Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism (27 page)

These naming and wedding traditions, and others like them, made me second-guess my professed need to find a feminism that suited me. After all, on one level I liked these traditions—they were deeply embedded in my culture and in myself as a person. When I got married, my husband’s eldest uncle asked for my hand from my eldest uncle. Did that mean that I wasn’t a feminist? Some of my friends, upon hearing this, wrinkled their noses in disgust and shook their heads sadly at me as if to say, “Poor thing! She’s just condemned herself to a lifetime of constant pregnancies, Little League games and soap operas.” My God, I thought, was I being kicked out of the club before I had even officially joined?

 

This experience—feeling emotionally torn between my culture and what white Western feminism told me I had to be—relates almost inversely to another conflict that obstructed the recognition of my feminist identity: America’s exoticism of Arab women. Although we were considered veiled and meek, we were simultaneously and ironically considered sultry, sexual and “different.” People, especially white feminists, were often intrigued by my “exoticness” and asked me silly questions, like whether Arab women knew how to belly-dance or whether I knew of any women who lived in harems. I was also frequently mistaken as a Muslim, because many people couldn’t conceive of an Arab Christian (although Arab Christians and Muslims have long allied themselves against the pervasive stereotypes that threaten to categorize us both). They wanted to know if I had ever ridden a camel and if I would have an arranged marriage and would my husband be taking other wives as well? If this was how little people in general, and feminists in particular, knew of my culture, what was the hope that I would be seriously received as a feminist?

Some Muslim women see no contradiction between feminism and Islam. In her book
Palestinian Women: Patriarchy and Resistance
in
the West Bank,
Cheryl Rubenberg studies Palestinian women who live in the camps and villages of the West Bank and highlights the phenomenon of the Muslim Sisters
(Ikhwat al-musilmat).
Sometimes called “Islamist feminists,” the Muslim Sisters believe that Islam gives women full rights but that the religion has been corrupted by men to suit their patriarchal agenda. One Muslim Sister whom Rubenberg interviewed said that their mission is to bring people back to the true Islam, which historically allowed women the right to be educated, to work, to participate in public life and to own property. According to the Sisters, however, Islam has been perverted by men’s patriarchal ambitions in the centuries since the Prophet Muhammad’s death. Because of anti-Muslim sentiments (which are inextricably linked to anti-Arab sentiments) and the general misconceptions of Islam in the West (that all Muslim men are terrorists with long beards and all Muslim women are battered and wear veils), it would be difficult for a Western, non-Muslim person to understand the desire of Arab Muslim women to retain both their religion and their sense of feminism.

Another conflict that threatened my development of a feminist voice was my split vision—my ability to thrive in American culture but to also appreciate Arab culture. Further, it was my frustration with white Western feminists who took up issues like keeping one’s name after marriage but who sniffed at Arab women, who had always kept their names
¹
and whose biggest problem was how to afford bread for dinner? I was living in America, land of the free and home of the brave, while cousins in the West Bank were throwing stones at Israeli tanks and working extra jobs to help my aunts and uncles pay the bills. While I was hopping in my car to work every day, perhaps stopping at a Starbucks for my morning coffee, they were walking to the taxi stop to see if a car was available and willing to drive them around the roadblocks that the Israelis had set up—all just to get to class on time for a final exam. Even worse, it was U.S. money and foreign aid to Israel that kept Palestinians locked in a seemingly hopeless situation that robbed them of their futures.

I think that I had a guilt complex as a result of this split vision: I loathed having to write papers on the “Angel of the House” theory and the imagery of women trapped behind wallpaper, while Arab women were dealing with issues of physical survival.
²
Although I admired the work of white feminists and respected the ways in which they surpassed their own obstacles, those were not my obstacles. I could not focus on the complexities of white Western feminist theory when I knew that Arab women faced very different issues.

And I returned once again to my initial question: Where did I fit in all this?

 

A few years ago, through a strange set of coincidences, I found an answer. I had started reading the work of Black feminists, such as bell hooks, who took on Betty Friedan full force. She challenged the relevance of Friedan’s ideas about housewives to Black women, who have always had to work. Her work led me to Gloria Anzaldúa, who led me to Barbara Smith, and the list grew. I was heartened by the fact that Black women and other women of color had the courage to carve a feminism of their own out of the monolithic block that was generally accepted as “feminism.”

