Doctoral Thesis Eman Ahmed Khamas Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona Doctorat en Filologia Anglesa Barcelona 2013 Director Dra. Felicity Hand 1 Between patriarch and imperialism, subject-constitution and object- formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into a pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‗third-world woman‘ caught between tradition and modernization…Imperialism‘s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind. Spivak, ‗Can the Subaltern Speak?‘ 2 Abbreviations CDA: Critical Discourse Analysis CTS: Critical Terrorism Studies ME: The Middle East/ Middle Eastern WOT: The War on Terrorism WTC: World Trade Center 3 Table of Contents Acknowledgements 5 I- Introduction 7 II- Theoretical Framework 17 PART ONE III- The Discourse of War on Terrorism: Critical Overview Conceptual Confusion 35 Definitions 44 War on Terrorism 50 The Metaphor of Terrorism as War 58 Writing the Terrorist Identity 63 IV- In Her Name: Targeting Woman in the Middle East Evolution of a Discourse 67 Conceptual and Contextual Frame 86 Orientalism / Neo-Orientalism 99 ME Women in the Neo-Orientalist discourse of WOT 112 Anti-WOT Feminism 135 V- The Mitigating Effect of Soft Power / Case Study: Iraqi Women 141 4 PART TWO VI- The Evolution of an Image Representations of Middle Eastern Women 183 in Anglo-American Narratives: Critical Overview VII- The Victim’s ‘Authentic’ Voice 262 Azar Nefisi Reading Lolita in Tehran & Things I’ve Been Silent About Khali Hosseini The Kite Runner & A Thousand Splendid Suns 309 VIII- Anglo-American Literary Representations of ME Women 313 Ian McEwan Saturday 313 Richard Zimler The Search for Sana 335 John Updike Terrorist 352 IX – Conclusions 368 Bibliography 380 5 Acknowledgements I would like first to thank Qusai Aneed Sultan for making this dissertation possible at all. When I started the research, he was a young Iraqi high-school student. Now he has a BS degree in optics. He had risked his safety several times to help me obtain my certificates from Baghdad University, the Ministries of Higher Education and Foreign Affairs, and the embassy. I had to leave everything behind and run away for the safety of my family, in the fourth year after the occupation of Iraq in 2003, and didn‘t have time or opportunity to bring my certificates. Many times I decided to forget all about this research if it meant risking the life of a wonderful Iraqi boy, but he never lost hope. Obtaining certificates from Iraqi Universities is almost a miracle, not only for security reasons. Many young and old students are denied their certificates because of loss, blackmail, mismanagement or corruption. But he could. I am immensely grateful to my supervisor Dr. Felicity Hand, the director of this research, for her understanding, generosity, solidarity, and above all her insightful directions, and invaluable observations without which the dissertation wouldn‘t be what it is now. My thanks are to Drs Sara Martin, and Isabel Alonso, for their significant observations during the annual discussions of the research progress. My thanks are to my friend Haifa Zangana, an Iraqi novelist, journalist, and anti-colonial feminist, for her support and encouragement. My Iraqi, European and American friends in the 6 international anti-occupation movement, many of whose writings are included here, thanks for everything you have done, and are doing to dismantle lies and make the truth appear. I would like to thank all my Catalan and Spanish friends. They have given me a second home, especially Professor Jaume Botey for taking my family and me in his house and helping us stand on our feet in exile, and my friends Josep M. Pijuan Utges, Beatriz Morales Bastos, Pedro Rojo, and Paloma Valverde for their relentless work against injustice and occupation. Last but not least, I am grateful to my friend Lluïsa López Segarra, and her daughter Anna, for their endless support. My daughters Hanan and Quitaf, this research is for you and about you, Iraqi young women who are going to build our country from ruins again, and make our voices heard. 7 Introduction In recent years, late twentieth early twenty-first centuries, a new ‗feminist‘ discourse accompanied the War on Terror1 in official Western discourse, in the media, feminist narratives, popular culture, and in literature (novels, fiction and nonfiction bestsellers, literary journalism, and autobiographies). The West, mainly the US, claimed feminist motivations for their wars in the Middle East: to ensure women‘s rights in countries where these rights were violated and abrogated, where women are rendered oppressed helpless victims; in other words these wars have had a civilizing, modernizing rescue mission in the name of human rights, among other justifications of democracy, such as curbing weapons of mass destruction, fighting terrorism, legitimate oil needs, world peace and stability and so forth. This new ‗feminist‘ discourse, in fact was adapted and