FIELD REPORT: On Writers with Vaginas, Revolutions, North Africa, Silencers, the Secret Police, and Birds

February 11, 2011

A few years ago, I was traveling and living for a month in remote southern Tunisia. At one point, I was lost in a very small village – the roads were unmarked, and there had been some disorienting sand storms that had closed my anticipated route.

The Arab men in this village refused to give me directions – refused to speak to me, refused to acknowledge my presence standing before them, veiled and covered and fluent in French but holding the keys to a car I was driving, nearly against the law for even a well-covered vagina to touch the driver’s seat.

Throughout my journey, my identity was perceived as half-white-European and half-Arab-African. This made for a certain increase in rage against me, because I was perceived to be rebellious. In fact, I was just naive, and my respectful attempt to wear a head-covering, long sleeves, and long skirt were misread: most European women wore low-cut tank tops and short-shorts, and many Tunisians refused to believe my alleged “American” origins. The Bedoin and Tuareg women were visible, active, vocal, but they were the minority. Time and again, men would chastise me for having been raised a Muslim woman who was coming back from an American university in possession of a driver’s license, a public voice, and a quest for enfranchisement.

Over and over, I was told to simply be quiet and get out of the public view.

Remember, men are your masters here, said the man holding my passport. I was prevented from using public toilets: public does not mean woman. I was refused service at restaurants. I was not allowed to drink alcohol.

This had been a surprise and a challenge to navigate, because the guidebooks had been written by men – lonely planet, timeout, these places recommended bars and restaurants and hotels where I would go and be refused service. Nothing about that in the guidebooks, and not a single female contributor to any of the guides about how to travel off the tourist map in the northern Sahara. Standing in the street wondering where precisely I would be allowed to urinate (answer: in a bottle in the front seat of my car) or eat (in my hotel room, after a man had gone out to purchase food for me), I realized that Lonely Planet editors should have titled the book: A Men’s Guide to Tunisia and Algeria.

Politics and religion have a way of making daily life difficult for those whose bodies are legislated against. These were not abstract beliefs – this presented a problem for my well-being.

On this particular late afternoon, I was lost in an area of the region where women are not allowed to enter hotels or converse with men in public, much less be allowed to secure a hotel room for the night. The situation was grim: I needed to be able to leave this town by nightfall so that I could reach the one pensione within 200 miles that allowed women guests (it later turned out to be a brothel).

Lost and with few options, again and again I went into private areas behind shops and walls and gates to find women who could give me directions to the next town. They were thrilled, warm, kind, shy at first but curious and deeply intelligent. The men, they said, knew how to read and write, but could not talk to a woman. The women wanted to help but could not, because they could not read or write and thus were unable to make sense of the marks on my map.

The expressions on these women’s faces when they realized that I could read, that I was driving a car – these wordless responses will remain with me forever.

For weeks I drove and walked through nearly a hundred Tunisian towns and never laid eyes on a woman who was old enough to menstruate. All of them were kept inside the house.

Trying to live in public as a woman in rural southern Tunisia was a foreshadowing of trying to live in Germany as a publicly identifiable Jew: it is enraging and horrifying to be the only one. In North Africa, it would be easy for a witness to believe a local genocide against women had been utterly successful. Yet there were many men who cheered me on, quietly, with a nod and a quiet invitation into a private home to meet sisters and mothers and daughters…where conversations and gender roles could be discussed with more freedom.

At a certain point, a Tunisian person – who I had known casually for a few days – came up to me when I was alone and asked to speak to me in private. In whispered French, he told me that I was being followed by the secret police. He said they were aware of my movements, and had assigned people to track my activities.  Why? Because I was an American, and because they had paperwork that stated I was a writer and a human rights worker, and a woman traveling out of the tourist path.

Secret Police.

I asked him if they were protecting me from a danger, or were they themselves the source of danger?

He responded yes to both questions.

For the remainder of my travels, I felt unsettled. I worried about the people who had interacted with me. I worried each time my passport was taken from me overnight.

I realized how much was happening under the surface that could not be talked about, could not be acknowledged, could not be named.

I watch the continuing news in North Africa and I feel concerned. For all our surfaces, and all our underneaths.

The many deeply frustrated, deeply visionary Tunisians I came to know in the human rights community – are they okay? And then I hope that the ideal of democracy doesn’t disappoint them. I hope they manage to take it to the next evolution, a farther stage of enfranchisement and inclusion and equality than we have been able to achieve here in the United States.

