The End of Women? Notes on ‘a divided sisterhood’

My head is still buzzing from yesterday’s discussion ‘The New World of Working Women: a divided sisterhood?’ put on by the RSA.

Prof. Alison Wolf, whose book The XX Factor was also released yesterday, had lots of data to back up her claim that educated and ambitious women have almost reached parity with their male peers in the workplace. In fact, Wolf argues that debates about the number of women CEOs and company directors are mostly symbolic at this point, and meaningless to the vast majority of women. That’s because these high flyers, says Wolf, have left the remaining 80% of their ‘sisters’ who don’t hold professional or senior managerial jobs mired in the gendered muck of low wage, low status and unstable jobs.

While I’m unconvinced that high flyers’ career trajectories are as smooth as she makes them sound, Wolf’s thesis is not especially controversial in light of reports that seem to come out weekly about the massively disproportionate effect of austerity on women. It’s widely known that the majority of civil servants – the ‘enemies of enterprise’, according to David Cameron – are women, as are the majority of hospital workers, social workers, carers, secretaries and sundry other ‘support’ staff. They’ve been hit hardest by government cuts and no one seems to give a hoot. (‘Collateral damage’ in the noble battle to ‘live within our means’ appears to be the unchallenged rationale.)

Statistics aside, there was lots to take issue with in Wolf’s presentation. For instance, the way her unquestioning view of ‘success’ led inevitably to the corollary that no meaningful proportion of men would ever be willing to trade career advancement for a better work-life balance. (I’ve read interviews with lots of men who’d disagree…) Or the tight, bright smile with which she announced that maternity leave that stretched a moment beyond the perfunctory should be expected to throw one’s career under the bus.

But it was the journalist Bidisha, chairing the discussion, who acknowledged the ‘elephant in the room’ – namely, class. Admittedly, she tried to put a positive spin on the issue by reminding us that education can transform one’s life chances in the market-defined sense, whilst acknowledging that tuition fees make it even harder for the less well-off to use education as a ladder.

Of course, expectations of a 50 minute long lecture that includes a 20 minute Q&A should necessarily be limited but I nonetheless left the RSA feeling irritated and unsatisfied by the way the class question was left. Indeed, it drew my attention back to what had originally irked me about the title of the lecture. ‘A divided sisterhood’ is a rather misleading phrase here, deploying as it implicitly does the notion of ‘sisterhood’ as a stand-in for ‘women’. Wolf’s lecture was about how women as a category are divided: by class, education, expectation, opportunity, and wealth. By contrast, sisterhood isn’t a category; it’s a relationship.

I’ve argued here before that the idea that anyone can speak ‘for women’ is unrealistic by definition, and tension about this question dates back to the first wave of the feminist movement. Recently, I read a profile of the sixties American feminist Shulamith Firestone, who died last August, which reminded me that those radical days featured as many implosions as they did confrontations with vested interests. Firestone herself was drummed out of pretty much every feminist group she ever joined, not to mention a few she founded, while Kate Millett, author of the groundbreaking Sexual Politics, was driven into a psychiatric institution after she was exposed for not ‘really’ being a lesbian (she was bisexual).

But yesterday’s RSA lecture nudged me further down a road that actually feels somewhat more dangerous and unfamiliar. I’ve begun to wonder whether debates about ‘women’ as a category are meaningful in today’s workplace. Wolf cited lots of statistics, but curiously absent were OECD figures showing that social and economic mobility in the UK have virtually stalled, leaving the country among the least fluid of any developed nation. The US – which is further ‘ahead’ of us in terms of women’s advancement within the upper echelons of the workforce, according to Wolf – has the lowest economic mobility of any OECD country. It strikes me that class and wealth have surpassed gender as meaningful categories by which to judge the ‘fairness’ of workplace attainment.

I’m not suggesting that issues like rape and domestic violence, female genital mutation, forced marriage and a litany of other horrors are not perpetrated against women as a category. Moreover, workplace sexual harassment is directed predominantly at women. But if you look at the loudest and fiercest battles about women at work, they’re invariably organised around benchmarks like women leading FTSE 100 companies and whether quotas would address the problem of their small numbers. In fact, I attended an Evening Standard debate on that very topic just a few months ago, featuring the likes of Helena Morrissey CBE  and Cherie Blair.

But if Wolf is right that these battles are mostly symbolic by now, why isn’t the Evening Standard hosting debates about the effect of the austerity agenda on women, surely a more newsworthy question that affects an exponentially larger number of women in ways that are dramatic, practical and profound. Indeed, why is the only broad public debate about women at work conducted and dominated by those who’ve nearly reached the top? And when we do look beyond them, why do we focus so feverishly on whether these women are pulling others up behind them, while collectively blanking the ordinary and uncertain work performed by the vast majority of their ‘sisters’, and the concerns that arise from that work?

