My mother is illiterate. She is a woman who lived in a sovereign state, as well as in occupation and exile. She has never been to school. She cannot hold her pen and write. But she is able to challenge patriarchy. When she got divorced, she was 34 years old and she decided to never remarry again.
She has never been to school but she has gathered her wisdom from day-to-day experiences. She has always told me that if I really want to be wise (not just well educated), I need to pay attention to the world around me.
Is my mother an invisible feminist? :) Would she say that as a woman she is systemically placed in a disadvantaged position? My mother will not call herself a feminist but she has always tried to improve the positions and lives of other women. Most of the women in the oasis believe that they should be submissive toward men and strive only to become good housewives. My Mother did not think like them.
My mother has always argued that Islam guaranteed women rights of which they had been deprived because of customs and traditions imposed in the name of religion. She told me that through the correct understanding and practice of Islam, women could regain basic rights, and their families and societies would also benefit.
She is persuaded that her society is backward because women were backward, and women were backward because of lack of education and because of social constraints.
One day we were listening to the radio. We heard a fundamentalist saying that he was against women who go to school and work. Today, conservative forces in Arab countries threaten women's expression in ways that many women have had round-the-clock protection by guards.
She was against this fundamentalist's ideas. She asked me to never stop learning. She asked me to work hard in school and to get a diploma and to work. She did not want me to become like her; a woman who cannot read and write and cannot take care of herself.
I was made aware early in my life that little girls were in danger. My mother never let me go alone anywhere, and allowed me to go playing with cousins of only three families. The admonitions grew more seriously when I was an adolescent. A young girl was seen as an endangered species to be protected from future predators. A little girl was never considered as an autonomous being whose life could turn out to be something other than what was considered to be the social norm: a little girl was a daughter, a school girl (if she is very lucky), and a future wife.
Rape was never discussed socially but my mother and my aunts thought about it all the time and they made sure that their daughters were not playing in the gardens or the streets with boys. The division of the world between a masculine universe and a feminine universe was very well established in our oasis.
My mother viewed the world in rather simplistic ways. She understood that I was growing to be different from her and it must have increased her sense of loneliness. When I was young, I was finding her views and her authority unbearable. My mother and my aunts left the house only on rare occasions such as family celebrations in the houses of relatives and close friends. Given the many prohibitions imposed on women, their movements were restricted. Women exhausted their lives with the huge cooking pots, carrying water, washing their clothes, taking care of their children....
Such an environment had a stifling grip on me, which intensified as I approached maturity. My journey through life was filled with intellectual struggles. We couldn't travel and experience field trips. We couldn't attend birthday parties. My commitment to life weakened as I remained secluded from the outside world. My world was school, home, then back to school. Summer times were all spent in my grandparents oasis.
My mother never went to school so she continued to consider male sponsorship and female subordination the rule. She believes that the power of men to make all the decisions in society is completely natural. Ideas are effective as long as people accept them and do not revolt against them.
I remember my mother used to hum softly with her sad, tender voice. I would sit on her lap listening actively. At fourteen my mother was married to my father who was seventeen. She moved from her father's house and her happy life there, to the house of her husband. It is the customs then for a young bride to live with her in-laws. The sons worked in their father's business. The men alone had the right to dispose of the family fortune. The men were responsible for the whole family, as was the rule in the oasis those days.
One of the strongest of my depressing memories of my mother began in my grandmother's room in the oasis. My grandfather came and told her that she was divorced. She was only 34 and she was visiting her parents during the summer school holiday. She never came back to her house and she had to send her children alone to their father who was living in another country. My spirit was broken and I spent the rest of my summer holiday with my eyes full of tears. When we returned to my father's house, I discovered great changes. The house had been repainted and the furniture redone.
I remember my uncle in the oasis had never refused anything to his mother. One day he rose promptly full of anger against his wife and he told her, "I will declare you divorced three times if you ever wear this dress and you go out to attend this wedding. I will never anger my mother because of you."
There are so many men like my uncle in our world! Men, being the patriarch of households, who avail themselves of the Quranically allowed four wives, constantly shuffling them through divorce and remarriage. And of course men are very well aware that God had laid one condition to polygamy: NO FAVOURITISM which is in itself impossible! A man cannot love four women the same way; therefore, Islam is against polygamy!
