Marrying Ameera (19 page)

Now that I am able to go outside again, I attend university most days and it gives me different things to think about. Tariq is busy finishing his Masters thesis.
We meet for coffee in the refectory on the days we’re both there. When he looks at me I see myself safe inside his eyes. He has a warmth, like a light, that flows through his whole personality. It washes over me and fills all my yearning spaces. Those folk tales echoed reality more than I ever suspected but now I choose not to be bound by them. Tariq and I will write a new story—one in which our love lives.

In 2006 I was visiting Pakistan on an Asialink Fellowship for research on an idea I had for another novel. My host school in Murree, Northern Pakistan, became a base to travel from and in between I worked in classrooms and did research in the comprehensive library on Pakistani culture and history, the Pathans, Gujjar nomads, as well as on societal customs such as weddings, folktales, crafts and religion.

The school was tight on security due to a terrorist attack four years previously, but since I had my husband with me I was able to take many research trips—including up the Karakorum Highway, where we passed the tribal areas of Kala Dhaka (Black Mountain) and Kohistan (Land of Mountains), to Azad Kashmir and other earthquake affected areas.

It was on that trip to Azad Kashmir that we met an English couple who knew a man from the Forced Marriage Unit in the British Consulate. I immediately could see the idea for a new novel. The next day at the school I was able to do mind maps on the characters and
write up an outline. This rarely happens so quickly but all that I had been seeing and hearing for the last five weeks suddenly erupted into this story and I began writing it at once. I also started collecting folk tales, cloth, patterns for outfits, news clippings and Pakistani literature.

Although I had spent seven years in Pakistan when I was younger I felt that this time I understood the richness of the culture so much more than I did before. I was able to visit in local homes, even overnight, and gained much insight into the Pakistani people and customs, including experiencing first-hand Pathan hospitality with its gun firing at parties, and honour, segregation and protection of women. I was taught how to make local foods and parathas and was there during Eid celebrations.

For me writing is a way of talking, a way of interacting with the world and making sense of what I hear and see. Sooner or later what I experience becomes assimilated into my work, and although that has happened with what I saw and experienced in Pakistan and
Marrying Ameera,
it is a work of fiction.

It is not based on anyone’s life and I do not know of any Australian–Pakistani girls who have had a forced marriage. However, I do know that in 2005 a dozen Australian girls under the age of eighteen (one was only fourteen) sought help from the Australian consulate in Beirut, Lebanon, after being sent abroad and forced to marry.
¹
In Britain, hundreds of girls are sent abroad for
marriages they do not want and many of these take place in Pakistan.

An arranged marriage is an accepted part of many cultures. However, a forced marriage occurs when one or both of the people getting married do not give their consent and they are married under duress. In many areas of Pakistan there is a clan or cultural honour system whereby a family is shamed if a girl doesn’t obey her parents or if she does anything they consider immoral. So there is much emotional, psychological and often physical pressure on the girl to marry according to the family’s choice.

In 2005 in Australia tough laws were introduced to prevent young people being sent abroad to engage in forced marriages. Every year the Forced Marriage Unit in Britain has thousands of enquiries and saves three hundred people from forced marriages in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and beyond.
²
About a third are under eighteen years of age, and fifteen per cent of cases involve young men.
³
In 2007 the British Forced Marriage Unit in Islamabad rescued one hundred and thirty-one British girls from forced marriages.
⁴

Forced marriages are against the law in Pakistan; a bill was passed in 2007 to stop the practice. Many
families do not realise that a forced marriage is a form of domestic abuse. I hope
Marrying Ameera
will shed some light on a practice that is kept so quiet that many young people are unsuspecting of it. If you do suspect that you, or a friend, are being forced into a marriage, help is available. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office in the UK has information on its website: http://www.fco.gov. uk/en/travel-and-living-abroad/when-things-go-wrong/ forced-marriage. Or if you are already abroad, you can contact your embassy.

A journal of my experiences in Pakistan can be found on my webite at www.rosannehawke.com.

I wish to thank Asialink for awarding me a Literature Fellowship to visit Pakistan and to carry out research. Thank you to Arts SA for funding the Asialink Fellowship and for providing a grant to finish the first draft of this novel; and the SA Festival Awards Carclew Fellowship, which enabled me to complete it.

Thank you to Anne and Colin Bloomfield who planted the seed of the idea that grew into this novel. Thank you to Murree Christian School which hosted me during the research period. Thanks to Frank Lyman, who took us to so many places and is always a source of inspiration, and to Rebecca Lyman for a preliminary edit. Thank you to Lenore Penner for reading the manuscript and giving helpful suggestions, Celia Manning for helping with the right word, and my agent, Jacinta di Mase, for her invaluable advice.

Thank you to Lisa Berryman, Lydia Papandrea and Nicola O’Shea and all at HarperCollins for their wonderful support and expertise.

I wish to acknowledge the excellent volume of Indus
folk tales by Samina Quraeshi,
Legends of the Indus,
Asia Ink, London, 2004, from which I retold Ameera’s folk tales.

‘The Girl Who Cried a Lake’ is from Sally Pomme Clayton,
Tales Told in Tents: Stories from Central Asia,
Francis Lincoln, London, 2005.

The mehndi songs are from A.B. Rajput,
Social Customs and Practices in Pakistan,
RCD Cultural Institute, Islamabad, 1977, pp. 52–53.

Rumi’s poem ‘This Marriage’ is found in full in
Love is a Stranger: Selected Lyrical Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi,
translated by Kabir Helminski, Threshold Books, 1993.

The story ‘The Ruby Prince’ can be found in Flora Annie Steele,
Tales of the Punjab,
Bodley Head, London, 1973 (first published 1894).

Rosanne Hawke is a multi-award winning Australian author. She has written over fifteen books to date, among them
Mustara,
which was shortlisted in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards in 2007, and
Soraya the Storyteller,
which was shortlisted in the Children’s Book Council of Australia Awards in 2005 and in the South Australian Festival Awards in 2006. She was awarded an Asialink Fellowship to write in Pakistan in 2006 and the Carclew Fellowship in 2008. Rosanne was an aid worker in Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates for almost ten years and now teaches Creative Writing at Tabor Adelaide.

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¹
Mercer, P., ‘Australia acts on forced marriage’, BBC News, Sydney, 3 August 2005 (http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/4740871. stm).

²
Richings, E., ‘Caught in the grip of a culture clash’,
Telegraph,
3 January 2006 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/3649113/Caught-in-the-grip-of-a-culture-clash.html).

³
Manchester City Council Report for Information, Forced Marriage, 16 October 2007 (http://www.manchester.gov.uk/egov_downloads/forced_marriage_final_v1.1.pdf).

⁴
Buchanan, E., ‘Tough choice between freedom and honour’, BBC News, 1 December 2008 (http://news.bbc.co.Uk/2/hi/uk_news/7754280.stm).