arab women

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation

mandy — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 18:00:00 +0000

This account of women’s central role in the industrial history of Lebanon adds another valuable title to Syracuse’s outstanding series of books on Middle Eastern history and culture, “Beyond Dominant Paradigms.” In stark contrast to images of women as helpless victims that pervade much of the depiction of the region consumed by the Western press, Malek Abisaab’s Militant Women of a Fragile Nation shows women’s transforming role in colonial and postcolonial industrialization, in the labor struggles and resistance to colonial rule, in the work of trade unions and the Arab Feminist Union, and in the modern Lebanese economy.

From the “silk economy” at the center of industrialization in the nineteenth century through the rise and dominance of the tobacco industry, women have largely negotiated and renegotiated their own position in industry. The author rejects the subaltern view of these women and their identity within the social and economic history of Lebanon: through active participation and protest, women have resisted exclusion from power and have contributed to a culture of changing alliances and class and gendered identities that are constantly in play. Through various power structures and economic models, women demonstrated, in Abisaab’s view, that “patriarchy cannot endure for long or unchangingly,” and that the women he studies are not “passive victims of capitalism” but strategically engaged in a resistance that has played a major role in shaping the modern economy.

Militant Women of a Fragile Nation begins with an account of the region known as Mount Lebanon in the later nineteenth century, and women’s involvement in silk production. As women moved into the workplace, they struggled against patriarchal control of their sexuality and an exploitative wage system that paid them half as much as men—whose work was gendered as “skilled” labor. As the silk economy declined, women dominated the “unskilled” part of the workforce in tobacco—and again earned subsistence wages while exposed to toxic chemicals in the factories.

During the period of French colonial rule of Syria-Lebanon, the French imposed the Régie, a monopolistic cartel governing tobacco production. It was during this time that women had a definable target for social action and struggled for improved conditions and resistance to colonial control. In the early years of the twentieth century, the Syrian-Lebanese “New Woman” emerged as a cultural phenomenon, and by the 1930s the Arab Feminist Union was organized to campaign against the Régie.

While there are differences in attitudes among women of different classes, the data the author accumulates shows a consistently remarkable level of women’s participation in the work force over the past 130 years. While women of the elite classes actively resisted colonial dominance, they tended to denigrate women’s participation in paid labor. “Factory women,” on the other hand, identified profoundly with their gender roles in the work place, and the factory became a site for active participation and reconsideration of their roles and identities. For both groups, women’s radicalism has had a shaping role in the economic history of the region.

Written by: Rick Taylor, September 8th 2010

Henna

admin — Mon, 21 Jun 2010 16:01:00 +0000

Directed by Saleh Karama

Practice Productions

Henna is a visceral cinematic experience that functions as an exercise in patience. Drawing from reflections on his own childhood growing up in a rapidly developing Abu Dhabi, Saleh Karama created the character of Henna (A’aesha Hamad), a curious eight-year-old girl through whose perspective we are invited to see the world.

Henna lives in a fishing village in an unnamed Arab country. The goings-on of daily life are marked by their simplicity, which is transferred to the viewer by lingering scenes of mundane living: collecting fish that have been caught in nets, conversations over coffee about nothing in particular, the process of cooking lunch for a visitor. At the side of the screen is Henna, eyes wide and twinkling with apt absorption.

The viewer is introduced to Henna on the floor of her bedroom, completing her homework before her mother shoos her to bed. The young girl lives with her mother and grandfather; we are given the impression that her father—who abandoned the pair after Henna’s mother was stricken with an unexplained illness—drops by only once in a while to bring uselessly modern gifts, like bottles of soda.

Most of Henna’s story rests on the visual juxtaposition of contemporary and traditional living. It’s often subtle, as with scenes of gender role segregation where women speak to other women and men to other men; female servitude is expected even as Henna’s family encourages her education. Elsewhere, it’s seen through the lens of infrastructure: The village lacks adequate water for its inhabitants, but the ongoing construction of things like paved roads that camels cannot cross and shopping malls with flashy, expensive goods interfere with the inherited methods of operation that have existed for centuries. When Henna’s uncle Tarsh, a Bedouin man who has been living in the desert, comes to visit, the stress of the newly formed, hurried ways of the community’s impetuous youth are too much for him to abide, and he promptly leaves.

Absent of narrative commentary, Henna leaves the viewer to sort out the benefits and drawbacks of the many different ways of existing in the world and the conflict that occurs at the cusp of change. Using a visually induced melancholy, coarse cinematography, and acting that comes across as more innate than put on, one is asked to consider the paradox of what is lost and what is gained during the process of industrializing the desert.

