I am Amani Haydar. My mother was murdered by my father. My grandmother was murdered by the Israelis: Même combat.(Some quick thoughts around Amani Haydar, The Mother Wound, Sydney: Macmillan, 2021.)

This book was distributed to bookshops yesterday. I already knew what it was about and I’ve been waiting for it. I think I was the first person to purchase a copy at my local bookshop, Gleebooks, yesterday. It was still in a box at the back and I had to wait for them to open the box for me. I started reading it in the afternoon and finished it at 3.00 am that night. I was going to start writing my comments there and then but thought I’d better sleep on it so I can write something just a little bit more coherent than an after midnight rave.

Like many in Sydney, I had followed the media’s coverage of the murder of Amani’s mother, Salwa, by her father. I was perhaps more interested than others because I had met Salwa in Sydney previously when organizing ways of commemorating the many victims of Israel’s failed, but destructive and murderous, attempt to subdue Hizbollah in 2006. Salwa’s mother, Amani’s grandmother, Layla was killed (indeed, obliterated) by an Israeli criminal bombing that targeted a car convoy of civilian escaping their village. But I didn’t know about the significance of the loss to Amani herself until I became aware of her activism, writing and artwork. Her portrait of herself holding a photo of her mum holding a photo of her mum was an Archibald Prize Finalist in 2018.

 

But what made me most eager to want to read it were two questions before all else. The first was: what kind of authorship and what kind of writing is needed to overcome the difficulty of writing a book about male domestic violence centred around your father murdering your mother? In my mind this could only be a kind of heroic writing that I was eager to read. The second question was: How do you write critically about patriarchy within an Arab Muslim setting, in a book destined for the general public, knowing that, no matter how you write, your words will be mauled and disfigured by the Islamophobic hyenas. I knew that Amani was up to the task. I have read some of her previous writing. So, I wasn’t asking myself whether she could or not. I just wanted to learn more about how she has done it. But already, by telling you that I was up well past midnight finishing the book, I guess I have already told you that I was far from being disappointed. This is indeed a heroically and subtly written book, full of insightful gems, that everyone must read.

 

First all, the book is very well crafted. One feels throughout that the writing, in the sense of the kind of words used and the modes of constructing sentences and paragraphs, is exactly the right kind required to express something as painful and psychologically demanding. It allows the author both the needed proximity and the equally needed distance. But the book is also well-crafted in the sense of it being a story that is exceptionally well-told. I am not sure if it is a suitable term to use when dealing with such serious, and seriously gutting and heart-wrenching, subject matters, but parts of the book do read like a thriller. It makes you eager to turn the next page to know what happens next even when you know what ultimately was going to happen next. Amani uses writing devices that also make the description of the court proceedings a page-turner. Perhaps the fact that she is a trained lawyer helped here. And she also introduces a testimony with a ‘secret’ referred to as ‘the thing’ that makes us eagerly await page after page to know what it is. I am not sure if Amani uses ‘the thing’ here with an awareness of the psychoanalytic genealogy of the term, but what is exceptional, and particularly powerful feat of writing, is how ‘the thing’ ends up being articulated around a critique of what is accepted as evidence of abuse in the court of law. And at the end of the book, when you think the story has been told and it is time to wrap up the text is augmented with exceptionally insightful commentary about storytelling that gives the book a certain raison d’être that is well beyond the individual and the therapeutic: ‘The best story telling is that which builds a community and it is, in turn, a communal responsibility to make the space – in courtrooms, media, schools, society – safer for stories. That way, victims know that they are welcome and supported to reclaim their narrative and thereby reclaim their world.’

 

As a tale concerned with male sexuality, patriarchy and migration, a topic I have dealt with in my academic work, I found the story of her father’s gradual loss of control speaking to two issues I have often encountered in my fieldwork. To what extent they help think the case of Amani’s father is not for me to decide but I can say that reading about what she described helped me to further think through the way I theorised the cases I am studying:

 

First, the loss of patriarchal control is experienced not merely as a loss of power but a disintegration of a primal patriarchal fantasy of being mothered, whereby the role of the mother (and later the wife also imagined within this fantasy as having the task of mothering her husband) is to create a space of absolute mothering: where everything and everyone around the male exists to service their needs. A particularly patriarchal mode of imagining ‘heaven on earth’. Because it is a fantasy space of absolute control it becomes so emotionally charged that any minor disruption, any minor moment when a woman looks the ‘wrong’ way or does the ‘wrong’ thing is experienced as disastrous and a threat to one’s primary well-being.

 

Second, in the cases I have examined, the patriarchal fear is not just a fear of losing control. What is most unbearable is seeing those whom you previously controlled flourish and leave you behind, socially stuck and unable to move along as successfully yourself: not only is my wife doing better than she was doing when she was under my thumb, but she is actually doing much better (getting better jobs, more education, networks, etc.) than I can ever do myself. It is a patriarchy-in-decline jealousy born out of comparative existential mobility. I thought I could see elements of this process in Amani’s story.

 

One of the most original aspects of the book is the way Amani articulates the killing of her grandmother by the Israeli army and her mother by her father (both with claims of being injured parties on the defensive). Amani explicitly shows herself to be aware of the importance of intersectional thinking to better understand the articulation of patriarchy, race and class in the way domestic violence among immigrants works. But in the way she articulates the killing of her grandmother by the Israelis and the killing of her mother and the working of the justice system in Australia, she seems to be pointing to another intersectionality, an intersectionality between different forms of patriarchy that operate at a family, social/national and international/colonial level. 

 

I thought that the book dealt exceptionally well with the question of the universality and cultural specificity of these patriarchal processes and particularly the question of patriarchal violence. For it is always easy to think that one has to choose here. Is this about Muslim patriarchy or is it about patriarchy, tout court? My anthropology tells me that any choice would be a false choice. The task is always to continually fluctuate between degrees of universality, or at least generality, and degrees of specificity. To say that the book is about Muslim patriarchy without making an effort to see in what way it is about patriarchy in general would be a mistake. But it would be equally a mistake if one deals with patriarchy as a general category and ignoring it culturally specific forms. This always has political consequences.

