Читать книгу Honor, Face, and Violence - Mine Krause - Страница 12
ОглавлениеSelf-worth is not always and not necessarily a good thing. To be sure, it is appealing from a post-materialist perspective. It is somewhat uplifting to think that the fountainhead of international relations is not so much lust for power (animus dominandi) or the pursuit of gain (homo oeconomicus) but rather the striving for self-worth. In reality, the struggle for recognition brings out not only the best but also the worst in people. (Jörg Friedrichs, 2016)
Honor-related values are strongly divisive. They are not only a source of inequality, but of violence all the way to murder. Without claiming to exhaust the social or legal dimensions, we can define violence as gender-based, hence as “discrimination that seriously inhibits women’s ability to enjoy rights and freedoms on a basis of equality with men,” including “acts that inflict physical, mental or sexual harm or suffering, threats of such acts, coercion and other deprivations of liberty” (see Convention, General Recommendation 19, in 1992). The Human Rights Watch Oral Intervention (see Item 12, in 2001) focuses especially on honor-related murder in this context: “Honor crimes are acts of violence, usually murder, committed by male family members against female family members who are perceived to have brought dishonor upon the family.”6 Yet that is too narrow to cover the scope of discriminatory acts; Robert Oprisko meaningfully points to the Face conception when he speaks of crimes of honor as including slander, assault, and battery (80–81). An awareness that these grim phenomena deserve investigation gives us the first motivation for our topic. We intend to use a pragmatic understanding of Honor and of Face, which we will explain in each of the respective sections below.
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In principle, the term “honor” can have various meanings, including notions of dignity, loyalty, and honesty. Yet in many parts of the world, in so-called honor cultures which are traditionally located in parts of the Middle East, Mediterranean regions of Greece, Italy, and Spain, South America, and North Africa, honor is often seen in terms of women’s assigned sexual and familial roles as dictated by traditional family ideology. For this reason, a direct link between male reputation and the female body can be observed in such cultural contexts, creating a gap between a woman’s and a man’s honor by setting double standards. What happens here is not just a matter of geography: in our multicultural world, such values can now also be traced in some parts of the so-called West. They are of growing and disruptive concern, as they clash with legal norms that are difficult to implement, and have become the target of divisive security policies, as shown in the U.S. presidential “Executive Order 13780” Initial Section 11 Report of January 2018. It includes the finding that few statistics on honor killings are available at a federal level, but also provides the following information: “Based on a representative sample studied through open media sources, 91 percent of the victims in honor killings in North America were murdered for being ‘too westernized’ ” (8). Some “glaring ironies” of the executive order were previously picked apart in the political dispute (see Milani).
Face cultures share certain features with honor cultures.7 Collectivistic in nature, they too have traditionally encouraged the maintenance of strong family ←2 | 3→ties, social harmony, and interdependence in East Asia.8 Individuals need to show proper respect for hierarchy, including displays of humility, while sustaining harmony in the social system is crucial. Within the common features, there are nevertheless considerable differences. Triggering death can be used in both types of culture as a means to maintain honor and face, but in face cultures, rather than murder, suicide has traditionally been the expected form of response when a person’s honor is harmed, whereas in honor cultures, forced suicide is regarded as just being a “cleaner” alternative to honor killings in order to restore a family’s reputation. Thus, in countries like China or Turkey, coerced sex and rape have been a punishable disgrace for the female victim and also her family, so that the victim is sometimes put under pressure until she takes her own life. What Salman Rushdie has called India’s and Pakistan’s “code of dishonor” belongs in a similar context.9
The concerns of face and honor are clearly correlated. As is well known, Erving Goffman considers honor in the context of “face-work” (5 ff.); Simon Meier similarly sees face closely resembling honor. Raphael Patai points out that, in the “Arab mind,” in order to be honorable a man “must beware of allowing his ‘face’ to be ‘blackened’; he must always endeavor to ‘whiten his face,’ as well as the face of the kin group to which he belongs” (96, 108 ff.; see also Stewart 99). Robert Paul Churchill adds that Arabic wajh or “face” for honor signifies that “the face one presents to the world is precisely the same as the face one sees in reflection” (80–81). For Robert Oprisko, face is a dimension of external honor: face fulfills the “need for a process of socially valuing individuals as they wish to appear and of appearing as one would like to be valued” (79).10 Depicting an honor culture, Algerian writer Yasmina Khadra describes how “if a man lost face, then all the ←3 | 4→rest was futile” (What 96). Giving attention to honor without closer attention to face, and vice versa, would fall short of what either requires.
Violence based on honor and face, which includes some of the most atrocious phenomena of our time, has been studied by a number of social scientists. Most researchers have used field studies of behavioral patterns linked to honor perceptions. These can be of interest for international business relationships, for instance, but are not so helpful for contexts which include the individual experience and implications of honor-based violence.
This gives us the second motivation for our topic: there is a growing corpus of fictional literature dealing with various forms of honor-related violence, in honor cultures and, with a different temporal dynamic, in face cultures. We can understand the literature as these cultures’ imaginary, in terms of the “creative and symbolic dimension of the social world” (Thompson 6). Yet this corpus has hardly been studied; as far as we could see, until now none of the research contributions dealing with honor and face in the sciences includes a literary focus. Drawing on Sufi wisdom, Turkish writer Elif Shafak points out one of the related consequences: “The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge. We know a lot about each other, or so we think. But knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves, it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected” (Shafak, “Politics”). Shafak tells us that, for fiction, the drawing compass is a desirable metaphor: while one leg is firmly grounded, the other “draws a wide circle, constantly moving” (“Politics”). With its presentation of temporality in the narration as well as in its content, narrative can qualify as a form of knowledge (see also Kreiswirth). Sociologist Mariano Longo explores literature in depth as a form of empirical material: his analysis considers fictional narratives as “tools that a sociologist may adopt to get in contact with dense representations of specific aspects of the social” (Longo 2). Since such narratives are capable of “organizing human experience in a meaningful temporal sequence,” they “may cast new light on human experience as such” (Longo 33). This emphasis also allows us to recognize that imaginative literature and phenomenology are not independent of each other; as Pol Vandevelde explains, literature is intrinsically phenomenological, just as phenomenology functions rather like literature. The social sciences, for their part, underline “the relevance of meaning as a structural element” in our relation with the social environment (Longo 34). Indeed, communication research indicates that phenomenology with a semiotic orientation ←4 | 5→can effectively engage complexities of “racial, ethnic, and cross-cultural difference” (Martinez 293). What is more, one can think of narratives as a process by which “the description of singular events and actions is useful to explain other contexts and actions” (Longo 50). Complementing sociology’s form of reality-understanding, they are able to give “a plausible representation of social reality and intercourse,” presenting events and themes as an “a-referential” representation of the referential world (Longo 137, 140, 147). We support this argumentation, especially seeing that the a-referential mode is elucidated further in the interpretive “shuttle” proposed by Harry Berger, to be explained further below.
Since the so-called ethical turn new attention has been given to Wayne Booth’s dictum that stories are “our major moral teachers” (241). Nie Zhenzhao argues that “[l];iterature teaches by giving illustrations of ethical choices” (Ross 7).11 As we turn our attention to the corpus, we should keep in mind Cao Shunqing’s call for taking into account not only the “homogeneity and affinity” but also “Variation and heterogeneity” (with a capital V) between cultures in studying comparability (xxx). Our chapters will give evidence of such heterogeneity. For these purposes, however, to offer literature as “authentic” material to explain or record a culture and by implication its mainstream would amount to a misunderstanding. It would mean essentializing the culture, treating a fictional artifact as a sociological and ethnographical document rather than as “a commentary on the culture” (Dalvai 282).12 From these considerations, we are encouraged by Pierre Bourdieu’s prominent attention to fiction’s lucid “ways of truth-telling” to analyze the masculinist experience of honor (Masculine 69).
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Marginal or representative conditions? (I)
The composite story told by the fictional works we have found may perhaps appear somewhat marginal rather than representative, a) if one considers a dominant or hegemonic masculinity mainly as a societal ideal in Western advertisements, b) if one finds it theoretically awkward to focus on a gender bias in exploring stigma in non-Western populations, or c) if one foregrounds that women can damage a family’s honor in Western societies as well as elsewhere (see, for instance, Ermers 54, 76, and 192). Yet whether the supposedly marginal is less significant is a matter of perspective.
