Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) was created in order to address Western feminist hegemony on women’s studies, feminist ideology and research on women in general, which became increasing visible during the United Nations Programme for International Women’s Year in 1975 (see AAWORD 1982).
CHAPTER 2: ‘I AM A FEMINIST ONLY IN SECRET’
INTERVIEW WITH TAGHREED ELSANHOURI AND CHRISTINA VO N BRAUN
INTERVIEW BY INES KAPPERT
In September 2010 African women filmmakers met with taz editor, German author and journalist Ines Kappert, who also took the time to interview German intellectual, filmmaker and feminist academic Christina von Braun and Sudanese filmmaker Taghreed Elsanhouri. While debate about the state of filmmaking on the continent continues, especially for women practitioners, there is an increasing demand for stories which capture authentic perspectives and reveal how women from the continent narrate stories from an African point of view. Within the framework of the three-day ‘ARTSWork: Meeting of African Women Filmmakers’ conference, Elsanhouri and von Braun met to discuss what it means to take a camera in one’s hand as a woman in the Sudan and why feminism has a bad reputation in African societies.
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INES KAPPERT: In your films and in your work in general, the gender perspective and negotiations between men and women play an important role. Would you call yourselves feminists?
TAGHREED ELSANHOURI: Only in secret.
CHRISTINA VON BRAUN: Naturally I am a feminist. The term is used almost only in a defamatory sense in the public domain; this is all the more reason to confess to it.
TAGHREED: To label myself a feminist would be counterproductive. We, that is my generation of women between 20 and 40 years old, are all grateful today for what women achieved in the seventies, but in our everyday lives we have learned that we have to proceed more strategically in order to get from A to B. Apart from that, for me as a black woman, race is just as important as gender.
INES [TO CHRISTINA]: Younger women, especially, dismiss the feminist movement as a point of reference in the struggle for their own freedom of action remarkably often. Does that annoy you?
CHRISTINA: Annoy? I don’t know. If women can’t relate to feminism, then they are entitled not to. That doesn’t affect me. But, unfortunately, closet feminists de facto put their names to the defamatory attributions to feminism. We shouldn’t participate in these derogatory discourses, and that doesn’t at all mean adopting an uncritical stance towards women’s movements and the different shades of feminism. But of course I understand that it is somewhat different for a Sudanese woman than for myself.
TAGHREED: Perhaps it is time to rehabilitate the term. At the moment to be a feminist is just as much as to be despised for saying: ‘I am a Communist.’
INES: What meaning does solidarity have for you?
TAGHREED: That has to do with my multi-culturalism, too. I was born in the Sudan and then grew up in London and also went to school there. I am completely clear about what Western women have achieved in the West. I am aware also that I profit from their achievements, whether it has to do with the right to a divorce or the right to vote. But I don’t believe that I’m dishonouring this legacy because I don’t wear a feminist badge on my chest all the time. There are very diverse forms of solidarity.
CHRISTINA: One should never forget: the first women’s movement, the Suffragettes, was used by the colonial rulers, male and female, to undermine Egyptian society. The same people who stood up for doing away with the veil and promoted the ‘modernisation’ of women in Egypt fought against the franchise for women in Great Britain. To that extent, it isn’t surprising that in African societies, feminism is seen as a Western import and has accordingly been given a bad reputation. But I’m pleading for people to keep in mind that there isn’t only one ‘feminism’, but very many different forms – in the West, too. In France, for instance, emancipation is understood somewhat differently from in, say, Germany or Scandinavia.
INES: The wholesale rejection of feminist ideas today as always paternalistic, if not colonialist, could also harm Western women because they have nothing to do with colonialism – even if it is only because of being born at a later time, or just because they’re trying to learn from the mistakes of their predecessors.
TAGHREED: I’d like to tell you both a story. When I was travelling around in South Sudan for the first time, I came across Nomad women who had never been to school. This shocked me greatly because the women looked just like me and in spite of that, they almost appeared to belong to another species. I thought at the time, for heaven’s sake, they can’t even write, what happens to them and what is my responsibility here? Such a thought made me think for the first time about the differences in the experiences of women in the Sudan. Perhaps white women felt like that when they encountered us, women in Africa. Perhaps they felt as if too much was asked of them and they were full of sympathy. In this sense there might be a similarity in this situation. And I wanted to help but hadn’t a clue as to how to do it or where to start.
CHRISTINA: I have never been an activist who attended large street demonstrations, it isn’t my thing. But in my research work I have continually asked myself the question: What were the circumstances that produced particular images of men and women? What were the cultural, societal and spiritual factors that characterised gender and the role of images in creating role models? Probably even the demand for emancipation is the product of historical circumstances. If we are to view it internationally, every society has its own type of emancipation. No one else can do it for you, it has to be created by the people, the women themselves.
INES [TO CHRISTINA]: Among other things, your scientific interest is directed toward the genealogy of cinema and the dominant ways of looking or gaze regimes. How are these connected?
CHRISTINA: Every new technology in the media was accompanied by a change in the order of the sexes. It does not matter whether we are speaking about the invention of the alphabet, the central perspective, the printing press or even the invention of the cinema at the end of the 19th century. Photography – and, following on from that, cinema – has adopted dominant ways of looking at the central perspective. Put simply, these have defined looking as male and being-looked-at as female. But the visual techniques are Western inventions and so these dominant ways of looking, the idea of the gendered gaze, are genuinely Western, too. In a different historical or social context these techniques may have a different effect on how technology, its relation to the gaze and gender intersect.
TAGHREED: Without doubt there is a cultural difference with regard to the gaze. The Western gaze is very direct as opposed to that of the East. In the East it is not customary to look one another in the eyes. Women and men, especially, routinely avoid direct eye contact and because of this I always find it exciting when a protagonist in film looks at me unabashedly or looks directly into the camera.
INES: Why?
TAGHREED: Maybe it is only curiosity because the man or woman concerned isn’t perhaps so familiar with the visual media. In spite of this there is always something radical and confrontational about not avoiding the eye of the camera but presenting oneself openly to it.
CHRISTINA: This would mean that in a culture that avoids the direct gaze or eye contact, a dialogue with the eyes is subverted by the direct gaze into the camera. This would represent an act of subversion in your own culture?
TAGHREED: Perhaps, yes.
CHRISTINA: But it could also mean that you employ
