(Interview) Adrienne Roberts: A Woman’s Work Is Never Done.

/Photo: See Red Woman’s Workshop/

Adrienne Roberts is a lecturer in International Politics at the University of Manchester since 2012. Her research and teaching interests are in the areas of international political economy, feminist political economy, debt and debt-driven development, and gendered dimensions of the carceral state and the criminalization of poverty.

Her work has been published in journals such as Third World Quarterly, International Feminist Journal of Politics, New Political Economy and Critical Sociology. Her book Gendered States of Punishment and Welfare: Feminist Political Economy, Primitive Accumulation and the Law (Routledge) was published in 2016. Roberts was a guest of the 10th Subversive Festival – European Left Against New World (Dis)order in Zagreb.

How is gender equality used as a stratgey of corporate business growth and a way of legitimizing capitalist exploitation?

It’s not only the corporations, but also a lot of the neoliberal government instutions, that have latched on the idea of gender equality as being smart economics. The idea is that it makes good economic sense to empower women. The problem here is how the empowering of women is understood, which is empowering women as workers and as consumers.

There’s been a lot of talk about the need to indrease women’s “human capital”, so that they can be integrated into the work force. What gets left out of those types of arguments is any attention to all the work that women already do, whether it’s dometic labour or home based work or various forms of the so-called informal labour. That is largely ignored in the debate that is positioned in a way that says that including women into the capitalist labour market leads to empowering.

What is the risk in enforcing such visions of empowerment?

The risk is that in ingoniring all of the other work that women are already engaged in, we risk further increasing the burden placed on women. It’s also important to talk about the power of women as consumers.

Different national economies and global economy in general haven’t recovered from the crisis of 2007/8, and we’re seeing stagnating levels of economic growth. Women are meant to be the real miracle workers, they are the ones that are going to get us out of it – empowered as workers and consumers. Valuing women as consumers risks obscuring all sorts of other inherent aspects of gender equality. Gender equality is underminded by the view that inequality is best solved by the integration into the capitalist market.

In connection to what you said about women as consumers, could we talk about feminism as a brand, the way it is often used as a marketing strategy, particularly in the Western countries, and then there are growing industries for empowering through “feminist” products?

There are many examples of how that’s done, and it depends on the type of feminism we’re talking about. This type of feminism is liberal feminism that isn’t challenging enough on a whole range of norms associated with femininty and capitalism.

All of the attempts to sell Dove products because they are somehow more natural and allow women to express their beauty naturally, but at the same time featuring images of women who are still being commodified and valued because they are attractive women, is a bad attempt to reconcile feminism with cosmetic industry. You see it in fashion magazines, like Vogue and Elle, which have explicitly adopted the feminist stance but don’t see any contradiction between that and continuously creating unrealistic and unachieveable standards of beauty.

How does this type of work contribute to feminism and does it at all?

There’s a lot of debates around that. I think it does. It’s obvious that feminism means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. In the USA, another example of this would be around Beyonce and her type of feminism, feminism of the famous, powerful and rich. They do have a message of empowerment and it does speak to a lot of people. Is that limited understanding of feminism? It is.

But this is a tricky question because it’s important for feminism not to alienate people and cause more separation, but there’s also danger in supporting feminism that is so inoffensive to the capitalist system, a system which is detrimental for women in so many ways. In such a narrow view of feminism, possibilities for major social changes are extremely limited.

Thinking about feminism globally, how can the feminism in the “developed countries” affect women elsewhere – like the “third world” labour, which now greatly depends on underpaid female wrokers? We can think about the relation of female workers and consumers of the garment industry as an example.

This is where the allegiance of different feminist organizations is important, and there are feminist groups that work on that. There are different feminist campaigns that have emerged globally, largely as respones to the corporate driven feminist agenda, and they are precisely about trying to draw attention to ways corporations exploit women through various industries, such as the garment industry, which is not well regulated.

