DANGEROUS CROSSINGS ~Encounters with Women/ Encounter 2 ~

From the window of the louage, we could see a long line of cars before the crossing point in El-Djorf.  Crossing from mainland to the island of Jerba does not usually take more than 15 minutes on board the ferry, but with that line of cars, waiting could last hours. Kady had been waiting for us for over an hour, and she was urging us ‘to make it quick’ or we would miss the cruise ship which leaves the port at noon. The woman with the tanned face told us that if we wanted to be on time, we had to do something proscribed, though quite conventional. ‘We are going to tell the driver that we’re getting down here, and continue on foot to the crossing point. From there, we may take the ferry as individual passengers.’ Her suggestion sounded reasonable regarding the time we still had to wait before our louage reaches the crossing station, but the problem was that the crossing station where we were heading was for vehicles only, and that individual passengers like us could access it from another gate at the other side, inaccessible to us at that point. She reassured us saying that there was no problem, that people do that all the time, that no authority was going to disturb us.

Eventually, we did as she bid.  My 2 friends, the woman and I, got down and walked to the crossing point without being stopped by authorities. "No one would get to Djerba on time otherwise" said the woman, smiling. Indeed, it was the beginning of the touristic season, and if someone happened to be travelling from the island to mainland frequently, getting in time to work and to appointments would be problem in vehicles. When we arrived, there was a ferry boat that was closing its gates, while another was visible from distance. We still had some minutes before it throws anchor and empties itself and before we can get on, and we seized the opportunity to take photos and go to the restroom.  We sat then on an old, half demolished fence next to the crossing point and it was during those minutes that I could see the woman clearly. She was any age between 30 and 45, and she wore an ample blouse with patterns of panther spots and tiger lines, and a headscarf.  She had weather-beaten countenance, amid which there were small scintillating hazel eyes which gave her an aura of both openness and cleverness.

When the ferry arrived, we sat in the second level, where we could sit totally still and enjoy the view and the smell of the ocean. We said goodbye to the woman before meeting with Kady and her husband who were waiting for us in their car. Although it was 5 minutes to 12, we were able to make it to the cruise ship right on time.

When I uploaded the photos of the trip to my computer a few days later to send them to my friends, I tagged the album with the name: ‘Harqa to Jerba’, as a reference to the ‘illegal crossing’ that we have made that day to reach our ship.  The word harqa means ‘burning’ in vernacular Tunisian, and it has many usages.  We speak about ‘burning’ the red light when we ride before red becomes green, and burning the borders, which refers to clandestine crossings to the European country, usually by means of boats ministered by ‘specialised’ agents.  It is a term that is more recent than all the others as it entered popular usage in the last decades characterised by the shooting  rise of the number of illegal immigrants which only corresponded with the fortification of the immigration in European countries.  In all cases, the word harqa is associated with a dangerous undertaking and about crossing a line, whether that of law or of geographical borders. As we bid the woman goodbye in Ajeem, I could not help thinking how much of her life consists of these dangerous crossings.

She was travelling between Djerba and other Tunisians towns on the other bank of the Mediterranean to trade in clothes and other goods. Precarious as it were, this itinerant way of living has become the  answer to many people who could not find decent permanent jobs, especially in the last few years during which employment has been on the rise.  I knew of many families on the south and midlands whose survival relied on trips their members made to Libya, trips often involving not only the dangers of the road but the continuous haggles with authorities which charged them exorbitant taxes.   Up in the north, a lot of young people traded illegally in unlicensed goods procured in Algeria, relying on ‘contra’ or the trafficking trips.  I remember the taxi driver who told me how he became severely injured in a traffic accident on one of those trips between Tunisia and Algeria, resulting in broken back and a period of three months hospitalisation, of which his family knew nothing.  A single trip could sometimes last 48 hours, he explained, and so, they were always in the risk of falling asleep on the wheel which was even more threatening than falling in the hands of police.  He had now quit and bought a taxi.  Although he missed his former life and the substantial financial gains that it brought along, he was now content with his life, safe and empty of risks compared to the past.  This financial security, he explained, he could not have been able to ensure if not for the years of ‘contra’. The thing he was most proud of was not the taxi though, it was the fact that he could afford for a respectable ‘zhaz’ for his sister, who had no job and no higher education, and who was compelled by a very traditional father to stay home. I still remember the tone with which he spoke, the tone of a retired person who was gratified with his accomplishments over a long career, ‘for you know,’ said he, ‘a girl’s honour is like milk, once a drop of water falls in it, it becomes stale.’  I understood he was talking about the rumours that may befall his sister if she did not get married, and I smiled at the creativity of the simile. The familiar simile in this context is to compare a girl’s honour to a match, very thin and once broken, it can never be fixed, similes that survive to the twentieth first century and attest the contradictions of modern Tunisian society. In the past, marrying a girl used to be the task of her family. Probably the wealth of her family used to play a rule, and if she happened to be beautiful, stories about her beauty would fly to would-be suitors, but the task of bringing a suitor home is exclusively not hers.  With changing cultural standards, ‘finding a husband’ has become the responsibility of the girl, and it relies more on her social web of acquaintances, and especially on the years of university.  I am not saying that girls go to university for the sake of getting married, but very often, something is also expected of her beyond accumulating diplomas while she is there.  This does not mean that society has become totally tolerant with a girl’s freedom, on the contrary, restrictions, though more flexible now, still remain imposed on her freedom . The biggest contradiction is that despite all this pressure she undergoes to rely on herself to find a husband, she is still accountable to prove an intact honour by marrying fast. (Fortunately, the meaning of ‘fast’ has also been subject to some elasticity in the last few years). 

