I wish I were a man. Really. Their problems seem so much more…significant, no?
At least, that’s how I feel after reading a Washington Post article entitled, New Wives Bring New Hope to Sri Lankan Widowers.
Thanggod! Some good news about Sri Lanka, I thought, as I clicked the link and started reading:
Plunged into despair after the tsunami killed his wife and two of his four children, Ruknadhan Nahamani passed the first months after the disaster in an alcoholic fog, drowning his sorrows in the potent local liquor known as arrack . But grief was only part of the problem, he said.
“There was nobody to wash my clothes and take care of my kids when I went out to work,” said the wiry 32-year-old fisherman, whose teeth are stained red from chewing betel nut, a mild stimulant. “It was really difficult.”
But Nahamani is a single parent no more. In June, he exchanged wedding vows and jasmine garlands at a Hindu temple with a woman from a nearby village. “We are very happy,” he said outside his tent at a refugee camp as his new wife, Leelawathi, heated cooking oil for the evening meal.[link]
The man survived a tsunami and lost almost his entire family and lives in a refugee camp. Of course he deserves all the happiness he can find.
But the grinchy pebble I call a heart couldn’t muster more joy when I remembered all the war widows in Sri Lanka. Some 40,000 at last count.
And the fact that women drowned in massively disproportionate numbers (three times more) during the tsunami because they’re not taught to swim.
And the fact that widows are still treated like amoral harlots in most of South Asia.
Where’s the bloody community support for them?
According to Sri Lankan human rights activist and lawyer Manouri Muttetuwegama:
Widows were marginalised by their communities, orphaned girls were deprived of basic education, and thousands of female-headed families struggling to survive are still waiting to be counted in official statistics so that they can receive aid, she says.[link]But let’s return to the happy fisherman:
In [his] village, 31 of the 37 men whose wives died in the tsunami have remarried, according to local officials and aid workers.
In the first months after the tsunami, virtually all of the 37 widowers [of one village] dealt with their grief — along with more pragmatic concerns, such as who was going to cook for them and raise their children — by drinking themselves senseless.
Widowers from the village appear to have had little difficulty lining up new wives, often with the aid of relatives or friends.
Why do I feel sour reading this? Why is it ok for men to have a pity parties while women are expected to hide and fend for their shameful selves? Can you even imagine how this village would react if a woman hit the arrack while her kids yowl with hunger around her?
Maybe I’m still a little steamed from watching 1-800-INDIA on PBS tonight. Young, single women earning enough to support themselves and their families…I was all set to have a happy hour in front of the telly. The show did address some ways in which traditional gender roles are loosening, but single girls, living with (female) roommates? Aunties, Uncles, and SuitableBoys, all say - “Sluts!”
Dismayingly, it’s a hypocritical refrain I hear even in NY, among the American-born…Men want to meet a sexy thing at a club, but not the woman they want to marry. What gives?
I ain’t trying to pour haterade on all the lovely SepiaBoys who visit this site. But while we tut-tut over the latest rural Panchayat decree sentencing a woman to be gang-banged by half the village, don’t we feel rather superciliously removed from it all?
I dunno. If you want to discuss this further, please come find me. I’ll be at the bar with a hipflask full of arrack.
