Women in Dark Times (23 page)

‘The
gurdwara
[Sikh temple] was – to me still is – the local gossip shop,’ writes Jasvinder Sanghera in
Shame
, the 2007 story of her life. Sanghera, who fled her home in Derby to escape an arranged marriage, is the co-founder of Karma Nirvana, a Derby-based community support project for South Asian women affected by domestic violence. Hers is, therefore, exceptionally a story of triumph against the odds. ‘A trouble shared is a trouble talked about by each and every gossip in the
gurdwara
, that’s what my mum thought. Better to keep things private and then you can’t be judged or shamed.’
18
When she runs off with her lower-caste boyfriend, her mother can no longer ‘hold her head’ in the
gurdwara.
Hearsay becomes a matter of life and death. Sanghera’s sister, Robina, prefers to die by setting herself on fire than to leave her abusive husband, because of what it would do to their parents: ‘If I left Baldev now,’ she explains to her sister, ‘the shame would kill them.’
19
People who had cut her mother for years after Jasvinder left had just started talking to her again. Such exclusion is a form of social death. Nonetheless, the mother’s deepest craving is to be reinitiated into the form of speech that cast her out, made her an outlaw, in the first place.

One of the most disturbing aspects of these stories is the involvement of mothers in policing their daughters, and even on occasion in killing them. Testifying on behalf of her dead sister, Alesha Ahmed described how their mother had stuffed a plastic bag into her sister’s mouth while egging on her husband: ‘Just finish it here.’ When Shafilea Ahmed swallowed bleach to avoid a forced marriage in Pakistan, her mother, Alesha reports, looked on stony-faced. ‘Like she was thinking,’ Alesha observed, ‘ “It’s better that she’s done it herself.” ’
20
Shafilea Ahmed fell so ill as a consequence that she had to be rushed back to hospital in England, where her weight plummeted to five stone. The fact that the mother turned evidence against her husband halfway through the trial only exacerbates the heartlessness of her crime. She had apparently been happy up to that point to leave her daughter floundering against the joint lying testimony of her parents.

Purna Sen sees such involvement by women as one of the distinctive features of honour crimes. One of the most renowned cases is that of Tina Iser in 1989 in St Louis, Missouri, daughter of a Palestinian father and Brazilian mother who was recorded telling her daughter to die over and over again as she lay dying after being stabbed six times. The house was bugged because the FBI had the father under surveillance as a suspected terrorist (one suggestion is that Iser was about to blow the whistle on her father, which would give a whole other, post-9/11 US ‘war on terror’, meaning to the crime). In
Maps for Lost Lovers
, one mother tells the bridegroom of a daughter repelled by her new husband she has been forced to marry: ‘Rape her tonight.’
21
Jasvinder Sanghera’s story is not one of honour killing, but when she phones her mother pleading to come home – her book opens with this scene – her mother tells her she is as good as dead in her eyes. ‘Why’, she asks, ‘did Mum maintain that unhappiness was just a normal part of married life? Why did she not protect her daughters?’
22
And later, at Karma Nirvana, to a woman abused by her brother and uncle whose mother likewise refused to help her, she says: ‘You wouldn’t treat your worst enemy like you’ve been treated, would you? You don’t have to put up with it, you know, just because the person doing it’s your mum.’
23
In
Maps for Lost Lovers
, Mah-Jabin, the daughter of Kaukub, the central woman character, returns home to escape an abusive marriage in Pakistan. ‘What hurts me,’ she says to her mother in a scene of violent confrontation between them, ‘is that you could have given me that freedom instead of delivering me into the same kind of life that you were delivered into.’ ‘I didn’t have the freedom to give you that freedom,’ Kaukub replies, ‘don’t you see?’
24

Fadime Sahindal’s mother, Elif Sahindal, testified in court on behalf of her husband, as did Farzana Ahmed, Shafilea Ahmed’s mother, at least to begin with. Even when she changed her story, it seemed pretty clear that it was not her daughter Alesha’s wellbeing, nor indeed the truth about Shafilea, that was at the forefront of her mind. In Ahmed’s case, we can attribute the mother’s actions to the brute domination of a husband whose physical and verbal violence was never in doubt. But then we make her the mere puppet of her own life. Such cases therefore push us up against an impossible question which goes to the heart of this book: how to think of women as subjected but not – solely – the victims of their lives? In the case of Shafilea Ahmed’s mother, we might ask: Which is preferable – the image of women as powerlessly submitting to male control, or a woman as full agent in a story that, for many, seems to defy all understanding?

