From work: Sarah Jaffe on New Orleans 4 years after the flood

In my biased opinion, this piece on the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was very, very good. It’s easy to forget New Orleans if you’re not actually in it, right? I’m not going to give you any platitudes about poverty and disaster, you can say them in your head already. Just, you know, let’s all pause for a minute and take off our various head garments, to commemorate the beauty and terror of that city, and lives lost, and lives that are trying to keep on keeping on, with our without adequate federal help.

P.S. The New Orleans Bingo! Show – for your pleasure.

What Luma witnessed: the sacred status of male abusers in Jordan (and how it hurts both men and women)

When something like this happens in public in Amman, I think it highlights one of the main reasons why the so-called honour killing law has still not been changed. Family is turned on its head, and the reverence for family becomes a reverence for psychological and physical abuse.

Of course, the situation described is also very much gender-specific. I seriously doubt that a sister would get away with treating a younger, smaller brother like this. The violence of male relatives, however, is not an aberration, it’s viewed as something natural and right and, most importantly, it is supreme. “She’s my sister,” he says as he’s grabbing her, and we automatically think, “well, she must’ve done something to piss you off then, eh? None of my business anyway. Who knows what might happen to me if I get involved? Let sleeping dogs lie.”

The bystander effect only reinforces the given situation.

I wish I could tell you that the incident Luma has described is shocking to me, but it isn’t. After being in Jordan for more than a year, it feels oddly natural, the way a broken bone feels natural after a while, inasmuch as it’s still a part of your body. This is what happens in a society where women’s worth is tied to a completely arbitrary and convoluted idea of sexual purity, and men are meanwhile charged with upholding this idea of sexual purity at all costs. And don’t you dare interfere with their duties! These are all private matters! Look away, unless you want to get into trouble yourself. Don’t you dare question it! You just want to destroy the moral fabric of our society and turn all of our women into whores!

“She’s my sister” really means that “she is a thing.” The words are like a magic curse, turning a flesh-and-blood human being into a kind of rag doll you can publicly rip apart.

I don’t blame the male witnesses for upholding the brother’s “right” to publicly abuse his sister. It’s a survival tactic as much as anything. It feels better to look away and pretend as though the woman has earned such treatment. If you don’t look away, you might very well get into trouble. The brother’s right to harm his sister is practically sacred. After all, brothers are cast into the impossible and equally dehumanizing role of shepherding their sisters as if the latter are livestock.

I think that all of this warrants a closer look at to what being a part of a family actually means. Is in abusive family still a family? At what point do we say – “these are not the actions of a brother”?

Also a closer look at womanhood is needed. What defines a “good” woman? Is it her mind and her integrity, or is it her hymen? You can’t have it both ways.

In a society where married men feel free to hit on young girls…

Women get stabbed to death for much less.

The post-mortem virginity tests on the bodies of honour crime victims are just another kind of violation, methinks. It shouldn’t matter if a woman was having an affair or not. Her precious life was deemed worthless, and that’s the only thing that matters.

Jordanian society is lopsided to the point of deformity. Men have freedoms that women simply do not, and they act upon them with impunity. Even when they are at a disadvantage economically. I mean, how many Jordanian guys who sleep with sex-tourists in order to get by fear getting stabbed to death by their family members? No matter the guilt and shame that some of these guys obviously feel, their lives still hold fundamental value.

Women, on the other hand, are treated as walking support systems for hymens. After being violently purged from this world, their memories are further sullied by the “did she or didn’t she?” inquiries.

So what if she did? What if she even enjoyed it? She at least partly deserved it, right? Women should expect to be violently punished for acting upon their desires. They are not allowed to learn from experience.

It’s not a mentality confined to Jordan. Up until recently, it was the sexually active girl who was stabbed to death in horror films, while the virgin outwitted the serial killer (a stretched or broken hymen automatically renders one into a complete idiot who runs upstairs instead of out the front door, it’s practically a scientific fact, right?). Even rape victims are routinely expected to take “the honourable way out” and die.

In Jordan, there’s nothing abstract about these ideas. The violence is right there, in your local paper.

