing, are all too grown up, stripped of their innocence."

"By the time they are born, their mothers' memories have faded like paint in the sun; they live on the island tied to their daughters. What, or who, will it take to break free from these chains? Uprising is a coming-of-age novel, and a response to the climate crisis; a story of sisterhood"

A community of sex workers on an isolated island at the end of Bangladesh faces ecological precarity and rising tides. Daughters grow up watching their mothers trapped in sex work, controlled by a cruel woman who was once herself sold into trafficking. The children understand that their mothers are not there because they did something wrong, but because harm was done to them. The island teaches that no one is coming to save anyone, and that living there changes people as inexorably as the tides. Mothers become ghosts of their former selves, and children are bound to their daughters. The story asks what can break these chains and frames sisterhood as a path toward a more just life amid climate crisis.

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