There’s no doubt that the recession and the inequities of the austerity drive it has justified have exacerbated existing tensions about social and economic mobility for men and women alike. Nowadays most people are struggling simply not to fall behind.  There’s also little doubt – for me, anyway – that the New Labour project drove the last nail into the coffin of a politics informed by empathy, fairness and justice, which are now derided as unaffordable and woolly headed. Between the shrill hectoring of a predominantly right wing press and a Chancellor who ties receiving benefits with burning your children to death, defending the disadvantaged has become politically toxic.

So where does gender fit into this brave old world of strivers and skivers? Well, that really depends on your post code.

 

Darya, who would have been 48

Today
There is no journey to trace
No perfume to smell
No food to taste
No song to play
No sun or wind with its hand on my face
Just the whole of missing
To attend to

There it is in that poem, Sky
By Szymborksa (who’s left us too, did you know?)
The one you gave us to read at your funeral
It would take her endless sky
Her moon and stars
Her planets and all their deputies
To fill the hole (with room to spare)
You left us with

But today
There’s no such work to be done
No shifting or heaving
No map to chart
No special pleading
Just the whole of missing
To attend to

 

Who Owns the Sisterhood? (with addendum)

I grew up among sisters, both biological ones and those with whom I’ve felt common cause. They’re often women I don’t know, but whose lives I think I know something about. Of course, ‘sister’ is how second wave feminists, and sometimes even women who don’t call themselves feminists at all, refer to each other, and it’s meant to denote an essential interconnectedness and mutual support. For instance, a ‘sister’ would never steal someone else’s husband, or overlook a talented female colleague because she feels threatened by her, or cross the picket line of a strike for equal pay or better working conditions.

But the truth is that as someone who has real sisters alongside this putative army of symbolic sisters, the symbolic sisterhood often doesn’t feel very sisterly to me. No, it feels a lot more like the cops, there to protect you occasionally but just as quick to lock you up when you transgress.

Take a look at the furore surrounding Can Women Have it All: The Myth of Work-Life Balance, Anne-Marie Slaughter’s article that appeared last summer in The Atlantic Monthly in which she argues that women can’t, in fact, ‘have it all.’ In the piece, Slaughter – who was the first woman director of policy planning at the State Department - tells us why she couldn’t, and concludes that if someone as privileged as she can’t, then it must be pretty much impossible for women who aren’t ‘superhuman, rich, or self-employed.’

These are controversial assertions so you’d expect a robust debate, and to date the piece has generated 2660 comments on The Atlantic website. But what’s alarming is the backlash. Slaughter tells us that a senior White House colleague expressed horror when she  mentioned the idea of writing the piece, advising Slaughter in effect that her obligation to women she would probably never meet but to whom she would be a role model should trump whatever concerns she had about her role in the lives of her teenage sons. (I can feel the sisters’ fingers twitching on their keyboards about how I chose to construct that last sentence. Ho hum.)

Meanwhile, some accused The Atlantic of conspiring with Slaughter to push a retrograde agenda. ‘A new Atlantic cover peddles one of the most dangerous myths about modern women,’ raged Salon, the ezine that’s cornered the market in liberal piety (and of which I admit to being a regular reader and occasional fan.)

SLAUGHTER’S FALL FROM GRACE

From the sounds of it, Slaughter was no Tiger Mother afflicted by Perfect Madness, but merely a bright, ambitious and sensitive woman who felt her kids were at an age when they needed her around a little more. Nonetheless, her decision to leave a ‘dream job’ in Washington and return to life as a lowly Professor at Princeton so that she could be closer to home, and then to flaunt it in print, was construed as a betrayal of both those who’d helped her get there and those who might follow. In short, her gender was the only filter through which we were permitted to view either Slaughter’s upward career trajectory or her self-inflicted fall from grace.

Slaughter’s piece came to mind recently when I began ploughing through the avalanche of articles in the papers about Lean In, the new book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. I haven’t read it (though I did read an in-depth profile of Sandberg in The New Yorker last year) but Sandberg calls the book ‘a sort of feminist manifesto’, which includes observations such as this one: ‘Fear is at the root of so many of the barriers that women face. Fear of not being liked. Fear of making the wrong choice. Fear of drawing negative attention. Fear of overreaching. Fear of being judged. Fear of failure. And the holy trinity of fear: the fear of being a bad mother/wife/daughter.’

Sandberg’s book, no doubt filled with outrageous claims like the one you just read, has produced a barrage of indignant ad hominems that can be summed up thusly: ‘how the hell would she know?’ The most entertaining of these comes from The New York Times‘s reliably pithy Maureen Dowd, who wrote off Sandberg as ‘a PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots.’ Ouch.

The point that Dowd and Sandberg’s many other detractors are making, of course, is that a woman in her position can’t possibly even know about the challenges other women face, let alone pontificate about how to address them.

