Revolutionary Struggles within the Home
Transformations in the Domestic Lives of Syrian Women in Exile after 2011
p. 43-64
Texte intégral
1“How long did it take for the French revolution to succeed? A hundred years?” I was often asked rhetorically by Syrians I lived among in Gaziantep, Turkey. The person would then conclude, “We still have a long way ahead of us!” referring to the three years that had passed since the beginning of their revolution. When I first arrived in Gaziantep in 2014, the revolution was still perceived as alive and my interlocutors—displaced lower- and lower-middle-class Syrians who had been involved in different ways in the 2011 revolution—strongly believed that the Assad regime could fall. Over the course of my two years of fieldwork, during which I shared Syrian families’ lives and homes, the revolution’s shape and meaning changed for the Syrians I lived among as the situation deteriorated inside Syria, the rebels increasingly lost territories, and the conflict turned into a proxy war. The possible success of the revolution slowly shifted from the present to a distant future, from the political to the social domain, and from the national to the intimate scale. Indeed, my interlocutors soon deemed the revolution as defeated in the political realm at the level of the State, as the revolutionaries’ presence inside Syria and their leverage in national politics drastically diminished. Hence, unlike what had been hoped for in 2011, the uprising had not succeeded in removing the Assad regime despite large parts of the Syrian territory falling under the rebels’ control and administration.1
2This chapter is based on over two years of ethnographic fieldwork between 2014 and 2017 and ethnographic engagement until 2019 with Syrian youths and families who were mainly Sunni Arabs from the lower and lower-middle classes, and from mid-sized towns, who participated in various ways in the 2011 revolution and were displaced to southern Turkey as a result of the revolution’s violent repression. This delimited temporal focus has, however, a wider theoretical purchase as it allows us to seize revolution’s (un)expected consequences in exile as well as the Syrian revolution’s short- and long-term impacts on its very actors.
3The focus on women is mainly linked to the absence of male relatives in many of the families I worked with, which were de facto headed by women in exile. I was very humbled by these women who struck me as both extremely resilient and strong-willed. During one of our conversations one of them laughingly and kindly reminded me that “the man is the head but the woman is the neck” and she spelled it out for me: “you see the man might be the head who takes the decisions but it is the woman that makes him turn, like a neck, in the direction she wants him to go”, thus showing that women had always had their ways to make their men go in the direction they wanted them to follow.
4This chapter explores Syrian women’s perception of the actual outcomes of the revolution at various scales and in various domains of their lifeworlds, both in the short and longer term. It argues that for the women I lived among, the social and the political, the intimate and the national, are strongly interconnected. How did my displaced female interlocutors experience and make sense of the effects of the revolution and its repression on their everyday life, their social relations and their new position within the beit (home, family lineage)?
5The women I worked with expressed that, in the context of the crisis (of revolution, war and displacement) that they were inhabiting, the personal is clearly political, echoing well-known feminist discourses without defining themselves as feminists. They linked the changes inside the beit (family) to the revolution. Like many of the Syrians I lived with at the time, they argued that the defeated revolution could succeed in the future, for it was linked to long-term and what were understood as ghir rdud (irreversible) transformations in the social fabric and in people’s ʿaqlia (mentality). The Syrians I lived with explained that the deep social changes they witnessed in their domestic and social lives and relationships would inevitably lead to political changes in the future.
6This chapter sketches portraits of Syrian women in their 20s and early 30s, and their mothers in their mid-40s and 50s, all of whom participated in multiple ways in the revolution: they took part in protests, designed and prepared banners, sang and addressed the protesters, participated in peaceful sit-ins, cooked and knitted for protesters and fighters, participated in cleaning campaigns, reported human rights violations, became citizen journalists, worked in field hospitals, and volunteered in aid and relief for internally displaced people (Khalili 2017, 2023b). They were subsequently displaced to Turkey, often without male or older relatives. This forced displacement was triggered by the revolution’s repression: the loss and arrest of family members, internal displacement for fear of being arrested and/or killed, the destruction of one’s home or hometown. Drawing on these ethnographic encounters, I show how revolution has had deep effects on the lives of my female interlocutors both inside and outside Syria. These revolutionary transformations have often happened within their home, attesting to a deep connection between things political and domestic in the revolutionary context and its aftermath in displacement.
7Although this chapter deals with political and personal transformations, it does not focus on Syrian feminist activists but on female heads of household and their adult daughters, who did not always see their new roles and duties as empowering. It examines the transformations in women’s selves and lifeworlds, and the processes of change in family and gender relations during a clearly defined period of time (2014–2017) in the aftermath of the revolution, in displacement in the city of Gaziantep. Moreover, this analysis has a peculiar positionality since Gaziantep became the capital of the revolutionaries in exile: located 60km from the Syrian border, it operated as a bridge between inside and outside Syria with Turkey’s open-door policy until 2015 and was a back door of sorts for Syrian and international NGOs alike.
8By describing female interlocutors’ struggles inside and outside their homes, I highlight often-overlooked revolutionary actors and spaces (Winegar 2012). Moreover, showing the continuity of their struggles in the streets and in their homes, as well as inside Syria and in displacement, the study aims to show that Syrian women are not passive victims of war, as they are often described in the mass-media, or as refugees who are “powerless” and “victim of (their) family’s actions” (Alhayek 2015). On the contrary, the women I lived with can be described as powerful political actors and agents of social change. If they were not necessarily political actors in the classic sense of the terms—public figures or political activists (nāshiṭīn)—since their actions blurred the boundary of things political and personal, they were, however, self-referred as harāʾir (free women) (Aubin-Boltanski & Khalbous 2020) or thuwwār (revolutionaries) and were actors of political and social changes at the domestic level.
