Gazing through the asshole: the castrated state apparatus and the crisis of governance in Lebanon

It’s official, and it’s really happening: When the state’s ideological apparatus is being reduced to its basic form of surveillance like the army and the police ( a surveillance that is heavily reliant on a hyper-masculine peformativity of power) and when this apparatus is being slowly and painfully castrated by different Lebanese parties, militias, humanitarian organizations and foreign state policies (etc.) , it gazes through subjects’ assholes as a micropolitical way to re-establish masculine power for the state.

In case you have not heard, please refer to this article. In a nutshell, the Lebanese police has apparently been conducting a series of “homosexuality tests” on male subjects since 2006, when the man is suspected of “looking too soft”, or not masculine enough.

That the Lebanese state’s authority is threatened is not really a new and surprising fact. The complete and continuous emptying of ideological state apparatuses in Lebanon, from state education, state hospitals, state media to state funded science, projects, programs and ministries, has reduced the Lebanese state to its basic hyper-masculine, muscle showing, snake eating police and army that are most of the time difficult to distinguish from zo3ran el 7ayy who keep hitting and harassing women in the streets. The absence of ideological apparatuses through which the state disseminates  everyday forms of  biopolitics and self-surveillance has been replaced by a direct, visible and enforced surveillance of subjects’ sexuality through what is being defined as “homosexuality tests”.

It’s really incredible that the state chooses to gaze at the subject and govern him through his asshole. But It actually makes a lot of sense. The only form of state power and governance left in Lebanon is its hyper-masculine apparatus of police and army; and even this form of power is being castrated on a daily basis by different social and political agents in and outside Lebanon.  What’s left for this apparatus is to check for the masculinity of its subjects, manifested in homosexual relations, as a way to check for its own masculine power.

It is true that the stories of these homosexuality tests have not occurred alongside this week’s “unfortunate events”, where the state seems to be in the midst of an overwhelming crisis of governance and of a visible castration of Lebanese state police and army. However, one should pay a lot of attention to these micropolitical, narrow, and dare I say, anal view of the subject that are being performed by the state in the face of a serious and continuous crisis of governance, credibility and power that has reached a ridiculous peak this week: in the police’s arrest of Chadi Mawlawi then his sudden release, the army’s shooting of Sheikh Ahmad Abdel Wahad and the consequential arrest of several army officers, the insane story of drunk man/prostitute-not prostitute-terrorist cell-I-have-no-fucking-clue-what-the-hell-happened-there in Rawcheh, and finally the ridiculous parade of sectarian cohabitation between Hizbollah and Future movement as a result of a Sunni/Shiite collaboration to release 11 kidnapped Lebanese from Syria , thereby saving the day and “rescuing” once again the state’s authoritarian image, only to be dramatically shattered when the kidnapped Lebanese never arrived.

All these “unfortunate events” have severely castrated and humiliated the Lebanese police and army and has completely shattered its masculinity. I wonder whether we will be experiencing more of these forms of sexual surveillance in the near future as the crisis in governance escalates

If you ask me, the patriarchical Lebanese state should take a good and long look at its own asshole; it feels extremely soft and effeminate to me. Instead of taking the narrow and anal view of castrated power, maybe the police and army can….eat more snakes?

Oh and by the way, the snake is a symbol of the penis, according to Freud. Just saying…it’s all so sexual.

Civilization and its discontents (A comment on the article: “Lebanon cannot be ‘civilized’ while domestic workers are abused”)

Following the abuse and suicide of Alem Achasa in Lebanon, an article was published by Nesrine Malik  in the Guardian entitled Lebanon cannot be ‘civilized’ while domestic workers are abused.  The article addresses the racism and abuse that resulted in the suicide of Alem. In the third paragraph however, Malik embarks on a description of Lebanon’s “status” via-a-vis other Arab countries:

“No country in the Arab world is free from racial discrimination. But there is a perception, encouraged by the eagerness with which people in other countries, particularly Gulf ones, devour Beirut’s cultural exports and standards of beauty, that the Lebanese are somehow superior to other Arabs in that they are more liberal, more occidental in inclination and above all else, much lighter-skinned and therefore more “attractive”. The last 20 years has witnessed an invasion by Lebanese music and entertainment. After many painful years of civil war that crippled the country, Beirut emerged, unencumbered by the conservatism of the majority of Middle Eastern countries, more “modern” and “civilised”. But it surprises few in the region that the worst discrimination occurs in Lebanon, and that it is inflicted on only certain races and nationalities.”

the rest of the article addresses the recorded abuse of different domestic migrants in Lebanon then ends with this remark:

 ”Farah Salka from the Lebanese Anti-Racism Movement says that it is time for a redefining of the word “racist” in Lebanon. Hopefully across the region we can also begin to redefine the meaning of “civilised”, making it not only about dress, physical beauty and liberal lifestyle, but empathy with other human beings whatever their race or nationality.”

What I want to address here is Malik’s use of “civility” as an indicator of anti-racism or the absence of racism.