Thus we can suggest a first way of responding to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. Fiction “takes the prevalent thought system or social system as its context, but does not reproduce the frame of reference which stabilizes these systems” (Iser 71). It “tends to take as its dominant ‘meaning’ those possibilities that have been neutralized or negated by that system” (Iser 72). Nobel Prize-winning Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk’s work illuminates this: “[…] the focus of much of Pamuk’s work lies on transgressing the official narratives of Turkish identity enforced by Kemalism and challenging the uncompromising secularism of the republic” (Furlanetto 55). Hence we remain aware of the fact that literature sometimes represents “typical deficits, blind spots, imbalances, deformations, and contradictions within dominant systems of civilizatory power”; it stages and semiotically empowers what is “marginalized, neglected or repressed in the dominant cultural reality system” (Zapf 62–63). Esther Lezra argues in a similar direction, claiming that “[a];s critics, readers and writers, we contribute to the disordering of dominant discourses by recognizing, pointing to and pushing the limits that dominant narratives would impose. We contribute to the remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices by pointing to the traces and echoes left by these acts of violence and historical forgetting” (102). Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz justly celebrates writers for whom writing becomes “an existential act,” who have “turned their back on hardline sensitivities” and “attacked the official version of history” (“Literature”).
Marginal or representative conditions? (II)
Yet should we also bear in mind the intersecting possibility that a staged marginality is co-opted in the commodification culture of a profitable book market? This suggests a second response to the query about a representative character of the stories of honor. It reveals a flaw in some of the above arguments: they do not always understand discourse as a Foucaultian event, as one can gather from ←6 | 7→Archaeology of Knowledge (II.1), one which includes speaker, words, hearers, location, language, and dissemination channels. “Who is speaking to whom” is a vital element of meaning: a writer’s positionality, location, or context are always relevant to the represented content (Alcoff 12, 14).13 In our time and not only in Europe the so-called masses, those who are struggling, “know perfectly well, without illusion,” yet “there exists a system of power which blocks, prohibits, and invalidates this discourse and this knowledge” – while the intellectual is “object and instrument” of the system (Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207–08).
Are writers instruments of a power system?
This question requires more attention, at least as a brief extension of our topic focus. Some authors whose works are part of our corpus comment quite explicitly on the experience, among them Turkish writer Ayfer Tunç. According to her own statement, she writes for “qualified readers” of her home country: “Turkey still has […] really powerful ‘qualified readers’ despite its population. In my opinion, this situation shows that our writers still can influence the readers in Turkey and their words create an effect into [sic] people even if they are not majority.”14 Yet what is especially significant in the present context is her experience that “Western writers expect us to write novels that show them more clearly as Westerners, and us more clearly as Easterners; they want us to make them feel happy and secure in this regard” (“Literature”). Western publishers, accordingly, “want stories of abject penury: about lives ruined under the weight of customs and traditions, about the unbreachable chasm between Muslim and Western lifestyles, and tales of ethnic strife” (“Literature”).15 Would that not invalidate the discourse?
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Gul Turner has aptly remarked about Sema Kaygusuz: “Turkish writers’ works are only published if they fit a preconceived/misconceived model of orientalism.” Kaygusuz reports the experience of being subjected, outside Turkey, to questions about Islam, Islamophobia or Sinbad, being treated as a “representative” of a particular country and religion (“Literature”). In the article “Buradan Bakmak,” Kaygusuz describes her experiences with Western literary expectations in detail, pointing out that readers generally only want to hear about her “Turkishness” as something exotic as well as her struggles in the role of an oppressed woman, thus restricting her artistic freedom (Aramızdaki 46–47). In a Voice Message via WhatsApp she has told Mine Krause that she generally does not have any particular audience in mind. She addresses
readers who feel restless, are curious about the world, who are searching for themselves. All those who are questioning themselves are my readers. Not specifically women or men, Europeans or Turks… I write to the whole world, even to the dead, and to future generations. This is my intention and my wish. I want to touch other people’s souls that do not have any gender or nationality.
In Turkey, Elif Shafak addresses a very heterogeneous group of readers: “My readers are surprisingly mixed. I have conservative readers, for instance, women with headscarves, but also many liberal, leftist, feminist, nihilist, environmentalist and secularist readers. Next to those are mystics, agnostics, Kurds, Turks, Alevis, Sunnis, gays, housewives and businesswomen” (Skidelsky). She turns against writers being seen not “as creative individuals on their own, but as the representatives of their respective cultures”:
If you’re a woman writer from the Muslim world, like me, then you are expected to write the stories of Muslim women and, preferably, the unhappy stories of unhappy Muslim women. You’re expected to […] leave the experimental and avant-garde to your Western colleagues. (“Politics”)
Such stories would, quite likely, be considered representative.
In a direct message to Mine Krause on Twitter, Négar Djavadi writes the following about her intended readership, which is rather Western:
Le livre [i.e., Désorientale] s’adresse avant tout aux Occidentaux, un moyen de leur faire connaître l’Iran et son Histoire, un pays peu connu et pourtant très fantasmé. À travers le personnage de Kimia mon désir était de leur dire que derrière une étrangère, une ←8 | 9→exilée, un homo, se cache une histoire, des histoires et si vous preniez le temps de les connaître vous verrez, vous serez surpris, ému, touché. En fait, cette envie a devancé celle de parler de l’Iran.
Scheinhardt is apparently also writing for Western readers who are less familiar with conditions in Turkey: “Deutsche und junge, in der Bundesrepublik aufgewachsene Landsleute” – as Anton J. Weinberger wrote in 1986. Yasmina Khadra seems equally to address at least some non-Western readers in order to effect a change in their perception:
If you think that my books are capable of bringing the necessary light to the beginnings of a solution, please advocate and support them. […] My readers, in all of the countries where I am translated, have accessed a certain reality of the world. […] [T];hinking that I am capable of changing something without your commitment is too much to ask. (Hoffmann)
Aboulela explains in an interview:
My books are […] marketed for the general reader, so if I count most of the people who read me, they are Western and non-Muslim. But the warmest response comes from Muslims. […] I’m increasingly getting the best reception from young, second-generation Muslims who grew up in the West. (Chambers, Interview 98)
She describes Minaret as “a kind of Muslim feminist novel, and girly or womanly as well” (Chambers, Interview 99).
Khaled Hosseini shares the following observations:
[…] The people who tend to read novels [in Afghanistan] are the educated, urban, progressive, affluent professionals. […] I do have my critics in my community, no doubt. The common theme among them is that some things are better left unsaid, kept in house, for instance the issue of ethnic tensions and treatment of women and violence against children. (Holmes)
Kamel Daoud’s aim seems to be to describe his homeland to readers from other countries: “I have for my country the affection of the disenchanted. A love that is secret and strong. A passion. I love the people and the skies, which I try to decipher in books and in glimpses at night” (“Correspondence”). Saleem Haddad stresses that “[i];n the Arab world, those of us on the margins often face a dual struggle: battling oppressive forces within our own communities and also resisting the global narrative that tries to use our ‘oppression’ to achieve broader military or political goals” (“Guapa” interview). However, Ayfer Tunç’s and Orhan Pamuk’s novels as studied here were not created for Western publishers; other writers will not want to be restricted in their range of subject matter and settings and will not only write novels about “lives ruined.” But when they do, ←9 | 10→we need not assume (without evidence) that the representation is invalidated by a publisher’s agenda, that it is not alloreferential. Concerning China, a Western literary agent is on record as saying, “For Western publishers and readerships, there’s a certain expectation of what China is, and if they don’t get it they don’t like it”; in a dominant template for translated Chinese fiction, stories are expected to take place in the past and in a rural setting (Leese).
In terms of our topic, there is an evident need to devote attention to the reality of penury, which, as social research has confirmed, is a frequent setting for honor-related violence in connection with lives ruined by customs. Accordingly, Pamuk’s statement is pertinent:16
[…] [T];he problem of the representation of reality becomes more important than the artist or author deserves or wants. […] While non-western artists want the same freedom […] of representation that western artists want or look for, they feel an immense responsibility towards […] representing this part of the world. (ter Braak)
The writers’ parenthesizing of these conditions (in Husserl’s sense), for all their individual variation, ensures that they are not at a disadvantage concerning their work’s credibility. These are issues of such far-reaching importance that we will come back to them in various contexts.
