Inspired by "Monologues," 12 South Asian women to share their stories. Home News Tribune 10/27/06

By REBEKAH KEBEDE, CORRESPONDENT

After nearly 10 years in the United States, many of them spent working for employers who paid her less than minimum wage, 50-year-old Afroza Chowdhury is ready to tell her story.

Tomorrow, Chowdhury, who lives in Queens, New York, will sit in front of an audience and talk about how she moved to the United States from Bangladesh in 1997, convinced by her ailing ex-husband that she was the only one who could nurse him back to health.

She will tell the story of how, when he did recover, he left her once again for another woman. She will tell the story of how the only job she could find was as a live-in baby sitter that paid $500 a month.

Chowdhury is one of 12 South Asian women who will take part in the second annual "Yoni Ki Baat," a theater production of mostly autobiographical one-woman acts being performed at Rutgers University in New Brunswick.

Inspired by Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," "Yoni Ki Baat" means "talk of the vagina" in Sanskrit and Hindi. Some pieces of the performance are, as in "Monologues," focused on women's sexuality and violence against women.

As a production that explores what it means to be a woman in the South Asian Diaspora, "Yoni Ki Baat" builds upon Ensler's show, according to South Asian Women's Collective, the Rutgers student group organizing the show. The performance will feature personal narratives, poetry, spoken word and book excerpts from Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Trinidad.

Last year, the show sold out a 250-seat space, so this year the event has moved to Trayes Hall at Douglass College Center, which seats 400.

Another one of the performers in the show, Aisah Ali, 26, of Queens, was brought to the United States from her native Indonesia to work for Qatari diplomats. Once she arrived, Ali, then 18, was paid $150 a month to work as a cook, housekeeper and baby sitter for 16 hours or more a day, seven days a week.

"I know by telling my story, it can help some other people," Ali said. "I just want to help other women who are trapped in that house."

"Yoni Ki Baat" will benefit Andolan, a Queens-based group that organizes low-income South Asian workers against exploitative employers. Andolan helps women like Chowdhury, who is a member, escape work situations where they are not only underpaid and overworked, but also regularly insulted, ridiculed and sometimes beaten.

Once, Chowdhury said, her employer threw a $5 bill at her when she asked for a week's pay.

Chitra Aiyer, a board member of Andolan, said storytelling at "Yoni Ki Baat" helps Andolan members convey the complexity of their situations. Many South Asian women come to the United States in search of economic opportunities they do not have in their home countries.

"There is so much richness that it's hard to convey in sound bites," Aiyer said.

Another goal of "Yoni Ki Baat," say organizers, is to debunk stereotypes about South Asians. Vrushali Bhojraj, a student at Rutgers University who is producing the performance, thinks that stories like Chowdhury's may also help challenge societal norms within the South Asian community.

"Divorce is viewed as a final thing in the South Asian community," Bhojraj said. "It's viewed as the end of things. There's nothing to an individual after divorce."

For Chowdhury, divorce was the beginning of her life as an independent person.

"I feel good in America, especially New York. I think this country respects women. I work myself, I pay myself," said Chowdhury, who got a job that pays $1,200 a month as a caretaker for a patient through Andolan. "I am happy now. . . . I feel good.