Women in Dark Times (28 page)

It is the peculiar density and quality of
Maps for Lost Lovers
that it can burrow beneath an honour killing and draw up, in the minutest, lyrical detail, the undercurrents of a whole life. That it can be so precise in its judgements – of the killing, of the values that sanction and require it, of the injustices of this Muslim community towards its women and of British life towards the Muslims – while opening out each narrated life into a web of endless complexity, which defies just about every generalisation about Muslims, their lives and their thoughts. How much discussion of honour killing is actually interested in either of these? A Muslim spinster turns out to have not one but two lovers. A pillar of the same community is embroiled in an illicit love affair. The woman he loves must find a temporary husband, according to Muslim law, before she is free to remarry her first husband and the father of her child in Pakistan who divorced her in a drunken rage (the novel never makes clear whether she is merely using him to this purpose or whether it is something more). A killer in the name of honour is raving, not against an ‘impure’ sister but against another woman who belongs at the heart of the storm that is his own sexual life. In Aslam’s writing, all the available clichés fade as if they had been placed under hot glass. Perhaps you need ­something like poetry – remember Luxemburg’s poetry of ­revolution – to make your way through the morass of honour crime.

Ayse Onal’s book,
Honour Killing
, which is subtitled
Stories of Men Who Killed
, also takes the not inconsiderable risk of asking us to enter into a killer’s mind (like Freud’s case studies, her chapters resemble short stories or romances and ‘lack the serious stamp of science’).
134
As Elif Shafak stated in discussion of
Honour
, ‘Without understanding masculinity, there is no way of solving the problem.’
135
In one particularly powerful story told by Onal, a young boy, Hanim, sits in prison telling of how he was his mother’s only son and her favourite child. She had been abused as a young girl by her cousin but then becomes the same cousin’s willing lover after years of a forced, loveless marriage to an older man. The son turns mute and depressed when he discovers them together and overhears his mother using to her lover the same terms of endearment he thought she used only for him: ‘My lion, my hero, my ram.’
136
But he only kills her, at the prompting of his uncle, when he realises that her affair, which he thought was his secret alone, is the talk of the whole community.

Like
Maps for Lost Lovers
, each of these interviews shows that any one honour killing arises out of a history, and that we can only begin to understand it as a phenomenon if that history, however confusing – indeed because so confusing – is told. This has always been a problem for the case for universal male violence against women – that it shuts down equivocation and, like the voice instructing them to kill, binds all men to the worst they are capable of: ‘A voice in your head tells you what you must do.’
137
For more than one of the killers, the act is a matter of deepest regret, even as they are egged on, lauded and told to be proud. These young men, often chosen to enact the crime on the grounds that their youth will lead to a reduction of their sentence, mostly find themselves rejected and isolated by their families once in prison. ‘You too die with the person you kill,’ states Hanim in Onal’s book. ‘She is sure to appear before your eyes every time you lie in bed’ (given his story, a remark of stunning ambiguity). ‘When you think about it logically, there is always an alternative.’
138
Every killer, whatever the pressure of family or community, has a choice. In a way, this makes it worse. The knowledge comes too late. But it also prises open a mental space between the murderer and his act, a sliver of freedom for generations to come. This is another reason why, beyond the immediate, legitimate outrage on behalf of women, we should listen carefully to the stories of these crimes. ‘Nobody’, states Sarhan in his interview with Rana Husseini, ‘really wants to kill his own sister.’
139
At a key moment in Shafak’s
Honour
, the father of the murdered woman expresses his gratitude that he never had a son when, much earlier in the story, another of his daughters flees the village with her lover (she returns and commits suicide). He knows he would have asked him to kill his daughter ‘and clean our family’s good name’.
140
Let feminism, then, proclaim honour killing as the violence against women which it is, while also seeing as its task to wrench open wherever it is humanly possible the gap, the space of reflection, however minute, between the perpetrator and his dreadful crime.

Is this, finally, a tale of progress? The answer has to be yes and no. The very fact that there is so much more writing, telling of these stories, should be taken as such a sign. Both Onal and Husseini have risked their lives by their work as campaigning journalists on honour-based violence – Onal also for implicating the Turkish government in the 2007 assassination of journalist Hrant Dink and three Christian Turkish publishers (in 1994 she was shot for linking the government and organised crime). In 2004, at the prompting of the European Council, Turkey introduced mandatory life sentences for those who carry out honour killings. But this is only part of the story. In Pakistan, a new Women’s Protection Bill brought rape under the Pakistan penal code, which is based in civil rather than sharia law, but according to the Asian Human Rights Commission there has been no reduction in the number of incidents of violence against women since the Bill became law in 2006. Tariq Ali’s 2008 account of the honour killing of a distant cousin would be a case in point.
141
Another would be the 2011 gang rape of Mukhtaran Mai, assaulted on the orders of a village council after her brother was accused of having illicit relations with a woman from a rival clan (not an honour killing but not unrelated, as his adultery became her violence-inducing shame).
142
Husseini has not succeeded in overturning Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code, although the campaign has increased awareness and played a major role in destroying public indifference towards honour crimes. In England, the Forced Marriage (Civil Protection) Act, which allows victims of forced marriages to pursue perpetrators through the civil courts, came into force in November 2008, although you might argue that such victims are unlikely to be in a position to do so. Everything I have read suggests, however, that, while the struggle to change the law remains crucial, and must be supported at every turn, it can only do so much. The problem goes deeper, into the darkest sexual recesses of the mind where – historical evidence suggests – neither love nor reason has ever found it easy to follow.

