Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to Women of the Middle east podcast, Women of the Middle east. This podcast relates the realities of arab women and their rich and diverse experiences. It aims to present the multiplicity of their voices and wishes to break overdue cultural stereotypes about women of the Middle east. My name is Amel Malki. I'm a feminist scholar and educator. This is Women of the Middle east podcast. Hello and welcome to season six of Women of the Middle east podcast. I hope you all had a wonderful summer and you're ready to delve back to into women stories from the Middle east. The Woman of the Middle east podcast is all about creating new narratives about women of the Middle east by the women themselves. Expanding on season four theme voices across genres, season six represents women's stories standing on the themes around which their life stories could be presented and told. We have a very lovely woman whom I've really wanted to meet for so long. We have Lina Abirafar.
Lena, wonderful to have you on women of the Middle east podcast.
[00:01:16] Speaker B: I'm honored and delighted. Just the fact that something like this exists, I think, is testimony to how successful you've been. We've been. Women now are in the region, so I think bravo. First of all, it's something to be proud of.
[00:01:32] Speaker A: Thank you so much. I want to start with the first theme I wanted to construct this season around themes around which all of our stories are really written, one of which is hybridity. And this is something that we both share. My father is Qatari, but my mom is Lebanese and her family is originally from Palestine. I understand what hybridity means because it's a lifelong experience for myself, and this is why I wanted to stand on it, because you've been talking about this for some time, but there's still areas that you haven't talked about. So, as women, our identities are certainly multifaceted, while we're different things to different people, different times, and different contexts where as well, in a constant negotiation between who we are at certain moments of our lives and in relation to the space and others. Your story as a hybrid defined you in the past and continues to define you until this moment. I want to hear more about what hybridity. We didn't have the language back then, and by the way, we shared the same year of birth, too.
So I know that in the seventies and eighties, there's no such a thing as hybrids. And then hybrids came to describe cars. So what did hybridity mean to you when you were growing up?
[00:03:01] Speaker B: I think what's beautiful and rich about it, I can see now in retrospect is the fact that you don't inherit a lot of things. You have to make conscious choices. So when you have so many different identities, sometimes in competition with each other, you can't just take things for face value. It, in a way, keeps you from being lazy because you actually have to think about what each part means. And then if you are so inclined, and this was definitely me, you have to make a choice about what aspects of the different identities you want to adopt and which you want to adopt when you are, I used to say a hyphenated person. I'm Lebanese and Palestinian. I'm arab and american. I am from different religions. I'm a lot of different things. When you have so many hyphens, on some levels, it's very easy to get lost in the cracks. You will lose yourself in the hyphens, in the gaps and in the empty spaces.
But as an adult, as I evolved, as I developed a feminist consciousness, I decided that I would choose, that I would think about what all of those things meant to me, and I wouldn't have to take a single one if I didn't want. And I found that to be a very interesting space. And it was enabled definitely by the fact that I didn't grow up in any of the countries that I was supposed to be from. So in the end, I was always an insider and outsider. And even when I started doing humanitarian aid work, I guess because I'm brown, people wanted to put me in a box that they felt was familiar to them. So working in a country like Afghanistan, people wanted me very much to be Afghan, or at least to understand it. They say, okay, if you're not Afghan, you're arab, so you get it. Or other countries where they said, you're not like, you're not like foreign, you're not local, you're something in the middle, but that helps us. So I learned to leverage that as well. So for me, it's been an interesting negotiation as a young person, but an absolute gift as an older person.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: But going through that, I bet you went through an identity crisis somehow, continuously.
[00:05:10] Speaker B: I'm probably going through one even now. I think it's an evolving process.
[00:05:15] Speaker A: How did you manage with being identified as different as the other in a certain context? Right. And this is what I think I went through at the beginning within this society, because I felt that I had to conform, that you were either from us, with us, or against us.
How did you negotiate that? How did you turn that difference into a leverage that would give you an open path towards diversity and dealing with others and bringing others together.
