Sawt al Niswa | صوت النسوة - alternative arab feminism

Aren’t we alone?

Anonymous — Tue, 12 Jun 2018 12:42:15 +0000

Yoru

Aren’t we alone?

Aren’t we alone when we run behind the doors, catching breaths we couldn’t take a minute before? When we come back from a meeting where everyone thought things were alright and yet we still had that suffocating pain in our throats because we felt like crying but couldn’t? Can we be safe to feel whatever we might feel? Would it stand in the way of our collective objectives and deadlines? Aren’t we alone when we can’t allow ourselves the time to shake off our personal burdens because bigger issues have to be prioritized?

Aren’t we alone when we get old and find ourselves in need of other’s assistance regardless of our researches, publications, achievements and of how many people we marked? Aren’t we alone if we fear that one can steal someone else’s work and appropriate it? Aren’t we alone if our efforts and work can go easily unnoticed and redirected towards another end? Aren’t we alone when we work without credits from our own people? And if we have been bitten by the same spider twice in the same place and still have to sleep beside it because of the movement?

Aren’t we alone if we need to hide some opinions because there won’t be a way to discuss them openly enough or time to allow them to transform organically into harmony? Aren’t we alone wondering how to face others with this un-feminist thought we’re stuck with? Aren’t we alone if we have to think about the validity of our thoughts and feelings in a feminist discussion?

We are alone, my friend. We are alone because our interactions are calculated and measured by external criteria and priorities that aren’t ours only. Where did we lose the people and how can we weave sustainable roots to harmonize the personal with the collective?

I now understand why people behave better in great distress than they do in times of rest; it’s because they have nothing to protect. Aren’t we missing the point if we wait for great distress to step over obstacles we sneaked around before? And is it by losing the cautiousness that we offer the best solidarity?

Where does the “I” go?

Ain’t I alone when I have to deny my own hurt for the sake of the bigger goal?

Ain’t I alone when I just want to burst but hold my breath not to afford a collective misinterpretation or misunderstanding?

Ain’t I alone when i have to be on guard while talking to peers with the same principles and objectives I have?

Ain’t I alone when others judge my stand points and forget the story behind them? Ain’t I alone in the fears and worries that lead me to where I stand now?

I am alone because I am distant and because distances are hard to travel. The shortest distances seem the least necessary to be crossed and places seem too familiar that we forget to look closely at them with time.

We are alone when feminism happens only in and for the public. When people say: “you never show up” instead of “you are missed” or “are you ok?”

We are alone when we only exist as a feminist production machine. What happens when we shut down? When we – just as any human – decide to rest or just can’t go on doing whatever we are doing? What happens to the load of responsibility and the guilt related to all those who walked before us? The pressure not to let them down or put their enormous struggles to rest… what happens to the constant reminder that things are not easy and never were?

Why would I be tired if all these women who have been in greater struggles, and still are, just kept and keep going? How can I validate my rest? And who would wait for it? Will the movement wait? Will it wait for me? Do I want the movement to wait for me or do I prefer it just keeps going without me being in the way?

In the layer between us and ourselves, there is always this alone-ness; sometimes it draws us back and sometimes it keeps us sane.

We are alone and that’s fine.

Sometimes we need to stay on our couches and watch the sun rise and set. We need to be kind to ourselves even when the movement requires constant confrontations. We are already faced with obligatory confrontations every day and without the least consideration to how we were doing in our heads and hearts before them. Do we need to replicate within ourselves the crushing load we receive from daily struggles? Do we really need to push ourselves further when we need to breathe instead? The movement can’t wait but what is a movement that can’t go on without us? And what about the women who do not contribute to it? Are they excluded because they couldn’t find a way to hop in?

Feminism is not a job, nor a membership hub. It is not deactivated when you get lazy or can’t get hold of things in your life. It is only put in question when you are not considerate to others around you in the same fight. We should only be accountable when we contribute to someone’s injustice, otherwise, we are contained and fine within the safe arms of the movement we believe in.

We are alone, with no guilt or pressure and the hope is to build a movement that is fine before and after us, inside and outside and all around, a movement that thinks about each one of us but not about one of us, a movement that knows how we are and surrounds us when we need, a movement that is safe for everyone, anytime.

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Transformations: Snapshots from a Modern Myth

deema kaedbey — Wed, 23 Dec 2015 14:15:44 +0000

Deema Kaedbey

I come from the side of the land, from semi-dry soil and rocks, from oak and pine trees, she tells herself. The rain nourishes me. There is a stream flowing through me, a familiar part of the landscape that I do not even notice on most days.

But she was always afraid of the sea and its depth.

She came to the sea when she started to feel again. Love, pain, her body, its longings. On the beaches of Sour and Batroun, she approached the waves like a worshipper in despair, praying to heal her soul. A few years later, she was still a worshipper, but also more of a tourist. She spent a few hours at the beach, but mostly tanning by a pool. She marveled at the sea’s calmness and its aggressiveness. She took mental pictures of it. But like a tourist she wasn’t ready or wasn’t able to be part of it. She could not yet let go and fully trust the waters.

At a private coastal resort in Khalde, where she went alone because it was the middle of the week and her usual companions were at work, Amal was reminded that the sea does not hide its history for anyone’s convenience. And the history of this shore was clear in its pollution. It was only her second trip to the beach this year, and because her need for communion with the salty water was stronger than her better judgement, she carried a few drops in her palms and released them on her head and neck, burning under the August sun. But she could not wash her face as she had wanted to.

