For March 8 this year, I will not be where I am used to being, where I am expected, where I am expected. I had the habit of celebrating the women of my country, of whom I have often admired; this year 2024 I discover that there are also others “women of my country”, foreigners who are also from my country. Country may not just be a physical geography; a geography is undoubtedly a movement, a quality of movement, a way of being in the world ; moving. There is Maria Lamas, another writer who says The women of my country as Nadia Tuéni says, my poet talisman mirror model in her poem Women of my country « Women of my country / the same light hardens your bodies, the same shadow rests it; gently elegiac in your metamorphoses/ The same suffering chaps your lips “. Maria Lamas, renowned photographer, journalist and woman of letters, had dedicated her collection, a literary and journalistic work relating the condition of women in Portugal – and published in the form of a booklet to escape the censorship of the dictatorship of the New State – to ” women of his country ». It was in the 1940s. The condition of women in Portugal, considered one of the poorest countries in Europe, has changed a lot since then. In Lebanon, we are almost a century behind: women are still subject to an overwhelming patriarchal social order; one of the striking illustrations of this state of affairs is that they cannot even give nationality to their children. “A country, if it does not grant women the place they deserve, does not have sons, but despots” writes Fatou Diomé, African novelist, author of Those who wait. I also discovered her as I discovered Maria Lamas. I discover these familiar strangers. They have destinies that resemble ours, thirsts that resemble ours, the urgency of not being just those who wait. I discover Snu Abecassis, Danish-Portuguese publisher, founder of the Dom Quixote publishing house which publishes works which clearly take a position, to the left, towards the heart, at the time of the dictatorship – she does not play the game – in love who dares to cross the social barricades of the time for a companionship that has become romantic with the brilliant and much appreciated Fransico Sa Carneiro, Prime Minister, for a time parliamentary. He died in a plane crash and Snu with him – the theory of assassination not being ruled out.
Snu Abecassis / Wikicommons
Do all rebellious women pay in one way or another for their thirst for freedom? In any case, they command admiration, they respond to my need for identification, my thirst for models or at least for inspiration. They are foreign and so familiar, they are Lebanese from before, most often in exile in Europe or already in heaven or on the other side. Their names are Snu Abecassis, Golshifteh Farhani, Andrée Chédid, Nadia Tuéni, Mireille Maalouf… They are these women encountered on the banks of the Atlantic, on the banks of a river of life, on this piece of Europe which looks towards Africa and who one day was oriental: they are Portuguese, Brazilian, Iranian, African, Cape Verdean, Russian and they inspire me. They moved, they left when necessary, for another country, for a love, for a certain idea of human dignity and love. They did not hide but they did not show themselves off either; they did not allow themselves to be seen constantly; they have seen around them, they live. They don’t use many words, but their work and the direction of their attention speak to their values.
One of them is called Ghalia, which means precious in Arabic. She is a veiled Syrian, who arrived as a refugee in Lisbon after an exhausting journey. She lets herself be welcomed, she learns Portuguese, she fights, and it is she who, as a mediator, welcomes those who, like her, arrive in Portugal, fleeing the violence of the world, dreaming of a haven, of a starting again. She wants to create a transmission belt between them and those who do not know them but who receive them. She translates, she seeks a common language. To ensure his own people and those who arrive alone, that is to say, loaded with their land but without its containment, a certain serenity, a certain dignity; to ensure for everyone, those from here and those from elsewhere, a certain quality of living together, she released her words; her colorful veil did not stop her. She says what she has to say to whoever has to hear her, even when it comes to an authority and a welcoming land. She is not burdened with an eternal debt. Yes, the Syrian, the Iranian, the Portuguese of the 20th century seem to say what they have to say more than the Lebanese of today, who for many play the game of the balance of power without always being able, in passing, to transmit the nationality to their offspring. Isn’t this deprivation alone symbolic of the imposter syndrome that obstructs us? As if, without the approval of patriarchal authority, we had nothing to legitimately transmit, not even our own creations. Preferring with man, fertility to downstream, communion to submission… to be able to reveal oneself, create and transmit.
“Don’t go back, you are safe here; “It’s a very peaceful country here,” a Russian woman, a gymnastics teacher, living in Portugal told me, where I came to seek respite from the violence in Lebanon and perhaps a glimpse of a wider horizon. Perhaps the feminine, even Russian, is indeed the renunciation of this addiction to war, to drama and to the guilt of renouncing it; the renunciation of these attachments to values which are perhaps those of a certain social order but not necessarily always those of life, that is to say, of full life.
Strangers, you make me less foreign to myself; THANKS. Perhaps this is what the feminine is all about: accepting, welcoming the stranger, the stranger to oneself. Maybe there is no stranger. Violence – fueled by this phobia of the foreigner – when it is generalized and not denounced, it reverses the order of things and we end up thinking that it is the person who opposes it who is missing the point. Thank you to foreigners beyond borders; to those foreign to this order of silence, of indifference.