The story of the taxi driver was evocative of all the contradictions of  a third world country, torn between the urgency to respond to the temptations of a nearby continent whose lights are visible on clear nights, and whose greatest lures was the western lifestyle levied by advertising.  To seek union with the promises of the market by crossing borders is punished by both the mother country and the destination country, for this citizen is expected to comply to the demands of the market and to remain constantly alleviated to consumerism, while also remaining within the borders of his countries. Women were subjected to the same contradiction, and now, more than ever, they are restricted by the demands of both traditionalism and modernity.   Her trip outside home is not the adventure she has been eager to assume, but the unleashing of a series of more requirements and yet limited freedom.

The woman who led us to break the rules at the crossing station that day was familiar with this lifestyle, and was herself victim of this contradiction.  She valued her economic independence more than anything, she loved those trips though they drained her of energy, but they did not come at an easy price.  Her husband beat her because he was jealous and did not like her frequent comings and goings.  In the past, similar ways of living were restricted to men, but novel economic standard imposed different realities. At the same time, the amount of profit she was bringing could not be ignored.  We asked her about how she was handling the issue, and she said that she once had to desert the house to force her husband into apologising and ‘admitting her worth’.  And a woman’s worth is not only her place in her husband’s heart, but also her role in bringing bounty to the home. It is why a lot of women choose to stay at home whenever the economic situations improve, when a child graduates and finds a job for example. They renounce their financial autonomy (tough, I found out, even the most ‘submissive’ women value economic autonomy), to sometimes abscond snags with spouses.  

I thought about those who crossed the sea for a ‘better life’, whatever the term means.  Some of those immigrants do not contact their families for months, work in terrible conditions and are treated like peasants in feudal societies.  The taxi driver had broken his back and several bones and risked his life many times in order to buy a taxi and help his sister get married, a sister who did not have the slightest idea on how to make a crossing by herself.  Everybody is seeking some kind of crossing. One cherished genre of the American movies and series now is the paranormal, which often deals with stories of wandering souls seeking to find their way to the world of light.  This may not be a fair comparison, but it strikes me how in all these stories of crossing, someone is always caught between the perimeters of two worlds, one which had grown too insufficient for him, the other refusing to open its doors for him.  

The changing socio-cultural and economic values had also transformed women’s roles radically, making them central agents in the family's economic stability, but remaining reluctant to acknowledge the importance of their roles, because otherwise, to acknowledge that is also to contest  patriarchal conservatism. One of the most serious predicaments that women all across the world face is the lack of open acknowledgment, which draws a shadow over the roles they play in family and in society.  While some jobs have become regarded as suitable for women, like those demanding high qualifications and necessitating less ‘adventurous’ lifestyles, others are still regarded as masculine or devaluing for women, when more and more women need to undertake them, out of financial necessity, or out of choice less frequently.  Women are caught exactly between that necessity, and the dogmatic denial of their standing which pulls them back and stalks them.  Only full, brave and responsible acknowledgment, a shedding down of silence, should make their sacrifice less strenuous. 

Challenges for Modern Women

I have met so many unhappy women, so very few who knew the causes of their unhappiness, and fewer who dared to think of solutions.

I was born and brought up in Tunisia, a small North African country where people did not talk much politics before the 2011 revolution, and talked too much politics after the revolution. Tunisians are known for their hospitality and gentle temperament, and a typical symbol of Tunisian identity is that of jasmine that accompanies most of Tunisian feasts and traditional celebrations. The revolution itself was dubbed the jasmine revolution by mainstream media, and the whole world nodded in agreement, for the world hated to see in Tunisia but the idyllic female that stands with open arms for its guests, greeting them with jasmine and offering its white shores to them. I don’t blame western media as much as I blame our ministry of tourism that corroborated the manufacture of this idea that I find now hard to challenge. Our culture carries the breath of the festive spirit of Mediterranean gods, blended with the unbending piety of ancestors who came from the Arabian Desert. My people manifest a strong taste of self-importance when they speak about themselves, with a sour sarcasm they had learned from a long contact with the French, and a lot of the stubbornness of the Berbers.  We are all these, and there is nothing I love more than my north African-ness full of cultural incongruities.   I love jasmine too, but it falls short in describing the essence my people.

As a woman, I was brought up on the interim between two schools, one of them required that a woman respect the codes of sobriety and heshma, to look down when in a conversation with men, not to speak until they are spoken with, while the other school was teaching them the competitive, somehow aggressive and cruel morals of modern age that were inspired by the ethics of the market: be a wolf among wolves, never trust anyone, go and have it before anyone else does. 

I am lucky to have a father who instilled in me the love of reading books from a very early age, and I say lucky because only a few in the world know how to make their children love books and not just read them, and it was my fondness of learning that made me start to wonder how the world that existed beyond my borders looks like. The borders I am speaking about are the borders around my home and my immediate geographical surrounding, but also the borders of my psychological landscape located within the realm of my safety.  Before I could know it, I was out in the larger world.  Typically, before they could decide what to do with the new freedom, women brought up like me would either shy away into the morals of traditional upbringing, safe, cosy and reminiscent of family and home, or totally indulge into the wild and adventurous laws of modern age. I realised there was a lot of injustice in the world, so much injustice that trying to change it was a waste of time, and I chose the first reaction. For a long time, I was totally convinced that our world was the toy of a primeval demon, and whether we do something or nothing to save it, salvation was never going to come.

