Bellydancing, Activism and the Politics of Pleasure
Illustration: Sümeyra Yüce
I am in the final year of a PhD program. Before sitting down to write, I dance. If I don’t, what I write comes out brittle and full of resentment. Dancing helps me shake out the words and formulate them.
And more specifically, I “belly” dance, or as Arabs call it: “dance.” The sensual movement of my chest up and down, the sway of my hips from side to side, the undulation of my spine as I circle and shake is a kind of ancestral meditation that makes me feel free. And like many young Syrian women, I have felt a sense of shame when I dance on my own. This has taken me years to feel comfortable doing.
Bellydancing is a way I have learned to overcome body shame, shame from sexual violence, shame from colonial violence & all of the ways each inform the other. When white europeans came to colonize our homelands they were disgusted by how sensual and homoerotic we are. (See: Samar Habib’s research in Female Homosexuality in the Middle East about orientalists’ obsession with Middle Eastern “sensuality,” such as Sir Richard Burton’s work on “homosexuality and the Arab.”)
The irony is that now, in the interest of imperialism and homonationalism, the colonizers paint our cultures as sexually repressed, void of eroticism, void of queerness, when the expression of sexuality is so deeply a part of who we are. Then, in Arab nationalist regimes, what was transgressive to colonial gender binaries, the indigenous, Black, Brown feminine healing arts, became stripped away and disavowed as barbaric and excluded from the ahistorical constructs they called our “culture.” Whether it was the Ba’athists’ “modernization” projects that decimated local indigenous communities in fela7, working class farmers’ areas, or Bourguiba’s modernization program that forced Imazighen people to flee their lands and abandon their languages; a certain brand of “Arab culture” became defined, circulated, and mandated as “civilized,” in order to show the colonizer we were human according to their standards. The irony is now so many SWANA activist cultures are devoid of pleasure for the sake of revolution. When our joy and sensuality is exactly what regimes of power want to take away from us. And we hide away pieces of ourselves, thinking this is how we’ve always been. Add to this that our dancing has been orientalized & appropriated from us, sucked dry of its sacred divinity (I’m looking at you, white lady bellydancers)[1]. And there is shame when we do our own culturally magic body-based healing. I often felt ashamed bellydancing because I felt so awkward at social settings when other women eased into it so smoothly. I practised in my room, alone, for years. I felt if I tried to express anything about my love for bellydancing on social media or in a more public space, it would be consumed by the patriarchal & colonial gaze. I have reclaimed it in quiet. Now I’m sharing pieces of this journey in this container because it has set me free.
As someone with friends and family who were activists in the Syrian Revolution, and who was both an observer and participant in some senses, I saw women in our activist circles publicly shamed for indulging in mundane forms of pleasure. I saw people circulate photos of a prominent early revolution activist in a bikini, swimming at a pool. “See? She can’t be a real activist. She’s swimming in a bikini while people are dying in the streets.”
At the time I couldn’t put into words why exactly this irked me. What the gendered implications of this level of scrutiny were. Why pleasure is rarely policed when it comes to male activists smoking shisha or drinking beer, but why the image of an activist woman enjoying herself was such a scandal. The psychologist Brené Brown talks about the idea of comparative suffering. That we can’t complain about our lives or enjoy small pleasures because elsewhere other people are suffering. In I May Destroy You the protagonist played by Michaela Coel has been sexually assaulted twice. She sits in a crisis centre, telling the counsellor that she’s fine because there are bigger issues in the world. She mutters, “There’s a war going on in Syria, there’s a war going on in Syria, there’s a war going in Syria.” I was both frustrated by and related deeply to this scene. Frustrated because, as someone from Syria, people throw out Syria as this litmus test for the ultimate suffering. This tendency normalizes suffering as if it were a stagnant never-changing background, an unknowable and overwhelming experience. Relatable because, as a Syrian whose family was displaced in the 1980’s, forced to run, who lost everything, I do that to myself constantly. It’s reinforced by cultural and religious and generational ways of relating, where your character is assumed to be enhanced by a sense of hero/martyresque denial of your own suffering in favor of the suffering of others. It feels deeply inappropriate to practice joy and empathy for yourself while your people are dying from chemical weapons, fires, barrel bombs. Your relatives are fleeing, their neighbours are buried beneath the rubble. Brown conducts neurological research on shame and empathy in the brain. She says that “when we practice empathy with ourselves we actually create more empathy for others.” When we deny ourselves the right to pleasure, or even the right to suffer, because others are suffering more than we are, we actually reduce empathy for others because we are not able to practice it for ourselves. She reminds us “we think that empathy is a pizza—there’s only eight slices. That there is a scarcity of empathy, that we can’t complain about our lives under covid while there are doctors on the frontline or people dying. But there’s enough love and empathy to go around. Putting ourselves down because we’re struggling but have it so much better than others kills our empathy for others.”
I know so many activists in Syria/Palestine circles, and I am one of them, who would carry such a huge sense of guilt and shame around enjoying day-to-day life while our peoples are in pain. I remember coming back from volunteering in the refugee camps in Chios, Greece, after the EU-Turkey deal. My friend suggested I take a bath for “self-care.” I filled up the tub, put in some bath salts and mint leaves. Sitting in the water, I had a panic attack. I felt like I didn’t deserve to enjoy myself while others were drowning in the Mediterranean. A simple bath was so stressful for me and I would not allow myself space to enjoy it because I was so ashamed. I didn’t realize that the act of opening to pleasure, embracing it, allowing myself space to enjoy it, liberates me and thus is in the service of liberation for others. It doesn’t mean I can’t empathize and recognize my own privileges of living in safety. Quite the contrary, showing compassion to myself and prioritizing my joy makes me able to be more present for others, show up better, and be more resourced so that I can listen and support when it is necessary.