9My analysis thus builds on the literature that looks at women’s roles in contexts of political turmoil (e.g., Aretxaga 1998, Peteet 1991), and of the Arab revolutions (e.g., Hafez 2012, Winegar 2012). By taking seriously my interlocutors’ claims and understanding of continuities between their political struggles and the transformations of their social and private lives, I propose to make sense of their questioning of the dominant gender ideology in (pre-)revolutionary Syria (cf. Peteet 1991). My aim is not to describe these processes in terms of “emancipation” or “empowerment”, which would risk imposing a white Western feminist gaze that universalises a historically bounded situation (see hooks 1984, Ghamari-Tabrizi 2016).2 On the contrary, I aim to draw out—inspired by bell hooks’s feminist writings and building on Julie Peteet’s work on Palestinian women in the resistance—processes of transformation of gender structures and meanings rather than analyse the situation in terms of liberation versus subordination (Peteet 1991: 5). The chapter thus focuses on the discontinuities perceived by women within the beit in gendered relations, roles, norms and practices, despite numerous continuities also existing.
10The focus on ruptures rather than continuities is an emic perspective emerging from my interlocutors’ perception of their situation as having changed dramatically. Discussing their involvement in the revolution and its impact on their lives, the women I lived with often brought together their struggles against two kinds of authority: the political (the regime) and the familial (beit). They formulated these two fights in terms of struggle against authority (sulṭa) and oppression/injustice (ẓulm).
11I will first describe the ways in which the fight against the regime was simultaneously understood by my interlocutors as a struggle within their homes against a “patriarchal bargain” (Kandiyoti 1988, see also Hafez 2012). I then go on to argue that the transformations of the organisation and power dynamics within the Syrian beit were a result of revolutionary action that were intensified and accelerated by displacement. Finally, I discuss novel marriage practices as ways for younger women to challenge the authority of older women, and to posit themselves as political agents in the aftermath of revolution and exile. By ethnographically describing Syrian women’s revolution within and outside the home, this is an attempt to shed light on often invisibilised revolutionary actors (women) and spaces (beit and exile).
Syrian women’s revolution: A struggle against state
and familial authority
12“If we get rid of Assad, we would still have to get rid of all the tyrants in our homes”, Mariam—a thirty-year-old teacher who had recently fled to Turkey with her two young children and husband—told me as we were discussing the future of the revolution.3 Developing her thought, Mariam explained that it was not only the regime’s authority in Syria but also men’s authority within the home that need to be dismantled. The idea that for women the struggle against the regime and its defeat would be incomplete without a struggle against what Mariam described as oppression within families, was actually widespread among my female interlocutors. This sentiment was echoed by Umm Zein, a mother of two and a housewife in her mid-twenties from a middle-sized town in central Syria, although the chronology she posited between the downfall of the regime and of patriarchal authority within the home were not the same as Mariam’s. “I want to fight for freedom within my own home first: […] I need my freedom from my husband before getting my freedom from Bashar!”, she told me during one of my visits to her home. Umm Zein had got engaged when she was 15 and got married two years later. She gave birth to her second child as the first protests erupted in her hometown. This was the reason, she said, why she did not participate in the protests. But she nonetheless saw herself as a “freedom fighter” (muqātelat al-hurrya) for challenging her husband’s authority at home, and for demanding her rights in her household (see below).
13Interestingly, the parallel that women established between State and patriarchal authority resonates with John Borneman’s work on father-son relations in Syria (2007). He argues that the authority of leaders and the authority of fathers have a similar logic in Syria: both are presented and justified as a patrilineal construct. In what follows, I examine the profound repercussions of the destruction of the wall of fear in the political domain, as well as of the impossibility of depending on absent fathers in the patriarchal organisation of the beit, and the resulting redistribution of roles and responsibilities. Mariam’s and Umm Zein’s statements stress that, for women, the political revolution against the regime had to translate into a social revolution within their homes (Winegar 2012). In Sherin Hafez’ terms (2012), in her study on the Egyptian context, the revolution led to a destabilisation of the “patriarchal bargain” in political and private domains. The concept of a patriarchal bargain on which Hafez builds her analysis is borrowed from Deniz Kandiyoti who, in the 1980s, defined it as women’s apparently disempowering choices that contain, however, the potential for gain in political and domestic domains (1988).
14Describing the ways in which this bargain works in Egypt and the region more widely, Hafez writes, “the older patriarch presides over and assumes responsibility for members of the extended family. […] the power of the patriarch thus derive[s] from his abilities to provide as well as control and ensure the obedience of the members of the group” (2012: 38). The bargain thus entails a reciprocal exchange “of allegiance in return for sustenance”, where “inequality is maintained” (2012: 38). Hafez argues that these power dynamics characterise male–female relationships as well as those between the Egyptian people and Mubarak. I would add, following Suad Joseph (1999a), that senior women become a sort of patriarch for younger ones as they exercise their authority over them within the household, and that this also applies to women-to-women relationships. Indeed, the power within the household is cyclically attributed to older women and it is the anticipation of gaining this power that leads to the “internalization of this form of patriarchy” (Kandiyoti 1988: 279).