Beyond my borders, I also met people who devoted their lives to a long struggle and hard work to make things better, sometimes never to obtain any result, or sometimes to obtain a very insignificant one.  They were always happy nonetheless.  Their dictum was that if action was not a solution, then inaction was not the solution either.  At least, by being active, one was participating in something called Life.

That is where life truly began for me. But where was I to begin? To stand amid the jungle of injustices and pick one, was a good solution, but it was the privilege of the very rich who had a lot of money togive away as charity and did not know where to start.  But that was not my privilege.  Innumerable were the injustices of the world, but varied and different as they were, they all had something in common, or to put it in a different way, they all shared the same injustice among themselves. Wherever I went, I was seeing something very peculiar.  Muslims were discriminated against in the west, but where they belonged, there was no discrimination.  Mexicans were killed by the hundreds if they crossed the borders northward, but by staying inside their borders, they did not have to worry about being called dirty Mexicans. Africans were racially discriminated against almost everywhere except in Africa (if we exclude the case of Apartheid). Kurds were hated in Iraq, Armenians despised in Turkey, Indians and Pakistanis looked down at in England.  In all these examples, every one of these despised groups has a home where they would not suffer abuse, hatred or disdain. Every one of them had a dark period of history when their guardian angels deserted them, and so many of them regained national authority, international recognition, or at least, obtained an official apology. However, everywhere, the history of women was that of abuse, hatred and disdain, even where they belonged. Women had no country to run away to, they had no rights in a territory where they could ask and struggle for sovereignty.  Most of the time, their oppressors were their countrymen, their husbands, brothers and fathers. They were also their own mothers and sisters who share with them the same portion of coercion.

I have seen women who were abused physically and psychologically, sometimes media and public opinion would fret about their situation and muster public support for their causes if political undertones were implied, like the case of Sakineh the Iranian woman sentenced to flagellation for adultery and for killing her husband. Yet most of the time, they would simply suffer and die unnoticed by the public opinion. That was not all.  The solutions offered to women in most parts of the world were nothing more than traps that were inspired from a very old masculine game, when they were required to compete with masculine power according to masculine rules, like when my brother in the old days imposed on me competitions based on the power of muscles, and in which he always won. The reason is simple, by competing with masculine power, women were granted recognition. Disney gives us an example of how women should act in a masculine world; heroines such as Pocahontas and Mulan tell us that to be accepted in society, they had to wear the attire of men, carry swords and go into the battlefield to be honoured by the father or the emperor.  The tricky thing about these old and seemingly innocent story lines is that their heroines struggle all through the story to gain recognition by acting like men, and thus, their victories in the end would look like the victory of the female body over its limitations. But are the real limitations summed up in being able to imitate men?  What these stories do not tell us in fact is the cost that these women had to sacrifice, for like the Amazonian warriors who to remove a breast to be able to carry the bow and shoot the arrow, something crucial to these women’s identity had to be removed in order to be accepted and in order to gain recognition in a masculine order.

I have met many women whom society defined as successful, and who would sit across the table with trembling fingers and explaining the repercussions of their ambitions on their personal lives because their own definitions of success differed from the standards of the market, and yet they had never tried any other way because they did not know other ways existed.  They were scared -- and I would be too, in their place -- to be part of the rat race. I have seen many a women in both conservative and liberal societies whose lives were turned into pathetic competitions against other women to win the approval of men by showing too much of their flesh, or hiding too much of it.

In my own country, I noticed that the more the society was conservative, the more the degree of women’s authority inside the family and the society would increase.  It intrigued me so much at first, but then as I travelled northward, and outside the boundaries of my own country, I found a clue by encountering the same case though in opposite roles. In order for women to be accepted, they had to play by masculine rules, and to become the guardians of a body of moral and social ethics created by men when society is mostly regulated by the authority of morality. This explains why nearly everywhere, when there was an abuse against women for some moral reason, other women would be standing watching, or blessing the act of aggression altogether, if they would not participate in it.  I have seen women harsher than men on other women and I understood that they were also afraid of being the next victims if they did not support the dominant morality. In liberal western society when the ethics of the market are stronger, women were gaining power by adhering to the masculine rules of the market, by becoming themselves slaves of this system and giving their time and energy in order to carve a success at the expense of their true ambitions.

Following this, I thought, the coming together of women as solid groups has never been possible, and if it happened, it was never strong enough to make influence.  Not only were women already separated by lines of nationality, ethnicity and race, but they were also severed from seeing where their real potentials lied.  Colonised nations fight for freedom, racial groups for equality and for recognition, and no matter how long the struggle would be, it would be fruitful in the end because they knew what their target was.  Often, women’s struggle for freedom is agonisingly slow, and one which has been associated with the elites of the society.  From generation to generation, female child after female child was born and suckled the necessary rules to initiate it into the system of discrimination against other generations of women.

