En effet, dans les cercles intellectuels comme dans les rues européennes, peu de noms de féministes arabes sont connus. Qui se souvient du nom de la journaliste libanaise Rose al-Yussuf (1898-1958) ? de l’égyptienne Houda Cha’rawi (1879-1947) ? de la tunisienne Bchira Ben Mrad (1909-1993) ? Et pourquoi les écrits féministes de Tahar Haddâd (1899-1935) sont-ils si peu traduits et si peu diffusés en Europe ? Nous constatons aujourd’hui cette invisibilité flagrante du féminisme arabe, sans en connaître les raisons profondes. Les féministes contemporaines sont un peu plus connues, telle Fatima Mernissi très active dans l’ensemble du Monde arabe, ainsi qu’en Europe. Mais tandis que le féminisme occidental (européen et nord-américain) s’est constitué comme une entité complexe, le féminisme arabe semble ne pas avoir existé hier, et peiner à exister aujourd’hui.

Kimberlé Crenshaw peut nous aider à comprendre ce phénomène d’invisibilité d’un féminisme non-occidental. Tout d’abord parce qu’elle a contribué à faire connaître les travaux de Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell et Barbara Smith et en particulier leur ouvrage All Women are White, all the Blacks are Men[2]. Ce titre énonce un préjugé qui explique pourquoi les femmes afro-américaines ont été d’emblée exclues des mouvements féministes. Et ce préjugé peut aujourd’hui s’appliquer aux sociétés arabo-musulmanes vues d’Europe et s’énoncer de la sorte : Toutes les femmes sont occidentales ; tous les Arabes, tous les Musulmans sont des hommes. Ainsi, en 2014, le féminisme mondial reste un féminisme foncièrement occidental, qui accepte malaisément d’inclure d’autres féminismes comme le féminisme arabe ou le féminisme musulman. C’est dire à quel point les découvertes de Kimberlé Crenshaw sont d’actualité.

Quelle est la réception effective de l’œuvre de Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman contemporain ? Dans quels domaines l’intersectionnalité s’y applique-t-elle particulièrement ? Et comment certains concepts y sont discutés, sans que l’ensemble de la méthode initiée par Crenshaw ne soit remis en cause ?

Intersectionnalité et sociétés

La réception de l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw dans le monde arabo-musulman est contrastée. Non encore traduite à ce jour en langue arabe, elle se trouve assez bien connue des universitaires des pays anglophones (notamment l’Egypte) mais très peu connue dans les pays francophones (comme l’Algérie). On peut donc parler ici d’une réception limitée, l’œuvre de Crenshaw ayant encore trop peu d’impact direct sur les sociétés arabo-musulmanes. Pourtant, la notion d’intersectionnalité ouvre un domaine de recherche fort utile dans des sociétés qui peinent parfois à penser leur hétérogénéité. L’ouverture prochaine de départements d’Etudes féminines (comme à l’Université de Tunis) devrait pallier ce manque, et permettre aux théories féministes non-occidentales d’être plus visibles.

Le cas de l’Egypte, où l’œuvre de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la plus reconnue dans le Monde arabe, est une exception : il s’agit d’un pays dont l’élite est parfaitement anglophone, et il s’agit du pays de Nawal Saadawî, figure de proue du féminisme arabe, longtemps exilée aux USA. Ainsi, le féminisme arabe devient visible dès lors qu’il se trouve porté par une figure internationale, maîtrisant la langue de l’autre (ici, la langue anglaise) et vivant dans le pays de l’autre (ici, les USA). Autrement dit, le féminisme de Saadawî a acquis une forme grandissante de visibilité à mesure qu’il s’occidentalisait. Cette visibilité ne réduit cependant pas l’invisibilité de tous les autres féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman, bien qu’il en encourage l’émergence.

L’invisibilité des féminismes du Monde arabo-musulman tient donc peut-être à la langue. Enoncées en langue anglaise, les théories de Nawal Saadawi rencontrent celles de Kimberlé Crenshaw, en Egypte, ou aux USA. Nawal Saadawî s’intéresse elle aussi à ce point de croisement aveugle entre diverses catégories : femmes, pauvres, malades, exploitées, emprisonnées. En tant que médecin, elle soigne ces patientes dont l’existence est niée par la société, et elle décrit leur parcours, parfois en s’identifiant très fortement à elles[3]. Il nous faut noter que les femmes auxquelles s’intéresse Nawal Saadawî sont opprimées par la société dans laquelle elles vivent, et non par l’extérieur (c’est-à-dire l’Occident). Elles peuvent dès lors plus facilement susciter l’empathie de femmes occidentales, qui, elles non plus, ne supportent pas la dictature, ni les dérives du patriarcat…

La solidarité s’avère plus compliquée lorsque les femmes qu’il s’agit de soutenir ne correspondant pas au prototype de la femme occidentale, par exemple lorsqu’elles sont voilées, et semblent soumises. Kimberlé Crenshaw avait vu juste en parlant de « the centrality of white female experience in the conceptualization of gender discrimitation[4]». A sa suite, Elsa Dorlin a montré comment « les [premières] associations féministes se déchirent et se scindent sur la question perverse de la prééminence « légitime » des femmes et épouses « blanches » sur les Noirs et par conséquent sur les femmes « noires », excluant purement et simplement ces dernières de la catégorie « femmes[5]» ». Autrement dit, les femmes arabo-musulmanes non-occidentalisées ne seraient pas des femmes comme les autres. Certains propos rapportés et analysés par Elsa Dorlin, datant de plus d’un siècle, et s’appliquant aux femmes afro-américaines, rejoignent des propos circulant depuis une dizaine d’années en France et en Europe au sujet des femmes arabo-musulmanes. Par exemple, il y a plus d’un siècle, aux USA, la Présidente de la Fédération générale des clubs des femmes expliquait ainsi qu’elle ne pouvait accepter Mrs Lowe parmi ses membres : « Mrs Ruffin appartient à son propre peuple. Là, elle sera un leader et pourra faire beaucoup de bien, mais parmi nous elle ne peut que créer des problèmes[6]». Ce préjugé s’applique aujourd’hui à la femme de culture ou d’apparence arabo-musulmane en France, ou ailleurs en Europe. En tant que femme arabo-musulmane, elle se trouve renvoyée aux siens, tandis que les siens la renvoient à leur tour à sa condition de femme. Finalement, elle n’est jamais totalement elle-même : dans une communauté de femmes occidentales et féministes, la femme arabo-musulmane est d’abord perçue comme arabo-musulmane (a fortiori si elle est voilée) ; et dans la communauté arabo-musulmane, elle est perçue comme une femme, avec des droits et des devoirs spécifiques. Aucune de ces perceptions ne rend à cet individu (qui se trouve être une femme, de culture arabo-musulmane) toute son humanité.

De plus, il nous semble que la question du féminisme arabo-musulman s’articule avec la question post-coloniale. Elsa Dorlin cite d’ailleurs, en note, Edward Saïd[7]. Si les femmes africaines-américaines n’ont pas eu leur place dans les premiers mouvements féministes aux USA, c’était à cause du racisme. Et si les femmes arabo-musulmanes n’ont pas aujourd’hui leur place dans les mouvements féministes, c’est peut-être une conséquence de la colonisation et de l’orientalisme.

En effet, durant la colonisation, la femme arabo-musulmane était très présente dans l’imaginaire collectif français. En peinture comme en littérature, elle fut constamment représentée, puis très photographiée. Et l’on peut noter qu’elle était le plus souvent représentée assise ou allongée, nue et parée de bijoux. Or, il se trouve que les femmes arabo-musulmanes d’aujourd’hui, dans le Monde arabo-musulman comme en France, peuvent apparaître comme l’exact contraire de l’ « orientale » : les femmes voilées figurent une verticalité en marche, qui trouble et parfois effraie. L’image fréquemment utilisée pour exprimer le malaise ressenti devant des femmes entièrement voilées est celle de « fantôme ». Ainsi, tandis que la femme arabo-musulmane colonisée et orientalisée était couleurs et chair, la femme arabo-musulmane d’aujourd’hui paraît spectrale, insaisissable. Même lorsque ses prises de positions rejoignent celles des féministes occidentales, le voile creuse entre elles un fossé.

Mais le monde n’est pas binaire, et les fossés se creusent au sein même des sociétés arabo-musulmanes. L’intersectionnalité n’opère donc pas seulement entre ancien colonisateur et ancien colonisé, mais au cœur de toutes les sociétés, car toutes les sociétés de notre monde contiennent des éléments hétérogènes. Autrement dit, la question de la femme arabo-musulmane se pose aujourd’hui partout dans le monde, et le même paradoxe s’observe ici comme ailleurs : le voile la rend visible, mais inaudible, et le féminisme arabo-musulman semble ne pas exister, à moins d’être porté par des femmes arabo-musulmanes occidentalisées.

On voit de ce fait que les théories de Kimberlé Crenshaw permettent d’élucider des paradoxes très contemporains. La femme de culture arabo-musulmane vue d’Europe, et en particulier vue de France, pays de la laïcité, se retrouve à l’intersection de plusieurs catégories (sexuelles, sociales, historiques, économiques, culturelles) qui la rendent invisible. Elle sera tour à tour appréhendée comme arabe (non-européenne), ou comme musulmane (non-laïque), ou comme immigrée (même lorsqu’elle a la nationalité européenne), ou comme issue d’une ancienne colonie française, ou comme issue de tel milieu social… Mais son identité singulière, qui coïncide avec le point d’intersection de ces catégories plurielle, peine à être reconnue. Des rôles lui sont assignés, qui entravent sa connaissance de soi, et sa reconnaissance par autrui.

Ainsi, le passage semble étroit pour que les femmes arabo-musulmanes, et a fortiori les plus féministes d’entre elles, puissent se faire entendre et se défendre, tout en échappant à la fois au repli traditionaliste, à l’orientalisme latent, à l’occidentalisation forcée, au sexisme et au racisme.

Intersectionnalité et littératures post-coloniales

Cinq ans avant la parution de l’article de Kimberlé Crenshaw « Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex : A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory, and Antiracist Politics » Alice Walker publiait la Couleur pourpre[8]. Dans ces deux textes fondateurs, l’un socio-juridique, l’autre romanesque, il est question des violences domestiques dont les femmes afro-américaines sont victimes. Cette coïncidence entre la parution d’un article scientifique et un roman, traitant de la même problématique, est intéressante. Elle révèle que parfois la littérature devance, ou rejoint la sociologie. En ce qui concerne la notion d’intersectionnalité, cette convergence semble remarquable dans les littératures issues du Monde arabe. On trouve cette problématique de l’invisibilité due à l’intersectionnalité dès 1945, date à laquelle Kateb Yacine commence à écrire Nedjma[9] dont le personnage se trouve être une femme, juive par sa mère, arabo-berbère par son père, nue dans une célèbre scène de bain, et finalement voilée, et errante. Quelle que soit la forme qu’elle prend, Nedjma ne parle pas. Elle est toutes les femmes que l’on veut, mais elle ne semble être personne. L’entrecroisement de sa judaïté, de son arabité, de sa féminité et de son statut de colonisé la font littéralement disparaître. Comme disparaissaient des statistiques les femmes afro-américaines battues sur le sort desquelles Kimberlé Crenshaw s’est penchée.

Après Kateb Yacine, d’autres écrivains ont continué à mettre en scène cette disparition des femmes arabo-musulmanes du champ de vision du féminisme humaniste, parmi lesquels Naguib Mahfouz, Assia Djebar, Hanan el-Cheikh, Fadhila Chabbi et, plus récemment Emna Belhaj Yahia. Dans son roman intitulé Jeux de rubans[10], Emna Belhaj Yahia s’interroge sur le voile en Tunisie. Elle rapporte ses pensées tandis qu’elle attend son tour chez l’épicier :

Je regarde les femmes auprès desquelles je fais la queue : nous ne sommes que deux à ne pas être voilées, c’est-à-dire à ne pas porter ce grand foulard qui enveloppe le cheveu et encadre le visage. Cela fait quelques années déjà qu’on commence à s’y habituer. Mais je suis tout de même à chaque fois surprise que cette nouvelle façon de s’habiller se répande autant et envahisse si vite le décor. Tout de suite, je me sens différente. Peut-être plus par les pensées qu’elle soulève en moi, que par le fait lui-même. (…) A les regarder de près, attelées comme tant d’autres aux tâches quotidiennes, ces femmes n’ont rien d’inquiétant dans le visage, rien d’agressif, à mon égard en tout cas, et ne manifestent aucune hostilité. Je revois à l’instant toutes celles qui leur ressemblent, que j’avais déjà remarquées bien des fois et qui, dans les quartiers populaires, ont sauté sur cet habit pour pouvoir exercer tranquillement leur métier d’aide-ménagère. Dans ces lieux-là, ce sont elles qui subviennent aux besoins de la famille[11].

Ici, une première raison de se voiler est explicitée : travailler, pouvoir aller et venir dans la rue, sans passer pour une prostituée. Mais la position de la narratrice est ébranlée lorsque son fils lui présente la jeune fille dont il est amoureux : étudiante, coquette, au caractère affirmé, et voilée. Le roman s’achève d’ailleurs sur une scène apocalyptique qui a tout d’une hallucination, et qui révèle l’immense perplexité de la narratrice :

[Mes enfants] se tiennent par la main et, derrière eux, il y a toute leur descendance, leurs enfants, petits-enfants, arrière-arrière-petits-enfants, qui avancent en dizaines de rangées correspondant à des dizaines de générations successives, de celles nées il y a plus d’un siècle à celles qui naîtront dans plus de cent ans. Mais, comme c’est curieux, elles se suivent dans un ordre singulier : une rangée où les femmes ont des foulards sur les cheveux, suivie d’une autre où elles ont les cheveux au vent, et ainsi de suite à l’infini, dans une alternance presque parfaite, vagues régulières, enlacées, exposant leurs différences comme si chaque rangée était une réplique à l’autre, comme si pour s’affirmer, elle avait décidé de marquer son opposition en reniant la tenue de celle qui l’a précédée. (…) C’est quoi, ce mystérieux manège ? Et pourquoi ce fétichisme d’un tissu sur la tête qu’on enlève, remet, retire de nouveau pour le remettre encore une fois, quelques temps après, et puis s’en défaire, et recommencer l’opération par la suite, tout au long des siècles ? Elles sont vraiment énigmatiques, les filles d’Eve, avec l’habillage de leurs corps, sur cette terre qui est la mienne ! J’aimerais les comprendre, mais je n’y arrive pas encore[12].

Ainsi, il y aurait autant de raisons de se voiler, que de ne pas se voiler. Les premières féministes arabes se voilaient pour aller travailler, ou pour participer aux assemblées politiques. Puis elles se sont dévoilées, pour être les égales des hommes. Aujourd’hui, les jeunes filles se voilent pour de multiples raisons : par réaction contre l’occidentalisation-laïcisation de leur culture, par réaction contre la nudité orientaliste, par réaction contre leurs parents, par désir de retrouver des racines identitaires, pour intégrer une communauté, pour retrouver une spiritualité, pour faire coïncider leur foi et leur apparence…

Pour Emna Belhaj Yahia, la plus commune de ces raisons serait une réaction par rapport à la génération précédente. Le résultat de toutes ces réactions en chaîne est une essentialisation de la féminité, en laquelle la narratrice ne se reconnaît pas. En effet, si, pour une génération, la femme doit être voilée ; pour la génération suivante, elle ne doit pas l’être, et cela à l’infini, comme si la femme se réduisait à ce qu’elle porte ou ne porte pas. A cette essentialisation, Emna Belhaj Yahia préfère sans doute un féminisme existentialiste, où l’existence précède l’essence, et non l’inverse.

De ce fait, la littérature contemporaine met en scène l’intersectionnalité tout en remettant en cause la catégorie de « femme ». Notons aussi que cette déconstruction de la catégorie de « sexe » s’accompagne d’une déconstruction de la catégorie de « race ». D’ailleurs, la langue arabe utilise le même terme pour dire « sexe » et « race », désignés tous deux par jins (qui peut aussi se traduire par « espèce »). De ce point de vue, la langue arabe semble nous inviter à dépasser les catégorisations « sexuelles » et « raciales » pour penser en termes de catégories mouvantes, et toujours à redéfinir.

