WORKING CLASS HEROINE
When Pakistani model and social media star Qandeel Baloch was murdered by her younger brother nearly two years ago, the so-called ‘honour killing’ transformed her from a guilty pleasure for fans of her gauche but endearing ‘sexy’ YouTube videos into a symbol of resistance against her nation’s grizzled, violent patriarchy. As the title of Karachi-based journalist Sanam Maher’s The Sensational Life &
Death of Qandeel Baloch suggests, it’s a tabloid tale. Nevertheless it throws up profound questions about Pakistani society (and that of northern India).
“I tried to see and listen to what Qandeel told us about herself,” Maher writes in an Author’s Note. “She created a story about herself, part truth and part lies and exaggerations. The story allowed her to be whoever we wanted her to be. It allowed her to be whoever she wanted to be.” Qandeel, not her real name, was a girl from a village about two hours’ drive from Multan. It’s the sort of place where you see women on the streets, but never their faces; where even the advertisements for washing detergents feature only men. When foreign journalists descended on the village after news broke of Qandeel’s murder, the local men would ask why the media were so interested when every other day a local girl was killed and her corpse thrown into the river.
It’s a fair question. The media’s own little-examined misogyny and sexism dictates that the murders of women are reported with an unseemly enthusiasm for lingering on bodies. Images of a pouting, scantily dressed Qandeel dominated the coverage of her killing and, indeed, were the only reason Qandeel’s murder received such exhaustive coverage in the first place, since such honour killings are commonplace.
Qandeel’s murder acted as a catalyst for the Pakistani government to close a loophole in the law that allowed an honour killing perpetrator to escape legal punishment if forgiven by the victim’s family—which in many cases is also the murderer’s family. But, Maher points out, the legislation hasn’t slowed the honour killings. Qandeel has become a poster girl, a cause célèbre. But the reasons why are almost as tangled and troubling as the reasons behind her murder.