15But women’s participation in street protests and, in the Syrian case, the scattering of relatives in displacement, destabilised the patriarchal bargain at the scales of both of the state and the home, as will be discussed in the rest of this chapter. Syrian women did play an important role on the streets in the struggle against the regime from its inception (Ghazzawi 2014). For instance, Mariam joined the peaceful protests of 2011 in Ḥoms. She was later forced to move to the liberated areas of the city, where she trained as a nurse to help remedy the lack of medical staff and to care for the growing number of injured. Mariam later helped establish a community centre in order to provide basic education and vocational training to local people and IDPs, since all public services (including education) had disappeared from the area as the regime withdrew from it.
16However, it is not only by protesting in the streets and taking part in political action that women challenged this patriarchal bargain: the revolution also took place within Syrian homes. In places and at times when women’s mobility and access to public space are reduced, one must carefully observe changes within the household (Winegar 2012). Umm Zein did not participate in street protests—even women’s ones—because she had only recently given birth. She nevertheless described herself as an active member of the revolutionary struggle, and was perceived among displaced Syrians as a revolutionary hero (baṭala) for her resilience and steadfastness (ṣumūd). She had lived in besieged Ḥoms for years, where she cooked and knitted for the rebels. She managed to prepare at least a meal a day for a group of them until the siege became too tight. But even then, she proved her inventiveness and resilience, always finding ways to put a little bit of food on the table. Through what Umm Zein perceived as revolutionary activities she made her husband accept that she would be going outside of her home by herself and taking major household decisions concerning their children’s education and whether to stay or flee their hometown.
17In participating in the revolution, the women I lived with thus started to see themselves as powerful political actors and to define themselves as revolutionaries. Moreover, the changes in their everyday lives and selves were considered to have effects not only on themselves but on their families and the social fabric at large.4
Revolution, displacement and reorganisation of the beit
18Female revolutionary action inside Syria, and the scattering of families outside the country, had profound repercussions in the patriarchal organisation of the Syrian beit—which encompasses the material house, as well as the home and the family lineage (Kastrinou 2016: 32, Sanyal 2011: 883, Sayigh 2005: 19). The reshaping of the beit thus appears as a result of the challenge to the previous “patriarchal bargain”, a re-shaping that led to a series of reconfigurations of social and gender relations. Hence, if revolutions happen in emblematic spaces, they can only be turned into real social transformation within people’s homes, that is, drawing on Jessica Winegar’s argument on the Egyptian revolution (2012) that lasting social transformations do not happen in the effervescence of public protests, but are, rather, long-term processes that are enacted in the everyday intimacy of the domestic sphere, as becomes apparent in the present study.
19The Syrian beit used to be organised following a “patrilocal logic”: sons would bring their wives into their family, which often meant moving into the family home and building an extra floor above their parents’, or, alternatively, taking a house nearby (Chatty 2018, Joseph 1999b, Kastrinou 2016). The beit is also structured according to another patrilineal logic: “children belong to their fathers, they are incorporated into their father’s genealogical line” (Joseph 1999b: 175).
20I argue instead that the patriarchal logic and patrilineal organisation of the beit were first shaken by women’s participation in the events of the revolution of 2011, and later reinforced by displacement. The social rupture perceived by the Syrian women I lived among as a simultaneous or consecutive struggle to the political one thus translated into very pragmatic and everyday issues. Moreover, displacement amplified these changes, which were perceived and experienced ambivalently.
21In order to illustrate the transformations of the beit I first give a detailed description of one family—Umm Yazan’s. Umm Yazan is a lower-middle-class housewife from Ḥamā and a mother of six in her mid-fifties. Before the revolution, most of her time had been dedicated to her children, grandchildren and household. Her parents, married daughters and in-laws all lived within walking distance of her house, and they visited one another on a daily basis, so her (social) life was organised around these visits. When I met Umm Yazan in January 2015, she was living alone with her two youngest daughters; her husband was still in Syria negotiating her son’s release from regime jails, and one of her daughters was living in a town under regime control with her own husband and toddler. When Umm Yazan arrived in Turkey she first lived with her two eldest daughters, who had fled Syria after being detained, and who were wanted by the regime for their revolutionary activities. She moved to her own house when these two daughters respectively married and remarried. As with Umm Yazan’s family, all the families I lived with were affected in one way or another by their involvement in the revolution, its repression, and their subsequent displacement. This left them scattered between different cities and countries.
22Turkey was perceived as a rather female space by my interlocutors, as it was marked by the absence of their male relatives: some detained, others martyred, some inside Syria working or fighting, others already in Europe applying for family reunification visas. Among the Syrian families I lived with, there was thus an omnipresence of women that strongly contrasted with the quasi-absence of men, often of the patriarchs. In the context of migration and displacement, the absence of male relatives is not something surprising and it often causes dramatic household disruptions and changes in women’s roles and status (e.g., Abu-Nahleh 2006; Brink 1991, de Haas and Van Rooij 2010, Elliot 2012). However, these disruptions are not necessarily full transformations, as roles can revert once men return or once women join their men in their new countries. Through Umm Yazan’s family story during the revolution, one starts to perceive how women’s participation in the revolution was the first cause of the beit’s restructuring (see Aretxaga 1998, Buch 2010, Jean-Klein 2000, 2003). These transformations were often more permanent, probably because they were not only caused by outside circumstances but were a result of women’s political actions.