[00:05:50] Speaker B: I felt as a young person, you're right, people want to understand you. They want to put you in a very small box that is familiar to them. And I desperately wanted to fit in. My entire history is one of not belonging. And I found that to be very uncomfortable initially. You learn as you get older that being other is a superpower, gives you a lot of freedom. Because when you continuously. I was trying to fit into the boxes people wanted me to fit into, and I just couldn't do it. It just wasn't comfortable. So I kept pushing and realizing that I was. You feel it in your stomach when you're denying who you are or you are doing something that doesn't feel authentic. And I felt the discomfort and the guilt of that. So when I finally realized that I didn't want to be those things, that was also uncomfortable, because it alienates you. And people then don't understand you, so they don't associate with you. So it's a little bit of a lonely life. It's a hard path to choose. But then when you stop allowing people to define you, you all of a sudden have a blank slate. You have total freedom. You have this beautiful silence without the cacophony of what you should be and should do. And it also comes with a lot of cultural baggage, like as a woman, as an arab woman, a lot of the haram and all of that stuff, the shame and blame that comes with what you are supposed to do and be and say and wear and study and date and everything. Your entire life is regulated. But when you push back on all of that stuff, suddenly there's the silence. There's the quiet of who do I want to be? Who am I, really? That's a scary place, and I think it's never done. I'm always asking myself those kinds of questions. And that's. I think that's a critical part of building an authentic life, is never feeling like I finished. This is what I know very well who I am. But I do allow myself the space and the grace to evolve and to change and to learn and to discover new parts of me. Even now, professionally, I'm reinventing entirely. I'm sure we'll talk about it. But just to say that even now I'm in a reinvention where I have to sit in that silence, even if it's uncomfortable, and decide who am I? What do I want and what's at my core, what do I really value?
[00:08:07] Speaker A: Now the second theme is being a woman from this region in specific, which also multilayered. So what has led you to expand your activism publicly and instead of focusing your efforts, like many women from this region, on the personal struggles that we go through on daily basis, to maneuver through those intersectional levels of. So instead of focusing on that, you went publicly. You went publicly to help others, but also to educate others. There must be a gender story, something that has hit you so hard to define you as a woman who wants to guide and lead.
[00:08:50] Speaker B: It's interesting. The origin story comes from a place of anger. It comes from a sense as a girl, as a little girl, of injustice, that something made me uncomfortable, something was wrong with the way that I felt, the way that I was treated, the way that other women and girls were treated. I probably inherited so much of this anger and this sense of what is right and wrong. And then it's an interesting process, because I was the kid who asked a lot of questions. I was the kid who said, why are we doing this? Why, as a kid who had a saudi child said, mama, why are you covering? Why can't I go? Why can't I go do this? Why can't I play outside? Why can't I? Always pushing boundaries? I was a very difficult child, I think, and difficult children, good, in our defense, being stronger adults, if you channel it. But for me, this idea that I just felt so, that something was not right and it was personal in many ways, because as a girl, you inherit and internalize this feeling that you are less than. And sometimes you can't put your finger on it. It's like what they say, death by a thousand paper cuts. It's like little, little things that just. That hit you and you think, that's just. That's not right. That's not how the world should be. That doesn't feel good to me.
And I didn't have a name for those things. I didn't have an understanding of the anger that sat in my stomach like a rock, these little things that accumulate, the rock that turns into a bigger. A boulder, that turns into a mountain that has to go somewhere. That was me. And when we finally moved to the states, that was a very difficult period. At age ten, mid eighties, not fitting in. Defining who I was. The word terrorist was definitely a popular word. Mudslinging against me as an immigrant, as a woman, as a brown person, whatever, all of the things, you know. And I felt that sense of injustice even more strongly. And when I was 14, this might be my pivotal moment, because I've learned the vocabulary to define the rock in the stomach. When I was 14 and I was in high school and I took a class called comparative women's history. And I talk about this class all the time, because there are moments in your life where you finally feel like I am, I'm right. I wasn't wrong this whole time. It wasn't just me. It's not just here. It's not just now. It's all of us. It's everywhere. It's all the time. And that set off the bomb in my heart. And I said, oh, my God. When you take a class like comparative women's history, you might expect something that celebrates the history of women and our contributions to the world and different countries and what we've done and all the unsung heroes and celebrities and whatever. What I got instead, as a 14 year old already angry kid, was our shared history, which is a history of violence. And I thought, this is exact. I get chills even now talking about it, because I feel like that was the moment that crystallized everything for me, where I said, these aren't just my feelings or my problems or my sense that there was something wrong. This is everywhere. And that was it. It gave me a source of my anger, a justification for the anger, a vocabulary for the anger. And that was when I started on the path, and I'm still on that path. I'm still talking about the same thing. So anger about the same thing. And I will give my entire life to this. I wake up every day for this, and I will do this until I die. But the idea being that was the moment that I can distinctly remember where I was given the affirmation that this was bigger than me. And that's when I took it in my mind. I took it global. I was only 14. I didn't do much at that point, but I started marching. I started protesting. I started writing about it. I wrote my first paper on a form of violence against women, and it was female genital mutilation when I was 14. And people are like, where'd you get. What is this? You're such a miserable person with a miserable subject. Where'd you get this stuff? Even my parents were like, I was obsessed. And anybody who knew me back then, family and friends and whoever, will tell you I have never, ever changed, which I think is funny, actually.
