It’s difficult to digest the brutality inflicted on Rumana Monzur by her husband, or to find a case that more clearly demonstrates how intimate partner violence transcends social status. But the Bangladeshi Canadian woman’s remarkable resilience and brave rebuilding of her life propels a gripping new non-fiction book by Denise Chong, the Canadian author of The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War.

Out of Darkness: Rumana Monzur’s Journey Through Betrayal, Tyranny and Abuse recounts the lead-up to the horrific day in 2011 when, in Bangladesh on a break from graduate studies at the University of British Columbia, Monzur was quietly working at home. She had recently asked her husband Hasan Syeed Sumon for a divorce.

With the couple’s tiny daughter Anusheh, 5, nearby, Sumon gouged Monzur’s eyes with his fingers, permanently blinding her, and bit off the tip of her nose. “I’m going to kill you,” she recalls Sumon saying. “I wanted to kill you with acid. Lucky for you, I couldn’t find any.”

 

 

This was not the first attack that Monzur, then 33, had suffered at his hands. The abuse began on their wedding night in 2000 when Sumon – who arrived hours late for the ceremony – slapped his new bride before turning his back to her in their bed. But the viciousness of the 2011 attack unveiled the years-long abuse Monzur had tried to conceal from friends, colleagues and family out of “fear of stigma, fear of bringing shame on her family,” the Ottawa-based Chong, 70, tells Zoomer from Vancouver. 

At the time of the attack, Monzur – an assistant professor at Dhaka University, where she had studied international relations – had won a UNESCO/Keizo Obuchi two-year research fellowship for scholars under 40, and was pursuing a master’s degree, her second, in political science in Canada.  

Nothing pointed toward the victimhood of this well-educated woman. “There’s the irony,” says Chong. “Rumana is so traumatized that she can’t even see the red flags in her own situation. Trauma turns lives upside down.” Prior to the marriage, the couple seemed in love. Both families appeared to support Monzur’s academic ambitions, and her father and father-in-law were friends dating back to university. “People are befuddled and in disbelief that a woman can’t leave that relationship,” says Chong. “I’m giving them an intimate look at it.”

 

As she writes in Out of Darkness, the assault did not draw universal public revulsion. Instead, in a smear campaign, Sumon’s family spread rumours that Monzur had an affair while studying overseas, and that Sumon had been wronged. “In a country with a poor education system, gossip prevails,” Chong says. “And social media had just taken off in Bangladesh.” 

Because Sumon’s family was politically connected, the police responded sluggishly when finally alerted. The Monzur family feared reprisals and initially demurred to file a report. That gave Sumon time to inflict collateral damage on his hospitalized wife, draining bank accounts and destroying “scholarly articles and every one of her paintings.” 

 

 

Bangladesh is a highly patriarchal society, despite having a long-running female prime minister, and only conducted its first survey of domestic violence the year Monzur was blinded, as Chong notes in the book’s afterword. In the survey, 87 per cent of married women reported experiencing some form of abuse from partners. “Asked if it had happened within the last twelve months, nine out of ten answered yes,” she writes. Monzur’s mother-in-law Ruby told Monzur, matter-of-factly: “After marriage, men beat their wives. Women have to tolerate a lot. Otherwise, marriages wouldn’t last.”

Despite being circumspect in the earlier days of her marriage, she finally refused to be silenced. After that ultimate act of brutality, Monzur found the courage to speak to the international press, drawing headlines across Canada and Bangladesh. She initially sought treatment for her damaged eyes in India. In September 2012, 15 months after the attack, she emigrated to Canada with Anusheh. There, she underwent additional, ultimately unsuccessful surgeries to restore her sight. But Monzur resumed her studies at UBC, switching majors and graduating from the law program in 2017. 

 

It was a bright, new beginning for both mother and daughter. Fellow students at UBC had been supportive throughout her recovery, fundraising for her and staging rallies to raise awareness about domestic violence. A fellow student, blind from birth, helped her access the university’s assistive technology. (Accessibility in Canada far outstripped available resources in Bangladesh.)

Author and subject met in 2017 when Monzur approached Chong’s agent about telling her story. Chong was an obvious choice. She had written 1996’s The Concubine’s Children: Portrait of a Family Divided about her grandmother’s experience; and 1999’s profile of Kim Phuc, photographed as a child, fleeing the napalm attack in the infamous 1972 Associated Press photo. Out of Darkness, her fifth book, presented unique challenges to Chong, who began her career as an economist, serving as senior economic adviser to then-prime minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s. “He had a huge influence on me,” she says. 

 

 

“When I met Rumana, she was someone in a new country, learning its laws, and about to graduate. It was so inspiring,” Chong says, adding that while researching the book, “I’d close my eyes and try to navigate around my house just to get myself in Rumana’s mindset.”

For one thing, communicating with Monzur took time. “If I sent her an email, it had to be read out loud to her. And I had to schedule trips out west.” There was also the matter of trying not to retraumatize Monzur as she recalled her story. “It was a balancing act,” Chong confirms. “And nothing is ordered when there’s trauma.” 

For another, the book took her six-plus years to complete – she was flattened three times by COVID-19, and went to Bangladesh in 2017 for on-the-ground reporting. A startling irony was the “willful blindness” of those in Monzur’s social circle “who didn’t move” on signs of abuse.

Chong ultimately views Monzur’s story as a positive one. Now 45 and based in Vancouver, she works as counsel for the federal Department of Justice. Anusheh, to whom Out of Darkness is dedicated, is 18 and about to begin studies at her mother’s alma mater, UBC. “Rumana came out of it so strongly. She reclaimed her identity, walked away from victimhood, and shed the idea that she was a survivor. She went back to the Rumana she was.”

 

And Sumon? He was arrested 11 days after the attack, and was found dead in a prison bathroom six months later, as he was awaiting trial on attempted murder charges. The official cause of death was a heart attack, but the family thought it was suspicious and the government never released the autopsy report. “Am I ever going to get to the bottom of that? No,” says Chong. “Is gossip still swirling about it? Yes.” 

Even after researching and writing the book, she still won’t hypothesize on what triggered Sumon’s violence following the courtship. “The dead can’t speak for themselves.”