by mai’a
this summer, we hired a couple of young women from the refugee school to babysit my two year old daughter, aza for a few hours a week while habibi was working out of the home and i was working at the computer. so i was normally in my bedroom or office and aza and the babysitter were in the living room playing or watching music videos or ethiopian soap operas.
normally aza is pretty easy to entertain. she likes attention, games, playing with blocks, dancing and drawing, reading. etc. you know toddler stuff. every once in a while she gets cranky. throws a heated aries fit. and usually, well since she was born, the easiest way to calm her down is to take her outside.
so when aza would get cranky with the babysitters, i would suggest that they take outside for a short walk. thats what we always do.
–outside? the babysitter asks
–yes just for a short walk to the church and back. it will calm her down.
silence.
–but the boys will talk.
–the boys outside? in the streets?
nods.
and here is the problem.
my babysitters are sub saharan east african refugee teenage girls. black girls, for short. and i know a little something about street boys and black girls.
i know that walking outside in black girl body is exhausting. the comments. jokes. laughter. cat calls. constant barage. men coming up to you. it happens much more rarely when i am with habibi. but walking alone is like walking the gauntlet. avoid. avoid. avoid.
i know that when refugee girls ask me – which sooner or later they inevitably do- if i like egypt- the correct answer is…its okay. they cannot imagine why anyone would move here on their own free will. oh, they say, egyptians treat you differently because you are american. i laugh, they cant tell im american until i tell them. i dont look american to them… yes, they say you look like us. well, maybe you dont understand what they are saying to you because you dont speak arabic that well. i laugh again, the first words i learned in arabic were- samara=black girl, kushi=black girl, etc etc etc. you learn the words you hear the most. (ask my daughter who today was trying to close a door and said: fuck. fuck. fuck. )
well, they say, there is no where to go in cairo if you dont have money. all we do is sit in the house all day.
and at first, i am thinking, oh, go to the park. take a walk through the streets. explore. its cairo! one of the most famous cities in the world! rich with history and populations and art and…
what they mean is. any place that they could go where there are folks who are less likely to harrass them is indoors. and being indoors in public, like a restaurant, cafe, show, museum, mall, etc. costs money.
if you are poor and black and female. you just sit in the house all day. because going outside is making yourself not only more vulnerable to attack. but more vulnerable to being accused of provoking the attack because what were you doing outside?
and i know what class privilege feels like. it feels like riding in a taxi because i dont feel like dealing with the street boys today. i have that choice.
my babysitters. dont.
how do we create the space so that we are safe walking. there arent really green areas. we cant go crawling through nature. if i stop to contemplate a tree nine times out of ten it is planted in concrete. this is a city’s city.
this is a what do we do when we are sitting in an apartment and my daughter is crying because she wants to go outside and the woman who is taking care of her is too traumatized to be able to handle walking a quarter of a mile outside. because after she escaped the eritrean army and journeyed alone across the subsaharan desert for weeks when she was 14 yrs old arrive in cairo and achieve refugee status from unhcr and suffers from chronic bronchitis …she cant even walk outside without some boys threatening her with sexual violence.
i want to describe the culture of cairo. but how do you do that in a blog post? i want to say something about the history of sub saharan african slavery in the middle east. how blacks are considered inferior. and all black women are considered to be prostitutes. how baggy pants are called: nigger pants. how sexualized the images of black women are in the middle east. how white skin is considered to be the most desirable. and skin bleaching creams are so popular here. how hard it is to catch a taxi here as a black woman. how a lot of the african refugee women i know clean houses for a living (as do my babysitters) putting themselves at greater risks for the sexual violence that was threatened on the streets…
i want to explain while in some ways their lives are safer and have more options than they did back home in sudan or eritrea, kenya or ethiopia, uganda or somalia, these teenage girls.women. hate it in cairo.
because they cant go
outisde.
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September 2nd, 2009 at 5:45 pm #
September 2nd, 2009 at 6:07 pm #
Great post.
One thing though: Is it possible that the street boys can still tell you are American or at least a relatively well off ‘foreigner’ regardless of your skin colour?
I ask because I’m black too and when I go overseas to where I was born – a country of majority people of colour – the locals can always tell I’m from a Western country because of how I dress etc.
September 2nd, 2009 at 7:06 pm #
@sahara
not really. i mean east africans here dress pretty western. especially the christians. and the youth. jeans. tshirt. sneakers. i mean alot of the youth east african culture here tries to emulate african american hip hop and pop culture. they listen to beyonce and fifty cent. (i teach a hip hop class at their school. and they requested hip hop and reggaeton)
further more e african popluation here is pretty varied in terms of ethnicities. i mean we are talking about refugees from a huge land mass and more than half a dozen countries. drc alone has 450 ethnicities and languages. so to ‘look’ e african here kind of morphs into just having black african skin.
and this shows. i do get harassed on the streets a lot. but i dont think of it as that big of a deal. because i have lived in countries where i got harassed much much more. here, people dont throw rocks at me or anything because im black unlike other places i live. so that makes it easier. the immediate danger is only verbal.
this is not to downplay the harassment at all. it is tortuous.
when i am not harassed is when i am with my partner. he is white. ‘looks’ american. and we have a biracial daughter. when i am with my lil fam ppl see us a lot differently. there is another post i want to write about race, children, and egypt…but that is for another time…
but when ppl do realize that i am american. like, when they ask me ‘where am i from’ and i tell them…i def get a lot more ‘respect’ if that is what you can call it. so it is obvious that they did not think of me as western before…
does that make sense?
