#169 Making Feminist History Visible: Women’s Archives and Records
An International Conversation
“Women in present-day collectives go looking for documents produced in the 80s, 90s, and even the 70s, for inspiration in formulating their own declarations and their own programmes of demands.
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“In the Anglophone world, there’s a huge amount of ideological control in the universities. A lot of feminism has become very contested through that, and women’s history, in particular, is taking huge hits.
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“It is so important for us to know the real and true history of what really went down because so much has been erased, especially when it comes to Dalit, Adivasi women and indigenous women.”
In this pilot episode of FiLiA’s new women’s history podcast series, we bring together four feminists from around the world to have an international and intergenerational conversation about the importance of women’s archives. We speak to American historian Max Dashu, Indian artist and activist Aqui Thami, and Algerian archivists Lydia Saïdi and Awel Haouati. Facilitated by Bec Wonders and translated by Natalya Vince.
Transcript (Click here for the Arabic Transcript):
Bec Wonders: Welcome to the FiLiA women's history podcast. FiLiA is a woman-led volunteer organisation which seeks to build sisterhood and solidarity locally, nationally and globally, amplify the voices of women, particularly those less often heard or purposefully silenced, and defend women's human rights. In this podcast series, we're putting into conversation women from around the world, across generations to talk about women's history. We'll be asking questions such as: what does it mean to do women's history and why do we do it? What different methods and strategies does it demand when women's voices and lives are often absent from the archives? How do we do women's history in a way which accounts for the huge diversity of women's lived experiences and realities, and encompasses class, race and sexuality as intersecting categories of analysis? Who do we do this history for, and how do we try and ensure that it reaches them? And of course, we'll be finding out about some lesser known women's histories along the way.
In this very first episode, we're talking about archives and archiving. If that conjures up images of dusty old boxes of documents containing the very important papers of middle and upper class men, who – in the colonial period at least – were overwhelmingly white, you wouldn't be far from wrong. Those who held the political, economic, social and cultural power in the past not only got to dominate in their time, they also got to determine what was considered important to preserve for posterity and what was deserving of consignment to the dusty box held by an institution somewhere. Far from being neutral repositories, archives are institutional structures that shape the historical record, usually through the exclusion of women, people of colour and the working class. The 1990s saw an uptake of feminist archival intervention, challenging the idea that archives are simply things or passive storehouses when, in fact, feminist archives are essential in the process of knowledge production and for understanding the present situation of women longitudinally, that is: feminist archives help us make sense of our present in relation to our past. We're allowed to become contemporaries and collaborators with the women who struggled before us and create intergenerational bridges and coalitions with our histories.
My name is Bec Wonders, I'm a PhD researcher in the field of feminist publishing, feminist conflict and the women's liberation movement. In this episode, we're delighted to welcome four women, Max Dashu, Aqui Thami, Lydia Saïdi and Awel Haouati, from the US, India, and Algeria. Through doing women's history, they have sought to challenge some of the power hierarchies inherent in archiving. And in doing so, they centre women as creators of knowledge. So, welcome, everyone, to today's podcast. I'd love to know more about who you are and what archival projects you're involved with. How about let's begin with you, Max?
Max Dashu: I founded the Suppressed Histories Archives in 1970, as an investigation of international women's history. And it was really because at that time, I left college to become an independent scholar, because women's history was literally a joke. There were no Women’s Studies programmes, there was just nothing. They would literally laugh at you, you know, trivialising women's history, and I could see that there was going to be more to find, but I had to go out and find it. And I knew that it was really important to document what I found, because there was this wall of denial: “There's nothing, there's no women. That's ridiculous. How could there be women? How could there be women warriors, women founders, priestesses, clan mothers, any of that?” And so I began very soon, within a couple years, in addition to collecting information in written forms, to start documenting the cultural record through images. And that’s really been the focus of my work. I do a lot of scholarly work, a lot of scholarly research, but the images are independent cultural testimony in their own right. So it’s very necessarily interdisciplinary. It’s not just history. It’s trying to integrate archaeology, linguistics, all fields of knowledge, the whole cultural record: rock art, and orature, indigenous orature especially, re-inscribing indigenous histories back into consciousness because it's not just about the empires or as you were saying the elite male writers, but something much broader. And so that's it in a nutshell.
