http://www.photoshelter.com/c/cassel/gallery/Lebanon-Hizballah-commemorates-Ashura/G0000JKgyWGNip3Q/

Will write about this later…need to go for bike ride now.

In Academia (and actually in Policy), at least that is what we are told here, you are supposed to anticipate criticism and address it. In Actorivism you ignore it. Powers that be do not deserve a voice in the movement for Social Justice. They already are everywhere. They dominate the airwaves. So they must be opposed with full force, full voice. Only Actors get things done.

Both Sides Now – Joni Mitchell
Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I’ve looked at clouds * that way

But now they only block the sun
They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow
It’s cloud illusions I recall
I really don’t know clouds at all

Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels
The dizzy dancing way you feel
As ev’ry fairy tale comes real
I’ve looked at love that way

But now it’s just another show
You leave ‘em laughing when you go
And if you care, don’t let them know
Don’t give yourself away

I’ve looked at love from both sides now
From give and take, and still somehow
It’s love’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know love at all

Tears and fears and feeling proud
To say “I love you” right out loud
Dreams and schemes and circus crowds
I’ve looked at life that way

But now old friends are acting strange
They shake their heads, they say I’ve changed
Well something’s lost, but something’s gained
In living every day

I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From win and lose and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all
I’ve looked at life from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It’s life’s illusions I recall
I really don’t know life at all

But what if local is not really me. What is local really? I have lived here for over a year and will continue to live here for another 8 months. But only for another 8 months. After this time I will return to my people who have been my locality before I arrived here and who have been the locality of my parents and my grandparents (talking out of the confines, demarcations of the nation-states of Lebanon/Palestine/Syria etc of course). And this is a locality whose existence has been so threatened by the policies of my physical locality right now. Policies that the powers that be here have said were vital for the security of this nation. So there is no harmony, between here and there. How can I be a local here, now, and a local there, how can I support local organizing and action here without doing this at the expense of local organizing and action ‘there’, which still does — it has to — define the plane of my existence here. Often I get stopped on the streets  and I get asked to sign petitions to support this or that cause about women, development for other countries but i dont, because somehow this doesn’t make sense to me. Because my place of social agency is there and I cannot bring myself to see the world  as this global community where working to effect change somewhere will effect change everywhere rather than subsume it somewhere else. Yes I realize that I contradicted myself in this posting. I said at the beginning that localizing produce can put the breaks on neocolonial conquests in the long-run. But as long as we are not in the long-run and we are in the NOW where the US pumps Israel with $ and bullets that kill and oppress my people every day, the wellness of US does not equal wellness of my people. Must choose. But I exist here hence dilemma.

I cannot conduct my life here, forging connections with place and people as if I am at home. But at the same time, I cannot just not stop life and work towards only my project (grad degree)  as if I do not consume, occupy space and interact in this place. I tried to do this last year and found that stunted time in general. My understanding of relationships, development, all became strained and distorted because I tried to defy the realities of my physical location. Now I know there is more to Washington, DC for me than just school, and I’m trying to get from it what I can. So the distinction is not as clear as I like.

I can still sense an invisible boundary before the here-and-thereness of PalBeirutiBDC becomes unequivocally DC. Many arabs I see here have crossed this line where Arabness becomes ‘exorcised’, when it is nothing but an exo-tic trait. I do not intend to join them.

poster for Nahr el Bared demonstration @ Martyr's Square tomorrow

Why Palestinian activists globally and civil rights activists Arab-ly must push Nahr el Bared out of the Media blackout:

1) Over 20,000 Palestinians have been made homeless by the war on Nahr el Bared two years ago. The gov’t's inaction has kept them in a perpetual state of homelessness. The vast majority still have not recovered their livelihoods that were destroyed by the aggression of the Lebanese army. Most cannot freely enter and exit the camp that is under very pervasive surveillance by the Lebanese army. Army harrassment is a daily occurence. This is a human travesty. Why do we not hear about it? Learn about it and speak about it and demand that your government take responsibility.

2) Improving the living conditions of the Palestinian refugees is part and parcel of the Palestinian cause. Too often we forget that the plight of the palestinians is not only in the West Bank and Gaza but very importantly in the refugee camps (and of course in 1948, this too is neglected). They are at the FOREFRONT of the fight for the Return to Palestine and thus they are most valued fighters. We must treat them this way and we must always advocate for their rights.