It seems basic, but it’s true. The more I care for myself, the more I practice small moments of freedom in my daily world, the more I can support others in the struggle for freedom. As Audre Lorde said, writing as a queer Black woman activist and poet, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”
The more I repress myself, shame myself for enjoying my dance, my bath salts, whatever it is, the less emotional bandwidth I have for engaging people, celebrating with them when they’re joyful, and being there for them when times are tough.
As I sat down to write this, I shuffled a stack of tarot cards I place next to my desk for inspiration. The card I drew:
Pleasure: It’s a mermaid, basking in the sun, opening her arms to the sky.
So what is pleasure? There is the indulgence of pleasure in a flight from reality, pleasure as decadence, but there is also pleasure as presence, pleasure as full experience. As my teacher Gitanjali Hemp puts it: even sadness can be pleasurable. It is learning to fully taste the sensation of every feeling and marvel in the beauty of it.
As Yara Awad says in her interview for Miriam Cooke’s Dancing in Damascus: “I feel like we have become numb, our emotions barely stirred by what goes on around us. But when I see a beautiful line or a powerful jump and when I know the effort and pain that went into that single move, I get chills; I ‘feel’ again. It’s very hard to make a significant difference in the world, but I think that if I can make at least one person ‘feel’ again, then I can be one step closer to making that difference. So I dance.” The power of our movement is only measured by how human we can become. If we are in activist movements that dehumanize ourselves while fighting for each other, we are not getting free. What will help us feel again?
I taught English in displaced Syrian communities in Amman and I asked my students, what is freedom? When do you feel free? One of my students, Yusuf, said, “You can’t have freedom without ‘free’ and ‘dome.’ Freedom doesn’t exist without a dome. You can’t have freedom unless you have a space to be free.” As someone whose peoples risked everything to confront an authoritarian regime for the violation of freedom, I am obsessed with freedom. I want to know how I can curate spaces of freedom beyond the circumstances keeping us from it.
I know many activists who would roll their eyes if I told them bellydancing was a practice of freedom. That the politics of pleasure, along with our fight against structural oppressions can create spaces of freedom even while we are unfree in the material world. I feel like we need to more deeply articulate our specific experiences around a politics of pleasure from a Middle Eastern context that takes into account the intersections of Zionism, colonization, patriarchy, transphobia, classism, regionalism, sectarianism, anti-Blackness, totalitarianism, extremism, regime repression, and war. That intentionally respects and engages the queer Black femme genealogy of theorizing that carved out the meaning of pleasure. It is a politics that Adrienne Maree Brown calls “pleasure activism.” She writes that pleasure is not “a frivolous spoil of luxury, but a measure of aliveness.” That we “begin to understand the liberation possible when we collectively orient around pleasure and longing.” As Lorde put it: attuning to the erotic as a source of power outlines our deep capacities for joy. It is “in the way my body stretches to music and opens in response, harkening to its deepest rhythms … every level upon which I sense ... opens to an erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea.” Activist-me five years ago would have rejected ideas of pleasure activism as “western.” But these theories emerge from queer Black women from the Americas for a reason — the entire system has been built on the exploitation of their labor and they have articulated ways to resist that. It is from those places they have dreamed up a roadmap to liberation. Lorde theorized that those who still operate under euro-american patriarchal paradigms have trouble attuning to the sensations of the erotic because they operate under a distortion that prioritizes logic, work, cartesian forms of rationality that deprioritize the innate, sensual, divine experience of pleasure.
When I was working with grassroots Syrian youth groups in the u.s., we within the activist circles had a lot of discussions about whether or not to prioritize arts-based therapies for children over more “practical” skills like English learning or computer skills. What Syrian activists on the ground in Syria have already figured out is that creating arts-based spaces for children — using theatre, poetry, drawing, creativity of all kinds — is a way to make sure that even while under siege, crouched in underground tunnels, children can access a feeling of creativity that is one step closer to their liberation. Like grassroots activists who transformed an old military checkpoint that guarded a regime “death camp,” a military encampment known as Wadi Deif, into a children’s healing school called Syria’s Hope, and put on a theater show and a children's concert at its opening in Ma’arat al Numan. Or the people of al-Aisha of Quneitra who opened an arts-based therapy center for disabled kids. Or Khotoat, a Syrian organization that held politicized theatre activities for children to somatically heal from violence in the countryside of Homs. There are hundreds of these examples (and yet western NGOs delight in the notion that bringing arts-based healing and somatic practices to Syrian refugees is an imported idea).
Pleasure is a form of freedom. When we fight for freedom, we can also attain it in a mundane, cellular, day-to-day way. When we honour our desires and daily pleasures, we carve out pathways to liberation. When we meet our desires with acceptance, rather than shame, we ease into freedom. Our pleasures are a map with sensual clues embedded in them that lead to our soul’s liberation. What makes you feel free? When do you feel free? I feel free when I dance. When my bare feet are on the earth and I’m looking up at the stars, dreaming about what could be. It is taking a break during work to daydream about what you want, even for a moment. It is just allowing space to feel, to dance, to swim in a bikini if it means that it will bring us some kind of joy in this heartbreaking world.
[1]: After discussion with the translator of this article into Turkish, D. dilan arslan, it came to the authors attention that the original phrase they used, “Russian white lady bellydancers” could perpetuate a stigma against economic refugees from Russia who may be in positions performing gendered and sexualized labor in the Middle East. We changed the phrase to white women to fit more authentically and to name the experience of appropriation.