I remember my maternal uncle found it hard to maintain a state of peace in his house, for fights amongst his two wives became a routine. I remember, one day, I heard the sound of fearful screeching coming from my uncle's room. That was the signal that a fight was about to start. My cousins and I would shoot upstairs to the rooftop which had the double benefit of giving us a bird's-eye-view of what was about to unfold. Most of the time, my uncle's wives preferred to fight out of doors where nothing impeded their movements. They fought, kicking and screaming, while their children, scampering to the rescue would take their positions behind their respective mothers, and lustily give their support! Dirty word upon dirty word shot to high heaven. For at this point, my uncle would pounce on his women, hacking wildly, roaring threats of divorced. Of course, the horrified women would immediately draw apart in a temporary truce :) For the mere thought of the divorce would drew the two wives instinctively together to form a unified front in the face of the menace.
My mother was proud of the women freedom fighters who carried guns against colonialism and its army. She recounted about how women who were equal to men in the struggle for independence had shared decision-making both at the political and at the military levels.
But then what happened after the independence? Women should be bound by tradition, while men had access to modernity. I understood that all these men used traditions to serve their purposes. Nationalism, socialism, and traditions were used as tools for the elaboration of anti-women state policy.
The Family Code in Algeria canonised women's inferiority and subjection to the authority of a man who had legal tutelage over her. Islam demands of each believer to be fair to his woman, and yet polygamy and repudiation are legal in all Arab worlds. Women have everything to gain by truly being internationalist! We must exchange information and support one another. We must create such solidarity in order to be able to regain control and change many laws against women.
Some things leave an impact deep inside that will never go away. I shall speak of something that touched me profoundly.
Once when I was spending my summer holiday with my mother in the oasis, I asked her about her best friend. My mother sighed and answered me in a sad voice saying that her friend had experienced great sorrow causing her to fall ill. The reason of this great sorrow was that her husband had married another woman because she had given birth to five girls. Her husband wanted a boy! How come a man began to dislike his wife because all his children were girls! I told my mother that this cruel husband is criminal under the rule of law, decency, humanity and kindness. Why isn't the man blamed as the woman is blamed? Why doesn't the woman ask for a divorce and marry another man so that she can bear boys?
My mother was shocked by my speech! She couldn't understand that we have archaic practices that shout for reform. I told my mother that the liberated woman is a person who believes that she is as human as a man. Since they are equally human they must have equal human rights. Women must free themselves from the inherited traditional attitudes which contain no human meaning and which disfigure her humanity. The liberated woman believes that as a human being she has the right to be responsible for herself and her society.
The liberated woman insists that her mistakes are no more evil than those of men, that there is no a male mistake that is forgiven and a female mistake that is not.
We want to create a society....... :) My mother ignored my philosophizing and gave me my third cup of fresh green mint tea! My grandmother burnt a handful of of incense to scare away the evil spirits from the house. The evil eye !! :)
My grandfather was in another room talking and drinking tea with my uncles and cousins. I was in the other room with the women drinking tea and his voice traveled the distance between us. He was telling them how the new generation like me who read books and talked in French was worrying him. I listened carefully, trying to get the gist of what he was saying; his voice would lower and then become clearer: "The women are our responsibility. We must respect them and not hurt them." My grandfather was against honor killing.
We can still hear today men performing honor killing. They murder a woman or girl and they justify their actions by claiming that the victim has brought dishonor upon the family name or prestige. When a woman, according to men, had gone wrong, she must disappear, no longer be seen, so that the shame does not touch her family. The relatives would lead the wrong-doer into a field where they would beat her, and then bury her.
Honor killing is against Islam!
There must be a joint responsibility between women who were lucky to go to school and those who were not. An educated woman has to help the others, otherwise how can we change society. The educated don't pay attention to the illiterate. Religion helps to organize your life at home but schools must remain secular. Religion must not be interpreted incorrectly. The Prophet wanted education for women. Arab civilization and Islam were built on the co-operation and equality of the two sexes. Women and men must stand up for equal legitimate rights.
Women are citizens who are particularly aware of economic, social and national problems. To deprive women of their civil rights is a harmful obstacle in the path of the development and evolution of the nation, a lacuna in the country's democratic process.
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