The Stoning of Soraya M

Every other Friday afternoon there's a movie screening followed by a discussion at my host institution for the PhD students at ICRS (Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies) and the master's degree students at CRCS (Center for Religious and Cross Cultural Studies). The thought-provoking movies selected for discussion tend to focus on injustice, violence, and cross cultural conflict. So far this semester, I've seen Raise the Red Lantern (about the power struggle between the four wives of a wealthy Chinese merchant in 1920s China); Crash (about racial discrimination in modern day Los Angeles); and now The Stoning of Soraya M (about an innocent woman who is wrongly stoned to death for adultery under Islamic Sharia Law in Iran in 1986). Soraya's story is shocking, heartbreaking, and, worst of all, true.

In the opening scene, a woman is shown chasing dogs away from the remains of a body by a river. The woman collects the bones, washes them gently in the river and then buries them. As she is finishing her task, she notices a bus pulling a broken-down car along the main road to the village. It turns out the car belongs to a French/Iranian journalist who wants to get to the border by nightfall and is adamant that the local mechanic fix his car as soon as possible. The woman notices the tape recorder in the journalist's bag as he is speaking to the mechanic and attempts through a series of rushed whispered conversations to convince him that she has an important story to tell if he will listen.

The journalist makes his way to Zahra's house and the majority of the story is told through flashbacks as Zahra recounts the fate of her niece, Soraya, who was stoned to death the night before the journalist's arrival. Soraya, a 35 year-old mother of four children, is married to an abusive, philandering husband named Ali who wants a divorce so he can marry the 14 year-old daughter of one of his prisoners and he can't afford to have two wives. Soraya refuses to divorce him because she would then be left with no means to support the children. When a neighbor's wife dies, the village elders and Ali decide that Soraya should go help the widower and his son with the cooking and cleaning. Zahra manages to negotiate a salary for Soraya so she can slowly start to gain financial independence. This arrangement works for a little while, but Ali starts to get impatient and thinks up a new way to get ride of his wife - he accuses her of sleeping with the widower and he and the corrupt village leader threaten the widower with his life and his son's life to go along with the allegations, knowing that under Sharia Law the punishment for adultery is death by stoning.

Ali convinces all the men of the village, and many of the women, that Soraya is guilty of adultery. Zahra tries to sneak Soraya out of the house, but the attempt is futile - the house is surrounded by men with guns. So, Zahra does her best to help prepare Soraya for the inevitable. She helps her get dressed in a beautiful white gown and tells her that she will make it her duty to tell her story to the world. When the time comes, Soraya is led out of the house and buried waist deep in a dirt hole. Her hands are bound and she is positioned facing the villagers. One by one, the villagers pick up the stones and hit their target. Soraya's husband, her father and even her own sons join in. The scene is prolonged and painful; it shows the effect of each and every stone for several long minutes. The stones hit, Soraya's head swings down and the up, blood drips down her face turning her white gown red, and she makes eye contact with the crowd. Cries of Allahu Akbar! (God is Great!) fill the air as eventually everyone starts throwing stones at once until Soraya is dead. That night there is a great celebration in the village. While the villagers are celebrating, Zahra and a few other women take Soraya's body down to the river. They aren't allowed to bury her so they leave her by the water, where we know from the opening scene that her body will be eaten by wild dogs.

Then the film returns to the present where Zahra and the journalist are finishing their conversation. The mechanic, who we now recognize as the widower, arrives to announce that the car is ready. The journalist packs up his equipment and tries to leave town. The village elders stop him to ask what the old woman has been talking to him about for so long. They say that what happens in the village, stays in the village. The head of the village then destroys the tape with Soraya's story. The journalist storms off in his car. The villagers watch him drive off, smugly thinking they have prevented the story from leaking out. Little do they know that Zahra has outsmarted them again. She's waiting for the journalist down the road with the true tape held high in her hand. She successfully passes it off to him. The villagers see what has happened and try to run after the car. There's a tense moment when the old car stalls, but then the journalist gets it going again and successfully drives out of town with Soraya's story intact.

This incident really happened in Iran in 1986. The French/Iranian journalist wrote a book about Soraya's story called La femme Lapidee, which was published in 1990. The film, The Stoning of Soraya M, came out just last year.

The story left me in tears. The tyrannical husband, the mob-mentality of the villagers, the betrayal of Soraya's sons, the desperate attempts of Zahra to stop the inevitable, the brutal, bloody stoning scene. Why would anyone do this?? Many people in the story knew what was happening was wrong but still did nothing to stop it. An extra cruel turn of events comes at the end when we learn that Ali's marriage to the 14 year-old is off because the girl's father was executed. Soraya's death was for nothing - except that Zahra's promise to Soraya came true. The world now knows her story and a lot more about the similar fates of women in other countries where Sharia Law is practiced. If you haven't seen this movie yet, I highly recommend it. For Soraya's sake and sake of women like her, it's important that the world know what's going on. And what continues to happen in Iran to this day.

