The Things I Would Tell You

by Sabrina Mahfouz

  Farzana Parveen is the latest name to add to a long list of women whose lives have been cut down in the land of the pure, Pakistan.

  According to human rights and women’s groups at least 900 so-called ‘honour’ killings have been carried out in Pakistan over the past twelve months. The term ‘honour’ killing is abhorrent and feeds into the narrative that killing a woman is justified. There is nothing honourable about killing a woman. There is nothing honourable about killing anyone.

  A society is judged by the way it treats its most vulnerable. Pakistan’s treatment of its most vulnerable, women, children and minorities, speaks volumes about the state of the nation. My beautiful motherland is sinking under a growing tide of blood and broken bodies. Each horrific killing leaves a lasting stain and a pain that throbs deeper with time refusing to fade.

  I was seventeen when I first understood how little a woman’s life is worth is in Pakistan. How the ‘love’ of a brother and a mother can lead to a woman, a girl, being hunted with brutality, killed and buried in an early grave.

  I met Sania (not her real name) when I was sixteen and staying in my grandfather’s village in Pakistan Kashmir. She had travelled to our village with her family from rural Punjab to visit some people. I remember Sania. She was sixteen. She was wearing a red scarf. She had beautiful almond-shaped eyes and whenever she was asked a question she would cover her mouth with the red scarf, look down and then whisper. Like most girls her age she was painfully shy.

  Sania appeared curious to meet a Pakistani woman around her age from the West. Because of her shyness we communicated mostly through smiles and she spent a lot of time giggling at me.

  The following year when I returned to the village and asked after everyone, I remembered Sania and asked how she was. My aunt raised her finger to her lips and told me to hush. She then pulled me inside the house and sat me down.

  ‘She’s dead. Her brother killed her. She was in the kitchen at the time. He entered the kitchen and told her that she was a shameful woman and had brought shame and disgrace on the family. He accused her of looking at a man. He then stabbed her over and over. We heard that she was stabbed at least twenty times.’

  Sania’s brother had killed her in the family home and nobody did a thing to stop him. The police had arrested him but he was released a few days later because their mother had forgiven him. A mother had forgiven her son for killing her beautiful daughter with the almond-shaped eyes. He was free to live his life while Sania was in the ground, covered by the soil of a country that continues to betray women like her.

  A week into my trip I spotted Sania’s brother, back in the village meeting friends. He was a tall man, he looked strong and arrogant. I observed him from the roof of our house as he swaggered past and felt a deep burning rage inside me.

  Every time I returned to Pakistan I would hear countless stories through my female relatives and friends in rural and urban Pakistan of women being beaten – one was attacked by an axe and left for dead, another’s body was discovered by her children when they returned home from school.

  The newspapers were full of stories that tripped off the women’s tongues almost like a weather report. Most of the time the women’s killers were members of their own families and very rarely is anyone punished for their deaths.

  Some of the strongest and bravest women I’ve met anywhere in the world are Pakistani. The housewives, teachers, students, health workers, doctors, human rights workers, lawyers, writers, journalists, activists and artists who step out of their homes not knowing if they will return in the evening. Many face the prospect of extreme violence in their own homes as much as they do outside them.

  Qandeel Baloch, a twenty-six-year-old former model and social media star, became a household name in Pakistan for her bold, unapologetic videos celebrating her sexuality and, in turn, exposing the deeply ingrained misogyny and hypocrisy cutting across Pakistan’s social and class divide.

  She pouted, she purred, she provoked – oozing confidence rarely seen in most Pakistani women her age or any age – and uploaded videos on social media platforms for her hundreds and thousands of followers, the majority of whom were young Pakistani men.

  They watched her videos behind closed doors with glee, and then hissed and cursed her publicly for her so-called ‘un-Islamic and filthy ways.’ In a country with reportedly one of the highest Google searches for pornography in the world, Ms Baloch became the target for the self-proclaimed male and female moral and religious police.

  As one Pakistani man told me: ‘She was like the forbidden fruit, tempting, eye candy that you knew was forbidden.’

  In one of her most rebellious and political acts, Ms Baloch posed for selfies with an Islamic cleric. Perched next to the excitable figure while balancing his hat on her head and with a twinkle in her eye, she shook the cleric’s hand and talked to the camera explaining she had borrowed his hat because she did not have a headscarf to cover her head.

  In that one moment alone she took on Pakistan’s religious lobby head-on by exposing hypocritical attitudes toward women. The video went viral and the backlash spread like wildfire; social media users in Pakistan called for Baloch to be taught a lesson or urged that Baloch should change her behaviour.

  In July 2016, Ms. Baloch was drugged and strangled to death in the name of ‘honour.’ Her brother Waseem, twentyfive, now in police custody after going on the run, confessed to killing his sister because, he said, ‘Girls are born to stay at home’ and bring honour to the family. He went on to say he had no regrets over killing his sister and for him the video with the Islamic cleric was the final straw.

  According to her brother, he killed her in the family home in Multan, Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, as their parents slept upstairs, proving once again that in Pakistan, as in other parts of the world, a woman is not even safe in her own home.