This cannot only be tied to campaigns on consumption and western-based feminist movements by fair trade clothing, because that’s still too simplistic and too indvidualistic and not transformative enough. There are other ways consciousness can be raised among feminists in the West by linking up with the very people involved in making the products we consume. There are many venues where these sorts of discussions are happening now, around the world, like social forums. It’s an ongoing project and its future is yet to be determined.

 /Photo: For All Womankind/

You’ve wrritten a lot about the role of the state in forcing women to adhere to the historically shaped roles and categories, including those of paid and unpaid work. How crucial is the role of the state?

It’s essential. There are so many ways we can think about the involvment of the state historically and in the present moment, in producing and securing gender norms, inculding gender norms around paid and unpaid labour. In the book Gendered states of Punishment and Welfare, I am looking historically, up to neo-liberalism, at how the state is involved in creating specific gender norms.

Before the transition to capitalism you have the family working together for the most part, as an integrated unit, you don’t have the separation of what we now call productive and reproductive labour. Through a whole host of state policies in the early stages of transition to capitalism, a change is happening.

I am talking about state policies in England to create private property, done through different laws, and then the private property being regulated in a way that criminalizes peasantry, and says they are no longer able to collect food, fish, etc. All of these laws lead to creating wage labour, and people not involved in wage labour are to be punished. As we get further along the capitalist development, closer to the Industrial revolution and particularly after the Industrial revolution – these laws take on a more gendered form.

They are not just trying to create a class of wage labourers, they also say women need to behave in very particular ways if they want to be considered deserving of any sort of state support. If you are unmarried, if you have “bastard” children, you’re considered to be undeserving. There are similiar types of practices now, but with the move from the welfare state to work state, there is a disregard for all sorts of reponsilibilites women tend to have, and there is a rise of equality with the vengance within the criminal system.

Talking about equality with vengance – a big part of your research focuses on the carceral state and gendered forms of poverty, especially in connection to the criminalisation of poverty.

With the criminal system during the welfare state, which was still highly gendered and problematic on many levels, women used to be thrown in reformatories, and now you have women who are treated increasingly harshly, who are thrown into prisons similar to men’s. You’re not seeing the disciplining of women in a gender specific way, as it was seen in the welfare state era.

This has horrifiying results because when we stop paying attention to reasons why people end up committing criminal acitvity, we lose sight of the fact that women who are in jail are almost always there either for drug related crimes or for property related crimes, petty thefts, etc. If they are there for violence it is normally for violence committed against an abusive partner.

The reasons for those crimes are rooted in women’s socio-economic position and gendered forms of precariousness that are produced by neoliberalism. To ignore that and assume that women have made a cost-benefit calculation and a rational choice to engage in crime and that the way we need to deal with that isn’t through social support and social services, but through a harsh state that will be punitive in its reaction to crime is a really wrong approach.

You also look at debt-development a lot, but unlike many researchers, you analyze it on a micro-level, on the level of households.

What’s been going on since 1990’s through the microcredit projects is that so-called development in the so-called Third world is presumed to be something that can happen and that can be enabled by providing loans at the small scale to indviduals and increasingly to women. Somehow the provisioning of these loans is magically going to enable them to start sustainable businesses to bring themselves and their communities out of poverty. The microcredit project has been discredited over the years, we have several decades of studies that have shown it has failed to deliver on its intended outcome.

But the idea behind it hasn’t disappeared by any means, we’re seeing it reinvented right now in the interest that the development agencies and states have in supporting small to medium enterprises, as well as the focus on enterprenourship and women particularly. Even when they’re not talking about microcredit as much, there is still this assumption to provide small amounts of loans and business training to women and that is how we will achieve development. That bypasses all of the existing issues around underdevelopment and it doesn’t address the role of the state in supporting and working towards the reduction of poverty.

And finally – how is it possible to develop deeply transformative feminism in a capitalist system, if gender inequality was so essential in the development of capitalism?

That is why feminism needs to be anti-capitalist. There are inherent limits to forms of gender equality we can attain in a capitalist system because it is historically founded on gender inequality and it always enables to continue to profit and accumulate by reproducing gender inequality. I don’t see a time where we can have gender equality in capitalism. This is still not a widely recognized feminist position, but it’s also important to fight battles as they come up.

