The Words of Mukhtaran, Part II

This entry is a follow-up to The Words of Mukhtaran Mai, Part I.

In Mukhtaran Mai's village, Meerwala, rape is condemned. However, there is more shame associated with a raped woman, because a woman is a symbol of her family's honour. Mukhtaran's brother, Shaqoor, had relations with a woman from the higher-caste Mastoi clan, which is why the Mastoi wanted revenge. Some male members of the Mastoi clan captured and imprisoned Shaqoor. Not only did they torture him, but they also raped Shaqoor, age 12. However, this was not enough for the Mastoi, because Shaqoor was a boy and not a symbol of his family's honour.

Indeed, when Mukhtaran reported her rape to the police the second time and the police went to Meerwala to investigate, the Mastoi denied that any rape ever occurred. They argued that such a thing, a public rape, could not occur because there was a multitude of onlookers.

The incident is much more complicated than the way it is often interpreted by Westerners who get their information from only soundbites. The "tribal council" (panchayat) are usually a group of the village elders, but in this case, the "tribal council" consists of the Mastoi elders. The Mastoi were the most powerful clan in the village, and the "tribal council" was anything but an objective third party.

The alleged rapists were arrested by the Pakistani police, but Mukhtaran had to go to court and give a testimony of what happened by herself, as no one else wanted to speak up. Here are Mukhtaran's words on that experience:

We left at about 9 o'clock. It took about an hour. I was worried a lot on the first day, because I did not know what would happen. I testified for three days, and they kept on recording my statement. I was scared, very scared. The defense asked me a lot of questions. At first I was surprised by some of their questions. The lawyers said horrible things. Then I began to understand why women were afraid to visit the court. But I have come this far, now I have to face them.

This sounds very familiar, because just a few decades ago, women in developed countries reported very similar experiences during rape trials. My high school law teacher said one woman who went through the ordeal told her that she was raped twice; the second time was in the courtroom. Only relatively recently were laws passed that prevented defense lawyers from asking about the alleged victim's sexual history. I do not know about the current experience of a woman testifying about her alleged rape in developed countries, but such women still suffer social stigma, which is why there remains a low report rate.

Mukhtaran Mai is admirable, because not only does she go through the ordeal of testifying about her own rape in court, but she also does it coming from a very conservative culture from a small, remote village in the countryside of Pakistan. Moreover, Mukhtaran does it not for herself (why would anyone want to announce to the world that they were violated and dominated, especially in a culture that has such strong views about virginal honour?), but for setting an example for future victims of rape. Mukhtaran explains:

But now at least other cases have emerged and women have gained courage. Now if anything happens to them, they go straight to the police station. Some still do keep quiet. I tell these women that we have to work together to fight against this evil. Otherwise these crimes will continue to happen.

This is why I'm a fan of Mukhtaran. She's received a few awards and honours, but she's still underrated.

More words of Mukhtaran Mai will come in Part III of this series.

The Words of Mukhtaran Mai, Part I

Shame is a documentary about Mukhtaran Mai, a Pakistani woman who was gang-raped as punishment for her brother's relations with a woman of an upper caste in a remote village. The upper-caste family is named Mastoi, who happens to be the most powerful clan in the village. The Mastoi, who made up the "tribal council", called forth Mukhtaran to publicly apologize for her younger brother. However, when she arrived, the Mastoi decided that she should be gang-raped to dishonour her family, to pay for the Mastoi's loss of honour. She was forced at gunpoint, and her father and brother begged the Mastoi to spare her, but they went ahead and raped her.

Although portrayed as a passive victim by the Western media, Mukhtaran Mai is an exceptional, strong feminist. The only reason why the story surfaced in the Pakistani and international media was because of Mukhtaran Mai's unbelievable perseverance.

Mukhtaran Mai and her family were so ashamed of the rape that for a few days, they stopped eating and didn't come out of their house. Mukhtaran tried to commit suicide by drinking acid because of the intense shame she felt. In the end, Mukhtaran resolved to punish her aggressors through legal means. As her village had no electricity or phone or police station, she had to convince the local imam to take up her cause during the next service in the mosque. Eventually, she acquired transportation to the city and filed a report with the police.

Here is a partial transcript of Mukhtaran Mai's first recorded interview with a reporter. ('M' is Mukhtaran Mai and 'R' is the reporter.)

R: What is your name?
M: Mukhtaran Mai.
R: One more time?
M: Mukhtaran Mai.
R: What is your age?
M: Thirty years old.
R: Are you educated?
M: Yes, I've learned the Quran.
R: When did you learn it?
M: Eight or nine years ago.
R: How much of the Quran have you read?
M: I have learned it by heart.
R: Why didn't you go to school?
M: There is no school here.
R: If there was a school here, what would you do?
M: I would study.
R: Are you fond of studying?
M: I am still very much fond of studying. If I get the chance, I'll definitely study.
R: How did all of this happen?

Against her family's wishes, Mukhtaran gave an account of her attack to a reporter.