 

For if it is true that racists have used the patriarchy of the other as a way of getting away with their racism, it is also true that sexists have used the racism of the other as a way of getting away with their sexism. As Amani puts it: ‘Such is the double-bind Muslim women survivors and activists find ourselves in. Between the screeches of Islamophobes and the booming voice of patriarchy within our own community, there is little room left for Muslim women to share their truths.’ She does an excellent job at finding some room and working within it but she also more than amply shows how this ‘double-bind’ is constructed. Indeed, the way her father’s lawyers organise his defence offers a rather breathtaking exemplification of this mobilisation of cultural specificity in the defence of patriarchy. But Amani herself is quite aware how important cultural specificity is but she is also aware of the limits, and necessity to limit, the work of cultural specificity. As a male, I could easily say this book is not about me. It is about Muslim males from a rural background. I am an urban cosmopolitan Christian Lebanese. I would be right to a certain extent but there will be a point where I would be using cultural specificity as a defence mechanism to stop myself from reflecting on my own sexism. It would stop me from asking, for example, a question that I need to ask myself: in what way does my short temper and occasional explosions of anger in continuity with the kind of male violence analysed in the book. Where does my anger and my mode of expressing it position me on the patriarchal spectrum, as it were? and how do I work critically on myself to continue to minimise the anger itself, rather than minimise its importance?

 

Without essentialising (as she is clearly blessed with an exceptionally wonderful male partner), Amani clearly wants to address all men: ‘I’m cynical about men. That’s not my fault: it’s theirs’.

 

The least we males could do is read her. So go, and pick up your copy… now… and make your COVID lockdown useful to help you thrive, flourish and become a better person.

Sutton, Walshe and Pascoe: Empirical truth and racist intensifications

 Let me begin with these three anecdotes. They might appear to be unrelated to begin with. But as I will show they all take us to the issue I want to raise here. They came to my mind in the recent media coverage given to Peter Sutton and Kerryn Walshe’s critique of Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu and the social media commentary it has generated.

 

Anecdote 1: 

I am in the car listening to a US radio program. The interviewer is talking to a member of an evangelical sect who had predicted the end of the world on a precise date. It was sometimes in 2005 or 2006. I am writing this from memory. I can’t recall the exact date. What I recall is that the person being interviewed was discussing his sect’s eschatological position. According to the sect the end of the world was accompanied by a state of ‘rapture’. For those who don’t know, ‘rapture’ refers to a belief that at the ‘end of time’ Jesus will snatch all the true believers from the earth and towards the heavens while the non-believers stay on earth and burn and suffer to death. This particular sect, according to the man being interviewed, held a particularly gory version of this: if you are a believer, not only did Jesus ‘suck you up’ away from earth and towards the heavens, but he actually suspends you mid-way through this process so that you can ‘enjoy’ the sight of the non-believers burning and suffering before finally going to inhabit your well-deserved heavenly realm.

 

This was all discussed in the interview. But the point of the interview was that neither the end of the world nor rapture happened at the date it was supposed to have happened according to the sect. The radio interviewer was pretty calm and understanding about all this (I remember thinking: in a way that only liberal Americans can be). Indeed rather than mocking the man or cornering him with the failure of the prediction, the interviewer was trying to help him find a way out. He suggested that maybe the end of the world is not as sudden as we like to imagine it to be. Maybe, he said, it will happen slowly as with global warming. The man’s reply remained and will remain with me forever. ‘Ah. Global warming. The jury is still out on this’ he said.

 

The man accepted the end of the world and the rapture unquestioningly despite the absolute lack of empirical data to support that view. But he doubted the validity of global warming despite the enormous body of empirical data validating it. In the first case he acted as if he couldn’t care less about the question of ‘empirical evidence’. In the second case, he was denying the facts presented by the majority of the scientific community, not by acting as if he didn’t care about facts, but by posturing as if his scientific standards of proof are much higher than all those scientists combined. For in the matter of global warming, unlike in the matter of the end of the world, nothing but the most stringent empirical proof can do.

 

The anecdote highlights the classical difference between belief and knowledge. It brings to mind arguments against thinking those as a binary opposition between different people, as if some people dwell in the world of belief and some people dwell in the world of rigorously evaluated empirical knowledge. In fact, most people’s views are a mixture of beliefs and empirical knowledge. But it also brings to mind something Pierre Bourdieu argued in relation to Levy Bruhl. It is mainly social scientists who have a vested interest in knowledge for knowledge’s sake who dwell primarily in the world of rigorously evaluated empirical knowledge. To demand an investment in rigour from everyone is a form of scholastic fallacy: a belief that everyone is motivated by pure intellectual pursuit. For most people, knowledge is subordinate to non-intellectual practical ends.

 

It is a mistake to think that it is strange that a man who believes in rapture is unable to engage in an empirical pursuit of some truth or another. But it is a mistake to think that the empirical pursuit of the truth is motivated by nothing other than the search for the truth. In the above case, it is clear that it is not the man’s search for the truth that has led to his position on global warming. It is his position on global warming that led to his cynicism towards the dominant existing knowledge on the subject. He was using a form of mega-empirical posturing as a way of reinforcing his belief.

 

Anecdote 2:

A group of people in my local café are discussing a news item in the morning paper. A Palestinian-background male doctor in Sydney was convicted of sexually assaulting his female patients. The man was clearly a creep, drugging his patients and assaulting them in his clinic. One of the women in the café was saying exactly that: that the man was a creep. But she was saying it with particular intensity that distinguished her reaction from that of the other women she was talking to and who clearly agreed with her. I was trying to guess where this intensity came from. I thought she might have been perhaps a victim of sexual abuse herself. But then she said: ‘that’s what you get from seeing a Muslim doctor’ (the doctor, as could be recognised from his name, was actually a Palestinian Christian). 

 

I was struck by the fact that, being partially deaf, I still heard this clearly. The woman felt totally comfortable saying this in a public space. She didn’t even try to lower her voice while saying it. It became clear to me that at least part of the intensity of her reaction was a racist intensity. I remember wondering at the time how one is to point to this racism without wanting to be seen to be defending the doctor. It initiated a long reflection on this question. But it also made me think of something that the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan once said. That it is a relief to find a good reason to hate someone one hates for no good reason at all. Racialized people behaving badly are a source of psychological relief to the racists who hate them just for who they are not for how they behave. The intensity referred to above is the symptom of the relief their bad behaviour provides. Similar forms of racialized intensities became a more generalised phenomenon during the public debates about Sydney ‘Lebanese gang rapes’ at the turn of the century.

