What the meek inherit

 

Well, you’ve made your bed and you’ve lain on it,

now it’s time to rise, throw off the sheets

and forge a new mattress from these hardships

even if that means you’re out in the streets

in the night. Look up, there’s a skyful of stars

for you still, a full moon - there’s room to breathe,

there’s space to become who you really are.

Some future planet may be for the meek

but this earth isn’t. And a true princess

will not put up with a pebble nor a pea,

a bedframe of arbitrary injustice,

headboards of unkindness and discourtesy.

Throw off those covers, step out - the world’s broad,

there’s fairness round the corner, down the road.

For all my sisters who've suffered unspeakable injustices due to/during the pandemic. 

Fifty Percent

VIII.

Tell me about the skilled women

who dye the cloth and spin the yarn,

who raise the invoice and basins,

who love and break and mend and darn

and yet they tread so light footed,

their prints are easy to wipe off;

the jingle of their anklets fades -

it rings just once and then it stops

and when the book’s opened again

there is no trace left on the page -

the work they did, the yarns they spun

are rubbed out of the percentage.

Speak of the quiet fifty percent

who’re rubbed out, the erased segment.

Last week, I posted a sonnet from a series I am working on - Ninety Nine Percent, and Elephant's Child commented - 'And teach me about women, whose work is both imperative for our survival and so often ignored.' Which was super uncanny because....!! well, great minds and all that... :) 

So I thought I'd put it up. 

Paper boats

Photo by Artak Petrosyan on Unsplash 

Paper boats on the river,

house of cards on the sands;

love walks on calloused feet,

winds wipe off the prints inland.

It stops sometimes, slumps and limps -

that too shows up in the prints.

Parchment leaves on the water,

fragile webs on a twig;

hope’s hands are slowly bleeding

popping dreams far too big.

The glass is cracked, the ice melts,

the heat is high, there is no help.

The brands are stocked in the shops, 

contract’s signed on dotted lines,

the top’s all yearly bonus,

the bottom marks overtime.

This glass ceiling’s pretty cute

depending on the side that’s viewed.

Fake and antifake uptrend,

history is just a hashtag -

edit, crop, rotate to suit.

There are two sides to each flag.

Several stripes, wheels, rockstars,

each with its own piece of war.

Back to writing it as it comes and keeping it short. Less agony for all concerned parties :) Still a little hungover, seem to be obsessed with rivers and riverine stuff such as confluences and boats, wonder why?  

The day's already getting noticeably shorter, light's failing by five thirty. I love all seasons, but autumn is my favourite, except I miss the long daylight of summer. But happy to do without the heat. The festival season is round the corner. Always a time for quiet glee. 

And it's also time for the spooky challenge sign ups over at Write...Edit...Publish...nothing quiet about that, I assure you...

W is for...Women...and Wrong impressions

is for

Egyptian musician Maii Waleed, collaborating here with Zeid Hamdan, a Lebanese producer, in Hsafeer Ba'aeid 

and also Dina el Wedidy, another emerging Egyptian musical star, with her Sokoun (Tranquillity) -

And if you are not in the mood to read a long and somewhat cantankerous post, you should stop while the going is feel-good with this music.  But if you want to feel hot and bothered like me, then go right ahead…

Women

I keep getting these vibes from non-Arabs about how Arab women are ‘oppressed,’ ‘not empowered,’ ‘can't access education,’ and somehow ‘forced’ to wear the hijab. Let’s talk some facts and kick the stuffing out of these stereotypes!

Firstly, Bahrain, where I am now: Bahraini women’s situation in particular is different from their much larger and notorious neighbour Saudi Arabia. Here’s an excerpt from a book by a couple of Western authors, one of whom grew up in Bahrain.

Bahrainis are more politically advanced than elsewhere in the Arabian Gulf because Bahrain has a longer exposure to Western style institutions. Prior to 1930, the Ruler of Bahrain appointed a British advisor who introduced elements of British law into the Bahraini legal system. Bahrain was the first country in the region to hold parliamentary elections in 1973 and 2002, women were probably the first in the region to have the right to vote.

Culture Shock! Bahrain: A Survival Guide to Customs and Etiquette – Harvey Tripp, Margaret Tripp.

