I knew I was not a cow, a chattel
In Ethiopia, men grab little girls, rape them and then marry them. The little girls don’t like it.
even though she was eight years old, she suspected at once what was happening. She had heard whispers that, when a girl is considered ready for marriage, a man will seize her, and rape her, and then she must serve him for the rest of her life. “That was the culture,” she says. But it wasn’t her culture: like all the other little girls, she didn’t want it. “I started screaming and tried to run out of the hut,” she says…She was taken back to his home, held down in front of his family, raped, and taken to be married the next morning. Dazed, she signed the papers, and waited for a moment when she could flee.
After three days she had a chance to escape, and she ran miles back home; she was crying with joy when she got there – but her parents told her she had to ‘go back to him and be a good wife.’ So she did.
Nurame has a distant sense of another life, one she will never lead now. “If it hadn’t happened to me … I would have been educated and got my own work and lived my own life. I wish to God that had happened.”
There’s a rebellion now, started by Boge Gebre.
When Boge was 12, she was pinned down and had her genitals cut out with a knife…This happened to all Boge’s sisters too – and it killed one of them…Men came to abduct Boge twice – but both times she ran away before they could rape her. “So – here I am!” she says.
When she was told this was her culture and she had to accept it, she found the argument ridiculous. “I thought – how can this be my culture, if it kills me?” she says, leaning forward. “What is culture? It is something that is constantly changing. In Europe, you burned witches. That culture changed. Every woman has a sense of her own dignity. I knew I was not a cow, a chattel, and I did not want to be treated like one. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. This is true whatever your culture. Culture is not stagnant – it is transient.”
That is what ‘culture’ is. That. culture. changed. The victim’s culture is not the same as the perp’s. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. Amen.
THIS is why notions of “cultural autonomy” like that suggested by Taner Edis are so unacceptable and why the concept of a monolithic, unchanging, all-encompassing “culture” — as defined by the usual (male) authority figures — that others must “respect” is so pernicious. They completely ignore the voices of those who dissent from WITHIN the group, and those who misguidedly defend the indefensible in the name of “tolerance” and “diversity” are doing the victims a serious disservice, to say the least!
I agree with Lisa. No woman wants to be abducted or cut up. So if that’s what your “culture” says, then fuck you. You don’t know anything. You are a moron. An automaton. A monster. And if you come near my little girl I will kill you.
I agree with all of this. What’s sad to me is that there are people here in this country who would bristle at such a comment. They don’t care about what the individual is put through–if a self-righteous outsider can declare it to be “culture”, then we should “respect” it. What worth is an individual woman or girl when I can write my thesis, which will be called “Transformative Pre-consensual Transfer of Sexual Autonomy: Toward a Problematization of the 11-year-old’s Imperialist Hegemony over her own Vagina.”
I can understand the motivation for using the “it’s the culture”-excuse for the people in that culture: either they are in a position of authority and don’t want to lose it, or it’s a rationalization to be able to cope with the bad things that have happened to them.
But I can’t for the life of me understand why anyone from a different culture would be claiming that “it’s the culture” is a good defense for bad practices. Especially not coming from someone from a liberal society like ours.
Or do you think that they put forward this defense for others because they expect some day to have to use it for themselves?
Going to foreign places or nearby cities in an all male or female group and then getting drunk as a skunk has become part of British culture. I doubt if the people of eg Riga or Prague who put up with this kind of shit would welcome an “it’s our culture” defence. They just say, quite rightly, crass, horrible and disgusting, and what kind of culture do you call that?
“Transformative Pre-consensual Transfer of Sexual Autonomy: Toward a Problematization of the 11-year-old’s Imperialist Hegemony over her own Vagina.”
You think you’re joking – but there was a letter on the Women’s Studies list just the other day asking about anorexia as a form of resistance to colonialism, as in ‘the colonized body.’ I’m not making it up.
The story of the little girl who finally, after such a terrible ordeal, escaped, and made her way back home is absolutely heartrending! Imagine her joy at coming home! A little girl! And then the despair of being sent away again to further abuse! It’s simply beyond comprehension to think of this without tears.
The horror of some cultural arrangements is abundantly evident. They are simply appalling. It seems from the article about the ‘good people of Armagh’ applauding Brady, that it is not only in Ethiopia that these horrors happen – clearly child rape was part of the culture – it was different back then! There is no way to absolutise these cultural nightmares. Johann Hari, though, is doing some very important investigative stuff of this kind. Last year it was children being sold to brolthels from Bangladesh to India. If it is colonialist to criticise such abominations, well, then, by all means, colonialism must be, at least, like the curate’s egg, good in parts.
Great title Wes. I didn’t think it was very far from what someone might actually write. It just sounds too plausible. (Shudder!)
Indeed. I dropped Johann a line yesterday saying how terrific that article is.
It’s only colonialist and imperialist if you’re actually advocating for colonialism and imperialism. This is the crucial point these “tolerance” people always miss. Rather than saying “these countries are evil and we must take them over for their own good” we are saying “these practices are evil and we must all work to outlaw them and stamp them out wherever they occur, even (sadly in the case of forced marriages it is sometimes true) in the UK.”
No no, you see, if you say ‘these practices are evil’ then you’re objectively colonialist even if you have no intention of being colonialist whatsoever.
This is just the problem… Madness!
It’s interesting that there’s no one specific religion behind this. It may be that it could be used as an argument against what the likes of Edis propose, which is also independent of those absurd allegations of Islamophobia.
The only culture the perpetrators have is on their teeth.