LITMIR.BIZ

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the celebrations can begin. It is thanks to the omniscient narrator who introduces himself in the first chapter that we learn something about this practice, which would otherwise have remained a family secret. Another aspect of virginity testing is depicted in the novel The Night of the Green Fairy by Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç, who appears to be one of the rare outspoken authors with regard to this topic. We follow the nameless female protagonist from her early childhood through her adolescence to her mid-forties, getting to know bits and pieces of her difficult life through regular flashbacks and flashforwards. Among the traumatizing experiences of her teenage years is a violent scene taking place in the house of her mother’s new husband Ekrem who is a doctor at a maternity clinic. Because his son has seen her walking on the street with a boy, he and Ekrem beat her up together. The statement of Ekrem’s son “I can’t go to school because of her! They call me the slut’s stepbrother!”⁷⁷ shows that the stage of gossip is already reached, which obviously makes Ekrem doubt the purity of his step-daughter’s body even more:

      Ekrem grabs my arm. As he pulls me away, he says, “You know what’ll happen if we find out she’s not a virgin!” My mother begs him, “Don’t do it!” She tries to hold Ekrem back, clinging to his waist, his legs. She tries to pull me from his hands. Ekrem kicks my mother. […] Ekrem calms down a little after examining me. Then he threatens me, wagging his finger before my eyes. His saliva splatters on my face as he shouts. I see the snot clinging to the nose hairs hanging out of his blackhead-riddled nose. My eyes fixate on the snot. I see his mouth moving but I don’t hear any of his words. It’s as if my ears are stuffed. I lock the door as soon as Ekrem leaves.

      Depicted in lapidary, choppy sentences that reflect the mechanical rhythm of the act itself, this rape-like examination⁷⁸ combined with an outburst of male-related violence is meant to intimidate the girl and teach her a lesson about appropriate behavior in public so that another misconduct of this kind will not happen again. Centering the action on the bodily images highlights its ugliness, forcing an escape route for the “soul” which is futile. However, the protagonist keeps breaking with the existing honor codes by continuing to spend her time with boys outside, which leads to a second incident of virginity testing: “Ekrem examines me again. I get the feeling he enjoys it, that he gets some sort of pleasure from ←57 | 58→examining me. This time my mother doesn’t cry and she doesn’t try to break it up. She’s angry. After Ekrem’s done with me she comes to me and snaps ‘Why can’t you smarten up? Are you doing this on purpose?’ ” While the mother’s lack of solidarity with regard to her daughter might be surprising, such reactions by female family members can be observed quite frequently in fiction (and apparently also in reality)⁷⁹ when it comes to defending their family’s honor. Before the protagonist’s disrespect of honor-specific rules can turn into a major source of neighborhood gossip, she is sent off to a girls’ boarding school in Istanbul where her virginity will be protected and she will be taught morals. Both her mother and Ekram seem to believe that she is a sinner, whereas in the narrative process of the whole novel she is rather portrayed as a victim who is judged within the existing value system.

      The writer portrays Ekrem as a sort of rapist who enjoys touching a teenage girl under the pretext of proving her virginity. In an email to Mine Krause, Ayfer Tunç confirms the interpretation that Ekrem hides his perverse ulterior motives by using his profession as an excuse to pretend an interest in a merely objective, medical examination. She adds that by describing this scene, she wanted to underline the abusive nature of female honor “namus” as a general concept.⁸⁰ When Krause remarked that only a few writers have been dealing with this issue in such detail, she recalled her own difficulties while writing this part of her novel. She concluded that enduring the shame that already comes with even imagining and putting to paper violent acts like this might have made writers shy away from this undertaking altogether.

