Differently Abled Iraqis in America: On the 16th Anniversary

Sixteen years have passed since America (along with other countries) decided to topple Saddam Hussein and institute their own sectarian-colored government in Iraq. The U.S. move to disband the Iraqi military has also been the primary reason for the rise of armed sectarian conflict in Iraq. This post is a commemoration and acknowledgment of U.S. culpability. It hopes to center the lives of Iraqi people who still bear witness to the evolving events of militarism and imperialism. 

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Today while I was on the 101 bus venturing from Malden to Medford, I saw three Latino men discussing the motherland (pais) fervently in Spanish.  All wore fashionable hats as well as similar clothes. When two of them left the bus at one point, the remaining one joined the male bus driver and switched to converse in English. He remembered his homeland nostalgically as a place where he did not need to pay for juice or fruit. He also recounted how his hard-earned money in the U.S. could enable him to own property in the motherland. They both lamented the disappearance of a nearby Papa Gino's Pizza. The man bragged about his work and salary to the bus driver and wondered "how can someone earn without working?" He soon left after this statement and the driver wished him a good day.

First, I was struck by the capitalist contradiction in which his labor and remittances will contribute to the capitalization of his motherland, which I guess would also wipe out the practice of receiving free juice. Second, I was annoyed by his ableist understanding of survival, which is prevalent among Chinese immigrants as well. The second part took a while for me to digest and verbalize.

Today was also another class with Prof. Kamran Rastegar where we discussed the connections between colonialism and trauma. While the latter's definition has been criticized by some as Eurocentric, I found trauma as a useful concept to understand my own circumstances as well as the Iraqi friends I made in Louisville. One important intervention made by people caught in political events is that trauma is often ongoing. For my experience, the ideal "safe space" for processing trauma is often (sadly) only found in America or Western Europe, since lives of those in such places are placed at a higher value. Many places in Iraq continue to suffer under conflict and private security companies profit from the current scenario.

For many Iraqis, even after they enter the U.S., their trauma often cannot be addressed due to their racialized subaltern statuses. One of the Iraqi friends I met in Louisville, "A," struggles with the ongoing effects of trauma and the same ableist situations as told by the man I heard on the bus today. "A" believed that only work could secure himself a respectable livelihood in America. On the other hand, he also witnessed the demise of Iraqi men who do not become a middle-class family man, either due to their class position (lack of resources for marrying and/or supporting a partner) or due to their estrangement from American society. One of his former friends resisted wage labor and continued to live as a homeless person in Louisville. This former friend's existence calls to question the possibility of rehabilitating people traumatized by American imperialism. Similar to the man on the bus, "A" also acknowledges that "nothing is free in America," yet he also has a certain pride in his ability to work.

from : @johnnyrodgersis

22 hour
Y, a former mercernary and non-Arab Iraqi, found me as an ideal person to discuss his encounters with the American military-industrial complex. He acknowledged his privilege associated with his contribution to the (ever-changing) objectives of American presence in Iraq and how that helped him disabuse any Islamophobic biases from white people in America. He also demonstrated some conflicted feelings over his acts of killing, whether for political or economic gains. His trauma affected him in a negative way. Yet his trauma was not as obviously manifested as trauma of other Iraqis, or me, for that matter.

Others who did not contribute to America's military project had more ambivalent feelings toward their "new" life in America. Many did not relate to their opportunities in America in the same functionalist way as Y did. M, another non-Arab Iraqi, for example, did not adhere to masculine norms of either American or Iraqi standards and did not have the same impetus to integrate into American society as Y. M, as a receiver of unemployment benefits, was seen as less masculine in both Iraqi and American contexts than Y. Thus while America and its capitalism economy is structurally ableist and prefers immigrants with ableist bodies, the need to appear as ableist and available for work also depends on the subjectivity and masculine ideals of each person. Rutgers scholar Dr. Amir Moosavi has also argued that ideals of martyrdom (Shaheed) can be found in literary expressions as well as experiences of Iraqi and Iranian people during and after the Iran-Iraq war. These differences are important for people who wish to decenter white masculinity.

Another case that prompted my thoughts on this subject was the 《和陌生人说话》 interview with former mercenary Bai Xiaobao. One can watch the interview here on Youtube. Originally from a formerly semi-rural background, he achieved middle class status by risking his life in post-2003 Iraq. He leveraged the idea of necropolitics and capitalism to his advantage by serving four years (2012-2016) as a mercenary.

("Necropolitics is the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die.")

Mr. Bai lived precariously along with other non-white mercernaries and prepared for his likely death: he wrote his mother's name as the recipient of the 4,000,000RMB life insurance. bought property near his hometown in China. He reflected how his worldview expanded after his encounter with Beijing and the internet where men discussed mercernary opportunities. Yet my question prompted by experiences of migration and globalization is that Bai Xiaobao's radical reassassessment of his life being more "valuable" in monetary terms in Iraq than in China. While he harmonizes his life choices by promoting China's society as stable and safe in comparison to Iraq, his acts of migration and re-telling can be subversive to China's state project.

Y similarly considered the idea of returning as a mercenary to earn money rather than play it safe with wage labor in the U.S. While ableism allows for some forms of labor, mercenary labor in Iraq has a logic that rejects the state's power of determining life and death. The Chinese and American government continue to profit from migrants in various forms, the former mostly of domestic migrants and the later being mostly migrants of color. Yet the biopolitics of ableism also relies on the idea that one necessarily appreciates one's body beyond all renumeration. If the concern of migrants are predominantly "who will take care of me when I am old," the mercenary (from subaltern backgrounds) has resolved this "money" problem with their own body.

Many of others follow the state logic that they will either die of natural death or state punishment and/or fail the stringent requirements for serving on mercenary forces. The bodies of these people often have to perform labor in order for their survival in America, despite that many aspects of their homeland had been destroyed by war and imperialism. Others, such as South Asian laborers, are exploited as well in Iraq. See: Documents Reveal Details of Labor Trafficking by #KBR Subcontractor in #Iraq.