One big problem of Marxist feminists is that their critique is of such great proportions, on a structural level, and it risks taking away the sense from the small battles within the capitalist system, which are all necessary and important for the immediate needs and everyday lives of so many people.

We need to hold on to the analytical understanding of the roots of the gender inequality, but that isn’t meant to be a demobilising approach that says that anything that’s not directly undermining the system is useless.

• • •

This interview was also published in Croatian, on H-Alter.

Without Peace, We Can’t Have Women’s Rights.

/photo: Shepard Fairey, Obey Middle East Mural/

More than a century has passed since the famous strikes of female workers in the American textile industry. For more than a century, all around the world, International Women’s Day is celebrated on the 8th of March. A century later, inequality isn’t gone. To discuss the issues of inequality and representation in the Middle East, a region often in the spotlight for violation of women’s rights, we talk with female lawyers, poets, aid workers, directors and activists from the region – Jehan Bseiso, Hind Shoufani, Roula Baghdadi, Fatima Idriss and Nagwan El-Ashwal.

In the honor of International Women’s Day, in the name of continuity of the struggle, we’re in discussion with women from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt. We tackle the issues for women in general, and in the Middle East particularly. Western media usually doesn’t do justice to this topic and the mainstream discourse on Middle Eastern women is highly problematic. It’s not only about the stories written, it’s equally about the imagery that follows them – in some cases the photographs chosen to accompany the news about Middle Eastern women are less than representational of the story at hand. Let’s change that. The struggle continues, but solidarity continues too!

Jehan Bseiso: Between victims and superheros – too much of a burden

Bseiso is a Palestinian poet, researcher and aid worker. Her poetry has been published in Warscapes, The Funambulist, The Electronic Intifada, and Mada Masr among others. Her book I Remember My Name (2016) is the creative category winner of the Palestine Book Awards. Bseiso is co-editing Making Mirrors a new anthology by, for and about refugees. She is also working on a collection of poems: Conversations Continued, a compilation of real, misheard, and misremembered conversations. Bseiso has been working with Médecins sans Frontières /Doctors Without Borders since 2008.

In Jordan and Lebanon, women continue to carve out a space across all spheres at home and at work. There is a lot of incredible progress, but also so much work left to do in confronting unjust laws , like the one that lets a rapist marry his victim, permits a brother to shoot his sister in the name of “honor” and forces women to “declare pregnancy” when applying for a job.

I find that women from the MENA region are portrayed either as victims or superheroes, and that is too much of a burden, it needs to stop.  The ordinary is extraordinary and we forget that. Western media is particularly obsessed with the trope of “the oppressed Arab and Muslim woman” to an extent that first it misrepresents that story, and it overshadows any other narrative.

Concerning change – each step, however small, if it’s in the right direction it counts. The struggle for change and improvement of the situation for women in the MENA is historical and ongoing, it predates the “Arab spring” and it must necessarily continue to be allied to any call for systemic change.

Hind Shoufani: Legal system written against women

Hind Shoufani is a filmmaker and a writer, working and living in many cities in the Middle East. She’s Palestinian by blood, born in Lebanon and at heart a Beirut girl, raised in Damascus, but also lived in Jordan and held a Jordanian citizenship her whole life. Shoufani currently lives in Dubai and considers herself from all of these places. She is the founder of the Poeticians collective, where poets from all backgrounds read multilingual spoken word and poetry in Beirut and Dubai. She performed her poetry in various cities in Europe, the US and the Arab world and currently works as a freelance director/producer/writer in the UAE and the Arab region at large. Shoufani is currently making a video art feature length documentary on the sensuality, politics and religion present in the poetry and life of six female Arab poets. 