Encounters with Women- Encounter 1: OUT OF MEMORY

This was a woman I met when I was a child, may be when I was no older than eight or nine years.  I was travelling with my family to my grandparents’ house in the countryside on a rainy Sunday.  My siblings and I were clustered together on the back seat of the car, looking out at the deserted road under a bleak winter sky, and at the muddy streams that ran down from the hills and went across the road.  Suddenly my father hit the brakes and stopped.  I did not know why he did, the road looked totally deserted. My father then drove the car back a few meters.  On the side of the road something caught my sight. There was someone standing, the size of a child, but it was not a child. It was a woman, a very old woman.  She was so tiny and curved that I did not see her when my dad drove past her.  He got down, and we knew he wanted to offer her a ride.  He opened the back door of the car -we had a van back then with a large space at the back- to let the woman in.  I was shocked and totally shamefaced; my father was not the kind of people who showed disrespect to old people the way he did that day by deciding to stock the woman at the back as if she were a holiday tent.  Soon, she was inside the car, while my siblings and I sat on our knees and faced backward to look at that strange creature, for that was all we could think of her.  Sitting with legs crossed, she was almost shapeless, her head sank inside her shoulders, and I noticed she had a hunchback that was bigger than anything else in her body.   She looked like a small holiday tent spread at the back of the car.  I understood why my father offered her the back of the car instead of offering her a seat, for she could not fit on any seat, nor could she sit in any other way but the way she was sitting.  She was almost totally deaf, and when she talked, we could barely understand a word of what she said.  My father introduced her to us as remote relative, but she looked like she had just been dropped out of a hole in time, and that minutes ago before she got into the car with us, she had been in a world where people had not yet known vehicles.

It was not the last time we saw that women.  A few months later, she came to a visit to our grandparents’ house.  I remember that my father called us to greet her, and that he re-introduced us one by one to her, but that she could not remember nor hear anything of course.  She was sitting on the floor the way she was sitting on the back of the van, - by then it became more and more evident to us that she could not sit on chairs- , noiseless, in a state of nearly absolute torpor.   When my siblings and I surrounded her and started noisy efforts at making her speak, she blurted out with a talk we did not understand at first, but then, we realised she was telling some sort of story, a folk story she may have memorised in her younger age.  It seemed like it was the only thing she could say, and her only way to keep communication with the world.

Remembering the story, an old African proverb comes to my mind:  ‘when an old man dies, a library crumbles down.”  I thought about that woman and I thought she was that library, and that when she died, all her knowledge sank into the silence of the grave.  It surprised me that telling those stories were the only thing she could say, and probably her unique way of communication.  She could barely maintain any other type of conversation and whenever she did, she would lose track, and she could hardly remember the names of people around her even if they were close relatives. However, when she told a story, she would regain the coherence and organisation she missed in ordinary conversations, and somehow, her memory was able to reach into the store of tales, which old people with weak memories or with Alzheimer are surprisingly capable of doing.   I still do not understand the secret behind that, but the more old people become disconnected from the social world and became immersed into themselves, the more their senses and consciousness were linked to a world that has already vanished.

I thought also about the same African proverb and thought about the importance of stories for women. In most cultures of the world, women were the libraries and the living memories of their communities. More than men, women preserved the spirit of storytelling; they passed their wisdom from generation to generation, while men would be busy coping with a very hard environment, and waging cruel struggles in the market or toiling on farms.  It did not mean the role of women’s in the household was less tiresome, or that they did not contribute with strenuous labour on the farm, most women in rural areas did, but they, as the dwellers of the household, were more in touch with the treasures of oral culture.

Nowadays, preserving oral culture is done through turning it into written culture, the way the Grimm Brothers collected the oral lore of their communities into compact books. This may diminish the value of stories as many folklorists contend, but at least, there will be an effort to preserve the core culture of a lot of women that is going to disappear if this lore disappears with the lives of their tellers.   That oral culture is the companion of old women in transition between life and death is not an accident.  The oral treasure is not a mere historical monument to be preserved; it is a paragon with psychological and emotional value, and a vital connector between women and their world.  In a brilliant book Behind Closed Doors, Monia Hejaiej discusses the role of folk stories in divulging part of the women’s daily preoccupations, and she weaves the forms of repression these women suffer with the structures and the morals of the tales they recount in closed households, and within the domestic sphere.  I tried to imagine the same old lady in her youth, when she was a young girl, or maybe a middle aged mother taking care of young children.  Probably, her existence weighed upon her one way or another, the way life becomes unbearable with a lot of women nowadays when the balance between satisfaction and the life they sacrifice to others becomes difficult to find.  However, she may have been in possession of something we do not have.  For she, through the stories handed down to her through her ancestresses, was able to translate her plight into words, words that she would weave into stories, which would be circulated whenever the social occasion allowed. Imagine being able to tell your own quandaries in codified language over and over and the healing effect it has over you.

Years later, when I asked my father about the woman’s name, he did not remember it.  He did not remember the day he stopped for her by the side of the road.  He did not remember a woman with a hunchback at all.  Nobody in my family remembered her in fact. I wonder how she has suddenly fallen out of memory and gone beyond every recollection, and I doubt sometimes that I might have invented her. I wanted to know her name at least, so that I can write it when I would tell her story on my blog, and I find myself unable even to remember it.  It is fine I tell myself, as I long as I can still tell about her, it is ok.  Perhaps it was my own ritual to keep shards of women’s disconnected history together, to pass it on to the next generation. 

on "Encounters with Women" series

"Encounters with Women" is a series of posts that comprise stories based on personal experience with women I have met mostly accidentally, and mostly only once in my life.  The reason why I decided to start this series is simple:

Women have always fascinated me.  I believe in women, and in the power of women, of what they can do if they are given the opportunity, the means, and the ability to connect with each other.  I have seen women save whole families from disintegration, and save themselves from total breakdown, women who had no education, no money, no social status, no authority whatsoever, the only power they had was the power of believing, believing in themselves and in in what they can do.