In the back of her mind, Amal carried all the stories that she had once heard of violence against the waters: in 1988, hundreds of barrels of toxins from Italy were sent off to Lebanon, thrown into its sea and its mountain streams, or used by the people as food and water containers*; in 2003, the cement-plant Holcim spilled fuel into Chekka’s shore; in 2006, Israel’s bombing of the Jiyyeh plant unleashed more oil into the sea. And many more stories of destruction, like the brown water and the shreds of blue and black plastic bags floating around her. These were stories she had recounted to her students during her many digressions from the assigned school textbooks.

What she would shortly realize was that water has not numbed itself to knowing, despite the violence against it, that every drop of water is aware of the story of every other drop on this planet. Every drop knows as much of what happens on the Lebanese coast as it does of oil spillages in the Niger Delta, of toxic wastes in the rivers of New Mexico, and of acid rain falling on industrial cities around the world.

As she gathered her beach gear into her blue gym bag and was about to head home, she closed her eyes and had a strong feeling that she was running back to the sea, diving in, zigzagging her way like an eel, at first struggling, then swimming freely. When she opened her eyes a few minutes later, it was like she had been in the sea for hours, had become part of the water, not through reading about environmental issues or meditating from the safety of her beach bed, but by living it. She wrapped the towel around her body again, her skin convinced that it was dripping wet.

II.

It was a Sunday morning with its Sunday rituals. Amal was sipping matti with her middle sister, quieter than they would be during the week, because they always spoke and laughed less when their father was in the same room. Her youngest sister was still sleeping. Their mother came into the living room, massaging her hands, having spent the last twenty minutes in the garden outside. The three women smiled at each other, sharing a mental joke about the father, who was watching the news as his fingers played with the dark brown masba7a. But Amal could read more of her mother’s mind than the joke. She knew that five minutes ago, her mother was cutting mint with the knife, as the water from the hose ran to the roots of her plants. She knew that her mother had tears in her eyes because of an unresolved argument with her husband from a week ago. And she also knew that her mother mumbled a prayer to calm herself. It was not a recitation of an old prayer, not one of those verses that women copy on a little paper and keep in their purses for guidance and protection. It was her mother’s personal prayer that came as much from the mint, the knife, the tears, and the earth, as it did from her religious learnings.

Amal, the oldest sister, twirled the dragon pendent that was hanging from her neck, as she did when she was anxious or drifting with her thoughts. At twenty nine, she was starting her second year as a history teacher at a private school in a suburb of Beirut, fifty minutes away from her parents’ home where she still spent every weekend. Many of her students loved her because she went beyond textbooks and she really listened to them. But she was also repeatedly questioned, almost reprimanded, by the school principle and by some older teachers for what she taught and how she taught it.

She felt confined by the spaces she occupied, her home, her neighborhood, the Teachers’ Room. All around her were quibbles, between her parents, between her youngest sister and her mother, between her middle sister and her father; teachers who were stuck in their old ways, sexism in almost every conversation, neighbors gossiping at each other; friends she had her first years of university, who had carried each other’s bad habits a little too long and were now unable to see anything but the flaws in each other. Closing in on her were relationships that had once been love, blood kinships, or close companions, but were now sites of many cold and open wars. Gossip or the threat of it at every turn. No move was safe, innocent or welcoming. She caught herself going through every word she had said or did not say to make sure she would not be deliberately or unintentionally misunderstood.

But then again there was definitely something different. Moving closer to the center of her life was a desire for a woman she had recently met. It had been twelve years since her cravings towards women shocked and confused her, so the feelings were no longer new nor confusing. But this felt like a stronger, maybe more meaningful kind of desire. Then there were her two close friends, the ones who had opened the door for Diana to come into her life; they were also women who saw more than they were taught to see, and talked about more than what she had previously been given a chance to express.

And in the midst of frustrations at home and work, her middle sister, Rihal, was the one who must have sensed some change in her, because she was beginning to share private issues with her for the first time since they were both teenagers. She was embarrassed to admit that she too had undermined her sister, because she was the least academically inclined of her sisters. Rihal was the one who had once been most expected to go to business school and take on her father’s job. Though Rihal did major in business, she hated it and did not do well at it. But Amal found out that while she was passionate about the old stories of her people, Rihal was learning old forms of carrying these stories. Rihal was interested in calligraphy and zajal and Arabic poetry, though she didn’t know what to do with it, and felt like all she was doing was copying. Copying men. But Amal encouraged her to keep going.

All Amal could do was notice everything that was happening around her, especially the slow transformations in her, the remarkable changes that were folded within the monotony of her days that it was not always easy to appreciate them.

III.

The dragon feels itself turning into a woman again when the fire in its belly calms.

She feels depressed right after she has transformed back into her human state. She has to get used to the mundane, to time, to walking, to her hands instead of claws and her wings.

It is only much later, ironically, after she began to settle into the mundane and to listen to the sounds of the everyday, that she can begin transforming again. After she has re-learned to trust the serene voice rather than the anxieties throbbing in her stomach and muscles. At first, she turns into a cat. That happened right before her relationship with her girlfriend turned sour, when she had a hunch that all was not alright. Five months later, after they had broken up and when she was starting to accept all that had transpired, when the memories of her failed relationship became a simple sigh, she lived as an owl for a few hours of the night.

