TRIPOLI - They refer to themselves as the “strange women.” And for good reason - they all grew up under the dictatorship, but through family ties and education managed to stay on the margins of Muammar Gaddafi’s system and the traditional women’s roles that are present everywhere in the Libya, a country dominated by conservative Islam.
The most audacious of them do not even wear the hijab, the veil that younger women carefully swaddle their faces with, “to look like a beautiful moon.” Most of them are not married, having successfully resisted family pressure or arranged marriages. Their passports have often served as a shield.
Jamila, a veterinarian and painter, is Libyan and German. Hadiah, a teacher and potter, is French-Libyan. Sheherazade is originally American. Before the fall of the dictatorship abolished the barriers woven by four decades under Gaddafi, they all had access to the seaside suburb of Regatta, where expatriates mix with the local elite who come to westernize themselves away from malicious looks.
These “strange” women are accepted by the mixed population in the capital city. They were once promoted by the fallen regime in order to encourage a more modern image of the country, and today they are at the avant-garde of discussions about a free Libya.
“That ‘men’s revolution’ would never have triumphed without the support of the mothers and the wives, the sisters and the daughters,” says Ibrahim Chellany, a former advertising professional and founder of the monthly magazine The Libyan. Three fourths of the magazine’s editorial team are women under 30.
Sheherazade Kablan, an intellectual who just returned to Libya from the United States, was on the cover recently. “I consider her our model,” says Iba Shebani, 24, a young television presenter who is half-English. Iba was in Oxford during the war, but returned to Libya right after the fall of Tripoli on August 21. “It was my duty. Libyan women of my generation have a lot to bring to the table.”
Jamila, 40, is more reflective. Up to this moment the veterinarian, university professor and artist led a double life. As a state employee, she quickly experienced the glass ceiling that Gaddafism had in place for women who were excessively independent. “I was named department head. And then nothing,” Jamila said. “The system expected from me something that I was not giving it.”
Her mother is German, and married to a prominent Libyan lung specialist who knows many of the “Colonel’s” comrades-in-arms. She knows how much her daughter has suffered. “All of the qualified women, whose education the regime encouraged, have found themselves in the same situation: marginalized trailblazers.”
Jamila didn’t hesitate to jump headlong into the void left by the revolution, and reactivated a scholarship to study in Italy, where she will be returning shortly. Her artistic work, however, underscore the silence around feminist causes in Libya. The articles on painting in The Libyan finally allow her to discuss her work. But opportunities for expositions are still quite limited. The human figures and nudes that she has been painting since adolescence are still taboo in a society corseted by religion and dominated by men.
High heels and polygamy
“People talk to me about sexuality and danger,” the artist says as she shows her works. “I respond that I am an artist who is in love with life.” She shakes her uncovered hair and adjusts her loose-fitting sweater. Her students, at the university, are almost all veiled.
Even with tight jeans and high heels, they are willing to accommodate the justifications for polygamy recently enumerated by Mustapha Abdul Jalil, the president of the Transitional Council, a pious Muslim. “It is all very complicated,” Jamila says. “These young Libyan women work, they drive their cars and they admire life in the West, but they are still submissive toward men.”
The question of divorce is one example. There were already laws that were favorable to women under Gaddafi, but they were rarely applied. There are also laws against harassment. But is it necessary to protest in the streets to defend these laws? “ The fate of the Libyan revolution is in the hands of the fathers, the brothers and the husbands. Freedom of speech risks breaking up families,” said Naima, a Tunisian woman in Misrata.
In this large port city, which along with Benghazi was at the heart of the insurrection, has always been conservative. The katibas (brigades) from Misrata weren’t accustomed to seeing women on the street in cars and in offices before they arrived in Tripoli. Hadiah, whose mother is French, prefers to laugh about it. “When they see me without the veil, the revolutionaries attribute it to the fact that I am not 100 percent Libyan. For these kids, I am from planet Mars.”
She notes that Gaddafi was focused on eliminating the different parts of Libyan society. “Everyone fell in line,” says Hadiah. “The big challenge is to have a different way of thinking or a different attitude.”
The two women walked together towards Martyr’s Square in Tripoli to celebrate the revolution, just as thousands of others. The occasional un-veiled girl smiled at them. “Gaddafi’s fall at least enabled us to see that we were not alone,” Hadiah continued. “A discrete republic of strange women was born in Tripoli.”
Photo - Magharebia
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