 

Anecdote 3:

It is 2002 or 2003, I am presenting a paper at a staff seminar in my own anthropology department at the time, at the University of Sydney. It is a piece of ethnographic work on male sexuality in a Lebanese village and its transformation in the process of migration. The paper argued that the usage of the concept of ‘phallocentrism’ as a metaphor in depicting some forms of masculinist cultures should not be universalised. I showed that the particular masculinity in the Lebanese village I was investigating (so I wasn’t generalising about a ‘Lebanese sexuality’ either) was phallocentric in an actual not in a metaphoric sense: that is, it was a penis-centred masculinity. After presenting the paper, a Lebanese-background man I did not know approached me to say that he is disappointed about me reproducing what he saw as ‘negative stereotypes’ about Lebanese male sexuality ‘given what has recently happened.’

 

I immediately understood what he meant by ‘given what has recently happened.’ He was referring to the above-mentioned ‘Lebanese gang rapes’ controversy which had indeed only just abated. I was taken aback by his comment and taken aback by the fact that he was positioning my research in events that had nothing much to do with it as far as I was concerned. The research was actually based on interviews with Lebanese migrants living in Boston. I reacted defensively saying that this was a social scientific anthropological research, and that what I am interested in has nothing to do with how people in Sydney discuss Lebanese male sexuality. I asked him if he was an academic and he said he wasn’t but that my name and the topic of my presentation piqued his interest. ‘As you know, a lot of people are interested in what you have to say’ he said. I replied, always defensively, that this was a specifically academic seminar and that I wouldn’t argue in the same way if I was discussing things on television. 

 

Part of me was genuinely annoyed at the idea that I should let the racism of some people in some part of the world like Sydney decide what research outcomes I should discuss or not discuss. At the same time, I was also worried about the ramifications of my stance. Isn’t that what the scientists who invented nuclear power said about the atom bomb? To be sure, it wasn’t that I was equating my findings with the discovery of nuclear fissure (!) but the socio-ethical questions were the same. Can I really act as if the world of research and science is a world independent of the more general social space in which it is occurring? It is not. At the same time, another question that leads to the opposite path was equally valid: can I be a professional without wanting to establish the autonomy of my findings vis a vis how some people outside the academic field invest in them? There is a social scientific field that is autonomous from the wider social field and where the questions that are asked and the issues that are raised ought to be asked and raised because of their academic and scholarly value not because they reinforce or challenge some politicised stereotype or another. Over the years, I cannot say that I found a satisfactory resolution to this dilemma. However, if I were to see this man again, I would thank him for ensuring that I always think about this dilemma as an unresolvable contradiction in which social researchers dwell and have to negotiate as best as they can. 

 

I trust that people can see how these anecdotes and the questions they have generated are relevant to the way we think about the public discussions generated by Sutton and Walshe’s critique of Dark Emu. Every such specialist debate with social ramifications occurs in what Bourdieu calls a ‘restricted’ and a ‘wide’ field. Debates about music or cinema happen between musicians or film makers (restricted field) and between the consumers of music or film (wide field). In much the same way, one has to be clear about the difference and interconnection between professional anthropological debates and the populist media debates they generate. One cannot treat the two as if they are the same, but nor can we treat them as if they have no bearing on each other. Nor is the value of an anthropological work solely based on the way other anthropologists perceive it. Rightly or wrongly, there are many works that have left a lasting effect on the public imagination, and that continue to be seen among the best of what anthropology can offer in that they move us in the right direction in our search for a better world, while being questioned scientifically: two different bodies of anthropological works come to mind here, the work of Margaret Mead and that of Carlos Castaneda. I am not sufficiently expert in Indigenous anthropology to have a strong view as to whether Pascoe’s work will end up being seen in this way. But it clearly has the potential to move us in this way. If so, Sutton and Walshe’s critique will matter very little regarding the social circulation of the work. My lack of expertise in the field also stops me for judging too categorically Sutton and Walshe’s critique, although I am more than willing to admit that many issues that have been reported to be part of their critique sounds right to my anthropological ears. 

 

But I also wonder if Sutton and Walshe are asking themselves the question regarding the significance of the populist interest in their work that I had to ask following my lecture. Do they really think that the media/populist interest in their work is an interest in truth? Is it? One can immediately think of the many fact-based critiques of the whitewashed early historical accounts of ‘the settlement of Australia’ that never got the kind of populist attention they are now receiving. And, far from me to equate their valuable scholarly critique to Keith Windschuttle’s petty number crunching mode of searching for the truth, one has to ask if it the media/populist interest in the ‘truth’ of their work is not itself actually treating the two exercises as if they belong to the same order of scholarship.

 

It would be a mistake to think that racists do not use empirical facts. But it would be a mistake to think that their usage of facts comes from an interest in the pursuit of truthful facts. For I can already see in the intensity of the populist critique of Pascoe that same racist form of intensification I referred to earlier.

 

‘The right to defend oneself’: a short history of an utterance with a long history.

During the Spanish conquest of the Americas, indigenous peoples were dispossessed and were massacred by the millions. Sometimes the indigenous people resisted and killed some of the Spanish colonisers. When they did, the Spanish retaliated with more massacres. ‘They are attacking us and they have killed some of us. We have the right to defend ourselves’ they said. Most white people agreed. They acted as if the difference between how many the indigenous people have killed and how many the colonialists killed is not important. They acted as if who invaded whose home is not important. They acted as if who is subjugating whom is not important either. They acted as if the only thing that mattered is the formula ‘they are attacking us and they have killed some of us and we have the right to defend ourselves’. That this was a very selective way of describing the truth of what is going on was obvious to all those who uttered the formula. But those who tried to point out that this was not the truth failed to understand something very important. Those who uttered this and similar sentences were not truth seekers. They were White colonial warriors. Their utterance was not a truth-seeking utterance it was a warring incantation that aimed to reinforce a White colonising apparatus.

