The Arab As Spectacle: Race, Gender and Representation in Australian Popular Culture

The Arab as Spectacle: Race, Gender and Representation in Australian Popular Culture

Paula Abood

School of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences University of New South Wales

NSW, Australia

A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

20th September 2007 Word Count: 101,616 PLEASE TYPE THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES Thesis/Dissertation Sheet

Surname or Family name: Abood

First name: Paula Other name/s:

Abbreviation for degree as given in the University calendar: PhD

School: English Faculty: Arts and Social Sciences

Title: The Arab as Spectacle: Race, Gender and Representation In Australian Popular Culture

Abstract 350 words maximum: (PLEASE TYPE)

This thesis, The Arab as Spectacle, is about representation. It is about the limits and the contradictions of representation. It is about the burden and the violence of representation. It is about the persistence of Orientalism and how the hierarchies of race and gender intersect with discourses on sexuality to inform and inflect the representation of Arabs in contemporary literary and media spheres of Australian popular culture.

This thesis comprises two sections. Part One is a research dissertation that explores the strategies, devices and parameters of the representation of Arabic culture and identities through close readings of specific texts. This theoretical project inaugurates the second part of my study which takes up the question of the contradictions of representation through a collection of ficto-critical writings. Through these satirical narratives, I seek to expose and disrupt the hegemony of Orientalist representations that proliferate in English language literature and news media by bringing into focus the inherent paradox of representation, working within and against Orientalist representational traditions. In so doing, it is not my aim to 'correct' the Orientalist logic and imagery that I theorise in the first part of this thesis, but rather to undermine the spurious truth-value of Orientalist representations by deploying the literary weapons of satire, parody and irony. In this way, my fiction works to engage creatively and critically with the very tropes that I theorise in my research dissertation.

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'I hereby declare that this submission is my own work and to the best of my knowledge it contains no materials previously published or written by another person, or substantial proportions of material which have been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma at UNSW or any other educational institution, except where due acknowledgement is made in the thesis. Any contribution made to the research by others, with whom I have worked at UNSW or elsewhere, is explicitly acknowledged in the thesis. I also declare that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work, except to the extent that assistance from others in the project's design and conception or in style, presentation and linguistic expression is acknowledged'.

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i Acknowledgements

I am indebted to many people for their support and involvement in the genesis and materialisation of this thesis. I particularly acknowledge the encouragement, guidance and critical support of my supervisors, Dr. Brigitta Olubas and Dr Anne Brewster, School of English, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales. As well, Professor Bill Ashcroft, Dr. Suzanne Eggins, Associate Professor Sue Kossew, Dr. Elizabeth McMahon, Dr. Shalmalee Palekar and Susan Price for their feedback and support over the years I have undertaken this work.

Thanks are due to the many individuals who provided texts, books, and critical feedback for my ideas and theorisations. Thanks especially to all who have always encouraged me to pursue a more complex way of being in my work. I especially acknowledge my colleagues and friends in both the community sector and in the academy whose critical work in and support of social justice has inspired me to produce this work.

I want to acknowledge my family who have always emphatically supported me in everything I do, especially my sisters and brothers and their partners and children, and my aunty Julie. I acknowledge my departed grandparents whose legacy has been to give us the spirit of a strong ancestry for especially difficult times.

I dedicate this thesis to my parents whose commitment to and unconditional love for their eight children has provided me especially with the will and determination to produce work that I hope will make a difference.

This is for you my most beloved parents. Salamaat

ii Table of Contents

Declaration……………………………………………………………...i

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………...ii

PART I Introduction…………………………………………………………….1

Chapter One: The Saga of Forbidden Love…………………….23

1.1 The Problem of Non-Fiction: Truth and Telling Stories……...……….27

1.2 Subjects and Reading Publics……………………….………………….....33

1.3 Discursive Dynamics of New Century (Neo)Colonial

Feminist Narratives……………………………………………………...…..45

1.4 Woman-Native-Author: Performing the Native Informant……………56 Chapter Two: Female-Centred Orientalist Literature as Genre and Signifying Practices of Representation...... 68

2.1 Female-Centred Orientalist Literature as Genre……………..……...... 70

2.2 The Spectacle of Veiled Alterity: Fetishising the Muslim Other…...81

2.3 Frozen in the Desert: the Contemporary Predicament of the Arab as an Object of Representation………….………………….94 Chapter Three: Rape as Racialised Spectacle……………….119

3.1 Literature Review………………………………………………………….123

3.2 Representing Rape in the Public Sphere……………………………….127

3.3 Race, Ethnicity and Media Discourse: Cultural Practices

of the Fourth Estate……………………………….……………………….141

iii PART II ……………………………………….……………167

Chapter Four: Exit Shaharazad c. 1991……………………...169 Chapter Five: The Disappearance of Dalia c. 1995…….……219 Chapter Six: The Saga of Sahara c. 1999……..……………269 Chapter Seven: Life without Hayat c. 2003…………………..310

Works Cited: …………………………….……………...... 362

iv Introduction

All roads lead to the bazaar; Arabs only understand force; brutality and violence are part of Arab civilisation; Islam is an intolerant, segregationist, 'medieval', fanatic, cruel, anti-woman religion. The context, framework, setting of any discussion [is] limited, indeed frozen, by these ideas. Edward W. Said Culture and Imperialism 1993: 357.

I come to this task cognisant of the tension between resistance and complicity, especially aware of the problematics of representation in depicting subaltern experiences. As I have already stated, it is not my aim to normalise Orientalist clichés and logic, or in theorist Homi Bhabha's terms, 'to assess them on the basis of some political normativity', (Bhabha 1994: 67). My interest is in exploring the inherent contradictions of representation through the construction of my own complex configuration of subjects, voices and geographies. The second part of this thesis thus offers a ficto-critical account of race relations in the temporal zone of the gulf between wars. My own positionality within the Arab Australian community as an activist and community-based worker informs this thesis, providing a standpoint that is grounded in the lived experiences of the everyday.

I frame both parts of this thesis in the terms of the Debordian conception of the spectacle as 'a social relation among people, mediated by images' (Debord 1983: 4). In this way, the spectacle is understood not as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies, but rather as a worldview that has actually been materialised, a view of a world that has become objectified to the point of abjection. Grasped in its totality, as Debord argues:

the spectacle is both the result and the project of the existing mode of production … in all its specific forms, as information or propaganda, as advertisement or direct entertainment consumption, the spectacle is the present model of socially dominant life. (1983: 6)

It is within this 'present model of dominance' that I analyse various modes of production that render the Arab as spectacle, arguing that this discursive project serves a political function in the maintenance of Western identity and its will to power.

In the first part of my study, I examine how the Arab is materialised in Australian texts through the specific forms of popular literature and news media narratives. I have intentionally limited the scope of this study to

2 concentrate on these two key areas of cultural production because these sites offer a plethora of scrutable material which is under-theorised from a postcolonial feminist position. While there has been a proliferation of texts about Arabs and Muslims in the last three decades which has led to a corresponding growth in scholarship and popular commentary, critical analysis of this mostly Orientalist material is limited in Australian literary and academic milieux. Thus, my dissertation attempts to fill in a lacuna within the field of critical inquiry.

In this thesis, I bring together diverse critical voices spanning three decades. I make use of the richness of critical discourse on racial difference, gender, culture and identity to produce a particular account of representation, Orientalist subjectivities and Arabic identities in an Australian context. My inquiry is informed by and engages with the hierarchies of race, gender and sex, drawing on feminist and postcolonial verities sketched by poststructuralist analysis, but extending on and insisting upon the lived experiences that these skirt. In this way, my thesis is transdisciplinary.

I am indebted to the foundational work of the many thinkers cited in this study for the theoretical hardware they have provided to enable critical inquiries into the domain of culture. I especially take up the methodologies of key theorists of the postcolonial field, in particular Edward W. Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi K. Bhabha, Stuart Hall, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Abdul J. JanMohamed and Kobena Mercer. Equally, the work of feminist theorists Leila Ahmed in Women and Gender in Islam (1992) and Meyda Yeenolu, who has built on the critical foundations of Said in Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism (1998), are of fundamental importance to my project precisely because my focus is on the sexualised and gendered nature of Orientalism as a discursive practice. The fields of critical race theory and whiteness studies (hooks 1981, 1989, 1990; Carby 1998; Roediger 1999; and Frankenberg 1993) have informed my approach to analysing the ways in which racialised identities intersect with

3 the issues class, gender and culture. I have supplemented these critical theorists with the textual-analytical work of Catherine Belsey's Critical Practice (1988) because of its attention to the process of subjectification in realism and its conceptual critical project subtending these more targeted analyses.

The importance of Edward W. Said's presence, critical output and public voice can never be underestimated, particularly for diasporic Arabs. He has provided an intellectual framework both to critique and produce culture that is informed by a multiplicity of concerns. When he poses the questions, 'How did and does Orientalism work? How can one describe it all together as a historical phenomenon, a way of thought, a contemporary problem, and a material reality?' (Said 1991: 44), he foregrounds the complexities involved in making sense of this particular mode of Western cultural production. Extending on philosopher Michel Foucault's theorisation that, 'power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations' (1991: 27), Said deploys the knowledge-power nexus specifically to investigate how the Middle East as knowledge has historically been constituted and actualised in Western cultural and political spheres.

Said's intervention has been crucial in understanding how knowledge production for and by the Western subject about the Arab works in a multiplicity of contexts. In particular, his scrutiny of canonical literature and its ideological functions has provided the analytical hardware for reading texts within the social, cultural and political milieux in which they are written and circulated. Said's point that the Orient (or in contemporary geo-political terminology - the Middle East), is 'less a place than a topos, a set of references, a congeries of characteristics, that seems to have its origin in a quotation or a fragment of a text, or a citation from someone's work on the Orient, or some bit of previous imagining, or an amalgam of all of these' (1991: 177) is my starting point. While the focus in the first two chapters of the research

4 dissertation is on the traditional Orientalist setting of the desert, the third chapter deals with a localised Australian setting, which I construe within Said's schema of Orientalism as 'a set of references, a congeries of characteristics' (1991: 177).

Foucault insists that an analysis of 'power-knowledge relations' must target the 'subject who knows, the objects to be known and the modalities of knowledge' (Foucault 1991: 27-28). My analysis coheres around these three sites of inquiry. I examine the primacy and constitution of the Western subject, and I extrapolate on the category of the stereotype, in particular, how various modes of Orientalist knowledge become productive sites of meaning in popular literature and news media narratives. My aim is to reveal the devices, processes and strategies which facilitate the normalising of this bleak universe of pro forma characters and stereotypic narratives in the pages of broadsheets and tabloids, novels and memoirs. I analyse how race is deployed when dealing with questions of gender, sexuality, oppression and violence. I examine how modalities of Western feminism, in particular the discourses of (neo)colonial and liberal feminisms, reproduce racialised and sexualised discourses to reaffirm the Western feminist subject as a universal moral subject, setting up the possibilities for the mission of rescuing Arab and Muslim women from their cultures. In this way, the liberal feminist and the (neo)colonial feminist are twin sisters in that they inform both the theoretical and action-based concerns of the white women's movement. I use the terms 'liberal feminist' and 'colonial feminist' interchangeably 'to trace', in postcolonial feminist theorist Chandra Talpade Mohanty's words, 'a coherence of effects' (2004).

I want to briefly review some of the key theorists whose critical inquiries into feminist thought and practice have influenced and facilitated my work. Mohanty's influential essay, 'Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourse' (1986) critiques the political project of Western feminism in its discursive construction of the category of the Third World woman as a

5 hegemonic entity. Mohanty argues that the necessary connection between feminist scholarship and feminist political practice determines the significance and status of Western feminist writings on Third World women. She sees this connection as 'a directly political and discursive practice that is purposeful and ideological' (Mohanty 2004: 18-19). Mohanty's argument importantly underpins my own inquiry in the first two chapters of this thesis, providing a template for identifying the ideological and political aspects of gendered and racialised texts. Indigenous Australian feminist theorist Aileen Morton- Robinson, whose important work scrutinises white feminist subjectivities in relation to Indigenous women in Australia, argues that because Western liberal feminism centres white middle-class women as occupying the normative position from which to judge all other women, it lacks an understanding of the different historical and material conditions that affect the lives of women of colour (2000: 35). Moreton-Robinson points out that the invisibility of white race privilege in Western liberal feminist theorising gives 'primacy to gender oppression' over and above race and class concerns (2000: 35). Thus, 'belonging to a privileged group means that liberal feminists can centre themselves as the subject of their theory while excluding other women' (Moreton-Robinson 2000: 36). While key feminist theorists like Ruth Frankenberg (1993) and Vron Ware (1992) have theorised whiteness in relation to women, Moreton-Robinson's interrogation of white feminist subjectivities from an Indigenous Australian standpoint within Australian feminism importantly provides my own inquiry with a critical and contemporary theorisation that is grounded in Indigenous women's experiences of white feminist thought and practice.

Arab American feminist theorist, Leila Ahmed, provides a particularised account of the discourse on women, gender and Islam (1992) using both Islamic texts and more recent Western contexts. Of particular note is Ahmed's tracing of how the new colonial discourse on Islam in the Victorian era came to centre on women. In this discourse, Islam was positioned as being 'innately and immutably oppressive to women, that the veil and segregation

6 epitomised that oppression, and that these customs were [seen as] the fundamental reasons for the general and comprehensive backwardness of Islamic society' (1992: 151). Ahmed argues that the fusion of the issues of women, their oppression, and the cultures of Other men by British men at the height of the colonial period was created by combining the languages of colonialism and feminism (Ahmed 1992: 151), a practice that continues in the discursivity of the (neo)colonial liberal feminist present.

Ahmed examines in particular the discourse of the veil. She writes that, 'veiling – to Western eyes, the most visible marker of the differentness and inferiority of Islamic societies - became the symbol of both the oppression of women and the backwardness of Islam' (1992: 152). This discourse remains a critical site of contemporary (neo)colonial feminist intervention as Western liberal feminism continues to be fixated on and with the veil. I draw on Ahmed's work in particular in my investigation in Chapter Two of how this racialised trope of Western feminism is made productive in both textual and visual settings.

Further, postcolonial feminist theorist Meyda Yeenolu's critical work on the persistence of this Western female fascination provides an important move in recognising that 'we need to subject Orientalist discourse to a more sexualised reading' so that 'we can understand how the representation of otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well as cultural modes of differentiation' (Yeenolu 1998: 26). My analysis is informed by Yeenolu's exegesis, extending her work in order to develop a critical reading of how sexualised modes underwrite contemporary popular texts like Forbidden Love and news media narratives. As well, the next generation of Arab feminist theorists, such as Lisa Suhair Majaj, Amal Amireh and Mohja Kahf who have produced a corpus of critical work that specifically engages with Arab women's writings, feminism, and transnational reception contexts, has provided me with particularised accounts that explicitly address Arab postcolonial feminist concerns about race, gender and representation.

My own rhetoric and writing as an engaged analyst of the discourses that deal with Arabic identities spans both the fictional and non-fictional worlds. My work is informed by postcolonial feminist theory and (neo)colonial material realities. While critical race theory and whiteness studies have examined the social and legal construction of race and whiteness and the material contexts for racialised expression and racist practices, Bangladeshi-American social scientist Naheed Islam, makes the point that within this body of literature, 'racialised group relations have been analysed in relation to studies of blacks and whites' (2000: 37). Islam attempts to reformulate race theory to capture the specificity of the subjects of his particular study within the discipline of sociology - south Asian immigrants and racial formation in Los Angeles (2000). In the same way, I aim to address the specificity of racial formation and the Orientalising of Arabs in a contemporary multicultural Australian context in this thesis drawing on this body of work.

The persistence of Orientalist ideology and activity has in turn produced a particular type of critical subjectivity in Arabic diasporic communities. Through both the research dissertation and the ficto-critical writing, I mark out how Orientalist narratives are read in particularised ways by diasporic Arabic communities. As minority 'publics' who read English language texts that are written about 'them' for a dominant (white) public, Arabic diasporic communities have very specific experiences of Western Orientalist culture that transcend time and space. While the idea of 'public' provides a political situatedness for the idea of counter-reading, I propose the term, the 'critical temporality of community' because this phrase embodies the idea that Arabic communities operate within a different temporality in their reading of and response to the West. The temporal aspects of this term represent a particular experience of time in how racial politics is understood. In his essay, 'Afro- Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora', political scientist Michael Hanchard explores time in relation to the encounters between people of African descent and the West, providing glimpses of the temporal politics

8 of racial inequality and the transnational forms of political organisation and community activism exercised by Afro-diasporic peoples. Hanchard defines Afro-Modernity as:

a self-conscious political and cultural project, … characterised by (a) a supranational formulation of people of African descent as an ''imagined community'' that is not territorially demarcated … (b) the development of alternative political and cultural networks across national-state boundaries; and (c) an explicit critique of the uneven application of the discourses of the Enlightenment and processes of modernisation by the West , along with those discourses' attendant notions of sovereignty and citizenship. (2001: 275)

Hanchard argues that the responses to the conditions of 'enslavement, servitude, and derogation, helped constitute politics among people of African descent and their desire to render possible conditions that were qualitatively superior to those they found themselves in' (2001: 275). While I would in no way argue that the experiences of African descended peoples are analogous to those of Arab diaspora peoples in my study, Hanchard's project exemplifies how particularised understandings of community have 'a distinct episteme, rooted in a more epistemological, temporal sense of community' (2001: 297). It is in these senses that I define the 'critical temporality of community' as Arabic diasporic communities occupying a space of knowledge and understanding about events that bear on them. They are thus located temporally, that is, before the lag of (in)comprehension experienced by the general public who have to wait for the journalistic exposé of what they have long known.

In conceiving Arab diaspora communities as transnational communities in this way, I am arguing that it is their very positionalities and identities that transcend borders and the limitations of place and space. Film theorist Hamid Naficy argues that the term 'diaspora' is necessarily collective, with people in

9 diaspora maintaining 'a long-term sense of ethnic consciousness and distinctiveness' (2001: 14). Naficy contends that 'diasporic consciousness is horizontal and multisited, involving not only the homeland but also the compatriot communities elsewhere' (2001: 14). I would argue that the 'multisited' aspect of diasporic consciousness is a determining marker of the critical temporality of community which sets itself apart from the diaspora in general, by concerning itself with contesting the ruling strata and ideologies both within and without. In short, the critical temporality of community is informed by an awareness of and struggle against racism, sexism and colonialism in all its contexts, whether 'here' or 'there', 'now' or 'then', allowing for a critical reflexivity that interrogates both the intersubjective and interstitial. In this way, the critical temporality of community is able to respond to the colonial, the postcolonial and the (neo)colonial as it continues to be played out in particularised local and transnational contexts of the everyday.

This critical effect is precisely a response to the 'everydayness' of Orientalist narrative and hyper-activity, to the steadfastness of Orientalist discourse as a historical and contemporary practice. The critical temporality of community is especially activated as particular texts appear in the public domain as fetishised truth. Norma Khouri's Orientalist bestseller Forbidden Love is a case in point. While a dominant Western public accepted without question the truth claims of the Arab insider Khouri, individuals and groups within the diversity of Arabic speaking communities (both Australian diasporic and Jordanian-based) were the first critics of this text when it was released in January 2003. Activists in both Sydney and Melbourne, and the Jordanian National Commission for Women called into question the book's veracity and thus its placement in the category of non-fiction.1 It took eighteen months and an extensive investigation by a Sydney Morning Herald journalist to expose the book more publicly as fiction and the author as having fabricated both her identity and the narrative. I unravel the saga of this text and the various

10 publics that this book convened in detail in the first two chapters of this research dissertation.

I am, at this point, mindful of how I use the words 'Arab' and 'Arabic', 'the West' and 'Western subject' throughout this study. I aim to foreground the ethnic, cultural and linguistic coherencies, and historical and regional ties that bind Arabs as such, rather than use the term 'Arab' to imply an essence. I use the term here to imply an identity, but also to make a political gesture towards reclaiming the word in a (Western) reception environment that is over-determined by hostility towards this 'identity'. Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish perfectly embodies a particular reality of being Palestinian Arab in the aptly titled poem 'Identity Card', in which he insists, 'Record! I am an Arab' (1964). While the experiences of Palestinians living under military occupation in Palestine are in no way analogous to the experiences of diasporic Arabs living outside this immiserated zone, Darwish's poetic insistence is a sign of resistance against the Arabophobic actualities of the broader Western world.

Secondly, my use of the term 'Arab' is in no way an attempt to mark out the ground for a fixed or stable identity. In fact, I emphatically reject any fixing of a singular identity relating to this term because it forecloses on the possibility of having multiple identities in a multiplicity of contexts. The especially problematic practice of conflating Arab with Muslim and Muslim with Arab in Orientalist discursive contexts at once erases the complexities of Arabic identities (both religious and non-religious) and serves the function of essentialising Arabs and Muslims as an undifferentiated mass. Equally, this practice reduces Islam and its complexities to an essentialist bind, when in fact, as Said argued immediately after September 11 2001, 'there isn't a single Islam: there are Islams' (Said 2001). I am especially aware of this aspect of identity production in the West which insists on imposing religious identities on all Arabs, regardless of their affiliations or lack thereof. This phenomenon provides a point of departure for my creative work as I construct 'fictional'

11 characters who variously identify as Arab, who are proud to be Arab, and who insist narratively on 'being' Arab, but on their own terms. In this way, it is my aim to inflect these characters with a s sense of complexity and critical identification, that is, forged in the light of Orientalism and engaging with it critically through satire. I am interested in exploring the critical temporality of Arabic diasporic communities, rather than burdening my characters with the responsibility of representing 'Arabness', as if that were in any way possible. My ambivalence in producing creative work is premised on a reticence to write about a subaltern group or minority who have a history of being represented by outsiders in racially hostile ways. I therefore take up literary theorist Terry Threadgold's counsel that, 'making the unconscious and the everyday "visible," inevitably changes the possibilities of meaning within a community' (Threadgold 1989: 109). Correspondingly, I aim to displace and disrupt hegemonic Orientalist logic in creative and ironic ways through the ficto-critical part of this thesis.

I deploy the term 'Western' and 'Western subject' in a similar vein to express an identity and a positionality, rather than an essence. Yeenolu engages in a discussion of her use of this term, acknowledging the 'many lines of fractures, rifts, discontinuities, and divisions that crisscross the Western subject' (1998: 2). Yeenolu notes that 'there has never been one Western subject', briefly scoping the problematics of the 'modernist, humanist and metaphysical bind in which such a term is caught up' (1998: 3). Her use of the term is more along the lines of a critique which implies 'critiquing its self-certainty, authority, and value' (Yeenolu 1998: 3). For Yeenolu, the category of the Western subject 'is not about essence, but the process of constitution of identity' (1998: 3). For the purposes of this analysis, I use the term 'Western subject' concomitantly as a positioning, an identity and a subjectivity that is always relational. I expressly set out to critique the 'self-certainty, authority and value' of this subjectivity, especially in how it relates to the Arab Other.

12 As I have stated, this thesis is divided into two parts that are linked via the theme of representation, with the first part divided into three chapters. In Chapter One, I explore the discursive framing and marketing of Norma Khouri's Orientalist bestseller Forbidden Love. I begin by setting out how this book came to be read by the dominant public in Australia as non-fiction, and move to investigate the representational terrain in which Orientalist texts like Forbidden Love are read. I situate this text as Orientalist realism in order to argue for a nomenclature that defines both the political and fictional dimensions of this text. I explore the different subjects and publics that this book convenes and examine questions of authority and agency through an analysis of Khouri's performance in what I term, after Trinh T. Minh-ha (1989), woman-native-author.

In Chapter Two, I further develop this inquiry through an exploration of how texts like Forbidden Love function in the Orientalist canon. In the first section, I identify female-centred Orientalist literature as a distinct genre and trace the historical passage of non-fiction texts, identifying the particular features that make this genre coherent. I argue that contemporary texts within this genre are powered by a liberal feminist desire to 'know' the Muslim Arab woman through the discursive mode of sexualised narratives. In the second section, I explore the visual codes which underpin the fetishisation of the veiled Muslim woman by and for the Western liberal feminist subject through an analysis of the veil as represented on contemporary book covers of this genre. I argue that the political nature of the aesthetic appropriation of the veil on these covers cannot be defined in isolation of the genealogy of representations of women in Western Orientalist traditions. In the third section, I explore the contemporary predicament of representation by dissecting how (Arab) otherness is constituted in Khouri's narrative, arguing that the author strategically mobilises a series of signifying practices and processes to position people, place, culture, and religion in spatial and temporal zones outside the contemporaneous present. I examine, in particular, the narrative devices, motifs and themes embedded in Khouri's text and determine how

13 they acquire their productivity, authority and discursive meaning as artefacts of Western knowledge. It is in this section that I begin to sketch the links between male racialisation and Orientalism.

In Chapter Three, I move on from a literature-based text to examine the discursive practices of the Australian print media in an analysis of media representations of the group sexual assaults that took place in south-west Sydney in August and September in 2000. In this chapter, I further investigate the links between male racialisation and Orientalism through this case in order to determine how racial ideologies are mobilised within media texts, and to expose how the media construct a particular discursive event to reassert racialised subject positions and to reify myths about race and rape. This textual analysis investigates the dynamics of the racial and gender hierarchies that characterised media practices in this case. In so doing, I critique the signifying practices of print media, and expose how particular social and cultural artefacts generate meaning. My arguments cohere around two key areas of this case. I examine how the subject of rape is taken up in the public sphere and I look at how race is imagined and narratively inscribed in media texts dealing with this event. I scrutinise the racialised identities that underpin the representations, paying particular attention to the apocalyptic metaphors at play in the media at the time.

Part Two of my thesis comprises four chapters of ficto-critical writing, drawing on the theoretical concerns and characters of Part One. Each chapter is titled and chronologically indexed to denote a temporal zone in which I place particular events, though many of these conjured events come from outside these time zones. The four chapters are respectively named, 'Exit Shaharazad c. 1990', 'The Disappearance of Dalia c. 1995', 'The Saga of Sahara c. 1999', and 'Life after Hayat c. 2003'.

As in Part One, my starting point is to address the persistence of Orientalist narratives on the social, political and cultural lives of Arabs. The primary

14 objective in Part Two of this thesis is to take up the very question of the contradictions of representation through my ficto-critical writing. As I have previously stated, rather than move to correct Orientalist fantasy, I work critically and creatively with the tropes as a way of undermining the very truth-value that Orientalist representations rely on for their valency. This strategy allows me to work with the implicit contradictions of the theory of Orientalism itself, in order to develop theoretical and creative alternatives, rather than appealing to a corrective approach. I have no interest in representing Arabs in affirmative postures as a mode of resistance. My intention is simply to undermine the structural and discursive power of Orientalism via the mocking ethos of irony, satire and parody.

Whilst I have loosely termed this work ficto-critical, I draw on the porous and overlapping categories of both ficto-critical and metatextual modes in order to develop a self-reflexive text that has the capacity to draw attention to its own artifice as fiction. Literary theorist Patricia Waugh argues in her work on the category of 'metafiction' that metafictional writings 'not only examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction, they also explore the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional text' (1984: 2). This metatextual frame provides me with the mechanisms to explore the problematic relationship between life and fiction in my own representations. I am thus able to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality within my own writing as a mode of resistance against the naturalising of my own representations. As Waugh cogently reminds us, 'metafiction sets up an opposition, not to ostensibly ''objective'' facts in the ''real'' world, but to the language of the realistic novel which has sustained and endorsed such a view of reality' (1984: 11). My intention is precisely to set up such an opposition through the fluid complexity of language, and through parody and satire. My text as a metafictional commentary thus 'situates its resistance within the textual form itself' (Waugh 1984: 11). My stereotypes of Orientalists are intended to provide 'collective pleasure' just as accepted stereotypes comfort and affirm (Waugh 1984: 81). Waugh notes that what is interesting

15 about their use in metafiction is that, 'when they are parodied, the release effect of such forms is to do with disturbance rather than affirmation' (1984: 82). Disturbance is my strategy of choice as I utilise theoretical texts, media texts and events, community anecdotes and (sub)urban mythmaking as the primary subject matter of my narratives. This metatextual writing is especially informed by theories of race, identity, representation, gender and sexuality; by the particularised experiences of racism, culture and Orientalism. I interweave Orientalist subjectivities around Arabic subjectivities, using a series of narrative devices to draw attention to my subjects of scrutiny as a way to foreground the contradictions of identity and representation. I mobilise theory in various ways to develop my narrative, to provide sub- texts, to juxtapose voice, to parody, and to draw attention to the artifice of my own representations. The intergeneric features of my ficto-critical writing provide me with the tools to draw from a gallery of theorists, poets, writers and Orientalists, using their register of voice within the text to speak back to my fiction, to speak over and under my representations, not only to disrupt generic expectations, but also to provide a space for the intrusion of other voices to bring in questions to bear down on the narrative.

A fundamental motivation of this project as both an engaged critic and writer is my concern with how Orientalism is able to straddle the worlds of fiction and non-fiction. It is precisely here that I would argue that Orientalism as a distinctive genre of writing should be understood as a fictional mode because, as Said argues, 'Orientalism is premised upon exteriority, that is, on the fact that the Orientalist, poet or scholar, makes the Orient speak, describes the Orient, renders its mysteries plain for and to the West' (Said 1991: 20). Said goes on to note that, 'the principal product of exteriority is representation' (Said 1991: 21). Orientalist representational practice, in this way, has traditionally been informed by the prejudices, fears, ignorance, desires, and the fixations of the Western subject. Inevitably, Orientalist representation is subject to the category of the stereotype, the function of which is to essentialise, to reduce and to naturalise, in order to make sense of a particular

16 world for a (Western) public who remain outside that world. Orientalism is able to straddle the worlds of fiction and non-fiction because the figure of the stereotype is able shift effortlessly back and forth from one to the other. This unproblematised movement is what I mean to demonstrate in this study as I critique Orientalist 'non-fiction' texts in the traditional mode of critical inquiry in Part One, and then move these very figures over to the ficto-critical world of my creative writing in Part Two.

In conclusion, I want to explore some of the political, theoretical and stylistic concerns that I have encountered in the construction of the creative writing by starting this brief discussion with a comment by poet and essayist Lyn Hejinian. She writes:

I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment stands under an enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast and undifferentiated mass of data and situation is one's ability to make distinctions. Each written text may act as a distinction, may be a distinction. The experience of feeling overwhelmed by undifferentiated material is like claustrophobia. One feels panicky, closed in. (1989: 271)

Hejinian encapsulates in this epigraph how I come to this task of creating a fictional narrative as part of a broader study on representation. It is the feeling of being 'closed in' by the mass of undifferentiated Orientalist material that passes for truth that moves me to create a narrative that engages with the contradictions of representation, with the complexities of fiction and reality. My understanding of the world resonates with Hejinian's, especially after unravelling the ways in which Orientalist thought and logic prevail in popular literature and media texts as common sense understandings of the world in which Arabs make an appearance. I aim to create allegories that are 'potent with ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed and certainly incomplete' as a counterpoint to the inability to make distinctions between the fictional and

17 non-fictional worlds. My writing is thus informed by these concerns and grounded by experiences in the critical temporality of the Arabic diasporic communities. I connect particularly with other postcolonial theorists and writers whose concerns and interests incorporate multiple worlds and realities, resistance and representation.

Arab-American poet and theorist Lisa Suhair Majaj's important essay 'Voice, Representation, and Resistance' explores processes of representation and narration as a site of resistance though an analysis of the classic Arab feminist text Sitt Marie Rose, by Lebanese/Arab-American writer Etel Adnan. This novel is a critique of the social and political conditions of the 1975 Lebanese war, offering 'particular insight into the intersection of gendered, political, sectarian, class-based, and colonial hierarchies of power in Lebanon' (Majaj 2002: 201). I utilise excerpts from both Adnan's novelistic prose and Majaj's critical reading of Adnan in my creative work not simply as a token gesture to figure the poetic voices of Arab feminists, but because Adnan and Majaj's very writings engage with voice, representation and agency in critical and innovative ways. This is an especially important consideration in my own positionality as both critic and creative writer. My fiction is prompted by the questions: How is it possible for an Australian-born Lebanese of Maronite heritage, or as an Arab-Australian secular subject, to represent the diverse subjectivities of being 'Lebanese?' How is it possible for a non-Palestinian to know what it is to be 'Palestinian in an indifferent world; of knowing what it is to be Muslim in an Islamophobic West? These subjectivities are materially and thematically taken up in both my writing and activist community-based work because it is precisely these subject positions and voices which are absent from, silenced, demonised and distorted in Western cultural production. I am thus conscious of the contradictions of my own creative representations and how they are inflected with power over the voiceless. Majaj examines this problematising of power in such projects, arguing that:

18 "giving voice to the voiceless"–through testimonials meant to convey the sufferings of the common people with no access to literature- is often a central goal of resistance texts. However, what is often inadequately acknowledged in such projects is the problematic role of power - for no matter how liberatory the intention, to speak on behalf of others is implicitly to participate in the same power structures that make it possible for some people to speak while others are spoken for. (2002: 207)

Majaj's analysis of resistance texts especially speaks to my concerns regarding a central figure in my fictional writing. I have responded to the imperatives raised by postcolonial politics of self-representation via stylistic strategies in part to resolve my ambivalence at participating in a power structure that elides both a material and metaphysical Palestinian presence, especially while the master narrative continues to break the sound barrier. It is here that metatextual modes provide me with a mechanism to question my own representations by incorporating a range of stylistic and generic innovations within the fiction, with the intention of 'providing structural as well as thematic acknowledgement of the difficulties inherent in achieving articulation in contexts of oppressive power' (Majaj 2002: 207). To this end, I include the voices of Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad and Lisa Suheir Majaj, whose texts, though marginalised in the mainstream of literary activity, have considerable publics in the transnational communities of Arab feminists.

Another important consideration in this creative work has been to produce writing that is double-coded. In this way, my work is metatextual as literary theorist Wenche Ommundsen tells us, 'metafiction relies centrally on textual strategies such as metaphor, irony and parody, all of which require the reader to recognise more than one level of meaning' (1993: 4). In particular, the Orientalist figures and subjectivities that I construct animate the text through parodic gesture and who systematically flaunt their own specific conditions and Orientalist pathologies.

19 I especially address the specificities of the culturally-informed reader through language, metaphor and irony in a way that outsiders may well miss. In this way, I emphatically speak to the critical temporality of the Arab diaspora community through an engagement with the very points of reference that underscore the concerns of that constituency about self, agency, culture and representation.

I analyse the fetishised disembodied female selves on popular Orientalist book covers in Chapter Two of this thesis. As a counterpoint to the disembodiment of the female subaltern body, I embody the Arabic language in my fiction writing as a mark of resistance against this fetishising gesture, as well as to resituate Arabic in its normative role as a language of communication. The Arabic language is meaningful in all its poetic 'gutteralness' and deserves to be understood on its own terms. As Suheir Hammad counsels in her poem 'ismi:' please learn to pronounce the name of my spirit the spirit of my name correctly and don't complain it's too throaty too deep too guttural (Hammad 1996: 77)

Arabic makes brief cameo appearances in both indistinct and ironic ways throughout the text. I especially do not mobilise Arabic in order to be marked out as the authentic other who can inflect an exotic word here and there to colour in the page. Rather, the Arabic terms I insert into the text come from my own fractured experiences of the m(other) tongue as a result of the success

20 of the white Australia assimilationist project; they also come via the West's fetishising of particular words.

It is here that I argue for a rejection of 'authenticity' precisely because it produces a literature that is informed by outside concerns and pathologies, and encourages the demand for and maintenance of the parasitic celebrity Native Informant. This is especially the case for Arab and Muslim women's writings in the trans-global literary industry. There are multiplicities of experiences, identities and narratives to be told, and of course, a chorus line of characters willing to perform the native-woman-author to Western publics 'hungry' for spectacular tales from the inside. My aim is to disrupt the possibilities for such a performance.

In conclusion, I want to take up the idea of representation as a theatrical one where the Orient is the stage. The sexualised and racialised plots must be constructed to produce a narrative that appeals to a gendered public in need of reassurance about its moral liberated self. The fetishised props include the sands of the desert, the bestial Arab male, the hapless, voiceless, veiled and victimised female. And that is just in the category of 'non-fiction', which brings me to the beginning of chapter one, a critical inquiry into Norma Khouri's Orientalist pulp fiction bestseller, Forbidden Love.

1 Activists in Sydney and Melbourne were in contact with journalists in Australia and Jordan in 2003 in relation to the veracity of Khouri's textual claims. Likewise, activists in Jordan made contact with the publisher. Sydney Morning Herald journalist Malcolm Knox reported that Amal Sabbagh, secretary-general of the National Commission for Women in Jordan, in interview with 702 ABC Radio said that the organisation contacted Random House in September [2003] and warned it was publishing a fake book. 'Actually, after reading the book we started investigating all the errors in the book. I mean, not just reading; really in depth into it,' Sabbagh said. 'And we finally sent them a letter on September 7 asking them very respectfully to review the book, have independent sources review it, and check the credibility of the book.' And once we were able to ascertain the accuracy of our position we respectfully requested that the book be removed from the shelves and be stamped as a fiction book. 'It could have been written by someone with no knowledge at all of Jordan, its society ... But for someone to say she is a Jordanian, lived in Jordan all her

21 life and just left the country it was impossible.' Knox, M, Sydney Morning Herald July 27, 2004 p 6.

22 Chapter One The Saga of Forbidden Love

And so in this stifling climate of laws, a modest beauty salon in Amman became the stage for an epic struggle between the almost blinding force of Islam and a fragile - haraam – forbidden – love. Norma Khouri Forbidden Love 2003: 71.

Forbidden Love, a bestseller in Australia for thirty weeks in 2003,1 tells the 'harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan'. Australian-based author Norma Khouri and publisher Random House promoted the book as a truthful account of Khouri's friendship with a Jordanian woman named Dalia. First published as non-fiction in Australia in early 2003, it was not until July 2004, that Sydney Morning Herald literary editor Malcolm Knox spectacularly exposed Khouri's book as a work of fiction on the front page of the Sydney broadsheet. In so doing, Knox brought into serious doubt Khouri's claims to autobiography and credibility as the authority of the text was dependent on Khouri having grown up in Amman with Dalia (rather than in Chicago without Dalia), and having been in Jordan at the time of the narrated events.

I argue in this chapter that Khouri invokes the truth claims of autobiography in the service of Orientalism to authenticate her non-fiction account. I examine the ideological context in which Orientalist texts like Forbidden Love are read and unpack the different subjects and publics that this book convened. I analyse questions of Khouri's authority and agency, examining in particular Khouri's performance as native-woman-author.

I start with postcolonial feminist theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak whose work across disciplines has provided the field of critical inquiry with a corpus of literature which reiterates the complexities of cultural analysis. In conversation with cultural theorist Alfred Arteaga, Spivak argues that if you

23 take writing as the inscription of cultures, as inscriptions that generate scripts, then we must begin with the deconstructive move because it 'is constantly and persistently looking into how truths are produced' (1994: 285). Spivak goes on to say that 'deconstruction does not say there is no subject, there is no truth, there is no history', but rather 'simply questions the privileging of identity so that someone is believed to have the truth' (1994: 285). To this end, I am concerned with unravelling the process of how Orientalist 'truths' are produced using the critical work of Spivak and other theorists like Catherine Belsey, allowing for a more precise analysis of how Khouri's text works in the service of specific ideologies, most insistently, Orientalism and imperialism, and the complications of race, culture and gender in these ideological formations.

In her important study on ideology, subjectivity and representation, Belsey suggests that 'literature, as one of the most persuasive uses of language, may have an important influence on the ways in which people grasp themselves and their relation to the real relations in which they live' (1988: 66). Contemporary Orientalist texts like Forbidden Love command a wide readership and therefore, in Belsey's schema, work to influence 'relations to the real relations' thereby forming and nurturing specific subjectivities through these texts.

Forbidden Love is an especially important text for scrutiny because of its spectacular passage from non-fiction to fiction. The stakes were and remain high on account of the very claims to truth made within the text and outside it in promotional events. The narrative credibility of this text was never a focus of critical attention in the post-disclosure period. Rather, it was Khouri as author who took the burden of scrutiny, figured simply as the latest individual to be caught out in a 'literary' hoax. This particular focus had much resonance in the Australian literary context because of the Helen Darville/Demidenko2 episode (1995), similarly, another spectacular literary hoax which preceded Khouri by almost a decade.3 Both Darville,

24 masquerading as the daughter of a Ukrainian migrant, and Khouri, performing the Arab female escapee–played out a charade of stereotypes in the promotion of their books. At once embraced by readership, and in Darville's case, rewarded by the literary community, having fulfilled, as theorist Efi Hatzimanolis cogently argues in her incisive essay on the politics of the ethnic body and the repression of irony, 'many of those institutional desires expressed through demands for tropes of authenticity and otherness' (1996: 7). In her passage from sympathetic Arab victim to duplicitous 'foreigner', Norma Khouri was an especially easy target because she was found to have had a history of embezzlement, fraud and dubious behaviour.4 This strategic avoidance of addressing claims of narrative credibility in the public sphere meant that not only did Forbidden Love escape critical scrutiny as a text, but so also did the institutional patronage (both literary and journalistic) which nurtured and promoted this book.5

Therefore, in place of the generalised appeal to the deceptive fraudulent nature of 'foreigners', I propose an analysis in accordance with Belsey's account, of the processes of subjectification at a specific moment and a particular place from which a text is produced and read. After all, as Arteaga suggests in his edited volume, An Other Tongue (1994), which interrogates the very processes that define selves and others as subjects of nation and ethnicity, 'it is only in the here and now that we exist, that we become subjects' (1994: 2). This idea of subjectification at a specific historical moment and material site is crucial to this analysis, as my focus centres predominantly on the period when the book was insistently being promoted as a work of non-fiction, a time when (neo)colonial discourse in the Anglosphere generated precisely the same sorts of discursive arguments, ideological motifs and cultural artefacts embedded within the text of Forbidden Love. As cultural theorist Michael Warner argues in his essay, 'Publics and Counterpublics' (2002), 'the temporality of circulation is not continuous or indefinite; it is punctual' (2002: 66). I begin this chapter with an examination of how tropes of

25 truth and claims to veracity are made productive within the generic category of non-fiction, and specifically via this text.

26 1.1 The Problem of Non-Fiction: Truth and Telling Stories

A deconstructive position would oblige us to admit that "truths" are constructions as well, and that we cannot avoid producing them. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'A Literary Representation of the Subaltern' 1988: 246.

The injunction to see things from the native's point of view speaks for a definite ideology of truth and authenticity. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red 1991: 65.

I tried to detach myself from what was happening and pretend that I was just a spectator and not a participant, but I couldn't separate myself from the horrifying reality. Norma Khouri Forbidden Love 2003: 139.

On its release, and up until July 2004, Forbidden Love was promoted as a work of non-fiction; it staked a claim to truth. This remains an important aspect in the saga about Forbidden Love because this emphatic claim to truth - and therefore to the category of non-fiction - is what provided the immediate source of the text's value. The accompanying phrase under the title on the front cover informs the reader that the book is 'a harrowing true story of love and revenge in Jordan'. On the back cover, a publicity review affirms the truth-value by describing the text as an 'extraordinary true story…worth telling'. Equally important, Khouri's authority as author is established in the back cover blurb where she is described as the central character's 'lifelong friend', and the book as 'a gift to the memory of her friend'. This unequivocally situates Khouri not only at the heart of the narrative, as affectively bound in ties of loyalty with the central character, but also with the

27 truth claims of the text being grounded in the generative force of Khouri's biographical data.

If, as Belsey points out, 'authors produce meaning out of the available system of differences, and texts are intelligible in so far as they participate in it' (1988: 45), what are the possibilities for the differences in reception if Forbidden Love was originally published as fiction? In raising this question, I don't intend to offer a solution via generic purity, but rather to inquire into how meaning is read via the categories in which texts are placed, and therefore argue that this text would not have been published in the first place, or indeed sold as a best seller for thirty weeks if it had not been promoted as a 'true' account authored by an 'insider'. Jonathon Galassi of the New York publishing house Farrar, Straus and Giroux notes, '[s]elling fiction has become tough since September 11, 2001, and non-fiction is shriller'. In his view, after September 11, 'people became less willing to suspend disbelief' (Wyndham 2006). These questions are crucial to my analysis considering the polysemy of Forbidden Love and the reception environment in which it arrived and was read.

As non-fiction, Forbidden Love fits into the traditional category of memoir, and within a specific genre of female-centred Orientalist literature, a genre which, I will later argue is both distinctive and coherent, with historical links to the first writings of female Orientalists in the eighteenth century. For the purposes of my argument here, I suggest that these texts are written predominantly by women about 'Middle Eastern' women and occur within a specific reception environment. The stories are told from first-hand experience, often through an interlocutor (usually a Westerner). The most famous of these contemporary texts are the bestselling Not Without My Daughter (1989) by Betty Mahmoody (with William Hoffer), and Princess (1992) by Jean Sasson. Indeed, it is Sasson who provides the review comment on the back of Khouri's book, affirming it as an 'extraordinary true story'. For her part, Betty Mahmoody offers the review comment on the back cover of Sasson's book Princess, thus linking the three texts to the canon of female-

28 centred Orientalist writing and lending each credibility. But most importantly, these books rely on the fact that they are believed to be true accounts. It is not uncommon to find this clearly stated on the covers with claims like, 'the true story of one woman's struggle' (Mahmoody 1989), 'one woman's true account' (Muhsen 1991), 'the astonishing true story' (Ali 1995), and 'the shocking, true story of one woman's escape' (Souad 2004). There is clear continuity across these texts in their claims to 'truth', and this constitutes an important feature within the genre. As Said affirms in his discussion on textual interconnectedness, 'the experiences of readers in reality are determined by what they have read, and this in turn influences writers to take up subjects defined in advance by readers' experiences' (1991: 94). In this 'rather complex dialectic of reinforcement', Forbidden Love works within the available market, because it is 'a text purporting to contain knowledge about something actual' and cannot be so easily dismissed (Said 1991: 94).

In terms of how truth is materialised through Khouri's 'native origins', the author gives 'voice' as a witness from the inside. Postcolonial feminist film theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha explores the fundamentally complex question of representing the other in her aptly titled chapter 'Outside In Inside Out', describing the very idea of 'giving voice' in terms of 'devices of legitimation whose random, conveniently given-as and taken-for-granted authority often serv[ing] as compensation for a Lack (of believability)' (1991: 67). I apply Trinh's formulation of Insider/Outsider to Khouri in relation to her authorship later in this section, but for the moment, I want to mobilise Trinh's 'taken-for-granted authority' in my reading of author Eva Sallis' review of Khouri's book, published in March 2003 in The Sydney Morning Herald. Describing Forbidden Love as 'a loosely fictionalised work part popular info- text, part personal testimony based on a true, first-hand account of the events leading to an honour killing in Jordan and the consequences for the author' (2003: 14), Sallis' review suggests that she does not think that the story is true in her specific reference to the work as being 'loosely fictionalised'. This description was the only sign in the official public reading of the text that it

29 may have suffered from a lack of narrative credibility, though Sallis does not elaborate any further on what she believes is fictional, and what is 'true', nor does she engage in any way with the implications of what this means in terms of the book's placement in the category of non-fiction. I would argue that Sallis' ambivalence in challenging the authority of what I call the 'woman- native-author'6 is indicative of the failure of reviewers to read Khouri's authority as performance, both in the text and outside it. Theorist Marnia Lazreg who explores the reception of Third World women in particularised feminist contexts in the West, calls this process 'theatrical indigenisation' where the Other woman is seen as representing her culture and 'whatever she says must be true' (2000: 33). This idea of the uncontested truth of the native author is reinforced via a one-line promotional review for the genre's most famous title, Princess, of which Betty Mahmoody writes, '[i]t had to come from a native woman to be believable' (Mahmoody 2005). In this reception environment, Khouri's positioning as native-woman-author thus guarantees her 'taken-for-granted authority' and demonstrates Trinh's very point that this authority then serves 'as compensation for a Lack of (believability)' that cautious reviewers like Sallis might have in their reading of Forbidden Love.

As I have noted, it was not until July 2004, some eighteen months after publication, that Knox's public disclosure officially threw both the authority of Khouri as woman-native-author and the truth of the text into disarray. Knox's investigation into Khouri's biography made the text's status as fact unsustainable. But what the general public learnt through Knox's probing journalistic exposé was already widely known in what I call the critical temporality of community, or in Warner's terms, the counterpublic, that Forbidden Love was a work of fiction.7 Unlike Sallis, there was no ambivalence about the status of this text in the critical temporality of community. The ensuing debates post-disclosure outside of this critical space strategically centred on the author's duplicity and deception, avoiding the more complex and far-reaching critique of narrative credibility and institutional support. The fact that the story failed to convince at a narrative level for the culturally

30 informed reader was not part of the public story. In short, media discourse reduced the affair to another literary hoax, limiting the scope of and thus the participants in the debate. In the literary sphere, Australian academic Gillian Whitlock concludes that Khouri chose to play out her hoax in Australia surely because the 'Antipodes was remote from both the suburbs of Chicago … and Amman, [and that] there are relatively few who are literate in Arabic in the Australian intelligentsia, and so Khouri's halting speech in her supposedly native tongue could pass' (Whitlock 2004: 174) Apart from the limitations of who counts as 'intelligentsia' in Whitlock's schema, her conclusion fails to recognise that the very implausibility of the narrative was itself the first sign that alerted the critical temporality of local Arabic communities to the fictional nature of this book, at precisely the same time that the dominant public was earnestly believing in its truth-value.

In short, the story failed at a narrative level for several reasons. Textually, the story struggles against its own internal contradictions, mistakes and plot inconsistencies to survive as a coherent account. The most significant anomaly that functions to undermine the text's credibility underpins the plot. If the fundamental premise of this text, that all Muslim women in Jordan are oppressed in the way that Khouri graphically describes, is to be accepted, then Dalia's relative ease in setting up and working in a unisex beauty salon is at once unbelievable from the start. Khouri goes to great length to detail the scrutiny applied to Dalia by her brothers and the restrictive practices placed upon both of them in all aspects of their lives. She writes,

It is haraam (prohibited) for a man and women who are not Mahram (related) to be together if no one else is present… this law has grown to mean that a woman is not allowed anywhere in public or private with an unrelated male and must always be accompanied by a male relative. (2003: 68)

Khouri painstakingly describes Dalia's life within the constraints of this oppressive economy throughout the narrative. Simply put, the possibility of a religiously-observant woman, who wears the scarf, working in a unisex hair

31 salon where she must make physical contact with male customers not known to her, seems remote and unlikely. The text thus relies on a contradiction that threatens the authority of the narrative as 'non-fiction'. This contradiction is also a glaring challenge to the authority of the author. Khouri's failure to convince the culturally-informed reader at the narrative level is a failure of realism because she has failed to create a plausible world.

Further to this, a litany of clumsy mistakes permeate the text, and thus reinforces the sense of the narrative being suspect, including a description on page two of Jordan being bordered by Lebanon and Kuwait,8 which it is not. The author outlines various Islamic codes and practices, making serious errors of fact when commenting on Jordan's judicial and social systems.9 These inaccuracies and inconsistencies accumulate to the extent that all claims to truth are at once questionable. For these very reasons, prior to the subsequent documentary proof that emerged through Knox's investigation, the text was read in the critical temporality of the Arabic community as a work of fiction from the very beginning of its public life.

In situating this text as fiction, it is neither my intention to deny the reality of the pervasiveness of 'crimes of honour'10 in Jordan (or anywhere else in the world for that matter), nor is it a denial or erasure of the suffering and injustice inflicted on women and girls who are forced to endure an inherently flawed system (both politically and socially) that sanctions femicide and acquits perpetrators. I do not intend to explore the morality, the politics or complexities of 'crimes of honour', or the various political and legal (non) responses to the crime in this chapter. Rather my project is to open up the fictional dimensions of Khouri's book more fully to a more engaged critical scrutiny around the trope of honour killing as literary subject matter destined for readership in the West. In so doing, my aim is to demonstrate where Orientalist 'truth', knowledge and logic takes us politically, critically and aesthetically via my own non-fiction and fiction writing. I now want to scrutinise the various publics that this text convened.

32 1.2 Subjects and Reading Publics

[The role of] 'Third World' women … is to provide the occasional piece of up-to-date information, but more importantly to entertain, in one way or another, audiences hungry for tales about women. Marnia Lazreg, 'The Triumphant Discourse of Global Feminism: Should Other Women Be Known'? 2000: 35.

… As incomprehensible as the violent acts against non-Muslims, non- Arabs, that, since September 11, have made the Western world suddenly hungry to understand this alien place. Norma Khouri Forbidden Love 2003: 57.

The metaphor of 'hunger' provides a sense of the rapacious desire that the spectre of Muslim women as subject matter elicits for particular publics and as narrative fodder for markets in the trans-global world of publishing. As cultural theorist Michael Warner argues, 'it is like explaining the popularity of films or novels as a response to market demand; the claim is circular because market "demand" is entirely inferred from the popularity of the works themselves' (2002: 53). In this section, I explore the various publics that Forbidden Love convenes, analysing in particular the dominant readership. I argue against the idea of a uniform reading practice, and thus challenge the certainties of the dominant public that read this text as non-fiction.

As already noted, before The Sydney Morning Herald's literary editor, Malcolm Knox, publicly called into question the veracity of both the story of Forbidden Love and the biography of the author herself, there was no question in the dominant public that this text was anything but a truthful account. I want to foreground the subject-reader as a site of scrutiny in place of the usual attention to the object in this section, then move to an examination of Warner's conception of publics in order to identify the particularity of

33 readership that this book convened. I start with Belsey whose critical work on subject reader positions provides an understanding of how realism:

performs the work of ideology, not only in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, but also in offering the reader, as the position from which the text is most readily intelligible, the position of subject as the origin both of understanding and of action in accordance with that understanding. (1988: 67)

Likewise, Yeenolu counsels that 'an inquiry into Orientalism cannot afford to ignore the constitution of the Western subject' (1998: 2). These two points cohere as a starting point for my inquiry into subject positions and the possibilities for discerning the different publics interpellated by Khouri's text.

Like Belsey, I am concerned primarily with the ways in which texts are conventionally read (1988: 69), but equally, I am interested in identifying the different sorts of readers popular Orientalist texts produce. To this end, I want to examine the mechanics of intersubjective communication, that is 'the shared understanding of a text which re-presents the world, is the guarantee not only of the truth of the text, but of the reader's existence as an autonomous and knowing subject in a world of knowing subjects' (Belsey 1988: 69). I want to scrutinise the reading practice of the implied reader of the text, as well as the counter reading practice which disrupts the conventional intersubjective relationship, challenging both the truth of the text and the authority of the author.

Quoting Iser, Belsey suggests the implied reader is 'a figure who is constructed by the text in the sense that '[s]he embodies all those predispositions necessary for a literary work to exercise its effect' (1988: 35). In the case of Forbidden Love, the implied reader must be drawn to the typology of the text, that is, the title, the visual design of the cover, and the texture of the narrative. The implied reader must have no reason to question the veracity of the narrative, and especially not its placement in the category of

34 non-fiction. The implied reader must be accepting of the authority of the author and the information that she is providing in the narrative. That, in Lazreg's terms, is where, 'the audience insists on information about "oppression," not an analysis of the institutional context within which "oppression" becomes meaningful' (2000: 34). The reader therefore must be convinced by, or at least attracted to the idea that Orientalist representations are a true and accurate representation of the Arab and Islamic worlds. By accepting all of the above, the reader is thus able to produce meaning and to read this book as a representation of the 'truth', questioning neither the fundamental premise of the narrative, nor the ideological underpinnings of the text. In this way, an orthodox reading takes place because the implied reader is faithful to the author's account of her original vision.

In making the point that 'it is possible to distinguish between an implied addressee of rhetoric and a targeted public of circulation' (Warner 2002: 54), Warner delineates between the individual subject as reader (of rhetoric) and a public that is the target 'audience'. My aim now is to identify the 'targeted public of circulation' via an analysis of how Forbidden Love and texts of this kind are both packaged and promoted to publics.

Michael Warner identifies the various publics that come to exist in his essay, 'Publics and Counterpublics' (2002). The first in his list of seven is cited as a self-organised public, 'a space of discourse organised by nothing other than discourse itself. It is autotelic; it exists only as the end for which books are published … opinions produced. It exists by virtue of being addressed' (2002: 50). Warner's second defining premise of the modern idea of public is as 'a relation among strangers' (2002: 55). He contends that in this second understanding, 'reaching strangers is its primary orientation' (2002: 56). While both these formulations are useful in distinguishing between the different types of publics (self-organised, stranger sociability, personal and impersonal, constituted through mere attention, etc) that make up a public of readers, it is Warner's exploration of the senses of public that provides me with a more

35 precise framework for this analysis. Warner's third sense of public, 'the kind of public that comes into being only in relation to texts and their circulation' (2002: 50)11 is the formulation that I mobilise in this analysis because it recognises publics that are 'mediated by cultural forms and do not exist apart from the discourse that addresses them' (Warner 2002: 54). This sense of public is particularly apt in the context of texts like Forbidden Love which appear from time to time in the public sphere and are read or picked up by various publics. As Warner argues, for a text to have a public, it 'must continue to circulate through time, and because this can be confirmed only through an intertextual environment of citation and implication, all publics are intertextual, even intergeneric' (2002: 68). This makes sense of a text like Forbidden Love precisely because of its citational nature (a dominant feature of Orientalism itself), reinforcing Warner's point that 'no single text can create a public … only when a previously existing discourse can be supposed, and a responding discourse be postulated, can a text address a public' (2002: 62). In this way, Forbidden Love is 'thus the addressable object conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gives it existence' (Warner 2002: 51). This provides an understanding of how a public 'can only act within the temporality of the circulation that gives it existence' (Warner 2002: 68), and how publics have the capacity for 'an ongoing life – it's the way texts circulate, and become the basis for further representations, that convinces us that publics have activity and duration' (Warner 2002: 68).

Warner argues 'dominant publics are by definition those that can take their discourse pragmatics and their lifeworlds for granted, misrecognising the indefinite scope of their expansive address as universality or normalcy' (2002: 88). The implied reader of Forbidden Love is at once addressed as the knowing sovereign subject within this discursive environment of universality and normalcy. Belsey's point that, 'the very condition of our experience of the world, unconscious precisely in that it is unquestioned, taken for granted' (1988: 5) exposes how the dominancy of Orientalist logic both defines the world for a particular public and provides for the constitution and

36 maintenance of a particular subjectivity. This subjectivity is what I now want to examine in looking at how Forbidden Love become a point of identity along ideological gender lines.

The constitution of subjectivity is implicit in how the book is packaged and promoted; for example in the visual design of the cover, the storyline and the sexualised narrative itself. Indeed, a line on the back cover directly addresses the 'targeted public of circulation' with, 'Forbidden Love will strike a chord with women everywhere and is a testimony to the courage and strength of women who are prepared to defy generations of male dominance'. The implied reader, the Western female subject is thus immediately able to identify a position for herself without even opening the book. The assumption that 'women everywhere' read the same is illustrative of what Spivak calls 'ideology in action', that is, what 'a group takes to be natural and self-evident … [where] the subjects of ideology are both the conditions and effects of the self-identity of the group' (1988a: 118). The term 'honour killing' itself is ideological in that it that has been discursively associated with particular groups, most insistently Middle Eastern and Islamic cultural practices and is understood by the target public because of its discursive relationship to similar texts that have gone before, thus reinforcing Warner's point that 'it is not texts themselves that create publics, but the concatenation of texts through time' (2002: 62). But as Chandra Talpade Mohanty makes clear in her theoretical work on the differences between women, the unity of the Western subject cannot be assured and is as problematic as ever when it is assumed that women make up 'an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location, or contradictions' (2004: 55). In the case of various publics and the possibilities for different reading positions that Khouri's book convened, Mohanty's point is all the more important because it is a reminder of the vastly different constituted groups (of women) that live and read in the West who are outside the dominant public, who reject 'orthodox' readings of Orientalist texts, and who actively undertake counter readings, or as Spivak suggests, 'the

37 rendering (im)possible of (another) narrative' (1999: 6). This is particularly the case for the critical temporality of (the Arabic) community, or in Warner's schema, the counterpublic.

Warner terms the counterpublic as such, precisely because the 'cultural horizon against which it marks itself off is not just a general or wider public, but a dominant one' (2002: 86). This public, while in no way uniform or homogenous, is a counterpublic as such because it 'maintains at some level, conscious or not, an awareness of its subordinate status' (Warner 2002: 86). This goes some way in explaining why Forbidden Love remained a popular non-fiction best seller for eighteen months and why various counterpublics, including culturally informed online reviewers (Amazon site), Jordanian women themselves (the National Commission of Jordanian Women), the Arab diaspora (Sydney and Melbourne) (all of whom made up a critical temporality of community in this instance) were calling for this book to be withdrawn as non-fiction, but were unable to exert any real pressure in the powerful spheres of the dominant public (media, reviewers and publisher). As noted, it was not until a white male journalist elaborately exposed the author in an extended investigation that the dominant public was convinced that this book was a work of fiction. Warner's recognition of the counterpublic as subordinate is especially apt in reflecting the particular status of the Arabic community as a critical community without the political power to effect even minor change. This is evident in the fact that this book remains in its original incarnation as non-fiction on the Transworld publisher's website two years after being exposed as fiction, and why there has been no substantial scrutiny to date from the academic or literary worlds vis-à-vis this text. In this way, Warner's description of the status of the counterpublic reflects the experiences of the critical temporality of Arabic communities precisely because it recognises 'the conflict extends not just to ideas … but to the modes of address that constitute the public and to the hierarchy of media' (Warner 2002: 86). It is within these modes and sites that the conflict is an especially

38 fraught one because of institutional investment in and support for texts of this kind.

Because Forbidden Love was originally written and published in English, distributed and promoted for the Western market place (predominantly in the Anglophonic Australian market), and the target public of circulation is 'women everywhere', it can thus be assumed that the dominant public identifies as both Western and female and is interpellated by liberal feminist concerns about the internal and social lives of Muslim Middle Eastern women. Belsey's point that an 'interpellation, in turn, facilitates the interpolation (inclusion) of the reader in the narrative through the presentation of events from a specific and unified point of view' (1988: 76) makes sense because Khouri's text actively constitutes the Western female subject as coming from a morally and culturally superior group where Western (liberal) feminism is in triumphant mode anchored against the 'subordinated' (Middle) Eastern woman caught in the backwardness of pre- feminist Arab Islamic primitivism. The agency and productivity of the Western liberal feminist public is thus activated via the fantasies of rescue, a posture and project materialised in the mission of colonial feminism.

