Fatima
Bhutto
Fatima Bhutto’s novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, draws heavily on
the pervasive violence in her
country
This
is what it is like to be a woman in Pakistan
today.
Walking across an airport you are told by a stranger, a man in an ironed
shirt, a leather belt with a silver buckle and jeans turned-up at the ankle, to
cover yourself properly because a peephole of skin — your collarbone, your leg,
your stomach — has shown through your salwar kameez. Applying for a visa to
Malaysia you are told that as a Pakistani woman you will need to provide a
return ticket to prove you are not travelling to the great Islamic state to work
as a prostitute (the consulate will not ask a French woman for the same
anti-prostitution proof, as though only Pakistani women are suspicious enough to
wish to spend that much time in dreary
Malaysia).
Filling out any government form — your national identity card, your
passport, bank papers — you are asked for two names besides your own: your
husband’s or your father’s. A rape victim in this country is required to have
police approval before a hospital can perform a rape test on her (and to get
police approval you must first file a police report — no easy matter — as the
strict Sharia Hudood Ordinance punishes women for sex outside of marriage and
for adultery, automatically criminalising all rape
victims.
Moving across your city, you are unsafe. You cannot ride an auto rickshaw
at night. On a bus you must sit in a section in the front, two rows of plastic
covered seats divided off from the rest of the vehicle by a metal cage so no one
can touch you or see you. Footsteps are forbidden, who can walk in cities that
never built pavements? Only streets and stop signs for those wealthy enough to
drive
cars.
Millions of women across South Asia – not just here but in Afghanistan,
Bangladesh, Sri Lanka – suffer at the hands of unfair systems every single day.
There is no force that doesn’t make its impact felt against women — political,
economic, social and even familial inequities are a daily battle. We imagine
that violence towards women only counts if it’s physical, if it’s brutal, but
there are those silent, terrifying violences
too.
My
novel, The Shadow of the Crescent Moon, was born out of the notion of
this pervasive violence and how it has disturbed the lives and imaginations of
young Pakistanis. When I began writing, I thought I was telling the story of
three brothers who set out towards the mosque for Friday prayers separately,
they cannot go together. It’s too dangerous, too violent and they do not want to
take the chance of the family being together in case the mosque is attacked. But
like real life, somewhere in the process, two women characters took over. No one
suffers Pakistan’s violence and alienation more than the country’s youth,
especially its women. And it is ordinary women, and the trials they must suffer
and struggle through, that are the heart of my
novel.
It
has not always been like this. There have been moments when young people here
lived perfectly ordinary, banal lives. Those who can shut off the poverty and
the violence and cordon their life off from the rest of the country still do.
But whoever you are, there’s no doubt that life has changed immeasurably.
Pakistan is, after all, in the crosshairs of the War on Terror. Since 2004
America has launched 380 drone strikes against Pakistan, our cities are plagued
by countless suicide attacks and there are quasi civil wars being fought across
the northern frontiers. Karachi, where I live, has 12-hour electricity outages,
water shortages, gas shortages. YouTube has been blocked by the State for the
past 14 months, on account of “un-Islamic content” — this is in a country where
more than two thirds of the population are under 30 (I’m
31).
To
be a woman in Pakistan, in particular, you have to be a fighter. You cannot be
anything else. Pakistani women are often cast as docile, weak, secondary figures
by those who know little of the country. There is a singular impression of the
hunkered down, frightened woman — but I don’t know any women like that
here.
Many
years ago my friend Sabeen was stopped by apolicemen in Karachi for being a
young woman out at night. They thought they could scare her, threaten a bribe
out of her. But Sabeen, whose political activist father was assassinated by the
police when she was a teenager, was unafraid. She noted down their badge numbers
and visited the local police station in the morning to complain. She had a right
to be free, to move without fear, to live unimpeded by her age or her gender. No
city — not even one as terrifying as Karachi can be, with its gang warfare,
daylight shootings and corrupt police force — can take that away from women like
Sabeen. And this is a country made up of women like
Sabeen.
To
live in a country haunted by fear and violence poisons one’s imagination, as the
Sri Lankan novelist Romesh Gunesekera would say. You learn how to distinguish
between gunfire — Kalashnikovs fired into the midnight sky to celebrate a
wedding or a birth have a different melody to machinegun bursts meant to kill.
Rubble, dirt and debris scattered along the city are no longer symptoms of a
lazy and inefficient Government, they can only be the remnants of terrible
destruction. The mind cannot process data any differently. “Look! A bomb went
off here!” a friend screamed one day, pointing at routine roadworks on
Shahrah-e-Faisal [a main road in Karachi]. He did not believe me when I told him
otherwise.
In
1996 the Government repealed the Execution of the Punishment of Whipping
Ordinance, which prescribed the flogging of convicts, but the Government didn’t
repeal the punishment under the Hudood Ordinance — so women convicted of
adultery or the crime of premarital sex can still be whipped in Pakistan. There
is no safety for women under the laws in Pakistan, none. You learn how not to
speak, how not to share, how to keep your thoughts hidden under lock and key
because even the walls have ears
here.
To
misspeak — to criticise the wrong man, to love the wrong faith, to follow the
wrong god — can be a death sentence in Pakistan. You learn to distrust each
other, to fear each other and no feeling remains free of suspicion — not love,
not belief, not even
bravery.
This
is the same country where 15-year-old Malala Yousafzai was shot for demanding
girls’ rights to education. Yet only a country like this could have produced a
Malala, unbowed by the terror around her, imbued with a courage to carry on her
fight no matter the
odds.
An
Indian friend, Karishma — another country whose women are warriors — once told
me that to her, Pakistan personifies resilience. Against all that is stacked
against it, against the backdrop of indiscriminate, continual violence, Pakistan
perseveres. And it does so on the shoulders of extraordinary
women.
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