During the Portuguese conquest of Brazil the same thing happened. Colonial massacres, dispossession, subjugation. Some indigenous resistance followed by more massacres. and for those who asked why more massacres? The Portuguese explained that ‘‘They are attacking us and they have killed some of us. We have the right to defend ourselves’. Most white people agreed. They acted as if the difference between how many the indigenous people have killed and how many the colonialists killed is not important. They acted as if who invaded whose home is not important. They acted as if who is subjugating whom is not important either. They acted as if the only thing that mattered is the formula ‘they are attacking us and they have killed some of us and we have the right to defend ourselves’. That this was a very selective way of describing the truth of what is going on was obvious to all those who uttered the formula. But those who tried to point out that this was not the truth failed to understand something very important. Those who uttered this and similar sentences were not truth seekers. They were White colonial warriors. Their utterance was not a truth seeking utterance it was a warring incantation that aimed to reinforce a White colonising apparatus.

During the European conquest of North America the same thing happened with Native Indians. And the same thing happened with the English in Asia, the French in North Africa, the Germans in southern Africa, the Italians in Libya and the Belge in the Congo and the Dutch and, and. They all conquered, massacred, appropriated land and when resisted they said ‘they’re attacking us and they have killed some of us and we have the right to defend ourselves.' For those who are invaded can only defend themselves as best as they could. Only those who have invaded and institutionalised their laws can have 'the right to defend themselves.'

I’ve left out quite a few but I wont leave out what happened on the land from where I am writing. Guess what happened here? The English came and conquered. And then what happened? Colonial massacres, dispossession, subjugation, a whole legal apparatus designed to legalise the theft and the right of the thieves. And sure enough, Indigenous resistance was followed by more massacres styled as ‘retaliation’. and for those who asked why more massacres? The Australian settlers explained that those Indigenous people were a serious murderous lot. ‘‘They are attacking us and they have killed some of us. We have the right to defend ourselves’.

And yes. Sure enough, most white people agreed. They acted as if the difference between how many the indigenous people have killed and how many the Australian settlers have killed is not important. They acted as if who invaded whose land is not important at all. They acted as if who is subjugating whom is not important either. They acted as if the only thing that mattered is the right to ‘retaliate’: ‘they are attacking us and they have killed some of us and we have the right to defend ourselves’. And I think it is worth repeating. That this was a very selective way of describing the truth of what is going on was obvious to all those who uttered the formula. But those who tried to point out that this was not the truth failed to understand something very important. Those who uttered this and similar sentences were not truth seekers. They were White colonial warriors. Their utterance was not a truth seeking utterance it was a warring incantation that aimed to reinforce a White colonising apparatus. And so, here we are today after the zionist invasion and conquering of Palestine, we are swimming in the Zionist claims that they are being attacked by Palestinians and that..., what was it again? ... ah yes... ‘they have the right to defend themselves’. 

And who is acting as if the difference between how many the indigenous people have killed and how many the settler colonialists have killed is not important? And who is acting as if who invaded whose home is not important either? And who is acting as if the question of who is subjugating whom is not important either? And who is asserting with force that the only thing that mattered is that ‘they are attacking us and they have killed some of us, and we have the right to defend ourselves’. And, as importantly, who is nodding in agreement? Funnily enough: all those who have been practicing those same or very similar formulaic utterances for centuries.

And unfortunately, despite this long history there is still those who think that what is important is to show the colonialists the ‘facts’ and demonstrate that what they are saying does not conform to the truth. Such people still fail to understand that those who utter this and similar sentences are not truth seekers. They are White colonial warriors. Their utterances are not a truth seeking utterances. They are warring incantations that aim to reinforce a White colonising apparatus.

Blessed are the invaded and the colonised who have always had to defend themselves without having the power or the privilege to declare it ‘a right’.

A Chief Editor Unfit to Edit or Write

There are certain things we take for granted, things that no one will say anymore today, when we read someone in the mainstream media discussing allegations of rape. No one is naïve. We know these things are still thought and said by some people, at least behind closed doors. But it is a kind of victory that they are no longer a feature of the public space. For instance, we expect that no one will question the motives of the person who comes forward to say that they have been a victim of rape. We expect that no one will use what a woman was wearing to even hint that what she was wearing was itself an inducement to rape. We expect that if you are a male talking about rape you need to do so with an awareness that rape is a male culture that you are part of.

Enter the Chief Editor, no less, of the Australian Lebanese daily, El Telegraph, with an editorial titled: A Sex Feature Film in Canberra?! This is how it starts:

What’s up with them, they wake up to their rape in such a belated manner? And how is it that you get a stream of accusations that follow the first accusation?

For, since the complaint made last week by the ex-Liberal Party employee (the photo) claiming to have been raped by a senior employee in the office of the then Minister of Defence Industry Linda Reynolds, after having consumed alcohol, in March 2019, three other women have declared that they have been subjected to sexual attacks and harassment in 2017 by the same employee.

And the question is: where have these women been since 2017 until today?

(The writer goes on to a brief history of belated accusations of rape made against Bill Clinton and Harvey Weinstein to repeat his initial question)

Why did these women keep their mouth shut in the past to go back and raise such issues later?

Of course, there are many answers, some of which might disturb women and some they might consider as an assertion of their claims.

I’ll stop translating this garbage. But you get the idea. And in case you are in doubt about the spirit in which the article was written see the photo above that accompanies the article.

I have to say I was particularly angry seeing this photo, as it is an innocent photo turned, in a very slimy way, into an accusatory weapon. In the way it is contextualised and presented, it reproduces the very culture of rape that needs to be struggled against. It could be the photo of any woman we know.

The idea that the main question that comes to one’s mind in the face of a belated claim of rape is ‘why now?’ is a classic deflection from the main issue, of course. So people might have motives for declaring a crime. The idea that this tells us something about whether a crime happened or not is part of the culture whereby a victim has to be innocent and helpless or they are not real victims.