3) The single most important part of our struggle is the preservation of the Palestinian identity, but in order to keep this identity alive we must stay true to the many diverse experiences that make up the Palestinian plight and we must incorporate this into our discourse. To stay focused only on the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and ignore the aggressions against other Palestinian communities is to attempt to keep the cause clean and simple. Make the movement cohesive and inclusive and fight against the injustices that happen against your countrymen and women in whatever form those injustices may take.

4) This is a pressing human disaster that encapsulates the tyranny and corruption of the Lebanese government specifically and the Arab governments generally. It is perpetuated by the lack of accountability, transparency, and blatant disregard for human and civil rights that characterizes our governments and it highlights the role that civil society must play in changing this. Rallying for this cause allows civil society groups to target the same institutional and moral deficiencies that it should target for any other civil rights issue in the region.  This sophisticates our strategies and discourses in the long-run and can build formidable alliances. It must be recognized that the reconstruction of Nahr el Bared, the repatriation of the residents and ending the daily harrassment is both urgent and long over-due however, so immediate responses must be sought..

Follow http://albared.wordpress.com and http://mlokheyaresistance.wordpress.com/ for updates from workers and activists in Beirut and Nahr el Bared about developments (or lackthereof) on the ground…

Like in all post-colonial regions our identity dilemma was engendered by colonial economic, political and cultural conquests in the region that depleted and/or distorted communal, economic arrangements so that commerce would be channeled from within these networks to Europe. In a nutshell. What results of course is not just an economic crisis but an existential one. The elites scrambled to whatever theories on culture and scientific progress were available in order to ‘catch up’ with the West. Some imported ideas on modernity and translated these works en masse. Others turned to Islam which was championed as the essence of Arabness. In short, the Arab intellectuals either imitated European thought in its pristine form or developed ideas around a position of fundamental cultural opposition to it. Edward Said makes this argument: in both ways we have imported and/or developed in relation to Orientalist works, and so we have allowed Orientalism to form the deeply entrenched crux of our thinking about ourselves. The only way to remedy this, he argued, is to develop new thought indigenously and dynamically.

Arabs who wrote about Orientalism either misunderstood it and misappropriated it as an attack on the West, or they only provided a summary of it in Arabic and lavished praise on our ‘home-grown’ genius, Edward Said. Many, of course, used it as a very potent critical lens to understanding and deconstructing, as it were, policies and ideas from America and the European countries for and about the Middle East. But virtually no one has proposed t ways we can actually use this critical tool to break our self-understanding free from the confines of European perceptions of who we are, which are inevitibly more oppressively reductive than our own views, so that we may become truly agents of our own futures.

But I think these groups of women…the Feminist Collective and also Meem…I think they get it.

They are groups that advance sexual and gender freedoms in Lebanon by supporting one another and by petitioning and communicating with the rest of society in ways that is the collective of all of the experiences of its members. I see the groups as something of a continuum unto itself, a collectively sustaining growth rather than a definite entity that brings its own pre-conceived conditions to its members and its communities. They are groups that made by and fed by ‘the multiplicity of experiences’ of Arab women and queers and in turn give back so that it is an organ that grows with ongoing exchanges of thought, action and feelings. This is the way it responds to the needs of a society that is ever-changing but is always in search of an identity. Meem and the FC don’t agree that we can have one identity. But even if that were not the case, even if there is one or few – as opposed to infinite  – identities that we can or should rally our political, social and economic issues around, then we have most certainly not found them. and the only way to respond to society’s needs and work towards progress is to acknowledge this fact, as Meem and FC (and im sure there are others but these are the only ones that ive come into the most direct contact with) does (with so much positivity and heart ). We must develop strategies for progress in the Arab world as vehicles of identity formation and not approach society with already set notions of what Arab society is. Because we’re not there yet. There are so many assumptions and distortions that we must fight and so many nuances that we must incorporate into our work. This is the means as well as the ends of progress.

Today 230 people gathered at AUB’s Issam Fares hall to watch the opening of the Arab Feminisms Conference. This is really a very large number All thanks to the amazing love-fueled activism of the FC.

you can follow the events of the conference here. They are also on tweeting about it @ www.twitter.com/nasawiya

Also you can read about some of the amazing ideas behind this group on Nadine’s blog the title of which i think is ingenious