Ce travail de redéfinition de notions liées au genre (masculin/féminin) ou à la culture (arabo-musulmane/occidentale) s’observe chez des écrivains tels Tayeb Sâlih, Amara Lakhous, ou encore Amin Maalouf. Ils appartiennent à une littérature post-coloniale qui repense les rapports de force tout en déconstruisant la notion d’identité fixe. Dans ce sens, ils s’inscrivent dans ce que Leslie McCall a appelé la complexité anticatégorique de l’intersectionnalité[13]. Amin Maalouf est allé jusqu’à théoriser cette nouvelle conception de l’intersectionnalité dans Les Identités meurtrières[14] en utilisant un modèle non plus à deux mais à une infinité de dimensions. En quelques mots : il se trouve que je peux être perçue comme une femme, ou bien comme un individu de culture musulmane, ou bien comme un.e salarié.e ou bien comme une personne aimant la nature etc. Or, ce qui est perçu de moi n’est pas la totalité de ce que je suis ; ce que je mets en avant n’est pas non plus la totalité de ce que je suis. L’identité est kaléidoscopique, et dépend des moments, des enjeux, des protagonistes et des circonstances. L’intersectionnalité n’est plus un croisement entre deux voies, mais un tourbillon d’intersections.

L’autre apport de cette littérature post-coloniale issue du Monde arabe à l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw est la fin de la notion de « race ». Le mot n’est plus guère utilisé en langue française, bien que des théories « racistes » continuent à avoir cours. Il semblerait que les luttes contre les catégories de « sexe » et de « race » soient indissociables dans les littératures post-coloniales issues du Monde arabe. Car il s’agit de lutter contre tous les sectarismes. Et cela se fait aujourd’hui non seulement dans des ouvrages scientifiques, ou dans des romans, mais aussi dans la littérature enfantine. Deux exemples récents : dans sa série « Mes histoires préférées », la Maison d’édition tunisienne Messa opère une petite révolution à l’intention des enfants : Dora l’exploratrice y est présentée comme « une jolie petite fille brune de peau[15]» à un lectorat pour qui la blancheur est un critère de beauté ; et, dans un autre livre de cette même série, la princesse choisit elle-même celui qu’elle épousera, en interrogeant ses prétendants (tous les personnages masculins de Disney, réunis ici) et en tuant ceux qui ne répondent pas à ses questions[16].

Pour conclure, l’intersectionnalité de Kimberlé Crenshaw a non seulement traversé les décennies, mais aussi les frontières. C’est un formidable outil d’analyse, dont les catégories peuvent être discutées, mais dont l’efficacité opératoire ne se dément pas. Appliqué aux cultures arabo-musulmanes, cet outil nous aide à comprendre pourquoi les femmes peuvent y sembler invisibles : comme Nedjma, à la fois femme, arabe, juive et colonisée. A l’aide de l’intersectionnalité, nous saisissons mieux ce passage entre la représentation de la femme orientalisée et la femme voilée, toutes deux très présentes dans les imaginaires collectifs, mais inaudibles. Dans les deux cas, le son est coupé[17]: les femmes peintes par Delacroix durant son séjour algérien de 1832 ne parlent pas, et lorsque, aujourd’hui, en France ou ailleurs, une femme voilée prend la parole, on s’interroge sur son voile avant de l’écouter. La femme orientalisée de naguère et la femme voilée d’aujourd’hui se rejoignent dans un silence qu’il nous revient d’entendre et d’analyser.

The post Intersectionnalité et féminismes arabes avec Kimberlé Crenshaw appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

The place that I occupied in the world made itself apparent very early. The first time I experienced direct racism was in my first year of primary school when a fellow pupil called me a “black bum”[1] and I got in trouble for pushing her. Many incidents followed that point, throughout the schooling years. Some were blatant, but others were more subtle, such as a teacher informing my mother that I must have been “drawing attention” to myself when I’d complained about being bullied. I simultaneously encountered gendered comments that would make me feel uncomfortable. I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be as strong and boisterous as the boys. I was supposed to like playing with Barbies and My Little Ponies, and enjoying the ballet classes I was enrolled in despite my other inclinations. In short, I felt continually limited and ridiculed by virtue of my race and sex and therefore considered the oppressions interconnected and to be contested together.

That’s how I continue to see it now. My responses to issues of gender are very much informed by my experience of race, and vice versa. My experience of structural forms of oppression was heightened due to these intersecting forms of oppression, and are particularly acute due to being of a working class background. Therefore, when it comes to Aboriginal feminism, I very much see our questions and tactics occupying the more “radical” end of the feminist spectrum. By radical, I am referring to streams such as socialist/marxist feminism, anarcha-feminism and radical feminism. I feel personally that the issue of race keeps me focussed on community rather than individual advancement, and therefore my feminism reflects this. Additionally, I seek self-determination as both an Aboriginal person and a woman, and therefore need to challenge the structures that negate this freedom. To borrow a quote from the Combahee River Collective Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression”. In an Australian context this carries a slightly different resonance due to the experiences of colonisation, but to decolonise from both a race and gender perspective is imperative.

I strongly believe that as Aboriginal women, whilst our fights are related to ongoing feminist struggles within other racially marginalised groups, they are not the same. By virtue of the fact that we are first peoples who have suffered under the process of colonisation within our own homelands, our struggles can be quite unique. Recently, for example, I was engaged in a markedly frustrating discussion on the concept of “fair skin privilege” as someone of a migrant background took issue to how I was utilising the term “black”. Fair skin privilege of course exists to an extent in an Aboriginal context, however the “Stolen Generations”[2], for example, highlight how limited this privilege has historically been. Additionally, migrant populations, whilst suffering marginalisation in Australia, also benefit from the displacement of Aboriginal people. Therefore there is a need to tell our own stories, and expand our own theories rather than simply drawing upon the experiences of others.

When I am highlighting why I feel a specific Aboriginal feminism is necessary, I tend to point to three formative elements that structure this need: the white patriarchy, the black patriarchy and “mainstream” feminism. As a point of oppression, the white patriarchy is self explanatory given its continuing historical legacy and political privilege. Aboriginal women feeling excluded by mainstream feminism is a topic that has been covered many times, most recently in an article by Kelly Briggs, which poignantly proposed that arguments regarding the lack of racial diversity in parliament are sorely lacking from mainstream feminism. Yet how the patriarchy operates within the Aboriginal community is not something that is discussed as often. It does have impact, even if the politics of race bind us. I am seeking to define how these elements play out in our communities more and more, because through better understandings we can build better and more inclusive movements that don’t leave the most vulnerable behind.

Many Aboriginal feminists have been rightly critical of mainstream feminisms in the past, due to lack of collaboration that centralized the individual over the communal, or the imposition of privileged viewpoints as if these were a universal experience for women. In addition, an “Orientalist” understanding that misread Aboriginal culture has sometimes been applied by feminists to cultural issues and practices that are ours to challenge. This is not because we necessarily perceive these things differently but rather, we need the space to interpret and challenge these things in our own communities. One example I like to highlight is the constant questions I receive from non-Aboriginal feminists regarding whether women should be allowed to play the didgeridoo, an Aboriginal wind instrument typically played by men. Considering the multitude of pressing issues that Aboriginal women face in Australia, a question such as this is not a defining Aboriginal feminist question, and the questioning of this cultural practice by non-Aboriginal women simply comes across as another act of imperialism. There is nothing to be gained for the feminist movement as a whole by non-Aboriginal feminists challenging these cultural practices; rather it just negates our rights of self-determination and indeed cultural ownership.

Over time, Aboriginal feminists (for example, Aileen Morton-Robinson in “Talkin’ Up to the White Woman”, 2000) have continued to highlight additional hurdles that they face due to the intersection of race and gender. Aboriginal women experience the issues that non-Aboriginal women experience due to the process of colonisation, but often there are additional complexities. For example, whilst equal pay is important for all of us, for many years Aboriginal people were historically not paid for their labour at all, and this acutely affected Aboriginal women working as domestic servants. Our wages were, in a lot of cases, held in trusts by the governments and therefore our “stolen wages” claims are ongoing many years later. “Victim blame” is something we face often, and indeed, a number of the Indigenous movements’ more conservative commentators tend to replicate these viewpoints. When we experience victim blaming as women, it is compounded by race to the point where Aboriginal women dying from domestic homicide at a rate ten times that of other women in Australia barely rates a mention. We tend to be subjected to the same issues of body shame and arbitrary and commercialised notions of beauty, but we are also judged on our skin tone and whether or not we possess certain features deemed to be tellingly “Aboriginal” (eg: a wide nose, deep-set eyes, etc). We can also experience fetishisation on the basis of our skin tones despite being mainly socially excluded because of them. In short, our experiences can add layers to feminist understandings and there are many ways in which a notion of a universalised women’s experience can exclude us or only tell part of the tale.

When it comes to the notion of a “black patriarchy”, I see this being perpetuated on two fronts. The first is through the patriarchal structures that we inherit through the process of colonisation by the mainstream culture, and the second manifests itself in our own community-based forms, through our traditional practices and how we view and deploy gender roles. To start with our internal patriarchy, it is always interesting to me when members of the Indigenous community argue that traditional societies had gender equality due to our understandings of gender complementarity, which presumes that the separate and set roles of men and women had equal importance in communities. This is not necessarily the case. From one side of this vast country to the other, different practices existed in different clan groups and therefore the experiences of “equality” for women via a notion of gender complementarity would have differed. If we state otherwise, then as black people we run the risk of universalising our own experiences similar to what mainstream feminism has been accused of doing. Secondly, gender complementarity has not been known to equal gender equality in many regions of the world. We have practices such as polygynous marriage that are arranged from birth, alongside norms such as specific forms of governance and punishment for women. At times, due to the fact that we (as Aboriginal people) are protecting family and culture in the face of ongoing colonialism, we lose the ability to critically examine our own practices because we are worried that anything perceived as negative will be used to further discredit us as peoples.

The patriarchy we inherited and in some ways continue to perpetuate from the dominant culture tends to manifest itself when we adopt external cultural practices and use them in ways that may enhance pride in Aboriginality but reinforce gender disparities. Examples of this are events such as the Miss NAIDOC pageants, which are based upon the idea that we need to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women. Beauty, as a concept, may be harmful to women as it often centralises the appearance of a woman as being her most important attribute. One of the points I made back when I first examined this in the above linked article was that we actually come from a culture that values age and wisdom, assigning great value to our older women. When it comes to beauty however, older women are almost completely excluded. Additionally, our women have been achieving highly in a number of fields for a long time; we have been obtaining tertiary education qualifications at a rate nearly double that of Aboriginal men. So why do we consider it important to celebrate the “beauty” of Aboriginal women whilst barely mentioning these wonderful achievements? The idea that something becomes empowering if it is community organised and run fails to examine what it is that we are instituting from the cultures of those we have been oppressed by, and if these are indeed worthwhile things to adopt. Without such questioning, we run the risk of merely contributing to the subjugation of our own rather than enacting true positive change.

It continues to be imperative to challenge the prevailing structures of power on the dual fronts of race and gender, both internally and externally. Australia, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, continues to privilege a very white and patriarchal culture in which exclusionary legacies, rather than being a source of shame, tend to be celebrated. I would even go so far as to argue that due to our complex history and culture wars, begun in the early 1990s then reinforced by the Howard government, we have gone backwards when it comes to being a space inclusive of race and gender. During the Howard years, Aboriginal people were continually rebuked for “focussing on the negative” when telling the true stories of what we have faced under centuries of colonisation. Women were told that fights for gender equality were “political correctness gone mad,” or otherwise not essential. Australia reflects this perspective today. Australia Day, which was of little importance to most of the population only a couple of decades ago, is now a day to drape flags across your shoulders and be “proud” at the cost of any acknowledgement of the true history of this day and what it has meant to Aboriginal peoples. ANZAC Day, which was also criticised because feminists drew attention to victims of war and rape as a tactic of war in particular, is again focussing on the “brave people who served our country” in the various conflicts. There is a need to challenge Australian historical narratives on a number of fronts, and Aboriginal feminists have an incredibly important role to play in this.

I strongly feel that Aboriginal feminism is going to continue to grow and develop. We have a number of incredibly strong Aboriginal women who are moving to the forefront of public discourse. A lot of them are unapologetic about their race and their gender, are highly educated, and ensure that they use these knowledges to continue educating and inspiring others. Through social media and online platforms such as blogging, their bodies of work continue to grow and circulate. The Internet offers a wonderful opportunity for those that have been traditionally denied a voice to claim a space. And claim it, we shall!

The post Intersectionality and Indigenous Feminism: An Aboriginal Woman’s Perspective appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

What if we declared ourselves perpetual refugees in solidarity with all refugees needing safe human harbor from violence and domination and injustice and inequality? …We are all refugees horribly displaced from a benign and welcoming community. And the question is: Can we soon enough create the asylum our lives will certainly wither without?

—June Jordan, “We Are All Refugees”

At the height of the Second Intifada (also known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada) which began in September 2000, a 23 year-old white American student from Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, arrived in Gaza to initiate a sister-cities project between Olympia and Rafah, a city in southern Gaza where the vast majority of the population is comprised of Palestinian refugees. As an active volunteer for the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a nonviolent organization dedicated to the Palestinian cause, she was particularly engaged in protests against the demolition of Palestinian homes by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It was during one of these protests, on March 16, 2003, less than two months after her arrival, that Rachel Corrie was murdered—run over twice, crushed to death by an IDF armored bulldozer on its way to demolish another Palestinian home.[1]

Three days after Rachel Corrie’s murder, Palestinian American social activist Suheir Hammad’s poem “On the Brink of…” was circulated on the internet. Frustrated by the violence against Palestinians in general, and against Rachel Corrie in particular, Hammad writes, “the murder of this white/girl from Olympia Washington has/my heart breaking and my blood faint./Something like ten Palestinians have been killed since/yesterday, when a Caterpillar bulldozer driven/by a man demolished the home that was her body.”[2] While the conflation of home and body is a significant motif that appears throughout Hammad’s work, that conflation becomes especially complicated in the case of Rachel Corrie who, despite the “privilege” (to use Corrie’s own words) of her race and nationality, was considered Palestinian in the weeks leading up to, and the months and years following, the tragedy. Not only did Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat proclaim her a “daughter of Palestine,” even naming a street in the West Bank city of Ramallah after her, but in her journals Corrie had professed her love for the Palestinian people and had identified herself with them, as did the people of Rafah who spray-painted “Rachel has Palestinian blood” across city walls after her murder.[3] And, in response to the vehement criticism of Corrie’s active solidarity with the Palestinian people, Evergreen professor Therese Saliba remembers her futile attempt to comfort a troubled colleague by explaining that Corrie had “‘become Palestinian, and she will be attacked in the same way the Palestinians have always been attacked and their struggle discredited. She will be called a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer.’”[4]

Saliba’s sentiment that Corrie had “become Palestinian” borrows from the Caribbean American poet June Jordan’s “Moving Towards Home,” published in 1985 in response to the 1982 massacres at Sabra and Shatila, in which Jordan proclaims: “I was born a Black woman/and now/I am become Palestinian/against the relentless laughter of evil/…/It is time to make our way home.”[5]^,[6] This concept that Jordan lyrically explores—of being “born” a certain identity and “becoming” another by way of establishing solidarities built on an inclusive morality, shared social ethics, mutual respect, and shared experiences with (or shared understandings of) human struggle—was exemplified and embodied by Rachel Corrie, whose “born” identity as a white American woman was complicated and expanded, even transformed, by her love for the Palestinian people and her fight for justice on their behalf (both of which would ultimately cost her her life).[7] It is Jordan’s powerful declaration of being (re)born a Black Palestinian woman that would not only inspire Hammad’s debut poetry collection, Born Palestinian, Born Black (first published in 1996, expanded and reissued in 2010), but would also become both a persistent concern and a consistent theme throughout much if not all of Hammad’s works. In her poetry, Hammad negates and negotiates varying identities in order to engage with and connect the various struggles of (primarily, though not exclusively, colored) peoples across the world. For Hammad, such identification is facilitated through a global (and globalized) sense of self coupled with collective self-love, in which we identify ourselves within others (and them within us) in order to form a global alliance based on shared affective love. Thus, by resituating her own difference within that of various marginalized communities in the U.S. and abroad, Hammad’s poetry redefines individual identity as a cultural collective built upon a solidarity of shared marginalization in the face of global oppressions, through which “patriotism” transcends nation, and the love of self is (re)located in—and conflated with—a universal love for others.

