If not now, then when?

Last week's AWSA conference also highlighted the plight of Arab women in exile. Amina Elbendary reports
It has for a while been a favourite game among some academics to try and define just who an "Arab" is. Sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists have come up with interesting and varied definitions, as have lay people. An Arab is someone who speaks Arabic, or a citizen of a country that is a member of the Arab League, or -- typically postmodern -- someone who sees himself as an Arab. All definitions are obviously problematic, for an Arab could be all, or none, of the above. Yet, increasingly, Arabs who are not "typical Arabs," whose mother tongue is not Arabic, who do not live in an Arab country and might not even hold passports from an Arab country -- those elusive "Arabs abroad" and their descendants -- have gained some prominence in the Arab order of things.
On one hand, they achieve what their brothers and cousins back home only dream of. Look at Edward Said, Ahmed Zuweil, Magdi Yacoub, even Salma Hayek. These people provide inspiration to some even as their sheer success convinces others of the impossibility of "doing something" with one's life back home. On the other, more optimistic hand, they are looked up to as the ones who might provide a light out of the cultural and political tunnel the Arabs have been stuck in for the past couple of decades. But since 11 September, people back home have been looking differently at Arabs abroad. They are no longer simply admired or envied for the quality of life they enjoy. Now more than ever, there is a genuine desire to understand how different "they" (for they, too, have become a "they") are from "us" -- and how similar. The heightened anti-Arab and anti- Muslim xenophobia that has accompanied the war against terror has also thrown into relief the social circumstances these Arabs live under and the pressures they face every day.
One aspect of this Arab existence abroad is the identity crisis -- people feeling torn between two cultures, two modes of life and thought, as highlighted in Miriam Cooke's keynote address to the Sixth International Conference of the Arab Women's Solidarity Association (AWSA), held from 3 to 5 January at the Greater Cairo Public Library in Zamalek. As Cooke, professor of Arabic literature at Duke University, explained, these sentiments are evident in the writings of Lebanese women forced into exile because of the civil war: e.g., Ghada El-Samman's characteristically shocking statement (in counter- reference to an earlier statement by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish), "Record, I am not an Arab." Lost between France and the Arab world, El-Samman comes to reject Arabism. Cooke also pointed out a shift in Hanan Al-Shaykh's writing. In Beirut Blues, Al-Shaykh's protagonist expresses a desire and a hope for things to return to the way they were. In her recent novel, Only in London, however, Al-Shaykh demonstrates through two characters, Amira and Nahed, that she has grown used to life in London, and now feels at home in that city. Implicit in that comfort is a realisation that things can no longer be the way they were before the war.
Cooke's presentation also highlighted the bias against Arab women's creative writing, noting that it was not given due attention by literary critics in the Arab world or beyond. It was only in the 1980s that Arab women's literature began being translated into Western languages, even though women have been writing since the 19th century; in fact, Aisha El-Taymouriya could very well be considered to have written the first Arabic novel in 1888, but that honour is traditionally reserved to Mohamed Hussein Heikal's Zeinab.
Imperialist condescension toward Arab women, Cooke argued, was evident in the discourse and policies of such men as the British high commissioner in Egypt, Lord Cromer. It is an attitude one literary critic described as being "white man saving brown women from brown men." Cooke remarked that after 11 September American official discourse on Afghan women, exemplified by Laura Bush's patronising statements, sounded too much like Lord Cromer for comfort. Now, Afghan "sisters" are seen to be the passive victims of violent Taliban men, and they need to be saved. Some American women, like Cooke herself, find the attitudes inherent in such discourse shameful.
The inherently racist ideas that have permeated public discourse since 11 September have been played out on women's bodies, as Nadine Naber argued in her presentation, "A place from which to shout: Arab American feminist practice." Naber criticised the totalising discourse of Arab versus American, Islam versus the West, that has been so prevalent recently. She also argued that this discourse is internalised and reproduced among Arab Americans themselves. Under racist pressure to assimilate with the larger Anglo-Saxon community, Arab Americans come up with various survival strategies -- chief among them the development of an "us- vs-them" mentality, which fixes cultural identity, Naber argued, as something to hold on to, and leads to a reinvention of the Arab patriarchal order in America. So "we" Arab Americans, for example, are "clean," and "our daughters don't go out at night."
