Our Women on the Ground

by Zahra Hankir

  Few people in the newsroom supported my project. In fact, many of my male colleagues mocked me for it. Sometimes they would suggest deridingly that I take on assignments related to sexual harassment, saying things like “Eman should cover the assignment, as she’s the professional on this issue.” Their behavior both depressed and infuriated me.

  Qasr el Nil Bridge, Cairo, Egypt; January 2015. Two young women are harassed by a group of men while walking along the bridge, where boat rides on the Nile offer cheap outings for tourists and Egyptians. The bridge leads to Tahrir Square and the downtown area, where the youth congregate. PHOTO BY EMAN HELAL.

  One day, after I had filed several photos that illustrated sexual harassment of varying forms on the streets of Cairo, I heard some of my male colleagues making fun of my work. They were laughing as they discussed one of my photos, which depicted a teenager touching his crotch area with one hand while crudely imitating the motions of fellatio with his other. Instead of condemning the boy’s behavior, my colleagues condemned my own, saying that it had been rude and indecent of me to photograph the boy in that situation.

  I had taken the picture during another International Women’s Day protest, in March 2013, exactly two years following the march that took place weeks after Mubarak stepped down. I was shaking when I took it, but felt empowered by the women who surrounded me in protest. The world needs to see this, I thought, and took out my camera. When I took the photo, the boy didn’t even realize that I was taking a shot of him. He looked behind him, to see if there was anything happening in the vicinity that I wanted to capture.

  Talaat Harb Square, Cairo, Egypt; March 2013. Boys make lewd gestures during an antiharassment protest at a march marking International Women’s Day. PHOTO BY EMAN HELAL.

  The newspaper, of course, did not publish the picture. (While I worked closely with a photo editor who supported my vision, a senior editor ultimately refused to sign off on it.) But I wanted to disseminate my work as best as I could, so I submitted some of my photos to workshops, and others to various photography programs, one of which was entitled Reporting Change in Arab Spring Countries. Some of them were published by World Press Photo Foundation, the New York Times Lens blog, and Polka magazine.

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  A male colleague once told me during one of my night shifts that I would never get married. “Eman, who would marry you?” he asked. “Who would marry a woman who works this late around her male colleagues, and who spends most of her time in the streets?” I will never, ever forget those words. I felt like he was trying to break not only my determination but also my soul.

  It’s painful and demeaning to be surrounded by men who don’t respect career-focused and ambitious women. Many Egyptian men prefer to marry women who will stay at home to serve them, or at least women who limit their work and outings so that they can be home early enough to prepare food and take care of children. To these men, everything domestic is the woman’s responsibility. This way of thinking leaves women like me in an impossible situation. The price I have to pay for pursuing a career is singledom. It’s as if I don’t have the right to marry and build a family as my male colleagues do, just because I “chose” a career.

  As I write, I’m thirty-three and living in Denmark, where I’m studying for a year. This is the first time I’ve ever been away from home for such a long time. And it’s the first time I’ve ever lived alone. Living alone and abroad, without my mother—as tricky as she was—and without my friends is not easy. Some nights, I feel lonely and depressed. But I never regret my choices. If I could turn time back to when I was a girl who’d just graduated from university with a journalism degree, I’d do nothing differently. Becoming a photographer in Egypt, despite facing adversity from my mother, workplace, men, and society, was the best choice I’ve ever made.

  Living in Egypt during this extremely complicated, hostile, and volatile political era is overwhelming, particularly if you’re a journalist, and even more so if you’re a woman journalist. There is no such thing as freedom of speech in Egypt. Working on simple assignments put me in situations of great danger. Police have been known to crack down on journalists and to imprison them. I consider my current experience in Denmark as something of a reprieve from all of those difficulties, a break from all of that stress. I’m also now able to focus on improving my photography, instead of battling harassment, my struggles with male colleagues, and other societal pressures.

  This is a crucial chapter in my long journey of self-discovery. Even though I’ve put a pause on my work on Egypt, it is always on my mind. I intend to continue focusing on women who have been abused, because I hope my work will empower other women who are struggling with harassment and assault—any obstacle that prevents them from moving around freely, whether that’s crossing the street by themselves or pursuing the job of their dreams.

  Three Girls from Morocco

  Aida Alami

  Dear Muslims, Immigrants, Women, Disabled, LGBTQ folk, and All People of Color,

  I love you, boldly and proudly.

  We will endure.

  We will not break.

  —SHAUN KING, CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST

  I grew up in Marrakesh daydreaming about two things: becoming a reporter and moving to New York. At the age of eighteen, I set out to do both, leaving Morocco to pursue a journalism degree at Hunter College in Manhattan. I was determined to build a life in the United States and had no intention of ever moving back. I didn’t feel I had any business to do in my home country. To my mind, Morocco wasn’t a particularly exciting place for an aspiring journalist. And the region seemed to me like it was stuck in time, crushed by dictators who were supported by the West.

