A photo-exhibit Jalil at the Chobi Mela highlights the situation of women imprisoned in Bangladesh.

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Bangladesh

Having spent a year in prison already, 25-year-old Rahima still cannot reconcile with her living conditions. "The air, the walls, the people, the place- all of it has been a shock for me," she says. She struggles to wear the blank and emotionless expression that the rest of her inmates wear every day, yet every time she speaks of her experience in jail, she fights back tears. © Momena Jalil

Freedom is a field stretched to horizon
On the other side of the fence
Freedom is being free
In the cage of denial
Freedom is a murmur
Where speech is forbidden
Freedom is a forsaken touch
For the untouchables
Freedom is knock on the door
Which is chained for eternity
Freedom is a solitary moment
Before a mistaken felony
Freedom is a torn piece of blue sky
From the prison window
Freedom is a beloved face
Lost in nothingness
Freedom is a the right to freewill
These condemned inmates will never know again

Women prisoners in cell © Momena Jalil

She was a mother, a daughter, a sister, a home-maker, a beloved wife but today she is only a prisoner behind bars serving a life sentence. She could have been many things but situation, time, circumstance and fate took all her rights to live free in society. Society finds them unfit because they cross the line of the law; they were not born to be criminals but time took them where they committed crimes… some killed step-children, some were found trafficking in-between borders, they were too many and we had too little time to know what crimes they were in for. We had ten minutes, the guards were rushing us, it’s unthinkable to let journalists roam inside a prison. But we have been there, my colleague and I; we saw faces up close, people who live among us, their faces hold the rumours of sisters, mothers…

Mother and daughter in cell. © Momena Jalil

They were some 21 women. Some with with children who were free but had nowhere to go. So they stayed with their mother in captivity. It was a rare chance for us; it was the opening of the new women’s prison on eight acres of land situated on the Western edge of Kashempur. We were allowed because we were women and in those ten minutes we learnt what we could not have learnt in a lifetime. Losing one’s freedom strips us of the right to live. It is the strangest feeling, a chilling feeling. Freedom denied is freedom lost in the cradle of the life.