Does an Australian-Lebanese person who has behind them a long history of racism really find it hard to understand why and how an injury can be hidden and suppressed and can later resurface at a particular moment? So many stories of racism follow this pattern. People subjected to a form of racial debasement that, while nowhere near as awful as rape, is nonetheless pretty awful, and who prefer not to talk about what they went through. They repress it and say nothing about it. But then an occasion arises, a change in circumstances or even more broadly a change in culture which makes it possible to put the repressed at the table. This is never easy. The history of racism and sexism is a long history of self-repression and self-silencing. People prefer not to be seen as victims, even in the eyes of their own family. For there lies a basic truth: it is demeaning to be recognised as someone who has been demeaned. This is at the core of how sexism reproduces itself. And the same goes for racism. An editor of an Australian Lebanese newspaper who is not sensitive to the nature of such injuries, is not only sexist and misogynist. They are also out of touch with one of the key affects that structures the Lebanese communities belonging to Australia.

I am not surprised that the editors produces a sexist, misogynous, kind of writing. He has done so before. The man’s connections with the conservative sections of the Lebanese clergy and the conservative part of the Liberal Party were made clear during the unfortunate ‘debates’ around same sex marriage. But this crosses the bounds of decency. The Lebanese community, like all communities and more, has it’s fair share of vile sexists. Some are sophisticated sexists and some, like the above, simply lack the sophistication to even begin to realise how bad they are. But it is intolerable that the Chief Editor of a newspaper can be free to exhibit such unreconstructed misogyny and subject the Lebanese community to it as if living in a hole away from mainstream Australia. This is both a specific community and a more general Australian matter. The man is clearly unfit to hold such a position.

Over the Fence

‘Jimmy’ an old eastern european immigrant, who works the land right next door to me, sees me sitting having my early morning coffee. He says hello and gestures for me to come towards him. He leans to the ground with a knife in his hand, picks a pumpkin and a watermelon and give them to me. I thank him, go back to my coffee and start thinking about how nice it is to receive a neighbourly gift of fresh fruit and vegetables ‘over the fence’. 

I also start thinking about the story of inter-cultural food exchange over the fence that i wrote about long ago: Lebanese people passing Lebanese food to Anglo-neighbours, the power relations underlying the exchange, but also the potential for inter-cultural friendship and solidarity that this 'over the fence' relation gives rise to. 

This led me to further think about ‘over the fence’ and reciprocity: you’ve got to have the fence to go ‘over the fence’... My mind is racing as I am drinking my coffee: it’s not borders that are the problem but how we relate to the borders and to each other across borders. ‘Over the fence’ would be a good theme for a conference or a writing project, I think. i check google: many books titled ‘over the fence.’ There's even films exploring the tensions of 'over the fence' relations ....

Then Jimmy comes back towards me and says ‘here are some left over tomatoes. the birds ate everything’. i say ‘they do this every year. no? you need nets.’ He says: ‘there’s always some who find a way in and eat what you’ve planted. you have to live with it otherwise you go mad.’

I always knew that our ‘full proof borders’-obsessed government, and the people who vote them in, have gone mad in some way or another...

Towards a Politics of Strategic Gullibility

One of the many social phenomena that I thought were specific to Lebanon when I left it in the mid 1970s and that I have seen grow with a vengeance in the western world since, is something that I will call decipiophobia: an excessive fear of being deceived, in the sense of being hoodwinked, conned or tricked (decipio in Latin). 

 

What I mean by excessive is that it is out of proportion to how often one is actually tricked and conned in life. Decipiophobia is an invitation to see trickery and deceit as a dimension of every kind of interaction one has with the world. Excessive also means that the subject acts as if his or her life depends on it: anything but being caught out as naïve; anything but people finding out that you have trusted someone who cannot be trusted; or worse still, being seen to having been taken for a ride. ‘Being seen to be’ is an important aspect of the phobia: the fear is not just of ‘being conned’ but of ‘being seen by others to have been conned’. For one can cope with failure but not the reputation of being a failure. Likewise, one can cope with being conned, but not with being thought of as gullible. Thus, an important preoccupation when presenting oneself in everyday life (à la Erving Goffman) is to ensure that one is seen by others as the kind of person who is not easily duped.

 

In Lebanon decipiophobia is an integral part of the culture of shatahra (cleverness). This is a culture integral to the mercantile laissez tout faire capitalism that dominates Lebanon. It pits people against each other and against a social environment that is perceived as challenging, if not outright hostile. You’re driving home through a traffic jam, you’re finalising a business transaction, you’re in a government office trying to obtain a permission to do something or another, you’re in a busy shop trying along with many others to reach a counter to pay: there are no forms of organised behaviour and no laws to help you. It’s you and your wits alone against everyone and everything. In this situation, the imperative of avoiding being outsmarted by someone who ends up being more of a shahterr (masculine) or a shahtera (feminine) – cleverer and sharper at dealing with a situation and coming out a winner – than you is paramount. This was and remains one of the salient dimensions of social and economic interpersonal interaction in Lebanon. 

 

The fear of being seen to have been outsmarted extends into a fear of being seen to be gullible, and of being seen to trust people who shouldn’t be trusted. It creates an ethos and disposition whereby it is safer to act as if you do not trust anyone and don’t believe anything. Everything that comes your way has to be handled with suspicion. This traditional retort to someone you think is trying to outwit you captures this attitude well: ‘wleh, ana lamma khelik el sheetahn, kint ’am dayyif meghli.’ This has to be said in a tone similar to the famed De Niro’s rendition of ‘You talkin’ to me?’ in Taxi Driver. It translates as: ‘hey smartie pants, who you’re talking to was distributing meghli when the devil was born’. ‘Meghli’ is a traditional spiced rice pudding distributed by the hosting family when celebrating the birth of a baby. Thus, the retort implies ‘I was already part of the devil’s family celebrating his birth when the devil was born’ which in turn suggests ‘I can outwit the devil, so don’t try and outwit me’. 

 

Decipiophobia generates a society where the lack of trust is endemic. This comes at an incredible psychological cost. For the level of tension and the psychic expenditure needed to relate to people with this continuous overdeveloped state of suspicion is enormous. There is a clear affinity between decipiophobia and paranoia and the first can easily turn into the other. It is exhausting. It is all the more so because the Lebanese have to sustain at the same time a quasi-feudal myth of Lebanon and of themselves that is the exact opposite of the above. In this myth, Lebanon is a place where ‘trust’ and ‘honour’ are the most important things there are. Thus, paradoxically, while suspicion is valorised within the culture of shatahra it also comes with a layer of guilt: a guilt generated by not living up to the feudal fantasy of oneself that one still entertains, despite all. This plays out as a tension between a capitalist-produced subject living a life of relative poverty and unmet needs, that encourages suspicion, petty calculations and the instrumentalization of others, and the quasi-feudal big-hearted subject desiring to be seen as if in a constant ‘state of potlatch’ where they can trust everyone because everyone owes them. It is yet another tension among many that is internalised and normalised by the Lebanese such that its poisonous effect on everyday life becomes unnoticed.

