2 - Stories and Silences: On Entering and Writing Women’s Worlds

Summary

A Town Transformed

When I began fieldwork in August 2017 in Cox's Bazaar, Bangladesh, it was not my first trip to the seaside town. I had visited Cox's Bazaar several times over the years, particularly during my childhood on trips to Bangladesh to visit relatives, and I remembered it always having the same rush of tourists flocking the city centre bazaars, with bicycle rickshaws and CNGs (auto-rickshaws) caught in stifling traffic jams and the sounds of holidaymakers partying through the night. In late 2016 and early 2017, I visited the Rohingya refugee camps (located 20 miles outside of Cox's Bazaar town) for the first time as part of a humanitarian project I was helping to organize. At that time, the camps consisted of a small number of refugees – a few thousand – who had fled to Bangladesh from Myanmar at varying periods over the past three decades. Only a handful of humanitarian organizations had set up shop in the centre of town. Nobody had anticipated a sudden influx of over a million people in the months to come.

When I returned to Bangladesh eight months later, in August of that year, the ambience felt starkly different. On the flight from Dhaka to Cox's Bazaar, it was unsettling to find myself as one of the only people of Bangladeshi heritage on a flight that was usually always filled with locals heading to a weekend getaway. This time, the flight was filled with international UN aid workers, NGO staff, and government officials. Driving into Cox's Bazaar from the airport was an even greater shock. Bangladeshi tourists were few and far between, and the streets were now filled with foreigners and humanitarian aid staff eager to ‘see’ firsthand the effects of the recent influx of Rohingyas from Myanmar. I was now one of them. The realization that I too had become a part of this sudden ‘fascination’ with the plight of the Rohingyas, and what that means for the ways we use the marginalized to obtain ‘breaking news’, would trouble me throughout my fieldwork and to this day.