This last day, devoid of any accusations of an unseemly April Fool's joke by the smallest margin, the woman known (and often mispronounced) as Fadime Sahindal would have celebrated half a century on the earth, in an existence which would, then, have included Turkish Kurdistan (yes, the adjective is important and no, a sovereign, should-be entity of uncertain borders, government, composition and international relations does not yet exist), the once free republic of now-Swedish Jamtland, Kenya, and old Uppsala, where she drew her last shocking breath, before her father fired a piece of lead too close for comfort (or dare I say it, elegance) into his daughter's brain, a second into her jaw, if intended in a needless and bewildering token of humiliation, a extra chastisement unfelt and backfiring on the perpetratorn. The picture painted in that stairway, a future snuffed out, which should have been "his", in the more general sense, with the decisions going with it.
She died, childless and a disgrace to her name, bereft of her Swedish partner, because she wanted to be an individual. She died because not only her father, but numerous other paternal relatives - and maternal, unless considered a mere extension of their male peers - considered the need to guide her entry into adulthood, wifehood (as a legal wife, nothing else) and maternity necessary, in order to safeguard an isolation - social, if not necessarily economic - from general society. From Swedes, in effect, . Had this affair considered a son refused leave to date a girl from, say, sub-Saharan Africa, the lens through which his murder (or, very much, her murder) would have been very clear, very loud and condemning to unanimous sublimity, rather than loud vocals occasionally interrupted. Condemnation followed, but the general, or should I say structural, norms did guide themselves into a very different current, one which seemed to take the considerations of the many Sahindals of Sweden in very great care.
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