But it will take many months before the fire in her belly will rise again. It will not be, as she had imagined it would happen, when she became angry at her father for intimidating her sister Rihal, or when the principle of her school openly smirked at her in front of her colleagues. It will also not happen following the pride she felt when a group of her students gave her a letter expressing how much they appreciated her. Instead, the transformation will come like faith, a surrender to who she is, like taking off her masks and her burdens. It will come when she can see every emotion, when she can trace it calmly as it moves in her body and wraps around another feeling, around some memories, around certain people.

Then she will feel her wings flap fiercely, she will fly, and she will breathe exhilarated blazes into the air.

*From Karim Makdisi’s “The Rise and Decline of Environmentalism in Lebanon.” Oxford Scholarship Online: 17. See also

http://al-akhbar.com/node/24556 بانة بيضون. "ماهر أبي سمرا يبحث في بداية تشكل العنف البيئي."

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Shadow Feminism in Lebanon, Part Two

deema kaedbey — Mon, 27 Jul 2015 10:59:11 +0000

Deema Kaedbey

deema kaedbey

In Part I of “Shadow Feminism in Lebanon,” I discussed some of the histories of women's labor organizing that reverberate in feminist thought and actions in Lebanon to this day. In Part II, I turn my attention to women's resistance to occupation and state violence. As in part I, my understanding of time is not as linear and one-directional, but as cyclical or serpentine, where the present holds its pasts and its possible futures together, and where different time periods and geographies are interrelated.[1]

I see some aspects of this non-linearity in contemporary feminist writings, such as in those that seek to understand the past and how it’s influencing the present moment, and in writings that unearth and highlight forgotten histories. In one instance for example, when Israel attacked the activist flotilla that was carrying aid to Gaza in 2010, Palestinian Lebanese feminist Sara Abu Ghazal wrote how the pain she felt the moment she heard the news of the flotilla was in fact very familiar and old. It was a history that “was passed on to me from [my] grandfather.” That is, the flotilla triggered memories of Palestinian expulsion from their land. About her grandfather's pain, Abou Ghazal wrote:

He carried it for a few months, and just like all pregnancies, he delivered it with an even greater pain. He had acknowledged that he lost something, not a land, but a history (Sawt Al Niswa).

Thus, through connecting past and present grief, Abu Ghazal shows that one tragic story of the deaths on the flotilla contains within it another story that is one “point of origin” and frame of reference to all these narratives: that of the loss of Palestine and the constant Israeli attempts to repress and distort Palestinian history.^{^[2]} “We are born each time we die,” Abu Ghazal states, as she connects multiple past and present realities, linking too the breaking of the siege on Gaza, BDS and her grandfather’s story.

With such non-linearity, the binary of past and present times are no longer clear-cut, where struggles, issues and themes are interconnected. This paper then presents a shadow feminism that does not turn away from people in prisons, but recognizes that the violence inside prison represents the intensification of social hierarchies and violence outside it. Queer politics, for example, recognizes that working class queer people, sex workers and other marginalized bodies are the ones who are most likely to experience violence from state institutions.

As Ghoulama, a queer Lebanese activist writes, it is not middle class self-identified queer activists who are at the forefront of state harassment and assault, but working class people (many of them immigrants and refugees) who have no safe spaces to meet (Helem website).^{^[3]} “Queerness” is also a concept I have been influenced by, not only in terms of LGBT-centered identities and politics, but in paying attention to how class, ethnicity and citizenship, as well as gender and sexuality are important factors that decide who is protected from violence and who is not. My framework is therefore inspired by from the tradition of women of color and queer of color critiques. Women of color in the U.S have always been and continue to be on the forefront of theorizing about the intersections of oppressions and the importance of paying attention to state violence, including the violence of imprisonment.[4]

Here, I start with a discussion of militant women’s resistance in prisons, as they were held for resisting Israeli occupation. In the 1980's, in the context of internal war and Israel's invasion of Lebanon, women participated in both militant resistance. Though militancy meant, for many women, questioning or dismissing domesticity, as Julie Peteet observed of Palestinian women in Lebanon (153), still, the sewing needle-- a symbol of domesticity (and daintiness), took on new meanings for militant women in prisons. Yet I also expand the scope of shadow feminism by paying attention to the situation of women and queered bodies in more recent times.

Needles, Pens and Guns: Resistance of Women in Prisons

Prisons are one of the most militarized of zones, yet they are also the most grossly confined by routine. I include prison resistance here for two reasons. Many Palestinian and Lebanese women who took part in militant (and non-militant) struggle against Israeli occupation after its 1978 invasion of Lebanon were imprisoned in Israeli-controlled, Lebanese-run, prisons in then-occupied South Lebanon. Secondly, women in prisons are often forgotten in feminist discourse. Thus incorporating them into feminist consciousness is part of the methodology of remembering marginalized resistance that I foreground in this study. Prisons, after all, are sites of resistance to violence and gender hierarchies.

In this section, through a reading of Suha Bechara’s prison memoir, Resistance: My Life for Lebanon, and her co-edited collection of prison stories, أحلم بزنزانة من كرز, (I Dream of a Prison Cell [Made] of Cherries), I integrate experiences of women in prison into a queer antiracist feminist thought, which I call shadow feminism. Much of my focus will thus be on political prisoners in Khiam detention center, which was controlled by Israeli forces and their proxy militia in Lebanon—the South Lebanon Army (SLA). The feminist tactics of women in prison that I highlight include a refusal of shame, naming the torturers, giving “symbols of femininity” new and old meanings, as well as creating close relations with fellow prisoners.