We should extend our focus concerning the expectations to which writers are subjected. Criticism of novels like Khaled Hosseini’s at times presents itself as worried by a solidifying of East-West political difference in his work. Some critics, quite apart from publishers, evidently resent writers who, functioning as native informants,17 depict unattractive features of their society or culture, thus ←10 | 11→allegedly nourishing Western stereotypes and by various means suggesting or at least implying Western cultural superiority. One can surmise that some critics would prefer writers to dwell on morally and aesthetically attractive characteristics of their country and culture, as bringing about a level East-West playing field. In our context, however, it would mean erasing the distinction between honor and dignity cultures, which we will explain below; this would not do justice to either. It would mean equating all forms of domestic and honor violence (and very likely refraining from their fictional representation). Yet, as Phyllis Chesler and several other scholars argue, case studies show that “honor killings are quite distinct from domestic violence” (Chesler, “Are Honor”). An East-West dimension would be misleading, as honor-shame communities tend to form only a part of their respective countries.
Then, in the context of North Africa vis-à-vis Europe, another form of the question about attending to more than marginal realities has become strongly political, erupting in the controversy surrounding Algerian writer Kamel Daoud. At the end of 2015, massive sexual assaults on women by young men mostly from North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds in Cologne (Germany) provoked an op-ed by Daoud in The New York Times with statements that are in tune with his fictional representations:
[…] one of the great miseries plaguing much of the so-called Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, is its sick relationship with women. In some places, women are veiled, stoned and killed. […] People in the West are discovering, with anxiety and fear, that sex in the Muslim world is sick, and that the disease is spreading to their own lands.
This in turn triggered a storm of harsh protest, for instance from a number of mostly French academics (see Maghreb Page Editors) who condemned Daoud for Islamophobia coming close to racist discourses. Finally the French prime minister Manuel Valls intervened with a post “Soutenons Kamel Daoud!”: “Ce que demande Kamel Daoud, c’est qu’on ne nie pas la pesanteur des réalités politiques et religieuses; que l’on ait les yeux ouverts sur ces forces qui retiennent l’émancipation des individus, sur les violences faites aux femmes, sur la radicalisation croissante des quartiers, sur l’embrigadement sournois de nos jeunes” (see also Zerofsky 63).
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This controversial debate, within the context of our second response, needs a little more contextual attention. A fatwa by Abdelfattah Hamadache calling for Daoud’s execution has been issued in 2014 (see Cocquet), though subsequently qualified a little. Orhan Pamuk has also experienced death threats. Elif Shafak was on trial in 2006 because her novel The Bastard of Istanbul was considered as “insulting Turkishness.”18 In a November 2018 lecture, Kamel Daoud speaks of his country’s “ability to accuse the West of all our evils while absolving ourselves of our own responsibility each day, in the face of each failure” (“Blaming”). Daoud is vindicated not least in the context of the Cluster of Excellence “Normative Orders” at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main: his arguments “sind beileibe keine, die man mit dem Verweis auf deren intellektuelle Marginalität zur Seite legen kann; sie schließen an eine viel ältere Tradition des arabischen Feminismus an, die von den postkolonialen Wissenschaftlerinnen vollständig negiert wird” (Schröter). Sema Kaygusuz has declared that “[s];ometimes, I know, a country needs to hear its reality from its writers” (“Sema”), a position which partly explains some of the vehement reactions.
Arab critics have also lashed out at Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun’s La Nuit Sacrée (quite apart from its Arabic translation) for producing “an essentially Western text” which ignores historical contexts of Islamic cultural history and implies that Moroccan life is “irrational, depraved, […] raging, dark, angry,” that Moroccan localities are “godforsaken places” (Faiq 206–08); Ben Jelloun is one of the chief “reinforcers of orientalist stereotypes and clichés about everything Arab and Islamic” (Faiq 204).19 One could almost describe the criticism itself as “dark, angry”; whether this is an adequate description of the novel’s content is another matter. As for Ben Jelloun, writer Mohamed Choukri, scholar Mohamed Boughali, and others have likewise condemned works of his. Anouar El Younssi (Emory University) emphatically agrees, noting that Ben Jelloun “allegedly seeks to empower and give voice to oppressed women in patriarchal Arab-Muslim societies. However, he runs the risk of giving a simplistic, black-and-white representation of Moroccan society […]”; L’Enfant de Sable “essentializes the alleged cultural regression of Moroccans – and, by extension, Arabs – so much that oppressing women becomes part and parcel of the Moroccan, Arab ←12 | 13→collective” (240). “We must […] caution his readers against the cultural and political consequences his literature may engender” (248). This criticism is leveled at Khaled Hosseini, too, for portraying misogyny as “an innate characteristic of most Afghan men” (Fitzpatrick 249). We can observe that hostile critics appear to claim that there is a loss of the referent. Yet we can also observe that the conditions Ben Jelloun depicts are hardly isolated cases, being supported in other works (and also in social science).
Not surprisingly, Khaled Hosseini has been the target of vicious attacks. Like other authors some of whose works we are studying, he has been included in the category of “native informant.” His work A Thousand Splendid Suns (on an illegitimate daughter in Afghanistan and the hardship she endures, as well as Taliban cruelty) is now analyzed, elaborating on Coeli Fitzpatrick, as showing that Hosseini “contributes to the stereotypical discourse which opposes the ‘progressive’ West where everything is done for the better of humans to the ‘underdeveloped’ East which destroys lives of its people”; the work’s author “adjusts to the tastes of Western audiences”; “the ideology it adopts is fundamentally Eurocentric,” so that “the whole picture becomes skewed” (Dagamseh and Golubeva 2, 3, 9). This criticism, too, is political: in the novel Hosseini justifies the “benign nature of the United States’ involvement in the affairs of other countries” (Dagamseh and Golubeva 9).20 Hosseini has been faulted for not giving significant attention to economic deprivation in Afghanistan rather than culture (for instance Mader 90). Studies have found that, indeed, a majority of honor violence cases tends to occur in economically disenfranchised areas, as a response to women’s perceived defiance of social norms such as the right to work (e.g., Karo Kari, Mansur et al.). Yet it would be implausible to assume that in Afghanistan or elsewhere poverty and lack of education per se induce honor-related violence, irrespective of cultural factors.21 Iis Sugiyanti praises ←13 | 14→A Thousand Splendid Suns for being “honest enough to give a more informed and rounded appreciation of the life of Afghan women” (48). But there is another angle of attack: strangely equating Pashtun people as a whole with Pashtun men, ones especially having “the responsibility of shielding honor of their women” (421), Khan and Afsar on this basis contend that Hosseini “disorientates readers by distorting real picture of Pashtun people” in that his “representation of Pashtun characters is not based on the traits for which they are known,” so that he “pleases Westerners by devaluing cultural values of Pashtuns/Muslims” and justifies U.S. intrusion into Afghanistan (426). Evidently literature can become a weapon not only of political conflict but of warfare. When another team of critics faults Hosseini’s work for being narrated from a female perspective (Khan and Qureshi 397), we can see how consistently masculinist criticism, with its allies, seeks to safeguard its cultural priorities in nosing out ideological concerns in its study object – but only there. It may need to consider Edmund Husserl’s warning that scientific questioning requires an “inhibiting” or “putting out of play” all “positions taken toward the already-given Objective world” (epoché or parenthesizing, in Cartesian 20). Moreover, whereas Mader condemns Hosseini’s novel for depicting Pashtun men as either brutish or effeminate (88), Khan and Qureshi find them portrayed as “matchlessly helpful to the needy” (392). Does the novel show a different face to different critics?
Another of the authors we will mention, Kader Abdolah, has been analyzed with similar categories:22 he “regularly employs old, orientalist stereotypes: ‘West’ is rational, straightforward and active; ‘East’ is irrational, traditional and passive” (Moenandar 61).23 As for Iran, when Parinoush Saniee’s Book of Fate was banned, she reports about the question of its depiction of realities: “Even when I asked what subject matter in the book was far-fetched, and where had I possibly exceeded realities at the time, the ministry’s response was that it was not a question of the subject matter being untrue ←14 | 15→or unrealistic, but that [the book] was bitter and would negatively impact perceptions” (Al Bustani). It is noteworthy how the whole issue of representative or distorted depiction can thus be neatly sidestepped. The realities are, in Saniee’s summary: “Indeed, there is no shortage of suicide, long family feuds and even honour killing. Societal expectations are more vital to people than life and death” (Al Bustani).
