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Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Reflections about Amina Arraff... if Tom MacMaster was not that wrong..




First of all I want to explain briefly that I think that whatever was his purpose, the author of Amina Arraff’s blog did it wrong. Despite all the good lessons the web community may learn from this story, his was a twisted, insensitive and narcissistic action.
But I think it is anyway possible to get some interesting conclusions from the evolvements of what happened in the last  weeks about Amina Arraff.

I am one of the few (few???) western (or at least italian :)) persons who has the privilege to follow what is happening in the Middle East, and especially in Syria (a country where I lived and where I have good friends) through the chronicles and and tweets of many courageous activists both in English and in Arabic. Since the beginning of the turmoil I had the possibility to realize that there are differences in the tone and in the contents between what is published in Arabic and what is published in English. Usually these differences are limited to few information or a different use of rhetoric (even who doesn’t speak Arabic can imagine how rhetoric  this language can be). Only about the Amina Arraff’s story I could see a real big difference.

I could find very few posts and tweets in Arabic about her. Many of the young activists I know did post and tweet about her, but mainly in English, probably perfectly conscious that this was a psychodrama all inside the West.  And I do not mean that they didn’t care. I am sure they did really care. But they did exactly in the measure in which they cared about all the hundreds (or thousands..) of people who have been kidnapped, killed, wounded, and forced to leave their houses. And since they are trying hard to give space to as many as they can, they could dedicate to Amina Arraff only few posts and tweets.
She was not the first activist kidnapped, and maybe (and unfortunately) she will not be the last. So why was her story so incredibly important for us? Why this huge psychodrama?

I am not an expert. I am just a student and a young writer, but I want to try anyway to give my answer.
I think she gave us a narrative. A narrative that could fit a lot more than many others we found until now with that strange and new form of racism, or perception of superiority (if they are not the same thing) that many call “liberal orientalism”. The same thing that impeded to every single western analyst to forecast the Arab Spring and that now is still impeding to us to understand it really. It is enough to follow a bit the internal debate inside a country like Egypt to figure out how many differences there are between their perception of the challenges and the future risks of their revolution and ours. Most of us are still keeping on debating about Muslim Brotherhood or fundamentalism, while they are manly (and rightly) talking about workers’ rights, welfare and social justice.  
The truth is that the gap between our stereotyped picture of the Arab people and the reality is still wide and what Amina has done has been giving us the feeling that she could somehow really fill this gap. She was a Syrian, living in Damascus, in a big house in the old city; she was (especially in our stereotype) one of them. The point is that she was definitely one of us too. She was liberal, radical, democratic. She finally made us think that we could identify ourselves with the people living the Arab Revolts without too many efforts. She made many of us think “Cool.. now I finally understand them! Why nobody else of them could explain it to me this way before?? “

And that is the great disappointment. That is the engine moving the psychodrama. We finally found a bridge, a way to understand, and we just could not believe it was not real, just a huge hoax. So we started a huge investigation about a single person while in same hours hundreds more were killed, wounded and arrested. Our need to feel able to understand was far more important.

And now we feel ridiculous and idiot (at least I do) . I feel I'm back  again the dark of the incomprehension , again aware that all the filters I unconsciously used until now to understand what I watch happening in these months are irreparably fallacious. And that I will have to work hard to change my mental schemes. I do not know how much these perceptions  of mine are the perceptions of the others who followed Amina Arraff’s story, but I am pretty sure I am not the only one.


So, Tom McMaster.. you may be a narcissistic son of a bitch, but maybe you were a bit right.. 

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