Missing feminist: “They speak”, an act of female imagination

On Wednesday, I woke up to a message from Zahra on Instagram. Zahra is Iranian, lives in Tehran with her husband and six-year-old son. and we first spoke in August 2021, when the Taliban took over Kabul. Zahra no se llama Zahra, pero ya entonces me pidió que resguardara su identidad por temor a las represalias: estaba segura de que el destino de las afganas era el mismo que el suyo y el de sus compatriotas y de que sólo era cuestión de tiempo para What the threat of anti-women terrorism will also grow on Iran.

Exactly a year later, last September, we were talking again on a daily basis: the murder of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was tortured by morality police into a coma with the supposed aim of “re-educating” her not to wear the veil as required by Islamic law, has spread nationwide protests and spilled over to the social media, where thousands of women burned their hijabs and cut their hair in solidarity. But the patrol continued to kill young people in the marches and Zahra was terrified.

If you had told me before women were “agents of change in the Middle East”and for this reason also “the first to pay the consequences”, she now worried that fundamentalism had a direct target: “I grew up in this culture and I am used to it – did I – she writes in one of our conversations on Telegram -, but the girls of the new generations do not accept it. And everything that gave me hope in them now fills me with panic: the Taliban regard women and girls as sex slaves, twelve-year-old girls are taken from their families and raped. They force them to give birth to the children of these rapes and kill them. This is what they are capable of, this terror.

When this week independent media such as the BBC reported that since last November Fundamentalists have fired poison gas at schools that admit women across the country – causing symptoms of poisoning in around 650 girls – in an obvious reaction to the protests and a deliberate attempt to force them to close, Zahra’s panic turned into a concrete and urgent decision: “Can you help me to leave the country with my son? The Islamic Republic is going to kill us all and I have the responsibility to save the life of the child I gave birth to.”

I still don’t know what to do with Zahra’s message or how to help her, I went private They speak (2022), one of Sunday’s 13th Oscar nominees. In just over a hundred minutes, the film by Sarah Polly It took me into a stark and different context – that of a group of women from a religious community deciding in a barn how to move on after years of gender-based violence – but, in this abstraction, the circumstances were the same.

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The approach seems simple, but, in its subtlety, it is far more complex than so many stories full of accuracy and good intentions that fail to overcome the dilemma of impunity and the ever-delayed means of delivering justice. . Based on the homonymous novel by Miriam Toews (2018) on calls “phantom rapes” in a Mennonite colony in Bolivia which happened over a period of at least five years, between 2004 and 2009, in Ellas hablan, the emphasis is on what to do after the violence: nothing, that is to say, to stay and forgive?, stay and fight?, leave?

The answers to these three questions are not (and cannot be) linear and develop within the “female act of imagination” that the film presents. The same wild imagination to which the rapists attributed the assaults for which they put their wives, mothers, sisters, nieces and daughters to sleep with tranquilizers used for cattle. Because of the religious nature of their communities – says Toews, who also grew up in a Mennonite colony – these women didn’t even talk about their bodies, that’s why they couldn’t name what they had done to them and they were afraid to say it. It took them years to make up their minds to talk to each other and to understand that what was happening to them was as real as it was common to everyone. It is a known path even for women who are born in less adverse circumstances.

The turning point for them came in 2009, when two men who lived and slept next to her in the neighborhood were discovered trying to break into a woman’s house to rape her. In their confessions, these men implicated many other men around them and admitted to sexually assaulting at least 300 other women and girls between the ages of 3 and 65 in their own homes.

The plot of Polley’s film fails to wallow in facts – to which it alludes only by showing how the protagonists wake up with bruises between their legs or in a pool of blood – to inform the debate after the announcement. of the return of the rapists. in town and the women must forgive them or leave knowing that they will be denied entry into the kingdom of God. What Toews’ book offers is the exercise of giving it a “imaginary response to a real event”.

And again, it makes sense that imagination is so important. As Ona says, the character played by Rooney Mara, a woman who became pregnant as a result of these rapes: “Women have no voice. We have nowhere to return. Even animals are safer than us in their homes. All we have are our dreams. So of course we are dreamers.”

Alongside Mara, a cast that complements – and maintains without more artifice than – the performances of Claire Foy, Jessie Buckley there Frances McDormand, among other things, is then devoted to examining the options. Everyone has irreproachable, non-transferable reasons to support their views now that someone is going to consider them (themselves, like those agents of change Zahra was talking about): the fury of the woman whose daughter was raped in his own bed and thinks that if they were treated like animals, maybe they should react like animals too; to the bitter resignation of one who has become accustomed to her husband’s blows and fears that it will be the same to stay or leave at this stage.

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A question then arises with the clarity that feminisms may not have reached in the urgent adventure of the last great wave, the post #MeToo or #NiUnaMenos: “How do we want our neighborhood to be, how do we want we be in case we win? “. It’s the key to everything, said one of the women in the barn: “We have to think more about what we are fighting for than what we want to destroy.”

There will be mutual reproaches until they understand that doing their part to bring up men who have neglected and abused them does not mean becoming violent, much less towards each other. They will admit that not all men are monsters, but there is a way of seeing the world that includes them, and it is the one that deprives them of living free and safe in their own town, in their own homes.

In the end, like Zahra, they will conclude that they must leave because staying is impossible. And they will understand that it is wrong that they had options. No one chooses to lose their freedom and security at the hands of fanatics, no one chooses to be raped or forced to cover up so as not to “provoke” men with the “nudity” of their hair. In the end, like Zahra, they will decide to take their sons to educate them differently, in a faith that does not kill them and does not turn them into abusers. Finding some form of justice is only part of what awaits them: first to survive, to heal, and to learn to be free. They have to go first.

It’s an act of female imagination, the act of giving voice to those who have never had it. Zahra is 38 years old and, like Oma in the film, she has spent her entire life under the rule of misogynistic fundamentalism. Like the women of Ellas Hablan, Zahra only has her dreams. The most logical thing in the world is to dream of freedom, yours and your son’s. With a life without violence. The most logical thing would be that it is not an imaginary exercise.

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