WHAT WAS MAUREEN DOWD WEARING?

At the risk of sounding glib, I’d ask you to consider this: aside from a smirk, what was Maureen Dowd wearing when she wrote that sentence? Can the women in Birkenstocks speak for the Prada pack? Or to put it more broadly still, precisely who is the paragon who can ‘speak for women’?

Now I should confess that I disagree with both Slaughter and Sandberg on the work-life balance question. I’m drawn instead to a different analysis altogether. In ‘Why Gender Equality Stalled?’ Stephanie Coontz argues persuasively that women ‘can’t have it all’ because public policy has failed to keep pace with attitudinal shifts that are reflected elsewhere, and which include men. You needn’t look far to find them, either: consider The Good Men Project and the Dad 2.0 Summit in the US, or the Fatherhood Institute here in the UK. Given these changes, Coontz says that ‘not having it all’ is an accommodation to prevailing conditions, not a repudiation of any particular desire.

The critical point is that in making these observations, Coontz challenges an assumption at the heart of the debate about women’s choices – namely, that men can and do have it all. I don’t think I’m going out on much of a limb by saying that feminists often tell ourselves that we’re the ones who make the sacrifices. Can we accommodate the idea that men’s choices are constrained too, by cultural pressures about their roles, bosses who think less of them for requesting flex time, the twin burdens of wage stagnation for all but the wealthiest and inflation for everyone, and myriad other concerns? I’m not so sure.

PROFOUND GENERATIONAL HOSTILITY

Admittedly fault lines like these have long existed within feminism. There’s a ton of evidence that during the ‘first wave’ of the women’s movement, working class women felt that their economic status rather than their gender was the most compelling and tangible challenge they faced and that the middle class feminist movement with its obsession with abstract ‘rights’ was out of touch with their lives and concerns. The Sandberg saga tells us that these class-based tensions still exist. I uncovered a parallel phenomenon in an article in Harper’s a couple of years ago, about profound generational hostility amongst women attending the National Organization for Women’s annual conference, which crystallised around a nasty battle over its next president. In short, young feminists didn’t think their old school ‘Moms’ had a clue.

Arguably, these tensions are natural but it strikes me that a movement must feel itself fundamentally besieged if it has no mechanism for absorbing the shocks they produce. I proudly call myself a feminist but I’m often disheartened by how readily we choose self-defeating turf wars aimed at shutting each other up over the pursuit of a more nuanced and multi-faceted vision of what a ‘woman positive’ world might look like. It’s true that not everything is feminist just because someone calls it that. But it’s equally true that feminism isn’t just one thing, and no one owns it. There is no paragon who can speak for women; there are lots of us.

Addendum (26/03/13): while the debate around Anne-Marie Slaughter and Sheryl Sandberg’s views is pressing and relevant, it nonetheless sits at a slight remove from my own life. Recently, though, I came up against the phenomenon of sister v sister in a more personal and frankly creepy way that perfectly illustrates the distasteful dynamic I’m talking about here.

For a few months, I’ve been following a blog of often thoughtful and sometimes provocative ruminations on feminism and motherhood. Yesterday, I spotted a post about recapturing a sense of our bodies and our sexuality within the identity of being mothers. By the time I got there, the comments had mostly digressed into a nasty discussion of avatars in social media, and why some people use images of their children to represent themselves.

One woman (who ‘confessed’ to being a non-mother) said rather apprehensively that she finds it an odd practice, especially among those she hasn’t seen for a while and whose children she doesn’t know or recognise. She was immediately attacked from all sides – for not really ‘knowing’ her Facebook friends, for judging the women she does know…for having an opinion at all, really, to which she clearly wasn’t entitled as a non-mother.

Sympathetic to her effort, I foolishly stepped in, saying that when I see kiddie avatars in action I sometimes think it suggests a kind of ‘boundarylessness’ or loss of self. Now I expected disagreement, of course, but I hadn’t clocked the ruthlessness with which the blog comments were being policed on a hunt for ‘mother shamers’, ‘selfies’, and other dissenters. In the midst of a discussion about why some people use these avatars, I was told it was ‘presumptuous’ of me to analyse their motivations and chucked in the doghouse alongside Katie Roiphe. In case you don’t know her, Roiphe is the anti-feminist anti-Christ who dared to write about how women ‘disappear’ inside motherhood. (In another comment, Roiphe’s musings were denounced as ‘concern trolling’.)

It turns out that ‘mother shamers’ are those who dare even to wonder aloud if there’s a questionable psychological impetus for using your child’s photo in place of your own (and a whole range of other ‘shaming’ activities, I’m sure). ‘Selfies’ (often one and the same people) are the vain and narcissistic women who – wait for it – use their own photos to represent themselves on their social media profiles. As in, ‘Oh her, she’s a real selfie. She even washes her hair sometimes for God’s sake. Like, who’s looking?’ As the vigilantes tell it, these selfies’ vanity is so profound and their desperation to erase evidence of the physical demands of motherhood so acute that they hire photographers and arrange elaborate photo shoots with make-up and ‘professional lighting’ to create their Facebook profile mug shots.

You’d be forgiven for thinking I made all of this up; if so, you’ll have to take my word for it as I’m reluctant to name and shame a blog some people like. As for me, I was so put off I’ve stopped following it altogether, just as I would any other form of consensus culture with so little tolerance for nuance, let alone outright dissent. No true sister would behave that way, and I’m relieved they’re not mine.

 

Reading my sister’s poetry

Reading my sister’s poetry, so much of it interrupted. A catalogue of cancer’s horrifying indignities. Fear like dye saturating the fabric of her words. A note in the margin never taken up. An arrow pointing, though I can’t see where.

Ellipses mark the place where Darya’s life was interrupted. And despair stains the page where my gentle guide, my truest friend, slipped through a crack before I could reach her hand. 

 

On Being an Arab 2: Spring Frost

It’s been more than 18 months since I wrote on this blog about my childhood as an Arab-Canadian and how it coloured both my self-perception and my outlook on the world. It was the late Spring of an uprising in the Arab world that had resembled a weather system, shifting from one place to the next in a pattern that seemed at once inevitable and unpredictable. Each iteration was like a thunderstorm on a suffocating summer’s day: bounteous, cathartic, its immensity in exact proportion to the light and air it promised.

Thinking about what’s happened since, I quickly run out of fingers and breath. The birth of two babies, the death of a sister, an old house in a new neighbourhood. The unseating of the US-backed Egyptian president and his replacement by a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Female protesters raped in Tahrir Square. Civil war in Syria; Assad an immovable object, his wife moved mostly by shopping. The clamour to ‘free’ Libya culminating in the gruesome death of the cartoonish fiend Colonel Gaddafi. The clamour for Iranian blood growing louder each day. In the meantime, US drones remotely controlled from the comfort of New Jersey and Nevada have continued to slaughter faceless ‘enemies,’ while Barack Obama promised change, again. And America believed him, again (for what else was there to believe in?).

There were predictable I-told-you so’s: those pleased to conclude that the Arab world ‘wasn’t ready for democracy,’ that it was destined to fall for the crafty certainties of the mullahs, that vacuums were being created and quickly filled by long-repressed conflicts among competing factions. But the Arab world is just like any other and – whatever the romantic spin – revolutions rarely happen overnight. The ‘French Revolution’ lasted about a decade and is more rightly described as a period of transformational change than a single act. Boris Yeltsin delivered a speech from atop a tank in 1991 and yet, as the writer Michael Weiss wrote recently, ‘Russian democracy has been in a state of arrested development for 12 years’, its resources plundered by home-grown pirates who now send their children to school in Belgravia and Hampstead.

Still, today’s announcement by the Foreign Secretary William Hague that the UK will abstain on a UN vote on recognition of a Palestinian state unless the Palestinians agree to unconditional talks with Israel is merely the latest in a depressingly familiar chorus from the US and its parrot states, a chorus of which barely a note has changed since the Arab Spring began. The announcement follows by just a few days Hague’s pronouncement that the Palestinians are the architects of their own misfortune in the current Gaza siege and confirms that the message is as it ever was: we know who are the intransigent ones, the dangerous ones, the difficult ones. And we know who are the victims in need of our protection. It’s not the dispossessed population living in an open-air prison and facing one of the mightiest armies on earth. It’s not the children with stones in their hands. It’s that very army, and the people in whose name it acts, who need us to protect them from any ‘conditions’ whatsoever, including the prospect that others might view their exploits as criminal and take these claims to The Hague.

In other words, don’t believe your eyes.

Indeed, the central issue here is how the collective imagination is animated and deployed to reinforce the assumptions that underlie this perverse and stubborn narrative. For me, this strategy was summed up best long before the Arab Spring, during the 2008-9 siege of Gaza when 1417 Palestinians were killed with the collective force of 78 attack helicopters, 299 F-16s and 3650 tanks. Thirteen Israelis were killed, four of them by Hamas-launched rockets.

In explaining his policy of unconditional support for Israel in this farcically one-sided and lethal campaign, the newly-elected US President Barack Obama – who rode to power on a vague platform of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ – told us that the thought of rockets being aimed at villages on the Israeli side of the border made him think of the danger such rockets might pose to his own daughters if they were young Israelis. At the time, I was deeply struck by the imagining Obama chose for himself, and the imagining he invited us to share. By then, we were all familiar with the bright, smiling faces of Malia and Sasha, their lanky frames belying their age while attesting to their parentage. If ours were the children of Israel, asked their father, how would we feel?

As a feminist of Arab origin, I am often irritated by lazy, populist sexism and racism. (Indeed, I’m never sure whether to be more offended by comments from people who don’t know my background, or those who do but who have decided to confer honorary ‘non-Arab’ status on me because I look and sound like they do.) Yet when confronted by this rhetorical invitation from a US President, carefully framed in the language of empathy, one thought came sharply into focus: this is how the Palestinians are ‘disappeared.’ This is how Ariel Sharon’s son can call for the annihilation of Gaza and all its citizens and elicit barely a whisper, barely even an involuntary intake of breath by people whose sympathies were long ago spoken for.

This memory came back to me with force recently, not on the birth of my own children but at a fundraiser I attended just last week for the group Canadians for Justice and Peace in the Middle East. The event was a rubber chicken affair, organised months before by a dynamic and energetic woman named Grace Batchoun, and held in an Ottawa hotel whose decor had yet to brush up against the 21st Century.

Despite the coincidental urgency of the occasion, which fell on the first day of the Gaza ceasefire, I confess that I was distracted away from the speeches by the slideshow on a seemingly endless reel that appeared on a screen over my shoulder. There was a shot of Palestinian schoolkids – perhaps 8 or 9 years old – smiling hopefully for the camera. There was a boy of 4 or 5, bewildered and crying in front of the remains of his house which had been destroyed by the IDF. They’re just a click away, these Palestinian children. Try here or here or here. I thought, these could be my children living a life where no place is safe, where you learn to walk in case you need to run, and my heart broke.

But the Arab Spring did not change the Palestinian issue, which was never about children in the sentimental sense embraced by spin doctors and PR professionals. It remains about justice for a people whose dispossession has been aggravated by demonisation at their refusal to conveniently disappear. They are afforded no protection under the Fourth Geneva Convention on the treatment of civilians during wartime, and today the UK government assured Israel that war crimes won’t count when they are perpetrated against Palestinians.

When I last wrote on this topic, I stuck a tentative toe into a luxurious pool of ‘pessoptimism’ and I liked it. It felt good to be an Arab for a change. Now I am very, very tired, and once again bracing myself for what’s next.

 

The First November 16th

When I think back, it seems odd how clearly I recall the morning after I learned that my sister Darya had breast cancer. Odd because I’d hardly slept. Odd because my mind was less a blur than a glass shattered on a granite floor, beyond recognition or repair.

I visited my aunt at her deli in London, where I live, to tell her. Even now as I write I can feel the saliva pooling in my mouth and how I wrestled each of my facial muscles into co-operation, forming the still-alien words that were a proxy for an unnameable horror: ‘Darya has breast cancer.’ They were barely rendered, but they were said.

That sensation is relentlessly dreary and familiar to me now, sometimes an in-between hum, at others acute and urgent. Its acrid bile is detonated by words that are often clinical, the human excised: biopsy, mastectomy, hormone-receptor positive, aromatase inhibitor. Metastases. Liver failure. Palliative. Occasionally, when I speak them I muster a tone you might almost call flippant, as though my cavalier posture will force the cancer back inside its box. But it outwits me; it wins that game, too.

And then came these: ‘Darya died.’ ‘What should we say in the obituary?’ ‘My sister’s funeral is on Sunday.’

They are the words of researchers and doctors. They are the words of someone else’s sister, surely? Surely not my sister; that Darya not this one, the one I never knew not the one I adored.

But yes. Christmas became the first Christmas; Spring, the first Spring. March 24th the first birthday she did not celebrate.

Today is the day she died, but in another year. Today is the day she died. It is the first November 16th in the year 0001 A.D., and I am wordless.

 

By the River Thames

We used to live near the River Thames, and sometimes on a Sunday evening my husband and I would take a stroll along its south bank, losing ourselves among the gaping tourists, middling buskers, mimes making a living as statues, vendors selling Softee ice cream, and overflowing rubbish bins.

There’s something deeply comforting about melding into a throng of tourists without being one yourself. Perhaps it’s briefly viewing home through their eyes, their eagerness to see the exotic in the ordinary. How the rain and its exigencies (‘macs’ and ‘brollies’ and ‘wellies’) enchant those who will leave it all behind in a few days’ time! I often wonder just how many photos have been snapped of visitors faking calls inside London’s iconic red telephone boxes, shakily climbing the steps of the city’s double decker buses, or posing next to the Queen’s guards who stand rigid as toy soldiers while they await the camera’s click. You’d have to be a crank not to be infected by their delight, if only because it reminds you of your own naïve awe when you too were a new arrival.

Old tube maps give a misleading impression of the river’s shape, and the distances between London’s neighbourhoods. The maps were finally updated a couple years ago, but skewed impressions were already lodged firmly in the mind’s eye. Still, facts are facts: sometimes you’re on the south bank but you’re actually north of buildings on the north side. That’s why you can stand in front of the National Theatre and not see Greenwich to the east or Chelsea Bridge to the west. It’s also why you’d be forgiven for thinking things are closer than they are. The old maps tell us more or less how a crow would fly, but we aren’t crows, are we? We’re people following roads that follow the serpentine logic of the Thames, while we remain shackled to ‘north’ and ‘south’.

Rivers run through lots of cities, of course, and sometimes they’re iconic there, too. The Danube splits Buda and Pest, which Hungarians persist in regarding as a single city, while a French kiss by the Seine surely claims an unassailable place atop any list of life’s most romantic events. Like the Seine’s Left Bank, Trastevere on one side of the Tiber River houses Rome’s colony of artists and intellectuals. Or it used to, anyway, before artists and intellectuals could no longer afford the rent in its higgledy-piggledy streets so they were replaced by bankers who wanted to live where the artists did because that way they weren’t really bankers, were they?

As for the River Thames, the witty guide on a riverboat tour I took with my sister just the other day pointed out Butler’s, the Globe, and A + B King Henry’s wharves, all vital – albeit workaday – structures when the Thames was still a transport route for goods headed in and out of central London. Now several decommissioned wharves have been transformed into luxury riverside condos that fetch a few million pounds and attract the Gordon Ramsay restaurants which bustle nearby. Evening cruises offer three-course dinners, a glass of bubbly and a spin on the dance floor as they slip past those condos’ terraces, leaving in their wake the echo of tipsy laughter above the low hum of engine. An exact replica of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, opened in 1997, recreates the experience of watching one of the Bard’s bawdy plays in his day, and a seat on the London Eye gives you a bird’s eye view as far as tony Hampstead Heath to the north, and south to the ‘garden of England’ in the Kent hills.

We moved away from the river some time ago, and I miss the way its whimsical logic pushes back against our efforts to decorate it and remake it in our own image. I miss how the Thames humbles London, and keeps us in our place.

 

He and I

(from the essay by Natalia Ginzburg)

He leaves his clothes in a heap on the floor. I kick them aside. Mine are dumped in the hamper, washed and folded neatly, put away where they belong.

He is pleased with ‘good’. I knead and worry every small undertaking till it is perfectly formed and executed. It never is, and I am often unhappy.

He once wished he was ‘cool’ but now jeers at those who seem it, saying clothes don’t make you cool, they just make you think you are. I tell him ‘cool’ is overrated; my other boyfriends were cool, and look where that got me.

His shoulders are broad, and he wears responsibility lightly. My muscles are strong, and I carry others’ burdens.

He struggles between loyalty to his party and his own clear view of things. He is frustrated by these compromises and I encourage his independence. I spurn parties, groups and clubs and he says my refusal to compromise is why I’m sometimes lonely. We are both right and wrong.

He delegates, tells people what to do. I feel guilty, do it all myself and grow resentful. When we were young, we were both called ‘leaders.’ Now he leads, while I go my own way refusing either to lead or to follow.

He half-listens, loses keys, forgets the conversation we had and what we agreed. He mocks my irritation in order to hide these lapses. I feel invisible, hurt, impatient.

He is good company: gregarious, big hearted and curious. He holds court and tells funny stories. I am lively, quick witted and mimic people and accents before suddenly withdrawing, curling up my paws beneath me, seeming unreachable.

He develops arcane interests and becomes expert quickly, talking easily about their complexity and how they work. I read widely about society and ideas, delighting in ephemera and going to bed with my book.

He is boastful and over-confident. I give away power too easily, and blush with shame at my failings.

He is patient and tolerates my moods although he tells me it is painful for him, that he feels the sands are perpetually shifting. He fears I will leave him, and sometimes I threaten to go. I hate myself for making him afraid and say I will be better next time. But these are compulsions: I am not better next time, nor the time after that.

He reads maps easily and always knows exactly where he is. I find my way by intuition and never get lost.

He is often lazy and procrastinates. He grows obstinate and irritated when I pressure him to do something he’s promised. Sometimes he lies and says he’s done it, when we both know he hasn’t. I am riddled with guilt, anxiety and a sense of obligation, which fuel my reputation for diligence and reliability.

He loves poetry, hates opera, reads novels obsessively or not at all. He paints and draws well, has a ‘good eye’ and buys art whose value appreciates. I write poetry, listen to jazz and watch contemporary dance. We hold hands and cry during concerts.

He loves the outdoors and wanted to be a farmer when he was a boy. I love the cinema, and losing myself in the anonymity of the city.

He wrestles with regret, and says he wishes he’d met me 20 years ago. I say we would have hated each other 20 years ago, and besides: my mistakes are the stepping stones that led me to him.

