Author: Churan Xu
Memories about Jordan were recalled as I sat in a café. Countless stories scrambled to stand out and to be written down. As I resumed my afternoon stroll, the pink exteriors of the public restroom immediately drew me back to a smothering day in Madaba, Jordan. A day that had precipitated in my subconscious – because memory feels before knowing remembers. Madaba was, and still is, a bubble from the callings of commercialization and urbanization in Amman, with its pasture and tracks and hills that wander through it. Trees stirred up the reflections in streams, above which boughs swayed faintly– a perfectly serene and undisturbed area. The sun always blazed high in the sky.
Yet the moment I entered a local vaccination clinic, the corridor smelled of expired medicine and old mats. Close, dank, cold. The pink paints of the rugged walls stood out from the rest of the space, squeezing out cracking and crispy noises whenever the wind swept through them. The clinic was set in a grassless compound, loosely enclosed by fences, where women covered in hijabs went in and out in erratic surges. On adjacent walls and windows was the accumulated dust that sooted from the water vapor and streaked down like black tears.
I was in my casual Lululemon fit, the one with black shorts that were just above my knees. As I stepped down from the school bus to take the Pfizer vaccine, eyes glared at the skin I showed. Old ladies, who were sitting in a shadow to avoid the heat, instantaneously formed a circle. Their eyes fell on me with hesitation in between shock and discontent as if they were inspecting my presence and gazing at me like an unusual subject with aggressive disapproval. At the same time, a nurse came to lead the way. Her skeleton was small, yet her body looked like it was long submerged in motionless water. Her voice was dry and cold. “Put this on”, she threw me a blanket, a common one you can find in any flea market in Jordan - coarsely and hastily made in white and red threads with the pattern of the Jordanian scarf.
Her instruction was crisp and quick as if there was nothing she needed to explain– as if the message she delivered was so unconscious that there needed no second thought. She continued leading the way and walked even faster, without any eye contact with me or others. When we reached a temporary vaccine spot covered with stained curtains, she let me keep the blanket on as if helping a foreigner who does not know the “rules” is sort of a nonchalant and normalized act of duty. Madaba ceased being an idyllic garden. Exiting the place, I noticed something one couldn’t see in a moving vehicle. Garbages from unmindfulness. From now on, the pastoral Madaba was contaminated and forever obliterated. Returning to the bus, all I could distinctively smell and recall were the stubborn decays of the hospital and the itchiness the blanket brought me. With my skin infuriated, I felt that I reached a forbidden land and was haunted by a taboo I have touched upon.
It was a pebble dropped onto a river, belonging to the jump start of a seamless narrative. It was an anomalous event doomed to be noticed, doomed to be the start of all repercussions.
As I grew conscious of the inconsistency between my values and the local culture, I swirled in a shell. Fashion and clothing used to be my haven and pathway to express myself. Putting on bald and nonconventional fabrics manifested my creativity. Passionate or moody, or whatever I feel like, I could use dressing as a way to uphold my power– the power over defining myself, when the whole world never stops imposing stereotypical restrictions on my identity– Asian (nerdy), young (inexperienced), woman (wear pink dresses and cute clothes!). Now the confidence became stares and glares, comments and whispers. In my head, they would doubt my choices, doubt if wearing skin-revealing clothes would be safe, doubt if it would further alienate me from the community, and doubt if standing out is too much in Jordan. Doubt– that was all I was left with. I couldn’t bear the potential gossip from nannies and male gazes; and though I never thought, even for a millisecond, that restricting women was acceptable, I had self-restricted.
Most of my wardrobe became black and long-sleeved. Almost could these clothes smother me in the desert weather in Jordan.
However, I didn’t realize, at that time, that all I experienced was only a speck of the whole picture. I didn’t realize that the metallic sky of Jordan, so far away in the sky, was not ripped apart by comets but by screams, struggles, tortures, and deep division between genders. Impossible, even after hearing what girls who are of the same age experience daily, when I now sit in a café in Shanghai, with a flat white in hand, to think and rethink of how they are devastated by one of the worst kinds of violence. Honor killing.