Due to this reality of the people I know, I am very despondent. There should be more ways in the U.S. that addresse trauma without predicating on the assumption that the person will recover, since recovery is often centered around labor productivity. Centering the trauma of Iraqis should not require more labor from Iraqis, since it is the U.S. that created the dislocation in the first place. Yet there are also other participants in the post-2003 conflict, such as Bai Xiaobao, which complicate the politics of trauma and imperialism.


Further reading:

Achille Mbembe. 2003. Necropolitics.

Antonella Ceccagno. 2017. City making and global labor regimes : Chinese immigrants and Italy's fast fashion industry

Amir Moosavi. 2015. “How to Write Death: Disenchanting Martyrdom in two Novels of the Iran-Iraq War.” Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, No. 35.

David Isenberg. 2009. Shadow force : private security contractors in Iraq. 

Gracia Liu-Farrer. 2011. Labor migration from China to Japan : international students, transnational migrants. 

Scott Fitzsimmons. 2017. Private Security Companies during the Iraq War: Military performance and the use of deadly force 

Ulrich Petersohn. 2013. The Effectiveness of Contracted Coalitions: Private Security Contractors in Iraq. 

Yun Gao. 2010. Concealed chains : labour exploitation and Chinese migrants in Europe.  

Working in a Louisville Supermarket

This year in February, I learned that I was accepted to a graduate institution and from then on I knew where I would live and do for the next five years. In the last few months of 2016, however, I was living on a week-by-week basis and had no long term plan. I have finally found the time to write about those days.[1]

A Chinese activist and intellectual in pre-communist China expressed the frustration, "Why am I not yet part of the working class?" He was speaking from a position of privilege, yet wanted to be in solidarity with the working class. Fortunately or unfortunately, graduate students and adjunct teachers are becoming increasingly a precarious social class; some have already become the working class and no longer need to ask that question. Yet even before I became a graduate student, I was already part of the retail working class.

I wanted to use Drake's song "Started from the Bottom" as the title, but that would have been too facetious. I actually descended to the "bottom" and worked my way up. This blog is about the experience at the "bottom." In 2016 October, due to unforeseen circumstances, I was living with some friends who were also quite precarious--one was a refugee living off benefits, and the other two were ex-refugees working as wage-laborers for 14.5$/hour and 14$/hour respectively. We were living in Shelby Park, a disreputable part of Louisville, known for violence.

Art in the neighborhood. "Building Something Bigger than Ourselves Together."

Luckily for us, everyone was able-bodied and healthy and generally we got along quite well. I was very upset with an unsuccessful Pakistan visa application for a history conference in Lahore, and felt that the embassy was destroying my future of becoming an academic. One of the friends, Yaseen, would comfort me and say, "We make the money. It's not the money making us." And I said, "Yeah，I write the f****** paper, not the embassy." Sometimes we cooked together, went to the club together, drank together, or watched TV together. Sometimes we talked about Iraqi politics, or joked about going to Tennessee on a whim (--it hasn't happened).

I lived there without working at a job for a few weeks, and later decided to find a job. I applied to Chipotle, a falafel shop, a packaging factory, and finally at an ethnic supermarket. I landed the ethnic supermarket job for 8$ / hour and also thought it was best for me to move out of the house. I pissed my mom off by using her credit card to rent a place at an Airbnb for a month. She confronted me and asked me, why I couldn't save money instead and stay with her? I said I needed time and space to apply to graduate school. She did not cancel the payment but swore to me that it was the last time she will pay for anything. So I went into the supermarket job with a "no-more-bridges-left-to-burn" mentality.

The woman who hired me has a very nice nickname--"Red." She asked me to call her Ah-Red, which does not indicate seniority even though she is a mother of two. She is from southern China and walks like a ball of fire. She speaks to Sun, the other cashier receptionist, in a Cantonese dialect; Sun calls her Big Sister Red. Her can-do spirit solves all the problems one could have in a supermarket. If someone needed to return something and get money back on their card, I would ask Red or Sun to help me. If anything needed to be fixed, Red would be up on that case. Red also knew the old customers and would talk to them when she was available.

When I first met her on a Monday, she was the only person at the check-out counter. She first said she would train me the next day. But when I went on Tuesday, I directly started on the job. It was very hectic as Thanksgiving was approaching and generally only two lines were open. The job needed someone who could recognize the myriad different types of Asian vegetables. I can't say I am much better than the average Asian American, since I did not eat that much variety growing up, but at least I could read the half-Chinese menu on the check-out monitor.

These vegetables were easy to check out because they already had barcodes. They were pre-packaged by Red's father, who also works at the supermarket but mostly behind the scenes. He also cooks lunch for us. Around 2pm, Red would bring her lunch to the front and tell us to eat in a very welcoming way. Lunch was served in the dingy storage section. When I ate, I sat between the office, where we would punch our hour cards, and the men's bathroom.

Highlight of the day

Red's father was definitely a good cook but sometimes didn't have vegetarian options. He was very insistent on me eating enough and I even ate meat in front of him. Later he was not happy with my association with the Iraqi friends, and became very distant from me.

Sun made this for me when Red and her father took Tuesday off.

The other Latino workers sat with each other when they had lunch. One guy, San Diego, was very nice and sometimes he would drive me home. San Diego doesn't like rap music and took care of unpacking the food items and placing them onto shelves. It seemed that he knew the products like the back of his hand and could even "read" Chinese packages. I did not have much interaction with the other Latino workers, besides checking out goods for them when they bought dinner from the supermarket, but I was generally fond of them. One of them would use the tips he earned from packaging fish for customers. One father and son who worked behind the fish counter were new from Honduras. Red would sometimes give them derogatory nicknames that she used for her own book-keeping.

The supermarket boss was a man from the north and would come in every now and then to check on things, including the CCTV camera. He had an issue with me reading my kindle at work. He said I should go roam around the stacks and learn the name of the groceries if I had time. Once his wife came to the store and deliberately blocked up the whole cashier lane because she could not decide on which goods she wanted to buy. Red took time to try and find exactly what the boss's wife wanted. I thought it was her way of showing her importance. 

