By Lauryn Oates, Projects Director, Canadian Women for Women in Afghanistan
CALGARY, AB, Sept. 2, 2010 - The security alerts, planning memos and latest news had arrived overnight from colleagues in Kabul, those working in the Afghan women’s movement and their ex-pat supporters. I started to sift through the pile and then stopped, frozen.
There was the cover of
Time magazine with 18-year-old Bibi Aisha staring from the centre of the iconic red frame, an Afghan woman whose nose and ears had been cut off by order of the Taliban. It was not the hole in Aisha’s face where a nose should have been that left me awe-struck, nor the fact that her beauty persisted despite her mutilation. It was that a mainstream American media outlet was explicitly linking the fate of Afghan women and the choices and actions of decision-makers, and their publics, in the West.
Time to face the facts
Aisha’s image challenged viewers to face facts, to acknowledge that this is the brutal outcome, for this young woman, of a regime hell-bent on the absolute submission of women and girls.
Print allows for euphemisms that photos are insensitive to. To come face-to-face with the outcome of unfettered cruelty stops us from skirting around the penetrating pain, both physical and emotional, that comes from the ruthless pursuit of violent repression and from the apathy of outsiders.
My shock at Aisha’s photo was a crude reminder at the rarity of putting the rights of women front and centre in a conflict. I started my work to support the human rights of women and girls in Afghanistan in 1996, and while the style and scope of media coverage of Afghanistan has varied significantly in the past 14 years, one constant has been that protecting the lives and dignity of women is secondary to any other goals.
Nations never go to war for the sake of protecting the lives of women, and when wars stop or one party withdraws, the question of what happens to the women then is not usually asked. This time it was, and I salute
Time magazine for this.
But my disappointment returned when reactions went to press. Very few commentators responded to the facts of the story, or asked what would happen to women under a new Taliban government. Instead they set up straw men, pointing out for instance that the butchering of Aisha’s face took place in 2009 (though in a Taliban-controlled area) rather than during 1996-2001 when the Taliban were the ruling government.
And many turned away from the photo, offended, or accused the editors of emotional blackmail. For instance, in a CBC radio interview, Priyamvada Gopal, a journalist with
The Guardian, called the
Time cover "mutilation chic" and "perilously close to a pornography of violence."
When we in the West dismiss exposing the torture of a young woman as an attempt to be fashionable, or claim that sensing emotion is a form of blackmail, we have a major problem, and little humanism left in our analysis.
Perhaps we don’t see such images enough. They trigger a reeling discomfort and worse, they disrupt the world we’ve carefully constructed, the world where we can let ourselves believe that such things simply don’t happen.
And if they are not happening, we needn’t intervene.
The attempt to preserve the notion that there is no need to respond to injustices in faraway places lies at the heart of cultural relativism. In the guise of an objective position, relativism is in fact nothing more than protection for selfishness and preservation of insularity. Relativism implies that the privilege and freedoms we expect in the West are values that only we own. It’s sloppy scholarship and a bad joke, that far too many have fallen for.
The dangers of cultural relativism
Cultural relativism allows us to listen to the power-hungry gun-wielders of a society - like the Taliban - and drown out those who, inconveniently, want the very same things that we do: democracy, human rights, wealth, and the capacity to live a life of dignity and free of fear. It is easier to ignore the will of Afghan intellectuals, progressive MPs, artists, activists and reformers to pretend the Taliban’s worldview is the status quo; it demands no action on our part.
Without being confronted with images like Aisha’s portrait, or with what she has to say, we can romanticize Afghanistan as an exotic locale, quaint and primitive, where different ethical standards apply.
But the truth, offensive as it may be to our sensibilities, is that Afghan women have as little desire to live under tyranny as you or I. To look right into their eyes, even those on a magazine cover, and say “I don’t care” is harder when you see another human, hurting, looking back at you.
Lauryn Oates will be speaking at “Gender, Culture and Religion: Tackling some difficult questions” hosted by the Sheldon Chumir Foundation, October 1 and 2, Calgary. For more information
visit website.