In the Chinese context there is a recent and heated debate, which is also significant for understanding the global dimension of the question of representation. It concerns Mo Yan, who has been severely criticized for not depicting “typical characters in typical environments”: has he not “distorted the Chinese history and reality” with a “wild and exaggerating” fictional discourse (Song 3, 4)? Song Binghui cites a critical stance that resembles charges brought against Middle Eastern authors: “though not intentionally bowing to Orientalism, Mo Yan has in effect confirmed the Occidental imagination of a backward and filthy East” (4). We need to be aware that his translator produces “marketable English books” and sees a “primary obligation” to the Western reader rather than the author (see “Howard” and also Lingenfelter). The debate about distorting reality, too, is instructive. In Hegel’s sense (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences 1: The Logic 2.8.112), it is not advisable to “look upon the world before us in its immediacy as something permanent and positive,” since what we can regard as Being is “the superseding of all that is immediate”; owing to the principle of negativity, immediate reality or the given carries the seeds of its dissolution, as the forms of phenomenal reality are contingent (see Zhang Shiying, and also for instance Button 192, 219–20). This is also a vital way to think of the query about representativity, or a notion of mainstream reality. Song Binghui vindicates Mo Yan’s creation of “a symbolic mixture rich in meaning” which features a “genuine concern for human nature as engrossed in the specially Chinese social-historical reality” (9); “existents and events of Mo Yan’s narratives do have their reference in the real world” (10).24 We would agree that fetters of “conventional realism” would not allow the writer to address significant real-world concerns.
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Our topic leads straight into the dispute about “skewing” the culture of one’s country. Such a practice would amount to a failure to give access to significant realities, to authentic or typical conditions. The accusation can bring about an impasse in representation as well as personal trouble. It is a form of “crisis in the correspondence between the representing discourse and the represented world” (with a suspicion that the writer is rendering little more than his/her own “aim and agenda,” as voiced by Khan and Qureshi), technically speaking a “shift from alloreferential to self-referential semiosis” (Nöth 10, 14). Further above, we have warned against treating a fictional work of art as an ethnographical document essentializing a culture. Yet the accusations against authors (in the previous section) show that non-ethnographical aesthetical representation is sometimes taken as if it was merely an opposite extreme, and is accordingly accepted only within narrow limits. Beyond what Winfried Nöth accounts for, there is a risk of losing the referent in such altercation when the depicted conditions’ reality is disputed and/or attention shifts away from them and toward the manner of representation. The Maghreb Page Editors, indeed, confidently proclaim that Daoud constructs “a non-existent space as the object of analysis.”
We have heard, in the context of our first response, that literature represents “typical deficits, blind spots” within “dominant systems of civilizatory power” (Zapf). Yet critical assessments of the kind we refer to suggest it is mainly the writers themselves who reveal “blind spots,” whether or not they appear to be co-opted in a commodification culture. Adjudicating the dispute adequately would involve extensive, neopositivistic field research in each target country. A number of social research projects have been carried out (see for instance Churchill 118 and 244 for Afghanistan), so that we can and will compare their results with the fictional works and sometimes with legal culture to provide a more comprehensive picture of this complex topic. We can and will also compare the fictionally depicted conditions between works, for an assessment whether any of them are isolated cases. We do remain aware that social science studies as such can be equally liable to the charge of “blind spots”; for major research methods of intercultural and intergroup communication, for instance, it is well said that “each paradigm has its own meaning and rhythm much as is the case with different genres of music” (Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 49). Yet this does not mean that each is, accordingly, more concerned with its internal harmony than with its study objects. Formulating necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge, as in a coherence theory of justification, is a challenging requirement both for social and literary inquiries.
←16 | 17→
Marginal or representative conditions? (III)
So far we have offered two approaches, the second with a fairly strong political component, to the query about marginality. We can attempt a third, possibly less controversial way of answering it. We should be aware that what we have referred to as dominant systems are intricately related to conditions prevailing for large segments or even a majority of a population and especially its subalterns. If one follows Robert Paul Churchill’s sociocultural account as well as the solidly based research on face cultures, the conditions shown in the fictional works we are studying here do affect the lives of numerous people.25 Notable critical voices underscore this. Zabihzadeh et al. not without justice declare that fictional works like Atiq Rahimi’s novel Syngué Sabour “play an integral role in addressing the plight of Afghan women” as “a persistent problem all over Afghanistan,” and “provide a better insight for the public” (64). For a different cultural setting, Dianne Shober (University of Fort Hare) characterizes the work of Sindiwe Magona: “Through each authentic orchestration, Magona exposes the heartache of the black South African woman striving to reach higher […]” (2).26 With its emphasis on the manner of orchestration, this is more than a simple equation of fiction and society. Magona herself has explained that the fate of ←17 | 18→the woman on whom her major character in the novel is based is “the story of the people, the majority of us that I call perfect products of apartheid” (Craps 54); her novel’s addressee is a White American.27 As for Robin Yassin-Kassab’s The Road from Damascus, in Tasnim Qutait’s analysis, it dramatizes “the inadequacies of political vision in the Arab world today,” and explores “the potency of the emotional rhetoric of peoplehood in the context of the ongoing crises in the Arab world” (82) – a further form of answer to what would otherwise be a reductive query about the range and scope of relevance attributable to the fictional works. We could add that, as analyzed by Hélène Machinal and CEIMA, Sir Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go can “be envisaged as denouncing a society drifting towards an impossibility to be anchored in the real anymore […] what emanates from our societies is mainly an artificial and illusive reality” (§ 24). The question of peripheral or representative conditions can easily evaporate.
We have referred, in our first approach, to authors’ contribution to a “remembering of erased and forgotten experiences and voices.” When authors delineate or expose honor- and face-induced violence, the question arises whether they are speaking about, or speaking for, those who are less privileged: hardly less than the latter preposition, the former is a mediated act, however legitimate we may understand the enterprise to be, and amounts to shaping others’ subject positions. When Ayfer Tunç for instance speaks about Western publishers’ expectation of stories “about lives ruined” (“Literature”), there is not much patent emphasis on speaking “for.” Because in our time the struggling masses “know perfectly well, without illusion,” Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault can diagnose “the indignity of speaking for others” (see Foucault, “Intellectuals” 207, 209). Yet we might take heed of the lingering effects of Gayatri Spivak’s suspicion that “[t];the social sciences fear the radical impulse in literary studies” (19). Literature subjects a character/person to being imagined “without guarantees, by and in another culture” in a Teleopoiesis of both distanciation and proximity; literary training is “the irony of the social sciences, if irony is understood as permanent parabasis” addressing its audience (Spivak 52).
←18 | 19→
This somewhat difficult statement becomes more transparent, surely, when we understand it as picking up the question “Who is speaking to whom” which we have touched on, in our second approach, and which has both conceptual and empirical relevance. The preposition has further implications than “about” and “for.” The narratives we are studying create fictive addressee positions with indexical orientation signs, according to Wolf Schmid. These comprise socio-ethical codes or norms which the addressee is expected to share. This does not mean that the narrator’s addressee is the same as the author’s implied or ideal reader. Moreover, the target readership is circumscribed in each case by the language in question, to which translations add a further dimension. In all cases, the mode of addressing the audience or its narratee positions is vital for the “radical impulse” which literary analysis may at least sometimes discern in the fictional works, as their society’s imaginary. Wherever we have found statements concerning the intended or empirical reading community, we have included the information mainly in footnotes.