Suha Bechara is arguably one of the most famous prisoners of Khiam, and here I read her narrative and that of her fellow prisoners through a lens that troubles violent gender hierarchies, as well as hierarchies between people inside prison and outside it. Bechara, who was a member of the Lebanese Communist party, took part in an operation where she attempted to assassinate the head of SLA, Antoine Lahed, in his house, after going undercover as his wife’s trainer. She was imprisoned for ten years, and was released in 1998. Five years later, she published her memoir. After Israel bombed Khiam into rubbles during the July 2006 attacks, she and Cosette Ibrahim, also a former Khiam prisoner, edited a collection of prison writings from Khiam, to preserve the memory of what happened there.

The Khiam detention center, in the Southern town of Khiam, was established by theFrench as a military post in 1933. Because it overlooked the North of Palestine, which was under British colonialism at that time, it was seen as having strategic significance to the French. Its strategic status declined after independence, when the Lebanese army took over, and the South became economically and politically insignificant to the central Lebanese government. However, with the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1978, Khiam became an interrogation center until the mid-1980s, when it was turned into a prison and detention center run by Israel and the SLA (Khiyam website).^{^[5]} In the midst of this loaded history, remembering the past becomes an integral part of women's resistance in prisons.

What theories can be adequate to bear witness and explain the stories of physical, verbal and emotional torture, the years of solitary confinement, the monotony and isolation, the censorship and lack of access to the basic necessities?^{^[6]} One anonymous contributor to I Dream of a Prison Cell of Cherries writes about the torture and its physical aftermaths, describing how the blue marks from the whippings and from the electric shocks remain for many months.

Torture changes the women's relationship to their bodies:

We do not care about the color of our bodies or its rapid weight loss or its odor. Only the pain it suffers and that distant cry in us takes hold of us. Everything in us hurts and everything around us hurts… The return of menstrual cycle after months is the first sign that our bodies have recovered their balance (my trans. 136).

The violence of occupation and of patriarchy is magnified in prisons, to a degree that it breaks the body’s balance and menstrual cycles. Remembering what they have suffered is a political act for women, as they resist the shame in talking about their vulnerabilities and the invasion of their bodies (Abboud 5).

Hosn Abboud, writing about the prison memoir of Zainab Al Ghazali, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood activist, argues that the public naming of the prison guards and of the torturers is a political act (5). Al Ghazali, who was imprisoned from 1965 until 1971, provided a candid description of the bodily torture she endured as a political prisoner during Gamal Abd Al Nasser’s rule. Her testimony is therefore a refusal to be shamed and silenced, something that many political prisoners’ literature shares. Bechara and her fellow prisoners, too, like many women of the Palestinian resistance in Lebanon (Bechara; Bechara and Ibrahim; Peteet 155), narrate their stories in order to push the physical and/or sexual violence against them out of the realm of the unspeakable and into their resistance narratives.

Prisons in Lebanon bring to the forefront existing violence and power structures, and the lack of accountability for this violence. It can also reveal the way women resistthese dehumanizing circumstances. Resistance can be direct and visible, but it may be kept hidden intentionally. In other words, while some prisoners have the ability, or choose to accept the consequences of direct confrontation, others choose to resist in less visible means. Caesarina Kona Makhoere, for instance, incarcerated under the South African apartheid system, stated that the government, and the prison authorities, do not listen “until you take action... you must hit them hard” (41). Makhoere and her fellow prisoners' main strategy “was to nag them with all our complaints, and, if nothing was done, then we took action.” The actions they took included hunger strikes and refusing to wear the clothes they were given (34). With these tactics, women confront prison authorities with direct defiance.

At times, however, indirect challenges to the institution are considered more effective. In Khiam, it was mainly the new prisoners who carved leftist slogans on the walls, and who were punished for their act. Many of the veteran inmates, on the other hand, engraved their defiant slogans where it could not be seen and in tiny letters (Bechara 91), because it may not have been worth the trouble. In other words, women's bravery does not always have to be loud, and some prisoners chose their battles. Furthermore, effective means of resisting can also include trying to maintain a degree of normalcy and finding meaningful routine in the women’s lives (Nusair; Agah et al).

In Khiam too, finding innovative ways to document and communicate prisoners’ experiences, is a means of resistance kept intentionally hidden. Women wrote journal entries on toilet paper (Bechara 91). For prisoners in solitary confinement, devising instruments for communication became the focus of resistance.^{^[7]} Prisoners found ways to make needles and pens out of wires, and to turn pieces of cardboard from cheese boxes into writing pads. One prisoner narrated how they made sewing needles out of an electric wire, following a long trial and error process. After the success of this invention, the needles became part of their rituals. The women presented the needles to newly arrived prisoners, for example, to honor those women who went through torturous interrogations without betraying their colleagues (Ibrahim and Bechara 60-1). Therefore, sewing needles, a symbol of female domesticity, were used by militant women, who often challenge gendered social expectations, as a symbol of much-needed normalcy. Yet at the same time, it is also used as a symbol of surviving the violence of torture.

