Women in Dark Times (22 page)

The case was remarkable by any standards, not least because of the family agonies that it so graphically displayed – most obviously parents against children, but also sibling against sibling, and then, when Farzana Ahmed eventually turned witness against her husband, spouse against spouse. Following the case on a daily basis in the press, it was not hard to see how it might have acquired for its small but dedicated court followers the status of a soap opera – a friend suggested I see them as the Furies of Greek tragedy who hover ready to tear the guilty to shreds (certainly the court was kinder than they were, describing Alesha Ahmed as ‘a case for mercy’ and sparing her a jail sentence for the robbery). Nor did the fascination seem racially tinged, unlike much of the press commentary, which never tired of repeating that the parents, and by implication their whole generation of Asians in Britain, were throwbacks to a primitive age. Rather it felt to me from talking to these women that it was horror at the death of Shafilea, a desire for justice to be done, that drove them; and then admiration for Alesha, even if she was ‘no innocent’, for being willing to speak out, at huge risk to herself, on her dead sister’s behalf. I felt that they were cheering her on and, in the process, neatly dismantling another stereotype: that, in the world of honour killing, women are pure victims who can make no difference, who lack any agency whatsoever in their own lives.

The three women whose lives we have followed so far all die before their time. Two of them, Rosa Luxemburg and Charlotte Salomon, are murdered (in fact that is also more or less the verdict of Lois Banner, the most recent biographer of Marilyn Monroe). Despite this, it has been my argument here that to see them as victims is to render their lives meaningless. It deprives them of their energy, their creativity and their fight. Feminism gains nothing, I argue, by swamping women in their worst fates. If honour killing is important in this context it is because it no doubt tests that argument to the limit – ‘the most extreme form of violence against women’, in the words of Jordanian-British writer Fadia Faqir.
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That is why it will be so important in this chapter to listen to the voices, and register the courage and resilience of many of the women who have been the target, directly or indirectly, of honour-based crime. Indeed one of the most shocking things about the case of Shafilea Ahmed was to hear the defence try to discredit the testimony not just of Alesha Ahmed, which was to be expected, but even the voice of the dead. Shafilea Ahmed had made an emergency application for rehousing on grounds of parental abuse. She knew her life was in danger. When her words were read out in court, it was not only her father who accused his daughter of lying. The defence argued that she was being manipulative and had made up the story in order to jump the waiting list.

Across England and Wales, women are murdered by men with chilling regularity (two women per week according to recent statistics). Not all of these by any means fall under the rubric of ‘honour’ crimes, but they are nearly all domestic, the product of the most intimate ties, a reality increasingly in the public eye.
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It was Hitchcock who famously described television as bringing murder back into the home, ‘where it belongs’. I lost count of the number of times that newspapers showed a picture of the Ahmeds’ Warrington home, as if its front should have vouched for its safety. Instead this case reminds us that it is under the veneer of normality that we should be looking for the most hideous crimes – normality, as I also argue throughout these pages, being mostly a cover and certainly something feminism should always be suspicious of. But there is another reason why honour killing has its place in this book, why it follows the tales already told, notably of Luxemburg and Salomon – one who anticipates, one who lives and then dies during the blackest moment of Europe’s past. And that is to prevent us from seeing in honour-based crime a form of cruelty against women unrivalled in the history of the West. For if, in the chilling words of Salomon’s biographer, Mary Felstiner, genocide is ‘the art of putting women and children first’, can it be simply true that honour killing is the most extreme form of violence against women? As Lila Abu-Lighod warns, it is strangely easy for commentators to be ‘seduced’ by honour crimes.
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As if honour crimes are somehow reassuring in exact proportion to how horrendous they are. For the Western observer, they are, we might say, the perfect crime – the crime of which she or he could never, ever be guilty.

In this chapter we will be looking at some of the most striking cases of what goes under the name of ‘honour crime’, while asking what can be learned from this form of violence in a still patriarchal world. In the process we will travel from Chester to Turkey and across the multiple cultures of our times and back again, since it is central to my argument that the violence endemic in honour crimes is not exclusive to non-Western cultures and that it must be placed in the context of an increasingly unequal, mobile and dislocated world.

