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Journalism of Courage
In 2016, the honour killing of social media celebrity Qandeel Baloch had caused an uproar in Pakistan and drawn strong media attention both at home and abroad. Sanam Maher, a Karachi-based journalist, who has covered politics, religious minorities, and women, gives a detailed account of Qandeel’s life in A Woman Like Her: The Short Life of Qandeel Baloch.
Baloch, 26 at the time of her murder, had earned both fame and vitriol on social media. Born Fauzia Azeem in a poor family in rural Pakistan, she faced an abusive husband before fleeing from her marriage.
Baloch then began to chart a career as a media celebrity, and was often dubbed as the ‘Kim Kardashian’ of Pakistan. In 2016, she was drugged and then strangled to death by her brother at their parents’ house, who believed that Baloch had brought “dishonour” to his family, and expressed no remorse.
In its review, The New York Times calls the book “a model of how to report on celebrity: by focusing on the seedy characters who feed and exploit it, and by harvesting the details, especially at the seam between public and private, that more conventional journalists leave behind”.
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Maher writes, “I knew that this book wouldn’t only be about Qandeel, but also about the kind of place that enabled her to become who she did — a place that ultimately found that it could not tolerate her. The book uses parts of Qandeel’s life in order to open up into a story about Pakistan and young Pakistanis at this particular moment, when, with the touch of a button, we are connected to the world like never before. While we might tread in a global space of ideas and possibilities online, we’re still very much grounded in a society and culture that may not allow for those possibilities. In Qandeel’s story and some of the others in the book, I have sought to reveal what happens when those two worlds collide.”
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