Aside from the violence against women, issues such as honor killings, assault and abuse that goes unreported and unpunished, women in the Arab world suffer the most from the legal system that is written against them. Whether based on Sharia law or civil rights law, women are never treated equally in the eyes of the law. We do not inherit assets, money or land the same way men do, we cannot pass on our citizenship to our children if their father is from a different nationality, and Christian women can be robbed of their children/assets/money if they marry a Muslim man who either divorces them, or passes away. Lebanon just removed the law that says if a rapist marries the woman he assaulted he will not be prosecuted under the legal system.

There are attempts in various countries to improve the standing of women in society as a legal citizen with rights, but it has not yet fulfilled any equality with men. This is mostly due to religion being the key reference for most arbitration in court, whether its issues of childbirth, divorce, inheritance or marriage in general. The personal status laws in the Arab world when it comes to women are abysmal and need a complete overhaul. Issues like violence against women are international issues and not specific to the Arab world, but our legal system really needs to be completely rewritten. A separation of “Church” and state is very much needed here. Sadly, there are very strong forces in the region who want to see us go back to a thousand years ago, and a massive clash of ideology is currently playing out, to very bloody and sad results.

That being said, a lot of mainstream discourse is offensive to Arab women. No one outside the region quite understands how amazingly strong Arab women are. We defy the odds and persevere every single day, we rise from swamps of hatred, prejudice, narrow minded beliefs, obstacles, violence, a legal system that treats us as inferior citizens, and we make life happen. We are doctors and poets and mothers and cleaners and dancers and teachers and warriors. This holds especially true for the Palestinian women who have resisted such a cruel occupation for over seventy years, and more recently Syrian women who are doing best to hold the sky together for themselves and their families dispersed in camps, prisons, street corners, homeless and refugeed and hated and besieged and starving.

The mainstream media is also missing a massive point. While there are hundreds of thousands of women who are struggling for a better life in the region, there are very large numbers of women who were born free, into educated and progressive and open minded families, who are leading brave and exhilarating lives. Not all of us are fighting oppression. Not all of us are in a camp, attempting to escape terrorists such as ISIS and so on. Not all of us have a brother or father who beats us. I personally know hundreds of women who have university degrees, live on their own, make their own money and are economically independent of their parents, choose their lovers, are lesbians, are artists, are outspoken activists and lawyers and nurses and teachers and poets. Many are atheists, some are spiritual, some Muslim or Christian. Free. The mainstream view of Arab women rarely showcases these stories because they are not considered sexy.

Roula Baghdadi: Without peace, we can’t have human and women’s rights

Roula Baghdadi is a Syrian lawyer. She is a part of supervisor’s legal team In Equal Citizenship Center inside Syria, and works with a legal team which defends abused women. Baghdadi is also currently doing her Master in Public law.

On the International Women’s Day, I am hoping for peace, in all of the world, for all of the people. Without peace we can’t achieve respect and fulfillment of all human and women’s rights.

Women in the region are in the worst situation, by the effects of religion and the Islamic extremism, but also totalitarian regimes. Our women today have to fight the long and strong history of thoughts and ideologies, wars, poverty… They have to deal with all of these problems to reach their rights. I believe women’s rights can’t exist without democracy, social justice, and full respect of human rights in general – in constitutions and laws and society. As a lawyer, I believe laws help societies evolve, but that still needs real development in the region.

In Middle East, women do their best. These issues will still need decades to be resolved, but we are on our path, we reject the old systems of the world – in which there’s discrimination between women and men, between black and white, between poor and rich. We reject the regime of profiling, we reject tyranny. And that is not easy.

Syrian women are sold in the markets and are whipped and are still being arrested and abducted. They are being targeted and used as a weapon of war, raped and sold, forced into marriage – particularly minors. All of the parties in Syrian war agreed to one thing, which is targeting of women. That’s why I’d like to say, once again, on the International Women’s Day – let’s work for peace, peace and peace. For all of humanity.

