Women in Dark Times (24 page)

No matter then that a woman is born pure, she is also judged before she breathes. Mehmet Mezra, another of Onal’s interviewees, taught his daughter – who he will one day kill – that the family honour was lodged ‘in her body’, but she had failed to understand that the mere fact of being a girl ‘was a shameful thing’.
43
How can both things be true? How can you lodge honour in a house of shame? In another of Onal’s cases, the father more simply cuts down a tree on the birth of his daughter (an immediate cot-betrothal is intended to pre-empt the dangers which lie ahead). He had planted a tree for the birth of each of his eight sons. In the Qur’an, it is the unbeliever whose face darkens at the birth of a baby girl and who hides away for shame: ‘Should he keep her and suffer contempt or bury her in the dust?’
44
Today, writes Onal, ‘it seemed to me that in small villages in Turkey the simple fact of being born a woman was tragic in itself.’
45

Turkish has a set of terms to describe the risks of honour.
Namusa lef gelmek
refers to other people’s gossip about one’s
namus
;
namusa kirlenmek
to one’s
namus
being dirtied or stained; and
namusunu temizlemek
to a man’s obligation to cleanse it. Honour is a quality, or object, that can be stained, muddied, tainted, besmirched. ‘How,’ asks Abdul Latif Zuhd, writing on a case of honour killing in the Jordanian daily
Al
Arab Al Yawm
in August 1999, ‘would a father take care of his daughter after she has . . . tainted his face with mud.’
46
This gives to honour the character of a symptom or compulsion, as well as offering a new take on domestic work. ‘Zahra was cleaning,’ writes Onal of a woman who has returned to the family home and who will be later be murdered for leaving her violent marriage. ‘In fact since the day she had arrived, she had been cleaning the already spotless house from top to bottom, as though it were an act of purification to cleanse her of all that she had to endure.’
47
The mother of one victim, who had encouraged her son to kill her daughter, whitewashed the walls of her house after the death to indicate that the family’s honour had been restored. ‘My daughters’, affirms a father who will die before the crisis that will envelop his family, ‘are sparkling clean’ (his words are reported to Onal by his murderer son).
48

Virtue must shine. The woman’s duty is to make not just the home but the world ‘sparkling clean’. As if she were already being asked to remove the stain of her own future dishonour. As if she were being asked to wash away, before the event, the blood of the crime of which she will one day be the victim. In her address to the Swedish parliament, Fadime Sahindal went to great lengths to present the feelings of her family: ‘Behaviour like mine must be punished and my guilt washed off with blood.’
49
Nazir Afzal, Chief Prosecutor at the Crime Prosecution Service in Britain, said he gave up his belief that things had improved with the new generation when a young man he interviewed compared a man to a bar of gold and a woman to a piece of white silk: ‘If gold gets dirty you can just wipe it clean, but if a piece of silk gets dirty you can never get it clean again – and you might just as well throw it away.’
50

The system is not, however, perfect or seamless, which would leave no hope or exit. Quietly but surely this logic can be seen as subverting itself from within. Obsession always reveals an underside of disquiet. Shala Haeri’s formula – ‘man owns, woman is, honour’ – resonates strangely with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s formula for phallic power: ‘She is without it, he is not without it.’ Counter-intuitively, but according to one syntactic option, the formula is meant to be read as indicating that being without it, she exists (
she is
), while his so-called possession empties his being at the core (
he is not
). As early as 1980, in
The Hidden Face of Eve
, Nawal Sa’dawi wrote of Arab men (although she was happy to extend her comment to ‘most men’) that they cannot abide an intelligent woman because ‘she knows very well that his masculinity is not real, not an essential truth.’
51
The honour killer is a stalker marking out his territory and policing a boundary between the sexes on which he cannot rely. The fact that her dishonour wipes off on him makes the distinction somewhat shaky, displaying how closely the man and the woman are enmeshed with each other. He has placed his masculinity in her hands. We could say that he needs her too much. Such dependency thwarts the image of an upright, self-reliant masculinity on which the man’s honour is based. If only unconsciously, the honour killer, even before he acts, has already ceded his victim too much power. ‘Honour,’ writes Lama Abu-Odeh, ‘is not only what women must keep intact to remain alive, but what men should defend fiercely so as not to be reduced to women.’
52
In one court judgement in Palestine, leniency was recommended for a man who had murdered his sister because ‘she had stabbed him in his manhood’.
53
‘We are men,’ state the killers in Aslam’s
Maps for Lost Lovers
,
‘but she reduced us to eunuch bystanders by not paying attention to our wishes.’ The act of murder restores them, or so they assert, because ‘it was we who made the choice to be murderers’.
54

We should therefore be wary of seeing honour killing as the supreme instance of violent male self-enactment, masculinity as the proud and complete fulfilment of itself. ‘Without understanding the construction of masculinity,’ Turkish-born novelist Elif Shafak stated in a London discussion of her 2012 novel
Honour
, ‘there is no way of solving the problem.’
55
Her novel is unusual for focusing on the childhood – failed parents and grandparents – of the killer, Iskender, who had, we could say, simply too much to live up to (his name in Turkish means Alexander, as in Alexander the Great). The novel is in many ways his story – the title in Turkish is not
Honour
but
Iskender –
and that story is complex
.
As much as fulfilling an unanswerable obligation, his murder of his mother, when he discovers her love affair, is presented as a comment on his wretchedness, on what he has failed to be. In a key scene he remembers being humiliated in the village for fleeing up a tree as a young boy to escape his circumcision. ‘Did you ever consider,’ his brother Yunus says to their sister, whose pained narrative drives much of the story, ‘that maybe it was harder on Iskender?’
56
Her retort is instant: ‘Yeah, being a sultan can’t have been easy.’
57
(The point being that the question is allowed to be asked at all.)