marketed to conceal the real motives of military interventions, invasions, and occupations within the context of reconstructing the political, economic and cultural systems in the area, thus it is a discourse that involved too many contradictions. To begin with it reenacts the same old colonialist racist discourse of the white man‘s responsibility of civilizing and liberating the Other, the stereotyped primitive man of color, from the chains of his own backwardness. Exactly as the white man‘s slogans through the last five centuries had humane civilizing missions in their declared narratives, now the new ‗feminist‘ discourse has the same mission of saving the Other, the Middle Eastern, Muslim, Arab woman from the misery she thrives in, imposed on her by patriarchal cultures, tyrant regimes, and above all Mediaeval religious (Islamic) traditions. 1 Henceforth WOT 8 A new stereotype is constructed and represented: a helpless victim deprived of her individual human rights, desperately needing help; and that it is the responsibility of the advanced self-congratulating men and women who had preceded her in gaining their rights to give her a hand in fighting patriarchal masculine oppression and its despotic institutions. This stereotype, which is basically built on images drawn by the old Orientalist discourse, remained faulty because it was based on impressions outside the cultural structure of a given society, and on political backgrounds serving the US imperialist interests of colonizing the Middle East anew. The new stereotype is decontextualized, western-centered and homogenous, hence often incapable of understanding the real nature of man-woman-institution relationships, which are necessarily controlled by systems of values deeply rooted in history, geography, and culture. Women are not a homogeneous class all over the world (Mohanty, 1991), joined by -and fighting against- the oppression of another homogeneous class, men. This binary universal division is basically naïve and based on stereotyping. What an educated, Christian, enlightened middle-class woman from a neighborhood, say, north of Baghdad, considers injustice and violation of her rights, might well be considered protection of her rights by another Baghdadi woman a kilometer away, with different education, religion, or class, to say nothing about millions of cultural types all around the world. What is best for one woman in a specific society and a specific historical period is not necessarily good enough for another. In addition to that, Western colonial societies, the saviors in this case, built their advanced economic and technological cultures, partly, on exploiting other nations, the Middle East included, in which case they became the victims to be saved. This point in particular is a repetition of the eternal question: why do the developing countries not learn from the experiences 9 of the developed and copy them? The answer is simply because the victim cannot- and indeed should not- imitate her/his persecutors. Middle Eastern2 women, lacking in educational, health, and economic opportunities, still need to maintain the struggle to get out of the subaltern Other position within their own cultures. Struggling out of this situation, however, assumes clear awareness of the dimensions of the problem, deep feeling of its injustice, and willingness to fight. Moreover, in the Middle East, this struggle is directly connected to the overall political and economic problems that it suffers from. On the other hand, cultures are never static, and human beings tend to strategize their conducts accordingly, in a kind of cultural negotiation or compromise. For example, progressive women who volunteer to work as teachers in remote conservative communities wear Islamic dress, but does that make them victims or fighters? Wars, foreign occupations and invasions complicate the situation for women, indeed for everybody, and make it even more difficult and, as in the case of Iraq and Afghanistan, actually deprive them from -and destroy- whatever rights they managed to achieve through their own struggle, apart from the fact that wars violate very essential and cultural human rights. The consequences are contrary to the declared intentions. These women blame the USA for the devastation to the environment and the deterioration in their quality of life…they have endured displacement, a cramped existence in refugee camps in foreign lands, the rape and abuse of their sisters, mothers and daughters, the slaughter of their loved ones on a daily basis at the hands of the US occupiers, and have had to watch helplessly as even their children suffer nervous breakdowns (Carty, 2008: 267) Well-intentioned foreign (feminist) solidarity should be no more, and cannot be more, than solidarity. The subaltern Other cannot be fought for, and the moral responsibility of the 2 Henceforth ME 10 supporter is not to speak for the female Other, but to listen and to let her speak, not speak for her.