Within this text, Khouri actively mobilises familiar tropes of Arab and Islamic misogyny within this context of 'social mission', appealing to this feminist public through the narrative frame of the Arab female victim. This sexualised narrative demonstrates 'the unique ways in which the unconscious fantasies, dreams, and desires of the Western subject structures [her] relation to the Oriental other' (Yeenolu 1998: 11). It is precisely this unequal 'relation' which marks the active constitution of the liberal-minded colonial feminist subject, privileging her feminist agency and subjectivity, and positing Western understandings of 'feminism' as the universal. Khouri writes, '[t]o Middle Eastern men, Dalia's beliefs made her an enemy, a sharmuta, [a prostitute] and they would have only one way to deal with her. The long- established way to get rid of sharmutas12 [sic] was execution' (26). Here, Dalia's

39 progressive views on equality and social change for women are polarised against the 'archaic' beliefs of Middle Eastern culture and men, who are represented as violently opposed to equality of status for women. Honour killing, as familiar subject matter to Western women, represents the idea of extreme inequality of the Muslim/Arab woman. This 'knowledge' comes to women in the West in racialised ways particularly through the media of popular culture. For example, the entertainment magazine New Weekly (NW) ran a story in November 2003, titled 'Killed for Family Honour', which focuses on Khouri and her book. Above her picture, the text reads, 'While women in the west are protected from honour killings by law, others in the world aren't so fortunate' (Inside Crime 2003: 5). In this way, having been a victim of the barbarism of the Islamic Middle East, the victims (Dalia and Khouri) thus become an allegory for the potential fate of all women who don't live in the 'progressive' West. This idea is enabled by and through Khouri's text because she reproduces essentialist ideas of the Middle East as being inherently oppressive to women and the 'West' as an enlightened enclave of feminist modernity. This polemic is reiterated throughout Forbidden Love, and is the hook for Khouri in promotional interviews.

Belsey's argument that 'the interpellation of the reader has a role in reinforcing the concepts of the world' (1988:66) is especially meaningful in the context of how the dialectic of oppositions is used to bolster the identity of the Western feminist subject as culturally superior to the Muslim/Arab woman, who is reduced to being a passive victim waiting to be rescued. Crucially, the power and agency of the Western feminist subject is contingent on the Muslim female other occupying this role as victim (a victim of her culture, a victim of her religion). It is on the back of the victim that the Western subject anchors her identity (Yeenolu 1998: 91). This position of power is best described by Said as having 'positional superiority, which puts the Westerner in a whole series of possible relationships with the Orient without ever losing the relative upper hand' (1991: 7).

40 In unpacking the discursive strategies that Western liberal feminism has been able to mobilise historically, Yeenolu provides an understanding of how race has informed power relations. She argues that:

[w]hile providing the necessary legitimising forces for colonialism, Enlightenment thought has also supplied Western liberal feminism with a whole battery of discursive strategies to know and understand its ethnographic other, and thus to secure the integrity of its own identity vis- à-vis its dark and uncanny double. Such a discursive lineament was crucial in the emergence and consolidation of what we might call, "an imperial Western feminist gesture." (1998: 97)

Khouri's narrative secures and consolidates the integrity of the Western feminist identity setting the Western liberal feminist subject at the civilising centre of the text, via the discourse of liberation, which makes possible the fantasy of 'an imperial Western feminist gesture' through the mission of rescue. Marnia Lazreg unpacks intra-female relations further, particularly scrutinising how the cultural roots of Western feminism resulted in two related outcomes:

On the one hand, they empower Western feminists when the latter encounter women from other societies, especially those from the 'Muslim' world, whom they understand only through the reductive (and misunderstood) categories of religion, which dissolve their individuality, if not humanity. Consequently, the discourse of liberation reinscribes relations of power between women. On the other hand, they compel women from non-Western societies to speak from 'Western women's perspectives', which means that they must speak about their cultures while fleeing from them instead of perfecting them from within. (2000: 31)

Khouri speaks from a 'Western feminist position' when she writes, 'while I could grow up to wear modest skirts and trousers, Dalia had been forced to wear the shar'ia13 since she was ten. While I could wear my hair loose on the street, her veil would cover her head' (65). By invoking the familiar liberal feminist discourse which privileges (Western) dress as a marker of modernity and 'loose' hair as a sign of female liberation, Khouri strategically becomes the Western feminist subject, her (Western) dress becoming a point of identity

41 with her public. This address is further consolidated with, 'it is only now, looking back six years from the beginning of our dangerous adventure – years of experiencing freedom, travelling across oceans, continents and cultures – that I can see that our action would be incomprehensible to women of any liberated culture' (57).

Khouri's own story of escape to the West served to bolster the liberal feminist subject position in her immediacy as a living testimony (despite none of it being true). This is most obvious in the way Rachael Kohn of ABC Radio National's religion program, The Spirit of Things structured her interview with Khouri in February 2003. Kohn asked questions such as: '[w]hat were the sort of things you were not permitted to do by your parents'? and '[i]s it actually possible for a Muslim man to marry a Christian woman'? to '[w]as the American school the source of some of these more progressive ideas'?; and, 'Norma, how does it feel to be in an open democratic society'?; [d]o you find it at all daunting'?

These circular questions are illustrative of how the 'imperial Western feminist gesture' continues to self-valorise within its own racialised and colonialist conceptions of the Middle East and Arab and Islamic culture. Khouri's interview is essentially specular, with interviewer Kohn using her as a mirror that reflects the colonialist's self-image (JanMohamed 1985: 65). Kohn's questions perfectly embody the sort of preoccupations that are reflective of Western liberal feminism masquerading as global feminism. Lazreg exposes the fundamentals of the triumphant discourse of global feminism when she writes:

Underlying the struggle of Western feminists is the assumption that they belong to perfectible societies, whereas Other women's societies are by definition 'traditional', impervious to change from within, and unknowing of what is good for women. This seldom recognised fact allows Western feminists to perceive themselves as fundamentally different from Other women whom they tend to define as 'oppressed' and in need of liberation. (2000: 31)

The institutional support provided to Khouri by Kohn demonstrates how the persistence of Orientalist ideology continues to inform the media's reception of certain books and authors. In responding to Kohn's questions, Khouri fulfils the fundamental requirement of the woman-native-author by reinforcing the racialised assumptions and prejudices about Muslims and Arabs. As a source of ethnographic information, in Lazreg's terms, Khouri becomes the convenient source for 'a public in need of native support for its own prejudices' (2000: 36). She offers: 'We were not permitted to just walk out of our households and go somewhere without first asking for permission;' 'You don't have the freedom to make those types of choices'; and, 'You're not allowed to go and shop for your own wardrobe without one of your parents with you to approve everything that you're choosing'. Khouri's appeal to her female listeners – her dominant public - is through a gendered discourse of freedom of movement and freedom of dress, the fundamental pillars of second wave Western liberal feminism. Khouri repeats particular phrases and words including 'not allowed', 'asking for permission', 'strict limitations', 'chaperoned' throughout the Kohn interview to drive home the idea that Arab and Islamic societies are profoundly misogynist.

Khouri's agency as woman-native-author makes real the possibilities for liberal feminist intervention by her tactical mobilising of popular gendered discourses familiar to a Western female readership. In this way, Khouri restores power to the idea that the Western liberal feminist has a moral place in the struggle as liberator and saviour of Muslim/Arab women. Online reviewer Louise North best sums up this position when she writes:

Some western feminists have argued that Muslim women don't want western interference in their lives, and say that there must be respect for religious tradition. In other words westerners should keep out of what is not their business. Khouri puts paid to this theory and adamantly says that Muslim women pray that their 'silent cries will be heard'. (2003)

Thus, Khouri's text can be read as an authorisation by the native woman for Western (colonial) intervention in the lives of Muslim Middle Eastern women. This reading becomes especially productive in the reception environment in which Forbidden Love arrived. Its release coincided precisely with the military imperative urging for a pre-emptive strike on and invasion of the Middle Eastern nation of Iraq. I will now turn to the ideological function of Forbidden Love within this discursive economy.

44 1.3 Discursive Dynamics of New Century (Neo)Colonial Feminist Narratives.

It should not be possible to read nineteenth-century British literature without remembering that imperialism, understood as England's social mission, was a crucial part of the cultural representation of England to the English. The continual disregard of these two points itself attests to the continuing success of the imperialist project, displaced and dispersed into more modern forms. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 'Three Women's Texts and a Critique of Imperialism' 1985: 243.

Anthropology, it has often been said, served as a handmaid to colonialism. Perhaps it must be said that feminism, or the ideas of feminism, served as its other handmaid. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam 1992: 155.

In this section, I examine the ideological context in which Khouri's text operates, arguing that the representational terrain within which Forbidden Love as realism is understood takes its meaning not only from the insistent truth claims made within the text, but concomitantly from popular political discourse. I explore what Yeenolu aptly terms 'the complicity between Orientalism's imperialist operations and a certain type of "feminist" gesture' (1998: 72) that texts like Forbidden Love impel. I begin with a survey of key theorists to sketch the inter-implication of the various modes of Orientalism and how they are aligned to textual and publishing imperatives.

Firstly, I want to offer texts like Forbidden Love a more precise nomenclature by situating them in a literary terminology that is inclusive of their political dimensions. Realism is my starting point because, as Belsey tells us, 'realism is

45 plausible not because it reflects the world, but because it is constructed out of what is (discursively) familiar' (1988: 45). This goes some way in describing a place for Forbidden Love because the very plausibility of this text is entirely dependent on the textual universe that has gone before, that is the citationary nature of texts that deal with subject matter about Arabs and the Middle East. But realism as a general term neither attends to what I consider to be the overtly political nature of this type of text, nor to the particularity of its intertextual nature. Therefore, I suggest the term 'Orientalist realism' not only because of the hegemonic style of representation that characterises this type of narrative, but also because of Said's point that Orientalism is fundamentally a political doctrine (1991: 204). I deploy this term than as both a political gesture and as a way to read texts that authorise their logic through the lens of Orientalist fantasy. I argued in the Introduction of this thesis that Orientalist texts be read as fiction precisely because they rely on projecting fantasy as truth in order to render the mysteries of the Middle East plain for and to the West (Said 1991: 20). Working within this frame, that is, the idea that Orientalism is a fantasy projected as reality and there is no other reality, my intention then to situate texts like Forbidden Love as Orientalist realism is an emphatic gesture to mark out the chimera as fundamental to the logic of Orientalism, thus undermining and questioning the valency and the very distinctions of the categories of non-fiction and fiction. It is precisely the double agency of Orientalism that I marshal in my ficto-critical writings in this thesis to uncover the kinds of investments and colonial desires that Orientalism as realism trades in. In situating Forbidden Love as Orientalist realism, I mobilise key theoretical arguments of both Said and Belsey to determine the productivity that this particular type of realism as a modality is able to exercise.

I therefore fuse Orientalism and realism through Belsey because she argues that classic realism 'performs the work of ideology in its representation of a world of consistent subjects who are the origin of meaning, knowledge and action' (Belsey 1988: 67). In this way, realism speaks to the world of Orientalist

46 logic, because the textual racialised worlding produced by both fiction and non-fiction is phantasmatic as I demonstrate in my own creative writing in the second part of this thesis. This world, in Orientalist terms, is a world where the distinction between the peoples and cultures of the West and the East is established via the binary oppositions that underwrite Orientalist discourse. As Yeenolu argues, the 'binary structure is the very structure which produces the desire for sovereign subjectivity, i.e. the economy of the subject' (1998: 8). It is from this position that the sovereign subject is able to exclude others and recognise himself (or herself) as autonomous (Yeenolu 1998: 8); it is from this position that knowledge about the 'excluded others' is produced and generated. As Said affirms, 'to have such knowledge … is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for "us" to deny autonomy to "it" – the oriental country – since we know it and it exists, in a sense, as we know it' (1991: 32). This is key to understanding the discursive power that texts about the Arab other are able to effect, and how the other becomes a racialised category subject to the prejudices, desires, and fears of those who produce 'knowledge'.

In Orientalism, Said offers a clear example of how British knowledge of Egypt is Egypt for Balfour in the high period of British colonialism (1991: 32). In much the same way, Khouri's description of Jordan is Jordan for a Western readership in the (neo)colonial present of the twenty-first century. This discursive process, as Yeenolu points out, is where the 'place' as such 'becomes possible only through the knowledge produced in and by these texts' (1998: 17). In the first lines of the prologue of Forbidden Love, Khouri tells us that:

[Jordan] is a place where a worldly young queen argues eloquently on CNN for human rights, while a father in a middle-class suburb slits his daughter's throat for committing the most innocent breach of old Bedouin codes of honour. It is a place of paradox and double standards for men and women, for liberated and conservative. (2003: 1)

47 Khouri provides this mode of 'knowledge' about Jordan throughout the text, with an entire chapter dedicated to explaining Islam (pp 59-71). By fixing Jordan (and Islam) in a series of binary oppositions, Khouri erases the other's subjectivity 'by the corresponding assertion of European superiority' (Dobie 2001: 7). In short, the constitution of the Western subject as the modern moral self is paramount in this economy, in that it provides for a position against which the other must then be fixed. The proliferation and fixity of Western subjectivity as moral (and the corresponding other as its opposite) remains fundamental in the productivity of Orientalist realism as colonial discourse.14

Postcolonial theorist Homi Bhabha argues that 'an important feature of colonial discourse is its dependence on the concept of "fixity" in the ideological construction of otherness' (1994: 66). Stereotypes of rigidity and degeneracy are representative of the signifying practices of this mode of representation. Such discursive practices can be traced back to the project of the Enlightenment, as Yeenolu argues, where the Western subject 'set up its boundaries as human, civilised, and universal, thus inscribing the history of its others as backward and traditional' (1998: 95). The Orientalist dialectic of modernity and primitivism, as 'signifiers of the project of Enlightenment and humanism, serve as the connecting tissue between colonial and modernist discourse and has functioned as legitimising categories in the civilising mission of colonial power' (Yeenolu 1998: 95). This dialectic underscores the first few lines of Khouri's prologue where modernity is 'a worldly young queen argu[ing] eloquently on CNN for human rights' and primitivism is 'a[n Arab Muslim] father in a middle-class suburb slit[ting] his daughter's throat' (2003: 1). An insistence on this dialectic of oppositions of East and West lies at the heart of the ideological effectivity of Khouri's text, foregrounding the (neo)colonial posture of the 'civilising mission' via the rescue of Muslim women.

48 In distinguishing between the discursive and the material, and the overt and covert aspects of colonial discourse, critical theorist Abdul R. JanMohamed argues that the overt aim is:

embedded as an assumption in all colonialist literature is accompanied in colonialist texts by a more vociferous insistence, indeed by a fixation, upon the savagery and the evilness of the native [and this] should alert us to the real function of these texts: to justify imperial occupation. (1985: 62)

JanMohamed mobilises the manichean allegory to argue how racial difference functions in colonialist literature, describing it as being 'the dominant model of power–and interest–relations between the coloniser and the colonised' (1985: 63). He makes the point that 'this axis in turn provides the central feature of the colonialist cognitive framework and colonialist literary representation', that is to say, a field of diverse oppositions including 'good and evil, civilisation and savagery, rationality and sensuality' (1985: 63). For JanMohamed, 'in the imaginary colonial realm, to say "native" is automatically to say "evil" and to invoke immediately the economy of the manichean allegory' (1985: 65). Khouri recounts a modern version of this allegory in Forbidden Love, where 'Arab' and 'Muslim' come to mean 'evil'.

This text is indeed preoccupied with the 'evilness' of Arabs and the 'savagery' of so-called Islamic practices. Throughout, Khouri insists on the ways in which, '[v]iolence is embodied in our [Jordanian] laws, and in our [Jordanian] history' (2003: 59), and that, '[b]igotry, discrimination, and male chauvinism are not just implied in Islam, they are an integral part of Muslim law' (68). The deployment of these tropes in the field of war thus becomes an unavoidable dimension of the context of this text's publication and reception. As Bhabha affirms in regard to colonial discourse as an apparatus of power, 'the objective … is to construe the colonised as a population of degenerate types on the basis of racial origin, in order to justify conquest' (1994: 70). In representing Arabs and Muslims collectively,

49 and Jordanians in particular as degenerate misogynists, the strategic function of Khouri's text as Orientalist realism thus becomes productive in a reception environment already saturated with similar racialised constructs.

Forbidden Love arrived on the bestseller lists in January 2003 and remained there in the months leading up to the pre-emptive strike on Iraq in March of that year and for the five months during the preliminary stages of the occupation of the Iraqi nation. This text thus circulated in a political environment where images of Arab brutality and duplicity as personified by Saddam Hussein and his military elite saturated popular media representations and political discourse.15 In this scenario, Saddam, as the embodiment of the Arab male and defender of Arabic culture, came to stand for Iraq and Iraq came to stand for Saddam, despite Iraq being a secular and culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse nation of 22 million people. In January of the previous year, Iraq was named by US president, George W. Bush, as one of the so-called 'axes of evil' and so became a primary target in the US Administration's rhetoric on the war on terror. In both Britain and Australia, the same lexicon of evil and degeneracy was similarly invoked as part of the domestic case in the months leading up to the pre-emptive strike on Iraq.16 I further investigate the spectre of 'evil' as embodied by the racialised Arab male in a localised context in the third chapter of this thesis.

The publication and popular reception of Khouri's book was thus over- determined by a frenzy of propaganda intended to sway various publics into supporting the invasion and occupation of Iraq.17 Previous to this intense period of justification for a military strike on a sovereign nation, there had been a proliferation of non-fiction about the Middle East in the market since the events of September 11, 2001. According to independent bookseller David Gaunt of Gleebooks in Sydney, non-fiction books, especially those about the Middle East, have had a solid market ever since Sept. 11, 2001 (Kremmer 2004). Many of these books were dedicated to the status of women in Islam,

50 with a particular emphasis on the experiences of Afghan women.18 Random House Australia's Fiona Henderson is reported as saying, 'After September 11, the sales of Geraldine Brooks' Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women skyrocketed' (Knox 2004a). Jesse Fink, a former editor with HarperCollins, in commenting on the timing of Khouri's book states, 'I suspect that this story about a Middle Eastern woman suffering at the hands of Muslim men just fell into the publisher's lap at a perfect time, [overriding] any doubts about the integrity of the book' (Kremmer 2004). Khouri herself makes this publishing imperative clear within the text when she writes: '[a]s incomprehensible as the violent acts against non-Muslims, non-Arabs, that, since September 11, have made the Western world suddenly hungry to understand this alien place' [sic] (2003: 57). Through Forbidden Love, Khouri thus provides the narrative 'food' in response to this 'hunger' of the Western world via this tale of victimisation of an Arab Muslim woman at the hands of the 'savage' Arab Muslim world. Khouri at once invokes the distress call to the 'plight of the Muslim woman' in the prologue when she writes, 'women still pray their silent cries will be heard… [w]e cling to the fading hope that someday we'll be released from the prison' (2003: 4). Forbidden Love operates here as a rescue narrative, reflecting the dominant (neo)colonial feminist discourse of a post September 11 and pre-Iraq war period.

Leila Ahmed explores the genealogy of colonial feminism as it relates to Islam and the Middle East, defining it as a form of 'feminism used against other cultures in the service of colonialism' (1992: 151). I now want to examine how Forbidden Love works in the service of Orientalism, paying particular attention to how the ideas of Western feminism have been mobilised to further Western imperialism in the Middle East.

In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks on US targets, the spectre of gender liberation was strategically deployed as one of the moral justifications for the bombing of Afghanistan.19 The emancipation of Afghan women from the Taliban (which became code word for Islamic

51 fundamentalism) thus entered mainstream public discourse via various public figures including 'superpower first ladies' (Flanders 2001), George W. Bush in a State of the Union Address, and by Administration officials and echoed by media commentators. In these texts, direct links were made between women's liberation and the War on Terror, with the blue burqa-clad figure becoming both the cause célèbre of mainstream white American feminism and the unwitting poster girl for US imperialism. Laura Bush, wife of the US president, an especially prominent and regular figure in this crusade to save Afghan women from Islamic fundamentalism, gave a radio address in November 2001, asserting that, 'the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women' (Flanders 2001). A few days later, she brought women's rights activists from mainstream groups like the Feminist Majority and Equality Now! along with Afghan women exiles to the White House for a photo opportunity and press conference.20 In an article titled, 'What Liberation?' writer Kimberly Sevcik reports that 'First Lady Laura Bush took over her husband's weekly radio address to comment on the success of the campaign' (2003). Laura Bush is quoted as saying, 'because of our recent military gains in much of Afghanistan, women are no longer imprisoned in their homes' (Sevcik 2003). Sevcik goes on to write that 'US newspapers ran front-page photographs of women tossing off their burqas, magazines ran triumphant articles on girls returning to school' (2003). In this simple statement, 'First Lady' Bush provides a 'feminist' justification for the bombing of Afghanistan because it has yielded the type of tangible outcome (women's emancipation) that is easily understood precisely because of the historical familiarity of colonial feminist discourse. Underpinning this discourse is the rhetoric of the 'civilising mission', a legitimising device that has effectively functioned to justify attacks on Indigenous societies and colonial expansionism in the form of patriarchal colonialism. Spivak terms this rather ironically as 'white men saving brown women from brown men' (1988b: 296). In a similar vein, Ahmed tracks how 'the discourse of patriarchal colonialism captured the language of feminism and used the issue of women's position in Islamic societies as the spearhead of the colonial attacks on those

52 societies' (Ahmed 1992: 243). She exposes the hypocrisy particularly of imperialist men:

who were the enemies of feminism in their own societies, [while] abroad espoused a rhetoric of feminism attacking the practices of Other men and their 'degradation' of women, using the argument that the cultures of the colonised peoples degraded women in order to legitimise Western domination and justify colonial policies. (1992: 243)

Ahmed sees this posture perfectly exemplified in the figure of Lord Cromer who was 'famous in England for his opposition to feminism, and in Egypt, where he was British consul general, [he] was a principal advocate of the need to end Islamic degradation of women and a declared champion of the importance of unveiling' (1992: 243). In the political environment of new century (neo)colonialism, a similar rhetoric is mobilised via the 'leader of the free world' and various other servants of empire. In January 2002, in the opening statements of George W. Bush's State of the Union Address, the US President asserted, '[t]he last time we met in this chamber, the mothers and daughters of Afghanistan were captives in their own homes, forbidden from working or going to school. Today women are free and are part of Afghanistan's new government' (Bush 2002b).21 In September 2002, twelve months after the September 11 attacks and the subsequent military attack on Afghanistan, and six months prior to the pre-emptive strike on Iraq, Bush strategically linked political events and colonial feminist rhetoric in this way:

The grief of families continues … we are rebuilding New York City… American troops have removed the Taliban from power, liberating Afghan women and children from lives of fear and oppression…this will be a long war. (Bush 2002a )

In so doing, as Zillah Eisenstein argues, the (neo)colonialists 'took the post- September 11 moment and appropriated the language of women's rights for a right-wing and neo-liberal imperial agenda' (2004: 148).

53 Quoting The New York Times editorialist Jane Smiley, writer Sara Pursley similarly exposes the productivity of (neo)colonial feminist ideology with Smiley 'expressing relief at the prospect of liberating Afghan women; it's like a cure for helplessness. Here's something we can all get behind' (Pursley 2001). But it is Smiley's comment that 'promoting the liberation of Afghan women is a political stance without risk and without a downside' (Pursley 2001) which unmasks the degree to which this sort of neo-liberal feminist concern unshackles itself from taking responsibility for the material effects of militarism and war on the very 'brown women' it purports to support. Further, it provides a clear example of how Western feminism 'is complicitous with the institutions within which it seeks its space' (Spivak 1989: 518).

Forbidden Love was thus read in a reception environment rich in hyper- colonial discursivity. This text's narrative structure inscribes the same sorts of (neo)colonial feminist concerns about the lives of Arab/Muslim women, mobilising the language of women's rights and women's emancipation, both within and outside the text, with Khouri speaking at events including women's day rallies.22 Reviewer Kay Hymowitz perfectly captures the discursive linkages between Khouri's text and the material politics of the period when she writes:

After September 11, many Americans reasonably concluded that, when it came to oppressing women, the Taliban were as bad as they come. Norma Khouri's new memoir, [Forbidden Love] suggests that we might want to revisit the subject. The Taliban, it seems, were just more unapologetic practitioners of a kind of misogyny that is rampant throughout the Arab and Muslim world. But if young love seems sweet on Elm Street, in the Arab Middle East it is an abomination. (Hymowitz: 14 February 2003)

This comment makes plain the extent to which readers both participate and make sense of the discursive linkages between political events and texts themselves. Yeenolu's point about 'the complicity between Orientalism's imperialist operations and a certain type of "feminist" gesture' (1998: 72) is especially evident in the text of this quote, considering how this 'gesture' is

54 exercised via the Western female public who continue to underwrite the success and popularity of ideological texts of this kind. Through books like Forbidden Love, the Western liberal feminist subject thus identifies as 'liberator' rather than '(neo)colonialist;' she sees herself as the moral subject rather than the handmaid to an illegal invasion; and she is able to justify military intervention via the rhetoric of the '(neo)colonial feminist civilising mission', rather than having to own up to being complicit in illegal occupations or imperialist expansionism. This complicitous feminist gesture on the part of readership indeed grounds Ahmed's point when she notes, 'whether in the hands of patriarchal men or feminists' (1992: 154), the ideas of Western feminism [are] heir to colonialism, to colonialism's discourses of domination, and to its cooptation … [in] further[ing] Western imperialism' (1992: 245), and serves to highlight how Orientalist realism texts like Forbidden Love remain productive sites in the hegemonic discourses of domination. This feminist gesture also sees a contemporary reworking of Spivak's point that recognises this changed context of 'white women saving brown women from brown men' (1988b: 296), with Khouri as insider 'feminist' author leading the vanguard. I now want to move on to an examination of the function of the author in the production of this text.

55 1.4 Woman-Native-Author: Performing the Native Informant

We have to train Insiders so that they may busy themselves with Our preoccupations, and make themselves useful by asking the right kind of Question and providing the right kind of Answer. Trinh T. Minh-ha, When the Moon Waxes Red 1991: 68.

How would I feel if I found myself attracted to a Muslim man? I wondered. Norma Khouri, Forbidden Love 2003: 30.

Khouri asks precisely the sort of question that Trinh refers to in her ironic voice of authority, setting out the requirements of the 'ideal Insider', a figure 'who faithfully represents the Other for the Master, or comforts, more specifically, the Master's self-other relationship in its enactment of power relations, gathering serviceable data, minding his/her own business-territory, and yet offering the difference expected' (1991: 68). Khouri proposes 'the right kind of Answer' in an Arabophobic moment: '[t]he thought of being married to an Arab man turned my stomach' (2003: 30).

In this section, I examine Khouri's performance as woman-native-author mobilising aspects of both Trinh's formulation of 'Insider' and Spivak's 'Native Informant'. I argue here that Khouri fulfils all the requirements of the 'ideal Insider' as set out by Trinh, most especially in the consolidating and confirming gestures that underpin the author's self-representation as authoritative Insider. I want especially to focus on how Khouri offers the 'difference expected' in her performance as Native Informant, arguing that the effectivity of her authority is contingent on a strategic interplay of Insider/Outsider.

56 Said writes that there is 'nothing mysterious or natural about authority [and] above all, [it] must be analysed' (1991: 19-20). He calls his principal methodological device for studying authority strategic location, which he defines as 'the author's position in a text with regard to the Oriental material [s]he writes about' (Said 1991: 20). I utilise Said's approach to identify the sorts of strategies that Khouri mobilises in establishing her authority. Said goes on to argue that:

Everyone who writes about the Orient must locate [herself] vis-à-vis the Orient; translated into [her] text, this location includes the kind of narrative voice [she] adopts, the type of structure [she] builds, the kinds of images, themes, motifs that circulate in [her] text – all of which add up to deliberate ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and finally, representing it or speaking in its behalf. (1991: 20)

I want to explore 'the kind of narrative voice' Khouri adopts in how she represents herself as an (exceptional) Arab woman to her dominant public. (I examine the structure, images, themes and motifs that circulate in Khouri's text in Chapter Two). As I have previously argued, Khouri resorts to the trope of truth to authenticate her account, grounding the authority of her realism in the generative force of her own autobiography. The author as a figure is ever present in Forbidden Love as narrator, friend and protagonist. In this way, she is central to the narrative, characterising herself as both Insider and omniscient observer. Outside the text, Khouri plays the supplementary role of advocate, appearing as a speaker at events like the International Women's Day celebrations in Brisbane 2003. According to Khouri, when the book was released in January 2003, within weeks she had received more than 1000 emails in support of her campaign against honour killings in Arab countries (Wyndham 2003). Khouri's advocacy was thus fundamental to the success of the book and operated as a device of legitimation for her authority as author, providing her with an opportunity to promote the book outside of traditional literary contexts to a much wider public, most notably through the rubrics of Western liberal feminism. Khouri is thus able to construct a particular narrative voice for herself mobilising a liberal feminist rhetoric that

57 frames gendered otherness in terms that are at once familiar and comforting for her (gendered) dominant public. She establishes this advocacy role within the text, writing that, 'I vowed to transform my silence into audible screams for justice and equal rights' (145). Khouri wants 'to make all Arab women's silent cries for justice and freedom heard around the world' (207), and hopes that the book will also help achieve a wider aim -the revision of the Jordanian laws to outlaw honour killings, conceding that, 'my words alone will not change what is happening, but I hope that they will bring light to what has been shrouded in darkness for centuries' (Khouri 2003: 208). She cites her motivation to authorship as, [l]osing my soul sister to such a barbaric practice angered me and hurt me, but eventually fuelled me with the courage to put pen to paper and expose these archaic traditions' (206). In her dedication to Dalia on the last pages of the book, Khouri writes, 'in your death you've become my purpose for living. I write this book in memory of you'.

Thus, the nature of Khouri's authorial engagement is to expose the 'barbaric practices' and 'archaic traditions' of the inside (the Arabic / Islamic worlds) to the outside (the West) through a 'non-fiction' narrative. Khouri's immediate authority as author is guaranteed by the fact that she self-identifies as native Jordanian, and by virtue of this identity is at once invested with an unproblematised authoritative voice. Both Trinh and Spivak variously examine the complexities of native subjectivity in the production of knowledge: Spivak through tracking the figure of the Native Informant in philosophy, literature, history and culture (1999), and Trinh, via her analysis of the fields of anthropology and ethnographic filmmaking (1991). Spivak borrows the term Native Informant from ethnography, 'understood in the Northwestern European tradition (codename "West") as being taken with utmost seriousness' (1999: 6). Though the texts Spivak reads are not ethnographic and 'therefore do not celebrate that figure' (1999: 6), I use this term for Khouri not simply because her performance as Native Informant is indeed celebrated by the outside, but because the author fulfils the fundamental duties of the Native Informant as provider of inside information,

58 and as both source and object of 'knowledge'. As Native Informant, Khouri establishes 'the "native" as self-consolidating other ('epistemic violence')' (Spivak 1999: 205) through the construction of a text in the service of an 'energetic and successful defence of the civilising mission' (Spivak 1999: 5). Thus, in applying the term Native Informant to Khouri, I mean to argue that both her narrative as ethnographic text and her performance as expert Insider are informed and indeed mediated by the reception environment of her dominant public.

Trinh's theorisation is more useful for my analysis in providing strategies for scrutinising the nuanced modes of the different sorts of Insiders that proliferate. Trinh explores the minefield of authority in the reception of insider accounts, asking, '[w]hat can be more authentically "other" than an otherness by the Other herself' (1991: 69)? She argues that an 'insider can speak with authority about his/her own culture, and s/he is referred to as a source of authority in this matter-not just as a [writer] necessarily, but as an insider, merely' (1991: 69) [my italics]. In short, being an Insider defines the fundament of Khouri's authority.

In Khouri's particular case, being Jordanian provides her with an ambit claim to authority, first and foremost because this is a story about Jordan. By situating herself in the centre of the text as a character, and constructing a life for herself in Jordan with Dalia, 'living as close neighbours in the Jebel Hussein district in Amman' (5), Khouri consolidates her identity-as-authority within the narrative structure of the text. In this way, being Jordanian is an essential commodity in terms of her authorship, with her authority dependent on an unproblematised understanding of Jordanian identity. Having had no actual lived experience as a Jordanian woman in Jordan, but rather a lived experience as a diasporic Arab growing up in Chicago of Jordanian heritage,23 Khouri is thus compelled to perform the all-knowing Insider in order to establish her authority in a market where authenticity is everything.

59 Feminist theorist Marnia Lazreg refers to this 'process whereby a woman from the "Third World" speaks to a "Western" audience as an expert, although her expertise takes a secondary role and her native outlook and origins are emphasised' (2000: 33). In both Trinh and Lazreg's analyses, it is precisely these appeals to the 'more authentically other' and 'native origins' that make Khouri's authority and thus her author-function immediately productive, especially within this genre because of both institutional and readership demands for first-person native accounts, or as cultural theorist Reina Lewis argues in her research on late Ottoman period harem literature, 'the cultural capital of the "native" voice certainly helped authors into publication' (2004: 9). Khouri strategically negotiates her identity as 'native' and thus her positionality according to how her dominant public has come to understand Middle Eastern identities through the essentialising tropes of Orientalist knowledge.

Khouri calls upon her identity as both Arab and Christian at strategic times in order to bolster her authority when it is a question of authorising particular representations of Muslims and Islam in the text, as well as herself. She delineates early in the text that, 'despite the fact that [she and Dalia] were from different religions – [Dalia's] family was strict Muslim, while [hers] was Catholic' (5)-they were friends. Khouri mobilises a familiar Orientalist conceit that pits Muslim against Christian, with 'Dalia's family allow[ing] her to associate with [Khouri]' (56), implying that it is Muslims who are segregationist. This importantly provides a narrative base for Khouri to situate herself here as an Outsider on the inside. A second Orientalist trope that Khouri deploys is her identity as a minority Catholic living in a sea of hostile Muslims. There are many examples of this trope within the text, including statements like, 'we non-Muslims must not be flagrant with prohibited things, such as intoxication, adultery, and incest [sic]. We must not build new churches or temples, or sound church bells … if we break the rules, violence is evoked' (62); and '[n]on-Muslims who break the conditions of their

60 protection [living under Muslim rule of law] are considered muharib (hostile), justifying the declaration of a jihad (holy war) against them' (62).

While strategically assuming minority status as a Christian living under Muslim law at different points throughout the text to power her positioning as outsider within, Khouri specifically privileges her Arab identity when it is a question of validating her power to speak about Muslims and Islam. Khouri relies on Orientalist subject positionality which works to blur the specificities of Arab identities and thus conflate Arabs as a homogenous group, or in Said's words, 'an undifferentiated type called Oriental' (1991: 252).24 For example, Khouri writes, '[t]he killing and imprisonment of women who broke the rules wasn't just Islamic; it crossed religious lines' (30). Khouri was asked in a radio interview: 'how would [your father] have justified that, being a Christian?' (The question refers to the possibility of Khouri's father finding out that she had aided Dalia in her illicit affair with a Catholic man and thus being duly killed herself by her father), Khouri's response was 'because this isn't a religious belief, this is a traditional practice. It has nothing to do with religion' (Kohn 2003).25 This underlines Khouri's strategy to make culture the issue rather than religion (in this instance) when in the service of her own identity-as-authority. This manoeuvre not only provides Khouri with the authority to speak on behalf of Muslims (after all, they are Arab in Orientalist terms), but serves to blur the lines between religion and culture. Therefore, I read Khouri's bracketed insistence '(for my blood is Arab)' (60) as significant, not only as a reaffirmation of her authority (as an Arab insider), but also as anxiety about her own ambivalence as a non-Muslim 'insider'. Khouri's need to reaffirm her authority within the text serves to elide questions of difference. Questions of power can thus be strategically avoided in a context where speaking for and writing about Muslims is not in any way problematised, because after all, as Khouri tells us, her 'blood is Arab'.

In considering the transnational reception of celebrated Egyptian feminist author Nawal El Saadawi, theorist Amal Amireh argues that, 'what El

61 Saadawi says or writes is less important than the places from which she speaks and writes, the contexts in which her words are received, the audiences who hear and read her, and the uses to which her words are put' (2002: 35). While I would argue that it is indeed important what Khouri says and writes, given the insistence on truth-claims that are central to this story, I want to examine how Khouri constructs a place for herself as an Outsider, while still insisting on insider positionality.

Trinh's analysis of the Insider-Outsider complex in the representation of otherness provides a critical approach to understanding what she calls the 'arranged marriage … between outsider's input and insider's output' (1991: 68). I deploy Trinh's formulation in analysing in particular how Khouri as native-woman-author negotiates this strategic interplay to produce a performance which convinces, appeals to and comforts her dominant public. Trinh suggests, '[t]he moment the insider steps out from the inside, she is no longer a mere insider (and vice versa). She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside' (1991: 74). Khouri's strategic location as Insider-Outsider is crucial precisely because it is 'central to the effective utilisation of Orientalist tropes' (Lewis 2005: 113) which underpin the text. Khouri mobilises a familiar structure or, as literary theorist Azzedine Haddour puts it: 'interpolates a colonial discourse into the structure of the novel which views Arabs from the "outside." This discourse is based on the exteriority of the Arabs and necessitates their objectification in [her] representation' (2000: 126).

Forbidden Love is replete with instances of objectifying the customs and 'ritual' practices of Arabs and Muslims, providing an account which foregrounds 'outside' understandings and forecloses on attaching any value to 'inside' meanings. Khouri's commentary on the traditional way of referring to women when they become mothers is an example of this. She writes: '[f]or as long as I could remember, Dalia's mum had been called Um Suhal, which means "mother of Suhal." With the birth of a woman's first son she loses her own

62 identity and is referred to as "mother of …"'(38). Khouri strategically limits the possibilities for any meaningful understanding of such a term. Belsey argues it is 'possible to refuse this limitation, to liberate the plurality of the text, to reject the 'obvious' and to produce meaning' in a new critical practice. To do this, Belsey sees the first task as identifying 'the effects of the limitation which confines "correct" reading to an acceptance of the position from which the text is most obviously intelligible, the position of a transcendent subject addressed by an autonomous and authoritative author' (1988: 55). What Khouri is doing here is to privilege the Western liberal feminist preoccupation with individual agency, drawing on the metaphorics of race and gender to delineate a position for herself as a liberal feminist, and thus affiliate herself with her dominant public. In fact, um is a term of great respect, signifying a depth of cultural and social meaning. As sociologist Suad Joseph attests, 'it is the custom in most Arab cultures to address a man or a woman as the mother (um) or father (abu) of their eldest son' (Joseph 1999: 174). Khouri reduces this idea of social capital to the narrowed conception that a woman's agency is elided because she has given birth to a son. Thus Khouri's 'correct reading' consolidates her position as Insider–Outsider, signifying to her dominant public that she is 'one of them'. In this way, Khouri plays the double agent in that her subjectivity as an Arab Jordanian woman is fundamental to the productivity of her authority, yet, her objectifying of Arabic customs fulfils the expectations of the outside. As Trinh argues, 'what the Outside expects from the Insider is, in fact, a projection of an all-knowing subject that this Outsider usually attributes to [herself] and to [her] kind' (1991: 70). In short, Khouri is of 'them', but not one of 'them'. She can speak about 'them', on behalf of 'them', and for 'them', because she knows 'them', has (claimed to) live amongst 'them', but is outside 'them'. Therefore, she is both an Insider on the outside, and an Outsider on the inside. In her performance as Insider- Outsider, Khouri becomes, in Trinh's words, '"the Inappropriate Other/Same" who moves about with various gestures affirming "I am like you," while still persisting in her difference' (1991: 74).

63 Khouri's performance as trickster is crucial in her survival as Insider- Outsider. This double agency enables her to move across dual terrains; she simultaneously insists on being an Insider and distances herself from the inside. As woman-native-author, Khouri is able to secure her authority through the over-determining of a native subjectivity that is both defined and mediated by the outside. Her Jordanian Arab identity is an especially important commodity in this economy, all the more so because Khouri's primary target is Islam, and being a non-Muslim, she is compelled to reassert an Orientalist subject positioning which privileges her Arabness over considerations of the specificities of Arab Muslim, Arab Christian, and a myriad of other identities when she speaks and writes about Muslims in the West. Khouri as woman-native-author is thus able to authorise versions of otherness unmediated by the 'others' themselves. After all, it is the Outside which authorises both Khouri's authority as 'native' in the first place, her core public.

Finally, it is through Khouri's performance as escapee that she is able to consolidate her status as a genuine Outsider because she is able to tell her very own tale of victimage when she 'arrives' safely on the outside, that is, in the West. In this way, Khouri became the text herself, or as theorist Bishnupriya Ghosh notes in her analysis of Nasreen Taslima's - (the so-called 'female Rushdie') - literary odyssey, 'the worlds that those authors mediate become less relevant to readers than the authors-as-text as commodified signifiers' (2000: 40). This description goes some way in elucidating Khouri's reception as celebrity author and her performance as escapee. This aspect of the saga of Forbidden Love is where the real story lies and is yet to be told. At precisely the same time Khouri was constructing the myth of her escape, 'fully believ[ing her] father and brother would carry out [her[ honour killing … [with her] family [having] to kill [her] to preserve their self-respect' (207), Iraqi, Afghan and African writers and journalists who had fled war and political persecution were being incarcerated for years in Australia's refugee prison complex for seeking asylum. Khouri's claim to 'protection' in Australia

64 was made on the basis that, as the author of Forbidden Love, she was in genuine fear for her life. The institutional support she received in her successful migration to Australia (from suburban Chicago) deserves public scrutiny. Equally, where the donations from the proceeds from the sale of the book ended up (as publicised on the back cover) are perhaps non-fiction narratives both insiders and outsiders, dominant publics and counterpublics alike might all be interested in reading about, should the truth ever be revealed in the real saga that is Forbidden Love.

1 Forbidden Love remained on the Sydney Morning Herald's top ten non-fiction list from Feb 1 – August 23 2003. 2 First known to the public as Helen Demidenko and after being exposed as having fabricated a Ukrainian identity, she was identified as Helen Darville, daughter of British migrants. 3 The Darville/Demidenko episode was widely discussed in both literary and academic circles where questions of ethnicity and writing, multiculturalism, faction versus fiction were all explored. Khouri's book was not considered a literary work and while it attracted popular readership, it did not attract a great deal of critical scrutiny from theorists or commentators outside the critical temporality of community. 4 Journalists Malcolm Knox and Caroline Overington uncovered a series of incidents in Chicago where Khouri was wanted by the FBI in connection to a string of offences concerning large amounts of money going missing. Khouri was named as a person of interest in these ongoing investigations. 5 As of March 2006, the publisher Transworld continues to advertise and sell Forbidden Love as a work of non-fiction; that is, there is no visible disclaimer that this book is a work of fiction, nor an alert to readers of the deception. Further, on the back cover, it clearly states that 'The author is donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this book to international women's and human rights charities.' Given the events of 2004, there has to date been no conclusive statement from the publisher vis- à-vis where the portion of the proceeds from the sale of the book ended up. March 30, 2006. 6 I have reworked Trinh's term Woman Native Other (1989) to reflect the specificity of the native author in my study. 7 There was much discussion and activity by community activists in Sydney and Melbourne specifically around the truth claims made within this book after it was published. Communication between individuals and journalists in Jordan and Sydney was established during this period. Individuals in Sydney and Melbourne worked with journalists at Fairfax Press to bring this story to a wider public. Activists in Sydney and Melbourne turned up at public events to challenge Khouri as

65 she promoted her book. In addition to this, many Jordanian readers posted comments on the Amazon.com site contesting the 'truth' of the narrative. 8 The National Jordanian Women's Association and a Jordanian journalist reportedly found 73 mistakes, inaccuracies which were never published in total but only ever alluded to in the media. See Knox, Malcolm. 'The Lies Stripped Bare' Sydney Morning Herald July 24 2004 9 'Honour' crimes are dealt with in Jordan's criminal courts not shari'a courts as asserted by Khouri. For a more detailed analysis of Jordan's legal code, see Sonbol, A.E.A. (2003) Women of Jordan: Islam, Labour and the Law. 10 For a scholarly discussion of this subject, see 'Honour:' Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women (Eds.) Welchman, L. and S. Hossain Spinifex Press 2005. 11 Warner's first sense of public is 'a kind of social totality, organised as the nation, the commonwealth, the city, the state, or some other community. 'This sense of totality is brought out in speaking of the public.' The second sense is that the public can be 'a concrete audience, a crowd witnessing itself in visible space. Such a public also has a sense of totality, bounded by the event or by the shared physical space' (Warner 2002: 49-50). 12 The Arabic language does not add the letter 's' to denote plural. The plural should read sharameet. 13 One doesn't wear the shari'a as repeated by Khouri throughout the book. Shari'a is commonly understood to be the Islamic code of law. It is not a piece of material to be worn. 14 I agree with Yeenolu's conclusion in her mapping of criticism of such terms as colonial discourse when she writes: 'to understand the complexity of colonialism and colonial discourse we need to conceive of it as a network of codes, imageries, signs, and representations which serve as a reference system and function as a regulatory principle that facilitates the recognition of a discourse as colonial' (Yeenolu: 1998: 38). 15 For a discussion on the themes and tactics of Western media in their coverage on Iraq in the late 1990s, see Abunimah, A. and R. Masri's 'The Media's Deadly Spin on Iraq' in Iraq Under Siege Anthony Arnove (ed.) London: Pluto Press 2000; and Derek Gregory's The Colonial Present Blackwell Publishing 2004. 16 The President the United States George Bush delivered the State of the Union Address, asserting that 'Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror … This is a regime that agreed to international inspections, then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world. States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.' Capitol Office of the Press Secretary, January 29 2002, August 16 2004. A dossier of human rights abuses allegedly perpetrated by the Iraqi regime, including torture and rape, was released by the UK Government. Foreign Secretary Jack Straw said the report was needed so "people understand the comprehensive evil that is Saddam Hussein". BBC World News Monday, 2 December, 2002, 20:37 GMTUK. August 27, 2004 Finally, Alexander Downer, in a Statement to Parliament concluded, 'As the Foreign Minister of our great country, I will not be remembered for turning my back on such evil and allowing the spectre of Saddam to haunt future generations. Feb 4 2003

66 August 27, 2004 17 While the Australian government followed the rhetorical lead of Bush and Blair in naming the assault on Iraq as Operation Iraqi Freedom, it is more accurately described as an invasion and occupation. On 18 March 2003, Downer asserted, 'Let me make it clear, we will liberate, not occupy Iraq.' Alexander Downer parliamentary speech, Canberra. August 27, 2004 18 Publications during this period included Behind the Burqa, Zoya' Story: An Afghan Woman's Struggle for Freedom, My Forbidden Face and The Stoning of Soraya. 19 Revenge for the attacks of September 11 were the primary reasons communicated to the global community for the War on Terror. 'The Afghan front of this war was originally launched as an extension of Operation Infinite Reach, and codenamed Operation Infinite Justice' (Gregory 2004: 48). Osama bin Laden, the alleged brains behind the September 11 attacks is believed to be based in Afghanistan supported by the former Taliban, (who had been originally supported by the US Administration and later the Pakistani government). See Gregory, Derek The Colonial Present 2004 pp30-46). 20 Flanders, Laura, ZNet, ‘Beyond the Burqa' Dec 14 2001, August 16 2004 August 16 2004. 21 According to numerous articles and reports, Afghan women are anything but free. See Sevcik, K. 'What Liberation?' July/August 2003 Issue August 16 2004; Zakaria, Y. 'Liberating the Afghan Women' 28 October 2003 August 16 2004; Lopez, M 'Interview with Cynthia Enloe' Spark Magazine Winter/Spring 2002. August 16 2004; Young, C. 'Freedom for Afghan, Iraq Women?' August 9, 2004 August 16, 2004. 22 Khouri addressed the International Women's Day Rally in Brisbane in March 2003. 23 Khouri's lack of 'insider' knowledge about Jordan and her fragmented use of Arabic within the text underscores precisely why her authority as a native Jordanian was questioned by the Arabic communities in Australia and by Jordanian readers. 24 The term 'Arab' in Western popular usage has come to stand for Muslim and Muslim has come to stand for Arab. 25 Kohn, R The Spirit of Things ABC Radio National February 9, 2003 July 25 2004.

67 Chapter 2 Female-Centred Orientalist Literature as Genre and Signifying Practices of Representation

As soon as the word 'genre' is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn. Jacques Derrida, 'The Law of Genre' 1980.

Hypothesis: a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without or less a genre. Every text participates in one or several genres, there is no genreless text; there is always a genre and genres, yet such participation never amounts to belonging. Terry Threadgold, 'Talking About Genre: Ideologies and Incompatible Discourses 1989: 114.

I take both Derrida and Threadgold's points in a spirit of mindfulness as I begin the task of 'conceiving' female-centred Orientalist writing as a distinct genre in the canon of Orientalism. In this chapter, I explore three main areas of inquiry in a further exploration of Forbidden Love to develop the representational terrain within which this text is understood and takes its meaning. In the first section of this chapter, I identify female-centred Orientalist literature as a genre and trace the historical passage of non-fiction texts and the particular features that make this genre coherent. In a further examination of the Western female subject, I argue that contemporary texts within this genre are underscored by a liberal feminist desire to 'know' the Muslim Arab woman through the discursive mode of sexualised and racialised narratives.

In the second section of this chapter, I explore the visual codes that underpin the fetishisation of the veiled Muslim woman by and for the Western liberal

68 feminist subject through an analysis of the representation of the veil on contemporary book covers of this genre. I argue that the political nature of the aesthetic appropriation of the veil on these covers cannot be defined in isolation from the genealogy of representations of Muslim women in Western Orientalist traditions.

Finally, in the third section, I explore the contemporary predicament of representation by dissecting how (Arab) otherness is constituted in Khouri's narrative, arguing that the author strategically mobilises a series of signifying practices and processes to position people, place, culture, and religion in spatial and temporal zones outside the contemporaneous present. This analysis further develops my inquiry into the ideological contexts of Orientalism (as explored in the third section of Chapter One) and how its underpinnings function to produce the sorts of Native Informants who are able to interpellate white feminist rescue fantasies through a representational terrain that is saturated with brown villains. I examine in particular in this section, the narrative devices, motifs and themes embedded in Khouri's text and determine how they acquire their productivity, authority and discursive meaning as artefacts of Western knowledge.

69 2.1 Female-Centred Orientalist Literature as Genre

70 I learned that one of the words for woman, hormah, comes from the same root as the words for both 'holy, sacrosanct', and 'sinful, forbidden'. Geraldine Brooks, Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women 1995: 10.

With a curvy sword and curly shoes A burly robe and several wives to choose In turn abuse, Not Without My Daughter Sally Field crying before she gets slaughtered Black beards, brown eyes Arab guys They the villains with no surprise Iron Sheik, Orientalism 2004: 48.

In the previous chapter, I argued that Forbidden Love was read as truth by its dominant public, its valency coming from the category of non-fiction. I examined the ideological context in which Orientalist texts like Forbidden Love are read and identified the different subjects and publics that this book convened. In unpacking the elements that underwrite this text’s authority as non-fiction, I then strategically moved to situate Forbidden Love as Orientalist realism as both a political gesture and as a way to read texts that authorise their logic through the lens of Orientalist fantasy. My intention is to undermine the purity of the generic categories as they are applied to Orientalist texts like Forbidden Love, and argue for a more critical reading of such texts. I now want to explore the genealogy of these texts. In this chapter, I identify popular female-centred Orientalist literature as a genre of Orientalism linking contemporary texts to the texts written by female Orientalists of the past. In placing this writing in a taxonomy of female Orientalist writing, I identify the particular features that make this genre coherent, and examine how these texts inform and relate to each other. In so doing, I argue further that contemporary texts within this genre are powered

71 by a liberal feminist desire to 'know' the Muslim Arab woman through the domains of racialised and sexualised narratives.

While one of Said's great achievements has been to trace the genealogy of the vastly different genres within the discipline of Orientalism and to analyse both its discursive and material power, theorists (Lowe 1991, Mills 1993, Lewis 1996), have argued that Said's original work lacked a gendered analysis. Lewis points out that '[Western] women did play a part in the textual production that constituted Orientalism, and that gender was integral to the structure of that discourse and individuals' experience of it' (1996: 18). Said addresses the effacement of gender and sexual considerations from his study in Culture and Imperialism (1993), and whilst he does not in any way attempt to regender Orientalism in this later work, theorists like Yeenolu have filled in this lacuna by repositioning sexuality and gender as central to 'developing a critical engagement with [Orientalism] so as to generate useful clues for feminist purposes', rather than providing a gender-conscious supplement to Said's analysis (Yeenolu 1998: 69).

Historians and theorists including Melman (1992), Lewis (1992), Lowe (1991), and Yeenolu (1998) have variously focused on female Orientalist writers and their place in the broader Orientalist canon from the period around the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a period which marks 'the beginnings of modern Orientalism' (Said 1991: 42). This period also crucially marks the beginnings of Western women's writing on the Orient. Historian Billie Melman (1992) maps English female Orientalist writers and memoirists in her study, Women’ s Orients: English Women and the Middle East 1718 -1918, tracking an extensive body of literature from women travellers, celebrated feminists, evangelists and missionaries, ethnographers and archaeologists, as well as from wives of professional Orientalists, who made the region and its people, and in some cases, its women, a focus of their writing.

72 Harem narratives represent the first examples of Western women's Orientalist writing. Lewis traces the production and reception of harem literature, examining the importance of this category as an area of cultural activity available to Western women (2005: 116). She argues that despite it never being a definable genre, the one constant in this category has been its 'authenticating female point of origin' (Lewis 2005: 113). Conversely, in noting that the harem trope was obligatory in colonial French fiction, cultural theorist Emily Apter identifies exoticist écriture féminine as a distinct genre alongside 'romantic orientalism and pseudo-ethnographic littérature coloniale' (1998: 121). Just as Apter identifies exoticist écriture féminine as a genre within French colonial fiction, so I argue here that female-centred Orientalist English literature has had a coherent identity since the beginnings of modern Orientalism and thus represents a distinct genre within the canon.

In collocating female-centred Orientalist literature in generic terms, I draw on the work of key cultural and literary theorists including Mikhail Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, Ralph Cohen and Terry Threadgold in order to determine my approach to this task. Cohen's point in his essay, 'History and Genre' (1986) that 'since each genre is composed of texts that accrue, the grouping is a process, not a determinate category' (1984: 204) is germane to my argument. I want to suggest the idea of a process that links historical texts to contemporary writings rather than arguing for a determinate category. In this way, poststructuralist Jacques Derrida's point that 'as soon as the word "genre" is sounded, as soon as it is heard, as soon as one attempts to conceive it, a limit is drawn' (Derrida, 1980), becomes less a concern precisely because the very nature of process connotes variability, mutability and change. By placing these gendered and racially-inflected writings under the rubric of female- centred Orientalist literature, first and foremost I recognise that there has been a historical tradition of exoticist writings by Western women and that these writings have not been approached as a self-evident generic category, but read as marginal or supplementary to men's Orientalist writings. Theorists like Lewis have further argued that these female narratives can be

73 read as counter-hegemonic because some Western women writers have represented 'Oriental' women and Arabic culture in 'positive' ways. Mikhail Bakhtin argues in his important work, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1984) that 'genre lives in the present, but always remembers its past, its beginning' (1984: 106). My motivation in identifying and connecting this cluster of writings over time is best encapsulated in Terry Threadgold's terms: I aim 'to make "visible" the social construction and transmission of ideologies, power relationships, and social identities' (1989: 109) that this genre convenes and indeed has impelled. Therefore, my objective both here and in my fictional writings is to make sense of the present by remembering the past, and to make visible the intertextual, discursive, historical and political elements of texts that might be placed within the genre I term female-centred Orientalist literature.

I begin with Melman who argues that the culturally most significant feature of historical Western women's writings on the Middle East is that these narratives are eyewitness descriptions (1992: 62). For her part, Lewis notes that the unique selling point of Western women's harem literature was contingent on 'the reliability of the female author as witness to the harem's forbidden domains [and] was indispensable to the successful production, distribution and reception of all harem accounts' (2005: 93) [my italics]. This important point serves not only to ground this cluster of texts within a genre that privileges the female-eyewitness as author, but also to link texts of the past to the texts of today precisely because the authority of the text remains invested in the authenticity of the female narrator as author figure. Threadgold's argument that genres 'involve, always, characteristic ways of "text-making," and characteristic sets of interpersonal relationships and meanings (reader/writer relationships, and positions of power, writer/text orientations)' (1989: 105-106) provides further criteria for generic compatibility. These texts particularly convene gendered publics precisely through modes including subject formation and distinct reader/writer relationships (as I have argued specifically in relation to Khouri in section two

74 of chapter one). The writer/text orientation of the first person (writer-in-the- text) narrative has especially been a stable characteristic of the genre over time and is key to the marketability of these texts.

I will now survey the 'authenticating female point of origin' that constitutes the female writer-in-the-text. Western women have historically performed the role of anthropologist/ethnographer of Middle Eastern women, having had exclusive access to the internal space of Muslim women, a space Western men have not been able to penetrate.1 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu remains one of the most celebrated female Orientalist writers from the early period, having left an extensive corpus of written documentation via her famous Turkish Embassy Letters, 'the first example of a secular account by a [Western] woman, on the Muslim Orient' (Melman 1992: 78).2 As the primary producers of this gendered and racialised knowledge,3 it is Western women who have established the discursive framework, despite the heterogeneity of the genre and recent feminist work arguing that female Orientalists like Montagu provided a counter-discourse to the unity of the male Orientalist world-view.4 The focus of early Western female narratives like Montagu's was traditionally centred on the spatial interior and internal lives of women, in the spheres of domesticity and sexuality. This focus is indexical of early female Orientalists' interests and inquiries; indeed, Melman's study examines the differences in approach to the question of sexuality between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of these Western female writers (1992: 19).

While female–centred Orientalist literature across the expanse of time is by no means homogenous, there are key intertextual features which 'guarantee the unity and uninterrupted continuity' of this genre (Bakhtin 1984: 106). Said's use of Foucault's strategic formation provides a way to analyse 'the relationship between texts and the way in which groups of texts, types of texts, even textual genres, acquire mass, density, and referential power among themselves and thereafter in the culture at large' (1991: 20). Because the valency of Orientalism as a strategic formation comes though the category of

75 non-fiction, authority and authenticity are fundamental to the genre of female-centred Orientalist literature. That is, the authors must in some way be able to demonstrate their authority in terms of inside knowledge or be able to authenticate their credentials via location or positioning. I have argued this in Chapter One in the particular case of Khouri as woman-native-author, and while different positionings and locations are available to the female author, I specifically want to examine how contemporary texts acquire their referential power using the Foucauldian mode of strategic formation in relation to Orientalism.

Today's writer is typically female, but not exclusively Western.5 There are many instances of Western women collaborating with Arab and Muslim women to write out the various stories in the contemporary period from the late 1980s to the present time.6 Princess (1992) remains the most celebrated of the genre with author Jean P. Sasson ventriloquising the Saudi Princess Sultana. Burned Alive (2004) is presented as being written by Souad, in collaboration with Marie-Thérèse Cuny.7 Narrative themes of contemporary female-centred texts vary across the genre, and can be grouped into the categories of romance (marriage/love gone wrong, honour killing), horror stories (sex slavery, forced marriage, forced seclusion, imprisonment, honour killing), personal memoirs and adventure tales ('modern' Western women surviving the 'primitive' Middle East), and escape narratives (focusing on women who experience almost all of the above). The genre has the capacity and flexibility to adapt to contemporary concerns and interests. For example, after September 11 2001, a proliferation of texts about women living under the Taliban saturated the market. On display counters in supermarkets and bookshops, new titles and covers emerged in this period to accommodate the specificities of the Afghan woman, with titles such as Behind the Burqa, Zoya’ s Story: An Afghan Woman’ s Struggle for Freedom, My Forbidden Face, and The Stoning of Soraya.

76 The topos of sexuality has historically been a key discursive theme by which both Western Orientalist women writers and Indigenous Orientalist Native Informants alike have traditionally authorised their representations of Muslim/Middle Eastern women. While both the market and styles of writing have developed and expanded over the passage of time, the enduring sexualised nature of contemporary female-centred Orientalist narratives provides further links to past writings, confirming the point made in different contexts by Bakhtin and Threadgold that genre is reborn and renewed at every stage in the development of literature and is 'not therefore something that pre-exists texts, but something that these texts constantly and continually reconstitute' (Threadgold 1989: 115). I would further argue that because 'genres are not autonomous, objective categories which can be separated from their participation in historical, social and political processes' (Threadgold 1989: 108), these texts can thus be read today as sexualised (neo)colonialist discourse, where the question of sexuality continues to govern and structure the subject's every relation with the other, articulating 'the historical with fantasy, the cultural with sexual, and desire with power' (Yeenolu 1998: 26).

This is particularly evident in the work of more established Orientalist female writers like Geraldine Brooks. The title of Brooks' 1995 book Nine Parts of Desire bears out the Western female Orientalist's continuing preoccupation with Muslim women’ s interior lives. The full Qur'anic quote from which Brooks' title is drawn, states: 'Almighty God created sexual desire in ten parts; then he gave nine parts to women and one to men' (1995). This text in particular was seen as an important text on Muslim women by a white Australian female journalist and attracted wide public attention and institutional support in its promotion in Australia. The second part of the title - The Hidden World of Islamic Women - is idiomatic of not only the genre's enduring fixation with the trope of 'the hidden Islamic woman', but also reflects the genre's strategic articulation of the scopic elements inherent in these sorts of female-centred texts. I will explore these elements in the next section of this chapter.

Brooks provides an instructive tale about how she came to write about Muslim women. Early in her book, Brooks simultaneously cites her frustration at being denied access to the big stories as a journalist in the Middle East on account of her gender – she is unable to cover the same stories as her journalist husband – and her dumbstruck fascination with why Sahar, her newspaper's bureau assistant in Cairo, put on the hijab. These two events converge to provide Brooks with an epiphany when she 'discovers' Sahar, who represents for Brooks access to the far more exotic female world of the Middle East. Brooks puts it in this way: 'For almost a year I fretted at the Middle East's closed doors. Then, thanks to Sahar, I looked up and noticed the window that was open only to me' (Brooks 1995: 7) [my italics]. So Brooks 'start[s] talking to women' (1995: 11), and like many an interested Western woman before her, she is able to mobilise her own gender to provide her with privileged access to the internal spaces of Muslim (both Arab and non-Arab) women. From there, she is able to convert her specular 'knowledge' into cultural commodity, probing every aspect of Muslim women's sexual and private lives including polygamy, sexual intercourse, honour killings, and of course, the veil, to produce a contemporary Western liberal feminist ethnographic text.8

Mohja Kahf’ s study of medieval European male writers' representations of Muslim women demonstrates how 'the sexuality of the Muslim woman is increasingly organised as a scopophilic experience, both voyeuristic and fetishistic' (1999:113). I would argue that 'modern' Orientalist female writers like Brooks and Khouri draw on the same traditions of their medieval male counterparts. As Kahf notes, sexuality has been an important part of the Muslim woman’ s portrayal in European narratives from very early on (Kahf 1999: 113). She writes,

The basic plot of the story of the Muslim woman in medieval [European] texts runs like this: A high-ranking noblewoman becomes attracted to a Christian man imprisoned by her father or husband and aids him in a

78 battle between Christians and Muslims. At the end of the battle, the lady converts, transfers the father’ s or husband’ s treasures to the Christians, embraces a more passive femininity, and becomes part of the European world. (1999: 5)

Not unlike Khouri’ s version in Forbidden Love, this medieval text links the historical with the contemporary. The frames are similar, mobilising stories of love between Muslim (woman) and Christian (man). In both stories, though centuries apart, there is an underlying subtext that inherently negates and attempts to contain Islam, a theme I will explore in the last section in this chapter. What is common to both texts is the mission of liberation and rescue of the Muslim woman through escape, death and/or religious conversion. The contemporary version - Khouri’ s story - goes like this: Muslim woman falls in love with Christian man. Muslim woman's father discovers illicit affair and murders daughter in honour killing.

