Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (26 page)

I had expected that as women of color, most of these students would also identify as women of color feminists. I believed the two terms to be synonymous. Instead, I found a rejection of the word “feminism.” I hear many women of color refer to themselves as such, yet they make the distinction that they are not claiming a feminist identity. Although many of the women support and stand in alliance with women of color feminism, there is still a lapse in their chosen identity. Many report to have read the popular and pivotal texts within women of color feminism and have felt moved, but their “empowerment” only goes so far.

What is it about the word “feminism” that has encouraged women of color to stand apart from it? Feminism has been indoctrinated into the academy through the discipline of women’s studies. It has moved out of the social and political spaces from where it emerged. Women’s studies have collapsed the diversity that was part of the feminist movement into a discipline that has become a homogenous generality. For women in the third wave then, one needs to have the academic training of women’s studies to be an “accredited feminist.” Once race is added to the complexity, many women of color feel as though the compromise or negotiation is just too high a price to pay to be called a feminist. Women of color’s participation in women’s studies and feminism still causes splintering in our identities.

Many women believe that there is a certain required persona to be a feminist. In the ethnic studies course “Women of Color in the U.S.” at Berkeley, for example, students expressed feeling that they didn’t have enough knowledge or background to be able to call themselves feminists. The students’ comments reflect how many women of color find difficulty in accessing feminism. Often the response is that “feminism is a white woman’s thing.” Whiteness in feminism comes to represent privilege, power and opportunity. It rarely positions women of color as being as legitimate as the identities of white women. Women’s studies has been accurately accused of treating race as a secondary oppression through offering courses about race that are separate from the central curriculum, while ethnic studies feels more comfortable as a place to discuss race and gender. But even in ethnic studies, women’s experiences and histories still remain on the margins. Like women’s studies, they too have had problems integrating gender into the analysis of race.

Women of color often feel women’s studies is a battlefield where they are forced to defend their communities and themselves. Women’s studies, the academic endeavor of feminism, has a history of relegating women of color as second. When women of color raise issues of race in these classrooms, the response from other students is often defensive and loaded with repressed white guilt. For young women of color, there is a sentiment that we must find a central identity that precedes all others. We are asked to find one identity that will encapsulate our entirety. We are asked to choose between gender, class, race and sexuality and to announce who we are first and foremost. Yet where is the space for multiplicity?

Although I am a self-proclaimed woman of color feminist, I struggle with being an “authentic” woman of color feminist. Even though I realize it is self-defeating, I worry that other women of color will look at my feminism and judge it as being socialized whiteness and an effect of adoption. The roots of my feminism are connected to my adopted mother, although I am uncertain whether she would identify as a feminist. She was a woman who wouldn’t let us watch the
Flintstones
or the
Jetsons
because of their negative portrayal of women, yet she unquestionably had dinner on the table every night for her husband, sons and daughter. Most important, she raised me to believe I could be whoever I wanted to be and in that a strong woman. If feminism has been bestowed onto me from my adopted mother, then I choose not to look at it as another indicator of whiteness or of being whitewashed. Rather, I see it as a gift that has shown me not the limitations of mainstream feminism but the possibilities of women of color feminism. People sometimes question my attachment to feminism. Despite the criticisms, it has served as a compass that navigates me away from paralysis into limitless potential.

One of the reasons that my project is now at a standstill is that the conversation has changed. In the 1970s and 1980s women of color feminists seemed to be in solidarity with each other. Their essays showed the racism and classism within mainstream feminism, forcing mainstream feminism to be accountable. Today, however, women of color are focused on the differences that exist among us. When we try to openly and honestly acknowledge the differences between us, we become trapped in difference, which can result in indifference.

Women of color feminism has currently been reduced to a general abstraction that has flattened out difference and diversity, causing tension between women of color. Instead of collectively forming alliances against whiteness, women of color now challenge the opposing identities that exist under the umbrella term “women of color.” It raises questions about entitlement and authenticity. It tries to suppress the heterogeneous composition of women of color feminism by trying to create a unifying term. Yet the differences of class, racialization and sexuality have arisen and persisted, challenging assumptions that all women of color are in solidarity with each other. We all come with backgrounds and histories that differ from one another and despite knowing this, we still maintain this ideal and creation of the authentic “women of color.” The one that is the right class, the right race, the right sexuality. We must refuse being reduced to an abstraction. We must address the conflicts that have begun to fester paralysis instead of fostering change. But that also means that we need to revitalize women of color feminism so that those actions can begin to take place.