The title of the story I refer to above is “in the beginning was the needle” (my translation). This title is a play on the biblical phrase “in the beginning was the word,” creating an alternative origin story centered on the needle, a “feminine” tool. After all, words cannot mark any beginnings if a person is in solitary confinement and is not able communicate with anyone. When the beginning is the needle, it becomes a symbol of imprisoned women’s ability to be part of the world, to communicate with it, and to resist solitariness. The redirection into an alternative origin story bears a resemblance to the way Abu Ghazal uses metaphors of pregnancy and birthing to describe her grandfather’s pain, putting the loss of Palestine as one origin story that challenges the erasure of certain narratives by those in power; it also implies that the militant and the mundane are not polar opposites but can be interconnected.

And if publicly remembering the torture, the torturers, and the isolation of prison is a political and feminist act, so too is the naming of fellow prisoners a politicized tactic of resistance. In the collection of prison stories, I Dream of a Cell Made of Cherries, while the authors are anonymous, they do document the names of their peers in the footnotes, along with the names of their hometowns and the number of years they have spent in jail. The collection therefore aims at remembering the names of women prisoners such as Kifah Afifi, from Palestine, Samar Alleeq from Arnoun, Wafiqa Aleeq from Yohmor, Haniyya Ramadan from Beit Yahoun, Amena Diab of Hawla, Hanan Khoury from Deir Mimas.

Another common theme in women’s prison writings is the importance of strong coalitions among women, often transgressing ideological divisions. These friendships are described by prisoners as therapeutic, acting as emotional anchors, and giving women a sense of purpose (Agah et al. 206). While strong relations between women ensure their survival, in these spaces of enforced gender segregation among prisoners, violent heteropatriarchy is evident as a segregating and disciplining mechanism (Alexander 192). In Khiam, the only men that the women interact with are their guards, who are often their torturers, while the men and women prisoners are kept segregated. In I Dream of a Cell, the women narrate stories of their attempts to break this segregation, by catching a glimpse of each other, or hearing each others' voices. And even as the prison reinforces a gender hierarchy between the women prisoners and the guards, torture creates a sense of gender equality and solidarity between the inmates themselves.

Zainab Al Ghazali, criticizing Abed Al Nasser’s socialist party, described “the socialist nature of torture اشتراكية التعذيب" —or better translated from Arabic as the unity of torture, among all inmates, irrespective of gender, age, and education” (qtd. in Abboud 11-2). This unity of torture is evident in my own research on women in Lebanese prisons, be they political prisoners or common law prisoners. It is not only in prisons run by Israel (though the Khiam guards were in fact Lebanese) where abuse of women and men happened. Furthermore, torture was not only a war-time practice, but continued across Lebanese prisons, creating confined war zones long after the fighting stopped.[8]To think of prisons as war zones allows us to see the different ways that women are victimized during wars; but it also ensures that we address not only the end of physical manifestations of violence, but all the structures and systems that allow violence, including the violence of confinement, to occur. In addition, Peteet notes that Palestinian militant women in Lebanon who experienced abuse in prisons, for example, were respected in their communities (156). Yet generally, women in prisons, especially women from socially and politically marginalized communities, are not afforded equal respect.

After of the end of the war and occupation, and to this day, life in Lebanese prisons remains horrific, and abuse is still prevalent. Prisons in the post-war period are overcrowded and the women are cut off from the world and held incommunicado, despite the illegality of these practices.^{^[9]} Whereas the law states that detainees should be released if they do not see a magistrate within the first 24 hours, the women are held for weeks before being interrogated (11). In the 1990s, political prisoners, whether they were accused of “collaboration with Israel” or engaging in activities “critical of the Syrian occupation,” were also subjected to torture, sexual abuse, and sexually abusive language. There are reports of teenage girls as young as fifteen were held for years among adult prisoners, beaten and tortured. In addition, “women accused of common law offenses often risk being abandoned by their relatives” and thus do not have the financial ability to hire lawyers (Amnesty International, Report 2001, 10-20).

In addition, migrant women workers, who suffer various forms and levels of abuse in their workplace (mainly in Lebanese homes) also experience violence by state authorities. Women who escape their employers can end up in detention, forced to return to their abusive jobs, or “held incommunicado without charge or access to lawyers.” Many migrant women, even after being acquitted or serving their sentence, are sometimes forced to stay in prisons. Often, they have no financial means to buy their tickets home. The General Security holds them as foreigners who are “a threat to public safety” (20-2).^{^[10]} Additionally, women charged with prostitution may face torture, as do women held for “trivial charges” (21). While recent reports track minor improvements in prison conditions during the last ten years, the situation in prisons are still unacceptable (Nassar 81-91).

Beyond calling for reforms to prisons, a queer intervention here, brought forth by shadow feminism, can challenge the relationship between people on the inside of prisons and those who are outside them (Hammad, “Letter to Anthony”). Because the walls that separate those who are inside from those outside prisons are structural boundaries as much as they are physical. Speaking about people of color and the prison industrial complex (PIC) in the U.S, Palestinian American poet, Suheir Hammad, declares that there is no “difference between/the inside and the outside” when she highlights the links between the criminalization of people of color in the U.S face and those of Palestinians (“Letter to Anthony”).