[00:13:21] Speaker A: It's good that we don't want to change. We want this anger to thrive in our belly, to be ignited all the time, because this is what moves us forward.
But speaking about that, how did you manage to channel that anger again into a public role, I'm sure during the eighties, for example, again speaking about hybridity and how our gender identity has been formed, Lebanon, for example, was going through hell in the eighties. Did that resonate with you? What other stories from the region you thought that, oh, wow, if I was there, that could have been me, to.
[00:14:00] Speaker B: Be honest, when we left the region, I didn't think of the region specifically, but I thought of myself connected to all women. I really saw the global sisterhood and I saw the global injustice, and it didn't matter to me where women were hurting, just that they were hurting. And that was enough, you know? And you asked like how I catalyzed that anger. And I want to go back to that for 1 second, because I was recently speaking to a group of young girls and I love this. Again, I get chills, I get so emotional about it, because they're girls between the ages of twelve and 15. They are much stronger, much smarter, much more assertive than I certainly was at that age. But that is a really critical time in a young girl's life. I think I told them this story about how I discovered this anger and how it built inside. And I said, we all have it. Like, what happens, I think, is the idea that you accumulate these kinds of experiences. And finally there's one thing, and maybe it is the cumulative effect, the death by 1000 paper cuts, whatever it is. But there is a moment, or there is the issue where there is the thing that crosses your red line and then you say in your heart, halas, enough, done. This is it. This is the moment, this is the limit. I cannot take anymore. And that is where that anger is. That's a magic spot in a way. That's a sweet spot, is that I told these girls, because that means that's where your principles are, that's your core, that's where your heart is, that's where your values are. And that is the moment that you can take that anger and turn it. Your red line is crossed, you cross over, you turn that into some kind of an action, and that action can be channeled into change. So it really is. It sounds very simplistic that anger leads to action, needs to change, but it's true. That is how movements have been made and battles have been won and change has been achieved. It is because it starts with that one thing where you say no more. And I said to them, let's talk about all the things that upset you. What makes you mad when you ask a bunch of young girls what makes you mad? You get a list. It was fun because I said of those things, you've come up with a list of 20 things that make you mad if you had to pick one that really, like when you learned about it or experienced it, heard about it, that it hurt, felt like someone punched you in the stomach. That's the one. Focus on that one. And what are you going to do about it? Because it's got to be upsetting enough for you, it's got to be painful enough for you that you can't not do anything about it. And that's where. That's your calling. When that was how it was for me, there was no choice. Like nothing would have stopped me. And that was. And I find that so interesting and unusual because I was young, what did I know? But I was determined. Everything I read, everything I studied, every paper I wrote, every volunteer activity I did, everything. I was hungry for it. I said, I'm just going to absorb and do everything I can to learn about this because otherwise I'm going to just explode all over the place.
And that's how I did it.
[00:17:11] Speaker A: And it's amazing. I know that you've touched on your global feminist consciousness. Of course, being a feminist is one of the huge themes in your story. As a feminist aid worker and academic, you've journeyed through different feminisms and across several feminist ideologies. As a feminist belonging to this region, we find ourselves, for example, constantly having to distinguish between our own brand of feminism and between white feminism and western feminism. What do you think of that? And what would you say your feminism ascribes to?