23Umm Yazan’s life changed dramatically in the revolution. Whereas she described life as mainly happening within her home before the revolution, during the revolution and later in displacement she spent the majority of her time outside her home. Her description of life happening “inside” in Syria resonates with the definition of space as gendered that was famously exposed by Pierre Bourdieu in the appendix to Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique (1972), “The Kabyle House or the World Reversed”. Bourdieu argues that the private sphere of the house (the inside) is a female space, whereas the public sphere of the field or the assembly (the outside) is a male one. The association of women with the inside and the private, and of men with the outside and the public has been challenged by Farha Ghannam (2002, 2011, see also Elliot 2012, 2016; Göle 2002, vom Bruck 1997). In her study of working-class families relocated from Bulaq to al-Zawiya in Cairo, Ghannam (2002) enriches the understanding of relations between gender and movement through different kinds of spaces by layering on her analysis the concepts of kinship and class. She argues that various factors—age, marital status, economic need, number of children (2002: 101)—determine women’s access to public places. For instance, she shows that, ideally, women should not work outside their homes once they are married, but this depends on the household’s income: if the husband’s income cannot sustain the household, it is accepted that women must do so (Ghannam 2002: 105).
24In addition to being linked to kinship and class, I argue that these experiences of the inside and outside are also linked to whether one lived in an urban or rural area, as well as to the family’s social and religious conservatism. Moreover, inside and outside have shifting and sometimes overlapping meanings in authoritarian regimes and in forced displacement. Under the Assad regime, the private and public spaces often had very blurred boundaries, since as the saying goes “walls have ears” and, as reported by my interlocutors, the community’s control over women’s mores, especially in suburban and rural areas, was often tight. In displacement, on the other hand, communities and families scattered, which led women to navigate public space in a more anonymised way. Furthermore, especially during the first years of Syrian displacement when registration was not as much controlled by the Turkish State, Syrians could travel within the country as well as back and forth between Syria and Turkey with more ease (Khalili 2023a).
25For instance, Umm Khaled’s life was that of a widow and mother of martyrs in her fifties, originally from a rural town in northern Syria, belonging to the lower-middle classes, and thus was mainly spent in women’s spaces, taking care of her children and household chores. Yet, in order to complement her husband’s meagre civil-servant salary, she also worked in the fields near her house, which made it possible for her family to have extra vegetables and fruit. On the other hand, Umm Ahmad, a working-class housewife in her mid-forties from the Aleppo suburbs, had never worked outside her home and thus had only moved and socialised in female spaces until she was displaced to Gaziantep. Having lost her three sons, and with her husband being sick, it was now she and her daughters who were in charge of working and collecting aid to sustain their precarious lives, a hard task that was not seen as emancipatory by the wider community.
26Women’s mobility was also limited by religious and social conservatism. Umm Yazan belonged to a lower-middle class urban family, and despite her wish to work as a schoolteacher—a profession she had trained for and practised before getting married—she had not been allowed by her husband and his family to continue her professional activity after marriage. This was not solely motivated by their more comfortable revenues, since Umm Yazan also mentioned financial difficulties, but rather because her husband and his family were in favour of a strict division of spaces and roles along gendered lines. Umm Ahmad’s family was similarly in favour of strictly divided spaces and roles, and had taken her out of school at 14, but she was able to impose her will for her daughters to continue their studies. Umm Yazan’s husband’s family and Umm Ahmad’s were ideologically close to the Muslim Brotherhood, and some of their family members had been politically involved with the organisation in the 1980s.
27However, in the revolutionary effervescence (2011–2012), Umm Yazan and Umm Khaled challenged their restricted mobility, whereas Umm Ahmad helped revolutionaries from home. At the beginning of the uprising, Umm Khaled secretly joined the first women’s protests in her hometown, covering herself with a niqāb so she would not be recognised. This was an act of defiance against the regime’s authoritarianism but it was also a gesture made to challenge her male relatives, as she told her husband and sons that if they did not join the protests, she would continue to do so herself. Umm Yazan’s movements outside the domestic space also began to increase during the revolution; she collected money for and distributed goods to internally displaced families, women being then less suspected and targeted. She recalled crossing checkpoints with her niqāb filled with medical supplies without attracting soldiers’ attention. Women’s roles in the revolution were thus not only hidden and did not only take place within their homes: my female interlocutors attended protests as well and were, indeed, sometimes the only ones able to carry out particular tasks outside of their homes.
28Since women were perceived as belonging in the private sphere of the home (Bourdieu 1972, Elliot 2016, Ghannam 2002, 2011), they were not primary suspects when it came to revolutionary activities. As in Northern Ireland, where women used their gender identity and perceptions of them as victims of the war (Aretxaga 1998: 66), Syrian women used these characteristics to circumvent the army and security forces and deliver medicines and weapons under their wide manteau (a long coat falling to one’s feet), circulating freely in the anonymity of their niqāb (Bhabha 2007 and Fanon 1967 on Algeria). This was especially true in the uprising’s first phase, when women were not yet targeted by the regime and could protest against the siege in Darʿa and demand food.