I am humbled that North Africans can admire the stated values of our democracy – admiring what we say even as there are deep problems in what we do.

Many Americans have been all delighted and flattered that Muslim nations are expressing this urge for democracy. There is a smattering of vanity going around, and it makes me feel a little ill at times, even though it seems largely well-intended.  I too am proud of democracy, but I am humbled and perhaps a little ashamed of how little we have managed to make it real for all our citizens. I worry that if the North Africans are looking to us as role models, they will not get far enough towards where they need to be. They will have to look beyond what we have accomplished, because it’s abundantly clear that all our citizens are not equally enfranchised. If this is the new generation of democracy, an invocation of the next evolution in governmental systems – let’s bring everybody to the table.

I am truly startled that after the centuries of colonial atrocities European and American – aka white – nationals committed on the soil of North Africa, that any single citizen would be willing to extend the slightest curiosity towards embracing one of western society’s allegedly core values. I hope democracy becomes something that is owned globally, and that the United States or other western nations don’t just get to perpetuate colonialism under a different rubric. It took about half an hour in Tunisia to receive the first of infinitely many horrifying impressions about the amount of damage that white colonials inflicted in that region, much less the continent. A systematic dehumanization puts it mildly. A profoundly casual contempt for the significance of individual or collective African life comes a little closer.

I hope all humans can help all other humans take this idealistic model of equality and enfranchisement to a place that matters for all humans, not just the ones without vaginas. And if a woman finally makes it to the table of national leadership, I hope North Africa can prevent a twenty-one-year-old white boy from shooting her through the brain.One of our young visionary female leaders just got her brains blown out by a man who thought women had too much power. We have a lot to learn that won’t be accomplished by condescending towards North Africa.

So I say hurrah for North Africa, but keep it in mind that the United States hasn’t made it all that far itself.

If this is a revolt against the secret police of silencing, let’s keep in mind that the gatekeepers of the literary world sometimes fall into that category, albeit at a smaller scale and perhaps without the legislative formality of Sharia law.  Talk about the secret police? Sure, there are issues of scale. But it’s the systemizing of silencing is what it is, wherever it occurs, and it means most writers with vaginas will be literarily arrested by the secret police at some point, and that silencing will happen in broad daylight but without opportunity for redress. Enfranchisement means getting equal access to speech on the electronic and printed page. And that’s not happening for American women: period.

I’m talking about the VIDA report on gender discrimination in publishing that has rocked the publishing industry and its inhabitants, as well as the Olivers who fog up the windows from the streets outside. I hope these astute and courageous activists keep at it. I hope the lid is finally off the pot in the Literary World, where the editors and gatekeepers who have long borne an underground reputation for misogyny are now called out to answer for it.  Yet throughout the week, again and again, the editors named in VIDA’s report cleverly turn the conversation away from their ethical obligations to dismantled a bigoted and segregated industry, and turn towards accusations of women writer’s lack of assertiveness, lack of confidence. This thinly disguised blame the victim approach does little to inspire admiration or respect, and only further corrodes their legitimacy as gatekeepers in a rapidly evolving society.

In the meantime, here’s a link and an excerpt from one of my new pieces, about the Mexican War of Independence against Spain. It appears in DIAGRAM.  They are lovely folks, and I encourage folks to send work their way. As for my work they took – if you don’t know the story of Hidalgo and others at the Granary in Guanajuato, you are missing out on one of the most intriguing revolutionary legends – this one happens to be true, and involves decapitated heads in birdcages.

 

It’s printed in DIAGRAM – a delightful magazine by Ander Monson.

But here’s my guillotine slice for a wrap-up.

The lovely folks at DIAGRAM have kindly acquired second online rights to the new work (that originally appeared in print in Re/Divider.

For any human with a moderately functional set of ethics, it hasn’t taken much brainpower to open up a publication and observe a distinct minority of women writers. It’s been like this since the dawn of the written word – not surprising considering that women have historically been banned from learning to write. But abhorrent considering that few in the field actually admit that regardless of ability, writers with vaginas have a profoundly lesser access to public self-expression of their thoughts and ideas. Perhaps many Editors should instead be called Silencers.

And in the meantime, read Vida’s THE REPORT, peruse the blogosphere commentary, and don’t shrug it off. If we’re going to talk about North Africa, we have to also talk about ourselves.