It was especially interesting to watch this movie about Islamic Sharia Law in a room full of practicing Muslims. The cries of Allahu Akbar! (God is Great!) by the murdering mob was deeply disturbing for many in the audience. Many Indonesian students were shocked. 'This is Islam??' Others were quick to point out that what Ali and the corrupt village elder did was manipulate religion to fit their cause, an ongoing theme in studies focusing on religious violence. Such manipulation is by no means restricted to Islam either.

One ICRS student also shared a very interesting academic theory as for why people would engage in an act as barbaric as stoning, especially to someone they know, love, and might even regard as innocent. Once an act of adultery has been committed, there is a disequilibrium in the community. In order to restore harmony, a scapegoat (guilty or innocent) must be found. Every stone that is thrown is a means to restore this harmony and win back God's good will. The otherwise inexplicable celebration scene following the stoning can be seen as a celebration of the restoration of harmony or equilibrium to the community. Powerful stuff, huh?

The aspects of Sharia Law depicted in this film also made me think about my upcoming trip to Banda Aceh, an Indonesian town in northern Sumatra governed by Sharia Law, where I've been asked to present a workshop next month. I've heard about the strict curfews and dress codes as well as the recent law change allowing stoning. Is it really true that right here in Indonesia adulterers can be punished with death by stoning? I dared to raise this question to the room. The response I got was that although death by stoning is on the books in Aceh, it's meant to scare people into behaving properly. The fact that four eye witnesses to the same act of adultery are needed to convict someone makes it highly unlikely that anyone will ever meet their end this way. A little online research at home revealed that the Acehenese defend their stoning law by asking how is it different from other countries with strict laws, such as death by lethal injection in the United States. The region also wants to attract tourists to the area so they can see for themselves how Sharia Law helps create a peaceful and secure community. Stay tuned for my reports from Aceh next month.

Sedikit Sedikit...

Sedikit sedikit lama lama akan terbiasa berbicara Bahasa Indonesia. Little by little it will become easier to speak Indonesian.

At least, that's my hope now that I've started my Bahasa Indonesia classes at ICRS. Every Monday and Thursday as of this week I'll be meeting with Mbak Nina for an hour and a half lesson. RD (from Iowa) and Lily (from Burma) are also taking the class. They're both PhD students at ICRS and Lily is actually in my academic writing class. I think this marks the first time I've ever taken a class with one of my own students!

Admittedly, I didn't have high expectations for this class going in. Last year Amber had studied at Wisma Bahasa, the premier language school on Java, and I had hoped that I would be sent there as well. My housemate Anastasia goes to classes there four times a week and meets all sorts of interesting people sponsored by the embassies and big international organizations in Jakarta. What's more, she told me Wisma Bahasa really tailors their lessons to students' ability levels. This sounded perfect to me because I'm what you'd call a 'false beginner' in Indonesian. I've never had a formal class before, but I've lived here for a year so I know a lot of random vocabulary and I can hold basic conversations. But Wisma Bahasa is pretty pricey so ICRS decided to have a current PhD student teach us instead as part of her work-study program. I was a little disappointed to hear this news, especially when I found out I'd be lumped together with actual beginners and that Mbak Nina had never taught a Bahasa course before. How could this be a good thing?

To my great relief, however, the class at ICRS is really exceeding my expectations. It turns out that even though Mbak Nina has never taught Bahasa Indonesia before, she has 10 years of experience teaching English as a foreign language and clearly knows what she's doing. She also speaks Indonesian nice and slowly and with such a beautiful intonation that I find myself wanting to imitate her. It's also working out fine that we're starting the course from scratch. On day one we learned how to introduce ourselves, how to say the letters of the alphabet and how to spell our names. Really basic stuff, but still useful. We're also filling in gaps in our cultural knowledge. For instance, today as we reviewed the material from Monday with flashcards of political leaders around the world, we digressed briefly to talk about Indonesian presidents. So now, for the first time in a year, I actually understand the difference between President Sukarno, who was the first Indonesian president after the country gained its independence in 1945 and regarded as a national hero, and President Suharto, who held the presidency for over 30 years after Sukarno and was seen as corrupt. This distinction is tricky because their names differ by only two letters. 

Having RD and Lily in the class makes it more fun, too. RD's background is in sociology and team building and he is just so supportive of everyone. He's quick to say, 'Thank you, Julianne, for asking that question. I really appreciate it.' Or if Lily or I say something correct, he'll quickly congratulate us with a Bagus! (Good!). I'm also fascinated by watching him learn Indonesian because he's never studied a second language before. Watching him struggle slightly through these first few lessons really makes me appreciate how my previous experience with language learning really does make learning additional languages easier.  