29The revolution did not increase the mobility of older women only, something that would seem in line with Joseph’s analysis of “patriarchal connectivity”, wherein women, as they become older and closer to menopause, take on a larger role in the beit and their mobility increases accordingly (1999). Instead, it is also younger women who challenged patriarchal and patrilineal logics in the revolution. For example, Umm Yazan’s eldest daughters, Sara, 25, and Raya, 23, fled Syria because they had been arrested and were still wanted by the regime for their active participation in the early years of the revolution. They had to flee to Turkey alone as their parents were caring for siblings and relatives remaining in Syria. They thus started to live without any (male) relatives in Gaziantep at a time when the Syrian presence in the city was still discrete, and when Syrians did not yet inhabit entire buildings or neighbourhoods, thereby enabling the reproduction of social dynamics resembling those in Syrian towns and neighbourhoods.5 In Turkey they also found their first jobs and started to socialise in non-sex-segregated spaces.6 This represented an important change, one clearly compelled by the revolutionary developments in Syria, as they had previously only been allowed to go out or travel between cities with a male relative, and they would never have been allowed to spend a night outside of their family home. Indeed, they were not safe in Syria anymore, but their relatives would have been at risk if they had accompanied them into liberated areas and to Turkey before returning to a town under regime control. This was also linked to the fact that they had asserted themselves as independent political actors and subjects by participating in the revolution. They had joined the protests in their town and became involved with activist networks, unbeknownst to their parents and relatives.
30Sara, for instance, was married and a mother of three in 2011. While living in exile in Gaziantep, she confided to me that back then she had joined the protests despite her husband’s support of the regime. When the security services started an arrest campaign targeting protestors and activists, she fled her city with her sister without informing their family. In fact, in the revolution, many activists had to cut their ties with family and friends and continue their activities underground in order not to endanger them. Soon after, Sara was arrested by the regime and detained for several months in appalling conditions. After her release from jail, she refused to go back to her married life, and asked her husband for a divorce settlement. She had been married to him without her consent when she was 16 and had never liked him, she said. Moreover, after her active participation in the revolution she felt that it would be impossible to live with him because of his support for the very regime that she had fought against, and that had detained and tortured her. Since neither her husband nor her family agreed to or supported the divorce, Sara had no choice but to leave her three children in their father’s custody.7 Losing her children rendered her separation from her husband particularly painful, a separation already hard given its impact on her relationship with her relatives, which constituted a brutal rupture of Syrian social and marital orders.8 Sara then fled to Turkey to avoid being re-arrested. Her sister, Raya, had already taken refuge there when Sara had been arrested. The two sisters’ stories exemplify how participating in the revolution had the potential to dramatically reorganise family relations, increase women’s mobility, and give them new roles.
31Through the revolution, my female interlocutors discovered new aspects of themselves: they learned to occupy public space and to voice their political opinions, they developed a taste for political discussions and public speeches—something that Syrians I lived with had not been used to before 2011. Moreover, by fighting against the regime’s authority they simultaneously fought against society and their family’s authority, as expressed by Umm Zein and Mariam, and as demonstrated by Sara’s decision to act against familial and social norms. In fact, their roles in the revolution pushed them to challenge and change their roles within their families. In her work on women in Belfast in the 1970s, Begoña Aretxaga similarly shows that women’s involvement in the struggle against the British was also “a time of self-discovery and political education, which provided a necessary space for reflecting on gendered social positions” and led to the emergence of a new political consciousness (1998: 54). Furthermore, she argues that the political and domestic fields cannot be conceived of separately: “the practices of resistance undertaken by women constitute a privileged scenario wherein to examine the mechanisms of social change”, she writes (1998: 55).
32As Umm Khaled’s, Umm Yazan’s, Sara’s and Raya’s experiences show, female participation in the revolution led to social and personal transformations. Indeed, Syrian women also began to challenge “former understandings of the roles of mother and wife, bringing new dimensions to the dominant gender discourse through their actions in the revolution” (Aretxaga 1998: 55). If these roles had been generally more accepted by my interlocutors before 2011, gender inequalities became increasingly read in political terms throughout and after the revolution. In this regard, it seems that the 2011 revolution led to a rupture from which emerged a female (if not a feminist) consciousness among the Syrians with whom I worked (Peteet 1991: 88, hooks 1984: 11), and which has thereby inscribed itself within a revolutionary discourse and a political consciousness.
33If this started with the revolution and its repression, it was also amplified by the main consequence of that repression: forced displacement. Here, displacement seems to operate as an “incubator for transformations”, and as an intensifier of social change (Wilson 2016: 10, see Malkki 1995, Peteet 1991). In fact, the absence of relatives and acquaintances allowed (or forced, depending on one’s perspective) women to socialise and move in non-sex-segregated spaces. In Turkey, Umm Yazan, Umm Khaled and Umm Ahmad started to work outside their homes and became the main providers for their families. They were running most of the errands their husbands and sons had been previously in charge of. But this was not always easy and was not necessarily seen—unlike their participation in the revolution—as “empowering”, for it was also linked to the absence and loss of relatives. These women also often struggled to make ends meet and had to carry alone the burdens of childcare, household chores, and job hunting and/or queuing for hours for aid from NGOs.9 Yet, this was not contradictory with the feeling that their new roles were the result and consequence of their revolutionary struggle.
Marriages as locii of political and intimate struggles
34Women’s participation in the revolution also led younger women to challenge the patriarchal bargain and older women’s authority through their exploration of new marital arrangements. Over the course of revolution and displacement, a shift from marriages based on kin and community ties to marriages based on political affiliations came about (Chatty 2018 on pre-revolutionary marriages in Syria).