Malik’s argument can be summarized as the following: Lebanon is seen as superior to other countries because of its “culture” (ie music, clothes), “light skin” (apparently we are all light skinned but let’s humor Malik for a while) beauty and liberalism. But the mark and indicator of civility is not all of the above, but the ability to respect and empathy with all human beings regardless of their race and nationality. 

Malik’s framing of the whole article in terms of civility is useless at best and problematic at worse because this sort of framing refers the cause of racism to an ethical and individual form of acquired civility that requires “empathy with other human beings regardless of their ethnicity and nationality”.

By framing the racism committed against Alem Dechasa and other migrant workers in Lebanon as “uncivilized”, Malik is first assuming that the problem of racism in Lebanon is a  problem of uncivilized Lebanese individuals who lack “real”  moral attributes of humanism against the other.

Second, and most important, framing Lebanese racism as an uncivilized individual form of humanist morality completely overshadows and neglects the form of systemic and structural racism that migrant workers suffer from on a daily basis. While migrant workers are directly maltreated and abused by Lebanese individuals themselves, there is however a whole institutional  system of labour, trafficking, migration, poverty and marginalization that not only made this form of racism possible but produced it. Racism in Lebanon is a product of a an institutional system of exploitation that renders migrant workers vulnerable to racist abuse and violence.

This form of institutional and systemic racism is not only found in wanna be “civilized” Lebanon, or in the “barbaric” and uncivilized Gulf, as Malik is suggesting and describing. Structural racism in Lebanon is connected to global and universal  processes of exploitation that manifest in capitalist labour, migration and human trafficking.

Also, framing the problem of racism in terms of civility because it occurs in a country like Lebanon works to reify the civilized/uncivilized dichotomy between the “really civilized” West and the “uncivilized” other parts. But let’s not fool ourselves, racism is a universal issue and  problem, as the latest events in the USA for example have shown us with the murder of both Trayvon Martin and  Shaima Alawadi. Framing racism in terms of civility, just because it happened in a country like Lebanon, only serves to reify the “West’s” own civility and render it absent of discrimination.

Instead of framing events of violence and abuse in terms of civility/uncivility, it would be more useful for Malik to present us with an inquisitive and analytical framework of the systemic form of racism that is producing racist individuals and employers in Lebanon. Using the “civilized” argument is getting pretty old and is really useless to everyone.

On madness, violence and suicide

Shortly after the LBC video ,showing a Lebanese man beating up am Ethiopian woman outside of her embassy in Lebanon, was shared, a few people asked on facebook whoever was watching the video to wait and watch the LBC news because “there is a story behind it that will explain why the woman was treated this way”.

The story turned out to be that the woman, Alem Dechasa, is insane, and therefore Ali Mahfouz, the man who was beating her up, was only trying to help her by controlling her “mad behaviors”. This is why her suicide a few days later came to actually reinforce Mahfouz’s story of her madness. Even though a lot of people dismissed this narrative of madness and called Alem’s suicide  murder , the “madness argument” seems to be quite successful in depoliticizing actions and events of violence that reveal the madness of the empire and society itself.  Such framings of violence as “madness”, be it a violence performed on others or onto oneself like a suicide, should be deciphered as a way for the system to cover up the gaps and holes that violent actions produces within it . Arguments of madness are a way for the system to re-cover its own unveiled “madness” and “violence”. After all, and to be very clear, madness as a thing of the real, as a real thing, does not exist.

If we look a bit closer, we will realize that we are and have been surrounded by madness narratives for quite some time. One recent “act of madness” is the killing spree conducted by an American soldier on 16 Afghani civilians, including 9 children. Memorable others include the attacks and killings of Egyptian Copts by a “deranged” egyptian man in 2006 in Egypt, school shootings in the US, and the Ford Hood shooting. These acts of violence were considered “deranged” and “a product of mad individuals” by both Egyptian and American governments and by no means rational, intentional forms of violence. Somehow madness arguments make stories of violence, racism, and terror less shocking and more acceptable. They (acts of violence) become not the product of a violent military and social system but an act of a deranged soldier.

The picture shows a Coptic woman in 2006 carrying a banner saying “The killers of al-Kosheh martyrs were acquitted by the government's justice system. What can we expect them to do with Alexandria’s deranged man?” The Kosheh bloody attacks in Upper Egypt on the eve of 2000 claimed the lives of 20 Copts

The madness argument works to sustain the status quo of institutional violence, to reinforce the state’s sole right to use violence, while others who use it without following the “proper channels” do not produce violence but madness. For the exception of course of Muslim Arabs whose action of violence vis-a-vis the West is always an act of terrorism and never ever an act of madness.

The madness argument therefore serves to regulate disobedient subjects’ actions, to show them not as political, defiant and violent, but as outside of the realm of what is acceptable “as violence” as an act of violence that does not need a solution or a project. Acts of violence that are framed as “mad” needs only medical and psychiatric attention. There is nothing wrong with the American army, with United States’ presence in Afghanistan, there is nothing wrong with the troops, with Egypt,  with the racist Lebanese society, with the systematic and formal state violence and how it is used and channeled.

