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A Trip to Remember
A Trip to Remember
- by Fawzia Afzal-Khan
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Only last week I was soaking up the sun's rays on the terrace of the Greater Cairo
Library, while wolfing down boxed lunches of chicken sandwiches and salad (that
reminded me of the delicious chicken sandwiches at Lahore Gymkhana)—in between
radio and television and print media interviews and animated conversations with fellow
participants at the Sixth Annual AWSA conference in Cairo, far away from the cold
January blues of New Jersey, USA.
"AWSA" stands for the Arab Women's Solidarity
Association, a pan-Arab organization dedicated to the uplift of Arab women through
research and action.
This AWSA conference was held from January 3 through 5, 2002. Indeed, its theme,
"Women and Global Change," was meant to bring together academics, activists,
researchers, scholars from around the world to join in solidarity and resistance with the
members of AWSA, against the ill-effects of capitalist globalization, whose most obvious
targets have been the poorest of the poor: women.
My own conference paper, or "intervention" as I prefer to call it, was in the form of an
analysis of certain conditions resulting out of such globalization policies as Structural
Adjustment Programs in countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh, for example, where
women at the bottom end of the social and economic hierarchy (the majority)--are forced
into a migrant labor pool with little, if any, protective legislation to ensure their basic
human rights. I then tied my analysis to the resultant increase in trafficking of women in
South Asia in recent years, a topic that provides the plot and theme of a play in the
repertoire of the Ajoka Theatre Troupe of Lahore, which produced Dukhini, written by
Shahid Mehmood Nadeem, about the plight of trafficked Bengladeshi women in
Pakistan, conjointly with Pakistani and Bangladeshi artists, and co-directed by a Pakistani
woman director, Madeeha Gauhar, and a Bangldeshi one, Sara Zakir in 1998.
The problem of coerced prostitution is of course, a world-wide one, and audience-
members responded enthusiastically to my analysis as well as to having learnt something
about the particular dimensions of this issue as it affects South Asia, especially Pakistan;
they seemed equally delighted by the fact that I sang a few verses from a "kafi" by Bulleh
Shah, one that I sang many years ago as an actor in another of Ajoka's plays, a song that
symbolizes the resistant power of women. The role of art in general, and theatre in
particular, in illuminating difficult societal problems and serving as a kind of catalyst for
cultural and political change, was, I felt, deeply appreciated and understood by the
conference participants and attendees.
There were many other moments of rapport between us, some especially sweet because
of their strangeness. For example, on a lovely dinner cruise down the ancient Nile river
which the conference participants were invited to on the next-to-last evening of the
conference, we were treated to both the sexualized realm of the female belly-dancer, and
the sacred realm symbolized by the swirling movements of the male dervish dancer.
When I was invited to sing with the Egyptian band on board, I decided to de-stabilize
such spurious boundaries between male/sacred and female/sexual, between the divine
spirit and the earthly body. I sang, once again, the poetry of our Sufi saints, a poetry that
does not recognize such boundaries; and, lo and behold, a woman, wrapped in traditional
hijab, got up in front of this "mixed" audience, and started to dance with abandon to my
singing! It was a wonderful sight, a glorious moment– and again, just reaffirmed my
belief that human beings have similar needs and desires everywhere, and to deny the
pleasures of the body in the name of the spirit (as the extremists in our societies wish to
do) is an unholy act which we must fight against.
As Citizen of the World, I must make alliances with people on the basis of shared humanitarian
principles, not narrowly defined beliefs propagated by mullahs and ministers alike. I realized that
I was hardly alone in my belief that the people of our planet are desperate for, and deserve, a
better message, one based on peace and love and tolerance, not hatred and anger that the Osamas
of this world have been ramming down our throats in recent times.
On the plane ride back home to New York—which is just as much my "home" as is Lahore, and
as should be Cairo, or Paris, or London, or Sydney, or any of the places where my politics and
passions take me towards liberation from the mind-numbing, spirit-shattering dogma of
patriarchal religiosity no matter what its brand—Islamic, Judaic, Christian, Hindu. Here's to
solidarity for a better world!
I may be contacted via email at: khanf@mail.montclair.edu
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