Universal patriotism (particularly in Hammad’s poetry) is synonymous with what Kwame Anthony Appiah interchangeably calls “global citizenship” or “cosmopolitan patriotism.”[8] This way of seeing, living, and being in the world is founded on the sentiment that if the whole universe is our “home,” then as “citizens” we have a responsibility to nurture it—to concern ourselves with the cultures and politics of all parts of our “home,” which just so happens to be the “home” of others as well. For Appiah, difference does not undermine, threaten, nor conflict with this all-embracing conception of home; rather, difference is a part of “home” and is precisely what makes “home” both tangible and malleable. And because home is figured (as it most often is) within kinship and country, cosmopolitan patriots can be considered “true patriots” because they “hold the state and the community within which they live to certain [moral] standards,” understanding that while “it is all very well to argue for, fight for, liberalism in one country—your own,” it is even more imperative to extend that fight to include those outside of our countries and selves, since our very own rights “matter as human rights … only if the rights of foreign humans matter, too.”[9] Thus Appiah not only reconciles traditional views of patriotism with his philosophy of cosmopolitanism, but also expands the definition of patriotism beyond national borders, thereby enabling it to accommodate a changing world and worldview. Although the essence of patriotism has long been argued to consist of “the responsibilities as well as the privileges of citizenship,” Appiah argues that patriotism is more importantly a feeling of connection:

Patriotism is about what the nineteenth-century Liberian scholar-diplomat Edward Blyden once so memorably called “the poetry of politics,” which is the feeling of “people with whom we are connected.” It is the connection and the sentiment that matter, and there is no reason to suppose that everybody in this complex, ever-mutating world will find their affinities and their passions focused on a single place.[10]

Since we are all connected, so to speak, and especially since that connection is not a single, mutually exclusive stream flowing to and from a single place, then there is no reason that cosmopolitanism and patriotism cannot be merged into a collective vision for the betterment of humanity: “We cosmopolitans can be patriots, loving our homelands (not only the states where we were born but the states where we grew up and the states where we live); our loyalty to humankind—so vast, so abstract, a unity—does not deprive us of the capacity to care for lives nearer by.”[11] Rather than conflict, these loyalties to “lives nearer by” and to all of humankind appear to be interrelated, mirroring the interrelatedness of peoples across the world while working towards bridging the gaps between “here” and “there,” “us” and “them,” “our” struggles and dreams and “their” struggles and dreams.[12]

The construction of such bridges among peoples and across cultures is precisely what concerns Hammad, and to which her poetry is intensely committed. Her literary gesturing towards universal self-identification is often connected with an affirmation of collective marginalization, demonstrated here for instance by her contemplation of the “many usages of the word ‘Black’”:

• Black   like the coal diamonds are birthed from
• like the dark matter of the universe
• like the Black September massacre of Palestinians
• the Arabic expression “to blacken your face”
• meaning to shame.

• Black   like the opposite of white
• the other
• Indians in England, Africans in America,
• Algerians in France and Palestinians in Israel
• the shvartza labor of cleaning toilets and
• picking garbage

• Black   like the genius of Stevie, Zora and Abdel-Haleem
• relative purity
• like the face of God
• the face of your grandmother[13]

The first group of usages signifies the negative connotations of “blackness”: the blackness of coal that “births” precious gems but is not a precious gem itself; the all-encompassing, sublime blackness of the unknown or the unfamiliar (“dark matter of the universe”); the blackness of death (“Black September,” which refers to the events of September 1970, in which King Hussein of Jordan unleashed a brutal military campaign against the Palestine Liberation Organization based in Amman, resulting in the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians); and the idiomatic blackness of shame. The second group places blackness within a racial context and furthermore connects “blacks” (here a metonym for marginalized peoples) and black struggles across the world, from the U.S., to Europe, to Israel. It is not until the final category that Hammad reclaims blackness, and posits it in an alternative way that is righteous and sacred (the “relative purity” of blackness); constructive and inspiring, associated with creation instead of death (referring not only to the face of the Creator, but also to the artistic “genius” of black “creators,” such as Stevie Wonder, Zora Neale Hurston, and the influential Egyptian singer from the 1950’s and 60’s, Abdel-Haleem Hafez); and deeply personal and relational (the black “face of your grandmother”). Hammad’s second and third definitions of blackness as both connective and empowering are a significant theme in her writings, and lay the groundwork for much of her poetry.

Collectively, Hammad’s poems explore the concepts (or, rather, the acts) of both self-definition and the continual redefinition of that self. As the poet herself makes clear, “we need to own our definitions and live by them. We need not be afraid to adapt or change them when necessary. Borders are manmade, and I refuse to respect them unless I have a say in their formation.”[14] These manmade borders—between persons, peoples, nations, cultures, movements—are precisely what Hammad undermines and transcends with the formal and thematic diversity of her poetic voice, as Siréne Harb notes:

Hammad exploits the flexible potential of borders and stresses the significance of discovering embryonic entities. Such entities allow her to reorganize cultural practices so as to creatively juggle/redefine cultural, linguistic, and stylistic norms. For this poet, thus, the construction of identity depends on acts of adaptation and appropriation … shaping ways in which she situates herself in discursive spaces and negotiates the heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders.[15]

Hammad’s “acts of adaptation and appropriation” and the “heterogeneousness of narrative, social and historical borders” are readily apparent in the poem “taxi,” in which Hammad connects the plight of the people in the Palestinian Territories with that of African Americans in the U.S. Separated into three sections, the first section, addressed to the self-proclaimed “urban warrior” and “street soldier,” trivializes and scolds the ghetto mentality for which Salman Rushdie offers one of the better, more succinct definitions: “The adoption of a ghetto mentality [is] to forget that there is world beyond the community to which we belong, to confine ourselves within narrowly defined cultural frontiers.”[16] Hammad’s criticism of those in the African American community whose understanding of struggle is limited to “not gettin taxis and little white ladies/claspin purses” necessitates a definitional expansion of “struggle” in all its forms and faces, and what it means for marginalized peoples in other parts of world, particularly in the Territories.[17]

This is precisely the subject of the second section, in which Hammad recounts the nightmarish reality of “refugee camps that make you long for/the projects …/this aint no/boy scout trip this is the real deal hell/on earth what it’s about.”[18] It is not until the third section that Hammad connects both worlds, both realities, in her call for a more all-encompassing understanding of struggle from which transnational solidarity can be built:

• conscious comrade
• there’s a place uglier than uptown’s slum
• where the people are just as beautiful
• strugglin sister
• there’s a debke[19] beat funky as p.e.’s riff
• signalin revolution liberation and freedom

• so when we’re vibin on the pale
• evil of welfare and crack          know i’m
• across the street and across the sea      so when
• we’re combatin cops and prisons          know there are prisons
• like ansar iii[20]   nazis wouldn’t touch     pigs wouldn’t visit
• so when we read baraka and listen to malcolm
• let’s read darwish and keep on
• listenin to malcolm

• so when you call me sista
• ask after our family
• this shit is about more
• …
• it’s bigger than
• our hoods and our heads
• it aint all about this poem
• and it aint all about
• taxis
• and little white women[21]

Here, the urban warrior/street soldier has been replaced by “conscious comrade” and “strugglin sister” as Hammad urges the African American community to extend its own struggle to include that of Palestinians on the other side of the world, who similarly struggle against poverty and crimes of the State, denoted by the “pale evil of welfare” and “cops and prisons.” She associates Palestinian Debke with one of the most influential American hip-hop groups, Public Enemy, to bridge the gap between one black pride revolution and another. Hammad’s imperative, that “when you call me sista/ask after our family” serves to remind us, as Michelle Hartman notes, that “merely local or parochial concerns of one community cannot be the main or only focus of social change. Developing an expanded sense of community must be more than simply calling someone ‘sister’ but show a deeper level of respect by asking about the larger family and community to which this person is tied.”[22] Thus, when Hammad proposes that “when we read baraka and listen to malcolm/let’s read darwish and keep on/listenin to malcolm,” she is gesturing towards and broadening a collective sense of responsibility, for “closed universities and open prisons/curfews and house demolitions/…/…the faces of mournin mothers/losin more sons to american tax dollars” that fund the Israeli military (directly) responsible for such destruction of human life and livelihood.[23] In this way, the references to Amiri Baraka, Malcolm X, and Mahmoud Darwish, like those to Debke and Public Enemy, serve “to bridge, through the juggling of a number of cultural notions, different types of struggle for social justice.”[24] As Carol Fadda-Conrey explains, the positioning of diverse cultural and creative icons in Hammad’s work, evidenced by poems like “taxi,” is a reflection of the poet’s own diverse origins:

[Hammad’s] poetry mirrors the intermixture of influences in Hammad’s life, including Palestinian displacement, connections to African American and Puerto Rican cultures that Hammad was exposed to while growing up in Brooklyn, and the various forms of violence she has experienced and been a witness to, manifested, for example, through the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as through the harsh circumstances surrounding urban youth culture in New York and the disenfranchisement of peoples of color all around the world.[25]

Hammad’s linking of peoples across the world via their struggles against oppression and marginalization foreground what Chela Sandoval and Keith Feldman call, respectively, “oppositional consciousness” and “interracial insurgency,” both of which are explicitly at work in Hammad’s poetry in general and in “taxi” in particular, where Hammad actively attempts to instill a camaraderie—a global patriotism—constructed from a fragmented sense of self that is located in multiple places, at multiple times, amongst multiple peoples.

It is precisely this collective sense of self that will enable both the individual and the group(s) to which she belongs to transcend nationality and reach beyond skin color in order to combat social injustices and sufferings from one end of the globe to the other, as Feldman similarly argues:

If one is to incorporate the multiple fractures of identity politics into the composition of self, then one must also address the political concerns of those individuals living beyond the political borders of the United States from whence the cultural elements have originated, the multiple heritages that have imbued the urban site with its complex of cultural forms. In this way, [Hammad] links ghetto with ghetto and forwards a political act both across the street of the urban metropolis and across the sea in the material locale of her national heritage.[26]

Because the “self” is composed of multiple fragments both within and without, to identify the “self” with others (or as “other”) necessarily aligns the concerns of that self with those outside of it. For Hammad, it is (and paradoxically so) human difference which connects and empowers us, as Trinh Minh-ha had profoundly asserted in her seminal essay exploring the interlocking identities of postcolonial women: “Otherness becomes empowerment, critical difference when it is not given but recreated.”[27] Embodying otherness as a way of being and employing difference as a means of realizing that “political and social commitment to justice depends on a broader vision of home/self” comprises Hammad’s poetic vision of the universal patriot, enlisted in a collective battle against various injustices and oppressions that, despite specificity (of geographic location, of oppressive authority, of victimization) affects us all.[28] As Hammad reminds us, “to find ourselves we hold up a mirror to the worlds we all inhabit,” and it is these worlds with which we relate and for which we fight.[29]

The poem “manifest destiny” not only exemplifies the broader (re)vision of home/self, but also the connective potential of multiplying identities and the power of difference that unifies diversity. In an interview by Marcy Jane Knopf-Newman, Hammad speaks of her multiple identities and identifications, shaped by her immigrant experience and her father’s insistence on her “difference”:

“I didn’t grow up Arab American—what the fuck is Arab American? I grew up Palestinian and Brooklyn, really specifically. And my father’s like you’re not this, you’re not that. And then I’d meet other Palestinians and he’d be like, yeah, but you’re not like them either. You know, because it was a very specific immigrant experience at a very specific time, and I didn’t relate to the problems that were being written about. I didn’t have a half-white parent or a white parent. I didn’t have the sense of cultural clash in my body. I had it outside of my body. In my body I felt like, I look like everyone else I grew up with—whether they were Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people.”[30]

The self-described similarity of Hammad’s physical appearance to the “Puerto Rican or Italian or light-skinned black people” with whom she grew up complicates notions of race as it relates to Arab and Arab Americans.[31] But rather than pose an obstacle, for Hammad this complication provides the perfect site for negotiating, adapting, and appropriating both individual and socio-cultural identities. This is especially evident in “manifest destiny,” in which an intimate dinner scene with a group of friends sets the stage for Hammad’s exploration of interior and exteriors, as they relate to questions of identity, cultural expectation, and poetry. The poem begins with a collective “we four/sitting nursing/plates of rice and beans in a Cuban diner/we all should have been other people/with other people.”[32] The imperative “should” suggests that such a gathering, at least from the outside, is far from typical, and it is this unlikely friendship among a diverse group of people sharing a meal which undermines the alleged tension between outer and inner, between what should be and what is. The individual descriptions of each person begin with who she may appear to be, and who she actually is: “one/who should’ve been a neo-nazi aryan baby breeder/a machete wielding man-hating dyke/was a lover of both men and women girl of riot and a poet” while “another/who should’ve been a witness of jehovah knocking down doors/or a gyrating video hoochie/was a scholar of african glory lover of knowledge and a poet.”[33] The repetition of “and a poet” ending each description functions to reinforce not only the common ground uniting them all, despite (or, perhaps, because of) their differences, but also the power of poetry to unite people across borders and barriers.

Hammad ends the poem with an affirmation of not only how outer appearances run counter to inner selves (which, in turn, run counter to cultural expectations), but also of how feelings of loss can be a connective force, on a level that is personal and intimate: “missing my family/who couldn’t understand/we four all missing family who wouldn’t understand/creating a family/we struggling to understand/we were where we needed to be/we are who we have to be.”[34] As Feldman notes:

The family unit is renarrated here to contend with the notion of family as the social receptacle of an identity based on genetic descent; rather, it is reconceived in the scene of cultural and political exchange. Heritage is a component of identity here that becomes malleable and contingent on the social construction of wider community, a community situated, in this case, within a transnational urban setting.[35]

For Hammad, this type of unity and community is essential—foundational—to establishing a collective self-identity based on her configuration of home and self, and the conflation of that home/self with other homes/selves, from which a “transnational mobilization of diasporic communities in ghettoized spaces” is made possible.[36] Hammad’s transnational autobiographical identification, which “plac[es] the autobiographical self in solidarity with a network of diasporic populations,” becomes a sociopolitical outlet through which traditional, essentialist, or isolationist understandings of identity are undermined and replaced by a more inclusive, transnational, trans-racial redefinition of home/self.[37] To return to Feldman’s reading of Hammad’s poem:

Hammad locates home in the production of a future through manifold resources of a culture forged in a transnational context and through transnational solidarities. As a community surviving displacement, exile, and diaspora, as Palestinian, as Arab, as Arab American, as a community forged through material, political, and cultural connections with others who survive the material effects of the diaspora, Hammad locates the potentiality for the building of a new home in which members of those ‘othered’ communities—like herself—might speak their own life experiences….[38]

Similarly, Harb argues that Hammad’s relocation of home and her re-situation of self within that home, in all its multiple locations, move towards a “universalism which acknowledges the importance of gendered and ethnic specificities, while at the same time stressing the commonalities and zones of intersection among different groups. As such, the universal is redefined as a form of political awareness of the workings of power and systems.”[39] From this redefined universalism—and re-imagined universe—comes the formation of a collective self, comprised of multiple (and multiplying) identities, and the practice of love towards that self and the others in which it is located, enacted through (and even synonymous with) responsibility.

The association of love (of self and others) with personal and social responsibility is at the heart of Hammad’s (seemingly) romantic “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” Here, the act of lovemaking is interrupted by images of violence and thoughts of suffering—realities that invade and pervade even the most intimate moments, and that continuously haunt the poet/lover and pollute her memory. After an extensive and intensely morbid chronicle of various gruesome sufferings in the world, from the “exploding legs” of Iraqi girls and “ants crawl[ing] out of somali eyes” to the “puerto rican women” and “young philipinas” who “go blind constructing computer discs/poems like this are saved on,” the troubled poet/lover pauses for a moment as she returns to the lusty scene of the erotic encounter: “yeah the smell of suffer/lingers even now/lover as we lay/in amazement and/if baby as you say/my skin is the color of sun/warmed sand then you’re/my moonless night/and we the beach/wet and tidal all that/good shhhh wet.”[40] This sensual serenity is then interrupted, once again, by images of violence, as the poet/lover’s mind returns to the global scenes of the crime:

• yet
• as we lay
• shrapnel awakens pain on
• an island of paraplegics
• courtesy of the 80s gun craze
• to our generation violence
• isn’t a phase it’s the day to day

• and though my head is filled
• with your sweetness now
• this same head knows
• nagasaki girls picked maggots out of stomach sores with chopsticks
• and hiroshima mothers rocked headless babies to sleep
• this head knows
• phalestini[41] youth maimed absorbing rubber bullets
• homes demolished        trees uprooted     roots dispersed[42]

The shift to and from the bedroom and the world outside, between the dreamlike sensuality of post-coital bliss and the nightmarish reality of human suffering, serves to bridge the spatial gaps between the “here” and the “there,” lending a sense of urgency to the poet/lover’s need to end these sufferings. Like in “first writing since,” written in the days following 9/11, Hammad urgently reminds us that the “there” is right here.[43] Her internalization of the “outside world” connects the lovers to the world that is outside of them (at least physically, anyway) and for which they are responsible. Though at the heart of “first writing since,” the collapsing of spatio-temporal binaries and the active refusal to subscribe to the political (meaning imperial) binary of life or death—of “with us” or “against us”—through personal and social responsibility indeed has its roots in this haunting love poem. “‘It’s this idea that we are not responsible for those we push aside,’” that Hammad’s poetry contests, as the poet herself explains, “‘I do believe in accountability on an individual level, but that can only exist legitimately within societies where we hold each other accountable as well.’”[44] Thus, the role of accountability not only bridges the gap between “here” and “there,” inside and outside, but also between self and other—between the individual and the social.