[00:17:48] Speaker B: It's an interesting question because I feel like we're boxing ourselves in again. Am I obligated, I ask people to choose between what is a white feminism, which is an uncomfortable label, or a brown feminism, which I suppose, you know. I guess I'm brown. You want to put me in brown feminist box or an arab brand of feminism which could be very different within the region based on the sub regions or a developing world feminism. Again, this is exactly what we pushed back on in the very beginning. To say don't box me in and don't force forced me to pick this or that because then I will pick neither one. At least that's me. I felt it with countries. Are you lebanese or palestinian? Are you Druze or are you greek orthodox? Are you this? Are you arab or are you american? No, I want to be both. And if you force me to decide, I'll tell you I'm nothing. Because the feminism that I feel the feminism that I ascribe to is extremely personal. It is about what I believe is right, remedying an inequality that I see everywhere, and I see that globally, and I see the different manifestations and people align with one brand of feminism or another. But I don't, and I won't, because as an arab woman who lives in the states, what does that really mean to me now? As an arab woman who spent less time in the Middle east proportionate to other countries?
Was I living in Papua New guinea, subscribing to a Papua New guinean feminist? How narrow do we want to make this? Are we doing ourselves a disservice? In many ways? And I don't like when people force me to choose things because I say I will continue to follow my passion and my sense of justice and my belief that the world is built on a phenomenal injustice to women and girls all over the world. And if you are a feminist that is white or brown or blue, it does not. It means you maybe experience things differently. But there are so many nuances to that. There are socioeconomic levels that we don't talk about. To reduce things to color, for me, is one level of analysis, but it is not the only level. What about people who are differently abled? What about all of the different aspects of our identity that we bring into our feminism that have to be negotiated within that? What about it? So, for me, and I feel like if I'm going to start defining specifically what kind of feminist I am and stay in that box all the time, that's not going to leave me a lot of room.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: No, I agree with you.
[00:20:23] Speaker B: I can march here in New York with women who are white because they are fighting for bodily autonomy and integrity. And I believe in that. I can ally with women in Iran and in Morocco now, after the earthquake and whatever, my values are clear, but labels are not for me.
[00:20:46] Speaker A: Yeah, I hear you. I don't want to move without talking about the m word.
So I believe that women across the borders share distinctive and very intimate experiences as a woman. Right. One of which is monopoles. Besides Munattahauy, I haven't found any personal accounts until I found your article. And I think it's time for us to collate these authentic accounts of women who are going through what we are going through. Right. And what other women will inevitably go through one day. What made you write this article?
[00:21:23] Speaker B: That's funny, because I write about things that are bigger issues that are happening to women or the mundane things that I experience in my daily life. So I write about. I think it's in the micro, in the macro. It's everywhere. And it was my own experience of looking at my body, thinking, what's going on here? There's an alien that has occupied my body, and I don't understand. And then I started to make the rounds. Doctors and things. Everybody said, go to the gastro, go to the gyno, go to the internist, go to the specialist. I did everything except for a podiatrist, really. I couldn't believe how many doctors just threw me back and forth. And that's also the american medical system. That's a whole other criticism. But just to say that there was never a sense that this is a process you're going through, it's going to manifest in many different ways. You might not have hot flashes. You might have this. Not that, but it is normal, and it's okay. And this might look like this, and just keep an eye on these things. No one ever did that. I remember one time I went to a session on menopause, and I received a card that said, here's a list of the 50 possible symptoms. You can check the ones you feel. You might feel some today, you might not. You might feel some in a year, you might note. But it left me with a lot of freedom, though, to say, okay, all of these things. Oh, this feeling of, like, irritability, or when I put my cell phone in the fridge by mistake. Oh, that's normal.
I needed that card, became like, my best friend, because it validated all of those things where I said, oh, okay. And then I started to look at myself with a little bit more kindness. Not, you're losing it. You're going crazy. You're unraveling. It's just an evolution now. We are not having this conversation at all sufficiently. You're right. Moneta. Howie does it. I love her. I love her courage. I love her candor. We need to do more of it. I have some ideas for. I'm writing a book now, but I have a next book already in my head. Maybe one of those will. We'll see. We'll talk about it offline, because maybe.