A view from one of the cash receptions

I also had to deal with the cultural differences. I counted that the customers came from at least 20 different nationalities. An Indian man once even complained very rudely about how the Latino workers didn't understand English. I defended them by saying no one else had a problem with them before. Shouting was generally the tone of the day--both for the customer and the workers. Sun once semi-yelled at another lady who has not yet mastered English: "Do you want sugar in a CANE or sugar in a CAN???" The general consumers who visited also had shorter tempers than people who would shop at a non-ethnic supermarket. One Asian American girl once shouted at me for 5 minutes about how I suck at my job because I made a mistake in calculating the change. I was very stunned and Red apologized on my behalf. Red also would complain about how some customers would bundle two spring onions and try to pass it as one bundle. Red also said that a Vietnamese lady purportedly fiddled with the scale to get more and pay less and claimed that the food was for offering to Buddha. Red joked about her: how will Buddha be able to accept this "offering?!" One customer also knowingly smuggled out a bag of rice without allowing me a chance to scan the barcode. The cultural differences were definitely a highlight but also stressful since misunderstandings could arise at any time. One time a white guy even walked in the supermarket openly carrying a gun. He was with his girlfriend and bought a lot of cute Japanese snacks. I later complained to San Diego about it and he was very used to these customers.

Sometimes I would have the more solitary job of unpacking incoming goods and labeling them for distribution. It was less stressful but it also made my head dizzy after some time. Human interaction was also missed doing this particular job. I liked observing different patterns of consumption based on the different groups of people. Many non-Asian Americans also bought ethnic food and made it themselves. It was impressive considering that they learned how to prepare it themselves. I also observed how some people hated to depart from money in the form of cash--how they would hold onto it, how they would count each bill when they paid for something very small. How much it mattered to their being and sanity.

Packages next to the medicine counter. Many non-Asian Americans also bought Chinese medicine from this supermarket

Red hanging decorations up for the new year.

I usually commuted from the Highland to the supermarket, which was next to a highway. Generally I had to change buses because the Highland is not very connected to the rest of Louisville. Sometimes the bus would stop quite some distance from the supermarket, due to the difference in routes. Then I would walk along the highway to reach the place. I arrived at 10am or 2pm or 4pm, depending on the need as well as my schedule. I would punch the card, spend my time either at the cashier, or right next to the cashier unpacking the goods, or in the stacks. Work ended at 9pm. I would count all the cash money, leave 152$ in the cashier, and hand the rest to the boss. Then I would I would punch the card, commute back on the bus, or my friend CP would pick me up and drop me off at Highland. The weekends were the busiest and Red generally expected me to take Mondays off.

Some additional highlights from an otherwise dreary job: three Iraqi boys came to buy fish one day. I showed off my Arabic by saying "zyein," which means "good." They also said "zyein" back to me. Another highlight was a woman drove 2 hours from Tennessee to the supermarket to buy food stocks for her restaurant. One final highlight was a Hispanic couple: the wife commented on my beauty in Spanish to her husband (que bonita) while her husband remained silent. I also pretended I didn't understand. Other Chinese customers would also joke with Red about my new and youthful presence. Red would say in her typical can-do tone: this place needs young people to liven it up.

I also learned about food stamps at the job and tried to apply for them myself, unsuccessfully. The boss had to sign the paper proving I was working for him. He was not happy about it, even though it did not affect him in any negative way. He said with a mean joking tone: you are just working here to apply for food stamps. I wished that were the case! I would not have balanced the books if I needed to pay for my own rent, based on the rhythm and frequency I was working on that job. But with the schedule and flexibility in contract, I could have applied for graduate schools in the mean time. And now looking back, it was the right decision for that time. I left the job in mid-December and went back for a few days in January just to get the paycheck. Red was not very sentimental when we said goodbye but she was as good as a supervisor could have been in those circumstances.

The hardest part was not being bored on the job or being tired after the job. (Sometimes I even sustained cuts from handling the  fish scales or the live crab.) It was getting myself to think in the hustling way to make it to the job, and then "de-hustling" and think about long-term graduate school plans. It was absurd that I had to believe that I could have control over my research, when I didn't even know if the next customer will yell at me or not. I also found it very difficult to relax and read anything that required some kind of intellectual investment, since I was always moving from one chore to the other.

This experience informed me a lot in terms of immigrant differences and how theories of race are utterly inadequate without taking into account of the economic circumstances. I still don't know much about Louisville and much of what I know is from that work experience. I watched Moonlight during this period of my life and working had also informed my understanding of the protagonist and his lover. I also translated the short story A Mason's Hand by Pakistani author Ali Akbar Natiq, first published in Granta, during this time. It was about a worker's journey to Saudi Arabia and his precarious experience. I would not have been so interested in it if I did not share some of the protagonist's subjectivity.

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[1]Two sources were very inspirational for my writing: one is the book Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality and the Law in the North American West, and the other is "Love in the Time of Trump," a conference on queer identity and class hosted by Dr. Kareem Khubchandani.

Encountering Followers of Jesus in Beirut

One day, my roommate Dan and I were touring around American University of Beirut as well as the sea front. When we ventured on the way back to our airbnb house, we passed by a bookstore that had an English sign board. I wanted to visit it earlier but always passed it during night time after it closed. This time it was open, so we entered. The decor was very nice and cozy, with a full cafe. Trendy English Christian music played in the background. All the books were related to Christianity. The store also sold decorations as well as stationary imported from China. A math student named Hasan welcomed us and offered us juice with biscuits from a famous western brand. We were a bit hesitant until he said it was his offer. We have clearly underestimated Lebanese hospitality!


Later we met Hiam, who was the person in charge of the place. She had a bespectacled, learned look and a motherly demeanor. Her English accent was quite versatile. When she knew that we were tourists, she warmly recommended some spots for us to tour. Then we moved to a sitting spot to sit down and chat. We learned through her that it was more of a fellowship for followers of Jesus Christ rather than a for-profit bookstore. They had Bible study meetings thrice a week. They also offered us cake from the famous chain Roadster Diner, which was also sent to them for free by some mysterious person. That person sent the desserts in a very passive aggressive way, as a form of apology for some small misunderstanding. Hiam said, "If you are sending the desserts because you think you made us mad, we are really not mad!" But the person still sent the desserts anyways.