There are of course different stories of mothers. Honour killing thus becomes its own testimony to the difficult, often life-­threatening options available to women in the worst of times. In 1999, Tulay Goren disappeared at the age of fifteen. Her father, Mehmet Goren, was convicted of her murder in 2009 in another case slow to come to trial. In securing his conviction, the testimony of the mother, Hanim Goren, was crucial. This act, which undoubtedly put her in danger, also freed her from all fear. ‘Until I went and told the police the truth I was afraid of Mehmet,’ she stated in court, ‘but then I went and told the police the truth and I wasn’t afraid any more . . . even if he killed me.’
25
In Faqir’s
My Name Is Salma
, the mother is depicted, and remembered throughout the narrative, as unequivocally on her daughter’s side: ‘When I got pregnant with you, Layla my darling,’ she imagines herself speaking to her abandoned daughter, ‘my mother begged me to leave the village before my brother found out. “He will shoot you between the eyes with his English rifle. You must go, daughter, before you get killed.” ’
26
‘She wanted to come to see me,’ she muses in prison after her child has been snatched from her at birth, ‘but my father and brother must have forbidden her from crossing the threshold of the house.’
27

And yet, if honour killing belongs behind closed doors, an act of perverted love and intimacy, it is also crucially public, belonging in some sense on the streets. Honour crime may be about women’s sexuality, but it is no less crucially about women’s right to public speech. It is central to the case of Fadime Sahindal that she became a celebrity. Sahindal had fallen in love with a Swedish Iranian, Patrik Lindesjo. Her family, who had lived in Sweden for twenty years, were Kurds from south-eastern Turkey. The tragedy began when she was spotted with Lindesjo in the street by her father, Rahmi Sahindal. Although the father later claimed that the families had agreed on the marriage and the only issue was who should pay for the wedding, Sahindal recognises this moment as a point of no return: ‘He would have broken my neck if he had got hold of me . . . I know I’ve ruined the life of my whole family.’
28
Not untypically, she identifies at moments like these with the values that will kill her: ‘No one will want to marry the girls in my family – they’re all whores now.’
29
These values travel. ‘They should cut me into pieces,’ Salma muses in Faqir’s novel after she sleeps with a stranger in London, ‘and leave each at the top of a different hill for birds of prey.’
30
Sahindal is cast out from her family, and leaves Uppsala for a social work course in northern Sweden, although that in itself is something of a breakthrough for a woman of her social group. According to Wikan, in a more or less explicit understanding shared by all the members of the family, Sahindal’s exile is the only acceptable alternative to her death.

Fadime Sahindal is remarkable for both the way and the extent that she goes public. First, for securing convictions against her father and brother for threatening to kill her, and then again against her brother for seriously assaulting her during a return visit to Uppsala, a conviction that resulted in a five-month prison sentence. These facts are in themselves worth noting, since when she first goes to the police, they are indifferent to her complaints. This is often the pattern. The most famous example in the UK is that of Banaz Mahmod, who was raped, tortured and strangled in 2005 by two members of her extended family flown in from Kurdistan while her father watched. Found covered in blood in the street after breaking a window to escape an earlier assault, she was accused by the police of exaggeration (‘a lying drunk’, in fact, in the words of one report, as her father had also forced gin down her throat). In the weeks leading up to her death she went to the police six times. The formal complaint against the PC, Angela Cornes, who also considered bringing charges of criminal damage against her for the window breakage, was dropped for lack of evidence and Cornes was promoted to sergeant in 2009.

Fadime Sahindal’s successes in court meant therefore that she had every reason to believe that her courage was paying off. A month before sentence was passed on her father and brother, she appeared together with Lindesjo on television, where they talked about their love and the threats against them (the quotes above are taken from that interview). She had sought publicity in the belief that it would save her life: ‘Perhaps they won’t dare to kill me now that so many people know who I am.’
31
Two months before her death, in November 2001, she agreed, after first refusing, to address a seminar in the Swedish parliament organised by the Violence Against Women Network. In front of an audience of 350, she described her turn to the mass media as her ‘last chance’. She had hoped to create a public debate about the problems of girls from immigrant families. But she also recognised that what she called the ‘media circus’ had got out of control: it ‘grew explosively’.
32
Sahindal became a ‘national celebrity’.
33
According to her sister Nebile, it is this that drove their father to violence, and made him sick (that he is a sick man will be the grounds for his defence).

