“[Omar] Mateen married Ms Yusufiy, an estate agent whose family was originally from Uzbekistan, in April 2009, and it didn't take long for her to realise that her new husband was an abuser. In a classic pattern of controlling behaviour, he confiscated her salary and refused to allow her contact with her family; he was physically violent as well, once trying to choke her because she hadn't finished the laundry. After four months of abuse, Ms Yusufiy's parents realised what was going on, came down from New Jersey and had to physically wrest her from their son-in-law's arms as he tried to stop her leaving him.

Mateen's second wife was not so lucky. Noor Salman, whose Palestinian parents came to the US from the West Bank, was divorced after an arranged marriage that did not work out. She met Mateen on a dating site called Arab Lounge and married him at a mosque in Rodeo, California, in 2011. In another pattern familiar to experts on domestic abuse, he started attacking her when she became pregnant, punching her and threatening to hit her harder if she told anyone. After interviewing Ms Salman, the New York Times described the abuse she suffered in detail:

When [Mateen] became angry, he would start biting his lips and clenching his fists. In public, he also had a code word he used if she was doing something he didn't like. He would call her 'shar'. That was short for sharmuta - slut or whore in Arabic.

He would also pull her hair, something she has since learned he also did to his first wife. He choked her and threatened to kill her. He never said he was sorry. ‘He had no remorse,’ she said.

In this second marriage, unlike the first, Mateen had a hold over his wife: they had a child together and he threatened that he would get custody of their son if she tried to leave. On the night of the attack, she was in bed when he sent her a text message in the early hours, asking whether she knew what had happened. Hours later, the FBI came to the house and revealed that her husband was the perpetrator of the nightclub attack.

From the outset, the FBI suspected that Ms Salman knew about Mateen's plans in advance. Very unusually, in a development which exposes a failure by the American criminal justice system to understand how women are controlled by their abusers, she was charged with being her husband's accomplice and spent four months in jail awaiting trial. The prosecution case rested on a confession she signed following an interview which lasted almost twelve hours, carried out directly after the attack, when she was in a state of shock and wasn't represented by a lawyer. The FBI agents failed to tape the interview and a key prosecution claim, that Ms Salman had gone on a reconnaissance mission to the nightclub a few days before the attack, fell apart when phone records showed neither she nor her husband was anywhere near it on the day in question. She was tried on charges of obstruction of justice and of aiding and abetting her husband, a man she accused of beating, raping and imprisoning her in their home. In March 2018, not quite two years after the massacre, Ms Salman was acquitted on both counts. Like other widows of terrorists, she has been left with the task of bringing up her son on her own - and one day having to tell him why he doesn't have a father. While Mateen is rightly reviled as the perpetrator of the worst homophobic attack in American history, he was also a domestic tyrant who tried to compensate for gnawing feelings of inadequacy by beating up women in his own home.”

-Joan Smith, Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists

RIP. While I've read two of his novels—The Unbearable Lightness of Being toward the end of high school and Immortality toward the end of grad school—it was his theory of the novel, encountered mid-college, that moved and influenced me most. Two of the 13 paragraphs in the Times obit are devoted to misogyny in Kundera's fiction—that his prime accuser in the '80s is now a gender-critical feminist scourging the "narcissistic rage of trans activists" earns him no credit and perhaps should not—and for similar scrutiny of the way the word "Europe" functions in the book I am about to quote in memoriam, see here. To subject a novelist to an ideological trial on the day of his death—this might be emblematic of the totalitarian desire for religious certainty and political purity, for "apodictic and dogmatic discourse," to which Kundera opposed the ethical essence of the novel as a form committed to "inquiry."

As God slowly departed from the seat whence he had directed the universe and its order of values, distinguished good from evil, and endowed each thing with meaning, Don Quixote set forth from his house into a world he could no longer recognize. In the absence of the Supreme Judge, the world suddenly appeared in its fearsome ambiguity; the single divine Truth decomposed into myriad relative truths parceled out by men. Thus was born the world of the Modern Era, and with it the novel, the image and model of that world. To take, with Descartes, the thinking self as the basis of everything, and thus to face the universe alone, is to adopt an attitude that Hegel was right to call heroic. To take, with Cervantes, the world as ambiguity, to be obliged to face not a single absolute truth but a welter of contradictory truths (truths embodied in imaginary selves called characters), to have as one's only certainty the wisdom of uncertainty, requires no less courage. What does Cervantes' great novel mean? Much has been written on the question. Some see in it a rationalist critique of Don Quixote's hazy idealism. Others see it as a celebration of that same idealism. Both interpretations are mistaken because they both seek at the novel's core not an inquiry but a moral position. Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands. Religions and ideologies are founded on this desire. They can cope with the novel only by translating its language of relativity and ambiguity into their own apodictic and dogmatic discourse. They require that someone be right: either Anna Karenina is the victim of a narrow-minded tyrant, or Karenin is the victim of an immoral woman; either K. is an innocent man crushed by an unjust Court, or the Court represents divine justice and K. is guilty. This "either-or" encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge. This inability makes the novel's wisdom (the wisdom of uncertainty) hard to accept and understand.

—Milan Kundera, The Art of the Novel (1986), trans. Linda Asher

smith family: round 1

Patti Smith by Joan Baez, 2022.

The book and the movie.

I KNOW HOW JOAN OF ARC FELT

t-shirts & stickers

Celebrity Barbies → Icons of Music Series

↳ Part 1 Featuring:

Dolly Parton, “The Queen of Country Music”

Patti Smith, “The Godmother of Punk

Stevie Nicks, “The Queen of Rock”

Madonna, “The Queen of Pop

Patti LuPone, “The Queen of Broadway”

Joan Baez, “The Queen of Folk”

the way it has clearly never occured to doctor who fans how black fans feel about 'human nature' and 'the family of blood.'

joan agreeing wifh martha a couple of times later in the episode doesn't make up for her racial prejudice. watching martha constantly be reinforced to her face that she will never be good enough is not happy viewing. it's supposed to be a reprieve actually, to show in another world they wouldn't work. but clealry these knuckleheads didn't realise that thay DOESN'T WORK when you have positioned her in a RACIST time period. martha and john don't work because he sees her as his LESSER not because they just don't gel together. and john smith despite being referred to as being "kind" to martha and viewing her as his "favourite maid' doesn't come across at all. he is indifferent and barely acknowledges her and is racially prejudiced too.

the cast is amazing but i am not rooting for john or joan and it's almost funny that the narrative expects me to. literally felt nothing at that 'life he could have had' montage. i was too focused on martha, because dammit someone has to be.

And now I know how Joan of Arc felt ⊹♡.𖥔 ݁ ˖🪽

smith family: round 1

aka "she was forced to complete the 100 baby challenge when he was 6"

I had a vision Joan style

the second coming of joan of arc!!!!

Joan Smalls wearing Laquan Smith spring 2023 for Numéro Netherlands (issue 8) photographed by Jack Waterlot