Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2003 17:42:04 +1300
From: Margaret Trawick <trawick-AT-clear.net.nz>
Subject: [Fwd: staying alive]


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alive

Once there was a thriving Arab women's movement. Right now, survival is
our political act

Ahdaf Souei
Thursday March 13, 2003
The Guardian

In Baghdad on any given day you might come across her. I will not tell
you her name - but she is tall and slim with brushed silver hair. She
dresses in black with black trainers and thick black socks. Her husband,
now dead, was an Iraqi ambassador long ago. Now she sets out from her
home every morning and walks. She walks though the streets looking and
listening and asking questions. Her project is to memorise what is
happening to the people and the daily life of her country. She's 88 and
doesn't have much time.

None of us have much time.

Have you ever seen a patched book? Here it is: SJ's slim volume The
Poet. SJ has a PhD in Arabic literature from Baghdad university. The
ancient piece of machinery coaxed into printing her book either dries up
or floods. On pages where the damage is too bad SJ writes out the
missing words by hand on a piece of paper and glues it in place. "War
gives birth," she writes, "and mothers do the bringing up." She sells
The Poet at 125 dinars a copy, hoping eventually to pay back the 3,000
dinars it's cost to produce. Three thousand dinars equals $1.50.

Do you see these women represented in the western media? Arab women are
generally portrayed as victimised, subservient. They sit next to silent,
wide-eyed children in Iraqi hospitals, they stumble among the ruins of
their homes in Jenin. Many in the west seem to think they need to be
dragged out from under their veils and scolded into standing up for
themselves. But as we all try to block, to temper, to survive the coming
horror, it is crucial for sympathisers in the west to understand the
truth. The women's movement started in Egypt, Palestine and Syria in the
1880s. By the 1960s women in many Arab countries had the vote, equal pay
for equal work and maternity and childcare legislation that is still a
dream in the west. Massive women's organisations worked to improve
women's education and healthcare. Women (and men) campaigned for reforms
in the personal laws and notched up several successes. But now all this
is on hold.

I'm asked what Arab women are doing in these critical times. They are
doing what they have to do: toughing it out, spreading themselves thin,
doing their work, making ends meet, trying to protect their children and
support their men, turning to their friends, their sisters and their
mothers for solidarity and laughs. There was a quieter, more equable
time when women's political action was born of choice, of a desire to
change the world. Now, simply trying to hold on to our world is a
political action.

F is an Egyptian architect. She has always been active in women's
organisations. She did voluntary literacy work with poor urban women and
her book on mothers and children was published by the UNDP. Her husband
is one of the 14 anti-war activists detained recently in Cairo. When she
took her two daughters, both engineering students, to visit him in Tora
jail, they were astounded at the hundreds of women and children waiting
to visit political detainees. Children were waiting to visit
grandfathers in their 70s. F's husband (now released) is from the left
but most long-term detainees are Islamists. The majority are
unofficially detained. They have never been to court and there is no
document that gives them prisoner status. They are not allowed to give
power of attorney to anyone. Without documents, wives cannot draw their
husbands' salaries, cannot travel, cannot marry off a daughter or even
bury a child. Because of the conditions in the jail, the detainees'
families have to provide them with food, clothes, books, cigarettes. The
distance from the centre of Cairo to Tora jail is 20 miles. Because the
detainees have no official status there is no agreed system for visits.
The women show up and hope that they and their provisions will be
allowed in. If they are not they have to come back next day. F and her
colleagues now find themselves campaigning at least for the proper
application of the hated emergency laws under which Egyptians have
laboured since 1981.

The emergency laws proscribe demonstrations or unauthorised public
gatherings. Six of the marches that have taken place in Cairo over the
last two weeks have been women's marches called by women's NGOs. Unlike
marches involving men they managed to reach both the American and
Israeli embassies. Men who demonstrate get shot before they come
anywhere near these, but the authorities are still wary of brutalising
women in public. It seems, though, that their patience may be wearing
thin; a recent demo saw 150 women cornered by some 2,000 riot police.
Last Saturday's demonstration in front of the Arab League headquarters
linked Iraq and Palestine, for while the world's attention is on Iraq,
Ariel Sharon's army shoots at ambulances and bulldozes houses down on
top of pregnant women. Since November 2000, 51 Palestinian women have
had to give birth at check points; 29 of their 51 babies died.

And yet Palestinian women continue to have babies. Is that a political
choice? At the centre of most women's lives are the children. Soha, a
nursing student, breaks down and cries in her home in Aida Camp when a
rocket whizzes through her kitchen window at supper-time and out through
the facing wall into the mercifully empty bedroom. Her mother tells her
to buck up and not scare the children. It is sobering to note that the
first Palestinian woman to make the political decision to become a human
bomb was a nurse, caring daily for children injured or maimed by Israeli
bullets. In between these two extremes - the giving and the giving up of
life, hundreds of thousands of women go about their business as best
they can.

Karma Abu Sharif, though 60 years younger than our Baghdadi friend, does
not walk the streets of Ramallah. She sits at home and compiles the
Hearpalestine newsletter and website, recording what she can of the
daily demolitions, expropriations, arrests and killings. Keeping the
children alive. Keeping culture alive. Preserving history and telling
the story - these seem to be at the heart of our women's concerns right
now.

The UN's Peter Hansen, writing in this paper last week of the terrible
hunger in Gaza, says that "the Palestinian extended family and community
network have saved the territories from ... absolute collapse". Women
are the backbone of these families and networks and they are performing
the same function in Iraq. Families who have, share with those who have
not, through the agency of the churches and the mosques.

Last night IK told me that her mother, in Baghdad, has sold the Virgin's
gold. An icon of the Virgin that has been in the family for more than
300 years. A neighbour in trouble - Christian, Jew or Muslim - would
come and whisper a prayer, perhaps make a pledge. When the afflicted was
healed, the traveller berthed, the child conceived, the neighbour would
fulfil the pledge. Over the decades the Virgin was adorned with the most
delicate filaments of gold. To her children's appalled protests that the
gold was not hers to sell, their mother replied that the Virgin had no
need of gold when there were people in the city who were starving. But
what comes next? Where do you go after you've sold the Virgin's gold?

Ahdaf Soueif is an Egyptian novelist. Her novel, The Map of Love, was
shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1999.

ahdaf-AT-hotmail.com

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