About this time I caught up with a friend of mine, an assertive and lively Arab woman from San Francisco, who was visiting when I lived in Philadelphia. I was twenty-four. It was a gloriously sunny day in the city, and we decided to go out. We sat in a coffee shop on Philadelphia’s hip South Street section and talked about the way that we both felt locked out of feminism and the lack of relevance that feminism seemed to have for our lives. We also talked about the way that analyses of Arab women’s issues seemed to be largely conducted by white Western women.

“But it’s white Western feminism that doesn’t relate to my life,” I interjected.

“True,” she agreed. “There is actually a group of Arab women who deal with gender issues—their association is called AWSA, the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association.”

“Arab feminists?” I asked, unbelieving.

“Yeah. I think that you can call them feminists.” She gave me the Web site information, and I checked it out immediately upon my return home. I found out that AWSA is a network for Arab women, meant to provide support and to serve as the basis for the Arab women’s movement. It was founded by Nawal el-Saadawi, an Egyptian doctor and leading feminist. That sunny Philadelphia afternoon initiated my awareness of AWSA members, who were scholars, artists, writers and everyday women who felt that gender issues in the Arab world and among Arabs in other countries should be discussed and diagnosed by a circle that included Arab women themselves.

Another life-changing event occurred around this time: I met the man I eventually married. As an Arab woman, romance had never been easy because of the strong cultural taboo on dating. I often watched movies and television shows in which girlfriends chatted with each other (usually while doing each other’s hair at slumber parties) about the good looks of a new boyfriend, the disappointment of a blind date, the elation over a romantic dinner or the pain of a breakup. I could never chat so easily about romance because it was a distant, remote experience, one that I knew only vicariously through television, films and books. Furthermore, it was difficult to meet American men who were not entranced by my “exoticness” (probably the most ridiculous comment I’ve ever heard) and the aspects of my culture that they didn’t understand (such as not showing someone the bottom of my shoes or genuinely enjoying time with my family, etc.). I also met some Arab men who, ironically, thought I was too “Americanized”: my unaccented, perfect English littered with slang; my tendency to wear boots and blue jeans; and my refusal to spend more than three minutes on my hair and makeup testified to that, I suppose, not to mention my vocalized interest in pursuing my career and my (equally vocalized) lack of desire to have children for a long time.

But meeting my future husband was an eye-opening experience. I felt that I finally had met someone who could understand and even relate to my split vision. Not only was he kind and caring, but he respected my intellect, my career goals and my opinions. In other words, he allowed me to be myself—and comfortably so. When, over dinner, I mentioned to him the topic of feminism—a word I had uttered to few men, save my father—he said that I didn’t strike him as a feminist. I asked why not, and he offered me an interesting response: “Well, I guess I’m thinking of ‘feminists’ as what I see here in the States. And they seem largely self-involved. But you care about all kinds of issues, not just the ones that affect you. And I think that you consider the concept of family to be above that of the individual.”

I pointed out that women have traditionally been reared to ignore and neglect themselves for the sakes of others (children, husbands, in-laws, etc.). This included Arab women. Women in general had also never had the opportunity to focus on their own development and their own goals. But I also realized that he was thinking of traditional, American, white feminism when he said that, and I explained that I felt that there might be another kind of feminism out there, one that appealed more to women like me, who wanted to be feminists and spouses and mothers.

I could see that he was intrigued by what I was saying, and he admitted that this conversation had redefined feminism for him. “Besides,” he asked casually, “Why does there have to be a choice between feminism and family? I think a woman can have both.”

He was right.

I knew at that point that with the recent riveting conglomeration of coincidental events in my life—my interest in Black feminism, AWSA and the discovery of a possible Arab feminism, and meeting my future husband—that something exciting was happening. My feminist self—my own version of feminism—was emerging.

It required no great sacrifice of my Arab heritage, no shame at my close ties to my family and no compromise of my own needs. It involved two of the most important men in my life—my father and my husband—unlike the ways in which I saw American feminism making a conscious split from male influence (I should also mention here that although my father and husband are the two best men that I personally know, they are not rare examples of Arab men—their mentalities are not unusual in the Arab world, despite what CNN says). There was no need to define independence as living in isolation from my family and making decisions without their support and advice. There was no imperative to shake my head at the thought of having my own family and being a mother. I could be a feminist in a way that suited my life, not in a feminism that would mold me to its ideal shape. After all, wasn’t feminism supposed to be about making my own choices?

