Honor, Face, and Violence. Mine Krause

the “sin” (“günah,” 69) of having a relationship with a man to whom she is not married. In The Night of the Green Fairy, which can be read as a sequel of Kapak Kızı, we come across other behavioral codes the female protagonist is expected to follow: “I was to speak properly, and not to use any foul language in any way, shape or form. In fact, it would be much better if I were not to speak at all. I was not to wear revealing clothing, no low-cut dresses. I was to be ladylike, well behaved, neat, tidy, courteous and clean. No playing up.” The female protagonist’s well-educated but conservative father-in-law, a professor, has the following perception of honor: “In this invaluable book on morality, you say that honour, the motherland and the flag are the principal values worth dying for; that wearing make-up has many harmful side effects, the most important ones being it makes women seem unchaste and causes premature aging; you advise young Turkish girls to stay chaste and young. […]” The inverse semiotic association of make-up and the flag is ominous in its anticipation of “dying for” appearances. Making women wear a veil or a burqa is one way to hinder other men from seeing them, as does religious Rasheed in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns. He explains to his wives Mariam and Laila the benefits of this garment, which according to him is used for their ←64 | 65→“own protection” (217), symbolizing a woman’s decency.⁸⁶ A woman’s leaving the house unveiled and without a male family member by her side can be interpreted as immoral behavior, which Rasheed underlines as follows: “I ask that you avoid leaving this house without my company […]. I also ask that when we are out together, that you wear a burqa. For your own protection, naturally. It is best. So many lewd men in this town now. Such vile intentions, so eager to dishonor even a married woman” (217). To Mariam, Rasheed describes the decadence of “uncovered” women who directly talk to him in the presence of their husbands, look him “in the eye without shame,” “wear makeup and skirts,” “show their knees” while “their husbands stand there and watch,” not understanding that “they’re spoiling their own nang and namoos, their honor and pride” (69).⁸⁷

      Rasheed adds that a “wrong look” or an “improper word” from a woman can lead to the spilling of blood (69). He stresses that as a husband it is his duty to “guard not only your honor but ours, yes, our nang and namoos.⁸⁸ That is the husband’s burden” (217), showing the heroic qualities of a man in defending his wife’s honor. In these statements, the direct link between a woman’s physical appearance and male honor becomes perfectly clear. It is not without reason that the laws established for women by the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan all focus on a woman’s modest appearance in public. For instance, “it is not proper for women” (271) to show their faces, wear make-up, nail polish, jewelry, or tight clothes, “make eye contact with men,” “laugh in public” (271), get any education ←65 | 66→or work, which corresponds to the above-mentioned findings of the social sciences. If a man makes a woman lose her honor, this is regarded as her fault: she must have provoked him by behaving in an inappropriate way, for example by openly seducing him with her feminine charms.⁸⁹

      Everything rises and falls with a woman’s appearance, as Elif Shafak summarizes with the metaphor “Modesty is a woman’s only shield” (15) in her novel Honour. Modesty is also a recurring topic in the works of Yasmina Khadra. He provides insights into the lives of Algerian women, claiming that they are often victims of a man’s abuse (sometimes related to a demonstration of male honor), a major reason for heartbreak and a source of frustration.⁹⁰ Where the male protagonist Younes in Ce que le jour doit à la nuit comes from, every adult female wears a headscarf to protect her honor. His obedient mother, who rarely opens her mouth, is “hidden behind a veil, barely distinguishable from the sacks and bundles” (10) and is used to disappearing completely when her husband shows up with other men in their home. This is how women in the rural regions ←66 | 67→have to behave, following certain gender-related codes: “In our world, when men meet, women are expected to withdraw; there is no greater sacrilege than to see one’s wife stared at by a stranger” (11).

      Men like the broker, for instance, announce themselves by loudly clearing their throats, giving women enough time to get out of sight: “[The broker] asked us to wait in the street, then cleared his throat loudly to let the women know to disappear – as was the custom if a man was about to walk into a room” (21). In the village as well as in the slum community of Jenane Jato, such honor codes continue to exist, defining what is right and wrong. Here, people are not pardoned for their inappropriate conduct. Once they have lost the respect of their community, they can no longer show their faces in public and hope for forgiveness. The greater the poverty, the more a man’s self-esteem depends on the intact honor of his female relatives. Once again, one of the most important virtues of a woman is her “modesty” (in French “pudeur”), an expression that is frequently used in Khadra’s novel, especially in contexts that might endanger female honor and thus the reputation of the whole family.

      However, while the lives of rural women are full of restrictions, including strict dress codes, those in the city are rather free in comparison. In Algeria’s second biggest town Oran, a woman’s honor is not in danger just because she shows her hair and face: “This was Oran […] Curiously, I saw, the women in the city did not wear the veil. They walked around with their faces bare; the old women wore strange headgear, but the younger ones went bare-headed, their hair on show for all to see, seemingly unperturbed by the men all around them” (17). This description is very similar to a paragraph in the novel A Thousand Splendid Suns, where Khaled Hosseini depicts women’s emancipated behavior in Kabul before the rise of the Taliban, contrasting them with the oppressed ones living in the countryside. To make a clear difference between both kinds of women, Yasmina Khadra uses the expression “city girl” who, in general, is “not like the girls round here” (295; see also 230). The mother of one of Younes’s friends, Madame Scamaroni, is obviously an independent urban woman who “lived by her own rules and was the only woman in the whole district to drive a car. The wagging tongues in Rio Salado constantly gossiped about her, but Madame Scamaroni didn’t care” (131). These city girls or urban women do not seem to know anything about the values and rules that need to be respected in traditional communities. Apparently, they also do not always have to fear punishment if they behave in an “inappropriate” way, maybe because of the anonymity in big cities, which makes the spreading of gossip more difficult.

      In little towns like Río Salado (today El Malah), however, the importance of the public eye and judgment can be felt in every context of daily life on which the ←67 | 68→reputation of a family depends. The question “what would people say?”, i.e., what the people of the village and friends might think if they witnessed a violation of certain codes is an omnipresent one, for both men and women alike. Any act that might be “outraging the whole village” (245) and become a source of gossip must therefore be avoided by all means: “This is a small town, mademoiselle, people talk” (236). As a consequence, the person who does not live according to certain traditions can “lose face” (“perdre la face”), an expression Yasmina Khadra uses a few times to highlight the loss of a man’s honor. Being surrounded by one or several “impure women” (43) immediately leads to a man’s bad public reputation. A woman can easily cause a sensation of shame in a man, also diminishing his sense of pride and honor, as becomes clear in Younes’s description of his mother: “I was ashamed by her greed, ashamed of the unkempt hair she had clearly not brushed for ages, ashamed of the tattered haik: draped like an old curtain round her shoulders, ashamed of the hunger and the pain that distorted her face, this woman who, once, had been as beautiful as the dawn” (128). This link between a woman’s honor and her appearance highlights the frequent dependence of this concept on superficial criteria which are not answered by empathy. All “taboos and propriety” (189) are passed on from parents to children, which explains why “[…] in Rio Salado generation followed generation and nothing ever changed” (190).

      In Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, Meryem complains about the “punishment of being a woman” (9) who has to cover herself and hide away from the public eye, who must serve men and respect all honor codes which follow Meryem around since her early childhood.⁹¹ In Parinoush Saniee’s The Book of Fate, which depicts the submissive life of the female protagonist Massoumeh, we find the rule that “when a girl laughs, her teeth shouldn’t show and no one should hear her”