35For many Syrians, and for nearly all my interlocutors, pre-revolutionary forms of marriage were endogamous, which did not necessarily mean that they took place between the father’s brother’s son (FBS) and the father’s brother’s daughter (FBD) (Wilson 2016:150), nor within the extended kinship network (Joseph 1999c). They were, rather, alliances that were usually formed with close neighbours and known members of the same community (see Ghannam 2002: 80, Joseph 1999c, see Kastrinou 2016: 98). Yet most of the women I lived with refused these forms of endogamous marriages after the revolution, and new forms of alliance appeared: “politically endogamous marriages” as Julie Peteet names them (1991: 181).10 These changes in marriage patterns, more than merely a consequence of displacement, were a revolutionary rupture, for alliances were redrawn on the basis of revolutionary affiliations, ethos, and actions rather than endogamic logic.
36Before the revolution, Umm Yazan had married off two of her daughters at the ages 16, Sara, and 17, Nour, to men that she and her husband had chosen. These two marriages followed an endogamic logic: the grooms’ families were neighbours and belonged to the familiarity of the beit’s surroundings. In addition to coming from known and respectable families, the men had homes, stable jobs, and were pious and moral subjects. Bride-price and dowry also played a central role in these two marriages (Goody 1990, Khuri 2004, Mundy 1995). This was mentioned by Umm Yazan as she once showed me the jewellery Sara was offered by her ex-husband when they got married.11 However, dowry and bride-price were not openly spoken of, as money exchange remained taboo (Kastrinou 2016: 103) and their role was challenged by the precarious conditions of Syrians in displacement.
37Umm Yazan had two daughters who did not marry before the revolution, Maya, 20, and Raya, 23. When I met Umm Yazan, Raya had married a man of her own choice a few months earlier, someone her mother did not even know or like.12 When I asked about the striking difference between her daughters’ marriages before and after the revolution, Umm Yazan explained that she could trust Raya, who knew what she wanted, so she did not interfere with her life. She described Raya as a strong, smart, highly capable woman whom she admired for her involvement in the revolution. Yet there was more to it than Raya’s character, since Maya also married according to the logic of political endogamy despite her mother observing that she was rather weak and noting her lack of participation in the revolution.
38Raya met her husband at a revolutionary meeting. They had been involved in the same underground network inside Syria without knowing it, then discovered it while chatting about their revolutionary involvement. Several months after this first encounter, they decided to get engaged, and got married later the same year. Their marriage faced resistance from both families, who did not know one another nor come from the same city or social background. Whereas Raya’s family was socially and religiously conservative and lower-middle class, Omar’s was rather liberal and upper class. Raya explained her parents’ opposition by saying, “It is harder to marry a man from Ḥoms [for a woman coming from Ḥamā], than a foreigner”. Umm Yazan was particularly dissatisfied with this marriage arrangement, but Raya went ahead with her decision.
39The fact that Raya participated actively in the revolution and had lived on her own with her sister for a year made it difficult for her mother to assert authority over her. Not only was she a respected revolutionary, she had also managed to find employment and accommodation, and had lived without male relatives in a foreign city, breaking numerous taboos and living an independent life (Ghannam 2002: 69). She was thus not ready to fall back under her parents’ authority. This was not an isolated case, as women, once involved in politics and public life, started to build new social networks, meeting the men they married through their involvement in political life rather than through their families.
40But Umm Yazan’s “standards” were also changed by the revolution and her understanding that things could no longer be the way they used to be. Marriage practices thus index the socio-political transformations that the revolution had initiated: the most important criterion was now that her daughter’s husband be a trusted and ethical revolutionary who had a degree and migratory projects beyond Turkey, as the situation in the country was perceived to be too uncertain and unstable due to the precarious legal status of Syrians (Khalili 2023a). When Umm Yazan started to mention her wish that Maya would marry, citing economic pressure and the desire to find a way for her daughter to start a new life in Europe or the Gulf, Maya suggested ʿAli, whom she had met through her sisters at a gathering with friends who were part of a revolutionary network from their town. He was a trusted revolutionary, and an acquaintance of her sisters. The two young people started to meet, alone and in secret—something that could never have happened before the revolution when Maya had not been allowed out of the house by herself. This was now facilitated by Umm Yazan’s absence from home, the absence of male and older relatives, and the largely anonymous environment of displacement that partly lifted the pressure to conform to social norms. Even after Syrians fled in massive numbers to Gaziantep, the family remained relatively free of community pressure since they came from Ḥamā and most Syrians displaced to Gaziantep come from Aleppo and the surrounding countryside.
41Maya and ʿAli’s marriage seemed at first very unlikely. Her older sister, Nour, saw several obstacles to it: ʿAli did not come from the same confessional community (he belonged to the Ismaili minority); their families did not know one another; he did not have a university degree and did not have a well-paid job; nor did he have plans to go to Europe any time soon, as he did not have the money to pay for the crossing and his family could not support him financially. Moreover, he asked for Maya’s hand in a rather heterodox way, as he was not accompanied by family members to support his request (Kastrinou 2016: 101). His proposal was met with suspicion and without joy by Umm Yazan, who hoped to marry her daughter to the son of a family she knew well, a man who was educated, and who was planning to (and could afford to) cross to Europe. In fact, more than wealth, what seemed to matter the most in displacement was education, as it was the only thing on which people could still rely.13 Yet eventually, after Umm Yazan sent relatives to enquire about ʿAli’s family in his hometown, she agreed to the engagement14 because he had participated in the revolution and had good revolutionary ethics. He also eventually agreed to travel to Europe, was lent the money for the crossing, and promised that he and Maya would pursue their studies there.