The theme of honour killing is markedly ubiquitous in contemporary female- centred Orientalist literature as one online reviewer confirms in her description of how she came to read and understand Khouri's story: 'after reading the Princess Trilogy years ago in high school, I was more familiar than most with the idea of honor killings' (Lafayette 2003). This comment recalls Belsey's argument that it is neither possible to ignore the intertextual elements of intelligibility, nor the recognition of similarities and differences between a text and all the other texts that have been read, as it is this 'growing "knowledge" which enables us to identify a story as this story' (Belsey 1988: 21). The intertextuality expressed via this comment is quite explicit, even knowing, with racialised and sexualised subject matter like honour killing being immediately identifiable through and within this genre.

Cultural theorist Alan Nadel goes a step further, arguing that the cogency and ubiquity of such narratives function as truth and reality. This is certainly the case where the subject of honour killing is immediately associated with Islamic and Arabic cultures in the broader economy of political, cultural and

79 social life. The slippages between fact and fiction occur precisely at these sites. Nadel writes:

Repeated at sundry sites, in sundry forms, a group of narratives become cogent, such that their invocation at a specific moment represents credibility. The same narrative alluded to by political speeches, newspaper accounts, stand-up comics, television commercials, and even to some degree fashion magazines, by virtue of its repetition and ubiquity, acquires the familiarity and tacit veracity of a cliché. Vaguely recognizable and tacitly assumed, these narrative clichés comprise a set of loose ''realities''. At any given moment, they are the stories a culture tells itself, as though they were true. (1997: 185)

In the same way, the veil as a signifier of oppression has been mobilised through this genre via the same Orientalist tropings sketched by Nadel. I now want to move on to examine how the veil persists as an immediate and distinctive site of visual intelligibility in this genre.

80 2.2 The Spectacle of Veiled Alterity: Fetishising the Muslim Other

I have argued that the cluster of texts I term female-centred Orientalist literature constitutes a coherent genre through a process of linkages which are both historical and thematic. I now want to explore the visual codes that underpin the fetishisation of the veiled Muslim woman by and for the Western liberal feminist subject in this section. In so doing, I argue that the veil, as a both a racial and sexual signifier is a site of fixation for the Western liberal feminist subject. I examine in particular the aesthetics of visual Orientalism through an analysis of the book covers of this genre, arguing that these representations of veiled alterity are linked historically to the sexual objectification of Middle Eastern women via the visual canon of Orientalism.

The image of the veiled woman is a prominent signifier of how Muslim women have historically been represented in the West. This visual image is ubiquitous in contemporary Western popular culture: it circulates as a sexualised commodity in all its racialised contexts, from the covers of journals, to newspapers, women's magazines, and advertising. Indeed, its banality is perfectly served in an advertisement for the men's product line 'Bijan' where the figure of a woman in a black head covering with dark kohl highlighting her eyes and full pouting lips coloured red looks out at us (Figure 1). On the black of the hijab, the simplicity of white text in lower case reads: women should be quiet, composed, obedient, grateful, modest,

81 respectful, submissive, and very, very serious. (Bijan 1992)

This advertisement illustrates precisely how the image of veiled alterity operates as commodified spectacle. The visual design is at once dramatic in both its up-close immediacy and the fixed glazed-over-gaze of the eroticised female figure. The text translates a stereotype that is at once intelligible in a Western marketplace saturated with this particular form of sexualised otherness. This same aesthetic can easily be found on the cover of a French current affairs magazine alongside a story about Islamists infiltrating the West (L'Express Nov 17-23 1994); in an article about Christian fundamentalism (The Sydney Morning Herald Dec 2 2002); or on a book cover with a title like Princess (1992). My specific focus here is on the covers of contemporary female-centred Orientalist texts like Princess, which mobilise this particular eroticised figure in the marketing of veiled alterity.

Literary theorists Amireh and Majaj perfectly encapsulate the reception of the 'veiled cover girl' in the West where the ' assumptions about the "oppression" suffered by Third World women come together with interest in the "exotic veiled Third World woman" to create an eye-catching image' (2000: 5). While Jean Sasson's Saudi Princess could hardly count as a 'Third World woman', the point here is that in the Western liberal feminist imaginary, the oppression suffered by women belongs in the domain of other cultures and religions, and the veil, for this public, is an intelligible visual signifier of that oppression. Before I explore the significance of this marker of otherness, I will first examine the intertextual elements of this 'eye-catching image' that adorns so many of the covers of this genre.

82 At first glance, within the external space of these book covers, the figure of a woman typically peers out from behind, beneath, or under the narrow slit of a veil. This familiar image works as an immediate mechanism for intertextual density, linking one with the others. Not without My Daughter, Princess and Behind the Veil all utilise the total surface area of the cover to maximise the dramatic element of the veiled female figure (Figure 2). The veil masks the face of the model in all three of these covers, except for the eyes which compel the voyeur to meet the eyes of this figure. Whilst the models are obviously different women, their sameness is over-determined precisely by the lack of variation in how the figure of the veiled woman is represented visually. This idea of homogeneity is at once a signifying practice that underwrites the very structure of Orientalist representations and is perfectly exemplified in the repeated use of two images on a total of five book covers in this genre. In the first cluster, two of these images are by the same author; the third is by the mother of the first two books (Figure 3). In the second example, both books are by two different authors and two different publishers (Figure 4).9 Using exactly the same pictorial representation of the same female figure in the same stylised pose on different titles reflects the importance of intertextuality for this genre, where the symbol of veiled alterity acts as an immediate visual code providing the reader crucially with a familiar language of intelligibility.

In this showcase of book covers, I have discerned four different types of representative modes based on where the gaze of the anonymous veiled female figure is directed. In the first group, to which most covers conform, the model stares directly at the spectator/reader in various modes of expression (Figure 5). Cultural theorist Kobena Mercer discusses the 'direct look' in his acclaimed analysis of racial fetishism using photographs as visual texts. Mercer's work is key to unpacking how visual codes function in both racial and sexual modalities. His argument that a 'direct look … does not so much assert the existence of an autonomous subjectivity, but rather, like the remote, aloof, expressions of fashion models in glossy magazines, emphasises instead maximum distance between the spectator and the unattainable object of

83 desire' (1994: 179). This importantly recognises the role that unattainability plays in the productivity of these images. The second grouping comprises the completely covered female figure, and though the eyes are not visible, the imagined gaze is directed towards the spectator, her total objectification and enclosure ensured by the stasis of what this image has come to mean (Figure 6). In the third grouping, the eyes of the model are downcast (Figure 7), with no eye contact being made with the spectator, effecting passivity and submission, foreclosing any possibilities for spectator interchange or indeed, self-agency. The way Figure 7a in particular is constructed, with only a fragment of the figure's face visible, forces the spectator to engage in a sort of peephole Orientalism, where the visual space is resonant of a keyhole, suggesting visual entry into a forbidden zone. In the fourth cluster, the figure's eyes look upwards (Figure 3), her brow furrowed. Anchored by titles like Sold and Without Mercy, the visual text connotes vulnerability, suggestive of fear and danger. Finally, in the last group, the model's eyes are turned away, though her face remains visible (Figure 4), she makes no eye contact with the spectator: thus she can be looked at without the gaze being returned.

In all these postures, the figure of the Muslim woman is turned into a fragmented object: a head, a set of eyes, the vague outline of a body under a swathe of cloth, the veil - the over-determined site of exotic difference, of gender oppression, of dangerous alterity. The repertoire of visual representations within this genre (Figure 8) is in no way rich in plurality, but that is not the objective here. These texts rely on their close intertextual links, both thematically and visually, thus the formulaic conventionality of the aesthetic is crucial as a marker of immediate intelligibility. Their generic survival depends on it. Scopic activity is an essential aspect in how the spectator is concomitantly able to identify the product at a brand level, and feel interpellated by it. Yeenolu makes the point that 'it is not an exaggeration to say that the body of the veiled Oriental woman is very much in the field of vision; she is the object of a look that turns her into a particular object of fascination and fixation' (1998: 111). It is certainly not an

84 exaggeration when this image is represented in various states of coverage over and over again on the covers of nearly all these books. The icon of Orientalist femininity - the veiled woman – thus becomes the object of both the gaze and the fantasies that these covers solicit. I now want to examine the sexual elements in the reception of this 'exotic' figure.

In examining Nietzsche's playful rhetoric 'supposing truth to be a woman', cultural theorist Madeleine Dobie, argues in her work, Foreign Bodies: Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism (2001) that, in the tradition of Western iconography, 'truth has conventionally been represented by a veiled woman, an allegorical figure that suggests that if the veil is removed, then truth, represented by the unadorned female body, is exposed' (2001: 25). In applying this to Muslim women, Dobie argues that 'in the late seventeenth century, the allegorical figure of truth as a veiled woman became intertwined with ethnographic representations of Oriental women' (2001: 27). By this she means that 'a great many Orientalist representations evince the belief that to unveil the woman is to know her, and to know the woman is to render the entire culture transparent' (Dobie 2001: 27). While this idea is fundamental to understanding Orientalism as a sexualised discourse at one level, Yeenolu’s study goes further in delving into the sexual overtones of the Western preoccupation with the veil and unveiling. She argues that 'the veil is one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetration into the mysteries of the Orient and access to the interiority of the other are fantasmatically achieved' (1998: 39). Being the repository of so much scopic activity, the veil 'attracts the eye, and forces one to think, to speculate what is behind it. It is often represented as some kind of mask, hiding the woman' (Yeenolu 1998: 44). It is this aspect which best articulates how these book covers function. Yeenolu goes on to argue that 'it is through the inscription of the veil as a mask that the [Middle Eastern] woman is turned into an enigma' (1998: 44). The urge to unmask this enigmatic figure thus becomes activated in this specular process. To unveil her then is to know her. Further, 'the project of liberating the Oriental woman through unveiling her is

85 inseparable from the mechanism of a subjectifying gaze that is supported by the desire to know her' (Yeenolu 1998: 110). Yeenolu sees this 'metaphysical will to know gain[ing] a sexual overtone' (1998: 45). This sexual overtone is made explicit in my reading of the titles of books like Unveiling, Lifting the Veil, Unveiled, Behind the Veil, and At the Drop of a Veil, where both the veil as an object and the gesture to unveil become fetishised sites of desire for the Western liberal feminist subject.

By unpacking how cultural/racial and sexual stereotypes function via these images, I want to argue that fetishism is what is at play in the representation of the veiled woman on these book covers, because as Stuart Hall argues in 'The Spectacle of the Other' (2002), 'fetishism takes us into the realm where fantasy intervenes in representation; to the level where what is shown or seen, in representation, can only be understood in relation to what cannot be seen, what cannot be shown' (2002: 266). Hall's account of the fetish in colonial modes of vision can be linked to the critical work of Yeenolu and that of Bhabha, whose work on reading the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism has been similarly influential. Kobena Mercer's particularised reading of fetishism and racial difference is most useful for my analysis because of his careful reading of the visual mode as cultural text in a same sex setting, and in his insistence that sexuality is inseparable from the racialised fetish in the visual mode.

Bhabha's analysis of the racialised and sexualised stereotype in representation foregrounds 'Said's inadequate attention to representation as a concept that articulates the historical and fantasy (as the scene of desire)' (Bhabha 1994: 72). Bhabha seeks to develop this dimension of Said's field of Orientalism 'within the apparatus of colonial power, [and how] the discourses of sexuality and race relate in a process of functional overdetermination' (1994: 74). Yeenolu emphatically argues that sexual and cultural modes of differentiation are constitutive of each, and should be treated as such, rather than as separate domains of analysis (1998: 2). Bhabha, for his part, mobilises

86 fetishism as it has been traditionally constructed as a concept associated with sexual difference in psychoanalysis, and transforms this theoretical mode into a reading of racial difference. In so doing, he moves to demonstrate how the function of the fetish works in the disavowal of racial and cultural difference. I read the image of the veiled Muslim woman as represented on these Orientalist book covers as a fetishistic object for the Western female subject, using Bhabha's cultural formulation and Mercer's precision of the same sex setting.

Feminist theorist Elizabeth Grosz' theorising of fetishism in a female-to- female formulation is immediately useful at this point. While agreeing on the one hand that psychoanalytic orthodoxy dictates female fetishism to be psychically inconceivable, she 'also claims that both "normal" (i.e., heterosexual) femininity and female homosexuality can be seen – in sociopolitical terms – to be in excess of their psychoanalytic descriptions as a form of fetishism' (Grosz 1993: 102). Grosz plays with the orthodox views of psychoanalytic theorists in her exploration of the possibilities for female fetishism, but she also makes an argument for 'how feminist theory may utilise precisely those discourse it wishes - and needs - to subvert in order to secure its own purposes, using them as strategic tools in its own struggles' (1993: 102). I want to strategically harness Grosz' claim in order to argue that female fetishism is indeed possible through an analysis of the fixation on both the veil and the unveiling of the Muslim woman by the Western feminist subject.

I want to take Bhabha's point that 'the functional link between the fixation of the fetish and the stereotype (or the stereotype as fetish)' (Bhabha 1994: 74) to explain how the veiled female figure has been transformed into an object that serves a contemporary Western liberal feminist desire, that is, female–to- female desire, to look and enjoy the fantasy while disavowing it at the same time. The veil thus becomes the fetish object, where the disavowal of cultural difference can be both indulged and denied by the Western liberal feminist

87 subject. I argue this point in terms of fetishism precisely because this form of knowledge allows for 'the possibility of simultaneously embracing two contradictory beliefs, one official and one secret, one archaic and one progressive, one that allows the myth of origins, the other that articulates difference and division' (Bhabha 1994: 80). This doubled view underpins the 'I know … but' optic of Western liberal feminism where the self-valorising subject can claim cultural and moral superiority while concomitantly fixing the veiled Muslim woman as her subordinated object of desire.

I now want to adapt and extend Kobena Mercer's account of racial fetishism to my analysis. Mercer provides a nuanced critique of how the object of fetish is made productive through the 'frisson of (homo)sexual sameness transfer[ring] erotic investment in the fantasy of mastery from gender to racial difference' (1994: 176). Mercer's specific focus is on the white homosexual male gaze and spectatorial desire for the black male body. My analysis is concerned with the frisson of sexual sameness in relation to women, and like Mercer, my starting point is 'the fact that both subject and object of the gaze' are the same sex (1994: 176) [my italics]. I am less concerned with the sexual preferences of the spectator, but rather, I am interested in what Mercer terms as the 'essence' of identity for the spectator. In my reading then, the 'essence' of Muslim female identity is fixed in the domain of sexuality for the Western liberal feminist (Mercer 1994: 174).

Mercer's analysis provides for a critical reading via the slippage of gender and (homo)sexual desire: the subject in my analysis is the Western liberal feminist whose gaze is fixed on the veiled Muslim female object. I contend that the feminist gaze operates under Mercer's rubric of mastery and authority, crucial elements in the fetishistic formation. However, in place of 'the glossy fetishised sheen of black skin' in Mapplethorpe's shots, it is the fabric of the veil (and thus the preoccupation with what lies under) that is my specific focus here, its texture which 'serves and services' a Western female desire 'to look and enjoy the fantasy of mastery precisely through the scopic

88 intensity that the pictures solicit' (Mercer 1994: 176). These images of female veiled alterity are contemporary examples of the scopic traditions of Orientalism, most especially the historical eroticisation of Middle Eastern women via visual representations of the harem. The harem, like the veil, has been a most popular site of visual depiction precisely because of the sexual connotations that have traditionally been associated with both in the Orientalist aesthetic imaginary. Apter argues that the harem trope loomed large in Europe's phantasms as an archaic erotic idea, recognisable for centuries as a distinctive locus sexualis (Apter 1998: 120). As Apter affirms, '[i]n full-dress pictures of the harem in the nineteenth century (Delacroix, Ingres, Gérôme, Alma-Tadema), it was as if the unconscious secreted itself into spatial and material form' (Apter 1998: 119). This 'material form' is now fixed on contemporary book covers and in advertisements, where the women as figures are represented in isolated ways as opposed to the former tradition of the collective sexualisation of women in the harem painting.

I argue here that the racial fetishisation of the veiled Muslim woman by and for the Western liberal feminist subject operates in a similar way to Mercer's analysis of white male desire for the black male body. I argue that the veil operates in this schema as a both a racial and sexual signifier, as a site of fixation and disavowal for the Western liberal feminist subject. The fetishistic modes of representation on the books covers of female-centred literature thus both serve and service the Western female desire to look and enjoy the fantasy of mastery, linking this feminised form of racial fetishism to the historical sexual objectification of Middle Eastern women via the visual canon of Orientalism.

On contemporary book covers like Forbidden Love and Princess, it is the photographic figure of the lone female who peers out in the field of vision. Mercer describes this strategic isolation as 'an imprint of a narcissistic, ego- centred, sexualising fantasy', which is 'a crucial component in the process of erotic objectification … because the solo frame is the precondition for a

89 voyeuristic fantasy of unmediated and unilateral control over the other' (1994: 177). This, as Mercer goes on to argue, is a function 'it performs precisely in gay and straight pornography, whereby the appetite of the imperial eye may feed, each image thus nourishes the racialised and sexual fantasy of appropriating the Other's body' (1994: 177). Cultural theorist Ali Behdad, provides a particular account of Orientalist fetishism and how the fetishistic (male) traveller (Flaubert) buys locks of an Oriental woman's hair and underwear as souvenirs to feel in possession of her body. Behdad argues that, 'this kind of appropriation implies dispossession, for the fetishist clearly knows that what [she] possesses is a mere substitute for what she cannot have' (1994: 61). In this knowledge, where the subject is unable to possess the whole of the Other, 'the fetishist derives [her] pleasure from appropriating part of it' (Behdad 1994: 61). He argues that these fragmentary objects act as substitutes for a part of the whole and thus 'the metonymic structure of the souvenir makes it a kind of fetish, for the substituted object is overvalued to the point of replacing the whole' (Behdad 1994: 61). The idea of the fragment as substitution for something that the subject cannot have is fundamental to the very conception of the fetish. I read the head of the veiled woman in these pictures in Behdad's terms, that is, as a fragment of the whole. The overvaluing of the veil has thus produced a desire within the Western liberal feminist subject to possess the Muslim woman, to appropriate her, to unveil her. In this economy, like Flaubert’s lock of hair and underwear, the veil becomes the commodity fetish for the Western liberal feminist.

In his argument that Mapplethorpe’ s pictures function as pornography, Mercer highlights the absolute mastery over the image underlining how the subject's power is made productive. Similarly, I argue that the Western liberal feminist desire to unveil the veiled woman highlights her power and mastery over the body of this objectified woman. I situate this desire to unveil as pornography precisely because both the political and sexual agency of the veiled female figure is taken away by the all-powerful subject-voyeur. My use of the term pornography here is political. As Mc Nair argues, ' [t]he history of

90 pornography’s emergence as a cultural category, and subsequent efforts to formulate a serviceable definition of it, show above all that the term is political in the broadest sense' (1996: 56). I deploy this term in both the strictly political sense and also in the traditional understanding that pornography is about power, violence, domination and lack of choice. I read the liberal feminist desire to strip the Muslim woman’s veil from her body as an act of metaphorical violence because it is the liberal feminist as all-powerful subject who takes away the very premise of choice in her desire, her will to unveil the Muslim woman against her will. The Western liberal feminist gesture is not neutral but enacts a will to power, and reflects her very dominance over the veiled female other. Further to this, discourses within both Western liberal feminism and colonial feminism argue emphatically that to unveil the Muslim woman is to liberate her. Thus the modern Western liberal feminist is able to conceive of this fantasy in political terms, that is, through the mission of gender liberation. In this way, she is able to strategically avoid the pornographic dimensions of her own desires.

I situate these fantasies in the realm of pornography in the historical canon of Orientalist representations, not only because of their links to the topos of racialised sexuality as it is most commonly depicted via the harem, but also because as Apter points out, '[a]cademics, painters and pornographers (whose work was often indistinguishable) exploited the harem for every possible venue of erotic fantasy' (Apter 1998: 125). In the same way, the image of the veiled woman as an object is exploited in every possibly way as a commodity fetish to sell magazines, narratives and products, her agency reduced to the demands of the market. The image is connected to all 'the features of orientalist eroticism: the stylisation … the scopic pleasure … the desire for domination, the objectification of the women' (Behdad 1994: 69). This fetishising of the veiled Muslim woman is made further productive via a sexualised language that speaks of penetrating the Orient via the women. As McNair notes, 'pornography' signifies '(a) a particular content with (b) an intention to produce (c) a particular kind of effect (its content is sex)' (1996: 45). In other words, 'pornography can refer to representations in which sexual penetration is

91 connoted; in which sexual activity is merely implied, rather than shown' (McNair 1996: 46).

I want to conclude this section with a final reading of the cover of the book that brought me to this analysis in the first place (Figure 9). The heavily kohled eyes of a veiled female figure meet those of the reader-spectator on the Australian cover of Forbidden Love. Her hand appears blurred as if in the performative mode of removing her veil. But equally, she could be putting the veil (back) on. In this posture, she is neither fully revealed, nor is she fully covered, her in-betweenness frozen in perpetuity. Ambiguity thus surrounds this anonymous figure as to whether she is acquiescing to the desires (and demands) of the Western liberal feminist subject and therefore her dominant (Western) public to unveil, to remove her mask, to be appropriated, to be known, to be possessed. Or has she been captured putting her veil-mask back on, having taken it off in a zone that is not immediately visible? Represented in this way on a book titled Forbidden Love, this figure is no longer the anonymous model of veiled alterity, she becomes Dalia, the victim in this sorry saga (both narratively and visually). As a character, her agency is controlled by Khouri who speaks for her and authorises her unveiling. In so doing, Khouri both serves and services the fantasies and desires of the Western female subject at the expense of this silenced and visually compromised figured.

I read this cover as an exemplary model of the visual effectivity that this genre of female-centred Orientalist literature is able to produce through an articulation of sexualised and racialised otherness. It is fetishistic precisely in its characterisation of ambiguity and ambivalence. It is pornography because as a venue of sexual fantasy, this image validates the mastery and authority of the subject-voyeur over and above the political and sexual agency of this woman. Finally, I read the gesture to unveil alterity in the public space as pornography, precisely because the desire to do so is enacted in the public space. Mercer's point that 'because the erotic and aesthetic idealisation is so

92 totalising in its effect, the text reveals more about the desires of the hidden and invisible white [female] subject … than it does about the anonymous [Muslim woman]' (1994: 175) is reflective of how the voyeuristic fantasies of the Western liberal feminist subject trap the 'Muslim woman' in a state of sexual stasis. I now want to return to the pages of Forbidden Love and examine the signifying practices of representation that situate the Arab frozen in the desert.

93 2.3 Frozen in the Desert: the Contemporary Predicament of the Arab as an Object of Representation

How remarkable romance is in an Islamic country, it occurred to me. Norma Khouri, Forbidden Love 2003: 101.

Yeenolu offers an insightful critique on the limits of key theorisations of colonial discourse most especially around the question of sexuality. Though Bhabha does attempt this task in his essay 'The Other Question: Stereotype, discrimination and the discourse of colonialism' (1994),10 Yeenolu argues that Said’ s reluctance to engage with Orientalism through psychoanalytic categories has an inhibiting effect on his pioneering analysis.11 For one, she argues that it prevents him from fully demonstrating 'the inextricable link between the process of understanding, of knowing the other cultures, and the unconscious and sexual dimensions involved in this process' (1998: 25). Yeenolu 's criticism that 'the utilisation of images of women and images of sexuality in Orientalist discourse is treated as a trope limited to the representation, without being understood as an important aspect in the way Orientalist discourse is structured' (1998: 25) is relevant to my argument in this section as I examine how otherness is constituted in Khouri's narrative. I argue that the author strategically mobilises a series of signifying practices and processes to position people, place, culture, religion in spatial and temporal zones, freezing them outside the contemporaneous present. I examine in particular, the narrative devices, motifs and themes embedded in Khouri's text and determine how they acquire their productivity, authority and discursive meaning as artefacts of Western knowledge. I argue that the discourse on honour killings, as it is represented in Forbidden Love, is a sexualised colonial discourse in that the productive meaning of the text is contingent on conceptualising otherness through Arab Muslim women's sexuality and Arab Muslim masculinity.

I want to begin this task by analysing how Khouri primitivises the Middle East through the zones of time and space. Anthropologist Johannes Fabian investigates how anthropology makes its object by examining 'the role of time – time passing, time experienced, time conceptualised – in the production and communication of anthropological knowledge' (1991: 225). Fabian calls the practice of positioning the other in a time outside the present 'temporal distancing and the discourse built on such distancing allochronic' (1991: 226). Fabian's work provides a template to understanding how the strategy of distancing the other from the modern present is most productive in 'defin[ing] the unequal relation of self and other' (Behdad 1994: 6), and works to push the other back in time by using terms such as 'primitive', 'backward', and 'traditional' (Yeenolu 1998: 96). By mobilising this strategy of temporal distancing, the author–subject is able to freeze the other in the past and therefore in a state of immutability, thus denying the object agency and contemporaneity. As argued in the previous chapter, like the fetishistic freezing of the veiled woman on book covers, this device functions similarly to situate the Western subject in a position of authority and mastery over the object.

Said makes mention of how the notion of the primitive is made productive in the texts of European Orientalists, including T.E. Lawrence, whose writings convey the idea that Arabs possess an essentially 'un-self-conscious primitive simplicity' (1991: 230). He argues that 'primitiveness inhered in the Orient, [therefore] was the Orient, an idea to which anyone dealing with or writing about the Orient had to return, as if a touchstone outlasting time or experience' (1991: 271). Both Said and Fabian's points are amplified in how the narrative structure of Forbidden Love is construed around the fetishisation of the primitive through stereotypic characterisations of the desert, Arabic and Islamic culture.

95 Michael Hanchard provides a further exploration of this phenomenon in his study on the encounters between people of African descent and the West and questions of space, temporality, and modernity, slavery and culture. (2001). Hanchard calls the temporal disjunctures that are conceived and constructed for African and African-derived peoples as 'racial time', defining this as 'the inequalities of temporality that result from power relations between racially dominant and subordinate groups' (2001: 280). Hanchard identifies that such unequal relationships produce 'unequal temporal access to institutions, goods, services, resources, power, and knowledge, which members of both groups recognise' (2001: 280). In the same way Hanchard appeals to understanding 'the meanings of race against the canvas of space, time, and history' (2001:281), I now want to examine how Khouri makes use of distinct temporal modalities in her book Forbidden Love in order to make sense of racial time as it applies to Arabs and modernity.

Khouri’ s four-page prologue is a contemporary study in how the strategy of temporal distancing is mobilised to reproduce static anthropological ideas about people, place and culture. The author's two main moves are to juxtapose the past and the present in a series of dualistic oppositions, and then to push the Arab/Muslim back in time through a series of familiar tropes. Mobilising the 'modern/primitive' and 'civilised/uncivilised' colonialist framework, Khouri makes these binary oppositions work where 'one term is given a positive value, which thus constructs an 'other' or negative of itself which signifies everything that it does not accept' (Yeenolu 1998: 7). On page three, Khouri invites the reader to:

Spend a day in Wadi Rum exploring the Nabateen and Thamudic cave drawings with the Bedouins, barter for their jangling jewellery or share tea in their goat-hair tents, and you’ ll feel as if you’ ve gone back in time. (Khouri 2003: 3)

Behdad notes that, in addressing the Western subject in the modern present, 'the use of [this] tense is indicative of the way the [text] claims the realisation

96 of its reader's fantasy as an immediate and possible reality' (Behdad 1994: 42).12 The moment of identity for the modern Western subject is the 'here and now', and the Arab as material other is locked in the spatial zone of the cave of the ancient past. Khouri further reinforces this sense of temporal distance by linking the spatial zone of Jordan with its civilisational pasts and ancient periods in the opening pages of the text citing 'the Roman Pillars of Jerash, the Nabateen temples of Petra, the Byzantine mosaics of Madaba, ... the baptismal site of Christ' (2). Behdad argues that this sort of historical knowledge is provided 'to situate the Orient in its irretrievable past' (1994: 39). It is precisely in the irretrievability of the past that Khouri anchors her objects, rendering both the (Middle) East and its civilisational present outside the possibilities of modernity.

Yeenolu contends that 'the essential difference between the [Middle] East and West is premised on this temporal lag. Such societies are by definition deemed "stagnant"; their temporality and dynamism are not understood to be simply different' (1998: 98). Khouri's Middle East is discursively construed as exceptional through statements like, 'Jordan is one of the very few counties where the present and past live in tense and dynamic co-existence' (3). This statement thus sets the tone for the inevitable tension between the past and present that is to be played out through the spectre of place (Middle East/ West), culture (tradition/modernity) and gender relations (Arab Muslim patriarchy/Western liberal feminism).

Khouri immediately sets her model for progress as late capitalist modernisation where the accoutrements of information technology have come to mean everything. She writes:

Amman did progress dramatically in the final decade of the twentieth century. New hotels and banks sprang up on virtually every city street; computers equipped with the latest technology were installed in offices and homes everywhere, linking Jordanians to the larger world. Cell phones, pagers, and portable faxes are now as common as a pair of sunglasses.13 (2003: 3)

While the claim that Jordan's dramatic conversion to modernisation occurred only in the last decade of the twentieth century might seem questionable in itself, it is further intensified by the first line of the next paragraph: 'yet a few hours drive from this modern metropolis is a world that existed before Christ' (3). Khouri repeats this manoeuvre throughout the prologue setting up the possibilities for contemporaneity, then destabilising them by pushing the object further and further backwards. For example: '[Jordan] is a country that unfurls banners of welcome to the future, yet holds tenaciously to its ancient roots and traditions' (3); 'Jordan swaggers with pride at being a modern technologically advanced and rapidly democratising nation … [b]ut the process is often awkward and outdated' (2); and, 'in a country that boasts of its modernity, a woman's decisions are still made by men' (4). I will return to this mobilising of gender relations later in this section, but first want to examine the specifics of the desert imagery that underwrites the narrative structure of the text.

Khouri's use of the desert motif is at once familiar in the Orientalist imaginary. She conceives Jordan as, '[m]odern on the surface, it is an unforgiving desert whose oases have blossomed into cities' (1). This description is important because as Behdad argues, 'the description of the landscape functions as a set of stage directions for the imaginative enactment by the reader' (1994: 42). Thus the reader is able to imagine the space visually as well as conceive of it in the familiar terms that are intelligible to a Western public. The desert is an especially vivid metaphor in the Orientalist imaginary as it has been constructed as being the traditional spatial zone of the Arab world, despite most of the Arab populace living in non-desert environments. This zone remains the repository for a richly imaginative sand scape of fantasies, fears and desires for the Western subject. This kind of Orientalist knowledge has been made discursively productive via the tomes of Orientalist writings by colonialists, adventurers, historians, anthropologists, evangelists and explorers making their redemptive pilgrimages, their

98 missions, their treks and desert odysseys variously to find themselves, to mark out their presence, to locate the authentic Arab.14

Through the lexicon of the desert, Khouri is thus able to materialise everything about the Arab that is 'known' in the popular Orientalist conception; the desert is a site of failed civilisation, a barren and lifeless environment, a place of deadly peril. Khouri repetitiously mobilises the desert metaphor in precisely these frames providing impetus for Said's point that, 'no Semite could ever shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe' (1991: 234). She writes variously of 'desert whispers', 'unforgiving desert', 'blowing in from the desert', 'calling back to the desert', 'desert laws', 'men of the desert’, 'as pervasive as a desert storm', and 'desert dwellers', with many more instances cited throughout the book. Even when Khouri is 'many thousands of miles' from Jordan, she 'still hear[s] the same whispers from the desert that [her] brothers hear' (205).

While the material productivity of the desert metaphor is clear, it is the submerged meanings at work that I now want to briefly explore. Said describes latent Orientalism,15 as being 'an almost unconscious (and certainly untouchable positivity)' (1991: 206). It is this sense which anchors the metaphor to a 'site where images, desires, fantasies and fears reside' (Yeenolu 1998: 23). Khouri's desert metaphor thus does a particular kind of work. So when she conceives the desert as a threat to the metropolis, modernity is being threatened here too. She describes how 'the desert drifts up to the city's boundaries' (2), making the unconscious threat possible: '[l]ike the sand that coats the streets after a wind storm, the Bedouin code is always encroaching on its urban streets'(2). Khouri describes the Bedouin code as 'fierce and primitive, permeat[ing] my family's neighbourhood in Amman' (2). Clearly it is the Bedouin, 'dense-packed and tight-knit as a nomadic camp and filled with descendants of the original tribes' (2) who represents the threat. Like the insidious sands of the encroaching desert, the Bedouin Arab is invested with the symbolism of the barbarians at the gate. Conceptualised as

99 the other in this way, the Bedouin thus represents a threat to modernity; 'its fierce and primitive code' becomes a logical threat to progress itself. Because modernity and progress 'belong' to the West, I read this idea of threat in a contemporary political context. Khouri's strategic use of words like 'encroaching', and 'permeates' materialises the threat into a language that is both intelligible and familiar in the West, vis-à-vis paranoia about the creeping revivalism of Islam across the globe, especially in a post-September 11 world. This metaphor becomes intelligible precisely because of the pervasiveness of the language of this discourse about Islam and Arabs in the different domains of representation throughout Western culture and thought. Intelligibility is crucial here, because representing the Arab world as a site of backwardness and arrested development, conceptualising Islam as a creeping threat to secular modernity, enables Khouri's stereotypes to work effectively in the reception environment. It enables her story to be read as common sense and her characterisations to be understood in the terms of what is already known and familiar.

Bhabha argues that the stereotype, as a major discursive strategy of colonial discourse, is a 'form of knowledge and identification that vacillates between what is already "in place," already known, and something that must be anxiously repeated' (1994: 66). Rather than simply identifying images as positive or negative, which implies assessing them on the basis of some political normativity, he argues that to understand the productivity of colonial power, it is crucial to construct its regime of truth, not to subject its representations to a normalising judgement (1994: 67). Following this line, while I am unconcerned with subjecting Khouri’ s representations to a 'normalising judgement', I do aim to uncover their productivity and to show how the Orientalist's regime of truth is established. To do so, I will now focus on how the discourse of Islam is conceptualised through a sexualised and gendered framework in Forbidden Love.

100 Feminist theorist Mohja Kahf identifies, in her essay on the reception environment that shapes the writing by and about Arab and Muslim women in the West, a typology using conventions that emerge from the long history of Western stereotypes about the Arab peoples and Islamic religion. Kahf identifies that 'these conventions take shape today in three stereotypes about Arab women'. One is that she is a victim of gender oppression; the second portrays her as an escapee of her intrinsically oppressive culture; and the third represents her as a pawn of Arab male power' (2000: 149). Khouri mobilises all three of these conventions in Forbidden Love through the representations of Dalia (victim of gender oppression), herself (escapee from oppressive culture) and Arab mothers (pawns of Arab male power). She writes: 'Arab mothers, like all mothers of daughters, did their job by training us to live in an unsympathetic, protected, male-dominated world' (19). While these sexual and cultural representations of Arab/Muslim women are intended to suppress women's agency in texts of this kind, my aim here is to scrutinise the representation of Islam in this text.

In dedicating an entire chapter to Islam, Khouri might have subtitled this section Understanding Islam: a Guide for Westerners,16 as she departs from her narrative realism to provide thirteen pages of an ethnographic snapshot of Islamic ritual, law and culture, framed strictly in (neo)colonial feminist terms. The opening paragraph of this chapter announces:

Violence is embodied in our [Jordanian] laws, and in our [Jordanian] history. It applies to warriors in battle, to perceived enemies of Islam, to Muslims who try to escape the faith, and, above all, it applies to women. (2003:59)

It is thus through the metonymic association between Islam and women that Khouri applies the colonial feminist blowtorch. Khouri's discourse on Islam is structured in totalising terms that equate Islam with the oppression and mistreatment of women. Within this totalising structure, Khouri leaves no room for Muslim women's agency (or men’ s for that matter) outside what

101 Ahmed calls 'the standard colonial feminist practice' that posits 'the notion that an intrinsic connection exist[s] between the issues of culture and the status of women, and in particular that progress for women [can] be achieved only through abandoning the native culture' (1992: 244). Indeed, the discursive strategies at work in Khouri's colonial problematising of gender relations function not only to totalise Arabic culture and Islam, but to conflate Islam variously with Arabic culture, Bedouin ethnic codes, and regional practices to explain the status and treatment of Arab women.

The gendered subalterns are thus held hostage to the familiar tropes of (neo)colonial feminism, the veil, gender segregation and honour killing. Progress is measured by the standard Western conceptions of dress where 'modern' girls with slim legs exposed to the knee sip espresso and smoke in city cafés' while 'envious young women in veils' (2-3) look on; and with 'women … who look liberated like me, in my loose skirts and trousers, and my hair swinging free of the veil' (4), and 'the women who have the freedoms and privileges come from very wealthy and modern families (3).17 These examples condense all that Islam has come to mean in the (neo)colonialist Orientalist imaginary. Ahmed's argument that in the Victorian era, 'the new colonial discourse of Islam centred on women', is resonant in the contemporary era of (neo)colonial discourse, which continues to prescribe Islam as 'innately and immutably oppressive to women' (1992: 152). Khouri mobilises the veil and gender segregation in precisely this way, describing non-veiled women as 'modern' and 'liberated', privileging narrow Western conceptions of progress, and reducing female liberation and feminist agency to the spectre of dress.

While the veil remains the iconic symbol of the Muslim woman's outward oppression in Khouri's text, it is the discursive linking of the practice of honour killing to Islam that provides the narrative with its fundamental trope. Having already established Jordan and its inhabitants, the Bedouin Arabs, outside the modern present, Khouri once again applies an allochronic

102 discourse to situate the practice of honour killings in the temporal zone of the primitive. She writes: 'to Westerners, honour killings are seen as anachronistic, scarcely believable, anthropological phenomenon that continues only in a few rare, isolated, still primitive pockets – like head- hunting in New Guinea' (196). In citing a case gleaned from the web, Khouri describes the woman in question as coming 'from a primitive village in the "barren north-west" of Pakistan' (196). In so doing, Khouri situates this practice in the domain of 'these backward desolate cultures' (196), and not in the contemporaneous spectrum of male violence against women. 18

Activist and feminist scholar, Purna Sen has defined the terms within which 'honour killing' as a term operates in contemporary discourse. In her essay, 'Crimes of Honour', she writes that 'the term honour killings is more widely known at the start of this century than in the previous decade and such killings are increasingly cast as emblematic of the problematic nature of one religion – Islam – and its treatment of women' (Sen 2005: 42). Sen contends that, 'in the post- September 11 climate, some Western concerns with honour killings so closely overlap the anti-terror discourse through exactly this recourse to almost knee-jerk condemnation of Islam' (2005: 42). Khouri's problematising of gender relations through this linking of Islam to honour killings bears out Sen's argument that the issue 'is in danger of being deeply mired in Islamophobic potential' (2005: 42). So when Khouri conceives of Islam as 'a religion founded by vicious warriors, and scarred by centuries of bloodshed, [with] endorsements of violence' (60), it is therein possible to argue that her language necessarily participates in the racialised discourse that is a feature of this form of violence against women.

Despite an inept attempt by Khouri to historicise the practice within the text, the terms of the discourse remain definitive via a quote from the Qur'an, grounding the claim that honour killings have their basis in 'Islam's holy book' (59). Khouri insistently returns to Islam as the primary site of blame (despite slippage throughout the text where the author variously switches the

103 site of blame for honour killings from Islam to Arabic culture, and then onto pre-Islamic codes), arguing that 'since most Arabic countries have been under Islamic law since AD 644, honour killing is no longer considered just an Islamic practice. It has been incorporated into Arab culture and is practised by both Christians and Muslims' (60), thus further blurring the distinctions between culture and religion, erasing the histories of peoples and the waves of colonialism in the region, and influences and impacts that empires have had on the evolution of culture, law and tradition, as well as changes and movements from within.

Khouri again undermines her claim that Islam is a totalising influence on Arab culture with the statement that, '[h]onour killings have been an accepted part of Jordanian culture since the beginning of human record' (195). Forgetting that Jordan only became an entity in 1946, and Islam entered the world officially in 644 AD, the author then informs us that 'the code of honour killings has its roots in the Hammurabi and Assyrian laws from 1200BC' (196). In the same section, Khouri has brought us back to the contemporary zone in her claims that this practice is most common in Jordan and among Palestinians, blaming 'ethnic Bedouin tradition' (195), which she adds, 'is still as pervasive as a desert sandstorm in even urbanised Arab families' (195), and further, 'these laws … are common to all Arabs of the region, of whatever faith' (196). The discursive strategies at work here function to essentialise Arabs and Muslims from the beginning of time, despite the complexities of Middle Eastern histories, and to reduce that complexity to a narrow spatial zone that posits people (others) and culture (tradition) in a state of immutability untouched by social and political change. In her shambolic attempt at inscribing honour killings into the very fabric of Arabic and Islamic societies, Khouri 'convert[s] instances of civilisation into ideal bearers of its own [supposed] values, ideas, and positions' (Said 1991: 252), subordinating both religion and culture 'to an essentialist, idealist conception' (Said 1991: 246) By strategically describing Jordan as the 'beating geographic heart of the Arab world' (2), Khouri thus completes her totalising project. This totalising is

104 made further possible through declarative statements throughout the text, including, 'like life in all Muslim homes' (11), 'it was a universal Arab creed (21), 'the taboos taught to all of us in an Arabic culture' (205), 'these laws are common to all Arabs' (196), and 'all Arab men are taught that…’ (31) [my italics]. As Yeenolu argues, it is precisely 'through such essentialising claims that the Arab world and Islam are Orientalised' (1998: 17).

I have argued that colonial feminist discourse on Islam is structured around the spectre of gender, in particular around the treatment of women via the narrow conceptions of dress. Moving on from a focus on how the practice of honour killing has strategically been linked to Islam, I now want to explore the very thematic foundations of colonial feminist discourse as sexualised Orientalist discourse. 's refusal to marginalise questions of sexuality and gender to a sub-domain of colonial discourse, but rather to reposition sexualised difference as central to understanding how Orientalist discourse is constitutively structured is instructive in the various ways gender is mobilised in Forbidden Love. In this framework, it is Arab / Muslim women's sexuality and Arab/ Muslim masculinities which become the fetishised sites of difference and serves to reaffirm the case for reading the racial stereotype of colonial discourse in terms of fetishism.

The characterisation of violent masculinity in Khouri's text comes via the Arab Muslim males, Dalia's brothers and father. The embodiment of a feminised masculinity comes through the non-Muslim lover of Dalia, who, like the Khouri, is Catholic. Dalia's brother's name is Mohammed and her father is Mahmood, a derivative of Mohammed. Therefore, the essentialised violent Arab male is called Mohammed, a name he shares with the revered Prophet of the Islamic faith, a pre-eminent Islamic name for males. Mohammed the brother is characterised as the violent controlling misogynist version of the Arab male, who polices his sister Dalia's sexual and social behaviour. Immediately after speaking about Dalia's brother, Khouri claims, '[w]e can blame the violence that has been part of the Islamic culture for

105 nearly fourteen hundred years at the feet of another Mohammed' (60). By this she is referring to the Prophet. Khouri speaks of 'Mohammed–free moments' (21). The name Mohammed thus functions in Khouri's text to bring together the diverse but always violent identities of Arab masculinity.

Conversely, Michael the lover is constructed as the exceptional Arab, a feminised version of 'Arab Man', emptied of his violent masculinity. His name is non-Islamic and he is thus at once de-Arabised in accordance with popular Western conceptions about Arabs, ethnicity and religion. Michael is characterised as being caring and sensitive, as opposed to Mohammed the brutish brother. Dalia describes Michael as 'different… he makes me feel special, beautiful, and smart. He respects me, and cares about my wants, needs, and thoughts. He's not like my brother or my father' (94). Khouri responds to Dalia with, 'I hope someday I can find someone who treats me the way Michael treats you' (94). The real point Khouri is making here is in Dalia's response. From Muslim Arab woman to Christian Arab woman, Dalia insists that Norma's success in finding such a man is contingent on 'mak[ing] sure that he's spent a lot of time outside a Muslim country [and trying] to find someone from one of the countries Michael's been to. He obviously learned those things there' (95). This representation of the Westernised non-Muslim Arab male subject as enlightened feminist in no way reduces his masculinity in that Khouri invests him with masculine agency via his occupation, as an army major in the Royal Guard (16). These representations reinforce Western liberal feminist anxieties about Muslim men at large and thus become emblematic of popular Western feminist representations of Arab men. Investing the Arab male with a capacity to be 'human' outside a Muslim country, works to provide non-Muslim men with feminist capital. This dichotomy not only functions to masculinise Muslim men in the most violent of ways, but serves to erase a history of gender and sexual violence, and misogyny of non-Muslim men both within the Islamic world and outside it. The executive power of this system of reference, as Said cogently argues, 'by which each discrete instance of real behaviour could be reduced down and

106 back to a small number of explanatory "original categories"' (1991:234) enables Khouri to reduce Arab Muslim men as a group to a violent and misogynist tribe, and non-Muslim (Arab) men as their enlightened opposites.

Reducing male violence and control over women to the site of religion (Islam) elides non-Muslim men's history and culture of violence both at home and abroad in the continuum of imperial activity. It makes invisible non-Muslim male privilege and power, particularly the hegemonic hold non-Muslim men wield in the overwhelmingly violent, racist and misogynistic West. It erases how Western articulations of masculinity and patriarchalism in all their violent formations maintain control over the state and thus the majority of women's lives.

In conclusion, to revisit Khouri's assertion that the Bedouin code 'is always nagging at men's instincts, reminding them that under the Westernising veneer, they are all still Arabs' (2), is to define the very predicament that Said offers: that 'no Semite could ever shake loose the pastoral, desert environment of his tent and tribe' (1991: 234). Fabian suggests that '[s]uccessful communication demands that we share time, that we are coeval' (1991: 226). This idea seems as remote as releasing the figure of the Arab from the confines of the desert, given the hegemonic hold that popular Orientalist literature and logic continue to have in the Western spheres of publishing, authorship and readership. I now want to move to further investigate the links between Orientalist practices and male racialisation through an analysis of Australian media texts covering a highly publicised rape case.

107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 1 Whilst Western men have predominated in the visual sphere of Orientalist painting in representing the harem, Western women's written accounts of the harem have often been the source of men's. 2 Montagu's letters are the subject of much feminist analysis. See Melman (1992), Lowe (1991), Lewis (1996), and Yeenolu (1998). 3 Lewis identifies the emergence of Ottoman women writers who began to present Western audiences with their own accounts of segregated life in the harem during the late nineteenth century. Lewis argues that these accounts operated as 'a counter- discourse contesting Orientalist knowledge through an adept manipulation of Western cultural codes not normally attributed to the presumed to be silenced Orientalised woman' (Lewis 2005: 96). 4 For a thorough discussion of critiques of Said's totalising conception of Orientalism, see Mills, Lowe and Lewis. Yeenolu (1998) critiques these feminist positions. 5 Lewis identifies the emergence of Ottoman women writers who began to present Western audiences with their own accounts of segregated life in the harem during the late nineteenth century. Khouri is the latest in a long line of Native Informants. Lewis argues that these accounts operated as 'a counter-discourse contesting Orientalist knowledge through an adept manipulation of Western cultural codes not normally attributed to the presumed to be silenced Orientalised woman' (Lewis 2005: 96). 6 There are some instances of men collaborating with women in the compiling of their memoirs, though they are marginal to the authority and primacy of the female as point of origin in this genre. Examples include, Not Without My Daughter by Betty Mahmoody with William Hoffer; For the Love of a Child by Betty Mahmoody with Arnold D. Dunchock; Sold and A Promise to Nadia by Zana Muhsen with Andrew Crofts. 7 Like Forbidden Love, the authenticity of this book was brought into question via an article appearing in the Australian magazine, The Diplomat in April-May 2005. Australian academic Therese Taylor notes that this book is a work of recovered memory, a fact that none of the book’s reviewers bothered mentioning. Taylor unpacks some of the glaring inconsistencies and contradictions contained within the narrative, which leads Taylor to question the veracity and integrity of 'so tendentious a book’ (Taylor 2005: 28). 8 Brooks' book was well-received by the Australian media and the literary establishment and reviewed on publication, with many appearances in the media and at various literary events including the Sydney Writers Festival in 1996. Random House Australia's Fiona Henderson is reported as saying, 'After September 11, the sales of Geraldine Brooks's Nine Parts of Desire skyrocketed' (Knox 2004a). 9 From a marketing point of view, intertextual borrowing works in the genre's favour, as online book sites - from libraries to commercial sites – attest. These sites draw readers’ attention to a library of similar titles, often exhorting, 'customers who bought this book also bought', and 'customers who bought titles by Norma Khouri also bought' titles by these authors. This is standard practice on the Amazon.com site, the largest global bookseller on the worldwide web. 10 Yeenolu examines Bhabha's attempt at theorising sexual and cultural difference, and while recognising Bhabha's approach as original, she argues he does not fully resolve the dualism in his analysis (Yeenolu 1998: pp27-29). 11 Yeenolu goes on to make the point that she is not privileging psychoanalytic theory over and above other theory, nor does she believe psychoanalysis can be unproblematically applied to the analysis of Orientalism, rather she uses

117 psychoanalysis, in her words, 'not because I believe it offers the truth, …my point of departure is the Orientalist discourse itself, which I believe exhibits important material that can be usefully examined in terms of ideology and subject constitution, and psychoanalysis provides convincing theoretical tools for comprehending their functioning in Orientalism' (1998: 24). 12 This passage resonates with the traditional style of the Orientalist travel text. The tone recalls the exotic space of a particular type of Orientalist writing, evoking elements of fantasy and a desire for the authentic other, its power being its familiarity. It is resonant of contemporary travel texts. 13 This positing of the city as modernity is not new to Khouri. Sasson's Princess writes in the best seller of the same name of 'the land of my ancestors is little changed from that of a thousand years ago. Yes, modern buildings spring up, the latest health care is available to all, but consideration for women and for the quality of their lives still receives a shrug of indifference' (Sasson 1992: 20). 14 See Said 1991; Behdad 1994; Melman 1992; and Shohat 1997. 15 Said does not elaborate in any detail the nature or process or mechanisms involved in the workings of latent Orientalism, Both Bhabha (1994) and Yeenolu (1998) critique Said for not elaborating on this distinct form of Orientalism. Both utilise the idea of the unconscious in their respective works (Bhabha's 'The Other Question'; Chapter 2 of Yeenolu). Khouri mobilises both latent and manifest senses of Orientalism, demonstrating Yeenolu's point that the unconscious structure of Orientalism is an important aspect in understanding the workings of Orientalist discourse, and is not necessarily sub-structural (Yeenolu 1998: 23), but central in the production of Orientalist knowledge. 16 I take my cue from Margaret K. Nydell's 1987 book, Understanding Arabs: A Guide for Westerners. 17 Modern and wealthy does not make progress as experienced by Saudi and Kuwaiti women who, it could be argued, are wealthy but this has not released them from domestic bondage or the dictates of the Wahabi patriarchal kingdom-state. Sasson's book Princess purportedly is the narrative of a very wealthy female Saudi member of the royal family. This book in a sense, is an example of what Yeenolu describes as the manifest content of Orientalism, whereby 'we can find variations, differences, deviations, multivalences, and paradoxes (even writings that challenge other Orientalist representations) in various individual accounts of the Orient' (Yeenolu 1998:70). 18 For a full discussion on the subject of honour killings, see 'Honour': Crimes, Paradigms, and Violence against Women (2005) Welchman, L. and S. Hossain (eds). Chakravarti’s chapter 'From fathers to husbands: of love, death and marriage in North India', provides a critical discussion on the use of the term honour arguing that '[f]eminists writing about and resistance groups against such violence tend to reproduce the term, though placing it within scare quotes to distance themselves from its ideological baggage'(308). I share Chakravarti’s discomfort with the fact that the term 'honour killing' has tended to come into popular parlance from international locations because the 'violence becomes associated with the 'uniqueness' of Asian cultures, with irrational communities and aberrant and archaic patriarchal practices refusing to modernise' (308-309). I would argue that Chakravarti’s definition of the way this term is used by Western commentators is equally applicable to Arabs in particular, and Muslims in general.

118 Chapter 3 Rape as Racialised Spectacle

The importance of the complex and contested relationship between media representations of rape and social attitudes about it cannot be underestimated. Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence 2000: 12

Guilt did not begin when all the evidence was gathered together; piece by piece, it was constituted by each of the elements that made it possible to recognise a guilty person. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison 1991: 42.

We find also something else: the 'absent' but imperialising 'white eye'; the unmarked position from which 'observations' are made and from which alone, they make sense. Stuart Hall, 'The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media' 1981: 38.

This chapter examines the discursive practices of the Australian print media and their central role in maintaining the hegemony of Orientalist narrative in popular Australian culture. The focus of this chapter is media representations of the group sexual assaults that took place in south-west Sydney in August and September in 2000. My aim is to determine how racial ideologies are mobilised within media texts, and to expose how the media constructs a particular discursive event to reassert racialised subject positions and to reify myths about race and rape.

119

This textual analysis will investigate the dynamics of the racial and gender hierarchies that characterised media practices in this case. In so doing, I challenge and critique the signifying practices of print media, and expose how particular social and cultural 'artefacts' generate meaning. My arguments cohere around two key areas of this case. I examine the rules which prescribe certain ways of talking about the subject of rape in the public sphere. I look at how race is imagined and narratively inscribed in media texts dealing with the Sydney gang rapes, and scrutinise the racialised ethnic identities that underpin the representations, with particular attention to the apocalyptic metaphors that characterised media's representation of this case.

Through this discursive analysis, I demonstrate how the media presented rape as a manifestation of Arab male bestiality, and in so doing, positioned the spectre of sexual violence as a product of Arab Islamic culture, arguing that the ethnic male body functions as race capital to produce the sort of racialised spectacle that is both enabled by and understood within the dominant conceptual frameworks of Orientalist media narratives. In this chapter, I argue that the links between male racialisation and Orientalism are made productive.

Perceptions of Arab criminality and stereotypes about racialised masculinity are central to teasing out how these textual representations have been enacted discursively to reaffirm the Arab male subject as predatory, violent and misogynistic. The texts that I examine in this chapter are gathered from English language print media within Australia including the broadsheets The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian, and the widely circulated Sydney-based tabloids, The Daily Telegraph and The Sun-Herald. I have limited my analysis to print media texts over two discrete periods of intensified coverage to these mostly Sydney-based newspapers which covered this Sydney event. I examine two different clusters of texts. The first group of texts appeared during July /August 2001 when the story first became a focus of

120 news media (despite the actual assaults having taken place in August 2000). The second group of texts were circulated from July/August to October 2002 when the criminal trials took place, the perpetrators were named, and the sentences handed down. I examine texts from both these periods in my analysis.

This highly publicised case attracted intensified reporting and popular interest. For this very reason, I have chosen texts from this case to argue that the media remain a crucial site for the dominant culture's means of ideological production. The sort of coverage and commentary that this case evoked certainly provides a strong case for examining how discourses of gender and race are strategically fragmented in the public sphere, especially around the subject of interracial rape. My primary aim in this chapter is to decode the discourses at work and demonstrate how media texts communicate the sorts of race ideologies that continue to inform how particular subjects are positioned in a localised Australian context. It is not my intention in this study to make further commentary on the 'politics' or the 'facts' of the case as reported by the media, but rather to examine how the 'facts' were mobilised to create and generate meaning. In this way, I offer a critical reading of interracial rape that seeks neither to diminish the experiences of the survivors of the crimes, nor engage in the problematic practice of racialising rape.

I have utilised the work of theorists including Stuart Hall, Teun A. van Dijk and Sujata Moorti. Stuart Hall has especially been an influential figure in the emergence of the cultural studies field, most notably in conceptualising the media as part of popular culture. Hall's work spans the areas of ideology, critical race theory, discourse analysis, anti-racism and representation. Similarly, media theorist Teun A. van Dijk has been a key theorist in developing the model of critical discourse analysis to identify the racialised practices embedded in the media. Finally, feminist theorist Sujata Moorti's work on the intersections of race, gender and sexuality provides a

121 particularised account of media representations of rape, the very subject of this chapter. I want briefly to review the corpus of literature that deals with Arabs, race and the media in Australia in the recent period.

122 3.1 Literature Review

In this section, I review the body of Australian literature that deals with Arabs and the media in the period since the first Gulf War. Before 1990, a distinct Arab presence or identity was neither widely represented nor documented in Australian literature. With the exception of traditional sociological and historical perspectives,1 Arabs have escaped critical scrutiny as an entity, unlike the Greek, Italian, and Chinese migrant communities in Australia, despite continuous emigration starting from Lebanon in the latter half of the nineteenth century. This changed with the onset of the first Gulf War in 1990 when Arabs as a group became a target and a focus in both media and political discourse. This period marked a time of intense discrimination and violence for Arab Australian communities, as well as a time when media coverage became a point of advocacy and action across Arabic speaking communities. I would argue that the sudden rise in interest in Arabic- speaking communities in the Australian media during the Gulf War period of 1990 marked the appearance of the Arab male figure as a 'demon' in accordance with the racialised and gendered tropes of war. I explore this phenomenon in relation to the later period of post–September 11 representations of the Arab later in this chapter and in the next four chapters of creative writing.

The first publications which drew links between media representations of Arabic-speaking and Muslim communities and the violent impact on those very communities were produced by two community-based groups, the Victorian-based Committee on Discrimination against Arab Australians (CDAAA), and the NSW-based Committee of Arab Australians (CAA). The first volume, Documentation of Incidents of Harassment of, Racism Towards, Australians of Arab descent and Australian Muslims (August-October 1990) was a report on the widespread attacks on Arabs and Muslims in the immediate period after the invasion of Kuwait by Iraqi government forces. The second volume, The Gulf in Australia: Racism, Arab and Muslim Australians and the war

123 against Iraq (1992) documented the types of harassment, but more importantly, provided examples of media coverage and responses by government agencies, media and community in the wake of the Gulf crisis. This two-volume report provides documented examples of the Australian media's active role in the constitution of Orientalist representations in response to an event. Whilst not explicit, this report also importantly provides a case for linking the discursive to the material, that is, how media representations of the first Gulf War impacted on Australian Arabic-speaking communities.

Anthropologist Ghassan Hage briefly touches on the racism experienced by Arabs in Australia from the time of the Gulf war in both White Nation (1998) and Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), but in his edited work, Arab Australians Today: Citizenship and Belonging (2002), various authors including Scott Poynting, Ray Jureidini and Hage himself examine explicitly how global and local events as reported by the media affect community, influence perceptions and inform communal identities. Poynting's essay in this book, '"Street Arabs" and "Mug Lairs": racism, class relations and moral panic about Lebanese-Australian youth' especially identifies the emergent moral panic about 'Lebanese' gang-related activities in south-west Sydney in the late 1990s, drawing attention to the causal links made by media and police between ethnicity and crime.

In Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth Ethnicity and Crime (2000), Poynting along with Jock Collins, Greg Noble and Paul Tabar further develop this theme of moral panic, looking at the aftermath of two violent events which occurred in Sydney's south-western suburbs in 1998, assessing the complexities of ethnicity, racialisation, youth and crime. This book charts the signifying practices of media through the widespread use of the ethnic descriptor 'of Middle Eastern appearance', and how this 'racialised regime of representation', to use Hall's term, was to become the standard practice employed by media, reducing the cultures of Arab Islamic communities in

124 this instance to negative difference (Hall 2002: 245). The same authors, Poynting et al, produced a second book Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other (2004), in which they dissect the now established hyper-fear of 'ethnic crime' and 'Islamic terrorism' in a localised Australian context, focusing on political and media discourses in a post- September 11 world. The authors argue that the emergence of the 'Arab Other' has become the pre- eminent 'folk devil' of the contemporary period. This book importantly provides an in-depth analysis of the Sydney gang rapes of 2000, exposing how politics and power were mobilised to produce the sorts of responses that framed how this event was reported in the media and understood in the wider community.

Bin Laden in the Suburbs was one of many books published between 2003 and 2004 on the subject of Arabs, Islam, race and the media. This, in terms of the body of literature on Arabs and Islam in Australia, reflects not only the burgeoning interest within the academy and human rights agencies, but also a concern with the normalisation of this particularised form of racism in public discourse. Liz Jacka and Leila Green's (eds.) The New 'Others': Media and Society Post-September 11 (2003), the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board's Race for the Headlines: Racism and Media Discourse (2003), Iain Lygo's, News Overboard: The Tabloid Media, Race, Politics, and Islam (2004), and Peter Manning's Dog Whistle Politics and Journalism: Reporting Arabic and Muslim People in Sydney Newspapers (2004), and the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity's (HREOC) Isma-Listen: National Consultations on eliminating prejudice against Arab and Muslim Australians (2004) all examine in varying detail the conflation of a series of local and global events from 2001 which has produced an intense period of racialised media reporting, and the impact of this reporting on Arabic and Muslim communities in Australia. The events which produced this racialised response included the 'unauthorised' arrival of Middle Eastern asylum seekers by boat on Australian shores, the September 11 attacks on US targets, the 'War on Terror', the Sydney gang rapes, the Bali bombs, and the push to war in Iraq.

125

The NSW Anti-Discrimination Board's Race for the Headlines in particular provides an in-depth theoretical analysis of race and media practice, examining historical and contemporary conceptions of race, and how they have been applied discursively in the reporting of all these events. This is one of the few studies that briefly examines the implications of the elision of gender from the Sydney gang rapes in order to foreground race, and the consequences for those attempting to critique or counter the racialised media coverage. This study became the subject of political controversy upon publication that resulted in dire consequences for its publisher, the NSW Anti-Discrimination Board.2

Kate Gleeson's analysis of the 2000 Sydney gang rapes, which appeared in the Journal of the Institute of Criminology (2004), provides an excellent account of the legal responses, and the media, political and community discourses which underwrote both the case itself and another equally infamous case known as the Mt Rennie rape trials of 1887. Whilst Gleeson in no way argues that these cases are the same, she nevertheless draws parallels between how each event was discursively framed for popular consumption. I draw on her research at various points in this chapter.

My study does not attempt to replicate the mapping and theoretical work that has already been produced in all these publications, but aims rather to provide a critical analysis of the media texts which framed the Sydney gang rapes case through a racialised discourse. To do this, I examine the semantic and micro-meaning of words, headlines and visuals, dissecting descriptors and statements to uncover core ideologies, frames, and how power was both asserted and performed in and through the print media. This case provides me with a cluster of texts to make sense of how race and gender are mobilised in ways which reify social relations and reinscribe an explicitly racialised system of domination.

126 3.2 Representing Rape in the Public Sphere

When victims of 'real rape' are not surprised by masked attackers, jumping out of bushes or sneaking up behind them at home, they are kidnapped, held against their will, and often beaten , tortured, and even killed. Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence 2000: 34.

