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INTRODUCTION
Violence in the Middle East tends to
manifest in ways other than the Elliot Rodger-esque narrative of a young,
entitled man without overt political impetus shooting up whole streets in
projection of the anguish of a bottomless sense of alienation. It is nonetheless
symptomatic of a parallel underlying cultural oppression, toxically projecting
the values of belonging-alienation’s more passionate brother. It too is not
monocausal. It too is further perpetrated by a fixation on shallow solutions
that detract from focus on our collective mindset of violent conquest. Our very
adherence to belonging encases us in predefined social spaces, their boundaries
structured with a rigidity that is no longer feasible and is often destructive.
Ironically enough, this destruction is often couched in terms of maintaining
and defending land, religious value, honor, and bodies. It unfortunately belies
a sense of duty in staking claim that is entitled in its own way,
systematically upheld by a tolerance for violence.
Lebanon struggles to ratify draft laws
criminalizing domestic violence against women, facing a tide of cultural
sentiment pushing back against attempts to deconstruct the rigidity of familial
roles. There is fear, from patriarchal authorities, that protecting women from
being battered will threaten the closeness of familial bonds and will undermine
the absoluteness of marital claims to sex that transcend will and consent. A
sense of duty is deeply interwoven with this resistance to removing the
structures that enable a sense of entitlement to the bodies of women and
children. To remove the encasings granting unchecked access to the bodies of
women is to trouble conceptions of how men ought to carry out their duties to
their families.
Throughout the Middle East, we have
inviolable laws and social norms that strive to delineate proper bounds but
instead radically limit women’s control over their sexuality, their choice of
spouse, their careers, their mobility, their ability to divorce, to claim full
stake in inheritance, to pass their nationalities on to their children. All of
these are measures of human autonomy so neatly circumscribed in order to make
meaning of duties and roles as we culturally understand them. Nations with the
most conservative dress norms have some of the world’s highest indices of
sexual harassment, consistent with a cultural language that hashes safety from
violation in terms of preventative conduct, requiring women to keep inside the
walls and limit their bodies and mobility rather than addressing the violator’s
sense of entitlement. Our penal codes allow reduced sentences for crimes of
“honor” that erupt when people become incensed at women who flout the
boundaries boxing them in. And honor “crimes” are projections of a particularly
personal sort of anguish that comes from associating the conduct and body of a
woman with the honor of the men in her family but not vice versa-as seen by our
inability to acknowledge a woman as worthy of passing on national belonging to
her children.
This does nothing but further entrench our
status as nations that privilege the urge to own, claim and malign the bodies
of our women and children. We prioritize a reification of values of protection,
belonging and maintenance, building up walls of normativity that we cannot bear
to have transgressed. This hierarchy of importance is symptomatic of a sense of
entitlement so outrageous it looks upon broken lives and dead bodies with
tolerance and understanding if they remain within the structural limitations of
our values.
We have laws in our penal codes pardoning
rapists who seek to marry their victims, actively rewarding the renewed victimization
of raped women-this time for a lifetime-oblivious to the double-crime this
poses. This is only makes
This is
symptomatic of how impermeable our sense of belonging is. We encase our social
spaces in preset molds that resist collusion with one another even as our
circumstances evolve to require it. Another symptom of this is our tendency to
present sectarian identity as integral to belonging, with our national IDs
bespeaking our denominations from birth until death, strengthening and
reinforcing the architecture surrounding our religious spaces. Doubtless too
the struggles of poverty, imperialism, and the threat of invasion sanctify our
need for non-collusive spaces, our paternalistic values of protection and
maintenance that spiral wildly into an ultimate privileging of control that is
tolerant of destruction and violation. Decades of Palestinian refugee crises in
Lebanon have done little to create opportunity or sustainability of livelihood
for people now born-and-raised in a country where they are perpetual outsiders
so long as they have stake and belonging within the dilapidated walls of
refugee camps. Now overflowing with Lebanese-born Palestinians, these camps
build themselves upon themselves ever skywards. Clearly, horizontal expansion
transgresses the careful limits of sanctioned space, resists the thought of a
Lebanese-born Palestinian putting roots down on the Lebanon side.
Identities with
footholds in more than one side of a given fence, that intermingle, also
transgress proper boundaries, as bespoken by the patrilineal resistance to
allowing women to pass on their nationalities to their children for fear of the
mixing, the creation of mongrels that challenge the clashing commitments of
separate social spaces. If a mother and father are of the same nationality, as
heteropatriarchal historicity would dictate they properly should be, they are
viewed as sequentially conjoined, as engine and caboose moving along a
designated track, unified such that identity rights default to the father while
the rights of the mother are redundant and thus unneeded. In accurate
reflection of our traditions, our penal codes refuse to acknowledge such a
need, despite our demographic landscape evolving to require more progressive
conceptions of the needs of identity and bodily space.
Our girls are
taught that they inherently have no such needs, that any rights not ensured by
their spaces of belonging are outside their circumscribed roles and thus
non-rights-hence the common cultural expression that religious codes dictating
correct conduct grant women all their rights. Our boys are taught a sexist
language of protection and duty that allows them to trivialize the freedom and
autonomy of women who transgress socially drawn bounds. And this cultural
language about all things body, space, family, and honor is troubled,
self-obsessed with a covenant of belonging. We must recognize it as
self-destructive, too, in its self-obsession. We must see that it propagates
projection after projection of violation through the vehicle of the very values
we uphold as virtues.
This recognition
is crucial to a process of healing and growth beyond the bounds that stifle us.
It is time to take the walls down.
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