42Displacement also played a role in these transformations in marriage patterns. Before the revolution, in Syria and the region, bride-price and dowry often used to be divided into three payments (Kastrinou 2016: 103, Goody 1990, Mundy 1995). The groom and his family used to pay for the wedding celebrations, gave a payment to the bride’s guardian, and gave money, gold or jewellery to the bride herself (Mundy 1995). In the context of Syria, these three transactions were known as the muqaddam, which was given before the marriage to the bride and her family; the jihāz or “bride trousseau”, which included clothes, jewellery and a home for the spouses; and gifts from relatives and wedding guests. However, because of economic pressures but also because it was deemed inappropriate in wartime, most of my interlocutors married without ceremony in Gaziantep. On paper, the payments were done in two parts: the muqaddam, an amount of money in US dollars given to the bride or her parents at the time of the ceremony; and the muʾakhar, an amount of money to be paid to the bride in case of divorce. Those who could afford it would add jihāz (gold or jewellery to the bride and her female relatives). But although these were included in the marriage contract, the muqaddam was in fact rarely paid or drastically reduced to a symbolic amount. This was linked to economic pressures but also to youths getting married without their families, who had been the ones in charge of these transactions.
43Through Umm Yazan’s marriage strategies for her daughters and their resistance to, and subversion of, them, one can get a glimpse of larger transformations: daughters gained control over their marriage options, unsettled patriarchal relations, and imposed a new form of marriage through their involvement in the revolution. In these new marriage arrangements, women clearly appear as agents of social change and of family remodelling. In addition, as the marriages of Maya and Raya demonstrate, political endogamy allowed cross-class and cross-sect marriages, as sectarian and class differences were partially erased by the revolutionary dynamic for the women I lived with in Gaziantep. By challenging and contesting old forms of endogamous marriage, as well as proposing new alliances, young women asserted themselves against older female relatives.
44Umm Ahmad told me, having developed her understanding of Syrians’ motivation for participating in the uprising: “You want to know why we started the revolution? It is because of the ẓulm […] Ẓulm was everywhere [before the revolution]. When the revolution started, we were all out to ask for our rights. We were just against the ẓulm […] This is why we got in the revolution, so we can live properly”.
45Echoing these words, Umm Zein confided one evening: “I’d really like to have a girl, but with the husband I have, I am happy I don’t have one! I don’t want him to oppress (yaẓlum) her the way he oppresses me!”
46Through such discourses and the practices described above, my interlocutors show how the personal is political as they draw our attention to the fact that as women, they were suffering from at least two sources of oppression (ẓulm): that of the regime and that of the family. Through the concept of ẓulm (oppression, injustice), which became a cornerstone claim and concept of the Syrian revolution (Khalili 2023b), they read in political terms their pre-revolutionary condition as women and their family situations.
Conclusion: Social changes as revolutionary transformations
47As pointed out by bell hooks, “the use of the term ‘oppression’ is important because it places feminist struggle in a radical political framework” (1984: 6). It has, however, not been the aim of this chapter to present my Syrian female interlocutors as feminist activists—as they did not participate in the 2011 revolution on this basis or define themselves as such—nor has it been to depict women’s revolution as a feminist revolution. In fact, many Syrian women I met and lived with would never describe themselves as feminists, and would view the term with suspicion (cf. hooks 1984). This was particularly true of older women who understood it as a Western and secular concept. Nevertheless, the women I lived with conceived the domestic as political when they fought against the patriarchal bargain simultaneously at home and in the streets. It is this link between the personal and the political that turns their struggle within the home revolutionary. According to these women, this showed the continued presence of the spirit of the revolution, and was understood as the revolution’s legacy: Syrians were not only rising against Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive and unjust rule, they were rising against all forms of illegitimate or unjust authority.
48In this chapter, I have described how women’s participation in the 2011 revolution led to the emergence of new selves, social relationships, gendered norms and practices, as well as a profound reorganisation of the beit and of marriage arrangements. Moreover, I have shown that these transformations of Syrian women, beit and social relations have been amplified by forced displacement, thus making these transformations painful in many ways. All in all, I have argued that there is continuity between revolutionary work outside and inside the home —in the social and political domains, and at the personal and collective scales.
49By focusing on rather overlooked revolutionary actors and transformations, this chapter has also shown that the Syrian revolutionary project, despite having been defeated in the political domain at the scale of the State, still had transformative power. It can be identified at the level of the constitution of subjects, social relationships, modes of dwelling, temporality, future horizons and imaginative modes. Moreover, departing from the premise that revolutions rarely reach their intended goals and that they survive their own defeat, this chapter claims that the Syrian revolution witnessed a displacement: rather than a political rupture at the scale of the State, it produced a series of transformations that dramatically reshaped Syrians’ lifeworlds.
