by Zahra Hankir
It’s not quite a newspaper, baba, I said, smiling, habitually uncomfortable when I receive praise. It’s just a website. Something intangible, inside the internet. I didn’t want to disregard the little things that made you feel good in the moment. But, baba, you didn’t tell the nurse I was your daughter. Perhaps you assumed he already knew. Or perhaps at that point, at the curious stage when you were on death’s doorstep, you were finally disowning me? I am struck by how you chose to identify me as a journalist—a media founder—and not your daughter.
I tried to write this essay during your lifetime, or rather, in your final moments—when you were dancing between the world we know now and an afterworld that seemed near, judging from the occasional smile in your sleep. But I failed. When you left us, I could write this only as a letter to you, an absent you.
Unlike most people writing to their departing loved ones, I do not wish to reduce you to an angelic figure, the first man in my life who helped make me what I have become today. Instead, I remember two specific incidents that demonstrate how our relationship—its presences and absences, its tensions and silences—embodies the word that my coeditor Naira Antoun says best describes the world: paradoxical.
Remember when you used to carry me when I was a little girl screaming in pain from an infected eardrum, whirling me around the dining table and humming a song slowly, your lips at times meeting my right ear? I don’t remember which song you were singing. But I remember feeling safe, even from that horrid introduction of physical pain in my early life. That moment marked my first encounter with your masculinity and a very specific tenet of our relationship. For years in my childhood, you’d return from your work travels, clothed in your policeman’s uniform, with a toy I had desperately wanted in hand. I’d be faced with the conflation of your engulfing virility as a robust young man and your tender softness as a loving, gift-carrying father. I understood that you had been out in the deep south, fighting a ferocious fight against armed militants in the ranks of a security apparatus that had enforced a broader fatherhood—a patriarchy—over Egypt. I thought, no one can be braver than you, and no one can give me more security than you. Even in your absence back then, you were so present. At the time, I had no relationship to speak of with the nation.
Fifteen years later, you set fire to a book I had been reading by a Syrian writer. As you randomly sifted through the pages, you caught sight of a passage that contained a graphic sex scene. You were so vehement about not wanting me to read the book that you forcefully disappeared its words into ashes. At that point, you had retired and mostly spent your time at home, completely disengaged from and disapproving of the life of activism and journalism that I had chosen for myself.
My bitterness that day made me wonder how the sea of love and comfort that I had once felt around you had disappeared. I pondered how the intense feelings I’d identified as love as a young girl had started morphing into feelings of estrangement as I grew older. Somehow, your enchanting presence had become an absence. Had you changed, baba, or had you reserved your tender softness for the younger version of me, treating me with the strictness of a man, a patriarch, and a policeman once I became a young woman, journalist, and activist—just as you were slowly walking out of your career? Was this transformation your choice, or had you been socialized into it? Had a layer of you retreated into the background?
Or was it I who ultimately grew up not wanting the dolls you’d always gifted me, and losing faith in that engulfing sense of security, simply because I didn’t need them anymore? My growth might have been a natural evolution, a coming-of-age. It also could have been tainted by the ways in which I sometimes associated fatherhood with notions of societal patriarchy and the violence of parenting.
Have I conflated your subject into that of the state in my growing up? With our patriarchal families being an inspiration for political authoritarianism and a site for the embodiment of its control, did you come to represent for me the very type of control I intended to fight against?
* * *
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The first time I saw policemen brutally beat protesters during the 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq War in Cairo, I found that I didn’t want to go back to my parents’ house. I wanted to remain outdoors, as the street and the protesters felt like a home and family I had chosen. I felt that fights at home about my curfew or safety or not focusing enough on my studies were trivial compared to the bigger struggles that were taking place outside the household.
At that time, both contentious politics at home and the antiwar movement—occupying public spaces, grappling with the state’s crackdown, tying regional and international causes to local ones—were interfering with my personal life and the different sentiments that governed it. They were a constellation of guilt, obligation, and fear, among other things, which were first and foremost nurtured at home and somewhat made more prominent by the fact that I was a daughter.
But I couldn’t live one life. I had to carry on living these two lives, bouncing between constant negotiation, compromise, and resistance. One was a life of choice, with an open-ended shimmering horizon, while the other was a life drawn solely in the imagination of one’s parents, an imagination that at times can seem like a prison of some sort. Living two lives meant constantly guarding them from each other, safely insulated, for one risked defacing and assaulting the other. It was exhausting.
All the same, I was perhaps engaging in some form of escapism or coping mechanism in choosing to ignore the realities behind these two lives. I found the consciousness of gender troubles psychologically daunting and somewhat unconstructive. I thought sidelining this consciousness and thinking of myself as genderless was, in a way, an act of resistance—a passive resistance, manifested by walking down the street, into the workplace, inside public institutions, and then back into my family’s home without the baggage of associated gendered expectations and assumptions. This was potentially fueled by a rather Marxist political environment of activism, which largely considered gender troubles to be subordinate to class struggle. I wasn’t paying much attention to the superficiality of this form of resistance. I simply closed my eyes to the fact that while moving forward as women, we continue carrying a piece of that oppression to which we are turning our backs.
