Defiant Women

Women in Kabul, Afghanistan

I would like to begin by telling you the story of an Afghan teenage girl called Rahila Muska, which I read in Mark Oakley’s book A Splash of Poetry. 

Her story starts with a poem -a form of Afghan poetry called ‘Landay’.  Landay is an ancient, anonymous and oral form of folk poetry, written in couplets, mainly by and for illiterate Pashtun women on the Afghanistan and Pakistan border. 

This is the Landay that starts our story:

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

Rahila, the heroine of our story, lived in Helmand, a Taliban stronghold. Her father had taken her out of school for fear of the Taliban, as they saw the education of women as dishonourable; and it left her vulnerable to attack- kidnap or rape. Rahila found some consolation in poetry; Rahila loved Landay and she was a frequent caller to a radio programme, a chatline run by a women’s literary group, to which women would call and share their experiences and most of all Landay poetry.

One day in Spring 2010 Rahila called the programme from a hospital bed to say that she’d set herself on fire. Her brothers had beaten her after discovering that she wrote poetry. To many Afghans poetry is forbidden for women because it implies a freedom of will and her brothers were brutal in punishing her.

Rahila, with all her resilience and strength, set herself on fire. Soon after her phone call on the radio she died.

I call. You’re stone.
One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

There seem to be connections between this story and the healing story in our Gospel today (Mark 7:24-30). The Greek Syrophoenician woman comes to beg healing from Jesus. Tyre, where the woman was from, was a predominantly non-Jewish region and here she is a gentile, a woman, risking everything to ask for healing for her daughter from a Jewish holy man. Jesus’ response to her implies the superiority of Israel’s claim upon God’s blessing, over that of the Gentiles. Worse, Jesus calls her and her race ‘dogs’ a typical form of abuse used against non-Jews at the time. It’s quite shocking to hear these words from Jesus’ mouth.

What did Jesus see when he saw this woman? No doubt her look, her clothes, marked her out as being a Gentile and non-Jewish. At that time, he saw his role as going to the lost sheep of the house of Israel- she disrupted and challenged his understanding.

There are many current terms of abuse today for people of different race, ethnicity, culture, nationality, religion, gender, the list can go on.  We know that division along all sorts of lines operate with force and violent expression in our culture. And we know that they probably always have. Humans break off into tribes and mark themselves out by specific forms of clothing and behavior.

What happens to Jesus when he is confronted by someone who dares to believe that God is different?

‘Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s food.’

Jesus changes. He is changed by her words, by her refusal to be pushed aside because she’s not the right religion, or the right race. He sees her differently and responds to her faith- in the goodness and impartiality of God:

‘For saying that, you may go, the demon has left your daughter’.

The recent debate about women wearing the burqa should be put in dialogue with the story of Rahila and the story of the nameless Syrophoenician woman.

What are they telling us? What can we learn from them?

It seems to me that they demand we take them seriously: ‘I call. You’re stone’ is the articulation of people who are ignored, whose existence is so denigrated and denied, that disappearance and invisibility become inevitable.

One day you’ll look and find I’m gone.

It could be that the absence is a positive one; a woman with courage claims her freedom and strikes out for it. Or, it could be tragic, as neglect, possession and control end up by destroying. But absence is their only form of protest.

The boundaries and barriers which keep us all locked inside our own prejudices and hatreds are there to be broken down. The women in both our stories are defiant and brave: Rahila knew of control and subjection but she also knew about the freedom of self-expression. In taking her own life she expressed her rejection of male violence and control. The Syrophoenician woman trusted that God could heal, and she claimed that healing for her daughter.

The demonic (from which the girl in the Bible story is delivered) seeks to control others, to subject and ultimately destroy them (we must forget the idea of little black creatures running around menacingly!). There are al sorts of ways in which we individually and corporately are controlled by the demonic. Rahila knew that her brothers wanted to control her and were willing to see her destroyed if she disobeyed. She set herself free from the demonic culture to which she was subjected, the only way that she could, by taking her own life.

Jesus realized that his powers of healing were not to be seen narrowly and only from within the context of his birth religion. He was challenged to be bolder with his gifts. The opening out of Christianity as a religion for all people’s, embracing and transforming all cultures, is essential to its message.  

Perhaps the connecting healing story in our Gospel ( Mark 7: 31-37) is instructive, for in it the man literally has his ears opened; might this be a metaphor for the ways in which we all refuse to hear and need to have our ears opened? We need God to open our ears so that we learn to speak ‘plainly’, i.e. the truth.

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Further reading: 'I am a beggar of the world. Landay poetry from contemporary Afghanistan'. Photos, Seamus Murphy and translation by Eliza Grinwold. 

A Splash of Poetry, Mark Oakley.