  This is the same home from where Ms. Baloch says she was forced into an abusive marriage with an older man at the age of seventeen and, in her own words, endured years of ‘torture’ from her ex-husband. She gave birth to a son and then a few years later escaped to build her own life.

  Ms. Baloch is the latest woman to be murdered by a family member in so-called ‘honour killings’ in Pakistan. Since May, there has been an increase in reported honour killings across Pakistan; women beaten and burnt to death. In one recent case a young woman’s brother slashed her throat and watched her bleed to death. Her crime? She was accused of talking to a man on the phone.

  The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports more than 1,000 women were killed for ‘honour’ in Pakistan in 2015. The prosecution for such crimes remains woefully low, with family members often forgiving the killers, who are also family members, so they walk free.

  There has been a huge reaction to Ms. Baloch’s murder in Pakistan and among the Pakistani diaspora around the world. Her death has opened a Pandora’s box of misogyny even among Pakistani women and many other Muslim women, who are leading the hate charge by labelling Ms Baloch online and on social media as a ‘prostitute’, ‘a filthy, dirty woman’, a ‘fornicator’ and a non-Muslim.

  The Islamic Republic of Pakistan continues to betray women like Qandeel Baloch, as do these so-called sisters drowning in hypocrisy and hate.

  Miss L

  Stand By Me

  During the hype of the Ghostbusters remake, a memory came careering towards me. It was one of the memories that you see so small in the distance and, as it races up at you, curiosity is replaced by horror as you start to recognise what it actually is. Suddenly I’m ten years old, I’m with my friends and we’re performing a full-length stage version of the film Stand By Me for our class. For about a week I laughed at the nerve of six ten-year-old girls thinking that this was a good idea, but once the laughter finally subsided, my disbelief at our sheer nerve took over. Every lunchtime, every day after school we were allowed to not go straight home, every morning we were all a little early, we practised this play. My friend Lucy and
I were the instigators after having watched the film together with her two older brothers. For some reason, instead of running outside to play, we decided to script and direct our own version. Being ten, it didn’t occur to us to ask boys to play the roles, of course not, we just decided that girls could play all the parts instead, and why not?

  I look at the film industry now and I look at the film industry when I was growing up, and of course we put female characters at the centre of our performance. This story didn’t exist where young girls could see themselves. TV and film told us that girls had to be pretty, with poker-straight blonde hair, long lithe limbs and an endless supply of pink and purple clothes. We didn’t know anyone like that. We were girls who grew up in the countryside. We were brunette, chubby, wore cheap jeans and perpetually muddy trainers. We climbed trees, chucked dolls out of windows and made dens in the woods. Telly was telling us that we should be obsessing over boys and silver lipstick but all we were obsessing over was the fact that a partially obscured white plastic bag about 15 metres from our unscaleable school grounds fence was definitely hiding a dead body. So of course we watched this film of friendship and adventure and needed to put ourselves in it. No one was telling our story, they were telling the story of boys.

  I wish I could go back and tell ten-year-old me that things have changed. That if she were growing up now there would be so many more things that she could relate to, things that wouldn’t make her feel as if she was somehow doing it wrong because she had frizzy hair and a big nose and liked running around outside with muddy feet. I wish I could tell her that, when she grows up, there will be so many more things that tell her story. That, despite her first few experiences, she’ll somehow have become an actress and that she’ll be playing roles that reflect her reality. Her eyes will light up for a second when I tell her that Ghostbusters now has four women in it but I won’t have the heart to tell her how much anger there was about it. And I’ll never have the heart to tell her that no one that looks like her gets to be the hero. She already knows not being white makes things harder. She’s been called ‘Paki’ in the street and I’m so proud that she was able to shout back and tell them that, if they’re going to be racist, they should at least get it right. She doesn’t know yet that, when a terror attack happens in 2001, she’ll panic about her family and the fact that her and her dad are the only Arab-looking people in their little white village.

  Before graduating as an actor, I’d played everything from Jack Frost to Gordie Lachance to a seventy-six-year-old woman, but, as I got older, the range of roles the world would let me play became narrower and narrower. By the time I was graduating from drama school, I’d been reduced to one role and one role only. Being a woman with an unpronounceable name and yellowy brown skin meant that I would only be allowed to play how the world saw me. My excitement at being an actress was quickly squashed by the realisation that all I was going up for was either terrorists of the wives of terrorists. Now, I’d been warned at drama school that this would happen but I never actually thought it would happen to me.

  Very recently I finally had my first ever television audition. Television has always played a huge part of my life; both a comfort and a window to the world, it’s a medium I’ve always held close to my heart. Given recent news events, I was unsurprised to see that I was up for the role of a refugee. She didn’t speak but they claimed she was integral to the scene so I needed to audition for the role. Ten years of being an actress have taught me that I need to be grateful, even for the silent roles, so I went up like the obedient actress I am. A week or so later, I get a call from my agent telling me that, as the casting director loved me so much, he wanted to upgrade me to a speaking role. I remember hearing this while walking home and I could’ve cried in the street. Acting is so often about damning failure after damning failure but here I was, for once, being told that I was good enough. The girl who’d played Jack Frost was finally good enough. ‘The only thing is, you’ll be wearing a burka.’ Smack. Five measly seconds I was allowed before being dragged back down to reality.

