Essay: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Love
Essay: Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Love
Who deserves romance in the time of war? Whose life matters?
A masked couple kiss in front of a burning barricade during a protest against Chile's government in Santiago, Chile November 25, 2019. REUTERS/Goran Tomasevic
Nineteen years ago this week, I went to see the Iraqi superstar Kazem al-Sahir perform at the Beacon Theater in New York City. I was not a huge fan but I was there to support his courage for coming to a country which was threatening to attack his country very soon.
Before I could enter the theater a correspondent for German and Dutch television cornered me for an interview. During my years as a journalist, I had cornered a fair number of people on their way into events, so I obliged.
When I told him I was there to show solidarity with Kazem's courage, he asked me if I supported Iraq. Like most Arabs around the world, I told him, I make a distinction between Saddam Hussein, a reckless dictator, and the people of Iraq, for whom this would be the third war in 20 years. I support the people of Iraq, oppose the war and believe everything possible should be done to avert it, I told him.
"But he (Kazem) sings about romance. Shouldn't he sing about protest?" the journalist asked me.
"Can't Arabs have romance?" I asked him before I entered the theater for two hours of nothing but romance. Love and longing are Kazem's forte. And isn’t romance a form of protest, I wish I had also said. Romance is an uprising in the name of your humanity.
If hate is the accelerator that dehumanizes both its subject and object, to allow the former to kill the latter, then indifference is worse; it confirms that you are not worthy even of concern. If hate is a precursor to killing, then indifference is the spectator who watches.
Declaring yourself worthy of romance–of love, not from the enemy trying to kill you, but in spite of the enemy trying to kill you–is a way for the object of hate to liberate themselves, to say I love and therefore I live. To revel in romance, is to tap into a grand human activity that erodes indifference. We all love. We deserve to live.
Love. Life. And Liberty. Fuck the pursuit of happiness if only those who dehumanize me are considered worthy of it.
And isn’t romance a form of protest. Romance is an uprising in the name of your humanity.
In the middle of one of Kazem’s songs, during that concert exactly 19 years ago, a woman sitting across the aisle asked me to translate a song that was working the audience into a frenzy.
It is a song that tells of a jealous lover asking her beloved who the other woman in his life is, I told her. He teases her with descriptions of his true love's unmatched beauty and her many virtues until he finally reveals that his heart's desire is Baghdad. At the mere mention of the Iraqi capital, the cheering at the Beacon Theatre became deafening.
From her accent, I could tell that the woman I was translating for was not a native-English speaker and so I asked her where she was from. I could not have orchestrated her answer better myself.
"I am Iranian. I love Kazem. I have every single one of his CDs. I love him."
That woman's country had fought Kazem's for 10 years in one of the bloodiest and most futile wars in the recent history of the Middle East. I wanted to run out and get that reporter for European television who asked me what a concert -- or romance -- could do.
To have romance is to be allowed to love, is to be worthy of tenderness, is to be worth saving. And this war between Ukraine and Russia has compounded what many of us already knew three years into a global pandemic: that to many, some lives are worth saving more than others.
With so many parts of the world still without vaccines, a new war has joined the many already wrecking lives around the world. But this most recent war and its victims, we are being told, is more important. It is a war between democracy and autocracy, we are told. But here’s the thing: many of the democracies who are supporting Ukraine in its fight to expel the invading troops of Russian autocracy, support autocracy in my country and so many others.
My country, Egypt, has long been the dumping ground and backdrop to the wars and skirmishes of “world powers,” be it through colonization, a staging ground for fighting between British and German troops during the Second World War, to a tug-of-war between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War that continues today wherein both the United States and Russia sell arms to our current autocrat, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi.
Sisi, like Russian President Vladimir Putin, is a former intelligence chief; former President Donald Trump used to call Sisi “My favourite dictator.”
So tell me again: where is this war between democracy and autocracy? For those of us who live on the faultline of geopolitical hypocrisies, it is a constant state of emotional and political whiplash.
To have romance is to be allowed to love, is to be worthy of tenderness, is to be worth saving. And this war between Ukraine and Russia has compounded what many of us already knew three years into a global pandemic: that to many, some lives are worth saving more than others.
Fuck Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. Fuck war. None of what I am writing aims to dismiss the suffering and death of the people of Ukraine, at the receiving end of a punishing bombardment, nor that of the people of Russia, whose lives are wrecked by an autocrat whose havoc has wrecked many in the region from which I hail. I side with the people.
I am asking instead: whose lives matter?
