Three very different women who took justice into their own hands
The furies, Greek goddesses of vengeance, punished the wicked by singing maddening songs and torturing them with guilt. They make an apt namesake for journalist Elizabeth Flock’s arresting, deeply reported new book, which considers three case studies of women whose lives became defined by acts of violence — women who, when faced with institutional failures of various kinds, “took matters into their own hands.”
In Stevenson, Ala., Brittany Smith, then 30, shot an acquaintance who she said had violently raped her earlier that night. In the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, Angoori Dahariya rallied a group of mostly low-caste women who avenged injustices by beating abusers with canes. And in northeastern Syria, Cicek Mustafa Zibo joined a militant guerrilla force defending the autonomous Kurdish region of Rojava, first from the Islamic State and later from Turkish incursions.
Flock, the author of a previous nonfiction book about three married couples in Mumbai, is a patient reporter who embeds with her subjects long enough to write about their inner worlds with authority and nuance. Brittany’s story, which Flock previously covered in an article for The New Yorker, a podcast and a Netflix documentary, hinges on the justifiability of self-defense.
Brittany shot Todd Smith (no relation) in a state whose motto is We Dare Defend Our Rights and where the law allows people to defend themselves with deadly force in certain circumstances. But Flock persuasively argues that, in Alabama, the law is geared more toward men defending their property than women defending their bodies; a judge denied Brittany’s request to use a stand-your-ground defense, and she faced a possible life sentence for the shooting. When, at a hearing, the prosecutor claimed that Todd didn’t have a weapon on him at the time he was shot, Brittany interjected defiantly: “His hands. And his penis. And his mouth. … I saw several weapons.”
Flock makes it clear that Brittany’s case was not an isolated incident. “When I examined local reporting on women who killed alleged abusers over the last several decades, many of the women were described as ‘coldblooded murderers,’ ‘evil’ and ‘heartless,’ with no mention of their history of abuse, which was often easily available in their court files,” Flock writes.
Through Angoori, Flock probes the potential — and limitations — of vigilante justice. In 1999, after Angoori’s family was unfairly evicted from their property, apparently because of their caste, the formerly timid Angoori mobilized a group of cane-wielding women to avenge similar acts of injustice.
As their numbers swelled to more than 1,000, they became known as the Green Gang, for the green saris they wore, and developed into a respected (and feared) force in the region. The Green Gang became a voice for victims and a source of empowerment for its members; Angoori gained renown for “her ability to turn girls who were as docile as cows into women headstrong as bulls,” as Flock puts it.
But as the group increased in power, and as Angoori settled into her role as arbiter of justice, the dangers of vigilantism grew. At one point, the Green Gang beat a teenage girl who had left her husband for an engineer with whom she was having an affair. “Do you care about your parents’ reputation?” Angoori chided the girl in a video that later went viral. Then, she and another Green Gang member drove the girl to a different village and forced her to marry another man. “They reasoned that if her first husband could not keep her away from the engineer,” Flock writes, “a second husband might fix the problem. The police, however, did not agree with this approach. Nor did local or national reporters, who descended from New Delhi to castigate Angoori.”
Cicek’s case allows Flock to examine how armed struggle can be both liberating and deeply traumatizing for its participants. At 17, Cicek enlisted in the Women’s Protection Unit, an all-female militia defending the autonomous majority-Kurdish government in Rojava. As a militant, Cicek found deep camaraderie with her fellow recruits, who were motivated by the feminist principles central to Rojava’s governance.
In between grueling training sessions and battles, the militants slept under the stars, sang and planted gardens. They also lived amid such regular irruptions of violence that Cicek sometimes had trouble washing all the blood from her hair. Her first kill of an enemy made her “so joyful,” she told Flock; later, she was grievously wounded by mines, drone strikes and bullets.
The cause provided Cicek with purpose, and combat gave her days a heightened reality. One day, as Cicek and a friend fled a drone, certain they were about to die, a shaggy white dog led them to safety. “War was full of miracles like this,” Flock writes. “Cicek thought everyday life was, too, but it was only in war that a person noticed.”
Flock is averse to offering up sweeping theories about gender and violence, or justice and retribution. This is a book that hews closely to the stories of its three central women, in all their fascinating, and occasionally maddening, particularity. This method of close portraiture, clear about its subjects’ flaws but nonetheless animated by deep affection, is least successful in the section on Angoori. Perhaps because the Green Gang’s founder is a figure so invested in her selfmythology, Flock never quite achieves the sense of intimacy she does with Brittany and Cicek.
At times, I found myself hungry for Flock to provide more of her own explicit perspective. When Angoori unrepentantly describes beating the teenage girl and then forcing her into a marriage, what was Flock’s reaction? But “The Furies” is deeply respectful of its subjects’ autonomy, including their selfjustifications and mistakes. Flock largely withholds judgment, and her work is richer and more troubling because of it. After all, as a Kurdish activist tells her, “nonviolence is a privilege.”
‘THE FURIES: WOMEN, VENGEANCE AND JUSTICE’
By Elizabeth Flock Harper
293 pages, $32