The series of encounter with women is meant to introduce stories about women whom I had met at different stages of my life, and who were instrumental in changing my attitude about crucial issues, or women who had simply left a print on my soul. I intend by this series to introduce the richness of the women’s world, its depth and richness, its difficulties and the challenges they faced and still face.   

WHEN WILL THEY STOP CALLING GENDER THE OTHER ISSUE?

NOTE:  The content of this entry has been originally published on HumanRightsTV EVOLVE:  http://evolve.humanrightstv.com/voice-tunisia/2011/when-will-they-stop-calling-gender-other-issue

“Lately, I’ve been thinking of men in powerful positions, abusing their power over women in less powerful positions’, says Sally Kohn, a political commentator and the founder of the Movement Vision Lab think tank. ‘What makes it ok? Asks Kohn in her 12 minutes slide show published on her Movement Vision Lab’s channel on YouTube, ‘What makes these men think they can so wilfully, so blatantly, violate these women’s boundaries, these girls boundaries, what makes them think it is ok?”

Kohn then exposes the embroiling of sexual violence with political power, territorial struggle, racial and ethnic discrimination, and finally the oppression of individual rights by the state.   Kohn is right in her assumptions, the history of patriarchy was not only based on the belief that men are superior to women, but more specifically on the belief in the dominance of the western white male cultural prototype, which accompanied the unfolding of modern history. It is a dominance which, in its primeval recourse to violence and territorial dominance, harvested ideologies based on sacred dualities. They were those sacred dualities that most of the time justified the control over and the violence against the less powerful or against the monitories: we can think of the duality of white vs. black and the history of violence against coloured minorities. We can think of monotheism and its opposition to other forms of theism and all the bloodshed in the name of the sacred that resulted from this duality.  We can think of logic vs. spirituality, and how, in the name of spreading science and enlightenment and wiping out ignorance, whole civilisations were wiped out and human beings were abducted to be examined in laboratories or displayed in cages for public entertainment. And of course, we can think of the duality of male vs. female, the duality which stands at the heart of all dualities, for in all dualities, the dominated, the disgraceful and the weak are often represented with feminine features in the literature of the powerful. Was not superstition regarded for so long as part of women’s lore, when logic was tagged as a mark of male excellence? Was it not in the colonial literature that the dark skinned and the inhabitants of the jungle were portrayed as docile female subjects when they were not the savage barbarians? Was not the female body regarded as the locus of evil and the habitat of the devil?

In their brilliant book, Patriarchy Resistance and Democracy’s Future, Carol Gilligan and David Richards trace the consolidation of modern times patriarchy back to the prime days of the Roman Empire. It does not mean that patriarchy had not existed before that of course, but it was the Roman Empire that authorised legal discrimination against women, and especially legitimised violence committed in the name honour more systematically than any other civilisation had done according to both writers, in a way that inspired the legal practices of western nations over the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire.  The influence of such laws such as Lex Julia passed by Augustus and aiming at fortifying the institution of the Roman family by limiting adultery, enthused the Christian Eurocentric culture and continued to do to this day though in very implicit forms. It is owing to the concept of Honour that individuals could be maintained in a state of continuous fervour and ready to kill when it comes to protecting family’s honour (located in the chastity of the female body), or the sanctity of national boundaries, but which does not ironically respect ‘women’s boundaries’ to use Kohn’s words. It was also thanks to the notion of honour that the strict codes of morality could be controlled and checked by the central figure in the family (the father) and that in the state (the emperor), and that the state could be called in to punish a woman gone loose.  Gilligan and Richards conclude their book by wondering about the future of democracy, which had so far failed in totally protecting the sanctity of individual freedom while succeeding in solidifying the borders of state and corporate domination.

The objective of my reference to patriarchy in western culture is not to draw attention to the similarities with the situation in the Arab world, although similarities exist, but to point another crucial issue: as revolts are sweeping over many Arab countries, what are the chances of the Arab Muslim world to establish democracies that challenge and overcome the social, ethnic, religious and gender inequities that have for so long threatened the stability of several of these countries? And will these countries in transition toward democracies acknowledge the interlacing of the gender issue with their socio-economic stagnation?

When it comes to discussing what may facilitate change in the Arab countries, gender is often swept under the carpet and given little attention in the media and in political debates. As the Arab world is probably standing at the threshold of a big transition, issues of tribalism and sectarianism are brought to the light and discussed heatedly.  However, premature marriage is not debated as the Yemeni are protesting for freedom, Saudi women protests to be allowed to drive are being regarded as an issue that is separate from the demands for human rights and individual dignity that citizens in their country have recently demanded, the demand for equal rights for women in Egypt is not given as much attention as the attention given to the clashes between Muslims and Copts, although many a woman die in Egypt and elsewhere victims to crimes of honour. I am giving these few examples to show that although media may tackle the question of women’s rights, very few commentators inside the Arab world would analyse it as part of the problems in their countries, or question whether the new changes will seriously bring a brighter future for women. 