  But as the years passed and the political climate in the Arab world deteriorated, becoming more and more hostile to freedom and human rights, I experienced a sudden urge to return home. Life in New York, where I was finishing up a master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School, had become predictable. I needed a challenge. The U.S. economy had faltered and journalism jobs had dried up. Scores of American journalists were moving to the Middle East to become foreign reporters. With little to do in the U.S. thanks to the barren job market, I decided to relocate to Morocco in late 2009, even though I was uncertain of what I’d do and how I’d feel about moving back to a place that had so often suffocated me.

  One year after my return, a Tunisian street vendor self- immolated, triggering the Arab Spring.

  The protests spread rapidly, and freedom from decades of brutal dictatorship finally felt within reach. I was elated. For the first time, I was proud to be Arab. The Tunisian revolution marked a new chapter in the region and in my life. I decided then to report solely on the Arab world. I was hopeful that I could present an authentic narrative to the Western media outlets I eagerly wished to work for. In hindsight, though, my professional mission had already become a personal one.

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  —

  Five years later, I was living in Paris, having followed the wave of refugees who were making the perilous journey to Europe, and found myself again in a personal and professional rut. I had recently experienced a period of grief and loss after a close friend of mine had died. I was also exhausted by the prospect of continually covering the ills of the Arab world half a decade after the start of the Arab Spring. I felt that my reporting had become redundant. I was no longer inspired by my work. And on top of that, terrorism had come close to my new home several months before, when the Islamic State had slaughtered 130 people in an attack that left France reeling.

  Fortunately, right around that time, I had a meeting that saved my creativity and maybe even my soul.

  I had stumbled on the story of a woman named Amal Bentounsi, an Arab French activist who was fighting police brutality. I wanted to know more about her, but because the French national media pay little attention to activists and movements
considered “radical,” there wasn’t much information readily available to the public.

  It was Ramadan, which fell during the months of June and July in 2016. Amal Bentounsi was nearly impossible to reach. For days, I contacted her incessantly. The checkmarks indicating she’d received and read the texts I’d sent her piled up. (I later learned Amal is constantly solicited by journalists, activists, families of victims of police brutality, and so on.) Finally, she called back and agreed to meet. As it was Ramadan, Amal told me she was entertaining guests and could come to the city only after iftar, the evening meal for fasting Muslims, no earlier than ten p.m.

  I didn’t know what to expect from my meeting with this mother of four who’d left her children in the care of her husband to drive from a Parisian suburb into the capital to meet me—a journalist and stranger—late at night. All I knew about Amal was that her twenty-eight-year-old brother, Amine, had been shot in the back by a French police officer, and that she’d vowed to get justice for his murder.

  From what I’d read about him, I learned that life had never been easy for Amine. At thirteen, he had been expelled from school. In the weeks that followed his expulsion, he loitered in the streets, mixing with delinquents. Soon after, he started a fire in a trash can that ended up burning down an entire day-care facility. Luckily, it was the weekend, so the building was empty and nobody was hurt. But Amine was imprisoned for arson in Fleury-Mérogis—the country’s notorious high-security prison—becoming the youngest prisoner in the republic at the time. Amid all these troubles, Amine adopted a French name, Jean-Pierre, in the hope that it would help him integrate into French society, with no success.

  When I left to go meet Amal, it was almost midnight. The streets were alive with the buzz of young Arabs mingling with post-iftar energy. (I love Ramadan in Paris. When I spend the holy month back home in Morocco, I’m suffocated by the heavy weight of state law, which strictly forbids citizens from breaking fast in public. But in Paris, Ramadan unites an entire community. Walking around Parisian neighborhoods that are home to Muslims floods me with a sense of comfort and familiarity. I smile at the men and they call me ma soeur—sister—offering me dates. I’m not religious or nostalgic, but in these moments, I feel distinctly Moroccan.)

  I made my way to Place de La République, the main square, where protesters had been camping for weeks, demonstrating against a labor bill. I paused at the Bataclan concert hall, one of the sites of the terrorist attacks several months before. Passersby were still paying their respects to the dead with flowers and candles. I sent my own warm thoughts to the victims and their families—some of whom I’d interviewed when I reported on the attacks for Foreign Policy. Life had begun to feel very fragile to me. The neighborhood that I called home—I lived a mere ten blocks from the Bataclan at the time—had been shaken.

  When I got to Place de La République, where we’d agreed to meet, dozens of protesters were camping near the statue of Marianne. I wondered what the Goddess of Liberty, proudly holding a torch and watching over her country and its liberal values, was thinking during these strange and trying times. I didn’t know it yet, but Amal was about to become my Marianne. Our encounter would shift my perspective and propel my career into a new direction.

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  The Bataclan hadn’t been my only close brush with terrorism. In January 2016, just two months after the Paris attacks and six months before I met Amal, my dear friend Leila—a French-Moroccan photographer who had been on assignment in Burkina Faso—was shot several times at close range by al-Qaeda terrorists, in an attack that left twenty-nine others dead. She was thirty-three when she was gunned down, two years older than me.

