Siba Shakib, Gender and Women Issues in her Works Essay Example

offered her own political observation and commentary during the interviews. She has well noticed the role of women in Islamic society, where most of women have become a mere subordinate thing in the eyes of patriarchy. She witnesses that woman identity has remained under the mercy of patriarchy.

Although some Muslim countries have granted some of women’s rights including right to equality, right to divorce, right to property and inheritance etc. ut most of the Muslim nations are following the same old, extremist Islam. In most of the Islamic countries, Sharia law is strictly enforced, and women are denied education and have to wear veil and serve men. Shakib’s international bestseller, Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Weep, tells the story of a suffering girl through which she draws the attention of the world to the plight of Afghan women. This book represents the story of many Afghan women who suffered under the Taliban regime.

The book is set against the Russian invasion and the emergence of the American funded resistance during which woman struggle to face day-to-day living in the war-torn capital of Kabul. It tells of a woman’s suffering due to her husband’s opium addiction, tragic consequences of rape on her, enforced prostitution of her to feed a growing family, and her attempt to commit suicide. At the same time, Sakib highlights women’s great courage and determination, human kindness, female friendship, resistance to oppression and a constant search for a better life where her children have a chance for better future without poverty and fear.

In her second book Samira and Samir, she tells the extraordinary story of a young

Afghan girl following her heart in a man’s world in a tribal community of mountainous region of Afghanistan, just after the Russian invasion against Afghanistan. In this novel, she draws attention to the distressing situation of Afghan women. It is a story of a woman who finds her own path of life. This tale of love and courage, and of a remarkable woman who finds her path in life, gives a remarkable insight into the extraordinary lives in Afghanistan behind the headlines.

The entire novel could be told as picturing the identity crisis of a woman who had to live behind a mask forgetting herself and her identity as a woman. Shakib portrays the moments of self realization and stages of transformation into womanhood in realistic terms in the novel. Moreover, she presents how women are living under the circumstances of male dominated Muslim war-torn country, Afghanistan. To sum up, Siba Shakib’s literary world, in her own terms, is: A land where only god comes to weep, the anarchy reigned state is truly a least liked place for a civilized person to step into.

It is not an ice cold water drops that rains in this land, but skull-braking bullets and fire spitting grenades. No sparrow sings a morning melody here, but roaring patterned tanks and high frequency bomber jets wake up the mornings. And at every foot step everyone expects a bullet shot straight into the heart or the sound of a land-mine unlocked beneath the feet. (2) For Siba Shakib Afghanistan is a land where god comes only to suffer and it is a dark and cold inside where skull-barking bullets

rules.

People’s lives are uncertain, they are living in a land-mine beneath their feet. In her view, Afghanistan is a land of infertility and a place where no civilized person inhabits. Working as a human rights activist, Siba Shakib gained valuable experiences by watching women suffering in different circumstances in war-torn Muslim countries may have enabled her to pick up the issues of female identity in her works. And as she worked as a filmmaker highlighting women concerns, we can also see the pictorial depiction of women characters against the backdrop of male dominated society.

That may be the reason behind Shakib for choosing female character in her works and giving her the role of freedom, despite the fact that she goes on suffering and torture. For raising the concerns of women, she received a German Human Rights film prize for film A Flower for the Women of Kabul on the 50th anniversary (1998) of the UN Human Rights declaration. Her films and books both reflects social and economical situation of needy people around the world, especially focusing on the women.

As an advisor of International Security Assistance Force (UN mandated peace troops in Afghanistan) in Afghanistan, Siba Shakib is well-known for her strongest plea “Neither bombs, nor war is a solution to anything” (5). On surface study, Siba Shakib’s works are just stories from the Muslim world. But if we analyze her novels, films and documentaries, we can clearly understand her focus on the differential treatment of women and men in a Muslim patriarchal society.

Her works always highlight, though in a subtle way, the way a society creates different

roles and responsibilities for women and men, where men play important, decisive roles and women languish in a disadvantaged position performing subordinate roles. Female characters dominate Siba Shakib’s works as central characters, highlighting situation of women in general. In her works, these central female characters can be seen performing the roles and responsibilities imposed upon them by society. They are wives fulfilling the desire of their violent husbands.

They are mothers who can do nothing except observing her daughters being treated differently than her son. They are daughters who sell their bodies to feed their families and pay debts. They are prostitutes who satisfy the sexual desires of men and are awarded with violent wraths. As a response to patriarchal domination and oppression of women, feminists have constantly raised the issue of female identity, female self and freedom after Mary Wollstonecraft stressed, for the first time, on the need for social and education equality for women in the eighteenth century.

Women freedom soon became the most talked about feminist issue among the feminist critics in the later years. Following the path of Wollstonecraft, feminists started showing major concern on gender differences and launched campaigns for women rights and interests. Especially, they have voiced women’s objection to be treated as a convenient object of man. As a response to patriarchal subordination and oppression of women, many feminists have proposed women freedom and liberation as the only solution to address the plight of women who suffer on a daily basis from men and their patriarchy.

Women freedom appeared as a central theme in literary work for the first time in 1870s in Henrik Ibsen’s

A Doll’s House. In this play, Ibsen chooses a conventional woman named Nora who revolts against patriarchal domination when it becomes too much to tolerate. A modest woman, Norah turns revolutionary when her husband fails to respect her as an equal human being. Ibsen wirtes; Helmer says, “Before all else, you’re a wife and mother” (472). Nora says, “I don’t believe in that any more.

