On Ending the Silence: The Liberation of the Maghrebi Woman
“La femme colonisée se retrouve ainsi hypersexualisée, érotisée mais surtout déshumanisée.”
“The colonized woman is thus hypersexualized, eroticized, but especially dehumanized” — nordafem
I recently watched a 1994 Tunisian film called Les Silences du Palasis (Silence of the Palace), and it centers around the story of a young woman, Alia, as she struggles to remember her childhood, growing up as the daughter of a domestic worker, set in the backdrop of the eve of Tunisia’s independence from the French protectorate. Her mother, Khedija, served their bourgeois Tunisian family not just as a caretaker, cook, and maid; she also existed to sexually serve the men of the household, whenever they so choose. Whether that was through belly dance performances or through intimate sexual affairs, Kehdija had to give up her own sexual autonomy in order to give both Alia and herself sustenance to live. At the end of the film, twenty-five year old Alia, on the precipice of deciding whether to keep her pregnancy or terminate it, delivers a powerful tribute to her long deceased mother, whose struggles paralleled Alia’s:
“I thought that Lotfi would save me
I have not been saved
Like you, I’ve suffered, I’ve sweated
Like you, I’ve lived in sin
My life has been a series of abortions
I could never express myself
My songs were stillborn
And even the child inside me Lotfi wants me to abort
This child…I feel it has taken root in me
I feel it bringing me back to life
Bringing me back to you
I hope it will be a girl
I’ll call her Khedija”
This harrowing film brilliantly highlights the complex and insidious connection between patriarchy and class divisions. Patriarchy, as it exists, is inherently a violent system that esteems masculinity and degrades and humiliates femininity. It affects both men and women; however, women’s oppression under patriarchy operates in two forms: direct, physical violence and violence of systems and the psyche. North African women in particular face oppression from two main forces: one from the Occidental West in which it both sees the Maghrebi woman as something exotic and exists merely for pleasure and as someone who needs rescuing from those “barbaric” men and governments that they live in and with. Secondly, the North African woman faces dehumanization and misogyny — both physical and non physical — from their own societies and cultures which deeply values subversive women, women in the household, women controlled, and women eroticized, as well. Orientalism towards the North African woman not only comes from the West, but also from the Arab world, as well.
What I hope to accomplish with this piece is to break down the various misogynistic forces that has forced the Maghrebi woman into particular roles and stereotypes and how, ultimately, that affects the type of work that she is forced to pursue, such as sex work and domestic work in which they face sexual abuse, emotional/mental trauma and other forms of physical violence. (i.e.the case of the Moroccan woman thrown out a window by her Saudi employer)
In the Western world, peoples of the East are both highly eroticized and highly vilified. In his 1978 groundbreaking work, Orientalism, Edward Said describes this vilification and fetishization as a result of a deliberate line of distinction — drawn by the Western world — between the civilized people of the West and the savage and irrational peoples of the East. It is a way of implementing a system of ideas that could justify policies, scholarship, and art that would further cement the idea that is the Western world that projects civility and it is the Eastern world that needs saving and control.
For North African women in particular, the implementation of orientalism is unique in its nature because not only does it create a distinction between Maghreb and West, but, more narrowly, it creates a distinction between the Arab and the Amazigh. The essay, “The role of Berber face tattoos in orientalist interpretation of the maghreb,” further explains this:
“The Orientalism employed in the case for the Maghreb, however, spirals further. It is not only the distinction between the Maghreb and the West being made (which already posits vague paradigms considering the Maghreb being situated in the Mediterranean), but the distinction between Arabs and Berbers within the Maghreb. Berber face tattoos have been a tool for colonizers to idly distinguish arabophones from berberophones who, in reality, belong to the ‘same race.’”
Already the North African woman becomes subject to an orientalist view that not only already dehumanizes her for her “exotic” femininity, but also for the origins in which she comes from, creating a division between the Arab North African woman and the Amazigh woman. This is merely just one part of the North African woman’s dehumanization.
By its very nature, colonialism is the application of Orientalism. For the colonizer, it recognizes the existence of the people of the lands it wants to subjugate; however, it neither sees their worth as humans nor does it see them as worthy of being independent and sovereign states. For the colonizer, they see themselves as a parent, protecting an unruly, bratty child; one that can only be subdued through domineering discipline. In this sense, the colonizer sees the colonized as being naive, irrational, and infantile, and this would justify the colonizer’s need to install a particular political system that would subdue the “unruly” people, under the illusion of “freedom,” and “democracy,” of course. So long as they believe they have a choice, they will accept the colonizer, welcoming them even. This is the insidious nature of Orientalism.
