By Sara Hailstone
Content warning: domestic violence, racism, kidnapping
The Shaytan Bride: A Bangladeshi Canadian Memoir of Desire and Faith is memoir that lyrically follows the courageous self-actualization and fight for her life by Sumaiya Matin, who was essentially held hostage by her family during a trip to Bangladesh and pushed into the prospect of an arranged marriage. Matin resisted the marriage and was helped by the High Commission of Canada to return to Toronto alone. She pursued writing and social work. She is now a part-time psychotherapist and strategic advisor for the Ontario government.
Matin moved from Dhaka to Ontario when she was six years old, and records with literary eloquence what life was like growing up in Toronto in a post 9/11 discriminatory society. She fell in love with a young man outside of her society and Muslim faith, and she traces the pains of the heart in her adolescence as she navigates the rigid ideological currents of how and who she was supposed to be as a woman within her culture. This young love later advocated for Matin and petitioned her case to the High Commission of Canada.
Matin expertly crafts the concepts of the jinn and the Shaytan Bride throughout the narrative. In Matin’s world, the woman is afflicted by jinn—demons—and is therefore used up, unable to be folded neatly into society. But Matin brilliantly identifies freedom for women in these wretched states:
Yes, I imagined the Shaytan Bride as forewarning, but not as terrorized by the bad jinns, the sorcerers, her human or non-human lovers, or even the Shaytan, like they said. She moved freely and in ways most others didn’t because they weren’t sure how, or they were afraid, or such freedom of movement existed entirely outside the spectrum of their imaginations.
She knew, in her own life, the cautionary lesson of the Shaytan Bride was to avoid becoming one. There is no redemption for a woman in love with or touched by a jinn. Obey. Do not become the Shaytan Bride.
This memoir is important for women. Matin works through the reality of the historical wars waged on women’s bodies. “By them I imagined the bodies of women raped, abandoned, and killed, corpses covered in rotten filth. Their bodies washed over with the echoes of voices of both strangers and kin. It was always the women who got the brunt of it, their bodies the battleground for all the sins.”
Considering the gravity of the adversity that Matin stood against and wrote through, and the mastery of her narrative, The Shaytan Bride should be eligible for awards. The memoir is that well written. It flows with a natural literary voice and has a powerful message for women: that story can shape the trajectory of a life, a life worth protecting and nurturing. Matin honours her inner truth again and again throughout the memoir.
Matin also shows layers of Canadian society that are important for Canadians to face now in turbulent times: our colonized bedrock exposes and isolates vulnerable members of society. Imagine returning from being kidnapped and almost forced into an arranged marriage and not being able to make that reality understood to an academic institution that requires one to pay the full tuition during the missed time. She gracefully and subtly shows the barriers within our country’s infrastructure, which permeate academia, government, and healthcare.
I see the full value of this text in the extension of the life Sumaiya Matin has carved out beyond the page. Her story is not over, she is just beginning. I recommend you follow her on social media to witness the flourishing of The Shaytan Bride as a novel that will most likely contribute to the canon of Canadian literature.
Follow Sumaiya here: @sumaiya.matin
Thank you to Dundurn Press for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!