Underscoring the ambiguity of who Iskender is in the gendered scheme of things, Shafak appears on the cover of the Turkish edition of her novel dressed as her male character (on the back cover she is dressed as a modern-day street hero, an Alexander for today). Sadly, this stunning, disquieting image did not make its way on to the English edition, whose cover instead fulfils just about every cliché in the book: an image of a partly veiled woman with downcast eyes, looking as if she carries the world’s sorrows and is surely bound to die. Apparently the first image suggested by the English publishers had the woman completely veiled. Shafak had to fight to get rid of that picture, but they saddened the woman’s eyes without consulting her. Shafak’s drag photo, one of the strongest possible statements of a novelist
being
her character, brilliantly performs her own proposition: that we will get nowhere if we do not get into the minds – and bodies – of the men who perpetrate these crimes. ‘One of the jobs of the novelist,’ writer Maggie Gee observed during a discussion of Shafak’s novel, ‘is to imagine the murderer.’
58
In which case honour killing presents the novelist with one of her most challenging, even perverse, opportunities – how often, outside fiction, are we invited to understand the perpetrator of violence? But by the same token we could say that honour killing also confronts the novelist with one of her most typical, almost banal and self-defining, tasks.
59
Maggie Gee’s point was that you cannot be a novelist unless you are willing to become someone wholly other to who you think you are.
60

*

One of the biggest disputes around honour killing is whether it can be safely assigned to non-Western cultures, which would mean there is no trace of such ideas to be found inside the legacy of Europe’s cultural and literary past. But while killing one’s daughter for honour has not historically been part of European codes of conduct, the idea of death as the only way for a woman to redeem her sexual transgression has. In
Much Ado About Nothing
, Claudio is told by Don John on the eve of his wedding that Hero has been unfaithful to him: ‘It would better fit your honour to change your mind.’
61
Wrongly accused at the ceremony, Hero faints to the ground apparently dead. When she revives, her father Leonato exclaims:

Do not live, Hero; do not open thine eyes:

For did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,

Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,

Myself would on the rearward of reproaches,

Strike at thy life . . . 

Hero is stained, like a piece of white silk:

O, she is fall’n

Into a pit of ink, that the wide sea

Hath drops too few to wash her clean again.
62

More, in Hero’s own eyes: if the charge is true, it would justify her death. ‘Refuse me, hate me, torture me to death!’ ‘If they speak but truth of her,’ Leonato responds, ‘these hands shall tear her.’
63
It is enough to convince the Friar and Benedick, also present at the scene, that there must be some dreadful mistake. But neither one of them challenges the basic assumption – that a violent, torturous death at the hands of a father would be the just reward for a daughter’s sexual offence.

Even more powerful in this context is Webster’s
The Duchess of Malfi
, based on the true story of Giovanna d’Aragona, daughter of the royal house of Aragon, consigned to prison by her enraged brothers for marrying beneath her and conceiving three children without their knowledge – it is not clear whether the transgression or the secrecy was the greatest offence (they also murdered her husband, and she and her children were never heard of again). In Webster’s version, the offence is against noble blood: ‘Shall our blood . . . be thus tainted?’ proclaims one of her brothers, but the true outrage – as with so much we have seen – is the affront to who they are as men:

Foolish men,

That e’er will trust their honour in a bark

Made of so slight, weak bulrush as is woman,

Apt every minute to sink it.
64

Lodge your honour in a woman, Webster seems to be saying, and most likely you will drown (as we have already seen, the very concept of honour conceals a fatal dependency).

It is crucial therefore that we do not fall into the trap of seeing honour killing, for all its horrific nature or rather because of it, as the expression of an alien culture, religion or tradition that has no resonance in the West. Examples can be found across the world, from the United Kingdom to Jordan, from Sweden and the United States to Pakistan. It is no less crucial to insist that honour killing cannot be equated with Islam. The first known honour killing in Sweden involved a Christian Palestinian family. Nor do honour cultures necessarily oppress women, as Unni Wikan insists, drawing on her own experience from her field work in Oman: ‘A Muslim society in which to be honourable means to honour others.’
65
Rana Husseini herself has been at the heart of the struggle to change the Jordanian law on crimes of honour. Article 340 of the Jordanian penal code exempts from penalty any man who kills a wife or any female relative, and lover, whom he discovers committing adultery. Often assumed to have some basis in Islamic sharia or tribal law, it can in fact be traced back to Article 324 of the French penal code of 1810 (abolished in France in 1975).
66
The founding petition of the Jordanian National Committee to Eliminate So-Called Honour Crimes calls on the authorities to protect women ‘victims of traditions and social norms that have no basis in Islam, the Jordanian Constitution or basic human rights’. Such crimes, it continues, violate Islamic religion, which requires four witnesses to testify to any act of adultery and assigns to the state or ruler the only power to inflict punishment on the guilty.
67
‘It must be clear to society and its various institutions,’ stated Prince Hassan of Jordan, uncle of King Abdullah, ‘that crimes of honour have no religious justification.’
68
He was speaking at the opening of a conference on violence in schools where Husseini had been invited to speak (he had been following her work). When the Netherlands circulated a draft resolution on crimes of honour at the UN in 2000 the chairman of the UN Islamic Group submitted a letter to the Secretary General, appending a statement: