Bad Feminist*/ Love Letter to Rafia Zakaria
“Feminism is the radical notion that women are people.”
That’s Mary Shear’s striking definition of easily one of the most contested terms of the last 100 years.
I tried really hard to watch this aggressively mediocre show on Netflix the other day. Something about white collar crime and cryptocurrencies. Despite doing my best though, I couldn’t make it past episode 3. The lead kept telling other characters to “man up” or not “whine like a little girl” and after a while I was just mad at the screen- so this was easily fixed. I promptly switched to The Office. Again.
As the nuance of my feminism has grown over the last few years, I find this happening more and more. Subtle (or explicit) threads of disdain for the feminine become increasingly apparent everywhere, and less and less palatable. It’s made my usual consumption of copious amounts of TV, books, music, and film harder. It’s made making friends harder. It’s made dating harder. It’s made being a person harder, really.
I was in a Terrible Relationship for a while. Engaged to be married. It’s been over a year since we parted ways (badly) but he/it continues to live rent free in my head. Recently, my therapist suggested that I should ‘say goodbye’ in my own way and see if that helps. Worth a shot?
A large part of why TR didn’t work had to do with how, increasingly, in being with this person I found myself choosing between being who I am or making him happy. Much of our twisted, co-dependent, trauma-bonded connection was based on control. There was little communication or support. There were also wide, yawning gaps- no, chasms- between our understandings of what we wanted from our respective lives and our life together. Both of us had tough childhoods, in our own ways. We each lost a parent early on. Unresolved childhood issues continued to loom large in both our lives, unaddressed to a significant extent, until ultimately, a straw broke the camel’s back.
But even post-TR, I continued to feel that perhaps I am “too much.” Maybe being not just with him, but any man from my culture would be hard for me. It’s hard to reconcile the standard brown upbringing, internalized misogyny and toxic masculinity deeply enmeshed in the fabric of our expectations from every gender, with my ideal intersectional feminism now. And so I quietly wrote myself off, or at least my prospect of companionship with a man from my culture.
But then, I picked up Rafia Zakaria’s much anticipated “Against White Feminism.” This is not a book review. Just, reflections?
Rafia uses some 200 pages to succinctly outline, using examples of historical, anecdotal, and contemporary events and personalities from around the world, why imperialist, white supremacist and increasingly neoliberal tendencies within the feminist mainstream have dominated its trajectory. She argues that this influenced the suffragettes, each successive ‘wave’ of feminism, global humanitarian and development work, and of course- the carefully curated and aspirational value of the “boss babe” as we know it.
There are many highlights of this seminal work- from the spotlight on sexual liberation as the only hallmark of one’s feminist truth and life, to the ways in which feminists of color, Muslim feminists and nonbinary feminists continue to struggle to be heard and remain hidden in plain sight. She takes pains to explain how even adding ‘diverse’ feminist voices as ‘appendages’ to a broken system instead of advocating for transformational change- an upheaval of the system and priorities of the movement- is part of the problem. I have always admired Rafia’s work, over years of following her biting columns in Pakistani and international publications on issues ranging from the inexplicable notoriety of Malala in Pakistan to the anxiety of watching fascism gobble up more and more of India’s once aspirational secularism. Rafia Zakaria is awesome.
The best part of her book for me though, is not how it informed my politics or educated me on historical subtleties that are patterns and not anomalies, or even gave me something to recommend endlessly to everyone for at least the rest of the year.
It’s how she admits to being a bad feminist time and again despite it all. That can mean all sorts of things. Sometimes, it’s glossing over the truth of certain situations and times in your life for Western audiences to spare everyone discomfort, or sparing yourself the follow-up questions about cultural or familial contexts. At other times, it’s allowing yourself, sometimes unknowingly, to be a prop in conversations meant to illustrate how brown or Muslim women need ‘saving’ from brown or Muslim men. Basically, ‘liberation’ from a backward culture. The saviors though, will never be internal, always external. Always Western. Always White. It might be allowing white feminism and its appendages to set the agenda on issues bigger than them, or not stepping in fully to mentor feminists of color when she could have.
I felt that deeply, because I too am and have been a bad feminist. I too have let go of opportunities to have meaningful conversations about important things in order to ‘fit in’ better at work. At school. In social situations. On dates. I too have taken the easy way out more than once, thrown Saudi Arabia’s human rights violations around more than China’s and not taken enough time to study the impact of the Indian Act on and in Canada. Maybe it’s due to the disorientation of building a life from scratch, with a deck stacked against you and the base instinct of clawing on to the highest rung on the ladder. It is also intentional dissociation from a culture that does, in fact, systemically disenfranchise everyone except its darlings- leaving women and minorities to pick up the pieces or fight for scraps. Maybe it’s just ambition. Either way. It’s there.
And in everything that came with TR, including dealing with the fallout, this was perhaps what I beat myself up for the most. I felt like a bad feminist, for letting a man almost walk all over me.
So Rafia not only helped me feel seen and understood in what I had often considered private battles, she helped me get closer to feeling redeemed. She reached out from the page, held my hand, and told me it was okay, as long as I keep learning and unlearning. My vulnerability in TR didn’t make me a bad feminist; maybe that’s what made me human. That the important thing is not to never fail as we try to live our politics but to understand that in a world betting against us, we continue to bet on ourselves. Carve out OUR feminism, build OUR systems, tell OUR stories, prioritize OUR experiences, OUR lives. It’s not a sprint, but a marathon. To stand on the shoulders of giants while helping others up. I read Rafia’s words, like I have many times before, and felt a little less lost and a little more motivated to carry on. On a frosty Calgary morning, as I flipped through the last few pages on my balcony and the sounds of the city merged into the background, she brought me home.
*This is a nod to the phenomenal Roxanne Gay, and her phenomenal book, the OG “Bad Feminist.”
