Unworthy Creature 3rd edition: A Punjabi Daughter's Memoir of Honour, Shame and Love - Paperback

by Barbara Kay (Author), Aruna I. Papp (Author)

The memoir of a South Asian immigrant to Canada, whose formative years in India were steeped in a reigning patriarchal culture of honour and shame, in which the burden of the family's good standing rests on the sexual purity of girls and women. The book traces the author's lonely, poignant, often risk-charged struggle to free herself from the oppressive code. As well, the book chronicles her courageous battle to help other South Asian girls and women in Canada step out of their kinsmen's ancient cultural cycle and claim their gender rights as fully equal Canadian citizens.

Author Biography

Born and raised in India, the oldest of seven children, Aruna's formative years were governed by her father's peripatetic pastoral service in the Church of Seventh Day Adventists, by the culture of honour and shame that dictated the behaviour of everyone she knew, and by her yearning for the education that eluded her. After immigrating to Canada as a young wife in a loveless marriage, with two small children, Aruna slowly awoke to the rights and protections Canada offered women. She embarked on an often frightening, but ultimately empowering journey that would lead to two graduate degrees, a second, loving and mutually respectful marriage, and a pioneering career counselling troubled families like her own, as well as training frontline workers. For the past thirty years, by insisting on the cultural roots of honour-motivated violence, in spite of multiculturalists' embarrassed denials, Aruna has given a voice to thousands of girls and women living lives of quiet desperation in the South Asian community and beyond. Barbara Kay is a columnist with the National Post newspaper.