SHIRLY BAHAR
I remember that day clearly. In the fall of 1989, we got a new homeroom teacher. I was ten years old, going on eleven, and had just started fifth grade, joining the “elders” among the students of the Zalman Aran elementary school in the Tel Aviv neighborhood where I grew up. The new teacher’s specialty was in bible studies and literature—my favorite subjects. Our fourth-grade bible class ended on a hopeful note: the fleeing Israelites had just made it to Canaan and were finally about to enter, or as narrated, “return to their promised land after years of exile and slavery in Egypt and an excruciating forty-year long journey in the desert.”
Now, the Israelites just needed to figure out how to reenter. I was on the edge of my seat. Captivating as bible classes were for me, this was going to be a whole new level, and the new teacher really knew how to tell a story. Eagerly, she started telling us how Joshua Bin-Nun, the leader of the Israelites, and successor of Moses, followed the word of God and prepared the people’s army for a complex military operation to reoccupy Jericho, and how, after seven days of incitement, the Israelites managed to collapse the walls of Jericho upon the Canaanites. No one survived but Rahab, the sex worker who provided the Israelites with intelligence for the operation.
Getting louder as the story progressed, her cheeks turning red, and her left arm waving around the bible book she was reading from, my teacher was on fire. But her fire really turned into fury as she made the connection between the biblical story and the current times—the latter years of the First Intifada. “If Joshua and the Israelites arrived back to Canaan after so many years of exile,” she asked, “were they not expecting it to be populated by people? Isn’t this military aggression by the Israelites reminding you of Israeli occupation of the territories nowadays?”
I carry this formative memory with me till this day. I think of my teacher’s burst of fury as an instance of what Sara Ahmed,1 author of Living a Feminist Life, has called “the feminist snap,” that “sharp sound,” “which infects a body with a desire to speak in ways other than how you have been commanded to speak … snap, snap … in a feminist and queer genealogy, life unfolds from such points.”
As Ahmed surely did, I think of Audre Lorde2 teaching us of the “uses of anger,” where she asserted that “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being.” The fury that my teacher ignited in me at ten years old has encouraged me to keep my eyes open through the thick, layered lies about Palestine and Palestinian history that constituted my upbringing in Israel. As my nascent desire for strong-minded, rebellious women blended with budding politicization, the fury that I zealously cast into my writing, teaching, and organizing is modeled after hers.
Coming home that day, I couldn’t keep my mind away from class. So, at a memorial gathering that took place that evening, I repeated the school day’s occurrences to my extended family. They were scandalized. “How could my teacher say something like that?” My mom and aunt protested. “It is illegal for a teacher to express her political views in the classroom.”
As the argument escalated, turning into a shouting match, my mom and aunt shushed me, fearing that my uncle, an extreme right-wing nationalist, would get mad—that he’d explode. We had seen his violence come out before around matters like that.
What I don’t remember is, whose death we were commemorating in the family that evening.
Though my family in Israel was small, the commemorations we held were many. Leaving Istanbul, Turkey, in the late 1970s, right before I was born, my family moved to Israel after my paternal grandfather died of a sudden heart attack. In Istanbul, my grandfather had run a successful business for scarves, which my family lost upon his death. Shocked and stripped of their most precious source of safety, my newlywed parents and my aunt and uncle found refuge where my grandfather had warned them never to venture: Under the wings of the Zionist propaganda, rapidly popularized in Jewish circles in Istanbul at that time, then in Israel, which Turkish Jews call “the medina,” or “the state.”
There, my family thought, they would find more opportunities. As young women, my mom and aunt fervently believed that, in Israel, they would be able to lead more liberated lives. But my family’s financial struggles only intensified after their departure, harboring confusion, frustration, and personal altercations; sometimes, as was the case with my uncle, minor physical violence.
In Israel, my family’s experiences of discrimination and exclusion at work, their cultural marginalization and social isolation as Mizrahim, were stacked upon dense layers of pain and longing for their home in Istanbul. But that took a very long time for me to understand. It was only when I reached my thirties that I started making those connections to my family’s lived experiences as Mizrahi immigrants. It is only now, in my continual attempts to weave the pieces of their and our personal, familial, and community histories into a story, that I dare to consider that perhaps the naive fury birthed in me during bible class at ten years old may have emanated from that deep, soft, wounded spot within me, drawing me to my teacher.
I don’t remember whose death we were commemorating that evening because, as I was growing up, my family told me little about their lives in Istanbul. When my parents would mention my grandfather’s business, for example, they would simply say that he sold scarves. It was not until I traveled to Istanbul to see his shop with my own eyes that I found out he was selling Muslim headscarves.
My family, who internalized the dogmas of Zionist education in their youth and learned to feel ashamed of their relationship to it, also learned to entrench the Orientalist and racialized framing of Islam and Muslims as backwards and misogynist. As I started recollecting the details concerning my family’s migration, I also learned that Zalman Aran, the man who my elementary school was named after, introduced in the 1950s as Israel’s Minister of Education, the intra-Jewish segregated school system. Aran believed that Mizrahi children in the “periphery” had inferior cognitive capabilities and therefore should be tracked into vocational education. Under this school system, the life that my family led for five hundred years in the Ottoman Empire—later, Turkey—was never told to me. Israeli history books had erased and distorted the lives, cultures, languages, tastes, and sounds of Middle Eastern Jews.
This process was complementary to the erasure of Palestine and Palestinian history. If, as Israel hoped, Arabs and Jews were to become segregated enemies, then Arab Jews could not exist. The centuries-long legacies of Judaism that emerged in the Islamic world had to be denied. Our provisional inclusion in Jewish ethnic purity and supremacy in Israel was conditioned by forced forgetfulness of our Middle Eastern lineages.
As long as the airs of the muezzin, pleading for Allah, still pound at the heart of the maqam composed for our Hebrew prayers, the sharp sound of my furious Mizrahi feminist snap will keep burning and bursting out of me, inappropriately demanding the proper, long-overdue clarity. The snap will break the silence on how intertwined our Mizrahi pain is with that of Palestinians who lost their homeland of Palestine and demand to return to it. The snap will break the silence imposed on our Mizrahi histories, cultures, mothers, and mother tongues, as well as on the lingering effects of silencing on our shattered voices, stuttered accents, and ongoing realities of inflicted amnesia.
“Snap, snap, sad, bad, mad, rad”: We will keep speaking up and talking back through and despite silencing. We will continue to raise our voices and reclaim our stories.
1 Sara Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), p. 191.
2 Audre Lorde delivered “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” in June 1981 as a keynote presentation at the National Women’s Studies Association Conference, Storrs, Connecticut (https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/speeches-african-american-history/1981-au-dre-lorde-uses-anger-women-responding-racism/).