Naber stressed that young girls born in the US to Arab immigrants suffer the most from this attempt at fixing a cultural identity. Any attempt to rebel against such patriarchal ideals is doubly resented, for it is construed as a wider betrayal of the Arab American community by losing one's identity to the American way of life. These girls often live what she referred to as the "double life" syndrome, carrying out many activities in secret, away from their parents' disapproving eyes. They suffer from two opposing mirror images of "Arab women": that disseminated by the US media, which portray Arab women as backward and oppressed, and that of their own communities, which see women as the custodians of honour and cultural identity.
Naber went on to explain how Arab American women were underrepresented and at times misrepresented within the American feminist movement. Even within the ranks of American feminists, traditional, biased views about "Arab" women persist. To remedy this situation, in 1994, and under the influence of Nawal El-Saadawi (AWSA's president, who was in the US at the time), an AWSA branch was set up in San Francisco. The branch attempts through various creative cultural sites to resist and transgress the patriarchal norms and racist biases Arab American women suffer from. Fifteen women have worked to generate interest in issues related to Arab patriarchy and racism, to discuss feminist issues on multiple fronts: within the Arab American community, and to increase awareness within the American community at large.
These multiple pressures, Naber emphasised, were more poignantly felt after 11 September. AWSA San Francisco was especially involved in post-11 September activism, organising "Sister, rise up," a coalition between Arab American and other women who also suffer from patriarchy and racism, such as African American and Latino women. Through poetry readings, art exhibitions, concerts and film screenings, the group have been attempting to craft new forms of resistance to oppression. They have also organised the "Artists for Iraq" campaign, which raised funds to put up billboards on American freeways, educating the public about the dangerous effects of the sanctions on the Iraqi population.
When these women take up national causes, like the plight of Iraqi children or Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, they are supported by their smaller communities. It is when they attempt to resist the oppression within that they are condemned. Raising issues such as patriarchy is seen as a betrayal of the large cause, perceived to be under threat in the contemporary political climate. At a time when the international and Western media are attacking Arab men in particular as violent, fanatic and backward, and when over 700 hate crimes have been reported against Arabs in the US since 11 September, bringing up feminist issues is seen as a betrayal of the community. The struggles of women must be silenced.
Also affiliated with AWSA San Francisco, Iman Dessouqi and Randa Debit discussed the pressure Zionist propaganda exerts on Arab American men and women in the US. This pressure has increased in reaction to the Intifada and the war in Afghanistan, presented as a "war on terror" and against Islamic fundamentalism in particular. The two young researchers attempted to highlight the intersection between colonialism and imperialism on one hand and patriarchy on the other, and to argue that "Zionist oppression is gendered too and affects Arab American women." Palestinian women are represented either as the passive victims of terrorist men or as murderous mothers who send their sons off to die in suicide bombings. Palestinians, like all Arabs, are presented in the American media as backward, their women almost sub- human.
These attitudes, the two young women argued, also prevail in international human rights forums, where Arab women are left out; "Arab" is mixed with "Asian," or "African," without due attention to specific Arab concerns. And when they are not represented in such forums, Arab women lose chances of impacting policy and decision-making.
In such forums, as in US society at large, Zionism silences any critique of Israeli policies. Any attempt to speak out about Zionism as a political project is labelled "anti- Semitism" and silenced. Arab American feminist activists are automatically branded as anti-Semites. This racist attitude, based solely on their Arab identity, affects their jobs and their work for social justice and human rights.
The various discussions that took place at the AWSA conference on the plight of Arab women in general, and those in exile in particular, highlighted many common concerns: the pressure exerted by globalisation and its totalising discourse, the racist imperialist bias that goes hand in hand with globalisation, and the age-old patriarchal pressures inherent within the community and reproduced and reinvented even in different cultural settings. In Lebanon during or after the civil war, in occupied Palestine, or even among Arab communities in the US, women's concerns are constantly relegated to the background; what are perceived as national issues or "high" politics consistently take precedence. It becomes tantamount to treachery to talk about Arab patriarchy when the nation is under threat. But examples of activism among young Arab women abroad point to a way of confronting these multiple oppressions -- racism, imperialism and patriarchy -- simultaneously. For if liberty and freedom are not to be struggled for both within and without, then how? And if they are not to be struggled for now, then when?
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