Contribution short abstract:

In a six-month long workshop, the sex workers of Mongla painted the reality of climate change in their life and described it. It also helped the community to produce an artistic archive for the future generations to see. occupations.

Contribution long abstract:

The sex workers of Mongla reside on the banks of the Passur River. Their occupational land is being gnawed at by the river forcing them to conduct sex trade on the remaining land or on the boats. The women of Mongla brothel are in a continuous conflict with the Bangladesh Government to safeguard their legal “right to livelihood” since 2010 which should get them secured rehabilitation. However, such struggles have yielded no outcomes yet. The resilience that these ostracized women show at the face of bureaucratic apathy, climatic assaults, and social abandonment is what I term as “Sisyphean Resilience.” Such that, like the Greek hero Sisyphus who rolls the rock on the mountain till the end of time; the women of Mongla also fight the adversities every day with a new zeal. Their uncelebrated life, I realized would undergo trauma if pushed for direct interviews during ethnography. Hence, I resorted to arts-based research as means of an “anthropology of emotions” (Lutz and White: 1986). In a six-month long workshop, the sex workers of Mongla painted the reality of climate change in their life and described it. The artistic project provided the sex workers the space to control their narrative and speak about it without trauma. It also helped the community to produce an artistic archive for the future generations to see. The artistic productions help seal the lacuna caused by year-long erasure of documentation and archive keeping of the communities related to ostracised occupations. Thus, depending on a yearlong fieldwork, transcontinental archival data, literary analysis of local religious literature and periodicals, arts-based research; the paper maps the “amphibious” lives of sex workers in the Mongla Brothel, Bangladesh in the era of Anthropocene.