Disappearing Act

It was a friend's birthday Thursday night and Rick had hired a second bartender at Lolita on the LES to accommodate the crowd. Even then, the bartender served too slow. I sat in a dark corner with our ladies and, as I talked to one about the secrets she had recently unraveled about her grandparents, we both came to the same conclusion: Every single family has an outlandish story that is stranger than fiction.

In her case, her real grandmother had gone mad and was kept in the basement by her husband while her sons upstairs were made to believe that their mother died of TB at the hospital. I wanted to bring this up because I think that popular imagination seems to relate honor killing and what happened to my grandmother directly with Islam and certain Muslim countries--which is not exactly fair (nor do I want to perpetuate that myth). Certainly, Islam does not condone and/or tolerate it.

"Murder of kin on the justification of restoring family honour is frequent not only in Arab Muslim society, but also in other societies, not excluding those, for example, of Sardinia and Sicily. This does not mean that Roman Catholicism encourages it. Honour killing frequently appears in other cultures such as those of Brazil, Spain, Colombia, and Mexico and has been represented in literary works such as those by Spanish playwright Garcia Lorca and Colombian writer Gabrial Garcia Marquez. Subjugation, exploitation, and commodification of women are ancient and widespread . . . the fact that Hammurabi, Aristotle, Augustus, Aquinas, and others, were occupied by notions of sexual conduct, honour, and shedding of blood demonstrates that killing for honour transcends space, religion, and time. . . Honour killing is simply an extreme redress by men who interpret the sacred texts according to their tribal vision of life."        

~ Amir H. Jafri (Honour Killing: Dilemma, Ritual, Understand)

What really interests me is how specifically women in families come to be the tangible symbol of honor. She is sacrificed repeatedly as a symbol, not as a person. In the view of the world around her, she has disappeared.