FIND THE DICHOTOMY
Big Picture questions are about one
aspect or another of a conflict or contrast between two theories, beliefs,
opinions, versions of events or agendas. In the following sample passage, you
will find a newspaper columnist's opinion piece about a young woman from Yemen.
Then a brief commentary follows. Reading both pieces of writing see if you can
identify the essential dichotomy.
Divorced Before Puberty
It’s hard to imagine that there have been many younger
divorcées — or braver ones — than a pint-size third grader named Nujood Ali.
Nujood is a Yemeni girl, and it’s no coincidence that
Yemen abounds both in child brides and in terrorists (and now, thanks to
Nujood, children who have been divorced). Societies that repress women tend to
be prone to violence.
For Nujood, the nightmare began at age 10 when her
family told her that she would be marrying a deliveryman in his 30s. Although
Nujood’s mother was unhappy, she did not protest. “In our country it’s the men
who give the orders, and the women who follow them,” Nujood writes in a
powerful new autobiography just published in the United States this week, “I Am
Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced.”
Her new husband forced her to drop out of school (she
was in the second grade) because a married woman shouldn’t be a student. At her
wedding, Nujood sat in the corner, her face swollen from crying.
Nujood’s father asked the husband not to touch her
until a year after she had had her first menstrual period. But as soon as they
were married, she writes, her husband forced himself on her.
He soon began to beat her as well, the memoir says,
and her new mother-in-law offered no sympathy. “Hit her even harder,” the
mother-in-law would tell her son.
Nujood had heard that judges could grant divorces, so
one day she sneaked away, jumped into a taxi and asked to go to the courthouse.
“I want to talk to the judge,” the book quotes Nujood
as forlornly telling a woman in the courthouse.
“Which judge are you looking for?”
“I just want to speak to a judge, that’s all.”
“But there are lots of judges in this courthouse.”
“Take me to a judge — it doesn’t matter which one!”
When she finally encountered a judge, Nujood declared
firmly: “I want a divorce!”
Yemeni journalists turned Nujood into a cause célèbre,
and she eventually won her divorce. The publicity inspired others, including an
8-year-old Saudi girl married to a man in his 50s, to seek annulments and divorces.
As a pioneer, Nujood came to the United States and was
honored in 2008 as one of Glamour magazine’s “Women of the Year.” Indeed,
Nujood is probably the only third grader whom Secretary of State Hillary
Clinton has described as “one of the greatest women I have ever seen.”
Nujood’s memoir spent five weeks as the No. 1
best-seller in France. It is being published in 18 other languages, including
her own native language of Arabic.
I asked Nujood, now 12, what she thought of her life
as a best-selling author. She said the foreign editions didn’t matter much to
her, but she was looking forward to seeing it in Arabic. Since her divorce, she
has returned to school and to her own family, which she is supporting with her
book royalties.
At first, Nujood’s brothers criticized her for shaming
the family. But now that Nujood is the main breadwinner, everybody sees things
a bit differently. “They’re very nice to her now,” said Khadija al-Salami, a
filmmaker who mentors Nujood and who translated for me. “They treat her like a
queen.”
Yemen is one of my favorite countries, with glorious
architecture and enormously hospitable people. Yet Yemen appears to be a time
bomb. It is a hothouse for Al Qaeda and also faces an on-and-off war in the
north and a secessionist movement in the south. It’s no coincidence that Yemen
is also ranked dead last in the World Economic Forum’s global gender gap index.
There are a couple of reasons countries that
marginalize women often end up unstable.
First, those countries usually have very high birth
rates, and that means a youth bulge in the population. One of the factors that
most correlates to social conflict is the proportion of young men ages 15 to
24.
Second, those countries also tend to practice polygamy
and have higher death rates for girls. That means fewer marriageable women —
and more frustrated bachelors to be recruited by extremists.
So educating Nujood and giving her a chance to become
a lawyer — her dream — isn’t just a matter of fairness. It’s also a way to help
tame the entire country.
Consider Bangladesh. After it split off from Pakistan,
Bangladesh began to educate girls in a way that Pakistan has never done. The
educated women staffed an emerging garment industry and civil society, and
those educated women are one reason Bangladesh is today far more stable than
Pakistan.
The United States last month announced $150 million in
military assistance for Yemen to fight extremists. In contrast, it costs just
$50 to send a girl to public school for a year — and little girls like Nujood
may prove more effective than missiles at defeating terrorists.
----------------------------------------------------
COMMENTARY – “Divorce Before Puberty”: Separating
Objectivity From Agenda
Nujood Ali’s story as related by Nicholas Kristof is
both a testament to the courage of a ten year old girl who freed herself from
an abusive arranged marriage and an agenda larger than Nujood’s personal
courage and initiative.
Kristof uses the emotional power of Nujood’s story to
justify his argument that relates the generalized experience of women to the
causes of terrorism. This definitely is a laudable argument worth exploring.
But his argument is weakened by unsubstantiated assertions. After the success
of Nujood’s book, her brothers treat her much better, Kristof tells us. They
had criticized her for “shaming the family” by getting her famous divorce. We
can infer that improvements in the family’s standard of living derived from
royalties paid to Nujood for her book helped mute the brothers’ criticism of
her.
Nujood’s brothers’ criticism allows Kristof to open
the subject of the deficiencies of male- dominated Yemeni society. But then,
instead of discussing Yemen, he asserts that unidentified “countries” are
“unstable” because they marginalize women. He continues to veer from verifiable
supporting evidence, stating women have “higher death rates...in those
countries.”
The linchpin of Kristof’s argument, that young men in
“those countries” are “frustrated” and thus join extremist terrorist
organizations, is based on unsupported evidence. What are those countries? He
does give one example. Women allowed to become educated in Bangladesh have
helped stabilize their country. But Kristof does not allow readers to judge for
themselves how educated women in “those countries” he does not identify could
stabilize them.
Instead of sensationalizing his argument—“little girls
like Nujood may prove more effective than missiles at defeating
terrorists”—Kristof could have better convinced readers by providing further
objective evidence. Most readers already agree with his agenda. Terrorism needs
to be defeated. But readers should be allowed to decide for ourselves instead
of having our emotions predominantly appealed to.
---------------------------------------------------------------------
What's the dichotomy? Or dichotomies?
No comments:
Post a Comment