Fatima Idriss: It starts with people addressing immediate issues of daily life

Fatima Idriss is a general manager of Tadamon Council (Egyptian Multicultural Council for Refugees) since 2009, and one of its founders. In 2013, Idriss published a research booklet on education for refugees, which was mainly written by children and young people. She has participated in many international conferences in Europe and in the Arab world. Idriss has been working in the human rights field since 2001, with different international organizations based in Egypt, including: Save the Children – Regional office Middle East and North Africa as Child Participation officer (2004); or CARE Egypt on an awareness-raising project on SIDA (2006).

It has been proved that women still struggle globally – to be considered an equal human and citizen, and those struggles are not ending, due to multi-dimensional factors preventing women to achieve a decent amount of their basic rights.

In Middle East and Egypt particularly, being a woman is a trouble for the community on a daily basis. Women in Middle East have been heavily torn under the concept of “women rights defenders” by those who declare themselves as protectors of the rights of women, but are full of hostility and hatred for women – they are not happy as long as women don’t complete the form that they want and not what women really want. Every violence against women and sexual harassment is still seen as women’s liability, they are the ones blamed by the whole community.

Freedom is not always about grand political debates. It often starts with people addressing the immediate issues of daily life. When it comes to women controlling their lives, the current mainstream discourse on women is different  – the example of Tunisia is completely different from Egypt, and then there’s Gulf area, which is totally different from the rest. When questioning the current mainstream discourse on women as an act of justice to the reality, the answer is “NO”.

We are witnessing massive deterioration of women’s rights. We’ve gone from taking on the roles as active citizens after the Arab spring to passivity – due to limits of change in the social, economic, and political atmosphere in general. At one level, community members kept back to undercurrent burden of economic situation (Egypt as example), it keeps them so busy with the daily needs. The economic situation got the priority and that created limited space for all citizens to engage in public life – so women have less opportunity to be active.

Nagwan El-Ashwal: The issue of democracy

Nagwan El-Ashwal is from Egypt. She is PhD researcher at the European University Institute – EUI- Florence, Italy and she works on Jihadi movements in the Arab region. Also, she was a visiting PhD scholar at the Institute of International Studies at University of California at Berkeley and the chairperson of Regional Center for Mediation and Dialogue. El-Ashwal was involved with a lot of different organizations related to justice, equality and democracy in Europe and in the Middle East.

The main issue for women in the Middle East today is the issue of democracy and freedom from repressive regimes. Those regimes close the public sphere when confronted with any kind of activism.

I think that women activists in the first years of the Arab spring have enjoyed a lot with the free space where they could take part in all political activities and push society forward to get more rights – in terms of political and economical struggle. However, after what occurred – either in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen or Libya, women involved in activism are getting back to the first step. The situation is better in Tunisia but it is still dramatically bad in other cases.

• • •

This article was also published in Croatian, on H-Alter.

Playlist: Rojava Women.

Female pressure is an international network of female artists in the fields of electronic music and digital arts founded by ElectricIndigo – from musicians, composers and DJs to visual artists, cultural workers and researchers.

Their Rojava Women compilation was out in March this year. The album is described as “tracks of understanding and solidarity. Sounds in support of a continuous, relentless opposition to regional fascism and, at the same time to universal fascism, religious or secular.

Opposition carried through body and soul on behalf of us all. Opposition that can make life, as a future of freedom and equality, available to all. Opposition that we must keep alive before we can celebrate.”

This compilation is a donation campaign – the donations go directly to the women of Rojava to build a women’s village on location called The Village Project.

You can find out more about the album and listen to the songs here.

♫

Previous Playlist:

The Melody of our Alienation (Yemen)

Ruba Shamshoum

Jerusalem in my heart

Maghawir by Mashrou’ Leila

What Do You Call it & A Dialogue For Peace.

Here are two great short animated films I recently stumbled upon. One is about naming, second about dialogue, so they kind of fit together great. The first one was done by the Syrian feminist group Estayqazat. The film is about a special part of a female body. It is… Wait… What do you call it?