The act of suicide on the other hand is an act of violence turned onto oneself that is easily dismissed as an act of madness, or at the very least, a consequence of substance or drug use and, in many cases as we all know,  of Satan worshipping. Through the madness narrative, Alem Achasa’s suicide becomes devoid of any form of political protest against a racist system and becomes an irrational act, devoid of political meaning, and of  the capacity to signal the violence and racism of the state itself. It turns the act of suicide, directed towards the state, back again onto Alem’s own body and soul. It’s amazing how Alem’s body and soul is and will always remain to be the problem here. racism and madness are very much intertwined sometimes.

We seem to be living in a time of suicide.  Some suicides have, amazingly enough, stopped being articulated as mad, insane and explained through madness. Acts of burning oneself, and committing suicide outside of ministries, police stations, one’s job in Egypt, Tunisia, Algeria and many other Arab and Muslim states by mainly Arab youth has been both shocking and undecipherable within the madness narrative. One can hardly frame these suicides as acts of madness because of their abundance and their very visible forms of protest. These suicides, including Alem Achasa’s suicide, threaten the very legitimacy of the state and powers of regulations because they should be  be read as a pure form of politics that punches a hole in the System’s wall to show us the racism and violence of the system quite visibly.

Last Sunday I took the bus #15 to Rawcheh to find a nice place to write this blog post. I sat down next to a middle age woman, listening to my music. I could tell that the woman was glancing nervously at me. When I looked at her she frighteningly looked away. I thought that she might be annoyed by my music so I turned down the volume. But she kept looking at me. Somehow her glances communicated fear to me. She was whispering something so I decided to turn off my MP3 player.

She finally asked me for 250 L.L. to complete her bus fare “I tought it was 2000L.L. on Sundays” , I said as I gave her the 250L.L. “no, it’s not, they tried to do it but everyone protested…so they couldn’t do it..no one would take the bus anymore if they do that…I take this bus everyday from Dawra to come here…. I bring food and leftovers to feed the cats, they wait for me..look, here is my bag of food…I feed them at Rawcheh and make them feel better….I found this cat the other day, he was covered with Mazout and he couldn’t breathe. I wiped the mazout off his stomach and fed him…He always hide in the same corner, look…here…he always hide in the bushes next to the bank…I take care of him…he almost died, you know, he was covered with mazout…”

Suddenly I could feel the whole bus staring at us, thinking “this woman is insane”. One woman kept looking at her, and some people turned and stared. She never looked any of them, or me. She talked as if she was talking to herself, looking forward at her seat. “I am originally from Tebnin, I used to go there a lot but they told me not to come back. They told me not to take the bus or service because it is not safe. They will kidnap me…It is not safe anymore, they kidnap a lot of people these days…it is not safe”

                                                                 

this picture is stolen from the internet.

She helplessly tried to avoid the gazing in the bus. She tried to look at the sea, fix her hair, any meaningless behavior to make them stop looking. People glanced at each other and smiled when she got off the bus. They looked at me, waiting for me to become complicit in this little game of “naming the mad”. Is this what madness look like, I thought, someone’s unveiled vulnerability, humanity and loneliness? A painful yearning to communicate and an inability to relate and make sense of a harsh, devastating and threatening world that drowns cats in mazout and is constantly gazing at you? I wanted to sob.

As for me, the story of Nietzsche going mad one day at the sight of a man abusing a horse keeps hunting me, and I wonder what my breaking point will be. As I was going back home today in the Service, three non-white non-Lebanese looking women were crossing the road when two men on a motorcycle started screaming things at them and laughing, and the two other women in the service started laughing as well “shoo 2alla? Shoo 2alla? hahahaha” Is that funny, I thought. is everyone going mad or am I the crazy one here?

Dying to be human: Khader Adnan’s politics of life

Khader Adnan, a Palestinian and Islamic Jihad activist from Arabeh, has been on hunger strike for 65 days to protest against the continuous abuse and humiliation he suffered during interrogation, as well as his unlawful detention without trial by the state of Israel, in what is now being termed as “a new Israeli record for the country’s longest hunger strike”. Khader Adnan’s hunger strike, which started shortly after his seventh detention on December 17th 2011, has stirred up a massive local and international solidarity campaign by activists, prisoners and Non-profits organizations

Khader’s hunger strike is becoming a site of protest over the politics of life and what it means to be human in Palestine.It is unveiling the paradoxes of humanity as emergent and articulated in discourses of human rights, Islam and biopower. Kader’s hunger strike is a powerful political action that is redefining and extending the domain of protest, by threatening problematic and global definitions and practices of humanity, as articulated in discourses of human rights and Islam.

Through Khader’s hunger strike and the reactions it is producing, the paradoxes of these institutions of the human become more apparent and visible for criticism and scrutiny.

The paradox of the human in human rights discourse

Perhaps the most succinct expression that  best describes the political action embedded in Khader’s hunger strike, as well as the debate around it, is “Dying to live”,  adopted as banners in rallies,  as graffiti and as a twitter hashtag (#Dying2live)  that follows Khader’ health and medical state daily. Another significant statement is also #KhaderExists.

Both of these poignant and powerful expressions are strong critiques of the  problematic paradox  in human rights discourse, that is becoming more and more visible, on what it means to be human. It is what Jacques Ranciere interrogates in his article “Who is the subject of the rights of man?” (2004) when he identifies a discursive shift  ”from Man to humanity and from humanity to humanitarianism”.

