Pagli - A Memoir
Transcending a brown woman’s scarred body
into an empowered, honest existence
Unpublished
"When I look at my body in the mirror, I see a powerful, honest, and courageous woman. For a long time, I saw a conflicted, broken girl. It took a long time to see her struggle with cyclical abuse and lineage scars. On my journey, I learned my childhood to be a cautionary tale. It ends with me; it is my vow to myself and my children. Love and nurture win over chaos. I won’t let the scars of my childhood be replicated in my children’s experience. We have to do the work to dismantle inherited trauma. This is that story.”
Pagli – A Memoir chronicles a brown Muslim person’s physical and emotional scars, compounded with ancestral and generational trauma. Starting with the scar on her nose, a reminder of the day she can’t remember, yet a clue of a dead tooth, unveils the chaos Shabana survived and thrived through.
A tumultuous divorce, abuse, trauma, and racism encapsulate Shabana’s childhood as she searches for love, home, and belonging. Twice a month, Shabana visits her mother as her egotistical father wedges a divide through parental alienation – a calculated effort to harm her relationship with her mother. Concurrently, Shabana is emotionally and physically abused by her step-family. Facing harsh racism in Long Island, NY, Shabana finds beauty in her Islamic and Indo-Caribbean identity at the madrasah (Islamic studies). After years of hatred, abuse, and neglect, Shabana develops survival and adaptability skills and learns how to use her most powerful tool, her voice.
As a mother, Shabana reflects on her childhood and vows, “Let it end with me." This is the author’s vow to end the cycle of trauma as she journeys through motherhood, IVF, pelvic floor recovery, and corrective surgery. Shabana also shares the joys that motivated her, including her Islamic faith, cultural background, and familial connections. Pagli is an exploration of the body and self.
About the title – Pagli (crazy female) is a Hindi word. In most North Indian languages, words ending in (i) are feminine, like larki (girl) and beti (daughter), and words ending in (a) are masculine, like larka (boy) and beta (son). The male equivalent of pagli is pagal, a word absent in Guyanese households, unlike pagli.
Ultimately, there is no male equivalent to what happens to women’s bodies or the stories that lie within. This isn’t just the story of a body. It is the story of a woman’s body.
Themes - Identity, racism, xenophobia, colorism, genderism, physical abuse, social/ emotional abuse, and neglect