For works representing conditions in honor-based communities or circumscribed by face norms, an empowering or transformative impulse would be relevant especially for empirical readers within such communities, including Eco’s concrete subjects of acts of textual cooperation (90) – though these may possibly not be the majority reading group. We are not suggesting, however, that members of families directly affected by honor-based violence are likely to be among the readers. At the same time we remain aware that, for interpretive tasks, it is not easy to identify difference regarding regional in relation to transnational or even global audiences, and that positing imaginary social unities for reading formations can be fallacious (see for instance Benwell et al.). The people who “look for the measure of reality in your work” come from different cultural environments. As they seek to exercise individual and collective agency, readerships form communities with porous boundaries, while they may become the targets of an alterity industry (Huggan 423–24). Whether consciously or less consciously, values as well as socio-ethical concepts are (re-)defined while interacting with a literary text in various ways, both on the writer’s and the reader’s side across cultural boundaries.28 Psychological research ←19 | 20→confirms that readers show effects of stories on their real-world beliefs and conduct.29
A rethinking of what seem to be ingrained sets of values may not be wholly unrealistic,30 if reading groups can engage in dialogue and seek to enable a presence with other change agents in communities with restrictive honor or face norms, gaining a foothold to effect a carefully calculated degree of cognitive dissonance without arousing “overwhelming anxiety” about attacks on a received way of life (Churchill 265). Ideally, our book might encourage the coming about of such engaged groups. Elif Shafak, who does not regard a fictional work as a “personal item,” argues in the same vein, seeing that female readers (for instance) “share it with their friends, their relatives, people around them, their boyfriends… It is thanks to this sharing by word-of-mouth that books survive even in countries where democracy is in danger” (Shafak, “Ten”). Shafak’s hope is that her novel Honour will connect readers and “transcend cultural ghettoes” (“Q&A”). A related perception is that of Sema Kaygusuz: “language does not belong merely to those of the same race, but to communities. […] In fact, all of the world’s writers are actually stateless” (“Literature”). Fiction does crucial sociopolitical work in building bridges, while negotiating and shaping differentiated attitudes toward the realities we confront, provoking the question “How should we live?” (see also Mbembe 13).
Between dignity and honor: A troubled heritage
Since we are dealing with values and socio-ethical concepts, literature can help us understand crucial variants of honor: how such a value is not only internal to an individual but also external, so that self-confidence in both honor cultures and face cultures very much depends on the approval of others, of a social collective. This perception is quite different from dignity cultures, which nominally ←20 | 21→uphold a conviction that “each individual at birth possesses an intrinsic value at least theoretically equal to that of every other person” (Ayers 19). At the same time, there is no denying that presumably all cultures are characterized by the “social self” as analyzed by Charles Cooley: in this classic concept there is no sense of “I” without a “correlative sense of you, or he, or they,” submerging the self to some degree in collective perception (182). Indeed, the whole notion of intrinsic value is not without controversy, and would need careful consideration in its own right, beyond what we can actually offer in our context (see Zimmerman and Bradley sections 3 and 4). In most Western European and North American regions, nonetheless, respective value systems profess notions of dignity rather than of honor or face (see also Welsh x), though there are some notable exceptions. Partly, this focus can be explained by the “modernization hypothesis”: “as societies become wealthier, more educated, and capitalistic, they become more individualistic and analytical” (Talhelm et al. 603). Yet there are significant exceptions; at the same time, dignity cultures lack built-in safeguards against the threat of rampant individualism.31 In subtle ways, it is fiction that traces a range of such connections.
In studying the variant values, our main focus is on the literature of our time. Yet we are aware that honor and face values have a history as well as a literary heritage which we cannot afford to ignore entirely. Hence in our major sections, as an extension of our core topic, we devote attention also to literary works from earlier periods. Beginning with the focus of Part 1, where many of our main fictional sources originate outside what is commonly known as the “West,” we have made an attempt to give a supplementary and incomplete impression of the ways in which gendered honor has been treated in the development of Western literature, as well as legal codes, citing instances in thematically organized sections. After all, “any history of fiction is simultaneously a history of nonfiction” (Berger 64). We know, however, that both an “easy dismissal” of tradition and its “unquestioned maintenance” are dubious (Mieke Bal, “Zwarte” 140 ff.). Our task requires relating materials to each other, sometimes surprisingly, which are normally considered in quite distinct contexts. ←21 | 22→The overall aim is to offer little more than an introductory glimpse at the range of historical treatments, whether they endorse honor codes or (surely of greater appeal to our present inclinations) turn against them. Authors like Lubna Khalid have briefly spoken of alleged honor killings “around the ancient world,” especially Western cultural or social history, to buttress a claim that “Greeks’ concept of honour wasn’t really different from the [modern] eastern cultures.” Though magazine articles obviously do not claim any scholarly quality, they have a relatively wide circulation. Hence, though we are quite aware of the conceptual risks, for an adequately cross-cultural interface we believe that we cannot wholly avoid at least touching upon this cultural history.32 Researchers have found that there are more substantial links from the distant past to the present: “In the Ancient Near East it was thought (and even still now it is widely thought) that the initiator of any act of adultery was the woman” (Stol 236). Perhaps an authenticated bridge across ages and cultures could even give our topic an added level of relevance.
Does the literary heritage support the idea that the West harbors dignity cultures? For our immediate purpose, this account can hardly do more than suggest the analytical potential. If an alleged Western dignity-culture ←22 | 23→orientation hardly goes back earlier than the later 18th century, it would form only a thin veneer on the larger cultural memory, perhaps even being only loosely attached. Our “Western” glimpse appears mainly in the “Notes toward ‘perceptions of honor through history.’ ” We hope that at least sometimes it will serve to promote a countertext forming a communicative or interactive double voice, with references to pertinent research sources for further in-depth discussions.
The “countertext” deserves a little more explanation. Across the landscape of honor, we should re- (and again re-)encounter each literary work from the discursive formation it has in common with others. It is in this sense that what we read is entangled with previous texts, beyond filiative relations. The honor value like few others is hurled (on more than one level) back and forth “between the poles of innocence and suspicion” (Berger 80), calling for continuous interpretive shuttling. So what does this mean? As we approach the study of our textual corpus, we can assume that a signifiant will characteristically enter a discursive interstice where it associates with a signifié which, beyond providing a tenuous hegemony in its historical moment, is already enfolded in dialogue with other such relations both in space and time – and marks out referentiality. Partly adapting some valuable insights by Harry Berger, we can further suppose that, in any interpretive process, we begin by innocently taking a document on its own terms, a reading “oriented toward the message” and hence toward the sign’s correspondence to a prior referent: s<r (Berger 86, 103). Orientation toward a referent can be complicit, for instance, in allowing human constructs to be “naturalized as objects of reference external to discourse” (Berger 97, see also Fairclough). Yet we should remind ourselves that “art and literature, particularly since the traumas of the twentieth century, never simply document experience” (Charles Laughlin on Mo Yan). What actually happens is that we become involved in a signifying energy beyond the prior reference, a dynamic which discloses the document’s quality as text in activating, among other features, submerged codes and a larger “intertextual network” (Berger 98). This enables a “suspicious” reading which is oriented “toward messages about the message,” the “mischief going on within the signs themselves”: s>r (Berger 87, 103). Along a continuum between the two manners of reading, a shuttle movement is ceaseless, generating a countertext which functions not as a return to “documentary innocence” (Berger 87) but rather a simulacrum, one which not merely adds to but actually identifies the document’s semantic potential, reshaping what used to ←23 | 24→be s<r.33 In this sense, we can surmise that a simulacrum counters the exclusive focus on signifiant/signifié relations. It also counters that initial, unmediated s<r. In all, there lurks a more or less palpable “countertextual imaginary” (Berger 96) – in the process it emerges that documents “are countertexts in disguise” (Berger 87). And for any text, to ignore this would be to curtail or otherwise distort it by shunning a larger load, as we will point out in the following.
In this context Berger favors developing Jonathan Culler’s sketchy postulate “to look at the specific presuppositions of a given text, the way in which it produces a pre-text, an intertextual space” (Culler 118, then Berger 37). Since a text’s own condition as a signifying practice presupposes other discourses, we can gather that “tout texte est d’emblée sous la jurisdiction des autres discours qui lui imposent un univers”; in discursive acts we have a “rapport à l’autre qui est inhérente à leur structure même” (as in Kristeva 337, 339). Documents and texts have porous boundaries – nonetheless for our purposes we would not regard all objects as indiscriminately open to others. We can be more specific than to assume that any text is “made up of multiple writings” (Barthes 146).