      Another case of virginity testing is presented in Sindiwe Magona’s novel Mother to Mother. Here, the regular examination of the female protagonist Mandisa’s body is not carried out by a male relative, but by her own mother, who makes her daughter lie down on a white towel and controls whether she “remained ‘whole’ or ‘unspoilt’ as she said. […]. I was the one who felt dirty” ←58 | 59→(95). She is so obsessed with these proofs of virginity that she even threatens to ask the men of the family to examine Mandisa when she refuses to go through this monthly “routine” (98) again and again: “I’m calling your fathers to come and do it themselves. I will not be responsible for anything untoward happening to you” (98). While Mandisa experiences this procedure as “the beginning of many a trial, for me” (95), her mother perseveres in her role as protector of the family honor, thus taking over a traditionally patriarchal role. She even brings the village midwife to their home, who “looked at me the way Mama had done” (112). Paraphrased as acts of “inspect[ing] me” (98) or “see[ing] me” (99), these examinations are regular checks on Mandisa’s appropriate behavior. Their results are supposed to provide sound evidence “that I was still a whole girl, complete and untouched” (99).⁸¹

      Scheinhardt describes the fictive fate of three Turkish girls in Drei Zypressen, depicting mostly stereotypical views through the eyes of her female narrators. This makes her approach rather simplistic despite the topic’s complexity. However, in the case of Zeynep Z., she presents to the reader a mother’s realistic preoccupation with her daughter’s virginity, which is here mentioned as her “being untouched”: “Ihr ging es in diesen Gesprächen aber hauptsächlich darum, im Auftrag meines Vaters herauszufinden, ob ich noch unberührt war oder nicht” (112). Moreover, it is pointed out that a method exists to repair the hymen and thus make it possible for “impure” girls to get married off despite their lost virginity – an operation that apparently took six minutes and cost 2500 Deutsche Mark at the time: “Es hatte sich unter den Türken herumgesprochen, daß ein Frauenarzt die jungen türkischen Mädchen, die nicht mehr Jungfrau waren, operierte, also ihre Jungfernhaut flickte, damit die Eltern des Mädchens sie als Jungfrau verkaufen konnten” (112). The use of the word “verkaufen,” which means “to sell,” speaks for itself in this context, stressing that women are often regarded as commodified objects.

      Leila Aboulela in her novel Minaret briefly hints at a similar operation. The protagonist Najwa’s boyfriend Anwar critically observes that “Like every other Arab girl […] you’ve been brainwashed about the importance of virginity” (175). In the course of this discussion, we hear about “his stories of prospective Sudanese brides paying for operations to restore their virginity” (175). Just like the “disobedient” girls who suddenly disappear from their Anatolian villages ←59 | 60→and are never heard of again in Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, those in Leila Aboulela’s Minaret are confronted with a comparable fate: “They weren’t lost, these girls, they weren’t missing – they were killed by their brothers or fathers then thrown in the Nile” (175).

      In Elif Shafak’s novel Honour, a part of which takes place in a Kurdish village, Jamila, the twin sister of the male protagonist’s mother Pembe, is described as “impure.” She lives alone in a Kurdish region and is called the “Virgin Midwife” (172). A flashback to the year 1961 highlights that Jamila had been kidnapped some time ago and nobody exactly knows what happened to her during this period of time: “A midwife examined her. She says Jamila has no hymen but some girls are born like this” (97). With the words “Your father says you may not be a virgin” (98), Adem confronts Jamila with this scandalous information: “Jamila had not defended herself or sworn her chastity, and her silence was so unsettling. What if she was not a virgin? How could he live with this doubt for the rest of his life? What would his brother Tariq say when he learned that he had found himself a tainted wife […]?” (99). Adem’s thoughts reflect that a woman’s virginity before marriage plays a considerable role with regard to the whole community into which she is married off. His decision to ask for the hand of a woman whose virginity is not a proven fact might have stained his family’s name, which had already suffered when his mother ran away with another man.

      In her novel Bilqiss, which describes various violations of existing honor codes, Saphia Azzeddine’s protagonist of the same name states that in some countries it is already a provocation in itself to be born a female: “Dans beaucoup de pays naître femme était déjà une provocation en soi” (47). In

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