Part I: Silence-from-the-self and silence-imposed-by-others: On Being a Privileged Arab, On Being an Ex-Muslim Woman

By Hiba Krisht

“In America, I fit, but I do not belong. In Lebanon, I belong, but I do not fit.”

— Rabih Alameddine

Ihave a short story out in The Kenyon Review, and the decision to publish it still gives me fear and trembling of an almost Kierkegaardian sort. I wrestle an internal rending between that duty to expression which drives and compels me most and a fear of surrendering ethical judgment within that expression. “The Witnessing” takes place in my hometown, Beirut. It features a Filipina domestic worker as an integral character, and I fear that I have mistakenly committed a horrible wrongdoing in writing her.

She is ethical, sympathetic, complex, and agential. At least, I think she is. I’m unsure because I am not a Filipina living under indentured servitude in Lebanon. I am unsure because I cannot ever, even via firsthand accounts and extensive research, fully appreciate the depth of that experience. I am unsure because of my Arab privilege within the Middle East, making it a questionable circumstance that I should breathe life into a Southeast Asian character under the yoke of the pseudo-slavery system wielded by my people.

I struggle with this even when this depiction is an honest attempt to humanize that character, uncover her agency, and critique the oppressive system that disadvantages her.

But I am compelled to write for reasons that run deeper than a complicity in the truths of a thousand and one women oppressed by my people. I write the stories of my people, too, and their struggle and oppression. “The Witnessing” belongs to a novel-in-stories about Beirut, a city almost solely characterized as war-torn in the West, if at all. I write to humanize my city full of life, vibrancy, struggle. It is brilliant, ugly, poor, and full of art. It is rich, war-staggered, patriarchal, corrupt, gleaming. It is all the pain and love I hold in my heart. Its name is tattooed into my skin. Long has Beirut driven my tongue and pen.

Long, too, has the domestic worker class of Beirut driven me, because it is a strong, stable fabric in the mesh of my city, with their dire, tragic, enraging, beautiful, and largely overlooked stories[1]. I have long been compelled to write about these women, with responsibility that stems from knowing what it is like, as a woman of color, to be represented as a prop, tool, and object if at all. I write to make them major characters instead of supporting ones—highlighting their agency, writing them with empathy, having them move and make in my stories as they move and make in my city.

As an Arab woman belonging to the privileged ethnic class in Beirut, I feel an ardent and great need for these stories to be written. As an Arab woman, I feel disgusted by how little I know in my very attempts to face my privilege. I am ashamed by how most of my knowledge falls into the very stereotypes I seek to break, how much I have to learn in order to do a project of this sort any kind of justice.

This moral bind is one that feminists, especially feminists of color, are familiar with. I feel hauntingly compelled tell a thousand and one stories of a thousand and one women, yes. But this comes with the grave responsibility of representation, the danger of falling into the easy trap of speaking monolithically about a group of people that are impossibly individuated. How can one not be at a loss about uncovering the humanity of the domestic worker class in Lebanon? In telling their stories there is not only a duty to honor the fifty thousand stripes of personal identity and being that color any minority class. It is even more complex an issue: the domestic worker class in Lebanon and in the larger Middle East hails from a mind-boggling variety of global regions—South Asia, Southeast Asia, Africa, therewith a plethora of ethnicities, nationalities, religions, and cultures. To represent some of them is to run the risk of being mistaken for representing all of them, even when it is done in service of critiquing the sources of their disadvantage, the oppressive system of imported laborforce in the Middle East.

As a woman from a theocratic, patriarchal background, however, I feel a difference that is another facet of understanding. I feel different, too, as an Arab-American, a member of a minority in my country of birth. Here in the US I am ever cognizant of the white, male, and heteronormative privilege surrounding me, and the conscious struggle of allies to grapple with this privilege. I feel different because I see those struggles from the other side, I see their dangers and places of failing, and I’m not sure I can do much better in grappling with my own Arab privilege.

I feel different because I know what it is to be silenced as a woman of color. I cannot contain my hurt, bafflement, and rage when some white feminists deny the oppression of women under Islam in lieu of an honest examination of the influences and structuring elements of that oppression. I feel helpless because their denial enables the silencing of my voice as one of those women who suffered under Islam.

