Five women confront a new Iraq
From actresses to lawyers, women are seizing a historic if uncertain moment
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BAGHDAD –
Ashtar Jassim Al-Yasari is standing in the cramped office of her newspaper, Habez Bouz, when the air conditioning suddenly cuts out. An immediate crash of heat - the product of temperatures outside soaring above 130 degrees F. - makes it harder to tolerate the jostling in the narrow room that houses editors of four papers that have sprung to life in postwar Baghdad.
Ms. Yasari, wearing a lavender head scarf that makes her khaki-green eyes even more striking, is the only woman among them.
There are other women journalists in Iraq, but postwar insecurity has forced many professional women to stay home. Yasari shrugs at the situation with an air of steely equanimity: It won't stop her, she says, though her father or brother escorts her whenever she leaves home - something she never faced before the war.
Neither will the signs warning women to dress more conservatively slow her down. "We are an Islamic country, but we can't be forced to wear things we don't like. No group has any right to tell us what to do just yet. That's why we're putting out this paper."
Three months since the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraq is tottering between the forces of renewal and revolt.
Amid the anarchy, some women are seizing opportunities to make an impact in ways never before possible. Some are just trying to stay afloat in conditions that make life feel more difficult than it was under the Baathist regime. Still others are alarmed to find that many liberties appear to be fast disappearing under the weight of ongoing violence and the newfound muscle of Islamic fundamentalists.
For the more than half of Iraqis who are women, whether life is better now than under Mr. Hussein depends on whom one asks.
A venerable newspaper is reborn
A man lectures his friend about the rampant looting in Baghdad. "It's your fault you're religious!" the man says. "I told you to steal, but you're too stubborn to listen!" Elsewhere, people praise a neighbor who has brought a generator to share among several houses without electricity. Exclaims one: "God bless him for such a good robbery!"
Such humor laced with social criticism fills the pages of one of the hippest new papers to hit Baghdad. A rarity among the flood of publications that have cropped up, "Habez Bouz" is a satirical weekly that revels in lampooning life both under Hussein and the US-led occupation.
A rarity, moreover, because its founder and editor, Ms. Yasari, is a 24-year-old woman.
The majority of Iraq's new publications tend to serve things straight up. But Yasari started her paper with a different mission: to hold a mirror up to Iraqi society and force people to snicker at its reflection. "Due to the circumstances we live in, everything around us seems ironic, and the only way we can breathe is to laugh at it," says Yasari.
The security problems are sometimes the focus of the more serious articles in the paper. In one piece, Yasari tells the story of a man who, not long ago, was arrested by intelligence police and imprisoned and tortured for a year and a half. He was sent home when the police realized they had mistaken him for someone with a similar name.
Yasari likes to publish such stories because in the past they were whispered about in secret, or simply went untold.
"All the newspapers after the fall reflect political subjects. But ours also reflect social problems. We write about the water problems, the gasoline lines, the looting. This wasn't allowed in the past," says Yasari.
Yasari gained some of her appreciation for a good story from her father, also a journalist and co-publisher of the paper. At Baghdad University, where she studied journalism, students learned the concept of using the press to take government institutions to task.
"Not everything we learned about could be put into practice," she says, acknowledging the understatement with a roll of her eyes. It was while studying media history that she learned of the original Habez Bouz, published in the 1930s. In studying the original - closed when the monarchy deemed it too uppity - Yasari discovered a tone no longer heard in Iraqi public life: irreverence.
But what perhaps helped her most were her college years spent interning at the newspaper Az-Zawra. There, she met Abed Hassan Abd-Ali Abdul Karim, one of Iraq's most famous cartoonists. When she told him about her hope to restart Habez Bouz, he agreed to help because he admired Yasari's willingness to push boundaries. "Most of the pictures I'm doing now I couldn't do in the past," says Abdul Karim. "It was like there was a policeman inside me."
Yasari is worried new press restrictions laid out by the US will stand in the way. They were meant to prohibit the use of media to incite violence, but she sees them as censorship. "If the Americans are doing bad things, we should let the people know about that," she says.
Other editors in Baghdad say Yasari has a unique product. "As an investigative journalist, she is good," says Ni'ma Abdulrazzaq, senior editor of the As-Saah newspaper. "But ... the paper deals with subjects by depending on jokes too much."