Aqui Thami: My name is Aqui Thami, I am an indigenous woman. I come from the Thangmi peoples of the Himalayas and I live and work from Bombay. One of my projects that I have been giving a lot of my time to in the past few years is Sister Library. I like to call it a space for women, or a space for people who are interested in women’s histories and women’s culture. But you can call it an archive because it has a collection of works spanning decades. It started as my own practice of reading women exclusively. As I collected more and more works, I started sharing those works with my friends. Then because I was sharing so many works, so many Zines and so many books, I had to start maintaining a diary of the books that they were borrowing. And that started the desire to have a functioning borrowing library. Then I travelled with some of the works to different cities in India, and now we have permanent physical space. The works that are in the library are both works from the Global North as well as the Global South. We are specifically also collecting writings from grassroots movements and collectives. Also, we pay attention to visual works such images and photographs, because this space also happens to be a space that is frequented by women that may not have access to schools and colleges, so many women who come there don't necessarily read. So images become an easier medium to exchange.
Bec Wonders: Thank you so much, Max and Aqui, it’s so interesting to hear how the principles of feminist archiving are manifested differently in your projects. I’ll now pass the mic to the women from the archives of women's struggle in Algeria starting with Awel and then followed by Lydia. Take it away Awel.
Awel Haouati (translated into English): I’ve been a PhD student in anthropology for the past five years. The project on the Archives of Women’s Struggles, I only recently realised, had been an idea for a PhD project when I was looking for a topic in 2016. One of the ideas that I wanted to work on was photographers who covered the political demonstrations in Algeria in the 1980s and 1990s, during what is termed the democratic experience, when the Constitution of 1989 ended the single party state and led to political parties and associations being authorised. This was a project which I put to one side, and which resurfaced during the hirak, the popular anti-government protests which have been taking place since 2019, and specifically after the demonstration which took place on International Women’s Day on 8 March 2019. I went to look in this box where I was storing documents which my mother had kept from her activist years. I took two documents out, I took photos of them and it started like that. A few days later, I decided to launch the Archives of Women’s Struggles on Facebook. A little later I asked Saadia Gacem, who is also interested in feminist archives and the archives of activist associations to cofound the project, and following that we were joined by Lydia. The aim is to collect – both digitally and in material form – it depends on who is giving or lending us their sources, all the documents produced by collectives and associations, by groups, by individuals – by women – in their struggles for their rights and equality with men. This includes a whole range of documents which we’ll show some of later – pamphlets, journal issues, declarations – a whole range of documents. The aim is to go and find these archives which are almost always inaccessible, which have never been seen, and which are conserved by the people who produced or disseminated them in their respective associations, and to make them accessible, primarily on a website which does not yet exist, and on a blog, and we’re also thinking about a publication. So the idea is to share and make better known the history of these groups. I’ll pass over to Lydia to continue.
Lydia Saïdi: I'm a documentary photographer and also I'm studying for a master in archives and images in France. And, I met Awel during the hirak, the social movement, she requested one of my photos to illustrate one of her articles. And that’s how we met, through photography and through the sharing of women’s archives.
Bec Wonders: Just from your introductions, it seems like images and imagery are really important in all your practices, whether it be photography, whether it be for accessibility, or whether it be for telling a story in a different way. So I’m wondering if you women have a certain image that is conjured up in your minds, or a certain artefact or a certain document that represents the motivation in your archiving practice or just a particular object that comes into mind, or image?