Later, as I began working as a journalist in Egypt, I ascribed a more articulate political meaning to my attitude. Women in Egypt, as well as in other Arab and Middle Eastern countries, are often depicted by the Western world as nothing but victims of patriarchy. Through the privilege of social status, and, more specifically, my family’s middle-class insistence to invest in a good-quality education (in other words, a French school and an American university), I had direct access to that Western world. I worked in English, the lingua franca of the globe. I became an extension of the object of the typical Western gaze in that context, albeit an exciting extension because of the irregularities I presented: I was an Arab woman whose activism was visible to the public, against the odds of the prevalent conservatism and patriarchy associated with the region. Speaking and writing invitations on the back of my gender started rolling in one after another. You may even consider this essay to be one of them.
These invitations often made me feel trapped in place, identity, and body. I felt as though a form of bourgeois or liberal feminism was being imposed upon me and I had to constantly free myself from it. I almost never had something smart to say as an answer to that nagging question: What is it like to be a woman journalist in Egypt nowadays? I didn’t want to recount stories of sexism, patriarchy, and oppression that would feed into commonplace Orientalist essentialism and render me a heroic survivor. Nor did I want to engage in a short-sighted defense of the Arab. But I had no third story to tell, no nuanced explanation of how we live a life of public engagement through the lens of gender. Rather than trying to challenge the question with my answer, I gently sidestepped it, acting a bit like the compliant yet skeptical copyist in Herman Mel
ville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” who was famous for responding “I would prefer not to.”
My tongue spoke a lingua franca, but my mind was refusing to speak its dominant mind-set, which tends to represent the society I come from as static. Hence, there were moments of silence. At that time, I had not yet read the Egyptian poet Iman Mersal’s illuminating text “The Displaced Voice.” Mersal posits that speaking a second language with an accent is a way for the mother tongue to be present—to be immortal—to the point of “sabotaging” that second language in some way. But instead of allowing for this duality, I worked on perfecting the sound of my second language, while muting its troubling implications. Remember the duality of the family home and the street home? In language, too, I silently lived this discomforting duality.
With time, I came to understand how that duality might have been my own manifestation of second-wave feminism, one of whose suggestions is that the personal is political. Like Carol Hanisch, a radical feminist and one of the first to have expressed this thought, once said, “I have been pressured to be strong, selfless, other-oriented, sacrificing and in general pretty much in control of my own life. To admit to the problems in my life is to be deemed weak.” Had I been conscious of feminist approaches to activism in my early life, perhaps I would have acknowledged and navigated my two lives more graciously, rather than fanatically rendering one invisible in the presence of the other.
* * *
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At the transformative moment of Egypt’s 2011 revolution, when masses took to the streets demanding the fall of the regime and chanting for freedom, justice, bread, and human dignity, I became the chief editor of a Cairo-based English-language newspaper called Egypt Independent. I had been working there since 2009, when the newspaper was led by a woman named Fatemah Farag, whose leadership was truly inspiring. Farag had created a space that allowed for experimentation and self-growth in the workplace, all the while managing her team’s complex personalities. I had learned a lot from her, but never associated the nuance of her leadership style with her womanhood.
The political developments at home and my engagement with them through the lens of journalism distanced me even further from the entire body of identity politics. Shortly after the magic of the uprising, which engulfed much of our thinking and work, not to mention our emotional states, the country’s struggles were split along the fault lines of Islamic and secular rule. Supporters of secular rule often flirted with a strain of conservatism, while remaining in fierce opposition to the political Islamic project. It was difficult to be a woman or to cover women’s issues without getting caught up in the Islamist-secularist polarization. Paying attention to gender was seen as a power play against the Islamist political elites, even though that wasn’t something that many of those invested in a serious conversation about gender were interested in, especially given the conservatism of the secular side.
As Arab Spring activism began to shift closer to identity politics, I chose instead to align myself with those calling for basic human rights and, especially, the right to resources. I constantly reminded myself that when Mohamed Bouazizi had set himself on fire in December 2010 in Sidi Bouzid, a Tunisian village, sparking entire revolutions with his ashes, he wasn’t fighting for the right to drink beer. He was drowning in debt because he wasn’t allowed to sell his produce on the streets of the town and had no other avenue for employment. My early years of activism had been marked by the antiwar movement in the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, which would leave behind it the shadow of a country mired in sectarian strife. A similar fate would later unfold in Syria. In early 2011, when the uprising escalated into an armed conflict, I covered what unraveled on the ground by shadowing a multisect revolutionary brigade in Aleppo. There, the people were fighting for dignity and freedom, not the triumph of one sect over another.
But there was another reality to reckon with, a stifling reality that couldn’t be negated by the simple denial of identity politics. The newsroom I was leading had already been established as a space run by women editors, Farag being its founding editor. However, it was part of a bigger media organization, where the power structure was more traditionally constructed and where men held most of the power. To many of them, our newsroom was irrelevant, perhaps because we were less experienced—we had been attracting mostly young journalists. A leak or a scoop coming out of our newsroom wouldn’t be treated seriously by the higher-ups, and our different way of producing content—one that encouraged less traditional, more innovative, experimental, surprising, and at times artistic forms of storytelling—was frowned upon. I’d spent so long attempting to look away from my womanhood that I failed at first to connect the dots.
At the time, I often attributed our marginalization to age, rather than gender, as though such abuses of power can be deciphered. It helped that in a wider context, the state had categorized the youth as a threat: revolutions are usually associated with the young and their able bodies. The older men of my organization, I thought, were probably stuck wondering how they could manage the troublesome youth of our newsroom.
For financial reasons, in early 2013, Egypt Independent’s print edition folded. In an editorial, the management’s representative, a seventy-year-old man, wrote that the newspaper hardly ever published useful content anyway.
The struggle to keep the newspaper alive and its eventual failure unsettled my tendency to turn away from identity politics. I didn’t suddenly choose to espouse them wholeheartedly, but through negotiation and resistance with the older men of the administration, I came to better understand those identity politics and the ways in which they sat systemically in the collective consciousness. They had to be dealt with, not denied altogether.
* * *
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In mid-2013, during another heightened period of political polarization, I cofounded the website Mada Masr—the news website my father would refer to while in the hospital five years later.
The forces of Islamism, spearheaded by the Muslim Brotherhood, had been reigning over the country for just over a year. Confronting the Brotherhood was a powerful military institution. Most Egyptians, anxious about an Islamist regime that had promised to interfere with their everyday social lives, threw their support behind the military, who ultimately won, ousting the Muslim Brotherhood from power. But first, there had to be violence.
Supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood set up protest encampments, and in August 2013, one of those camps was the site of a massacre. Security forces killed at least one thousand men, women, and children in broad daylight. This massacre and the violence written on the bodies of the victims in a battlefield marked by the annihilation of the other pushed me to reinvestigate the question of identity and identity politics.
I saw how massacres can be a spectacular demonstration of the Foucauldian idea that power is manifested ubiquitously in daily life and over the human body. Witnessing violence and connecting it to the idea of power over bodies challenges the limiting, essentialist, and undeveloped binary of female subordination to male power. In other words, bodies are constructed and reconstructed to serve different functions, chief among which is the exertion of power. Instead of simply focusing on male-female gender dynamics, we have to look at the forces behind the constructions of these identities. Only by addressing those forces can we deal with subjugation, including gender-based subjugation.
But the notion of modern power is commonly critiqued by those who argue that humans can be reduced to “docile bodies,” changeable objects that are acted upon by force or subject to different forms of systemic violence. The possibility of violence, spectacular or structural, confirms the docility of our bodies. At the same time, our bodies have possibilities to be reckoned with. Away from the newsroom, from politics, broader and personal, from state and family, I turned to the arts, where I always found room for these other possibilities. Together with Kinda Hassan, an audiovisual artist whose work centers on the body a
nd its collisions with self-image, instincts, and impulses, I lived, conversed, and cowrote texts on the body’s journey to new realities. Hassan’s immersive practice as an artist opened up introspection into how the body can mobilize subversive roles that can unsettle common understandings of gender. From her work, an aura of possibility was constantly unfolding in association with gender, and the body was central to such possibility.
Later, I sat on my balcony reading through philosopher Judith Butler’s writings on how gender is a bodily discourse—repetitively performed, so as to become real and accepted—as opposed to a sheer identity that requires a fixed representation. A fixed-gender identification, I learned, is not a natural disposition, but rather a process of cultivation. In this notion of subjective gender construction, I came to see how gender could be different from identity politics.
I returned to the newsroom at Mada Masr—a space essentially designed to cater to possibilities—with a certain sense of awakening, gleaned from textbooks, exhibition halls, and living room chats. From my coeditor, Naira Antoun, and other colleagues, I learned about intersectionality, a framework that analyzes the ways in which different institutions of power can overlap. We could use this framework as a tool with which to investigate stories through a lens of gender instead of focusing only on gender itself. We engaged, for example, with state institutions, looking into how class differences changed the amount of control those institutions wielded over the people. We asked questions such as: How and why have homosexuals of different social classes been targeted differently by the state? How does class interfere with women’s experiences when undergoing abortions?
I learned to venture into questions of gender in coverage across the board, questions that were at times direct and at others subtle. What does thinking through a gender lens mean in terms of people’s modes of coping and resistance in the wake of unprecedented austerity measures and economic hardship, for example? What kind of possibilities emerge from gendered roles and constructions within these attempts to survive?