 

So here I am—an Arab-American feminist. I am happily married. I work. I write. I plan to have children in a few years. I read the newspaper every day. I call my congressperson about U.S. foreign policy issues that negatively affect Arab women. I follow the news in Palestine and Israel religiously, on both American and Arab news channels (thanks to satellite technology). I cringe first and take action second whenever I come across hackneyed “exotic” portrayals of Arab women. I eagerly read the ever-growing body of work being produced about Arab women. This lifestyle is what feminism means to me now, although I once thought that I would never use this word to describe myself.

Most important, once I realized my own version of feminism, I found myself better able to understand white Western feminism and the many outer storms and internal divisions it has had to weather. Now that I have my own foundation, I see the need for a cross-cultural feminist dialogue, especially after the September 11 attacks on the United States, which have led to an overthrow of the Taliban and an intensified interest on the part of Americans to understand Islam in general. As that interest expands to include the issues of Muslim women and Arab women, it should be clarified that any resulting dialogues must be inclusive of Arab voices in order to be successful. I applaud American feminism for attempting to bridge an intimidatingly wide gap, but that bridge must be rooted in firm ground at
both
ends of the divide. It should no longer be possible to write about Arab women with any aura of expertise or authority without
first
knowing what Arab women need and want.

 

Darice Jones

 

 

 

 

 

I lived my life for a long time on a tightrope, trying to find my middle ground, to please my audience of parents, friends, teachers and bosses, trying to look good doing it and come out on the other side unscathed. In my little block of Oakland, California, it was not OK to be all that I was. There was too much contradiction involved. I am African and American, Christian-raised but Tao-embracing, invested in the plight of black men but my life partners are to be women, raised working class but with a middle-class education, peace-bound but activism-prone, and a feminist whose politics are centered around all life—not just the lives of women. Part of learning feminism for me has been about learning that you can’t be what people want you to be—and learning how to do better than just survive when you fall.

I didn’t grow up with “feminism” as an important word. In fact, I didn’t come to hear a working definition of it until a college professor created one for me. She said feminism is simply the idea that women should be free to define themselves. A feminist is someone who espouses that belief. I would add that feminism is also about putting that belief into action and working on your own internalized sexism. A feminist is not just someone who envisions a different world but someone who creates a life that will change it.

I can see feminism at work in every area of my life, as I went from a teething ring to an eyebrow ring. In the late seventies, my early years, I watched my mother and her mother stomping out a ground for me to walk on. Full-time working mothers with full-time investments in their communities and churches is the only image I ever had of the women closest to me. So media images of “stay-at-home” moms never penetrated my psyche. They were as fictional to me as Saturday-morning cartoons. Most of the images I saw in magazines, on television and in movies were of white middle-class women, but working-class African-American women were my reality; mothers, aunts, cousins, teachers, even my Girl Scout instructors were black women on a mission to make good in the world.

As early as I can remember, I knew the bar was high. I was expected to conquer any challenge presented to me at school, to excel in extracurricular sports and music, and to be a young leader in our church. These expectations were implicit in the way our family operated. My mother taught me and my four sisters to read as soon as we could speak, and she made us teach each other. That passing down of learning, child to child, laid the groundwork for our deep, close relationships as sisters.

The relationship between my parents was filled with examples of the feminist ideal in action. While we all lived together, until I was twelve, I saw my parents as two equal superpowers, one never bowing to the other. They seemed to have a respect for each other stronger than romance or love. My father, who passed away a couple of years ago, was a big man, intimidating to many because of his size but a man of heart to those who knew him best. My mother is a tall woman, and people responded not to her size but to her presence, her voice, the way she takes over a room just by walking in. So while movies, TV shows and commercials portrayed women as weak and emotional and men as strong and stoic, the Jones’s residence was a home in which a couple’s home was their castle and the king was more likely to cry than the queen.

When my parents separated, the two equal pillars that had held up my world into adolescence were shaken. When the dust settled, my mother was left holding up the earth, on her own. After working anywhere between ten- and sixteen-hour overnight shifts as a nurse, our mother would come straight home and drive us to swim, tennis, crafts or drama lessons. My father lived in the same city and was involved in our lives, and although he never worked an overnight shift, every single ride to every single lesson, my entire life, was given to me by my mother. She made it clear to us that learning was essential to living. Maybe the even greater message was that a woman’s choices, actions and goals were not necessarily dependent on the support of a man. With my mother at the helm of our family, I just assumed that they weren’t.