Human rights, assumed to bring together universal rights of freedom, dignity, equality (etc) to all forms of humans, regardless of gender, nationality, race and culture, turned out to be the rights of the rightless only, of victims, of those who lack these basic rights, those who need humanitarian interference.

In order to become a visible subject of human rights, in order to claim his basic rights of respect and dignity as a human, Khader Adnan is starving himself in a sign of protest, because the only way for him to become human, to claim his humanity, is when he turns his life into “bare life”, to become what Giorgio Agamben calls a Homo Sacer (‘a sacred man”), “a man who may be killed by anybody, but may not be sacrificed”, a man stripped from all civil and social rights, who is in the process-of-dying but must be rescued by humanitarian intervention.

Khader reveals to us this problematic paradox of the human so clearly, so powerfully. Statements like dying to live, and khader exists are critical resonances of this paradox, where human rights can only be invoked through its absence and decline, where humanity can only become visible when it is absent or slowly deteriorating.

The problem of political action in Islam

What Khader’s hunger strike also reveals is a fascinating and important debate in Islam one what is the defining line between political action (or jihad) and suicide, a debate which is also at the core of what it means to be human and the preservation of that humanity, both physically and ethically. The fatwa issued by AlAzhar religiously forbade Khader’s hunger strike because it assumes a sort of intention to kill one’s self , to commit suicide, and this action should not be equated with jihad, which should be sought and achieved through “guns and money”.

While I am no near being an Islamic scholar, a first reading of this fatwa reflects a debate in Islam that is emerging (and i bet has been there for quite some time) on what constitutes lawful political action and what is mere suicide. is Khader’s hunger strike a political action or a de-sacration of his body? It seems that the reactions to the fatwa have undoubtedly confirmed the former, especially that many other prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails have now started a hunger strike themselves.

Finally, What makes Khader Adnan’s hunger strike so powerful in my opinion, is his persistence on intentionally threatening his own physical existence and undermining it, as a Muslim, for the sake of less immediate needs and rights for existence like respect and dignity. Khader exists, and he exists more than all of us could ever imagine existing.

 

20 things more terrifying than a new civil war in Lebanon

20- hipsters (in general)

19- The dinosaurs in the government and Parliament that do not seem to be dying anytime soon

18- the state of Lebanese newspapers

17- The discreet disappearance of sidewalks in Beirut

16- AUB cats

15-Dany’s alley in Hamra

14- The tazer guns and dogs that Solidere bodyguards have in downtown (for their defense though, they seem to have turned tazers into toys and dogs into spoiled animals, as far as i have noticed)

13- the Lebanese universitieS

12-the price of everything you like to buy or thought that you could once afford.

11- the president of Beirut’s municipality (this one is ro3ob total)

10- Lebanese men who are always in need of an audience to talk about themselves, their theories, their accomplishments in life and their (always) revolutionary politics

09- defining political action as having  a strong opinion about everything, and expressing that opinion on facebook and twitter everyday.

08- the “new generation” and their “Lebanese memes”

07- the Lebanese Labor Union

06-the shitty situation of workers in Sukleen and migrant workers in Lebanon (redundant)

05- the amount of women I know who have done plastic surgery

04- The amount of women I know who have been sexually abused (redundant)

03- the old old man who sits opposite from main gate asking you if you need a shoe shine

02-  the amount of activism and activists in Lebanon, correlated with the absence of any form of social change.

01-  the suicide of Zahed zogheib, and his father before him

يوم في بيروت

Reblogged from جدران بيروت:

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إستيقظت بتوقيت بابا عمر. ثلاث عائلات ذبحت في حمص من قبل ميليشيا الأسد. ثلاثون منزلاً يحترق في بابا عمر. القصف الصاروخي في أشده منذ بداية الثورة.

عادةً لا أستيقظ على التلفزيون ولكن هذا اليوم كان إستثناءاً.

شعرت في مغص في قلبي ورافقني هذا الشعور طيلة اليوم.

كنت قد طبعت في الليلة الماضية رسالة إعتراض هيأتها للطعن بـفاتورة خدمة الـ DSL التي وصلتني من أوجيرو.

Read more… 11 more words

The Emptying of the Political in Lebanon: Lara Fabian and consumable revolutions.

Recently, a concert by Lara Fabian scheduled in Lebanon brought upon a storm of actions by the “Campaign to boycott supporters of Israel in Lebanon” who protested the pop singer’s recent involvement with and support of Israel and called for a boycott that eventually led to the cancellation of the concert.

This brought upon a counter campaign from Lebanese businesses and the pop singer’s fans who accused the boycotting campaign of censorship and of threatening the singer. A picture of the Lara Fabian’s concert was published on the Facebook page “stop cultural terrorism in Lebanon” accusing the campaign of cultural terrorism and of mixing politics with art and music. These events were all preceded by the state censorship of “Hotel Beirut” , a Lebanese movie prevented from showing in Lebanon because it contains scenes that “threatens national security”. The counter campaign grew strong enough for Lara Fabian to re-establish her concert in Lebanon, which will be again held on February 14^th.

