It’s our Saturday – after an exhausting week of work, we deserve a break. A break from the world, a break from the bullshit that surrounds the world we find ourselves in. And to be completely honest it was going all serenely and as planned – the doing nothing that is – till we opened Facebook to find out that Qandeel Baloch has been killed.
And now we’re enraged.
We can’t write enough about how sad, shocked and enraged we are. Our bodies shiver from a mix of these emotions and we can’t physically vocalise them. Why? Because the eternal patriarchy that upholds the Pakistani society is rejoicing after Qandeel’s murder.
And it has so many names and forms: the celebration is happening on cell phones held, through tweets and Facebook posts, in the kitchen where rotis are being made, in darkened rooms littered with tissues and dirty rags, in weekend gatherings of testosterone – it’s everywhere.
And we as an organisation are repulsed. Qandeel Baloch, a girl in her late twenties, a survivor of an abusive marriage, a mother of a child – and a woman who was taking charge of sexuality has been murdered. It doesn’t matter who killed her, because let’s be honest – we as a nation killed her.
Yes! Me and you, us – we killed her and many others who die every single day in Pakistan – the approximately one thousand girls who die every year in the name of honour. And now while every news media outlet tries to capitalise on her death, while members of this society raise her son to hate her mother’s memory – we as citizens won’t be held accountable. We killed her.
Never forget. All of us who are happy in her death, who called her names in public but jerked off to her in our rooms – we killed her. We killed her slowly but surely. And we aren’t sorry, we won’t be sorry, we will celebrate. This me and you – we have so many forms. We are mullahs who sleazed up to girls and boys whilst stroking our beards. We are the boys and men who police women 24/7, we are the girls and women who verbally abused her. We are the same bunch who say things like “if that girl was killed in the name of honour, she probably deserved it”.
Qandeel Baloch – was, is and now never will be the ‘Pakistani Kim Kardashian’. She did not come from the bourgeois elite, she was not educated in the best schools, she did not have the best paid PR team in the world marketing her, and she most definitely did not have the one of the best security detail surrounding her.
Qandeel was a woman who chose to share her life on social media despite of us, she chose to be in-charge of sexuality and she refused to be ashamed for her being. She was defiant and courageous, she claimed online spaces and offline spaces – she made sure that her presence was felt and that she was heard. And we Pakistani loved her for it! This was why we followed her, debated her, invited her on talk shows, and took selfies with her. We loved to hate her and now we’ve done the best we could. We couldn’t all collectively **** her, so we helped kill her.
It’s all good though, our conscience won’t be too burdened by this killing. We’ll resort to the Quran, the Mullahs, our ‘ghairat’ to justify her killing and many others to come. We are sure about this, because this is exactly what we’ve done to justify all the other honor killings that take place in this country every year. And we as a nation hope to one day reach a place where we will have killed every defiant woman and minority before they have even managed to take their first breathe.
The writer works at Digital Rights Foundation