I believe that, before all else I am a human being, no less than you—or anyway, I ought to try to become one. he majority thinks you are right…. but I can’t go on believing what majority says” (472). When Nora fails to locate her identity as a human being in a marital relationship with Torvald Helmar, she leaves Helmer behind and goes for searching her identity as a human being by “slamming the door” (472). Nora’s emancipatory language and door-slamming ushers in a new direction in literature. Writers after Ibsen have taken A Doll’s House as an inspiration to develop the theme of liberation and salvation from the patriarchal norms and values, and search for female self and identity.

Siba Shakib is one of the writers who write on this theme and advance the issue of women rights and women freedom. In Afghanistan, Where God Only Comes to Cry, Siba Shakib highlights women’s great courage and determination, human kindness, female friendship, resistance to oppression and a constant search for a better life where her children have a chance for better future without poverty and fear. In Samira and Samir, Siba Shakib dramatizes the identity crisis resulting from subversion of female identity in a patriarchal community and suggests

alternative, free life as the solution to the life ith identity crisis in a patriarchal society.

To make her freedom voice more effective, Shakib presents beautifully the identity crisis of a woman through different stages she passes through: living behind a mask forgetting herself and her identity as a woman, difficulty in living life with false identity, moments of self realization and stages of transformation in to womanhood again. Critics have mostly reviewed this piece of literature in the context of Muslim culture and identified the problem of living with the false gender identity.

Mariam Maude views, for example, the novel as a Muslim fathers’ desire to see a son in his daughter. The father needs a son to prove that he can also father a son to continue his family legacy. But when he fails to do so, in order to show his potency to his community, he goes to the extent of subverting identity of his girl child to raise her as a boy child. She writes: This beautiful girl (Samira) was brought up as a boy (Samir) by a powerful and influential father holding an authority in a culture that shames having a daughter as the first child.

Being his only seed, he continues to treat and raise Samira as Samir! He taught her how to fight, ride horses, Shoot, hunt and many more muscular tasks. Samira showed courage, she showed might and she showed compassion. She became her mother's strength and her grandfather’s missing arm. She is never scared, she lives and acts as men do. As Samir, she teaches others lessons about bravery and confidence. (2) In

the novel Samira, the protagonist, is born a girl, but her father, being unable to father a son, wants to bring her up as a son.

Under her father’s guardianship, she learns to fight, ride and shoot, and successfully leads a life of a man. But despite living a successful male life outwardly, she never forgets that she is a female. She reveals her secret of being a female, and marries a man. But she fails to become a good wife, and finally chooses to remain alone. Saneesh Michael describes the novel as a story of a female protagonist who goes through identity crisis. He writes: “The entire novel could be told as picturing the identity crisis of a woman who had to live behind a mask forgetting herself and her identity as a woman.

The moments of self realization and stages of transformation into womanhood is penned so realistically in the novel. At the end of the novel Siba depicts Samir transferring into Samir in a symbolic way. ” (1) The publishers review the novel as troublesome because the raising of Samira as a boy brings clash between her own true identity of a girl desiring for man and the falsely assumed identity of a man having to continue family legacy. Yet, as she approaches adulthood, Samira becomes increasingly troubled by her false identity.

And when she falls passionately in love she is faced with a heartbreaking choice: she wants to live as Bashir's wife, but to do so she must betray her family, reveal her female identity and, in doing so, give up her freedom. . . . . (282)

Siba Shakib’s Samira and Samir is indeed a representative book raising the issues of women and gender. The novel subtly illustrates how patriarchal values prevalent in a society shape collective social consciousness that in turn influences the way people make decisions. Patriarchal values are charming not only for men but also for women owing to its powerful position in the society.

Shakib’s story depicts the fact that such charm for being a man and masculine discourse often destroys lives of women. This thesis consists of three chapters: Gender and Women Issues in Siba Shakib’s Works, Masculinity Discourse: Gender Identity Crisis in Siba Shakib’s Samira and Samir, and Conclusion. The first chapter briefly introduces how the concepts of gender, masculinity discourse, womanhood and female identity appear in Shakib’s works. It presents general background of author herself and her literary world.

Moreover, it introduces her novel Samira and Samir, from the point of view of the theme of the thesis. It prepares general basis of the thesis, which will be elaborated in the second chapter. The second chapter entitled “Gender Identity Crisis in Siba Shakib’s Samira and Samir” is the main body of this thesis where, issue of masculinity discourse, its impacts in the society to lead a particular lifestyle, its hegemonic effect upon the women and the resultant identity crisis are discussed in details. For the analysis, tools on masculinity discourse and gender are applied in wide range.

It includes the textual analysis of the novel with the supporting ideas drawn form various writers and feminist critics. For that purpose, relevant theoretical aspects of masculinity, patriarchy and feminism are broadly discussed before analyzing

the textual facts. The conclusion chapter will wrap up the thesis. In this chapter, the findings of the textual analysis are summarized and presented. The main idea of thesis will be restated by bringing the tentative evidences from the chapter two and that will prove the issue that I raised in Siba Shakib’s Samira and Samir.