[00:23:17] Speaker A: We should write it together, Lina, you know? Because, seriously, this fills a gap. Unfortunately, in this part of the world, Monopoles is a taboo. Even the moment I started speaking about it publicly, all of the women around me, my age or older or even younger, would say, but don't. Why are you? As if it's a stigma. I appreciate.
I'm very thankful that I've reached this age, and as a woman and as a feminist, I know that this offers me an opportunity to reinvent myself. Two, okay? Because now my priorities are different.
I'm physically being told that my priorities should be different. My priorities should be myself, my mental health, my physical health.
[00:24:05] Speaker B: I feel like we inherit a history of being unkind to our bodies from the minute we develop a consciousness of our female bodies. There's that aspect. First of all, we are coming at this with so much scrutiny that we put on ourselves, society puts on us, men put on. So already there's that rubbish that you have internalized. Then there's the idea of anything having to do with your bodily functions that is viewed as dirty.
Menstruation, childbirth, even this idea that I don't want to see it and I don't want to know. And it's gross. It's not gross. It's natural. And the more we normalize these conversations and deny the. And the taboo around it, and no, I'm not going to be isolated, because I'm what are incredibly natural processes and quite powerful processes about this, our cycle and our powerful abilities to reproduce and our bodies that kind of renew and reinvent themselves. It's really extraordinary. And then the other problem. So add to all of that the idea that when menopause decides to land or creep in slowly, whatever it's doing, we are viewed as sexually obsolete. You're not breathing. You're not even attractive according to social standards. Whatever they are today, they change every five minutes. Who can keep up with that? So who cares? And then the other problem, they're layered problems. The other one is overall medical care. Scientific research does not prioritize our concerns. Again, this has been said so many times, but the idea of the funding and the research that went into to Viagra, God bless it, compared to other things for women's sexual health. And imagine, I've got another thing. Conversations about women's rights to sexual pleasure. Whoo. I say things like that and people are like, okay, hang way this away. That's too much. You also want to feel good. I'm sorry, but you're really asking for a lot, girls.
[00:26:02] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
[00:26:03] Speaker B: It's unbelievable how we are denied the rights and we are dismissed or gaslit when we want to have these conversations that are not just natural, they are critical, they are important. They are part of our fundamental rights as living beings.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: Now, this takes me to the theme of being an academic. How can we bridge the worlds of academia and activism when, as the freedoms are shrinking all around us, especially for civil society and women groups in the MENA region. What could we do to bridge those two? Sometimes people think two different worlds.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: It's interesting because I call myself an accidental academic, because my academic life was born from anger, surprise, but also curiosity. And I was in Afghanistan at the time, and I looked at things that we were doing and I was doing and living and seeing, experiencing, hearing from the women. I'm thinking, there's more to this story, and I want to understand. So it was my own curiosity, my own desire to do better, my own desire to critically reflect on the work that I myself was doing in that moment. So I was like, I want to critique myself, which is a weird thing to do, because I think academia is so built, at least old fashioned academia is built on, like, observing the natives from a distance and you critique them. You've got nothing to do with it. You have no part in the story. You're just an observer. You're never just an observer. You know, you are implicated in that reality. Even the minute you set foot, the minute you set your gaze on that, you are already playing a role. You are already part of it. For me, my academia, my academic principles are built on lived realities. I became an accidental academic because, as I said, please forgive me, I wanted to bitch constructively. I said, no one is listening to me now. But maybe if I really, I go deep, I think, I write, and I come back with a degree that I can wave at people, then they will listen to me a little better. Okay. They listen to me, like, a little bit more, but not much. I laugh at the degree. Now, you're going to love this because I appreciate it. I earned it. I really worked hard for it. And I continued to work full time as I was studying. So now I go to Lebanon, or I go to whatever, and people say Madame au mademoiselle, and I say, doctor.
