From Victim to Heroine: The Depiction of Woman in the Movie Osama - Case Study Example

From Victim to Heroine: The Depiction of Woman in the Movie “Osama” "I wish God hadnt created women," sighs the mother at the beginning of the movie, as she watches the Taliban militia crush a female demonstration. And so slowly unfurls the story of "Osama" produced in 2003 and directed by Siddiq Barmak, a 12-year-old girl disguised by her mother as a boy so that she can work to support her family. She worked in the grocery store of a friend, and for a while managed to circumvent the Taliban rule that all women should work indoors. She is made to join a local school, but her secret is discovered when she gets her first menstrual period. She is then forced to marry a man about four times her age. Her frightened eyes peeking from under the traditional burka, articulate more clearly than any words could, the suffering of this girl-child, thrust into a new life she cannot yet understand but has to accept. It is the metaphor of the eyes peeking from the burka that is most gripping. The eyes are a potent symbol of power. To be able to lock eyes with someone is associated with equality. The authority to command a person’s gaze is considered power. When one averts his or her glance, then that is deemed acknowledgement of one’s inferior status. But when the slave decides to stare into his or her master’s eyes, then that is the beginning of his or her struggle towards freedom. Says bell hooks (116): I know that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our black people’s right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.” Even in the worst cases of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. In a sense, Osama and the black people referred to in the paper live a world apart. Osama’s character is from Afghanistan during the time of the ultra-conservative Islamic fundamentalist group Taliban. The paper discusses black women as spectators and how they have managed to carve their niche and make their voices heard. And yet, there is an indisputable intersection in these stories. As Murphy (1998) said, “factual and fictional media portrayals have a propensity to activate culturally shared racial and gender stereotypes and affect judgment involving those who belong to stereotyped groups.” Different as the contexts may be, the themes of defiance and struggle resonate in both narratives. Osama represents a whole generation of women who, during the Taliban rule, suddenly found themselves reduced to non-human beings with neither rights nor identities nor voice. Two scenes in the movie are particularly striking. The image of Osama up a tree surrounded by boys her age alternately taunting and threatening her demonstrates the helplessness of women in Afghan society -- bereft as they are of basic human rights, let alone any channels of redress. The wedding night scene with her husband represents the obscenity with which the Taliban has managed to violate the Afghan women in mind, heart and body. During the first part of the movie, when the girl had to dress up as a boy in order to support her mother and grandmother, one is shocked at what the young Osama is put through to fulfill a noble intention. Feminist discourse has long lamented how women often have to "man"-ify themselves in order to assimilate themselves into a world where the standards and yardsticks are still male-oriented. But never has this been more literal and more scary than in the case of Osama, hair shorn short and dressed like a young boy in a desperate bid to go around a patently repressive policy. It is truly appalling to think of the women of Afghanistan – talented, intelligent, beautiful, all – locked up in their dark houses, but it is more appalling to think of the premise of this policy. Women are considered impure, causing men to commit evil, and therefore must be "reined in" so as to protect social order. The oppression is more than socially-acceptable, it is state-sponsored, the product of government legislation. During the second part of the movie, Osama is married off against her will in a public ceremony to an old man. She is resigned to a life of servitude and subordination with a man she does not love, a destiny that is not of her own choosing. This is not a special case, this mirrors the tragedy that scores of Afghan women barely out of puberty had to deal with. The Taliban treated women as chattel that can be controlled by men. Husbands own their wives, and thus are permitted to beat them for "discipline", demand sex of them, reduce them to slaves. The film was set in the Taliban, yes, but it also reflects a policy environment in many parts of the Islamic world where women are subjugated in policy and in practice. For example, only in 2004, a 13-year-old girl was condemned to death via stoning for having been impregnated by her older brother. Her brother, on the other hand, got away with the relatively minor penalty of 150 lashes. Despite the fact that the circumstances behind the impregnation are yet unclear, she was sentenced to death by Iranian Ayatollahs. The most unfortunate part is that her death sentence was actually done not only with the consent of her father, a devout Muslim, but also at his behest. By virtue of Iran’s ultra-conservative laws, she will suffer the same tragic fate as Ateqeh Rajabi, a 16-year-old girl hanged in public on charges of prostitution. Rajabi was publicly hanged on the street in the city center of Neka in the northern province of Mazandaran for “acts incompatible with chastity.” Sources reported that “The lower court judge was so incensed by her protestations that he personally put the noose around her neck after his decision had been upheld by the Supreme Court”. It is all too easy to watch the movie and believe it to be a story of an isolated spot in the globe, far removed from the world as we know it. The details are gory, the images extreme. But this is less a story of a young girl dressing up as a boy to save her family from abject poverty, less a story of the rape and defilation of a prepubescent on her