I see women of color feminism at this moment of indifference. I see the backstabbing. I hear the gossip. I feel the tension. We use our words like fists to beat each other down and beat each other silent. It is not pretty and certainly not productive. When do we recognize that the moment has come to move forward? I wish I had some solution of a way to “use our difference to achieve diversity instead of division.” But we know that clichés are just clichés. They don’t provide us with the fairy-tale endings. They don’t make us feel better or more hopeful. More often than not, I think clichés just annoy us and leave us sarcastic.

It is crucial to explore and expose the problems of women of color feminism, but we also need to be weary of what we are willing to sacrifice. I think a new, third space is being created in women of color feminism. Those of us who are not easily recognized and acknowledged as women of color are coming to feminism as a place to discuss the implications of invisibility. We are pushing, expanding and exploding ideologies of multiplicity and intersectionality. We come as transracial adoptees, women of mixed race, bisexuals, refugees and hundreds of other combinations. For us, women of color feminism continues to be a living theory and a way to survive.

 

 

 

Susan Muaddi Darraj

 

 

 

 

 

I see no reason to say that the Arab woman is less intelligent and energetic and sincere than the [W]estern woman.

—Ghada Samman, 1961

 

My father is a feminist, although he would probably never admit it. It is difficult to even write the two words “father” and “feminist” next to each other in the same sentence (despite the nice alliterative sound). I can imagine him hearing it and shrinking away from the word, shaking his head vehemently and saying, in his thick Middle Eastern accent that all my girlfriends find so charming, “No, no, no, not me, thank you.” And yet, despite his denial, my father has helped me form my own unique feminist identity more than that other F-word-Friedan.

I remember sitting in a feminist theory class in graduate school, feeling strangely unmoved by the words of Betty Friedan and the second-wave feminist writers. I understood their struggles and respected their courage—there was not a doubt in my mind that it took a lot of courage to resist Western patriarchal demands on women’s lives. But these were not representative feminists. In
The Feminine Mystique,
Friedan expounds on the woes of being a mere housewife, but it seemed there was a certain level of class privilege that accompanied her position. The role of a “housewife” usually developed when there was a man to support the family, when he could do it all on his own salary. Although my mother swept the floor and cooked most of our meals, I realized that housework was not her only “work.” She also worked full-time in the business that she and my father ran together.

Sitting in that class, with other women who expounded on the oppression of housework, I dared once to ask, “Who will do the housework then?” Seventeen pairs of eyes turned to me, and I continued: “If men don’t do it and women don’t do it, who will? It has to be done. Do you propose that we hire
other women
to come and do it? Other women who clean people’s homes because they have the opportunity to do nothing else?”

Silence greeted my question, as I had expected. I realized then that most of the women in the class were upper-middle and middle-class white women—and I felt like a complete outsider. Perhaps they could understand Friedan because her brand of feminism spoke directly to their experience. But it didn’t speak to mine. I didn’t view housework as a mark of oppression. There was a certain sense of pride placed on a clean, welcoming home, and both my parents had always placed value on it. That was why my father spent his weekends trimming the lawn and sweeping the walkways and why my mother mopped the kitchen floor and wiped the windows until they sparkled. It was why my brothers and I were marched off to various rooms every Saturday morning, armed with furniture polish and dust rags. We all did housework. No, this version of feminism did not appeal to me. But then again, what version did? For a long time I thought that this was the only brand of feminism that existed. If that was true, I certainly wasn’t a card-carrying member.

Furthermore, I didn’t like the way that this feminism viewed people like my mother and grandmothers and aunts—and me, for that matter. I was tired of turning on the evening news, eager to learn news of the Middle East, and seeing women clad in heavy, black robes, their eyes lowered but barely visible behind the slits in their face veils as they scurried past the television cameras. I have been to the Middle East. I am an Arab Christian, and I know many Arab Christian and Muslim women. Some—but definitely not all—of my Muslim friends veil themselves, as do a few of the older, conservative Christian women, especially before entering a church. Why did Americans equate Muslim women with veils so completely, and why did the cameras seem to pick out only these women?

