Nafsi
“We still need to invent the woman who belongs to no one.”
Leila Slimani
“I felt guilt before I even sinned.”
—Interview conducted with Leila Slimani
In the fall, something began to shift in me. I'd just come back with my bird after months on the road. I had no home, no money, no art. I landed in Virginia, defeated from the circular motion of life. The departures, always followed by the defeated, submissive returns. But something in me began to change. Somehow, in that awful house, as I watched my grandfather depart from life, in a long, slow, agonizing way (the way I believe troubled consciences go), and as I watched my grandma sink further into a shadow of herself, hating me while she sank, something alive and urgent began to rise in me. I returned to calligraphy. To fabric. I returned to the desires I abandoned because I thought myself unworthy of wanting. I saw Rotana in person. Everything began to slowly make sense. I began to see, things I wanted to see and things I didn’t. Books began to enter my life that I hadn’t come across before, books that began to undo the last of the doubts I carried. Everything I knew about god, religion, sensuality, divinity. There was a larger revolution taking place around the world, and a quieter, equally urgent one happening in parallel within me. I and the world were moving to the same drum beat, the same consuming, unyielding demand for absolute freedom and total truth… I made it out of that house. My grandfather passed away. I went off to do life on my own. The chord was severed. Without me willing it, without me planning it, all of a sudden, I was standing in a place of no return. Days, weeks, then months passed with no contact with my family, a tribe that nearly killed me in their aversion for truth, their desperate, desperate desire to believe all is well…
“Lilith, the original women, the one who existed long before Eve, created from earth just like Adam. Lilith, the independent, free-spirited woman who left paradise of her own choice.”
—Confessions by Joumana
The Erotic
Then I fell. All the books I’d been reading, the truth that felt so close, the desire to know, to protest…all of it vanished. Maybe I stood on the edge of something dangerous, something that would have changed everything had I stepped into it. Instead I closed the books, retreated from the desire to tell all, to learn all. I’d already read too much, seen too much. I’d already lost so much. All of this should have made it easier for me. People often don’t speak the truth because of their fear of loss. They often don’t look too deeply into things because of their fear of all that can be lost in seeing. But for myself, I should have had no fear speaking, no fear looking. What more was there left to lose?
And still, the terror sent me away…
***
Arab liberation only goes so far. We bear a collective demand for freedom, but only in the most obvious cases: when there is violence, when there is blood, when there is a name, a slogan, a face. But when there is something from within us, among us, whom to face would also inevitably mean facing ourselves and our own faults and errors, suddenly we don’t know how to scream anymore. We become evasive, forgetful. We announce god, shame, family, everything within our reach that we can throw at the person trying to speak, to tell what was left to be forgotten in the silence. Suddenly, we, who’ve always been loud, passionate, messy, fiercely loyal, suddenly we are all very quiet and well-mannered. Suddenly, that loyalty turns into something nasty. It places the tribe above the individual. You tell the older figures in your family, I have been assaulted by my father, and everyone turns their head away. That rage that they showed you when you wore a shirt that was too tight, or when you took photos in the garden, or when you cried, that rage that has spilled over your head all your life, where does it go when a real demand for rage arrives? I believe no one can shout the way we can in the face of injustice…but our rage is as conditional as our love. So long as that rage and that love does not demand from us that we look at our own and into our own, so long as it does not ask us to sacrifice one family member for the other, so long as it does not ask us to confess an ugly truth in exchange for a higher, more honorable one, than yes, we can say we are a people that love and protect. But only then.
In tribute to the ancient Arab civilization in which desire came in many forms, even in architecture, where love was liberated from being sinful, in which both having and giving pleasure was one of the duties of the believer.”
The Almond by Nedjma
“Guilt and shame are powerful tools of domination and control because guilt and shame’s primary functions are to shut down intuition.”
To sever a woman from her erotic source is to sever her source of knowledge, her internal compass that naturally leans in the direction of justice. The same source that tells us what is deeply right also informs us what is deeply wrong. It’s where our “true knowledge” lives, and this knowledge guides us into lasting change. Audre Lorde calls it the “erotic demand” for justice. It’s this uncompromising power that doesn’t submit to the alternative; it doesn’t accept . It says I want this and trusts that that demand is leading the body and leading the tribe in the right direction. It informs us of our desires, desires that are, as Rotana describes them, “deeply inconvenient.” Because while it moves us closer to what is right, there is so much to lose along the way. It’s a deeply powerful source that many of us have either been intentionally severed from or we have willfully done the severing. Why the severance? Because it is an uncompromising, unforgivingly honest, and demanding source. If you are connected to it as a woman, you can’t be controlled, deceived, muted, submissive. And if it is kept alive in you, it means the people around you will have to answer to it. They have to face themselves, in you. The erotic source is a guide for us, a mirror for them, and, “When someone holds a mirror up to [us, we] smash the glass.” (Nabil Ayouch)
This is why we have to speak out against the injustices committed against us as women. If we can’t acknowledge that what was done to us what deeply wrong, if we don’t protect that rage, if we dismiss the violence against our bodies, if we ignore the source that tells us what was deeply wrong for us, what will sustain that rage for others? And what source will tell us what is deeply wrong for others if it was muted when it tried to speak for us? How is it fair that rage is a permitted expression when it is a common, public cause, but deeply shamed when the cause is intimate and personal?