  I felt I shouldn’t be complaining because someone was willing to pay me to act. Despite all the hard work I’ve put in over the years and the fact that I actually deserve it, I’m still, of course, grateful for the work. I kept telling myself that the credit would be great on my CV. I tried cheering myself up by laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of it and the fact that this little tale completely summed up my acting career. But deep down I was gutted. Yet again I was being told that, as a Middle Eastern woman, no one gave a damn about what I’m able to represent. I can be anything. I proved that back in 1992 when I pretended to be a twelve-year-old boy who fainted when he saw a leech on his penis. Look at what that girl had done. This girl had done interpretive dance at the age of five in a tinsel wig and white tights to play Jack Frost. That girl was now being told that she was worth nothing more than a faceless figure uttering a couple of lines to further on the white man’s storyline. Oh, and do you know what finally happened? Filming was delayed and they decided to do away with the scene. I’d cry if I wasn’t laughing at the fact that nothing could sum up my acting career better.

  So how do we change things? The problem is that yes, as Middle Eastern women, we have stories to tell. We owe it to other women to tell their stories, but we also have stories like everyone else’s. Being a Middle Eastern woman doesn’t mean you have to be in an arranged marriage or about to blow something up. Our real duty is to show young Middle Eastern girls that they matter just as much as that blonde-haired, blueeyed girl in their class. They need to see themselves on screen, they deserve to see themselves on screen, and they deserve to pretend that there is a leech on their penis because they want to, not because they have to.

  Aisha Mirza

  Staying Alive Through Brexit

  Racism, Mental Health and Emotional Labour

  It’s the night of the EU referendum. I am three thousand, four hundred and fifty-nine miles from London, my hometown, and I am scrolling. The UK is sleeping but New York is five hours behind and I am here, trying to pet the dog and have a nice time at a BBQ, while watching the votes get counted. I report the result of each area to my American friends like one of those text message services you didn’t sign up for, and we talk about it even though none of us know what it means. I text my mum to tell her what has happened while she was sleeping and in the morning she replies, ‘whatever happens, happens’ which I momentarily mistake for apathy.

  A few days later I am at New York PRIDE’s Dyke March celebration. The music is good, the weather is good, I look good in the photos, my friends are nice and I am the most comfortably gay I have ever been. This should be a good or at least average day but I realise I am uncomfortable. My eyes are darting, focusing on everything and nothing and my chest is getting tighter with every step, until it almost feels solid. I recognise this as the beginning of a panic attack and excuse myself. As I leave, an intuitive friend asks me how I feel about Brexit. On a quiet corner I cry and gasp and try not to piss myself. Brexit. I have never felt so far from Home.

  I am still awake at 5am, the tightness in my chest now a watermelon. It is hard to breathe. A dear friend from London has called and I struggle to speak loud enough for her to hear me. I am searching for hope like lost keys, it’s here somewhere, I just had it. She tells me a story to try and cheer me up, a story in which all is not lost and London, in all its superdiverse glory, in all its tolerance, prospers. In this story, my friend witnesses a drunk English man in London tell a group of Eastern European women he does not know that he is so glad they are there. I tell her that is not a happy story.

  And the unhappy stories keep coming.

  ‘Haven’t you gone home yet?’

  ‘Paki.’

  ‘Would you like a banana with that?’

  I think about my mother as a child in Seventies Britain, quiet, skinny, hairy, brilliant. The oldest of four, she was tasked with protecting both her immigrant parents and her younger siblings from
the constant threat of physical and psychic white violence. I think about my grandmother who kept a bucket of water underneath her letter-box just in case a burning rag or a firework visited in the night. I think about my sister, my cousins, their brown skin, their Muslim names. I try to stop thinking. Eventually I fall asleep with my fists clenched.

  The leave voters are not the problem. They are the product of hundreds of years of colonial divide and rule, most recently implemented via a vicious austerity programme that has nothing to do with migration, and everything to do with keeping the elite rich. I am most fearful of the white middle class liberals who voted to stay, who think they are Good White People but are actually People With Power Who Never Listen Because They Don’t Have To. These are the people who see themselves as separate from the leave voters and the black and brown people being attacked on the street; distinct, commentators with so much to say. I have spent hours, days and years in conversation with people like this, discussing structural inequality in the UK, isolation, fetishisation, why I had to escape – and still they seem to think racism started a week ago.

  They are the people who really scare me, because after this recent spike of hate crime normalises, and we are left with the constant, low-key, micro-aggressive, soul-destroying racism that has always characterised life in the UK for people of colour, they will forget. They will continue to talk over us, to tell us we are ‘moderate Muslims’, to get paid to write and speak about things they know absolutely nothing about and to doubt us every time we try to talk about racism. To truly consider what life as a black or brown person of colour might feel like takes work – hard work, a rupture in a free existence and then inevitably, culpability. I have yet to meet a white person prepared to do that work, to step into that vulnerability. There are cheese and crackers that need to be eaten after all.