In Continuum.

How You See The World

Are you missing something, looking for something?
Tired of everything, searching and struggling?
Are you worried about it, do you want to talk about it?
Oh, you're gonna get it right some time

It was only too real for comfort, when the article flashed itself out before my eyes on the table. As I was running my attention through the Sunday Times for an article to cut out for Monday's quiz, there it was before me on the second last page of everything, the news of an Iraqi girl being killed just because she fell in love with a man from a different religion. To make things worse, she was killed by her relatives in the name of the family's honor, and the horrific description involved in the article itself, disturbed me the way the paragraph of the book The Kite Runner did, when I first read it almost a year ago.

In one of the scenes, the protagonist revisits his country - Afghanistan - where he fled from thirty odd years ago, to look for his childhood friend Hassan. In the course of doing so, he was somehow drawn to a horrific scene of public killing at a national stadium where a soccer match was held. In the half-time of the game, a man and a woman was paraded around the field in the back of a van, and as they did so the crowd cheered and jeered at the couple. When the van stopped, they were asked to get out of the back, and the man was asked to crawl into a hole dug previously before the game. The woman was then asked to stone the man to death, and because of the pressure from the overwhelming crowd, she did as told. She was - of course - stoned to death by members of the audience later on, and that was the kind of 'entertainment' other than the actual soccer game, the people of Afghanistan enjoyed under Taliban rule.

There's so much to be scared of, and not much to make sense of
Are you running in a circle, you can't be too careful
And she can't relate it, 'cause it's complicated
Oh, you're gonna get it right sometime

You're gonna get it right sometime

Of course, you can say that it was a storybook, that the accuracy of such things can be questionable. But I have read in other sources about such killings during soccer games in certain Middle-Eastern countries. Some of them even involved the dead body to be hung on top of the goal post during the game itself. I remember my high school teacher Mr. Ragu telling us about it, and at that time none of us truly believed that this kind of atrocity could happen in our supposedly civilized, advanced world. Perhaps a thousand years ago, but definitely not in our world, the one which we are taking granted for so easily. But we can't be blame for our ignorance, for it is not a commonplace for news channels to showcase such news or images on their programs in the evenings. Especially in Singapore, the news here have the tendency to show only smiling citizens, politicians kissing babies, and optimistic graphs of rising economical growth. But on the other side of the world, such things are happening, and maybe even every day of our comfortable lives.

The 17 year old Iraqi girl - Dua Khalil Aswad - was humiliated in front of a group of boys which included her own family members, and then stoned to death by the crowd. It was all too real for me to behold when I first read the article, and it was almost preposterous too justify killing in the name of honor. The girl's family belongs to the Yazidis, part of the ethnic Kurds who practise an ancient Middle-Eastern religion that forbids marriage outside the faith. The man that she fell in love with was a Muslim, and when the family members found out about her, she was forced to go into hiding with the town's cleric.

It's how you see the world
How many times can you see
You can't believe what you learn
It's how you see the world
Don't you worry yourself
You're not gonna get hurt

However, she was lured out of her hiding under the illusion that the family members have forgiven her. At least that was the case for her immediate family, but not her cousins who went to fetch her from the streets. She left her hiding place, convinced that she was going to be accepted and forgiven, only to meet a whole bunch of people brought along by her cousins. The torture lasted for half an hour, and it involved the group stripping the clothes off her lower body, and then kicking and punching her like they would to a stray dog. Then rocks were thrown at her bleeding body while she was still alive, until a large rock was passed around the hands of the boys at the scene, to have it later land on the poor girl's skull, crushing her head and soul. As if that wasn't enough, everything was caught on mobile phones, and later found their way to the internet. And all of those, in the name of honor.

I remember that day well, when the vehicle stopped all of a sudden and the heat from the sun was almost excruciating. The boys peeped our heads out from inside the vehicle through the hatch, and the view from the top of the vehicle was breath taking. I remember the desert spreading out from every direction, the way it would only in documentaries and television shows. But there it was before our eyes, with the horizon far from reach and between us and that, endless miles of sun-baked sand and rocks. To me, it seemed like the land of infinite possibilities, a place where dreams really do come true. At least that was what I thought before my friends started talking about the existence of Honorary Killing in India. Basically, a raped daughter can be killed because she tainted the family's name, and in some provinces of India, that kind of act can be tolerated or ignored altogether.

Is there something missing, there's nobody listening.
Are you scared of what you don't know, don't want to end up on your own
You need conversation, and information
Oh, you're gonna get it right sometimes

You just wanna get it right sometimes

It is not difficult to assume that the whole world works by the laws the government of your country has in place. After all, different cultures of our world are exposed to different traditions, different beliefs, and a lot of such beliefs clash with our own in more way than one. There are certain acts which cannot be explained by the society that we live in, or particular traditions that might seem questionable to people from the outside world. For example, the Hamar tribe in Africa says that in order for a boy to become a grown man, he has to go through the traditional act of cattle jumping. Basically, during the ritual, a bunch of cows would be lined up in the middle of a circle, and the whole village would be there to witness the transformation of the boy. The boy will then run from one end of the cattle to the other over their backs, and done several times before the ritual would be considered a success.

There isn't anything wrong about cattle jumping per se, but what happens before the ritual to the wives of these men can be seen as brutality to our eyes. I saw a documentary on it once, and the women would be stripped down, and then whipped on their backs with cans until their skin and flesh split open. The twisted irony was, those women were happy to get whipped, and to them the pain of the horrific wounds was nothing compared to the honor involved in jumping cattle.

So you see, at the end of the day, it all depends on how we see the world. We cannot force ideas or ideologies into the minds of people because we are very individualistic from one another. Humans have never been a species of animals that would conform to one single belief, and one single practice. There are bound to be distortions, or the differing in ideas all around the world, and some of them might not be as acceptable as we may think. To the family members who killed the poor girl, they thought the honor of the family and the family's name was more important than the life of the girl. But to us, we start to question if the name of a family is really that important, and also the hold religion has on people and how they can distort the true teachings of religion to their own perverse ways.

And to think that she died because she fell in love with a man of a different belief, saddened me even more. It wasn't even the case of adultery or theft, but a simple act of falling in love. That was the hardest part for me to stomach really, the way people can be so blinded by their own beliefs and rituals. But what can we say about it, really? Who are we to say that they are wrong to do this or that, and not anything else? This is how they see the world, this is how they have decided to rule it under their laws. I don't think outsiders like ourselves, have the right to be judgmental of their actions. The most we can do, is to read about them on the second last page of the weekend papers, and ask questions softly under our breaths at the atrocities of men against men, humans against humans.

I am sure that in the future, we are going to hear of such things more and more often. More questions will be raised with every person humiliated and killed in a foreign and distant country. With every body buried in a hole next to a dog, there are going to be questions raised in our world, as to if we should intervene and help to stop such acts. But how much can we do? Or rather, what can we do at all? There are endless questions to such acts of violence, and it takes more than the pressure of the world to stop them. The least we can ask for, is to hope that in the future, our society is not going to be numbed by such news, that people are not going to read about this in the papers and then throw the thought aside just because it has already happened a thousand times to a thousand different people.

It's how you see the world
How many times have you heard?
You can't believe a word
It's how you see the world
Don't you worry yourself
'Cause nobody can learn

That's how you see the world
That's how you see the world