The operations of power relations in network news discourses can be understood by examining whose perspective is represented in the narrative and by examining the causal relations made: who is represented as doing what to whom. Sujata Moorti, The Colour of Rape 2002: 77.

My starting point is to examine the ways in which rape is represented in the public sphere via the media. The subject of rape rarely generates headlines unless the news value of the story is considered sensational. As sociologists Keith Soothill and Sylvia Walby found in their 1991 British study of sex crimes in the news, 'the process of reporting sex crime is necessarily selective, with the press concentrating on the more sensational rather than on the routine, as it is the sensational and the unusual which sell newspapers' (Soothill and Walby, quoted in Soothill and Grover 1996: 575). Factors which appear to determine a case sensational or unusual include where one or more of the subjects is a high profile individual - the most pervasive of whom seem to be sporting identities (basketballer Kobe Bryant, boxer Mike Tyson, first- grade football players from the Sydney-based Canterbury Bankstown Rugby Club), figures or identities associated with politics or political families (Geoff Clark, William Kennedy Smith); where there are multiple assailants (in Sydney: the Newington rapes, the Ashfield rapes, Sydney gang rapes 2000, and in New York: the Central Park rapes3), or where the victim's race and

127 perpetrator's race are not the same (the Sydney gang rapes, Ashfield and Central Park cases). What all these media stories have in common is the nature and extent to which the media covered the investigation, the trial process and sentencing across the spectrum of local and global media outlets.4 Indeed, Frances Henry and Carol Tator, in their study of racial bias in Canadian English language press, affirm that sensational crimes are the ones that 'involve personalities … or involve more than one victim, or, in our increasingly heterogeneous society, are interracial or intercultural' (2002: 163). This chapter focuses on interracial rape and multiple assailants as this best describes the fundaments of the Sydney group sexual assaults which took place in 2000.5

In The Colour of Rape (2002), Sujata Moorti offers an incisive study on how the categories of gender and race are imagined in television rape narratives. Her analysis focuses on 'the contestation and negotiation that underpins cultural understandings of sexual violence', and on 'the sedimented discourses of gender, race, and sexuality that shape television narratives' (Moorti 2002: 3). Moorti looks at the news value of sensationalist incidences of rape and reports on the Central Park case, where the coverage centred on the spectacular elements of violence, while in the Kennedy Smith and Tyson cases, it focused rather on the celebrity status of the accused men (Moorti 2002: 108). Importantly, Moorti finds that the news reports of sensationalist cases tended to erase the sexual violence of rape, and in the Tyson and Central Park case,6 the network discourses presented rape as a manifestation of black male bestiality (Moorti 2002: 109). These findings are critical in understanding how rape narratives are constructed to become media events, particularly in the context of interracial rape. Moorti's study is useful in developing a discursive framework that neither privileges gender nor race to the mutual exclusion of the other. This approach allows me to analyse the ways in which race, gender and masculinity were mobilised in relation to the Sydney gang rapes of 2000 to produce a news narrative that foregrounds a dominant understanding of sexual violence. This approach provides an

128 opportunity to resituate the gendered nature of sexual violence that was strategically elided in the rush by media to racialise rape.

For Moorti, indeed the problem with privileging the sensational cases means that, 'rape enter[s] the public arena of news discourse through the back door as a sensational phenomenon' (Moorti 2002: 108). In her examination of the Central Park case, she found the coverage centred on the spectacular elements of violence, while in the Smith and Tyson cases, it focused on the celebrity status of the accused men. Moorti concludes that the primary result of such a focus on newsworthy elements means that 'news narratives portray rape cases as isolated, individual, monstrous crimes' (Moorti 2002: 108). These reports rarely situate the phenomenon of sexual violence as a manifestation of the gendered structures of domination that prevail in society' (Moorti 2002: 108). I will examine later in this chapter how culture, religion and ethnicity were the primary focus of the Sydney gang rapes and thus represented the newsworthy elements of the reports.

Despite the proliferation of feminist discourse and activism over the last three decades on the subject of sexual violence, the focus on sensationalist rape stories reinscribes a male-centred worldview of what constitutes 'newsworthy' rape. By exposing the different ways in which the 'white masculine gaze inflects news portrayals of sexual assault, the accuser and the accused' (Moorti 2002: 80), Moorti uncovers how this works to reinforce the belief that 'rape is an isolated event having no structural relationship to other social practices or phenomena' (Moorti 2002: 109). Within this male-centred framework, it makes sense then that there is little news value in reporting the sheer 'everydayness' of the individual 'private' rape that the majority of women experience, reflecting a white masculine desire to construct news rape narratives to be understood as aberrant and outside of the everyday. Research analyst Denise Lievore confirms this in the Australian context, finding that:

129 the "classic" rape scenario is misleading, as attacks by strangers who use inordinate physical force or weapons to subdue victims are in the minority. Sexual assaults are more likely to be perpetrated in a residential setting by a man known to the victim, than by a stranger in an open location. (2002: 5)

This fact is rendered invisible in the domain of the news, whereas visible sex crimes, such as rapes that come to the attention of police, though they comprise a small proportion of sexual violence against women (Lievore 2002: 2), represent what it takes to make it into the news.

The active privileging of the sensational over the ordinary in news narratives functions to situate particular forms of sexual violence like gang rape typically as constituting 'real rape'. For criminologist Julie Stubbs, this phenomenon highlights that this limited notion of the 'real rape' still has 'powerful resonance within the criminal justice system, in public discourse, the law and order rhetoric of our political leaders and some media outlets' (Stubbs 2003). In this way, the media actively perpetuate rape myths by privileging images of dangerous, unknown 'others' and are therefore implicated 'in reinforcing a view of sexual assault that is atypical, obscuring the level of violence by offenders who are known to the victim, and the level of sexual violence that occurs within the home' (Stubbs 2003).

The print media's representation of the Sydney gang rapes worked precisely in this way to reinscribe the myths that circulate in mainstream news rape narratives. The sort of coverage and commentary that this case ostensibly evoked reaffirmed the myth that interracial rape is dominant and constitutes 'real rape'. While the violence of the assaults was well documented by all sections of the media, the case reflected all the core criteria operating in traditional media rape narratives. As reported in the Central Park case, the Sydney group sexual assaults in 2000 were interracial, though this term was never used in the reporting of this case. Moorti importantly identifies the stereotypical understandings of 'real rape' as reported in the Central Park case. This sexual assault:

130 was typical of gang rapes, which are overwhelmingly committed by teenage boys on a lone female who does not know the assailants. Gang rapes are likely to involve more sexual humiliation, beating and torture than single-assailant rapes. Above all, the victims are picked for their availability, not for their looks or personality. (2002: 80)

The Sydney gang rapes can also be described in the terms that Moorti sets out, though at no time did the media represent the Sydney gang rapes as being typical of gang rape, or for that matter, atypical of sexual violence against women. Research on the subject of rape in the US finds that the majority of rapes are intraracial, and not interracial.7 In the Australian context, white-on-white rape is the most common form of sexual violence (Carrington 1998, Stubbs 2003).

Angela Davis' seminal text, 'Rape, Racism and the Myth of the Black Rapist' (1981) famously exposed how the myth of the African American rapist was used after the civil war to justify lynching and maintaining racial hierarchies. This text continues to challenge the anti-rape liberal feminist establishment which has traditionally been blind to the racialised experiences of violence against women of colour. Davis marks out their collusion in the 'resuscitation of the old racist myths of the Black rapist' (Davis 1981: 178), and sets the ground for an anti-racist anti-rape discourse and practice. Davis' critique identifies white feminist scholars as 'suffer[ing] the influence of racist ideology', seeing this 'historical myopia' as further preventing white feminists 'from comprehending that the portrayal of Black men as rapists reinforces racism's open invitation to white men to avail themselves sexually of Black women's bodies' (Davis 1981: 182). I would argue that the 'historical myopia' Davis identified in the early 1980s can still be discerned at work 20 years later in the ways the print media approached the Sydney gang rapes, setting up a white solipsistic framework which functioned to erase the largely unspoken history of interracial rape in the Australian context. This remains an important aspect of this case precisely because it demonstrates the hegemony of whiteness within the institution of media in Australia and how it gives

131 voice to racism, in this instance, both through omission, and in particular, the erasure of Indigenous women's experiences of interracial sexual violence by white Europeans/Australians. I would also argue that white moral authority is recuperated through the racialisation of the Arab as the sexually predatory other. In other words, the first stage of my argument is to re-establish the terrain of interracial sexual trauma in Australia as grounded in colonial history.

Documentary evidence clearly points to the systematic sexual abuse of and assaults against Aboriginal women by white Australian colonialists (both military and settler perpetrators), even though this devastating aspect of the colonisation project is largely ignored by the dominant white public (see Saunders and Evans 1992; Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 1991). Australian law teacher Stephen Gray argues in his essay, 'Black Skeletons in a White Man's Cupboard' (1998) that, 'non-Aboriginal Australian people knew what happened on the frontier through the existence of Aboriginal or "part-Aboriginal" children scattered throughout certain elements of non-Aboriginal society – in missions, in institutions, or as domestic servants was part of common, unspoken knowledge (Gray 1998: 79). Gray argues that 'it must have been also part of common, unspoken knowledge that rape and sexual misconduct by white men gave rise to many of these children' (1998: 79). Gray charts the story of one such case of a white newspaper editor in what he calls the brutal suppression of 'the physical reminders of white men's guilt' (1998: 79).

Criminologist Chris Cunneen argues that the process of colonisation involved a range of strategies, many of which were explicitly gendered in their intent, with the exploitation, abuse and rape of Aboriginal women evident in, for example, the prevalence of sexual diseases. Cunneen notes that 'direct evidence of abuse from the courts and the police is infrequent because the abuse itself was sanctioned' (Cunneen 2001: 159). In a chapter entitled 'Harlots and Helots', historians Raymond Evans, Kay Saunders and Kathryn Cronin provide documentary evidence from colonial Queensland to demonstrate

132 how 'the rape and subjugation of Aboriginal women was a key feature in European/Aboriginal sexual relations' (1993: 106). Quoting white men themselves, statements like ' Aboriginal women are usually at the mercy of anybody' (Meston) to 'the "Gins" were usually unwilling victims of the white man's lust' (Ward), provides a glimpse of how interracial sexual violence is grounded in white Australian history.

In this way, interracial violence against Indigenous Australian women is similar to that of other colonial regimes where gendered brutality is considered legitimate in the context of colonial conquest. As Chicana scholar Antonia Castañeda, points out in her essay, 'Sexual Violence in the Politics and Policies of Conquest', 'in California as elsewhere, sexual violence functioned as an institutionalised mechanism for ensuring subordination and compliance. It was one instrument of sociopolitical terrorism and control-first of women and then of the group under conquest' (Castañeda 1993: 29).

My objective here is to historicise interracial rape in Australia in order to challenge the discursive framework of the media that interracial rape is somehow outside the practices of hetero-normative Christian European /Australian culture. As Davis argues, 'given the complexity of the social context of rape today, any attempt to treat it as an isolated phenomenon is bound to founder' (Davis 1981: 201). Australian Indigenous feminist theorist Aileen Moreton-Robinson thus brings us to the present by reminding us that the 1991 'Human Rights Commission's Inquiry into Racist Violence' found that 'it was common for white police to rape Indigenous women after taking them into custody' (2000: 170). Moreton-Robinson's reminder underscores the contemporary materiality of this continuum of sexual violence against Indigenous women, writing that Aboriginal continue to 'have a fear of white social spaces inhabited by white males' (2000: 170).

The strategy of erasing interracial rape from its Australian historical context set the immediate discursive terms of how the media presented the Sydney gang rapes of 2000. In so doing, media commentators produced a subject

133 position from which white commentators could speak. This practice of historical myopia thus enabled white Australian subjects (both male and female) to assert a moral supremacy, a triumphalist discourse without having to engage with the historical legacy and continuum of interracial sexual violence in Australia. This strategy is most clearly at work in a feature article in The Weekend Australian, which is constructed to convey this idea that interracial rape is somehow new to Australia. Working to the title, 'Rape Menace from the Melting Pot', journalist Martin Chulov writes:

In every case the victim was a Caucasian, aged between 13 and 18. The pattern has become, according to NSW Police Commissioner Peter Ryan, a new and shocking phenomenon that is probably without precedent in Australian criminology. 'I've never come across something quite like this before', Mr Ryan said yesterday, 'where a particular, clearly defined cultural group of attackers attack a very clearly defined cultural group of victims'. (2001: 1)

The NSW Police Commissioner's assertion of 'a new and shocking phenomenon that is probably without precedent in Australian criminology' went largely unchallenged in public discourse, thus adding force to the media argument and discursive construction that these 'race/sex crimes' were imported by 'Lebanese Muslim' men, rather than situating interracial gang rape in its Australian historical context.

In a similar act of white solipsism, the presiding judge in the trials, Michael Finnane's comment that, 'we read about [this type of crime] happening in war-torn areas. We don't expect it to happen in Sydney' (Gerard, August 9, 2002) functions to further distance interracial gang rape as an aberrant form of violence in the Australian landscape, circumscribing the site of Sydney as peacefully settled, erasing the attendant racial and sexual violence that is typical of all colonial settler states. While this comment by the presiding judge was reported widely in the media, I want to examine the placement of this particular comment in two texts. In The Australian, Finnane's statement is positioned in the very last paragraph of his article, foregrounding rather the judge's plea to tolerance, stating that it was 'deplorable the attacker's family

134 had received death threats since their son had been charged' (Gerard, August 9 2002). Conversely, the Sydney-based tabloid, The Daily Telegraph placed the same quotation at the very beginning of the first paragraph, thus privileging the idea of gang rape as being anomalous to 'civilised' Australia (Wockner, 9 August, 2002). By strategically mobilising the authorial voice of the presiding judge in this prime position, The Daily Telegraph set up a framework that allowed for a triumphalist and racialised narrative. As Henry and Tator affirm, quotations serve to 'lend credibility and act as important sources of evidentiality in news reports', and thus when journalists 'want to favour a particular point of view in an article, they can do so by quoting a source that reflects it' (2002: 76).

The media's practice of relying primarily on institutional voices, such as, the police commissioner and the presiding judge, gave credence to the mythmaking culture about race, rape, place and history. As Moorti confirms, it is precisely 'through the institutional voices, we hear definitions that emerge from the ideological centre of society' (Moorti 2002: 32). In this instance especially, it was crucial that the white ideological centre strategically distance itself from its own violent history in order to offer a coherent and morally pure narrative, and to produce an explanatory cause for this brutal instance of sexual violence. The success of this strategy thus meant that political and media commentators could locate interracial gang rape as aberrant to white Australian normativity. By situating 'this type of crime' in the realm of 'over there', as outside the moral boundaries of whiteness and here, and 'typical of less civilised cultures' (Block 2002: 151) provided the ground upon which to build the case that violence is the province of the immigrant others, and in this case, the Muslim Lebanese other. Through this strategy, the media are able to be 'critical of certain interpretations of rape when they emerge from "out there" but are reluctant to turn a similarly critical view when covering sexual violence "at home" '(Moorti 2002: 40).

135 Media columnist Janet Albrechtsen deploys the strategy of aberration when she constructed her notorious opinion piece in The Australian (July 17 2002), suggesting Arab Muslim youth in France similarly targeted Caucasian women for sexual assault, thus confirming not only the view that it is specifically 'cultural' to Muslim Arabs, but also that it is not cultural to the centre of Europe/Australia. While the Albrechtsen text has been variously exposed and critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Danish criminologist Fleming Balvag (see Media Watch 9/9/2002; Collins et al 2004: 140), it deserves mention here because it attracted the only public intervention at the time which significantly challenged the racist 'historical myopia' that underscored print media. This intervention was significant for the fact that it was made by prominent Aboriginal magistrate Pat O'Shane and that it came through in the form of a letter to the editor. O'Shane wrote:

Janet Albrechtsen does not let Australian history stand in the way of a few prejudices. Her comments about racially motivated gang-rapes, and that this first hit in the last 12 months, ignores 200 years of such events. Indigenous Australian women have been subject to such criminal behaviour by Anglo-Australian men, many of them in positions of control over the women and their communities.8 (O'Shane 2002)

Stubbs affirms that, 'both historic, and more recent incidents commonly have involved Anglo-Australian men, and that rapes with a racist motivation have been all too common experiences for indigenous women in Australia' (Stubbs 2003). As Stubbs strategically reminds us, 'the media seem much less interested in asking whether cultural values or ethnicity had any role to play in those offences apparently involving Anglo-Australian men' (Stubbs 2003). As the authors of Bin Laden in the Suburbs attest, 'rape, hatred and racism have never been accorded the column-inches and the air-time when suffered by subordinated cultures, be they Indigenous or immigrant' (Collins et al 2004: 138).

Further to this, The Daily Telegraph prominently described the case in large font on the front page as 'one of the most appalling episodes in the city's

136 history' (Wockner, August 3 2002). By privileging this case historically, and by isolating the criminal act by branding it in terms that place it outside of all other criminal acts and episodes spanning over two centuries of the city's history, media commentators are able to establish the premise for the line of argument they want to pursue. (Henry and Tator 2002: 183). That line is necessarily a moral high ground where white commentators9 can talk about rape while dissociating themselves and white Australia at large from such acts of sexual violence. In a strategic comparison between the 2000 Sydney gang rapes and the 1887 Mt Rennie case, Kate Gleeson argues from text gleaned from the Sydney Morning Herald that 'even in the 19th century, there was recognition in the press that gang rape was a common and systematic practice in Sydney' (Gleeson 2004: 196).

In response to the way the media was both reporting and commentating on the Sydney gang rapes, NSW Rape Crisis Centre manager Karen Willis was forced to respond to the media's representation of what constitutes 'real rape'. Willis writes:

Women are being led to believe that if they stay clear of Middle Eastern men, they will be safe. But the harsh reality is, young men are congregating after the footy, after the cricket, after a surf, at weekend parties ... and they are committing these same horrific acts on women. (Duff July 21 2002)

I now want to examine how liberal feminist understandings of rape were mobilised discursively by the media in the service of strategically separating gender from race. While Western liberal feminist scholarship and practices have traditionally privileged gender over race, postcolonial feminists and critical race theorists from Davis (1981) and hooks (1981, 1989, 1990), Spivak (1988, 1989) Trinh (1989), and Carby (1998) to Ahmed (1992) and Moreton- Robinson (2000), have actively challenged the monolithic status of Western liberal feminism, and developed a more critical framework that moves beyond the spectre of gender as a category on its own.

137 Both Moorti and feminist theorist Sarah Projansky look at the intersectionalities of race and gender in rape narratives in the public sphere in the contemporary contexts of post-feminism. Projansky's study Watching Rape: Film and Television in Postfeminist Culture (2001), focuses on the relationship between the discourses of post-feminism and representations of rape. Projansky sees each as a dominant means through which contemporary popular culture discursively defines feminism (Projansky 2001: 13), arguing that post-feminism is limited by its 'overwhelming focus on white, heterosexual, middle class women (and sometimes men)' (Projansky 2001:68). She examines the complexity of post-feminist discourses in popular media, illustrating the 'adaptability and pervasiveness of the assumption in popular culture that feminism existed, was wholeheartedly absorbed by the mainstream, and therefore is no longer needed' (Projansky 2001: 68). This is a significant argument given that common sense feminist understanding of sexual violence underscored during the coverage of the Sydney gang rapes, in both editorials and features and even in conservative newspapers, yet this 'understanding' was only made possible within a racialised discourse.

Feminist theories have traditionally postulated that 'rape is a violent manifestation of the systems of subordination and domination that are prevalent in society' (Moorti 2002: 5), and that sexual violence should be situated as a public concern rather than a private individual problem. What the reporting of the Sydney gang rapes of 2000 suggests is the valorisation of feminist knowledge in news rape narratives. Examples of this were evident in the mainstream press which included the following feminist-friendly editorial statements: 'Rape is a horrific crime. In this violent act sex is the weapon and aggression the motivation' (The Australian, August 24 2001); 'Sexual assault is an abominable crime…when there are multiple perpetrators and the assaults are aggravated in any of numerous ways, the anger is increased' (The Sydney Morning Herald August 23 2001); and:

138 The circumstances in any rape case are disturbing as it is a crime that shows not only contempt for the victim, but for society and its values. Serial gang rape is an even more sinister aberration because of the levels of domination, systematic humiliation and violence associated with such loathsome acts of degradation. (The Daily Telegraph July 17 2002)

While these texts clearly articulate lines from the standard feminist lexicon, and are normalised in broadsheet and tabloid editorials and features, these statements are only made within the framework of the text that comes immediately after. Respectively the first two examples are followed with: 'traditional, offensive patterns of male violence towards, and hatred of, women could be taking an even more disturbing turn, as racist motivations are heaped on top of misogyny, threatening not only relations between the sexes but across ethnic groups' (editorial, The Australian August 24 2001); and the second with, 'When the crime crosses ethnic boundaries, a new intensity of feeling is generated' (editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald August 23 2001).

While the first statements seem to promote a feminist explanation of rape, this normalising of feminist knowledge has been mobilised within the framework of racialised discourse where the perpetrators are non-white and the victims are white (at least in media coverage they were reported as white). The foregrounding of race over gender is a disjuncture that had to take place in order for the privileging of (white) feminist articulations of rape to be given agency.

The media thus becomes a site for the racialisation of rape, via the appropriation of Western liberal feminist discourse on sexual assault. The strategic elision of gender from public discourse enabled specific racial ideologies to reshape the public image of sexual violence in this case. The media's insistence on racialising these rapes produced a discourse that perpetuated racially-based understandings of sexual violence. The active foregrounding of ethnicity and religion of the accused in texts functioned to emphasise the crime as a wrong committed by a member of a racial group, inscribing race as an ideological construction that imputed causation to

139 supposed racial reasons (Block 2001: 146). I will now examine this in the next section.

140 3.3 Race, Ethnicity and Media Discourse: Cultural Practices of the Fourth Estate

The white normativity of the news is brought out in sharp relief in the coverage of the accused. Sujata Moorti, The Colour of Rape 2002: 80

It is through the domain of the popular media that representations of racialised subjects are enabled, understood and circulated to the everyday consumer of news and current affairs. More than any theorist, Stuart Hall has developed a critical understanding of the media as an apparatus of ideological production, producing social meanings and distributing them throughout society (Hall 1981: 33). As Henry and Tator confirm, 'the media are one of the most powerful institutions in a democratic society because they help transmit its central cultural images, ideas, symbols, as well as a nation's narratives and myths' (Henry and Tator 2002: 4). Theorist Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, how nothing more precipitated the rise of nationalism than print-capitalism, 'which made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways' (Anderson 1991: 36). This point is especially important in understanding how conceptualisations of Australianness are inscribed and reasserted through the popular media.

The news in particular, as a medium for the dissemination of actual and everyday events, plays a crucial role in how race, ethnicity and culture are deployed and understood, and how racial ideologies are cultivated through its narratives. Teun A. van Dijk argues in Racism and the Press that 'it is white elites who control the contents and structures of the system of ideological ethnic representation' (van Dijk 1991: 33), framing stories as 'ethnic events'. These stories include 'immigration, racially based social disturbances and socio-cultural conflicts between the dominant majority and immigrant or

141 other minority groups' (van Dijk 1991: 3). As Hall attests, the media are 'not only a powerful source of ideas about race, [t]hey are also one place where these ideas are articulated, worked on, transformed and elaborated' (Hall 1981: 35).

In this way, the media are the engine room of cultural production, shaping the individual subject's sense of self, an understanding of what it means to be male/female, and a sense of ethnicity, class, race, and national identity (Henry and Tator 2002: 4). So, the stories and reports to which audiences have access offers milieux through which social difference and diversity can be explored, represented, contested, reproduced and modified (Jakubowicz et al 1994: 15). Perhaps more significantly, the media helps us understand 'who is us and who is them' (Henry and Tator 2002: 4). It is the 'we-they' character of race representations in media practice that is of great import in decoding how racialised others are positioned in news media, and how events like the Sydney gang rape cases of 2000 can be understood.

Characterising a news event by giving it a popular tag has come to represent an important strategy for the media to communicate its product. The first Gulf War (1991) became widely known as 'Operation Desert Storm'; the serial murders of elderly women in the late 1980s and early 1990s on Sydney's North Shore came to be known as the 'Granny Killer case'. The 1986 rape and murder of Sydney nurse Anita Cobby was simply referred to as the 'Anita Cobby murder'. In New York in 1989, the sexual assault of a female jogger in Central Park became known as the 'Central Park rape', though it did become an encoded term for interracial rape. What separates the Sydney rape cases of 2000 from these equally prominent cases is the fact that this case did not end up with a single uniform tag attached to it. It was most widely known as the 'ethnic gang rapes',10 otherwise described interchangeably as the 'Muslim gang rapes', and the 'Lebanese gang rapes'. The Australian media were unable to find race-neutral nomenclature to describe the sexual violence that took place in the south-west suburbs of Sydney in 2000 without resorting to terms

142 which functioned as modes of racialisation. As I have already mentioned, the term 'interracial' was not part of the lexicon in the reporting of this case. In seeking to analyse a case that evoked such intense media coverage and commentary, setting the terms for critical analysis demands an exercise in renaming. For these reasons, I have purposely referred to the case in this thesis as the Sydney gang rapes of 2000,11 rather than reinscribe the widespread media practice of describing the crimes as 'ethnic', 'Lebanese', or 'Muslim' as the preferred tag of the media.

Examining how the print media mobilised race in the reporting of the Sydney gang rapes of 2000 provides a contemporary case study of the reification of racial ideologies in Australian print culture. The might of the term 'race' was used in a multitude of ways by media to construct, sustain and reaffirm racial views about sexual violence, elaborate myths about community attitudes and culture, and to reshape ideas about race itself. In particular, I am arguing here that race played a central role in the publicity value of this case and was mobilised by the print media especially during the intensified periods of reporting. The spectre of the dominant white elite mobilising 'race' as a discursive tool against a minority both to reassert a moral positioning as the civilised Western subject, and at the same time, perform the 'racialised other', as a victim of 'a new race crime' (The Sun-Herald July 29 2001) is perhaps the least discussed aspect of this case. The fact that race was invoked by so many in the media, and contested by so many outside the media, deserves some analysis here.12

The words 'race', 'racial', 'racist', and 'racism' regularly appeared in headlines and were used interchangeably. The Daily Telegraph, led the charge with 'Racism a factor in gang rapes' (article, Hildebrande and Morris, July 16 2001) and editorialised with 'Recognising loathsome racist acts' (July 17 2002); The Sun-Herald offered, 'Racist rapes: Finally the truth comes out' (opinion, Devine, July 14 2002) and, 'Rape, hatred and racism' (opinion, Devine, August 12 2001); editorialising with 'Rape, race and people in denial' (August 12

143 2001); The Australian contributed with 'Gang violence goes beyond the racial divide' (opinion, Shanahan, August 28 2001); and The Newcastle Herald with 'When race is the issue' (opinion, Corbett, July 18 2002).

These few textual examples neatly sum up the limited possibilities for how race was discursively figured through the function of the headline. According to van Dijk, headlines express the most important information about a news event and exert a powerful influence on the interpretation of a news report. His study indicates that the information in the headline is also the information that is best recalled by readers. Loaded with ideological implications, headlines are the first and prominent textual categories of news (van Dijk 1991: 61), their function necessarily implying an opinion or a specific perspective on the events (van Dijk 1991: 51). Thus, through the headlines of this case, media writers insisted on a dominant understanding of these rapes as being racist, rather than interracial, constructing both the interpretative framework and terms of reference for the discourse. The Australian, while not mentioning the actual word 'race', resorted to the use of code-words in the front page headline, 'Rape menace from the melting pot'; and further into the broadsheet with, 'From out of the melting pot, a gang rape menace' (Chulov, August 18-19 2001). Van Dijk argues that code-words like 'melting pot' are typically deployed to avoid 'explicitly racist labels', and 'readers are able to interpret these words in terms of minorities and the problems attributed to them' (1991: 39). Van Dijk analyses the various structures and strategies of media text and talk specifically looking at the ways in which the news may contribute to 'what is sometimes called the 'new racism' (van Dijk 1991: 33). This 'new racism', is different from the 'old' racism of 'slavery, segregation, apartheid and lynchings', in that it 'wants to be democratic and respectable, and hence first off denies that it is racism' (van Dijk 1991: 33). Van Dijk argues that: because of their often subtle and symbolic nature, many forms of the 'new' racism are 'discursive'; they are expressed, enacted and confirmed by text and talk …. [and t]hey appear … far removed from the open violence and forceful segregation of the 'old' racism. (1991: 34)

144

He affirms that it 'needs no further argument that the consequences of these forms of discursive racism in the lives of members of minority groups are hardly discursive' (1991: 34). Indeed, the number of published reports measuring the effects of racism on the Arabic and Muslim communities from this period attests to the pervasiveness of the new racism van Dijk discourses (see Anti-Discrimination Board Report 2003; Dunn 2003; HREOC 2004; Poynting and Noble 2004; Dreher 2005).

The Sun-Herald headline from the opinion piece, 'Sorry, but the rapists mentioned race first' (Devine, August 26 2001) perhaps best encapsulates both the limits of the terms of the popular discourse, and the abject failure of those commentating within the institution of the media to understand the distinction to be made between interracial rape and the racialising of rape. In a populist lexical style address, this headline functions to lay claim to a defence that resorts to evading a more complex debate that moves beyond the simplistic ways in which 'race' was constructed in this case.13 The moral framework for the media defence is explained in simple enough terms by The Newcastle Herald's Jeff Corbett under the headline, 'When race is the issue'. Corbett writes that, 'the most relevant fact is that the rapists themselves introduced race as a factor in their crime. They identified themselves as Lebanese choosing young Australian women as their victims' (Corbett, July 18 2002). While the perpetrators were reported widely throughout the media to identify as 'Lebanese', The Age's report 'When race and rape collide', emphatically states that 'all [perpetrators] were born, raised and educated in Australia, they still 'identify as Lebanese Muslims, or just "Lebs", although two had mixed parentage' (Crichton and Stevenson, September 17 2002). British ethnicity theorist Steve Fenton asks the very question that most journalists were unable to consider outside the standard practice of linking origins to behaviour: 'if people assume an ethnic identity, does it in any sense become a real guide to action' (Fenton 2003: 7)? I will address this question in more detail later in this chapter.

145

The NSW Anti-Discrimination Board's report Race for Headlines: Racism and Media Discourse briefly touches on this aspect of the discourse of race, teasing out the question of whether these sexual assaults were an act of racism (ADB 2003: 61). Under the sub-heading 'Gender Implications', this report represented one of the few public challenges to the dominant interpretative framework of the case, and paid the political price for it. As sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz explains in a quote from the report:

There are two questions then about whether these are racial rapes… Is there something about the general Lebanese Muslim culture that drives young men to rape Anglo Australian women? The answer to that is quite clearly no, there's nothing specifically cultural about it. Is it the case that adolescent thugs, looking for easy targets to play out their stuff on would pick women from outside their own community? The answer is yes, they clearly would. (2001: 62)

This question of causality underpinned much of media narrative, both in the reports and the opinion pieces. Jakubowicz's point underlines how the media's insistence on 'Lebanese Muslim culture' being the cause of this 'exceptional' case of sexual violence in Australia and thus not in the realm of 'Australian behaviour' slides into a dominant racism in the context of both colonial history and a persistent white supremacist bind that is operational in the Australian media when it comes to reporting on matters of race. This white (neo) colonial understanding of sexual violence not only provides a moral place from which to point the finger of blame at the bestial other, but allows for a reiteration of the white male narrative that rape is an isolated event and has no structural relationship to other social practices and phenomena (Moorti 2002: 109). I now want to address how ethnicity and religion were mobilised in tandem to produce and confirm dominant Orientalist understandings of Arabic masculinity in the Australian context through the media's use of 'ethnic descriptors'.

146 Ethnic descriptors, an institutionalised practice in the state of New South Wales, are most commonly understood in both police and media lexicons as assisting in the apprehension of suspects in criminal investigations. Their application is more often anticipated in the early search phase, though certainly this stage is not the only time that racial identifiers are used as the Sydney gang rapes of 2000 certainly demonstrated. Ethnic descriptors - or the more accurate term, racial profiling - are applied to particular minorities in New South Wales and represent a contentious practice that has attracted much criticism, especially from those communities most adversely affected by their application.14 Terms like 'of Middle Eastern appearance', 'Asian', 'Aboriginal' and 'Pacific Islander' are in most frequent usage throughout the media. 'Caucasian', the seemingly odd term for the 'suspect white', is most irregularly applied to white/European-descended Australians, its application having little political gravitas or social stigma attached to it.15 Whiteness as a category largely goes unmarked in media texts. In fact, the absence of a racial descriptor in media texts invariably implies the suspect's whiteness (Block 2002; Soothill and Grover 1996).

Cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue in their excellent volume Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (1994), that when it comes to the representation, 'socially empowered groups need not be unduly concerned about "distortions" and "stereotypes," since even occasionally negative images form part of a wide spectrum of representations' (Shohat and Stam 1994: 183). This point is key to understanding how for marginalised minorities, racial stereotypes function in harmful ways, in ways beyond mere discomfort. For example, the 'media's tendency to present all Black males as potential delinquents … has a searing impact on the actual lives of Black people' (Shohat and Stam 1994: 184). Similarly, the portrayal of Aboriginal men in the Australian context as violent and deviant has a material impact on the lives of communities, most especially on young men. This argument goes some way in explaining why representation for minorities becomes a burden that 'can indeed become almost unbearable'

147 (Shohat and Stam 1994: 184). Because racial identifiers are not applied uniformly across ethnicities or racial groups, a case can thus be argued that the institutional practice of singling out particular groups is evidence of the media's racial double standards, most especially in the uniform elision of whiteness from news reports. As Ruth Frankenberg points out in her study, White Women, Race Matters, whiteness is a location of structural advantage, 'a place from which white people look at ourselves, at others, and society' (Frankenberg 1995: 1).

The racialised reporting of crime, or in this instance, the racialisation of rape is thus an important site for scrutiny in order to challenge not only dominant understandings of rape and race, but equally, the hegemonic subjectivities of media writers. Grover and Soothill's study of how ethnicity is figured in the reporting of rape cases has relevance for my analysis of media representations of the Sydney gang rapes of 2000. Their scrutiny of nine British newspapers for the whole of 1992 provides evidence of racialised media practices specifically in reference to how rape and race intersect to produce dominant understandings of sex crimes. The authors found a serious distortion in the media reporting of ethnicity during the early stage of the criminal process in the search for alleged rapists. While the researchers found an over- representation of minority ethnic men accused of rape coming to the notice of the police, the cases identified as involving minority ethnic men (particularly black) men as assailants, were much more likely to be reported widely. In their final analysis, they conclude that:

by much more frequently 'flagging' the identity of minority ethnic men compared with white men, it must make it appear to the general reader that minority ethnic men are much more heavily involved in rape cases than is actually is the case. In fact, if the ethnic identity of all alleged rapists was routinely reported, there might be a widespread awareness amongst readers that it is usually white men who are the assailants. (Grover and Soothill 1996: 571)

The mention of ethnicity, national origins and the religious affiliations of the perpetrators featured prominently in print reports of the Sydney gang rapes.

148 In fact, as the Anti-Discrimination Board (ADB) study found, 'the racial background of the perpetrators became the predominant angle for media reporting' (ADB 2003: 62). So much so, that the practice of racial identification came to stand in as a general descriptor for the case itself as I have previously agued, and thus became a point of contestation by both politicians and the media after community complaint. Media commentators, tabloid and broadsheet editorials argued that because the perpetrators allegedly used racially encoded language, this was 'taken as a justification for the racialised coverage (ADB 2003: 61).16 Thus, triumphalist headlines for opinion pieces such as, 'Sorry, but the rapists mentioned race first' (Devine, August 26 2001) typified the inability of commentators like Miranda Devine to represent the perpetrators in race neutral ways without reducing sexual violence to culture, religion and ethnicity, regardless of the perpetrators' backgrounds. This seems central to understanding the critical difference between the practices of reporting interracial rape and the practice of racialising rape.

Fenton, in his study of ethnicity in a British sociological context, argues that the actual word has come to be a gather-all term to denote 'dimensions of descent and culture and how they are mobilised to sustain public definitions of groups and the boundaries between them' (2003: 7) Fenton makes the important point that, ethnicity is not, 'on its own, an explanation of anything' (2003: 7). In the case of the Sydney gang rapes, ethnicity and religion were everything in media representations. I want briefly to address Fenton's question, 'in what sense is ethnicity a causal factor in societies and social action?' (2003: 7)

In examining the countless articles, reports, opinion pieces, editorials and features written on and about this case in the print media, it is difficult to find one text that did not engage in the racial identification process in problematic ways. Journalists and editors, letter writers and opinion commentators differed only in the varieties that the identified ethnicity and religion both appeared, and were expressed in the countless texts as a descriptor. The

149 reader was left in no doubt as to the ethnic origins and the religion of the assailants. The perpetrators were named variously as: 'three teenage boys of Lebanese extraction' (editorial, The Daily Telegraph, September 8 2001); 'boys from Lebanese backgrounds'; (opinion, Shanahan, August 28 2001); 'young men described as either "Lebanese" or of "Middle Eastern appearance"' (opinion, Devine, August 26 2001); 'youths of Lebanese background', 'Lebanese-born … Lebanese Australians' (editorial, The Australian August 24 2001); 'youths of Lebanese origin' (article, Wockner, 2002: 1); 'Lebanese Muslim youth … young Australian men of Lebanese background' (editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald, August 23 2001); 'Muslim youths of Middle Eastern extraction' (editorial, The Sun-Herald August 29 2001); 'a gang of 18 Lebanese youths' (article, McIlveen and Chulov, August 22 2001); 'Lebanese Australians … young Muslim men … young Muslim immigrant men … mostly Lebanese…young men described by police as "of Middle Eastern extraction," a term now regarded as a police euphemism for "probably Lebanese"' (opinion, Sheehan, August 29 2001); 'gangs of mainly Muslim Lebanese youths' (opinion, Parker, August 22 2001).

The two main descriptors mobilised in this small sample are 'Lebanese' and 'Muslim'. Less often are 'Middle Eastern extraction' and 'Middle Eastern appearance' employed, together with the strategic lexical choice of 'immigrant' alongside 'Muslim'. The function of foregrounding the identities Lebanese' and 'Muslim' serves to erase the 'Australian-ness' from the perpetrators, positioning them as 'them', thus distancing 'them' from 'us' (the white subject-reader). This discursive technique functions to construct who 'they' are in the terms of a polarised out-group, and at the same time, who 'we' are not (designated in-group). This is precisely what Hall is talking about in the epigraph that opens this chapter: 'we find the "absent" but imperialising "white eye"; the unmarked position from which 'observations' are made and from which alone, they make sense' (Hall 1981: 38). Moorti importantly argues that this is the 'operation of power relations in news

150 discourses which can be understood by examining whose perspective is represented as doing what to whom' (Moorti 2002: 77).

The strategy of distancing is at work in The Australian's editorial attempt to draw a distinction between being 'Lebanese-born or Lebanese Australian' (August 24 2001). In both examples, the editor foregrounds 'Lebanese', over and above their Australian identity. Media commentators are ostensibly able to do this by using, in their defence, the claims made by the accused that they themselves are the ones who identify as Lebanese Muslim. The perpetrators are obviously not 'Lebanese', in the strict sense of national status. As Crichton and Stevenson inform us, 'all were born, raised and educated in Australia … two had mixed parentage' (Crichton and Stevenson September 17 2002). There are few examples where their Australian/ness is actually alluded to or even mentioned. This mode functioned as the dominant strategy of racialisation in media texts. Community leaders further problematised the discourse about who and what is to blame, by insisting that since 'they were born here, then they learnt to rape here' (Collins et al 2004; Shanahan 2001), as if sexual assault doesn't happen everywhere.

The signifying practice of foregrounding the racial, ethnic and religious background of the accused served the ideological function of causally linking being Lebanese and Muslim to the spectre of sexual assault: that is, being Lebanese and Muslim is the reason for the sexual violence; the inference here is that the accused committed the crime because it is 'cultural'. This reading is unavoidable given this media practice was so insistently mobilised in each and every text. The foregrounding of ethnicity and religion emphasised the crime 'as a wrong committed by a member of a racial group', thus inscribing 'race as an ideological construction that imputes causation to supposed racial reasons' (Block 2001: 146). In calling attention to the ethnicity and religion of the accused men in all reports, media writers thus highlighted the racial atrocity of the rape (Block 2001:150). In so doing, the gender dimensions of sexual violence were and continue to be strategically elided. This practice of

151 bringing culture, ethnicity, and religion of the perpetrators into sharp relief thus provides a rhetorical shield to blame the spectre of sexual violence in this instance exclusively on Lebanese Muslim culture.

This system of representation, of selectively naming racial categories and religion (especially when Arab and Muslim)17 in the context of crime thus constructs meaning through a dominant system of racialisation that is historically embedded in the state's practices. As long as ethnicity, particularly the ethnicity of minority groups, remains 'one of the factors which make the reporting of a rape search newsworthy, there can be little hope for the disproportionate reporting of those cases involving racialised minorities to change' (Grover and Soothill 1996: 581). The spectre of the Muslim Lebanese rapist has temporarily usurped the myth of the Black rapist in a contemporary and localised Australian context. In this setting, Lebanese Muslims males are invested with meanings that can be tied to the racialised discourse that imagines Islam and Arabs as violent, predatory and primitive. As Black British feminist theorists Valerie Amos and Pratibha Parmar argue, 'any talk of male violence that does not emphatically reject the idea that race of colour is relevant automatically reinforces these racist images' (2001: 27).

The victims were naturally situated against these categories of distanced otherness. The women were variously referred to as 'young', 'Australian', 'Caucasian', 'non-Muslim', 'non-Muslim Australian', and 'of European extraction'.18 The story of course is more complex than the media reported. It was not widely reported that three of the women survivors did not fit into the category of the 'traditional' white Australian. One was of Greek background, one Italian, another Aboriginal.19 Seemingly, in the rush to invest and embody the women with 'Australian/ness' in order to distance the perpetrators as far from the borders of civility as embodied by the identity 'Australian', their racial/ethnic categories were strategically elided from media reports. This is symptomatic of how race descriptors are applied selectively, and in this case, an insistence on the women being 'white' was crucial in constructing the other

152 as a threat. Poynting et al point out the two converse ideological manoeuvres being affected in this case through 'the "othering" of the perpetrators and the "whitening" of the victims' (2004: 124).

I have argued in this chapter that race played a central role in how the Sydney gang rapes of 2000 were framed and represented in print media texts. The practice of foregrounding the ethnic and religious backgrounds of the accused in these texts emphasized the crime as a wrong committed by a member of a racial group, inscribing race as an ideological construction that imputed causation to supposed racial reasons. The strategic elision of gender from the discourse enabled particularised racial ideologies to reshape the public image of sexual violence. An insistence on the racialising of this rape produced a discourse that perpetuated misunderstandings of sexual violence, reiterated a racialised exceptionalism, and normalised common sense feminist understandings of rape in the service of racism. As writer and academic Paul Tabar commented:

It is a shame that we have to be racist in order to recognise the rights of raped women. It seems to me the fact the rapists are an 'ethnic other' explains both the exceptional space given to the rape victims and the magnified outrage manifested by the dominant culture. (2003: 61)

I will now examine how the Arab male subject has been narratively inscribed in selected media texts, with particular attention to how these representations have been enacted discursively to objectify this figure as the evil and rapacious other.

Hall argues that, 'reality exists outside language, but it is constantly mediated by and through language: and what we can know and say has to be produced in and through discourse' (Hall 1980: 131). Belsey points out that 'ideology is inscribed in signifying practices – in discourses, myths, presentations and representations of the way "things" "are" – and to this extent it is inscribed in the language' (Belsey 1988: 42). Hall and Belsey remind us how discourse,

153 language and myth are key sites for scrutiny in understanding how meanings are made productive at particular points in time. I want now to take up the question of how specific meanings were discursively produced by examining the lexical choice of such words as 'evil' and 'animal' to describe the perpetrators.

A typology using popular conventions of demonic anthromorphism to describe the un/human nature of perpetrators of violent sexual assault is a standard practice in popular media discourse. In the Central Park case, the perpetrators were variously described as 'animals, a wilding wolf pack, dark creatures of the night' (Munk 1990: 368). In the case of Anita Cobby, the Sydney nurse who was raped and murdered by five perpetrators in a paddock in the Western Sydney suburb of Prospect in 1986, 'newspaper headlines and political opinions screamed "Monsters!" and "Animals!"' (Dagistanli and Lumby 2003: 64). In an essay on the objectification of language used to describe perpetrators and victims, writers Selda Dagistanli and Carrie Lumby found that Cobby's assailants were described 'as "pure evil," "monsters," and "animals" by individuals who had some level of involvement in the Cobby case, as well as the greater public' (2003: 65).

By using this type of language to characterise this crime, Dagistanli and Lumby argue that this 'presents an unequivocal dichotomy between good and evil [a]nd nowhere has such a clear dividing line between good and evil been established in the discourse surrounding violent crime as it has in the murder of Anita Cobby' (2003: 66)'. I would argue that this was certainly the case up until the 2000 Sydney gang rapes became public knowledge via the media. The spectre of evil once again became the lexical choice in how the accused were constructed in popular discourse. This rhetorical device was especially resonant at this particular moment in time because of its immediate relationship to the political discourse that had framed the Western public's understandings of September 11 and the political rhetoric that underscored the global publics' acceptance for a War on Terror.

154

In the immediate period after September 11 2001, the language of media commentators and the US president 'was increasingly apocalyptic'. Canadian scholar Derek Gregory argues that the war they were preparing to embark on was presented as 'a series of Manichean moral absolutes: good against evil' (Gregory 2004: 47). US president George W. Bush 'constantly fulminated against "the evil One" and the evil-doers, positing an extended "axis of evil"'(Gregory 2004: 48). Writer Joshua Gunn dissects this rhetoric in his aptly titled essay, 'The Rhetoric of Exorcism: George W. Bush and the Return of Political Demonology'. He provides a contemporary context for the increase in demonic rhetoric in popular culture, his goal is to demonstrate 'how speech writers used a demonic anthromorphism to craft a righteous presidential rhetoric in order to overcome the widespread experience of anomie and speechlessness caused by the violence of 9/11' (Gunn 2004: 1). Gunn argues that 'the ineffability of 9/11 has created numerous rhetorical acts designed to restore the voice and security of the polity, including a litany of rituals, speeches, and performances' (2004: 2). Words like '"courage," "honour," "freedom," "trust," and "faith" were key words in political speeches, the Western terminological repertoire for expressing 'goodness, secular and divine was indeed large' (20004: 2). Gunn goes on to argue that:

Those who sought to characterise the 'terrorists' or their deeds, however, were limited in expression. They described the terrorists' intent and motives as 'evil', reducing human action to inhuman motion and thereby dehumanising the racial/religious Other as monsters controlled by a malevolent force. (2004: 2)

The frame from which the Western public (or the dominant public) were able to 'understand' and therefore accept what had taken place came through the power of meaning. Thus, as Gregory argues, the rhetoric of the 'cartography of evil' was 'designed to bring relief to "us" while bringing "them" into relief; at once a therapeutic and a vengeful gesture, its object was to reveal the face of the other as other' (Gregory 2004: 49). This is immediately significant in my reading of how the face of the other was mobilised at the local level to

155 represent the evil of the Sydney gang rapes. This is no more compellingly expressed than in The Daily Telegraph's cover story after the media were granted permission to disclose the names and publish photographs of two of the perpetrators. The headline, graphically emphasised by the use of large capital letters reads, 'FACES OF EVIL' (Wockner 2002: July 13) (Figure 10). Underneath this text, the faces of two of the perpetrators appear in photographic form, one smiling, the other looking sullen. This text provides a localised meaning for visualising evil via the faces of young men of Middle Eastern appearance. The most obvious property of this headline is its hyperbolic use of the metaphor. In this way, this text became the definitive inscription that underwrote the media's representation of not only this case, but of the global rhetoric in the immediate months before this headline came into being. Finally, 'we' could put a face to evil in the local context.

The term 'evil' is used interchangeably with various animal references in much of The Daily Telegraph's representations of the perpetrators during the trial and post sentencing. In another large font capitalised front-page headline, 'EVIL AUGUST' includes metaphorical references such as, 'hunting its prey in a sneering, violent pack' and a police constable is reported to have 'a gut feeling for evil' (Wockner, August 3 2002). Further, The Daily Telegraph's (DT) 'Inside Edition' story on the family of one of the survivors is titled, 'A family's journey to overcome evil' (Wockner, August 3 2002). In yet another instance, 'Rape victim pursued by evil' is the analogy used by Crown Prosecutor Margaret Cunneen and mobilised as a DT headline. The text of the article also includes animalistic references like 'the paw of the predatory cat' and the survivor being likened to a 'mouse' (Wockner July 9 2002). As Dagistanli and Lumby argue in relation to the Cobby case, populist references to the perpetrators as animals functions to 'put a dividing line between "us" and "them" as other, excluding them from the moral community' (Dagistani and Lumby 3002: 66).

156 The apocalyptic metaphor is further made productive with the headlines 'Final reckoning for gang rape rampage' (Chulov et al, July 12 2002) and 'Sword of justice fells worst rapist' (Crichton, August 16 2002). This discourse is resonant of the language being mobilised temporally in the political sphere in which terms like final reckonings and infinite justice functioned as strategic terms in the quest for moral righteousness. The codename for the Afghan front was 'Operation Infinite Justice'. The US president had most famously referred to the 'axis of evil' made up of 'regimes that sponsor terror: Iran, Iraq, and North Korea' (Gregory 2004: 48). This metaphor of evil was invoked variously by US, British and Australian politicians in the lead-up to the pre- emptive strike and occupation of the sovereign state of Iraq in 2003.

In the strategic deployment of this rhetoric of demonology in the case of the Sydney gang rapes, the perpetrators thus became localised representations of the evil that Bush characterised in his apocalyptic gestures post-September 11. This form of knowledge and identification works precisely because it moves between what is already in place, via the Western rhetoric of September 11, and then is insistently repeated through events like the Sydney gang rapes. The representational terrain within which these media texts are therefore understood, take their meanings not only from the claims of evilness and bestiality made within the text to explain sexual violence in this instance, but also from populist (neo)colonial discourse which positioned the Arab male as savage and barbaric, and therefore must be contained.

Finally, I want to conclude this chapter by suggesting that the media's use of such apocalyptic language and the embodiment of the perpetrators as evil served an ideological function in providing the grounds for white male redemption and the necessity for a symbolic 'execution'. I argue this in how I read The Daily Telegraph's headline which heralded the 55-year sentence handed down to Bilal Skaf, the identified leader of the group sexual assaults.

157 But before I theorise the symbolic 'execution', I want briefly to examine the idea of a discursive 'lynching' that enabled the 'execution'. Media commentator Stephen Romei's piece on the 55- year jail sentence offers the question, 'Community standards or lynch-mob mentality?' (2002: 11). Romei's broad concern in this opinion piece is 'with the idea the sentence is appropriate because it is "what the community wants."' Romei goes on to write that he suspects '"the community" would not mind seeing the rapist hanged' (2002: 11). Kate Gleeson, in her critical essay, 'From Centenary to the Olympics, Gang Rape in Sydney' (2004), discusses this aspect of the case through the historical lens of the Mt Rennie gang rape case. She notes that the legal response to this 1887 sexual assault was the most severe sentence for rape in the history of the colony. She sets out to demonstrate how the accused ('native' white) in this case were similarly constructed as barbaric and outside the boundaries of the 'normative' community (British), and how this underscored in part, the public's call for the hanging of the perpetrators. Of the more recent Sydney gang rapes, Gleeson writes:

With little imagination the threat of 'lynch-law' could be read also as the sub-text of the 2001 rhetoric of the public demanding tougher sentencing. [NSW state premier] Bob Carr threatened the judiciary with the demands of the outraged general public, that 'will not tolerate light sentences'. On 2GB talkback radio there was talk of burning 'every Muslim house down in the area to get Muslims out', if need be. On ABC radio advice was offered that, 'you just want to get 'em and string 'em up by their nuts, that's the only way they're going to learn'. (2004: 195)

Gleeson goes on to note that Skaf's 55-year sentence is the longest custodial sentence for rape in the history of Australia. She contextualises this sentence in Australian criminology by comparing Skaf's non-parole period of 40 years, which dwarfs, 'the non-parole period of 27 years set for Julian Knight who shot dead seven people and injured 46 others in the Hoddle Street massacre in Melbourne in 1987' (Gleeson 2004: 195).

Lynching narratives are historically rooted in North American tradition. Feminist theorist Vron Ware identifies how in post-Civil War Southern

158 society, 'racist diatribes on black criminality and bestiality came to be accepted by whites as the observable truth, and in 1889 there began an orgy of lynching. From then on the practice became a specific form of racial terror' (Ware 1992: 171). This particularised form of racial terror was 'carried out in the name of defending the honour of white women', precisely because the crimes which 'precipitated these historic lynchings were invariably sexual in nature' (Ware 1992: 172). Angela Davis and many other African American theorists have exposed how lynchings were a pretext for the racial terrorising of African American communities. I use this term not in any way to argue for the innocence of the perpetrators here, (as many African American men were lynched as a result of vexatious complaints and false accusations of sexual assault on white women20), but rather, as a means of understanding how the symbolism of 'execution' as a public spectacle was a necessity for and by the white male subject in the name of both defending the honour of white women, and redeeming white male honour in his perceived emasculation by the Arab male subject.

The discursive lynching and symbolic 'execution' of the 'Lebanese Muslim rapists' was played out via the spectacle of a front-page headline. The Daily Telegraph performed the (self-appointed) task of chief executioner through the construction of a dramatic headline announcing the sentence of 55 years. On a black background reminiscent of the black hood of the executioner, the emboldened white text dramatically capitalised reflects the white hand of justice (see Figure 11). I read this textual inscription as spectacle with particular reference to Foucault's theorisation of the public execution in his influential work, Discipline and Punish (1977). Foucault writes that:

the public execution has a juridico-political function. It is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted; that the public execution restores that sovereignty by manifesting it at its most spectacular. (1991: 48)

159 I read the 'injured sovereign' specifically in relation to white masculinity. As Moorti argues, 'the problematic images of racialised sexuality inevitably normalise white sexuality, particularly white masculinity' (2002: 79). Critical race theorist Michael Awkward argues in the case of Mike Tyson, in his study on rape, representation and black masculinity, Tyson is seen 'as a subhuman shadow upon whom we [men] can thrust all of the negative qualities of masculinity in order to purge ourselves of the guilt of our own implication in the hierarchical structures of male dominance' (1995: 113). In this way, I read this headline as a purging of white guilt in their very implication as sexual terrorisers in the Australian context. This symbolic execution provided a redemptive force for the sovereignty of the white male subject to reclaim the moral high ground and reassert his power over both white women (as protector), and over out-of-control other masculinities (as sovereign- punisher). Feminist theorist Lisa Cuklanz found in her analysis of popular prime US television rape narratives that male protagonists were central to the episodes, serving as a clear moral contrast to the rapists. But importantly, Cuklanz deciphers the methods in these narratives of bringing 'masculinity to the centre of the story, thus marginalising rape victims and other women in the process' (Cuklanz 2000: 63). In the same way, through the spectacle of the execution, (white) women's experiences of sexual assault are made secondary to the redemption of white masculinity.

Foucault argues that the very public/ness of the spectacle is to bring into play 'the dissymmetry between the subject who has dared to violate the law and the all-powerful sovereign who displays his strength' (1991: 49). The spectacle is an important framework for such a show of power precisely because, as Foucault tells us:

In the ceremonies of public execution, the main character was the people, whose real and immediate presence was required for the performance. An execution that was known to be taking place, but which did so in secret, would scarcely have had any meaning. The aim was to make an example, not only by making people aware that the offence was likely to

160 be punished, but by arousing feelings of terror by the spectacle of power letting its anger fall upon the guilty person. (1991: 57)

The Daily Telegraph, as chief executioner, summoned the people as spectators through their theatrical use of the headline. This headline heralding the 55- year sentence established the 'public execution as the moment of truth' (Foucault 1991: 43). Foucault goes on to argue that 'a successful public execution justified justice, in that it published the truth of the crime in the very body of the man to be executed' (1991: 44). In Foucault's schema, 'the public execution is to be understood not only as a judicial, but also as a political ritual … belong[ing] to the ceremonies by which power is manifested' (1991: 47). This encapsulates precisely the very terms upon which this event was framed by both tabloid and broadsheet print media both to reaffirm and reassert white narratives of race, gender, and sexuality, and to rewrite masculinity and violence in the Australian nation.

In the next four chapters, I address these very manifestations of power and the dominancy of white narratives of race, gender and violence through a fictional exploration of how the Arab has been narratively inscribed in popular media and literature, further exploring the links between male racialisation and Orientalism. I have expressly chosen the mode of fictional writing because of the persistent hegemony of racialised representations that saturate the media in particular, and Australian popular culture in general. While critical inquiry is an important intervention in unpacking how discursive power is enacted through media, fiction writing offers me, in this instance, satire, irony and parody, two modes that are liberatory in the face of the racialised discourses that come through media headlines, opinions, commentaries in order to tell the same old stories. As Hall attests, 'theory is always a (necessary) detour on the way to something more important' (Hall 1991). I begin this necessary detour with the 1990 Gulf War period as I creatively attempt to make sense of theory through the mode of fictional realism.

161 162 163

1 Historians Trevor Batrouney, Andrew Batrouney and J McKay have published on the history of Lebanese immigration. Sociologists Michael Humphrey, Abe Ata and Paul Tabar have published extensively on Lebanese social identity and political organisation in Sydney. More recently, Anne Monsour has published a critical history of Syrian/Lebanese settlement in Queensland looking at the gendered aspects of migration and the racialisation processes in settlement. Monsour's work is of critical import precisely because she centralises race and gender concerns in an historical context. 2 This report was widely scorned and demonised in the media with the then Premier of NSW, Bob Carr publicly criticising the Anti-Discrimination Board (ADB), an agency of the Attorney-General's Department of NSW. The Premier claimed in parliament, 'that any report with the word paradigm in it had to be suspect'. The policy unit which researched and produced the report was abolished shortly after publication. For a more detailed picture see Jakubowicz, A. 'Review: Race for the Headlines' in The New 'Others': Media and Society Post-September 11 L. Jacka and L. Green (eds.) Media International Australia No. 109 November 2003. 3 The Central Park case was framed by the media as interracial with multiple assailants in 1989. It was not until 2002 when this case unravelled that a single perpetrator was charged with the rape. According to CBS, the young men who had been falsely accused had spent between five and a half years and thirteen years in prison. 4 Most media consumers have some knowledge of the Tyson, Kennedy Smith cases and the Sydney gang rapes cases because of the saturation coverage by both local and global media. 5 While reports positioned the victims as 'Australian', both the Sydney Morning Herald and The Guardian reported that two of the girls were Italian-Australian, one was Greek-Australian and one was Aboriginal-Australian. This complicates the media claims that the rapists targeted 'Australian' women, in the specific context that this term is generally reserved for white women, not women from non-Anglo backgrounds. This information also strengthens the argument that these acts of sexual violence were about gender and power, rather than the ethnicity or racial background of the women. 6 The 1989 Central Park Jogger case in New York City offers us a cautionary tale. The young men originally convicted of that offence were vilified in the media and in court. DNA evidence and a confession from another person 13 years after the incident proved that the young men who had been accused, were not responsible for this offence. Their confessions to police were apparently extracted under threat and duress. At the time this came to light, it was reported that all of the young men, who had been teenagers at the time of their arrest, had served their sentences. The New York Police department issued a statement denying these allegations and conducted their own inquiry. The young men's convictions were over-turned by the NY State Supreme Court in December 2002. 7 For a discussion of the myth of 'real rape', see Susan Estrich's book, Real Rape (1987). 8 I purposely have reprinted the complete version of Pat O'Shane's letter given no space outside the letters pages was provided for dissenting views of the media’s representation of this case. Nadia Jammal, a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald responded to an article by Herald journalist Paul Sheehan who used the same

164 argument as Janet Albrechtsen of The Australian in framing this story. Jammal, a Lebanese Muslim woman herself, used her article to challenge the racist views and racialised frames that represented the standard practice of commentators across both political and media spheres. 9 See Sarah Projansky (2001) for her inquiry into antifeminism, new traditionalism and the backlash. 10 The Daily Telegraph referred to the case on the front page several occasions as the 'ethnic rape debate' (22/08/01). 11 As a general term, sexual assault encompasses all acts of sexual violence including rape. I use the terms group sexual assault, sexual violence and rape interchangeably. Rape as a term remains a potently descriptive reminder of the violence associated with the act, and for this reason, I have chosen to use it throughout this chapter. I also use the term 'gang rape' in the same way that media mobilised the term in much of the coverage. 12 Mostly community advocates and letter writers. There was little space for dissenting voices on the issue of how race was used in the case by both media and politicians. 13 David Fickling of The Guardian expressed what many critics of the media's coverage were expressing in private: '[T]hose who care equally about misogyny and racism are left in an invidious position by the gang-rapes of 2000: attack the racists, and you risk defending the rapists; attack the rapists, and you risk siding with the racists'. David Fickling, 'Racially motivated crime and punishment', Guardian Unlimited, 27 September 2002, p.3, at 14 This is a key example of the critical temporality of community which has advocated against this institutional racism which marks out particular communities including the Arabic communities. This practice has been questioned in formal settings with police and government, at conferences, and through cultural action since 1997. More recently, Sydney Morning Herald journalist Robert Wainwright (15- 16 July 2006) wrote an article questioning the accuracy and political nature of such practices as racial profiling, echoing the arguments that Arab activists and community organisations (including the Australian Arabic Council) have been putting forth since 1998. 15 The question as to who identifies Caucasian, excepting those from the Caucasus region, is pertinent to why the term is not analogous to the living and breathing identities of 'Aboriginal' and 'Middle Eastern'. The racialised histories of especially Aboriginal communities provides evidence of how colonialist paradigms continue to inform and dominate how identities are constructed in contemporary multicultural Australia. The term 'Caucasian' should be discarded in favour of a more relevant and contemporary term like 'white'. 'Caucasion' can hardly be compared in the same way that the racial identifiers 'Middle Eastern', 'Asian', 'Pacific Islander' and 'Aboriginal' are applied and experienced in the context of race relations and white dominancy in Australia. The terms simply do not exercise the same power. 16 The sexualised dimensions and sexist epithets were played down if not elided in all reports in order to both foreground and privilege the racial dimensions of the case. 17 It is rare to read or hear that a white Christian has committed an offence in Australia. Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism and Hinduism are not routinely invoked as descriptors in the Australian press, whereas, Muslim is actively mobilised as evidenced in the Sydney gang rapes of 2000.