  Three days after she was shot, Leila’s brother Soulaimane finally called me. I didn’t want to pick up the phone. I was paralyzed by an awful intuition that the unthinkable had happened. As I stood alone in my cramped Parisian apartment, where I’d been pacing for three very long days, I knew that the longer I waited, the longer I could find refuge in a comfortable state of denial, even if it were for another few seconds. When I did answer the call, in just four words, those final glimpses of hope were gone forever: “She didn’t make it.” It struck me that Soulaimane spoke in English before he broke down into tears, probably using a foreign language to tone down the cruelty of the sentence. Words—on which I have built my whole career—failed me. I grieved in silence.

  When she died, Leila had been in Ouagadougou with Amnesty International, taking photographs of women who’d survived violence and abuse. Projects like these were what she thrived on: she’d devoted her entire adult life to raising awareness of the plight of victims of war, terrorism, and poverty through her images. The essence of Leila’s work was to empower, rather than to victimize, her subjects. I tried doing the same with my own career in journalism, through writing and reporting on terrorism in the Arab world and beyond for mainstream Western publications like the New York Times.

  Leila did not know fear. She used to say that positivity generated positive events. That belief, she explained, assured her that “good karma” would continue to protect her as she traveled to unstable countries. She glided through them, as if guarded by a shield of luck. Leila fought aggressively for her life during those three grueling days after she was shot. Even though I was aware her body had been riddled with bullets at close range, I was convinced her good karma would save her. The day Leila Alaoui died, I took some consolation in just one thing: she hadn’t wanted an ordinary life, and in a cruel twist of fate, both her life and her death were anything but ordinary.

  My job over the past few years has required me to interview people who have lost loved ones to war and terrorism. In the Arab world, such tragedies are commonplace. For years, I’d managed to distance myself from those interviews. In some cases, I found myself speaking to family members of terrorists. Even then, I kept my emotions and judgment at bay. I made sure I prioritized the importance of documenting what I saw over any visceral reaction to the disturbing events that swirled around me.

  But when acts of terrorism reached Paris, and then Leila, my capacity to feel isolated from them started to diminish. France was no longer a neutral home base where I could pause to reflect on and write about the atrocities of the Arab world. The attacks on the Bataclan showed that the country had become a key target for the Islamic State and its sympathizers. The Arab world and its baggage, it seemed, were chasing me. It became hard to compartmentalize. Leila’s death forced me onto the receiving end of the fallout from terrorist attacks. I was the one being called by journalists who wanted comments about Leila and her death. I was both the one consoling and the one being consoled.

  * * *

  —

  I finally spotted Amal at Place de la République. She was engaged in an intense discussion with a group of young activists who were gathered around a projector screening Who Killed Ali Ziri?, a documentary about the death of an elderly Arab man at the hands of French police in 2009.

  She was dressed in sweatpants and I felt a pang of guilt for pulling a busy mother away from her young children. We awkwardly said hello and sat at the terrace of one of the many cafés facing the square. Like me, Amal was born in Morocco. Her parents moved to France when she was still a baby. While there isn’t a social etiquette rule book, you generally never ask a Moroccan you’ve just met if they observe Ramadan or if they drink alcohol. When I meet other Muslims, particularly in reporting situations, I let them take the lead. So when Amal ordered a virgin mojito, so did I.

  At that point, I wasn’t sure exactly why I was interviewing Amal, other than a personal desire to meet her. I had a vague idea of directing a documentary about second- and third-generation immigrants in France and the integration challenges they faced. The nation had yet to address its major assimilation problem, sparked by several waves of postcolonial migration. Mounting terrorist acts deepened an already palpable divide, enabling persecution of the Muslim po
pulation by the state and a spike in Islamophobia. I wanted to find activists who were part of what I believed to be the racial awakening of an entire generation, inspired by African American movements and their own struggle for equality.

  When Amal started telling me Amine’s story, I sensed her hesitation and reluctance to divulge. The last time Amal had seen her brother was two years before he died, when she had driven him to the Gare du Nord train station in Paris. Amine was on a furlough from prison, where he was serving an eight-year sentence for robbery, on top of the time he’d already served for arson. He had completed most of that term, which had been reduced to six years, and had only a few months left. Amine was supposed to return to prison that same day. Instead, he decided to make a run for it. His escape attempt was successful until two years later, when he was caught by the police. They asked him for his ID and he began running away from them. One of the officers then shot him in the back—an injury that would prove fatal.

  Amal is a beautiful woman. Her warmth struck me within seconds of us meeting. She smiled genuinely and seemed to trust me immediately. But despite this, her big brown eyes shifted away from mine and darted around the square as she told me about Amine’s past. She rushed through key details about what had happened to him. I’d later come to understand this was because to many, Amine’s problematic record meant his death at the hands of a police officer wasn’t really tragic, because he had been on the wrong side of the law.

  We both let our guards down while discussing Amal’s aspiration to get justice for her brother. As a self-imposed rule, I never speak about myself with sources during interviews. But I opened up to Amal about Leila’s death just six months earlier, a loss that had destabilized me and still sometimes kept me awake at night. Amal and I understood each other. While drinking virgin mojitos in the middle of a bustling square in Paris, we—two Moroccan strangers—connected over something as abstract as death. Her brother, a child of immigrants and victim of police brutality in a political environment that enabled Islamophobia; my dear friend, a victim of terrorism and Islamic extremism.