Staying Alive

By: Ahdaf Soueif

In Baghdad on any given day you might come across her. I will not tell you her name – but you’ll recognize her. She is tall and slim, has silver hair and dresses in black with black trainers and thick black socks. Her husband, now dead, used long ago to be an Iraqi ambassador. Now she sets out from her home every morning and walks. She walks through 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 eighty-eight and doesn’t have much time.

None of us has much time.

Have you ever seen a patched book? Here it is: SJ’s slim volume The Poet. SJ has a Ph.D. 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 equal one dollar and fifty cents.

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

F is an Egyptian architect. She has always been active in women’s organizations. 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 fourteen anti-war activists detained recently in Cairo. Last Monday she and her two daughters, both engineering students, went to visit him in Tora jail. Her daughters were astounded at the hundreds of women and children waiting to visit political detainees. Children were waiting to visit grandfathers in their seventies. F’s husband is from the left but the majority of the 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 husband’s 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 twenty 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 the 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. In the Arab world today, the human rights of women are indivisible from those of men.

The emergency laws proscribe demonstrations or unauthorized public gatherings. Five of the marches that have taken place in Cairo over the last two weeks have been women’s marches called by women’s NGOs and timed with the Women in Black demonstrations across the world. 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 brutalizing women in public. It seems, though, that their patience may be wearing thin; the latest demo saw 150 women cornered by some 2,000 riot police so their protest took place in front of Shepheard’s Hotel round the corner from the American embassy. Today’s demonstration in front of the Arab League headquarters will link 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 checkpoints. Twenty-nine of these 51 babies died.

And yet Palestinian women continue to have babies. Is that a political choice? At the centre of most women’s lives ate 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 on about their business as best they can.

A great many of the cultural workers in the West Bank and Gaza are women. Marina Burhan operates a childrens’ theatre out of Beit Jala despite her roof having been blown off. Carol Michel keeps the small cultural centre in Bethlehem working – curfews permitting. Suad al-Amiri restores houses in the old city of al-Khalil (Hebron) and takes the Israeli army to court when they try to demolish her work. Tania Nasir researches traditional embroidery patterns. Adila Laidi stages concerts and painting competitions in Ramallah despite her computers being ripped apart and excrement smeared on her walls again by the army. ‘By responding to the occupation, interpreting it through art, we are no longer its victims, we work our own will upon it.’ She says. Vera and Tania take advantage of a sudden lifting of curfew to slip out and have highlights put in their hair. They say it makes them feel stronger and able to cope with the soldiers.

Karma, though sixty years younger than our Baghdad 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.

Peter Hansen, writing in the paper last Wednesday 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 golf. 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 traveler 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?

* The Guardian, 13 March 2003 published this in a shorter form. The full essay appeared for the first time in Mezzaterra, 2004.