165 18 'The gang rape of two young girls …. victims because they were "Australian"', 'Branded by the crimes of others', The Daily Telegraph editorial (September 8 2001); 'teenage girls of "European" extraction'; 'Sorry, but the rapists mentioned race first, ' Miranda Devine, The Sun-Herald (26/08/01); 'young Caucasian women have been targeted', 'Culture must be aired in rape debate' The Australian, editorial (24/08/01 p12); 'non-Muslim Australian girls', 'Taboos, stereotypes' editorial, The Sydney Morning Herald (23/08/01 p12); 'Caucasian girls between the ages of 14 and 19 were targeted', 'Society not to blame for ethnic crime' The Australian Luke McIlveen and Martin Chulov, (22/8/01); 'sexual attacks on non-Muslim women', 'Tolerant, multicultural Sydney can face this difficult truth', Paul Sheehan Sydney Morning Herald (29/8/01); 'in every case the victim was a Caucasian, aged between 13 and 18', 'Rape Menace from the Melting Pot', Martin Chulov The Weekend Australian (18- 19/08/01 p1); and 'the rape of Australian girls' Maralyn Parker The Daily Telegraph (22/08/01 p 25). 19 See page 56 and footnote 87 of ADB's Race for the Headlines. 20 The Scottsboro case (1931) was a landmark case in the history of civil rights and also in the history of rape coverage, pitting race against gender. For a discussion of this case, see Moorti (2002) pp57-59.

166

PART II

GENRES ARE NOT TO BE MIXED. I will not mix genres. I repeat: genres are not to be mixed. I will not mix them. Jacques Derrida, 'The Law of Genre' 1980.

167

No more social crises! No more economic crises! All that is left are racial crises! Aimé Césaire, 2000: 63

baba we once stood on the edge of our sea but they made us leave (Suheir Hammad 1996: 33)

I am of course not claiming that history is real and fiction unreal. (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 1999: 344)

168 4. Exit Shaharazad c. 1991

…Telling stories into the early morning in order to forestall death, to postpone the day of reckoning that would silence the narrator, Shaharazad's narrative is an effort to keep death outside the circle of life. (Foucault 1984: 120)

The discovery was gruesome, if not downright gory. Shaharazad was in all her Orientalist finery, veils colourful, bra sparkly. Even dead she oozed glamour, albeit a bit tacky, only now with a big scimitar in her back and a chrysanthemum in her mouth.

So much blood for a skin-and-bone woman. Her Persian carpet was ruined. Had she struggled? The police suspected she had though no one could be sure. There were certainly a lot of sequins over the expanse of the floor, but as the detectives would soon learn, sequins were always to be found when a belly dancer had been around.

Shaharazad had fallen like a Degas statue, her knees bent with legs folded under, back arched over. It was like the base for one of those art deco tables, only this was real life and Shaharazad was somebody. When the detectives arrived, they walked around her body anticlockwise, then clockwise, trying to work out how she had got into such a hazardous position. It seemed almost impossible to have died in such a contortion, but Shaharazad was always breaking new ground.

The detectives took shots of Shaharazad from all angles, pulling back as the pungency got up their noses. They struggled to untangle her. It took a bit of a tug but finally the bigger detective was able to remove the obvious cause of death. His eye glided down the blade of the weapon. It seemed like an ordinary sort of scimitar. No embossing and absolutely

169 no overlay. The other detective was thinking fingerprints, but not everyone was that clever.

The local police had registered a call from a woman tipping them off to a crime in the suburbs. The caller had an accent that the desk officer couldn't quite place. The detective wrote it all down. Anonymous tip off. Funny accent. No sign of forced entry, no discernible indication of a disturbance apart from a dead body. And a late night complaint about blaringly loud 'wog' music lodged by a disgruntled neighbour. But then, that generation complained about everybody.

The two detectives continued to pick up samples of anything they thought might facilitate their inquiry. Both had been on exotic cases like this before, and felt assured that they would be best to clear up the mystery. Detective Harry R. Holden (HR) liked to model himself on serial television. His special interest was ethnic crime, preferring it organised and of the Middle Eastern variety.

On the street, he was called Dirty Harry. He was always after someone of Middle Eastern appearance. Even if the suspect turned out to be Greek or Italian, Pakistani or Azerbaijani, he considered this merely a minor detail after the fact. Ethnic descriptors were his consummate passion. His leading question never deviated far from, 'And what nationality was he'?

For HR, the underbelly of multiculturalism was where it was at. Over the years, he had learnt to pronounce all the relevant terms - mafiosi, endraghada, triad, gang, cartel, drug baron. He was able to recognise all the possibilities of brown collar crime; to understand the dialect of the homeboy in preparation for the future of policing. HR would frequently insist, - Mark my words, in ten years we will be fighting gangs of Arabs and Asians in the centre of our cities.

The other detective was Dick Hunter (DH). He had developed his policing credentials in the back allies of the suburbs. His reputation as a

170 tough ball breaker was not to be challenged, least of all if you were Black or Brown. His speciality was to hang out on the gay beats and entrap the ethnic men who frequented them. He just hated miscegenation. Many would whisper, and some would outright claim, that DH received money on the side to keep quiet the fact that he had caught many a married man doing it, especially in the local communities. The media considered Dick Hunter a bit of an expert on the sexual habits of Mediterranean men. The local shabaab called him the Great White Hunter. A perfect duo for such an investigation.

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171 I don't know if I'm up to the telling of this tale. If it were easier, more constant. If I could be promised that every word would be understood. Every meaning appreciated. …..I have to cry it out and hope it finds its way. (Hammad 1996: 38)

Hayat lived on the feckless fringes of a literal life, where the outer scape of the suburb ran right off the margins. A sense of new world decay clouded the environs, affecting the old, the thinkers and the callow. In an ordinary world, there would have been a quiet place for her. She was cast in the mould of the dutiful daughter who held the patchwork of family together. But Hayat was a little indifferent. She had grown tired of all that had come to pass. Looking through a small window to the city, she now wanted to fly by night. Biding her time, she waited for a sign, any sign, to denounce the indolence that plagued her mind.

Working through the tumult of living and dying, Hayat had reached the nadir of existence in her conscious state. Remembering all the pasts that invoke one's sense of being, she just curled up inside herself and cried the quiet tears of memory. Not unlike her people, scattered like the diasporic dust of the cremated, she would always resist forgetfulness.

There wasn't a day that passed her by that she didn't try to restore. The Aunties had said if the dog's prayers were answered, the sky would rain bones. She no longer clung to this aching belief, as the dailies now filled her with knowing dread. She had got to reading the papers to improve her sense of argot. For a time she read between the lines, then stopped short of a full sentence when every page turned bad for her.

This was about the time in the Gregorian year of 1990 that the artifice that is the state in the Arab world came to grief. The political intrigue that so defined the history of the Arabs throughout the twentieth century was coming home to roost at the beginning of the last decade. Palestine was haemorrhaging after decades of brutal military occupation, Saddam was amassing his bravado on the false borders of the Gulf States, and the region was bracing itself for another magnificent disaster. A litany of failure had been passed down the generations, many still reeling from when the Europeans carved up the

172 lands that the Kurds, Baluchis and Assyrians (amongst others) had called homeland for countless civilisations. With the Western construction of the Gulf sheikhdoms, the Arab world never recovered from the betrayals and anachronistic political systems put in place and supported by high-tech tribal military powers. The final blow was the theft of Palestine. The systematic massacres of fleeing peoples and strategic destruction of hundreds of towns and villages never acknowledged. The abandonment of refugees in camps not fit for the living. The grieving did not cease for the land, for the dead, for the future born, for the ancestors in the ground. And then there was 1967. And 1970. Followed by 1975 and 1978. Then 1981 and 1982. And 1985. In 1987, the Intifada grew from the ground. And now this, another gulf war, the mother of all disasters. Not to discount all the calamitous years in between. With homeland the crossroads of three continents, there was never going to be much peace.

There was always a tomorrow of course. Hayat wished this latest disaster was all just a passing shadow, but she knew better. Before any semblance of cloud could determine thoughts piled high for millennia, a bad day's exile usually left her with a concrete feeling only a Herculean personality might try to offload.

Hayat thought she ought to get involved. No mean feat considering the resurgent hostility out there. With family in Palestine, Jordan and Kuwait, she was devastated by what was happening in the world. She knew that Palestinians in Kuwait were in grave danger and she could not get through to her uncle over there. Her father had died a broken life in a broken down body in a broken up diaspora. Her uncle was her living link to her baba and she was beside herself with anxiety.

The four walls she cherished enough housed her real escape. She would put it all off till tomorrow as soon as she entered her own lucid space. The outside triumphalism had kept her inside for a long time now, the cover of bed offering stark relief from a callous world. For Hayat, there was little to do but be in bed with the dishevelled. She would count down the minutes rhapsodically, convincing herself that it was all for

173 her own good, there was nothing she could do out there. Cradling this closet drama, she had now come to disclaim her own pouting place. She decided to do away with her silence and unmanacle the little she could salvage, and emerge from exile. She had decided to go out.

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174 Shaharazad will open the door for us. She will lead us not into her own nights of storytelling but into an investigation of the explosive relationship among sexuality, the body, and woman's voice in the Arabo-Islamic sphere. (Malti-Douglas 1991: 5)

The first port of call for the detectives was Abdul's Family Restaurant. HR had found a small card on the floor of Shaharazad's bedroom. It advertised a cheap range of mezze including hot kafta balls and a belly dancer as the main attraction. He located Shaharazad's diary and quickly matched the name Abdul scribbled on the night of her expiry. HR couldn't help but notice the diary was full of colourful shots of Shaharazad in a range of stylised positions.

The exotic woman poses in exotic postures at every opportunity. Her attitude is always planned. She looks exciting even while vacuuming the carpet, tending a roast in the oven, or presiding at a buffet dinner for 20 guests. (Princess Nyeela 1970: 19)

The two detectives arrived mid-afternoon at Abdul's and launched straight into their standard line of inquiry. Abdul was not sure where it was all going, but answered their questions.

- Yes he had been in Australia for forty two years. Yes he liked Australia. Very much. Very beautiful country. No he didn't like looking at white women. Why would he? Yes many people had his card. He gave them to everyone. Here take one. Belly dancer? Yes we have a belly dancer. Shaharazad is the only one who dances at Abdul's.

HR took out one of the many pictures he had selected from Shaharazad's collection; he especially liked the one of her with a big scimitar in her mouth. He showed it to Abdul. -Yes, yes, that's Shaharazad. Is she dead? Ya haroum! What happened? Yes she danced here on Friday with The Three Fatimas. They left about

175 eleven that night and he hadn't seen them since. But then, why would he?

Meanwhile DH was getting hungry. The succulent smell of laham mishwi cooking out the back was just too much for him. After the detectives finished with Abdul, they both promptly ordered a kebab sandwich, adding,

- But hold the garlic Abdul, you know we're still on duty.

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176 Within the perspective of the acclaimed centrality of the textual game, Scheherazade continues to be a mere function of the tale. (Cavarero 1997: 122)

It was not until mid-life that Sadie could bring herself to open her window. In the heat of a simmering day, it felt nothing less than dangerous out there. If only she knew how prescient that was given the narrative. Inevitably, she turned to the news. At first she couldn't find the wavelength she had grown accustomed to hating. It gave her a bite for the day. There was no mistaking the hissing that always preceded the sensational.

SHAHARAZAD STABBED TO DEATH screamed the usually well- modulated newsreader. Sadie stopped dead in her slippers. That was a headline to shake you out of fin de siècle stupor. Sadie watched herself let go of the coffee tin, scattering a thousand and one brown particles into the grout of the floor. She took a split second to recover enough to find herself dialling her friends to see if they had heard the news.

They hadn't, but thought it strange nevertheless. Hayat was convinced it was a hoax and wouldn't buy into it until she had read the papers. George thought it typical of a belly dancer to get herself into the headlines, pushing the threat of global war off the front page. But who the hell was Shaharazad? And who would want her dead?

A good question. Who would want to kill Shaharazad? After all she had brought belly dance out from the cold of the cabaret and into the lounge room of liberal feminism. Shaharazad had most recently appeared on the popular TV breakfast show Australia Wakes Up! as the resident exercise mistress. The audience was mostly the post-30s female, attracted to the idea of feeling sexy while getting fit. It seemed belly dance was the perfect form for just that. And there was money to be made flogging it. The costumes and props were a great deal more exciting than the dull aerobic bum hugging sports gear.

177 Shaharazad knew her audience intimately. She didn't try anything too convoluted. She stuck with the basics, getting the at-home woman in touch with her body.

While bending forward, bring legs together and cross ankles. Extend arms out to the side, then bring them around until hands meet in front, continuing to shake shoulders and breasts. Concentrate on keeping hips still, limiting the movement from the waist up. (Princess Nyeela 1970: 48)

Having seen Shaharazad perform at dawn, a small publisher approached her to put together a book on a thousand and one exotic exercises for the modern woman. Shaharazad was dazzled by the literary break. She had always wanted to write a best seller. What more could a white girl want than to be an exotic international author? Soon she would be everything that she had ever desired: to be an absolutely fatuous somebody.

Around the time of the publishing deal, Shaharazad had scored a contract with a local cosmetics company. She was to be the new face representing the cosmopolitan white woman living in the multi-racial city. In the burgeoning era of commodified multiculturalism, she was being approached more and more to promote all manner of consumer things: from carpets and biscuits, to weight loss programs, bed sheets and hair removal creams. The corporatisation of Shaharazad alarmed the Belly Dance Council. Not because she was selling out, but because she was making so much money. On top of her unbridled success on morning television and in small-time publishing, everyone wanted her to perform at their seminars, clubs, restaurants and bazaars.

The Shakiras and Safiras, the Delilahs and Nadiras were outraged. The aspirational were being pushed out of the circuit before they had come close to paying off their heavily decorated costumes. A disgruntled posse of dissident dancers got together and held a public meeting at Ali Baba's. Whole troupes turned up: from Sisters of the Sand Camels to the

178 Dancers of the Crescent Moon and Jewels of the Nile. On that August night, Ali Baba's resembled a Hollywood harem. Scores of dancers arrived in swathes of gold and lamé. Bangles and noisy ankles piled in to plot the demise of Shaharazad. By all accounts, the belly dancers tried to appear to be anti-corporate in their contempt for Shaharazad's good fortune, but before too long, the meeting descended into a sledging session. In her absence, Shaharazad was an easy target. She was cursed and derided, and subjected to all manner of veiled threats. In a secret ballot, Shaharazad was cast out from the Belly Dance Council.

The detectives learnt of this fractious turn of events from Dalia, Shaharazad's best friend and the only belly dancer in the city who wasn't out to harm her. DH and HR collected a list of exotic names from Dalia, but every belly dancer they interviewed only had good words to say about Shaharazad. It was as if the meeting at Ali Baba's had never happened. What were they to think?

Whom to believe? There is nothing to believe. We must learn to read symptoms as symptoms, and television as the hysterical symptom of a war which has nothing to do with its critical mass. (Baudrillard 1995: 41)

Dalia told the detectives that she had to organise a bodyguard for Shaharazad after the summit at Ali Baba's. She felt Shaharazad needed protection. She knew a security guard who was looking to diversify into celebrity management. His professional name was Nijinsky. He was tall and he took his martial arts seriously. Shaharazad loved the idea of her very own personal protection in the form of a tall white Russian. (At least she thought he was Russian, though he could easily have been Polish). Shaharazad couldn't resist a fling with the androgynous Nijinsky. She liked men and Nijinsky was no different from the thousand and one others she had taken to her bed. Nijinsky and Shaharazad became intensely close, but their passion expired in less than a season. They came to amicable agreement that he would

179 continue to be her personal bodyguard but also double as her artistic manager.

Poor Shaharazad was now condemned to exist only from the navel down. She had pants, yes, but no brain. She could dance, but Nijinsky was in control. (Mernissi 2001: 69)

Nijinsky was fiercely ambitious. He saw Shaharazad primarily as a cash cow. With the burgeoning cult of the exotic, the fight against First World obesity and the re-asserion of sexualised femininity, he knew there were dollars to be made. He encouraged her to show more flesh and terminate poor paying clients like Abdul and his Family Restaurant. But Abdul had given Shaharazad her first real break and she felt loyal. Nijinsky understood multiculturalism better than any and felt it shouldn't be wasted on poor paying clients like Abdul. Soon Nijinsky was choreographing Shaharazad, overworking the sexual dimensions into her every step.

At one point during a typical oriental dance routine, most dancers will do what is known in the business as “floor work.” It usually consists of moving about in provocative positions, including lying prone and moving only the stomach muscles, up and down, around, and in and out at the same time! (Princess Nyeela 1970: 50)

It didn't go down well. Shaharazad's mainstream appeal was put at risk by engaging in this sort of avant-garde sexuality. The belly dance public were simply aghast at the sight of it. Shaharazad herself had wanted to come across sensual, but it was just too sexual, the belly dancer's curse. She had no choice but to let Nijinsky go. Shaharazad went solo.

180 No one, in fact, forces her to make the most of her talent; on the contrary, it is she who decides to risk her life in order to save other virgins from a certain death with her art. (Cavarero 1997: 123)

By the time she was found dead, Shaharazad had acquired a moderate public following. Dalia had encouraged her friend to think about writing her memoirs. Shaharazad would have done so had she not be murdered. She had a lot to say. She wanted to explore the discourse between interculturalism and prosperity; to research the dance way back to its origins. She wanted to publish a book on ethnic costumes. She was also interested in doing a belly dancer's cookbook for her devoted morning audience.

Strangely enough, the intellectual Scheherazade was lost in all these translations, apparently because the Westerners were interested in only two things: adventure and sex. (Mernissi 2001: 62)

When it came to belly dancers, the detectives were as ignorant as any. They first thought Shaharazad was the victim of an honour killing. But when it became obvious to them that she was white, the detectives started to take it far more seriously. They had several leads but HR was not convinced he knew what was unfolding. He was methodical enough to want to build a profile of Shaharazad on the office whiteboard. Dalia seemed his most credible source.

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181 Factual authenticity relies heavily on the other's words and testimony. To authenticate a work, it becomes therefore most important to prove or make evident how this Other has participated in the making of his/her own image. (Trinh 1991: 66)

Dalia thought Shaharazad's story was important. It was, like, she never got a chance to finish it. But of course Shaharazad hadn't always been Shaharazad, just as Dalia hadn't always been Dalia. The detectives needed to be informed that one isn't necessarily born exotic. So Dalia, being the confidante of Shaharazad, felt it her narrative duty to bear testimony for her friend.

Before becoming Shaharazad, the dead dancer was known as Harriet Harper. Life started out ordinary enough. She was born and grew up. Her parents were strict white Baptists and forbade their daughter almost everything.

Harriet Harper's first experience of the wider world occurred when she was given stamps from the proselytising Christians dotted around the globe. They sent letters to the local congregation asking for prayer, forgiveness and cash. This was the first contact Harriet had as a child outside the immediate confines of her parents. Her family were so nuclear, they were positively atomised. No extended family to speak of, only a lost maternal uncle who had been cast out because he was caught drinking once before church. Harriet was typically the product of a scant upbringing, deprived of anything but dogmatic religion. Like many a literary heroine before her, she was forced into reading so that she might make something of a story.

Harriet's world opened up after she took up fiction. For the first time in her life, she could imagine herself as the exotic daughter of missionaries. The Good Earth provided her with enough information about Chinese rural life for her to become a popular expert. There were few Chinese around where she grew up, except for the family who ran

182 the local take-away restaurant. Harriet was intrigued by their inscrutable difference.

She started to secretly visit the Wangs in the take-away, accepting small servings of fried rice that they bestowed upon her. In return she gave them her presence. The Wangs thought her typically an interested Westerner: the sort who dare only order chicken chow mien or chop suey at a stretch. Chicken feet were hardly welcome and not to make a public appearance for at least another two decades.

It was not long after visits to the Chinese take-away that Harriet's mother noticed early signs of identity transgression. Harriet started wearing Chinese collars while poring over the teachings of Lao Tzu. Of course traditional white Baptists were going to think that strange.

So it came to pass, Harriet Harper left her parents to their scripture, moving into the multi-racial centre.

Harriet learnt quickly how to operate in her new milieu without too much trouble. She found a one-bedroom apartment and a mindless day job. At night, she flirted with 'foreigners'. There were so many cultures floating around her, it really was the proverbial smorgasbord. Harriet extended herself way beyond all known delimitations. It was only a matter of time before she was over the Suzy Wong age of chinoiserie and eyeliner to die for. It came to her when the Mandarin ducks fell off the wall. As if in communication with each other, all three took a dive and ended up as shattered ceramic on the parquetry floor. It was a sign. Time to start looking around for something altogether other.

The cosmopolite is an essentially 'mega-urban' figure: one detached from strong affiliations with roots and consequently open to all forms of otherness. (Hage 1998: 210)

Harriet immediately went shopping only to happen upon the last copy of Forbidden Daughters of the Desert Harem - an Orientalist bestseller.

183 It was here in aisle five that she had her second ethnic literary epiphany. She couldn't put the book down for the excitement. She had finally found her true trans-cultural calling. She instantly fell in with all things Arabian. Harriet had moved from the far to the near in her quest for difference and ended up somewhere in the middle. She would find that certain Arab something to hang on her wall where the Mandarin ducks had once been. Nothing much had changed.

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184 Once an oriental dancer has decided to become a professional, there are two essential steps required in addition to learning the dance steps proficiently. The first is to acquire an exotic oriental name.* (Princess Nyeela 1970: 153)

Narratively speaking, it was only when Harriet met Dalia that she was able to put all her Orientalist fantasies into action. Dalia first appeared to her out of dry ice mist, barefoot under a shower of florescent light in a diaphanous stage costume. She was performing at the local ethnic festival in the shopping mall. Dalia was her exotic best, titillating the late night shopping crowd with her hip drops and camel walks. The wild beat of the desert drum created untold chaos amongst tearaway children.

Like many white girls in the multiracial city, Harriet had yearned to step outside the beige cloud of mediocrity, and shimmy over to the sequinned world of the exotic dancer. The idea of dancing barefoot made Harriet feel excited. She knew immediately she was born to be professional. She rushed over to Dalia and gushed her profuse admiration. They immediately became colleagues. Harriet Harper morphed into Shaharazad overnight and never looked back, except in performative exit.

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*'The second [step] is to join an entertainer's union'. Exotic Exercises Princess Nyeela with Bill Thomas Tandem Books London 1970 p 153

185 Your name's really Sherazade'? 'Yes'. 'Really? It's … it's so… How can I put it? You know who Sheherazade was'? 'Yes'. 'And that doesn't mean anything to you'? 'No'. 'You think you can be called Sherazade, just like that'? (Sebbar 1991: 1)

It wasn't easy being Shaharazad. For a start, she was confronted with the dilemma of spelling. There were so many variations on her chosen name, it was near impossible to know which version was appropriate. Scheherazade or Sherazade. Shaharazade or Shahrazad? For Harriet, this was nothing short of a multilingual nightmare. The trials of choosing an exotic name could not be understated. She wrote down all the possibilities, finally deciding on the one which yielded the most propitious numerology. After some quick sums, she signed off as the new Shaharazad.

A little pout, an effective but not untouchable hairstyle and make- up that complements your natural features may be all you need to create an 'exotic' look. (Princess Nyeela 1970: 90)

Shaharazad now needed to learn how to apply the delicate shades of bronze shimmer without looking fake. Dalia provided counsel on this most important of aspects in the ethnic makeover. Brown contacts and thick camel lashes were fundamental ingredients. The more authentic she appeared, the more she knew she would attract accolades. She liked to think that she could pass for something.

186 Cross dressing offers both the pleasures of consumption – the Orient as a space of enticing goods to be bought, savoured and worn – and the deeper thrill of passing as a native. (Lewis 2004: 213)

Orientalist attire provided a fabulous wardrobe to a world of enthusiasts. There were experts on just about everything: from tribal to baladi, frou frou to vulgarity. Shaharazad was introduced to Fatima,* an expert on the construction of ethnic and tribal costumes. Fatima (née Freda) was a recognised scholar on Near Eastern tassels and had amassed a collection of Biblical proportions over the past 17 years. Shaharazad shared Fatima's fascination with Oriental colour and style, vibrancy and texture. She became Fatima's student and devotee. Fatima/Freda was in the process of retiring from the profession and had made the painful decision to revert to her Anglo identity. She hated to see her collection broken up so put her entire trousseau at Shaharazad's disposal. Fatima/Freda had whole Egyptian narratives stored in the back of her closet. She had biblical bodices, desert décolleté, Cleopatra cuffs, and harem pants galore. Shaharazad was impressed with this array and aspired to supplant Fatima as the new queen of the Nile. Shaharazad was bound for the big picture in little more than twelve months because of her commitment to consumption. But costume aside, the overall transformation of Shaharazad was nothing less than immaculate. Now she just had to concentrate on her routine.

At first, Shaharazad did not believe there was any deep symbolic meaning in the dance. She just liked the costumes. At best, she thought the dance folkloric. In the unreconstructed world of the belly dancer's manifesto, dance belonged to everybody.

* Not to be confused with The Three Fatimas.

187 It was clear from the beginning that Shaharazad was streets ahead of the rest of the caravan. Whenever she performed, she always made sure she was either the first to appear or the last to disappear. She was shrewd enough to know that where belly dance was concerned, dancers all began to look the same after a long day's taka boom into night.

[S]hould audience participation, or the “Sultan bit,” be included, several bars of the “Camel Walk” or “Snake Dance” while the dancer circles around and teases her victim, finally going straight into a fast number – perhaps “Fiddler on the Roof” again- as dancer and Sultan dance together. For the ending, back to “Hava Nehguila” and you have an act. (Princess Nyeela 1970: 154)

Dancing for the Arabs was her biggest challenge yet. She had done the rounds of the fast food outlets, the upmarket restaurants, the multicultural fiestas and symposia, the bellygrams, the precarious night club circuit and world music festivals. She had been subject to all the right exposure and profiles in women's mags and men's rags. She first appeared as a Turkish delight in the suburban belly dance follies with Dalia. But after a few minor mishaps and serious falling-outs, Shaharazad had an absolute bellyful of the shebang and believed it was time she articulated into the Arabic community. She had heard that they were a hard market to crack. But she had them all figured out. Brown the flesh, cover up a bit and pass herself off as Cairene.

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188 The veil dance is a playful, erotic dance, in which the elements of reserve and openness, which make up the art of seduction, are expressed in a particularly beautiful way. (Al-Rawi 2003: 129)

No one had attempted to crack the Arabic community since Salomé had danced the seven veils at Aladdin's and the business went bankrupt. Shaharazad would never attempt the seven veils anyway. It was way too clichéd. But she hadn't counted on the other dangers that went with being Shaharazad. At times, it was as if she signed her own death warrant. First she sprained her ankle. Then she escaped near self- immolation.

The night Shaharazad played with fire was the night she lost all her body hair. She entered from the right phalanx with a small brass bowl, slowly creeping across the floor like an arachnid getting ready to dance the tarantella. The bowl contained accelerant and remained unlit, awaiting the drama of flame to turn her virtual stage into an authentic Arabian night. She carefully placed the bowl on the floor, then danced with her cobra arms around it. She dipped her fingers into the fuel and then lit her fingers off a candelabra that was on her head. She ignited the bowl with her fingers, the flame becoming a mesmerising focus. The relentless monotony of a uniform drum beat impelled Shaharazad to move as if her whole corpus were on fire. She had truly gone native.

No wonder that the veil is used in the women's dance. It is fun to shroud oneself, showing only the part of oneself that one wishes to expose. The veil lends the dance an element of mystery. Swung over the head or over one's shoulder, it seems to take in the space and extend one's aura (Al-Rawi 2003: 131)

Meanwhile, Shaharazad got so taken up with her choreography that she forgot to blow out her fingers and her veil caught fire, singeing the outer layer of her hair as she swayed into the next stage of the narrative, the willow arm movement. Her silver-sequined-pastel-blue

189 veil just melted into oblivion in less than seconds. Shocked audience members thought the veil burning a deliberate political act. Shaharazad had little clue that she had created such turmoil from her rather dangerous mistake. The club owner immediately took the fire extinguisher to both Shaharazad and the smouldering veil, abruptly ending her night of incandescence. He then chastised her in private for endangering his livelihood.

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190 Unlike earlier wars, in which there were political aims either of conquest or domination, what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future. (Baudrillard 1995: 32)

In the first week of January, everyone had tried to focus on the immanence of war, avoiding the subject of Shaharazad. No one mentioned the belly dance murder, especially those organising the rallies and protest meetings. As the few trudged in the light summer drizzle to make their point, or at least have their voices heard, even though it was a silent march which defeated the whole purpose of having a voice, indifferent shoppers pushed through the anti-war brigade to reach the boutiques on the other side before another bargain slipped away. Some onlookers were more inclined to pass commentary on the solemnity of the day. - Get ya mufti off, screamed a man of middle-aged appearance in a smart double-breasted suit. Yeh, whatever. And the attempts at simple irony, - Welcome to our country passed over and between the diasporic Arabs as they looked ahead and tried to keep the sanity of the day intact. And of course, there was, - Go back to where you came from, but everyone was used to that.

George was not one to contain herself and screamed back in a shot, - I-was-born-here-you-great-fucking-dickhead. This was not how she was expected to present as a calm, rational Arab, but it did make everyone feel a lot better for the remainder of the moment.

The war, along with the fake and presumptive warriors, generals, experts and television presenters we see speculating about it all through the day, watches itself in a mirror: am I pretty enough, am I operational enough, am I spectacular enough, am I sophisticated enough to make an entry onto the historical stage? (Baudrillard 1995: 31)

191

By mid-January, the Gulf War indeed was taking place and it was impossible to have any perspective on the murder of Shaharazad. Baghdad was the new Saigon and all manner of people were intent on dreading the inevitable. The Arabs were busy drawing their own conclusions. This media-managed war of computer-generated images had taken death out of the picture, convincing Western publics that there were no dead to speak of. But not everyone fell for it. Hawa had been around long enough to know that blood spilt was still red. She knew all the tricks of the generals.

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192 I am the birds of October, The flocks of migration I am the first woman in the new country Who will dare love me? (Kahf 2003: 85)

Hawa had got the wanders a lifetime before and took off from the old country. It was not unheard of in a time of limited options that a woman like Hawa would head for opportunity. She had been a silk worker from the age of ten and the sole breadwinner for her extended family. By the age of seventeen, she set out to convince her mother that she would earn more money if she moved to the New World. Hawa's mother remained silent, unable to conjure a life for Hawa outside the village. Hawa took that as consent and set out for Trablous. Like many an émigrée before, she had to endure degradation, steerage and humiliation, but she looked to the bigger picture. Hawa established herself in no time. She hawked her wares selling silk stockings to cocky farmers' wives and itinerant sex workers. As she walked the roads and dirt tracks, she couldn't but wonder if this was the same silk she had spun herself from the mulberry trees of her girlhood. She used to say peddling made her contemplative because she would walk for days without speaking to anyone. And when she did have to speak, she mastered the only phrase a hawker needed, 'Buy sumthink laydee'. But those days came to an abrupt end when Hawa was caught taking apples from a tree. She was hungry bordering on delirious having not eaten for some days, so when she spied a paradise of apple trees, she didn't think taking one would be grave. The white farmer who had stolen the land three generations before had been on the lookout for what he called 'thieving blacks'. Before Hawa could take a bite of the succulent fruit she had craved since she had left the village, the farmer grabbed her by the hair and threw her to the ground. He then strung her up a tree branch by her thick waist length plaits. Hawa screamed and screamed but to no avail. She was left to hang by her hair for the rest of the day and eventually passed out from shock. It wasn't until an Aboriginal woman passed by that she was let down as gently as she could manage.

193 Hawa never peddled the open road again and returned to the city to open a brothel.

She became wealthy in her own right and was able to keep sending money back to the old country for decades. Everyone knew all about Hawa, but nobody ever passed judgement because she helped so many new arrivals. She picked up English in time becoming an expert on the vicissitudes of Western ways. Street English, shop front English, speak English. She learnt her lessons well. She believed she had done her time in the new country. She even bought Australian. But now it was enough. She imploded that hot Gulf War January and she was not the only one. Explosions happened all over the city. Cousin Louie got the sack for talking back. Old Moussa had got into a fight and had to be restrained. Even timid Tawfiq had chased some stupid redneck down the street with his industrial strength broom. And poor Ahmad, he just couldn't be saved.

Those who smell the soil of Ahmad's grave will have musk scented breath for the rest of their life, but the catastrophe poured on me could night the day. (bint Mohammad 1999: 64)

Hawa had never previously shown any interest in the politics of the day. Now she brooded all night about Pax Americana. She listened to the radio and became depressive. Her demeanour underwent a dramatic change. She stooped more and more as each and every smart bomb was unleashed on the city of books. Soon she would be sweeping the floor with the hairs on her chin. She hadn't felt so defeated since the fall of Granada. She started to wear black exclusively again. She had not worn her mourning attire since her only surviving brother had died.

And only the host of mourners crying for their brothers saves me from myself. (Khansa 1999: 60)

But Hawa's change was no less indicative of the bigger picture. Children became sullen and repositioned themselves in the overcrowded margins.

194 Others responded with moments of strategic withdrawal. Suddenly strangers came to speak of Saddam as if they knew him intimately.

- Who is Saddam, mama? Saladin had asked his mother. A teacher in his school had kept calling him Saddam. Saladin first thought the teacher might have got him confused with another migrant kid. After all, he knew, even at his age, that those not familiar with the culture might somehow make the mistake of confusing Saladin with Saddam. But Saladin indeed was a generous child. He had learnt to tolerate other kids' prejudice, but he drew the line with teachers.

- No Miss, Saladin gently protested. I am Saladin, not Saddam. He even spelt it out slowly for her to ensure that she didn't keep making the same mistake. She didn't seem interested. Saladin was then made to sit by himself for the rest of the year.

Umm Saladin cursed both the teacher and Saddam, exhausting her command in several languages. She implored her progeny to ignore it as much as was possible. A thousand curses cannot tear a robe. Umm Saladin felt especially compromised after having impressed upon her children that one must always respect one's teachers. Saladin knew that his mother was angry. She only ever resorted to cursing on very special occasions.

For Hawa and those of her generation, the occasion of fin de siècle felt like a flashback to the fifties, though without the smart furniture and Frank Sinatra. The airwaves continued to pump up the volume for the call to arms to root out the enemy, with the suburbs becoming the inevitable battleground. It was time to stay inside and wait for the storm to pass before someone got seriously hurt in the foul tempered environs. The summer heat clawed away at people's reasonableness, leaving a raw state of nerves. Something would have to break soon.

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195 But if you're not moved by this outrage, you might as well bathe in scent and kohl your eyes and wear the bridal dress. (bint Abbad 1999: 32)

The storm erupted just as Bassma was about to get out of the car in her finest hour. A vicious simoom nearly blew off her veil from an unremitting grip. The maids of honour were absolutely no help, concerned only with their own collapsing bouffants. How were they expected to think of anything else? George was looking decidedly uncomfortable in her chiffon dress. She kept muttering expletives and was not at all in good humour for such a big day. She had wanted to attend the anti-war rally, but instead was left holding her sister's bouquet. No one had seen George in a dress since she was a baby. She was not happy either.

[Shaharazad's] entrance into the world of Arabo-Islamic discourse is much discussed, her exit not. (Malti-Douglas 1991: 5)

As for the belly dancers, they were outraged. Shaharazad's murder had been put on the backburner in favour of reporting the events of the Gulf War. How could the media give up on Shaharazad? The belly dance community decided to make their collective disgust public. They hit the streets; not in support of the 'Bring the frigging Frigates Home' campaign, or 'Troops Out' or even 'Stop the Slaughter', but rather to show their anger that the police were no longer taking Shaharazad's murder seriously. Out they got in their costumerie, shimmying down the central business district like a clutter of excited cockatiels as anti- war demonstrators silently trudged in the opposite direction with their rainbow peace flags.

Belly Dancers have rights too! Shame! Cover Up! Who killed Shaharazad? screamed the banners and placards. Drums, duffs, and an odd assortment of percussive kitchenware amplified the attention that was already promised via the spectacle of soft white flesh and sequins. Why hadn't the anti-war coalition signed up the belly dancers for their

196 campaign, some of the savvier activists had wondered after the media turned out in droves to cover the belly dancers' complaints?

I am against everything Against war and those against War. Against whatever diminishes Th'individual's blind impulse. (Marechera 1988)

Sadie was not impressed. How a bunch of belly dancers managed to get maximum media coverage whilst simultaneously titillating the left was beyond her. She had given up trying to work out the Western mind years ago. She was on a mission and to this end she would sacrifice the need to be angry so long as the unaligned left kept up the protest movement without fracturing and splintering. Political discussions were already starting to stalemate on whose strategy was more revolutionary and whose was merely marginal. A moot point, considering thousands of people were dying, a country was being carpet bombed with depleted uranium, and local Arabs were getting the sort of treatment that made the archetypal redneck look compassionate. It seemed that the most outspoken of spokespeople were just banging their heads against each other's beds. Hayat, George and Sadie in their different ways all knew this, continuing to organise themselves around the traditional gestures of protest, wondering what to do next.

The detectives were equally stumped. They had built up a detailed character profile of Shaharazad and now understood the importance of choosing an exotic name if you were professional, but this didn't necessarily aid their inquiry. Dalia had articulated her friend's life story eloquently, but had little idea about the business of policing. The detectives needed a new lead fast given the tabloid media's frenzied demand that the police arrest somebody. HR and DH came to the conclusion that the secret to Shaharazad's death lay in last night of her life. And only The Three Fatimas – Shaharazad's troupe - could tell them that story. So they tracked down Diane, Melinda and Margaret

197 who finally gave them the missing piece they knew would invigorate the narrative.

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198 Clothed in heavy gems, and presented to the viewer as an image graven in stone, she embodies the stereotype made pure performative: at once fetishised and mobilised in conceptual and visual space. (Apter 1996: 19)

Shaharazad had worked the night for all it was worth. It was Friday, and she liked to keep her best performance for Saturday. The crowd was mixed and tended to drink more alcohol. Shaharazad believed she could out-shimmy all other dancers who she knew looked absolutely rank amateur when next to her. It didn't help that the support lights blew and left the chorus line to the mercy of a black spot. Luckily they had fairy lights connected to their hips providing some light entertainment; otherwise it would have been a complete disaster. As it was, most patrons thought it part of the act. All up, Shaharazad felt rather pleased with the choreography. A Parkinson-afflicted pensioner had struggled to put a five dollar bill under her bra strap. Another had put a twenty towards her crotch. A woman placed ten dollars in the palm of her hand as she strode out the door, saying something she didn't quite understand. Shaharazad was yet to master the language.

The Arabic language is as tribal as the desert culture that created it. Each word trails a host of relatives with the same three-letter cluster of consonants as its root. (Brooks 1995: 10)

The dancers filed into the dressing room after the last of the applause. It was singularly uncomfortable in that confined little box. Stale sweat, baby powder and the rancid aftermath of cheap Cairene perfume saturated the air. The support dancers were just holding it together, irritated that Shaharazad was so gluttonous with the limelight. Well any light for that matter. What was the point of dancing when nobody could witness the spectacle? Imposing a silence on Shaharazad when she most liked to recount the night was the troupe's punishment on her. Only the sounds of sequins and the clatter of plates from the neighbouring

199 kitchen intercepted Shaharazad's self-congratulation. Shaharazad feigned indifference to the troupe's irritation.

Shaharazad then speaks. But woman's voice is more than a physiological faculty. It is the narrative instrument that permits her to be a literary medium. (Malti-Douglas 1991: 5)

- So girls, another night of satisfied customers. Remember when we performed at the Thousand and One Nights and Emad got violently jealous just because I accepted two hundred dollars to do a private show for the rugby team. That was a night to remember. On top of the agreed fee, I made another three hundred in tips, so from a fiscal point of view, it was worth it. Anyway, how about we go and celebrate with the tips I've made. It almost comes to sixty-five dollars. Cocktails at the Hilton for Shaharazad and The Three Fatimas.

This was vintage Shaharazad: telling stories to get out of trouble. Diane, Melinda and Margaret were hardly going to say no. Shaharazad was unfailingly good at getting herself back in favour. Her only redeeming quality was that she was never stingy with money. She paid her dancers the going rate and always shared the night's taking of tips, unlike a lot of the other hip swindling princesses in the inner city. Shaharazad bought The Three Fatimas a couple of Bloody Marys then rushed off into dark of the night in her velvet green cloak, leaving a trail of sequins behind her. This was about the last that anyone was ever to see of her.

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200 Morning overtook Shaharazad and she lapsed into silence. (Mernissi 2001: 56)

It was hardly surprising that the death of Shaharazad was destined for the corporate news. In the immediate period after the discovery of her body, the first tabloid editions went into overdrive inserting what looked like a swag of page three spreads. The imminent bombing of Baghdad had been relegated to the following pages. The anti-war coalition was collectively dumbfounded by this; the Arabic community were not. It was a truth universally unacknowledged that only a fool would try and compete with the spectre of a dead white belly dancer.

A Western woman, in these narratives, exists in a relation of subordination to Western man and in relation of domination toward "non-Western" men and women. (Shohat 1997: 40)

Media stories almost uniformly constructed Shaharazad as a naïf cut down by the forces of evil; a victim of a crime that surely was foreign to civilised people. Commentators speculated that she was punished by the sword because she was transgressive sexually; that she fell victim to a ritualised killing. Underpinning all these familiar narratives lay the belief, in the words of one hack, that Shaharazad was murdered because she was Western; that the local Mullah regime hated 'our freedom'. This sentiment was in tune with the pro-war campaign that necessitated the active demonising of the enemy to ensure local support for the latest imperial adventure.

In death, Shaharazad became an inadvertent propagandist for war. After all, the dog whistles and media commentary only confirmed what most suspected. The dead Shaharazad became a pin-up girl for the Western military. She now smiled out from the walls of bunkers and mess halls in a series of stylised Orientalist shots. In death, she became more famous than she could ever have hoped for in real life.

201 That Shaharazad's murder was being manipulated politically didn't surprise the usual cynics and those used to reading the media. Sadie was not the only one alarmed by one line in the last paragraph of a big feature detailing Shaharazad's legacy. A man of 'Middle Eastern extraction' was assisting police with their enquiries. This could not bode well for anybody.

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202 War stripped of its passions, its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics, as though with a second skin. (Baudrillard 1995: 64)

Hesham was getting ready to lock up the Palace a little later than usual when he noticed the same unmarked car parked across the road he had noted two days earlier. Old Mabruka was in for a trim, but as usual Hesham ended up giving her the works. She paid Hesham lavishly to take his time with her, so was happy for him to be a touch more tactile than hairline attentive.

After the scent of Mabruka dissolved into the humidity of the afternoon, Hesham lingered at the door trying to make out the faces of the two men watching his shop front. He smelt trouble. He had a nose for it and was not about to sit back and wait until something untoward happened. He rang Sadie.

She arrived not much later. The new model Ford was still there. Sadie parked directly behind and eyeballed the two white men as she walked past. It was so obviously the police, Sadie was tempted to say something but thought better of willing disaster. Hesham was inclined to go and chat them up, though he knew he would be done for sodomy. He seriously needed to know why he was under surveillance. What was he to them? The Aunties had always said after the incense is passed, there is no sitting on. The police were so conspicuous, that before long the whole street was watching them watch Hesham.

At first Hesham thought that they might have him confused with another rather handsome man of Middle Eastern appearance. After all, it was common knowledge to the Westerner that anyone east of the Bosphorus looked the same.

After a week of the stakeout, Hesham turned to alarm when the two detectives started taking pictures of everyone who entered and exited

203 the Palace. Old and young alike were captured on film as they left with their once curly hair now flat and straightened. Emad who had been seen spending hours in Hesham's Palace every other day of the week, always came out looking suspiciously different. To the police, this was nothing short of a makeover.

Hair after all is an alterable sign. (Candelario 2000: 129)

Emad had the sort of determination only someone in his shoes would. His concentration was regularly interrupted by the inconvenience of living. He needed cash money fast, so swept the floors and washed the hair of the diaspora over Hesham's shiny alabaster basins. For Emad, it wasn't simply a case of the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on.

Hesham's nerves were on scissor's edge after a sizzling hot day. As the barrage of bombs blitzed Baghdad, he had stayed up all night smoking in front of the TV hoping that a collective consciousness of deep inhaling might avert the catastrophe. But it was already happening. On top of that, he was coping with the daily harassment of being Arab, as well as contemplating one of the great mysteries of the suburbs, the police stakeout. Hesham was usually a stoic sort of cynic, but this summer he'd had enough. He became a chain-smoking fit of neuroses, having nipped a woman's neck earlier in the day as he cut into her luscious brown nape. As usual, Sadie took a late lunch and came with cigarettes in hand to the rescue. Hesham was consumed by the scent of gloom.

- This is out and out harassment. It's intimidation. Soon no one will enter the Palace but bald men. And you know I'll have to go back to driving Miss frigging Daisy. Sadie was less dark about it and proffered the clearest of options. Every knot has someone to undo.

- Hesham, there has to be an explanation. Maybe it's time to just go and have it out with them. They can't just watch you for no apparent reason.

204 Hesham was less sure, but more than that, he knew the fear and hysteria at work having listened to the diaspora as he caressed their stressed out hair.

- You can't go out there habibti. It's war and they'll shoot you. At the very least, they'll throw you into detention and it'll ruin you.

Sadie had no real fear of ruin that she knew of, other than when the Aunties tried to arrange her future.

Hesham was so desperately not himself. He fumbled over his cigarettes. He lost his cool demeanour even though he had just installed a new super three-way air conditioning system. He frowned more than he looked. It was like the prayer beads had finally come unstrung.

For all of two minutes, Hesham seriously considered returning to the old country. Then he remembered his last visit there and the dusk till dawn haggling about who would make the best aroos for him. He knew that he would rather not revisit that nightmare for some time.

The day after, Hesham had recovered enough to regret his uncharacteristic outburst, though he did seriously worry that the troubles were having an effect on even his most thickened of skins.

It is a war of excesses (of means, of material, etc.), a war of shedding or purging stocks, of experimental deployment, of liquidation and firesale, along with the display of future ranges of weaponry. (Baudrillard 1995: 33)

He didn't have to wait too much longer before the police gave up the stakeout and launched an all-out-assault on the Palace. Hesham handled it like a virtual Beiruti. One minute he was spraying gossamer shine over Mervat's bountiful bun, then HR and DH, accompanied by four from uniform, burst in like a spray of bullets through the frosted glass.

205

Disembodied hair went flying and swivel chairs spun out of control with customers still attached to them. It was like there was no tomorrow. Hesham knew straight away that this was the mother of all busts, but remained cool as a khiyar. After the hair finally settled, he ventured a question:

- Now who's for a treatment? How about you habibi? choosing the one with dead straight hair. What about a blow wave. If you'll just sit down, I'll be with you in twenty.

HR didn't like Hesham's tone. Nor did DH. They knew Hesham's type. Full of attitude and gay abandon. These two big beefcakes were not going to take this sort of insubordination lying down, especially from a hairdresser. And a Lebanese at that.

DH was onto Hesham in seconds taking over the machismo while HR started opening all Hesham's private compartments. The uniforms proceeded to turn everything upside down. They were obviously looking for something, but as they would discover, there was nothing to find. The women in the swivel chairs were spinning to a stop, mouths as wide open as Hesham's squeaky clean basins. Old Miss Samaki started to get up but was put down immediately by DH.

- OK peoples just stay calm, No need to panic. I don't want anybody to move or to touch anything.

DH walked his Cool Hand Luke walk, fondled the decorative arghile in the corner and continued.

- This is police business and it won't do you any good to try to escape. Just stay peaceful and no one will get hurt.

The spiel came so easily, it was as if he didn't even have to think about what he was saying as he repeated the same banal statements over and over.

206

- This won't take long, we'll be gone before you can say…. shishkebab.

DH paused before he uttered the last word. Shishkebab did not belong in the usual script. He had done a quick engine room search for a culturally specific word and came upon the only thing he knew. As he enunciated the shish in the kebab, he glanced sideways and eyewinked Miss Samaki.

Utterances are made intelligible because of differentiating features, features which are activated by the exigencies of the moment and context of the utterance. (Hejinian 1985: 276)

The women eyed him back disdainfully. Why would anyone want to escape? And why would they think to say shishkebab? If they felt compelled to say anything, the first utterance would have been jahaj. The women of Hesham's Hair Palace were hardly au fait with DH's version of criminality, though some of the banaat thought the ladies' activities verged on the criminal.

Mervat was hardly going to do a runner having just led the Ladies Auxillary to ba'laweh victory for the second year in a row. And Miss Samaki was a model citizen having just been elected vice-president of the Ethnic Ladies Gratitude Society for the local region. And poor Mrs Shoucair, she could barely walk on her own, let alone jump the chair and hobble it out of there.

Hesham stood in the middle of the bedlam priming his bravado. DH was onto him in a flash and the first thing he asked was if he was Muslim. Hesham shot back with the usual, - And what's it to you.

DH moved on to Emad and asked him his name. Emad looked worried, but Emad always looked worried and gave the himar a straight answer.

207 Next thing, the uniforms were escorting Emad out for formal interrogation.

There is a profound scorn in the kind of ''clean'' war which renders the other powerless without destroying its flesh, which makes it a point of honour to disarm and neutralise but not to kill. (Baudrillard 1995: 40)

Hesham was beginning to sense that they must have thought that they were about to foil an international terrorist operation, or maybe they thought his Palace was a front for a drug smuggling ring. Maybe it was some sort of sting. Hesham scratched his head looking for revelation via the inventory of stereotypes.

HR returned to the front of the palace having ripped open every box he could get his hands onto. He brushed past Hesham and started to speak as if it were serious.

- We have reason to believe that you are operating some sort of scam out of here, and sooner or later, we will find something.

Hesham was gob smacked at HR's admission that this was a fishing expedition.

- You mean to tell me you watch me for a week then bust in like this and don't know what you are looking for? Who is going to pay for all this damage? I'm sure the Ombudsman will be interested to hear about this.

The hairs on the tip of HR's nose bristled big at the mention of the O word. He hated uppity migrants who threatened the system, so went straight into damage control and allowed himself the liberty of explaining the 'visit' in plainer English.

208 - We have confirmed reports that the men who work here have engaged in perceived strange activity. We've already got one suspect in police custody. Any one of you could be next. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to have to come back here again. Do you understand me?

That was about as plain as it got, but Hesham was none the wiser. He wanted to give HR what for, but one of the girls who manicured on Tuesdays told him to uscut! before they all got bundled into the wagon.

The police left as quickly as they had come with little more than hairballs down their throats and poor Emad in tow. And for all the mess, what did they find? Nothing but gallons of sinister shampoo and buckets of dangerous hair straightener, enough henna to colour the world ten times over, and of course all the usual accoutrements found in any salon. They weren't terrorists, they were just hairdressers.

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209 Shaharazad's stories lead to another dichotomy, that between 'reality' and fiction. Her narrative 'nights' become, then, journeys into desire and the unconscious. (Malti-Douglas 1991: 25)

The Three Fatimas were unanimous in the belief that Shaharazad's longevity came to an abrupt end when she met Emad. They presumed he came from the desert, and being the garden of Allah, they believed him when he recounted how the sand told him secrets. Shaharazad fell for it. She would hear the sound of a distant chant or a drum calling her in the middle of the night. Often, she would ask Margaret, the youngest Fatima, 'What is that playing', and it would be dead quiet. She would invariably answer her own inquiry with, 'It sounds like a Moorish love chant'. Shaharazad believed her fate was in the desert weeping among the ruins. On the other hand, she did like her foreign affairs and her harem parties. They sort of kept her grounded.

The belly dancers knew that Shaharazad was dazzled by the occult. Dalia was somewhat smarter. She knew its inherent dangers, having studied the trance dance at a weekend workshop at a belly dance festival some years back. She had counselled Shaharazad not to mess with the zâr. But Shaharazad being Shaharazad was keen to try everything.

It was Emad who put Shaharazad in touch with an all-purpose sheikh should she need any spiritual help. But it soon dawned on her that Emad may have had a curse put on her. As night fell, she found it impossible to speak, not to mention the series of accidents that were awaiting her in the morning. She fell down a flight of stairs, miscarried and then her toilet broke.

After a month of misdemeanours, Shaharazad was forced to seek the advice of a curse counsellor at the local migrant resource centre. She wanted a counter curse put on Emad. She had heard it was a simple enough procedure guaranteed to make men go away. It seemed to work even though he visited now and again. But Shaharazad could live with

210 that. She was back to her old talkative self and soon became enamoured with a new male interest. Karim was low maintenance and lived up to his name. Emad was quietly furious when he learned that he had been gazumped by a Tunisian.

Dalia did not think Emad an immediate suspect in Shaharazad's demise, unlike all the other belly dancers in the city. Over time, Dalia came to see Emad as rather harmless. Not like some of the other lovers Shaharazad had squeezed. In love terms, Shaharazad tended to like her men patriarchal. The worst she had acquired was a man called Bob. He was really a scary character. She dumped him almost as quickly as she found him. According to unsourced reports, Shaharazad had close to a thousand and one lovers, something the detectives would need to further investigate. But if the truth be told, Shaharazad was fatally attracted to the Arab male. DH was devastated.

Here, the unapproachable exotic Oriental queen turns out to be the familiar, accessible Parisian whore. (Behdad 1994: 69)

HR knew that this was where the true meaning of the story might be located. He, unlike DH, cared little that Shaharazad had a different lover every night, though he did withhold this potentially damaging information from the media. HR was as concerned with protecting the reputation of a white woman, as he was in tracking down the last two of her paramours who both appeared to be Middle Eastern. HR was especially happy about this turn of events.

DH, on the other hand was gut wrenched to think that Shaharazad had preferred these swarthy manifestations of masculinity to white bread. He felt denuded. He was both fascinated and repelled by Shaharazad's seeming sexual ignominy. Were all exotic dancers like this? No wonder he preferred Filipinas. He hated race traitors like Shaharazad who transgressed sexual and cultural boundaries that had been in place for a reason.

211 Hence the breakdown of orientalist eroticism and its dispersion in a frustrated pornography that dispossesses it of its difference and multiplies the signs of banality. (Behdad 1994: 69)

HR, like the belly dance community, was convinced that it was Emad who had put the scimitar in Shaharazad's back. He believed her murder bore all the hallmarks of a traditional honour killing. The suspect was from Middle Eastern culture that was inherently misogynistic, where the men were sexually predatory. Besides that, he had been cuckolded by a Tunisian. With this belief system entrenched, Emad represented the model suspect.

After the police took him from Hesham's, they were finally able to front the media and report that they had apprehended a viable suspect in terms that were immediately tangible. The media trashed any possibility that Emad would be given a fair hearing and called on the community to own up to its criminals. It was Gulf War hysteria and all men of Middle Eastern appearance were now potential criminals. Emad was guilty by ethnicity.

I lived in the outside world - outside the tunnels, that is - for twenty years, unable to breathe no matter how I tried, like a man who is drowning. But I did not die. (Habiby 2002: 76)

After the briefest of questionings, Emad was detained indefinitely. His proficiency in English was never doubted even though he struggled to answer their incriminating questions. Without access to an interpreter he was completely done over. He was the brand new suspect and no matter how many believed him innocent, Emad represented the only chance HR and DH had to make their case into something.

Luckily for the detectives, Emad's prints were found all over Shaharazad's place. The only rather large hole in their case was the inconvenience of Emad's fingerprints missing from the alleged murder

212 weapon. The scimitar had a lot of smudges, teeth marks and prints, but none vaguely matching those of their suspect.

Emad had tried to explain in faltering dialogue that the bad sheikh had put a curse on Shaharazad independently of him. She had confided in Emad that she believed her life started to resemble that of a miserable Arab. That's when he gave her the address of the all-purpose sheikh.

Emad had told not an entirely different story from Dalia, only the detectives were less inclined to believe him because he had an accent. He repeated over and over as if he were learning a language that he did not get a curse put on Shaharazad.

Finally, after a bit of rough and tumble, Emad admitted that he did make a visit to a sheikh, but it was the good sheikh and it was to put a love curse on Shaharazad. The good sheikh had instructed him to get a picture of her face and a swab of cloth that had touched her flesh. So Emad went over to her place bearing the latest dance groove disk from Cairo. Shaharazad was not one to decline a gift, so invited him in for a minute. She was getting ready to go out for the night, so Emad offered to drive her to her destination. While she was getting ready, Emad lifted a pair of her panties from the dirty laundry and stuffed them into his pocket.

When he got home, he cut a little bit from the inside crotch of Shaharazad's panties and put it in an envelope with a miniature of her face. Mission accomplished. Emad returned to the love sheikh and the curse was settled after the exchange of a small donation. Soon Shaharazad would fall madly in love with Emad, marry him and he could finally stay in the country. Unfortunately for Emad, the love curse kicked in about the same time Shaharazad was murdered.

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213 Does hospitality consist in interrogating the new arrival? Does it begin with the question addressed to the newcomer: what is your name? tell me your name, what should I call you, I who am calling on you, I who want to call you by your name? What am I going to call you? (Derrida 2000: 27)

HR's case all but fell apart. He found Shaharazad's stolen underwear in Emad's apartment with a small circle missing exactly from where Emad had recounted. He had also tracked down the good sheikh and put him on notice for engaging in unAustralian activities. He wasn't able to locate the bad sheikh, but kept the book open on this one. It was a disappointing end to what HR thought might be a sensational break. Here he had a dead white belly dancer, her Arab ex-boyfriend on a dodgy visa with a view to marrying Western. It all made sense to him.

But Emad had a watertight alibi. He had spent the night at Hesham's and there were independent witnesses to prove it. The detectives were back where they started. HR Holden had wanted to give fin de siècle terrorism a human face by busting up Hesham's Hair Palace. But all he got was Emad, a virtual over-stayer, having a mere week to get his visa extended. Before HR handed him over to immigration, he had wanted to pin something bigger onto him.

Immigration had inducted Emad's into detention and then promptly visited Hesham to check that the Palace was not a safe house for harbouring illegals. Hesham was unmoved by their threats. What the hell did he care? The officials had informed the police that Emad had matched all the indicators of the classic over-stayer. He was Lebanese and over 40, nearing the end of his visa. Equally, in their world of stock characters, Hesham conformed to the standard indicators of the classic harbourer. They speculated that Hesham was operating at the tip of a complex web in the underground movement of 'foreign' peoples. All in all, immigration was happy. They were about to deport an Arab.

214 Emad's unlikely escape from being tagged a white woman killer represented an emotional setback for the detectives. To HR, he was still a virtual suspect despite evidence to the contrary. He could always get Emad extradited, if the right circumstances were to prevail.

As for Hesham, for someone who was held up as a model citizen of small business, he always seemed to attract unwanted attention. DH suspected he was trafficking Middle Eastern men into the country for his own queer purposes. For this, he would keep a straight eye on him. These sorts of tasks were the stuff DH was made for.

George, Hayat and Sadie arranged to visit Emad in immigration detention, having heard blow by blow what happened at Hesham's. Sadie offered Emad legal representation and George brought enough food to feed the prison. Hesham wanted to come too, but his fear of barbed wire and electrified fences kept him at a distance. Sadie had started to plan a campaign to publicise Emad's case, but it looked pointless given the political climate. Emad wore the expressionless glance of a defeated man. Hayat tried to entice him to speak, but he wouldn't be cajoled into anything. The humiliation of his situation was etched into his being. Sadie tried to reassure him, offering to interpret anytime he needed it. But it was too late. Immigration had already booked him on a direct flight back to the old country. He couldn't abscond even if he wanted to.

**********

215 At the beginning of the ninth century … Baghdad the fabulous city of the Thousand and One Nights, … had been the world's richest and most powerful state, its capital the centre of the planet's most advanced civilisation. It had a thousand physicians, an enormous free hospital, a regular postal service, several banks (some of which had branches as far afield as China), an excellent water- supply system, a comprehensive sewage system, and a paper mill. (Maalouf 1984: 54)

In the meantime, Iraq was still being pummelled back to the Stone Age. Baghdad café was bombed into the ground, in its place lay piles of rubble and the broken landscapes of Haroun al Rashid's dreams. Baghdad was now fated to be nothing more than a smoking post modern ruin. And from the embers of its destruction, the spin doctors prescribed a New World Order. The lingering smell of burnt flesh and desert oases of yellow cake were all that was left after the triumphant chorus sang its last dirge on CNN.

The media promote the war, the war promotes the media, and advertising competes with the war. Promotion is the most thick- skinned parasite in our culture. It would undoubtedly survive a nuclear conflict. It is our Last Judgement. (Baudrillard 1995: 31)

The Western media were victorious in their lack of attention to casualties, except of course if they were talking collateral damage. The rotting corpses, both civilian and military, were hardly good news stories. Human death and suffering were kept out of the lounge room, so that Western sensibilities weren't put off their TV dinners, as with Vietnam.

The black clouds of poisonous smoke buried Kuwait city like a shroud of death, forcing Palestinians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, Filipinos to flee for

216 cover. Borders remained clogged with the traffic of human misery as families waited anxiously for news of the über-exploited. As for the anti-war warriors, they kept trying to have a conversation with the world, but nobody would pay attention. The last thing middle Earth wanted to own was culpability for a war most had supported.

It seemed Shaharazad was also quietly forgotten despite her short–lived fame. She disappeared from the newsprint, in part because the detectives had failed to find a motive for her killing. Shaharazad's death thus lost all sense of meaning in the absence of a credible perpetrator. The question of who actually did it was left up in the air, but after months of damaging hearsay, popular opinion had all but criminalised Middle Eastern men.

However fantastic the events related in the narrative may appear, they are in this respect anchored in a concrete historical and commercial reality that is acknowledged from the very beginning of the story. (Dobie 2001: 163)

Dalia felt anger that Shaharazad's case was left unresolved. It seemed she was put to death by the sword simply because she was Shaharazad. Dalia had her suspicions of course, but that would mean informing on her own subject position. Equally, she felt distressed by the Gulf War. It was disrupting her bookings. Dalia was one of the few belly dancers who took a scant interest in the politics of the region. She believed herself an Arabist rather than an Orientalist, but that was open to conjecture. As a lasting gesture, she had decided to participate in the final march before the war was officially declared closed. She wanted to communicate to the world that nobody was as passionately opposed to war as this belly dancer. Out she got in her little red sequin number and drew up a placard in a blaze of screaming red marker - Belly Dancer against the Bomb.

'Which bomb' thought Hayat? The one that fell on the hospital; or the one that destroyed the bunker where hundreds of civilians had taken

217 refuge? The mustard gas dropped on the Kurds sold to Saddam by his 'civilised' Western interlopers? Or the bombs disguised as toys that the Israelis dropped on south Lebanon for children to pick up so their limbs would blow all the way to Damascus gate?

Should we applaud the fact that all these techniques of war- processing culminate in the elision of the duration and violence of war? (Baudrillard 1995: 35)

Dalia was a one-woman show and for all her chutzpah, it mattered little to anybody other than the corporate media that there was a belly dancer against the bomb. She was definitely not a woman of causes and not about to die on the barricades. It was all about marketing. And she had mastered the art of self-promotion, having made the six o'clock news that night and every other station's three-second grab to capture an enduring image of the anti-war movement for posterity.

**********

218 5. The Disappearance of Dalia c. 1995

It is not lives that produce stories; it is rather the stories that produce the characters who believe that they are alive. (Cavarero 1997: 124)

The Kasbah was as usual packed to the chandeliers. Dancers were arriving from all over the country for the 10th annual belly dance extravaganza. This year it was to be was a black tent event. The svengali of the desert drum was coming to town and belly dancers were buying up sequins like there was no tomorrow. Tickets were red hot and scalpers were hustling big, eager to swindle any number of odalisques out of their cash money.