In Lebanon, it a similar attention to state violence that had queer feminist activist, Ghoulama remind activists that it is working class people outside the norms of heteronormative sexual practices and gender identities who are the ones facing state violence. One case in point was the police raid on a “gay friendly” club in Dekwaneh, north of Beirut in May 2013. On that day, the Internal Security Forces raided the club, arresting and assaulting people, who were mainly Syrian immigrants. At the municipality headquarters, one of the arrested, a transgender person was “ordered to strip... to 'check whether she was a man or a woman'” (CSBR petition)

One queer feminist response was a petition and call to action to protest police violence. Importantly too, the activists did not see the attack only on LGBTs, but situated it within the context of violence by state security forces and political parties against homosexual men, sex workers, and political protestors (CSBR petition). These attempts at interlinking multiple struggles, communities, and understanding how histories of violence and resistance play out in the present are an integral part of what I read as shadow feminism in Lebanon. Importantly too, this paper has shown how shadow feminism pays attention to those who are marginalized in order to challenge sexual, gender, class and citizenship hierarchies and break patterns of marginalization.

Bibliography

N.P. “Tarikh Mo’taqal al Khiam.” Wo Tol Shway ‘al Khiam. http://www.khiyam.com/aboutkhiyam/kdc.php. Last accessed 27 July 2015.

Abu Ghazal, Sara. “Margaret Atwood: Lessons in Selling Out.” Sawt Al Niswa. 3 June 2010. Last accessed 14 April 2014.Abu Mjadeh, Fawzi. “A Nidaa 211: Mahatat Nidaliyya fi Tarikh al Tabaqa al Amila wa al Haraka al Niqabiyya.” Lebanese Communist Party. 8 May 2013. http://www.lcparty.org/website/index.php?option=com_content&id=2120:-211-. Last accessed 20 April 2014.

Alexander, Jacqui. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred. Durham: Duke UP, 2005.

Abboud, Hosn. “Al Sijin lil Nisa' Aydan: Zainab al Ghazali wa Ayyam min Hayati.” Bahithat: Out of the Shadows: Investigating the Lives of Arab Women Vol. IX. Beirut: Lebanese Association of Women Researchers, 2006. 268-89.

Agah, Azadeh et. al. We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women. Toronto: McGilligan Books, 2007.

Amnesty International. Torture and Ill-Treatment of Women in Pre-Trial Detention: A Culture of Acquiescence. London: International Secretariat, 2001.

Bechara, Suha. Resistance: My Life for Lebanon. Trans. Gabriel Levine. NY: Soft Skull Press, 2003.

---- and Cozette Ibrahim. Ahlamu bi Zinzanah min Karaz. Beirut: Dar al Saqi, 2011.

Black, Ian and Haroon Siddique. “Q and A: The Gaza Freedom Flotilla.” The Guardian 31 May 2010. Web. 9 May 2014.

Boyle-Watson, Carolyn. Peacemaking Circles and Urban Youth. St. Paul: Living Justice Press, 2011.

Chen, Ching-In et al, eds. The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence Within Activist Communities. NY: South End Press, 2011.

Coalition for Sexual and Bodily Rights in Muslim Societies (CSBR). “Solidarity Statement on Dekwaneh Abuse.” csbronline. 3 May 2013. Last accessed 15 Nov. 2014.

Davis. Angela. Are Prisons Obsolete? NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003.

Falcón, Sylvanna. “’National Security’ and the Violation of Women: Militarized Border Rape at the US-Mexico Border.” Color of Violence. Ed. Incite! Women of Color against Violence. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006.

Fernandes, Leela. Transforming Feminist Practice: Non-Violence, Social Justice and the Possibilities of a Spiritualized Feminism. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2003.

Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Ghoulama. “Niqash fi Aliyyat al Tanzim al Mithly wa Qawnanat al Jinsaniya fi Lubnan.” Helem May 2012 http://helem.net/?q=node/215 . Last accessed 15 April 2014.

Hammad, Suheir. “Letter to Anthony: Critical Resistance.” Mike Geffner Presents the Inspired Word. Youtube. 1 March 2011. Web. 12 Nov. 2014.

Incite! Women of Color against Violence. The Color of Violence: The Incite! Anthology. Cambridge: South End Press, 2006.

Khaldieh, Johayna. “Al Protocol al Molhaq b' Itifaqiyat Monahadat al Ta'azib: Mata Toqar Aliyyatuhu al Wiqa'iyya?” Assafir 30 March 2011.

Makhoere, Caesarina Kona. No Child's Play: In Prison Under Apartheid. London: The Women's Press, 1988.

Naples, Nancy. Grassroots Warriors: Activist Mothering, Community Work and the War on Poverty. NY: Routledge, 1998.

Nassar, Anita Farah. Dalil lil 'Amal Dakhil Sojoun al Nisa' fi Lubnan. Beirut: Institute of Women's Studies in the Arab World, 2011.

Nusair, Isis. “Gendered, Racialized and Sexualized Torture at Abu Ghraib.” Feminism and War: Confronting U.S Imperialism. Ed. Robin R. Riley, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Minnie Bruce Pratt. London: Zed Books, 2008.

-----. Rev. of We Lived to Tell: Political Prison Memoirs of Iranian Women, by Agah et al. Toronto: McGilligan Books, 2007.

Partamian, C. “An Armenian Perspective on the Flotilla: Euh, Erdogan, WHAT?” Uruknet: Information from Middle East. 16 June 2010. Last accessed 14 April 2014.

Peteet, Julie. Gender in Crisis: Women and the Palestinian Resistance Movement. NY: Columbia UP, 1992.

Sudbury, Julia ed. Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex. NY: Routledge, 2004.

Stanley, Eric E. and Nat Smith eds., Gender Captives: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011.