Hiam first asked about our story. She asked how we came to decide to come here, since zlebanon was quite "dangerous." I told her I was interested in understanding the society after hearing about the cartoon incident.  She was especially intrigued by Dan, who was half-Syrian and half-British and could speak phrases in Arabic. He was also studying French and Deutsch, so they conversed in French as well. She praised that some people just have a knack for languages, such as her nephew who learned Mandarin, Turkish and Russian in addition to the regular three. She requested to see a picture of Dan's Syrian mother. But he said his mother didn't have a picture. Hiam exclaimed that his mother is quite extreme on the religious front. Hiam mixed some Arabic phrases in her speech and had a very chic dressing style. She is teaches Arabic as a private teacher for foreigners who live in Beirut.  I learned that she has no kids. I said that it is quite fortunate since she would have fewer problems. She said that problems do not come from children or marriage. Happy people find happiness with or without marriage. But she also frowned down upon divorce when she heard that Dan's parents divorced; she did not cite theological reasons. Rather, she finds that two people who have lived together for a long time would find it very difficult to separate and the general outcome is not a good. Her way of talking about the faith reminded me a lot of the people I had met in the US. 


Other tha Hasan, there were many others also helping around the store. One woman, who I will call Jane, shared with us her conversion story. It seemed that she was already from a Christian family from her name, but Jesus Christ did not have the same role in her life until she was healed from a jaw-lock in the recent years. All her close relatives had died from various reasons and she was the only one. Hiam said that she walked through many dark phases in her life. Hiam said that the beggars who usually said "Bless your parents" or "uncle" in idiomatic Arabic did not have anyone to bless when they encountered Jane. One beggar even offered to give her money instead when they heard about her story. Jane was painting a very nice painting with a cross on it. She later played the piano very well and also played crazy, improvised tunes for the fun of it. Her entire demeanor was very jolly, so it was even more intense when she did not smile and looked intently at Dan throughout the story of meeting Jesus Christ, as if that could push him towards conversion in some way. Jane and Hiam had a very casual and close relationship. Hiam used the phrase "Ma too zghale" to ask Jane for a favor and explained to me that it means "Don't be made small".


Hiam also shared the story of a Lebanese man with a Shi'a name in the store, whom I will call D. D was homeless when an Ethiopian maid found him. He was considering suicide. But the maid told him about Jesus's love and introduced him to Hiam's brother-in-law. Her brother-in-law met up with him every day to study and talk about things unrelated to "the street." Hiam said that his mother tried to kill him, which was the main reason for his mental instability and homelessness. She emphasized how unusual it was in Lebanese society to be homeless, since family ties are really strong. (I was a bit skeptical about this claim but had no way to figure out the truth of it.) Both Dan and I listened but later we both found it odd that she was sharing this story with us without D's consent or involvement. He wore casual western clothes, looked around 26 years old and shyly hung around without doing much work related to the store. According to the story, Hiam considered to take him in, since there was room in her place. But she was a single person living with her mother at the time, and she said that the neighbors would talk if they took in a single male. She said that as a follower of Jesus Christ, she could not let people of Beirut think about her religion in the wrong way: "I can't talk about Jesus and do something against our Culture. people don't think nicely." Since he has found a place, he has been coming to the book shop for the past 6 months.

They closed the shop around 8:30. After unexpectedly spending around two hours there, Dan and I left with the others. Hiam said that we should come by again to volunteer or study, and we said sure. I later visited again to introduce my friend Morgana to the project. They didn't seem like they needed extra hands, so I didn't go as a volunteer. Dan brought his brother the next time he went and they also just talked about Jesus. Still, it was quite eye opening to see how some Christians with the evangelical streak are similar in this vastly different part the world. 

Access to the Iraqi Field

In between a trip to Prague, I have been reading books on the modern history of Iraq, the legal history of women's rights in Iraq, and biographical narratives of diasporic Iraqi women. This coming month also marks the third year since I permanently moved from Beijing, which was my home for many years. Many reflections on diaspora and the meaning of living abroad came up when I read books on Iraqi politics as well as Kundera's classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I also compare diasporic conditions cross cultures during my time spent with the Pakistani student community in Gottingen. While the background of my interest is mostly personal, this blog post will mainly address the political issues and questions of methodologies that surfaced when I read the books on Iraq.

In her book Iraqi Women: Untold Stories from 1948 to the Present, Dr. Nadje Sadig Al-Ali presents material she gathered through interviews with women from four different diasporic communities, including Amman, London, San Diego, and Detroit. There are many similarities between the Iraqi communities I am reading about in Dr. Al-Ali's work and the Pakistani community I encountered, such as the highly contested narratives of the twentieth century. Given the hetergenous makeup of the Iraqi diasporic community, with different ethnic groups, sects and classes occupying different social and political lives, the matter is evidently complex. Generations also mattered: the order of persecution entailed a different relationship with politics. This was also spelled out to me during a conversation with a Kurdish friend, P., who comes from Syrian-occupied Kurdistan. He has stayed in Germany for many years and most of his family is here. He works, studies, and likes the idea that his future would be bounded with Germany. I told him during a conversation about the sufferings of my other Syrian friend who lives in India right now and has been separated from his family since the war started. He replied that indeed, it is a hard life for my friend and other recently exiled Syrians, but his own family had established themselves abroad earlier because they have been persecuted earlier as a religious minority. In other words, my friend may suffer now, but it's because he didn't have to think about it earlier. We each receive our own due in time.