I'm really happy to be back in the language classroom again as a learner. Taking language classes as been a hobby for most of my adult life, be it French, German, Spanish or Swiss German. I love those little moments when the light bulb goes off and you finally understand something you didn't before. I also like guessing spelling and meaning correctly and having it confirmed by the teacher. Most of all, I like the digressions and the cultural tidbits and sharing the learning experience with others. It's too bad I didn't have this opportunity last year, but I'll try to make the most of it this year.

Teaching Academic English

I've finished my first month of teaching! Well, perhaps I should clarify that by saying that although I've finished teaching for the month of September, I've only actually taught four classes. My first week at ICRS was spent settling into my office and modifying the syllabus put together by Amber last year so that I could actually teach it. Then I went off to Bali for 10 days for the Idul Fitri holiday. And then I came back to teach my awesome schedule of only two classes per week. So now that I have this first month (or 4 classes) under my belt, I thought it was time to give an update on my teaching situation this year.

Let's backtrack to my first week at ICRS. I spent most of this week being alternately extremely grateful for all the files that Amber had left behind and also super intimidated by the work she had done. She was the first ELF at ICRS and she literally wrote the book on the academic writing curriculum here. Seriously. She WROTE A TEXTBOOK as part of her project last year. And while I was very thankful for all her groundwork and clearly labeled folders and documents on the hard drive, I also grew increasingly worried that I was in over my head. Amber is a PhD student in Rhetoric and Composition. Not too surprisingly, her extremely thorough syllabus is peppered with jargon from her field: discourse communities, genre analysis, rhetorical sequence, rhetorical situation, summary reminder phrases, and rhetorical prospectus. Fear raced through me as I read over her syllabus for the first time. How was I supposed to teach students to write a rhetorical prospectus if I didn't even know what that term meant? And, I wondered, if I had trouble understanding the terms on her syllabus, how did her students feel?

Fortunately, a nice long chat about expectations with my counterpart Ipung helped calm me down. Taking into account that my background is in TESOL, not rhetoric and composition, and also considering the feedback from last year's students who felt they had more work then they could handle in the academic writing class, Ipung and I decided that I could tweak the syllabus a bit. So, I went back to the drawing board and hashed out an adapted version of Amber's syllabus that I felt much more comfortable teaching. I took out the year-long research paper project (complete with annotated bibliography, lit review, and rhetorical prospectus) and focused instead on 4 distinct assignments each semester. This term I'll have my students write a personal literacy narrative, a summary of a religious studies article, a reaction paper and a final writer's reflection paper. Next term, I'll assign an editorial and response, a comparative summary of two religious studies articles, a book review and a film critique. Then they'll have a final publication project where they select and polish two pieces of writing from the year to be published and distributed to all members of the class and the ICRS office. My hope is that my students will see my class as a workshop where they can get comfortable with the conventions of writing in academic English. For most, this semester will be their first experience doing so since their bachelor and master's degrees were entirely in Indonesian. (As a side note, all ICRS classes are conducted in English. ICRS is an international, interreligious PhD program that attracts applicants from all over the world.)

Even after feeling good about my changes to the syllabus, I was still nervous for the first day of class. I was about to step foot into my first classroom of PhD level students. Many of them are currently lecturers at other universities on Java and have published numerous articles and books (in Indonesian) on religious studies, a field I know extremely little about. My students are Muslim, Buddhist and Christian and are comfortable tossing around buzzwords like 'interfaith dialogue'. This is completely new territory for me. Luckily, our first few sessions together have gone extremely well. There are only 12 students in the class and they all seem very approachable and eager to learn about academic English. I have a feeling that I will learn just as much from them this year about religious studies and 'interfaith dialogue' as they will (hopefully) learn from me about academic writing in English.

As part of the course, my students are required to come see me at least once per assignment for a 30 minute individual consultation session. This is a time where we can talk about the feedback they have gotten from their peers, the revisions they are working on, grammar points they want to clarify and anything else that comes to mind. I've had a handful of sessions so far and was, in a sense, relieved to hear that my students are still looking for help with things like prepositions and thesis statements. These requests I can handle, since they're much more within my realm of experience than, say, research proposals or rhetorical moves.

To finish this post, I'd like to share a funny anecdote from a recent individual consultation session. The student came in, sat down and handed me the first draft of his essay. I glanced over it and asked him, "Do you have any specific questions about this essay?" To my surprise, he started listing the places he had visited in America. He rattled off numerous states and even mentioned attending some sort of month-long program in Hawaii. I listened politely while trying desperately to figure out the connection between his list of places visited in America and draft 1 of his essay. Finally, he stopped and said, "No, I've traveled a lot there. I don't think I have any specific questions about the USA."