Abundant debates over Lara Fabian’s concert in social media like Facebook, and newspapers like Al-Akhbar, that recently published around four articles in their Culture section on the topic, has clearly brought upon two main and opposing arguments: 1) boycotting Lara Fabian’s concert and any other cultural event in support of Zionism is a way to resist against Israel’s apartheid system and its unlawful policies against Palestinians, and 2) leaving people to decide for themselves which cultural event to attend and why, is a human right that should never be censored or politicized under any circumstance.

Somewhere in these debates, the act of boycotting Israeli commodities, or commodities dangerously linked to Israel, was equated with the act of cultural terrorism and censorship.

These forms of identification, arguments and debates are strong examples of how the political is emptied in Lebanon, in the midst of the “Arab spring” and revolutionary changes in the Middle East. 

Boycotting vs. cultural terrorism: signaling the terror in commodities of the global

Boycotting and cultural censorship are both forms of politics that reflect an anxiety over certain forms of commodities, whether because of their attachment to Israel, as is the case with Lara Fabian, or whether they are deemed to be culturally inappropriate, commodities that might shake the social and political system, like “Beirut hotel”. While the act of boycotting assumes a personal or collective choice to abstain from consuming certain commodities, state censorship is a more institutionally implemented “abstinence”, where citizens have no say in the matter.

What is at stake here is a visibility/censorship dichotomy that reflects the current state of global politics. Both the act of boycotting and censorship are a reflection of a generalized anxiety over the consumption of certain global commodities. The act of boycotting however marks the commodity as dangerous and bad by localizing it in history. Lara Fabian’s concert, when boycotted, stops being “just art” and becomes visible in the political arena as holding marks of Zionism and oppression.

Through the act of boycotting, certain local and dangerous characteristics emerge onto the surface and become unveiled, which threatens the globality of the commodities themselves. The act of censorship on the other hand, works by removing the commodity all together from the reach of the public, marking it as dangerous as a whole, by removing it entirely, thereby rendering it invisible and unreachable.

Therefore, boycotting marks and signals the terror in commodities, thereby making them political, while censorship signals them entirely as terrorizing and remove them all together from the political field and from consumption. So, why did boycotting Lara Fabian’s concert become so rapidly equated with censorship and “cultural terrorism”?

The global politics of human rights

In order to understand why and how boycotting became equated with cultural terrorism, we need to locate Lebanese social actions within global politics. In the Lara Fabian debates, the boycotters centered their argument on the importance of being conscious of the forms of commodities consumed within the current global order, while the other group evoked freedom of expression as the primary and most essential human values that should never be compromised.

While the boycotters framed their argument around the right to abstain from consuming certain commodities, the pro-concert group evoked a clear discourse of human rights that mainly revolved around freedom of expression anywhere and anytime, regardless of history and context.

Through these human rights values, commodities like music and clothes (etc.) become global in a sense that they can hold similar meaning and consumptive function anywhere without being challenged. Their locality must always be hidden. After all, art is just art, music and fashion has nothing to do with politics and should be enjoyed by everyone regardless of who made them and for what purpose. To mention for example that Coco Chanel worked as a Nazi agent from the occupation of Paris to the aftermath of the world war II , should not be mixed with fashion line that modernized and revolutionized clothing. By not respecting this politics/art dichotomy, the boycotters threatened the very globality of commodities of art and were accused of censoring and interrupting their global flow.

The emptying of the political in Lebanon

The Lara Fabian’s debates are one example of how the political is emptied in Lebanon through the subscription to a global discourse of human rights, whose politics of life assumes a universal way of being that disregards and makes hidden the locality of the human. In the midst of the “Arab spring” revolutions and social movements, Lebanon appears to have been emptied of the political at the expense of moral discourses of human rights and of the globality of consumption.

Much like dominant arguments that called against the incorporation of the political into domains like art and consumption, the current state of the art in Lebanese politics brings into the present past narratives and stories of rebellion and resistance and re-introduce them into the political discourse as “revolutions”. Recently produced movies like “Rue Huvelin” (2011)  revoke and combine post-civil war youth demonstrations, protests and sit-ins in Lebanon between 1990 and 2005, into a solid revolutionary narrative under the new light of “the Arab spring”. Conferences like “Lebanon on the margins of the Arab Spring” held in Washington DC on the current state of Lebanese politics   strive to bring into the present past demonstrations and protests like the “Cedar revolution”.

These narrative forms are also strong examples of how the political, or practice politics, in Lebanon, is easily replaced with apolitical narratives of consumptive revolutions. In this sense, “Lebanese revolutions” become commodities themselves that are consumed to satisfy the need for political and social action.

 

“Ma32oul?!” Tracing the conditions of possibility for politics in Lebanon

Let’s face it. The Lebanese Moghtarib, or the Lebanese returnee, is pretty annoying. She nags about everything that is wrong with the country, she relentlessly points out to you all the problems, as if you didn’t know them already, and she’s always shocked by how things are ‘here’. As if she never lived here before and suffered through “the pollution”. It’s not that she is not right, but she annoys us because she points to things that we have gotten used to over the years and are learning to deal with on a daily basis without losing our minds.

