My Life, Myself, & the World
An amazing Writer…who puts her life lessons - which molded her into what she’s become - into perspective…
Women and children out on the streets hitting and being hit without blinking; young and old men languishing in jails, wilderness, or mountain caves; live bullets whizzing all around; tear gas and tanks; mosques stormed with cleavers and bombs; chants broadcast from cassette players everywhere. The rhythm of the street was rapid and the blood hot. These were days like dreams, and the tales of sacrifices and heroism were like what we read in fiction or history books. Woman proved to the whole world that she was not a nonentity, but the heart, the mind, the feeling, and the living conscience of the revolution.
It all began with the birth of a little baby girl into a Palestinian family from Nablus. Not unexpectedly, the baby girl was received with discomfort punctuated with sobs and tears; she came fifth in a chain of eight girls. The father, who was yearning for a boy to preserve his name and inherit his property, was badly affected by that unhappy event. The fact that girls were unable to preserve the family name was not the only reason for disappointment. He felt that his image as the “father of girls,”as Arab tradition has it, with all the concomitant implications of a diminished virility, was fixed for good. Mother’s reaction, however, was far stronger. She wept for days on end and considered herself a most accursed and unfortunate women.
In such a gloomy and hostile atmosphere, I learned the meaning of my existence and my value in this world. I learned that I was a member of a miserable, useless, worthless sex. From childhood, I was taught to prepare myself for the risks associated with being a woman. I was told time and again that I had to train myself to obey and comply with all kinds of rules that covered every single aspect of my life.
From childhood, we women became accustomed to watching somebody else make decisions on our behalf. This is why we remain stuck in the same place; we opt for words rather than deeds, and settle for sobs, prayers, and curses rather than for action.
During the years of my marriage, three momentous events took place that changed my relationship with my mother and the world. First, my only brother was in a car accident when he was sixteen. His spinal cord was severed, leaving him paralyzed for the rest of his life. As a result of this calamity, the family fell apart. My mother lost her desire to live and shrank away. My father, however, reacted completely differently; after crying for weeks, he suddenly woke up, regaining his vitality, energy, and appetite for life. He looked for a young blond girl to take as his new bride. I have never hated my sex the way I hated it at that time.
After Father’s death, Mother grew more hopeless and sorrowful; she became a mere lifeless body. She lost her intelligence, her beauty, and her power, and became a nobody. I discovered, for the first time, that my mother - like me, like all women, like my sisters and all the sisters - was a mere victim. In her tragedy and mine, I saw the tragedy of all women regardless of traditions, laws, or cultures. That is how I became a feminist.
Our defeat in 1967 was the third tragedy to take place during my marriage. I discovered that our political defeat was a result of our cultural defeat. I could see very clearly that the debacle of 1967 was the fruit of a rotten tree that needed a cure - the internally defeated do not triumph. The cure must start with our households and with those in power, with our social values and ties, with the fabric of the family, with the rules and basics of the upbringing of the individual at home, in school, and at university, and then progress to the street. Mothers can be both the dough-baker and the steel-maker of nations. Mothers are the nation because they are the source and the cornerstone.
During my work on “The Cactus,” I met a leftist young man. He was intelligent, ambitious, and a bundle of nerves. He wanted to change the world, and that was exactly what I too dreamed of. But where would we begin? He said confidently: “We start by changing the system, by breaking the rules, and by setting examples for others.” But I thought to myself: “I have already broken the rules, but nothing has changed; the law of people has not changed, the family system has not changed, and I have not changed either. So what will it be like for a woman in a society against which she rebels? Can she effect any change if she is outside the system?” At some point I resolved to wage a new war by starting debate about our own leadership.
After conducting in-depth interviews with more than 50 leading intellectuals, revolutionaries, and ideologues, I decided to conduct similar interviews with their wives, girlfriends, or the most active women in their respective communities. To my disappointment and great chagrin, I found the “theme” of exploitation, inferiority, and sexism that branded and poisoned my life and that of my mother, sisters, and many other relatives, reflected crystal-clear in every story I heard, with slight differences in form but not content. The tragedy was further compounded for me by my discovery that these women, in spite of their education, had internalized a feeling of inferiority and self-disdain. They firmly believed that whatever a woman did or sacrificed, or how high she rose - politically, professionally, academically - she remained far inferior to man; her sacrifices to keep the household and family together, and her struggle at work or in jail, were too insignificant to be noticed. I discovered that our leaders - those I took for pioneers, revolutionary avant-gardes, and progressives - were no more than a carbon copy of a former generation with modern looks. I learned how deplorable our male leadership was; that the revolution, our revolution, was sterile and limited because it did not deal with the internal issues. Everything I saw, heard, and discovered added a new dimension to my fears: we have no hope and no way out; we are going to be defeated again and again, and we shall not be liberated. [Continue on]