Yasari hopes to give readers more than a good giggle. "In between the sentences, there is a path, an awareness for the people that is different from the past," she says.
In the university classroom
Before the war, Alia Khalaf threw herself into a passion that has long been her passport to another world: English literature. Then, while sitting in her tiny apartment across from Mustansirriye University where she teaches, the war arrived, literally, in her living room.
An antiaircraft missile launched by Iraqi soldiers pierced the ceiling and landed "right in Nadia's heart," Ms. Khalaf says. Her younger and only sibling, who also had a promising academic career, died almost instantly.
Khalaf traded her more colorful, if Islamically conservative, dress for a shroud of pure black, the hue of mourning she will wear for a year. The Shakespearean plays and sonnets that were a joy to teach have taken on a more poignant, personal tone.
"Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer/The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them?"
Khalaf is reading to students from Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1. "Hamlet is destroyed now," Khalaf explains to her class. "He is asking whether he should end his life. Hamlet is saying, I am ready to endure the pain of unrequited love because I am afraid of what comes after death," she says. "It is better to endure the difficulties that we know than to face the horrors that we don't know."
The temperature in the packed classroom hovers around 115 degrees F. A fan whines fecklessly overhead. The war froze higher education for nearly two months, and now, instead of taking exams in balmy April or May, the students are sitting for them in the furnace of July.
Hamlet, Khalaf points out later in the scene, tends to blame Ophelia for his troubles. "We see he thinks that all women are corrupt and immoral," Khalaf says in a smooth, soprano English, as students fan themselves.
Something about this theme seems to leap from the English texts into current-day Iraq. On campus, signs have appeared urging women to cover up with proper
hijab, or head covering. Though Khalaf dresses in Islamic fashion, this development disturbs her. "They're saying you shouldn't wear the 'French
hijab.' Maybe next week they will say a woman should cover her whole face. Maybe in 10 years, they'll say we should be buried," Khalaf says. "Everyone is free now not just to give his opinion, but to impose it."
The signs have been posted by a clique of students claiming to represent the Hawza, a council of religious Shiite clerics in Najaf. Khalaf is also a religious Shiite, but she is troubled by the Hawza's use of this vacuum.
Where the Baathists' informants used to spread fear on campus, she says, now the Hawza's do. After her last class at 12:30 p.m., some of the Hawza's self-appointed security toughs tell her and her visitor they need to leave the campus. "I am a teacher here," said Khalaf, who, from a distance, looks as if she might be one of the students.
She lingers a little longer to make a point. "You cannot confront them as a teacher, or they will target you. We have no government, and they can do whatever they want to us."
Khalaf's students seem to worship her; her teaching style is more inspirational than didactic. Many of them wrote sympathy letters to her, in English, about her sister.
"She is like a ladder - she help us understand. When you look at her, it gives you hope that there still something good out there," says Zeinab Sadiq, a stylish junior in a short-sleeved pants suit. Before the war, Ms. Sadiq says, she wore above-the-knee skirts to class; now she wouldn't dare.
Khalaf - who is still completing her doctorate - is that kind of special teacher who moves minds, the kind students stop in to see after class. But she is no pushover. A former night student - now forced to come in the daytime because it's too dangerous to hold classes at night - stops by to tell her she should make a handout summarizing what they must know for the exam. "No, you should read the books and come to my class," she says firmly, before moving on to the next student in the scrum.
"Even if she's demanding, she does it for our own benefit," says George Nichola, an Iraqi Christian who takes her poetry class. "I thought she couldn't get past [her sister's death], but I was surprised. She came in a few days later and said, 'We have many poems ahead of us.' "
And many changes to be made come fall. The university needs to fix buildings wrecked by looting. Baathists who held senior positions must be moved out. One of the biggest challenges, she says, will be turning students on to real learning after years of a dictatorship in which connections mattered more than capabilities. "The aspiration to attain knowledge is limited," she says. "Some students have it. Too many others expect to be spoon-fed."
Nothing has come easily to Khalaf. But in a few students' eyes, she has found reasons to keep going. Mr. Nichola quotes Sonnet 33, a favorite: "But if the while I think on thee, dear friend. All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end."
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