If human suffering is foreground by human intimacy, then individual and social accountability are foreground by human suffering. In “we spent the fourth of july in bed,” eroticism is offset by horror while the illusion of privacy, of the inner self / outer world binary, is shattered:

• this same head with
• all them love songs
• and husky whispers knows
• our moans come with a history
• deeper than our groins     our
• groans marry a story older
• than this lust

• as we lay          and love
• our touch is not free it comes with memories
• and the reality that even now
• food is a luxury
• viruses free
• …
• we baby
• look into our brownness to
• see those who’ve gone without
• knowing this     comfort of entangled legs
• foreheads of sweat     heart beats of love and sex

• our sighs indeed heavy with
• history     destiny     cum     and responsibility
• even now         in this heat
• on this futon
• we are not alone[45]

Here, love is not confined to romance, between a pair of lovers, in a room. Rather, the concept of love is broadened to include the whole world, all of humanity:

The boundaries of the marginalized collective are extended to encompass third world, predominantly female, victims of racial and imperial oppression. Here again, the connecting “we” supersedes the collective Arab American identity, linking the plights of Iraqi, Malaysian, Filipina, Puerto Rican, Yemeni, and Palestinian girls, women, and youth, as well as women from Nagasaki and Hiroshima, thus creating a solid unity out of their suffering, [that] unifies diversity.[46]

If the self is a collective formation, then it necessarily follows that the love of self, and the responsibility that love entails, exceeds the individual and extends to the community and, even further, to the world. In this way, the intimate “sighs” of the lovers are “indeed heavy with/history…and responsibility” for that which is “outside” of them. Thus, Hammad revisits the inside(r) / outside(r) binary she began exploring in “manifest destiny,” as well as the here / there binary she had begun to challenge in “taxi,” and incorporates collective responsibility as the driving force behind Sandoval’s oppositional consciousness and Feldman’s interracial insurgency. It is useful here to return to Minh-ha’s essay about interlocking identities among marginalized peoples, particularly women, in which she also addresses difference and spatial binaries, arguing that “differences do not only exist between outsider and insider—two entities. They are also at work within the outsider herself or the insider, herself—a single entity. She who knows she cannot speak of them without speaking of herself, of history without involving her story, also knows that she cannot make a gesture without activating the to and fro movement of life.”[47] As Hammad demonstrates in this poem, there can be no peace, not even in the privacy of one’s bedroom or home (or “self”), when the world is at war, with poverty, disease, injustice, violence, and other residual effects of imperialism: “even as we lay in/all this good feeling/people lay in dirt vomit shit and blood/and I gotta tell you/that my sincere love for real/is for my peeps my family humanity/love for real for real freedom/well fed human dignity for sisters and their lovers/…/there aint enough good feeling/to push the pain and awareness out.”[48] It is fitting, then, that on the day of American Independence, the poet/lover realizes and asserts that the most patriotic thing to do is to celebrate interdependence, by setting out to correct the troubles of the world for which she is personally and socially responsible: “we gotta get up soon/come on now baby/we got work to do.”[49]

Hammad demonstrates that universal patriotism, facilitated by universal love, begins with an awareness of pain as universal—a recognition that can link people to people, struggle to struggle, and “over here” to “over there.” This recalls Appiah’s imperative that it is also patriotic—cosmopolitically patriotic, that is—to concern ourselves with and defend the rights of others “over there” in addition to our own “right here”:

We should, in short, as cosmopolitans, defend the rights of others to live in democratic states, with rich possibilities of association within and across their borders; states of which they can be patriotic citizens. And, as cosmopolitans, we can claim that right for ourselves. … [T]he freedom to create oneself—the freedom that liberalism celebrates—requires a range of socially transmitted options from which to invent what we have come to call our identities … giv[ing] us a language in which to think about these identities and with which we may shape new ones.[50]

Through the construction and contemplation of a multitude of identities, Hammad is able to subsequently engage in the linking of global struggles as reenacted in “letter to anthony (critical resistance),” in which Hammad connects the issue of prison reform in the United States to both the Palestinian struggle for legitimacy and justice and the global sex trade. In doing so, the poem lends itself to a contemplation of the concept of criminality as a residual effect of imperialism’s oppressive agendas, executed through economic exploitation of the poor (and often colored), the subjugation of women, and the suppression of “minority” voices. In the second section of the poem Hammad issues a confession, an admission of her own guilt: “i have always loved criminals/i tell people who try to shame/me into silence.”[51] As the poem continues, the poet conflates the criminal with “10/years to go nowhere how much deeper/you going to get until a system based/on money deems you rehabilitated” with the Palestinians, deemed “criminals” by a system (Israel) built on their forced absence and perpetual incarceration in refugee camps:

• i have always loved
• criminals and not only the thugged
• out bravado of rap videos and champagne
• popping hustlers but my father
• born an arab boy
• on the forced way out
• of his homeland his mother exiled
• and pregnant gave birth in a camp

• the world pointed and said
• palestinians do not exist palestinians
• are roaches palestinians are two legged dogs
• and israel built jails and weapons and
• a history based on the absence of a people
• israel made itself holy and chosen
• and my existence a crime.

• so i have always loved criminals
• it is a love of self
• and i will not cut off any part of
• me and place it behind fences and bars
• and the fake ass belief
• that there is a difference between
• the inside and the outside

• there is no outside anywhere
• anymore just where we are and
• what we do while we are here[52]

In “letter to anthony,” prison becomes a symbol of forced separation, the embodiment of the inside / outside, here / there binary erected and enforced by hegemonic power structures and their exclusionary politics. Hammad associates Anthony, the “criminal” sitting in an American prison and to whom she is writing, with her father and, by extension, her people: Palestinians whose very existence has been criminalized by Zionism’s agendas. Furthermore, she equates her love of criminals with a love of self—that is, her own “criminality,” namely her Palestinian heritage. Her refusal to abide by the “fake ass belief/that there is a difference between the inside and the outside,” and her conclusion that “there is no outside anywhere/anymore,” recalls her internalization of the external that was at the heart of the poem, “we spent the fourth of july in bed.” The poem’s ending is indeed a powerful affirmation of humanity—and the global patriot’s promise to continue to defend the rights of others everywhere—as well as a reassurance to Anthony in the American prison and to Nazim in the Palestinian refugee camp that there are people, like the poet herself, who erase the lines between inside and outside, bridge the gap between the here and the there.

This is essentially how Hammad connects struggle to struggle across the world and resists on behalf of those who are withheld and withdrawn by structures more powerful than they:

• and there
• are people anthony who make a connection
• between you puerto rican rhyme slayer beautiful man and
• young girls twisted into sex work and these
• people nazim they are working to stop prisons
• from being economically beneficial to depressed
• communities and these people
• bronx bomber they imagine a world
• where money can’t be made off the hurt
• of the young the poor the colored the
• sexualized the different
• …
• they believe human
• beings can never be reduced
• to numbers not in concentration
• camps or reservations not in
• refugee camps not in schools
• and not in jails
• …
• stay well
• and safe
• resist
• and love
• suheir[53]

In “letter to anthony,” Hammad attributes incarceration to invisibility, and invisibility to the hegemonic campaign against the coalitions of difference—like the ones Hammad is constructing in her poetry—that threaten that hegemony. As Minh-ha reminds us:

Difference remains within the boundary of that which distinguishes one identity from another. This means that at the heart X must be X, Y must be Y and X cannot be Y. Those running around yelling X is not Y and X can be Y, usually land in a hospital, a rehabilitation center, a concentration camp, or a reservation.[54]

For Hammad, love, and the alliances born of love, serves not only to bridge disparate struggles and identities across many fronts, but also to connect the traumatic experiences that can otherwise isolate the individual and jeopardize the collective self-love meant to empower them. Collective self-love and the interracial insurgency it motivates (or necessitates, rather) is at the center of “open poem to those who rather we not read…or breathe.” Again, Hammad begins with a collective “we” and an affirmation of a shared interracial, presumably (though not exclusively) third world alliance: “we children of children exiled from homelands/descendants of immigrants denied jobs and toilets/carry continents in our eyes/survivors of the middle passage/we stand/and demand recognition of our humanity.”[55] The opening of “open poem” testifies to “a collective past fraught with subjugation and discrimination (extending to the present)” and reaffirms that Hammad’s “own Palestinian history of exile cannot be disengaged from the larger history of imperialism and colonialism that scatter peoples across the world and sever them from their homelands, whether they are exiles, immigrants, or descendents of slave-trade victims.”[56]

Thus Hammad reconceptualizes “third world,” broadening its scope to include the plights of those who are marginalized in the first world, corresponding to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s de-limiting description of “third world” as being “defined through geographical location as well as particular sociohistorical conjectures … thus incorporat[ing] so-called minority peoples or people of color in [first world nations like] the U.S.A.”[57] Such a revision of the “third world” as an “imagined community of … oppositional struggles … is useful because it leads us away from essentialist notions of third world feminist struggles, suggesting political rather than biological or cultural bases for alliance.”[58] This movement away from essentialism and exclusion in an effort to unify and mobilize diversity against hegemonic and hierarchical power structures is precisely what is at work in “open poem,” where Hammad “locates her individuality within communal concerns and struggles, thus explicitly situating the poetic ‘I’ within a ‘we’ … represent[ing] a united but multiple-colored voice denouncing American white hegemony,” and in doing so redraws the maps of struggles.[59] As Harb similarly notes, “Hammad accomplishes a critique of power through the rearrangement of traditional geographies and seemingly unrelated spaces. In this process, she uses historical experience rather than geographic location as the frame of reference for the redrawing of maps of struggle against a number of oppressive practices.”[60] This is evident in the poem’s powerful reclamation of humanity through a declaration of resistance, in which “brown-eyed girls clash with governments of war” in their determination to “think, analyze, fight back, and be human beings”:

•              we
• witness and demand a return to humanity

• we        braid resistance through our hair
•              pierce justice through our ears
•              tattoo freedom onto our breasts

• the bluesy souls of brown-eyed girls
• clash with blood on the pale hands of
• governments of war
• … sent on a mission to set back
• our strength     power     love

• we be political prisoners walking round semi-free
• our very breath is a threat
• to those who rather we not read
• and think         analyze                        watch out         and fight back
• and be human beings the way we need to be[61]

Thus, the transnational poetic geographies that Hammad establishes set the stage for a collective resistance against the structures of power intent on “setting back,” meaning marginalizing, various “semi-free” peoples determined to claim full freedom through solidarities built on the power of love. In this way, the cartographies of struggle are themselves composites, much like identity and the “self” it projects, to which Marco Villalobos attests:

Hammad has drawn a map full of dots we still take pleasure in connecting. …[She] reminds us the distance between millenary African Cities and a Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the distance between Cairo and Jerusalem, is only 265 miles—closer than Los Angeles to San Francisco; closer than Manhattan to Washington, D.C.; that Jordan is only set apart from the African continent by the Sinai Peninsula; that the Red Sea doesn’t make so much of a difference in this respect, since it is crossed by the dust of footprints and the wet of tears, since without the wind’s help ululation reaches from one side of the Suez to the other.[62]

This linking of struggles—and securing one’s own link to a variety of peoples through shared concern for and participation in those struggles—is reenacted throughout Hammad’s poetry, and it is through her poetry that she revisits the sites of struggle to engage with the multicolored voices and multiple narratives of oppression, on all levels and at all distances.

By envisioning identity as flexible, relational, and polycentric, Hammad is able to transcend distance and employ disparity as a battle tactic in the fight against hegemonic structures of power and their oppressive practices. Such intercommunalism, or multicultural polycentrism, according to Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, is not only “a more substantive and reciprocal approach” but also a “profound restructuring and reconceptualization of the power relations between cultural communities” which produces “informed affiliation on the basis of shared social desires and identification.”[63] This is very much the basis of Hammad’s universal (or cosmopolitan) patriotism, designed to counter what Steven Salaita calls, “U.S. imperative patriotism,” which “assumes (or demands) that dissent in matters of governance and foreign affairs is unpatriotic and therefore unsavory. It is drawn from a longstanding sensibility that unconformity to whatever at the time is considered to be ‘the national interest’ is unpatriotic.”[64] Hammad’s poetry not only confronts this notion, but proposes an alternate form of “patriotism” that aligns itself with Appiah’s emphases on multilocal connections amidst an increasingly global “feeling” of interconnectedness. It is this redefinition of patriotism that links tragedies across disparate geographical locations so that struggle is no longer figured in terms of binaries, such as “them” and “us.” And as such, each individual becomes responsible for the struggles of others and, by extension, all communities become subject to answer for the ills of the world.

This belief in both a collective responsibility and in a more global(ized) form of patriotism are unsurprisingly at odds with governing bodies intent on maintaining, militarizing, and exploiting borders and boundaries. This tension is most evident in Hammad’s poem “Beyond Words,” written between 2003 and 2004 as chaos was unfolding around—engulfing—the world: “the axis of evil” was cemented into American political rhetoric; Saddam Hussein had fallen; the United States was in the midst of war with both Iraq and Afghanistan; sexual violence in the Congo was the most rampant in the world; and just as news broke about the horrors at Abu Ghraib, the town of Rafah on the Gaza Strip (where Rachel Corrie had been killed) was nearly destroyed by the IDF, determined to quell the Second Intifada. The poet, who had found—or created, rather—a “home” in poetry, who sought refuge in language, was now at a loss for words:[65] “Where has my language gone?/The poet searches for words to wrap around these times/Make them sense Make them pretty Make them useful/…/Desperate for words I can write/…/Language has failed me.”[66] Although Hammad had constructed entire bodies of work upon the premise of a collective struggle against various forms of global oppression, that premise was now under threaten, once again, of being delegitimized by the vocabulary of separation, the mentality of isolation, and the politics of exclusion: “I am told over and over/Iraq is not Palestine/Kabul is not New York/…/Haiti is not Chechnya/Chiapas is not East L.A./Iraq is not Palestine/Over and over I am told/…/No connections here/No illuminated parallels/Two different histories and two different peoples/Make no links/Do not confuse the issues/Only confuse the people.”[67] Hammad finds herself in limbo, and though her sense of responsibility is immense, it is, ironically, the interconnectedness of conflict that leaves her struggling with paradoxical decisions: “How fucked up is it that I have to choose between ending/One occupation or another?/Partition my time and portion my information/…/[I] am taking too much on Too much in/I find nowhere to rest this responsibility/If I say nothing I am complicit/If I say something I am isolated as extreme.”[68]

Hammad’s sense of hopelessness gives way to a series of negations:

• This is about light and dark
• There is no black and white in humanity

• I am told
• Venezuela is not Cuba
• Rwanda is not Kurdistan

• I am not the woman kneeling
• In front of soldiers and their cameras and their weapons
• I am not the child shot in the head by the Israel Defense Forces
• I am not the starving AIDS inflicted mother
• Praying I live longer than my children
• So they will not be orphaned and sick and have to bury me
• I am not the child who watched
• Her family chopped to death in Lebanon in Sudan in Nicaragua
• I am not the father who leaves his children so as not to hear their
• empty Bellies call out Baba, where is the bread?[69]

Followed by a series of affirmations:

• I am the woman whose taxes outfitted this tragedy
• The American the Authority does not speak for
• The Arab the Arab leaders do not speak for
• The woman whose shouts of Not in My Name
• Were spit back at me as a slogan of the misguided at best
• I am the girl from Brooklyn told to mind her business
• I am the poet in search of new words
• And a new world Not Mars[70]

By demonstrating how all that separates us can threaten any attempt at collective empathy and struggle, and also how authorities and leaders exploit those boundaries and manipulate (in addition to perpetrating, of course) human suffering so as to maintain those boundaries, Hammad struggles to regain common ground and reconnect the dots across a world on fire. In the end however the poet remains hopeful, reaffirming the power of love despite love’s vulnerability in times of chaos:

• There is still love in us
• …
• There is still enough resistance in us
• To create a world where there is no
• Your people or my people
• But our people
• Our people who kill Our people who are killed

• I somehow know love will save us
• …
• I know somehow love will save us
• Though I can’t find the passion or desire in my body to make it

• There is still a source for peace deeply embedded in this chaos

• I know love will save us
• Though words fail to point out how

• Amazingly I still pray
• To a god I envision to be larger than any nation Any religion

• And I still hunt for language to gather into a poem
• That I pray will feed those like me
• In need of proof they are not alone[71]

The repeated affirmations of love’s power to save and unite that end “Beyond Words” can be found elsewhere in Hammad’s poetry, such as in “some of my best friends,” in which she proclaims “love is larger than our details/these are my people.”[72] The poet’s—and, by extension, the universal patriot’s—determination to stay connected, to continue to assert that “over there is over here” and therefore “their” concerns should also be “ours,” brings to mind another profound conclusion drawn by Minh-ha:

The moment the insider steps out from the inside she’s no longer a mere insider. She necessarily looks in from the outside while also looking out from the inside. Not quite the same, not quite the other, she stands in that undetermined threshold place where she continually drifts in and out. Undercutting the inside/outside opposition, her intervention is necessarily that of both not quite an insider and not quite an outsider. She is, in other words, this inappropriate other or same who moves about with always at least two gestures: that of affirming “I am like you” while persisting in her difference and that of reminding “I am different” while unsettling every definition of otherness arrived at.[73]

Such is the nature—the mission, the dream—of the universal patriot, neither inside nor outside, here nor there, nowhere but everywhere. In this schema, the world becomes the site of multiple engagements, with home, with self, and with struggle.

