are not unconnected but rather complementary to each other (Longo 147, see also 36).
“I wanted nothing more than to fit in and be a respectful wife and bring my daughter up to do the same. Like my mother and her mother before her” (118), writes Sarbjit Kaur Athwal in her autobiographical novel Shamed, confirming that mothers bring up their daughters so that they are “programmed to be the perfect wife” (150). Fictional works dealing with this topic often highlight that girls are taught innocence, obedience, modesty, and decency as well as feelings of guilt and shame by their mothers. Zülfü Livaneli’s Bliss, which focuses on different forms of honor-based violence (which also include the planning of an honor killing), tells three parallel stories with three protagonists. Two of them, i.e., Meryem63 and her cousin Cemal, become directly involved in an incident of honor loss which has consequences for the whole community. The novel highlights honor-related behaviors and reactions from a female and male perspective, giving insights into the corresponding gender-specific value systems. In the novel’s course, Meryem complains that she is taught the shame of being a woman and is punished for it: “I was blamed for everything I did: Don’t laugh loudly, Meryem; don’t flirt, Meryem; you’re grown up now, Meryem; don’t play ←46 | 47→with boys!” (98). Elif Shafak, who writes both in English and Turkish, expresses similar thoughts in an article on honor killings published in The Guardian in 2011:
Since my childhood I have heard more than once old women advising young women to be modest. Traditionally, females and males are thought to be cut of different cloth. Women are cut of the lightest cambric whereas men of thick, dark velvet. The colour black doesn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which reveals even the tiniest speck of dirt. A woman who is believed to have lost her modesty is at times worth no more than a chipped coin. There are always two sides of the coin: dignity or disgrace, and little consolation for those who get the wrong side. (“Turkey”)
In Shafak’s novel Honour, which (as its title indicates) treats honor as its main subject, we find the same “cambric” metaphor when Pembe’s mother Naze teaches her daughters always to stay in the background: “It was all because women were made of the lightest cambric, […] whereas men were cut of thick, dark fabric. That is how God had tailored the two: one superior to the other” (16). Textile production as a primary marker of gender identity has a long history, associated with social values (e.g., white, stainless clothes reflecting innocence) which easily become reified.
A similar observation about conduct can be made in Tahar Ben Jelloun’s L’Enfant de Sable, which especially highlights gender inequality by also touching on different manifestations of honor.64 Its protagonist stresses that all female members of the family have been brought up to be obedient and keep silent: “Dans cette famille, les femmes s’enroulent dans un linceul de silence.65 … elles obéissent…. Mes sœurs obéissent” (46). Leila Aboulela’s Minaret, which now and then describes honor-related aspects in an intercultural environment, ←47 | 48→provides us with Najwa’s statement “I was a girl and Mama’s responsibility. […] I was going to get married to someone who would determine how the rest of my life flowed” (78). The image of flow suggests an easy course after assenting to marriage, a course whose channel is not hers to carve.66
One of the main reasons why female family members often feel inferior to their male counterparts is their lack of education. It is mostly the mothers who hinder their daughters from going to school. Instead of promoting them intellectually, they rather focus on showing them how to cook and do chores, so that they are well equipped to get married off easily. In her novel Désorientale, Négar Djavadi briefly describes the inequality between boys and girls67 that is frequently promoted by their mothers, who are in charge of their children’s education. She highlights that from generation to generation, certain behavioral codes have been passed on concerning the way sons and daughters should be brought up. These gender-specific rules include “girls must help their mothers”68 (“fille qui aide maman,” 219), and also deal with their respective futures. The obsession with how to become an excellent wife and mother who later on can teach her own daughter(s) modesty, obedience, and decency explains why the notion of female (especially sexual) honor remains so important for each generation of women in honor cultures, regardless of the country they live in.
In both Elif Shafak’s Honour and Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, which both reveal various types of honor-based violence, the mothers Naze and Nana explicitly speak out against their daughters’ getting a school education. Naze in the novel Honour thinks that any intellectual skills could diminish her daughters’ chances of finding a husband, because they might develop the capacity to question male authority and start to rebel against ←48 | 49→existing honor codes: “Meanwhile, their mother, Naze, didn’t see the point in their going to such lengths to master words and numbers that would be of no use, since they would all get married before long” (10). Moreover, she draws attention to the material damage that comes with the girls’ walking to school: “ ‘Every day they walk all that way back and forth. Their shoes are wearing out,’ Naze grumbled. ‘And what for?’ ” (10). Education becomes reified in a commodity that could drain the family resources. The only question on her mind with regard to a girl’s possible intellectual development is “How’s that going to help my daughters get married?” (11). In a similar vein, Mariam’s mother Nana in A Thousand Splendid Suns answers the mullah’s request “Let the girl have an education” with the words: “What’s the sense schooling a girl like you? […]. There is only one, only one skill a woman like you and me needs in life, and they don’t teach it in school. […] And it’s this. Tahamul. Endure” (18). She repeats a last warning twice: “No more talk about school” (18), subconsciously knowing like Shafak’s Naze that education brings a certain independence with it which might cause women to rebel openly against the patriarchal system, lead to the loss of their honor, and put their own lives at stake.
Depriving a girl of her school education is a general tendency, especially in rural regions, where the villagers “would like their daughters to be modest and virtuous, and yet they wanted them to get married and have children in due course” (34), as Elif Shafak depicts it in Honour. The indirect warning of Laila’s mother in Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns is similar: “The reputation of a girl, especially one as pretty as you, is a delicate thing, Laila. Like a mynah bird in your hands. Slacken your grip and away it flies” (160). This evokes an incongruous image of having held a bird all her life to prevent it from flying, which would disable her from using her hands for any other purpose. Obviously, Naze’s comparable efforts to teach her daughter decency bear fruits, since Pembe does not miss any opportunity to teach her own daughter Esma the notion of female honor “namus” and, especially, of shame: “It would be one of the many ironies of Pembe’s life that the things she hated to hear from Naze she would repeat to her daughter, Esma, word for word, years later, in England” (16). Naze’s obsession with morals and appearances surely leaves a lasting impact on Pembe’s own behavior. It is therefore not surprising that her son Iskender can “touch her guilt” and “smell her shame” (51), inscribing his moral codes on her body, when Pembe starts to have an affair, thus breaking with the rules she has been obeying all her life. She even catches herself “smoothing down her skirt beneath her knees as if she suddenly found it too short” (133), which can be read as an automatic, subconscious gesture reflecting her shame.
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In the Turkish translation rewritten by Elif Shafak, this notion of disgrace is expressed even more clearly with the words “as if she felt unprotected.”69 Such a reflex can be traced back to the understanding of female honor she was taught by her mother, associating white fabric with a woman’s innocence which can be easily stained: “What mattered was that the black didn’t show stains, unlike the colour white, which revealed the tiniest speck of dirt” (16). Here too, the image reifies the coded normativity. Throughout her life, these sensations accompany Pembe like a “sneaky serpent” (315) that “settled on your skin, sucked your blood, laid its eggs everywhere” and “infested her soul” (282).
In