The belly dance ball was the event of the year in the Orientalist calendar. It was the high point in a weekend exposition reminiscent of the colonial World Trade Fairs. There were exhibitions and displays, coffee cup readings and henna competitions. There was even a vitrine display of Native Women. But of course, Oriental dance was the primary distraction. Dance troupes and individuals could apply to perform their latest routines with world scouts in attendance to spot the Next Big Thing.

There was certainly no shortage of Orientalist all-stars at the belly dance ball. The usual themes reappeared every year just in different costumes: from 'The Arabian Nights', to 'Dance of the 1,000 Veils', and there was always the old faithful 'Enter the Harem'. The performances themselves, in the common dance sense, were as dull as, but in the Orientalist frame, the spectacle was truly remarkable.

Dalia always liked to make a big entrance. She had been veiled Belly Dancer of the Year previously and this was her last night as reigning

219 queen. She arrived at the head of a convoy of camels as they made their way precariously down the main street. The beasts of burden were primed like they were on amphetamines, manoeuvring their bodies around the traffic chaos that had slowed down to ogle at the caravan. TV cameras and blinding flashlights contributed to the bedlam. This was just how Dalia liked it. She had secured the principal sponsorship for this year's event so was doubly rewarded with the opportunity to perform the pièce de résistance. She came dressed as a cross between Cleopatra and Salomé.

The night was a panoply of Orientalia. There were swords and colourful scimitars, coin belts from an array of foreign currencies, ostrich feathers and peacock fans, and enough dress-up sheikhs to hold a snap OPEC meeting. Dalia was in her element. She got to perform in the best possible slot before she handed over her turban. For her swan song, she staged The Sheik narrative. She enlisted the services of an Anglo-Italian actor to be her Valentino. He had buffed up for months so that the oil on his taut skin glistened more than the chandelier. He spent weeks under the tutelage of Dalia mastering the look of the sexually hungry subaltern.

As ambiguous as his racial identity may be, there seems to have been little doubt in the minds of the audiences for whom these popular entertainments were intended that the sheik could perform cultural Arabness authentically and flawlessly. (Caton 2000: 99)

But Dalia wanted more. She wanted to stage the ultimate: the rape and rescue fantasy. She knew that this would be controversial with some of the traditionalists. But the postmodernists were in the ascendancy and she knew she could get away with anything. After all, it was only popular culture. Dalia wrote, produced and starred in all her choreo- dramas.

220 The design motif reflected both her own love of twenties colonial kitsch and Orientalist miscegenation drama. The set just oozed brutal sensuality. Her positing of female sexual enslavement in an interracial love story had her devotees enthralled. Suddenly everyone wanted their very own tyrannical sheikh into the bargain.

Sahara, Dalia's contemporary, thought the whole parade tacky and unedifying. Dalia's disregard for white female probity had some of the more conservative dancers dissembling. But Dalia didn't take it that seriously. This was symptomatic of the bigger malaise affecting the discipline. There was a constant struggle between those who remained committed to traditional articulations of the Orientalist idiom and those who were into experimenting. It was a tussle really about where the dance was heading. Dalia was into the theatricality of the event. She worked hard at developing a creative place for a Disney-like narrative instead of regurgitating the same old spectacle. To achieve this, Dalia raided as many cultures as possible. To this end, she was a serial appropriator. It wasn't like she was trading beads for land here. It was dance and she was adamant that she was stealing from everybody. After all, dance was universal. This was the one thing every belly dancer, regardless of her stylised position, vehemently agreed on.

**********

221 When Allah willed to break us, hypocrisy fed us grief and ripped us apart. (Buthaina 1999: 206)

Sometimes in the presence of mind, Hayat believed she was the only one listening. Srebenica was in the news and no one seemed to grasp the immediate horror that was unfolding. Men and boys were being forcibly separated from their families and led away by war criminals. What was wrong with everybody? The world just stood there in rank indifference. Then they disarmed the Bosnians. In a decade from now, there would be the stock mea culpa after countless war crimes commissions and inquiries, but genocide is genocide and there is no forgiveness or forgetting.

Helpless in front of the television, Hayat fell into depression. Once again she refused to speak. Why should she? Who would listen? Speak of what? Hypocrisy and indifference, wilful belligerence? Bury my heart in Bosnia. She could only watch as the living corpses moved from the buses to their graves, pulling out her hair like the mothers, wives and sisters of the disappeared men and boys.

I wish death had swept us all away before you were buried and mourned. (Fatima bint Muhammad 1999: 68)

Hayat moved quietly between massacres, sheltering little more than a sigh. She often fixed herself close to walls, to listen and not to talk. She was silent to a fault. She would rarely make eye contact. Sometimes in the mistaken belief that this was cultural, people thought it unavoidable.

Everyone was always asking her mundane questions. She lived in a space where family and other kin predominated. The Aunties would sit out on the balcony waiting for the next altercation. This street had been all white just a stone's throw from yesterday. A street where a diehard monocult had reigned supreme, where a fruit tree was never permitted to grow on the footpath. But with change pressing down hard, olive trees flourished and whites took flight to their gated communities.

222 Loyalist proud, the patriots who lived at the entrance of the street stayed put. Stunned-looking gnomes dotted their neat green lawn, and pink city roses drooped heavy in strict isolation. These folk darted around the yard like white ants preparing for the coming storm. They did not want to engage, so no one ever did, except in times of extreme illness and sudden death. Those few who remained to protect the dry imperial soil from the menace of the tree planter did not count on the tenacity of clan to take root and bear fruit.

Conflict was never far from sight. The local council was inevitably called in to treat all footpath trees as contraband, as righteous informers reported the ease in which The Ethnic People came out and took off with the spoils of the trees. It seemed the fruit pickers were a threat to civic cohesion. One low ranking official ordered an inquiry into the legality of bagging street fruit for personal use. An interim report was handed down to council.

From the moment when a public authority, a State, this or that State power, gives itself or is recognised as having the right to control, monitor, ban exchanges that those doing the exchanging deem private, but that the State can intercept since these private exchanges cross public space and become available there, then every element of hospitality gets disrupted. (Derrida 2000: 51)

But this didn't stop the racket. Once it could be established that summer was in full spring, the pickers came out with a vengeance. It was a given that they knew the best of a good bunch. Hostile neighbours watched from behind closed screen doors as women dressed in black scurried off with countless sacks of forbidden fruit.

In time, Hayat needed a break from all this. Anywhere, away from the suffocating strictures of living in the suburbs. She had heard of a little known locale, an underworld of interchange, a place where one could

223 roam without anyone asking where you were from. This locale was a distance off by anyone's notion, though it was not that far from the mainland.

Hayat went there for a while, but by necessity of responsibility, felt compelled to return. A return to the mainland made her at once melancholic. She knew the game was up. She would eventually have to speak. The thought of it made her stomach turn like the sea caught up in a shell of cold lingering sound. Blooded beyond the self, she had her connections of course, and it was to those she would invariably return. The Aunties had said what the wind brings, the storm takes away. Sea- lagged but thoughtful, Hayat ate mansaf for weeks thereafter. It never lasted long enough though. Nothing ever did but time. It was always plaguing her mind. Western standard time looping labyrinthine, forever dissipating her silences. She yielded to every waking minute. Be here. Be there. Be always there. That she was always there was nothing short of a miracle.

*********

224 Dalia's last night as queen of the desert was everything a belly dancer deserved. She received accolades, applause and air kisses galore. However for all that, no one seemed to notice she went missing after her star turn. Had anyone bothered, she might have been found at the bottom of the back stairs of the Kasbah. Instead Dalia was taken away with the rubbish in the morning. She had gone out on the landing for a cigarette and a quick snort. It was exhilarating to look out over the factories of the industrial complex knowing for certain that she had made a difference. She inhaled heavily and felt the chemicals animate her nerve endings. But it was all over in what could have only been seconds.

When push came to shove, Dalia ended up head over turkey as the single steel railing failed to prevent her from flipping over the fire escape stairs. She landed head first in the skip bin on the ground that had conveniently been positioned to collect her airborne body. And that was the end of her. Dalia disappeared without a trace and no one seemed to worry. She had gone from non-fiction to fiction overnight, and while people thought that strange, after Shaharazad, nothing was improbable.

The chrysanthemum is associated with femininity, fragility, and delicacy, the sword with masculinity, strength, and aggressiveness. (Yoshihara 2003: 173)

HR had remained deeply troubled by the enigma of Shaharazad. He felt he had somehow failed in his mission. It was hard to forget the scent of a dead belly dancer. Intermittently, he would return to the corpus delicti to see if he had missed something elementary. There were countless loose ends but nothing he could tie together. Most puzzling of all, HR could not reconcile the chrysanthemum in the mouth with the scimitar in the back. Why mix Japanese motif with Arabian? What was the bigger point being made?

225 At first, HR had thought it some weird Japanese ritual, symbolic of the underworld. After all, he had just read a report on how the yakuza gangs were muscling in on the syndicates. HR was on the lookout for street level extortion but had found nothing yet, just more new ethnic words to learn.

But technically, HR knew only too well it wasn't a sword, but a scimitar and Shaharazad wasn't into Kabuki. True, Dalia had performed in Japan, but then so had a whole lot of exotic dancers. Nothing made sense. Self-absorbed introspection had compelled HR to start writing about his time on the case. He had tried to map out an agenda for living among the barbarians using Shaharazad as his leitmotif. HR was not a fan of multiculturalism. In fact his primary motivation for writing his book was to argue against immigration.1 First on his list was the Middle East and then South-East Asia. The triads were keeping him busy. Then there was the Lebanese luxury stolen car rebirthing industry. But HR was also forward-looking. He saw that in years to come Pacific Islanders and Africans would bring more crime to his precinct. He felt he needed to issue a cri du coeur so that the patriots were ready for the inevitable race war. Never mind the one that had been going on for the last two hundred years.

HR was forever on the lookout for new opportunities in crime formation. He had done his time. He had dealt with the Italians and their drug importation. He had been on the case to outlaw motorcycle gangs, though they were not strictly ethnic. (They may as well have been as there were enough Yugoslavs to sink a republic, HR used to joke). And there was the Vietnamese and their heroin trafficking, not to mention the scourge of the home invasion. And the Chinese with their fraud, espionage and money laundering. And the Russians were coming with more rackets up their sleeves than Svetlana. And the Greeks with their codeine smuggling and welfare fraud. Not to mention the human trafficking by south East Asian syndicates recruiting women into sexual enslavement. But this was not an immediate priority on HR's agenda.

1 HR wasn't strictly opposed to immigration. He gladly welcomed Brits and Northern Irish, white South Africans-Canadians-Americans-New Zealanders, and of course, white farmers from Zimbabwe (though in private he called them Rhodesian).

226 Besides, the 'Asians' were doing it to their own women, so it was obviously cultural. Thankfully, HR mused, he didn't have to deal with Columbians or Mexicans. And now the Lebanese and their family-based industries. For HR, their gang-type activity seemed somehow unprecedented. They were so violent, so recklessly criminal. He reckoned he had never seen anything like it. Except of course, for the Aborigines. In his mind, it was only going to get worse.

HR had become more self-assured as the Lebanese became more visible. It was as if his prophecies were at last bearing him credentials. As the doyen of racial profiling, HR was approached by the police publications unit to address the knowledge gap in the system. Understanding Ethnic Crime: A Guide for Law Enforcement Agencies was his idea for a manual. HR meticulously listed the usual suspect cultures and religions he thought were trouble and their various vocabularies. He had to research a whole lot of new words which had emerged from the ever- expanding ghettoes. And that wasn't easy. There was always some new fangled language arriving.

HR was under the mistaken impression his manual would make a difference. The book's reception was lukewarm, but certainly wasn't a big hit in the library. HR was a victim of his own imagination, but he did have his successes. Appealing to the zero tolerance enthusiasts in the government, he finally got scimitars banned from being carried in public. Anyone found with a scimitar on their person without the right papers got a custodial sentence. HR knew that the previous government's soft approach to cultural traditions had made the city an easy target for urban terrorism. He aimed to send a strong message to the Ethnics. His ideology told him that unless they had the rule of law shoved down their throats, they would continue to bring their barbarian ways with them. He especially believed Arab tribal culture was resistant to change and needed to be dealt with by brute repression. HR was always one to remind the pacifists, - I mean look at Saddam and Qaddafhi.

While Saddam Hussein was the current poster boy for evil, HR knew precious little about modern Middle Eastern history, let alone Memmi's 'mark

227 of the plural'. Entangled in his own medieval belief system, HR's worldview situated him as a latter-day Crusader. He thought the Americans were gormless to have cut and run from Desert Storm. He would have liked the elder Texan to finish what he started in Iraq, then move on to Syria, Iran and finally Libya. But of course, that would come.

*********

228 His Orient was a world of visual inscriptions: people, gestures, signs, drawings. Unlike the Orientalist savant, he did not seek essences; nor did he question the truth of appearances: a love of signs without essential content. (Behdad 1994: 60)

With Dalia disappeared, HR officially re-opened the case of Shaharazad. He felt this was sign. It was just too much of a coincidence that his precinct had to investigate another belly dance mystery. HR and DH were not immediately convinced Dalia had disappeared. There was no body, no forensic evidence to suggest she had been scuppered maliciously. And there were reports of random sightings of her in the days following her 'disappearance'. HR had figured she was coming down off her camel in her own time. In one unsourced report, Dalia was said to have made an appearance in the middle of the eastern suburbs. But that turned out to be Sahara, a contemporary of the said fictional character.

HR was keen to return to his original thesis that an Arab was central to unlocking the enigma. But Dalia was no Shaharazad. She had failed to evoke the scale of public interest that her deceased colleague had. Instead, there was only cursory mention of her suspected disappearance in the media. A dead body is so much more tangible than a presumed missing person. The detectives had no leads to speak of, other than the flaky Sahara. In fact, thus far, Dalia had been their only contact, so they trawled their notes briefly to see whether she had given any indication that she would be the next Shaharazad.

Yes, what if Scheherazade were to be continually reborn, only to die again at every dawn, just because a second woman, a third, a fourth, did not take up her post in her shadow, in her voice, in her night? (Djebar 1993: 143)

After a week of no-show, the detectives officially took Dalia's disappearance seriously. HR decided to give the case a media angle with

229 news values that the public would immediately understand. Operation Lift the Veil was launched with the usual Orientalist fanfare. The detectives enlisted their new contact Sahara in this latest inquiry. Whilst she and Dalia were socially estranged, she more than any, could inform on her erstwhile friend.

*********

230 By making others recount her own story, she is in fact attempting to stitch her narratable self together with the story into which she was constitutively interwoven. (Cavarero 1997: 37)

Dalia had actively entertained myths about her identity to garner authority. Sahara was one of the few who knew that Dalia's family were globetrotting evangelists. The Digbys were like travelling salespeople. They moved from country to country spruiking the word of the gospel. Dalia's grandfather had been born Anglo cult Christian in a colony in Palestine well before the European Zionists took over. Old Digby wanted to be in the Holy Land for the imminent arrival of the Second Coming, but Armageddon came first in the guise of Zionism. While old Digby himself had no ancestral or ethnic links to the land, he felt he had as much right as the Zionists to colonise the land which produced the religion he adhered to. But the European Jewish colonisers were well organised and more politically committed than the belated Christian proselytiser. The Zionists were first at the door of the brand new United Nations and Grandfather Digby was not one to argue at the point of a resolution or a rifle. He had lunched once with a bridge named Allenby and talked of problems of Empire. But Old Digby had always felt uncomfortable about the way the British abandoned the Palestinians. It was just not cricket, he would counter.

Soon after the Zionist bombing of the King David Hotel which left countless dead, Digby hurriedly left, arriving forthwith in Brisbane with his wife and children. Dalia's parents were committed Pentecostals. They left their daughter in the care of local prayer partners when they went off proselytising. Dalia grew up as Diana in the suburbs and learnt to speak in tongues from the pastor. Under a sweltering sky, her grandfather fed her a canon of colonial stories. As she collapsed backwards in exultation at prayer revival meetings, Dalia fantasised about the virile Gertrude Bell and the effeminate Lawrence. She decided early in her life that she would reinvent herself through her own cross- dressing adventures. *********

231 I want the aroma of coffee. I need five minutes. I want a five- minute truce for the sake of coffee. I have no personal wish other than to make a cup of coffee. (Darwish 1995: 7)

Post-Gulf War, Hesham's world had turned upside down. From being a small-time hairdresser, he had graduated to urban hero when word got out about the bungled raid on the Palace. His salon had become a site of pilgrimage for community and others disaffected. People saw Hesham as a symbol of their dormant resistance. When he spoke on the news, it was as if he spoke for everybody. He was articulate, passionate and looked fabulous. He oozed arabitude as he damned the hypocrisy of Western democracy. Then he sued the police for damages.

Hesham's diasporic life was nothing if not safe. In the old country, he had struggled to find a place where he didn't have to sleep awake. He had taken a degree in philosophy, then moved naturally on to hairdressing. His salon set new trends almost immediately. But just as he was finishing with al Ghazali, his world collapsed around him.

Monday morning there is a gathering of people around a Mercedes. The driver received several bullets in the head. His brains stick to the interior walls; matter adheres to matter. (Adnan 1982: 12)

Death came down on the city leaving the chroniclers busy. People ran for their lives to avoid the shrapnel. Children disintegrated into limbs as bombs and bullets emptied their playgrounds. Hesham toughed it out for seven long years learning to make coffee like a Palestinian.

All the quarrels of the Arab world have their representatives here. They all participate in the carnage. The wretched and down- trodden are terrorised … a body seems to fall every second. (Adnan 1982: 12)

232

He thought he had mastered the art of living on the Green Line up until the Israeli incursion. During the siege of Beirut, Hesham simply refused to leave the city. It was a gesture of defiance that many felt compelled to make. While the Israelis mercilessly bombarded the city and suburbs with their US hardware, everybody including Hesham had to dash every other minute to shelters which proved useless in the face of state-of-the- art weaponry.

Bullets crack and resonate in the amphitheatre that is Beirut. The location is perfect. The sound of the guns is echoed off the great stretched surface of the sea. Thunder mixes with the rhythmic sounds of war which purge Beirut. (Adnan 1982: 13)

But as the mortars rained down on Martyrs Square, Hesham, like everyone, was on the verge of a breakdown. Only when he thought the worst was over would another atrocity play itself out even more ferociously.

Israel's occupation of West Beirut did not last long in relative terms. The invaders did not count on the determination of ordinary Beirutis or the underground resistance for that matter. But Israeli collusion with right wing Christian Lebanese militias in the massacre of 3000 Palestinians, Lebanese and others in the camps of Sabra and Shatila, was what would remain raw for eternity.

Enraged by the assassination of their man Gemayal, Lebanese Phalangists entered the refugee camps and in their usual display of violent sectarian frenzy, killed thousands under the watchful eye of the Israelis. Perched on top of the buildings surrounding the camps, the Israelis illuminated the sky so that the Phalangists could murder their way in the dark.

Hesham could barely bring himself to cut hair after the massacre. The Israelis and their collaborators had gutted the last remnants of day-to-

233 day sanity. Those who could flee took to the hills and became diaspora. Women who buried their children became living corpses. Poets killed themselves before lunch, asking the always-salient question, - Wayn el arab? did her skin smell of zaatar her hair of exploded almonds (Hammad 2005: 75)

Hesham tried to remain steadfast in the face of oblivion, but his salon ended up as collateral damage from an unknown missile. He was not there at the time having decided to take an unusually late subhiyeh. Feeling the almighty explosion from the far corner of the café, he instinctively got under the table.

The most elementary fear of pain prevents me from participating in this battle. Kidnapping of passers-by and torture become daily events. Women stay at home more than ever. (Adnan 1982: 13)

He harboured interminable grief at having abandoned his city at a time when she most needed him. He wore it in his skin. Hesham could no longer bear to watch the city collapse under the weight of insidious brutality. He decided to leave.

*********

234 Character itself emerges as stereotype in drag, ethnically, socially, and culturally gender imitative. (Apter 1996: 23)

Dalia had never been the same since she took her first steps in the desert. She knew that in order to be part of the continuum, she would have to have a desert experience. She felt it would liberate her from urban degradation. She was certain it would reveal to her deep inner meaning. And she intuitively knew that she would finally find her mecca. The metaphor, not the holy city. And who else to accompany her on this road to Damascus than her best friend, Sahara.

Already I have dropped back into the desert as if it were my own place; silence and solitude fall around you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon… (Bell quoted in Wallach 1996: 108)

Having scanned the diaries of the countless female adventurers of the golden age of colonial travelling, Dalia and Sahara decided upon the best route that would lead them to discovery. They thought they ought to start local, considering Sahara had never left her leafy middle class suburb. They went on an all-paid up bus trip around the perimeter of the Great Sandy and then made their way up to the Simpson in preparation for the real thing. But it was not exactly what they had in mind. No stallions or black tent encampments, just a few humpy settlements of displaced poverty-stricken Indigenous. They came face to face with actuality and were in no mood to look dispossession in the eye, so promptly returned to the city and figured the next trip would be much more exotic.

They planned their first Middle Eastern getaway to reflect the great place names of the Western imaginary: Cairo, Istanbul, Alexandria, Palmyra, Jerusalem, Giza (but definitely not Gaza). After some haggling with the travel agent, it became too complicated to organise politically,

235 so they downsized to Egypt and Turkey. Here they would be able to enjoy the dry desert heat without having to engage with military occupations or anti-Western sentiment. Rather, they could count on the fact that no one would be able to speak much English and they could remain the exotic westerner under the thin veil of day.

Instead of keeping [her] ideological distance from the Other, the belated Orientalist dissolves [herself] in images, figures, and signs of otherness, allowing the abolition of observer and observed, subject and object, self and Other. (Behdad 1994: 60)

Ensconced in their white skins, they had little idea about anything. Somewhere in Egypt, Dalia had tried to get herself abducted by a caravan of camel-drivers, but they just weren't interested. Sahara made frequent dashes into the desert when she felt crowded in by the local inhabitants. She didn't like Arabs or their ways. In fact, Sahara found the whole package intolerable. The acrid smells, the teeming cities, the heat and the sand, the customs, the men, the toilets. Difference for her produced a thinly veiled revulsion.

But Dalia was just the opposite. She felt quite at home with the Ottomans and didn't mind the Arabs. Especially the Palestinians. She felt somehow connected considering her evangelical roots. It was like she was coming back to something. Dalia was quick to adopt their ways. She even took to wearing a part-time veil.

She smoked the narghilye and liked to go barefooted, wearing the traditional blue robe and yashmak. She learned to outline her blue eyes with the smudge-line of kohl that is an essential part of an Arab woman's maquillage, and flung herself into the life and habits of the tribe. Both outwardly and inwardly, she was one with them. (Blanch 1998: 176)

236 Truth be told, neither Dalia nor Sahara could tell the difference between a Turk or an Arab. In fact, Dalia thought dance-wise, they were pretty similar. But the trip ended in complete disaster when Dalia fell under the spell of a paramount sheikh, and left poor Sahara to cope on her own with a shocking bout of tinea. Dalia knew this desert thing was hard to find, but she had never expected it to be so elusive. Maybe she was more the harem girl.

Hesham was not so sure. He was forewarned of the dangers of befriending belly dancers but was tempted by the challenge of Dalia's golden tresses which fell upon her pasty freckled shoulders, washing over into an under-abundance of hair. He was happy to oblige as much as he could manage the dynamic at work in between entanglements.

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237 inhaling strawberries through argelas we've become a people of living room politics and tobacco stained teeth painfully reminding each other reciting quranic verse and um kolthum scripture oh how jasmine can fill your head on a clear night and mint tea dawned you to morning (Hammad 1996: 32)

As soon as Hesham set foot in the new country, he knew that this was not the place he had imagined. It was full of hostility and unseasonably cool given it was summer. His accent did not help. Hesham had thought to return to the refuge of philosophy, but found the whole experience of migration so debilitating, he couldn't stomach the idea of thinking about anything.

His return to the prodigal salon gave him cause to get on with it. As a hairdresser, he had accomplished much in Beirut. It seemed that the community lacked someone who really understood the complexities of diasporic hair. Hesham knew he had found his niche. Before too long, women from a number of villages had heard of his skill and came to see for themselves. Straight men naturally avoided him.

At the salon, girls and women learn to transform their bodies - through hair care, waxing, manicuring, pedicuring, facials, and so forth - into socially valued, culturally specific, and race- determining displays of femininity. (Candelario 2000: 135)

Hesham's genius with identity transgression had all but been enshrined by the time he could afford to open his own palace. He had tried to get a loan guarantee from a distantly rich cousin who had made his future in

238 the Gulf in the heady oil producing days of the seventies. But Fahd was somewhere in Texas chasing blondes and doing arms deals. Hesham had been unhappily working for Sheikh Pierre and could no longer tolerate the rank workplace conditions in which he had found himself in the New World. He was forced to go the bank and pay interest just like everyone else.

Hesham's newly opened Hair Palace fast became a site for hair straightening and a dynamic socialising agent. He built up a clientele not unlike the mix he had serviced in Beirut before the explosive cleavage of the mid-seventies. From the glamour girls of the shmel, to the matrons of the jnoub, all sorts of styles and stacks walked in and out of Hesham’ s Hair Palace.

Bad hair is hair that is perceived to be tightly curled, coarse, and kinky. Good hair is hair that is soft and silky, straight, wavy, or loosely curled. (Candelario 2000: 137)

Everyone had come to the Palace at some point in the narrative. Hayat brought her Aunty in for a treatment. During Black September, her hair had turned white and she left it like that in memoriam. George and Hesham had become the best of friends when he had not long been in the country. They bonded over their mutual displacement. Both openly deplored the world, never fearing that they might appear ungrateful. And Sadie, well she was always there.

Sadie had acted as legal counsel for Hesham when he took action against Sheikh Pierre. He was a local warlord who owned a chain of hairdressing outlets across the city and employed newly-arrived migrants to maximise his profit margin. He paid a pittance and his employee relations were positively pre-industrial. He was the darling of the small business fraternity and a generous donor to the conservatives. He kept his staff fiercely casual so he didn't have to pay luxuries like sick leave and worker's compensation. Why should he have to pay for someone's holiday? Sheikh Pierre was the boss from last century. He

239 would have employed children if he could have gotten away with it. It didn't take long before Hesham was in dispute with Sheikh Pierre over unfair dismissal. Hesham went to the local legal aid centre where he met Sadie. She knew of Sheikh Pierre and Sons Incorporated long before Hesham had entered the narrative. The union had tried to fry the Sheikh once in the Industrial Commission, but he had contacts in the highest of places.

Meanwhile Sadie was busy working through a backlog of complaints from Gulf War casualties. She had taken up case after case of those who had been on the front line of the backlash and were litigating. There was the sixteen year old who was physically assaulted by a sneering body builder. Acting like Schwarzenegger's doppelgänger, it took five grown women to pull the big brute off poor Said. He sustained severe injuries including a broken arm and bruising to his kidneys. Not to mention his mental health. He didn't stand a chance against the hulking physicality of a pumped up Aryan. Then there was the shock jock who barged into the mosque wearing jackboots and playing the national anthem on a tinny bugle. And the supervisor who ordered Fouad to shave off his beard or lose his career. Having done the right thing, he swore by his beard and was fired. Then he sought out Sadie. Hesham had always kept Fouad's beard well-groomed, so it couldn't be because it was untidy. And there were the litany of complaints that fell through the cracks: denial of services, everything from rental accommodation to not insuring Arab businesses. But mostly Sadie dealt with women. She had countless cases of unfairly dismissed women waiting at her door. They had refused to remove their scarves having been told they were in violation of the national dress code. The line was endless. Sadie had enough work to keep her busy at least till the beginning of the next Gulf War.

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240 The protagonist wavers between the successful cultural plagiarist travelling through the casbah unremarked, to the unauthentic native who, on catching sight of himself in a mirror, perceives a risible figure. (Apter 1996: 23)

Dalia came back from the Middle East full of ideas. She knew where she wanted to be. She had heard from her Arab friends that Hesham was the very best when it came to hair. He actively aided and abetted Dalia in her own latter day makeover. He took one look at her and restyled her with a technique he had perfected around the outbreak of the war. Dalia desperately needed volume but there was just not enough matter to work with. She had grown accustomed to wearing wigs before she discovered Hesham, but wigs were so cumbersome when in the act of performing. Hesham had given her a good chocolate-brown rinse and then sent her to the African salon to get some extensions. When Dalia returned, Hesham was able to transform her into a veritable parody. Dalia finally felt she looked the part, and with her brand new breasts, she was able to carry off the Beirut bouffant wonderfully.

Dalia believed herself to be at the interface of Arab and Anglo cultures though she couldn't quite put it into those terms. The Arabs called her Diana of Arabia. It was not meant as a compliment. But she had been called a lot worse by other belly dancers. Dalia had always been boyish and big-boned and fighting off someone. No name calling was going to affect her at the height of her trajectory. She had no belly to speak of but her hips jutted out so she worked that performatively to her advantage. She shimmied like no other and her cup size worked wonders. She hoisted her perfectly sculptured breasts up high every night so that the sword didn't slip. Though, she had stopped feeling comfortable with the double-edged sword after what had happened to Shaharazad. She herself had experienced a close call with a sword and was wary ever since.

241 Dalia was whiter than the inside of a turnip, but had perfected the art of passing, unlike Shaharazad. She spoke a strange version of Arabic, sounding more often than not like she was lost in the warp of a language lab. It was obvious to Arabs that it was not her first language. She had most probably learnt the basics in the Gulf region.

Arabic, which had seemed to come easily at first, now stymied her. 'I find it awfully difficult', she confessed to her family. 'The worst thing I think is a very much aspirated H. I can only say it by holding down my tongue with one finger, but then one can't carry on a conversation with your finger down your throat, can you'? (Wallach 1996: 45)

But Dalia was high maintenance. She was always breaking a nail or bursting the silicone. After a time, Hesham felt he was sinking into something a little too swampy for his nature. He wanted to maintain Dalia's hair at its optimum, but Dalia was always trying to get something out of him. Henna this, tattoo that. Where can I buy sumac? Hesham was fed up with Dalia's demands.

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242 These people aren't real. I'm making them up as they go along, any section that threatens to flesh them out, or make them 'walk off the page', will be excised. They should rather, walk into the page, and break up, disappear. (Gilbert Sorrentino quoted in Waugh 1984: 89)

Meanwhile, DH saw himself as unequivocally hetero-normative. He liked to divide the world into binaries. Good and evil, north and south, male and female. While he recognised the existence of the points East and West, he preferred to deal in black and white. He was a Fifties Man. The good were largely Christian hetero folk and the bad were the queer migrant heathens. DH voted Christian Democrat and believed in the viability of the devil. He had remained committed to surveillance as the best way to monitor sexual deviants.

Just prior to Dalia's disappearance, DH had gone through a messy divorce from his Scottish–born wife. She upped and left him for an Argentinean. Ever since then, he hated Latin Americans. Lola (formerly Lois) had taken up dance as a way of filling in the lonely nights when DH was away in the park entrapping his latest prey. Lola was told she had a gift for the samba. She had a feel for the cha-cha. She could move with the best of the amateurs. Her dance partner, a recently arrived immigrant represented everything her Dick was not. He was larger than life, he dressed like the Mediterranean, and danced like Antonio. Lola was sexually exhilarated. She became smitten and left her husband. DH became embittered. He started drinking in the morning. He could now add women to his hate list.

Meanwhile, professionally, DH was still tailing Hesham. He had kept a watchful eye on the Palace since Desert Storm. He remained convinced that Hesham was sodomising in his salon. Hesham knew he was under surveillance, so he got used to performing for the camera. The bungled raids on the Palace during the Gulf War probably saved him from a more insidious intervention. The negative publicity and subsequent internal investigation guaranteed Hesham some protective capital.

243 While DH was spotted regularly in the vicinity, his powers were limited due, in his mind, to his superior's kowtowing to minority hectoring about over-policing.

Rain came on, and soaked me, and then it blew fine and freezing till I crackled in armour of white silk, like a theatre knight: or like a bridal cake, hard iced. (Lawrence 1986: 508)

DH felt he could not confide in anyone, nor act upon his imagined suspicions. It was Sydney and the gay mafia had infiltrated even the police force. Mardi Gras was a mainstream event that brought in buckets of pink currency, and it seemed just about everyone had a homosexual friend or tendency. DH was a card carrying homophobe and felt ever more isolated in his own milieu. It was only his Christian Democrat buddies who were simpatico. They used to gather together every February to pray hard for rain. And when they felt especially outraged, under parliamentary privilege, they would publicly offer up a name. Apprehending homosexual kerb trawlers was one of DH's most satisfying areas of arrest. The other was soliciting undercover in parks. In his world of forbidden sexuality, DH strategically conflated gays with pederasty. This made him feel comfortable. But he also knew that this would win newspapers over. Equating criminality with homosexuality would gain him neo-conservative approval. Instilling fear in ordinary folk was the political way to the future. DH hated the homosexual paedophile with a vengeance. He tolerated the heterosexual paedophile, because after all, in DH's words, - That was unremarkable.

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244 Sight is not reducible to the welcoming of a spectacle; it at the same time operates in the midst of the spectacle it welcomes. (Levinas 1987: 80)

DH and HR were obliged to witness one of Dalia's famed performances during the investigation into Shaharazad's death. They rocked up to the Kasbah early in the night thinking they would interview Dalia before she went on stage. After some hours passed, they both realised that belly dance was a late night affair. The pair sat in a dank corner and drank most of the night. By the time Dalia came out, both detectives were almost under the table.

And it is the veil, a garment that simultaneously conceals and reveals, the material embodiment of the literal striptease, that is the most characteristic adornment of the transvestite of 'Araby'. (Garber 1993: 304)

Dalia had created a special performance for her detective friends. Poised in a modified arabesque position, Dalia did an abridged version of Salome. She had resisted the dance of the veils for years, believing it the ultimate cliché. The flurry of Salomés that had flooded the market had compelled her to look beyond the archetype. The veil dance had been done to death and she knew it just wasn't possible to unveil any more mystery. And while she was not averse to having the head of John the Baptist on a platter, she had bigger narratives to master. So when she finally decided to perform Salomé professionally, she did it her way. Her immediate desire was to unravel the trope of unrestrained sensuality into a muscular dénouement of languid ecstasy. It worked a treat. In so doing, Dalia demonstrated that the veil was the perfect illusory conceit she had so far found to facilitate her own imaginary. At the very least, she could evade disclosure.

The Imaginary is the transformation that takes place in the subject at the formative mirror phase, when it assumes a discrete

245 image which allows it to postulate a series of equivalences, samenesses, identities, between the objects of the surrounding world. (Bhabha 1994: 77)

Dalia stood surrounded by a multiplex of mirrors and lights. A Palestinian carpenter had built a spectacular arrangement of vertical mirrors which formed a small octagon around the perimeter of the room. Dalia did a little twirl with her most vibrant veils and silks wrapped around her naked body under a colourful crush of luminosity that a Brazilian electrician had connected for her. It had become the centrepiece in Dalia's performance.

Rows of coloured lights and globes, spotlights and specials were hooked up at the interstices of the mirrors. She liked to be gazed at, draped in the Matisse reds and orange blossom waters of an Orientalist's impressionism. She aimed to unmask her performative femininity under lengths of sheer gauzy fabric.

As a narrative of exotic clichés, this scene does not represent so much the sexual act as the expectation of and preparation for it. (Behdad 1994: 68)

With this octagonal mirror, she could see herself reflected like she was the chorus line, the troupe you have when you can't stand the competition. Dalia's mimicry allowed her to create her very own harem. She would raise her arms lifting the silken veils to new heights and then do a freeze frame of her favourite Orientalist position as her multiple selves reflected her stylised move in the mirrors. She waited for the intro then mimed the words,

I'm gonna go where the desert sun is; where the fun is; go where the harem girls dance

246 Go where there's love and romance –out on the burning sands, in some caravan. I'll find some adventure where I can. To say the least, go East, young man.

You'll feel like the Sheik, so rich and grand, with dancing girls at your command. When paradise starts calling, into some tent I'm crawling. I'll make love the way I'll plan. Go East–and drink and feast-go East young man.

She had watched Elvis sing this maybe two dozen times over the years. She had fantasised about having been a white slave in a harem long before it was fashionable. Undergirded by her desire for mystique, Dalia was enabled by a maxim of orientalism: the thicker the veil, the harder the male stared. Dalia was onto that before anyone. She knew the little tricks of the trade and how to attract maximum attention. After all, she had taught Shaharazad everything.

Desert serenade, burning sands In some caravan I'll find some adventure Go East young man I hear those desert drums Go East young man

Dalia was now less disposed to harem envy and more interested in exploring the contours of her own performance through her ingenious contraption. She transported her mirror around the nightclub circuit, becoming a much celebrated feature.

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247 It is not just that she adores the veil as an item of clothing, but that she also mistakes it for a sleight of hand way of temporarily inhabiting another identity. (Lewis 2004: 201)

Since Shaharazad's murder, Dalia had aged considerably. Too many years under the sun lamp. Before hooking up with Hesham, her hair had become limp and dry, exhausted by years of chemical assault through permanent waves and home colour jobs. The wild desert look was taking its toll. She had taken to wearing her trademark turban. She liked to entertain the confusion that swirled around her true identity so long as nobody asked any forthright questions, or scrutinised her body too closely. She knew for a fact that Westerners could never distinguish between anybody. Fortunately for her, no one had her figured.

The theatrics of passing [is] crucial to the performance of national and sexual identity, as well as to the idea of performance as identity. (Apter 1996: 23)

In the broad light of the day, Dalia was a bit of a mystery. All those who had come into contact with her would want to know, 'Is she Turkish'? or 'Is she something'? At the very least, she was thought to be East European. No one was really sure, except Sahara. None of the coterie was brave enough to broach the question of identity, circa mid 1990s. Some of the belly dancers felt it too abrasive a question somehow, although they would never think twice about asking any number of Ethnics where they came from.

Some had speculated that maybe Dalia was the one who disappeared all those years before in a blaze of mystery under the name of Sultana. Others liked to suppose that maybe she was an exiled desert princess, because she did appear somewhat regal. Truth be told, she looked as if she stepped straight from the set of Sunset Boulevard.

DH was agog the minute he clapped eyes on Dalia sans turban. In his mind, there was something not quite right with her. She was handsome

248 enough, lean and preternaturally strong-boned. She seemed almost ambiguous, even affected at times. Just too independent. And while Shaharazad was hardly the sort of woman he would prevail to call upon considering her libidinal excess, Dalia seemed almost virile to him. DH had not come across such a priapic character outside burlesque.

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249 His diminutive stature and hairless face - aspects of his appearance that were hinted at as unmanly - were advantageous in his new-found disguise. (Caton 2000: 105)

DH had started to suspect Dalia's sexual indeterminacy after he witnessed her star performance, but thought he was just spending way too much time in the homoerotic closet. In the heat of the summer of Shaharazad's disappearance, DH had made a pass at Dalia and it went unremarked. He had always wondered what was wrong with her.

At first DH thought Dalia was a lesbian, considering she didn't really go for him. Sahara considered her borderline because sometimes she played soccer and cricket. After some months of chewing it over, DH was convinced Dalia was not all she claimed to be. He felt that she was neither here not there. Something was just not right in the bottom paddock with her sexuality.

This failed cultural pass is intertwined with the failed heterosexual pass. (Apter 1996: 23)

In the first year after Shaharazad's death, DH had spied Dalia going in to Hesham's Palace. She was visiting him on an irregular basis. DH was perturbed by this. There were plenty of hairdressers in the city, what did Dalia see in Hesham? But, equally, DH wondered why Hesham would associate with Dalia. The hours they were keeping were not strictly business and DH was getting more and more suspicious. DH had a thought. What if Dalia wasn't Diana after all, but David? That made sense to him. Now DH was getting excited. He believed he was onto something. He considered it time for a second pre-emptive strike on Hesham.

DH put in a request for a permanent surveillance unit on the Palace. But DH's hoped for operational permission was met with blank-faced disapproval. As far as his superior was concerned, what consenting adults do in the privacy of their own salon was not worth his attention

250 or the state's resources. DH begged to differ. He had now reconfigured Dalia as a transsexual sociopath who had most probably murdered Shaharazad. According to DH's thesis, Shaharazad had most likely discovered Dalia's dirty little secret and had to be silenced. Who else had Dalia killed, he wondered? He took his theory to HR but HR didn't buy it. Besides, the race factor was missing and that's what held immediate cachet for HR, otherwise he just wasn't interested. But Sahara was open to it. It made sense to her. She felt that Dalia was foreign in so many ways, but could never quite put her finger on it.

DH and Sahara bonded over their mutual dislike of Dalia. Sahara was the first belly dancer that DH could fetishise without feeling threatened. When he was with her, his defensive white masculinity was no longer in crisis. He felt confident. They spoke the same language. Together they developed a rapport unpacking the mystery that was Dalia.

By the time of her disappearance, she had a regular following of gushing devotees new to the field who would sit on the floor and watch her shimmy out routine after routine. She had saved enough capital over the years to establish a boutique selling Orientalist paraphernalia. Posters of Dalia adorned the walls of her shop like custom-made wallpaper. One depicted her performing Cleopatra live at the Sheraton. Another as a harem slave at the Tokyo Hilton. The Japanese just loved it. White women dressed up as Arabs doing Orientalism.

Dalia decided the quickest way to be recognised as an authority was to set up her own academy. Whilst there were many dance schools operating out of colleges and community halls, Dalia wanted hers to be the Ivy League of exotic dance. She got accreditation as an institute and now, with her own professionally trained troupe, she would choreograph avant-garde scenes not seen since turn of the century. Dalia immediately started poaching recruits from established dance schools across the city. This unilateral action was tantamount to a declaration of war. It was an unofficial golden night's rule that the borders in place as laid down by the Belly Dance Council meant that only one instructor was permitted to teach in each designated area. This

251 protected the Council's hold over the industry and ensured their member's businesses were economically bountiful. To transgress the borders was unheard of before Dalia entered the picture.

When folks speak of 'border crossing' or 'transgressing boundaries' they are frequently referring to the radius of their own psychic circumference. (Banerjea 1999: 19)

Dalia created fury as she crossed all the known boundaries. She made blood enemies with everyone: from the more established Council members to the up and coming movers and shakers. The scene was thrown into crisis. Even though its exponential growth had become commercially viable, only the entrepreneurial few were able to make it a full-time living. Everyone knew everyone intimately, so Dalia knowingly played with fire in her quest for a slice of the belly dance dollar.

All manner of hostilities erupted and from within, a new more aggressive faction emerged among the denizens of the dance hall. Costumes were ripped whilst on the very bodies of performers; death threats were sent by fax and bomb hoaxes dispatched to disrupt special events. One dance school was torched. The Belly Dance Council - mostly made up of traditional Orientalists and Folklorists - was not going to take it any more, and set out to destroy the hybrid movement led by Dalia. They saw themselves as the ones who dared to dabble with difference while everyone else was still whistling Dixie. The dominance of traditional Orientalist codes had to be upheld.

When the possibility arises, as indeed it must, that foreign cultures could eventually displace or marginalise the previously dominant or central ones, then talk begins of preserving cultural purity and Western traditions. (Taylor 1991: 73)

252 Sahara was a member of the executive that set upon Dalia. Their collegiate behaviour had long since dissolved after that fateful day in the desert. Besides, like DH, Sahara was suspicious of Dalia. There was always some hidden agenda with her. Sahara was a born-again traditionalist and in her eyes, syncretism was a crime against culture. In short, Dalia was eroding the brand. Dalia had once accused Sahara of crass conservatism. In retaliation, Sahara pilloried Dalia in the Guild newsletter as being inauthentic. Then Dalia accused Sahara of being a smuggler. This was when Sahara cut Dalia off forever. She was intent on reasserting the art of Orientalist dance as a cabaret form. She was fashioning herself as the new expert on belly dance culture and Dalia was in the way. Hybridity was the scourge of the 90s and Sahara was not one to stand by and be swamped by cultural métissage.

Dalia's wild hybridity had attracted approbation for some years. By the time of her disappearance, she had made syncretised otherness the fashion. She specialised in modern tribal, a somewhat made-up form that she articulated as being part Middle Eastern and part contemporary, as if the two could never be one and the same. Dalia was not into being authentic for the sake of it, though she was aware of the importance of zagareeting. She liked to think of her own style as postmodern ethnic. Even those, who were neither supporters nor detractors, found her style way too art house for her to be included in any of their fabulous galas. So Dalia organised her own events at her own expense.

If Dalia's transgressive style had some of the hips displaced, then her costumes really provoked the fashion police. She created a wild tribal cabaret look mixing styles and regions like it was nouvelle cuisine. She borrowed heavily from Turkish, Roma, Egyptian, Algerian and Bedouin motifs, ending up with something Gaultier might have authored. She was not restrained by ethnic lines or national borders. The hard line traditionalists felt her unconventional approach to the art of ethnic costume diminished the significance of their attention to detail. She had an indifferent contempt for maintaining any sense of decorum.

253 As long as First World commentators speak of acquiring or otherwise assimilating the foreign features that they admire, all is well and good with interculturalism. (Taylor 1991: 73)

The last straw was when Dalia brought butoh to belly dance. Most belly dancers wouldn't know butoh if they stepped into it. Turning the dance into an art form was against all commercial sense. Besides, it belonged to popular culture and that was where the money was to be made. Butoh was hardly going to bring in the big bucks. The purists were left gaping long after the dust had settled back onto the floorboards post Dalia's premiere performance. Peers had turned up in droves to witness what had been marked as cutting edge in the rarefied dance world.

Thankfully for the belly dancers, butoh and belly dance didn't quite gel for most of the hour–too-long performance. For that, the Belly Dance Council enjoyed a glass of Schadenfreude at Dalia's expense. But the fact that Dalia was being courted by arts people with offers of residencies in all sorts of institutions was met with profound resentment. What were they thinking? As for the achingly slow movement, what did it mean? The Council breathed relief knowing that this aberrant style was doomed to be nothing more than a niche. Boring butoh could never match the glitz of the cabaret spectacle. They happily marched out of the performance space and went straight to Ibrahim's for some sweet baklava and bitter coffee.

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254 In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood…it is called the suburbs now, but when black people lived there it was called the Bottom. (Morrison 1973: 11)

Sahara came to grief one humid afternoon when she bit off more than she could chew. She was in Ibrahim's when she threw herself into a piece of ba'laweh and lost a filling. She wanted to sue. She was having an especially bad day. She had just lost a big show to Dalia and now even Ibrahim was out to get her in what seemed like a curse from beyond the Saqqara tomb.

Ibrahim's had long been the site of trouble. Before it was a pastry shop, it had been a Tandoori Takeaway. And before Tandoori, a Vietnamese family had set up a Noodle house. And before Vietnamese noodles, it was an Italian deli. And of course before the deli the Chinese café stood its ground. And before this tower of Babel, it was Black and, truth be told, still is.

When the Chinese first set up their modest café, they had a time trying to survive in an era where they were regarded as pig-tailed heathens. While White Australia was still setting the dictation test, Tsin Chin Shan had opened a café as a refuge from the hatred and hostility on the open plain. But urban white people were no different. They, like their rural counterparts, looted at will, attacking non-whites with their customary domestic pick-handles and shovels. The Chinese owners had enough. They closed down the café and left for the ghetto.

Next came the Italians. They lasted a little longer, but fled forthwith after white vigilantes burnt their deli to the ground. The smell of cured meat lingered in the street for weeks after the last of the mortadella had burned itself out. The local Progress Association had warned the Italians to take down their salamis swinging in the window. But the Italians didn't understand why anyone would be offended by a dangling salami,

255 so didn't heed the neighbourly advice foisted upon them. After the Italians had departed, the remnants of the deli remained in ruins for some time, a reminder to other minorities of the consequences of publicly exhibiting difference.

Then came the Vietnamese. They were refugees and started with nothing. A nice little shop they built with tables and matching chairs, but no one came to visit them or their noodles. Instead they received the traditional white Australian welcome. Rocks through the window, abuse at the counter and faeces in the mail. They even tried giving food away but to no avail. They were forced to go south-west.

The Indians thought they could do it. They cleared the site and built a fine tandoori takeaway. At first business was a bit slow, but the Indian diaspora were well versed in British customs. This family had lived in the Midlands before becoming weary of the Northern winter. They imagined Australia no different, though it might be warmer. So a slow start to their new enterprise was not entirely unexpected. Cosmo- multiculturalism was bursting at the seams, and Indian was supposed to be part of the new recipe. While business did pick up and colourful saris were all the rage, the idea of tandoori was still not really taking off, let alone being taken away.

Tandoori's time in the sun would eventually come in another decade. But before they had a chance at it, bricks were thrown at two of the delivery cars and the windscreens were smashed. Then there was racist graffiti sprayed on the front window that said, 'Go Home Paki'. But they were Indian. The sound of shattering glass became a regular occurrence at the tandoori house. Just as they were putting the final touches on a magnificent Taj Mahal makeover, fire gutted the upstairs of the takeaway causing thousands of dollars of damage. Fortunately the Greek man in the kebab shop across the road saw the flames above the shop and came running over. He had had his own troubles. The Rashids were upset. Whoever had started the fire must have known people were in the building, so it was obvious that harm was intended. This happened in the first week that HR was officially

256 made a senior detective having been upgraded from desk sergeant. He was sent out to investigate. After some minutes, HR was convinced it was insurance fraud. An Indian stock take. An inside job. Arson. Mr Rashid was convinced it was racially motivated. Ever since they had come to the street, he had told HR that he and his family had been the target of a number of racist incidents.

This latest one made him think about leaving Australia. He had put hard work and all his money into the takeaway. Since the fire, other ethnic small business owners had come past to offer their condolences. Someone even wrote sorry on the footpath. That was a lot more than the traditional owners ever got.

Mr Rashid found it hard to be a victim. That's what happens in England. He didn't expect it in Australia. What would he tell his family? It hurt all the more because he was born in England and considered himself quite a Brit. He certainly sounded it. He never had trouble on the phone with his accent, only when he had to spell his name would the tone invariably change.

Everyone who came to see Mr Rashid heard him say, - I have the same rights as anybody and it hurts me when people make out that I don't have the same rights.

These words were always being repeated by a whole world of multi- racial people. It was like they were the refrain of the multicultural manifesto after an 'incident'. But things never changed. How could the Indians, or Italians, expect any different when this was embedded culturally? The Rashids felt defeated. They moved to another state. And so, Ibrahim and his sons arrived on the street, and turned the tandoori into Ibrahim's Pastry. That was when it got a tad more dangerous.

But could it have got any more dangerous than when the first owners were 'dispersed'? God knows that the white settlers were well-versed in the most enterprising ways of extermination. An eerie absence pervaded the street as if no one had a right to be there. If anyone had paid heed,

257 no one would have gone near the site in the first place. The Chinese, Italians, the Vietnamese, the Indians, and the Arabs: by rebuilding over a site that had been marked by massacre they were part of the colonial project of burying history. Ibrahim had little idea about this. He just wanted to make kanafi.

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258 Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face. (Stewart 1998: 23)

HR had been experiencing a recurring nightmare long before Dalia's disappearance: what if all the different ethnic crime figures came together into a loose-knit confederation? Sort of like a rainbow consortium of diverse criminals. HR predicted that the East Coast would become a mecca for illegal activity if government didn't respond with an iron fist. Bugger civil liberties. There was little doubt in HR's mind that ethnic background constituted an important principle in the sphere of criminology. He was an advocate for stop and search, zero tolerance and mandatory detention.

Equally, turning a blind eye to fundo-terrorists in 'our' midst would only imperil the future. HR felt he was speaking for everybody. After all, he had been studying the habits of the ethnic subject since Federation. He subscribed to a 'keep them out, send them back' policy, despite the protestations from the multicultural mafia.

HR went into great detail to postulate his ideology. In the HR bunker, Anglo–American power was the only civilised hegemon. He just hated the French and Germans. He believed allowing pluralism to prosper was an affront to Western supremacy.

HR traced his civilisational lineage back to the Crusaders. Godfrey was perhaps a distant cousin. HR was a committed monarchist, and would die for the national anthem. He hated postmodernists including the usual suspects: multiculturalists, uppity Blacks, librarians and new historians. He was not a black armband sort of bloke, he was more your white blindfold patriot.

HR worked to reassure white Australia that they were right to oppose cultural diversity. There was no extortion and unemployment queues before the waves of dirty-faced immigrants and their stinking cheeses

259 arrived at the quayside brasserie. In HR's white solipsistic bubble, there was only one version of history, and Black claims had to been dealt with accordingly. His Australia was 'settled' peacefully, certainly without the rape and pillage that usually goes with colonising.

But it was the 90s and HR was being challenged on a whole lot of plot inconsistencies. He dared any to come up with the records to prove there were massacres. He always prefaced his spiel with the disclaimer that there might have been a bad apple here and there, but that was the anomaly. HR adhered to the last refuge of the (neo)colonial: triumphant exceptionalism. HR hardly had the moral wherewithal to question the very foundations of his skin colour. He was scornful of the idea of self- determination. He had always taken his privilege as natural. After all, he was white, male, and heterosexual.

Under conditions of war or conquest, rape is a form of national terrorism, subjugation, and humiliation, wherein the sexual violation of women represents both the physical domination of women and the symbolic castration of the men of the conquered group. (Castañeda 1993: 25)

That genocide and dispossession didn't enter his lexicon should surprise no one. Or that frontier brutality and massacres, forced separation of children from families was systemic. HR would never think to utter the word rape, unless of course a white woman was raped by a Black or Brown predator. Then that was a whole different ball game. He thought the very word had been diminished by black feminists anyway. After all, his paternal grandfather had 'relations', and he himself had black quarter cousins. HR's family never acknowledged the black skeletons in the closet, least of all, HR's father's father, who it was said, raped nearly every woman he came into contact with.

Grandfather was a mission manager so HR was brought up in the tradition of violent race relations. Grandfather Holden was in fact a war criminal. He had withheld food rations from children if their mothers

260 weren't forthcoming sexually. After a night on the turps, he would go on a rampage. The women never slept. They would dress their girls as boys so that the old bastard wouldn't come near them. This was the real front line in the colonial confrontation.

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261 This female masquerade served other than tactical purposes, and we do not have to go far in the text to find them. (Caton 2000: 105)

Sahara had long been suspicious of Dalia's attempts at false modesty well before their falling-out. The latter would shroud herself in scarves as if she were Muslim. She even covered up in the heat of summer. Whilst everyone else supposed Dalia was Turkish, Sahara knew for a fact she was straight Pentecostal. It was only in more recent times that Sahara suspected Dalia may have converted. She knew she was into other cultures, languages and scarves, but she never thought Dalia was a race traitor.

Meanwhile, DH and HR had also grown apart in the wake of DH's relentless pursuit of the truth about Dalia. HR was simply not interested in sexual dimorphism. He was even less disposed to spending any more time with belly dancers. Besides, he had new words to learn like hizbollah and hamas, jihad and fatwa.

DH was convinced Dalia was part male, part female. He did an identity check and discovered that Dalia had made a trip to the Philippines. That could mean only one thing. But then again, so had he. DH had a truck of unhappy experiences with women and decided on the only option available to him in his current character formation: a mail-order bride. He had heard Thai women were good, but Filipinas looked less Asian. He recognised his limits. He found the process fluid. No health or personality checks; all in all, a general lack of scrutiny. He filled in a form and paid some money on his credit card and was home and away. He picked up his new bride in Manila. Her name was Concepción, but DH called her Connie. She was from the lower middle-class, but that was just a hovel above poverty. Concepción was bilingual, and was now forced to cook, clean and attend to DH's every whim. With DH being a serial abuser, Concepción wondered how long she would last in the story.

262 While DH speculated over Dalia's gender, he further discovered that she may have undergone hormone treatment and psychotherapy. DH was convinced Dalia became feminised with electrolysis at Hesham's. For him, that sealed the mystery. Dalia wasn't Turkish, she was transsexual.

During the intense period of investigating Dalia's every move, DH also discovered that Dalia had made a visit to Baghdad in the midst of the embargo. At this point, HR and DH had a professional rapprochement. And while DH remained transfixed by his thesis on Dalia's sexual ambiguity, HR made contact with British intelligence. According to an unsourced dossier, Saddam's intelligence chiefs were using belly dancers to spy on and eliminate Iraqi opposition abroad. HR figured Dalia was their woman, her brief being to infiltrate exiled dissidents and report on anti-Saddam activities.

HR was now dealing directly with global intelligence agencies. He was heading where he had always wanted to be. With the help of some shadowy multinationals, HR traced Dalia's movements to one of Saddam's outer suburban palaces. HR deduced that she was one of a handful of special agent belly dancers chosen to undertake a 45-day intensive training course focusing on poisoning and organising car 'accidents'. Dalia would then have been expected to return to the West and continue her cover as a belly dancer, so as not to attract attention. Dalia was a regular fixture at the Baghdad Café, dancing gratis for the dissidents. Her intercultural skills already polished, her presence scarcely raised an eyebrow, let alone a veil of suspicion.

HR figured Saddam was paying her kickbacks. The Belly Dance Council was enraged, having heard whispers about the latest transgressions of Dalia. Not only did her behaviour undercut the profession by dancing for nothing, but now Dalia was giving belly dancers a bad name. Sahara knew that if the linkages between Saddam's regime and belly dancing were made public, it would adversely affect the industry. She had already tried to get an Egyptian master over to give classes on the finer points of the snake dance, but he was denied a visa by the foreign affairs department.

263

HR and DH were in the liminal space of approaching fame, having uncovered Australia's very own Mata Hari. But without any warning, the case was abruptly closed and they were both put on desk duties. The Dalia files were removed and the two detectives were none the wiser. They were forbidden to disclose any information to media or they would be disciplined. They were scheduled for an unspecified period of leave.

Dalia's alleged espionage was a delicious end for Sahara and the pro- war brigade. During the first Gulf War, Sahara had entertained the troops as Salomé with Saddam's head on a platter. And now with Dalia being linked to the regime, this proved that being anti-war was akin to being in bed with Saddam Hussein. Sahara was relieved that Dalia was out of the way. She could now concentrate on taking centre stage.

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264 my mother has always been plaiting hair untangling grape leaves preparing plates of mahshi between prayers and sharpening machetes (Hammad 2005: 79)

Habiba had dissed belly dancers ever since anyone could remember. She saw them as excessively exhibitionist and was contemptuous of their attempts at cultural mimicry. At many a family wedding or community event, some clueless individual would book a belly dancer and all hell would break loose. Habiba would heckle the girl bilingually. In restaurants, she went much further. She would curse them in language that would shock even the second generation. For decades, Habiba had run a popular restaurant called Kul wa Ishkur that was frequented largely by community. In those days, there was no modern Middle-Eastern hybridised tabouli with currants and lime juice. When white middle class people finally realised that they were getting the blancmange end of nutrition, they started to test out how the other half ate via the Women's Weekly. It was like a revolution. Slowly Lebanese food became as fetishised as ragout had been previously. In principle, Habiba wasn't opposed to feeding white people so long as they didn't turn up their noses at her kibbi. Then somehow, belly dancers entered the picture. Habiba remained mystified as to why anyone would want a woman dangling her bits in the tabouli. She banned them outright from entering her eating house. But that didn't stop them from coming. She was forced to put signage up which emphatically stated Absolutely No Belly Dancers. They would arrive with cards and cymbals in hand and try to force their way in regardless. Habiba's was not the place for this sort of fleshy fetishism. It was a serious place of eating where bread was valued above and beyond Orientalist exhibitionism. Besides, if anyone felt like watching the spectre of dance, they could book the under-fives Dabke group from the local village association. Now they could dance.

265 The drama underlying these dramatic 'everyday' colonial scenes is not difficult to discern. In each of them the subject turns around the pivot of the 'stereotype' to return to a point of total identification. (Bhabha 1994: 76)

But by the mid nineties, Habiba had had a gutful. She was chopping buckets of parsley as she had for the last century. Her back was crook and her fingers were weary. She couldn't be pissed whether the parsley was chopped precisely according to tradition. Then just as she was finishing the last bunch for the century, in came Sahara with her ghetto blaster playing pop Egyptian. Sahara was short sighted enough not to have noticed Habiba's warning sign, so was oblivious to the fact that she had entered enemy territory. Habiba came out in her green stained apron to investigate the sudden sound of music, took one look at Sahara and slapped her as hard as she could across the face. Sahara went flying. She came back screaming and pushed Habiba against the drink vending machine. A Mecca Cola became dislodged and fell into Habiba's hands and it was on for young and old literally.

George, who had been out back chopping laham came running into the public dining area covered in blood to see Habiba and Sahara in a clash of civilisations. George jumped in gallantly to rescue Habiba from the belly dancer. They were both screaming obscenities at each other, one in Arabic, the other in English. George was caught in the middle and took hits to both sides of her head. Finally, Habiba sat down exhausted by all the excitement and laughed uncontrollably.

Sahara didn't see the humour. Habiba had ripped her outfit, pulled out a chunk of her hair and hit her so hard on the head with the can of Mecca that it exploded cola all over her Orientalist daywear. Sahara for her part ripped off Habiba's scarf, but Habiba had no hair left to pull. Habiba was wily enough to escape serious injury, a miracle considering she was well over eighty. Sahara was getting more hysterical. Picking up her belongings that had been thrown across the room by Habiba, she threatened litigation. She finally left in a huff of invective. George

266 looked at Habiba as she sat there in hysterics. What could she say? What happened? She knew very well what happened. Habiba had been threatening belly dancers for decades. She had finally fulfilled her ambition.

But before George could light a cigarette in her own recovery, in walked DH with two in uniform to arrest Habiba. George was dumbfounded. - How can you arrest her? She is an old lady.

DH was unimpressed. She should have thought of that when she launched her unprovoked attack, he countered. George argued and pleaded with him not to take Habiba away, but to no avail. She even showed him the signage to prove that the stupid himara had entered at her own peril. The police were to lay formal assault charges against Habiba. DH warned George that she might also be charged for aiding and abetting.

- But she is over 80, George kept insisting.

George tried to get Habiba a cardigan to cover her apron as a last gesture but the police were in no mood for obfuscation. They hurried Habiba into the squad car. She was happy. George was alarmed. She rang Sadie.

Once again George and Sadie made their way down to the police station where Sadie arranged for bail. After a long night of torturous wrangling, Habiba was free to go. But she was already changed. She had survived a famine, two wars, migration and a bad marriage, but it took a scrag fight with a belly dancer for Habiba to lose her marbles.

The community were outraged that Habiba was charged with assault, given every second redneck was patted on the back. The media ran with the line Arab runs amok in the evening edition. Sahara was going to suck all the publicity she could out of this story. For good measure, she took out an apprehended violence order against both George and Habiba. They were to go nowhere near her, but neither of them would

267 have contemplated that in a month of Fridays. After all, it was she who had trespassed upon them.

Habiba moved into a new phase of her life post-Sahara. She was now not allowed to mix with anyone but family and community. She was issued a blanket ban not to engage with white people. It fell on George to take over the running of the eating house. She decided it was time for a makeover to dispel the demons that had assailed the characters in this latest chapter.

