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It takes a global village

Posted in Irshaddering Thoughts on Sep 01, 2008

As First Lady of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton wrote a book called It Takes a Village. A mother and world-traveler, she understood that raising children well demands attention, care and persistence from a sprawling network of individuals beyond the immediate family.

America’s right-wing nuts hated her metaphor of the village, interpreting it as an assault on the sanctity of parental power. But having grown up in a violent household myself, I loved Hillary’s point that a biological mother and father often ain’t enough. It takes a village.

So how ironic that, for many children in the Muslim world, the village is the problem, not the solution. Actually, it’s village idiots who are the problem. Let me illustrate.

Village Idiot #1: In Pakistan, Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri has defended the fact that three girls and two women were buried alive in his remote town. Their “crime”? According to reports, they wished “to marry of their own will.”

Senator Village Idiot sees nothing wrong with shooting these girls, then flinging them into dirt pits as their bodies cling to life. He calls the brutality a part of “our tribal custom.”

Village Idiot #2: In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai sheds a few tears, fires a police chief every so often, but ultimately tolerates the gang-rape of adolescent girls because, hey, it’s tough to rule a lawless country.

In an honor-drenched society, it’s equally tough for fathers to step up and admit that their daughters have been violated. But Sayed Nurallah has gone public. From CNN.com:

“Nurallah says that coming forward with his daughter’s story makes him a target, which he firmly accepts. He says that seeking justice for his daughter is a matter of integrity.

‘She wakes up in the middle of the night screaming,’ Nurallah says of his daughter. ‘Her arms, legs, her body - she is always tense and frightened.’

Nurallah also pleads for justice. ‘I have one question for Mr. Karzai: If this was your little girl, what would you do?’”

President Village Idiot has yet to reply.

Village Idiot #3: There’s no name by which to identify this person because it’s not one person. It’s the formless, faceless web of traffickers — a village in its own right — that exports children from the Bangladeshi borderlands to India for the pleasure of, in the words of one girl prostitute, “bad men.”

Recently, the brave British journalist Johann Hari went undercover to capture the story of these village children. Afterwards, he shared with me a passage:

“One tall girl with high cheek bones is singing. She shakes my hand and introduces herself as Shelaka, and says she is 16. Then, confidently, carefully, she explains how got here.

She grew up in a village three hours from Dhaka, and for as long as she could remember, she loved to sing. ‘It is the best feeling in the world, to sing,’ she says. But when she went through puberty, her fiercely religious parents said it was no longer ‘appropriate’ for a Muslim girl to sing, and she had to leave these ’stupid dreams’ behind.

‘If I tried to sing, they would hit me,’ she says. ‘I didn’t think it was fair, because if I was a boy I would be allowed to sing. It doesn’t make sense. Why should only boys be allowed to choose their own job? Men make women depend on them, and that’s why they are treated badly.’”

Compelled by Shelaka’s words, Johann pulled me closer to the rumblings in his conscience: “The next time somebody tells me that feminism is a ‘Western’ concept, I will tell them about Shelaka. She thought of feminism all by herself, in a village in rural Bangladesh.”

Which brings me to some positive news.

For all the village idiots out there, we can also put names to their opposites: agents of moral courage. These are individuals who speak truth to power in their own communities for a greater good.

Shelaka is one of them. Then there’s the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, whose members are routinely targeted for busting deadly silences about the treatment of females in “post-Taliban” Afghanistan.

Even in the Pakistani legislature, when Senator Village Idiot justified burying girls alive, the issue only rose to the surface because of a morally courageous woman, Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah. She demanded accountability. Although Senator Shah didn’t get far, she managed to have the barbarism of this case officially recorded for future legislators.

“Big deal,” some would snort. But in the absence of immediate change, getting it in writing is a big deal. Johann Hari ended his note to me this way:

“I’m slightly — slightly — soothed by the great war correspondent Martha Gellhorn. She had just heard that the novelist Dos Passos had said people shouldn’t be wasting their time writing during war. In a letter to a friend in 1941, Martha disagreed. ‘If a writer has any guts he should write all the time, and the lousier the world, the harder a writer should work. For if he can do nothing positive to make the world more liveable or less cruel or stupid, he can at least record truly, and that is something no one else will do, and it is a job that must be done. It is the only revenge that all the bastardized people will ever get: that somebody writes down clearly what happened to them.”

That’s my contribution, too.

If you don’t know what yours can be, start with Equality Now. I’m linking you to their “creative ideas” page in English. You can also read their web content in French, Spanish and Arabic.

More than ever, I’m convinced that it takes a global village to transform the local village into a place of dignity for every child.