Abstract
Female suicide in Afghanistan has generally been given economic and psychological explanations. More rarely has its social dimension been analysed. In this paper, I underline the communicative potential of Afghan women’s suicide in the ‘post-war/reconstruction’ context. I highlight its ambiguous symbolic power and its anchorage in the subversive imaginary universe of women’s poetic expression. I argue that while reproducing certain cultural ideas about women’s inherent emotional fragility, women’s suicide also challenges the honour system in powerful ways and opens possibilities for voicing discontent. I qualify female suicide as the ‘art of the weak’ (De Certeau 1980, 6), a covert form of protest, a performance—in the sense of Bauman (2004)—that builds upon traditional popular ‘knowledge’ about gender in order to manage the impression of an audience and make women’s claims audible.
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Notes
The popular assumption according to which women are by nature emotionally fragile was revealed to me on numerous occasions. For the purpose of this paper, I mention only one of them that I find particularly revealing. In November 2007, I visited a shrine located a few miles away from the Eastern city of Jalalabad, in the village of Samar Khel. The small beige mud shrine is located in a middle of a graveyard reserved to the descendants of Syed Muhammad Ali Shah. Hundred families descended by the founder, Syed Muhammad Ali Shah, who died about 350 years ago, run the shrine. Syed Muhammad Ali Shah was known as Mia and all his descendants, the shrine guardians, are known as the Mias. Mias are believed to be endowed with religious healing powers. Families seeking remedies for a wide range of problems such as infertility, behaviours considered as ‘abnormal’, and other health-related problems, therefore visit their shrine. Some visitors, however, come to the shrine for rather more specific purposes such as healing for misfortune and distress of various kinds. If the shrine also cares for men, women remain the primary visitors. Along the compound’s walls of the shrine, thirteen tumbledown cells accommodate ‘severe’ patients, all of them men, chained-locked to the walls, lying on dusty tochak thrown directly on the dirt floor. These men are considered as ‘insane’ (dewana) and receive a special treatment, consisting of a specific diet (black pepper, water, bred) and the daily reading of prayers blown over their heads by the Mias. By contrast, the women who attend consultations at the shrine are believed to be victims of Jinn possessions. According to Nancy Lindisfarne-Tapper (1991, p. 215), the fundamental distinction between these two types of afflictions is related to the explicit association of men with notions of responsibility while women are generally perceived as passive, irresponsible and emotional. Women are indeed perceived as ‘victims’ of misfortunes whereas men are meant to be active and able to use sound judgments. Men’s incapacity to use reason results in social stigma and in their relegation to the status of dewana (crazy), whereas women, who are perceived as naturally weaker and driven by emotions, cannot be held responsible for their maraz (disease). The traditional healers who work at the shrine explained to me that women are more prone to jinn possession, especially at specific moments of their lives when they experience a change of status that triggers intense emotions: when becoming wives, after marriage or when becoming mothers, after childbirth.
Brief poem of two verse lines of nine and thirteen syllables, respectively. Landays are exchanged and spontaneously improvised by Pashtuns and used in their everyday interactions.
I do not intend to say that men never resort to suicide. They certainly do but my understanding is that there seems to be a greater level of stigma attached to that act when it is a man who commits it. Since men are expected to be in full control of their emotions, male suicide and self-harm are traditionally understood as acts of ‘cowardice’.
The story of Majnun Layla is based on the real story of a young man called Qays ibn al-Mulawwah from the northern Arabian Peninsula, in the Umayyad era during the seventh century. Upon seeing Layla, Qays fell passionately in love with her. But he went mad when her father prevented him from marrying her. For that reason he came to be called Majnun Layla, which literally means ‘Driven mad by Layla’.
During the 5 years of the Taliban rule in Herat city, poets and writers organised a fierce resistance. Not with weapons, but with books and poetry. A network of clandestine literary circles, officially called ‘Sewing Circles’ to avoid attracting the authorities’ attention, flourished all throughout the city (Lamb 2002). There, young women, faces and bodies hidden by their Taliban-enforced uniform of sky-blue chadari and flat shoes, would come several times a week to read and comment on ‘illicit’ literature. In their handbags, concealed under scissors, cottons, sequins and pieces of fabric, were notebooks and pens. On the curriculum were classic Persian writers and poets as well as foreign authors like Dostoyevsky, Brecht and Shakespeare. Their teachers would also encourage them to develop their own literary creativity by initiating them to poetry writing, right under the nose of the religious police.
Ghazal translated by A. S. Shayek. http://www.persianmirror.com/community/writers/MSN/2006/AfghanPoets.cfm.
The mourners occupy these three functions in death rituals among Inner Mani people.
In 2009, the documentary film Afghan Star followed the trajectory of four contestants appearing in the third season of the Afghan reality show. The film illustrates some of the tensions that I discuss in this paper. Khadija made her appearance on Afghan television during another season of the show.
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Billaud, J. Suicidal Performances: Voicing Discontent in a Girls’ Dormitory in Kabul. Cult Med Psychiatry 36, 264–285 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9262-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11013-012-9262-2