What makes the situation even more complicated, is that while these societies that have been long deprived of individual freedom and human rights, have also been dominated by dictators who did not openly reject democracy, (Tunisia and Egypt are democratic republics according to their constitutions), even though they made individual freedom a matter of state under the guise of protecting national security sometimes, and keeping the order of morality some other times.  What makes us certain today that this will not happen again, especially that when it comes to women, the majority regards gender inequity as a minor issue and is ready to remain silent about the oppression of half of its population, a portion of society that is bigger than any other minority?

A few weeks ago, there was a report on the CNN about the virginity tests conducted on the female protesters in the Tahrir square, with the pretext that authorities did not want the women that were arrested to accuse them of raping them. The procedure in itself did not upset me as much as the following statement by a general in the army did: “The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine. These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs).”The fact that these women entered the banned zone of political protests made them a target for the authorities’ hostility.  The claim that moral/religious codes were breached (drinking, sleeping with strangers), was enough to make the sanctity of their bodies violable.   

All over the world, sexual abuse, or accusations of moral indecency, are the most common ways of oppressing women.  Often, they are very much interrelated, for accusations of moral indecency alone can justify sexual violence.  There was another story about female protesters in Egypt being sexually harassed by male citizens, and while in the first story the aggressor is the state, in the second, they are citizens, who, like in the first instance, found it justifiable that they could molest the female protesters because they broke an established order. The two stories underline basically the same doctrine: breaking the order set by a phallocentric authority and threatening its dominance justifies the assault over ‘women’s boundaries’. That these protesters were asking for equal civil rights for all citizens and for the rejection of discriminatory laws based on ethnicity, religion or gender, makes their personal boundaries a matter not of their own. Sexual violence is the perfect instrument through which a dominant culture can put those women transgressing conventions back to where they belong. It is believed that the state instils the forms and the tools of oppression from the cultural and social texture of the nation it governs, so that if a society is governed by discrimination against a certain group, the state’s oppression is going to target that group more than the others, and if a society is patriarchal, the state will also show a biased attitude against women. However, I believe the opposite is also true, for this is a two-way coercion: the violations of the state can justify the violations carried out by individuals against others as these two stories show, and women have to face and challenge a multi-layered oppression before vanquishing gender discrimination.

Another important problem is the laxity in the engagement of political parties when they deal with the question of gender. In the discourse of political parties in Tunisia for instance, women are present. Always.  Although they differ in the ways they approach the matter of gender in the country, they all agree that ‘they are not going to abolish the code of personal status.’  You may ask, what is in the code that makes them all agree upon preserving it? It is true the code is a unique text of its type in the whole Arab world, as it was inspired by civil laws more than by Islamic chariaa. But What I personally think is that political parties are trying to pertain to the popularity (or notoriety) of the code, and not to its efficiency.  We have barely heard, since the times of Habib Bourguiba, -the man who implemented the C.P.S- of anything like asking women to participate in crucial decisions related to gender on a mass scale, and several social commentators are wondering whether a text with a similar magnitude could be regarded as a victory for women if it did not consult those who were concerned. Post revolution political debates are still extensions of an old political discourse that tried to define the Tunisian woman as the liberal westernised prototype, and they seem to forget about the richness and variety of the social backgrounds and the aspirations of women.  Rural women in Tunisia for instance are largely ignored, even though they represent a very large portion of the female population, and even though their predicaments are really serious: they work sometimes twice as long as men and gain smaller wages, they are the main supporters of their families and they do not have control over their wages. Despite that, they are invisible, and media and politics seem not to notice them at all.  They are part of a dying culture, but they, very much like their female offspring who will or will not continue to live in the rural parts, and like their sisters in the rest of the region, are alive and they need above everything an independent engagement that goes beyond flirting with the values of the patriarchal society and state.  

VIRGINITY, AGAIN AND AGAIN

VIRGINITY, AGAIN AND AGAIN

Why is Virginity a Political Issue?
A few days ago, I watched the CNN report on the female Egyptian protesters who were detained after the March 9^th protests and subjected to virginity tests.  If you think this is surprising and if you are wondering about what virginity tests have to do with political protests, then the following extract from the CNN website may clarify it for you:

"The girls who were detained were not like your daughter or mine," [a] general said. "These were girls who had camped out in tents with male protesters in Tahrir Square, and we found in the tents Molotov cocktails and (drugs)."

The general said the virginity checks were done so that the women wouldn't later claim they had been raped by Egyptian authorities.

"We didn't want them to say we had sexually assaulted or raped them, so we wanted to prove that they weren't virgins in the first place," the general said. "None of them were (virgins)."

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/meast/05/31/egypt.virginity.tests/

Now there are two things to remember. First, the girls who were subjected to the tests were not like ‘daughters of yours or mine’, that is, girls of an inferior order:  they (supposedly) drank, slept with male protesters, in short, they are not different from prostitutes, and that is enough to divest them of their dignity according to the general.  The fact that they were already not virgins in the first place, makes the act even more justifiable.

Second, the target of the virginity tests was to prove that the girls were not raped by authorities.  In other words, virginity or its absence is the only, and really the only way to prove sexual abuse according to the authorities. If sexual abuse takes place in any other way that does not include vaginal penetration, then too bad for the girls, there is nothing they can prove.  And even if they can prove it, it will not probably count as a crime, simply because it kept ‘virginity’ intact.  The general certainly knows that routine forensic examinations can easily reveal other types of sexual abuse, but for him to say what he said, he understands very well that to be accountable, one has to avoid messing with ‘virginity’ and take freedom with everything else.

