"Men and Women: The Unfounded Hierarchy" by Altar Gür

“My name is Asiye. And this is my story:

My family and I lived in Ketenli, a village of Rize, a rural area in Eastern Anatolia, Turkey. Ketenli is a village with a low literacy rate and where literacy is considered unfamiliar trait for a person. I started my life with a handicap: My father had a verbal agreement to betrothal with the richest man of the village. This means that my marriage was arranged by my family before I was born. This kind of marriage is very common in some parts of Turkey due economic reasons.

I did not want to follow the path my parents arranged for me. I did not know my husband at all, and my heart belonged to someone else. I used to sneak out at nights or meet at corners with the man I loved. At the end we decided to run away and leave my chosen husband behind. Our goal was to escape to Izmir, the most modern city of Turkey.

After huge struggles, we finally settled in Izmir. We had a stable income, and we were happy. Our happiness exceeded with the expectation of a baby! I was finally free from the rural patriarchy thousands of miles away from me, and I was delivering a child to this world.

All of our happiness ended with the death of my loved one whom I sacrificed my life and escaped from my family. To say that I was devastated physically and mentally would be an understatement to explain my feelings.

I was all by myself without any money or a shelter and a baby on my lap. The only way to survive was to reach out to my parents. I hoped that they remembered that I was their daughter whom they love and adore. I was not right. I was not their daughter anymore and they disowned me. My mother’s only reaction was: ‘I am not going to raise an untrue child. He is an abomination. He is NOT one of us.’

I had no choice but to find a job and a home for us. With my baby, I started living in a tent. For money, I applied to many jobs: dishwashing, cleaning houses, waiter positions... I got rejected from all of them due to being a widow with a child. Because the man figure of my household passed away, I was facing unemployment and ‘shame’.”

Did Asiye deserve to be disowned because she carried another men’s child? No, but she was immediately cancelled out of her community. While all of this was happening, Asiye’s parents were relieved that she got what she deserved as she opposed the honor code. That is simply patriarchic and toxic.

This is Asiye’s sad story. Asiye was a strong Turkish woman. She knew that she had to struggle for her son. She left her parents again but this time for her son’s destiny. She went back to Izmir and found a job. She fought for years. Asiye is now an independent and powerful woman, who has a house and knows how to read and write. Asiye suffered from ridiculous morals embedded in our society. She is one of the victims of a country where women still struggle for gender equality even though they are considered equal by law. Correspondingly, a lot of child marriages besides betrothal in the cradles can be seen in Turkey, without the bride’s consent. Men treat women like puppets, and when women stand up against the domination of men, they are excommunicated or driven out, like Asiye escaping to Izmir.

Women in Turkey hold an extremely fragile position in the society: oppose men-imposed rules one time and you are out. Because women are attached to men, any attempt to liberalize women will result in failure and excommunication. Asiye received death threats from the betrothed husband, and was scared for her life. Asiye’s honor and Asiye’s bounded husband’s honor from Rize “had to be cleaned, purified, and defecated”.

The biggest challenge women face in my country is facing the toxic cancel culture. To stabilize and strengthen the place of women in society, education is necessary. Education, instead of polarizing, will integrate women and challenge the bigoted honor concept. We also need a government to stand besides women with its reformed Turkish criminal and civil law. We, the Turkish people, do not want to hear women yelling, “We don’t want to die.”