French colonization of the Maghreb directly affected women. For example, during the Algerian struggle for independence from the French, many women were forced to remove their veils in order to be (forcibly) photographed. By removing the veil, the French were able to subject Algerian women to the Western male gaze. Though it might seem to the outsider that photographing women without their veils seems innocent compared to the physical violence during the Algerian uprising and throughout the entirety of French occupation of the country, it still operated as a means of colonial control, and a means of dehumanizing the Algerian woman. Without the veil, she is free from the constraints of her “barbaric” society; yet, she becomes a tool for the colonizers. Thus, the Algerian woman was subjected to a colonial violence that demanded she remove an essential part of her identity in order to present herself to the West, to become a “success” story to uphold France’s claim to the territory.
France’s dehumanization of the North African woman did not end when their (direct) colonial control ended. Fetishization of the North African woman was and still is a massive impulse in French society. For example, French slang typically ascribes the word “Beurette” (the feminine version of the word “Beur”) to women from the Maghreb. Its rise in popularity rose in the 1990s, and was typically just used to refer to Maghrebis who were born in Europe but had roots back in North Africa. However, there is a sinister misogynistic and racist impulse lying beneath. The 2017 Konibi article, “Beurette: l’historie d’un mot et d’un figure” perfectly describes this impulse:
“Bien que validée par cette dernière, car devenue la signification de l’efficacité du modèle français d’intégration républicaine, elle ne l’est plus par sa communauté d’origine qui la rejette, voyant en elle une jeune femme de peu de vertu, prête à tous les échanges de partenaires possibles, attirée et hypnotisée par les sirènes et la luxure de la société de consommation occidentale, peu encline à se ranger et à fonder une vie de famille stable de femme respectable. Beurette instaure une autre trinité, aux faux airs d’évolution : “fille voilée > fille non-voilée > Beurette”. Et dans ce trio, elle est la fille perdue, paumée, le penchant hypersexualisé de la femme maghrébine, une Lilith pécheresse face à la prude Ève.”
“Although validated by this last, because become the meaning of the effectiveness of the French model of republican integration, it is not any more by her community of origin which rejects it, seeing in her a young woman of little virtue, ready for all the exchanges of possible partners, attracted and hypnotized by the sirens and the lust of the Western consumer society, reluctant to settle down and found a stable family life of respectable woman. Beurette establishes another trinity, with false airs of evolution: “veiled girl> unveiled girl> Beurette”. And in this trio, she is the lost girl, lost, hypersexualized penchant of the Maghreb woman, a sinful Lilith facing the prude Eve.”
In short, the word “beurette” becomes synonymous with a particular perception of the North African woman, one that is familiar in a misogynistic and bigoted world. That she, the woman from a mysterious and exotic land, merely exists for pleasure, she has no virtue. She, in relation to the Western (and white) woman, is tainted whereas the Western woman is pure. And this directly affects the labor North African woman take.
In the Middle East and North Africa, the Maghrebi woman doesn’t find much reprieve from hypersexualization, orientalism and exploitation. The most popular narrative of the North African woman that is often told by Middle Easterners is that she is a seductive witch, who practices black magic in order to seduce men, luring them into sin. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen tweets like these from young Middle Eastern men and women alike. To Middle Eastern men, the North African woman is “exotic,” “mysterious,” but something to be conquered as well. And for Middle Eastern women, the North African woman is nothing more than a temptress, a snake-tongued succubus who lead their good men into sin. And it’s tragic, really, the way misogyny operates in a way that gives other women a taste of power — though the punchline is that they are still oppressed by that very same force at the end of the day — to enforce perceptions of another group of women, and, often, it requires class analysis, the understanding of the relationship between capital and power.
Going back to the case of Maria, the then twenty-year old Moroccan maid, who was assaulted multiple times before being thrown out a window by her Saudi employers, which inflamed Moroccan public opinion about the various abuses that many Moroccan women, along with other North African and South Asian women face in the Gulf Kingdom. It is one of many horrifying stories of North African domestic workers — mostly Moroccan, as the kingdom is one of the main suppliers of domestic workers to Saudi Arabia, and often, domestic work is a disguise for forced marriages and even sex trafficking. And more troubling, Saudi women themselves are often complicit in the abuse and narratives of these women. In a report from Morocco World News, some Saudi women have claimed that they were “wary” of Moroccan women being hired as house workers because they have been known, to quote, “use black magic to lure men to marry them.”
All of this leads to several important questions: what is to be done? How do we dismantle these systems, deconstruct these narratives that often leads to the abuse and dehumanization of North African women? I think what we first must do is break down the various socioeconomic factors that often leave women vulnerable to exploitative work, which means an honest conversation about poverty and class relations. And secondly, we must confront the cultures that breed this dehumanization, the silence that North African women are often forced into, and for me, it starts within the family dynamics. Misogyny can and does start at home first. And if we provide better resources and better understand the power of these oppressive systems and the power that we, as women, have in order to overcome what seeks to keep us docile and subdued and once and for all, break the silence.