In December 2010, American Quarterly featured the forum, “From La Frontera to Gaza: Chicano-Palestinian Connections” in which the aim was to “ask important questions about the connections between pursuits of justice and the organization of bodies and nations.”[74] I could not help but to draw connections between this particular issue of AQ and Hammad’s poetry, which essentially strives to accomplish the same ends. Thankfully, it seems that Hammad’s poetry is part of an ongoing project in which nations, especially “America,” are deconstructed and rearticulated as a series of connections within and without its borders. Such a re-articulation necessitates a revision—that is, an expansion—of a term closely associated with nationhood: patriotism. Curiously (though not surprisingly), while nations extend their borders and expand their frontiers, the same does not follow for the concept of patriotism. In her provocative essay “Intifada, USA,” June Jordan, tormented by the onset of the Gulf War and haunted by images of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, endeavors to link struggle to struggle in the very same fashion as Hammad and contemplates the fate of us all:

• Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than any number of Palestinian lives. Clearly, a barrel of oil is worth more than 250,000 young African-American and Mexican-American and Latino and poor white men and women now sweltering on the Arabian desert while they await God-knows-what horrible and untimely death.

• I say we need a rising up, an Intifada, USA.
• …
• We need to rise up. We need to stand against the “standoff” in the Persian Gulf. We need an Intifada, USA.

• At night, I go to bed afraid to close my eyes, or sleep: I ask my soul these questions aching on my conscience: What will happen to that little girl, that child of Palestine? What is happening to you and me?[75]

Those haunting questions Jordan poses at the conclusion of her essay rhetorically close the distance and bridge the gap between “them” and “us” by premising that what is happening to “that child of Palestine” is what is happening to “you and me.” The work of Jordan and Hammad, the activism of Rachel Corrie, and the “project of reimagination” at the heart of scholarly publications like AQ are continuing to make these connections, and in the process are redefining what it means to love one’s country, one’s people, and oneself in a world that is anything but singular. As Gloria Anzaldúa wrote, from the borders:

Through the act of writing you call … the scattered pieces of your soul back to your body. You commence the arduous task of rebuilding yourself, composing a story that more accurately expresses your new identity. You seek out allies and, together, begin building spiritual/political communities that struggle for personal growth and social justice … [and] forge bonds across race, gender and other lines, thus creating a new tribalism. … [I]nternal work coupled with commitment to struggle for social transformation—changes your relationship to your body, and, in turn, to other bodies and to the world. And when that happens, you change the world.[76]

Unfortunately, however, the obstacles are still there, even growing: given the prevalence of violent conflict all over the world, the comfort of hierarchy and the rhetoric of separation seem only to be disseminating instead of dwindling. Thus, the quintessential challenge facing any project of social justice is to invent new ways of drawing out and prioritizing the “we” in “I” in order to be a successful, at least possible, global force for change.

The post “Woman Walking Heavy/Brown Worlds in her Face”: Global(ized) Identities and Universal Patriotism in the poetry of Suheir Hammad appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

“Religion can contribute to a post-patriarchal world.” [1]

The silence around feminism and religion is a profound one, and its roots lie in the metanarrative of secularising[2] that influences knowledge production in the field of feminism (and more broadly the social sciences). The silence functions to highlight not only a difficulty in approaching the subject of female autonomy in relation to religion, but also indicates a negativity towards religion on the part of feminist scholars.[3] Although there has been a significant amount of work on religion and patriarchy as well as on agency, autonomy, and gender; there has been little on the specific subject of women, religion and autonomy.

In an article by Elina Vuola, it is argued a shallow or condescending view of religion in the part of feminist scholars has meant that they do not see the full picture:

“On the one hand, there is a kind of feminist ‘blindness’ of, or resistance to, the importance of religion for women. On the other hand, there is a ‘religious paradigm’ type of feminist studies in which women are seen mainly through the lens of religion, especially in research done by Western scholars on Muslim countries.”[4]

This reflects the tension within the literature: while there is a focus on women and religion, this focus is problematic as it reproduces religion as inherently patriarchal and women as lacking autonomy in relation to said religion. This has especially been the case in studies on “women and Islam,” a genre that has grown exponentially since the attacks on September 11, 2001. In this paper I want to focus on the feminist ‘blindness’ Vuola mentions, and try to unpack the various reasons why mainstream Western feminism has largely neglected the area of religious women.

Delineating the contours of feminism

“The limitations of feminism are evident in the construction of the (implicitly consensual) priority of issues around which apparently all women are expected to organize.”[5]

An important underlying point about mainstream Western feminism is that of secularism.[6] This is due to its genealogy, which links back to the European Enlightenment. Rationalism and a focus on civil rights have thus been central.[7] Critical theory has moved past secular humanism (also a product of the Enlightenment) through focusing on the tragedy of colonialism (Edward Said), critiquing European humanism (Michel Foucault) and deconstructing the center (Jacques Derrida). These theories served to de-center Europe and critically question the Enlightenment and the centrality of secular discourse. Importantly, scholars have pointed to the “Judeo-Christian” (itself a problematic construct) heritage of secularism emphasizing that the negation of religion is still a mode of relation.[8] This also served to construct Islam (as opposed to Judeo-Christianity) as outside of modernity. Within feminism, postcolonial and black feminists have never been overtly secular, and in fact religion and in particular spirituality has long been central to their worldviews and work[9], in stark contrast to mainstream feminism.[10]

Mainstream Western feminism today has evolved mainly from the early 20^th century first and second wave feminist movements in Europe and America. While it has come to incorporate a wider variety of experiences and analytical lenses since then, there is little doubt that many of its assumptions have changed little over time. Moreover, as an academic discipline it continues to be heavily influenced by both modernism generally and positivism in particular, thus inevitably reproducing problematic notions of objectivity in research and universal truths. Its inheritance of first wave feminist ideals also ensures an essentialized notion of women that are on the margins of their own experiences, including religious women.

Chandra Mohanty has written extensively on the production of the “Third World Woman” discursively, documenting how scholarship about women in the third world has been formed through categories of feminist analysis that are Western. The term Western feminism is broad and to some extent homogenizes the various movements that comprise it. Nevertheless, there is a certain body of knowledge with certain underlying assumptions that together distinguish a general approach that can be termed Western feminism. As Mohanty writes,

“Clearly Western feminist discourse and political practice is neither singular nor homogenous in its goals, interests or analyses. However, it is possible to trace a coherence of effects resulting from the implicit assumption of “the West” (in all its complexities and contradictions as the primary referent in theory and praxis. My reference to “Western feminism” is by no means intended to imply that it is a monolith. Rather, I am attempting to draw attention to the similar effects of various textual strategies used by particular writers that codify Others as non-Western and hence themselves as (implicitly) Western.”[11]

Underlying assumptions that distinguish what can be called “Western feminism” include: the theorization of “women” as an unproblematic category of analysis that assumes women have homogenous or similar experiences and needs, which serves to construct a “universal” womanhood that erases power relations between women; the subsequent use of academic research to prove the universality of women’s experiences; and the construction of third world women as the opposite of Western women: in other words, constrained, victimized, poor, ignorant as opposed to Western women who are educated, modern, and free to make their own choices.[12] “Women are characterized as a singular group on the basis of shared oppression.”[13]

Importantly, Mohanty points out that feminist scholarly practices are inscribed within relations of power, since there can be no apolitical scholarship.[14] The knowledge production on the part of Western feminists colonizes discursively the “material and historical heterogeneities” of the lives of third women, thus resulting in the production of a singular “Third World Woman.”[15] This knowledge production occurs within a global system that is made up of specific relations of power, as Anouar Abdel-Malek points out:

“Contemporary imperialism is a hegemonic imperialism, exercising to a maximum degree a rationalized violence through the fire and the sword but also through hearts and minds. For its content is defined by the combined action of the military-industrial complex and the hegemonic cultural centers of the West, all of them founded on the advanced levels of development attained by monopoly and finance capital.”[16]

Western feminists, therefore, are situated within a global system. In other words, the way the “third world” has been constructed[17] forms the context of any scholarship on women in said third world. The lack of awareness of this, as well as the lack of self-reflexivity has meant that scholars within the field have often reproduced imperial notions in their work on women in non-Western contexts or marginalized women with Western contexts themselves.

Black American feminists were the first to argue that mainstream feminism did not, and could not, represent their experiences by only taking gender into account as the most important variable and thus constituting “woman” as a singular category apriori. They insisted that their realities were far more complex than this: they were women; but they were also black, poor/rich, urban/rural, educated/uneducated, and so on.[18] All of these different aspects of their identities combined in order to create their realities. At first, the “triple oppression” notion was created, which argued that Black women suffer from three different oppressions: class, race, and gender.[19] This later became the holy triad of feminist studies: race-gender-class. Intersectionality was later to add other identities such as sexuality, disability, and so on. This was to take apart the notion of a universal woman, and bring to the forefront the idea that “woman” is a contested notion with vastly different experiences and subjectivities.[20] For this reason, it is problematic to speak of a “universal feminism” or a “universal woman.”

Intersectionality would later become widespread among feminist scholars who were working from a post-modernist or post-structuralist perspective. What Black, lesbian (and later queer), and Marxist feminists did was to address the “most central theoretical and normative concern within feminist scholarship: namely, the acknowledgment of differences among women. This is because it touches on the most pressing problem facing contemporary feminism: the long and painful legacy of its exclusions. This legacy of exclusion has been articulated particularly well by scholars like Kimberlé Crenshaw, who pointed out that feminist theory remains white, and therefore its potential to include non-privileged women remains unrealized.[21]

The discursive construction of third world women as homogenous and disempowered is similar to the construction of religious women as uniformly and automatically oppressed or suffering from false consciousness. Religious women are thus produced as a homogenous bloc who cannot or will not see the inherent patriarchy in religion. When it comes to Muslim women, this is amplified due to the already-prevalent construction of third world women (of which Muslim women are assumed to belong to) as oppressed and victimized. This construction serves to hide the specificities of each woman’s lived reality and instead centers the debate on false consciousness.

Agency, autonomy, and subjectivity

Framing the debate around religion in terms of “choices” made by women or forced on women already reveals a liberal ontology where agency—the free exercise of behaviour—becomes the signifier of female emancipation. Similarly, framing the debate around “rights” granted to women by religion or “rights” taken away from women by religion also reveals a liberal ontology. In other words, arguing whether religions are patriarchal based on the types of “rights” women have reproduces an approach to feminism that assumes an individualistic premise, which is a key part of the secular metanarrative that informs feminist scholarship today, which I will discuss below. The idea of a higher being that transcends the individual is already a transgression of the secular and liberal worldview in which individual autonomy is central.

Related to the question of agency is that of autonomy, defined as exercising choice, satisfying individual preferences, and the capacity for rational self-government.[22] Agency and autonomy are defined in relation to external powers that attempt to stifle individualism and create relationships of dependency. As pointed out by Phyllis Mack, feminism has spent a lot of time discussing agency while taking certain assumptions embedded within the concept for granted.

This focus on agency and autonomy stems from the metanarrative of secularisation.[23] According to this narrative, religious women are seen as possessing no agency, in contradistinction to secular society, “which locates religious authority and practice outside the spheres of politics or the marketplace, allows for domains of free, autonomous behaviour.” [24]

Related to this is the problematic creation of a binary between what is secular and what is spiritual. This has emerged in particular due to assumptions about modernity and progress, which state that individuals move from a state of religiosity towards a state of secularity, thus evoking a linear progression of time. Not only does this create a binary between the secular and the spiritual, it neglects the fact that many religious movements are profoundly modern.

A key tension within these debates over agency and religion is the blanket depiction of religion as oppressive, which raises the pertinent issue of subjectivity. Scholars have pointed out that many women choose to submit themselves to a higher power, and do not interpret this as a form of oppression. In Mack’s study of Quaker women, she reflects that attempts by women to displace social norms were done from a position of obedience rather than a position of will. This has been echoed by Saba Mahmood in her study of Islamist women in Cairo, who effectively challenged social norms as an act of obedience to God. This obedience, however, was to a transcendental power, not men or patriarchal systems. Moreover, this obedience is conceptualized as voluntary: disciplinary practices of religious people can often show both how one becomes subjected to relations of power but also creates space within those relations for the exercise of agency,[25] a concept Foucault discussed by stating that the same conditions that damage can also lead to resistance or transcendence.[26]

Other authors have worked on the agency and autonomy of Muslim women by centering processes of re-interpretation and contextualization of the Islamic texts. Asma Barlas discusses questions of religious knowledge and religious authority to show how patriarchy has been read into the Qur’an and argues that the Qur’an supports complete gender equality.[27] Judith Tucker’s work has tried to understand how Islamic scholars have interpreted issues related to women and gender roles over time. Tucker argues that Islamic law has been more fluid and flexible than is often assumed, and that women’s concerns and needs often influenced fatwas given by scholars.[28] Kecia Ali’s book, Sexual Ethics in Islam, explores what makes an act or belief ethical in the eyes of God. Ali touches on very sensitive topics and uses the Qur’an, Hadith and jurisprudence to answer questions that have long been the purveyor of men.[29] Although not all of these authors consider themselves Islamic feminists, their work has been central to challenging male authority and interpretative privilege in Islam, and re-centering women’s autonomy. Tucker demonstrates that women’s needs and concerns often shaped Islamic law; Barlas argues that patriarchy has been read into the Qur’an and thus distorted the text itself; and Ali shows that a more complex reading of the Islamic sources reveals very different interpretations of key verses. Thus they all contribute to scholarship that has female agency at its core, as have numerous other scholars working on gender and Islam.[30]

Gender within Islamist movements has also been studied. Nilufer Göle and Barbara Pusch have both written about the phenomenon of feminism being articulated by women within the Islamist movement in Turkey, and argues that the structures within Islamism that reproduce gender inequality are making these women question issues of gender in Islam (as opposed to leaving Islam).[31] Göle argues that we can speak of a post-Islamist stage where Islamism is losing its relevance but at the same time permeating social and cultural life; and it is this space within which Islamic feminism is growing.[32]

Despite this, women working from within Islamic movements or interpretations often have the effect of further reproducing patriarchal norms. Mahmood has pointed out that the women she worked with in Cairo—part of the “Islamic revival movement”—chose to be part of structures that view women as unequal to men. This raises important questions about choice feminism, which has come to dominate critiques of mainstream Western feminism. Portraying feminism as the “freedom to choose” not only (again) reproduces notions of agency as central to feminism, but also raises questions about what to do when women choose to be part of structures that view men as superior and thus reproduce forms of gender inequality. More importantly, such an argument assumes that “choices” exist and can be made outside of power relations. Choices are never “free” in the sense that they are never made outside of power structures or hegemonic systems and ideals. Nevertheless, it is clear that certain “choices” have been designated as feminist of emancipatory while others have been designated as oppressive. Following this, women who make “choices” that are seen as oppressive are suffering from false consciousness and thus have not reached the stage of liberation other women have reached—again reproducing the linear view of time where progress is measured as a continuum, with Western women at the top. Moreover, although beyond the scope of this article, it is pertinent to note that the way certain choices have been designated as emancipatory and others as oppressive is itself enmeshed within power relations stemming from both (various forms of) patriarchy and Western mainstream feminism.

One way to reconcile[33] agency with religion is to reconceptualize the concept of agency itself. Women who use religion to displace social norms reflect a capacity for action, and demonstrate a concept of agency used by Judith Butler among others.[34] In this perspective, agency and autonomy can be found where there are challenges to power. Thus an attempt by religious women to challenge social norms reflects an act of agency, not insubordination. However, a reconceptualization of agency such as this one still reproduces agency as central to these debates, and agency remains a strongly liberal concept. Mahmood has attempted to move past both emancipation and agency as they continue to produce a teleology of emancipation that portrays women as either struggling, resisting, or subverting—but never active.