*

It was in 2003, the year Shafilea Ahmed was murdered, that the term ‘honour killing’ entered the British legal system, when Abdullah Yones pleaded guilty to killing his sixteen-year-old daughter Heshu Yones. Accounts of the case vary but certain facts are clear. The family had fled Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 1991 – in London the father worked as a volunteer for the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. At the William Morris Academy in West London where she was a pupil, Heshu Yones repeatedly expressed to her teachers fears of a forced marriage, but was ignored. When her parents discovered her relationship with a Christian Lebanese boy, she ran away from home – the teachers had told her family about him out of concern that he was having an adverse effect on her school work. Taken to Kurdistan to marry her cousin (one account says Pakistan), and forced to undergo a virginity test, she was threatened with a gun by her father but saved on this occasion by her mother and brother. Back in England, her brothers discovered letters repeating her desire to escape. She was locked in her room and stabbed to death by her father, who then jumped from the balcony after slitting his own throat.

In interviews before the trial, Abdullah Yones first denied having anything to do with his daughter’s murder, then claimed she had committed suicide and that he had tried to kill himself out of grief.
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His £125,000 bail money was raised by the local community. Threats were issued against those planning to give evidence against him. In court, Yones pleaded guilty and asked for the death sentence but was given life. ‘Heshu’s case,’ writes Unni Wikan, ‘shows the terrible price the community exacts of a man who feels bound to kill his daughter,’ although Yeshu’s case is of course ‘the more tragic’.
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Wikan is an anthropologist who has made it something of her brief to extend the boundaries of cross-cultural understanding. Her book,
In Honor of Fadime
, is a study of Fadime Sahindal, a Swedish-Turkish woman killed at the age of twenty-six by her father in 2002. The case pushes her beyond her limits. ‘There have been times when I faltered,’ she writes in the opening pages, ‘because I came to feel too much sympathy for people I did not want to sympathise with.’
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Her dilemma should give us pause. Honour killing presents us with crimes that for many are impossible to comprehend. How can brothers murder sisters, parents their own child? Most often, however, the question cradles its own answer: that there can be no answer, such crimes are as incomprehensible as they are inhuman, a judgement which nicely dispatches whole cultures off the edge of humanity and the knowable world. As if, for these crimes, there were no story to be told, no voices to be heard, no complex lives in need of being understood. In fact we have everything to learn, after their deaths, from what women had to say about their families and themselves. In this chapter I will therefore be moving against the spirit of the defence who tried to discredit the voice of the dead Shafilea Ahmed.

While Heshu Yones’s case makes history as the first legally recognised ‘honour killing’ in Britain, it is also remarkable for the testimony left by Yones herself. ‘Hey, for an older man you have a good strong punch and kick,’ she writes in a farewell note to her father when she is planning to leave, ‘I hope you enjoyed testing your strength on me, it was fun being on the receiving end. Well done.’ The fact that, before killing her, Abdullah had repeatedly beaten his daughter was somehow never picked up at her school. But Heshu’s tone is also resigned, self-blaming and philosophical, the voice, we might be tempted to say, of a ‘modern’ child: ‘It is evident that I shouldn’t be part of you. I take all the blame openly – I’m not the child you wanted or expected me to be. DISAPPOINTMENTS ARE BORN OF EXPECTATIONS. Maybe you expected a different me and I expected a different you’ (the capitals are hers). The letter could – almost – be a letter from any teenage daughter to her father: ‘LIFE BEING HOW IT IS, IT ISN’T NECESSARILY HOW IT IS, JUST SIMPLY HOW YOU CHOOSE TO SEE IT.’
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But of course if her father could agree on this principle, which gives equal viability to different ways of seeing the world, then he would not have had, or rather would not have felt that he had, to kill her.