“They were buried, but they were not forgotten.” I clutched my nails unconsciously when I thought of the nameless graves. This was the first time I had a 3-am conversation with my neighbor– the girl who lives right next to me in my dorm. I dragged my weary body to respond to the knock, only to find her sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. “My neighbor disappeared. I don’t know what happened.”, her voice was infused with trepidation and agitation. One that didn’t resemble a tempest or earthquake, but shook her in ways I could never imagine. The girl who knocked on my door came from a well-off family– golden decorations glistening her Greek-style garden and extra-sensitive security on duty. She spoke perfect English, unlike the rest of her peers. Her eyes were blue as sapphire in light, but subtle green in the dark.
I made her some chamomile tea with honey. She was finally able to collect herself. Though her words were trembling and her grammar was falling apart, I felt an overwhelming, acute sense of fear. In the span of days, the gossip she heard escalated to watching her own neighbor and friend vanish overnight. Her neighbor tarnished the family’s honor because she went out to see a boy with makeup on without her father’s approval. Puff, she was gone. It was as though her existence never had any weight, unbearably light. I wonder what made her male family members torture her as the prayer echoed through Amman’s streets in the wee hours of the morning. Had he risen early so he might sip his potent Arabic coffee? Observed his dark scarf and bushy beard in the mirror one more time before executing the great mission?
The girl came to talk to me four or five times after this conversation. Every time, I hesitated to bring my perspective because of how little I knew. How do you justify honor killing? How do girls and women feel in an unsafe community? These questions led me deep into investigating the cultures and social fabrics that consolidate such brutality. There was shocking news of women and girls being beheaded by axes, smashed by concrete blocks, and even publicly executed – for rape, wearing jeans, wearing makeup, or in the neighbor’s case, going out with boys without reporting beforehand. Merely skimming through the words made me empathize heavily with how little integrity and independence women have. It gave me chills down the spine, when I learned how the Jordanian legislature systematically fails to prevent honor killing from happening. The truth was that more women are involuntarily put in jail to protect them from potential honor killings. On the stark contrary, the perpetrators are commonly released in months, and so the punishment is leashed to the victim.
I also heard personal stories that hid in the dark and aren’t communicate oftentimes . My best friend, a girl with curly hair from the UAE, opened up about seeing her own father write frivolous bravo comments about honor killing reports on Facebook and never daring to look him in the eye because the gazes down his bushy eyebrows would keep her unable to sleep all night. I met her father before, and I squirmed uncomfortably as I realized that he would’ve killed me if I was his daughter. (I am bisexual, and this is considered a breach of family values and customs.) Another friend showed me the bruise on her legs. She was hit by a man at a McDonald, while she was chilling and wearing an oversized hoodie. After she sought help from the police, she was told that it was a private issue. The policeman stood outside the glass window the whole time while the boy did not stop. She didn’t dare to scream or publicly accuse him. That would be crossing the line, so she went home limping. It became these girls’ responsibility to protect themselves from random strangers and family members. As though it was their fault that those people physically and mentally abused, attacked, and threatened them. In Middle Eastern culture, their negative experiences weren’t even granted a name– most concepts related to women striving for equality are considered taboo. Before they talked to me and conversed with each other, they were out of words to articulate what happened. This broke my heart.
Being deprived of the right to express oneself through fashion is depleting one’s identity, but being killed because of “honor” eradicates one’s identity. Women’s names are left empty on graves, girls who are physically attacked do not dare to speak a word, and daughters come back home silent; it’s a form of slow violence that creeps through the society. The more I heard, the more powerless and hopeless the conversation became. One of the girls left me a message several days later, secretly telling me that she felt safer in the space that was created in the conversation. It became my motivation that pumped my research on this topic.
The journey has just begun– I hope that one day, women are allowed, enabled, and encouraged to speak their names and exert their power. And this starts from not shying away from the name of honor killing, because there is no honor in killing.