Transnational Feminist Perspectives on Terror in Literature and Culture

Basuli Deb

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317632108
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria feminista

This book offers a transnational feminist response to the gender politics of torture and terror from the viewpoint of populations of color who have come to be associated with acts of terror. Using the War on Terror in Afghanistan and Iraq, this book revisits other such racialized wars in Palestine, Guatemala, India, Algeria, and South Africa. It draws widely on postcolonial literature, photography, films, music, interdisciplinary arts, media/new media, and activism, joining the larger conversation about human rights by addressing the problem of a pervasive public misunderstanding of terrorism conditioned by a foreign and domestic policy perspective. Deb provides an alternative understanding of terrorism as revolutionary dissent against injustice through a postcolonial/transnational lens. The volume brings counter-terror narratives into dialogue with ideologies of gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, class, and religion, addressing the situation of women as both perpetrators and targets of torture, and the possibilities of a dialogue between feminist and queer politics to confront securitized regimes of torture. This book explores the relationship in which social and cultural texts stand with respect to legacies of colonialism and neo-imperialism in a world of transnational feminist solidarities against postcolonial wars on terror.

1 The Us War on Terror

Queerness, Imperial Women, and Their “Sister” Outsiders¹

INTRODUCTION

The US War on Terror has earned the United States a strong currency in transnational and postcolonial critiques of racial oppression. During the war, photographs and literature of incarceration and torture of men of Arab, South Asian, and African origin began circulating in the new media and in global circuits of print consumption. This made it difficult to deny the inevitable links between nineteenth- and twentieth-century European colonial violence and twenty-first-century US neo-imperial governance. The British writer Rudyard Kipling’s exhortation in his 1899 poem “The White Man’s Burden” has indeed been heeded. In the poem, Kipling urges the United States to take over the “burden” of imperial governance from a declining Europe to preserve the white man’s empire. The poem was written in the wake of the Spanish-American War in which the United States won the Spanish colony of the Philippines and re-colonized it, but the poem resonates deeply with the continuity of imperial governance over the Muslim world today.

Nonetheless, the relationships in which the women of the empire stand with respect to the imperial machinery are significantly different in the imperial Europe of yesteryear and today’s US empire. Whereas European women traveled across the world as wives, daughters, and prostitutes of the empire, in the US War on Terror American women are an integral part of the US military. As direct participants in imperial governance they are both re-imagined and re-imaged in literature and photography at violent social locations of gender empowerment. In a post 9/11 milieu, torture became endemic to the American enterprise of containing and eradicating twenty-first-century international terrorism as the US intensely focused on identifying men with Muslim, Arab, African, and South Asian affiliations across the globe as potential terrorists or possible links with terrorists. The militarized femininity of US women soldiers who invaded Afghanistan and Iraq and tortured the “enemies” of the empire in the cells and hallways of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and Bagram became symbolic both of gender equality within the military and a mighty white empire. The public debate in the wake of such torture mainly focused on women’s agency as torturers within a hyper-masculine military patriarchy that controlled them as well as the homophobic feminization of the tortured Muslim male prisoner. But what ideological implications does such a hierarchy of gender power between American femininity and Muslim masculinity have for Muslim femininity? The figure of the Muslim woman has largely been repressed in these literary and visual narratives of detainee torture, as have the alternative films and music that have pierced through the silences around post 9/11 US foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia.

A transnational feminist inquiry into the War on Terror is useful here in exploring the embedded ideologies of racial and cultural supremacy that sustained and still sustain the torture of Muslims in the US prison industrial complexes around the world. This continues despite the pressure of international public opinion to stop such brutalities. Examining the figures of militarized American women, as well as the gaps and silences around the figure of the Muslim woman, is of special significance in unraveling the extent to which epistemological and ideological control upholds imperial mechanisms like torture. The imperial archive of Abu Ghraib torture photography, anti-imperial literature such as Guantanamo lawyer Mahvish Khan’s My Guantanamo Diary, Haifa Zangana’s City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance, and Riverbend’s Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq and Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq will offer major points of analysis in this attempt.

HISTORY BEHIND THE WAR ON TERROR: WOMEN AND MILITARY OCCUPATION

The US War on Terror ensued in the wake of September 11, 2001 as suicide hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center in New York City and American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at Arlington, Virginia. With this, the two most powerful icons of American financial and military might collapsed. This was followed by economic cutbacks of international news bureaus and foreign correspondents which led to American news being depleted of “incisive structural answers” to the “Why do they hate us?” question (Kaufer and Al-Malki 54). Mainstream news raised this question in “the ahistorical bubble” uninformed by “the background of colonialism and twentieth-century British and American foreign policy toward the Middle East.” Supported by a largely uninformed national population, the Bush administration, in alliance with the UK, declared a full-scale air strike on Afghanistan on October 7, 2001. Australia and the anti-Taliban Afghan United Front, also called the Northern Alliance, became US allies in this war. The US presumed that Afghanistan was the base for al-Qaeda, suspected to be involved in the 9/11 attacks, and the country was sheltering the Taliban backed al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden. The US, UK, European Union, and their allies as well as the UN had deemed al-Qaeda a terrorist organization. The ostensible goal of the War on Terror, called Operation Enduring Freedom, was to dismantle the Taliban government in Afghanistan, headed by Mullah Mohammad Omar, and to demolish al-Qaeda. At the end of 2001, with bin Laden still at large, millions of civilians in Afghanistan had been mercilessly air bombed and killed by coalition forces in complete violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention concerning the protection of civilians in combat zones. Placing Hamid Karzai at the head of the puppet government in 2002, the US brought to Afghanistan its own brand of “democracy” stamped with its colonial visions of vanquishing the Islamic world.