By the time I had finished reading these ghastly stories, for me it was the sisters who stood out as the heroines. Not the ones lamented too late – ‘Nobody really wants to kill his own sister’ – but the ones who survive and go on telling the story. Songhul Sahindal, Fadime Sahindal’s sister, took to the witness stand against the advice of her whole family, who were happy to dismiss her and her evidence as insane – ‘a mad woman’s tale’.
143
Bekhal Mahmod, sister of Banaz, was the key prosecution witness at the trial of her father and uncle and the first woman in the UK ever to testify at an ‘honour killing’ trial. Undercover and in hiding ever since, she continues to speak out on behalf of her dead sister (you can see one of the interviews on YouTube). Alesha Ahmed, torn between her dead sister and her parents, eventually found her voice, risking the wrath of the rest of her family, especially – we can only assume – the wrath of her brother and sister, who held on to their deluded belief in their parents’ innocence to the end. Their futures will probably not be public knowledge, but they are each there as testimony to women’s fight for justice in the face of what might seem insuperable odds, showing us what even the hushed voice, the quietly spoken words of women can do. Trying to follow them, or perhaps just remembering the difficult nature of the lives they are now likely to be living, might be one way to keep this painful issue at the forefront of our minds, and to hold on to what happens next.

III

LIVING

This book has been about the creativity of women, often where least expected. It ends with three modern women who are artists in name as well as deed. We live in a time when violence and discrimination against women shows no sign of diminishing, a fact which must serve at least partially as a measure of what feminism has been able, and unable, to achieve. We live in a time when inequality is still glaring, despite the advances towards freedom for many, although by no means all, women in the world. None of this should however deter us. The fight for women’s emancipation is, as Juliet Mitchell put it, the ‘longest revolution’.
1
Setbacks, rage against feminism, are part of the picture. Today we are witnessing a resurgence of feminism which many are describing as its fourth wave (the suffragettes, de Beauvoir’s post-war feminism, the 1970s women’s liberation movement as the first three). This campaign is spurred by a young generation of women who are speaking out with renewed energy against misogyny and inequality, an energy born of the growing recognition that the struggle for women’s freedom is far from won.
2
But however bleak the reality for women might seem at moments, we should not, Mitchell suggested in a recent interview, talk of the successes and failures of feminism, only of feminism’s long struggle.
3
In this light, the apparent failures are paradoxically a sign of the ongoing force of feminism, the battle that is still engaged. We should therefore be talking only of our success.

If the argument of this book has any purchase, however, the question remains as to how far the world wants to hear the voices of women. By this, as will be clear by now, I do not only mean their public voices, the urgent political demands feminism continues and will continue to make. I am also referring to the private voices, the capacity – call it a need if you like – which women have, certainly the women of this book, to draw up the most energised and sombre colours of our inner landscapes into the glare of the outside world, to persuade us that what goes on, mostly hidden, inside the heart is the companion and prompt, at least as much as the obstacle, to the better world we want to create. They are all – and in this I include the women of the previous chapter boldly speaking out against honour crimes – custodians of the night, for whom the dark cannot be warded off but must be given its place as an indispensable part of freedom. Their importance and quality as women writers, speakers, artists and protestors, resides in the way they bring into focus the proximity of these two domains. The three women artists I end with have in common their sheer stubbornness in insisting that we turn our gaze to the overlooked, the rejected, the unseen. More simply, each one lays on their work the burden of the unspoken in ways which have struck and moved me. As artists, they are also closer to Luxemburg, Salomon and Monroe than at first glance it might appear. Luxemburg’s poetry, drawings and ink paintings were the backdrop to her revolutionary zeal; visual artistry, it goes without saying, was Monroe’s privileged domain; Salomon survived her story by giving it colour and shape, as she poured, almost without catching breath, one painted image after another on to the page.

Artistry has always been seen as a form of defiance. In this context the artistry of women takes on an additional significance. As Germaine Greer has written of Thérèse Oulton, my final artist who provides the second epigraph to this book, she has become less well known the more she has immersed herself in paint at a time when many critics proclaim its demise, the more she has made the density of paint – nurtured almost to the point of obscenity in some of her works – a way of holding on to a world we are in danger of destroying. Paint is her substance. It is her tribute to the disappearing lushness of the earth, her counter to the aridity and incremental barrenness of the times. Oulton was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1987 – she has come close to the dominant, officially sanctioned ways of being recognised. But as far back as 1988, when Wendy Beckett included her work in
Contemporary Women Artists
,
it was clear, even if Beckett herself shied away from the gender implications of her own selection, that Oulton was to be celebrated as one of many women artists who, while they may be the object of intense scrutiny and acclaim, are only rarely, and in Oulton’s case fleetingly, given the same status as their male counterparts.
4
On this topic there is now a fierce tradition of feminist art history, in which Germaine Greer herself, and others such as Griselda Pollock, have been so key. The point of this final section of the book might then be said to be to give these three women artists their place in what Pollock has defined as the ‘Virtual Feminist Museum’, a piece of loving and continuous feminist archaeology designed to accord women artists their due.
5
Except that museum is not quite right for this book. The companions I offer my three women artists are women of the world – Luxemburg, Salomon, Monroe, Alesha and Shafilea Ahmed, Fadime Sahindal, Heshu Yones – who, from silver screen to seascape, from revolutionary pulpit to courtroom, have made their presence felt way beyond the limits of their lives, way beyond the space to which a cruel and hostile world has wished to confine them.