And then they're like, it's funny because it's a good conversation stuffer. But anyway, all of that to say, when I took over as executive director of the Arab Institute for Women 2015, I really wanted to make it hybrid. I wanted to make it academic and activist, and it had to be both. We cannot afford to be ivory tower academics talking about women's rights and lives as if we're examining them like bacteria under a microscope. It is happening all around us. It is happening with us. It is happening to us. We are here and we are in it, and it has got to be real. It's got to be valid. It's got to push agendas for social change and policy change. I understand the reason for academia in abstraction, but it has to be relevant. It's got to have, it's got to be both. That was the push that I made, the adjustment that I made at the institute, and I think that was very true to its core founder and its original, its original goal, to be something that was relevant to women and meaningful to their lives, and hopefully impacting them in positive ways. Doing something, doing the thinking that would enable the change that was going to make their lives better.
Thats really what I did. Looking at whats going on with women in conflict, whats going on with women in politics and positions of power and leadership and decision making, what's going on with women in urban environments and spatial arrangements, what's going on with, well, all of that stuff, because I'm a rapidly curious person. I wanted to see all of these things around me and understand them better so that we can build them better, better for women and girls, because we deserve better. So that was it. And so I don't divorce my academic curiosities from my activist tendencies because they're mutually reinforcing. Having said that, even though I've written a bunch of academic things, it's not my favorite way to write and it's not my favorite way to share information with people. In fact, I worry when I write these things, which now I don't write anymore. I did three academic books in Halas. That's why I'm writing something practical now.
I worry it's only for the people who understand that particular language and nuance and the way that academics are supposed to write. A so already that's isolating an elitist. Plus, you're only preaching to the choir. Really, it is far more effective in some ways for me to blog about an issue than to write an academic book about it, because the blog will go farther, faster, and it will reach people who otherwise would not pick up the whole book and read, will not delve into the theories, will not care, and I don't blame them. Having said that, I think it's an important marriage. And the stuff I've learned from academia, I then blog about and digest it better.
[00:31:04] Speaker A: And it's wonderful to be able to be both. Right? I'm an academic who converted lately to activism. It was very important to me to be an academic, to write and lecture in English, because also you need to produce knowledge that is authentic by the women themselves. But at the same time, I hear you, there are things that you need to engage with firsthand and this is where activism comes in. What do you think the main achievements of the Arab Institute for Women are so far?
[00:31:35] Speaker B: Oh, my God, so many. This is the 50th anniversary of the institute. So, number one, survival. Survival for 50 years is an achievement that we cannot understate. The idea that this institute was born in a context, in a region, first of all, in a region where nobody even imagined such a thing could be born. Right? It's the good story we never tell. And I think that's unfortunate that this institute was established in 1973. It's older than us, meaning it happened at a time when even around the world, there were not that many institutes. It is one of the. One of the early institutes globally, the first in the region and one of the first in the world. So you can imagine what a position of prominence that is. And I think we don't celebrate that enough. At the same time, what the institute has done as a voice for women, by women in the region, I think, is so powerful. It is a name, it is a brand, it has inspired other institutes in the region, and I love that, and I want that to continue to happen. I want us to be able to join together across all of these lines, country lines, national lines, arbitrary borders that weren't drawn by us to say, let's put these institutes together and let's be powerful. Let's be much more powerful than we could be apart. We're not in competition. So the fact that we have maybe birthed and inspired or helped the creation of other institutes, I think, is a major victory.
The creation of academic programs, of research that is focused on women's lives and making them better, like I said, of working on development and community based projects as an academic institute, I think, is very pioneering. Our biannual journal that's been in publication since 1976, it goes, I could go on forever, because this institute deserves all of the celebration, and I think it never gets enough of it. And especially the fact that these days, as it, it's a regional institute, but as it sits in Lebanon, and the crisis and layers of crises that Lebanon has undergone over the last few years, it's drowned out any sense of joy and victory in celebration. So our 50th anniversary is muted because we're in a context where truly, what, 80% of the population is now below the poverty line. It becomes very difficult to create the space for celebration when I. When people are starving.