However, the full extent of the irony of Operation Enduring Freedom comes through only when we read it against the history of Afghanistan, caught in the crossfire among the imperial dreams of Russia, Britain, and the US. In Other Asias (2003), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak traces how Najibullah, the last Communist president of Soviet Afghanistan, was “trying to break the cycle of imperial power-play to achieve national liberation through knowledge” (135). The Soviet-backed Najibullah was in the middle of translating for his people Peter Hopkirk’s book The Great Game (1990), about the nineteenth-century struggle between imperial Russia and imperial Britain for influence over Afghanistan, when the CIA-backed Taliban publicly executed him in 1996. Spivak asserts:

The Taliban thought they had come to power, although they were as reliant upon the CIA as he [Najibullah] had been upon the Soviet Union. What did his execution signify in the end? Success for the Taliban? In 2002, this question takes on historical poignancy and looks forward to other reversals of fortune. This is why Najibullah wanted “his people” to understand that Afghanistan could not act for itself. (136)

In 2007 Pakistani-American writer Mohsin Hamid, author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), wrote an opinion piece in The Washington Post: “Why Do They Hate Us?” He elaborated on the effect of US foreign policy during the Cold War in Afghanistan as it spilled over into other South Asian countries like Pakistan. Hamid describes how the US was still reeling from the defeat in Vietnam and was concerned with the 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan with its proximity to the oil-rich Persian Gulf. As a pre-emptive measure against Soviet takeover of the Gulf, the US provided Pakistani president Mohammed Zia-ul Haq with billions in economic aid and weaponry to support the Afghan guerrillas (mujaheddins) in waging a holy war (jihad) against the Soviet occupation. As “jihadist training camps sprung up in the tribal areas of Pakistan” and “assault rifles from those camps began to flood the streets of Lahore,” the rate of crime in Pakistan soared. This US foreign policy in South Asia would re-emerge when Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would come under severe pressure from the Bush administration to become a US ally in the 2001 war in Afghanistan. Musharraf opened up Pakistani airbases to the US for Operation Enduring Freedom and Pakistani police handed over countless innocent men from the region to the US, after which they were detained, tortured, disappeared, and decimated in US gulags across the world.

Against this historical backdrop, one question remains at the forefront of this particular analysis of the US occupation of South Asia: What new histories of the War on Terror emerge when we gender our analysis of counter-terror occupation? Spivak has offered a crisp summation: “Returning to a position against the Soviets and against the King’s enemies produces, through historical amnesia or ignorance, a concern for women’s emancipation, the reason for which is simply called ‘Islam,’ implying that it is essentially ‘Afghan-cultural,’ and therefore justifies Euro-US intervention” (142–3). However, to stop Euro-American imperialism from marching forward in the name of liberating women of the elsewhere, transnational feminism must question the empire’s differential response to the Taliban during the Soviet occupation and after the Soviets left. In her brief essay “Saving Brown Women”—an obvious allusion to Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?”—Miriam Cooke argues how historically “[s]aving brown women became the justification for declaring war that drove the civilizing mission in South Asia” (468). In another essay “Islamic Feminism Before and After September 11^th” Cooke elaborates on this contention. She draws our attention to the Spivakean argument over suttee—the self-immolation of a Hindu widow on the funeral pyre of her dead husband, the Victorian outrage over it, the subsequent British abolition of the custom, and the justification of British presence in India under the banner of women’s rights. Cooke underlines how the much-vilified “burqa recalls suttee” and how the empire’s logic of a universal civilization “genders and separates subject peoples so that the men are the Other and the women are civilizable” (227). Thus rescuing these women justifies attacking their men:

These women are to be rescued not because they are more “ours” than “theirs” but rather because they will have become more “ours” through the rescue mission. The rhetoric of empire conceals race, ethnicity, and class so that gender becomes these Afghans’ major defining characteristic. Politics in the era of American Empire disappears behind the veil of women’s victimization. (228)