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:00 pm #
Yes I take your point. However where I was born – in an African country, the people dress pretty Western too. And listen to all that hip hop/RNB stuff plus really good local music! And I get the street harassment, sexual harassment etc too even though people can tell I am a Westerner.
But I take your point about the many different ethnicities etc. I don’t know…it must just vary.
Also are you the Maia who is going to Gaza and needs support from WOC orgs but weren’t getting it? If so, I would like to give some support, not in the immediate future though cuz I’m crazy busy – but if you want it, please email me and I’ll try.
September 2nd, 2009 at 8:26 pm #
although i should be clear that i am talking about egyptians seeing me as e african. not necessarily e. africans seeing me so.
although when i was in the drc. because i could speak french plenty of folks assumed that i was congolese. not from their region…obviously…but from kinshasa maybe. or i was born in the congo but now lived in the states. like they could definitely tell difference. but that difference did not automatically equate to westerner.
oh and yes, i am that same maia. thank you for your offer…
September 3rd, 2009 at 5:46 am #
beautiful post mai’a. and painful. and reminds me of your posts about transnational organizing…and how black girls (and girls of color) here in the u.s. also struggle with that going outside–but for different reasons–i’m thinking of my home city, Flint, and now Detroit…I’ve been thinking a lot about how when I was in flint, there was a serious rampage of car jackings…and how some good friends (all women) got car jacked/raped. and how knowing that could happen in that city effected everything about my decision to have kids, how i treated my kids–how I *never* went for a walk when I lived in flint.
Another incident that made national news in flint–a group of kids had jumped the train outside of flint and wound up in flint–and a group of men started following them, stalking them–and eventually, the kids were cornered and attacked horribly–the boys were killed and the one girl in the group was raped, then shot in the head. there is no street harassment, because everybody is trained not to go outside. men too.
but then in my new city–i was sitting in a car once, and a girl (who looked like she was a woman of color), was walking up the street–right next to a library. one of the better streets in the neighborhood. and a black guy stops on his bike right in front of my car…and the woman–I could tell *immediatly* she knew danger was in front of her. the man started singing at her, I couldn’t hear the words, just the tune–and she crossed the street. He started to get loud then, and she had that posture–that one where you can tell she was going into a fight. I stuck my head out of the car so that both of them knew that they were not alone–and the guy stopped singing, then eventually rode away on his bike…but it makes me think–the difference between all these cities. one city is so unsafe and violent that even men don’t go outside…the other one is relatively privileged whose most reported crime is burglary–and it’s women who aren’t safe.
and that doesn’t even speak to the safty/lack of saftey citizenship brings people–my city is not targeted so harshly by ICE-but nobody ever sees any mexicans. we all know they are here, because taquerias and mexican grocery stores are popping up everywhere–but the mexicans stay to themselves and rarely integrate into larger community.-Detroit, on the other hand, IS targeted very heavily by ICE–. but you go through mexican town, and you see TONS of people on the streets comparably–other parts of detroit where there would presumably be more privilege–and it’s isolated and scary because nobody is there. people have learned to stay inside, like they have in flint.
…just so much brought up by this post–thank you so much for posting it.
September 3rd, 2009 at 12:48 pm #
I’ve seen the same dynamic in the US–obviously, street harassment of girls/women, but there is definitely a racial component. A black woman I was friends with, whose shift started at 5:00 a.m., was often approached by guys trolling for prostitutes. She was in a business suit, didn’t “look” like a prostitute–no matter. She’s black, she’s outside, she must be a hooker, was the thinking. While I was hassled by curb-crawlers when I was walking near or through the Combat Zone (when it was the Combat Zone, or the Adult District), my friend didn’t need to be anywhere near there to get hassled. Black woman outside = public property in the eyes of many men.
I was waiting for a bus in a fairly affluent, mostly white suburb. There was a black woman waiting with me. We noticed the same car driving around the block, over and over, the (older, white) guy looking at us. Or I thought it was us, at first. Then I noticed that he was staring at the black woman. I was very afraid for her–I figured that if she was getting a different bus from me, I’d catch it with her just so she wouldn’t be alone for that creep to harass. I asked her, and she said she was getting the same one I was planning on getting. It really hit home to me how much *more* vulnerable women of color are.