Mona Eltahawy Profile picture
Sep 17, 2020 9 tweets 3 min read Read on X
In addition to doing my best to survive a pandemic, I’m engaged in a massive exercise in reinvention - not just my hair; how I write too.

This - about Umm Kalthoum, powerful femininity, and tender masculinity - is more personal than I usually am.

patreon.com/posts/ansak-41…
Listen to the song as you read.

I have long wanted to write an essay “Do My Lovers Have to Understand Umm Kalthoum?”

So this is a start.

Or perhaps: Fuck the Patriarchy and Other Lovers.

The names (and the years) have been changed to protect the innocent. Image
I started writing about the evocative power of songs because ironically, since the pandemic began, I haven’t been able to listen to lyrics, only instrumentals. And that gave these songs from my past a greater resonance.

This one is my childhood in London patreon.com/posts/40353489
I have known foreignness most of my life. My parents knew a rootedness I've never experienced. And Sawwah is a song addressed to them and others like them, wondering so far, with their roots so exposed, so vulnerable. In a strange land. In exile of sorts, exile of the heart. Image
We used to send cassette tapes from London to my grandparents in Cairo because international phone calls in 1970s were so expensive.

And this Halim song evokes so much of that longing and what I call exile of the heart.

Ansak evokes my anarchist rebelliously unmonogamous heart
This one captures the misery of my teen years in Saudi Arabia. After I wrote this, I sat for a long time with memory and sadness.

I was tempted to find happier memories but what’s the point in censoring memory? It would be propaganda of sorts.

patreon.com/posts/holiday-…
Or maybe that’s what memory is: personal propaganda that we do in fact censor so that we can live with ourselves.

More songs and essays coming soon.

I call the series These Songs of Freedom. But I like Fuck the Patriarchy and other Lovers... patreon.com/posts/40311477
I haven’t decided yet what I will do with all the songs and words they evoke.

I am writing what I want these days. Not with the goal of persuading an editor to give me space.

Creating my space for what I want to write.

That’s part of my survive the land and transform goal.
Many years after we sent those cassette tapes to my grandparents, I found some as I was going through things at my grandparents’ home in Cairo.

In these essays, I was to recreate how it felt to hear my brother and I, twenty years later on tape patreon.com/posts/40353489

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More from @monaeltahawy

Mar 16
So successful has white supremacist patriarchy been at convincing white women that they’re lucky to live in the U.S. and not Saudi Arabia:Iran, that so many white women didn’t pay enough attention to theocracy that white supremacy was building at home
theguardian.com/us-news/2024/m…
It was being built by white men who look like their fathers, brothers, husbands, and sons, not the scary brown men with beards, right?

I wrote this in 2020 and I have more and more reason to say it in the U.S .today feministgiant.com/p/if-amy-coney…
The same arrogance and naiveté that made so many white Americans think Trump would never become president is same arrogance & naiveté that made so many think "it would never happen here” whether it was destruction of abortion rights:anti-divorce laws feministgiant.com/p/essay-the-ha…
Read 13 tweets
Dec 9, 2023
Two months into its genocide in Gaza, the more Israel displays its savagery against Palestinians, the more obvious its moral and philosophical defeat.

Militarily, Israel is armed to the teeth and propped up by the U.S., the world’s most powerful country.

And Israel is losing
The unconscionable vote against ceasefire at the UN yesterday by U.S. & abstention by the UK are reminders that while some western political powers might still be propping up Israel’s crimes,around the world more & more people vehemently oppose the genocide.

Israel is losing
Israel’s crimes are repeatedly being equated w/some of worst genocidal crimes: from ethnic cleansing and genocide in Srebrenica to the cultural genocide of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

It has come at a staggeringly high Palestinian death toll—at least 20,000.

Israel is losing
Read 7 tweets
Nov 25, 2023
When the NYT is reporting it like this, something is changing Headline: Gaza Civilians, Under Israeli Barrage, Are Being Killed at Historic Pace In less than two months, more than twice as many women and children have been reported killed in Gaza than in Ukraine after two years of war.
"People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups." Text: People are being killed in Gaza more quickly, they say, than in even the deadliest moments of U.S.-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were themselves widely criticized by human rights groups.  Precise comparisons of war dead are impossible, but conflict-casualty experts have been taken aback at just how many people have been reported killed in Gaza — most of them women and children — and how rapidly.
"It is not just the scale of the strikes...Israel’s liberal use of very large weapons in dense urban areas, including U.S.-made 2,000-pound bombs that can flatten an apartment tower, is surprising, some experts say." Image
Read 7 tweets
Nov 1, 2023
Some of you will remember that at in Sept. 2012, I was arrested in NYC for spray painting over an Islamophobic and racist pro-Israel ad.

Notice the language of the ad and how it continues to echo today. 📷 Kristy Leibowitz Image
Anytime you see the words “civilized” and “savage” being used, understand that the purpose is dehumanization.

I refused to allow that dehumanization to exist without challenge on the walls of the subway that I and millions of New Yorkers use.
We who oppose Israel are not savages and there are more options than Israel/Jihad. And if it makes me a savage to oppose that option, if it makes me a savage to support Palestinian freedom from apartheid, occupation, ethnic cleansing and genocide, then I am a proud savage.
Read 7 tweets
Oct 16, 2023
The wife of the Illinois landlord who stabbed to death Wadea Al-Fayoume, a 6yo Muslim Palestinian-American boy, told investigators the man "listens to conservative talk radio on a regular basis" and became obsessed with the war between Hamas & Israel nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…
The landlord also the boy's mother, Hanaan Shahin, a dozen times while she was trying to protect her son and call for help.

The man was screaming "you Muslims have to die" when he barged into the ground-floor apartment the mother and son shared in suburban Plainfield.
A friend of the family said the landlord--71-year-old Joseph Czuba--shouted: "You are killing our kids in Israel. You Palestinians don’t deserve to live."

nbcnews.com/news/us-news/s…
Read 14 tweets

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