Sweeney, Megan. Reading is My Window: Books and the Art of Reading in Women's Prisons. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2010.

[1] See, for example, Jacqui Alexander’s discussion of a Time and the feminist interlinking of the political and the sacred (300-11)

[2] In my dissertation chapter I also look at how another feminist, C. Partamian, mobilized a cyclical concept of time in the wake of the attack on the flotilla to talk about the Armenian genocide and Turkish repression of Armenians and Turks http://www.uruknet.info/?p=67113. I link this incident too to documented histories of organizing by Armenian women in Lebanon.

[3] n.p. Helem English. n.d http://goo.gl/BjyTSJ

[4] The organizing of U.S Black feminists, as well as many women of color and indigenous feminists, against the prison industrial complex and for transformative justice offer crucial contributions to theorizing about the complicity of state institutions (from police, to prisons) in the violence of colonialism, heteropatriarchy, racism, imperialism and capitalism. See, for example, Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete. NY: Seven Stories Press, 2003; Incite! Women of Color against Violence, The Color of Violence: The Incite Anthology. Massachusetts: South End Press, 2006; Julia Sudbury, ed. Global Lockdown: Race, Gender and the Prison Industrial Complex. NY: Routledge, 2004. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis and Opposition in Globalizing California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. Eric E. Stanley and Nat Smith eds., Gender Captives: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex. Edinburgh: AK Press, 2011. Importantly, such theorizing is always looking for local alternatives to combating violence and holding perpetrators accountable (Incite; Chen et al; Boyes-Watson).

[5] n.p. Al Khiyam.http://www.khiyam.com/aboutkhiyam/kdc.php

[6] I use the term bearing witness as Leela Fernandes writes about it, as a (political/spiritual) feminist responsibility that breaks the dichotomy of theory and practice. Carolyn Boyes-Watson, in her book on Peacemaking Circles and

Urban Youth in the U.S, also talks about the power of witnessing in healing from personal and collective traumas (149).

[7] Megan Sweeney's Reading is My Window, complicates the idea of “fighting back” and direct resistance that often puts U.S women of color to prison in the first place (97-112)

[8]Sylvanna Falcón writes about the U.S-Mexico border as a war zone, in order to show how militarization ensures the continuation of unaccountable “militarized border rape” (Incite! Anthology 129)

[9] For a legal analysis of women in prison, see دليل العمل داخل سجون النساء في لبنان

[10] Amnesty International. Torture and Ill-Treatment of Women in Pre-Trial Detention: A Culture of Acquiescence. London: International Secretariat, 2001.

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Politics of Closeness and Alienation

sara — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 21:00:00 +0000

source unknown

Sara Emiline AbuGhazal

To Audre and Adrienne,

Prologue

Because a true vision holds much power, if it is not killed into this reality, it will have no place to go, and all its power will destroy the one who received it. A vision is a responsibility, and to kill the vision into reality is a complete act of power.

Dreaming the Council Ways, Okhy Simine Forest, p.92

I sit down to write to Audre and Adrienne a letter, and in this letter I mean to explain to them who I am, and what is my vision of womanhood and change. How do I insist that this notion of feminism is more ancient than the programs for economic empowerment, and how it goes beyond what we understand of violence in the modern world, that it extends to a memory I invoke by understanding my particular history, of this land and this culture, of knowing that I will continue to evolve as long as I unfold my ancestral roots, the forgotten history, where the feminine / female was sacred.

That this kind of feminism, if we wish to call it that, runs deeper in our blood than any other “identity,” that it allows me and many others to know that what they call an “act of rebellion” is nothing more than an instinctual pulse that we have followed. That regardless of what they say, and however they say it, what women have suffered from and continue to suffer from, is not normal. That patriarchy in its sectarian, national and capitalist faces will not fall down, until women, especially those in the south of the lands, change their consciousness and remember who they are and what they have always represented, that they meet, and create spaces free of that.

I wanted to write about the layers of identities, sexualities, class and privileges that prevent us from moving towards the ways of true change. How every time people use English my heart gets broken, as I feel our mother’s tongue is being cut over and over again, and we are forgetting what we are, and how to look at ourselves from that language in particular, and how we invent ourselves through it, distancing ourselves from what the colonialists told us. That I feel ashamed of having to write this in English, because many of my sisters choose the easy ways of communications, that the sum of what we know and we don’t know about is not being documented, that we often don’t practice what we preach.

That we are surrendering to the system, and it is luring us to a change that happens a certain way, into a revolution that fits the market, a revolution that doesn’t not challenge our brothers and sisters into an understanding of how working with feminists is not an issue of diversity; it is an issue of saying that your spaces, your attitudes and your actions are women “friendly,” that you don’t treat women in meetings as either princesses or as hysterical, as an object of love or as an object of liberation. That women’s spaces and their work is about shifting the paradigms of work and politics.

I have realized that I don’t have a vision, that the sum of my visions has been killing parts of myself. The parts where I’ve fought battles to cultivate. I realize that I’m so detached from the person I wanted to give birth to. We all give birth while we transform into the people we want to be, we mature in labor, while we struggle against conforming or holding onto our new-found beliefs.

We all understand that liberation and emancipation is an act of individuality, before it is an act of collectiveness. We all change, we all cultivate this change, adding to it and taking from it, so that we become what we are meant to become. To have visions is to have the desire to change, to have a desire means that the power to create hasn’t been taken away from you, and your chances of survival are stronger. We don’t live in the wilds to worry about survival, but we do live in a globalized economy, our identity crises are becoming more or less crises of consumers and consumerism. Can I afford this house? Could I afford this lifestyle?