Choice, the homogenization of religion, and the re-interpretation of texts

A key issue that emerges from the debates outlined above is that of choice: put simply, who defines which choices fall within the parameters of feminism and which do not? However, once one accepts the premise that socialization constructs the choices that are available and acceptable, as well as ideas of what is emancipatory and what is oppressive, then it follows that these can be deconstructed, particularly in terms of unpacking the power relations they are linked to. This complicates the question of choice as well as of definition.

Defining the contours of what is feminist and what is not (or what is patriarchal and what is not), a process of essentialization and homogenization often takes place. These processes of representing entire cultures as homogenous, static, and essentialized is a classic feature of Orientalism, and has been reproduced in much Western mainstream feminist literature on religion, especially with regards to Islam. The implicit or explicit assumption that “Islam is patriarchal” not only assumes that there is an “Islam” but that patriarchy has already been pre-defined—but by whom? Many discussions that revolve around patriarchy and religion assume an essentialized version of Islam that simply does not exist in the lived realities of Muslim women. As soon as a text interacts with its reader or listener, the outcome is an interpretation that will differ from other interpretations. While the boundaries of interpretation may be somewhat defined by scholarly consensus—among other sources of authority—the content itself cannot be said to constitute a homogenous “Islam” that can then be labelled as patriarchal.

While academia is only part of the problem in portraying Muslim women as oppressed by religion (feminist activism often does the same), it is notable that feminist academics have also had problems approaching the religious women from a perspective that does not minimize their agency. Saba Mahmood has commented on how various feminist historians, for example, treat women within religious institutions as needing to be reformed or modernized.[35] Dipesh Chakrabarty proposes that there needs to be a form of history that abandons its secular epistemology by

“Rendering the claims to divine agency visible and plausible. This allows an academic historian to both engage the hegemonic terms of the discipline of secular history constructively and to expose the violence this narrative commits against life world and imaginaries that are not encompassable within a secular framework.”[36]

Islam has long played a central role in feminist debates, and has consistently been defined as being outside of the parameters set by Western mainstream feminism and thus as intrinsically patriarchal. This does not negate the fact, however, that to many women Islam forms a central aspect of their lives and their lived experiences. While religion itself is a highly contested term, there is little doubt that to many it provides a spiritual framework with which to view and experience the world. This spirituality serves as a counter-point in a world in which rationality is valued above all other systems of meaning—another expression of the metanarrative of secularising.

Islamic feminism constitutes a field that can be broadly defined as an attempt to exercise power over knowledge production and meaning making within Islam. This movement has flourished in several places, particularly Iran,[37] Morocco,[38] and the United States[39]. Scholars within this field are attempting to dismantle misogynist interpretations of Islam through different interpretative methodologies. Fatima Mernissi in particular has been important in this process, as she has argued that many popular Hadith which have been used to support gender inequality in Islam are actually false. Importantly, she makes this argument using traditional Islamic methodology—the same methodology used by men who have consistently propagated these same Hadith.[40]

Religious texts constitute the main battleground on which many of these debates take place, whereby these texts are constituted as either inherently patriarchal or are conceptualized as needing re-interpretation that would allow for feminist readings. The focus on patriarchal interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith tend to center men as interpretative authorities and ignore movements that call for more inclusive or feminist readings of these texts. The argument is that religion is patriarchal regardless of interpretation, even though every act of understanding is an act of interpretation. Muslim women who write about feminism and Islam have raised questions about the monopoly on interpretation. Riffat Hassan writes:

“Men have taken on the task of defining the ontological, theoretical, sociological and eschatological status of Muslim women.”[41]

Hassan raises the important point that as long as women are defined as theologically inferior, the battle for sociological, political or economic rights will not go very far. For believers, the theological definition of human equality and the equality of men and women’s souls is as important as other aspects of gender equality.[42] Hassan argues that a return to the Qur’an would allow for the theological equality of Muslim men and women to emerge. Thus we see that even Islamic feminists use the religious texts as the grounds for their argument about patriarchy and Islam. In other words, the Qur’an is post-patriarchal and thus a return to it would render Islam post-patriarchal, but only if this return is predicated on different interpretative practices. It is useful to note that this is not necessarily about women re-interpreting the texts, since women are just as capable of reproducing patriarchal interpretations as men. Rather it is a question of the approaches women and men use in interpretation. Many scholars who focus on feminism and Islam favour historicizing as a key approach in re-interpretation, as it contextualizes certain practices and thus renders them as inapplicable today.

While some scholars within feminism engage with these re-interpretations and then reject them as insufficient in creating a new framework of understanding,[43] other scholars simply refrain from engagement at all. This lack of engagement is what is problematic, and it frames the attempts to re-interpret Islam by Muslims as further proof of false consciousness. This stance is contradictory coming from movements that claim to take women and their experiences seriously.

There are two assumptions at play here. The first is that women are always passive, and in rare instances when they are not, they are resisting. Thus attempts to re-interpret religious texts will always fall into one of these narratives. This creates a binary view of action that is difficult to overcome. It situates women within two separate realms of action that go on to define any action taken by these women. In effect, if they are passive and accepting, they are oppressed; whereas if they are resisting—although it is seen as a more ‘autonomous’ act—they are still responding or reacting to a specific audience and narrative. In other words, it is reactionary. Who are they resisting? Who are they proving a point to? It is simply another relation of power, whereby women are constituting the system they are said to be resisting by resisting it.

The second assumption is that religion and religious texts are seen as the domains of men: thus in effect much of mainstream feminist discourse reifies the precise point many Islamic feminists are trying to disprove: that religious texts belong to men.

To conclude this section, I want to reiterate that the focus of my critique is on the decision on the part of many feminists to not engage with scholars who attempt to represent religion as more than simply inherently patriarchal. The Islamic feminist project can be seen as an important attempt to challenge knowledge production and meaning making within a confined space. Traditional male interpretations have dominated for centuries, thus managing to construct “Islamic ideals” that have delineated the borders of what Muslim femininity is. Simply the act of re-interpretation is a challenge to this, and constitutes an attempt to imagine and construct a different reality, which is already an exercise of power.

“A feminist critique of religion stresses the dismantling of religious legitimization for certain political and cultural practices; it critically analyses the power structures of religious communities; it reminds us that there is no Christianity or Islam but different forms and interpretations; and that the determinant role of religion in society should be questioned.”[44]

In the next section I want to suggest that a way out of these predicaments is by focusing less on essentialized notions of feminism and religion, and more on the lived realities of women who are religious. By centering experience, feminism can move away from the problematic of definition (which by extension is always a process of exclusion) and try to explore the option of multiple feminisms. Intersectionality is one way of theorizing such a move.

Intersectionality and its limits

The theory of intersectionality is a relatively new theoretical approach to doing research in the social sciences. First conceptualized by feminists of colour, it has now been adopted by other disciplines such as sociology, race studies and ethnography. The context in which intersectionality arose is extremely important in trying to understand the theory itself. Soon after the spread of first wave feminism in America & Europe, critiques began to surface from women who felt excluded by the discourse being used by first wave feminists. Above all, the claim to represent women universally was problematized by women who felt that their experiences were very different from the average white Western middle-class woman whom the first wave feminist movement was largely comprised of.

Epistemologically, intersectionality falls within post-modernism and post-structuralism, which both constitute powerful critiques of modernism and positivism. Modernism is seen as an “arrogant metanarrative, a universal story that claims to be superior to other stories of what it means to be human—a story capable of evaluating all other stories.”[45] Post-modernism argues that grand narratives are to be rejected, and multiple perspectives should form part of any research project. As mentioned previously, grand narratives, universalizing tendencies and the assumption that a researcher can be objective have all been important aspects of Western mainstream feminism. Post-structuralism values judgement from below, as opposed to the structures that disguise the exercise of power from above.[46]

Intersectionality arose as a direct response to the exclusionary nature of much of mainstream feminism. Thus its main accomplishment has been to be more inclusive of varying experiences, realities and identities, as well as to become more aware of the way power functions in order to exclude/include. Intersectionality functioned as a more complex methodology where different sources of oppression were looked at simultaneously, and understood as influencing one another in very complex ways.

Aside from Black feminists, other groups of feminists such as Marxist, lesbian, and post-colonial feminists were also analysing the relationships between various systems of oppression (such as capitalism, sexuality, nationalism) and gender. European and post-colonial feminists, for example, were doing so by developing feminist standpoint theory.[47] Standpoint theory emphasized that research should be done from the perspective of the marginalized, as their view of society is more comprehensive. Women’s experiences should therefore lay the grounds for feminist knowledge.[48]  The term intersectionality itself was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw, an African-American legal scholar who was part of the discipline of critical race studies in the 1980s, which aimed at unpacking the supposed neutrality and objectivity of the law.[49] Crenshaw wanted to show how the single-axis framework often used by feminists should be replaced by intersectionality, which could better demonstrate the ways in which race and gender interact.[50] In effect, intersectionality represents a means of looking at multiple layers of identities in order to analyse how they interact with one another. The issue of power is a recurrent one, as is the critique of the idea that gender should have primacy in feminist analyses.

Intersectionality thus allows for a complex analysis of people’s lived experiences that takes into consideration not only various marginalizations but analyses how these marginalizations and positionalities intersect in order to create unique situations. It is a process of complicating research through addressing the way multiple positionalities intersect with one another. Importantly, it represents fluid, constantly expanding theoretical notions. As more scholars engage with it, more intersectionalities emerge. The example of masculinities is illustrative of how intersectionality has moved past the classic race/gender/class configuration and has adopted many other positionalities that are often neglected such as masculinity, disability, age, sexuality, transnationality and so on.

While there has been much intersectional research since Crenshaw’s ground-breaking article, little has been done on the topic of religion and feminism from an intersectional perspective. On the one hand, there is the risk that intersectional approaches could still reproduce the assumptions present in much of mainstream feminism. On the other hand, I argue that intersectionality as an approach has the ability to overcome this bias. The aim of intersectionality is to listen to the voices of women and men on their own terms, in order to piece together narratives and unpack experiences that can help in understanding social life. The emphasis is thus on the voices of those being listened to, not on pre-set categories of research or pre-set assumptions. This provides space within which religious women can speak and not be confined to certain narratives. Intersectional research would allow religious experiences to be part of the narrative, because those speaking are setting the narrative. In other words, personal narratives are central, and this makes the subject central to the story. This is not to say that researchers employing an intersectional approach will not have pre-set assumptions—we all do. But intersectionality forces researchers to confront, rather than disguise or explain away, these assumptions.

While intersectionality has been ground breaking for feminist research, there are numerous points of critique that need to be highlighted. Critiques towards intersectionality have highlighted several issues, ranging from the fact that highlighting the “marginalized” seems to reproduce knowledge that claims to know and represent the “Other” and that becomes part of the industry of knowledge-production; to Judith Butler’s point that the ‘etc.’ that follows at the end of lists of social categories signals an “embarrassed admission of exhaustion” as well as an “illimitable process of signification.”[51] This can be somewhat avoided by using the concept of “master categories” and the recognition that in specific situations, certain social divisions are more important than others.[52] However in doing this it is important to understand that different positionalities have different logics and operate at different levels.[53]Another critique that has been levelled against intersectionality is that it does not problematize the use of categories, thus viewing humans are made up of various categorical and “innate” aspects that, when studied together using an intersectional approach, can expose the human being in question.

“A critique of intersectionality that takes the category as ontologically problematic or certain is the stage for the entrance of a transcendent subject or subjects.”[54]

The reliance on categories can even lead to intersectionality being portrayed as positivist, as the category is supposed to lead to “authentic” knowledge about the experiences of marginalized women.[55] Scholars such as Wolf have argued that instead of taking categories as names of things, we should instead understand them as “bundles of relationships and place them back into the filed from which they were abstracted.”[56] Others have argued that floating categories can be replaced by signifiers that are grounded in the lives of specific women, and that representations should never be seen as showing us the “essence” of a person.[57] Crenshaw has responded to these critiques by pointing out that categories can sometimes be empowering, and by arguing that even if categories are socially constructed, it does not negate the real effects they have on the lives of people.[58]

Conclusion

The metanarrative of secularising constitutes the assumptions underlying much of mainstream Western feminism, and explains the difficulties the field has had engaging women who are religious, as well as addressing the agency of religious women in non-simplistic terms. While critiques have moved the feminism discipline forward, it remains largely Western and secular. This means that when movements such as Islamic feminism emerge, the response has been to either label them as further proof of false consciousness, or to not engage with them at all. The key tension remains the unwillingness to engage with religious women on their own terms, instead of the apriori assumptions of religious patriarchy that rely on the homogenization of religions.

In order to address the complexity of feminist research, a focus on the lived experiences of women themselves may provide a way forward. Focusing on lived experiences makes intersectionality a useful approach in the study of women and religion. Conceptualizing religion as a positionality may prove a useful way of doing research that does not apriori reject the experiences of religious women as patriarchal. The use of narratives is one methodological approach that can be used to achieve an intersectional analysis. Personal narratives aim to situate the subject within the full network of relationships that define their social locations, but some have pointed out that usually it is only possible to situate them from the partial perspective of the specific social group being studied.[59]

A critical intersectionality-based assessment of the feminist field in general can help in decolonizing the continued Eurocentrism that plagues the field. Until assumptions of what constitutes patriarchy are thoroughly decolonized, feminism will continue to reproduce dynamics and analysis that excludes women who live different realities.

The post Feminist critique and Islamic feminism: the question of intersectionality appeared first on The Postcolonialist.

D’après l’organisation des Nations Unies pour l’Enfance, l’éducation constitue un droit fondamental indispensable au développement de l’individu et de la société, et nécessaire au bien-être (UNICEF, 2007). Au-delà de cet aspect juridique, il s’agit d’un moyen par excellence d’accès au savoir et au savoir-faire, et un outil de développement socio-économique d’un pays.  Conscients de ce fait, les dirigeants africains, aux lendemains des indépendances, ont fait de l’éducation l’un des défis majeurs de leurs gouvernements en manifestant leur volonté d’accélérer la scolarisation. En effet, pour eux, elle est « source de richesse économique et le développement d’un pays repose sur la capacité et la qualité des hommes et des femmes » (Kacou, 2007 : 1). De ce fait, de nombreux efforts ont été déployés dans ce domaine : construction d’infrastructures scolaires, formation du personnel enseignant, attribution de bourses, tenue de forum et sommets au niveau international.

Conséquence de ces entreprises, l’initiative « Education Pour Tous » (EPT), née de la Conférence Mondiale sur l’éducation tenue à Jomtien en Thaïlande en 1990, visait à offrir à tous les enfants -garçons et filles- la possibilité d’accéder à un cycle complet d’enseignement primaire d’ici à 2015 et à promouvoir l’égalité des sexes et l’autonomisation des femmes. Cette conférence a suscité beaucoup d’espoirs parce que, selon Roger PONS (1994 :33), « à partir de ses recommandations, la plupart des Etats Africains allaient mettre en place des politiques éducatives ». En effet, cette rencontre faisait de l’éducation de base une des grandes priorités du développement et les Etats se sont engagés à rendre l’éducation primaire universelle en l’an 2000. Cependant, l’objectif de l’EPT fixé à Jomtien n’ayant pu être atteint, une autre rencontre a été tenue sur l’éducation. Ainsi, dix ans plus tard, en Avril 2000, plus de 1100 délégués venus de 164 pays renouvelaient leur engagement à l’égard de l’EPT au Forum Mondial sur l’éducation de Dakar. Cela a donné lieu à l’adoption du Cadre d’action de Dakar, document ambitieux qui définit six objectifs de l’éducation pour tous et les stratégies pour les atteindre d’ici à 2015. Il s’agit de développer la protection et l’éducation de la petite enfance ; d’apporter un enseignement primaire obligatoire, gratuit et de qualité pour tous ; de promouvoir l’acquisition des compétences de la vie courante pour les adolescents et les jeunes ; d’améliorer de 50 % les niveaux d’alphabétisation des adultes ; d’éliminer les disparités entre les sexes dans les enseignements primaire et secondaire et d’assurer l’égalité entre filles et garçons dans l’accès et l’achèvement d’un enseignement de base de qualité. L’initiative EPT a été érigée en 2000 comme un objectif du millénaire pour le développement (OMD n° 2). Son ambition est d’une part d’assurer l’éducation primaire c’est-à-dire donner à tous les enfants, garçons et filles, partout dans le monde, les moyens d’achever un cycle complet d’études primaires d’ici à 2015 et d’autre part, de promouvoir l’égalité des sexes et l’autonomisation des femmes. L’objectif fut d’éliminer les disparités entre les sexes dans les enseignements primaire et secondaire avant 2005 si possible et à tous les niveaux de l’enseignement en 2015 au plus tard (UN, 2001).