The answer was an uncomplicated one: because this was the quaint vision of the Middle East with which America felt comfortable. This vision included heavily robed and mustachioed sheiks, belly dancers, tents, camels and—of course—veiled women. This vision was, to use an orientalist cliché, a desert mirage, concocted by the same Hollywood producers who created Rudolph Valentino (The Sheik).

American feminists, like the rest of the nation and the Western world, had accepted the flawed image of the Middle East and Middle Eastern women without question. “Of course, they [meek and silent Arab women] are oppressed;
we
[liberated, assertive Western women with voices] must help
them.”
I have heard similar statements (with the notions in the brackets implied) from white American feminists who wanted to save their Arab sisters but not to understand them. They wanted to save them from the burden of their families and religion but not from the war, hunger, unemployment, political persecution and oppression that marked their daily lives and that left them with only their families and religion as sole sources of comfort. The tone of white Western feminism—with its books about “lifting the veil on Arab women” and Arab women “lifting the veil of silence”—was that Arab feminism was nothing greater than an amusing oxymoron.

The apparent hypocrisy and condescension that white Western feminists held for Arab women confused me. I felt betrayed by a movement that claimed to create a global sisterhood of women; it seemed that the Arab woman was the poor and downtrodden stepsister in this family.

Where was my feminism?

 

It was my father who first taught me “feminism,” who told me that I could do anything I wanted—achieve any goal, reach any height—and that he would support me in that climb. I don’t remember ever feeling that my culture—and in my mind my father embodied that culture almost completely—stood in my way, although others thought my culture was a jungle of patriarchal pitfalls.

One day my father told me a story that rocked my world. It was that of Jamila Bouhereid, the Algerian woman who had played an instrumental role in the Algerian resistance against the colonial French forces. It was one of those stories that he and his generation had heard about while growing up in Palestine, nations away from Algeria, though the story stirred them nonetheless. Bouhereid had been captured by the French and tortured in unspeakable ways, but she refused to divulge essential information about the resistance. The torture continued until it finally killed her. He told me the story during one of our many marathon conversations that usually lasted through the night, while we sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and eating oranges. I became obsessed with Bouheried’s story and tried to find out everything I could about her. Unfortunately, there was very little information about her—or Arab women in general-available in English.

My futile search was not a complete failure, however, only the opening of a new door. I came across the names of other Arab women whose names I had heard: Huda Sha’rawi, the founder of the Egyptian Feminist Union, who had called for the ban of the veil at the beginning of the twentieth century; Mai Ziyyadah, a feminist writer and a contemporary of Sha’rawi, who called for men to free women in order to free themselves; even Khadijah, the first wife of the Prophet Muhammad, who had financed his travels, owned a lucrative business and been the first convert to Islam. I searched the Internet for information on more modern Arab women: Hanan Ashrawi, a chief spokesperson for the Palestinians; Leila Ahmed, a feminist and scholar who wrote about Arab women with accuracy, honesty and pages of solid research; and Fatima Mernissi, who sought to rediscover Islam’s valuation of women.

I also searched for something that neither the Internet nor the library’s shelves could offer me: a real, hard, searing look at the lives of modern, everyday Arab women. I saved my pennies and, armed with my notebooks and pens, traveled to Egypt, Jordan and Palestine over the course of a few years. I met women in my family and made some new friends. One summer, I spent three months in the West Bank, in the city of Ramallah, and studied at Birzeit University. Ramallah and Birzeit were a mere half-hour taxicab ride away from Taybeh, the small village where my parents grew up and where my grandmother and several aunts, cousins and uncles lived. Although I was thrilled to spend time with my relatives, I also wanted to meet and interact with Palestinian college women, and I met quite a few and listened to their stories. At many points and on many occasions I felt like I was looking into a mirror, at what I would have been like had my father and mother never left the political oppression and insecurities of Palestine.