Sahindal knew that to expose her family publicly, when the original sin was one of dishonour or public humiliation, was massively to compound her offence. She refused the option to have the first hearing against her father and brother behind closed doors. She was therefore courting danger, as she did by violating the unspoken conditions of exile and returning to Uppsala to visit her mother and sister on the night she died. None of this, of course, remotely excuses her killing. There is also something contradictory in the idea that someone could ‘go for celebrity status in an attempt to protect herself’ (celebrity always contains a potential element of shame).
34
But if this case is so powerful, it is because Sahindal was also driven by another vision of social obligation. She was speaking for the invisible women of her community. This is an impulse that drives many of the women who investigate honour crime. For Rana Husseini, author of
Murder in the Name of Honour
,
one of the main objectives in reporting case after case – also at huge personal risk – is to make sure that every single instance of honour killing becomes
news
(her book is subtitled, not unproblematically:
The True Story of One Woman’s Fight Against an Unbelievable Crime
). For any journalist venturing into this terrain, the simple fact of writing about honour killing can be seen as a form of devotion, at once tribute and campaign. More simply, to write about honour killing is in the first instance simply to demand that these crimes be talked about and seen. Viewed in these terms, Fadime Sahindal’s self-exposure is a kind of sharing and an act of love: ‘I gave voice, and lent face.’
35

*

One way of trying to understand these crimes might then be to try and make our way inside the words which permit them. There are two words for honour in Kurdish:
sharaf
, an Arab word,
which refers to a man’s sense of honour and self-worth, and
namus
(originally derived from the Greek
nomos
), which refers to the purity and propriety of women. In fact the distinction between the two is precarious – a man’s
sharaf
will be irreparably damaged if he fails to control the behaviour of the women in his family. His honour is therefore irretrievably linked to their potential shame. To these two terms, James Brandon and Salam Hafez add
I’rid
, an Arabic word that indicates the sexual purity with which a woman is born – once damaged it can never be restored (the equivalent term would be
maryada
in many Indian languages,
ghairat
in Urdu and Pashto).
Honour is therefore vested in women but it is the property of the man. ‘Women cannot own honour,’ writes anthropologist Shala Haeri with reference to
izzat
, the Pakistani term for honour. ‘They are honour.’
36
Honour is basic, like bread. One of Ayse Onal’s interviewees, in prison for killing his pregnant sister, says he lives for ‘honour, dignity and for his daily bread’.
37
But it is also something elusive and constantly under threat, in the words of Brandon and Hafez, ‘an intangible asset dependent on a community’s perceptions’.
38
The man’s honour depends on the woman, who, by his own account of her sexual nature, necessarily places it at risk. ‘In Arab culture,’ writes Lama Abu-Odeh in her brilliant 1996 essay on crimes of honour in the Arab world, ‘a man is that person whose sister’s virginity is a social question for him.’
39
Or in the words of Gideon Kressel, ‘In Arab Muslim culture, the honour of the patrilineal group is bound up with the sex organs of its daughters’ (the term
I’rid
combines the two).
40
As Abu-Odeh also points out, men make deals with each other not to ‘sneak’ inside the walls built by their friends around their sisters, but then exploit the
camaraderie
that follows to ‘sneak’ inside the walls built around the sisters of other men.
41
Women must abstain from pre-marital sex, ‘and from any act that might lead to sexual activity, and from any act that might lead to an act that might lead to an act that might lead to sexual activity’.
42
Feminism has long pointed out that the idealisation of women’s bodies can be a thinly veiled form of hatred (as we have just seen in relation to Marilyn Monroe), like all idealisations which are always ready to trample on the one who falls or fails. In the case of honour, the rift is glaring. We are dealing with a vicious injunction, as well as a Sisyphean task. You will enact honour in every bone of your body and every minute of your life because, as a woman, you are the one who carries the seeds of its destruction.