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Written by: Mandy Van Deven, June 21st 2010

Mutluluk

admin — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 09:00:00 +0000

Directed by Abdullah Oguz

First Run Features

In his first few shots, all very wide angles and washed-out greens, Abdullah Oguz shows his cards as an ambitious, technically brilliant filmmaker. In the Anatolian countryside, a flock of sheep turns a slow circle as the camera, peering down on a girl’s body, does the same. A melody—composed by Zülfü Livaneli, who also wrote the book on which this film was based—hums through the valley. A shepherd picks up the girl, and so begins Mutluluk.

The characters in a village drama are executing by rote what, as a character glibly explains later, circumstances demanded: Young Meryem (Özgü Namal) has been raped. Her father reluctantly submits to cousin Ali Riza Amen (Mustafa Avkiran) insistence she be killed to mitigate the family’s shame. When Ali Riza’s son Cemal (Murat Han) returns from military service, he begrudgingly takes the girl to Istanbul in order to carry out his father’s sentence. But he can't carry it out, and after his last-minute change of heart, Cemal and Meryem flee Istanbul and Ali Riza’s henchmen. Aimless after a stint at a remote fishery on the Mediterranean, on a whim the young cousins join a stranger named Irfan (Talat Belet), who has fled his wife and professorship for a yachting joy-ride around the Aegean.

From there, the film devolves into maudlin lectures on beauty, purity, and love, giving its stars little room to develop their broadly drawn characters; Cemal swings between stoically surly and jealously unhinged, Irfan acts predictably free-spirited, and for the most part Meryem hangs back meekly. Fortunately, the lectures are lent some credence by the wide-angle attention that cinematographer Mirsad Herovic pays the seascapes and craggy shores and by the adaptable actors’ still game performances.

However, some of Mutluluk most powerful scenes become its most disappointing because the dramatic confrontations they stage prove neither earned nor transformative. Oguz saves the identity of Meryem’s rapist as a minor and unnecessary shocker for the end, and he pulls too many tricks to convey intensity: sped up tracking shots, sudden switches to black and white, barrages of extreme facial close-ups.

Such clutter is doubly frustrating because Oguz is a gifted storyteller with a knack for expansive imagery—fenced-in fishes, an elevated expressway—and an affection for his characters. Thanks to the tenderness with which he imbues even mundane exchanges, Mutluluk develops almost imperceptibly from a tale of sheltered villagers struggling with imposed moral codes into one of dear friends negotiating their personal senses of duty. While Meryem stumbles headlong past the sites of her rape and would-be murder, the film moves gorgeous and delicately alongside toward some seafaring redemption.

Written by: Sam Schulz, December 7th 2009

A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman

admin — Mon, 11 May 2009 08:30:00 +0000

By Wadad Makdisi Cortas

Nation Books

Nostalgia is front and center in Wadad Makdisi Cortas’ atmospheric memoir of life in Beirut, a war-torn city once belonging to Syria and later, the capital of Lebanon. Born in 1909, Cortas died in 1979, but her impassioned account of a four-decade career as principal of the Ahliah School for Girls touches on themes that remained pertinent throughout the twentieth century—colonialism and the founding of Israel, among them.

Cortas was fiercely committed to the education of girls and sought international examples to prod her students into imagining an array of possibilities for their lives. American journalist Dorothy Thompson gave a talk on campus; so did Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, the first woman president of the UN General Assembly; Bertha Vester, a Jerusalem resident who founded a children’s hospital; and Helen Keller. “Nationalism as a chauvinist ideal never took root in our school,” Cortas writes. “Fairness, humanity, and principles of equal rights all found deep expression in our collective inner life.”

Her descriptions of visits to Palestine before 1917’s Balfour Declaration—in which Lord Arthur Balfour promised to give Palestine to the Zionists—and following the creation of Israel as a Jewish homeland, are gripping. “For Arabs the problem of Palestine was our common denominator,” she writes. Her position was, in part, shaped by Jawaharlal Nehru’s assertion: “When the British declared that they were willing to establish a national home for the Jews in Palestine, Palestine was not a wilderness. There were Arabs and non-Arabs living there, Moslems and Christians… Zionism is a colonial movement. The generous offer of the British was made at the expense of Arabs.”