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268 6. The Saga of Sahara c. 1999

From the wealthy down to the fellah, the festivities are wonderful and bountiful: but what happens afterwards? (Memmi 1965: 84)

Every occasion has its fracas and George's sister's wedding was no different. First Hemami tried to put salt on the bride's shoes, then the rains came. Hemami was always getting underfoot with her bag of salt speaking in crypto-sentences. It was as if she only had memory for words, syntax lost to the forces of transcreation.

But this day Hemami was barely tolerated in the bedlam of bride worship. So she went outside to sprinkle salt on the patron saints instead. She uttered a prayer to Saint George and then vanished into thin air. She had a habit of disappearing at a moment's notice. Sometimes she went missing for days. But she would always turn up at someone's house to remind this one or that one of their duty of care. She was testing the émigré, to see who had assimilated outside the village square. If Hemami was ever turned away, it always got back to the old country and there was hell to pay.

She is the stranger; yet as the orphan, the widow, and the hungry, she is also the one who judges me on the basis of my responsibility to her. (Cornell 1992: 53)

The wedding party eventually found Hemami at the house of the groom. There she was sticking a piece of dough onto his back doorstep to see if the marriage would endure. She would then of course inform the bride's family. Hemami knew her business, and despite all the snide

269 commentary, she remained indifferent to the slights of the modern émigré.

By the time the bridal crew arrived at the church, the storm had all but passed, but it left its mark. Dresses of rain stained crushed taffeta were hardly good fashion moments, neither was bridal hair nearly frizzed over. George was joyful that this was the last of her sisters' weddings. She just hated the vaudeville of marriage. But this was of little import considering what was about to happen. An obscure family feud threatened to wreak havoc on the unlucky groom. Just as the priest was about to perform the last blessing, in walked Umm Charbel, disrupting the conjugal proceedings. She was livid. Her son had been cuckolded. She and the bride's mother had made a pact that their children would marry when they were both born. A broken engagement was not to be taken lightly. Pride demanded that the disaffected mother curse the bride. The priest fearing an internecine mêlée offered to dissolve the prior arrangement. But Umm Charbel was not to be denied. She threw spittle at the bride. George's sister immediately went into a catatonic state. Her face stretched upwards, her body stiffened downwards. The perplexed groom tried to lay his virtual wife gently on the altar steps, but she kept slipping away. No one could bring the frozen bride around even though nearly everyone tried. Women ran from the church flagellating wildly. Hemami was called in, but even she couldn't shift the bride's freeze frame. The priest was furious. He didn't like cursing in his church. He decried the recidivism that plagued his congregation. What about God? Where did blind faith fit in the new country? No one knew exactly how the bride came to, but Hemami was seen dragging Umm Charbel by the scarf down the aisle. The bride rose once again, no thanks to Umm Charbel and her son. The priest finished the service abruptly, refusing to bless the children after the ceremony. George's sister fortunately had no recollection of what went on at the altar.

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270 The Granada Inn was the preferred place for weddings and other celebrations. Tribes of people would parade across the floor as clan scouted for spare tables to accommodate the always flourishing family. It was not uncommon that a few extras might drift in. There was not much you could do if cousin's cousin was visiting all the way from the old country.

George and Sadie's families came from neighbouring villages. Sadie's second cousin had just married George's sister so, ipso facto, they were now related. Hayat found a quiet place at a corner table away from the main action. She watched as clan greeted each other on the cheek. Eluding lips was the real trick to it. The air kissers were out with a vengeance this summer. Centuries of kissing customs had left the women no alternative but to take culture into their own hands. Air kissing was more and more routine in these times, necessitated seemingly forever by the age old dilemma, of greeting everyone without ever putting anyone's nose out of joint.

The more the room filled up with chemises for all seasons, the louder everyone seemed to pitch conversation. Women walked almost convincingly in heels pumped so high that many a bouffant ended up in the chandelier. Men, suited in their black and browns, sometimes in safaris, wasted no time in breaking open bottles of Johnny Walker, pulling out bellies big to pontificate on the price of tomatoes. Alert children escaping the aunty brigades of cheek pinching and soft skin biting roared in fright across the space, taking off with bonbonnière before anyone had a chance to recollect what rightly belonged to them.

The wedding was much like any other. The injudicious matchmaking behind the cover of the pink serviette always took precedence over and above the day's proceedings. George was always the most obvious target. She wore it like a badge of honour.

Instead of working within the framework of the new world daughter, George chose to be hassan sabi, and ended up with the whole village on her back for her troubles. Unlike Sadie who managed to perfect the art

271 of the dutiful daughter, George just didn't give a fig what the Aunties demanded of her.

It is simply impossible to imagine an Arab wedding deprived of belly dancing. Belly dancing is the highlight of the wedding, though today it is usually performed by a professional dancer. Yet guests and relatives do not leave it at that; once everyone hears the music, they want to perform their own dance. (Al-Rawi 2003: p147)

Just as Hesham was about to launch into his queer tales of Beirut, the music changed tempo and out came the dreaded belly dancer. Women were almost uniform in how they responded. Some grabbed their cigarettes and made a quick run for the exit. Others made a strategic grab for their lipsticks and headed straight to the toilet. The stoics who stayed in their seats gazed ahead trying not to encourage any more of a spectacle than otherwise expected.

Sahara was oblivious to all of this manoeuvring. As she dropped her lily-white hips to the floor, she dangled her breasts for the men and the lights, and launched straight into the business that was belly dancing.

This was the time of the night when the women would catch up, and the banaat would sneak off for a quick snog far from the eyes of amou. But Samira was not going to have any of this focus-pulling hip swinger at her cousin's daughter's wedding. She climbed up onto her chair and then onto the table. She liked to disrupt the line between spectator and performer as culture naturally demanded. Of course women openly encouraged her ululating wildly, as plates of soggy tabouli and fridge- cold lamb's brains went crashing to the floor.

Though the smile remained on Sahara's face, her discomfort was plainly evident as she tried to get the attention of Farouk, the function centre

272 manager. Samira was up on the table in performative glory, and Sahara was left on the floor looking like a himara.

Children ran into the toilets and outside screaming, - Yallah, Aunty Samira's on the table! Women dropped their lipsticks and cigarettes mid fellatio to rush back immediately to participate in the spectacle. Samira knew how to put it out there, but more importantly, when her sense of irony was intact, she knew how to upstage a belly dancer. By now the tables were crowded full of clan women dancing to the song that they knew better than any.

Meanwhile, Farouk was rushing from table to table trying to contain the orgy of women, but the oestrogen was pumping and he was in for the impossible. Then he made the fatal mistake of trying to get Samira down and when push came to shove, Farouk was the one who wore the last of the mezze.

Sahara retained her signature pose, though was on the verge of spitting the dummy. After the Arabs had their fun, she finished her routine, albeit in fast forward, but by then nobody was interested, except the pre-pubescent and the needlessly desperate. And we all belong to them.

What for "us" is the story of triumph is for "them" the story of defeat. What one has, then, is a different cast of characters or a different hero. (Spivak 1994: 283)

Sahara was livid at her treatment at the hands of the Arab women. It had taken her years to recover from Habiba's assault on her. She believed she had been deliberately targeted because she was Western. She felt vilified by slurs of rank orientalism. She was out of her depth in their critique of her profession. But this was not the first time she had come a cropper with the prefects of postcolonialism. She had got into almighty trouble speaking about Arabic culture at an arts forum. In another incident, she was heckled by an angry mob of women at an autumn convention. They told her to go back to her own culture. And

273 then at spring carnivale, she was made to feel decidedly unwelcome. She was affronted by their hostile reception. They seemed to have a withering contempt for all things Western. If it wasn't for belly dancers like her, Middle Eastern dance would be dead like Latin. Speaking for oneself was all very well, but as far as Sahara was concerned, the far more important question to be asking was - Can the subaltern dance?

Sahara believed belly dance was fast becoming an endangered art form. By appropriating this ancient tradition, she knew it was Western women who were literally keeping the dance moving. She had met some Phoenicians who had expressed their gratitude to belly dancers for promoting the culture. After all, Sahara postulated, if you knew the dance, you understood the society, the people, their customs, beliefs and values. Isn't that what they wanted? Sahara was militant about speaking up for the emblematic art form that she believed was hers, post- Shaharazad and Dalia. As one of its most fervent defenders, Sahara was always being asked tricky questions. Anything from whether authentic Middle Eastern dancers could be blonde, or whether it was proper to wear fish net stockings. Sahara would offer that belly dance was liberation theory in practice, therefore you could wear anything you wanted. -We're reclaiming our archetypal feminine side, she would confide.

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274 The desire for the exotic depends for its realisation on the differential role of the female companion as the stable observer and admirer of such adventures. (Behdad 1994: 97)

Sahara had done her time in the Middle East. Even though her first trip was nothing less than disastrous, she didn't give up. Unlike Dalia, Sahara went into the desert without a sense of purpose. She did not seek salvation or fulfilment. Sahara wasn't one of those Orientalists. She neither had an unhappy nor disaffected childhood, even though she was reared Presbyterian. Compared to Dalia, she felt she was more objective. She preferred to keep moving in search of adventure, whereas Dalia had wanted to remain stationery and experience the surroundings. Sahara's unyielding desire to discover left her no alternative but to break with Dalia.

After she abandoned Dalia in the desert all those years ago, Sahara travelled between upper and lower Egypt, searching for Memphis. She did all the temples and palaces, then headed for the clubs in Cairo. She set herself up at the Sheraton where she happened upon a belly dance symposium, imposing herself on their hectic schedule of master classes and countless costume try-ons. Madame Abla fitted her up with the very best Egypt had to offer, but she got bored as quickly as the sequins changed colour. She felt inclined to adventure and so when an archaeological expedition stopped briefly in the lobby, Sahara tried to ingratiate herself so that they took her with them. They declined in the politest French.

Sahara had long desired to enter the darkness of a tomb and glance at the hidden past of civilisation up close and personal. Raiders of the Lost Ark had once been her favourite film. Indiana was to die for as he rescued archaeology from the hands of the conniving Egyptians. Even better that the Ark ended up in the hands of the US army for safe keeping. Sahara at once imagined herself as the protagonist Marion. Every middle class white girl aspired to this sort of rescue fantasy. When she eventually returned to Australia, she enrolled in a continuing

275 education program and prepared for her first big dig. She would soon be excavating with the best of them. She regarded it as her duty to save the past from oblivion. So when she came into some dead estate money, she packed herself off in the tradition of many a tomb raider before her.

When white adventurers first laid eyes on the opulence of 'the East', their overarching desire was acquisitive. (Banerjea 1999: 20)

Sahara's second attempt at Egypt was much better planned. She arrived at the archaeological site well into dawn and by lunch was gravely disappointed. She was just one of the countless helots employed to dig relentlessly with the tiniest of spades in the heat of the day. She was to dust off the dust that never seemed to throw up anything but more dust. This was not what she had imagined. No bad Arabs colluding with the Nazis, and no rugged cowboys anywhere on the horizon. This was just a disaster. She had all but decided to throw in the pick-axe when she spotted a sign she had been yearning for. Absolutely no access without authorisation was Sahara's signature entry. She grabbed her pink torch and snuck in whilst the guard was off peeing in the sand. She came face to face with everything she had ever imagined. A veritable treasure trove of hieroglyphics and sarcophagi. She moved from one to the other, not knowing how to read the mummies. There were so many, it was just like the British museum. Her excitement at defying authority prevented her from experiencing reality. After all, she was alone with a lot of dead bodies. Just as she felt she had witnessed enough of ancient history, she bumped into one of the smaller corpses, knocking its foot clean off its body. Sahara bent down to stroke it lovingly then slipped it in her Gucci carry-all for posterity. She had got what she had come for.

This was the beginning of Sahara's bountiful career in smuggling. As a belly dancer visiting biannually, customs were hardly going to suspect her of doing anything as serious as stealing antiquities. She cashed in on the thriving international black market. She held onto her mummified foot as a memento, using it as a paperweight in her studio.

276

Eventually she wanted to try her luck in Iraq. She thought she would wait till the Americans had carpet-bombed and then make a trip during the peak of post-war anarchy. Chaos was the best possible environment for this sort of endeavour as people were least likely to suspect you were lifting their heritage when they were so intent on survival.

Over a decade, Sahara built up quite a collection. She even dated an Egyptian dealer for professional reasons. As the century drew to a close, it got a bit tricky with the revivalists contesting characters like Sahara and her cabal of thieving (neo)colonials.

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277 Sarah Jayne Payne came from a strictly white middle class ghetto. She was born by caesarean. Her mother was a proud stay-at-home woman and her father a suburban tax lawyer. They were part-time Presbyterians, attentive enough to send their three daughters to a respectable ladies college. A sound protestant education would ensure that their daughters had the wherewithal to marry establishment. But Sarah Jayne wasn't interested in that. The Paynes had to be content that at least two of their daughters married miserably. Being the youngest, Sarah Jayne was bound to be different. She was more into dancing.

Performances were not only stereotypic, they were socially and politically insignificant. (Foster 1996: 148)

Sarah Jayne started classical ballet at the age of four. She grew up learning to be rigid and straight, and for a time was content to perform feminine fragility in the countless swan lakes. But after a while she got jack of the pastel costumes and wanted to rock the Kasbah. Her mother, Prudence, railed against Sarah Jayne's rebellious attraction to popular culture, so got her in as an extra in the opera Aida. Prudence Payne thought the experience of being around high art people might somehow seduce Sarah Jayne into being more cultured. But things turned out different. Sarah Jayne discovered Egypt. She fell in love with all things Pharaonic. She immediately enrolled in belly dance classes after school, specialising in Egyptian style baladi. But it wasn't easy. Having trained in ballet, she had never moved her midriff. Belly dancing was completely the opposite. As a ballerina, she pirouetted around on her tippee toes. Now she had to be grounded. Despite back to back classes, Sarah Jayne retained remnants of her stiff upbringing in nearly every pose. Inflexibility was irrevocably etched into her frame. But she did master the camel walk. When she was ready to perform professionally, she made it clear to all her acquaintances that she was not to be called Sarah Jayne Payne ever again. From that moment on, she would only answer to Sahara.

Exactness is a mirror, not of the world, but of the ideology of the world. (Stewart 1998: 5)

278

Sahara's mother was not happy. She had inculcated her daughter in racism from the placenta. Prudence Payne hated migrants, itinerants, Muslims and Catholics. In fact she came from a long line of bigots. Her father had fought at El Alamein. He returned intact with a healthy hatred of Arabs. He used to thunder that the next war would be the result of the clash of civilisations. Prudence was more circumspect. She hated the way migrants thought they could just arrive and change everything. She lamented how they grievously disfigured the charming 1920s homes of her childhood with aluminium frames and cement rendering. The suburb of Prudence Payne's upbringing was classic neo- Edwardian elegance. Bungalows with leadlight windows and sold white picket fences. It was overwhelmingly Anglo Saxon protestant and diehard conservative. She grew up happily desolate.

But suddenly the migrants started arriving. No one had asked her whether she wanted to live next to them. They bred like rabbits, and that meant more Catholics. She detested the way they ripped up the genteel green lawns that her ancestors had laid as foundation to the nation. The foreigners had replaced them with communist grey concrete and morbid black tiles. Some went even further. They built gargantuan wog mansions over the old homes, forcing poor old white folk to flee to the central coast.

The shock of the change forced Prudence Payne into action. She joined forces with the local Progress Association. Their first campaign was to close down a brothel. It had opened up in the quietness of what they regarded as their patch of the world. It had been operating little more than a month when the local white women in their designer hats started protesting outside the front. Prudence took her small daughters with her all those years ago.

The coordinator came out to try to convince the ladies' brigade that this wasn't a brothel but a women's shelter. The white women were adamant. There was bamboo growing down the back and they had sighted 'Asian' women coming and going at all hours. Some even had

279 seen children in the flophouse with them. Besides, why should they believe her; she was Vietnamese. They bunged on their middle class mock indignation and called up the district officer. But no one took them seriously. So they went to the media. The local paper was more than happy to assist in exposing the underbelly of the sex industry. Photographers were sent forthwith as the ladies had directed, taking a series of snapshots of the façade of the said-house in question. A huge colour spread of the refuge appeared on the front page of the next issue with the address printed in font the size of a headline. The women in the shelter felt exposed. Their refuge was blown. They now had to move as a measure of safety. Prudence and her band of feminine militants could claim their first victory. Next they would go for a ban on lesbians in cricket.

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280 Don't let the subtleties of vocabulary, the new terminology frighten you. (Césaire 2000: 60)

Meanwhile HR had more new words to learn. He was moving up the forensic food chain, and was now considering a move to the federal police. His expertise in ethnic felons would be especially useful in combating international crime. Apart from his own professional situation, things were going nicely in the Anglosphere. He and his white pride compatriots were feeling reinvigorated. Restrictions against racial slurs were being lifted. People could now get in touch with their inner bigot. And multiculturalists could go to hell in a hand basket.

Driving along the chocolate superhighway, HR was intent on knocking over as many shibboleths as he could handle. He wanted to ram raid the rhetoric of reconciliation and bust up state-funded ghettoes. In the 90s, this had been his article of faith. He had a gutful of neo-liberal discourse about minority rights and cultural harmony. He kept waking up to find himself in a deeply multi-racial society and didn't like it. HR was especially readying himself for the Islamic bomb. He had been raised in a petrol station by a single father. He knew how volatile every day could be. He supported the Gulf War for the obvious reasons, but also because it was a strategic time to increase the price of petrol.

HR's life goal was to protect white nation privilege. His race-coloured glasses had only got thicker as he got older. White pride politics was in its ascendancy, but things were getting trickier. HR knew intuitively that he needed to brush up on his knowledge of jihadism. Homeland security and border control were fast becoming buzzwords in the global paranoia industry. Australia was vulnerable to all sorts of incursions, most immediately from the dreaded boat people. HR was readying himself for a deluge of arrivals that intelligence had predicted would multiply as Afghanistan and Iraq invariably crumbled. The Taliban had it too good for too long. And now, they were oppressing women. Where were the radical feminists on this one? HR would bluster. They, like Saddam, had bitten the white hand that suckled them and now needed to be bombed back to the Stone Age. The sanctions on Iraq had all but

281 starved an entire population, so people were leaving in order to live. The attacks on the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were all but a dress rehearsal for a much bigger show.

In the spectacle, the goal is nothing, development everything. The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself. (Debord 1983: 14)

HR's rigorous attention to the traditional cause célèbre of the tight white right put him in the best possible position to move to the Feds. At first they sent him to the department of immigration for elementary training. As a fervent advocate of anti-immigration, his placement in compliance meant he could deport as many as could be sent. It was important to be seen to be doing something. HR was in professional heaven. Filipinos, Arabs, Muslims, Indonesians, Banglas and Sri Lankans were his favourite targets. What did he care that some might be permanent residents? They were still foreign.

By the end of century, HR had shown prescience of mind by enrolling in an online course in homeland security. He had read that there would be a 29 per cent increase in demand for anti-terrorism professionals in the next ten years. He was hungry to reap the rewards. He had started out as a boy scout and wanted more than ever to help protect his country. Finally, he felt prepared. He studied victimology and airport security for starters, then graduated to counter terrorism. He did two extra electives, which cost a little more, but he convinced his superiors that it would pay dividends in a few years. Racial profiling was his pet project, so he was only validating what he already knew. The other elective, 'How to pick a terrorist from his iris', was more for pleasure. HR had found the whole education experience enlightening. He could see himself some day in the academy.

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282 I had never dreamt to find Egypt so Egyptian. (Copping 1996: 38)

By the late 1990s, professional smugglers like Sahara were drifting back to Egypt in the mistaken belief that the troubles were over. Belly dance had in the meantime become a somewhat precarious business. Condemned by revivalists as licentious, some clubs were attacked and torched by militants. Belly dance had even been banned from the television. Sahara herself had been called the 'son of a belly dancer' mid-performance. Although it was a serious insult, she took it as a compliment. Dancers most recently had to register with the morals police who regularly turned up unannounced at performances to check on costumes and deportment. Some dancers took to covering their midriffs with a skin coloured net to demonstrate that they too could be modest. Sahara refused to appease the fundamentalists and wore even more shocking costumes. She took a hardline position, which antagonised the local artisans. Who was she to come here and impose her white skin privilege on the native dancer? She spent a month in the country and then scurried back to the West to complain about how oppressive the Middle East was for women.

Sahara did battle from her suite at the Meridien Heliopolis. She was always open for business. As a blonde, she was in demand, so felt she could charge an arm and a leg. Her big gig this latest trip was a society wedding and after 10 minutes into her specially devised Hatshepsut routine, they pulled the plug on her CD. While the groom's family were all clapping and carrying on one side of the room, the bride's family were exuding contemptuous disapproval. Even in polite society, belly dance was now being thought of as disreputable. Sahara packed her bags and headed straight for London. She knew that Gulf money at the Omar Khayyam club in Regent Street would tide her over till she felt she could face her peers again. Sahara felt pissed off with the fundamentalists, reassured in the knowledge that she could at least make her point known in the zone of dialogue.

283 A zone is the locus for hearing a voice; it is brought about by the voice. (Bakhtin 1981: 434)

- Those mullahs want to take Egypt right back to the dark ages, Sahara would bellow. Her friend Shakeela (aka Katie) would query, - Did Egypt have a dark age Sahara? - Habibti, Egypt is a dark age! Without us, there would be no dancing. It's really that simple. - But don't Arabian women dance at their weddings?

Sahara was instantly annoyed at the intercultural hiccup.

- That's entirely different. It's not professional. It's folkloric. Besides Middle Eastern women are not allowed to perform in public like we are. It's fine if they dance at home behind closed doors trapped in their harems, but dancing publicly will buy you an honour killing. Arabs are uptight about promiscuity. They're more into locking up their women and cutting off their clitorises. - Sahara, really, is that true? - Of course it is. Where have you been, Shakeela? Feminists have written about it. They do it here in the West too, though if you try to help, you hit nothing but a brick wall. They're like that. In denial. As soon as there is a community problem, they all just shut down and you never hear a word about it again and those poor victims are left to suffer in silence. - Do you know anyone who has had it done to them? Shakeela was fast becoming fascinated whilst simultaneously repelled. Sahara thought for a good moment and came up with the usual, - No, though I read a really good article in a fashion magazine about some poor girl who was rescued by a Swiss nurse. It was just harrowing.

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284 the dead will they speak to the silences swallowed with bulldozed earth (Hammad 2005: 69)

Suad was worried. She had been pregnant before but his time she felt different. Something was wrong and no one was telling her anything. The doctors kept her in the dark for her own sanity. They wanted her to birth naturally. That way they could study her baby and report on the findings. But that day in the sweat of her night dress, she cried until she was told of the situation in plain Arabic. She was not alone in her disbelief. She was induced and there was silence. No eyes, no face, twisted limbs, no brain. Her baby was nothing but dead flesh.

The doctors took her boy to the morgue and put him in a bottle. Suad stayed immobile. For days she couldn't eat or speak. Her brothers had to carry her out of the hospital hoping soon to leave Basra. Beautiful battered Basra, a cemetery for congenital deformity. Suad was just one of many giving birth to the effects of radiation. One million rounds of ammunition coated in depleted uranium. The heaviest metal in the world being dropped on the unborn. Bullets tipped with DU, so tough they could slice through tanks like a knife through labni. Iraq was their laboratory, dead babies their progeny.

Something happened to our environment in that war. Maybe it was the DU or maybe it was the chemicals that were released when we were bombed-we can't say for sure yet, but something has happened to our environment. (al-Ali 1999)

Another woman in the ward had given birth to a baby with no genitalia, no nose, no tongue, oesophagus or hands. She lived, but not for long. Another, her baby had no head. The spine was there, but it ended abruptly at the neck. And in the next ward, little Hamed's skull wouldn't stop growing. Ali Samir's fingers were fused to his palms. He had no toes. And Haidar had two fingers instead of ten.

285

It was like Hiroshima and Hanoi in replay. A trickle of journalists came to see but it seemed unlikely that the news networks would be interested in the ease with which uranium crossed from the placenta to the foetus. Suad and her brothers packed up their things and headed for Basra Road. They would eventually end up in Woomera.

And so would Alia. Her children were starving. Her husband had been in hiding for years since the marsh Arabs rose up only to put down so brutally. She had tried to keep living but watching her three girls waste away was more than she could tolerate. No rice, baby food, or water purification chemicals as decreed by the Sanctions Committee. Shipment after shipment was turned away. No oxygen tanks or incubators, no anaesthetic, nappies or pencils. There was no food, apart from genetically modified marrows and tomatoes irradiated through. They were big enough to feed just about everybody. In its usual abandonment of humanity; the West suffered slippage with its power of veto, and half a million children died quietly.

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286 The search for authenticity, for a signifier of the 'true' Orient, is a crucial part of the belated Orientalist's practice of collecting. (Behdad 1994: 61)

Shortly before Dalia's disappearance, Sahara had started to trade exclusively in pre-dynastic jewellery. She found it easy to pass off priceless bracelets as cheap junk from khan el khalili. But in the last summer of the century, Sahara's story took an abrupt turn for the better. She performed at the Marriott that summer as well as in the Golden Nights room at the Holiday Inn. She got an apartment overlooking the Nile and lived like a modern day Cleopatra, taking master classes and enjoying a Cairo nightlife that only a Western woman would entertain. She kept a horse near the pyramids and rode in the desert most days before classes. She felt liberated by the rush of desert wind blowing through her blonde hair, willing a mirage to appear to her before day's end.

Sometimes she would recline by the Nile and watch the feluccas crammed with white faces ferry on by. She also wrote a series of reflections and got them published in fashion magazines. When she danced in the tourist clubs she was feted like a princess. She had quasi- millionaires offering her semi-precious jewels and perfume, apartments and papyrus, but not one lousy camel. Men rang her all night telling her how beautiful her white skin was. She was not like the Russians; much more classy. Even a Saudi businessman waved his handkerchief in appreciation. The men she seemed to attract just wanted to take her out, not marry. But of course Sahara had no desire to marry into this or any other tribe. Rather, when she was not looting, her main objective was to match the star of Tahia Carioca or Samia Gamal, even Fifi Abdou in her heyday. Arab men were of zero consequence to her, though she always gladly accepted their gifts.

The desire to accumulate Oriental objects makes the belated traveller a kind of Orientalist antiquarian who attempts to

287 reconstruct an 'imaginary' past through the materiality of the objects collected. (Behdad 1994: 61)

Sahara made one last trip to Egypt in a bold attempt to smuggle out the mythical Star of Aswan. She had heard stories about this venerable gem but had never imagined she would come close to touching it. It had been lost for centuries. Its net worth was reputed to be priceless. Smuggling it out would net her a cut. Set in old gold, the black gem was thought to have been worn by Cleopatra's handmaiden on the day she famously suicided. Sahara was exhilarated to be caught up in such an adventure. She had gathered up other small pieces to bring for herself from the 19th dynasty. They would pay for a new studio and furniture.

Sahara packed her things carefully in the manner to which she had been trained by her Western backers. But as she went through customs, she couldn't find her usual man. She would wait till he gave the signal, and bounce over to him as if she were innocent. She would greet him in language and then slip him a wad of US currency. But today he was not where he was supposed to be. She waited and waited until finally she had to chance it with a stony-faced woman who gave her the once over disapprovingly. The woman meticulously unpacked all of her fake Gucci luggage much to Sahara's creeping alarm. There was no point in performing the belly dancer's charm after a full body search was ordered. She started sweating as if she knew what was about to happen. Finally she had been caught white handed. She was taken away with a minimum of fuss as her plane took off without her.

Sahara was questioned and she denied everything. She remained calmly confident. She assumed she could bribe her way out because she was Western. She ended up spending a lot of money, but it came to nothing. The Egyptian police, unimpressed with her blue eyes and greenbacks, threw her into a jail full of Arabic-speaking criminals. Sahara was now frightened. Her least favourite movie was Midnight Express. She waited but no one came to her rescue. She rang the embassy and they sent someone to check on her, but they were in the middle of lucrative trade

288 negotiations, so Sahara wasn't exactly a priority. In fact, she was a diplomatic embarrassment. It seems she had a history. She had been caught once smuggling mullakhiyya into Sydney but got off with a warning.

The theme of hardship is crucial to the discourse of discovery because it fulfils the ideological function of valorising the orientalist as the heroic adventurer. (Behdad 1994: 104)

After a week, Sahara demanded to be released, proclaiming her innocence. She alleged that she had been set up by an international smuggling ring. Someone had planted the jewels on her while she was at Madame Abla's. That she had bought the jewellery in good faith believing it to be genuine counterfeit. Nobody took her seriously. Sinking into an Arabian nightmare, she felt abandoned. No one spoke English, even though the British had colonised this once exotic place. Why hadn't she got stuck in India where corruption is so much simpler?

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289 and when we your daughters say we are about more than chickens and tea you ask who do we think we are we're no better than you and you are right (Hammad 1996: 72)

George was short for Georgette. The fourth of five girls, her poor father was slapped for his troubles. She and her sisters were the displaced generation, far enough removed to have lost functional language, but still obliged to endure the strictures of customary relations. George had initially started working with Habiba as a favour to her grandmother. Habiba was getting old and before her forced 'retirement' had struggled to keep up with the buckets of parsley. George was not one to suffer post-immigrant ambition, but she did like the idea of cooking for a living.

After a few hiccups in the beginning, George finally settled into Habiba's kitchen. Nothing had changed in the eating house since Habiba first opened her doors to the mahjar. The paint from the murals was peeling badly and needed restoration. The torsos of Om Koulthum and Abdel Wahab appeared on one wall in their characteristic poses, while Fairuz and Dalida beamed from the other. Habiba used to sing to them. They were family to her.

George was determined to preserve the cultural foundations of Habiba's place, but in keeping with the times, gave it a second generation feel. She bought big plates and updated the menu. In deference to Habiba, she kept the sign on the front window. She converted the upstairs into a club room. George now felt ready to mess with tradition. Club Kishk was the perfect place for what she wanted to do with food.

290 Kishk had long been kept off the public menu. And for good reason. The elders were adamant. You didn't share lu'mit 'umm with just anyone. The Arabs had always been vigilant in keeping kishk off the menu. Many would recount the howls of disgust at their grandmother's table. George decided to introduce variations of the dish to the eatery.

It is clear that the whole story is structured by an implicit fear of the Anglo gaze and its imagined rejection of the migrants' food. (Hage 1997: 112)

Habiba had been a renowned connoisseur of kishk. No one made it quite like her. George had tried to extract the recipe when Habiba was of sound mind, but she gave nothing away. George was bewildered by Habiba's reticence to pass on tradition. What sort of elder was she? George had worked hard to convince her mentor that she was worth her salt in the kitchen. She believed kishk to be the food of the future. She predicted in a decade everyone would be adapting to its taste as they had done with homous and tabouli.

Multicultural bellies, full of tacos, felafel, and chow mein, are sometimes accompanied by monocultural minds. (Shohat and Stam 1994: 21)

Sadie wasn't convinced. There was a long way to go before they would appreciate the tart texture, not unlike the politics. George thought kishk could be marketed as postmodern porridge. She wanted to stake a claim before the plundering foodies got their hands on it. George felt she was on the cusp of the latest craze. Kishk would be the next big thing. But talk has a taste like food, and George got more than she bargained for.

Late one evening a stranger came in and announced two decibels a little too public that kishk was not Arab but Israeli. The elders, who had been sitting at the same tables for decades, went into apoplexy. The young would not have ordinarily been bothered with the odyssey of kishk, but

291 this was different. Hayat didn't care to argue with the Israel lobby, but George, feeling fully Semite since the first Gulf War, took him on.

Having studied the polysemy of kishk, George was more than aware of the complexity of the situation. That kishk had started out as kashk didn't especially worry her. After all, they were her political cousins, so she knew she was on firm ground. She had sourced kishk shami, kishk mosuli, kishk babli, kishk laban, kishk sa'idi, kishk bizayt. But no kishk yehudi. Where did the Israelis get off? First they steal the land, now they take the food. They might think they had commandeered falafel to their cause, but they weren't going to nick kishk as well.

Warda, a big-haired regular, overheard the argument and thought the whole thing distasteful. After all, it was only food. But in the lives of the dispossessed, it wasn't that casual. Warda decided to enter the fray and became more and more contrary as she argued the point. She relished the opportunity to abuse Palestinians. After all, she blamed them for everything that ever happened to Lebanon. In her mind, the Lebanese, that is, the Christians, were the innocent victims. They had nothing to do with the internecine atrocities, the political chicanery or duplicity, the massacres or instability. To her, they were just trying to protect their insular fiefdoms from a hostile Islamic sea.

Warda came from a long line of Christian warlords. Her uncle, Sheikh Pierre, was a 'decorated' general in the Lebanese Forces. She proudly wore her crucifix araldited to her cedar tree around her neck. Buttressed by Maronite mythology, she was committed to her version of history. Her revisionism spoke for a whole constituency. Warda was her uncle's favourite and as the Aunties would insist, the daughter of the house is one-eyed.

Sheikh Pierre had been a stalwart in the Guardians of the Cedar. He was a brave son of the mountain having killed countless women and children. He sent hundreds of high-school boys to their deaths convincing them that they were fighting a noble cause. The 'Sheikh' had the bluff to carry it off brutally. He even blew up churches when it

292 suited him. In Marounistan, anybody could be the enemy. He prided himself on getting rid of the Palestinians and then he would crush the Muslims. Like the Israelis, he knew keeping Lebanon prostrate was in his best interests.

Warda had drawn her sword in the wrong place. There had been an unspoken rule during Habiba's reign that no one would bring the troubles into her domain. Whilst her eating house had remained one of the few places that serviced quiet political discussion, she had always railed against chauvinist exclamation. George liked to think she could continue this tradition. The kishk dispute lasted longer than the fasting month and to this day has never been resolved. Warda and her Israeli friend were frog marched out to the tune of coffee cups rattling and women ululating. It was like the long yearned-for liberation. Patience is bitter but its fruit is sweet.

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293 Flaubert went to the Orient to find the object of his desire, the Other outside, but instead he encountered the abject in himself, inside. Filth, waste, decaying carcasses, rotten food, plague- stricken people, foul-smelling objects, stinking chancres, opened corpses: these are the images that clung to him in Egypt. (Behdad 1994: 66)

Rising early to the sound of the call to prayer, Sahara cleaned her metre square, trying to find distractions from the crushing boredom of an Egyptian prison cell. Her Spartan existence got her thinking. It dawned on her just how much she had despised the actual Middle East. There was not one good thing she could say about anything she had ever experienced. She had always thought the pyramids overrated, the Blue Nile was hardly blue, and the red sea certainly wasn't red. She hated communal eating; she demanded her own plate. Sahara considered converting and Zen Buddhism seemed most likely. She had decided if she ever got out of this hell hole, she was sworn off all things Egyptian. She had made a considered decision that she would go Indian. After all, she loved patchouli, saris and curry. And with her dance history, she was more than equipped to learn the kuchipudi. Sahara's dance trajectory started in ballet and then moved to belly. It seemed only natural that the next step would be bolly. Sahara had always felt at one with the Indians on a kinetic level. Besides, Indians were non-violent, unlike the Arabs. - I mean did Ghandi ever blow up a bus or shoot at the British?

When Prudence Payne first heard about her daughter's arrest, she immediately sought solace in polishing the silver. It was only when her husband went away on business that she hit the bottle. DH, feeling marginalised by his police colleagues, called on Prudence to see how Sahara was faring. Prudence insisted that the government get her daughter on the first flight out of Egypt. Sahara's father was another matter. He wanted the crack troops to go in and rescue her. It took DH all afternoon to convince them neither was possible.

294

Prudence Payne felt she couldn't show her face in polite society again. Even though she accepted grudgingly that Sahara had been framed, the ignominy of having a daughter in prison was too much to bear. If only the media hadn't made it so very public. She could easily have dismissed queries about Sahara's whereabouts with white middle class indifference. But now the whole city knew about her convicted daughter. Smuggling was one thing, but it was the exotic dancing that would really appal the ladies. Prudence had invested so much in her own respectability, she didn't know where else to go. She just cringed at the thought of having ended up with such base-line progeny.

DH did as much as he could to counsel the Paynes, but left them to their own dysfunction, considering they were only interested in how Sahara's disgrace had affected them. In the interim, DH had travelled the downward spiral. His obsessive attention to the sexual peccadilloes of senior public figures in his pursuit of paedophiles had done him no favours professionally. He wanted to name a high court judge and others in the establishment, but his superiors had put a gag on him. He had become disgruntled with the establishment. He had not felt this emasculated since the fall of Saigon. It was clouding his judgment.

To make matters worse, DH’s wife Concepción had made contact with a neighbour, and escaped to a shelter before DH could get her deported. The divorce was as acrimonious as his first marriage. DH was not to be deterred. He went back to the Philippines and found another bride. This time, he chose more carefully. Salvación spoke no English and was from a shanty town. He was hoping this would be the last time he would have to travel abroad.

Sahara believed her 20 year sentence political. Even though she was found guilty on all counts of illegally transporting priceless treasures out of the country, she maintained her rigid composure. After all, she was an ex-ballerina. Her supporters fervently believed Sahara was innocent. They were convinced that she was given a harsh sentence because they hated her freedom. That she was being offered up at the

295 altar of anti-Western feeling. That this was payback for the troubles over Suez. Sahara was locked into appeals to lessen the sentence, but the system was overloaded. She would languish in her prison-issue blue and white cotton shift dress for the rest of the narrative, no longer having access to her preferred couturière, Madame Abla.

Bob was a dedicated talkback radio listener and he had had enough. The Arabs had incarcerated Sahara. He had listened to the news all his life and believed everything he heard. Politicians and media were telling him the same thing day in, day out. That they were taking over. That they were raping his women. Not that Bob had any women, but he didn't like the way Arabs looked at white girls. And he certainly didn't like the way they treated their own. He felt terrorized by living in a multi-racial city. He had had enough. It was time to take the bull by the balls and make a stand. A last stand. A stand that white people could be proud of and perhaps one day tell their grandchildren. It was safari time.

As in the Cold War, in the era of the New World Order, the disciplining of 'evil' proved incomplete, the evil Other hard to pin down. (Nadel 1997: 187)

Bob loaded up his prized hunting rifle. It was registered in his father's name. He knew his father wouldn't handle the fame. This thought made Bob neither anxious nor wanting to tread carefully. Rather, it propelled him into making this act of reclaiming white male honour as valiant as possible. He put on the regulation army fatigues that his father had bought him last Christmas. Both father and son had gone wild pig hunting infrequently. That was the only time they ever really bonded.

Bob looked at himself in the mirror. He had always liked the aesthetic of camouflage, though he had never been in actual combat. But he did love American history. The Confederates in the Cupboard was his favourite comic. He read it six times. He knew every line, every nuance in the narrative of the last heroic Anglo. Those were the days when war

296 was valued above humanity. A time when returned fighters didn't complain about stupid syndromes and chemical poisoning. What did these whining vets expect? A tea party? Bob imagined himself as a latter day Custer. Then he came to. It was getting late.

Bob's war was a race war. It wasn't as a much about north and south as eastern and western suburbs. His battle was in the urban ghettoes of ethnics, where you didn't know where you stood anymore. It was as real as any gulf war. Bob had tried to enlist for Desert Storm, but his ears weren't up to scratch. He blamed all that pig shooting for blowing out his drums as a vulnerably excitable boy. He wasn't interested in fighting Asian immigration anymore. He would rather kill Arabs. Bob had often contemplated the day he might achieve an existentialist act. That day was coming.

Standing on a beach with a gun in my hand Staring at the sea, staring at the sand, Staring down a barrel at the Arab on the ground The sea is on my mouth but I hear no sound I'm alive And dead I'm the stranger Killing an Arab (The Cure 1986)

Bob liked that song. His friend Albert reckoned it was about him. He climbed into his jeep and loaded up his gun. Then he put the radio on. His favourite shock jock was right there exploding. Big Al was angry as ever. But today more than anything he was angry about anti-war demonstrators. The dirty traitors. The desecrators. What must our boys be feeling to hear these pathetic bleeding hearts carp on about war being illegal? Bob felt Big Al's anger. He started the jeep. It stalled. He tried again and again and flooded the engine. So he kept listening. Now Big Al was pissed off with feminists. Yes feminists were easy to get pissed off with. Uppity bitches. Bob rolled the jeep down the drive and

297 finally the engine kicked in. He felt like he was heading in a humvee with the marines down the Highway of Death. Embedded between the gear stick and the handbrake, Bob felt the warm wind of the Western desert ruffle his sandy-coloured hair. He felt exhilarated by who he was and where he was headed. Onward Christian Soldier; he was just an ordinary sort of person. He didn't hate anyone any more than any other redneck. He just felt it time to put his plan into action. He had heard on the radio that they were the fifth column. They had put a jihad on his suburb. No one was quite sure what that meant other than knowing that house prices would certainly plummet. Who in their right mind would buy into a suburb with a jihad on it? And of course, as Bob knew, there was no easy solution to Arabic violence.

The superiority of Western culture is sustained only by the desire of the rest of the world to join in. When there is the least sign of refusal, the slightest ebbing of that desire, the West loses its seductive appeal in its own eyes. (Baudrillard 2006: 7)

Heading down the Great Western Highway, Baghdad Bob found the café he had been searching for. Ibrahim's Pastry was bustling with afternoon life. Men sat out the front playing cards after the taxi shift had ended. Some spat on the ground as they gesticulated. Bob hated that. They weren't fit to live in the city. He drove around three times before he worked out his battle plan. Then he spotted what he really came looking for. A youth with a baseball cap. An easy target. He looked down the barrel and aimed thinking precision like an Israeli soldier. He pressed hard and the rusty bullet found its target. Mohammed slumped to the ground. Bob then opened fire splaying the rest of the afternoon. All the men dived to the ground. The women stood up. The front window with a magnificent design of the Alhambra crashed to the pavement. Bob drove off.

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298 Like Bob, Miranda Jones had followed the trial of Sahara closely. She was a racing reporter with the city newspaper and was sick of the smell of horses. She thought a feature on the misfortunes of Sahara would be the scoop she needed to finally get tenure. She updated her laptop and borrowed a digital recorder, then boarded a flight for Cairo. Miranda Jones would give her readers a snapshot of life in an Egyptian cell through the blue of Sahara's eyes.

On arrival, she sought solace in the Sheraton. She had long wanted to be a foreign correspondent, but now she was having second thoughts. Why did all these seemingly smart women wear the immensely unattractive veil? She marvelled at her own freedom as she sipped her sugary mint tea from the hotel café. Her editor had organised an interpreter for her, but Miranda and Suha didn't hit it off at all. In fact, Suha was affronted by Miranda in a matter of seconds. Miranda was dumbfounded. She was only asking questions. That was her job. She was a journalist. That Suha took it so personally could only mean one thing. She came from a closed culture.

Where women wore the veil, there was money to be made in Islamic fashion. Cairo had the Salam Shopping Centre for Veiled Women, a three-floor clothing emporium that stocked nothing but Islamically correct outfits. (Brooks 1995: 22)

Miranda was nothing less than observant. She noted every little thing that transpired, predominantly in and around the majestic hotels of Cairo. The troubling incident in the Hilton toilet with the Saudi woman; the way the porter spoke so rudely to an unscarved woman. Something just wasn't right in Egypt. Miranda started thinking. Like Shaharazad, she had an epiphany. She realised that this would be her calling. She wanted to understand the mind of the Arab woman. She felt compelled to rescue Muslim women from the shackles of Islam. She could best do this by recording her observations about them, alerting her audience to how wretched their lives were.

299 That night, after trawling the web, Miranda committed herself to freeing her Muslim 'sisters' by exposing the misogyny of Arabic culture. She hadn't yet worked out that not all Muslims were Arab and not all Arabs were Muslim. But she wasn't overly concerned with details. As a Western woman, she felt it her duty to speak for all women. And by virtue of her gender, she knew she could penetrate the hidden world of Islamic women.

But before becoming the popular expert, Miranda was obliged to do the job she had come for. The idea of interviewing Sahara from Killara no longer held much cachet. But being the professional, Miranda travelled to the prison with the sullen Suha, as unforgiving as ever. The interview didn't go well. Sahara was performing 'first world woman in a third world prison' and Miranda didn't suffer divas at all. She was not into women's victimage. Miranda asked all the formula questions and gave Sahara a bonbon every time she answered. Miranda was unmoved by Sahara's saga. By paragraph's end, Miranda was glad to put closure on Sahara's miserable narrative.

Canvassing her notes later, Miranda was far more fascinated with the two Arab women in Sahara's cell and thought they would make far better hard copy. Perhaps that was why Sahara got so narky. The exotic pair had been jailed for sex-based offences, but Miranda could glean nothing more as Suha refused to translate anything other than the perfunctory sentence. The women seemed to speak for eternity, but all Suha came up with in English was one measly statement. Miranda was suspicious. She would see to it that Suha never worked again.

Miranda talked to other Western journalists and researched more on the web. Finally, she felt she had enough facts for a feature. She decided that this new angle on the misogyny of Arab culture would now underpin the narrative and Sahara would have to make do with being marginal. She left Cairo the next morning.

On the flight out of Egypt, Miranda was anxious. The week before, a veteran Egyptian pilot of a doomed plane had yelled Allahu Akhbar'!

300 down the radio and seconds later the plane crashed into the sea. He had to be a suicide bomber. That seemed the most likely explanation. Miranda had tried to change airlines in light of this disaster, but was informed she would have to wait a week for a seat on another carrier. It seemed that all Euro travellers were suffering from the same strain of hysteria. Miranda was in a conundrum. She couldn't spare a week. She was an up-and-coming journalist and had to sign off on her story. So she boarded flight 101 at 12.28 and sat uptight in a state of heightened paranoia for ten hours.

Settling into economy, Miranda cased all the other passengers as far as her eye could see. Sitting opposite were two men with beards. She grew slightly uncomfortable. They were carrying blue passports with Arabic writing. In fact, she looked around her immediate vicinity and found to her horror that she was surrounded by men speaking Arabic. Some wore flowing robes, others were in green and blue tracksuits. She realised she was on the flight from hell. All the passengers were Middle Eastern men. It seemed to have eluded Miranda's journalistic faculties that she was on a plane leaving Cairo.

The difficulty of challenging common sense, however, becomes apparent in the context of the close relationship between language and thinking. (Belsey 1988: 45)

Shortly after take off, Miranda tried to steady her nerves. She ordered a double tomato juice. But she couldn't take her eyes off the two men sitting diagonally opposite. One got up after the plane had levelled out and removed what appeared to be an odd-shaped case from the overhead storage. He sat down with it and started nervously tapping the case, watching as the flight attendant moved behind the curtain. Then he got up and went to the toilet. The one in front then left to join him. He wore a dark suit and sunglasses. He took a Macdonald's bag with him and seemed to know at least six of the men on the way down the aisle. Then another with a backpack got up and followed him. Panic set in. This one had a bad leg. He limped as if he had been injured in an

301 explosion. His orthopaedic shoe seemed a particularly bad fit. Miranda could only guess. She felt alone, not one Westerner within sight to exchange glances with.

Miranda's anxiety only flourished when two more swarthy men joined the others in the galley. They too carried strangely shaped cases. The man who had the Macdonald's bag was suddenly making his way back to his seat. Miranda noticed the bag was now nearly empty. When he had got up, the bag was brimming full. As he limped past two men with moustaches, they exchanged glances and he gave them the thumbs-up sign. This could only mean one thing. They were assembling a bomb in the toilet.

Miranda pressed the flight attendant button. No help in sight. She kept pressing but no one came. Besides, what would she say? The suspicious others were within earshot, so she would have to be careful they did not hear she was onto them. She considered making a dash for the cockpit to alert the pilot. But she felt frozen by the events. For the next hour, small groups of men were congregating near the toilets. Miranda was convinced it was a strategy to keep non-Middle Easterners like her away from the bomb-making workshop. Miranda had to get in there. She gathered all her courage and got out of her seat.

She walked the aisle like it was a plank. As she neared the lavatories, she avoided making eye contact with the gaggle of men. She waited in line. One man gestured at her to go before him to a different toilet that had just been vacated. She refused his offer. She would not be cowered by this false show of good manners. Miranda stood her ground. Another addressed her too familiarly, - Madame, this one is free. Libre. Fadlik. Miranda ignored his misogyny. She could sense some of them were getting rattled. They started speaking in Arabic. She tried to flag down an attendant, and warn her in coded language, but the attendant blew her away. Miranda was on her own. She now had little choice but to barge into the said bomb-making toilet and lock the door behind her. She had to move quickly. She first checked the refuse and then the tissue compartment. She looked in every possible place but found

302 nothing out of the ordinary. They must have already assembled the bomb and planted it elsewhere. By now it could be anywhere.

Miranda emerged from the toilet slightly dishevelled. She decided to try a different tack. She would get close to the man with the limp. She put on the friendliest look she could muster considering it was so out of character, but the man with the limp glared back with a cold defiant snarl. Miranda felt the shiver in her spine reach the top of her head. She was close to meltdown. What was she to do now? She headed for the cockpit. On her way down, she could see that there were Westerners aboard, but they were all up the front of the plane. She asked if she could be moved to be with her own. A sympathetic attendant found her a place near an old pervert and she was grateful for the favour.

After a couple more tomato juices, she told the attendant of what she had witnessed. He promised to investigate. He came back to Miranda and reported that the captain was aware of what was going on. They too had concerns of the comings and goings of the said men in question. As a rule, they didn't like the idea of having so many Middle Eastern men on board at any one time, but they couldn't do anything about it.

Miranda felt relief that there were others on board who were equally paranoid, but that hardly made her feel any safer. This was her first full-blown experience of terror in the skies. She decided that this episode would be her second feature. She felt it important to alert the authorities that their systems were failing people like her. How thoroughly did they check these men's IDs? And how on earth did they all get away with bringing those odd-shaped cases on board? How did they know each other and why did they let them sit together? These were all questions that needed urgent answers. Miranda felt strongly that Arabic should be banned from being spoken on planes. This ought to be the international minimum requirement.

Here, she is an intrepid adventurer who embarks on a difficult journey, overcomes the 'hostile' world and triumphantly brings

303 back home strategic information or knowledge about the Other. (Behdad 1994: 104)

As the plane finally touched down to refuel, Miranda was first off in search of another airline. She was told by the attendant who had now become her informant that the men in question were not getting back on. She demanded to know why ground security had not taken them in for questioning given their suspicious behaviour. How could they let them get away? This was most likely a dummy run for a major terrorist attack. The attendant tried to calm Miranda, insisting passengers were never in any material danger. Miranda knew spin when she heard it. After all, she was a journalist.

As for the men in question, they downloaded their odd-shaped cases from the overhead and headed straight for the convention centre. They were in town to play at the world jazz music festival.

*********

304 Sometimes even when we have heard the choir sing it is still hard to believe that the dead are dead. (Ahmed 1999: 31)

The day Hayat died was a day not unlike any other. It started out with the sun drenched red and ended with a darkness heavy in mourning. The coffee was bitter as, the world colder than, the chabi unable to think what was to become of them.

Hayat lay on a hospital bed with tubes connected, but there was little hope proffered. She was officially brain dead. It was only a matter of time before the machine would be switched off. Pulling the plug on Hayat would not be easy. Who would do it? She had never woken up from her afternoon sleep. Did Hayat know she was dead? The living certainly did. How was anyone to continue without Hayat in the world?

The elders tried to make things appear better. They said she would be reunited with her beloved father and grandfather. The men in Hayat's family had all died quietly. Hayat's grandfather was watchman of the olive grove, a position of great importance to this very day. He nurtured the trees and watched them grow every year until the Israelis took the land. Few trees remained after they plundered the grove that Hayat's ancestors had planted for centuries.

And today was hardly different. The rumbling high-powered earth moving Caterpillars enabled a far more efficient vandalism, crushing the bones of anyone who got in the way of land stealing. There was no end to the grieving over the trees cut down before their time. The crushed branches still bore olives ripe for harvest. Abu Jaffa would always want to know why they waged this war against the hapless olive tree.

Hayat's grandfather had loved sweet black tea but hated sardines. Filth of the sea. He was very particular about his routine. He lived in the imaginary of recent history. Memory was his only link to his trauma. He found refuge in resistance stories and his garden. He reconstructed Palestine in six metres square to distract him from the barrenness of the

305 nakba. He died quietly under his orange tree just as the fruit were ready to pick. He had been waiting to return, just like Hayat's father.

I am weary. My death, after all, will deprive them of very little. It's a beautiful day on the other side of the city, and the streets, even with the bullets flying, are still lively. Oh how innocent and courageous are these people whose vitality defies death! (Adnan 1982: 85)

Hayat certainly wasn't hoodwinked by the pantomime of the peace process. She saw the golden hand shake-down on the lawn for what it was. Oslo was a scam and the acceleration of the facts on the ground only proved it. Settlements of fundamentalist frenzy toting Uzis had multiplied in zealotry. Checkpoints and targeted assassinations merely represented the banality of occupation. Hebron had all the colonial charm of a massacre. The peace of the brave, nothing but the cunning shtick of ageing warriors.

And then came Qana. Hayat had tried to stay calm, to forget, to ignore, to live away from the world. Once again, she gave up reading the papers. She tried writing poetry, but words failed to fortify her. Her wounds were hardly unique. She shared her sorrow in the silence of darkness. She burdened no one but herself. She was neither a freedom fighter nor a victim. She wanted nothing but to peer through the cracks of her father's ancestral home. Al-Awda was her inheritance and she was keeping it. The rules and laws governing return merely reflected the hypocrisy of the colonial settler state. There was nothing more inconvenient than the original owners turning up at the gate with the keys to their property. So many had done so only to stand out in front of the grand homes of their forbears, trying to imagine how it would have been. Others went further trying to locate the disappeared villages, climbing over the dilapidated ruins in search of something familiar. There was little to be got but a hostile reception. Hayat imagined she would curse the illegal occupants. She would bring down on them what they had brought down on so many. She knew this to be the same story

306 where she had ended up. The irony was not lost on her. Whose land was she on? She didn't want to be here. All she could do was to visit the camps in Lebanon.

The pictures in the papers were always the same: babies and old men, Palestinian and Lebanese, lying dead or dying; bits of bodies, shops, and cars; houses reduced to unrecognisable rubble; an old woman, wiping away her tears, picking her way through the ruins of her home, holding up a picture, perhaps, a saucepan, a bent and twisted vase – items that had once been part of her life and now had lost all meaning. (Makdisi 1990: 155)

But there was little comfort for her there. Her old aunty lived in the same squalor as many. She visited the sites that had come to stand in for memory. Camps of bitter political struggle, cafes of redemption. Palestinians in Lebanon were treated badly. She said she was Australian to avoid a hostile airport reception. But then she fought back and started to speak like a Palestinian. She returned with a strength that could only be healthy.

This is the only time the Other 'speaks'. The disease has not been diagnosed or named yet. (Spivak 1988a: 260)

The old women sang from the liturgy of the dead. How did we allow her to go so soon? The emptiness of the refrain filled in the evening's gloom. She had barely breathed life into the narrative before disappearing at end of century. Hayat's death was an ironic gesture for those who thought she was everything.

Hayat had written brief notes on coloured paper requesting how she wanted to be buried. George and Sadie found them in a small box beside her beloved bed. Hayat knew she could not escape the traditional gestures of departure, but insisted in writing that Hemami be allowed to bless her the old way. That was the first dictum to be rejected

307 unanimously by the council of family. The only request which survived the power of veto was that Sadie be the speaker at her memorial.

At stake in the representational process is the relationship between articulation/expression and agency: between the ability to speak, whether for oneself or others, and to take action in the world. (Majaj 2002: 205)

Sadie felt an immediate burden. As a Lebanese, what right did she have to speak on behalf of Hayat, a Palestinian? Especially so, considering Hayat had barely uttered a word herself in the last decade. George disagreed. She knew the politics of speaking for oneself as opposed to speaking for others, but surely in death the rules were different. Besides Sadie was her friend. Sadie was not convinced. George told her she had to do it. Who else was there? But how could she speak of Hayat? How could she represent all that Hayat meant?

During the unbearable evenings of Hayat's wake, Sadie's inclination to bitterness resurfaced as she watched all those who had criticised Hayat perform genuine sympathy. They were the ones who spread the endless stories about Hayat's mental state. These rumours upset Hayat as much as the media did. She felt they had no right to assume she was not of sound mind. It was the world that was mad and she was trying to make sense of it in a dignified way. Sadie wanted to set the record straight. But she didn't think for a minute she could ever do Hayat justice. Bidding farewell to Hayat was never going to be easy. But for someone like Sadie, the task felt impossible.

After much reflection, a thought came to her. She would give voice to the poetry that spoke for her friend Hayat, and then everyone could know her as she was. But then Sadie was adamant. No one deserved to know Hayat in death if they hadn’t bothered to love her in life. Hayat had indeed chosen her emissary wisely.

308 In the first [poem] I was the mother (al-um), and now I am the land (al-ard). Tomorrow, no doubt, I will be the symbol (al- ramz)…. I am not a symbol. I am a woman (al-mar'a). (Khalifeh quoted by Harlow 113)

Sadie was brief in both her grief and delivery. Some listened closely and thought it too figurative. Others wandered off in their own reverie. George and Hesham thought Sadie chose brilliantly. Hayat had always resisted being a subject in the narrative. She struggled against being a fetishised area of study. Analyse this, analyse that, it was time enough she would respond that the occupiers become the focus of scrutiny. Hayat didn't need liberal humanism or lectures about Gandhi. Throwing rocks at tanks was as human as it could get. She didn't want to live in the ghetto of victims. She rejected the immorality of equivalence. She just wanted the Israelis to leave her country.

Hayat did not like her portrayal at the best of times. But it was the worst of times that it became burdensome. Before her enforced silence, she talked incessantly. People would joke, - Boy, can the subaltern talk! But what more could be said? She didn't want to speak for or on behalf of anybody. It would only be taken out of context anyway. She took to silence as an exit strategy. She had never feared death herself. Rather than dreading what came after, she felt terrorised by the living world.

*********

309 7. Life without Hayat c. 2003

I am the death that has visited a dying town, and I am the heaven who has offered them a newfound ground I am yesterday, today and tomorrow, I am their grief, pain and sorrow… (Husseini 1999: 118)

Hayat's passing ushered in the chaos of the new century. No one could quite see that in the immediate aftermath of her death. It was only when the smoke had settled over the corpse of the twin towers and the daisy cutters had ravaged the catacombs of Afghanistan that people thought to offer up Hayat's death as some sort of harbinger.

Hemami had forewarned what was to come, but as usual no one listened. She had predicted that life would end and the world would change. Most had expected Hemami to react forlornly to end of century. But no one thought she would pursue anything out of the ordinary. There were the usual summoning of saints and appeals to the ancestors, the offering of prayers to the forgotten dead. But it was only when Hemami saw Hayat that she felt dread. Hayat was having a particularly messy nose bleed and Hemami didn't like the look of it. She took Hayat's ancestral front door key and placed it on the back of her neck. Then she tried to feed her dirt from Saydniyyeh. Hayat was partial to Hemami's ways, but eating soil from a shrine was not something even she could not stomach. By the next evening, Hayat had crossed the river Jordan.

Hemami felt broken by this turn of events. She had failed to avert the inevitable. She couldn't keep Hayat from certain death. This didn't bode well for the rest of humanity. If Hayat couldn't be saved, then what good was Hemami to anybody? She hadn't felt so defeated since the eye of the great catastrophe. She took off with her things and for some years refused to deal with anybody.

310

Community is revealed in the death of others; hence it is always revealed to others. (Nancy 1991: 15)

Sadie and George had also taken Hayat's death particularly hard. But then they were closest to her. Hesham had thrown himself into all manner of things trying to avoid the paroxysms of grief. Instead, he took it upon himself to coax Sadie and George out of their inconsolable states. He was especially good at bereavement counselling considering he had spent years cutting hair and dodging death in West Beirut.

For her part, Sadie lay down on Hayat's grave for forty days. She would have stayed another forty, but George and Hesham dragged her from the field of the dead. Memory is a precious sister when there is no solace in grieving. Sadie had tried to recollect when Hayat started the downward spiral. She first noticed a mood change during the 1991 Gulf debacle. From the moment the American forces bombed Baghdad, Hayat slumped into a maudlin silence. She watched death drop from the sky and wondered why anyone would bother having a child. Her introspection turned catatonic during particularly bad times. She became seismic in her reaction to anyone who didn't oppose the mother of all battles. She felt betrayed by the ease with which normalisation occurred after Oslo. Did shaking hands mean forgetting the dead and dispossessed?

There's no noise in this world. That's why the war doesn't stop. Nobody wants to stop it. Far away, the big powers are too busy, and besides, they never think about us. So we just keep it up. In silence. From the Gulf to the Atlantic, on our geography maps, the Arabs are all silent. (Adnan 1982: 43)

There had been a time when Hayat was different. If anyone could bring sense to those who took an unnecessarily harsh view, Hayat was the first to eloquently defend a people's right to resist. Whether it was

311 Palestinians or the Indigenous, Zapatistas or Chechens, she breathed for a people's right to exist outside dying to live.

Hayat had a gift for finding poetry in the most hopeless of situations. She was, after all, Palestinian. Softly spoken, she never raised her voice. Rather, she waited till all had been said, then lulled everyone into thinking outside themselves. She had a facility in both languages, though she preferred Arabic over the harshness of English.

Agency involves both self-affirmation and action in the world; it requires the capacity for protecting the embodied self from physical domination. (Majaj 2002: 207)

In the year before her death, Hayat had become incoherent. They were at it again, bombing Baghdad. This time it was the Democrat in his liberal cloak who bombed Dar al-Hikma. Lost in the fires were centuries of teachings, manuscripts written in the pursuit of knowing. By the time the latest mother of all battles was over, Hayat's inner strengths had faded. Shock tried to raise a voice, but by then, it was just too late. Meanwhile, settlements were expanding, the occupation was burgeoning, peace nothing more than a rhetorical shield. Then once again, Hayat stopped speaking indefinitely. She sent word to all her contacts and explained that she would not be speaking until further notice. The world's indifference to violence pushed Hayat into a month of silence.

Resistance is neither a human privilege, nor a rock's, just as radiance does not characterise a day of the month of May more authentically than the face of a woman. (Levinas 1987: 78)

George blamed the Israelis. Sadie railed against the media's double standards. Hesham pointed the finger at Arab impotence. Hayat felt as much ire for the Arabs as any. Maybe more. Betrayal was emblematic of each and every story. She had lost her mother and brother at Tel al Za'atar. Camp David crushed her father, and the war in Lebanon

312 destroyed everybody. Hayat's silent protest spoke for everyone. In the meantime, George, Sadie and Hesham could do nothing.

Did we have to die every day before we could celebrate peace? (Mouhoub 2002: 111)

Hayat spent her last year searching for a means to an end. It was no secret that she found solace in the eloquence of quietness. Of course there were those who admonished her for not speaking. If she had something to say, why didn't she just say it? What was the point of having a voice if she didn't use it? Muteness would get her nothing, least of all, a bi-national state. Her difficulty in coming to speech had nothing to do with her own person. It had everything to do with the intensity of the violence.