 

Twins

When my sister and I were young girls, we pretended to be twins. Born only one year apart, for a time Darya and I were roughly the same height and had the same chestnut hair and hazel eyes. Eventually, despite being younger I grew a little taller, while Darya’s face became angular, its delightfully moody planes often punctuated by a smile that is joyful and mischievous. Later still, she began colouring her hair till it was fiery and dazzling, painted like October leaves in Quebec’s Gatineau Park near where we lived.

As for me, my face has remained broad, almost Slavic through the cheekbones, tapering to a small chin and perched on a long neck. I’m told I look reserved and haughty, which is sometimes useful.

When we were twins, Darya and I would meticulously pair our clothes, rummaging through cupboards in search of shoes that seemed to match, frustrated by any small compromise. Our father once returned from a business trip with matching blue velvet skirts for all four of us girls, undoubtedly oblivious to how this well-intentioned but unimaginative gift would fuel the fantasy Darya and I shared. Forget the random coincidence of merely similar white turtlenecks or red wool tights, we thought. Our skirts were identical and so – fingers crossed – were we.

Our apparent sameness was often rewarded with admiring smiles from passers-by. ‘How pretty!’ they would coo. ‘Are you girls twins?’ Despite our intention to deceive we didn’t have the courage to lie outright so instead we would beam back at them silently, our blushing smiles calibrated to convey agreement without committing us to a blatant fib.

Eventually we outgrew our obsession with twins, but I have often wondered about this common childhood fascination. Is it merely fancy dress, pretending to be something you aren’t and – better still – hoodwinking naive grown-ups? Or perhaps we were intrigued by the trompe l’oeil of being identical in the most minute detail, yet utterly discrete at the same time?

Years ago, I read about the famed Minnesota Twins Study, which showed that even twins separated at birth unwittingly found ways to be identical. Many of them had never laid eyes on each other, yet they had similar jobs and the same number of children and sometimes their spouses bore the same names.

Of course, twins examined this way help us explore the nature/nurture question, providing the closest available approximation of two paths offered to (almost) the same person. But for me, this study poignantly exposed the relentless pull of an unbreakable connection, and I suspect this is what Darya and I longed for. Since she was diagnosed with breast cancer five years ago I have often wished to be Darya’s childhood twin again, to believe that her pain and fear could be mine and that she could have some relief from them. But I know that we are not twins; we are separate people wearing clothes we choose for ourselves. Now I am merely Darya’s sister who holds her hand and loves her fiercely.

 

On Being an Arab: Identity and the Politics of Shame

In 1973, when I was 7 years-old, a girl in our class scrabbled on top of her desk one morning before the teacher came in and conducted an ad hoc poll about the Yom Kippur war. ‘Who wants Israel to win?!’, Brenda K. demanded loudly. Looking bewildered, most of the other girls put up their hands. ‘And who wants the Arabs to win?’ she asked rhetorically. Not a single hand was raised, not even by me or my sister, despite the fact that our family comes from southern Lebanon and our childhood was steeped in Palestinian-Israeli politics. Of course, these biographical details were beside the point, for what did a bunch of 7 and 8 year-old girls really know about this war? The relevant facts were these: Palestinians were hated and despised, and Arabs were bloodthirsty and irrational. And what our hearts told us as we blushed and fidgeted was that Brenda’s poll was not about politics. It was about acceptance and shame.

Though it was close to four decades ago now, I’ve often had occasion to look back on that episode and others like it, and think about how we learn which parts of ourselves are acceptable and which must remain hidden. Despite being born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, my mother was labeled a ‘black Syrian’ throughout her childhood, and some parents wouldn’t let their daughters play with her. They especially hated the fact that she outshone their children at school. Nonetheless, she has always been outspoken about the Palestinian cause and myriad other political and social justice issues.

In fact my mother, who is now a successful entrepreneur in the music world and a well-known arts patron in Ottawa, told me recently that it wasn’t racial discrimination that she felt acutely as a child; it was simply difference. ‘I guess I felt they were superior – what they ate, where they lived,’ she said. ‘We always lived behind a store or upstairs, and I wished we had a house with a front door.’

‘MRS BEECHAM’, IF YOU PLEASE

Ironically, my grandmother – who was born in Syria and lived there till she was 11 – was a true integrationist. After she married my grandfather, whose Arab surname ‘Boushey’ had been transformed into the French-Canadian ‘Beauchamp’, nothing gave my grandmother greater pleasure than having an English person mistakenly refer to her as ‘Mrs Beecham.’ She used to wear kilts and knee-highs that were never quite high enough, and in her older age she was invited to join the stuffy Chelsea Club, a women’s organisation in Ottawa, which offered blue-haired ladies white bread sandwiches slathered in butter in an atmosphere about as joyful as a library. As a ‘treat’ she took me there for lunch once, maybe it was my 14th birthday. I sat across from her rigid with terror, not daring to make a peep and risk the sharp pinch she was sure to mete out under the table at the slightest transgression of etiquette.