 

Although my home was a haven for a girl with ambitions and dreams like mine, our Pentecostal church was the first place I encountered a challenge to my right to fully explore my potential. I was thirteen. It was the first place where I saw people close to me reinforce those media images of women “in their places” that I had so easily dismissed in early childhood. The more deeply involved I became in the church, the less sure I became about my right to a full, free, explosive, untamed life. Even though I had been raised in the Pentecostal (Christian) church all my life, it had been peripheral for me at best. With hormones raging, acne taking over, body blossoming and grown men looking, I needed something to define me other than those things. I chose the church. That choice would later determine my responses to my African ancestry, education, friendship, relationships, sexual violence and sexual identity. And if feminism had a face, she would have frowned; if eyes, she would have cried; if hands, she would have slapped that thirteen-year-old me before I ever internalized the church’s position on women.

The story of Adam and Eve reveals the church’s view on women. The woman in the story is created specifically to meet the man’s needs. He is made from earth; she is made from him. She manipulates him and her trickery is his downfall. She is smart enough to fool the man but too dim to realize the scope of her actions. She is disloyal to her partner and conspires with the creature who has the most to offer. All of the suffering she endures, she brings upon herself, including the pain of childbirth and the death of one of her sons. In short, women are inferior, manipulative cheats whose main purpose in life is to bear children and please men. This was not considered an insult to women in my church but a fact of life.

My parents’ reaction to my newfound faith only reinforced that I had made a good choice. I remember the day my father, who was not a religious man, got all dressed up to see me sing the lead in our choir. Similarly, my mother, who never blinked an eye when I brought home the expected A on my report card, seemed to take a sense of pride in my loyalty to the church. So while United States politics around women in the 1980s was generally a time for marked advance, I was headed back in time to a destination that was literally biblical. Despite the fact that I had recognized the import of Geraldine Ferraro being chosen as the nation’s first female vice presidential candidate, of Whoopi Goldberg’s Academy Award for
The Color Purple
and even the rise of several popular television shows with female leads, my teenage heart was numb to every image but one. The image imbedded in my head through no less than three church services a week: Jesus Christ hanging on a cross, giving his life for sins I had committed. For this I had to pay with my soul, and the men who led my church would show me the way.

The lessons came in many ways. All of our ministers were men. They sat in a raised pulpit above and away from the congregation. They were in charge of all the messages to the congregation. Admonishments to women to stay in their places as outlined in the Bible were commonplace: Women, obey your husbands; and single women, obey your preachers. Never wear pants because the Bible says a woman should not dress like a man. Choose a profession becoming a Christian; my broadcast focus was out because I’d have to wear makeup. Always forgive—even cheating, lying, abusive partners. And for God’s sake, young women, get married and be fruitful—the younger the better. Don’t be gay, period; it is an abomination in the eyes of God.

With admonitions flowing, rushing over the pews like water over a fall, teachings about our African ancestry were notably missing. I was grown before I heard of the Diaspora. I was grown before the feeling was real to me that there must be more to god than rules that, if broken, led to eternal punishment. The feeling that sometimes whatever Spirits moved people to sing and rock and love and look inside must have a woman’s face. Some of the god in me must look like me and move like me and soul like me. But Pentecost had no time, room or interest in telling a little curious girl with an open heart that she was a daughter of the Goddess Osun. Osun is a representation of a creative force in the universe that is not male, coming directly from our African sisters and brothers but not found at all in our teachings—not even as an alternative “god view” to be dismissed. When I started studying African religions on my own, in college, I realized that I was both shocked and comforted by representations of spirit that put forth a need for a balance between female and male energy in life; it felt closer to right than the male-dominant philosophies that permeated Christianity.

What you don’t know can hurt you deeply. This sin of omission and ignorance committed by the church kept me as far away from my sisters and brothers in Africa as the miles between us. The internalized racism presented to African Americans as part of the United States’s ongoing system of oppression of thought, history and culture against us—beginning with the Atlantic slave trade and continuing today with the prison industrial complex—was so deeply ingrained that children even used the words “black” and “African” as insults to each other. No one was rushing to offer other images of Africa besides those found in the
National Geographic
books that lined the shelves in both the school and public libraries. Exacerbating the ignorance about our history was the apathy that pervaded it. Our only passion was God. As a result, we weren’t even Christians of action like Martin Luther King Jr. and his cohorts; we were Christians of criticism and isolation and passivity.