One of the benefits of being a Lebanese returnee however, is that particular cultural shock that you experience when you come back home, however annoying it is for the locals. You begin to look at everything from a different perspective, and, as a result, you are genuinely surprised at the way things are. After all, culture is much less about norms, traditions and rituals than about common sense; all these behaviors, embodied gestures and ways of being that are taken for granted as “the way to be” .

The Lebanese returnees are then  bound to break many more of these embodied norms and behaviors, and be faced by indignation and protest from the locals, especially with the Lebanese expression “ma32oul?!” (is it possible?!). But this does not just apply to the Moghtarebeen, a lot of Lebanese communities and groups are faced daily with the “ma32oul?!”, as they strive to make sense of what is a possible way of being-in-Lebanon.

So l thought it would be a good idea to start following and recording the different “ma32oul?!” I have encountered both as a local and a “returned Lebanese”. These “ma32oul” encounters, although quite innocent in appearance, holds a lot of meaning and inscriptions of what is considered a possible political action in Lebanon and what is classified outside of the realm of the possible. By recording these “ma32oul?!” encounters, we can map the conditions of possibility for politics in Lebanon. I am using only a few encounters here for the sake of illustration.

Throughout these incidents, I am sparing you my own angry reaction to all the “ma32oul?!!” that I had to suffer through. It’s probably my own attempt at understanding why these particular behaviors that I did were so appalling to others and not other forms of gestures and behaviors. here are some of my “Ma32oul?!” experiences..i am sure you have many of them yourself if you think about it.

1- I bought a dress for my cousin’s wedding from Mango around three years ago. As I was trying on the dress, I noticed it was too long. And since I am short and don’t really wear heals, I thought the dress would look pretty if I shorten it enough to show my ankles and a small part of my legs. I communicated that to the tailor who went absolutely nuts: “ma32oul?! You want to shorten the dress that much?! But it’s a wedding, you can’t do that!” I insisted but she was not happy. She made me feel like an idiot. The next day, I get a call from the tailor herself “are you sure you want to do this?! Isn’t it for a wedding?! Ma32oul?! It’s too short? How tall are you?” the dress looked awesome by the way, at least i thought so.

2- I saw these really cool sticky notes in Canada that were poster size. My friend was using them to design her research project and since I was going back to Lebanon to start my own research, the first thing I did was go to Fairco and ask about those sticky notes. “Hello, do you have those poster size sticky notes? ..or A4 size?” the salesman, who is around 18 or 19, literally starts screaming at me : “POSTER SIZE STIKCY NOTES?! MA32OUUUUUL?! THERE IS NO SUCH THING” I made him swallow the small sticky notes…in my mind.

3- So I am good citizen and decide to go protest for improving wages in Lebanon. The demonstration was around 10am and I wanted to prepare a protest banner. So I woke up around 9 and went straight to the bookstore next to my house to buy posters. For some reason, I thought it was a good idea to also ask if they had small sticks I could use to hold the poster with, which made the sale’s lady figure out that I was going to a demonstration. She was happy I am participating, but still: “ma32oul?! You are buying and preparing your banner an hour before the protest?! Why didn’t you prepare it yesterday?! Ma32oul?! You should always give yourself time to prepare your protest banner!” I was speechless for this one. I thanked her, apologized for being so late in preparing my protest banner, and left.

4- One of my personal favorite “ma32oul?!” story dates back to around 2007, when I first entered my mother’s barber salon. I mean I had of course cut my hair before and all but I had not done it too elaborately, if you know what I mean. So the “coiffeur” comes in and as he is taking care of my mom, he asks me what I want to do with my hair and if I want a “brushing”. “shoo ya3neh brushing?” I ask him, as his face turns completely pale. He never answered my question. He just stared at me and was silent for the rest of my stay. The shampoo guy however did not hold back “ma32oul?! You don’t know what brushing is?! You’ve never done brushing before?!” I built up the courage to ask some friends what brushing was a few years later and it turned out to be about straightening your hair (if you didn’t know and was afraid to ask, like me.)

5- A classic “Ma32oul?!” that I am sure we’ve all experienced one way or another: The AC/heater handyman is appalled by the image of me bringing the ladder to him. “Ma32oul you’re bringing the ladder to me?! Ma 3endik we7deh (don’t you have someone, ie a maid, ie an object/robot that you can make do everything?)

These are a sample of “ma32oul?!” encounters that have marked me over the years. A quick look at them reveal the rigidity and importance of certain gendered Lebanese ways of dressing, protesting and consuming that are not to be challenged or resisted. The conditions of possibility of being a Lebanese woman are very well-defined and strongly demarcated in this case. Perhaps Bourdieu’s work on taste, knowledge and social class in Distinction can be a first attempt at analyzing these regimes of being. As Bourdieu argues, all these encounters implies a specific form of knowledge about dressing, taste, aesthetics and social relations that are accessible by a specific social class who themselves start defining what is possible and what is not, what is tasteful and what is not.