50Hence, processes of social transformation were understood and experienced by the women I lived with as bringing both social and political change: social transformations were to precede and lead to a future political rupture rather than being the result of it. Indeed, the defeated revolution at the level of politics still produced a series of deep ruptures in the social field: within the beit, in gendered relations, roles, norms and practices. Furthermore, during my fieldwork this rupture was qualified by my interlocutors as “irreversible” and “long term”, deeper than the defeated rupture at the political level, but it was also perceived as the condition of possibility for a future and irreversible rupture to occur in the political realm. This deep rupture was understood as the real revolutionary transformation—the radical rupture—that will eventually lead to a political revolution in a distant future. The depth of the rupture was thus judged by its permanence, radicalness, and future revolutionary potential, while social rupture was perceived as, and became, a revolutionary entity and a transformative force in its own right. Thirteen years after the beginning of the Syrian uprising and over seven years after the beginning of my research, one might, however, ask what remains of these revolutionary transformations and whether these processes have been or can be reversed.
51Through the continuous long-term relationship with the women I present in this chapter, and based on additional fieldwork in Gaziantep in the summer of 2022, I can only offer a located and partial answer: for my interlocutors exiled in Europe, further away from their homeland and local communities, as well as for those still living in Turkey, their dire economic situation and too-often uncertain legal status have allowed them to break more social and gendered taboos and assert themselves as long-standing political and social actors and sometimes as public figures (see also Taha 2020 on Syrian women in Egypt). However, this does not overlook the violence and the hardships that women still face within and outside their homes in Turkey and Europe (Dogutas 2019). A racist and sexist attack against an elderly Syrian woman on the street of Gaziantep by a Turkish man in the summer 2022 was filmed and the video was widely spread by Syrians in Turkey 15 and abroad, highlighting, for instance, Syrian women’s increasingly precarious presence in the public space in exile.
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Notes de bas de page
1For an overview of the global situation in Syrian from 2011 till 2020 see Vignal 2021 and Munif 2020.
2I discuss in more depth the competing definitions of feminism within the Syrian community in Gaziantep and more broadly elsewhere (Khalili 2023b). On this debate see also Chancellor 2020, Ghazzawi 2014 and Taha 2020.
3All conversations and interviews happened in Arabic. All interlocutors have been anonymised, and all their places of origin have been changed, along with some biographical details, in order to protect their identity.
4My argument is of course not to say that all Syrian women’s lives were happening within their homes and that they had primarily “typical’ roles within them before the revolution; but to follow my interlocutors in their recalling of their lives as such before the uprising.
5This was, however, not always positively perceived by women themselves. Indeed, if, on the one hand, neolocal residence allowed women to move and make decisions more freely, on the other hand it left them alone to carry out housework and childcare (Peteet 1991, p. 34).
6It is not uncommon for women to go to malls, cafes, or restaurants in Gaziantep, where they share space with men. Moreover, unlike the coffee shop, which remains a space for (older) men playing cards and smoking—and which should not be conflated with the café—most spaces in the city are non-sex-segregated, and women can be found circulating alone in all public spaces.
7This specific example does not contradict the fact that many women who had been imprisoned by the regime were often repudiated by their husband, ostracised by their family, or found themselves in difficult positions regarding the possiblity of ever get married due to rape and sexual violence used as methods of torture in regime jails, causing women to be deemed impure as a result.
8In Syria children belong to the father and his family (Chatty 2018), both traditionally and by law, and in the case of divorce or repudiation the father has the right to keep his children (Rabo 2011).
9See Khalili 2023a for more on Syrian everyday conditions in Turkey.
10Politically endogamous marriages existed within small circles of political activists before the revolution. For instance, some of my interlocutors reported that political detainees from the Communist Party married among themselves. However, this was a small-scale endeavour that only concerned active members of revolutionary circles, whereas in a highly polarised political environment such as the post-2011 one, it was unthinkable for my interlocutors—even those who did not take an active part in the revolution—to marry people who had different political views.
11Umm Yazan had managed to smuggle with her the few golden bracelets she had been given by her husband when they got married (jihāz) and those of Sara. She started to sell them once she had completely run out of money, and showed them to me when we went together to Gaziantep’s gold market.
12This does not mean that resistance to marriage arrangements did not exist before the revolution (Abu-Lughod 1990; Chatty 2018) or that marriage arrangements did not concern men too (Borneman 2007), but rather that it took on new meaning for my interlocutors.
13My interlocutors’ most cherished belongings were their diplomas and their (marriage, birth, etc.) certificates. The diplomas allowed those who had qualifications to hope for better employment or to resume their studies, while the certificates were needed for visa and family reunification processes (Khalili 2023b).
14Maria Kastrinou (2016) describes engagement processes in detail in her ethnography of the pre-war Druze community in Syria. See pages 100–103 in particular on the engagement process and celebrations.
Auteur
-
Charlotte al-Khalili
University College of Sussex
C.M.D.Al-Khalili@sussex.ac.uk
Charlotte Al-Khalili is a Leverhulme Early Career fellow in Anthropology at the University of Sussex. Her work focuses on revolutionary politics and subjectivities, as well as religious temporalities and practices in Syria and Turkey. Her research explores the effects of the 2011 revolution and its aftermath on displaced Syrians’ lifeworlds, and examines Syrians’ evolving understandings, imaginations and conceptualisations of revolution and displacement. She is the author of the monograph Waiting for the Revolution to End: Syrian Displacement, Time and Subjectivity (UCL, 2023) and co-editor of the Revolution Beyond the Event (UCL, 2023).
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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