You are forgiven for considering me a right git for even asking this question. We all know who did it. On the surface, we all at least seem to know. But to only acknowledge things swimming on the surface while avoiding inspection of what lies beneath would be akin to steering a ship into the Arctic Basin and not expecting to break to smithereens. It would be stupid and destructive.
A woman in a faraway Rasht prison in Iran is quietly hanged without any notification to her attorney. Minutes before the noose is tightened, she makes frantic phone calls to her parents begging them to save her life. They are unable to and she is executed anyway. She was a teenager when the crime she was (allegedly) party to, was committed. That didn’t matter. She made repeated claims of how her boyfriend had coaxed her into admitting to a crime she may or may not have committed because she was a teen and they expected a “light” punishment. That didn’t matter either. She slashed her wrists while in prison; a cell mate informed the authorities and she was rushed to the hospital and revived, in order to hang her two years later.
She is not the first and most definitely won’t be the last casualty of the brutal trend of child execution.
I read the papers and then put it all away.
How does this affect me?
I am a self proclaimed nonchalant slacker of sorts sitting and sipping Kiwi flavored ice tea in a Bombay suburb. I enjoy spitting theories and theorems galore. How does this one incident alter, if at all, my reality when I can’t seem to see any direct correlation or experience a palpable threat to my life or existence?
How does it conflict with the choices I make as a brown Asian woman in a largely patriarchal world I currently inhabit, professionally and personally, and will continue to do?
I don’t quite know why but I can’t help feel as though some sort of residual guilt is settling in the moistened corners of my throat.
Didn’t we hang her as much as they did?
We, of this gender – born into, chosen, acquired whichever way you may perceive or box it – have been told, since the beginning of Time, that we are born to a set of disadvantages. An entire matrix of reasons that dissuade women from feeling any strength, pride or, god forbid, happiness in their womanhood, exists and increments with a rather obstinate sort of (male engineered) social approval. We are reminded, day in and day out, of how despite appeals, forums, movements, revolutions and discussions – not to mention aggression and violence – we are running at jet speed and yet covering only about fraction of an inch with each sprint. It’s acutely adversative and stamina sapping without yielding any particular, let alone a desirable, result. We haven’t been able to stop them from murdering us.
At the present time though, I wouldn’t want to invest myself in extrapolating dissertations, mine or other people’s, to make an “intelligent” point and escape the core issue. Nor do I want to entertain divisionism that’s sucking the life out of feminist movements in our times. Instead, I will invest myself in examining why some of us are still being hanged, shot, bludgeoned, whipped, burned and defiled in as many ways as is inhumanly possible without so much as a squeak from the larger populace – women. The silence over this death makes me blood-spitting, hair tearing mad. Insanely mad.
I was debating earlier, with a group of hardboiled feminist students and academics, about issues plaguing us and the choices that lay before, of how we needed to regroup to make ourselves heard. Soon enough, there were segements within segments of who identified with what brand of feminism and that proved to be our undoing. Amidst repetitive accusations and false appreciation, I penned a few blame missives we flung at each other like ill-gotten and really cheap nukes.
We are disengaged from the others. We are too taken in by a smugness as lupine and voluptuous as it is precarious. We are cherry picking issues and functioning from within compartments. We are focussing on fringe benefits and are too keen on empty subversion than to be of any particular consequence to the changing pace of the larger women’s rights movement. We are too taken in by academic theorizing without having bothered with grassroots volunteering. We are not talking enough, talking too much, talking to the wrong people and some more.
Scrimmage is possibly the only word to describe this congregation of cultivated, educated, civilized academics.
We still didn’t quite get around to discussing Delara Darabi though she was to be the focal point of this meeting. The kernel of our concerted effort to gather and ponder about our social and gender condition disintegrated and dissipated faster than I could yell Pop tarts!
I came back disillusioned with myself and with them. And with us. Without an answer, of course.