Cortas’ allies in opposing Israel included Albert Einstein, who favored a bi-national state in Palestine and condemned the violence and terrorism wrought by the Haganah and the Stern Gang against Palestinian villagers. In fact, Cortas consistently sought to include the voices of anti-Zionist Jews in her work, and her outspoken activism always included expression of distress over Jewish persecution in Europe. As the same time, she writes, she felt that it was unjust “that the Arab world was being forced to bear the consequences of Europe’s cruelty.”

Yet despite the efforts of anti-Zionists the world over, in 1949, Israel came into being. Not long after, Lebanon was torn apart by civil war and Cortas’ memoir closes with a searing account of the fighting, 1974-1978. “Hatred breeds hatred,” she concludes, “and love breeds love.”

This simple statement sums up Cortas’ philosophy toward both her students and toward political engagement. An optimist but not a Pollyanna, her example is invigorating. While I wished A World I Loved had provided a bridge between her death and today—an afterward, perhaps, about the Ahliah School and the state of contemporary women’s education in Arab countries—the book is nonetheless fascinating. Full of nuanced historical detail and rich observations, it reintroduces a foremother whose wit and grace help explicate the political quagmires of the twenty-first century.

Written by: Eleanor J. Bader, May 11th 2009

Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan

admin — Sat, 02 May 2009 16:33:00 +0000

By Barbara Bick

The Feminist Press

A deluge of books on Islamic fundamentalism had swamped the world's bookshelves following the wake of the 9/11 attacks. Some 100 books and 5,600 articles were written on the subject, many focussing on the lives of Afghan women under Taliban rule. I chose to review Barbara Bick's Walking the Precipice: Witness to the Rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan despite knowing well that another book on Afghanistan and its peripheral issues would fill me with some apprehension. Would it be yet another sob story about those poor burqa-clad women and how much they need to unveil their faces, I wondered?

Thankfully, Bick's book is a little more than that. Walking the Precipice is a fascinating insight through the eyes of a long-time feminist activist in a country devastated by war and deprivation. Bick's keen observation and intrepid spirit for someone her age (she was sixty-five and arthritic on her first trip to Afghanistan in 1990, seventy-eight years old on her last) is inspiring and makes reading a well-trodden and tiresome topic easier. In her memoirs, readers will learn quite intimately of her arduous travels and passion for the local women's liberation groups that began as nothing more than her “one last, unforgettable journey before 'old age' kicked in.”

Once in Kabul, Bick, together with a small group of American women made their rounds in orphanages, schools, international health agencies, and support organisations for women widowed by the war. Not surprisingly, the burqa would immediately come to her attention – both a symbolic and physical form of repression she feels impassioned to lift.

In 2001, Bick returned to Afghanistan, this time to an even more dangerous terrain: a region dominated by the Northern Alliance, the anti-Taliban militia. Her journal entries at this stage become a gripping countdown of events preceding the 9/11 attacks, including the assassination of the Northern Alliance's leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, by suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists. In the final section of the book, she witnesses during her return in 2003 the drafting of the Declaration of the Essential Rights of Afghan women and the post-9/11 reconstruction, marking a poignant cadence to her adventures in Afghanistan.

Bick and her cohorts, all foreign-based, are the dominant figures in this story. With little evidence of Afghan female agency throughout the book, Bick and Co. appear to do much of the "rescuing", reinforcing the idea that feminism is a privileged woman's preoccupation. The one major weakness in Walking the Precipice is the second-hand interpretation of events due to her inability to speak any of the local languages. She appears to be a sympathetic observer at best, but a helpless bystander of the injustice around her at worst.

Just as interesting is Bick's experience with the different strands of activists fighting for the Afghan women's cause. On her first trip, she travelled with a feminist with a strident pro-Soviet political agenda, while on her second she was in the company of an anti-communist member of the Kabul elite. These are all examples of how groups that are ideologically each other's polar opposites can come to agreement, for better or worse, on providing international aid to Afghan women and children.

All in all, Bick's slim memoir, although fascinating, recounts in the manner of adventurous Western holiday-makers and gap-year students in faraway, dangerous places. It is vivid, as many good travelogues are but it is hardly groundbreaking in the sea of post-9/11 books.

Written by: Alicia Izharuddin, May 2nd 2009

Breaking Poems

admin — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 16:44:00 +0000

By Suheir Hammad

Cypher Books

In her third book of poetry, award-winning Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad explores the resilience of women’s bodies across borders in a fluid set of poems entitled Breaking Poems. Hammad embraces life at the border, refusing to translate her identity to fit a bounded-identity construct of what it means to be Palestinian or American. She uses a diasporic language, blending anglicized Palestinian Arabic with English. She fuses cultures, dropping names of inspirational figures like Umm Kulthum, Fairuz, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin.

