Nothing to Say
April 8, 2009
I've been putting off writing this all day.
Today is the two year anniversary of the death by public stoning (or "honour killing") of Du'a Khalil Aswad. Had she lived to today, she'd be nineteen years old.
Du'a was Iraqi (from Kurdistan), and an adherent to the Yazidi faith. She fell in love with a Muslim boy. Her tribe found out, and, you see, this crime "dishonoured" them. Her parents hid her and planned to get her out of the country. Honour or not, they didn't want their daughter to die.
She was found, dragged outside into a mob of hundreds (if not thousands) of men, stripped of her clothing, and then beaten and stoned to death.
This event was filmed by multiple people, from the front row, with camera phones. This girl's brutal murder ended up on YouTube about a month after her death.
May 2007, Joss Whedon penned an emotional essay condemning violence against women around the globe (you can read it here). This lead to the creation of the anthology Nothing But Red and I encourage you to get yourself a copy--the proceeds go to Equality Now.
I avoided writing this today because I just had no idea what to say.
It's been two years, and it's such a fight to get anyone to care about anything. We even found during the process of putting together the anthology, enthusiasm waned. Volunteers disappeared. When it came time to launch we received a lot of support, but not the same level as when Joss wrote that essay to start it all--it was old news, I guess. Or maybe it's because the whole thing is just so upsetting and frustrating, it's easier to be apathetic.
This girl is still dead. So are hundreds, if not thousands of other girls killed for "honour" since Du'a's death.
I think what bothers me the most about the apathy is that so many people seem to think this happens "over there" with those "other" people.
I watched multiple videos of Du'a's murder. I felt I had to--I organized the antho, and I felt it was my duty to really confront this ugliness. And what still stays with me is the sound. A mob of men chanting for her death. That sound fucking terrifies me because it's so eerily familiar. Ever walk down a street a night when there are a group of men standing around? Ever walk past them to hear them calling after you, sometimes following you? It's the same sound. Different language. Different words. But the sound is the same.
That sound makes me feel powerless. Now, I'm an alpha female, and I'm confident that I can usually take care of myself. I very rarely feel like I don't have power.
But that sound is bigger than me. That sound can hurt me--it's the sound of something I can't do anything about.
I always say I can't imagine what Du'a went through in the twenty odd minutes of beating we see in that video, but I think I can, to be honest. When she's on the ground, struggling to stand, pleading for help...she knew. She heard that sound and she knew she didn't have any power.
Misogyny and violence against women isn't an "other" thing. It doesn't just happen "over there." We are confronted by brutality every day in North America. Visit any womens' shelter to know how true this is.
We're all, rightfully, upset right now about the law passed in Afghanistan that legalizes rape and various limitations on women's rights. Yeah...it's bad...but you know what? Up until 1976, marital law was legal in every state in the U.S. Only some states currently have no legal distinction between martial rape and stranger rape. In Canada, it wasn't until 1983 that we had actual reform of rape laws. The attitude that a man can't rape his wife (ahem, or common law spouse) is disturbingly common in our own culture, whether the act is illegal or not.
So yeah. I really have nothing to say today. I'm just so fucking exhausted. Nothing is different. Nothing changes. The good folks at ICAHK are still fighting the good fight. Most people are still apathetic. I'm still writing stupid little urban fantasy books because I don't have the guts, or energy, to dedicate my life to activism. Du'a is still dead.
I used the image to your left as my Facebook profile picture. I notice fewer of my acquaintances who used it last year did this year. So maybe some have forgotten her. I haven't. She reminds me that I have more power over my life than she did, but that it's still not enough to change anything for the better.
Sorry to be a downer this evening, kids, but I can't put a positive spin on anything tonight.
Comments
#1 That sound you mention is
That sound you mention is also the sound of fear. It is the sound of bullies who are too afraid to step outside the confines of their culture and really question what it is that they are doing. You are a strong, confident woman. Against a mob you are powerless but against any single one of them alone, the playing field equalises.
Maybe not a comfortable thought when the mob is baying for blood, though.
The truth of the matter is that humanity is not nice. To get where we are today, in evolutionary terms, we had to do some not very nice things. We committed genocide, we brutally oppressed other species so that we rose and they did not. And I am not talking about things that happened in recorded history. We did all those things so that we could be the ones who recorded history. Now, when we have reached the top, we have run out of other species to fight on equal terms. So, for the last few thousand years we have been fighting ourselves - doing all the crimes we performed on other species on each other. In so called 'civilised society' we have laws to suppress the urges that drive us, to keep us in our place. Take the laws away and you still have the bloodthirsty monkey waiting with a rock.
And sometimes the law fails because it is the wrong law. Actually, quite often it fails because it is the wrong law. Because you cannot simply have a law which states 'be nice to one another'. Even the basic rules of the 10 commandments are open to interpretation and need clarification, as if 'Thou shalt not kill' is not clear enough. In many countries (America included) the basic 10 commandments, which all monotheists (be they Jewish, Christian or Muslim - the 'people of the book' as Muslims call them) follow are ignored because of alternative scriptural interpretation. This is why you get rape cases thrown out of court, why women are oppressed all over the world, why honour killings happen.
My problem, when faced with this dilemma, is that I can see there is a simple solution - just follow the rule to be nice to one another. However, I also see that there is no hope in hell of all humans agreeing to that and sticking to it at the same time. The vicious little monkey is always there in the darkness behind our eyes.
#2 I'm going to be honest. I
I'm going to be honest. I didn't watch the full video. I realize as a member of the "team", I probably should have, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. I clicked on it. I watched about 20 seconds and then it occurred to me- No. I don't want to. I do not want this in my memory bank.
I think it was the obvious violent chaos I could see, only 20 seconds in, that triggered my reaction. For me, watching the video doesn't change it. It doesn't make it any less or more violent, and it definitely doesn't change the outcome.
Good post, Skyla. And since I didn't watch it, it helps to read what you wrote about it. I understand what you mean about the sound. It was probably what scared me into turning it off.
Angela