“Mankind comes to the world due to it, more than half of the world’s population is defined by it, and it gives pleasure to both women and men. But how do we talk about what we don’t have a name for – or have a name that we will not speak? Silence creates confusion, and confusion then again is covered up in silence. So, what do you call it? A number of Syrian women put their words of it into the public. Now you know too.”

The second one was a collaboration of four cartoonists (from Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia) to find common ground in creating a 2-minute speed drawing video for peace.

“Dialogue is the preffered approach to resolve our issues in MENA – be it in our families, communities, or societies as a whole.”

 

Arundhati Roy: Feminism & Foundations, Burkas & Botox.

Here is a great excerpt from Arundhati Roy’s Capitalism: A Ghost Story, published on Verso Books.

“Why do most ‘official’ feminists and women’s organizations in India keep a safe distance between themselves and organizations like say the ninety-thousand-member Krantikari Adivasi Mahila Sanghatan (Revolutionary Adivasi Women’s Association) that is fighting patriarchy in its own communities and displacement by mining corporations in the Dandakaranya forest? Why is it that the dispossession and eviction of millions of women from land that they owned and worked is not seen as a feminist problem?

                     /Arundhati Roy, photo via Naomicanton/

The hiving off of the liberal feminist movement from grassroots anti-imperialist and anticapitalist peoples’ movements did not begin with the evil designs of [corporate-endowed] foundations. It began with those movements’ inability to adapt and accommodate the rapid radicalization of women that took place in the 1960s and ’70s. The foundations showed genius in recognizing and moving in to support and fund women’s growing impatience with the violence and patriarchy in their traditional societies as well as among even the supposedly progressive leaders of left movements.

In a country like India, the schism also ran along the rural-urban divide. Most radical, anticapitalist movements were located in the countryside, where patriarchy continued to rule the lives of women. Urban women activists who joined these movements (like the Naxalite movement) had been influenced and inspired by the Western feminist movement, and their own journeys toward liberation were often at odds with what their male leaders considered to be their duty: To fit in with ‘the masses.’ Many women activists were not willing to wait any longer for the ‘revolution’ in order to end the daily oppression and discrimination in their lives, including from their own comrades. They wanted gender equality to be an absolute, urgent, and nonnegotiable part of the revolutionary process and not just a postrevolution promise. Intelligent, angry, and disillusioned women began to move away and look for other means of support and sustenance.

As a result, by the late 1980s, around the time when the Indian markets were opened up, the liberal feminist movement in India had become inordinately NGO-ized. Many of these NGOs have done seminal work on queer rights, domestic violence, AIDS, and the rights of sex workers. But significantly, the liberal feminist movement has not been at the forefront of challenging the New Economic Policies, even though women have been the greatest sufferers. By manipulating the disbursement of the funds, the foundations have largely succeeded in circumscribing the range of what ‘political’ activity should be. The funding briefs of NGOs now prescribe what counts as women’s ‘issues’ and what doesn’t.

The NGO-ization of the women’s movement has also made Western liberal feminism (by virtue of its being the most funded brand) the standard-bearer of what constitutes feminism. The battles, as usual, have been played out on women’s bodies, extruding Botox at one end and burkas at the other. (And then there are those who suffer the double whammy, Botox and the burka.) When, as happened recently in France, an attempt is made to coerce women out of the burka rather than creating a situation in which a woman can choose what she wishes to do, it’s not about liberating her but about unclothing her. It becomes an act of humiliation and cultural imperialism. Coercing a woman out of her burka is as bad as coercing her into one. It’s not about the burka. It’s about the coercion. Viewing gender in this way, shorn of social, political, and economic context, makes it an issue of identity, a battle of props and costumes. It’s what allowed the US government to use Western feminist liberal groups as moral cover when it invaded Afghanistan in 2001. Afghan women were (and are) in terrible trouble under the Taliban. But dropping daisy cutters on them was not going to solve the problem.”

Remembering May Ziadeh: Ahead of (her) Time.

