Writers also treated female heroines badly, so today the victim is blamed more than the perpetrators
2022-08-08 15:10:34
TiranaPost
How we tell stories determines the fate of societies and lives. In a 'reel', Elif Shafak explains in a few lines how literature, with great writers from Shakespeare to Tolstoy, with Anna Karerina who fell in love and ended it on the train tracks, or Gustav Flaubert with "Madame Bovary" who he drank poison because he dared to go outside the frames. Seeing the tragic end these writers gave their book heroines, you realize that how a story is told matters a lot, and to this day, the media, justice continue to humiliate women, often blaming the victims and not their abusers …
"How many times did I hear the word 'ayıp' (shame) growing up in Turkey?" We women and girls are constantly told that we should be careful in everything we do or say, the length of our skirts, how we sit or talk, in fact, our very existence is ayıp-shame," writes Elif.
And in the video he explains further: "It is "ayip" (shame) a Turkish word, but an international concept. To illustrate, I will read to you part of my novel "The Island of Missing Trees", in which there is a moment when the Turkish aunt Meriem has a conversation with her niece, where the aunt excuses herself because of the mess. of her room. She says: Sorry for the mess. Menopause is to blame. All my life I have taken care of my sister, my husband, my parents. Even where I went to the restaurant, I cleaned the table so that the waiter would not think badly of us. That it was AYIP (shame). Does this word sound familiar? It means 'shame' and it is the word that defines my life. Do not wear short skirts. Sit with your legs closed. Don't laugh out loud. Girls don't do that. Girls don't do it. Why? Because it's Ayip. I was always neat and organized, but recently something happened. I don't want to clean anymore", says Elif and continues.
"Many women, including myself, have grown up with this concept. In our society, men and women experience the concept of shame differently. Here we should mention another term 'slut-shaming', the shaming of women who break the 'rules' and boundaries.
I see a lot of this kind of slut-shaming in world literature as well. Some of Shakespeare's works, in classic works like 'Anna Karenina', 'Madame Bovary' have endless slut-shaming. When you look at the heroines of Tolstoy, Flaubert, they are married women who dare to fall in love with other men, they always have a terrible end, terrible deaths. So even by the authors themselves, what they have done is considered a shame. They drank arsenic, or lay down on the train tracks to end their lives. So what I mean is that there is a lot of slut-shaming in the way we tell each other's stories. And it is important that this way of telling destroys people's lives. In cases of rape, abuse, we see on the news covers the victim, the fingers pointing at her. So we confuse the fact of who has shamed",
Watch the full video
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