 

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My partner, Caroline, is reading the most recent messages on her ‘next door’ app, an app where people from our neighbourhood leave all kind of messages, selling furniture they no longer need, requesting babysitters, offering to walk dogs, etc… ‘Look’, Caroline says. ‘This guy is saying he has nothing to eat. ‘Show me’ I say suspiciously. A photo of the guy showed him to be a middle-aged white man. While I was wondering whether he really needs help or he is ‘bludging’ on the neighbours, Caroline had already gone to the fridge and packed some food. ‘I am about to walk the dog and he lives on the way. I’ll also buy him some bacon and eggs on the way’ she said. I was immediately confronted with the fact that while I was approaching his request with suspicion, Caroline did not hesitate for one second. She just acted. I don’t think Caroline’s behaviour is a common Australian behaviour. She is quite special this way. But my suspicion was a common Lebanese one. 

 

A memory of an aunt of mine in Beirut who used to take me out for an ice-cream every now and then when I was a child comes to me. Every time we were approached by beggars she would tell me: ‘never give these people anything. They are much richer than you think. They have gold hidden in their houses.’ I remember even as a kid thinking: ‘even if they have gold, there’s something wrong if they choose to do this for a living.’ She used to say it so often that many people would gently mock her. When a beggar showed up someone would say: ‘here comes Aunty Josephine’s millionaire.’ When I became teenager my friends and I joined in mocking her. We would say to her: ‘you know you were right aunty. So and so, the beggar near the petrol station, he’s bought a bungalow next to us at the beach resort.’ ‘Really!?’ she would say. ‘Yes, we swear we’ve seen him’ we would reply. Still, despite this, what she and many others had instilled in me made it impossible for me to see a beggar without being suspicious at first wanting to know whether they’re not taking me for a ride, whether they ‘really’ deserve it or not.

 

Such is decipiophobia. It is like racism and sexism. If you have been formed to think in this particular way, it is a continuous struggle to stop oneself from doing so. As a first step, what you can hope for is becoming aware of yourself the moment you are exhibiting the unfortunate symptoms, and not allowing your behaviour to be influenced by these unfortunate tendencies that have been instilled in you. But you can do more. When you are overtaken by suspicion and the fear of being conned, you can ‘wager on trust’. 

 

The idea of ‘wagering’ comes from Pascal’s notion of ‘wagering on God’. For Pascal, even if you do not believe in God you can put yourself on the road towards believing by simply practically doing what believers do: go to mass, taking the holly water, etc… Assuming you really desire to believe, of course. Likewise, if you really desire to be a trusting kind of person, it is practice infused with this desire, not just intellectual reasoning, reflexivity and self-critique, that sets you on the path. After Caroline left for her walk, I said to myself as I’ve said to myself on a number of occasions: ‘Next time I see a beggar, I commit myself to simply give him or her money without even thinking about ‘why’ and ‘what if’’. And I did, knowing I’ll lapse into decipiophobia again and will try work on myself again by wagering on trust. I like to think that this way of working is guided by a kind of ‘strategic gullibility’ which is another way of conceiving of ‘wagering on trust’. Clearly, I don’t mean by strategic gullibility ‘acting as if you believe every word uttered by the Prime Minister today’. As with anti-racist and anti-sexist practices, strategic also means politically directed, in this case directed strategically towards creating spaces of trust and solidarity with downtrodden people. It is to this politics that I will now turn.

 

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As I began by writing, my interest in decipiophobia did not simply emanate from a desire to explore the way it marks Lebanon and the Lebanese, or the way it marks me personally and how I deal with it. It is also motivated by the fact that I see it as an increasingly diffused phenomenon worldwide. More importantly, I think there is a strong affinity between the rise of decipiophobia and the rise of right-wing populism, thus the importance of making it the target of intellectual critique and of thinking of ways of challenging it practically at an individual and a collective level.

 

In Australia, for instance, but I know that this has been the case in many places in Europe and the United States, the opposition to refugees is marked and reinforced by a clearly decipiophobic impulse. Refugees are routinely portrayed by right-wing nationalists the way my aunt saw Beirut’s beggars, as ‘faking it’, as being less needy that they make out to be, and as trying to con a naïve and innocent western world into accepting them. Once perceived this way, anything the refugees can do to demonstrate that they are genuine becomes proof of how cunning they are. Thus, we often see among those opposed to refugees an on-going inter-play between racist essentialism and decipiophobia with each reinforcing the other. In Australia as elsewhere, a symptom of this decipiophobia is a nostalgia for an imaginary white innocent self that is seen as having been corrupted and lost by the cunning and lack of sincerity of those requesting refuge: we were kind, and by trying to con us, they made us nasty.

 

One would think that there is at least a positive dimension to such a culture of suspicion when it comes to the politics of knowledge. For it can be reasonably assumed that suspicion fosters inquisitiveness and a desire to question received knowledge. An academic might even fantasize that a lay people’s culture of suspicion could translate into a receptiveness to those whom Ricoeur has called the ‘masters of suspicion:’ Marx, Nietzsche, Freud. But it has not often worked this way. Here, the importance of the ‘being seen’ dimension of the phobia comes to the fore. For the decipiophobic fear that marks the domain of knowledge is not a fear of ‘not knowing’ but a fear of ‘being seen to not know’. Thus, decipiophobic subjects never ask inquisitive questions in public for this can be seen as a mark of ignorance. In Lebanon, and one finds this tendency emerging elsewhere today, there is an imperative to appear to always already know everything there is to know such that as to consolidate in the face of others the image of the-subject-that-is-not-easy-to-trick. This in fact fosters sociologically unsophisticated claims of having ‘cleverly cracked the code’ that allows one to understand all there is to understand that is happening ‘behind the screen.’ In anthropology it is argued that if social science entails the search for the social mechanisms that are behind the people who are behind the event, magic such as the belief in the causal power of curses, involves the search for the people who are behind the mechanisms that are behind the event. Decipiophobic explanations are always on the side of magic in this context. The interpersonal ‘you’re not going to get me, I know what you’re up to’ is elevated into a mode of explaining macro political events: I know what governments are up to, I know what world leaders are up to. This is why there is a close relation between decipiophobia and the claims to total knowledge that one finds in conspiracy theories. As with arguments concerning refugees such ‘modes of knowing’ create a closure that make them self-perpetuating: any attempt to change the views of ‘knowing subjects’ are experienced by them as the work of either naïve people who can’t see the scheming that is happening behind the scenes or worse someone who is actively trying to influence them because they are themselves part of the conspiracy.