The constant image of one god with a male face only perpetuated the sexism that was so accepted that I never even heard it called by its name. I took in silent messages as I watched the twentysomething couples struggle with the church’s heavy-handed tenets and old-world views of male and female roles. The women were always encouraged to acquiesce in any disagreements, while the men were encouraged to show strength by keeping their families in line. Men whose wives seemed to conform were openly rewarded with higher posts; men whose wives were less obedient were slower to rise up the church hierarchy. Divorce was one of the greatest indications of spiritual weakness, so the few married women whose husbands were not in church were encouraged to wait them out, let God handle it and at all costs, stay.

But my greatest lesson about the value of women in the church’s eyes was a personal one. One of those pulpit kings took off his crown and robe and stepped down from his dais just long enough to rape me. God had allowed my teenage body to blossom too soon. When I confided in my trusted women in the church, they told me my salvation depended on me forgiving him. Years later when I told our pastor, he told me that that preacher had much more to protect and much more to lose if the news became public. He was a man with a family. I was just a girl. I was a girl too afraid to tell my parents. I was a girl too warped by the fear of losing what felt like the only real relationship in my life—that with Jesus—to leave the church right away. So I paid with my soul, and feminism prayed for eyes to cry for little old me. What she got was an eleven-year struggle from that dusty road of Bible stories, church sermons and women who walked behind to a place where I would rather walk alone with eyes open to the world than in a shadow just to feel like I had some company.

 

The journey was by no means smooth. Although 1980s politics had failed to touch me, the politics of the 1990s held me in a suffocating embrace. It was in this last decade of the century that all my cultural, religious and political contradictions came to a head. The world was battling over a woman’s right to choose, and I was confronted with my own obligation to do so. It wasn’t a choice about my body but my mind, and everyone seemed to want a piece. To practice our religion, one had to filter every thought, every move or emotion through the Bible. It was a constant checking and rechecking against biblical tenets and the church’s interpretation of those doctrines. The older I became, the more I came to question the teachings. The more I questioned, the more I was reprimanded for being weak in spirit. Mention of other belief systems brought reproach, and instead of exploring questions fully, I was encouraged to put my faith in god and wait for answers from him. It was a way to keep people in line and quiet. The discussion was to be confined to prayers between you and god, preventing you from having discussions with each other.

This narrow view of my spiritual possibilities and total lack of acknowledgment of our forefather’s and foremother’s beliefs eventually put me on a path away from Christianity. As I started college in 1992, the church was still teaching that pride was a person’s downfall, but African-American pride was calling my name. The more time I spent with my young sisters and brothers seeking knowledge about our spiritual possibilities, the more I realized how stifling the church was for a woman with questions. It disturbed and at the same time invigorated me to learn that ours was one of the only religions on earth that lacked powerful images of women as gods.

It is no surprise that the Christian United States continues to show open contempt for its female population through its dissemination of wealth that keeps working-class women and their children last. African-American women and their children are barely in the running. By 1990 a woman’s right to choose was being openly attacked by terrorist murderers, while woman battering and rape laws laid down sentences that belittled the crimes. As a rape victim—who could have easily become a teen pregnancy statistic as a result—I found the politics of the time grating on my spirit.

If that wasn’t bad enough, there were weekly news reports of women, mostly African-American women, cheating the welfare system. These images were constant and so incessant that they became normalized as a representation of the average low-income African-American mother. Single African-American women were commonly represented as teen mothers, who either abandoned their babies or smoked crack until the babies were born with a multitude of birth defects. Similar news stories about white women were more forgiving and left the audience with questions rather than judgments: What is our country saying when a young woman has to deceive the government about how many kids she has just to get enough support to take care of one child? Where have we gone wrong when a young woman is so afraid that she leaves her newborn to be found by a stranger? When the subject of the same stories were African American, reporters spun them in a way that inevitably left the audience outraged, no questions asked. The shoddy journalism supporting a racism that lived so deep in the average American consciousness that it went unspoken was painful. It was like being slapped across the face with the hatred our high-school history classes tried to convince us died after the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. It was a different kind of hurt than the every day encounters with people who showed contempt for my brown skin, because it was being mass marketed as the truth. I felt as if they were daring viewers to even think about questioning it.