Mais, en 2002, le rapport mondial sur l’EPT fait état du fait que 28 pays représentant plus de 26% de la population mondiale risquent de n’atteindre en 2015 aucun des objectifs mesurables fixés à Dakar en 2000. Ces pays se situent pour les 2/3 en Afrique subsaharienne (Kacou, 2007 : 2). En dépit des efforts internationaux et nationaux consentis pour développer l’offre scolaire, les pays d’Afrique au Sud du Sahara demeurent parmi ceux au monde où les taux de scolarisation sont les plus bas (Lange et Pilon, 2000 :297). L’Afrique subsaharienne regroupe à elle seule plus du tiers des 113 millions d’enfants qui ne vont pas à l’école et qui risquent de ne jamais y aller si des stratégies novatrices et urgentes ne sont pas définies et appliquées (Dakar, 2006). C’est dire que cette partie du continent demeure la région du monde la moins scolarisée, celle où le problème d’accès à l’école se pose avec le plus d’acuité et où se trouve le plus grand nombre de pays présentant un faible rapport de parité (fille/garçon) en matière de scolarisation. On note une survivance des disparités entre les deux sexes.

Le Gouvernement Camerounais n’est pas resté en marge des efforts mondiaux. Il a fait du développement du secteur éducatif une priorité, depuis son accession à l’indépendance. Quatre phases majeures ont marqué l’histoire de l’école moderne au Cameroun. – La première qui va de 1844 à 1884 a vu l’ouverture par le Pasteur Joseph Merrik de la toute première école (1844). Cette dernière a été implantée à Bimbia, près de la ville de Limbé actuelle, dans le département de Fako. La deuxième école est fondée l’année suivante à Bethel (Douala) par un autre missionnaire, le Pasteur Alfred Saker. Quatre ans plus tard, près de 80 enfants camerounais fréquentent l’école. En 1859, on dénombre déjà 7 écoles au Cameroun : à Bimbia, à Victoria et à Douala. – La deuxième période (1884-1914) voit la Mission Suisse Allemande de Bâle et la Mission Presbytérienne Américaine débarquer au Cameroun le 18 décembre 1884 et 1885 respectivement. Les Pères Pallotins, quant à eux, arrivent au Cameroun en 1890. Ce sont eux qui installent la mission catholique dans les régions actuelles du Centre et du Sud où, parallèlement, on a assisté à la concurrence dans la création des écoles entre les différentes missions. Ainsi, l’introduction de l’éducation scolaire au Cameroun à cette période était parallèle à l’évangélisation. A côté de chaque école, il y avait la case du moniteur et la case de passage du missionnaire. Mais le processus d’implantation de l’école moderne ne se fait pas de la même manière dans tout le pays. En effet, Contrairement aux sociétés côtières et forestières du Cameroun sus-mentionnées, les sociétés septentrionales (le Grand-Nord du pays) participaient à un univers de civilisation totalement différent, essentiellement marqué par l’Islam. Les relations avec le monde occidental étaient extrêmement rares, et le décalage historique et sociologique a ainsi été entretenu jusqu’au début du XX^e siècle, avec la conquête Allemande. Lorsque l’Allemagne perd la guerre de 1914 – 1948, les Alliés se partagent le Cameroun. Sur leurs traces, la France et la Grande Bretagne portent leurs premiers efforts de scolarisation sur les régions du Centre, du Sud, du Littoral, de l’Ouest, de l’Est et du Nord-Ouest. L’école coloniale franco-britannique est l’œuvre de l’administration, des missions et des autorités indigènes. Ce n’est que vers les années 1904 que les régions du grand-Nord reçoivent leurs premières infrastructures éducatives. Ainsi, l’école moderne est introduite dans la région septentrionale du pays environ 60 ans après l’installation de la toute première école dans le sud du pays. Ce retard en terme d’introduction de l’école moderne  dans la région Nord tiendrait au fait de son éloignement des côtes, porte d’entrée des explorateurs occidentaux mais aussi des opposions persistantes. S’appuyant sur l’autorité de l’état colonial franco-britannique, puis camerounais, l’école s’est cependant progressivement étendue sur l’ensemble du territoire. – La dernière période est marquée par l’école postcoloniale (à partir de 1960). En œuvre depuis l’indépendance, cette école fonctionne sur un double système (francophone et anglophone). Elle a été plusieurs fois réaménagée dans ses objectifs, ses contenus et ses méthodes (Moussa, 2007 : 8). Aussi, depuis près d’une dizaine d’années, l’Etat s’est investi dans une dynamique de dissémination spatiale de l’offre scolaire, privilégiant ainsi « l’école de proximité » (Alawadi, 2008 : 42).

Sur le plan démographique, le Cameroun compte une forte proportion de population jeune scolarisable. En 2005, les résultats définitifs du 3^e RGPH indiquaient que sa population était de 17 463 836 habitants. D’après les analyses des tendances démographiques, ce chiffre s’élèverait au 1^er janvier 2010 à 19 406 100 habitants. Constituée de 43,6 % des moins de 15 ans, cette population est relativement jeune. En effet, l’âge médian y est de 17,7 ans et l’âge moyen se situe à 22,1 ans.

Comme beaucoup de pays d’Afrique au sud du Sahara, le Cameroun est classé parmi les pays en voie de développement. Selon les résultats des deux précédentes Enquêtes Camerounaises Auprès des Ménages (ECAM) réalisées respectivement en 2001 et en 2007, 2 personnes sur 5 (soit 40 %) vivent en dessous du seuil de pauvreté monétaire. Les indicateurs sur l’emploi et l’éducation n’ont pas beaucoup varié au cours des 10 dernières années. Au niveau macro-économique, le pays a connu une période de croissance soutenue jusqu’au début des années 80 ; à partir de 1986, il a traversé une période de crise dont il n’a commencé à sortir que vers 1994, avec la mise en place des politiques d’ajustement monétaires. Ainsi depuis 1995, les indicateurs macro-économiques du pays montrent une reprise de la croissance, bien que, comme il ressort du DSRP[1] (2003 : 101), « l’amélioration des performances macro-économiques ne s’est pas accompagnée d’une amélioration comparable des conditions de vie des ménages » (Moussa, 2007 : 13), ce qui a eu des incidences importantes, comme le souligne Mimche (2006 : 8) : « …la crise économique qui perdure depuis le début des années 1980 et qui s’est aggravée avec les programmes d’ajustement structurel et la dévaluation du franc Cfa en janvier 1994, a engendré des effets néfastes dans tous les secteurs de l’éducation ».

Le Cameroun est connu pour sa grande diversité culturelle. Plusieurs religions y sont pratiquées : le catholicisme, le protestantisme, l’islam, l’animisme et les religions chrétiennes émergentes, avec respectivement 38,4%, 26,3% et 20,9%, 14,4% de fidèles. On y dénombre plus de 250 ethnies. Malgré cette grande diversité ethnique, « le Cameroun possède un fond socio – culturel commun, notamment en ce qui concerne la famille et le mariage » (BUCREP, 2010a : 7). En effet, la plupart des us et coutumes encouragent les restrictions basées sur le sexe, en consacrant la primauté sur l’homme, notamment dans les domaines tel que l’accès aux terres, aux services de santé, à l’éducation, etc.

Au niveau politique, le gouvernement camerounais a pris des mesures en faveur de l’instruction. En effet, les Ministres en charge de l’éducation au Cameroun (MINEDUB[2], MINESEC[3], MINESUP[4], MINEFOP[5]) ont pris en février 2005 l’engagement d’œuvrer à l’élaboration d’une stratégie sectorielle globale, articulée à la Stratégie de Réduction de la Pauvreté. Dans le rapport de la 3^ième Enquête Camerounaise Auprès des Ménages, on note une amélioration du taux net de scolarisation globale des 6-14 ans  au fil des années.  De 67,5% en 1976, il est passé à 73,1% en 1987 ; 76,3% en 1996, 78,8% en 2001 et 79,8% en 2007.

On note cependant, de grandes disparités régionales en matière d’éducation. Les régions du Grand-Nord (Adamaoua, Nord et Extrême-Nord) présentent des retards dans la scolarisation des enfants, par rapport au reste du pays ; c’est dans ces régions qu’on retrouve les plus faibles taux, inférieurs à la moyenne nationale. En outre, c’est aussi dans ces régions qu’on observe les écarts les plus prononcés entre garçons et filles en matière de scolarisation. Dans l’Adamaoua, le taux net de scolarisation des garçons est de 75,4℅ et celui des filles de 51,3℅. Ce taux est respectivement de 66,4℅ et 54,0℅ dans  le Nord, 59,4℅ et 42,6℅ dans l’Extrême-Nord. Tandis que dans les autres régions ces écarts sont moins prononcés, et parfois même à la faveur des filles. Dans le Centre par exemple, on relève un taux net de scolarisation de 96,1℅ chez les garçons contre 94,9℅ chez les filles. Dans le Littoral, il est respectivement de 93,0℅ et 96,3℅, dans le Nord-Ouest de 90,3℅ et 92,3℅, au Sud-Ouest de 93,9℅ et 95,0℅, à l’Ouest de 95,2℅ et 95,8℅, au Sud de 94,9℅ et 96,6℅, et à l’Est de 76,4℅ et 74, 2℅ (BUCREP, 2010b : 57).

Les études qui se sont intéressées à l’éducation dans la partie Nord du pays ont montré le retard que connaît cette zone. Pour Alawadi (2008 : 48), « contrairement à une région méridionale à forte densité de population scolarisée, le « Nord-Cameroun fait figure de parent pauvre dans l’espace scolaire national ». Et à propos des différences entre les sexes, le rapport du dernier Recensement Général de la Population et de l’Habitat souligne que « par rapport au sexe, les inégalités de scolarisation des enfants d’âge scolaire sont beaucoup plus perceptibles dans les régions septentrionales où une plus grande attention est accordée aux garçons » (BUCREP, ibid.)

Cette étude s’intéresse à cette partie du pays où les écarts de scolarisation entre filles et garçons dans l’enseignement primaire sont plus importants. Afin de mieux orienter les politiques et programmes de lutte contre les discriminations basées sur le sexe au Cameroun, elle entend contribuer à la connaissance des facteurs explicatifs des inégalités sexuelles en matière de scolarisation primaire. Plus spécifiquement, il s’agit de : i) décrire les variations différentielles des inégalités de scolarisation des garçons et des filles selon quelques caractéristiques socio-démographiques et économiques ; ii) Identifier les facteurs qui expliquent les disparités observées.

I. Brève littérature sur les inégalités de scolarisation des enfants

Depuis le travail pionnier de Thomas et al (2001) pour mesurer les inégalités dans la distribution de l’éducation, une littérature en forte croissance s’est développée sur les inégalités sexuelles dans l’éducation, aboutissant ainsi à des théories explicatives. Quelle que soit l’approche considérée, les études empiriques font la distinction entre deux types de facteurs : les facteurs liés à l’offre scolaire et ceux liés à la demande.

I.1. L’offre scolaire

L’offre scolaire est l’ensemble constitué des infrastructures éducatives, du personnel enseignant, du matériel didactique, du contenu des enseignements, etc. La proximité des infrastructures, la présence d’équipements, l’accessibilité financière, les compétences du corps enseignant exercent une influence sur la propension des parents à envoyer leurs enfants à l’école. En effet, la distance séparant l’école des domiciles des parents oriente la décision de ces derniers quant au fait  d’envoyer leurs enfants dans un établissement scolaire, et surtout les contraint à privilégier les garçons au détriment des filles. C’est ce que démontre Kobiane (2002 : 89), lorsqu’il affirme que « de crainte de les exposer à des agressions physiques ou morales, les parents évitent d’envoyer les filles dans des écoles distantes du lieu d’habitation ». De la même manière, l’insuffisance de places ou de certains équipements importants peut également limiter l’accès des filles à l’école. Diallo et al (2009) expliquent les inégalités entre filles et garçons en milieu rural par ce problème d’infrastructures.

I.2. La demande scolaire

L’offre scolaire ne suffit pas à éradiquer les inégalités entre sexes. La recherche s’est ainsi orientée ces dernières années vers les facteurs liées à la demande  scolaire. Par demande scolaire, il faut entendre le « produit d’un ensemble de facteurs (scolaires, économiques, sociaux, démographiques, politiques, religieux, culturels) que les individus et les groupes prennent en compte, directement ou indirectement, consciemment ou non, dans leurs pratiques de scolarisation : ces facteurs conditionnent ainsi la mise à l’école, l’itinéraire scolaire et la durée de la scolarité » (Kabore, Pilon et Lairez, 1999 : 224). La littérature fait ressortir trois grands groupes de facteurs, au niveau de la demande : les facteurs démographiques, culturels et économiques, plus des facteurs politiques et législatifs.

1.2.1.     Les facteurs politiques et législatifs

Il s’agit des politiques en matière de scolarisation, qui prennent en compte le nombre d’établissements scolaires, leurs capacité d’accueil, la quantité et la qualité d’enseignants, la quantité et la qualité des enseignements, la disponibilité du matériel nécessaire, les ressources humaines, les enseignants dotés de compétences solides et des qualifications académiques appropriées.

Ces facteurs peuvent influencer la propension des parents ou des familles à envoyer leurs enfantsà l’école. Cela peut expliquer la discrimination dans l’accès à l’instruction des filles.

1.2.2.     Les facteurs démographiques

Le sexe du chef de ménage

La recherche sur l’éducation démontre que les comportements des hommes chefs de ménage et ceux des femmes ne sont pas les mêmes en ce qui concerne la scolarisation des enfants. Il s’avère en effet que les enfants vivant dans des ménages dirigés par des femmes ont plus de chance de fréquenter un établissement scolaire et d’y rester plus longtemps que ceux vivant dans des ménages dirigés par des hommes. De nombreuses études ont pu confirmer cette propension des femmes chefs de ménage à scolariser davantage les enfants que les hommes. C’est le cas de Kobiane J.F (2002), Clevenot et Pilon (1996) qui ont travaillé dans sept pays d’Afrique (Ghana, Kenya, Madagascar, Malawi, Rwanda, Sénégal, Zambie), Wakam (2002) au Cameroun, Kabore et al (ibid.) au Burkina Faso, et De Vreyer (1993) en Côte d’Ivoire, etc. Pour Pilon (1996) cela s’explique par le fait que les femmes plus que les hommes, consacrent plus de leurs temps et de leur argent à l’éducation des enfants ainsi qu’à leur épanouissement. Toutefois, certains auteurs (Cisse, 2011) relèvent que les femmes scolarisent toujours plus les garçons que les filles, bien que la discrimination dans la scolarisation des filles et des garçons soit moindre que dans les ménages dirigés par des hommes.

Le statut familial de l’enfant

La fréquentation scolaire des enfants et les inégalités qu’on peut observer peuvent varier selon le statut familial de l’enfant, qui est généralement appréhendé par le lien de parenté avec le chef de ménage et la présence des parents au sein du ménage ou leur état de survie. Pilon (1996), suite à une étude réalisée au Togo sur les enfants de 6 à 14 ans, conclut que les enfants confiés sont moins scolarisés que les enfants du chef de ménage. Wakam (2003) trouve le même résultat dans une étude menée au Cameroun.

La structure par âge et par sexe des membres du ménage

La répartition des tâches au sein des ménages confère souvent aux filles outre les travaux domestiques, la charge de s’occuper des enfants en bas âges. De ce fait, les chercheurs ont formulé l’hypothèse de l’existence d’une relation négative entre le nombre d’enfants d’âge préscolaire (généralement 0-5ans) dans un ménage et la fréquentation scolaire des filles de ce ménage. Mais cette observation n’est pas généralisable, car Marcoux (1994) observe qu’en milieu urbain malien, la présence d’enfants de 0-4 ans dans le ménage accroît plutôt la fréquentation scolaire des 8-14 ans.

La taille du ménage

La taille du ménage peut conduire à une scolarisation différentielle des enfants. Dans les pays d’Asie du Sud-Est, la relation entre la taille du ménage et la scolarisation des enfants est négative ; par contre, dans les pays d’Afrique sub-saharienne, elle est positive. Ces conclusions ressortent des travaux de Marcoux (ibid.) en milieu urbain malien, et Lloyd et al (1994) sur sept pays de la même région.

Le statut matrimonial du chef de ménage

Le fait que le chef de ménage soit célibataire, monogame ou polygame peut exercer une influence sur la scolarisation des enfants, la préférence pour l’envoi des garçons plutôt que des filles à l’école, et même le parcours scolaire de ces enfants. Kobiane (2002) reprenant Marcoux (1994), fait remarquer que les garçons appartenant à des ménages dont le chef est polygame présentent les plus forts taux de scolarisation alors que chez les filles, ce sont celles qui appartiennent à un ménage où les coépouses vivent ensemble qui sont les plus scolarisées. Cependant, Pilon (1996) et Lututala (1996) (cités par Kobiane, 2002), font le constat contraire, à savoir que les chefs de ménage monogames scolarisent plus les enfants que les polygames.