To survive is to constantly make sure you can consume. I’ve consumed enough of the promoted individual lifestyle, I’ve consumed enough of love stories and emotions, I’ve consumed enough of activism. I’ve consumed enough of being an individual living in Beirut. I’ve consumed enough. I’ve consumed enough coffees at Younes’, and drinks in Hamra, I’ve consumed enough of polite greetings, I’ve consumed enough ways to tame my sexuality so it doesn’t freak people out, I’ve consumed enough betrayal from those who are confused about the difference between friendships and social networking. I’ve consumed enough of not being visible as the only Palestinian in a room, and that needs to count for something, I’ve consumed enough of being the token of diversity. I’ve consumed enough of promises of change. I’ve consumed enough of hatred because if we can’t deal with one another, then we’ve got to hate one another. I’ve consumed enough of avoiding connecting with anyone, because I’ve consumed enough experiences to learn that trust means honesty. I’ve consumed enough lies to understand that everything that we live amidst is a lie, that everyone consumed a little bit in it that it became our reality. I’ve consumed enough assimilation to fit in my Lebanese surrounding, that my need to return home had grown tremendously. I have an unmistakable urge of returning home. I want to get out of here, if “here” will not change.

Dear Adrienne and Audre,

I’m old as my wounds are, and they seem to be growing older but preserving their freshness. I’ve been meaning to write to you both, but now that Adrienne too has left and the letter I’ve been meaning to write you both became a metaphor, of having this urge to write to those who wish to listen; a metaphor of good will and wishful thinking, that words build bridges, and words destroy them too, that words are the gems of survival and salvation, they are manifestation of faith, they have the ability to shift what is stagnant into motion, they are the components needed to heal, of all potions, of all healing recipes, words are the catalyst of change. .

I live in Beirut, a city that is the living and breathing example of the world we live in today, a city that represents short memory, with an outstanding privatized downtown that screams in your face: nothing happened here. Nothing of importance at least. A city that hosts migrant workers and shove them off its balconies, a city that is welcoming and generous to the visitors from the west, that it caters to all their needs, and transforms itself into their homes, even at the expense of its local sons and daughters while they leave the city slowly to those who can afford living in it. Soon, Beirut will know no poverty, soon Beirut will hide them well in its peripheries, suburbs and towns, with houses and balconies overlooking Beirut, as it becomes an ultimatum for internationality .

I’ve been meaning to write to you about an outline of a story concerning a group of friends, a group of friends that once had the ability to create change and sustain it. A group of friends that represented the core of what you both talked about, a group that understood queer, feminist and the baggage that each brings on the table. A group of friends each with a talent, each with a history of her own, each with a shadow of insecurities, and fears. A group of intellectual and artistic talents, of witches, seers, visionaries, healers and so much more, a group of friends, that understood that womanhood unfolds to become the secret of life itself. But I couldn’t. I was afraid if I had a vision of this group, and this vision doesn’t become true, it could kill me. Kill us.

II.

I had a few questions for you, but it’s too late now. I wanted to ask you about your communities, were they harmonious as they sounded? Did you not belittle each other’s work? Did you not betray one another? Did you exclude one another, until everyone excluded everyone? Did you become what these wounds made of you? Did you try to survive against all odds, but also against one another? Did you take in all the violence, all the discrimination, all the tactics of patriarchy and reflected it onto one another? Did you? Did you become a feminist version of your own societies– resources and power in the hands of the few? Did you hate one another, and did this hate drive you to silence each other? Blackmail one another? Did you fight, and did those fights preoccupy you from challenging what’s out there? Did you have to protect yourselves from your communities as much as you protect yourself from racism, sexism, and homophobia? Did you forget about what brought you together in the first place? Did you not learn how to forgive one other, and have faith in one another? Did you use your privileges against one another? Did you host parties and screenings in your own private houses so that you intentionally isolate one or two individuals? Did you use language against one another? Did you use academic achievements to delete the experiences learned by another through surviving what you theorize about, but never experienced? Did you compromise what is not yours so that you seek revenge against one another? Did you not read each other’s stories in a book that you all worked on and understand that you all came from such battles, and some of you are more bruised and more wounded than others? Did you mirror each other’s fears, and feared what you saw in that mirror? Did you make alliances with brotherhoods that neglect, belittle and use women’s presence in the struggle as it fits their apologetic politics, so you guarantee a space for yourself? I wonder if you did.

III.

I think about what I lose on a daily basis, if I’m not conscious and aware of how feminism is multidimensional, how it penetrates to the details of the details of my everyday life. How much do I lose, when I don’t understand that sisterhood is what saved me, from myself at times, and it’s what broke me at times. How much do I lose on a daily basis when I don’t make the effort to protect myself, by protecting others, by understanding that no (wo)man is an island, that anything without a sense of community to contain it and to engage with it, will not liberate me or my sisters.

Dear Audre and Adrienne, dark times are coming. I don’t know if you can see it from the other side, times where we need to make use of every single individual that believes in change, were we need to change something amongst ourselves, fear each other and one another less, for we complete each other.

I want to write more, but for now, I can’t write about any vision until I have the guarantees that this vision, will not kill me. Will not kill us.

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