It was a huge wake-up call to me when I realized that the guys who sexually proposition me have nothing to fear. The conservatism of Jordanian society only extends in one direction. It doesn’t serve as any kind of deterrent, in this case. At most, they have something to fear from my male relatives (of course, being blond and foreign, you are assumed to be “of no tribe” and hence fair game).

For men, family serves a different function altogether. Family is their place of support. In most cases, their choices will be upheld or at least forgiven. Women often have to deal with an entirely different set-up.

Last year, I was in Amman, talking to a friend about how weird it was for him to have to run into the uncle of his ex-girlfriend.

(A vast amount of dirty language follows. Don’t read if you think you might be offended.)

Continue reading “In a society where married men feel free to hit on young girls…”

Delwar Hussain on homophobia in Tower Hamlets: hmmmmm

The awesome Andrea tweeted a link to this piece by Delwar Hussain on Comment Is Free, and as much as I think the author’s intentions are good, his attempts at making sense of the homophobic violence plaguing the multicultural Tower Hamlets borough result in several assumptions that just don’t sit right with me.

First of all, the piece basically implies that there are no gay people among the young Bangladeshi dudes living in Tower Hamlets, setting up a “rich white gays” vs. “poor brown straights” dichotomy. This is simplistic. Obviously, it would be pretty hard, if not downright impossible, for most of these guys to be “out” amongst their peers. However, these issues of violence and lack of acceptance affect minorities in all communities, and you can’t make them invisible for the sake of argument.

Second of all, Delwar assumes that the only reason that new people are moving to Tower Hamlets has to do with their shallow attempts to live in an “exotic” locale. But how about the fact that Tower Hamlets is a bit cheaper? You can’t just leave economics out of the equation entirely. Delwar does mention that there has been “brown flight” in the area, as some of the more affluent folks move out. So it would only be logical to assume that not everyone coming to Tower Hamlets is there because they have a dire need to drip “authentic” curry all over their “authentic” designer jeans.

Third of all, Delwar has this to say at the end of his piece:

“It is time for gay people to begin engaging with the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets and not simply to see them as the colourful backdrop to their multicultural existence.”

Of course, he tempers his statement with this:

“Simultaneously, it is time for Bangladeshis in the area to stand up for their fellow neighbours as many others had previously done so for them.”

I get what he’s trying to say here, but I still have a major problem with calling on a group that must fear for its health, if not its life, to “engage” anyone terrorizing them, at this point. “Engaging” someone is such a vague concept to begin with. Am I “engaging” with a specific community because, say, one of my friends is a biker? Or a person with a visible disability? Do you “engage” with Ukrainian-Americans when you post comments on this blog?

Furthermore, should a woman, say, “engage” her rapist, because, um…he came from a background that’s objectively more disadvantaged than her own? Should an immigrant woman who has people spit on her hijab “engage” with members of the BNP?

The thing about hate crime is – it’s not like, you know, stealing someone’s iPod. It’s a big deal. The motivations there are scary and complex. I think Delwar does an admirable job in linking it to male bonding issues. But in trying to propose solutions, he veers into “blame the victim” territory.

Societal alienation is a real issue, I more than agree with Delwar on this. Religious fundamentalism, which can offer comfort when one already feels pretty alienated in one sense or another, is also a real issue. But I think that the real solutions to the problem of violence are education and, get this, the radical idea that violence is not OK, no matter what you believe.

Once again, I think that multiculturalism may not necessarily be about “loving” your neighbour, as much as it may be about leaving your neighbour the hell alone. Only then can people begin to “engage” one another, not as types, but as individuals, and then, in turn, move past their prejudice when they begin to see that their new friends are *gasp* human beings.

And the other thing is… I know plenty of Muslim dudes. They are perfectly capable of not beating up a gay dude, of any background, in the street. Could it be that Tower Hamlets has a pretty specific problem on its hands in regards to the way in which violence is both ignored and even tacitly approved of? Maybe that’s something to think about in all of this as well. Because right now, what I’m getting is – “they’re brown, they’re Muslim, they’re dudes, they’re hanging out… they’re going to engage in violence and harassment against women and gays!”

And that’s just letting off the perpetrators way too easily. The kids doing this aren’t savages, noble or ignoble.