Al-Ali also addresses the sectarian issue through her experiences in the field. During her research in the U.S., she stays with various Iraqi families and acutely notices the differences in locale and socialization. During her research in Dearborn and the broader Detroit Area, the issue of sect becomes strong enough for her to voice her own opinions in this particular situation:

As I talked to the group of young women refugees, it became evident that at least this group of recently arrived women had a very strong sense of their roots and identity, both as Iraqis and Shi'is involved a strong sense of entitlement in terms of rights and privileges in the new Iraq. It also entailed a very strong and, for me personally, disturbing sectarianism that was directed not only at Sunni Iraqis but also at Iraqi Chaldeans. Khadija, just like Fatima and her sister Zeinab, criticized Iraqi Chaldeans for having been supporters of the previous regime and for failing to engage in anti-government activities in previous years. I was puzzled by this sweeping generalization and condemnation of the Chaldean community. Although several Chaldeans I talked to had clearly appreciated the generally secular nature of the previous regime, especially before 1991, which allowed for the relative religious freedom of minorities, many of the more established and well-to-do Chaldean families have been active supporters of the Bush government and his war on Iraq. (p38, emphasis my own)

I also encounter this question of methodology when I conducted research in Germany and Lucknow. When I encounter South Asian and Iraqi Muslims and explain that one of my research interests include Shi'ism, it often sends a message that I am someone who has affinity with the imagined community of Shi'as. The scope of the imagined community depends on the world view and values of the person in question, and how he or she would answer the question of "who is a Shi'a." For me, the question is extremely delicate and variable on situation.

A picture of Imam Hussain in a food store owned by Iraqis. Louisville, KY,  2016

The paragraph by Al-Ali also raises the question of politics and religion: to what extent can one draw the line between sectarianism and political activism? Many of the NGOs and charities related to Iraq claim that they service all sects, which clearly shows there are many NGOs and charities that have particular sectarian identity, subtle or not. When does a "sectarian" conversation or situation call for an activist scholar, such as Al-Ali, to intervene? This also goes back to the debate within race and sociology: is one studying a social group for the purpose of an empirical understanding, or is there an ethical obligation to that group's future? When one labels and understands situations through the lense of sects in an informed manner, the research is usually empirically rich and analytically strong. But what are the additional methodological concerns?

In evaluating narratives of women's rights in Ba'athist Iraq, historian Noga Efrati has noted in her book Women in Iraq how positionality affects the written historical accounts.

Doreen Ingrams and Deborah Cobbet present the clearest examples of following only one narrative. Whereas Ingrams favors the Iraqi Women's Union narrative, Cobbett bases her work on the League for the Defense of Women's Rights narrative. Their contrasting historical probes were probably influenced mainly by their conflicting attitude toward the Ba'ath regime as well as by their personal connections with different Iraqi women. Ingrams, at least at the beginning of the 1980s, sided with regime supporters, whereas Cobbett sided with its opponents. (p134, emphasis my own)

Furthermore, what happens when one relies on one's own group identity to gain access? Researchers such as Nadje Al-Ali (p29) as well as anthropologist Hayder al-Mohammad have mentioned how their family introduced them to certain contacts in the field. Al-Ali has also met many contacts through her own activism in London and Hayder al-Mohammad established contacts from arising circumstances over the length of five years in Basra. Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod also discusses her father's role in her field:

[M]any people remain intrigued by what I wrote about my father having introduced me to this community, perhaps because it makes us think hard about our inevitable positionality in fieldwork. I understand my father’s motives a bit differently now that I am a parent, but I also worry that people exaggerate the importance of this introduction. I still treasure the ways I was able to participate in the intimate and lively women’s world. I know that it was a bit easier for me to be part of this family because of this identity. But even though being perceived as Arab, Muslim, and respectable (under the protection of my father) was important, I don’t think we should overstate its importance. Fieldwork is intense and interpersonally complicated for everyone. Once you are there, no matter how introduced, it is you—as a person—who develops the relationships you do, even as you never escape your locatedness.

It would be an overstatement to say that their research would have been markedly different without the family contacts; still, the question is unresolved in my mind. Al-Mohammad does a wonderful job of historicizing the idea of "tribes." He questions the method which sees tribes as the dominant form of social organization in his 2011 article "You have Car Insurance, We have Tribes." Still, access to tribes were crucial in the field, and the male Iraqi identity was no doubt a gamechanger in terms of on-the-ground research. He writes, "Many leaders are very generous, not only with their wealth and power, but also with their time. Many have also been tremendously protective of me, with no hope of ever seeing anything in return other than friendship and gratitude." Identity plays such a crucial role in these sites, and thus to present oneself with an established lineage (sect or locale) affects how one is perceived in the field. I would like to read more about the implications of this approach.

Al-Mohammad passionately argues about his positionality in an interview and invokes his "brown eyes" that sees what non-brown eyes fail to see--

I have skin in this game, to invoke an idiom I am rather fond of. I’m an Iraqi. I consider Basra my home and not London where I have spent more than twenty years. The problem is, then, where can I turn to that has been relatively untarnished by the theorizers and fly-by-night Iraq specialists? What I noticed was that events, local happenings and moments, are too small for the young bucks, trying to make their name in this racket, to get their hands dirty in. They also did not have access to such experiences, nor did they have a grasp of the background knowledge and ways of life of ordinary Iraqis, hence struggled to notice the significance of certain events. Many have conducted interviews in the north of Iraq in Erbil, or outside Iraq in Amman and Cairo with Iraqi refugees, but essentially, everyday life in Iraq has been beyond the reach of the machinery.

Finally, it is appropriate to end with this observation on academia by Hayder al-Mohammad, to understand the importance of entering the field with his particular approach:

The reason why anthropologists have turned to institutions, cults, groups, and scholars is because of the obvious difficulty in locating one’s fieldwork. Not being natives of the region where they are working in, most anthropologists have few doors open to them. But what starts off as a difficulty in locating where one should, and actually could, conduct fieldwork has a very serious impact on what is studied and how it is studied. Clearly, working with religious scholars and Imams will give you a very limited picture of Islam as it is lived.

...