So speak against what was done to you. It is the opposite of selfish. It is the only way you can sustain your rage for the others. Your body will grow tired of speaking for the injustices of others when you’ve ignored the ones committed against you.
Through these lines, in which sperm and prayer are joined, I have attempted to break down the walls that separate the celestial from the terrestrial, body from soul, the mystical from the erotic.”
— The Almond by Nedjma
The more I read, the more conversations I have, and the deeper I dive into the subjects of femininity, Islam, god, divinity, sensuality, and the distortions, contradictions, and inter-depedency of each, the more the rage multiplies, and the clearer it becomes to me how much there is to lose in the pursuit of what’s true. Until recently, the women I’ve met who had been raised under this soulless version of Islam chose one of two routes: two leave, or to stay. The ones who left did so quietly, the ones who stayed were just as quiet. It was either I accept or don’t accept this god, this denial of femininity, this severance of the self, and the shaming of sensuality. We were unspokenly handed two options: to live as we desire, but without god, or to have god, but to live against those desires. I used to believe that to leave this god and that religion was resistance, but it was cowardly and lazy; ultimately our leaving preserves this punitive version of Islam; our absence allows it to live unquestioned, unchallenged, unexamined, so that it can be passed on as it was to us to the next generation of vulnerable girls. In leaving, we relieve ourselves of a necessary war, this “deeply inconvenient calling.”
“I have always been what you would call, whether sympathetically or disapprovingly, a ‘bad girl.’
—Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman by Joumana Haddad
“We’re forgetting everything. We’re forgetting that it’s we Arabs, we Muslims, who shocked the West with our erotic texts in the fifteenth century. We invented the realm of the erotic. We’re suffering from collective amnesia.”
—Nabil Ayouch
In the end, it’s their loss. In their repulsion and suppression of the feminine, they have denied themselves a part of god that can only come through a woman. Their “divine” experiences are only half the depth they could be so long as women remain hidden behind the prayer wall. There is only so much of god they can touch without the feminine. There is still a long, long war to fight in proving that there is no contradiction in the divine and the sensual, and that not only do the two not conflict, they rely on the presence of the other to achieve wholeness.
Until then, I will do everything I can to fight this “soulless” version of Islam that is killing us. This fundamental migration that is leaking into everything that was once beautiful and alive in the Arab people. It is killing our hineyeh, our innate tenderness. Don’t ever believe that this version of Islam, exported by Saudi Arabia and kept alive by us, is a layer of our experience that stands separate from the others. Through my research, through my conversations with so many other women who have been raised in Islamic households, I am learning that this damaging version of Islam slips into every crevice of our life. It sinks deep into the subconscious and affects every aspect of our lives. In some ways, we are aware of this affect. But mostly, we are very unaware of the extent of that damage. I’ve met old friends of mine that were raised in the same crushingly suffocating environment as I was. Women who were ‘devout,’ covered, holy in all the ways holiness is understood in this limited interpretation of Islam. And they have walked away, all the way to the furthest side away from Islam. But they are still deeply unhappy. I see it in their eyes. I recognize the rage. We cannot walk away. Our freedom does not only involve the physical liberation of our bodies from those environments. No. We have to speak our truths. Tell others what happened in the schools we were sent to, the homes we returned to. What happened in those rooms when the doors were closed to the world and no one could hear us? When we were ready to speak and no one was around to listen, can we still remember what it was we meant to say?
“Later on, I understood that this affliction of decency was imposed on women only to make them into pained mummies with empty eyes.”
“I told her about the wretched life I’d led, made even more unbearable by the mask of secrecy I was forced to wear.”
—The Almond by Nedjma
“I am the product of that stiff religious education you gave me.”
—Confessions by Joumana Haddad
“Mine was a strange world/ of criminal silences/ of strangers’ watchful eyes/ misreading the evil.”
—Freda Kahlo
“The closer you are to God, the less I see of you — so goes the thinking behind the niqab…It comes from an ideology that wants to hide women. [It] represents a bizarre reverence for the disappearance of women.”
Mona Eltahawy
“All the monotheistic religions are shot through by the conflict between the divine and the feminine, but none more so than islam, which has opted for the occultation of the feminine, at least symbolically, by trying to veil it, hide it, and mask it.
Fatima Mernissi
“There is this fateful moment for all of us when you realize you cannot inherit the silence. You you have to decide between appeasing the tribe for now, or healing your lineage for good.”
“True desire…this deeply inconvenient calling. I’ve learned that it comes with savage consequences. And that I don’t get to choose what stays and what goes. And so much goes…”