But, and now my role at the institute is very different. I'm no longer the executive director. I call myself the fairy godmother of the institute, which is a role that I love because I want to. I really want to make. If I can make magic happen for them, I will. If I can sprinkle some wisdom or love and support or cheer for them, I will like and then disappear into the background. That's exactly the role I want to play, not just for the institute, but for others as well. In this new incarnation, as I now reinvent myself, I think for the third time, the idea of supporting and cheering from the back end, lighting fires and helping fan the flames of whatever future feminism is going to take, I think that is the role for me. And I love that. I don't need to be on the front lines. I don't need to be the front base. I don't need to be the head of this and that. I don't need a big position. I don't need a title, nothing. I'm sitting here at home in my pajamas, writing my books, doing my blogs. But when people come and seek me out for advice or conversation, guidance, inspiration, a match, that's what I want to do. Yeah, that's the stuff I love.
[00:35:12] Speaker A: Lovely. Okay, so the last theme is on being a humanitarian. And I know that this is very close to your hearts. With 24, five years of experience in humanitarian work as an aid worker, combating violence against women, that would never stop, apparently. What are the lessons learned? What are the hard facts that you were faced with?
Could you tell us a bit more about what you learned?
[00:35:39] Speaker B: This is. I am sitting here trying to write a book about this. I'm trying to. I'm writing a memoir means looking at your life on the screen, at least for me, and coming to terms with what it was and what it will still be. Right. But when you assess what you've achieved.
When I went into the field, when I started this work, I wanted radical change. I wanted to work so hard and for so long, do whatever it takes to work myself out of a job because I just couldn't stand it. And I depleted myself, truly. But I did. I did it with all of the enthusiasm and the belief that this was the right thing to do. It is. I still think it is. And I could not see the small victories along the way. I could not see them because I wanted the whole thing. I wanted the whole damn thing to stop. And I wasn't going to be the person to do it alone, obviously, but I wanted to work harder and farther and more countries, and I kept going and going, almost to the point of burning out myself because I think it feels like an impossibility. What I really learned, as I come to terms with my life on the screen, is that hope is in the microscopic stuff. It's in the tiny stuff. It's in a conversation that I had with a young girl in a country, somebody I was able to help in a very fleeting moment. Maybe I didn't realize it at the time, a woman in Sierra Leone that I did something for that, then turned into something else. It really is this possibility that tiny seed of hope is planted, and it will take root long after I'm dead. Maybe. But those are the things that I now see as enough. Watching a woman write her name for her for the very first time, a woman who is almost as old as you and I, who never learned to read or write, who struggled for survival, begged for food, children, survived a war, lost the husband, just went through all of the unimaginable things.
And when I met her, she was begging on the street and said, I'll do whatever. I just need money.
And when she joined the program that I was running, this is in Afghanistan, actually. And she came to me after six months and she said, I see that I've learned something that I can use to make money. I'm making jam. I'm selling the jam. My life feels a little bit better. I don't have to worry about food on the table every day. I can plan for one week, which is amazing. My children are fed. I sleep better at night. Now I see that there are these classes where women are learning to read and write. And I realize I never cared to write my own name, and I've never once done it, and I want to do it today.
And it was one of the most emotional things I've ever seen. Because I thought it's not just about her writing her name. It is about her saying that she is here, that she exists, that she has a right to it, that she wants to learn, that she has desires and is going to achieve them. And it all came just at the writing of this name. That was her name. And I felt this sense from her of having arrived. And it was a magical moment. And when you think about it, that's nothing. 80% of afghan women still can't read and write. And now the country's occupied by the Taliban, and now schools are. It is very easy to allow yourself to be absorbed and, in fact, to drown in all of the depressing realities that we as women have to endure in countries all around the world. But to hold on to those little hopes, I think, is what I learned, because they're contagious they're very powerful, and they will grow. And if you really look for them, you start to see more and more of them, and that's where the change lives.
[00:39:35] Speaker A: This is a wonderful realization, right? And I bet it's recent with all of the changes that's happening in your life, because this is exactly the realization that I've reached and.
And made me step down as a dean because I wanted more. I wasn't happy. I'm very passionate the way you are, but just felt the limitations and the constraints and did not enjoy the small wins. And now I understand that the small wins are what we have right now. To sheriff, I absolutely agree.
