Kirthi Jayakumar
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Around the World in 50 Voices Kirthi Jayakumar AROUND THE WORLD IN 50 VOICES Kirthi Jayakumar Published in 2015 by The Red Elephant Foundation www.redelephantfoundation.org Facebook: www.facebook.com/TheRedElephantFoundation Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheRedElephnt © Copyright Kirthi Jayakumar Kirthi Jayakumar asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of the all the interviews and stories in this book. All stories are a product of interviews undertaken with the women mentioned. All stories are based on interviews with the women themselves. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted (including but not limited to photocopying, scanning, cyclostating) or stored (including but not limited to computers, external memory devices, e-readers, websites etc) in any kind of retrieval system without the prior written permission of the publisher. Dedication To Patti: You aren’t here to see it today, but you sat with me when I did each interview. I miss you. To Amma: You are the greatest woman I know. I love you. To You: Because I am who I am because you are who you are HOLDING OUT HOPE Afra Jalabi Afra Jalabi is one of the most powerful voices against institutionalised oppression in the Syrian context. When the Arab Spring began in 2010, Tunisia and Egypt were the first to encounter vox populi with such powerful overtones that a regime change became inevitable. Libya and Syria followed suit. But the Syrian narrative would wind longer than its counterparts as the civilians would stand strong in their struggle against an oppressive government. Born in Damascus, Afra left Syria when she was five. She spent her growing years in Germany, Saudi Arabia and Canada, visiting Syria very often, and even staying there for a few years during childhood so that she along with her siblings got some exposure to Arabic and Arab the way of life. Living at the moment, in Canada, in Quebec, a French-speaking province, Afra has made it a point to stay rooted to her culture and language, teaching her children who were born and raised in Canada to speak Arabic as well. Deeply rooted in her love, loyalty and affection for Syria, Afra sees herself as a citizen of the planet, sympathizing immensely with those who are oppressed. She believes humans act against the backdrop of specific contexts, which enables them to be part of the larger universal struggle for justice and dignity. Afra’s uncle, Jawdat Said, a well-known intellectual, who influenced her thinking, has been writing about non-violence, social justice and Islamic reform for over half a century. Inspired by his universal, humanistic and non-violent principles of Islam, and emphasis on the study and understanding of history, Afra learned how important it was to know the past, and this realization had a great impact on her. With avid readers in her family, Afra grew up surrounded by books, authors and study groups, peppered with constant debates and discussions. There was a great deal of repression in Syria, even before she left, and from faint memories of her early childhood days in Syria; Afra recounts when her father, Khales Jalabi, and uncle Jawdat were imprisoned. The women in Afra’s family were all out-of-the-box thinkers—strong, independent and motivated. Her mother, Laila Said, who passed away in 2005, impacted the lives of all those who knew her. A woman of depth and a formidable mind, Afra narrates, her presence was immensely stimulating Laila was a great mother who lovingly taught her children the love of nature and instilled in them environmental conscientiousness as early as in the 1970s just as her father’s reading habits instilled in them an insatiable appetite for reading. Spending most of her life outside Syria did not take the country away from Afra’s thoughts. She lived in the country in 1982, when the Massacre of Hamah occurred, after which the world re-accepted the Assad regime. The daunting thought of all the people in Syria living under abnormal conditions always worried her—a state of melancholy that was only deepened by growing up between the Middle East, Europe and North America. The recurrence of another repression of Syrians still remained a distant dread, when in the Middle East, the conspicuous presence of the Mukhabarat or the secret police literally stealing creativity from people’s lives and squashing humanity by restraining all natural social networks and sparks for innovation and movement. Afra’s family on her mother’s side came from a village in the Golan Heights, in the neutralized zone under UN protection. Her grandmother’s village, Ein Ziwan, located inside occupied Golan is an Israeli settlement today. Conscious of the notion that those oppressed in the past are becoming oppressors in the present, in light of the numbness of Israeli’s policies towards Palestinian suffering despite everything they had endured and witnessed in the holocaust, she is fully aware of the danger of darkness to take over the yearning for wholeness and freedom. ‘That very darkness lurks within – in the hope of reincarnating our enemies from the debris of our own shattered identities.’ The combination of these multiple contexts influenced Afra abundantly, sensitizing her to strive for justice, equality and the preciousness of our journey as human beings. After the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, who had reigned over Syria for 30 years, Bashar al Assad was initially positively received by Syrians, who momentarily wished to forget the years of the ‘father’. But complete disappointment soon set in, as more and more people were beginning to believe that they were losing Syria. In her heart, Afra was getting divorced from the country though she didn’t want to lose hope. With Assad’s tight-fisted security measures in place, Afra’s cousin got arrested for three years over some lone emails, and many of her friends were arrested for civic actions that included cleaning up the neighbourhood and anti-smoking campaigns in Daraya, a suburb of Damscus, besieged since 2011. Afra was disillusioned about her homeland. In 2008, members of the Damascus Declaration approached Afra in Canada to make her a signatory. She accepted, especially after noting that the president of the Declaration, Fida al Hourani, had been imprisoned along many women activists, doctors and writers. The Damascus Declaration was an umbrella group and an attempt to bring different opposition figures in the political spectrum to create a gradual movement towards democratic reform and change in Syria. But the regime did not leave a small margin even for something as soft as this. Working with the intention of being aligned with the oppressed, Afra found that her challenge lay in being emotionally wrapped on the side of the oppressed. That took its inevitable toll. Afra had to learn that the best use of her energy and empathy was to sublimate the sense of indignation into action and positive work and also to challenge herself to think in proactive ways instead of reacting to events. The journey of justice and compassion on the planet still has some mileage ahead of it and none of us should underestimate whatever we do in being part of the journey that is leading towards justice and equitable and dignified distribution of resources. To Afra, it is an honour to contribute to the momentum of change even if by taking small steps and new creative directions in thought and behaviour. When the Syrian Revolution started, Afra realized that the search for signs of sanity, or a glimmer of light in the dark was on. It turned out that many people of Syria knew about each other and their writings and activism was actually resonating with the cumulative resentment against the present political scenario. However, as Afra explains, they couldn’t create enough of a momentum for reform-based thinking, nor a solid ground for a non-violent paradigm of change and action. There was hardly any change and the people naively thought that they were beyond the bloody years of Hafez al-Assad and were not prepared for a movement. However, Afra asserts that the events in Syria need not be interpreted as a reflection of a movement but rather more of a natural phenomenon like a tsunami—a collapse of plates under a society. There had been so much oppression, corruption and injustice that the plates of Syrian collective consciousness had indeed erupted, which is why perhaps it has lost leadership and has become unstoppable. Afra grew up in a family where being a woman was valued. Her mother’s inherent feminism and her understanding of an egalitarian world for men, women, rich, poor, educated and uneducated people inspired mutual respect and a sense of parity amongst all members in the family. They were sensitive to gender issues and understood the value of respect and dignity for all men in Afra’s family took the women around them seriously. That strengthened Afra’s feminist sensibilities as she came to realize that not all girls beyond her family had the same experience as she had it. This firmed Afra’s resolve that all women deserved to be treated as human beings and should not be subjected to any form of discrimination from a young age. To Afra, being a woman implies feeling womanly, thereby fully human. There are no rigid definitions and existentialist notions for Afra on what it means to be male or female. She quotes Susan Sontag, who explained that the most beautiful thing in the most feminine woman was something masculine and that the most beautiful thing in the most virile man was something feminine.