Most anthropologists do not make clear at all how extraordinarily artificial the pictures they draw of Islam and the life of Muslims are because of the limitations of where they do their fieldwork. So artificial indeed that I have on many occasions sat with my ethnographies of Islam and translated it into Arabic to small crowds in Iraq for most to eventually breakdown into fits of laughter. The comments I hear on many occasions tend to be: “They must think we are really stupid in the West.” (emphasis my own)

Reliance on Landlords: From the Colonizers to the Congress Party

Why did India never have a class-based revolution or stark social transformation? In a letter to Engels, Marx suggested that the arrival of British free trade brought the only social revolution in India. He starts by invoking the imagery of the static village-- 

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Tehri village paddy fields, Uttarakhand

But in Reinventing India, Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss have shown that the British left many pre-existing structures, such as the zamindari system or the village caste relations, untouched or even retrenched. Some have suggested that this was their strategy of divide and rule, since it would be to the British rulers’ advantage if supra-village structures were weakened and villages were strengthened. Others have also argued that the British colonizers could have been thinking only in terms of “Western” and “Indian” terms, saw India as a divided society, and strengthened preexisting divides in the process. Anti-colonialism sought to adapt western institutions while also understanding India as distinctly different than Western societies. Spiritual values and private practices can remain “Indian” while the public sphere becomes Western, which created new identities and contradictions. Economics definitely fell under the public sphere and has been a politically contested issue in India throughout the 19th and 20th century.

The authors provided many critiques of the Congress Party-led nationalist movement. Historian Barrington Moore suggested from a Marxian view that Gandhi provided a link between landed classes and peasants through satyagraha and ahimsa movements. Gandhi and his followers advocated for class conciliation while others saw a need for class struggle. But the Congress Socialists were divided and weak and eventually established their own party--CSP.  Therefore even though Jawarhalal Nehru’s position towards socialism was sincere, as Pramit Chaudhuri has pointed out, Nehru did not push for nationalization of land seriously within his own party for the sake of unity. He also felt personal loyalty to Gandhi’s positions. As soon as Congress Party came into rule after independence, according to David Arnold, they have strengthened rulings of the Raj, such as the civil administration and refused the interference of politicians. Some would say that the Congress Party became the Raj to some extent.
Corbridge and Harriss follow Gramsci, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj’s idea of Nehru’s “passive revolution” to explain developments in the 1950s that substituted any real social revolution. Nehru wanted to uplift the poor through development led by a centralized state. Nehru proposed that top-heavy industrialization could reduce dependence on agriculture. He resisted conservative tendencies in the Party but he did not have the power to institute industrialization as much as countries like South Korea or redistribution of land like China. Furthermore, Nehru’s Congress Party garnered support through regressive taxation, in which the state did not tax rich Indian farmers much. This contributed to Nehru’s inability to implement agrarian reform and contributed to the 1970s’ “crisis of planning.” Due to these demand-side requirements, the state could not raise resources domestically. Used to the many concessions by the state, the New Farmers’ Movement in the 1970s also championed lower input costs such as the reduction of irrigation charges and more subsidies. This arrangement impeded planning and the passive revolution.
Partha Chatterjee and Karivaj identifies Nehruvian ideals as “high modernism” that was distant from popular support. For example, secularism through education was also an alien concept to the broader public. The English-educated elements in Congress Party realized in 1947 that in addition to these ideals, they also had to struggle and compete for local control of party organizations. They gradually lost ground to networks of important individuals with bonds to business patronage.

If nationalism had certain problems, how should we assess India’s (nationalistic) claim that it is the biggest democracy? Ambedkar, social reformer and champion of lower caste rights, criticized the lack of change over the caste-class issue. He posed the contradiction that from 1950, “In politics we will have quality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, one value. In our social and economic life we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value.” (p34) Nehru understood democracy from the Raj and Westminister models, which nowadays people consider overly idealistic. Yet at the time mostly everyone in the Constituent Assembly agreed with him to form a centralized Parliamentary constitution rather than something close to the ground, like a panchayati government. Barrington Moore also identified the weak bourgeois class for a functioning participatory democracy in India. Karivaj proposed that due to the weak bourgeois, India requires state bureaucracies for social justice and redistribution. These institutions have been less funded since privatization led by Indira Gandhi and the Indian economists of the 1990s, which Corbridge and Harris criticize in a later chapter.

In an international context, state planning and rule by economic experts were two hegemonic ideas among much of the Third World Nationalists, such as Egypt’s Nasser and India’s Nehru. There was a brief honeymoon period between the Communist leadership and economists in China as well before Mao Tse Tung started movements to purge many intellectuals, economist and others, and consolidate in 1952, 1956-57 and 1966-1976. In India, Congress Party could not execute social justice through land reform and redistribution. Rather, the Party continuously distributed subsidies to rich farmers throughout post-independence. For example, fertilizer subsidies only strengthened the dominating landholding farmers. This strategy was also in line with the “demand side” Keynesian economics that sought to increase spending in the economy. Yet as Beverly Silver has pointed out, the Keynesian prescription was meant for the “developed” countries. High mass consumption and full employment were deemed to be beyond the reach of “underdeveloped” economies. (Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labor, 154.) Only the upper classes in India had money to spend and and rich farmers were taxed regressively. Since the money was not flowing to the state through taxed consumption, the subsidies partly caused the crisis in state finances in the 1980s and 90s. 

Banana tree in village near Rishikesh

Since rich peasants have been one of Congress Party’s main constituents’ interest, and may continue to serve as a powerful constituent of the BJP as well. Rich peasants obtained votes often vertically by coercing their tenants or dominions to vote with the rich's interest, this tendency may continue even as Congress Party support in current elections.  Rupa Viswanath argued in class that the phenomenon in which rich do not vote as much as the poor is because nowadays the rich are confident of their control over rural power. Thus it does not matter which political power is at the center. New taxes would be protested and fended off by the rich peasantry since there was a precedent of low to no taxes. More readings need to be done on the relationship between rural interests and electoral politics.