Finally, if virginity can only be revealed through a medical examination that can isolate those who had intercourse from those who had not, then we should deduce that in this context, virginity is a term strictly related to women, and that male virgins is a term that does not exist in the glossary of the general.

Perforated:

What reverberates in this report is a very old story.  That politics have recourse to virginity tests is not something new, virginity has often been the primary test used to twist the arms of its victims, if victims are women.  I am not claiming that these arrests were made on sexist and discriminatory grounds, (they targeted both male and female protesters), but I am pointing to the fact that humiliating a man is different from humiliating a woman, for to chasten a woman, it is enough to appeal to her fallen nature. 

The insistence on the intactness of the hymen is an insistence on keeping the structure and the flawlessness of the social order. For the male honour to remain intact, this membrane MUST be kept intact.  If whole civilisations were brought up on the idea that honor of the whole community depends on virginity, then no doubt societies will wage wars to defend its chastity, because perforated bodies cause people to panic.

It reminded of the panic that seized the world when the ozone depletion was discovered. I was still a child when the discovery was made in 1984, and like many children of my age who did not yet know what the story was, I was struck with terror that was even greater than that of scientists and ecologists, for when you tell a child that a layer is perforated, he or she can only think of the ozone as a sort of material shield, made of some sort of substance -maybe plastic- that surrounds the earth, something in the likeness of  a thin, transparent and elastic cover. From there, we, humans, have been for thousands of years watching the heavens and contemplating the starts orbiting beyond our world, in the remote darkness of outer space. My diligent imagination also led me to deduce that whenever human beings wanted to launch their spaceships, rockets and aircrafts or to visit outer space, some sort of opening must be created in the body of the ozone to let flying objects in and out, before closing the opening behind them just as it was opened. Inside it, we humans were the preserved, protected and most precious kind that had been created by God.

It is only later that I learned that the ozone is not a tangible shield, but a mass of gas that surrounds the earth, and it was not only the innocence of childhood that led me to breed similar thoughts, but also the mad ideas and stories that mass fear and imagination produced - like the story of the gigantic balloon that would be made and sent into the sky to block the hole- in a reaction to something that was still mysterious to many people at that time.  Of course, all this should be combined with a considerable dosage of ignorance.

As I reflect on this now, I can say that the inaccurate interpretations related to the nature of the ozone was chiefly caused by the type of language, metaphors and figurative styles, that people used to describe the phenomena.  Our use of language is often innovative, unpredictable, and funny, and when the object of our description is something as vital and sensitive as one that touches our existence, the way we use language can become even more creative.

History is Honour, Future is Dignity:

Perhaps it was the discovery of the perforation that shifted the perception of people toward the ozone from a mass of gas, to a physical shield, because a perforation is an infection in the body of wholeness, a violation of compactness that led humans to feel exposed and unshielded below a fractured and God-forsaken sky.

I am giving this example because I believe that the language used to describe female virginity was also imparted by a large scale feeling of vulnerability, especially if we are talking about something as incomprehensible and mysterious as female sexuality. The time-old obsession with wholeness and perfection and the fear of holes, perforations and gaps made people entrust the duty of guarding social and moral codes to a thin membrane, as a way to keep alive the oldest scarecrows of families and societies.  With that, the meaning of chastity with its very moral core is entirely lifted from its spiritual context and placed on a tiny crust inside the female vagina, so that both men and women could internalise the idea that the approving eye of God was watching them through an unbroken virginity.

The west has known the chastity belt since medieval times, but Chahrayar, the hero of chastity, gives the East what an alternative chastity belt should be like, by marrying a virgin and killing her the next morning. The challenge for him, as it seems, was not to ensure no one had ever slept with the women, but that no one had ever slept with the vagina. The story centres on securing the king’s position, pride and supremacy through the wholeness and the intactness of chastity, even if it means slaying a woman each night. 

The obsession with virginity crumbles down to an ancient fear of the mystery female sexuality. It is no longer surprising that through virginity women are requested to submit a report about their sexual activity that should necessarily start at marriage, while male sexual life is allowed to go undetected.  I do not know exactly when or where the first human tribe decided to use marriage as a virginity test, but I am sure it is something very old, older than religion itself, and it had to not only with social order, but also with the interests of power.  The sacredness of women’s sexual power which had been highly associated with life and fertility in ancient beliefs, was very quickly smothered by a death sentence pronounced by patriarchy.

 Patriarchy is too old to detect, it may have started when the myth of the Mother Goddess was replaced by the myth of the Father God, and solidified when the Roman Empire wrote the first law that legitimised the banishment and punishment against fallen women, and later appended it to the sacred discourse of religion, paving the way for the civilisations that arrived later to do the same.

Negative attitudes about the depravity of the female goddess reverberate till later ages, when western and eastern cultures, philosophies, and religions from the classic age up to the present moment produced one report after the other about the abomination of female sexuality.  The demonisation of female sexuality was manifest through the vilification but also the mutilation of female genitalia.  Clitoridectomy, the most common form of female genital mutilation was also known in western societies, especially in the nineteenth century, under the hood of science that regarded the clitoris as the source of several ailments, like dementia and hysteria. The same scientific male figures of authority explained that the causes of hysteria could also be traced through the examination of, guess what, the hymen.

So much weight for a small, flimsy membrane.

