Event Review: Taste of Culture

On May 2nd, the “Taste of Culture” festival was held in Souk el Tayeb to honour the labour of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, followed by panel discussions in the evening in Masrah al Madina, a photography exhibition, and a hip hop/reggae concert to end the long day with.

FC members, Zainab and deema, sat down and talked about the event.


deema: So how did the taste culture festival at souk al Tayeb go?

Zainab: It was good. Good food, good music. Simba Rousseau, who was responsible for organizing the event, said that she was very satisfied. Basically, it was Saturday, it was Souk Al Tayeb, and there were many people there, from Lebanon and other countries; they weren’t there for that particular event per se, but people seemed interested in approaching the people who were offering the food, asking about the dishes and then buying. And those who were selling the food—cultural dishes from six different countries, seemed to be enjoying their time selling what they had prepared. I tasted the Sri Lankan food, chilli chicken with rice—very delicious!

deema: The event was held to honour migrant domestic workers on Labour Day. Were there many migrant workers there?

Zainab: No, not so much, which is understandable, because many workers are not free to leave the houses they work at, or to attend events. And how about the panels at Masrah Al Madina. There were two panels there, right? What were the topics discussed?

deema: Yeah, there were two panels. The first one was a “Lebanese panel,” of “experts” giving an overview of the situation of migrant workers, presenting a gendered look at how racism and sexism of the Lebanese society is working against migrant workers, and talking about the efforts caritas is doing to help.

The other panel, which was by far the more interesting, and the more important panel, had the leaders of the migrant communities in Lebanon to speak about their situation. The first speaker, from Madagascar, told about her work with migrant women, how she listens to them and offers them affection. As she told us, these women have sad stories to tell, not just about their lives in Lebanon, but back in their home countries as well.

The second speaker, a woman from Sudan, also went over the particularities of the Sudanese migrants’ case, where they willingly flee their country and come to Lebanon with their families, but their visas expire and for political reasons, don’t get extended. And so they become unregistered. Sudanese migrants may not live in their employers’ houses, but they face similar attacks of racism from society: from harassment on the streets, to bad treatment and underpayment where they work, with their children also experiencing racism at their schools.

The speaker from the Philippines added her perspective, telling us that the minute migrant workers step off the plane, the bad treatment begins. Employers expect her to work all day, she said, from the moment she opens her eyes till they decide to go to sleep. And she has not yet found the family that treats her as a human.

Zainab: Could you talk a bit about what went wrong? Cos some of us, and not just from the FC, expressed dissatisfaction during the panels.

Yeah, what went wrong was that we seem to think that the migrants can’t speak for themselves. That we need “experts” to introduce the issue and to give us an overview. But those women know their own situation pretty well, they know about the law that doesn’t protect them, that throws them in prisons under the worst conditions and forgets about them there. So that first panel—the “Lebanese panel” was not really necessary. It lasted too long, and we didn’t really learn much from it. It should’ve been all by migrant women. So that’s a lesson for us for our next event!

Solidarity With Domestic Migrant Workers in Lebanon - International Women's Day

Sunday was a day to remember, as we all walked proudly with our shirts, made especially for this occasion, in Hamra street and then on Corniche el Manara. People couldn't help but look at us since we were walking in groups of twos and threes, because maybe for some, we looked like a football team.

Yesterday was beyond amazing. At first, we had a sit-in for Foreign Workers in Lebanon and to me the cause was something that matters more than I show because these people don’t have any other resort in a country that is not theirs and they don’t have anyone to fall back on.

At 2:00 pm, all the Feminist Collective members headed towards Hamra, Al-Madina theater and it was overwhelming for all of us. I got there with couple friends of mine at exactly 2:30, got a banner from my friend and stood with every one.

Then I started looking around and I asked myself: where are the foreign workers? Where are the girls to whome this issue matters the most? I know it matters to us but this is the biggest cause in their lives.

The more I looked, the more I realized that this was like the upper class protesting for the lower class, or white people for people of color. I’m not saying there is something wrong with that but in a way it always looks like the upper society is feeling sorry for the lower, poor and unfortunate people and I never liked that.

30 minutes later, the foreign workers came and they seemed very shy and reluctant to come and be a part of it. Can you blame them? Really. Afterwards, everyone started to encourage them to come into the middle which was the right thing to do-- they should be the middle of the sit-in. But it was obvious how uncomfortable it was for them.

And when they finally felt a bit encouraged, the cameraman from a tv station started to harass them to get more footage and after they refused to stand more he reacted very violently; he took his camera, said to his assistance in the meanest tone ever: “ emshe ya 3ame sho mana netrajehon” and they took off…

After that it was time for us to leave for our own sit-in.

We live in a country where people criticize the West for being racist and abusive to non white people, and we live in a country where the color of the skin does not seem to be an issue because we don’t have black and white but we do have non-Lebanese people... We don’t really see that when it comes to racism we are still where the west was 50 years ago.