My father managed somehow to straddle two identities, being at once an outspoken Arab nationalist and critic of Israel, and a fervent Canadian immigrant and fiscal conservative. His family is educated, intellectual: doctors, engineers, teachers. In 1928, his mother was the valedictorian of her high school class; his father was the mayor of their town in southern Lebanon. My father arrived in Canada at the age of 19 after his family’s land in northern Israel was confiscated, and he worked for several years for the Iron Ore Company of Canada in Schefferville, Quebec, a godforsaken Northern outpost where he learned to wear flannel shirts and drink Molson beer and smoke DuMaurier cigarettes. Later, he took enormous delight in zipping up me and my sisters in our one-piece snowsuits (‘close on your chest, Jules!’) and taking us to the local hill for skiing lessons. And then at my sister Darya’s insistence, we got Arrow, our delightful collie, because what suburban Canadian family was complete without a dog, for goodness sake?

COLLAGE OF HISTORIES

Although our parents split up when we were young it was within this collage of histories, talents and inclinations that my sisters and I became who we are: outspoken in manner, feminist in perspective, international in outlook, articulate, academic and sporty. Among us, we have dabbled in Buddhism, competed in gymnastics, made films, won scholarships, attended marches, written poetry. Like many second generation immigrants, we occupy myriad identities. Some of these we wear lightly; with others, the fit is imperfect.

In 2005, I embarked on a Masters degree in Arts Administration and Cultural Policy at Goldsmiths College in London. As we neared the end of the course, we had to choose a topic for our dissertation, and I decided to write mine about the role of culture in the Palestinian resistance. I was interested in protest poetry and reconciliation through music, and I wanted to know what (if anything) art could offer in such a bitter dispute.

Even before my work began, I was struck by many people’s reactions to my subject. They were not hostile; instead, they looked confused, bewildered even. I’m not sure many of them had heard the the words ‘Palestinian’ and ‘culture’ in the same sentence before. Isn’t it the Israelis who are like ‘us’, their eyes said, writers, scientists and philosophers in the ‘only democracy in the Middle East’, under perpetual existential threat from neighbouring Arabs, with their blood-lust, barbaric religion and racial predisposition to violence? They didn’t ask these questions, of course. Instead, they offered hard, tight smiles.

It was only when the real work started, however, that I began to appreciate the thicket into which I had wandered. I quickly understood that I was asking the wrong question altogether. The central issue was not whether poetry can be as effective as a pistol, or whether music-making can turn enemies into friends. We know what meaning to ascribe to a man with a bomb strapped to his body. But what do we think when we see a man with a paintbrush in his hand, or a woman with a flute at her lips? How do these images confuse the narrative of ‘us vs them’, and disrupt the status quo? Culture is powerful not because it can stop tanks or defuse bombs, I concluded, but because it shifts our attention to those who create it, and asks us what we know about them.

THE ARAB SPRING

As the so-called ‘Arab Spring’ has unfolded over recent months, I have been amused by how bemused much of the Western media and many of our politicians have been by events in the Middle East and North Africa. I was about to write ‘unexpected events’ but I changed my mind, for were these events really unexpected? Only if you had accepted in the first place the relentlessly one-dimensional characterisation of Arabs as a homogeneous and uncivilised mob of anti-Semitic and anti-American thugs who hide their meek and oppressed women behind veils. If so, you might well ask where all of these doctors, lawyers, writers, students, clerics, teachers, fruit vendors, shop clerks, and secretaries pouring into Tahrir Square had come from? And how come nobody told us about them?

I don’t make these observations with any special cynicism. Indeed, cliched images of Arabs have been the only ones on offer for so long now that I suspect the logic of trading the freedom of millions of Arabs for Israeli security and reliable oil supplies reflects Western assumptions which no one really thinks about much. This might seem far-fetched, but how else to explain why so many politicians and journalists have appeared genuinely flummoxed by this uprising from the Arab ‘street’ in response to decades of corruption, cronyism and suppressed aspirations? If Westerners believe Arabs are human, then why are they surprised when they act human?

Of course, I have a personal interest in these global events which have called into question the assumptions at the heart of my own struggle to accept a complex identity without apology or shame. As Tahrir Square and Bahrain, Tripoli and Tunis have up-ended many stereotypes about Arabs and the Arab world, there’s now a discernible chink in the armour of the ‘us vs them’ paradigm, a chink through which I can see to the other side. Sure, the hawks and neocons are desperately struggling to fill it with their shrill forecasts of doom, while Israel responds with the brute force that is its only modus operandi. But these days they sound tired and out of touch. Call me a pessoptimist but it feels as though the narrative is finally up for grabs.