The rigidity of these everyday actions in society is a marker of an influential and well-established social class in Lebanon Their rigidity in my opinion is striking, especially when we compare them to the realm of the possible in Lebanon; ie the behaviors, ways of being-in the world and action that do not elicit a “ma32oul?!” emotion.

One very immediate example can be the tragic collapse of the Achrafieh building two days ago. Mohammad Nazzal’s article on the building collapse in Al Akhbar http://www.al-akhbar.com/node/29652 traces the set of normalized processes, techniques and behaviors through which politicians, officials and the Lebanese in general brought the collapse of the building into the realm of the possible, by taking away the shock and the tragedy and turning the event into a normalized and possible incidence, into “ma32oul”. The collapse of the building was not the result of Israel’s bombing, but of a worn down building and “there are a lot of worn down buildings in Beirut at risk for collapsing” as the president of Beirut municipality Bassel Hamad stated in the interview.

The normalization of the event takes it away from the element of shock and makes a traumatic event possible and mundane, thereby distancing it from the forms of social protest embedded in the emotion of “ma32oul?!”. After all, “ma32oul?!” is an expression that carries in it fundamental forms of social action that determines what is socially possible and acceptable. It seems striking that “ma32oul?!” encounters in Lebanon emerge as a way to mark and reinforce privileged class knowledge of aesthetics and consumption, but is less established and rigid in situations of violence and disaster. The collapse of the building was of course shocking and distressing for a lot of people and have elicited i am sure a “ma32oul this happened?!” emotion, but not an institutionalized and rigid one like the one expressed by the Sticky notes Fairco sailsman.

By making violent events possible, and making certain micropolitical behaviors rigid and impossible, the conditions of possibility for politics in general becomes more and more restricted in Lebanon.

The Saudi sovereign and the breast: King Abdullah speaks to women through a cancer prevention campaign

     In the last few weeks, The Saudi TV channel MBC has been broadcasting an ad of a Saudi national breast cancer campaign, organized by Zahra Breast Cancer Association. Officially launched on October 10^th, the national campaign is led by Princess Hessah Bint Trad Al-shaalan (the Honorary president of the Zahra Breast Cancer Association and wife of Kind Abdullah Bin Abdulaziz) and princess Rima Bint Abdullah bin Abdulaziz, aka Abdullah’ s daughter.

The campaign made a fascinating ad that quotes an interview (how recent it is I am not quite sure) by King Abdullah talking about the importance of women in Saudi society. If you have missed this absolutely amazing and ironic ad, you can watch it here: http://www.ckfu.org/vb/t235906.html

Basically, the advertisement starts with King Abdullah’s definition of what a woman is: “a woman is my mother, is my sister, is my daughter, is my wife. I am created from a woman” (This last sentence made me nauseous every time I heard it on TV. There was something about it that was just so wrong and yucky) then the ad shifts to the campaign’s slogan and main purpose: “because you are the foundation, and your life is precious to us, we beg you to do the preventive test for breast cancer”

The timing for this national campaign should first be noted. At the end of September, after a series of social movements and protests led by Saudi women to demand their basic social and individual rights, especially the campaign for driving in Saudi Arabia, king Abdullah announces a series of reforms for women, especially the right to vote and standing for elections , which will  be effective in 2015.

A quick reading of the reforms reveal the attempt of the Saudi sovereign to include women in the political scene, thereby allowing a basic representation of women, symbolized in the right to vote and to be voted for, without providing any form of social and everyday reform that is more urgent and immediate, like the right to drive a car etc.

This is why this campaign for breast cancer prevention is so fascinating. While meant to show the King’s admiration and appreciation of Saudi women’s role in society, what the ad produces is obviously a patriarchal representation of women, mixed with a call for a new and “modern” way  for them to regulate their bodies and breasts.

King Abdullah’s definition of a woman is always in relation to himself. He, the king, wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for women. This is not a dialectical relationship. Woman + king Abdullah =  nothing productive and transformative. In all of his statements, King Abdullah simply appropriates the woman into himself, as his. Women do not and cannot stand by themselves as subjects but are always in relation to the sovereign/man.

That’s the obvious part. King Abdullah, at the end of his life, is awkwardly trying to talk to Saudi women through a cancer breast prevention campaign and fails miserably at it. But what is fascinating about this is the royal family’s choice of venue from which the king spoke to his female subjects. In The history of Sexuality (1978), Michel Foucault traces the shift in “power” from an authoritarian sovereign power that governs people by deciding who lives and who dies, where subjects sacrifice their lives for the sake of the sovereign, to a modern power over life, a  modern power that fosters life “and disallows it to the point of death”. Foucault terms this new form of power “biopower”, an institutional form of regulation and control that is much more productive and hegemonic than the former oppressive “do what I tell you to or I will kill you” power.

Biopower can be defined as a technology of power and a way to regulate and control populations’ bodies and health by modern states, through numerous technologies and techniques. This new form of power relies on subjects to regulate themselves without any need for an oppressive or visible order. Modern institutions of knowledge like psychology, psychoanalysis and medicine, center on the body and regulate it not authoritatively but through propagating a series of “healthy and normal” behaviors that people are expected to do on their own and for their own health. Behaviors like brushing teeth, putting on a seatbelt and taking annual check ups for cancer prevention become taken for granted habits and a form of anatomo-politics that shift the role of regulation and control from the sovereign to the individual herself.

