Women are peculiar beings . . . whoever, whatever they are . . . they are always attached to home.
Our home is our shell, our protection . . . the men may come and they may go, but our homes are our shelter . . . you take away our homes, you strip us naked . . .
Many of us Iraqi women have been stripped naked that way, some of us even more, a full striptease . . . until we ended up in brothels . . .
Most people don’t understand . . . most people are stupid, make no mistake about the human race . . . very few of these fuckers are worthy of respect or consideration . . . they will only understand when they lose a home . . . until then, don’t count on neither—nor their empathy, nor their understanding.
Specially don’t count on empathy from those in the “first world,” they are too polluted, these are people cut off from the most basics . . . they are far gone—down. Forget them.
Truth is—don’t count on anyone . . . take stock of your losses, all of them. .all of them . . . if need be, ruthlessly strip yourself from the grief . . . and count . . . keep counting . . .
Turn that grief into the real thing . . . into an accounting exercise. Your language does not count no more . . . the language of grief, of feelings, of emotions, of sentiments, mean shit . . . you need to learn a new language . . . the language of accounting, of adding up figures . . . of even out . . .
This is the language they understand . . . speak to them in the language they understand.
You may never recover your home, your protective shell, but at least you would have learned a new language. You have been taught a new language for well over 9 years now . . . Speak it. And speak it well.
Layla Anwar’s blog is An Arab Woman Blues—Reflections in a sealed bottle where this was first pubished.
For once I find myself unable to agree with Layla Anwar in this generalization about women and their attachment to “home.” Such a generalization discounts the experiences of migrant women such as myself whose physical relocations have inspired a rethinking of the meaning of home, and have problematized the term “home” itself. However, perhaps Anwar intends to point out the trauma of forced deracination brutally imposed upon the Iraqi people, and the burden falling, as the burden of men’s wars have always disproportionately fallen, upon women.
Anwar’s experience is not one of voluntary relocation, but of forced de-sheltering. Hers is an indispensable voice in a mediaspace where even American “progressives” hardly bother to talk about the non-American victims of America’s aggressive wars before their attention is diverted to American victims. Voices of the Iraqi, Afghan and other “unpeople” are very rarely heard and there appears to be no clamour from American “progressives” that those voices BE heard and recorded and valued. Cannot thank IR enough for repeatedly picking up the voice that is routinely ignored by almost every other “progressive” media outlet. In my view, just as feminism means the radical idea that women are people, IR seems to subscribe to the radical idea that non-Americans are actually human beings. With voices. With perspectives that deserve a respectful and attentive hearing. IR is years ahead of its time – and light-years ahead of the vast majority of other American “progressive” news sources for whom “progress” is limited to the voices of self-pitying Americans talking to one another and ignoring the rest of the world.