In other words, violence enacts a schism between body and voice, reducing the individual to aversive embodiment while simultaneously stripping the subject of his or her voice. (Majaj 2002: 205)

So many had tried to tell the story, but were shut down before they had uttered a sentence. Others had tried to relate their exodus only to be drowned out by the master narrative. Some had taken to civil disobedience and were dealt with militarily. Children threw stones and had their bones broken.

With Hayat gone, the world seemed even more futile. Then things got brutal. The Butcher of Beirut made a strategic visit; children were shot dead in Gaza sitting with their fathers; massacres tore open Jenin. The only sense that could be made of the millennium was to be found in the vanishing spectacle. *********

313 The spectacle is the existing order's uninterrupted discourse about itself, its laudatory monologue. It is the self-portrait of power. (Debord 1983: 24)

George, Sadie and Hesham sat out the tumult of ground zero at Tanous' townhouse. As soon as the event started, people appeared bearing worry beads and pumpkin seeds. The first frames evoked gasping incredulity. Then of course the usual suspects were filmed dancing. A world away, others braced themselves for the inevitable aftershock. And it came as expected.

Afghanistan was the first port of call in this new vengeful drama. Osama's star turn had come. Sightings of the seemingly mythical monster appeared frequently on al-Jazeera. CNN and the wily Fox were predictably furious about Osama's strategic cameos. The Americans didn't like foreign media at the best of times. They would have liked to have bombed al-Jazeera out of transmission. Anything was possible in the business of imperialism.

It wasn't long before the US and its partners in war crimes had dropped the last of the cluster bombs on the people of Afghanistan, than they were ready to announce mission accomplished. While the hawks were itching to topple Saddam instead of the Taliban, the Afghan adventure worked in the interim. Decimate everything; smash anything left standing, Western casualties kept to a minimum. Nobody but a few bleeding heart liberals would bother a mention of death on the other side.

Some years later, Saladin asked his mother the most obvious of questions. - Where's Osama?

Saladin's mother believed Osama was a figment of a televisual conspiracy. That al-Qa'ida had no real basis. That buildings don't just fall straight down into their own footprints. Saladin's cousin Said saw it

314 differently. He had a theory. Said believed Osama was necessary. Without bin Laden, there would be no script for the 21st century. His most important contribution being in global foreign policy. The War on Terror was this century's fix for any given context. A catchall phrase for containing diverse conflicts from separatist movements to paramilitary activity and liberation struggles. Russia could crush the Chechens, Sri Lanka the Tamils, Israel the Palestinians and the Lebanese. Any pesky minority or group could now be dealt with under this new panacea. The patriot act, internal security, counter terrorism bills were now de rigueur. The whole world could officially be anti-Muslim and breathe easy. Authorities could lock up Muslims from Sydney to Seattle, Birmingham to Guantanamo. Islamophobia just didn't have the same punch as anti-Semitism. The War on Terror represented a workable proposition for any tin pot tyrant wanting to rid their respective domestic sphere of political opposition. And that was just in the First World. To think it took an uncanny Texan to repackage repression in such an inscrutably clever way. The Aunties had always said what is written on the forehead, the eye must see.

*********

315 September 11, if carefully studied and understood, is therefore a sign that should help us see each other more clearly. It is the millennial sign of the final calculus of the human spirit. (Nwankwo 2004: 611)

HR's careful reading of the political scape was as prescient as ever. It was as if he had written the script himself. As providence would have it, he was in New York on September 11. He was being briefed on projected terrorist targets when the plane hit the first building. HR couldn't believe his luck. He knew this was big and he was there to bear witness. He rushed up to the top floor of the scraper he was in only to see the second plane hit the next tower. The virtually symmetrical collapse had him reaching for his camera. It was like a controlled demolition. He took photos. His sang-froid in a time of terror impressed his graven-faced hosts.

HR's move from small time ethnic crime to the Global Islamic Terrorist Threat (GITT) had paid off prodigiously. National security had usurped home invasion in terms of real news values and HR was satisfied that he was there for the transition. He returned to Australia a week after that momentous event and was feted from one capital city to the next. He gave briefings to the highest in office and even had a photo with the Prime Minister. On the quiet, HR sold his own personal snapshots of the collapsing twin towers to the highest bidder. But more importantly, he had lobbied to set up a counter terrorism unit with the sort of resources that even he did not expect. He was immediately appointed strategic terrorist spotter and set about searching for bin Laden in the suburbs.

Then, as fate would have it, he was in Bali a week before the bombs went off killing mostly civilians, but far more importantly, in terms of domestic politics, Australian tourists were among the fatalities. HR rushed back to help the local polisi with the investigation but felt frustrated by what he saw as their extreme lack of CSI experience. He wanted to spearhead the investigation but the locals wouldn't have a bar of it. He felt that these people didn't have the wherewithal to be

316 methodical like a Westerner. He returned home determined to undermine confidence in the Indonesians via the media.

HR now had the enviable task of ramping up national security fears and locking down border control. His gut feeling told him to go for the doomsday scenario. He was trained to connect the dots, but he had the added advantage of being ideologically inclined to right wing policy.

As for the target communities caught up in the narrative, HR was preparing a white paper on how to catch terrorists. Everything was up for consideration: mass internment, involuntary repatriation, forced deportation, a ban on migration from the Middle East and South East Asia (especially Lebanon and Indonesia), torture where necessary, outsourcing if possible, accidental shooting when required. Disappearances of course were more convenient, but left wing media and civil libertarians would have a field day. And HR was not about to give them that. He was a long-time admirer of Pinochet and had a soft spot for the Argentine general, except of course when HR was barracking for the Iron Lady to nuke Buenos Aires. HR was a follower of South American politics. He had long thought Pinochet's decisive style a model to be copied. He had felt dismal when those pesky chorizo- eating Spanish tried to indict Pinochet. After all, he was an old General. Latin America was a basket case for leftward trends and needed hard men like Pinochet to keep it straight. And now with the Administration's focus so fixed on Iraq, HR was fearful a swathe of states would fall to the left. Most likely Venezuela, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile would go first. It was the domino theory all over again.

HR believed military dictators like Pinochet were unfairly maligned and had to be looked at in their contemporary circumstance. Pinochet and others were just trying to save their part of the world from socialist insurgency. HR believed the Mothers of the Disappeared were stooges for the Marxists. As a general rule, he hated women demonstrating, just like Winston Churchill. He felt those who took to the streets should always feel the full force of the high-pressure hose. HR wasn't interested

317 in hearing testimonios from survivors of right-wing governments, only those who escaped leftist regimes.

HR had mellowed little since he first busted in on Hesham all those years ago. In fact, he had only got more determined. And now he didn't have to explain himself. He had real power. Media sought him out, politicians flattered him. Everyone wanted to be seen to be tough on terrorism. HR knew this was the best possible environment to bring in the sort of legislation any Argentine general would have been proud of.

*********

318 I clean cucumbers and mint in the rivers that carry this story. Wash the mint for tea, and the cucumber for salad. (Hammad 1996: 52)

The week before September 11, Hemami reappeared. It was as if she had never been gone. In no time, blessings were sought, days were short, and she was back attaching blue stones to swaddling and seeding cucumbers for anxious grandmothers. But outside the usual demands, Hemami was busy preparing for the coming storm. While she kept a low profile knowing it was going to be hostile, she had not reckoned it would be so volatile. Freedom was first to go.

Hurriya was sleeping in the same bed as her two sisters when she went missing. Her older sister Amal woke abruptly at dawn and saw her sister gone. She got up and looked in every room and then under the furniture. She opened the back door and checked the yard but Hurriya was nowhere to be found. She then went to her parent's room quietly alarmed. Her parents searched the house, the street, the suburb. But there was no sign of Hurriya.

They then called the police and the relatives. The police interviewed Hurriya's father, her sisters Amal and Fatima. They asked the usual questions and drew the wrong conclusions. Hurriya's mother could only sob in two languages. Meanwhile the extended village were frantically looking for Hurriya in her orange satin-trimmed pyjamas.

The police were making little progress as the community kept arriving to make coffee. The detective felt frustrated by the amount of people filling the house and ordered everyone who was not immediate family to vacate the premises. Being ignorant of kinship affiliations, no one moved. The detective thought he would try a new tack. Anyone who didn't live in the house had to leave. Uncles and aunties, cousins and village kin all filed out promising to scour the neighbourhood.

319 By the next morning, the police formally listed Hurriya as missing. In the news, she was described as being of Middle Eastern appearance, but she was only a child. Hurriya's mother had to be permanently sedated. After one month, the police had no new leads on the enigma of Hurriya, and could do little more than file the requisite report. Hurriya's father roamed the streets night and day carrying a picture of his smiling angel. Those who did not know the story thought him strange. Calling out, - Hurriya, Hurriya, Where is my Hurriya?, he never worked again.

No one could imagine why anyone would want to take Hurriya from the bosom of her family. She would never have wandered off by herself having always been a shy child. She barely left her mother's side, and then only for the protective arm of her father, her sisters, her cousins, aunties and uncles. The police could only surmise that she had been lifted from her bed in the dead of the night. The media implied there was something more sinister, after all, the family were Middle Eastern.

Amal was eternally damaged by the loss of Hurriya. She blamed herself for not waking up in time to save her little sister. She admonished herself for not looking out for her even as she lay beside her. From that day, Amal never let Fatima out of her sight for fear that she too would go missing. Like her father, Hurriya's mother never recovered. She rarely left the window or got out of her nightdress. She sat waiting at her window for Hurriya to be returned to her.

As for Hemami, she was accused of stealing lemons in aisle five. She was forced to empty her bag in front of a queue of hostile looking shoppers. She had nothing but an old oil rag that she had found in the sacristy of the church. Why would she steal lemons? If she was going to steal, she'd choose mangoes or raspberries. Lemons were so pedestrian. Everyone grew them in their garden anyway. The owner of the store didn't resile from the randomness of his dragnet. He was on the lookout for local terrorists buying ammonia and fertiliser. He thrust a packet of almonds at Hemami as a token gesture, but she no had no teeth to speak of, so threw them back at him. *********

320 Discovery is made real after the traveller returns home. (Behdad 1994: 104)

Miranda Jones had returned triumphant from Egypt and published her feature article. She had no trouble convincing her editor that the plight of the Third World woman had far more news value than a convicted smuggler. The editor agreed. Sahara had put on a lot of weight, and in her prison–issue uniform now had the look of a cell-block lesbian. They both knew Miranda's targeted public would be more partial to a hapless brown victim than an overweight white felon. Miranda played her cards right. Her article was syndicated widely.

Miranda's editor was doubly impressed with the letters pouring in from both sides of the cultural divide after her exposé of the fate of Third World women in Egyptian prisons. He immediately appointed her the paper's new resident Middle East gender expert. She would commentate on all things Muslim. She was given carte blanche to travel the hotspots to find fascinating stories. She had always loved foreign places having had numerous pen pals as a child. She often wondered what it would be like to read Lolita in Tehran. Now she would try.

Miranda went from Algiers to Tangiers, Amman to Oman, in search of the usual story. From the grimy toilets in Aleppo to the darkened bathhouses of Petra, sex slavery, honour killing and polygamy were her favourite topics. Miranda covered every known artefact of colonial feminism.

Miranda chose her subalterns carefully. She had a knack for locating escapees and pawns. She was adept at pushing her subjects back in time. She preferred Bedouin village types to middle class women; they always made much better victims. She shared a meal in the desert with the wife of a mullah whose name escaped her, but after September 11, she was sure his name was Omar. She had tea in a harem with a child- bride, coffee in a bazaar with the sister of an enslaved princess. But her favourite subject was Queen Noor. Miranda wrote about how the American-educated Noor worked tirelessly to stabilize the Middle East,

321 single-handedly bringing feminism to the desert. Miranda saw her as the only enlightened one in the vastness of the region. Noor was a woman who wore her scarf stylishly, unlike the masses of masked militants masquerading under the banner of revolution. Miranda had no time for autonomous women. How could they call themselves feminists? They wore the veil, some even the chador, and unless they escaped their culture, they would continue to be the dupes of their men. Miranda so admired Noor she started to wear her Prada scarf as loosely as she did. Miranda was determined to experience as much as was possible. She even had tried her hand at performing in a Cairo nightclub.

I looked down on a sea of turbans and felt a wave of panic. But with an insistent boom-tap-tap from the drummer, the music took off, and I went with it, losing myself in its circles and switchbacks. (Brooks 1995: 222)

Miranda would frequent the clubs when in Cairo, socialising exclusively with Europeans to escape the locals. She had written once about belly dance after she interviewed Sahara, but it wasn't a great focus. She always signed off with an inshallah in her articles not because she was a believer, but should she survive another day as a lone Western woman battling the Middle East, she would continue to brave the issues.

But the subject to which Miranda always faithfully returned was the veil. How did this seemingly ordinary piece of material seduce so many women? Miranda had never moved on from her first experience of dumbfounded fascination. Whilst she had harsh memories of nuns in their habits at school, they were hardly her idea of the exotic subject. They were the repressed brides of Christ and cruelly took it out on pre- pubescent girls.

At high school, Miranda had done an elective on Third World women and became fascinated by Middle Eastern women. She had always

322 wanted to do something for the oppressed, and then she read Jean Sasson's Princess trilogy and from that moment on, she had wanted to be a feminist. She was determined to rescue as many of her Muslim sisters from the Saudis and Abu Dhabis, but then again, she was only one girl.

As a journalist, Miranda wavered between liberal feminism and anti- feminist feminism, depending on the issue. She vehemently supported a woman's right to wear whatever she should choose, but drew the line at the chador. She was virulently anti-abortion being Catholic and all. Miranda had long been keen to lift the veil in the new century. She wanted to free Muslim women from the shackles of primitivism. She was neither afraid to enter Freud's dark continent of female sexuality, nor was she to broach subjects that were verboten.

Through her mastery and display of ethnographic details and her construction of an authorial narrative voice, she simultaneously established her position of expertise vis-à-vis her Western readers. (Yoshihara 2003: 52)

It was a literary fact that Islamic women remained a fetish for a Western female public. Miranda felt there were few good books that really dealt with the topic. Her editor agreed with her. There were certainly lots of academic tomes of postcolonial gobbledygook. But where were the popular titles on the daily horrors of being a Muslim female for the absent reader? Deep down, Miranda was desperate to be recognised as a bona fide author. She wanted to harness the renewed interest in Muslim women post-September 11 and pin down the veil as the root cause of all evil. Western women could teach veiled women a thing or two about democracy, equal rights and wearing bikinis. Miranda's baseline belief was that Islamic women came from societies impervious to change. With the notes she had collected, Miranda felt it time to write a full- time book.

Miranda's first literary attempt, Unveiling Islam: How Muslims Mistreat their Women was an instant best seller. Her confessional account

323 included excerpts from all the women Miranda had ever interviewed, spoken informally to or met in passing. Miranda got her subalterns to talk exclusively about why they wore the veil. Once they had opened up, she then got them to describe their sex lives in detail. She was not interested in their political views. Miranda used her subalterns' voices to back up her own ideas. She entreated the women to refuse holy orders, to revolt in the harem, to escape from the desert, to join Western women in the wonders of modernity.

The subaltern cannot speak. There is no virtue in global laundry lists with 'woman' as a pious item. Representation has not withered away. (Spivak 1988b: 329)

But under the veneer of global sisterhood, Miranda privately harboured a quiet contempt for the women in her narrative. She especially found Palestinian women most undeserving. Female suicide bombers were an aberration that she thought typified the dysfunction of the whole damned society. She would argue that those who strapped bombs under their chadors had most likely been sexually assaulted or jilted by their cousins. Having been seduced by the Israeli narrative on a government- funded study tour, Miranda thought it marvellous that the Israelis Made the Desert Bloom. She had dated an Israeli soldier for three weeks while she covered the uprising, and understood he had a job to do. Shooting children and preventing pregnant women from passing through checkpoints was just one of those things that you did in occupation.

What else do you need to know … ? Yes, I speak English Yes, I carry explosives They're called words (Kahf 2003: 39)

*********

324 The present madness is singular: the dimension of the spectacle has never been interfered so palpably, so insistently, with the business of keeping one's satrapies in order. And never before have spectacular politics been conducted in the shadow - the 'historical knowledge' - of defeat. (Retort 2005: 37)

Daoud got caught in between post 9/11 frenzy and pre-war fervour. He had a visa, but that counted for little. He had been to Pakistan to visit friends. How was he to know they had strong opinions? He was on a bus in the middle of the night and next thing he knew he was in Guantanamo. He couldn't work out why he was in Cuba. Wasn't this the land of Castro and Guevara? How did he end up in a Yankee concentration camp with a one-eyed Bosnian? Both had plastic handcuffs and a hood over their heads, standard Israeli motifs in the global detention industry. Prolonged imprisonment without rights or charges. The security guards recorded all their terrorist chatter that would certainly be held against them.

After his cellmate disappeared, Daoud had an Abu Ghraib moment. The soldiers defecated on him to amuse themselves. He could handle this. It was when they stripped him and brought in the dogs that he very nearly lost it. The military guards had done their homework. They also threatened other 'methods', but Daoud prayed even harder. He became more spiritual as they became more earnest in their torture.

Before Daoud 'went' to Cuba, he was renditioned to Romania. Outsourcing torture was the latest innovation in the Western democratic sphere. Daoud got a real going over. He never quite recovered. To think a year before, he had led a quiet life in suburbia. He visited the mosque regularly, but because Daoud was not outwardly Middle Eastern, he escaped the usual surveillance. But then, one evening, he saw the light on in the mosque. The call to prayer struck more than a chord. As serendipity would have it, a known 'radical' was visiting the mosque that same evening, and Daoud instantly became a suspect. From that moment, security services were onto him. Hesham

325 had always thought Daoud was Albanian or maybe Chechen when he saw him at the tobacconist next to the Palace. They would often discuss the horrors of the world over a pipe. They had a lot in common. There is not a tree that has not been swayed by the breeze. This did not go unnoticed. DH, who remained convinced of Hesham's criminality informed HR of this meeting of minds. Finally, they could tie Hesham to something infinitely more sinister.

All the excluded, the disaffiliated, whether from the banlieues, immigrants or 'native-born', at one point or another turn their disaffiliation into defiance and go onto the offensive. (Baudrillard 2006: 7)

Before Daoud was Daoud, he had been marginal to the story. It was only when he got caught stealing a pair of shoes that he found religion. HR's investigators profiled him as a loner on the fringes of society, rejected by both his mother and father. Ripe for the picking, HR suspected he was fair game for the Islamists in Sydney. Little wonder he got mixed up in the murky Muslim underworld. The Daouds of the world were the sort of young men who worried HR no end. How many other impressionable naïfs would be seduced by Islam to carry bombs onto trains, buses and planes? They could easily slip through the net as security only checked suspicious looking brown people. Whites could easily walk through without a modicum of suspicion. Daoud had to be severely punished to send the right message. Not only was he branded a race traitor, he posed the most serious of threats in the view of terrorism experts and paranoid commentators.

Meanwhile, Hesham finally decided to hand himself in. He just couldn't fight the beast any more. Racial profiling had done his head in. He felt dogged by the spectre of his own appearance. There was no escaping the tyranny of being Middle Eastern. By all accounts and reports, he was wanted all over the state, the country, and now the world. Being of Middle Eastern appearance wasn't an easy calling when a claque of authorities was out to get him. He wondered if Omar Sharif felt

326 burdened. Hesham went to the nearest police station and gave himself up.

Greeks, Portuguese and other olive-skinned people were counting their blessings. Mediterranean and Caucasian descriptors hardly exercised the same power. There was always someone of Middle Eastern appearance robbing ATMs, carjacking BMWs, drug dealing M&Ms, terrorising TWA, attempting murder, mugging pensioners, stealing lemons, attacking prize fighters, kidnapping Christians, burning flags, shooting video of tall buildings and other installations, abducting babies, raping women, hijacking planes, being seditious, blowing up buses, leering at women, graffiting walls. Hesham had seemingly committed all manner of crime and was guilty by association. He no longer wanted to be identified as Middle Eastern. But the police refused to take him seriously. He decided from that moment he would now be West Asian.

*********

327 Every text creates its ideal reader by implying the body of knowledge and the expectations the reader is presumed to possess. (Kahf 2000: 163)

Miranda's first book fast became the book du jour. Within months, it went into a second edition with mistakes hastily corrected. The key to Miranda's literary success lay in her ability to deliver precisely what her readership demanded. They did not want political correctness. They wanted reassurance that their society and lives were outwardly superior to the miserable lives of other females. Miranda was feted by journalists, book clubs and shock-jock announcers. In interview, she recounted some of her most shocking views. The establishment of Miranda's authority was a given when she claimed her first literary award. She was lauded for lifting the lid on the mysterious world of Islamic women; for opening up the debate where previously it had been forbidden; for bravely bringing to light the miserableness of women who had been shrouded in otherness for eons.

Miranda's success as an author was a divine revelation. In lecture after lecture, Miranda convinced her public that the bombing of Afghanistan and the imminent invasion of Iraq were the only way forward. If Western women wanted to liberate Muslim women from their oppression, they had to support war as a moral cause. It did not matter that Iraq was secular and not exclusively Muslim. Miranda did not have a huge body of empirical data to draw on. She was more a search engine scholar. War to liberate Third World women from the shackles of primitivism was her social mission. Miranda's imperial crusade on behalf of other women made her a celebrated figure in the pro-war campaign.

*********

328 Perhaps it is apt that we land finally on the metaphor of the crusade, as this is both the means and the mission of a terrifying anaemic travel narrative. (Banerjea 1999: 26)

All was all going bountifully post-September 11, with sympathy at an all time high for the rogue state, when ibn Bush got blusteringly impatient. Popular custom insisted that no foreign body be seen to outsmart a Texan, be they Iraqi, Panamanian or Mexican. Thinking vengeance in the name of the father, God told Bush junior to invade Iraq (in a strictly private conversation). An invasion would be a tricky sell. But God knows the world was well used to the manifest destiny and who was there to stop the barbarians? France and Germany were hardly worth translating, both suffering chronic superpower envy. Bar China, every other nation state was too damned inconsequential. Besides, the chicken hawks in Washington knew how to make the military option work for them. Unleashing weapons of mass destruction dressed up as collateral damage, anarchy was the best chance to introduce a puppet government. Iraqis were used to dying and besides, body counts only count if they're yours. The US and its lap dogs of war would bring Freedom and Democracy to the Middle East. Language was important. Iraq would be the new front in the global war against terror. And Saddam would remain in his fox hole until the time was right to parade the vanquished.

Vengeance will not do. Power and bluster of power will not do. The gory masquerade of firepower and ugly rhetoric behind national insignias and flags will not do. (Nwankwo 2004: 610)

As the world convulsed in anticipation, the land of the unhinged cowboy unleashed a pre-emptive strike on the seedbed of western civilisation. This time they were serious. The air was poisonous, and the particles of death would soon saturate the Fertile Crescent. Whispered across the Atlantic, the American forces were hoping to drop white phosphorus when deemed necessary. Shake and bake shells were worse than napalm, and the casualties would be horrific, but in the theatre of

329 war, one always needed to test out new modes of mass destruction. The secular state formerly known as Iraq was now in bits and pieces.

Your fire wafts over our tribe, Mounted on a beast, With indomitable commands, You decide all fate. You triumph over all our rites. Who can fathom you? (Enheduanna 1988: 199)

Strategically, HR knew a strike on Iraq, a sovereign Arab state, would rile the Islamists, the mujahadeen, the fedayeen, the pacifists, the Muslim brotherhood. US policies had made terrorism a burgeoning industry and HR was eternally grateful. Bombing Afghanistan and now Iraq would give extremists a new focus and thus widen their appeal amongst the Arab on the street. Palestine was always a festering sore, the blowback thesis made for compelling reasoning. HR knew the jihadists would take up the cudgel and make holy war the ideal. As he liked to joke, there was nothing more satisfying than poking a big stick into a nest of fundamentalists. Fetid anti-Western rhetoric was essential to the success of the US campaign. Nothing would put more fear in the average punter than running the mad mullahs live every night denouncing the infidels. And so, HR was certain the jihadists would ratchet up their war against Western interests. In turn, HR's budget would only get bigger. This meant more resources would be invested in fighting the axis of evil. That was always the main game plan.

*********

330 Things had got fortuitously apocalyptic in the Western sphere. Middle Earth got spooked. People started arguing against pre-emptive strikes, millions around the world in fact were marching for peace. HR was dumbfounded. This didn't happen during Desert Shield, and it wasn't like Saddam had changed his spots. Grannies in their sensible footwear and kids jigging school clogged the streets. HR could not understand where this mass movement of peacnik stupidity was coming from. Didn't these people realise that WMDs posed a direct threat to them? Didn't they get that this was the epoch of hyper-terrorism? That a nuclear bomb could be dispatched within 45 minutes? HR hated pacifists and humanists. They were the barnacles on the bum of his universe. They were as odious as civil rights campaigners and environmentalists. Who else would put humanity above strategic geo- political concerns?

In the deep south of his mind, HR hoped one day he would get the opportunity to send in tactical response troops to break up civic demonstrations. He had always wanted to wipe out dissent from within the sprawling metropolis. And now there were cells operating in kebab shops.

Among the most startling features of Islamic radicalism is how smoothly it blends centuries-old religious orthodoxy with the cosmopolitan world of global travel, finance and the Internet. (Graff and Boyle 2004)

And while the latte-drinking lefties were carping on about human rights and freedom of speech, the domes of mosques were dominating the skyline. The scourge of the turban had taken hold in the Pacific. HR wasn't concerned with the petty differences between Sikhs and Muslims; he was more interested in backyard terrorists recruiting disaffected youth in the ghettos. In HR's profile, anyone who wore religious headgear in public was suspect. He was waiting for the day when an Islamic bomb would be detonated on a subterranean train. Most likely London or Madrid. More mad mullahs there than here. But he knew

331 that, poor fellow his country had its share of minarets and chadors. The upside of course, in HR's view, was that this sort of attack would be propitious in terms of introducing the sort of patriotic legislation that he felt necessary. He wanted extra powers to order a lockdown on suburbs, especially those with mosque-going Muslims. Sedition, control orders, extraordinary rendition: new words didn't seem to faze HR anymore. They seemed to fall out of his mouth so fluently: al Qa'ida, mullah Omar, allahu akhbar, madrasa, shoe bomber. HR had finally got his tongue round the zeitgeist.

*********

332 Hi, babe. It's Scheherazad. I'm back For the millennium and living in Hackensack, New Jersey. I tell stories for a living. You ask if there is a living in that. (Kahf 2003: 43)

Nijmi K. appeared out of nowhere. She claimed international protection having escaped the double-edged sword of an honour killing by the skin of her teeth. She arrived with script in hand and suddenly she was an author. She had never written before but her draft was popular with publishers. After Miranda's rapacious success, the readership was hungry for inside accounts of Arab women's victimage. Nijmi's book was deliciously titled I Married an Arab. She faithfully recounted the travails of being sold into slavery in a remote desert village, the bride price hardly worth banking. Nijmi's non-fiction was promoted as harrowing; her real identity remained a mystery because of her honesty. Nijmi's tale was simple: her duplicitous parents married her off to a polygamous Bedouin.

Orientalist non-fiction was known to walk off the shelf, but pulp desert classics like Nijmi's were the most profitable. I Married an Arab was everything the genre could promise – veiled seclusion, female genital mutilation, inter-wife sexual activity, a near enough honour killing. Nijmi went where Miranda could not go. She told the sexual tale from the inside.

If this narrative is imitating anything, its intention is to convince the audience to enjoy the imitation, whatever its lack of truth or reasonableness. (Harryman 1995: 3)

After the inevitable culture shock of the desert, Nijmi settled into her marriage. At first she thought she could make a life for herself given her new husband was a small-time sheikh. But it was not what she had imagined. Her parents had told her that she would live by an oasis with Versace-style desert motif furnishings. She had not counted on the fact

333 that her parents would trade her for a five-cycle washing machine and a flat-screen TV.

Nijmi arrived in the desert with her trousseau in tow feeling bitterly disappointed. Not one slave-girl was waiting to welcome her. All she got was a Sri Lankan houseboy. The marital home was hardly a palace and surrounded by all sorts of relations squatting in their mud hovels. What sort of sheikh was Ahmed? She felt dudded.

Nijmi survived 3 natural births and Ahmed's over-extended Arab family, was forced to wear the chador, not to mention endure her husband's infidelity with his other nine wives. Nijmi was not one to accept rank inequality. She had an affair with her husband's young cousin. They met by the light of the desert moon and engaged in the usual passion. When she was found out, she was locked in her room. Her children were taken from her and she was forced to beg for her food. Nijmi became bored. What was she to do? She had always wanted to write literary non-fiction and now had a room of her own, so set about penning her memoirs.

Nijmi languished in her literary enclosure for some years before a wandering Christian heard of her predicament. After some dangerous moments, she helped liberate Nijmi from her desert prison. She whisked her to Greece where Nijmi finished her memoirs in a café with the support of a small group of evangelical feminists. They helped her apply for a temporary visa as a gender refugee. Her publisher stepped in and sponsored her and soon she was on her way to Australia. Nijmi left without her daughters.

*********

334 'You people have such restrictive dress for women', she said, hobbling away in three-inch heels and panty hose to finish out another pink-collar temp pool day. (Kahf 2003: 42)

George's friend Latifa had her headscarf pulled for the second time. The first time it happened, she didn't know whether it was because of Desert Storm or because Shaharazad was murdered. Either way, she was shocked by it and didn't tell her mother. But this time round, she reported the incident. The police told her to think about not wearing her religion in public. Latifa was not to be deterred. Despite having been serially violated, Latifa refused to be held hostage to hate.

This abrupt return to the 'real' world suggests that the fantasy of the Orient as a pure space of literary invention cannot be maintained, that the Orient and women are not pure figures devoid of reference to things beyond the text. (Dobie 2001: 169)

Ripping the scarf from a woman's head had become blood sport in the suburbs. From the beach to the main street, this act mostly went without public comment. Some called for tolerance, while most thought it an acceptable response to the scourge of the Muslim. George tried to understand the pathology of ripping a scarf from a woman's head. Sadie had given up years before. She had tried to argue in court that it was a racialised form of violence against women but was told this was an overblown assessment of what appeared to be random acts of harmless larrikinism. After all, no one was seriously hurt. Sadie expected as much. Violence against women was hardly big news unless it was directed against white women. What if Arab men went round harassing white women? There would be a riot.

Big Al was at it again, only this time he was frenzied more than usual. His listeners were calling him up complaining about the usual suspects.

335 There were too many on the beach. They were taking over. They didn't fit in. They didn't respect the Aussie way of things. Big Al's listeners blistered furiously. One caller screamed his grandfather didn't fight the Japs only to have the Lebs take their beaches from within. Big Al could only concur. He issued a call to arms over the airwaves. It was time for the white patriots to teach the wogs a lesson. Big Al was baying for blood. He and his fellow travellers had endured the bombs in Bali. Big Al thought there was nothing more cowardly than to kill innocent Aussies while they were on holiday. And now the Muslims were beating up defenceless lifeguards. Like Baghdad Bob, Big Al felt unfettered anger at the way that Muslims looked at white women. If they wanted to shroud their women in black tents all well and good, but this was Australia and Big Al wanted to ban the burqa in public. Big Al had always railed against wave after wave of misogynist migrants.

He was staring at my body as though I didn't have on that bulky jacket, those baggy jeans, and my brother's huge sweater. His eyes made me feel naked … this white guy, with the glassy dead stare, saw my discomfort and got off on it. (Hammad 1996: 20)

Big Al was the godfather of the Angry White People. He felt duty bound to rally the troops to reclaim the white nation. The beach was once again under threat. This time it was Middle Eastern migrants. Big Al had always made it clear that the beach was theirs and it was his call who came and who went. Big Al didn't mind the Italians or the Greeks visiting once in a while, after all he was partial to pasta and souvlaki. The southern Europeans had assimilated more or less politely. Forget the race riots and mass internments of the past century. After September 11, all was forgiven, bar the Arabs. They were from another country. They moved in packs and it was hard to tell one from the other. Big Al knew it was time to act decisively. Text messages were deployed in their thousands.

336 Sometimes lynching was frequently publicised a day or two in advance, sometimes even beyond the area in which it was to take place. (Ware 1992: 171)

The patriots heard Big Al and came from afar. The white hoods were off, they brought flags, cricket bats and beer in their eskies. They sang the anthem and cheered chauvinistically. It was a hot summer festival of racial hatred. Anyone vaguely looking Middle Eastern was in big trouble. The crowd spent the morning getting wired. Big Al had already gone on holidays. But before he left the multi-racial city about to explode, he made sure to counsel the white patriots to get some Pacific Islanders on side to help beat the living Mohammed out of those dirty stinking Arabs.

Some laundry was stolen (a frequent incident in these sunny lands, where laundry dries in the open and mocks those who are naked), and who but the first colonised seen in that vicinity can be guilty. (Memmi 1965: 90)

Eddie had been oblivious to what was going down. He had been upcountry visiting family and attending the never ending procession of funerals. He was generally too busy with family business to bother with tabloid news. It was a hot sort of day and he thought to cleanse himself of an all night bus trip. He had decided to get down to the water's edge and throw himself into the sea by lunchtime. He had grown up near a river and was drawn to water even though none of his people could easily access the beach anymore, despite the fact the land was traditionally theirs.

Eddie got on the train and arrived to an eerily strange place. As he disembarked, he could hear chanting in the distance and the cacophony of smashing bottles. At first he thought it must have been the cricket or football. But something didn't feel right. As he got further from the train station he could hear the chants more clearly. 'Kill the Lebs' 'Fuck the

337 Lebs'. Eddie didn't like the sound of it. He saw a white girl pass him with a t-shirt that read 'Ethnic Cleansing Unit'. Another man had his children with him and each carried a baseball bat. They didn't look like baseballers. By now, Eddie could see a lot of shirtless white men with flags draped around their necks like they were superman and girls in skimpy bikinis looking like Paris Hilton. He felt a sense of panic consume his body. It felt unnervingly historic. Eddie was trying to make out in five seconds flat what the hell was going on. He was walking faster now but away from the beach. His senses told him that. There were far too many white people carrying flags for Eddie to feel comfortable. The Aussie flag remained a symbol of violence for Eddie's people.

Many times I have been stopped in broad daylight by policemen who mistook me for an Arab; when they discovered my origins, they were obsequious in their apologies; 'Of course we know that a Martinican is quite different from an Arab'. I always protested violently, but I was always told, 'You don't know them'. (Fanon 1967: 91)

Suddenly the call went out, 'There's a Lebo' and dozens of white people charged, drunk on racism. Eddie took flight sensing immediately he was the target. He ran like a lightening rod, but angry White People were coming at him from everywhere. There were hordes of them in full lynch mode. Eddie felt like he was an extra in a Birth of a Nation. He had heard about white hordes gone mad before but he himself had never experienced such a violent outbreak. His great grandmother had survived a massacre and his father a vicious assault in police custody. His beloved uncle had died at the hands of the authorities in suspicious circumstances. His name was merely one on a long list of black deaths in custody. Eddie's mother and grandmother were determined that the white devils would not get their hands on their beautiful Eddie.

But just as Eddie thought of his mother, a blonde red-necked Aussie tripped Eddie up as he turned the corner. Within seconds there were

338 hundreds of them descending on poor Eddie. The redneck screamed, 'I got one'! He pulled Eddie up by his shirt shouting, 'You dirty fucking Lebo'. Eddie cottoned on. But he knew if he said he was Aboriginal, they would beat him even harder. So he said nothing and copped a violent bashing anyway. Beer bottles were smashed on his head and his back was belted with standard-sized cricket bats. Eddie screamed out in shock, covering his head as the free flowing beer burnt the insides of his eyes nearly drowning him. Eddie was kicked and punched from hell to breakfast. He was flung against the scorching hot concrete and then set upon anew by the white barbarians coming from the opposite direction. Eddie felt he was about to die. He conjured up his grandmother. Unnoticed, a lone policeman had entered the fray and threw the white brutes some capsicum spray. The copper grabbed Eddie by the neck and led him out of the lair spraying any who dared come near them. For weeks after, Eddie couldn't believe that a copper actually saved him from this race hate fate. That was definitely one for the history books. He told him never to come to these parts again.

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339 The wider the frontier is pushed back, the more local Other women become. (Lazreg 2000: 32)

George had dived to the bottom of the deep after Hayat's death. Politically, she had always been a bit laissez-faire, but now felt militant. As a rule, she avoided confrontation. Even in extreme circumstances, when she was race-baited, she maintained calm and played the mediator. She and Sadie had often intervened and diffused the vitriol that had been a hallmark of crisis meetings. But now George had lost her groove. She felt vengeful in the wake of recent history.

Nijmi K was the face on every magazine cover, the voice on every talk show, the guest in every bookshop. She received a chutzpah award and was nominated for woman of the year. She was the new darling of the literati and George was sick to death of her publicly dissing Arabs and Muslims. Nijmi was nothing if not savvy. She knew how to work the mediaplex to her advantage. She spoke quickly and authoritatively. She never stopped to take a breath in case somebody interrupted. Westerners believed every word she uttered. After all, she was the archetypal native-woman-author. No Western person would think to question Nijmi's authority. She was treated reverentially, as if she were the new prophet. She played the victim whenever she was asked hard questions.

If she couldn't speak ill of the Arabs, then who could? George was neither fooled nor surprised by Nijmi's popularity. She was merely the latest in a long line of Celebrity Native Informants (CNI) making a load of money. George decided to take her on publicly. She turned up to Nijmi K's book launch and head butted the publisher.

By acceding to the wildest fantasies (in the popular sense) of the coloniser, the stereotyped Other reveals something of the 'fantasy' (as desire, defence) of that position of mastery. (Bhabha 1994: 82)

340 Before George entered the bookshop where Nijmi was due to speak, she was body searched like she was about to board a plane. George had never been frisked entering a bookshop. After she got general clearance, she looked around to see if she could see Nijmi. Nijmi had long lush hair and was diminutive. She looked like the model ethnic princess. Nijmi was surrounded by security guards with walkie-talkies and bulging trousers. She was cordoned off from the audience by an additional defence wall of more burly minders. Who would have thought Nijmi was that important. George only wanted to ask her a searing question. She looked around and saw no one else in the audience vaguely familiar. It was an exclusively white female public. Nijmi's security was all part of the publicity. Danger woman had been threatened by unknown persons, and it was a bonanza for business.

Their manufactured notoriety gives their speech greater authority and meaning. (Lazreg 2000: 36)

Nijmi had Orientalist gravitas as she pontificated from the bookseller's pulpit. She threw in the odd Arabic word to titillate the audience. Muharib, jihad, Shar'ia, haraam, fatwa. George was suspicious. Nijmi was methodical in listing the wrongs of Arabic culture. But that was not her primary target. She was a card carrying Islamophobe and hostile to all things Muslim. She blamed the Prophet for all the ills of the world. She described herself as one of the countless victims of Islamic misogyny.

No one in the third world gets off on being third world. (Spivak 2000: 3)

George watched Nijmi perform the victim with aplomb. She looked around at the white women in the audience. They were enraptured. This daughter of Arabia was making an impression. Nijmi recounted her colourful brush with an honour killing, her close encounter with polygamy, and gave a flourish on clitoridectomy. She drew on her own forlorn experience as a child bride.

341

We are yet again in the bleak novelistic universe of tragic essentialism; a universe populated with abused victimised women, whose abuse comes at the hands of men and whose crimes are an attempt to survive in an almost immutable, relentlessly oppressive patriarchal system. (Al-Nowaihi 2002: 73)

It suddenly dawned on George that she was alone. She felt a wave of panic as she sat in a room full of white people who found humour in racist diatribe. She felt she was left with little autonomy but to make her voice heard. She wanted to ask a question. She was the very first in the audience to put her hand in the air when Nijmi finally closed her mouth. But as fate would have it, the publisher picked an older white woman to ask the first question. The woman wanted to know how widespread child marriage was for Arabian (sic) women and whether the practice was done here. And if so, what could First World women do to save these poor girls from their husbands.

Nijmi responded immediately and thoroughly. It was her sort of question. George again tried to get the attention of the publisher but she pointed at another white woman who got to ask Nijmi the next question. This woman wanted to know how the sheikh decided which wife he would sleep with each night. Then a third question came and went and again George's inquiry was left dangling. Another white woman got up to ask if democracy was ever possible in the Middle East given the primitive nature of the culture. George was not sure which culture the woman with flamingo earrings was referring to, but she had her suspicions.

By question eight, George was close to exploding. This woman wanted to know if Nijmi had been genitally mutilated, and if so, what sex was like. George's heart was racing outside her body. Her face was as red as a pip in a pomegranate. She sat through four more questions that got dangerously close to vilification, but it was as if George was invisible. Even people around her were looking through her. She now kept her

342 hand up permanently to make a point, but to no avail. The publisher had marked her as trouble and George knew that she would not be asking a question any time soon.

The last straw was when the publisher abruptly terminated the session ten minutes before the advertised end. George was livid. Nijmi was rushed out the back exit by the bustle of burly Pacific men. It was the only job open to them. But George was not getting any calmer. She walked up to the publisher and they had words. It was poisonous. George could think of nothing better than to head butt her, so she did it for Habiba. As quickly as George's head left the publisher's, she was out of there.

When Sadie heard of George's bookstore imbroglio, she gave her a red card. She admonished her for giving those Orientalist literary types exactly what they had wanted: more publicity. Nijmi's book sales went up again. Now Nijmi had the proof she needed to make real the claims that Arabs were violent. George was in the doghouse. Hesham and nearly everyone else were more accommodating. He consoled her by reminding that Habiba would have done exactly the same. Hesham had often felt like head butting any number of racists, but felt constrained by his distaste for pain. For him, vengeance was a dish best served cold.

George escaped serious assault charges only because the witnesses had mistaken George for a man. The police went looking for a male of Middle Eastern appearance and George left them to it. It was hardly her fault that ethnic descriptors were unproductive and stupid, not to mention assumptions about gender.

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343

Otherness has its laws and interdictions. (Trinh 1991: 69)

After Nijmi's meteoric rise to celebrity as a bona fide Arab escapee, Miranda's book sales dropped off. She felt an urgency to diversify before all was lost. Colourful descriptions of harems and the sexual peccadilloes of Arab women made good reading, but Nijmi K. had ethnicity on her side. Miranda could hardly pass for exotic with her straggly auburn hair and lack of ethnic credentials. She knew all too clearly Nijmi's authority was guaranteed whereas she had to earn hers. And on top of that, Nijmi had a fatwa on her head and Miranda couldn't compete with that. There wasn't enough room for two experts on the same literary circuit. Someone had to go.

Race relations were at an all time low and Miranda had been noticing more and more that Muslims were out of control in the multi-racial metropolis. She returned to her old newspaper and was appointed resident Islamophobe. Every newspaper had one and Miranda was perfectly suited to the position. She would now concentrate on Middle Eastern men and their primitive form of misogyny. She would go where no columnist had gone before. Miranda was not one to shy away from talking about race. She was sick to death of how minorities had hijacked the debate. No more would they impose their views on the white majority.

Miranda covered everything from interracial sex to cultural barbarism. She interviewed blonde teachers and girls at beaches. Of course a lot of cosmopolitan liberals shuddered at Miranda's approach that reduced everything to race, culture and religion. Her editor didn't concern himself with the edicts of the politically correct. Miranda was keen to generate more letters than any other columnist. Her aim was to polarise readers. She liked to wear a flak jacket as she sat at her desk. It made her feel like she was among the barbarians.

If people assume an ethnic identity, does it in any sense become a real guide to action? (Fenton 2003: 7)

344

Miranda believed it did. She was covering an explosive interracial gang rape case and felt she needed to reaffirm that culture was everything. As a white Western female, she felt she could especially empathise with the plight of woman raped by predatory brown men. She had travelled the hotspots of the Middle East and felt she understood the minds of the perpetrators, even if they were born and bred locally. It wasn't as if they had assimilated. They were card carrying misogynists like their fathers and uncles. Besides, most of them probably had dual citizenship. Miranda attended court proceedings everyday with an undercover interpreter. She wrote a special report on the mothers of the rapists, blaming them for the sins of their sons. She happened upon some obscure French research and adapted it to accommodate her ideology. The French authorities had big problems with their Muslims too. While France was still stuck in integration mode, Miranda figured the local episode as the abject failure of multiculturalism. HR appreciated Miranda's position. He always read her faithfully. Whilst he had not been on the suburban beat for a number of years, he had predicted that one day the inevitable would happen. Gangs of swarthy Middle Easterners preying on young white women. HR felt almost nostalgic for his old work. He missed the thrill of arresting monsters like these. But HR had much bigger terrorists to fry.

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345 The vast majority of villains are notorious sheikhs, maidens, Egyptians and Palestinians. The rest are devious dark complexioned baddies from other Arab countries, such as Algerians, Iraqis, Jordanians, Lebanese, Libyans, Moroccans, Syrians, Tunisians and Yemeni. (Shaheen 2001: 13)

Osama didn't get it, though it hit him in the face every day. It was like there was a jihad against his name. There was no mistaking the subtlety. He could not say his name without the abuse that invariably followed. He had considered a change to Sam as hardly necessary, seeing that's what so many called him already. Eventually, Osama got called Ossie, or more precisely, Aussie. Suddenly, the auto mechanic, formerly known as Osama was now Aussie. It was only a matter of time before he started to adopt the nuanced customs of the dominant culture. But this story is really about Ali.

Ali was an especially generous man. He had lost everything but blamed no one. He sat outside his favourite café and recounted a thousand and one years of history. He talked about the day the British tried to suppress his people and failed miserably. Then about how Saddam tried to repress his people and failed. And about how the Americans and British were again trying to contain his people and they would fail too.

Ali had left the southern marshes soon after they were drained. He had made his way with his brother to country after country looking for a safe haven. Finally they found themselves in South-East Asia. Together they made the difficult trip to northern Australian. On arrival, they were immediately incarcerated. They didn't see the light of day for years. Behind barbed wire, faces changed expression but never colour. A woman in a scarf poured water on her feet and sighed as if she had something to say. The road she had travelled was not unlike Ali and his brother. Her sister had drowned with her children in a sea of faceless others.

346 you can smell the death of a woman on her sister's breath as the story of her people's sad laughter is told (Hammad 1996: 53)

When Ali and his brother were eventually freed into the desolation of temporary protection, there was little to do but find work. For a pittance, they slaved in a cold cuts room. The boss called Ali the Ayotallah. He could hardly have complained; the times were against him. Ali and his brother made friends with Jamal. He had never been imprisoned but escaped near death like his new friends. He left the freezer room and now drove taxis.

Jamal was recovering from yet another 'incident'. He drove his taxi every day trying to stay within the vicinity of the area he lived. It felt safer. There were people from all faiths, places and beginnings. But sometimes, for a good fare, Jamal had to drive to the southern suburbs. He always felt nervous in the shire that appeared culturally indifferent. One time, after the bombs struck Bali, Jamal found himself outside his familiar territory. He was in a suburb he had always avoided. As he turned his taxi around to head home, he got a little lost just as dusk edged out the sun. He felt stressed. But on top of that, he noticed he was being followed by a car full of white men. At a red light, one got out and came up to Jamal's window. He abused him for no reason. Then he began punching Jamal in the face. When Jamal pulled out his mobile phone and tried to call for help, his assailant snatched the phone from his hand and smashed it to the ground. He called Jamal a terrorist and a sand nigger. Jamal was used to the first insult, but had never heard the second epithet. Another Americanism had infiltrated the local dialect.

Jamal's assailant kept screaming at him to 'go back to whatever fucking Arab country you came from'. A police officer who appeared on the scene after Jamal's assailant drove off said the man was only exercising his freedom of speech. After all, this was a democracy and everyone had

347 the right to offend. Jamal felt upset. The police insisted there was nothing more they could do. Jamal drove home with his windows up.

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348 After much whistle-blowing, DH decided to leave the police force. There were purges afoot and DH was tipped off that he would be offered redundancy. He took his package and considered joining the army to revitalise his masculinity, but decided instead to run for the Senate. He thought a political career was his true calling. After all he had impeccable right wing credentials. He was anti-feminist, homophobic and fundamentally Christian. He would use the parliament to outlaw same sex everything. Then he would close down the beats and ban all queers from going near children.

He sees himself as at once self-demonstrative and self-denigrating, an apt guise for a complicated man who could write that he 'liked the things underneath me and took my pleasures downward. There seemed a certainty in degradation, a final safety'. (Garber 1993: 30)

Prudence Payne felt the same. She and DH kept in touch. After his visit to inquire how Sahara was faring, Prudence felt inspired by DH's zealotry. She thought it was time to be active in the fight again. She re- entered the narrative. After Sahara was first imprisoned, she thought that was the end. But her new friends in her new suburb convinced her she had much to offer. They had heard how she got the 'brothel' closed down. And now there were rumours aplenty about a development application at local council for an Islamic prayer room in the vicinity of the ladies rest centre. Nightmare on Bland Street was about to begin. No one wanted to wake up and find an Arab at the end of their bed, least of all Prudence.

Abbas was preparing to renovate the dilapidated centre which had not had tenants since bush dancing days. He had consulted his faith community and decided that there were now numbers enough to fill a small place of worship instead of having to drive far and wide to the nearest mosque. Council had considered pulling down the centre that Abbas had located, but a development proposal would invariably save it. The mayor and another councillor baulked at the idea that Muslims

349 would be allowed to pray in his municipality. Word got around and soon enough all sorts of wild stories were being printed in the local newspaper.

Abbas had expected some resistance but in no way was prepared for the vitriolic campaign. He was aghast at the seemingly widespread antagonism to a simple prayer room. Prudence hastily joined the local Progress Association in preparation for what needed to be done. She instantly became best friends with Betty Baker. Together they devised a strategy to get the kybosh put on the Islamic invasion planned for their neighbourhood. Betty had previously been active in preventing the local Muslim women getting a women's only hour at the local pool. By the time it got to council, Betty had lobbied every last councillor. Betty, like many of her tribe, could barely tolerate the sight of walking sheets in the street, let alone swimming in her public pool. Betty's family had lived in Moree in days past, and her mother had run a 'keep them out' campaign some decades before, targeting Aboriginal swimmers. Betty Baker knew how to keep the white strain pure.

Who, in our day and age, would not prefer to side with dialogue, cultural pluralism, and tolerance for other voices? (Todorov 1994: 204)

The local Muslim women's association led by Zeina tried to set up afternoon tea with Betty and Prudence, but they weren't interested in talking. Nothing would have pleased Prudence more than a total ban on wearing the chador. She had once spied a woman in Kuala Lumpur airport completely covered. She was shocked by what she saw. She had faithfully read both Miranda and Nijmi's books and it definitely looked like death out for a walk.

Betty Baker was a life member of the Progress Association. Like HR and Prudence, she was a foot soldier for the preservation of the white nation. She felt she was drowning in a city of Arabs. As Western women, Prudence and Betty felt threatened. They were fearful for their children.

350 Prudence had never felt the need to disclose the history of her daughter Sahara to Betty, but privately blamed the lure of cosmopolitanism for Sahara's demise. Betty did not want her children to be exposed to rampant difference. She feared her girls would be seduced by the unbearable smell of otherness. Betty was infinitely more hardline because she had two young daughters. Imagine that one of them converted. She could not entertain the thought of losing a child to Islam. If her daughter was ever to bring someone to home to dinner who did not conform to the Judeao-Christian tradition, she would cease to be a daughter. Betty had drummed this into her girls every evening as they sat down to eat. Prudence could only concur with Betty.

Meanwhile Abbas was appearing before committees and being interviewed all over the city. He became a statesman overnight. Then some upstanding figure hurled a pig's head through his centre's window. It hardly shocked him. It had happened before. None of the worshippers wanted to continue the application after the incident but Abbas was determined not to be cowed by this sort of pig-headed bigotry. By the time the application got to council, there had been a campaign of letters and emails numbering in their thousands. It was hard to believe that so many people could write the same letter, but each and every comment had to be put on the public record. Abbas lost the vote. He would have to take it to a higher body.

Prudence's struggle to cleanse her Christian suburb was cut short. Just as she and Betty had won this first round against the infidels, her husband was arrested in Cambodia for procuring sex from young girls. At first, Prudence wouldn't accept it. Her husband was an upstanding Christian. He went to church. He was not capable of bestiality or paedophilia. But a militant from a women's NGO took his photo as he was leading a child into his hut. Prudence was crushed. Once again she was forced into hiding because of the criminal activities of her family.

Prudence's new friends deserted her in droves. Once again she was alone. She had no choice but to keep moving. Soon she would be in the desert with Sahara. She felt victimised by association. She couldn't help

351 it if her daughter was a convicted smuggler and her husband a serial molester of children. For a brief moment, Prudence felt pain. But then, she decided to change her name.

Try to look at things in a linear sort of way. It helps. White men 'going abroad' to fuck brown children is not such an amazing story, mired as it is in mythology and a historical precedent longer than a gibbon's arm. (Banerjea 1999: 20)

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352 The imperative to veracity would be absolutely unconditional. One should always speak the truth, whatever the consequences. (Derrida 2000: 67)

Miranda's star was again on the rise just as Nijmi's was eclipsed by a run of bad luck. As the ink was drying on Nijmi's second book, The Trouble with Arabs, she was being investigated for literary fraud. She was convinced that this was nothing more than a witch-hunt initiated by Miranda to get her away from the podium. Miranda also had a new book about to be published and needed to clear the shelves. Why Muslims Rape Women was her latest achievement and bound to sell well. Nijmi knew Miranda wanted to monopolise the market and Miranda knew Nijmi was far more popular. Nijmi had committed the grave sin of moving into Miranda's territory. In her new book, Nijmi had written exclusively about honour killing, a subject seemingly much more fascinating than child marriage. Nijmi knew there was a world of sensational stories of forbidden love and being burned alive waiting to be sold. She felt she should capitalise on the subject of honour killing considering it nearly happened to her. She could easily have been buried up to her neck and stoned to death for loving the wrong man. She felt her new book would fling open doors where Miranda's only lifted the veil. Nijmi saw her book as a wake-up call, an act of moral courage. She self-described as an Arab refusenik; the media loved her ability to provide a good by-line. Nijmi was praised for her audacity, nerve, boldness and conviction. She was named Feminist for the 21st Century.

Narrative might be thought to be a character and its defects lie in [her] 'potential to observe [her] own practice of making falsehoods'. (Harryman 1995: 2)

But Nijmi's book was barely on the shelf for a week when her publisher rang her with the bad news. There were claims circulating that her first testimony was a fabrication. Nijmi was affronted. Where's the proof? she demanded. Before the week was out, Miranda, having just returned

353 from Yemen, had unceremoniously exposed Nijmi as a fraud on the front page of her newspaper. Nijmi had allegedly grown up in Brisbane and was the daughter of kindly Lebanese migrants who owned a corner store. She hadn't been sold into slavery but rather married a sheikh of her own volition.

Nijmi's parents were not overly ambitious, just happy for their children's existence. But Nijmi was anxious for something a little more exciting. Her brother was expected to take over the family business and she was left to ponder whether she would marry village or local. Then one night she was out on the town and she met the man of her dreams. Within a week she was besotted but he had to return to his emirate to wind up some outstanding business. He gave her a necklace until further notice. He was a sheikh and she was ecstatic with the possibilities. They corresponded and he promised he would marry her.

Despite her parent's disapproval, Nijmi chose to move to the desert town where her dashing sheikh had his compound. Nijmi had been seduced by the Hollywood version and started to prepare for a life mired in fantasy. She was not to know that her sheikh was the son of a minor sheikh in a small town on the outskirts of Sana.

If I could only have represented her as young and lovely, escaped from the harem of some cruel and elderly Moor, and with large tearful eye imploring the sympathy of a Christian, what a valuable incident it would have been. (Ormsby 1996: 59)

Miranda was nothing if not thorough. She had buried Sahara and now she was about to do the same to Nijmi. She interviewed the Yemeni Literary Society who reviewed I Married an Arab when it first came out. They found mistake after mistake. They were somewhat surprised it made it past the first draft, let alone into non-fiction. How they wondered, did Nijmi sequester such support, engender such blind belief? How gullible was her public? How shrewd her publisher.

354 The situation is not helped by the fact that these generalised native informants sometimes appear in the Sunday supplements of national journals, mouthing for us the answers that we want to hear as confirmation of our view of the world. (Spivak 1999: 342)

Nijmi hired a publicist, but it only got more incriminating. She reluctantly went into hiding. Her publisher was forced to remove Nijmi's books from the shelves. The readership was disappointed, but not about to give up. After all, it could have been true. Every house has its sewers. For her part, Miranda could barely contain her joy. Her new book would soon be where Nijmi's had been.

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355 Narrative is about closure; the boundaries of events form the ideological basis for the interpretation of their significance. (Stewart 1998: 22)

Waleed was as cynical as ever. He decided to pursue his studies in the academy. He wrote a thundering thesis on the drama of Osama. He asked difficult questions and came up with clever answers. He got a scholarship to go further. He wrote incisive letters to the editor, though was never published. They thought him too ideological, too political. He was not one to accept compliments from the media. He believed the éminences grises of right wing opinion were flag bearers for outspoken ignorance. That they made lots of money from their ivory towers only convinced Waleed that opinion-making was a lucrative career move. The shock jocks could enjoy the luxury of unanswerability because their lifeworlds reflected the surplus of prejudice. Waleed had come to expect that sooner or later he would be taken away for questioning.

Waleed's sisters were less serious. They thought Miranda and Big Al were parodies. They were clearly fictional. Nobody could be that unbelievable. But their brother Yousef was as different as siblings could often be. He had developed an extreme fear of white people. He had watched far too much television as a child. From cowboy movies to the French Foreign Legion, white people were always killing a brown-eyed somebody. They didn't just kill people, they wiped out entire tribes, groups and villages. Native Americans, Africans, Aboriginals, Chinese, Latinos, Chicanos, Algerians, Vietnamese, Arabs, Somalis, Yemenis, Indians, Islanders. The white people killed each other too. They especially went for European Jews. They dropped atomic bombs, napalm, Agent Orange, depleted uranium, mustard gas, daisy cutters, cluster bombs. They had guns and knives, robots, missiles, scuds, spaceships and F-16 helicopters.

After the first act of violence in the opening scene, Yousef would freeze in front of the screen. Then he would start to shake. He carried it over

356 into the street. Anytime a white person came near him, he would scream hysterically and find it hard to breathe. Yousef was especially terrified of Schwarzenegger. After watching The Terminator, he took a fit. Then Arnie became Governor and he was on the news. Who could blame Yousef for being confused? The Terminator now had real power. No one could work out precisely what afflicted him. Umm Yousef took him out less and less. Then she took him to a Chinese doctor. Anglophobia was a distressing prognosis. How would Yousef live in a country dominated by white people with such a condition? The doctor prescribed a traditional herbal mix in the hope that one day things would improve.

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357 Literature cannot mime the world; it must mime the social. It cannot escape history, the burden of signification borne by language before literature takes it up. (Stewart 1998: 26)

For Sadie, the carnivale was over. No more b'lawah or za'atar gelato. She had had enough in the gulf between wars. She was careworn. As the Arabs stood impotent in their readiness to repeat history, she was sick of the Nijmis and the Mirandas, the Dalias and Saharas, the Prudences and the HRs of the world. These characters had saturated the narrative. They had taken over. They wrote their columns and invaded countries, occupied lands and dropped their bombs. One minute HR was carping on about the threat from within, the next day Miranda was getting under some brown skin. Sadie wanted to throw the television out the window. She wanted to sue for defamation. She wanted to rip the pages from her daily newspaper. But she had her hands full.

Every day it was the same old story. Arab terrorist, Muslim fanatic, Arab lunatic, Muslim problem; the demon from Damascus, the tyrant from Trablous, the suicide bomber from Nablus, the nutcase of Nabatiyyeh, the rioter in Ramallah. What about the hero of al-Khalil, the saviour of Saida, the martyr of the Marwaheen, and justice for Jenin? Where did all the other possibilities figure in between?

Even the so-called reputable media were sucked into the black hole of misrepresentation. With this burden weighing heavily on the shoulders of bint el nass, there was little chance that the seeds of Hayat would ever bear fruit again, let alone triumph over this inheritance. It was just impossible to fight the hegemony of Foxtel. Arabs were stuck in a prism of negativity. Even Daffy Duck had it in for them and there was little to be achieved in getting irritated every waking nanosecond of broadcast news and all the God-awful shows in between. Sadie felt momentary relief that Hayat was not here to witness the latest spectacle.

358 Control of Baghdad changed hands eight times in thirty months: on average, the city had known a new master every hundred days. This while the Western invaders were consolidating their grip on the conquered territories. (Maalouf 1984: 55)

To make matters worse, Salaam had become violent. Sadie's sister was being treated for schizophrenia, but had stopped taking her medication. She was having psychotic episodes ever more frequently. She attacked an army reserve with her purple umbrella. She ran down an off-duty policeman with her shopping trolley. She pulled the hair of a blonde woman for no reason. Then when the authorities were called, she went postal. They locked her up unable to ascertain her immigration status. First she said she was a citizen. The younger constable wanted to believe her. The older desk sergeant said that was not possible. So then she changed tack and said she was Queen Zenoubia. The police first thought she might be Aboriginal. But then they decided she must be an illegal. Sadie reported her sister missing to the local police but it seemed no one could locate her. She gave them photos, but the police were unable to differentiate looks from appearances. Salaam got lost in the system.

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359 It is in fact typical of every story to demand that the tale stop only at the end, when the story itself is finished and silence can speak. (Cavarero 1997: 123)

Sadie could see it was not going to get any better. She had tried to infuse some sense into the story, but knew it was out of her hands. She still had a shelf of unresolved grief left over from the 1991 Gulf War and the latest Shock and Awe was wreaking chaos on countless more. People were lining up with complaint after complaint. Brown was the new black. There was nowhere else to go. The relevant state bodies had been emasculated and no one took anti-Arab racism seriously. when war smoked his way into our collective dream were we awake ? (Hammad 1996: 40)

Sadie and George wondered what would come next. Hemami knew but refused to tell anybody. She was still sour about the incident with the lemons. Hesham was happy to prophesise at will, but he had his own troubles with DH now in parliament. Waleed published his dissertation on bin Laden overseas and was being monitored by his own people. HR was busy rounding up the Bedouins with a view to finding a Muslim supergrass. If this was not possible, then he would settle for warrantless wiretaps. For HR, there was no end to the imagination of a potential terrorist. Salaam was placed in immigration detention until they could find somewhere to deport her to. Yousef was banned from watching free to air television, but that did not make a difference. His condition did not improve. Miranda was negotiating a cable series based on her column and received an advance for her next book on female suicide bombers. Nijmi was hiding somewhere in Brisbane plotting a new nom de plume. Sahara was pardoned quietly in a pique of amnesty but never reconciled with her mother. Abdul went bankrupt through lack of business and became a wayward itinerant. Betty Baker rang the anti-

360 terrorist hotline every time she heard an accent. Hayat was gone, but her spirit lived on. Hemami made sure of that. And Sadie was feeling unusually sanguine. She hoped for a month of quiet before the barbarians offloaded more of their bombs. If only the world could be brave. If only the Arabs would turn off the benzine. Yallah salaam, it could have been a different story.

*********

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