Feminine resolve
on Our Women on the Ground: Essays by Arab Women Reporting from the Arab World, edited by Zara Hankir
Our Women on the Ground is a collection of essays by Arab and Middle Eastern Sahafiyats (female journalists) that stand on the front lines of the Arab spring. For so long I had refused to learn about this; fully expecting narratives charged with military strategies and state policies I was much too unfamiliar with and the merciless exclusion of women’s accounts. Granted, military combat is the defining male role, and the patriarchal society of the Middle East actively exclude women from combat on religious and moral grounds.
While their fathers, brothers, sons and husbands are being recruited or hunted, women - deprived of agency in almost every aspect of their lives - are left to fend for themselves. The divide between men and women multiplied, creating a space beyond the reach of war correspondents, which consists largely of men. Despite having been assaulted, detained and shot, these Sahafiyats reach into this space, determined to tell the stories left untold. Beyond accounts of gender violence and forced displacement, this book reminds us of the horror of transnational recruitment to the Daesh, as well as the legacy of patriarchal autocracy in the Middle East.
Hwaida Saad, in her essay What Normal? recalls an informant that was recruited: “Even the chef became a batallion leader...He was once a professional at making Arabic sweets and kebabs; he’s now a professional at making hand grenades.” Zeina Karam, in Syria Undone, recalls the day Hafez al-Assad died: “I caught a glimpse of a man covering his face, and realised he was weeping silently. “Tyattamna (we have been orphaned),” said the young security guard searching our car when my taxi driver offered his condolences. Although he was hated by many, Assad, having ruled Syria for thirty years, was the only leader many had ever known. A Syria without him seemed unthinkable.” This much is true: Patriarchy has failed us - women, men and nations alike. This is an anthology of the female resolve; collected evidence on unbroken purpose and inexhaustible courage.
notes
I finished this book on a train ride back to London. To read about war in a city blessed with a multitude of convenience and ease; a city so liberated that people roam free to wear, to read, to kiss, to preach...the comfort feels almost like a misdeed. Perhaps this is why these Sahafiyats return, over and over again, to their war-torn countries. What do you call the guilt you feel when you are safely confined from the flames that burn the world you are bound to? I always wonder if we are to apologise for our disposition. Must we offer repentance over the circumstances of our birth, our wealth, or citizenship? We carry within ourselves the burdens of our families and the sins of our countrymen. Is it enough to simply acknowledge the kind of privilege they have allowed us; or must we strive, endlessly, to prove ourselves worthy? Or perhaps it is not guilt after all. Perhaps it’s a longing, a kind of hope in their raging hearts to mother the abandoned and destitute back to life. A better life. Can the woman ever truly be herself? Is it possible for her dreams to never be diluted by the duty to nurture that is imposed upon her - to mother all that is broken?
