Tuesday, May 01, 2012

News at Eleven: Zarmina took solace in writing love poems

and reading to the women of Mirman Baheer by phone. Then came the spring day in 2010 when Zarmina got caught reading these poems and her brothers beat her. A couple of weeks later, according to her aunt, when the girl was cleaning the house, she locked a door behind her and set herself alight, a common means of suicide among women in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The custom can be linked to the outlawed Indian practice suttee, when a wife climbs on a funeral pyre. The practice and even the Hindi word--suttee--exist in Pashto, too. In this sense, it is possible that Zarmina saw her choice to die for love as romantic and honorable.

from The New York Times: Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry

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