Even though the west seems to have got over the issue of virginity in the first part of the twentieth century, popular culture still reflects the residues of a demonised female sexuality. In the Arab world the question of virginity remains very critical and so embarrassing to talk about that so many people doubt whether they should discuss it openly or secretly, and that  it is almost always left undiscussed in the end.  And whenever it is discussed in public, it is done with moral overtones and implied warnings to young girls. Popular culture and media in the Arab world, especially movies, have often showed us fallen women who fret over the loss of their virginity, and though those movies may appeal to the viewers’ sympathy, this sympathy often involves the kind of pity and understanding we are invited to have toward criminals whose unhappy lives pushed them to become criminals.

The seriousness of this stance is that it treats those women as though they are some kind of guilty segment of society who are not very different from prostitutes (and many female protagonists in movies turn into prostitutes after their first illicit sexual affair, implying there is no way out).  Women whose sexual activity is their own choice do not seem to exist at all in those movies, history has been suckling us only narratives of shame and disgrace, of meanings reduced to objects, of symbols turned into authorities. To submit a woman to a virginity test, whether it is done by a police officer or by her husband, is a disgrace to women, but it is a disgrace to men more than women. What thousands of women who have survived crimes of honour and who have been subjected to the humiliation of the virginity test really need today is not payback, but justice, and justice is when our children in the future are no longer reared on the wrong stories about woman, when women’s dignity becomes more important than men's honour.

About KHOLKHAL, or The Woman on the Moon

       About KHOLKHAL, or 'The Woman on the Moon'

When I was a child and when I still had a lot of time to do many things, I used to enjoy spending long hours lying on my back on the grass on summer nights to contemplate the moon.  During those hours, my sisters sometimes joined me, and we would find a great resemblance between the moon and a woman’s face, especially on days when it was full.  When the moon was not full, the face of the woman would look slightly bent on one side, with sad eyes and a mouth curved with grief.   We used to call it ‘The Crying Woman’ and though we knew even at that age that the moon is merely a desert planet orbiting around the earth, we used to see in that semblance a doorway onto a greater mystery.  Until this day, I still see that face, even though looking at the moon is a ritual that I do less and less frequently.

The word moon in standard Arabic is a masculine word, yet in my vernacular mother tongue it is feminine, "gamra”. We compare a beautiful woman to the moon, never a handsome man, it is a strictly feminine comparison.  Maybe my ancestors identified the same resemblance that I and my sisters used to see after all. But this is not all. The association of the moon with the feminine side is very old as you may know, for the moon was the mother goddess who, before any other mighty father god became prevalent, was responsible for bringing life and fertility to both women and the earth, harmony and balance to all living creatures and natural cycles.

But the tales that were handed down to us from generation to generation, told by our very grandmothers full of wisdom, were surprisingly about evil mother goddesses.  When children disobeyed their parents, I remember that they would be told that God would hang them in the heavens as He did with the woman who disobeyed Him. In the folk beliefs of my culture, that story was believed to be true by some stubborn adults who did not trust science. That woman, we were told, was still there, and we were still able to see her and learn from her story a lesson in obedience: she was the moon.   I heard and read many other similar stories from cultures from all over the world.

As I grew up and started reading more about the mother goddess, I discovered the remains of an old, dying world that existed at a time when women once lived in harmony not only with their world, but also with their woman-ness, that very woman-ness which women bore as a badge of shame throughout different stages of history, as patriarchy suckled them with stories about their fallen nature since early childhood.

The woman on the moon was punished by being taken to a faraway forgotten prison and left there, locked in her silence.  The moon, which, once upon a time, had been the natural home of the woman, her nurturing soul, has now become her prison. The old wisdoms that were once part of matriarchal societies and which reconciled women to their nature and prepared them for the different challenges of life, became part of a shameful past that women struggle to smother; that which has once constituted the golden age of womanhood has become their disgrace.

Throughout different stages of their lives, whether it is the promises of young age or the challenges of old age, that wisdom accompanied them and put a hand on their shoulders and told them to look at the world through the eyes of a woman without being afraid or ashamed. Things became different after women started being fed the wrong stories about themselves, stories which they believed most of the time.  Under the influence of these stories, they comply when they are asked to stay at home and do nothing but housework and taking care of children because they are told they cannot do jobs predestined for men, they are asked to do their best to remain sexy and to push away the ghost of old age as best as they could, and they are even pushed into a harsh world of wild competition and asked to be part of a rat race in the name of female liberalism that does not at all answer her personal sense of success.

I am not against women who strive to reach professional success, nor against those women who identify with a life of a housewife, but I am against the mass manipulation of women to drive them into one of those categories against their choices, and most of all, against the creed that they should sacrifice one vision of life at the expense of another.  

Through this blog, I am answering a gnawing urge and an old call that has been living inside me for a long time, to unearth the golden bust lost and buried in the mud, to bring to the modern women the essence of their grandmother’s wisdom, in order to give them power, strength and insight to face today’s challenges, and to make them aware of the multiple dimensional source from which they originated. 

My deepest gratitude to my twin sisters for their love and support, for being the first two women who lied on the grass with me to contemplate the crying woman on summer nights, for unleashing their imaginations and refusing to believe that the woman on the moon was evil, for being the first two persons who shared with me the compassion instead of disparagement for the first fallen woman we met, and finally for their patience and ingenuity during our long conversations.  

For encouraging me to write, I am   profoundly indebted to my sister Bibo.