Exploring the theme that wars are fought on women’s bodies, Hammad writes, “in gaza still flesh is ashed/wa smoked wa denied/a women’s chest caves in/smoke escapes legs.” (Wa means "and" in Arabic). In fact, the violence in Gaza is a constant topic in her poetry, summoning us to act and react as she evokes images of exploded bodies, rubble in place of homes, and empty stomachs. She connects the experiences of women in New Orleans to Gaza, capturing the resilience of women’s bodies as they encounter multiple forms of violence.

Breaking poems is also about breaking with old identity constructs. Hammad undergoes a personal transformation as she finds it impossible to fit into fixed and bounded notions of identity. Instead, she embraces border identities that are contradictory, fluid, and multi-sited. She refers to herself as “translinear me” and allows herself to exist simultaneously across time and space as a young girl in Deheisha to a woman in Beirut to a refugee in Brooklyn. “We lived there once my parents sisters and me,” she writes about Beirut. “I left my skin there still boiling.” Beginning to find home in change, Hammad writes:

sometimes I leave my body wa I leave my country wa my religion sometimes leaving is my religion.

Hammad also offers up the poem as the space for home, writing, “Poem is my body my language my country.” By exploring transnational and border identities, Hammad joins the ranks of women like Gloria Anzaldúa, Uma Narayan, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ella Shohat, and Nadine Naber.

Hammad’s poetry is never conventional; she plucks words that evoke the sensations of sight, smell, and touch. She induces feeling and meaning by convincing the reader that her words describe their memories. Nuanced and complex, breaking poems explores a new space in twenty-first century poetry.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 29th 2009

Things I’ve Been Silent About

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 16:47:00 +0000

By Azar Nafisi

Random House

Things I’ve Been Silent About is the second memoir for bestselling author Azar Nafisi. Offering a larger lens into her life than Reading Lolita in Tehran, Nafisi tells her life’s story and the story of her country of Iran. Interspersed throughout her memories are references to poems and novels that had a profound impact on her, as well as memories of revolts and protests preceding and following the Iranian revolution.

A captivating theme in Nafisi’s memoir is the interwoven relationship between myth and reality. When the realities of Nafisi’s life are illogical, irrational, and uncontrollable, she retreats to the world of fiction. As a child, she finds comfort and escape from her severely depressed mother in the stories she creates. She constantly has her head in a book, obsessed with ancient tales and, eventually, modern literature. Fiction is the reliable fixture that offers a comforting presence in her life. Her mother’s mythical versions of reality—which she tyrannically imposes upon her family—make Nafisi’s quest for truth more urgent. Her quest expands as a result of the seemingly nonsensical nature of post-Revolution Iran, which saw the promise of equality replaced by the rise of authoritarianism and the depletion of women’s rights.

Nafisi’s memoirs hold true to the saying that the personal is political. She tells the history of the Iranian Revolution through her story. These profound insights are weakened by the battle she continuously wages with her mother’s ghost. The magnitude of resentment and unresolved issues towards her mother that she writes about threaten to make an otherwise powerful story into an unreadable epic of self-pity.

The memoir is also weakened by Nafisi’s profuse obsession with proving her critics wrong—the same literary critics that found Reading Lolita in Tehran to be an orientalist work relying on Western stereotypes to portray Iran. She goes to great haste to strengthen her father’s political stances; she too often repeats his love of Iran, critique of the Shah’s regime, and desire for revolution. Yet she never acknowledges that her family’s economic and political privileges situate them in a less vulnerable position than many other Iranians. Instead, she portrays herself as the victim and the martyr at many points in her life.

However, the dynamic relationships between myth and reality—and the personal and political—are the redeeming factors that ultimately make Things I’ve Been Silent About an enlightening and moving memoir.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, March 25th 2009

I Had an Abortion

admin — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 00:53:00 +0000

Directed by Gillian Aldrich

Women Make Movies

This documentary cuts to the core of reproductive freedom—to the stories of women's lives as told by ten women themselves. Distributed by Women Make Movies, the film features detailed accounts from a number of women, ages twenty-one to eighty-five, from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds who had abortions under different circumstances and at different points in their lives. Their stories are complicated and grounding - from a woman who had an abortion as a Mormon high school student in Utah, to a woman who had one at forty-four, married and with children. Prominent activists featured include Loretta Ross, Gloria Steinem, and Amy Richards. Interestingly enough, many of them talked about how many other women confided in them about their own abortions once they themselves had broken the silence that often shrouds the experience.

