Student Entry - Emerging Talent Awards

Call me Heena “I feel like a mermaid. My body tells me that I am a man but my soul tells me that I am a woman. I am like a flower, a flower that is made of paper. I shall always be loved from a distance, never to be touched and no smell to fall in love with.” Heena ,52 Hijra, a term of South Asia which have no exact match in the modern western taxonomy of gender, designated as male at birth with feminine gender identity and eventually adopts feminine gender roles. Instead of coming from various social and family backgrounds, Hijras feel a strong sense of belongings to their groups. These groups give them the shelter of a family and the warmth of human relationship. Outside the group, they are discriminated and scorned almost everywhere. I, like almost everyone else in my society, grew up seeing them as less than human. Their habits, way of life, and even looks marked them as different and deviant, as if a living testimony of biological aberration. Then I met Heena, who showed me how wrong I was. She opened her life to me, made me a part of her world and helped me to see something beyond the word Hijra. She made me understand her and other members of her community, as the mothers, daughters, friends and lovers that they actually are. In today’s world Hijras hardly get an opportunity to have a normal life. They do not get the opportunity to get admitted to schools, they are never employed in the government jobs, no private company in Bangladesh would want to see them in their employee list. They neither have access to the legal system nor they receive the proper health services. Photography has always been an extremely effective tool to challenge the social stigma and help unleash a different reality to the world. I hope my work will help the Hijras to find a breathing space in a claustrophobic society like ours and it will help them to find new friends in their friendless world.