Caged Bodies, Raging Minds, Dissident Voices: Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Taslima Nasreen

Abstract

This paper aims to analyse the mental state of Taslima Nasreen and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, writers that are primarily celebrated for their rich casket of fictional narratives, through poems written at a juncture in their lives when they were dealing with the pain of separation and displacement from home and country. As a consequence of defying their respective governments through their revolutionary writings, such a separation is accompanied by the loss of a stable identity. Although they do not share the socio-political context that resulted in exile, the commonly felt strains and fissures of exile have guided their perspectives through particularly intimate landscapes, so that it is possible to describe their poems’ meaning in a wholly decontextualised manner. They both are, in a way, separated from conventional contexts: exile is an alienating experience, and home, no longer homelike, is perhaps an even more estranging place.