When the imperial rescue mission for Afghan women is propagated by American women, especially by the likes of Laura Bush, the speech act promising the joys of American womanhood to Afghan women bears the weight of the US president’s office. It attempts to lure colonial subjects by extending the dream of a global sisterhood while simultaneously American sisters in arms under the directives of the US president invade, conquer, mutilate, and kill their Afghan sisters and their people in an already impoverished Afghanistan. Cooke points out that, unprecedented in history, on November 17, 2001 the first lady took over the president’s weekly radio speech to kick off a global endeavor against the violence against women and children in Afghanistan upheld by the terrorist network of al-Qaeda and its supporters, the Taliban regime. As she reminded other nations of their global responsibility by virtue of a “common humanity” to ally with the US War on Terror, she also emphasized: “The fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (235). Cooke highlights that, in the messianic discourse about Afghan women, ranging from those by the feminist majority in the post-Soviet Taliban era to Laura Bush in the post 9/11 era, the role of Afghan women as fighters and agents of change within their society is erased. She asserts that the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA) has “a history of opposition to the Soviets in the 1980s, to the Mujahideen holy warriors who ruled from 1992–1996 and most recently to the Taliban, religious fundamentalists produced by the dire conditions of refugee existence. Some of these women were jailed, some tortured and some killed” (228–9).

In fact, Cynthia Enloe has pointed out how the War in Afghanistan has intensified the benighted plight of Afghan women as the Northern Alliance—“a deeply masculinized local provincial regime … ensured by its deeply masculinized foreign institution, the U.S. military” (283)—has gained more power “to act as the guardian of ‘true’ Afghan femininity” (285). Enloe’s criticism is incisive:

When U.S. policy-makers in Washington selected Ismail Khan and his fellow Northern Alliance anti-modernist regional commanders as their most promising allies, they did not employ “the empowerment of Afghan women” as their chief criterion. Instead, the Washington strategists used “ground-level military capability” and “previous experience of co-operation with us” as their principal criteria for choosing their Afghan allies. (282)

Thus, in the context of Afghanistan, transnational feminists have to ask: If the Taliban were a threat to the well-being of Afghan women, and the United States and its European allies are the messiahs of brown women, why in the first place were the Taliban empowered by US aid against the Soviet regime? Why has the South Asian woman time and again become a chess piece on the white imperial chessboard, as her rights have been moved to the front seat or back seat based on the imperial desires of transnational white masculinities?

However, this imperial chess game is not unique to Afghanistan. Iraq—the other major site of the War on Terror—has also been sucked into this imperial sport as both participant and prey. To trace these politics, first it is vital to understand the condition of women, the Palestine and Kurdish question in post-Ottoman Iraq, as well as the transformation of Saddam Hussein from a Euro-American ally in the Middle East to a dreaded foe of the transnational empire—much like the Taliban in South Asia. Iraq had been part of the Ottoman Empire for almost four centuries when the victorious Allied Forces of the First World War dismantled the Ottoman Empire and distributed it among European colonial powers. In 1920 the League of Nations, echoing the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916) among Britain, France, and Russia, granted Britain mandates over Iraq and Palestine. Syria and Lebanon fell under the French mandate. Though Iraq gained its formal independence from Britain in 1932, when British interests in Iraqi oil were threatened, the Anglo-Iraqi War of 1941 ensued, leading to the military occupation of Iraq again. A pro-British Hashemite rule was reinstated under King Faisal II, whose reign lasted till 1958 when the Iraqi Army assassinated him in a coup d’état. During this time “landowning elites and rural tribal sheikhs [were] propped up as local clients in power-sharing by the British colonial authorities” (Smiles, 277). In 1968 the Ba’th Party, to which Saddam Hussein belonged, came to power. Hussein saw the crucial importance of engaging “women in the public sphere, many [sic] whom had been cloistered in rural, tribal communities (Smiles 277). This was perceived “as central to breaking down the political economy of kinship structures and realigning Iraqis’ sense of belonging to the Iraqi state.” Throughout the seventies the Ba’th Party re-socialized women by drawing them into the work force, into the education system marked by the Ba’thist doctrine, and into the organization called the General Federation of Iraqi Women.² Women’s rights legislation was enacted in the public sphere while some reforms were extended to the personal status laws to expand women’s legal standing in the family. It can be argued that women have again become chess pieces—this time in the battle between nationalism and imperialism. “[I]ntegral to the Ba’ath’s state-building project” and “[a]s symbolic markers of modernity and progress,” women were seen “as politically useful in reorienting the loyalties of the population” whose allegiances were conditioned by the British colonial patronization of the landed gentry and the tribal chiefs (Smiles 278).

In fact, as women became chess pieces in the battle for Afghanistan and Iraq, the Taliban and Saddam Hussein became the kings to be checkmated by the imperial chess players, though both had started as Anglo-US allies. The National Security Archive at George Washington University has published declassified British and US government records that chronicle this chess game. The archive carries a 1969 telegram by the British Ambassador to Baghdad, Glencairn Balfour-Paul, about a conversation between him and Hussein, then the “recognised heir-apparent of President Bakr.” Balfour-Paul states that Hussein “would welcome the restoration of warm and meaningful relations with Britain (and with America too for that matter) wh...