When we read each of the fictional works which we analyze in the following Parts as documents or alternatively as texts, what happens is that this maps generic fields and intertexts onto each other, leading into the discursive formation of intertextuality (only) by intersecting extratextuality, the coordinates of ideological configuration and conflicting social interests. Thus it is loaded with enunciated ideology “from specific sites of power” (Berger 40), not without a historical dimension. As Sema Kaygusuz has observed: “Literature is such an important vehicle with which to talk about sociology, history, and so on” (“Sema”). Countertext absorbs the discursive formation and offers it to us for recognition, so as to validate or to violate referential acts. Pace Berger, we find that the entanglement is by no means confined to genre conventions as we will present them in our analysis of certain fictional works.34 The agendas embrace ←24 | 25→pre-existing textualities which are active in cultural memory, and which they subvert or reverse. In turn, these speak to post-existing textual configurations whose hyper-directional journeys are already pre-scribed in them, a temporality which is never unilinear. Indeed, temporal distance between sign structures is not necessarily relevant per se, but rather when conjoined with sociocultural discourses.
Berger himself illustrates riding the shuttle with a striking instance: “the instituted discourse of honor has its own logic, dynamic, and contradictions,” which manifest themselves in “conflictive politics” (41). He suggests that they have correspondences in apparently unrelated literary works across cultures, ones which are many centuries apart, in relation to Homeric epic. We are inclined to endorse Charles Laughlin’s declaration that “all literature has political meanings. No literary accomplishments are purely aesthetic” (on Mo Yan). A work can reflect, but also comment on its society’s ideologies; what is decisive is that the commentary “gains added force” when it is mapped onto a “distanced intertextual commentary on precursors” (Berger 40). This proposition has become relevant for our approach, especially when honor appears as “the ideology of the (power) holding group which struggles to define, enlarge and protect its patrimony in a competitive arena” (Schneider 2). Consequently, the sign cuts across interfacing referents and extratextual norms; it links literary and legal discourses as well as genres; it traverses language cultures along with social practices and their imaginary dimensions. Each textuality, as we can witness, extends to a global history nourished by as well as influencing local conjunctions. And in each case, these receive their shape from the antagonism of social inequalities: “The act that asserts dignity is any will to power or will against the power of an other” (Oprisko 128). Signifying power is meant, too.
While we would be inclined to adapt for our purposes the s>r/s<r shuttling and countertextual process as described, we prefer to set it in relation not only to an individual reading and interpreting experience but rather to dialogic “meetings among friends” in a real or virtual space: from the graduate seminar to the encounter group, the private and the collective are not isolated from each other (see Sedo). Members of reading communities, as studies show, have “actively constructed meanings together, sometimes in joint streams-of-consciousness, ←25 | 26→based on such issues as character, identifications, and the moral qualities of the books as they related to the members’ own lives” (Oatley 452).
What we (within the communities we form) can learn about the rich literary heritage, at any rate, is that it begins with what must be the most stupendous result of a young wife’s dishonorable action in all the world’s literature: a highly ambivalent war lasting no less than ten years, as presented in Homeric epic and in Euripidean tragedy. What is more, the heritage embraces one of literature’s most perplexing problems: the question of Iago’s motive in William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello. And it draws our attention to the complex psychological ambiguity of Lope de Vega’s dramatic characters. The heritage, in these and other cases, helps us to grow aware of the variety of ways in which Western cultures, too, have grappled with the honor problematic.
As we approach our topic, in working together we wish and hope, beyond any single text, to understand better the multiple sources of intercultural conflicts. Like Elif Shafak, we believe that “we need to be exposed to multiple voices, multiple interpretations of reality” (Kok). Sema Kaygusuz underlines a similar aspect:
I have no objection to the lyrical lexical composition of Turkish literature being compared to Japanese literature, which introduced incomparable literary genres to world literature; or to Chinese literature, the first exponent of prose and essentially regarded at the progenitor of the novel. On the contrary, I see these characterisations as being the key to pluralism and diversity. (“Literature”)
Hence in this book we will focus on a comparative approach to representative works of contemporary literature from countries like Afghanistan, China, India, Iran, Sudan, Syria, Turkey, and others, to contribute to a detailed, cross-cultural analysis of honor, especially honor-related violence, in its various forms. In our globalized age, which is continuously subject to re-conception, the impact of local rituals gains a strongly international and intercultural dimension. The problematic of a “dishonorable defense of honor” has become relevant for foreign policy (see for instance Al-Tamimi as well as Baig). Perceptions of honor-related values can be (mis)used as efficient means to oppress women. Such values tend to be passed on from generation to generation, a process which ensures their durability. It is not only women who are constrained. Wherever possible, consideration of narrative methods and techniques will illustrate how literary works explore honor-based values which not only impose hidden shackles and fetters on female but also on male society members. Owing to the nature of ←26 | 27→the topic, we will be largely concerned with reading from a thematic approach, without in-depth studies of particular fictional works’ comprehensive structure. The fictional works, we find, harbor a number of surprises in their representation of strongly variable conditions.35
←27 | 28→
Working in three countries, and with intercultural experiences in Turkey, Western Europe, and China, we are associated with an Intercultural Institute which has published research volumes on value frameworks and value dynamics across cultures. Our academic profile is in comparative literary studies, partly connected with legal studies. Building on some earlier collaborative research, it is our aim to develop a more in-depth analysis of the literary culture of honor and face. Yet at each stage we should remind ourselves that “the acts of cross-cultural reading” which academics as well as translators and publishers perform are “never disinterested,” being inculcated by specific experiences of socialization and education and informed by our specific understanding of literature in the reading communities to which each of us belongs (Dalvai 277). The configuration of these communities, their reading strategies and practices, emerge as a form of discursive politics (see Dalvai 8–9).
Amy R. Williamsen is right: “We must acknowledge the potential bias inherent in every generation of scholars and respond to the undeniable need for continual reexamination of the presuppositions that operate in our discipline” (137) – whatever the discipline. Mine Krause’s perception of honor is influenced by both dignity culture and honor culture approaches, having been brought up with both value systems. She has worked with immigrant children and adolescents in Germany and France, which has allowed her to learn more about patriarchal family structures torn in-between different traditions. Having studied intercultural identity problems for several years, she regularly communicates with Turkish writers and feminists on honor-based issues to gain current insights on the subject. Yan Sun had been immersed in face culture before leaving home for college education. The emigration from rural to urban, from northern to southern China has provided her with a perspective on the complexities and varieties of honor conceptions. Then, a one-year visit to Mississippi as a Fulbright scholar as well as a one-year period in New York as an exchange scholar gave her chances to learn more about dignity culture. The M.A. program at the Law School of Fudan University and the Ph.D. Program in English literature at Shanghai International Studies University assisted her in gaining a more systematic and in-depth cognition of differences between face ←28 | 29→culture and dignity culture. Michael Steppat’s potential bias is grounded in a “dignity-culture” personal background, in Southeast Asia, Australia, and several countries in Western Europe, with no personal involvement in honor culture. Academically, he was already concerned with honor issues in a study of Shakespearian reception, then with literature in relation to cross-cultural communication in several Intercultural Research volumes which include attention to honor contexts (Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press).
Turkish author Sema Kaygusuz has agreed to write the Preface to this book (see above). Her novels and short stories, which describe Turkey’s social reality, cultural variety, and existential issues including the search for identity and the marginalization of minorities, have been translated into several languages. In a 2013 contribution to The Guardian, she sums up her country’s situation in the following question: “The real issues in Turkey – the language conventions forced upon us by nationalistic thinking, the simplistic attitudes induced by the power of mediocrity, the barbarity of popular culture, all the sexist attitudes I have to endure daily, the gulf that exists between writer and reader – are they not enough?” In her short stories collection The Well of Trapped Words and her latest novel Barbarın Kahkahası, we come across the problem of gender-related double standards which can also be analyzed in an honor-related context. Among other awards Sema Kaygusuz has received the ‘English PEN Translates’ Award, the Yunus Nadi Novel Prize, the Coburg-Rückert Prize, the France-Turquie Award, the Balkanika Award, the Cevdet Kudret Literature Prize, and the Yaşar Nabi Nayır Prize for Young Writers.
