Quest For Romance Ended In Murder

Reports of honor killings, if they are reported, tend to come out of Middle Eastern nations. Two stories of young women of Kurdish heritage who were murdered in their quest for Romance and love appeared in the news last year. One was the case of Banaz Mahmood who was murdered in Britain. The other was of a teenaged Kurdish Yazidi girl named Doa (May 2, 2007 post) or Du'a or Doa'a depending on how some bloggers spell her name. On the blog where this girl's name is spelled Du'a is the actual video of her slaughter which some brutish person video taped on their cell phone. I watched a portion of if it, but was too afraid to finish it. So if you choose to watch, watch with extreme caution.

The average American is not familiar with the term "honor killings" since we have a culture where generally women's minds and bodies are not controlled to the extent which the minds and bodies of women are controlled in some cultures. Such cultures in which women are treated this way are more feudal, patriarchial, and tribal based. Honor killing is when a woman, and occasionally a man, is killed by family members or associates of the family. The reason for the instigation of the killing is when a family's status or honor is blemished by the actions or perceived actions of the family member. In some Middle Eastern cultures family members will kill a girl or woman if they believe she has lost her virginity outside marriage, committed adultery, is raped, wants to divorce a husband even if he is abusive, decides to adopt a more liberal lifestyle or seek a better education, or who just refuses to obey the dictates of what the male members of her family want. Sometimes such murders are encouraged by females in a family when another female member refuses to enter an arranged marriage which is seen as advantageous to the family's well-being. Men who are homosexual or who are accused of being so are sometimes killed. Nevertheless, the case of honor killings of females receives more attention.

Concern about honor killings has become a big issue in Turkey in recent years, perhaps because of its' bid for membership in the European Union. Turkey also has a growing number of feminists who want to bring attention to the problem which occurs more often in the country's eastern and southeastern sectors, regions which are predominately Kurdish. In recent years, Turkey has witnessed cases which are honor suicides. If a person commits an honor killing in Turkey they can be sentenced to life in prison, so some people who want to engage in this blood sport have tried to cut corners, so to speak. Cases of young Kurdish girls who are seemingly the victims of suicide or accidents have occurred. There was the case of a woman who came up pregnant while her husband was away in the military, so her family told her that in order for the family's honor to be cleansed, she should just commit suicide since no male member wanted to spend the rest of his life in jail. Also in Turkey there was the case of a woman who spoke out on a talk show about abuse she had suffered at the hands of her husband. When she returned to her home in the eastern part of the country, her adolescent son was pushed up to shoot her because she had stained the family's good name by going on television to speak publicly of her plight. In December Turkish Daily News ran an article Natural Born Killers (and Victims) about a Turkish female producer who is trying to shed light on the problem of honor killings in her country.

Often honor killings are seem in the west as a problem mainly against women in Muslim communities, but in some rural Christian areas of Jordan, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority, there have been some rare cases. In India, some families have killed women in rages because of dowries which they felt were insufficient. The first honor killing I ever read about was against a prince in The Bible and all the men in his city. Prince Shechem ravished Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, but fell in love with her in the process and wanted to marry her, but in an act of deception, one night Dinah's brothers raided Shechem's city in retaliation for their sister's honor and killed all of the men. In 1997, Anita Diamant's The Red Tent was a best seller about this Biblical incident. In the New Testament, Jesus showed his belief in the rights of women when he stopped the stoning of a woman supposedly caught in the act of adultery .

The stories of Banaz and Doa are issues of human rights and ignorance. Cases like this are common in rural areas or where people are too unenlighten to see that some cultural practices and traditions should be left to die in the past.

In Iraq where Doa was killed for her quest for love and Romance, last year these words once came from the former and late president of Iraq, Saddam Hussein 30 years ago:

The most important thing about marriage is that the man must not let the woman feel downtrodden simply because she is a woman and he is a man.
----Interview with the Al-Mar'a magazine in 1978.

When God and The Prophets Were Black

The Green Pastures was a movie produced in Hollywood in 1936, the year my maternal grandparenst were married. It was adapted from the Pultizer Prize winning play of the same name. Like Disney's 1997 TV version of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella which I wrote about in my December 30th post, the casting for The Green Pastures was like nothing the world had seen before or since at the cinema. The entire cast is African-American. God, the angels, the prophets, Adam and Eve, the King of Babylon, etc. are all blacks who speak in "old" black southern dialect. All of the stories in the film come from The Bible and are played out in the mind of a little black girl.

The characters of The Green Pastures may be offensive to some who despise old Hollywood films which too often portrayed blacks as ignorant, unlettered servants or slaves, or excessively comical, but the characters of The Green Pastures have a kind of dignity which is too lacking in what is considered by some to be "black culture" in America today. Current popular culture which is held too much in adulation by young African-Americans is a negative pool of gangsta's (gangsters), pimps, and ho's (whores). This, with a number of other issues, has damaged the black community in America. Even abroad some people believe current black stereotypes and cannot understand African-Americans who do not act "black." I would feel so ashamed sometimes when I was in Turkey and see some rap videos. Being someone who was 18 or 19 when the first rap songs went mainstream, I continue to view with distaste what rap has become since the first rappers I heard were The Sugar Hill Gang and

Kurtis Blow. They did not spew vulgarities, praise the gangster and thug life, and denigerate women. Not being a total prude, however, I do view some of the 1990s rappers like Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., and Bone, Thugs, and Harmony as rap artists inspite of everything.

When I saw The Green Pastures on Turner Classic Movies (TCM) about 3 years ago, I did not find it offensive. Here were black people who spoke like my rural grandparents and others I would be around during my summer vacations in Greene County, Georgia, the county seat of my mother's family. In fact, I understand less the dialect that young African-Americans speak today than I do these people's in the film.

The Green Pastures is rated with 5 stars on Amazon where it can be purchased in DVD here. Here is also an excerpt from the film.

Controversial still, stereotypical, naive, sentimental, whatever your opinion, The Green Pastures is a classic artifact of African-American cinema, and I recommend it as a Romantic, moving, heartwarming, creative take on The Bible, and a work of art.