 

I am sure that neither the rudimentary analysis of the way decipiophobia articulates itself to right wing politics, nor the concepts that I have proposed to challenge it such as ‘wagering on trust’ and ‘strategic gullibility’ are enough to treat the phenomenon thoroughly, or to fully explore how to combat it politically. But I hope that what I have presented can at least begin a discussion about the importance of the phenomenon and its role in reinforcing right wing politics and immunising it against any challenge.

 

And let’s not forget the Scandinavians: Paulette and the task of post-colonial theory

And let’s not forget the Scandinavians:
Paulette and the task of post-colonial theory[1]

When I was growing up in Lebanon, my father was a reasonably influential military/political figure. ‘Reasonably’ meant he was not influential enough to be elected to parliament and he was not a rich businessman, but he had enough clout and enough following to influence the economic and political fortunes of such people. As such members of parliament and ministers regularly came to our house. They needed my father to secure their power and my father needed them to secure his prestige. That’s how clientelism worked. My mother played an important but very traditional role in this process: her ‘table’ (the food she offered) was famous, and often people we met would directly tell her how much they yearned to be invited to lunch or dinner at her place. While my mother was indeed a mean cook, she nonetheless had a lot of help. My father benefited from what was called a military ‘ordonance’, basically a chauffeur and a gendarme, Hanna, who worked as a full time cook in our house. What’s more, for whatever reason, his wife also worked at our place. Her name was Raf’ah.

Raf’ah was mentioned as often as my mother when it came to cooking because of her kibbeh. She came from a village in northern Lebanon and did her kibbeh the traditional way: she put the meat, the herbs and the crushed wheat in a jeren (a special kibbeh mortar) flipping it with her hand and pounding it rhythmically with a wooden pestle. I loved Raf’ah who, beside cooking, often looked after me and my two sisters. I would often sit next to her when she was making kibbeh, and she always spoiled me by rolling a mouthful of kibbeh with her fingers when it was ready and putting it straight in my mouth. She spoke to me in French: ‘viens, viens ici, yaa habibeh’, ‘you are so handsome. If you were older you could have married my daughter Paulette’. I was six or seven at the time but she often would talk to me about Paulette… ‘Paulette est belle’, ‘Paulette est très jolie’.

It was not until a couple of years after I’ve known Hanna and Raf’ah that I met Paulette. My father was driving to see his brother who was a judge in Tripoli and it was decided we would give Raf’ah a lift to her village on the way there. My father sat in the front next to his military chauffeur and Raf’ah and I sat in the back. The first thing she said to me when we got into the car was, now you will see Paulette. And indeed, when we got to her house, she called for Paulette who dutifully showed up. I was stunned to see her. I was nine or ten and she was in her twenties. I thought she was incredibly beautiful. But she was strangely ‘western’ (today I would have used ‘White’): exceptionally white skin, blond hair and blue eyes. I did not dwell on her whiteness then though it certainly came to my consciousness as a mark of distinction. Two other things stood out from that first encounter. Paulette la très jolie had very sad eyes. And she also spoke French. She gave us a perfect: ‘Bonjour’. I still remember her ‘Bonjour’ and I still remember that even for me, a ten year old or so at the time, there was something not exactly right about how perfect this Bonjour was. French was well understood everywhere in Lebanon, and everyone around me said ‘Bonjour’, but how well one says ‘Bonjour’ (ie, how French you sounded) was a mark of class distinction.

I saw Paulette a few times after that. And every time I saw her I couldn’t take her out of my mind for many days after: her beauty, her whiteness and her sad eyes. When I was twelve or thirteen, my dad had retired, and Hanna and Raf’ah no longer worked for us, I heard my mum say that Paulette was marrying a lawyer from Zgharta, the main Christian town in North Lebanon, situated above Tripoli. The implication was she has married well. I remember my father saying: ‘well, she is beautiful, but this guy must love her since he didn’t care’. I also remember not understanding very well what my father was saying. I thought maybe he was referring to the fact that she was a lower-class girl.

I did not hear about Paulette for another four or five years. I was finishing high school and it was the year before the civil war started. I was home when I heard my Mum speaking on the phone, sounding very distraught, and saying ‘oh no’ ‘oh no’ ‘God give you patience Raf’ah’. When she put the phone down, she had tears in her eyes. I ask what was going on. She tells me: ‘Paulette entaharit’ (Paulette has committed suicide).

I stood there stunned by the news. And further stunned when she said with anger ‘her father that son of a dog (Ibn el Kalb) should have helped’. I had never heard Mum or Dad say anything bad about Hanna. We all loved him and had fond memories of him. And he was always perceived, and spoken about, kindly. So I couldn’t help but get upset and say: ‘Hanna?! Ibn el Kalb?’. Mum looked at me as if I should know something I didn’t: ‘No! Not Hanna! Hanna is not Paulette’s father. Can’t you see that her father is not Lebanese?’ Then she filled me in: her father is a retired French officer who continued to live in Lebanon after the French mandate forces left. Raf’ah says that he raped her, but, Mum added, ‘who knows? he might have seduced her and she might have fallen in love with him’. When Paulette was born she hoped for a while that the officer will marry her. Instead he left to live in Lyons and never came back. But he paid for Paulette’s schooling. Later he flew her to Lyons a couple of times but these ended in disaster according to Raf’ah’. Mum shook her head reflexively. ‘Poor Paulette,’ she said, ‘she was never a happy child. She carried a heavy burden’ ‘her beauty was her curse (haleha mseebeta).’