Ask Syrians, Palestinians, Yemenis, and so many others whose countries have been wrecked by war and occupation—wars and occupations caused by, supported by, or justified by the very powers who now tell us they are supporting democracy versus autocracy by siding with Ukraine.
In 2016, while I was visiting Bosnia, my feminist sister and comrade Nidzara Ahmetasovic took me to Srebrenica where, starting July 11, 1995 and for over a week, Bosnian Serb forces systematically murdered 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys and ethnically cleansed 30 thousand, in the worst crime of the 1992-1995 Bosnian war. It remains the only massacre on European soil since World War II to be ruled a genocide.
There were 6504 boys and men victims of the Srebrenica genocide buried there when I visited, after their remains had been identified. About 2,000 more were awaiting identification. When you see the names of those buried, you see from the surnames, repeated over and over, just how many families were wiped out.
Media coverage and the political statements around the Ukraine-Russia war serve as reminders that sympathy and support during war are never equal: they depend on how you look and how you pray, and they are undergirded by white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia–from the anti-Blackness obvious in who could leave Ukraine to the implicit and sometimes explicit confirmation that Ukrainian refugees were welcome in various parts of Europe because they were white and not Muslim.
The whiteness fueling who deserves to be saved in this latest war has compounded the whiteness of who deserves to be saved in the pandemic: white people matter the most. And not even all white people, equally. As Bosnian Muslims have pointed out–they were the “wrong” kind of white Europeans.
Media coverage and the political statements around the Ukraine-Russia war serve as reminders that sympathy and support during war are never equal: they depend on how you look and how you pray, and they are undergirded by white supremacy, anti-Blackness, and Islamophobia
That journalist who asked me why Kazem sings of love and not protest, has been reincarnated for me recently in the assembly line of journalists, politicians, and pundits who after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, expressed shock that blonde and blue-eyed people in a country in Europe were under bombardment.
When journalists associate you with violence and war only, they help to shove you into the straightjacket of stereotype. Declaring that romance belongs to you too undoes the stitching of that straightjacket.
My parents’ romance led them from Cairo, where they met at medical school and married, to Port Said, a city that faced much of the brunt of Israeli bombardment when Egypt and Israel were at war in 1967. They were 24 and had wanted to spend their medical internships in the same city and by the sea. When the war broke out in June of that year, my mum was heavily pregnant with me.
The first sound I reacted to was that of bombs. My mum has told me I would kick inside her when bombs would fall during that war–my parent’s third and my first. They have lived through five wars so far; I three.
It is imperative that we write our own stories so that we are not objects of geopolitical hypocrisies but instead subjects of our own romances. In the same way that white journalists and politicians and pundits have told us who deserves to live–by repeatedly expressing shock that white people in Ukraine were in danger of dying from war–they have told us who deserves to be free–they repeatedly expressed shock that brown people dared to imagine we deserved to be free when country after another rose up against regimes following Tunisia’s lead in what has become known as the “Arab Spring.”
Who is considered worthy of love, who is allowed to want it? Who is considered worthy of freedom and who is allowed to want to be free? The answer to those questions is also the answer to who is worthy of living and who is allowed to live. Because the answer to all those questions undergirds our very humanity.
Nina Simone gave a masterclass in how to write your own story and why it’s important to be the subject of your own narrative, during her introduction to the civil rights anthem "Young, Gifted and Black," written for (another icon and hero for me) Lorraine Hansberry, at the Philharmonic Hall in New York live album recording for Black Gold in 1969.
"Now, it is not addressed primarily to white people. Though it does not put you down in any way. It simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get."
Who is considered worthy of love, who is allowed to want it? Who is considered worthy of freedom and who is allowed to want to be free?
Kazem al-Sahir, like the great Egyptian diva Umm Kalthoum, sings the words of Arab poets. Those of us who are denied love and liberty and therefore life, who are not “blonde haired and blue eyed,” who are not considered “civilized” or “European,” know that we are creators and protagonists of our own romances. We must simply decentre—ignore—the white people and the white narrators who dare deny our right to romance—and the right to live—in return for indifference. And we must do so for ourselves because we do indeed need all the inspiration and love that we can get. That is a major reason that I started FEMINIST GIANT.
Our stories of romance sing across the divide of hate and indifference; a call across the aisle to our shared humanity, as the Iranian woman I met at the concert in New York City 19 years ago reminded me.
I love, therefore I am.
Perhaps this is why so many - perhaps all! - war stories are told as romances.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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