The Old Revolution

If the Egyptian Revolution happened in 2008 I would have been much more familiar with the political actors. I had been very concerned with democratic freedoms around the world, especially China's, and even staged or joined politically charged performance art in Beijing. But times have changed and my personal opinions regarding the discourse of democracy and human rights have also been complicated since. Ethically, a crucial point occurred when an opportunistic entrepreneur and alumni gave a speech at my college. To put it bluntly, he got rich during the privatization of the former Soviet Union's state sector the 1990s. During the speech, he was very unabashed about the fact that he took advantage of an unraveling country's state sector. He married a Czech wife and lives in Czech now as a millionaire. When I asked something along the lines of whether he sees the same happening to China, he was unconcerned with the moral dimension but rather focused on the "How to Get Rich" factor. He recommended people who have the ambition to go to Burma for the next liberalization windfall and invest there. I still remember this event, but this is my first time recounting it and I still feel indignation that there will always be these type of people who take advantage of political changes in other countries and encourage others to do the same. I see opportunistic actors gaining material benefits in China if liberalization occurs, and I hope that when people discuss "democracy" arriving they would also recognize this moral (if not legal) hazard. In and out of China, I am more concerned with AIDS rights, feminism and specific labor movements.

As a historian in training, I also know that certain cases have specific contexts and democratic experience of one country is not necessarily transferable to another country. However, these issues appear in discussions when I am in studying in Germany, since I met people who are from different parts of the world (and many who are anti-American). I have recently befriended an Egyptian, called A., who is my age. He comes from a Muslim family but he himself is non-practicing (no fasting during Ramadan, drinks and eats pork.). He is not very anti-American but he is sufficiently skeptical of neoliberal discourses. I have shared my favorite book that critiques the idea of "economics" as this objective subject that can necessarily promote development through top-down means, The Rule of Experts, by Timothy Mitchell with A. last month. 

More on this incredible book later, which was not the core of our discussion today over coffee. (A really tall and clumsy German sat next to us in the Balzac cafe, spilled his tea and then his stuff. When he settled down with his handwritten notes papers, he was probably also listening) I learned that A. was part of the revolutionary wing in Egypt and on and off with the Socialist wing from Jan. 25th 2011 and stopped a few months after his female cousin M. got arrested around the time after the military took power through a coup the second time, around July 2013. M., according to A., along with a group that consisted of half girls and half boys, were left in a desert for some time. None were fed for some days. The girls were released because it was very controversial. The boys were sentenced to 15 years in jail. M. is still active in pro-democratic organizations but A. thinks that it is too dangerous and that there is no hope. He does not want to return to Egypt, for both political and social reasons (he finds them too materialistic. I recommended him to check out the scene in China. Arabs in this city still regard A. as an Egyptian, regardless of how disaffected he is.).

A. still wants to take part in leftist groups in Germany and he thought about groups that help refugees. We have only arrived for 2 months so we have yet to find our "组织." I have tried talking with some Socialists here, references I got from the U.S.,  but my German is not at their level yet to be of any help. A. also attended Socialist Alternative meeting in New York, near Zuccotti Park, and was invited to talk about the Egyptian Revolution in 2012. He thinks that this invitation would not happen again these days. The enthusiastic side of American politics is that people are genuinely outraged by racist police brutality against African American males, but Egypt under the undemocratic leadership of al-Sisi does not seem to have a lot of hope in A.'s opinion.

Here's a song by Leonard Cohen about personal loss and political defeats, also the title of this post.

I fought in the old revolution
on the side of the ghost and the King.
Of course I was very young
and I thought that we were winning...

Yes, you who are broken by power, 
you who are absent all day, 
you who are kings for the sake of your children's story, 
the hand of your beggar is burdened down with money, 
the hand of your lover is clay. 

Current Trends in Indian Politics

The Center for Modern Indian Studies hosts weekly colloquiums that host engaging speakers who analyze history or current events. Yesterday's topic on democracy and current trends in Indian politics was also very thought provoking and incited many comments. This post is an attempt to summarize the points and questions raised by visiting professor Ajay Gudavarthy's presentation, titled "Maoism, Democracy and Globalisation: Cross-Currents in Indian Politics." The talk is based on chapters from his new book Maoism, Democracy and Globalization. He teaches Political Science at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) in Delhi. 

What is the new middle class discourse?

In the 1960s and 1970s, series of social movements such as feminism, Dalit, and Other Backward Class (OBC) and their leadership, agenda and social base are drew from middle class, and they met at places such as the Calcutta Coffee House (aka College Street Coffee House). In the past two decades, a new middle class emerged in the context of social "mobility with insecurity."

Calcutta's India Coffee House on College Street, place where many leftist intellectual discussions took place

There is an increase in popular participation with increasing centralization of the state, as well as more technocrats and state surveillance. Recently, despite critics, Gujarat has made voting compulsory, which stems from these pressures. In an interview with the Indian Express, a election commission officer said in disagreement that "forcible voting is against the Constitution. Right to vote is a statutory provision, and compelling (voters) may not work. The basic feature of our electoral system is free and fair elections. Compulsory voting is not free. You can’t herd people into polling booths and make them vote.” Gudarvarthy said that if one reads David Harvey's A Brief History of Neoliberalism and look at India, "nothing matches." Contrary to the decline of the state, he sees a resurgence of surveillance and welfare as well as increasing notion of human rights language. (Dr. Ahuja later disagreed and does not see India as a case of exceptionalism from Harvey’s observation of neoliberalism. Welfare is not necessarily the same as the 1970s.)

In Dr. Gudavarthy's opinion, Anna Hazare's years of protest is the political and social face of the old Indian middle class. Hazare-led protest movements focuses on anti corruption, anti-sexual violence issues. But Gudavarthy observes that the protest against of corruption is empty and socially-displaced category. Corruption has a scope so wide that any act, regardless of size or whether it is committed by the poor or middle class, can fit into this category. 