I was totally taken aback. I felt exceptionally naïve for not having thought at any point that Hanna was not Paulette’s father, something that seemed so obvious to me now that it has been brought into the open. At the same time, Paulette’s whiteness, her sad eyes, all the French spoken by Raf’ah and Paulette came back rushing through my head as well as my Dad saying that her husband ‘didn’t care’.

I had forgotten all about Paulette until a day, while researching for my PhD in the mid-1980s I came across a text by Michel Chiha, one of modern Lebanon’s ‘founding fathers’. Chiha, like many Christian Lebanese thinkers at that time engaged in considerable intellectual labour to prove that the Lebanese were ‘white people’ not ‘Arabs’. He clearly perceived the latter as a lesser/backward ‘race’. Here is from the article based on part of my thesis that I published later: 

Like others before him, but more ‘scientifically’, Chiha moves to demonstrate the Lebanese link with the Phoenicians. As importantly, Chiha informs his audience, that the Phoenician alphabet is today used by ‘the quasi-totality of the white race’. ‘To which we belong’ he hastily adds (Chiha, 1984, p. 38). Reviewing the many people that had invaded Lebanon, he takes a special interest in reminding us that of the ‘thousands of Westerners who came from Europe, without forgetting the Scandinavians, many never went back’ (Chiha, 1984, p. 32). He goes through considerable pain to show that after those Westerners many other non-Arab people came and stayed. The ‘racial proof’ that the Lebanese are not Arabs accumulates... To end with, Chiha injects into the Lebanese more of his favourite sperms: ‘And let us remember a fact that we cannot neglect. Only in the last twenty-five years, the mixed marriages between Lebanese and Westerners have produced thousands of children...’ (Chiha, 1984, p. 34).[2]

I thought of Paulette immediately when I read this sentence. It was characteristic of the Christians of Lebanon, and particularly the Maronites, to always want to see Western-Lebanese colonial relations in a good light. Colonialism is often imagined within anti-colonial thought, metaphorically and not so metaphorically, as a process of rape. But too often, with the usage of the imaginary of rape, comes an expectation that the only way of thinking it is outrage. While some colonised people joined the colonisers in imagining, at least at the metaphorical level, that what took place was nothing like rape, others were able to think that being colonially raped included the acquisition of something positive, so one should try and not dwell on the rape itself but on what resulted from it. The Maronites were not alone in thinking this way. But it must be said that they excelled at it. Even when joining the struggle for independence against the French mandate, they managed to do so by saying that it was important for the French to leave in order to maintain the love that the Lebanese felt towards them. 

It came to me that in the very fact of celebrating how ‘très jolie’ Paulette was, people, including Raf’ah, her mum, were not only participating in the process of uncritically valorizing western beauty, they were also willing to turn the blind eye as to how this beauty was acquired. In her hope that he would end up elevating their sexual encounter to an all-encompassing relationship, in calling her daughter ‘Paulette’, in her continual usage of the French language, and the way she celebrated her beauty, in all this Raf’ah was acting in a  quintessentially Maronite way, willing to make the best out of, both her colonial impregnation and its outcome. This is not to diminish the dimension of the process in which she is also a victim of the colonial process. 

Seen through the eyes of Paulette, however, this drama has a very different, and as it turns out, unbearable dimension. As the child of an, actual or metaphorical, colonial rape she was an inheritor of a whiteness that was valorised by all those around her. Paulette was also made to further augment the value of her whiteness through the perfection of the French language, as a sign of paternal identification (or perhaps a hope for paternal identification). As such, and at one level, her colonial/paternal inheritance was a form of cultural capital that she, or her family, were able to deploy, to engage in strategies of upward social mobility. And yet, and here I can only guess, the very value of her inheritance had also an excruciating dimension that was hard for her to live with. The very value of her inheritance was a reminder of the horrendous way she had inherited it.

Paulette’s story offers a further critique of those facile attempts at revalorizing colonial history by producing lists of benefits (such as economic, medical and educational) that have supposedly come from the introduction of capitalist modernity into the colonial realm. It is well established that those attempts happily forget all what colonialism has taken away from the colonies and from the colonised. It is also well established that such attempts uncritically accept the positive nature of the modern colonial inheritance. Paulette’s fate highlights the way, this logic of listing benefits falsely separates what colonialism has bequeathed the colonised from how it has bequeathed it. An anthropology of colonial inheritance as an extension of the anthropology of the gift takes us precisely into the subtle effects of this ‘how’.

More importantly perhaps, the above is an invitation to think the difficulty the colonised have negotiating their colonial inheritance. This is true of even the most anti-colonial among them. Establishing the way colonialism imposes and valorises and makes the colonised inherit certain languages, ways of being and ways of thinking is easier than negotiating a way of living with such an inheritance. This is especially so when the inheritance itself shapes the very tools we have in our possession to negotiate it. Even the most post-colonial of theories, that creatively and powerfully showed the way the colonised can subvert their inheritance in the process of inheriting it, such as Homi Bhaba’s conceptualisation of mimicry, owe more to a colonial inheritance than they sometimes wish to delve into. This has had a lasting effect in the field of post-colonial academic writing.

Faced with the inability to eliminate and transcend such contradictions, certain de-colonial critiques are increasingly taking an absolutist turn. They aim for a ‘decolonisation of everything’ in ways that are motivated by fantasies of cleansing (one’s self, one’s culture and one’s territory from the effects of colonialism). And yet, there is something profoundly colonial and modern in these fantasies of cleansing. Indeed, I would say that the very nature of such absolutist de-colonial critiques, fails even more so than those before them to free themselves from what they are critiquing. To me the story of Paulette takes us in an opposite direction. I think of her tragedy as grounded in the difficulty of the colonised to live their colonial inheritance as both a privilege and a burden at the same time. And when I think of the contribution of thought to a post-colonial future, I think of a theory that can precisely confront the difficult task of finding how to negotiate and best inhabit such an inevitably contradictory reality, rather than fantasise about its elimination.

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[1] This text benefited from a number of excellent editorial questions and suggestions by Carol Que.

[2] Ghassan Hage, Maronite White Self-Racialisation as Identity fetishism: Capitalism and the experience of colonial whiteness, in Karim Murji and John Solomos (eds), Racialization: studies in theory and practice, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2005