Lebanese people tend to think they’re better than anyone who is not Lebanese, European or American. They don’t see it and don’t notice it but it's out there, and I think it will take a lot of time for this to change.

Zainab Nasser

Migrant Domestic Workers Rights sit-in - What an FC had to say

It was 2:10 pm as me and Layal were approaching Masra7 Al Madina in my car and the big shock was the humongous number of people who were there.  We were surprised to see all these people we didn't even know standing there while holding very colorful and meaningful posters in their hands and raising them up. 

We stood with them and we started realizing that they weren't people we knew, they weren't from the feminist collective, yet we didn't feel lost since all of them were there for this specific cause which is defending the rights of foreign workers in Lebanon.  I was amazed by the different nationalities and gender of people attending the event. 

As more feminists came and joined us, we felt more excited and more enthusiastic about defending our rights as women. Personally, I was thrilled to participate! I got goose bumps as one foreign worker started talking to one television station about her suffering and about her boss treating her like she was a slave! 

It's about time we open our eyes and truly see what is happening in our society, no matter what gender we are, no matter what nationality we have, no matter what religion we believe in, we are all humans and we will continue fighting for our rights as humans. 

We're not gonna take it, we're not gonna take it, we're not gonna take it anymore! Today was the launching of our cause, we will not give up and we won't stop until every woman in Lebanon has all her rights, no matter how long it's going to take, we will fight for it because we simply are feminists!

Farah Jaafar

Constructing Victimhood

Part of the work I see the Feminist Collective doing is creating a space for self-refection and critique of women’s and feminist politics in Lebanon – and the Arab world more broadly. I would like to offer up one such critique to the women’s movement: We need to stop fetishizing our own victimhood.

In every feminist discussion I’ve ever encountered on “honor” crimes, the outrage at the phenomenon is almost invariably followed by a disclaimer that points to the fact that an inordinate number of women are posthumously found to be “innocent” (read: virginal). The underlying assumption is that the crime would somehow seem less heinous, or at least more defensible, had the woman in question actually been “guilty” of having sex, the act which supposedly led to her murder. Honor crimes are made all the more tragic by the apparent sexual innocence of the victims.

There is a sort of twisted logic to this. To further the cause, it becomes politically necessary to strip agency from the victims. To gain people’s sympathy and to allay fears that by challenging the legitimacy of these killings we’re encouraging promiscuity or allowing women to get away with having illicit sex, the victims must be presented as pure and innocent. How else can we get people to identify with victims when they seem to have committed such unspeakable crimes? Soiled women don’t make good poster children for the cause, after all. By playing into this on strategic grounds we are vindicating the logic of the very system that allows for these sorts of crimes to happen with impunity.

This is not only a problem of practice, but it also points to the larger problem of how human rights, as a normative legal system, represents certain events and reconstructs people as victims of a particular human rights violation. This conception creates a set of disempowering and counterproductive social categories: firstly, that all victims should be innocent, and secondly, that all victims are in a perpetual state of need, denying them subjectivity and agency. When working on issues related to sexuality, this becomes acutely apparent. In advocating for the repeal of anti-sodomy laws for example, gay activists constantly find themselves having to downplay the actual act of gay sex itself. To sell the cause, we must create sex-less beings, we must transform them from criminals to victims, innocent and act-less in order for the issue to be palatable to a conservative social order. Instead of focusing on the illegitimacy of criminalization as such, we look for other issues to push the point: police brutality, invasion of privacy, torture, etc. Although this is strategically sound for our purposes, we nevertheless inadvertently end up selling ourselves short: Disembodied beings, we look up wide-eyed in supplication and ask for the world’s sympathy, insisting on our sexless innocence. It’s almost like applying a band-aid over a malignant tumor.

Still, this strategy doesn’t work for everyone, particularly not for the less “popular” victims of human rights violations such as sex workers, who suffer from systematic state persecution, situations of legal limbo (particularly if they are migrants), violence, denial of health care, and a host of other abuses. Discussions on the rights of sex workers in the human rights community are almost solely centered around their right to be free of sex work, and the possibility of some sort of agency or will in the decision to engage in sex work effectively becomes null and void. The solution becomes to reconstitute sex workers into victims of trafficking, forced into the sex trade against their will – which is firstly not necessarily true, and secondly often leads to the adoption of policies that further marginalize and criminalize.

As feminists, we really need to start critically interrogating this idea of innocence. We need to move beyond the dominant human rights model of innocent victim vs. evil perpetrator. Once we dig a little deeper and start looking at systems of social control and oppression rather than individual violators/victims, the question of accountability becomes murkier. We need to restore a model where people are active subjects of human rights rather than passive recipients, able to frame their stories and lives with autonomy and on their own terms.