R: What punishment should they get?
M: Death. Only with the death sentence will these men realize the worth of a woman. I hope my actions against these four men can save other women. Women will become more aware.
R: How can we raise awareness amongst the women of this area?
M: First with education. Then with this. Women should realize that they are also human beings, and that no one can get away with abusing us. Only then will they realize.

Mukhtaran Mai's family members did not want her to report the rape because it would bring more attention to their perceived dishonour. None of her family members wanted to testify to the police to corroborate her story. In addition, their family received numerous death threats from the Mastoi clan. Despite all this, Mukhtaran went against the grain and made a path for future women who may be sexually assaulted.

Although I oppose the death penalty on principle, I am awed by and greatly admire Mukhtaran's courage and selflessness. How many high-profile women in the West are as brave and thick-skinned as her?

Moreover, this woman was educated only on the Quran, yet her insight into women's rights surpasses that of the average female Westerner. It's a shame that her inspirational story is not as well-known in the West.

More Mukhtaran Mai quotes will posted in Part II of this series.

Orientalism and Sex

Edward Said's Orientalism, Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures, Part IV: Pilgrims and Pilgrimmages, British and French, p. 190:

In all of his novels Flaubert associates the Orient with the escapism of sexual fantasy. Emma Bovary and Frederic Moreau pine for what in their drab (or harried) bourgeois lives they do not have, and what they realize they want to comes easily to their daydreams packed inside Oriental Cliches: harems, princesses, princes, slaves, veils, dancing girls and boys, sherbets, ointments, and so on. The repertoire is familiar, not so much because it reminds us of Flaubert's own voyages in and obsession with the Orient, but because, once again, the association is made between the Orient and the freedom of licentious sex. We may as well recognize that for nineteenth-century Europe, with its increasing embourgeoisement, sex had been institutionalized to a very considerable degree. On the one hand, there was no such thing as "free" sex, and on the other, sex in society entailed a web of legal, moral, even political and economic obligations of a detailed and certainly encumbering sort. Just as the various colonial possessions—quite apart from their economic benefit to metropolitan Europe—were useful as places to send wayward sons, superfluous populations of delinquents, poor people, and other undesirables, so the Orient was a place where one could look for sexual experience unobtainable in Europe. Virtually no European writer who wrote on or traveled to the Orient in the period after 1800 exempted himself or herself from this quest: Flaubert, Nerval, "Dirty Dick" Burton, and Lane are only the most notable. In the twentieth century one thinks of Gide, Conrad, Maugham, and dozens of others. What they looked for often—correctly, I think—was a different type of sexuality, perhaps more libertine and less guilt ridden; but even that quest, if repeated by enough people, could (and did) become as regulated and uniform as learning itself.

It is frequently said that stereotypes are based on some aspect of reality. In many cases, however, the reality that stereotypes are based upon reflect less on the stereotyped subject and more on the person who holds this stereotype. The notion of the Orient as a real alternative to 'our' sexually-repressive systems seems to reflect deeply-held desires rather than empirically-based generalizations.

Perhaps the European Orientalist and modern Western Asiaphile hope to find in Asia a socially-acceptable escape from social obligation.

Orientalism and Women

In Orientalism, Chapter 2: Orientalist Structures and Restructures, Section IV: Pilgrims and Pilgrimmages, British and French, p. 180, Edward Said writes of Orientalists Nerval and Flaubert:

More important, however, is the fact that both writers (Nerval in 1842-1843 and Flaubert in 1849-1850) had greater personal and aesthetic uses for their visits to the Orient than any other nineteenth-century travelers. It is not inconsequential that both were geniuses to begin with, and that both were thoroughly steeped in aspects of European culture that encouraged a sympathetic, if perverse, vision of the Orient. Nerval and Flaubert belonged to that community of thought and feeling described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, a community for which the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes (what Praz calls algolagnia), a fascination of the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism, all combined to enable literary work of the sort produced by Gautier (himself fascinated by the Orient), Swinburne, Baudelaire, and Huysmans. For Nerval and Flaubert, such female figures as Cleopatra, Salome, and Isis have a special significance; and it was by no means accidental that in their work on the Orient, as well as their visits to it, they pre-eminently valorized and enhanced female types of this legendary, richly suggestive, and associative sort.

Even within contemporary mass media images, the East is stereotyped as an exotic and strange world, an alternative to the structure and mundanity of the West. It is interesting that in addition to the alluring yet dangerous themes of sadomasochism, death, secrecy, and occultism, exoticism of the East and exoticism in general are often associated with femininity and female sensuality. Literary archetypes like the Femme Fatale and the more recent Dragon Lady intrigue the imagination through both attraction and repulsion, but this script becomes coherent only when the observer is assumed to be a heterosexual male. Similarly, the allure of the East is very much connected to the perception and possibility of the Oriental female. Oriental males, on the other hand, are rarely featured in inviting portrayals of the exotic East.