One woman, a twenty-four-year-old student, told me how it was a struggle to get to the university every day, not because her father wouldn’t permit it (for he actually encouraged her), but because she had to take a multipassenger taxi in which she had been groped many times by the male passengers. Another woman, also in her mid-twenties, described how her parents were proud that she had been accepted at the university, but she often skipped semesters because money usually ran low. It often was a choice of buying textbooks or letting her younger siblings go without meat for several months. She estimated that at that rate it would take another six years to finish her bachelor’s degree. Another woman, who veiled herself, explained to me how as a religious person she felt compelled to educate herself for her own betterment and for that of her family.

It struck me that many of the women whom I met could be considered feminists, perhaps not by the standards of the white Western feminism that I had encountered in my feminist theory class, but by the standards of a different feminism—one that allowed women to retain their culture, to have pride in their traditions and to still vocalize the gender issues of their community. These were women whom I considered feminists because they believed in the dignity and potential for upward mobility of every woman; they wanted to erase class lines between women; they worked so that they could have choices in their lives and not be channeled into one way of life.

 

I realized upon my return to the United States that fall that, more than ever, I longed for a feminism that would express who I was and what my experiences were as an Arab-American woman. That feminism was within my grasp, but I discerned several obstacles that blocked my path. The chief one was the seeming universality of white Western feminism, which appears to leave no room for other visions. This caused various conflicts within me. Another obstacle to voicing my own feminism to white Western feminists was that the various traditions in my Arabic culture were indeed the markings of a patriarchal culture. Many feminist texts and discourses on the Middle East highlighted such traditions, although most modern-day societies, including that of the United States, can be accurately described as patriarchal.

One such tradition is that Arab parents are usually referred to by the name of their eldest son. Thus, a couple whose eldest son is named Abdallah would be referred to socially as Im Abdallah (mother of Abdallah) and Abu Abdallah (father of Abdallah). I am the eldest child in my family, but my parents are called by the name of my brother, who is a year younger. There is generally an emphasis on having at least one male child in Arab families, and the boys are often named after their grandfathers; my brother Abdallah was given the name of my grandfather Abdallah. As a woman, this certainly bothers me, and it strikes a sour note with many Arab women. After all, why the big deal about boys? What is so disappointing about girls? It seems to me that American feminists overly criticize this tradition, however, while forgetting that it is no different than American boys being named David, Jr. or Jonathan So-and-So, III. As far as I can remember, American girls aren’t dubbed Michelle, Jr. and Jennifer IV, unless they are European monarchs, but this point does not occupy chapters in Arab feminist texts on the West.

Another unfairly beleaguered custom is that of the traditional Arabic marriage, which has wrinkled many a conversation with my American feminist friends. In the Middle East and among Middle Easterners living in other parts of the world, when a couple decides to get married, it is expected that a
toulbeh
takes place. During the toulbeh the potential bridegroom arrives at the home of the potential bride, escorted by several members of his family. The bride’s family waits, and members of her extended family wait with them. The eldest male of the groom’s family requests the bride’s hand from the eldest male in her family. When the expected “yes” is announced (because the question is a formality, after all), the two families celebrate their upcoming union. Of course, this is a patriarchal tradition, one in which a woman is viewed as a person who should not answer for herself. Again, is it different than in American culture, where it is considered a sweet gesture and a romantic leftover from traditional times for a man to ask for the bride’s hand from her father? And don’t fathers still walk their daughters down the aisle and “give them away”? The endless explanations of Arab wedding customs that I had to offer my American feminist friends, however, would have led one to think that it was utterly barbaric.

In the aftermath of the events of September 11 and with the recent conflict in Afghanistan, the same stilted media coverage would make anyone think that
every
Middle Eastern woman saw the world from between the peepholes of her burqa’s face netting. These traditions are usually used as examples that create a picture of the Arab world as a
1,001 Nights
-like land of wicked and despotic sultans and silenced and imprisoned harem girls—women who need the West to enlighten, educate and save them (But Scheherazade, a Muslim Arab woman and the heroine of
1,001 Nights,
saved herself and her countrywomen, so it doesn’t make sense to me
why
Arab culture is attacked as anti-woman, as if no other culture has gender-oppressive traditions of which to be ashamed).