Honor, Face, and Violence - Mine Krause Cross Cultural Communication

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| 49→existing honor codes: “Meanwhile, their mother, Naze, didn’t see the point in their going to such lengths to master words and numbers that would be of no use, since they would all get married before long” (10). Moreover, she draws attention to the material damage that comes with the girls’ walking to school: “ ‘Every day they walk all that way back and forth. Their shoes are wearing out,’ Naze grumbled. ‘And what for?’ ” (10). Education becomes reified in a commodity that could drain the family resources. The only question on her mind with regard to a girl’s possible intellectual development is “How’s that going to help my daughters get married?” (11). In a similar vein, Mariam’s mother Nana in A Thousand Splendid Suns answers the mullah’s request “Let the girl have an education” with the words: “What’s the sense schooling a girl like you? […]. There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don’t teach it in school. […] And it’s this. Tahamul. Endure” (18). She repeats a last warning twice: “No more talk about school” (18), subconsciously knowing like Shafak’s Naze that education brings a certain independence with it which might cause women to rebel openly against the patriarchal system, lead to the loss of their honor, and put their own lives at stake.

      Depriving a girl of her school education is a general tendency, especially in rural regions, where the villagers “would like their daughters to be modest and virtuous, and yet they wanted them to get married and have children in due course” (34), as Elif Shafak depicts it in Honour. The indirect warning of Laila’s mother in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is similar: “The reputation of a girl, especially one as pretty as you, is a delicate thing, Laila. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies” (160). This evokes an incongruous image of having held a bird all her life to prevent it from flying, which would disable her from using her hands for any other purpose. Obviously, Naze’s comparable efforts to teach her daughter decency bear fruits, since Pembe does not miss any opportunity to teach her own daughter Esma the notion of female honor “namus” and, especially, of shame: “It would be one of the many ironies of Pembe’s life that the things she hated to hear from Naze she would repeat to her daughter, Esma, word for word, years later, in England” (16). Naze’s obsession with morals and appearances surely leaves a lasting impact on Pembe’s own behavior. It is therefore not surprising that her son Iskender can “touch her guilt” and “smell her shame” (51), inscribing his moral codes on her body, when Pembe starts to have an affair, thus breaking with the rules she has been obeying all her life. She even catches herself “smoothing down her skirt beneath her knees as if she suddenly found it too short” (133), which can be read as an automatic, subconscious gesture reflecting her shame.

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      In the Turkish translation rewritten by Elif Shafak, this notion of disgrace is expressed even more clearly with the words “as if she felt unprotected.”69 Such a reflex can be traced back to the understanding of female honor she was taught by her mother, associating white fabric with a woman’s innocence which can be easily stained: “What mattered was that the black didn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which revealed the tiniest speck of dirt” (16). Here too, the image reifies the coded normativity. Throughout her life, these sensations accompany Pembe like a “sneaky serpent” (315) that “settled on your skin, sucked your blood, laid its eggs everywhere” and “infested her soul” (282).

      In Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother, which is mainly about racial segregation but occasionally deals with gender inequality, the female protagonist describes a similar situation: “Mama had not told me how to be with a boy. She had told me never to be with one. Never,” making her understand that being with a man before getting married would “disgrace our families” (111).70 These examples illustrate that in honor cultures girls are shown from an early age how to avoid bringing shame on their families. Partly, their mothers’ education makes these daughters victims of a patriarchal system promoting a gender-specific understanding of honor with its related restrictions.71 Daughters will appeal in vain to their mothers, as Nazik al-Mala’ika’s poem “Washing off ←50 | 51→disgrace” (1957) illustrates: “ ‘Mother!’/A last gasp through her teeth and tears” (Women 20). Rather than any mother, it is “the meadows and the roseate buds,” the “date palms,” that are listening and then disseminate the disgraced daughter’s cry, making it the despair of nature.

      Ramziya Abbas al-Iryani in “Misfortune in the Alley,” which treats honor-related violence as a prominent issue, creates a setting of darkness owing to a power crash in “a long, narrow alley covered with dirt and scraps of paper, and littered with trash” (Cohen-Mor 73): readers are evidently invited to gather this spatial information into a cognitive map, attributing symbolic meaning to the location (see Ryan). The narrow alley brings the whole neighborhood together when Hajj Abdallah shouts that his daughter Samira has vanished. His wife Latifa (who is her aunt) provides material for gossip by telling everyone “I saw her myself yesterday talking to a cab driver. And the other day I saw her getting out of the same cab” (74), thus turning the girl into a sinner. The neighbor woman Safiyya shouts at her “what you say can ruin her reputation!”, while Nuriyya the baker defends the girl by portraying her as a victim: “Samira cannot be blamed if she ran away today. You beat her every day, so she became fed up with her life. The housework and the care of your children are upon her shoulders.” Fatima the henna painter seconds her: “[…] God will take care of her and ease her way. The blood that dripped from her nose and mouth yesterday is still visible on the stairs. Surely you haven’t forgotten that you pushed her down the rooftop stairway!”

      Having been unable to find his daughter, Hajj Abdallah reappears looking “to the right and left in humiliation and dejection as tears silently rolled down his face” (75), the tears making him lose his masculinity. Latifa’s “malicious, vengeful voice” breaks the silence: “I tried to go after her. Death before dishonor.” But her husband hits back: “Your hypocrisy killed my daughter. I used to believe you and go to extremes in punishing her. You broke her spirit and destroyed her life.” He blames the assembled neighbors for not having protected the girl, which is a rather unexpected turn of events: “What have you done other than whisper and gossip about what goes on in my house?” (76). Finally, light symbolically bursts onto the alley scene, as a noise enables the father to find Samira hiding outside a neighbor’s house: “crouching among the spiky pieces of firewood, blood dripping from her hands and legs!” He shouts his relief: “Come out to show them that my honor is well protected, and that shame did not and will never enter my house!” Evidently Samira cannot believe that “she would escape punishment” – for once. The vividly narrated incident demonstrates the precarious nature of the father’s honor, and the aunt’s (replacing the perhaps deceased mother’s) extreme devaluing and belittling of her niece. Community gossip is the ←51 | 52→response to a girl’s suffering, while other narratives underline its significance in response to perceived transgressive conduct (as for instance Khaled Hosseini’s novel A Thousand Splendid Suns). Nonetheless, in this incident some community members turn against the oppressive aunt, vindicating the father’s honor. This may be one of the few examples in literature where a father defends his daughter and some community members back up the victim, which appears to be a rather unrealistic reaction. Here, fiction shows a way out where social reality often does not.

      Another rare case of a man criticizing female obedience can be found in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit Sacrée where the protagonist’s father says about his wife: “une femme sans caractère, sans joie, mais tellement obéissante, quel ennui! Être toujours prête à executer les ordres, jamais de révolte, ou peut-être se rebellait-elle dans la solitude et en silence” (24–25). It becomes clear that this behavior is the result of educational patterns: “Elle avait été éduquée dans la pure tradition de l’épouse au service de son homme” (24). In the following, we will examine various cases of disobedience that occur despite the daughters’ initially flawless upbringing by their mothers and that result in female honor loss, staining the whole family’s reputation.

      Since early times, several cultures have regarded a woman as

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