Now, the new middle class have transformed “social justice” discourse, shifting the focus from social justice to representation, from contestation to negotiations. First question the backward caste leaders ask Modi was, "How many Dalit ministers have you appointed?" He has appointed three Dalits in contrast to five in the previous leadership tally. Secularism and left/right/center stances do not make sense in Dalit politics. They are concerned with representation. Reservation as the catch-all policy preference and subsequently supplanted land reform, rural urban divide, and questions of poverty. However, Dr. Viswanath points out that it is because there are increasing presence of Dalits in politics and this is left out of the account."When was there even this mass of Dalit politics for us to distinguish between left, center, and right?" She also points that there are formal complaints and political interventions regarding land in Tamil Nadu, showing a resurgence in land issues. Furthermore, NGOs are taking up the poverty and land issues, which is why there is a decline in political mobilization for these concerns.

How does the old left view the Dalit, OBC and Maoist movements? There seems to be a new preoccupation with caste stigma and reservations.

Traditionally, people in Maoist leadership were from (the newly created state of) Telangana. (Dr. Gudavarthy related a joke in which Telangana Maoists were caught due to a complaint in the north, Orissa, and they were all speaking Telegu despite being in the Hindi belt. The police were confused and asked, "Why did this happen in Orissa?") Nowadays, Maoist sub-command and district areas have organic tribal leadership and they speak in their own tribal language. When Dr. Gudavarthy visited, he had to bring a translator. 

This arrangement is in contrast with the Dalit movement that has middle class leadership. This group does not talk with the Maoists and these two groups do not share the same political language. Maoists only see Dalits as the new social elite, and they do not see caste as a significant political factor.

Subalterns like Maoists have vacated the streets and they are caught between powerlessness and militancy. There are no trade union movement and migrants are demobilized while at least 3,146 farmers committed suicide in Maharashtra in 2013. Theses streets now are occupied by new middle class such as Gujjars, Jats, Rajputs, but they are clashing with each other when taking protests onto the street. Furthermore, the old revolutionary spirit is dying out in Maoist movement. Similar to the trend of Dalits focusing on reservations, tribals also focus more on concrete issues such as their forest threatened by mining companies, mobilizing under the slogan for "Jal, jungle, jameen (water, forest, land)."

File photo from Muzaffarnagar riots. AP

There are growing inter-subaltern conflicts in Indian politics, such as conflicts between OBCs and Muslims (see Muzaffarnagar riots) and Dalits v. Muslims in Dehli and Western Uttar Pradesh. What used to be a collective, wide-scale  farmer’s movement movement has now become an OBC-led movement that targets other competing rural interests.  Gudavarthy observes, “The RSS is reaching out to Dalit politics. There are larger representation for Dalits in politics of the right. We see the de-Brahminization of the right and a renewed Hinduization.” In relation to these comments, I found this similarly eye-opening analysis in The secret of BJP's success in Uttar Pradesh--

The BJP-RSS combine adopted a special strategy for appropriating Dalit and backward caste votes. Amit Shah, the coordinator of the UP chapter, along with RSS preachers took more than an active interest in such caste associations. Shah projected backward and Dalit faces and engaged in Hindu polarisation in the wake of the Muzaffarnagar riots. The message disseminated among Dalits and backward castes was that the Congress, BSP and the SP were so busy polarising Muslims, they had no concern for Hindus.

I was not quite sure how heatedly contested current Other Backward Caste politics were until I looked up and found this dire analysis in the one of the English reports in 2007 Caste in Conflict--

In Rajasthan, if a caste feels better off and secure within any reserved category, it opposes inclusion of any other caste that might threaten their monopoly. So if Jats faced resistance from existing OBCs while attempting entry in that category, Gurjars are opposed by Meenas. Off the record, political parties admit to Meenas' political clout and even the need of reservation for Gurjars in certain pockets, but none will admit this in public.

In 2008 protests occurred again and clashes with security forces ended with 36 deaths.

Thus, Dr. Gudavarthy proposes that inter-subaltern conflicts signal a new kind of subaltern agency. Using middle man with culture capital, the subalterns undermines traditional Patron-client relationship with hegemonic forces. When he mentioned that Dalit movements have moved from contest and conflicts to pragmatic negotiations to scholar Partha Chatterjee, Chatterjee replied that: I noticed this 20 years ago. 

5 Points that show the breakdown of different groups' social contract with the state.

1. As aforementioned, the old middle class is withdrawing its consent with the state, with Anna Hazare's movement as the front. He has contempt for representative politics, he sees that people are giving their votes for drinking and smoking. Thus, by deriding representative politics, Hazare has gained a moral consensus outside of the political representative domain. 

2. The new middle class also undermines state’s sovereignty that calls international organizations for understanding “caste as race” through human rights discourses.

3. Maoist movements also undermine state sovereignty.

4. The Right to Information Act, while positive, also undermines parliament and state institutions.

5. (BJP supported supposedly democratic idea of) small states, but this has also produced a strong center. We understand the catch in public knowledge. What political language can we use to analyze this? 

Media as a site of understanding middle class democratic values

Gudavarthy joked that,TV anchor host Arnab Goswami, who is famous for his bombastic presentation style, "has made our lives very easy, we know what is wrong in the view of politics just by watching him." But Dr. Srirupa Roy also finds the media downplaying leftist movements that could have national potential to just a local scope. She questions, "Why is there no organized formation of left on a national level? One reason is that, "It’s easier for local movements to link up globally rather than locally."

Related to the media and law, there is also a shift from investigation to the construct of popular pressure, what Gudavarthy calls "the demonstrative effects of popular democracy"  and “encounter killings.” Often, suspects are charged and convicted with no legal evidence, such as the suspect in the 2001 Parliament attack case.

Some remaining questions

1. What will the current regime do to welfare? Modi is cutting down on MNEGRA but welfare is still at the center of politics. Dr. Chandra also points out that one should beware of neo-welfarism as connected to the labor-thirsty nature of capitalism: MNEGRA reproduces colonial schemes from the past: you have to work in order to get food. Welfare becomes a new way to manage of labor.

2. How to explain regional differences in movements and party formations? Why do some right-wing parties emerge in some regions and and not parties similar to the Aam Admi Party?

Every talk stimulates a lot of ideas and things to further investigate or revisit. Here are some I have organized:

1. Read Moyn's The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History

2. Understand religious polarization in Telangana

3. Rewatch film about media phenomenon and Indian farmer suicide Peepli Live