I feel different because so many of those white feminists mean well—maybe mean as well as I do—but are simply unequipped to enter a discourse they understand so little of. I cannot know for sure that I am not doing a similar thing in writing about foreign domestic workers in the Arab world. I know that those white feminists from the West grapple with a serious Western colonialist and appropriative narrative, and they are trying to resist an imperialist account of the poor, helpless oppression of brown women that enables racism against brown people in general, a narrative that I agree is incredibly important to fight. But perhaps in much the same way I am trying to critique an oppressive system of imported labor because it is incredibly important to do so, but instead I might be nullifying the agency of the women who actively choose to participate in that system for their own important, compelling reasons, who are more than just sad, conflicted, oppressed victims of it, but strong, positive, resilient people doing what they do out of understanding and conviction of their own personal and family needs.

And this is why I know that I would not want white feminists in the West to talk of the oppression of Muslim women in many contexts, because they are simply not equipped to. I feel like even I am barely able to engage in the very difficult critique of theocratic patriarchy in the Middle East. I, the ex-Muslim woman of color raised there, a victim of abuse and control from Muslims and abduction at the hands of Hezbollah, a militant Islamist organization. Even I, the 26-year-old woman who wore hijab from the ages of 8 to 23, who grappled with the coercion and choice of it for a decade and a half, who lived through the bombing of fighter jets and civil strife and random car bombs in the Middle East, hid her bisexuality amid a sea of homophobic sentiment, who speaks Arabic and is deeply acquainted with Islamic scripture. Even I, who battled, resisted, and found an avenue of escape from that system rather than being the passive oppressed person I am painted to be—even I am sometimes at a loss when I try to discuss all of this with nuance.

It is a struggle to stress the grave dangers of imperialist Western narrative of poor, oppressed brown women and condemn anti-Muslim bigotry without denying the realities of tangible religious oppression of women in the Middle East. And when I do, it barely registers. Because even the most well-meaning of feminists, who truly have the defense of Arab and Muslim women at heart, silence me. Their own discourse on an issue they do not understand is promoted and spread by mainstream, popular platforms, enabling the silence of mine.

Because I know what it is like to be silenced, as a woman of color, I struggle with writing characters whose struggles I’ve only witnessed, and not experienced.

But I have in fact erred on the side of writing these characters, and here is why:

I write these characters because my silencing comes not only from the West, but from the same system of Arab theocratic patriarchy that oppresses my characters. I largely write about the Middle East under a pseudonym because of the dangers of that system, the damning brand of apostasy, the violence and suppression driving me to exile. I write because I hate being masked, because I am a dual national yet half-an-outsider in whichever country I go, a Third Culture Kid expatriated from my country of birth until I turned 23, and from my motherland until I turned 13. In neither place am I not silenced in some way. The critiques I give, born from my liberal international education in Saudi Arabia, place me in contempt in Lebanon by my origin culture and people. I cannot go back to Beirut without great danger befalling me. So here I am in the US, and my socialization and actualization far from the shores of North America leave me mismatched in almost everyplace I walk today.

I write these characters because of the struggles we share. I too am a victim of the same oligarchical, patriarchal, dehumanizing, misogynistic system. While radically divergent in a plethora of ways, our experiences converge in haunting, heartrending ways. The employers that rob, imprison, rape, beat, overwork, and mistreat domestic workers are often our fathers. They are often our brothers, our husbands, men that do many of the same things to their Arab daughters and sisters. Migrant domestic workers have their passports unlawfully stripped upon arrival in the Beirut airport. Lebanese women are withheld at the same airport terminals as they try to leave the country without their fathers or their husbands’ permission. We are both trapped, unable to escape, our freedom subject to the whims and kindness of our families, our employers. Our treatment, we separate groups of women, stems directly from a patriarchy that expects compliance, silence, obedience, and invisibility from women. That is a system I can speak to with honesty, experience, and understanding.

I write these characters because their plight is a matter of social justice that directly pertains to one of my homes and my people, and it is one that I have been witness to, that I largely understand in terms of many of its political and social dynamics. It is not a matter of speaking of people half a world away, with discourse obscured by the distance and politics of an antithetical worldview.

I write because condemning the perpetrators of the system is not enough without also promoting the humanity and well-being of its victims.