[00:40:11] Speaker B: And it's such a nice way to look at it because, you know, in work like ours, you go into it wanting radical change, and you're not going to achieve it. That's a problem with this type of work, is that it's very difficult to measure. I can't go into a country, can work and work and then emerge and say, okay, no more violence there. Who's next? There's no. There is never a moment where I can do that. There's never a moment where I can even measure what I've done. How do you look back on your life and measure it, especially in context where you feel like the setbacks are continuous and it is always this dance. What I learned is all you can do is just build things a little better so next time the bad stuff comes around, it hurts a little less. And that doesn't sound particularly encouraging, but I think it's true. It's the idea that with every single cycle around, with every single war, every single setback, it gets a little bit easier to manage. We get a little bit stronger. The victories, these small glimmers of hope get a little bit brighter, and that's how it's going to move, very slowly, and we have to be okay with that and continue to light those fires as much as we can. And I keep saying, when I'm long dead, I want to look down and see all of the flames. That's what I want. All of these fires that have been lit in the bellies of these people, people who think, I'm not going to take this anymore. Yeah. And I think that's the stuff I tried to say when I did a TEDx talk in 2015, and it was the first time I had to reflect on me personally. And they said, what is the one thing you want to say to people, if you can say one thing? And I said, I would say, start where you stand, look around. You don't have to go far to do good, right? I always say that because it's true. People are like, I don't want to go to Afghanistan. You don't have to. All you have to do is open your eyes, and once you see what's going on around you, you will always see. You will see how prevalent it is and how great the needs are and how much needs to be done. And you can do it right here in your home, in your school, on your street, in your work, in your recording studio. Everywhere you are, there is a role that you can play, and all you have to do is step up to it. That's all you have to do.
[00:42:20] Speaker A: Absolutely. Now, since the beginning of our conversation, I feel there is change in the air. You've been trying to allude to things that. That are happening and will happen. So what's the next theme that you would like to write in your story?
[00:42:36] Speaker B: Oh, gosh. It's this. It's the memoir that is happening right now. I decided that I would sit and process it, and I wrote it all in two months. And now I have to organize that. I have to look for an agent, I have a publisher. I have to do all of these things because this is a message that needs to go wide. This is not about a niche, academic subject for people who are curious or who are already deep in that topic. No, this is something that needs to be like, if I may, like the eat, pray, love of the aid world, you know what I mean? Something that people find very relatable, even if the context, they're not relatable. And I get very personal in the stories. I talk about my own experiences in the field, my experiences being sexually harassed by colleagues, my experiences doing this sort of like, it is very much personal. So I am writing myself back into the story, and it is a weaving of my story and the stories of women I've worked with. It is a story, the woman who wrote her own name, and so many stories like that, because I was there, I played a part. We had conversations. We impacted each other's lives, and we're both different or both better women, better people as a result of that. And so I feel like telling the story that way is, for me, really interesting. And really, it gives me a nice sense of closure for that phase of my life. And what I really want to say to young women who are just starting out as activists, who are angry on the street, who see their rights being stripped away, who are here right now in New York for the UN General assembly asking what we're talking about and if it's relevant to them and where they are and why things haven't changed faster and 131 years until they quote. I want to tell them that, yeah, it's a tough fight and it's a long fight, but it is a worthwhile fight. And if you look for those little bites of hope, that's what's going to sustain you and you can do it. And maybe you'll be the ones to finish what we couldn't finish.
[00:44:40] Speaker A: I can't wait to read it.
I really hope that one day in the near future, all of us would come together and talk and collaborate somehow and this would be a final theme, collaboration.
[00:44:57] Speaker B: I love that. I love that. I think that's very much the future and I think it will happen sooner than we think. And that's such a part of my core belief, this idea that we really are all in this together and we are stronger when we're together. And the more that we share and exchange and collaborate and believe in each other and cheer each other on and fairy godmother for each other, the better it's going to be. And that's exactly what I want. For me, it might not be achieved in my lifetime. I want to hear about it from the stars. I want to know that. I want to know that we did it. And I feel like maybe I had a small part to play in, in pushing things forward in the right direction. And that's. And to me, that's enough.
[00:45:38] Speaker A: You are an integral part of this fight for social justice, equality and dignity for a woman, not just in the arab world, but also worldwide. Lena, thank you so much. It was wonderful to talk to you.
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