We speak so much, we write an equal amount, we raise our voices frequently and loudly and for all of it I am thankful. Very thankful. However, in this collective dissonance and some times in the inescapable white noise cosseted within it, the voices seem to lose their intent and purpose and in the mean time Delara Derabis are hanged, miscarrying mothers-to-be who lose their unborn child in traffic accidents are being dragged to courts and charged for homicide, young mothers are dying in battle zones ensconced in used up hand grenades, girlfriends are getting their faces slashed by broken glass, activists are raped when demands of better sanitary care are made. In short, we are as grossly dehumanized now as ever before while we fail to reach any concrete plan of action. We give up on issues faster than the issues give up on us.
There could be a (cyclical) debate here about how the Darabi murder broaches the broader issue of crimes against humanity, a particular reigion/religion’s inability to be pacifist on any account and whateveritmaybe: I am going to limit (unfortunately) my concern to the fact that this indeed is a feminist issue, a female issue and the issue of a woman treated wrong. The prosecution couldn’t provide with any concrete evidence to support their claims of her being anything more that a witness to a murder that her boyfriend had comitted. Iran also has a young age of eligibility for the death penalty - 15 years for males, and 9 for females and operates a fast-track to the gallows. Tragic as these facts are, they are equally concrete and won’t melt away easily.
I don’t disagree with capital punishment neither do I exhibit any naievete about the prevalence of controlled and uncontrolled violence (legalized both) in the world we live in. I do, however, have a very serious problem with regimes executing young girls for crimes they may or may not have committed while an adolescent. A multitude of women, young and old, languish in prisons of Iran without any smidgen of a fair and honest trial in sight. Such women exist in my country too, as they do in yours. I am not claiming that all of them are unfairly imprisioned or that all of are denied their woman and human rights. Some of them do manage to study and live as normal a life as the iron bars will allow. However, most of them are not even blips on our radars. They are forgotten chapters, moth eaten and moldy, the language of their mourning is often in need of an interpreter. The ink in which these stories were written has dripped through pages – of a book left open to bleed in the downpour. Records of their existence are expunged till nothing but empty sheets stare back at us with invisible eyes.
In all their manifest forms and sparkling glory, how frequently do feminisms of the world concern themselves with the suffering of women in prison, especially if these women are brown women?
What kind of access can we provide to them where a just course for presenting their case is made possible?
We can easily become disappointed in the legal systems prevalent in the brown world; disappointment is easy to come by. Law’s purpose is to serve as an enabler and a defender. That often is not the case, since law in a majority of the world has been duly tweaked to bolster those who already are at the helm of all the power available and possible – usually someone white, male and monetarily endowed. Law in action should, technically, not be about power but about strength, it is meant to solidify our faith in the precedent of equality. We can hurl epithets of choice at the impotency of law, its inherent weaknesses when defending those who are not power brokers: people of the Other Gender, Other Class, Other Color. Usually the “other” is annotated as the lesser. We are not lesser. We are not equal, yet. Then where exactly on the curve are we sitting?
Some ignoramuses can counter us by relating incidents of how men and women are equally and constantly abused by the law without discrimination because ultimately the law is blind. Such laughable quacking aside, a very serious issue at hand demands introspection and action: the unjust treatment of women by the law (whether you consider sharia a law is really not a point of argument when a good chunk of the population out there swears by it and falls in it’s jurisdiction).
Every few weeks, months, years a story surfaces about a woman hanged, assaulted, tortured in a prison in some “godforsaken” part of the world. This is usually followed by tiny mutinous waves in the respective spheres of academia and media. Each uses the female tragedy as a suitable bait to further its own cause/s – sometimes they show limited concern to the female cause - but mostly the parallel discussions are not even so ancillary to our predicament or treatment or, shudder shudder, status. No real antidotes are worked upon. We remain unsafe, unprotected and open to harm, give or take a few freshly minted book deals for the newly styled prophets of modern feminisms. We, the ordinary ones, don’t really get much further towards the end of it.
You are not safe if they continue to hang more Delara Darabis. You must never let that thought perish.