wedding night, and more a story of fundamentalism gone mad, of religion being used as a device to oppress. If there is a danger in watching the movie, it is that it might lead one to believe that this systemic oppression of women on account of religious ideology is an "exotic" phenomenon taking place in far off places in the Middle East or in Africa; and because of that, it may preempt a deeper analysis of how organized religion spouting innocuous terms like "family values" and "tradition" could – stripped of trappings – be so anti-woman. It is evident that Islamic law itself is responsible for the conditioning of Muslim women and for making them believe that they occupy an inferior status. To quote from the Quran: "And tell the believing women to lower their gaze and be modest, and to display of their adornment only that which is apparent, and to draw their veils over their bosoms, and not to reveal their adornment save to their own husbands or fathers or husbands fathers, or their sons or their husbands sons, or their brothers or their brothers sons or sisters sons, or their women, or their lawful slaves, or male attendants who lack vigor, or children who know naught of womens nakedness. And let them not stamp their feet so as to reveal what they hide of their adornment. And turn unto Allah together, O believers, in order that ye may succeed." [Noor; 24:31] The veil stands as a perfect and articulate symbol of the difference in Islamic and Western thinking where the issue of gender is concerned. For the Western feminist, the veil is perceived as oppressive and stifling, yet another reminder of the inferior status of women in Islamic society. The literal restrictions the burka gives on the female form could well be seen as a metaphor for the shackles that Islam puts its women in. For the devout Islamic woman, on the other hand, the veil or the “hijab” is worn proudly, and in some cases, even defiantly. It is a symbol of a distinct Islamic identity, a liberation of sorts from Western form of neo-colonialism and imperialism that to them is more stifling than any stricture from Islam. However, If one is to see religion as the path towards salvation or eternal life and the teaching of goodness and virtue, it is difficult to understand how this could possibly have anything to do with the oppression of women and the rejection of the feminist initiative. History, however, is replete with examples of wanton and wholesale violations of womens rights on account of religious ideology, from the burning of women at the stake for allegedly being witches to the curtailment of womens civil liberties under Islamic law to Hindu bride-burning to female circumcision. Why the consistent pattern of subjugation of women in the great religions of the world that do not intersect and in some cases are antagonistic with each other? This is only the tip of the iceberg and a complete answer requires awhole dissertation, but institutional religion is about social order and its maintenance – the regulation of behavior, the setting up of a rigid moral code with which to measure deviation from the established norm --  and a traditionally-structured social order will in great likelihood be consistent with the patriarchal model that defines man as the standard against which everything is measured. This kind of set-up quells emergent and alternative voices because these voices threaten the premises on which this set-up is built. An important theme in the movie Osama is how sex is used to demonstrate power. Indeed, this is a familiar theme in many movies: a male establishing his domination of a woman through the conquering of her physical body. The body contains political meaning. Says Holmlund (38): An analysis of the way popular film reflects and shapes the categories of body, sex, sexuality and race remains an urgent project for film theory. Despite the incorporation of critiques made by the women’s black and gay movements of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s – indeed in some ways because of these critiques – we continue to see and speak about the body as the last bastion of nature. Moreover, according to Conrad and Milburn (131): Popular culture communicates a set of myths about sexuality that are so ubiquitous we hardly even notice them. These myths become so ingrained in people’s thinking – in the form of unexamined assumptions about the function of sex, how we should behave sexually, what is “normal” or “abnormal” – that we often respond automatically within the framework of these assumptions. At the end of the movie, Osama still manages to be triumphant. She represents the triumphant woman: unbowed in the face of adversity, creative in finding ways to end her misery. The movie is a telling indictment of the Taliban regime and the excesses of organized religion, but at the same time, it is a celebration of the spunk and spirit of women everywhere. The contradiction of the image of fiery eyes peeking out of a burqa is brilliant: the burqa for Afghan women constricts and restricts. It is a symbol of their inferior status. And yet, peeking out of this burqa is the most amazing, shining set of eyes possible – replete with possibilities, hopeful of what the future might bring. In her article, hooks ended by saying “Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future.” The women of Afghanistan would certainly agree. And as Osama has shown, the capacity to invent the future is within them. Works Cited Conrad, S. & Milburn, M. Sexual Intelligence. New York: Crown Publishers. 2001. Holmlund, C. “Visible Difference and Flex Appeal: The Body, Sex, Sexuality, and Race in the "Pumping Iron" Films.” Cinema Journal, Vol. 28, No. 4 (Summer, 1989), pp. 38-51. bell hooks. ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators, in Thornham, S. (1999) Feminist Film Theory: a reader, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Murphy, S. “The Impact of Factual versus Fictional Media Portrayals on Cultural Stereotypes.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 560, The Future of Fact (Nov., 1998), pp. 165-178 Read More