Safe spaces — a term I keep hearing a lot these days. It is confusing for me because there never really have been safe spaces for me since I became aware of the world. For that matter, there really haven’t been many ‘spaces’ to call my own or claim for my own in the four decades I have walked this earth. The ever desplazado that I am destined to uproot again and again seeking refuges and sanctuaries from the bigotry and brutalities of Man, render me an ardent supporter of safe spaces and private spaces.
A girl child in the South Asian subcontinent is never safe. If she survives her conception in the womb through some liberal bent of mind of the family where her mother has been married into, then somewhere else she has to face the non-stop battles of her existence by virtue of her gender. She has to fight for adequate nutrition, her rightful place in the hierarchy of the family, her right for equal treatment and dignity. Most of the times girl children are not even aware that the discriminatory treatment meted out to them is not the right or the democratic one. They grow up thinking their value is inferior as compared to boys, many of them internalizing the lessons of childhood reinforced through patriarchal mindsets about their weakness, their unluckiness (munhoosiyat) so much so that they grow up with very low self-esteem.
The concept of a safe space does not even occur to them. Being children, ever-resilient to the daily aggressions of their lives, beatings, verbal abuse’ molestation, incestuous advances of male relatives or strangers, their own parents often turning deaf ears if they complain. Partly because the concept of pious and older Uncleji being lecherous is too preposterous or because the family honour is at stake and the girl child’s dignity and self, are the first to be sacrificed at the altar of (honour) ‘izzat’.
Yes, the resilient girls DO create safe spaces, some in those concealed diary pages locked in drawers or steel trunks under piles of clothes in the surreptitiously written lines of poetry; some in their minds — dreaming dreams of an escape from the drudgery of mind-numbing household chores catering to a huge joint family — those chores taken as practice for their future lives in soon-to-be-in-laws’ homes. Some who have the luxury of living near fields, or rivers, or mountains, or gardens and parks, make good of a few hours of escape to those stolen spaces of time and a world where no patriarchy or bigotry interferes.
So when I hear about safe spaces needed in academic countries of democratic, liberal, secular countries I can’t help laughing in derision. These are places where anybody can get up and say anything and not fear for their lives. These are Universities known to be bastions of freedom of speech and assembly. These are safe spaces achieved after millennium of dark ages, fought for over battlefields in Europe and the Americas, gained through lifetimes dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and rationality, science and research. I balk at the idea that some people/movements have the audacity to demand that these bastions be made into safe spaces!!!
I know the value of a space of one’s own or as the famous Virginia Woolf said in her phenomenal essay ‘A Room of One’s Own’. Be it a room, a closet, a steel trunk, in a joint family in Srinagar, with every Tom, Dick and Harry encroaching and advising how to live, walk, talk, what to eat, drink, how to best spend one’s free time, adjustments made in the name of family everytime a relative dropped in — the famous hospitality of the subcontinent at work (which also makes it a big space for the aggressions against female members of the family) safe spaces are something women have always created in the face of misogyny, bigotry, and patriarchy. A sweater knit in a certain way, a needlework with strong, personal symbols, interiors arranged as an expression of their will and thoughts, some craft learned or some tweaking of a recipe — are all spaces and mediums of asserting individuality and it doesn’t happen with demands, just happens when individual women/ girls make choices.
The streets or the marketplace are spaces where it is always the women who have to be careful, and not attract the attention of any lout, or street Romeo. In the case of an incident, the women themselves are blamed for any harassment by questions raised about their dressing sense, their mannerisms, whether they were giggling or not, if there was way too much makeup (hence you are automatically sluts) so on and so forth. Safe spaces have been created by women drivers, owning vehicles they may have inherited or worked hard for by becoming financially independent enough to buy. I see liberal families creating safe spaces for women members of the family by permitting them to cycle on the streets or drive their mopeds, scooters, or cars for their daily schedule. This in itself bodes a quiet revolution happening in niches and corners and nooks of patriarchal bastions.
Srinagar city is located in the basin of a Valley with mountains from all sides, the waterways of yesteryears gone in the mad rush of accommodating the growing population — the wonderful wooden architecture of the past giving way to the ugly, monstrosities of concrete and brick, based on cloned designs copied from each other, in a comparison game. But here’s the irony — the earlier wooden, congested architecture — an overlapping of neighbour’s courtyards, the street public property and the ever-spying pigeon-hole windows looking in at the other people’s lives though representative of a distinct Kashmiri culture and identity has been replaced with the metallic, impersonal, and hi-fi tech designed spaces of office buildings, palatial bungalows, and malls which automatically erased the uniqueness of the culture and tied it up with the construction boom happening all over the subcontinent for public, private and shared spaces.
Walking past those luxurious mansions and reflecting on the lives of those inside, equally lonely and troubled as the average dweller in a middle class neighborhood or the ‘donga’ (houseboat) families living on the waters of the Jhelum River or the famous Dal Lake, I can’t help thinking of how modernity provides spaces to only those who can afford to and have the means. Yet, those who desperately long for the private spaces have to either shut themselves off from the world or look for creative ways to maintain their sanity and dignity in a world desperately trying to conform/mould them to the dominant narratives.
Leave the secular, liberal countries alone. They have their heritage and civilisation which evolved from the dark ages and spaces to Enlightenment and Freedom. They don’t need to be told or guided about safe spaces. They developed Human Rights and the concept of Freedom of Speech and Assembly and you take those very liberties to push your agenda of theocracy and a Caliphate using the only tool of takfiri — blending, obfuscation, and deception. It will take them some time to see through the deception, but hopefully, it won’t be too late for them.You should concentrate more on the human right violations happening on the bodies, and minds of people belonging to your faith who never even make it beyond a few freedoms and almost never realise their potential in this one lifetime that they get. We are not at the mercy of your fight in a secular, liberal country, we are the victims of those very ideologies you defend in bastions of freedom and free speech. The hypocrisy has reached a new level and I can only surmise that you are no better than the man standing with the sword blade to behead — the only difference his act is a swift expose of his intent while yours takes years to understand and uncover.
If you really want to create safe spaces, take the fight to the doorstep of those ‘spaces’ which spew ideology after ideology asking for the annihilation of a culture, a people who are different from us, who have had the accident of being born in a faith different than yours, just like you were born accidentally in the faith you were brought up in. Rarely does a person ever call out the regressive practices in one’s own culture and this never seems to hit the ‘safe space’ demanding activists. It is always the victims of those very systems who try to dissect, analyze and break through that very belief system and its trespasses and almost always the ones opposing or dismissing the victims narratives are the ones who benefit from that very belief system or didn’t have the unfortunate experience of its ugly side.
The more brutal the expose of the belief system, the more vehement the opposition and backlash. I have examples of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and others who face the onslaught of slander right down to being disinvited to these ‘safe space’ campuses but then it gets bracketed in the Islamism vs Democracy debate. While in the subcontinent there are meta-narratives of Dalits and the Brahminical stranglehold on the system along with the Left’s dominance in India’s prestigious institutes maintaining a hierarchy of its own.
Do we need safe spaces? We do need them but in countries and regions which are yet to taste real democracy or liberal secular laws. South Asia is yet to shed its tribal affiliations and progress towards a strong secular constitutional identity. In such a cauldron of diverse cultures and identities, scores of languages, traditions, norms it is very difficult to progress towards a constitutional identity and affiliation. It has to start somewhere. With suppressed voices, and subaltern narratives finding ‘safe spaces’ in the virtual world, it could well become a reality.
