Psychology specialist Nadia Ansar (43) has been married to Venstre’s Abid Raja since 2001.
The book “My shame”, which was published on Wednesday, is described as “a story about expectations and detachment”, and deals with “the bright minority girl’s struggle to be allowed to be herself”.
The book is given a six by Dagbladet’s reviewer:
She won over the shame
“Outwardly, she was the immaculate daughter, the great love of Abid Raja, the good immigrant alibi and the well-integrated psychologist, an expert on emotions such as shame and guilt. What no one saw was that she was carrying a rucksack full of shame and dark secrets,” writes Cappelen Damm.
In 2021, her husband Abid Raja published his autobiography “My fault” at the same publisher. The book received a lot of attention and became a bestseller.
MARRIED COUPLE: Nadia Ansar and her husband Abid Raja on their way to the Amanda award ceremony in 2020, when Raja was Minister of Culture and Equality. Photo: Jan Kåre Ness / NTB Show more
The husband’s book is about his liberation from a conservative Muslim culture of honor in order to create his own identity as a Norwegian-Pakistani. It also deals with Raja and Ansar’s love story, and the struggle for it to be the two of them.
“But Nadia’s voice was missing”, writes the publisher.
Becomes controlling
Similar to what her husband did in her book, Ansar writes in “My shame” among other things about how she experienced that her husband changed in the time before and after the wedding.
Ansar describes how Raja, in the attempt to make her “more edible” for the family, becomes an increasingly conservative Muslim, and is influenced by the demands and expectations of the woman’s honor.
ABOUT TERROR: Abid Raja in the election booth. Video: Dagbladet TV Show more
She stops wearing both T-shirts and lipstick, and starts to dress more covering up.
– While I tried to reconcile my two worlds, the Norwegian and the Pakistani, Abid became increasingly concerned with purifying his Pakistani culture and being blameless as a Muslim. He was genuinely afraid that I would not behave in line with his opinions and thoughts when we got married. Therefore, he asked me to work on respecting him more, and not to irritate him so often, she writes in the book.
In the book, Nasar writes that after the birth of his twin daughters, Abid vowed to break with “the old-fashioned, patriarchal attitudes”. However, that was not all he got rid of, according to the book.
Nasar writes that Raja, while the children were small, appeared in Aftenposten and said that he took it for granted that the men should also look after the children and look after the home when they had time off.
However, at home with what eventually became a family of three, it was not quite like that.
– I myself would very much like to be a working woman who kept up with the times and lived in an equal marriage. But it was still only me who cooked, took care of the children and cleaned the house, writes Ansar.
– When I complained about his grumpiness or that he didn’t contribute more at home, it felt like talking to a wall. “That’s the way I am,” he could then reply.
Desired divorce
Ansar decides in turn to leave him, it appears.
– He realized that he had treated me grossly unfairly. That he had had unreasonable demands and expectations of me. “I’m willing to do anything,” he said, “if you can only give me one more chance.”
Ansar gives her husband a second chance, on two conditions. He needs to go to therapy, and he needs to contribute more at home.
– Had he not settled with his family and created the necessary distance from the controlling regime, had he not gone to therapy and changed his way of treating me, we would not have been able to be together, states Ansar in the book.
Writing about abuse
In addition to the challenges in marriage, the book devotes a lot of attention to what it was like to grow up in a patriarchal culture and how the whole childhood was about satisfying the needs of others. The cross-pressure she experienced threw her into a self-reinforcing spiral of shame and inferiority complexes, she writes.
Photo: Cappelen Damm Show more
In particular, the shame is linked to an incident when she was six years old, where, according to the book, she claims to have been abused by a man.
In the book, she describes her experience of the incident.
– I have no idea how long it lasted. Maybe it didn’t take more than a few minutes, writes Nasar.
In the book, she describes her own shame linked to the incident, which left its mark.
Not until well into adulthood was Nasar able to come to terms with the incident, and eventually also received an apology, she writes.
The wish with the book is to give “hope and a voice to others who have lived and live with overwhelming shame, and who have experienced similar abuse”, writes Nasar in the book’s afterword.
– Proud
Dagbladet has asked both Nadia Ansar and Abid Raja for an interview in connection with the book publication. Both refer to the publisher, who says that an interview is not relevant.
In a comment via the publisher, Raja says:
– I am so incredibly proud of Nadia, and speechless with admiration at how brave she is to have written this book. And I am so grateful that she put up with me, because there have been moments in our relationship where I think it would have been completely understandable if she had left me.
Raja opened up about the time before and right after the wedding during an interview on “Lindmo” on NRK in 2021.
He then said that he does not recognize the Abid he was at the time, and that it was one of the most difficult things to write about in his book, which was published when he was Minister of Culture and Equality in the Solberg government.
– I had fought to get the woman I loved above all else, but my cultural baggage was so great, and I was raised for 25 years that I, as a man, should decide over the woman, said Raja.
The turning point was the birth of the twin daughters, he said.
– They should not experience what we have been through. They should live completely free lives, and not walk around feeling ashamed and feeling guilty. They must be completely free.
2023-09-13 07:18:45
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