Chinese scholar Professor Ma Chi has agreed to write the Foreword (see above). With a Ph.D. in literature, Ma Chi is Secretary General of the Center For Thought and Culture Studies of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, member of the Standing Committee of the China Democratic League in Shanghai, Associate Chair of the Mao Zedong Literary Theory and Thoughts Study Center, and Premier Scholar for the TV program Past at Shanghai Documentary Channel (DOCUTV). He has published more than 20 academic books including Theory, Culture and Practice, A Difficult Revolution: Marxist Aesthetics in China, and an essay collection Reading Scenery.
←29 | 30→←30 | 31→
6 Lindsey Devers and Sarah Bacon understand honor crime as “the killing of a female, typically by a male perpetrator, because of perceived or actual misconduct of the victim who has dishonored or shamed her family and clan by actually or allegedly committing an indiscretion” (360). Kwame Appiah points out that under the honor code women appear “less worthy of respect” than men, and he speaks of “wars against women” (Honor 167).
7 In our context, “culture” is only obliquely a phenomenon covered by the evolutionary approach of Churchill, for whom it is “an evolving product of groups, or populations, and of human brains” (184). Ermers’s approach is communicative, building for instance on Edward T. Hall: “beliefs, symbols and meanings […] which facilitate ways people of a given community can communicate with each other”; this includes “customary beliefs” and “(attributed) shared attitudes, values, goals, conventions and practices” (3.1.8). People can retain their moral norms and values when they “ ‘shed off’ (partly) their original culture and acquire a new one – or have several ones at once” (3.1.8.2). In our context, a static definition covers most cases: “an identifiable, pass-on-able, mutually adopted set or shared semiotic system of inherent meanings, acceptable behaviors” (Kulich and Weng 16); that it can be passed on to the next generation is decisive for tradition (see Hall 49–50 on cultural transmission, also Idang). This is also associated with a needs-based concept: culture is then evidence of a “need to associate with, identify with, and seek similarity, comfort/security, and belongingness in the inherent and constructed codes of a community” (Kulich and Weng 16–17). For the passing on of “the sense-making process of culture” together with “a sense of communal identity,” creating a tension with individual identity, see Ting-Toomey and Dorjee 42.
8 We agree with Talhelm et al. when they point out: “Even though psychology has cataloged a long list of East-West differences, it still lacks an accepted explanation of what causes these differences” (603).
9 Pakistan undertook new legislation concerning honor in 2016, not for the first time: Criminal Law (Amendment) (Offences in the Name or Pretext of Honour) Act; powerful clerics opposed the bill as “anti-Islamic” (see also Bilal). In India, The Centre in 2018 announced to the Supreme Court that it would bring a law to make honor killing a cognizable offense. In 2009, a Law on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (EVAW) was enacted in Afghanistan by decree, but not ratified in parliament (see Churchill 243–44).
10 Robert Ermers takes face and dignity to be “universal concepts” (171). He adds that, as “loss of status,” face is usually “not a moral issue,” so that, owing to his moral concept of honor, it is “not equivalent to loss of honor” (52). This emphasis is not wholly supported in Patai’s analysis, to which Ermers does not refer. We observe that the loss of face (as well as the loss of honor) often results from moral misconduct and should therefore be regarded as a “moral issue.”
11 While affirming that literature “solves no problems and saves no souls,” Derek Attridge in Singularity insists that “it is effective, even if its effects are not predictable enough to serve a political or moral program” (4); “it has had a role to play in significant, and frequently laudable, social changes […]” (8). Accordingly, it is “an effective social agent” (Work 146). Elif Shafak observes: “All around the world, literature has played a tremendous role in projects of nation-building”; yet in cases of belated modernity, “literature has not only been one of the many constitutive forces of the nation-building process, but rather the constitutive force” as writers “paved the way for the transfer of state power” (“Accelerating” 24).
12 This would be equivalent to reading with emphasis on the “illusion of denotation and referentiality,” the semantics of sign-referent relations, in Harry Berger’s understanding (62, 103).
13 Ideally, one should be able to analyze “the probable or actual effects of the words on the discursive and material context” (Alcoff 26), which inevitably becomes a political arena. Regrettably, this goes beyond what we can offer at present, both for literary works from earlier periods and for those of our time.
14 http://english.republika.mk/ayfer-tunc-turkish-writer-i-dont-write-to-be-on-a-best-selling-list/, removed by Feb. 2019.
15 In a WhatsApp message to Mine Krause, Tunç underlines a similar aspect, saying that she is not addressing any specific readership at all, but simply writing from the perspective of a Turkish writer and, while doing so, not thinking of a potential Western reader who generally expects ethnic, neo-orientalist novels from countries like hers. In a short story, “Mikail’s Heart Stopped,” Tunç describes a district which in the past has welcomed the main female character “to its festering bosom in her times of poverty when she had lived through thousands of heartaches and humiliation,” characterized by “the smell of blood that flowed from the broken noses of women beaten every night, and the echo of the violence of strong against weak shown without demur as something very normal.” In the story’s setting, “even a little slip of the foot would flatten one’s honour in a trice.” The vivid narrative evokes ruined lives. But the point is that it does not necessarily evoke a chasm between its setting and Western conditions.
16 Orhan Pamuk reaches more readers outside of Turkey than inside the country: “My readers inside of Turkey and outside of Turkey are […] women and students who like to read novels, and ‘intellectuals’ who want to be updated on the scene. […] But that may be less true outside of Turkey. Ninety-five percent of men over 35 don’t read novels in my part of the world” (http://www.caroldbecker.com/sitepages/interviews/interviews_by/orhan-pamuk.html).
17 Khan and Afsar, for instance, use this figuration (426), a replay of Dabashi’s earlier lambasting of Azar Nafisi; apart from Hosseini, Orhan Pamuk (as reported in Göknar 23), Yasmina Khadra, and Elif Shafak have been scripted into the role. It misapplies Gayatri Spivak’s theorizing of a figure, building on Edward Said’s concepts, who is “a blank, though generative of a text of cultural identity that only the West (or a Western-model discipline) could inscribe,” a “self-marginalizing or self-consolidating migrant” including the native subaltern female, needed and foreclosed by the “European” who is “the human norm” (Critique 6). The native informant’s data are “to be interpreted by the knowing subject for reading” (Critique 49). A related category is “comprador intelligentsia” (Appiah, “Postcolonial” 119).
18 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2006/jul/24/fiction.voicesofprotest.
19 An artist’s thematizing of depraved conditions in her/his own country may be assessed differently according to positionality: a Western writer at home in what may appear to be a hegemonic environment does not need to negotiate cultural and commercial expectations with a foreign publisher (and sometimes a foreign language), as Shafak, Tunç, and Haddad (among others) explain.
20 Khan and Qureshi contend that, while Hosseini shows some Pashtun men to be “constructive-minded” and “matchlessly helpful to the needy,” he “exaggerates in misrepresenting” the Taliban as in the character of Rasheed so that, because the novel is narrated “from female perspective,” it is “biased” and “discriminatory” (392, 395, 396, 397). In such a reading, Hosseini’s work does not reveal representative conditions; the critics might be more pleased with a novel that shows the Taliban and their male adherents opposing any form of violence or discrimination against women. Further attacks of this kind on Hosseini’s work can easily be found (see also our chapter 1.1.2.). Yet Sarah O’Brien from a very different reading sees in Hosseini’s fiction “a sometimes problematic subversion of post-9/11 New Orientalist stereotypes” (4).
21 Tahira Khan places “the prescribed socio-cultural norms” first: a lower-class and economically dispossessed man retains honor as long as “the women in his family remain in his control”; honor-related violence occurs, too, in upper classes, with “more ‘sophisticated’ and modern” weapons (66).
22 Writing for “Dutch, Belgian, European readers” (Braun), Abdolah sums up his intentions by stating that he is specifically addressing “my Dutch, Belgian, German and American readers, since it would not even have been necessary for an Iranian audience. I take my readers by the hand and let them peek behind the curtain” (Braun).
23 Tahar Ben Jelloun, too, has been the target of scathing attacks, as we will discuss further below (see chapter 1.1.3.).
24 There are further aspects to the debate about Mo Yan: Xue Wei discusses the writer in the context of Western promotion of authors who “criticize the Chinese government,” quoting the Nobel chairman’s award ceremony speech (109). From another perspective, Duran and Huang highlight the “sustained crosscultural gazes” on Mo Yan, which result in enabling the “instantiation of a brave, significant, critical, communally constructed connection of East and West” (15–16).