What I think is fascinating about the Saudi ad for breast cancer prevention is exactly this funny mixture of sovereign power and biopower that the ad reveals. The king wants to both cover the breast entirely and unveil it medically. Usually, ads that try to convince women to get checked up for cancer attempt to focus on the efficiency of these tests in rescuing women and keeping them alive. Messages like “if you test yourself once a year, you will protect your health and live longer” work because no one can refuse to be against her own health and therefore will self-regulate her own body.

However, what happens in this ad quite different. The message portrayed in the ad can be decoded somewhat like that: “please get tested for Cancer because your life is precious to us”. This rather weird form of biopolitics is revealed by trying to convince Saudi women to self-regulate because their bodies are important for the sovereign. While statistics about the efficiency of these tests for cancer prevention are mentioned at the end, the main character in the ad is the king himself, telling his women subjects that their bodies and health are of direct importance to him.

This interesting form of “power mixing” symbolizes the state of the art of Saudi politics today. It is not a coincidence that the king (his wife and his daughter) chose a breast cancer prevention campaign to speak to Saudi women subjects. His message portrays a sense of paternalistic care for Saudi women’s healthy breasts on one hand, and a re-establishment of his role as a sovereign who oppresses and controls every single inch and dimension in their bodies on the other.

Working harder and staying the same: how social class awareness, Rafik Hariri and secularism came together through difference in a taxi from Hamra to Jemmayze

I did not object to the double fees for the ride from Hamra to Jemmayzeh..after all it was Eid. But the driver immediately apologized: “I won’t find any clients in Jemmayzeh….this life is getting tougher and tougher..working harder and harder  just leads to the same situation: at the end of the day, I am making the same amount of money”.  This comment stirred a really interesting conversation on labor and social class in Lebanon between the driver and I. He compared his job to the job of his previous employers, “very rich people” who would do nothing all year-long, spend like crazy and take him with them to Cannes and Nice as their driver (“it was amazing, such a different culture, I wish I could take my family there one day!”) but then they would stop spending at the last month of the year because they were waiting for their financial investments to produce money “I work harder and harder and stay the same, and they do the bare minimum and get richer every year”.

What happened next striked me as nonsensical and unexpected. The driver moved directly from discussing the problem of classicism in Lebanon to praising the role of  Rafik Hariri, Lebanon’s first prime minister after the civil war in 1990, a billionaire (multi billionaire? I can only think of billionaire as the most obnoxiously big number) usually critiqued for privatizing state institutions, putting the country in debt  and owning 6% of Lebanon (or so the driver admitted), in improving the social classes in Lebanon. “I am not politicized and do not support any party but I disagree when people talk about Rafik Hariri as a thief. He had many projects and was always fought in the parliament because war lords like Walid Jumblat and Nabih Berri wanted things to stay the same. He also made his own money, he worked hard to become a billionaire”.

Wow, I thought, how did we get here? We were having such a nice Marxist conversation, and now we’re talking about how socially aware Rafik Hariri was?! To make things more complicated, the taxi driver concluded the conversation by announcing that the only solution for social change in Lebanon is secularism and the fall of sectarianism: “it is the only way for state institutions to function in a just way outside of the interests of sectarian war lords” .

Although I still don’t know what to think of this conversation, I realized that we Lebanese spend a lot of time trying to find people who think, argue and say the same things we believe are true. It is, I believe, a sort of “Lebanese” urge to find out where the other comes from (men wein men Beirut?), who she supports, in order to map out the in-group from the out-group, in order to form the “from us/not from us” (منّا او مش منّا) dichotomy. I think we all do it all the time, be it by categorizing people through their sects/religion, political views or causes they support, etc. But this service driver is a hybrid, he does not fit either the in-group or the out-group.

In Friction: An ethnography of global connection (2005), Anna Tsing, among many other things, looks at the friction produced by the traveling of global social projects in local sites. Friction, the connection between the global and local is a productive connection that comes not from similarity and commonness but from cultural diversity and difference. The coming together through difference is crucial for social change. Tsing talks about how local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tapers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers and hikers, nature lovers, village elders, farmers and urban students, among others came together through difference and adopted a glocally (global + local…her word not mine!) produced a project and movement against deforestation in Indonesia. Don’t misunderstand her, the process was full of messy misunderstandings but they were misunderstandings that worked out and shaped the social project and movement. People from different social classes, interests, opinions, affiliations and causes create social change because they come together at one moment in time through difference.

Perhaps the failure of the campaign for the fall of the sectarian regime in Lebanon should be analyzed through these terms. The campaign systematically addressed people with similar ideas, class, opinions and systematically cut off other forms of Lebanese subjectivities with different backgrounds, interests and aspirations. The service driver and I finally came together through difference. It is this difference that made our “coming together” powerful and interesting and his call for the fall of  sectarianism so meaningful. That’s why a future campaign for mobilization and social change in Lebanon should not be so restrictive and should strive to see beyond the from us/not from us dichotomy. Coming together through difference requires the breaking of this dichotomy.