According to the UNDP study on Gender Inequality, Bahrain is second among the GCC countries in Gender Inequality Index (GII), second to UAE by a hairsbreadth. Here is a recap:

Country	GII 2016	Global Rank (in 188 countries)	% women’s share of seats in parliament	% female population 25+ with some secondary education (male)	% women  in labour force (15+)
Arab
Libya	0.167	38	16.0	65.7 (44.2)	27.8
UAE	0.232	46	22.5	77.4 (64.5)	41.9
Bahrain	0.233	48	15.0	61.6 (55.6)	39.2
Saudi Arabia	0.257	50	19.9	63.3 (72.1)	20.1
Oman	0.281	54	8.2	59.8 (57.1)	30.0
Tunisia	0.289	58	31.3	37.5 (49.9)	25.1
Kuwait	0.335	70	1.5	56.8 (58.1)	48.4
Lebanon	0.381	83	3.1	53.0 (55.4)	23.5
Algeria	0.429	94	25.7	34.1 (35.7)	16.8
Jordan	0.478	111	11.6	78.5 (82.7)	14.2
Morocco	0.494	113	15.7	26.7 (33.2)	25.3
Iraq	0.525	123	26.5	35.8 (55.5)	15.1
Qatar	0.542	127	0.0	70.9 (67.8)	53.6
Syria	0.554	133	12.4	34.8 (43.4)	12.2
Egypt	0.565	135	2.2	54.5 (68.2)	22.8
Chart-topper n benchmarks
Switzerland	0.040	1	28.9	96.1 (97.4)	62.7
UK	0.131	28	26.7	81.3 (84.6)	56.9
USA	0.203	43	19.5	95.4 (95.1)	56.0

It leaps off the page that in most Gulf countries, more women than men have secondary education. Bahraini women certainly are not denied schooling!  In twenty years, I haven’t met a Bahraini who was not literate. The overall literacy is 95.7% here, so it figures! 

A greater percentage of women participate too, in the labour force in the Gulf as compared to other Arab nations. Political participation is a different matter altogether, but then again, nowhere in the world is it perfect, is it? Not even in the strongholds of democracy do women have adequate representation, so what of these here, which are just a few decades into their lives as independent nations? 

Now onto Egypt, where I was just before I came to Bahrain. Egypt is a painful instance of regression over the last few decades, they started out very differently.  Again, don’t take my word for it, I am an outsider, read what Alaa al Aswany, a famous Egyptian author, essayist, social commentator and a US-trained dentist, has to say:

In the aftermath of the 1919 uprising against the British occupation, the pioneering Hoda Shaarawi took the Turkish burka off her face at a public ceremony as a sign that the liberation of the country was inseparable from the liberation of women. Egyptian women were truly the pioneers for women in the Arab world: the first to be educated and to work in every field, the first to drive cars and fly planes, and the first to enter parliament and government.  But at the end of 1970’s Egyptians fell under the influence of fundamentalist ideas and the Wahhabi school of thought proliferated, with the support of oil money, whether through satellite television or…the Egyptians who worked for years in Saudi Arabia and came back saturated with fundamentalist ideas.

On the State of Egypt – the Issues that Caused the Revolution.

Alaa al Aswany.

For all the depressing figures, there are still many, many educated women working in every field in Egypt, and across all of Arablands.  A quarter of the Egyptian female population is still more than 10 million.  

This is not to claim that women’s situation is not a concern – in Egypt particularly - Wahhabism, Female Genital Mutilation and sexual molestation remain major issues.  But it is equally wrong to assume all Egyptian/Arab women are uneducated, powerless, browbeaten, spineless wilting lilies, covered top-to-toe in veils, who don't know their own minds. This attitude is patronising and insulting and frankly, weird. Read about some prominent Egyptian women here. 

And watch this Saudi video which went viral last year.  The lyrics translate to 'Oh God rid us of these men.' :) Times they are a-changing, even in the final bastion of patriarchy! 

Oh yes, nearly forgot - the misplaced Worry re hijabs. I've known Arab and Muslim women who wear it, and those who don’t. As a random example, I once knew a young woman who wore the hijab to work because she didn’t want to “deal with hair issues at 6 a.m.” and never covered her hair for social occasions/in the evening.  And I have known others, deeply devout, who wore it as a religious duty. Some women wear it as an identity marker, others as a fashion statement. There's no law that forces women to wear the hijab in Bahrain. Or Egypt, though there has been a spike in veiling as mentioned before.

It seems to me beyond belief that the hijab is conflated with degree of freedom, or ambition, or education, or anything else. It's a non-issue, women should be free to make their own choices re attire and not be discriminated against for wearing/not wearing a scarf, or a dupatta, or a certain length of hemline, full stop. People really need to get over this obsession with what women wear, everywhere in the world! 

An apology for the length of this post, and thank you for your patience if you've read through till here.  It's just one of those topics where word limits get thrown into the wastepaper basket. 

Posted for the A-Z Challenge 2017