25 Elif Shafak explains in an interview with Le magazine littéraire, “Fiction for me does not mean telling my own story to other people. Just the opposite. It means putting myself in the shoes of others, making endless journeys to other people’s realities and dreams. In fiction it is essential to transcend the limits of Self. […] Sometimes I think I am full of multiple voices.” As for Shafak’s work, we can read it as exposing a fallacy within the “real”: she partly adapts to but also counters “the dominant discourses in Turkey as well as in the western world, and offers changeable perspectives to confront on the one side the hedonist and consumer reality in which many Western European readers are living today, and on the other side the polarised, patriarchal and nationalist reality in Turkey” (Heynders 164). In this way Shafak’s fiction, its “[n];arrative articulation and representation help to imagine and understand social ‘events’,” to prompt “intercultural consciousness” (Heynders 179). It is also useful to be aware of Shafak’s social and academic orientation: “To me, it is very important, both the theory and practise of feminism” (“Ten”). This is not too different from Orhan Pamuk, who has said he “wouldn’t refuse” the designation feminist: “I strongly believe that I’m representing the truth about the repression of the woman in Turkey – and in an honest way” (Bednarz and Pieper).
26 As Longo argues from the perspective of sociology, agreeing with Jerome Bruner, literary narrative exemplifies singular happenings which assume “the features of a more general type,” with events and actors “in their emblematic dimension” so that the description is “useful to explain other contexts and actions” (50).
27 From Magona’s following statement it becomes clear that she is mainly writing for a White audience: “I am a black woman and I am writing from a black woman’s perspective. The gatekeepers to publication are white people. Yet if a white person writes about black people, who will pick up the errors?” (Salo).
28 See also Steppat and Krause. As for teleopoiesis with its evoking of both completion and distance, as re-imagined by Spivak, it would require working through the Other, aiming toward a future with and through that distant Other, while retaining a certain doubt whether the gap can actually be bridged. If that should involve a perceived spreading of Western value notions, the prospect might possibly be feared to convert the addressee “en refoulé” (Derrida, Politiques 198).
29 Attridge reminds us that “the mere fact of a text’s changing the subject who reads it does not signal an inventive work and a creative reading,” as the advertising industry’s products also rely on texts to change recipients’ behavior (Singularity 85). It is “creative reading” of inventive works that is able to “introduce into the culture the hitherto unthinkable” (85).
30 Khalid reports the advice of Mufti Naeem Ashraf from Karachi: “Religious scholars can tell their congregation that Islam forbids killing a human being. […] NGOs should move forward and work with ulema.”
31 See Baker et al. on an “inherently individualistic component of family honor” and a shift of the enforcement role “from natal family members to individual men” (174); also: the individual Western man is “both judge and executioner” (179). Négar Djavadi in Désorientale presents the West as “bereft of a closer, vital sense of unmediated community”; Western democracies do not “provide the humanity that binds one individual life to another, that sustains an individual and a community through private or shared trauma” (Provata-Carlone).
32 For such a context, see also for instance the sketchy surveys by Goldstein in 2002 (29) or Muhammad in 2010 (16–18) or Kiener in 2011. As the secondary sources, including scholarly analyses, show not only considerable divergence but sometimes also dubious statements, we believe it is necessary to take pains to be as meticulous (or even fussy) as possible in identifying authentic records for such a highly sensitive subject. Fiske and Rai in 2015, for instance, assert that the Trojan War in The Iliad “should conclude in an honor killing” in light of “the prescribed violence by Menelaus against Helen” (88), yet this lacks evidence unless one consults later sources in various genres. In another instance, according to Taylor in 2008 the theme of wife killing in Spanish drama “first came to prominence” in 1631 (2), yet there are notable earlier dramas. Other such cases can be easily found. We need to test the evidence for James Bowman’s hypothesis that “even in classical times, I believe, the Western honor culture showed signs of its later instability and collapse” (45). We should also note the assessment that “considering the history of Roman rape laws helps put into context the rape laws of other modern legal systems which might still be primarily based in the honor/shame system and its relation to sexual gender roles” (Nguyen 112). What is more, Churchill (264–71) suggests promoting an alternative model of masculinity based on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 4 and Marcus Aurelius’s stoic Meditations. Yet we do not wish to forget that “[t];he kind of critique that a politically alert cultural analysis can usefully bring to bear on traditions cannot cleanly disentangle itself from the cultural fabric in which the critique is embedded” (Bal, “Zwarte” 140–41; Travelling 246).
33 For Deleuze, whom Berger does not mention but whose concept becomes useful for our purposes, a simulacrum is “that which overturns all copies by also overturning the models”; it “seizes upon a constituent disparity in the thing from which it strips the rank of model,” as “the instance which includes a difference within itself” (xx, 67, 69). It implicates “word” in language with “action = x in history” (Deleuze 299), hence for us the impact of extratextual coordinates.
34 To illustrate: when Cao Xueqin has a major woman character in Story of the Stone at the moment of death reflect “honor and disgrace follow each other in an unending cycle,” or when Khaled Hosseini (as we will see) shows us how it comes about that “Nana’s own father disowned her,” in each case the signifying network and its narrative conditions call for tracking discursive agendas, be they parallel or competing, which they disclose – beyond what Berger calls “mischief” within the immediate sign structure.
35 In Singularity Derek Attridge argues that literature cannot serve as an instrument for any predetermined end, be it political or moral, “without at the same time challenging the basis of instrumentality itself” (13). As an event, in terms of its reading a literary work presents an “unprecedented, hitherto unimaginable disposition of cultural materials” (63). Hence reading as a creative process is or ought to be open to “surprise and wonder” of diverse kinds (83), an expectation which may owe something to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Life is a series of surprises” (413) or “In the thought of genius there is always a surprise; and the moral sentiment is well called ‘the newness,’ for it is never other” (483). In Work, significantly for us, Attridge is attentive to “responsible reading across cultures” (216): the value of “opening up to new possibilities” of a culture, enabling multiple readings (218). Literature is “characterized by a challenge to the habits and norms by which the reader relates to the world,” dislocating the reader, and “responsible” textual instrumentality will not seek to glide over a work’s challenge (121). Hence of value is “that which is unencounterable, given the present state of the encountering mind or culture” (55).
Mariano Longo, too, from the viewpoint of social science emphasizes fictional narrative’s ability to provide “new perspectives from which to observe and understand reality” (51, similarly 33). This is worth keeping in mind whenever we are tempted to read mainly for confirmation of our own stereotypes regarding honor and face cultures.
In its proximity to Levinassian otherness, this post-theoretical highlighting of responsible reading enables us to share the experience which, for instance, Khaled Hosseini has articulated about literature: it will “allow you to climb over the wall of yourself”; Kimberly Collins affirms that his work can “jar our previous impressions” (Collins). There are significant cases: the fairly dominant but nonetheless endearing patriarchal figure of Baba in The Kite Runner does not simply support a stereotype. As Moira Macdonald describes it, Elif Shafak’s Bastard “extends beyond its pages into startling real-life news.” The father figures in Yasmina Khadra’s Ce que le jour doit à la nuit and also in Orhan Pamuk’s The House of Silence are not merely dominantly masculine, as befitting a patriarchal structure, but are also described in their weak moments. In Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable we likewise find features which a reader may not have expected; we gain a strong impression of the pressure on a husband because his wife does not give birth to a son. Chen Xunwu reads Cao’s Story of the Stone in terms of contingency, the opportunities created by “openness, novelty, uncertainty, unpredictability, and irregularity” (25, then Chapter 4): this, too, comes close to the challenge we find in reading. It takes the unprecedented disposition to fuel the interpretive shuttle we have discussed above: “no representation without alteration, […] alterity, alienation; the very concept of representation involves entry into a signifying medium that splits the representation, alienates it, from the presence it represents” (Berger 502).
To some degree “new possibilities” emerge, too, whenever the fictional realities we are studying do not quite run parallel to social science’s image of realities in honor and face cultures. In such cases, we see no reason to assume, without further evidence, that the fiction does not address genuine social phenomena. We should add that in our limited context we cannot always interpret the narrative works as extensively as might be desirable for a full focus on each.
