My birthday was the day my father started to grow a beard. According to the rules of the village a man must let his beard grow for one week or 40 days when a close relative dies. This time nobody died but God granted my father a daughter, instead of a son… In every phase of my life I came up against constraints that prevented me from feeling like a human being. In third grade I realized that as a girl I must conceal myself. There was graffiti on the school walls: Rza + L = Love and Mammed + A = Love. In declarations of love boys wrote their names while keeping the names of the girls they admired a secret. This was done to protect the girl’s name and not to injure the boy’s pride. Our literature teacher, Nazim, used to say to us, “Do not irritate the eye like a nettle, Be a violet and let somebody find you.”
At university I studied philosophy but thought of becoming a reporter. In my first years as a student I dreamt of writing from hot spots around the world. This is when I began writing my first articles and submitting them to a newspaper. As soon as one story was published I would have another one ready. This brought me into the world of mass media. The majority of journalists working in our newspaper were men. At first I wrote on social issues but later switched to politics. My wild dream of becoming a war zone reporter was closer and clearer than before.
At 18-19 I was already used to participating in press conferences. Once, my colleague and I went to the Parliament building to gather information for an article. From far away, we saw a young girl who I knew fearlessly conducted economic and political investigations for a daily paper. I look at her and said, “She looks so small, fragile and shy but her articles are so good and daring. I think she is a nice person.” To which my colleague replied, “If a girl writes for a newspaper, how she can be ‘nice’?”
Men of all backgrounds and regardless of their level of education talked about women in a sexist way. In discussing world famous women authors they focused on their private lives and external beauty but not their work. It did not matter what I did, my gender was always a barrier. Despite this I continued to write short articles for my newspaper. They would get published with my photo at the top. From time to time I managed to contribute to other periodicals as well.
As my career began to progress I met my first love. This was an Azerbaijani man with whom we worked together at the paper. We felt a connection while reading the same book – The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. Our topics of conversation ranged from European history to movies to philosophy. It seemed I found an island of Europe in Azerbaijan. And this is why I loved him.
This was a time when I was surrounded by intelligent people who worked in high places as editors-in-chief and politicians. According to many of them, the best woman was the one least talked about by the public. The social withdrawal of a woman was considered attractive. An active woman, who worked, wrote for newspapers, engaged in discussion with other men, was not marriageable. She was like a beautiful but oil-stained blouse. These people believed that women should think of marriage to a man as an award. A woman should be happy to be picked out like a Christmas tree from among other trees for her appearance. She should be happy because someone CHOSE her in marriage.
I remained indifferent to these comments because my beloved was not at all like them. I was supposed to live my life differently. And the one day, he said to me, “I don’t want you writing these short articles for the newspaper.” I asked him “Why?” and my open-minded man responded like this, “In Azerbaijan people use newspapers in the toilet. I don’t want someone to wipe his bottom with a photo of my lady from the paper. Moreover, I don’t want other men to talk about my woman. I also have pride and dignity, please understand this.”
I could not understand him and continued my work. Eventually we broke up and in a couple of years he married another girl, a school teacher. She lived her life without paying much attention to events taking place around her or the news in society. The children surrounding her at school did not threaten his dignity or manhood.
Dr. Narmin Kamal is a researcher, scholar, and writer from Azerbajan. You may reach her on Facebook or through commenting where this essay was originally posted, at this forum on women and society: http://women-forum.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=119%3Aboys-gathering-violets&catid=62%3Aessay-competition&Itemid=98&lang=en