This documentary is a part of that movement to speak out through a tradition of truth-telling that activist Jennifer Baumgardner (co-producer of the film) launched with the same name as the film. This includes the controversial "I Had An Abortion" t-shirt that many women donned on the cover of Ms. Magazine several months ago. By speaking out, these women put a face to the issue of a woman's right to choose.

Written by: Katy Otto, August 29th 2007

Zaatar Days, Henna Nights: Adventures, Dreams, and Destinations across the Middle East

admin — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 13:14:00 +0000

By Maliha Masood

Seal Press

Pakistani-American Maliha Masood needed a change in her life. She resigns from her lackluster job, cashes in her savings and books a one-way ticket to Paris. While in Europe, her strong desire for adventure and self-discovery propels her to hop on a flight to Cairo, Egypt, but the journey does not stop there. In Zaatar Days, Henna Nights, Masood recounts the literal and metephorical journey she takes across the Middle East, living in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey. She describes, with harrowing detail, her experiences riding Cairo's bustling subway system, floating in Jordan's Dead Sea, roaming around Damascus' old city, strolling down Beirut's posh commercial streets, praying in Aleppo's Great Mosque and laying in the sand of Turkey's Patara beach. Yet Masood is certainly not your average tourist. Instead of isolating herself in luxurious hotels while solely visiting popular sites, she forces herself to become immersed in the varying cultures by renting apartments in average neighborhoods in which she must communicate in order to survive.

Masood always finds room to write about the specifics. The reader cannot help but feel as if they are walking and sitting alongside her, smelling the various spices in the souq (Middle Eastern marketplace) and feeling the anxiety that comes when one cannot rely on language to haul themselves out of a sticky situation. While the details are important, Masood's profound insights are the jewels of this text. She struggles with the privilege of being a tourist, especially when she opens her eyes to the widespread poverty that often surrounds her. She elaborates on insider versus outsider tensions, religious versus cultural practices, language as a social bond and a barrier, Western ideas about the Middle East and vice-versa, among other things.

Ultimately, this text is a personal and spiritual quest in an attempt to transcend duality. As a Pakistani-American, Masood writes that “[duality] seems to be the thesis of my life,” and she often divides her identity into her Eastern and Western selves. However, her travels open her up to the possibility that we are all more alike than we assume, that perhaps we share common desires and hopes. The readers of Zaatar Days, Henna Nights will certainly come away with more than a tourists gaze of the Middle East. They will understand its vast variations, complexities, and subtleties in a way that only a person with both insider and outsider status (like Masood) is fortunate and brave enough to experience.

Written by: Arwa Ibrahim, April 13th 2007

Lady of the Palace

admin — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 18:46:00 +0000

By Samir Habchi

Arab Film Distribution

To hear it told by those who were there, Nazira Joumblat, the Lady of the Palace was nothing but extraordinary. This documentary presents an interesting cross-section of Lebanese history by telling her story. Her rise to power was a groundbreaking event, the first instance in three centuries of Druze history that a woman assumed any sort of power role. In the absence of any male heir old enough to hold sway, Nazira Joumblat stepped up, securing her family’s reign over the Moukhtara palace. Initially met with resistance from traditionalists who opposed any involvement by women in what were regarded as "the affairs of men," Nazira’s strength and wisdom as a leader earned her respect and acceptance from even the most firmly entrenched fundamentalists. The palace and the persona become inextricably linked throughout the film. The narration personifies the palace throughout, as an entity who speaks to Nazira and acts as both her confidante and instructor. Nazira Joumblat’s story represents the triumph of intellect and leadership over the boundaries of gender.

This film is to be commended for commemorating the outstanding life of a respected and powerful Lebanese woman. There is no denying that the subject is a worthwhile one. The execution, however, leaves much to be desired. Stale images and even staler narration turn this film into something to be endured rather than enjoyed. I found myself wondering how many different ways a camera could possibly capture a veiled woman wandering the halls of her palace. The endless close-ups of windows, palace stairs, melting snow or flowers blowing in the wind contributed to my feeling that the images were gratuitously added to the narration to catch the eye while the history lesson was transmitted. Lady of the Palace has its weaknesses, certainly. Luckily, the subject outshines the execution.

Written by: Kelly Moritz, November 23rd 2006