My grandfather had married late. He married a widow with three daughters. Later on, he got three sons, Mahmud, Abdul and Karim. Mahmud died when still he was young. I don’t know anything about the reason of his death, but I heard about the courage of my grandfather as a father. My grandfather washed the corpse and did the entire coffin ceremony by himself. ‘If you cry for a passed away son’, uncle Arif said to his wife and the other members of the family, ‘it means you object Gods will’.

The three stepdaughters had married, one in Parazan and the other two in other areas. If my great aunt was alive, I could not dare to say ‘stepdaughters’ as she always said, ‘uncle Arif did not treat us as stepdaughters, no nobody even notice that we were his stepdaughters.’

Abdul was described as a short but strong and hard man. ‘I am sorry for Abdul, nobody had ever had that courage’, uncle Sabir was saying whenever they mentioned his name. ‘He was never scared of any wild animal; he was watching his vine garden at dark nights alone and made smoking pipes from tree branches. Once I thought that the wild animals already ate him, as I heard a lot of scary sounds from that area. When I called him from a distance he said, ‘uncle Sabir those are my pets, don’t disturb them please! He was laughing with his rough sound when he was counting his wild pets by names.’

Abdul was infertile. The problem was neither himself nor anybody else could realize that reality. There were no laboratories to check people, so the only and simplest solution was to blame the woman; a man was above any blame as long as he had an erection!

In uncle Abdul’s laboratory, a man was a perfect man as long as he could transfer a virgin girl into a married woman. He was perfectly passed the test and made his first virgin a woman without any delay. Delay was also a problem, all family and friends were waiting for the news to announce his victory in that challenging battle. A woman, normally a middle aged one, was accompanying the virgin girl to her new home, she had to wait to take a piece of white cloth with the virgin’s blood to the girls family as soon as possible; that woman was called Pexesu. Those women are considered as bad and ugly, nobody likes them, there are many stories and myths about their job, but people could not overtake a tradition as easily as taking off a dress. That tradition is now wiped away in most parts of Kurdistan, but still practiced in some rural areas. If the man was late in doing his manhood job it was in the discretion of the Pexesu how long she could wait.

If the bridegroom announced that the girl was not intact, it meant she had lost her virginity and the penalty was death. She was normally murdered by a member of her family like her father, elder brother or a cousin for cleaning the shame she brought on their family. This practice of murdering women for having sex or relationships with somebody outside the marriage lock is still a big problem in many societies, including many parts of Kurdistan. This crime known as honour killing is widely practised against women, which has nothing to do with honour.  In this case men are blameless as there is no obvious sign on their penis after having sex with any human being , animal or masturbating; but it is very easy to blame women. 

 I have never heard of any incidents of that problem happening in my village, but it is obvious that the crime was, and still, carried out without any shame or remorse in many communities. From my childhood, as any other child of my society, I have learnt that girls have a thin curtain-like stuff inside their vagina, when it is torn it means a girl had sex and she is not virgin anymore, so she is unfaithful and brings shame on her family. There were great threats on girls and women, and girls and women were very cautious about their social and sexual behaviour. I have heard of the term ‘defloration’ in the English literature as a sign of loosing virginity in the past, when virginity was mattered, but I do not know to what degree.  I have heard of a girl in my village that was fallen down from a ladder and she lost her virginity. They asked some known personalities from the village to sign a letter certifying that she had lost her virginity by accident. 

 I have heard of good bridegrooms who cut their fingers to make the cloth bloody in order to save their face in the delay or to rescue the bride who has no blood. There were families who arranged a fast marriage for a couple who have sex without marriage to marry before everybody know about it. The most tragic thing about this virginity tradition was the fact that some girls have no blood at all in the first relationship due to the nature of their hymen, but nobody acknowledged that reality and even not heard of any difference between any women.

To overcome the problem of infertility, Abdul married and married until with his fifth wife, he disappointed to marry any more, but still he was sure that he was perfect! He brought back one of his wives from Karwani as he had swapped his donkey load of fruits with the woman! The poor women had to wait some time to have a child, when they were disappointed one after the other; they blamed themselves and their bad luck! Nobody dared to say a word against a man who was sexually active and had good erection! Women were going to magicians, fortune-tellers and religious men for a solution. Some times by pure accident a woman got pregnant after such a visit and made a good sound for the fortune-teller. Before oil was discovered in Kirkuk, the most oil-rich place in Kurdistan and Iraq, people believed that that eternal fire was coming from the grave of a holy soul who died there. Women were going to pray for help to bring them not simply just a child but a boy. Having girls but not boys was another disaster which caused many women their family life or at least their respect and dignity. A man who had some daughters but no son had a good excuse to marry another woman while he was keeping his former wife as his first or elder wife i.e. polygamy.

In Islam, a man has a right to marry four women at a time, if he could afford their life costs. This sounds very savage to the ears of anybody in the civilized world. Many men in the west envy their Muslim counterparts! However, many men in the same civilized world have relationship with many women at a time. Men and women murder their former partners and the term ‘ex in the car boot’ is somehow common. This situation is not exactly similar, but we have to understand that different societies have different problems and unjust, when it comes to dealing with women. Divorce and separation was a big disaster, as there was no social security or any public funds for a divorced jobless widow with many children. To avoid that problem keeping the previous wife was a poor and absurd solution. There was the story of the poor widow of a dead man who married in another village and left her infant child to die from hunger and her other children to live a life of absolute abuse.

In my village, in my life time, nobody had two wives at a time. It was very expensive and it was not socially acceptable without a plausible reason. Although, some of those who had no sons were threatening their wives by a second marriage, and this threat remained until hours before their death, but nobody did it.

Short before his death, my uncle donated his entire asset to the mosque, because he did not have any sons to inherit it. When his last widow wanted to leave, she made an agreement with my father to take all the household items in return to the mud house itself for my father. The agreement was kept inside a box which contained the books of my father. When I was reading the agreement, my mother was laughing, as she said that neither the household items nor the house itself had any remarkable value at that time.