I write these characters too because of my conversations with foreign domestic workers in Arabia. Their faces, their own expressions of pain, resistance, strength, love, despair, resilience—they are forged into my skull and I am driven to give ink to those voices that were. I write until things change enough so that they are no longer robbed of being able to speak for themselves, and that is when I will stop writing their characters, and instead joyfully read their work. Because it is not like it is in the in the West, where there are many women of color, Muslim women, and Arab women willing and able to speak to their experiences, if only they would be heard, where silencing is a matter of uncovering voices already alive rather than giving air to voices so suppressed they are utterly incapable of forming words to begin with. I write because I have often been in need of any sort of help, have from a literal dark cell wished profusely for a messenger to carry my plight to the world as second best to carrying it myself.

I write them too, in this form of character, because story is a powerful, humanizing, gentle form of discourse that deals not in absolutes. It is pliable, presenting characters who move, speak, interact, and act as representative of potential truths of living and being, truth-as-experience, shorn of explicit commentary that unilaterally endorses or condemns those experiences. In story, critique can be enmeshed in subtleties, interwoven within the complex interplay of the five levels of consciousness: author, narrator, point-of-view character, audience, and reader. Stories are gentler, more patient, potentially kinder forms of social commentary. There is room for growth within them.

But of course, presenting even a character from a disadvantaged minority comes with a responsibility that is not reducible to an abstract cognizance of privilege and power dynamics. Even if well-meaning, there is plenty of potential for minority character depictions to be unintentionally insensitive, extremely paternalistic, and appropriative of the struggles of those represented due to attempts at hashing them in terms the author understands through their own worldview. There is a danger of these representations being used as a tool to alleviate Arab guilt, or white guilt, what have you (Avatar, anyone?).

With these pitfalls in mind, I’d like to present a series of considerations I’ve grappled with in writing my Filipina domestic worker in “The Witnessing” beyond standard story parameters of plausibility, complexity, and quality writing. I can’t pretend they are more than choices that are merely better than potentially worse ones, and they clearly contain their own problems, even if they are measured attempts at promoting that social truth that compels me.

For instance: in this story, the character faces an ethical dilemma regarding another character in the story, an Arab. This was a decision worth weighting, because on one hand, it presents a critique of a system which unfairly forces foreign domestic workers to evaluate and consider the problems of others—those belonging to the class that oppresses them, no less—above their own. On the other hand, the agency, ethics, and complexity of this character are hashed in terms of problems thrust upon them by an oppressive system. While reactive agency is powerful, I felt it unjust to reduce my character to reactivity to outside forces playing upon her, and tried too to root her personhood in the active, in loves, hopes, thoughts, transcending the oppressive system.

Another significant consideration comes in creating the character. Because such a significant variance in nationalities, cultures, and religions among foreign domestic workers, it could be all too easy for an author to just pick one randomly for a character based on the reasoning that they are all disadvantaged, and it is their disadvantage that is the crux of the story. Or—and this is arguably worse—based on the hierarchy of disadvantage (e.g., in Lebanon Filipinas used for nanny and tutoring work vs. South Asians used for drudge work). This is clearly problematic because it is a slap in the face of a plethora, an incredible variation of personhood, lumping it together in a monolithic way. It also reduces, from the very beginning, the potential character to how they are viewed/treated by privileged classes rather than creating the character as an individual with their own life, goals, personality, customs, family, loves, drives. But even—I found myself struggling—even conversely, in choosing a character based on a rounded conception of personhood… it is all too easy to create those character traits based on how well they fit in response to the oppressive system—even in critique of that system— and is thus also problematic. Less problematic, maybe, but it still privileges elements of their personhood only insofar as they are in service of commenting on that oppressive system.

And at this point I think to myself: be wary of your care turning to silence.

Because isn’t that what I do even for myself, in referencing my personhood, my experiences, and those of my friends and families? Do I not reference them in my critique of Arab women’s issues in the Middle East and under Islam? Is it use, exploitation, to bring intense, unyielding, honest focus on individual people and their plights within a sweeping, inescapably powerful system? Would I object to the reference of my life story, my hopes, dreams, loves, aspirations in service of breaking the structures that quelled all of those things?

I would not. Because in referencing them I do not use them, but champion them, and I must take care of the distinction.

So yes, as difficult and delicate as it may be, and as many times as I make mistakes and will have to go back and correct them—I will keep writing stories with these women, Filipina, Bengalese, Ethiopian, Eritrean, Sri Lankan, and more, ongoing, to champion the voices of my sisters in arms under the yoke of patriarchial misogyny in the Middle East.

It is better than silence.