Saving Face - Hina Anwar

                What the documentary Saving Face and The House is Black had in common was that they both made me uncomfortable and extremely sad. Though they were of two places in the Middle East, the two were very different in that acid attacks are something humans created and that’s just disgusting. Being American born, but of Pakistani origin it was hard for me to establish a sort of prejudice for the people in Pakistan. It’s not as if people there are bad and it would be expected that I run to my “country’s” defense, but I just can’t.  The film just helps showcase how much a male dominant culture Pakistani women have to live in and it’s just not fair. All the husbands and offenders in that documentary were just pathetic excuses for human beings. How dare they think better of themselves, how dare they think they had the right to ruin the lives of their wives. They weren’t possessions, but I suppose that’s the kind of belief dowries ensure.  “I’m paying you to marry my daughter” so essentially you just bought her. It’s not the women’s fault at all and though the blame lies with the offender, I feel that part of it belongs to the women’s families. They had arranged marriages, most forced, and it’s like signing off on their death sentence. They may have not been in those situations in the first place had not been for that.  If I had not already known of both the country and acid attacks I would most definitely have formed a harsh opinion of Pakistan. You can’t blame all the people residing in a country for its problems, but you can blame them for not stopping them, for not trying hard enough to prevent them. It’s not as if I hate the people in Pakistan, it’s just that I hate that such horrible arrogant people exist, no matter where they are in world.

It’s reminiscent of rape in the military. Who’s going to believe the woman over the man? The military had been male dominant for so long; it’s hard to get rid of that standard. These crimes much like the acid attacks take so long to processes and by then women are far worse in their suffering. Also the military has to take extra precautions to prove the crime, as to not falsely damage its reputation. Even if they get their justice, the women still have the emotional and physical scars. It’s scary to think that such things could happen to anyone, and yet to see the women with burnt faces behave so normally, to laugh, to smile was heartwarming. That they had such courage and willed themselves to keep on living was just wondrous.

A particular part of the documentary that really stuck out to me was when the doctor told the daughter of one his patients that she had her mom back that she was lost for a little while, but she’s back.  The surgery did give her the confidence to face the world, but the statement really made me question beauty, the face, and what it means to us as humans. It’s so important to us to be beautiful, to look nice, and to be liked and they all seem like such trivial things when you look at the rest of the world. We are defined by the way we look, our face, and to take that away is to take away our identities.  But I wonder, is the face really as important as we think it is? Sure the face is an important part of us, but it’s not our mind, the mind that tells us what’s supposed to beautiful, what’s supposed to have importance.  Aren't we really just our minds hidden behind a face that society determines is good enough or not?