1.2.3.     Les facteurs culturels

Le statut de la femme

En Afrique, la répartition traditionnelle des tâches est telle que la femme s’occupe de tout ce qui est relatif à l’«inside», c’est-à-dire les relations avec l’intérieur (du ménage), tandis que l’homme s’occupe de l’«outside», c’est-à-dire des relations avec l’extérieur. Outre ses fonctions reproductives, la femme a donc la charge d’exercer les travaux domestiques. Le garçon sera de ce fait envoyé à l’école, en tant que futur pourvoyeur de finances, contrairement à la fille, dont on estime que la mise à l’école pourrait la détourner de son rôle de « future mère ».  D’où la sous-scolarisation de cette dernière par rapport au garçon. De nos jours, on note cependant d’importants changements par rapport à ce modèle traditionnel de base (Kamdem, 2010). En effet, à travers une analyse des opinions sur la sous-scolarisation des filles dans deux groupes ethniques du Cameroun, il est démontré que la plupart des informateurs désapprouve la sous-scolarisation des filles car « elle favorise la prostitution et la marginalisation des filles » ; l’instruction n’est plus seulement perçue comme une garantie d’un bon emploi rémunérateur, mais aussi comme un facteur qui « rehausse l’image, l’estime, bref le statut de la femme » (Kamdem, 2010 : 181).

La religion

Dans plusieurs groupes ethniques, il existe des croyances religieuses d’après lesquelles l’école serait sans valeur pour les enfants, en particulier les filles. Yacouba Yarou (1996) et E. Gérard (1998) dans leurs études portant respectivement sur les provinces Séno et Bani au Burkina Faso et le canton Baya au Mali, mettent en exergue l’influence négative de l’islam sur la scolarisation des enfants, notamment celle des filles. Evina Akam (1990 :35) fait un constat semblable au Cameroun, à savoir que « Les populations de religion musulmane ou traditionnelle se sont singularisées pendant longtemps et ce, jusqu’aux premières années d’indépendance du pays par leur faible ouverture à la culture occidentale véhiculée par la scolarisation ».  

L’ethnie

Les attitudes et comportements en ce qui concerne la scolarisation des enfants varient d’un groupe ethnique à un autre. Les ethnies ayant embrassé le christianisme ont plus facilement intégré la scolarisation des enfants, et ce pour les deux sexes. C’est le cas des Baganda de l’Ouganda (Akoto, 1993). J-Y. Martin (1972) quant à lui, au terme de ses recherches au Cameroun, classe les ethnies en trois catégories, suivant leurs attitudes face au système d’enseignement : une attitude de refus, une attitude d’adhésion et une attitude d’adaptation.

Le niveau d’instruction du chef de ménage

Pilon (ibid.), dans l’étude susmentionnée sur la scolarisation des enfants dans quelques pays d’Afrique subsaharienne (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Sénégal, Zambie), met en évidence l’effet du niveau d’instruction de chacun des parents sur la scolarisation des enfants. Il observe que le niveau d’instruction des mères apparaît au moins aussi important sinon plus que celui du père pour la scolarisation des enfants. En effet, plus le niveau d’instruction est élevé, moins il y a discrimination des filles.

Le milieu et la région de résidence

Les inégalités d’accès à l’école des filles et des garçons sont visibles en fonction du milieu et de la région de résidence. Une étude de Wakam (2000) au Cameroun a montré que les enfants du milieu urbain avaient nettement plus de chances de fréquenter un établissement scolaire que ceux du milieu rural, et que les inégalités entre filles et garçons seraient plus grandes en campagne qu’en ville. En effet, l’offre de scolarisation est plus élevée en ville. En outre, en campagne l’attachement à la culture est plus marqué.

1.2.4.     Les facteurs économiques

Le niveau de vie du ménage

L’influence du niveau de vie du ménage sur les disparités entre sexes en matière de scolarisation a été démontrée par plusieurs études. Senda Lusamba (2001) explique les inégalités entre filles et garçons par les difficultés économiques et sociales. Cette thèse est proche de celle de Piamale et al (2004) pour qui la condition économique du ménage joue un rôle important dans la décision des parents de scolariser leurs filles.

L’activité économique du chef de ménage

L’activité économique du chef de ménage discrimine la scolarisation des enfants. A l’issue de certains travaux, Levison (1997) et Marcoux (1994), ontfait remarquer que les enfants appartenant aux ménages où le chef est un travailleur indépendant sont plus exposés au risque de travailler, par conséquent au risque de ne pas être scolarisés, par rapport à ceux vivant dans des ménages dont le chef est un travailleur salarié.

II. Hypothèses, données et méthodes d’analyse

2.1. Hypothèses et variables

L’étude pose l’hypothèse générale suivante : Les inégalités de scolarisation entre filles et garçons sont influencées par le contexte de résidence par l’intermédiaire de l’offre scolaire, des caractéristiques du ménage et celles du chef de ménage d’une part, et d’autre part de façon directe par les caractéristiques du ménage, celles du chef de ménage et les caractéristiques individuelles de l’enfant.

Le contexte de résidence est appréhendé par le milieu de résidence. Les caractéristiques du ménage sont mesurées par le niveau de vie du ménage, la taille du ménage, la présence d’enfants de moins de 5 ans dans le ménage. Les caractéristiques du chef de ménage concernent son âge et son sexe. Les caractéristiques de l’enfant font référence à son âge, son sexe, et son lien de parenté avec le chef de ménage. La scolarisation est mesurée par la fréquentation scolaire actuelle des enfants (garçons ou filles) âgés de 6 à 14 ans qui est la variable dépendante.

L’indicateur de mesure des inégalités sexuelles en matière de scolarisation est le rapport des taux de scolarisation. Cet indice est noté IPT (F/M), avec pour modalité de référence le sexe masculin, et est calculé de la manière suivante : IPT (F/M) = TF/TM où TF et TM désignent respectivement les taux de scolarisation des filles et des garçons. Lorsque la valeur de l’indice de parité des taux IPT (F/M) est inférieure à 1, cela veut dire qu’il y a existence des inégalités sexuelles en matière de scolarisation en défaveur des filles. Quand cette valeur est égale à 1, on peut conclure à l’égalité des chances de scolarisation entre les enfants sans distinction de sexe. Cependant lorsque l’indice est supérieur à 1, cela est synonyme de l’existence de discrimination en défaveur du sexe masculin.

L’étude teste trois hypothèses spécifiques :

Hypothèse 1 : les inégalités de scolarisation entre les filles et les garçons sont plus prononcées en milieu rural qu’en milieu urbain.

Hypothèse 2 : les disparités en matière de scolarisation entre les enfants de sexe masculin et ceux de sexe féminin sont plus accentuées dans les ménages dirigés par un homme que dans les ménages ayant une femme à leur tête.

Hypothèse 3 : les filles vivant dans les ménages de petite taille sont plus susceptibles d’être victimes de discrimination en matière de scolarisation que celle vivant dans les ménages de grande taille.

2.2. Données et méthodes d’analyse

Afin de tester les hypothèses de cette étude, les données de la 4^ième Enquête Démographique et de Santé (EDSC-IV) combinée à l’Enquête par Grappe à indicateurs multiples (MICS) sont utilisées. Cette opération de collecte de données a été organisée de Janvier à Août 2011 sur l’ensemble du territoire camerounais par l’Institut National de la Statistique (INS). Elle a concerné 19 thèmes, dont celui sur les caractéristiques des logements et de la population des ménages, où l’on retrouve des informations sur la fréquentation scolaire des enfants. Au total, 6332 enfants de 6-14 ans ont été identifiés.

Ces données présentent cependant quelques limites pour l’analyse de la scolarisation des enfants. On peut noter l’absence d’informations importantes pouvant permettre une meilleure compréhension du phénomène étudié : c’est le cas des informations relatives à l’offre scolaire. Cette dernière est un déterminant de la scolarisation des enfants, en ce sens que sa présence donne déjà aux enfants des chances d’être scolarisés.

Deux méthodes d’analyse sont ici utilisées : l’analyse descriptive et l’analyse explicative. L’analyse descriptive consiste en l’examen des associations entre chacune des variables indépendantes retenues et la variable dépendante (qui est ici la fréquentation scolaire) à travers les tableaux croisés et les statistiques du Khi-deux y afférentes. Mais l’analyse descriptive ne se limite qu’à mettre en relation deux variables, ce qui est insuffisant pour bien cerner les facteurs explicatifs d’un phénomène, car les relations obtenues au niveau bivarié bien qu’étant significatives, peuvent être instables : en présence d’autres variables, elles peuvent se révéler être réelle (en se maintenant ou en se renforçant) ou plutôt fallacieuses (disparaître ou apparaître). Il est donc nécessaire de procéder à l’analyse multivariée explicative, qui permet la prise en compte simultanée de plusieurs autres variables explicatives afin de déterminer l’effet net de chaque variable indépendante sur la variable dépendante. Dans le cadre de cette étude, c’est le modèle explicatif de régression logistique binaire qui est utilisé.

III. Principaux résultats

Les résultats obtenus au terme des analyses descriptives et explicatives sont présentés au seuil de significativité de 5%.

3.1. Analyse différentielle des inégalités de fréquentation scolaire entre filles et garçons de 6-14 ans dans le Nord Cameroun

L’examen des variations des inégalités de scolarisation entre sexes a permis de saisir les associations entre la fréquentation scolaire et les variables explicatives à partir des tableaux croisés au niveau bivarié. Ainsi, il ressort que le milieu de résidence, l’âge du chef de ménage, le sexe du chef de ménage, le niveau de vie du ménage, le nombre d’enfants de moins de 5 ans dans le ménage, le lien de parenté avec le chef de ménage sont significativement associés à la fréquentation scolaire.

3.1.1. Fréquentation scolaire des enfants et milieu de résidence

Le tableau 1 présente les taux de fréquentation scolaire des filles et des garçons au moment de l’enquête et les indices de parité des taux filles/garçons selon le milieu de résidence. Il en ressort que le milieu de résidence est significativement associé à la fréquentation scolaire des enfants de 6 à 14 ans dans les 03 régions du Nord-Cameroun. En outre, on remarque que l’IPT est plus faible en milieu rural. En effet, on y enregistre 88 filles scolarisées pour 100 garçons ; tandis qu’en milieu urbain, on a 95 filles pour 100 garçons, soit un écart de 7 points. Cette situation peut s’expliquer par le poids de la culture qui reste élevé dans cet environnement, où les mariages précoces sont encore en vigueur.

Conclusion

Le rapport mondial sur l’EPT rappelait en 2002 l’urgence pour les pays de s’investir pour l’atteinte des objectifs fixés à Dakar en 2000. Le contexte de précarité économique dans lequel évoluent les pays d’Afrique noire n’est pas sans conséquences sur l’accès à l’éducation, comme l’observe Joseph Ki Zerbo (1990 : 25) lorsqu’il affirme que « Une économie qui s’effrite ne peut qu’accompagner le déclin de l’éducation ». Le Cameroun a réalisé de nombreux efforts pour développer l’offre scolaire ces dernières années. Mais les trois régions du Grand-Nord restent en marge de ce développement socio-éducatif, et continuent d’enregistrer les taux de scolarisation les plus bas, et les écarts les plus prononcés entre filles et garçons scolarisés. 

La recherche des facteurs explicatifs des disparités de fréquentation scolaire chez les 6-14 ans dans cette région a permis de voir qu’au niveau bivarié, six des sept variables indépendantes retenues sont significativement associées à la scolarisation des enfants : il s’agit du milieu de résidence, de l’âge du chef de ménage, du sexe du chef de ménage, du niveau de vie du ménage, du nombre d’enfants de moins de 5 ans dans le ménage, du lien de parenté avec le chef de ménage. Au niveau explicatif, cinq facteurs ont été identifiés, ce sont le milieu de résidence, le sexe du chef de ménage, de l’âge du chef de ménage, le niveau de vie du ménage, et du nombre d’enfants de moins de 5 ans dans le ménage.

Plus précisément, les résultats suivants ont été obtenus :

Les enfants vivant en milieu rural sont ceux qui ont moins de chances d’aller à l’école. Et c’est dans ce milieu qu’on note les plus grandes distorsions entre les filles et les garçons.

Les enfants issus de ménage dirigés par un homme ont moins de chances d’être scolarisés, et ces ménages enregistrent les plus grandes disparités entre garçons et filles.

Les enfants de 6 à 14 ans vivant dans un ménage dont le chef est âgé de 45 à 59 ont les plus grandes chances d’aller à l’école moderne.

Les enfants qui vivent dans des ménages pauvres (niveau de vie faible) sont ceux qui ont les plus faibles chances de fréquenter l’école moderne ; on y observe les plus grandes disproportions entre les deux sexes.

Plus un ménage compte des enfants en bas âge, plus grandes sont les différences de scolarisation des enfants, et ce sont les filles qui sont défavorisées.

Ces résultats ont permis la confirmation des hypothèses 1 et 2 portant respectivement sur l’influence du milieu de résidence et du sexe du chef de ménage. La 3^ième hypothèse n’a pas été validée, car dans cette étude la taille du ménage n’est pas apparue comme un facteur explicatif des disparités de fréquentation scolaire des garçons et des filles dans l’enseignement primaire au Nord- Cameroun.

L’étude présente quelques limites, principalement le manque d’informations sur l’offre scolaire, qui auraient été d’une utilité indéniable pour cette étude. La présence et la répartition des infrastructures scolaires, la présence d’un personnel enseignant qualifié, du matériel didactique suffisant, l’accessibilité géographique et financière sont autant d’éléments qui jouent un rôle dans l’envoi des enfants à l’école et leur maintien dans le système scolaire.

Au vu de ces résultats, les recommandations suivantes sont formulées :

Sur le plan politique :

Poursuivre l’initiative d’implémentation des infrastructures éducatives dans les milieux ruraux, afin de permettre aux enfants de ce milieu d’être instruits.

Sensibiliser les agents socialisateurs dans ce milieu, c’est-à-dire ceux qui sont chargés d’encadrer et d’éduquer les enfants : les parents, les communautés, les chefs traditionnels et religieux sur l’importance de l’instruction en général et celle de la femme en particulier.

Encourager la scolarisation des filles dans ces milieux à travers l’octroi des facilités (bourses, fournitures scolaires, etc.).

Encourager la mobilisation des élites du Nord-Cameroun en faveur de l’éducation dans cette région, comme cela se fait déjà dans le département du Mayo-Sava. La stratégie a consisté par le passé à intervenir auprès des autorités politiques afin de les amener à prendre des actes créant un établissement scolaire, un lycée ou un collège dans une localité précise, à envoyer du personnel enseignant dans une zone qui en est dépourvue. Cela a contribué au renforcement des pratiques éducatives dans une région jadis présentée comme étant réfractaire à l’école.

Organiser des séances de causeries éducatives à l’endroit des hommes, particulièrement ceux qui sont chefs de ménage pour leur montrer l’importance d’envoyer les filles, autant que les garçons à l’école.

Le ministère chargé de l’aménagement du territoire et les autres ministères sectoriels doivent veiller à une bonne répartition des infrastructures dans la région, à la création d’activités génératrices de revenus, à la création d’emplois décents afin de permettre aux ménages pauvres d’accéder à un niveau de vie acceptable pour que la scolarisation des enfants ne constitue plus une lourde charge financière.

Organiser des séances d’IEC et de CCC[2] avec les agents socialisateurs, afin de lever les obstacles culturels et les réticences à la scolarisation des filles aussi bien en milieu rural qu’en milieu urbain, en dénonçant, les pratiques de mariages forcés et précoces ; cette initiative devrait s’accompagner d’une valorisation de l’image de la femme en général et de la femme instruite en particulier. Ces séances d’éducation devront aussi dénoncer les pratiques néfastes telles que le fait de confier aux filles la charge des enfants en bas âge au point de les empêcher d’aller à l’école.

Valoriser l’image de la femme dans les manuels scolaires. Car comme l’observe Mimché (2006) «A la lecture des manuels scolaires, le quotidien des femmes reste dominé par la vie domestique, comme si elles ne se limitaient qu’à des fonctions de reproduction ». Il est important de faire disparaitre ces habitudes déjà conventionnelles.

Sur le plan scientifique :

Mener des études approfondies sur le sujet, aussi bien qualitatives que quantitatives, afin de connaitre la perception des parents sur la scolarisation des filles. Cela permettra de connaitre les déterminants familiaux de la scolarisation. Il serait intéressant que ces études tiennent également compte autant que faire se peut de l’offre scolaire disponible dans la région.

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