A Qandeel in the wind

Cultural hostages

Qandeel Baloch is dead, and it matters that she died because it mattered how she lived.
For women especially, the chains of society are spider-webs, nearly invisible, but stronger than steel and they bind you, oh yes. And the further down the socio economic spectrum you were born, the more vigorously they wrap themselves around you and cling to you with their silken death grip, over your arms and your legs and most especially your mouth. Do not move. Do not scream. Absolutely do not talk. Save your energy, and you will last longer before you suffocate.

The result is nearly as impressive as it is profoundly evil. The effects are everywhere.

Wherever women go you look into their eyes and see how they hold themselves and how they cover their mouth if, God forbid, a fit of madness tempts them to laugh, and how they know just when to demurely lower their gaze and just how to contort their body in public places into a submissive, sexless shell, apologising for their existence with every limb.

Now, simply imagine that behind every woman is an invisible man – The Man, perhaps- with a loaded gun or sharpened hatchet. This is how many Pakistani women experience life-as hostages. The supposed “great respect” our culture showers upon women? Nothing more than the kidnapper telling the hollow-eyed victim to look into the camera and tell the world how well they’ve been treated, how they’ve been given three square meals a day and a proper bed to sleep on.

Qandeel Baloch badly lost the lottery of birth. A girl child in a small, conservative town in southern Punjab, born to a poor family with twelve other children, married off when she was 17. Hers was a small, miserable little story authored by a mean spirited hand that had written it a million times before. Stays at home. Cooks and cleans. Never speaks out of turn. Never raises her eyes, let alone her voice, to her “betters”. Gamely rolls with the punches, both metaphorical and literal. Raises a dozen or so kids of her own. Dies tired and empty.

This was to be her life, bound by chains heavy with inevitability. And then, impossibly, she walked out of her own story and the chains snapped and fell away, like the spider-webs they were.

To compare her to any social media celebrity in the United States, as some terminally uninspired people have, is to miss the context and thus the entire point.

Consider this: She lived in a country where even the most emancipated woman takes a moment to gather herself before walking down the street. Where simply being out in public is often seen as inviting trouble. Where the bodies of women are treated as precious commodities, to be guarded and plundered and forcibly made a repository of some terribly dark idea of honor and culture.

In this place, everything Baloch did, everything she was, was a political act, and act of defiance, an act of rebellion.

In this place, she released public videos pouting at the camera, promising to perform a strip tease if Pakistan beat India at cricket (a pretty safe bet, to be fair). She became an internet sensation. She starred in music videos. She engaged in satire. She laughed at her detractors and told them to keep her in their heads if not their hearts. She talked back to self-righteous religious clergy, stuffed to the gills with their own importance, and made fools of them. In a nation where thieves and charlatans sit at the highest tables and cover themselves in respectability, she was unflinchingly, painfully honest about what she wanted and who she was.

How they hated her and feared her. The endlessly aggrieved, the vicious little hypocrites sniping at someone who did brazenly in public what they did shamefully in private, the guardians of morality that no one asked for. She was an unimaginable threat to their place in society, to their view of the world. There were thousands of televangelists and public morality defenders and one Qandeel Baloch and yet they screeched in terror about how she, alone, would corrupt our children and our society and destroy our culture.

They knew that if she was the tip of the iceberg, they were done. If one Qandeel Baloch could threaten them, a hundred would end them.

If our culture, our identity is so brittle that it can be shattered by a woman’s pouting lips, the sway of her hips, a wink in her eye, then let it die. By the law of nature, nothing so fragile deserves to live. Qandeel Baloch was not fragile. She was bold and fearless and thick skinned as an alligator. She took societies’ scorn and derision and mockery and spat it back with venom and mischief.

It took a man wrapping his hands around her throat and slowly choking the life out of her to stop her, while she shattered worlds with a careless glance, a saucy remark.

Her brother was merely the festering pustule of a deep infection. The moral orthodoxy fed him poison till he burst, believing that he had to kill either her or himself to end his pain, to salve his bruised masculinity.

The Throne of Heaven is surely not so fragile that it trembles every time a girl bares some skin, but the Pakistani patriarchy obviously is.

Rest in peace, Qandeel Baloch. You made us laugh, and you made us applaud, and you made us whistle, and you made some of us angry-you made us feel something, the only job of the artist.

I think history will remember you -as a provocateur, a living exhibit, a larger than life role – just as you would want to be remembered.

As for the animal that killed you, history will not deign to learn his name. I certainly haven’t.

May you live on as a breath of fresh air, deep and free, on our lips and in the wind, blowing the spider webs away.