It is significant that this story begins when the father receives an anonymous letter at his place of work accusing his daughter of behaving like a prostitute. The slur against a daughter’s, mother’s, sister’s honour most frequently begins with rumour and gossip, words that home in unfailingly on their target, but which also seem to come from nowhere. Women who are suspected of immoral behaviour, writes Fadia Faqir on honour in Jordan, ‘usually end up dead’ (although on examination, most will be found to have been sexually inactive).
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In
Crimes of the Community, Honour-Based Violence in the UK
, the 2008 report of the Centre for Social Cohesion, an independent think tank set up by Civitas in 2007, James Brandon and Salam Hafez describe how honour is damaged less ‘by a person’s action than by knowledge of that action becoming public knowledge’.
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‘Knowledge’ is not quite right, however, since the damage is effective, they recognise, even if the stories are ‘untrue’.
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It is when a woman’s ‘
perceived
failings’
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become known to the wider community that she is condemned out of court. Honour-based violence then becomes at once a perverse tribute to the social power of fantasy and a brutal attempt to put an end to the unstoppable circulation of words.

‘Some whispers in the dark turned into a rumour,’ writes Fadia Faqir in
My Name Is Salma
, ‘and then turned into a bullet in the head’ – her novel tells the story of a girl from a small village in the Levant who flees to England to save her own life after having a child out of wedlock.
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‘Honour’, states Sana Bukhari, an outreach worker at the Sheffield women’s refuge, Ashiana, ‘is about stopping people talking.’
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Or, in the words of Mohamed Baleela, project worker for a Domestic Violence Intervention Project based in Hammersmith, West London: ‘Whispers will go around.’
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There is an irony here. Women, the subject of potentially death-dealing rumour, are often themselves too frightened to talk. ‘Don’t mistake silence as OK,’ pleaded Jasvinda Sanghera at a discussion on ‘Crimes of Violence and Honour’ at the London Doughty Street legal chambers in February 2012. ‘Such is the power of honour.’
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Killing, however, does not stop people talking. Even when its aim is to wipe the existence of the one killed from everyone’s minds. In some, indeed many, of these cases reported from across the world, the killer is honoured for his act, feted in prison – if he is sent to prison – and given special status (honour is then both cause and effect of the crime). But a ‘dishonoured’ woman carries an aura, and the hateful, sordid fascination she excites can also rub off on her killer when she dies. Ayse Onal is a campaigning woman journalist in Turkey, one of the few investigators into honour-based crimes to have talked to men found guilty of killing (her book is called
Honour Killing: Stories of Men Who Killed
). One of the men she interviewed in prison is Nevzat, who killed his wife and daughter when the wife told him the daughter was pregnant. ‘It was obvious to Nevzat,’ Onal comments at the end of her discussion, ‘that nothing, not even the sacrifice [
sic
] he had made, could halt the rumours . . . It had done no good to ruin his family for fear of what was really nothing more than a simple, traditional form of entertainment.’ He had killed his wife and daughter to stop the talk behind his back, ‘but that talk had now reached epidemic proportions’.
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Nevzat acted to save his ‘honour’ but it now lies in shreds. Like his daughter, he has become gossip’s prey. You cannot, even by killing, stamp out words.

If language is so powerful, then by the same token it is also a constant source of fear. Not just for the potential victim but also for the whole community, which seems to be permanently braced against the chance that words will turn ugly and stain a family’s reputation for ever. ‘When two people stop to talk on the street,’ observes the narrator of Nadeem Aslam’s 2004
Maps for Lost Lovers
, ‘their tongues are like the two halves of a scissor coming together, cutting reputations and good names to shreds.’ His novel tells the tale of an honour killing in a Pakistani community living in an unidentified northern English town. Allegations, hints, slights, innuendo mean that every gathering in the neighbourhood, in another of Aslam’s evocative images, is full of ‘broken glass’.
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There is no safety in numbers. Rather it is as if social being, or togetherness, at the very moment it affirms itself by public display, is silently tearing itself apart from the inside. In this light, a woman’s virtue, on which so much is staked, becomes the guardian of a form of social cohesion that is in fact being constantly eaten away by the very mechanisms, of talk and rumour, which are being used to police her.