The story of the ground-breaking Women’s Livelihood Bonds that have till date channelled more than $300 million into impact enterprises to hundreds of thousands of women in over 50 countries would be a story worth telling even without Durreen Shahnaz’s backstory.
I have read my fair share of both Wall Street memoirs as well as accounts of those who have worked heroically to bring change to the lives of everyday people, and indeed a number of stories that combine the two.
Looked at from this perspective, Ms. Shahnaz’s arc from Smith College to Morgan Stanley to the Grameen Bank to the World Bank to the Wharton School to finally setting up her own social investment exchange and launching the first bond that sought to bring Wall Street money to the world of women’s NGOs, non-profits, and cooperatives across the developing world itself makes for a riveting and inspiring story, and one that needs no embellishment to capture the reader’s interest.
Her harrowing and hair-raising account of life on Wall Street bears comparison with the chronicles of Michael Lewis, while her odyssey from the world of finance to wanting to do more for the world and with her life calls to mind, among others, books such as Leaving Microsoft to Change the World by John Wood, the founder of Room to Read, and perhaps more crucially, the fascinating journeys undertaken by her more well-known compatriots, the two grand old men of development, the late great Sir Fazle Hasan Abed, founder of BRAC, the biggest NGO in the world, and Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank (where Ms. Shahnaz cut her teeth), pioneer of microcredit, and doyen of social business.
But while her Bangladeshi background is inextricably linked to her worldview and desire and determination to use her gifts and skills to make the world a fairer and better place for the underprivileged and disenfranchised, and in this way Ms. Shahnaz is very much following in the footsteps of both Sir Abed and Dr. Yunus, there is one aspect of her story that makes it stand out and that underpins everything she is, everything she has experienced, and ultimately, everything she stands for.
What makes Ms. Shahnaz's book required reading, in my estimation, and makes her such an interesting protagonist, is the hurdles she has to overcome just by virtue of being a Bangladeshi woman, and how this identity of hers has imbued everything she has achieved..
The social commentary in her life story is never front and centre, and Ms. Shahnaz wastes no time bemoaning her fate or feeling sorry for herself, but the casualness which which she recounts the deeply ingrained sexism she has had to overcome from early childhood through her university days through her apprenticeship on Wall Street right up through the present day should give anyone reading this memoir pause for thought and reflection.
She is not writing about a childhood a century ago but just a few decades past. Her experience as a woman of colour in the world of finance is not lived but a living experience for her.
We like to look at the achievements of women like Ms. Shahnaz, and use that as self-congratulatory evidence for how far we have come as a society and a species, but nothing could be further from the truth.
Charlotte Whitton, mayor of Ottawa in the 1960s, famously said: “Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily, this is not difficult.”
Now while this aphorism is amusingly witty and self-deprecating, it obscures a harsher truth: actually it is difficult. And the point which comes through loud and clear from Ms. Shanaz’s memoir is that when you are raised in a traditional, conservative middle-class Muslim Bengali family, it is even more difficult than anyone who has not experienced something similar can possibly imagine.
The memoir opens with a devastating first page in which we learn that Ms. Shahnaz was born at an astrologically auspicious moment: “The moment is called chura moni: chura, the peak, moni, the jewel. When a boy child is born at the very time that you were born, the universe ensures that he will reach great heights,” her grandfather tells her before concluding wistfully “But alas, the moment of chura moni was wasted on you. You were born a girl.”
That is quite some origin story. And I do not think it is overstating the fact to say that it was at least in part the desire to prove to herself, her family, and the world that the chura moni was not wasted on her that has propelled Ms. Shahnaz to reach the heights she has in her own life and career.
Throughout her childhood Ms. Shahnaz had to fight against the limitations others envisaged for and placed around her, and the story of how she broke through these barriers makes for truly compelling reading and is one that we can all learn from.
But while we can all take inspiration from her heroism and indefatigability, the real lesson from Ms. Shahnaz’s memoir is that the barriers she overcame through sheer force of will, intellect, and personality should never have been there in the first place, and that while exceptional women such as herself can break the shackles of their upbringing and the world’s relentless campaign against women’s self-actualization, that it is too much to expect that every woman will do the same.
The author has made it her life’s work to stand alongside women who are fighting to improve their lot in life, but the key takeaway, for me at least, was that as worthwhile and important as the work she does is, it is even more important to recognize just how much needs to be changed and understand how far there is to go.
The injustice and unfairness that women have to battle every day of their lives permeate this unputdownable memoir. The book is a call to arms. Not only does it serve to inspire the reader, but it should also serve to outrage the reader and fill them with the fire that burns at the heart of the author’s being.
The author is an optimist, and you have to be one to have the wherewithal to undertake the arduous struggle that has marked her life and professional career. But it is the defiance that she embodies, the refusal to accept things which are unacceptable, to accept a world in which women remain marginalized and disempowered and shut out from the world of global finance, that makes this memoir so special, so readable, and ultimately so indispensable.