May Ziadeh (Marie Elias Ziadeh, born in Nazareth, Palestine in 1886, died in Cairo in 1941) was one of the key figures of the Nahda in the early 20th-century Arab literary scene, and is known for being one of the early Palestinian feminists. Ziadeh was born in Palestine to a Lebanese father and a Palestinian mother, and moved to Egypt where she wrote for Arab newspapers and periodicals.

May Ziadeh /image © Iwan/

Her poetry and essays were pioneering, she wrote numerous articles and editorials and was noticed for her translation efforts and intiatives concerning English, German, and French novels of the peirod. Shortly after the Russian Revolution, she raised the issue of socialism and other political ideologies of the day in a series of articles.

In 1921, she convened a conference under the heading “The goal of life”, where she called upon Arab women to aspire toward freedom, and to be open to the Occident without forgetting their Oriental identity. Ziadeh also wrote sensitive biographical studies of three pioneer women writers and poets, Warda al-Yaziji, A’isha Taymur, and Bahithat al-Badiya.

She was perhaps best-known for hosting a Tuesday salon, which remained active for approximately 20 years (1911-1931), during which time May’s house, where it was held, was the pole to which the greatest writers and intellectuals of the age were drawn.

Antje Ziegler writes in her essay May Ziadeh Rediscovered:

„ If May’s, in comparison to other women of her time, nearly unprecedented literary, journalistic and rhetorical efforts to find public recognition, can be seen as a steady search for social integration, the founding of her salon appears to be the logical culmination of these efforts.  Open to men and women of varied religious, national and social background, this salon contrasts with the other famous Egyptian salon of the period, the politically influenced salon of Princess Nazli Abu Fadil, exclusively visited by men.

…

May Ziadeh was a prominent, but moderate representative of this ‘age of enlightenment’, who did not equate modernity with the denial of cultural heritage in blind imitation of the West.  Strongly dependent on integration herself, she advocated the reconciliation of conflicting views all her life.“

Ziadeh /photo via northshorewoman/

Very well known but still mysterious in its nature is her correspondence with Khalil Gibran (who lived in New York), which extended over two decades, though the two never met. Ziadeh became one of the most prolific writers of the new genre of ‘shi’r manthur’, prose poetry or poetic prose.  Her reputation as a critic also grew first of all in connection with Khalil Gibran, whose works she helped make famous in the Arab world with her articles.

Ziadeh never married. At the end of 1920s, she suffered a series of personal losses, beginning with the death of her parents, her friends, and Khalil Gibran. She fell into a deep depression and returned to Lebanon where her relatives placed her in a psychiatric hospital to gain control over her estate. She eventually recovered and returned to Cairo where she died. She left more than 15 books of poetry, literature and translations. I believe none of her works are available in English, unfortunately.

/image via Bambi’s Soapbox/

Gibran’s letters to Ziadeh were published in a book Love Letters (Ziadeh’s family did not want her letters published, so we do not get to read her responses to Gibran). It feels appropriate to finish this post with one of Gibran’s letters to Ziadeh (written in May of 1921). He writes:

“Where is my letter, May? Why have you not sent it to me? I am eager to receive it, and I want all of it, every little bit of it. Do you know how much I desire to receive that letter after having read a brief snatch of it—a divine fragment which arrived to announce the dawning of a new day?”

The Feminism of Nizar Qabbani.

My newest article, The Feminism of Nizar Qabbani, is up on Muftah.

“Nizar Qabbani is one of the most famous Arab poets of the 20th century. From his direct, erotic poetry, addiction to women, and impulsive and passionate verses, to his constant criticism of Arab leaders and powerful calls for justice, sixteen years after his death, Qabbani remains an indispensable voice throughout the Arab world.”

Nizar Qabbani /photo via Antika/

“Qabbani adressed many gender-related taboos, from the frustration of a woman whose husband will not satisfy her sexual needs, to the anguish of a pregnant mistress thrown out on the street by her lover for refusing to get an abortion. Out of his enormous love for the Arab world, Qabbani criticized what was wrong with the region, in the hope that progress and change for the better would come.”

It’s always inspiring to read and write about Qabbani. You can read the full article on Muftah.