Aunt Safiyya

Reading the novel, Aunt Safiyya, one scene that caught my attention was in chapter two. The scene where the bey beats up and tortures Harbi. First of all, I didn’t understand why the bey was so upset in the first place. I got the feeling that based on his old age and senility, Harbi may have said something that angered him and he got paranoid. In his paranoia, he found Harbi a threat to his family and decided to take action against it. Secondly, I could not believe the scene where Harbi is being beaten up and tortured, and the narrator must watch. It was so graphic and angry. Harbi was pleading with his father, pleading with the narrator to stop and go get help. Then when the bey’s guards tied him up to a tree and began picking him up and down, scratching the skin from his back and legs, it was so torturous and cruel. The bey shows his callousness when Harbi is pleading and he continues to taunt and prod at Harbi’s chest. It seems to me that in this novel, same-sex relationships are very violent and volatile. The way the narrator’s mother disciplines the female children- physically hurting them for dropping a plate of cookies and basically for no real reason at all other than they turned out to be girls. The male-male relationship between the bey and his nephew, Harbi is just as violent. In our culture, most would never consider harming family like that, but in this culture it’s different. However, the opposite sex relationships are strikingly different. There is a significant amount of respect that one sex has for the other. In the relationship between the narrator’s father and Safiyya, though he has the final decision, he allows Safiyya to have a good amount of say in her relationships. I think the respect that is there is so great that it confuses be because the same-sex relationships are so violent. It was interesting to look at the familial social relationships in this family and culture.