Max Dashu: That’s a hard question. You know, it's really hard to pick one image. I have archives of, I don't know, 50,000 images. So it's like, how do you pick? At certain moments, one will come to the fore because I get excited when I find something. For example, several months ago, I came across a Palaeolithic stone altar in the form of vulvas, they’re natural stones from India. And the archaeologists all agree that this dates back at least 10,000 years. And so that's interesting, because I do track iconography, that is what I call vulva stones, you know, this is something you see all over the planet, petroglyphs that are engraved on rock, the symbolism of the female, of the female sign, the vulva being one of those, but in this case, the exciting thing was not just that this existed, they had taken it off of this plateau, they had taken these stones, and there's a lot of them where they're kind of triangular shaped, and there's like these internal layers in it that are red, kind of triangular. But that the local indigenous people were still using these stones on altars. So there was a continuity of 12,000 years of practice, where they were still being used in the same way. So it's just you could you find things, and then that's when I get excited because you come across a gem, and it could take any number of different forms. In that case, it's archaeological, but it could be a photograph of a medicine woman from Zimbabwe, or it could be anything, and sometimes all you have is the picture, you may not have any background information about it. But in other cases, there's a lot more written or other kinds of documentary evidence. In the case of the stones, there were local indigenous people who talked about the stones and the traditions they had around goddesses that were associated with them. And you jog my memory in thinking about images. I think in several cases here, those of you who have this photographic imagery or even flyers about events, like maybe you know, a poster saying “Come to the march in Algiers” or someplace, in the future, you might think about audio documents where you show these things to women and then use that as a prompt to get them to talk and maybe talk about their memories and things that they might have as commentary. You can basically augment what your starting points are. You may not find anything written, but if you can locate women, who are sources, who can give you commentary: “Oh, yes, because now I remember there was this, or so and so did that”, then you're going to be able to grow out from those single images. And it could be audio, or you could sit there and write notes, but we have all this digital media now. So it’s not hard even just on a phone to record that.
Aqui Thami: There are so many women in the Indian women's movement, and the anti-caste movement, for whom we don't really have photographs, but we know how they used to look because they were just like ordinary women struggling with poverty, and with being a Dalit, or being indigenous. So now when we do open access at Sister Press – Sister Press is a press that we run at the library, which uses the library as resource centre for women to make work – so when we have open access at Sister Press, we celebrate one feminist foremother or a foremother who worked so that we have what we have today, this little independence that we have, and the life that we have. Like we can't talk about the women's movement in South Asian region without talking about Savitribai Phule. The context is so important when we talk about India or South Asia, because cerebral work was allowed for only upper caste people and within that men. Dalit and Adivasi, the indigenous people, were not even allowed to read and write or even speak the language of the Brahmins or we would be penalised by getting our tongues cut off. So in that environment, when she worked towards opening a school for women, she would march, she would walk from home to the school every day. And it would be like people throwing stones and garbage at her every single day. And these are oral histories. But also, she was a poet. She's written a lot about her struggles and the joy that she experienced when working and forming collectives with women and doing all this work, like opening schools and opening shelters for widows. So the whole image is something which fills me with so much strength and courage and gives me power. And I think it does the same to many, many women who are anti-caste and for women. But then again, it depends on where you are placed in the social hierarchy.
Bec Wonders: It's interesting, because in this sense, the archive isn't just a repository of images, but you're saying that you're actually creating workshops where new images are created. So the archive not just becomes a storehouse of things, but actually an active environment where women are generating new knowledges.
Aqui Thami: It's a living space, which is why the idea of an archive for me – because I'm an artist, and I've also had some experience with academic spaces because I'm also a doctoral candidate – when I look at archives, archives are these very sanitised spaces, spaces where you have to go with your gloves and make sure that you don't damage anything, and everything is kept in boxes, and nothing can be added to it. But when I look at the works in Sister Library, things are evolving every day because there are new experiences being added, and new works being made, inspired by the works that we already have. And it's also an open space for people to bring in more works that might help other people celebrate women. So it's like an ever growing and evolving space. For me, I feel like it is so important for us to know the real and true history of what really went down because there's very little that we know now. So much has been erased, especially when it comes to Dalit and Adivasi women and indigenous women. There is very, very little that we can find in archives and in universities. It has been systemically, systematically erased. Thankfully, for some indigenous people, we have a lot of oral histories and stories and songs that we can go back to.
Bec Wonders: This raises some important questions about intergenerational learning and practice. Awel, does that aspect of intergenerational knowledge transmission ring true to you as well?
Awel Haouati (translation): I can see that there are echoes, and I can see especially that, since we launched the project, we have attracted not just women who were former activists. Former activists make contact with us to ask questions about the project, to find out more, they want to know what we will do with their archives if they give them to us and they want to ensure that they will be truly accessible for everyone, they ask questions to find out more and also offer documents to donate or lend so that we can digitise them. But we also have young people, a younger generation of women who come, and who are very curious and who have never heard of, or have only vaguely heard of, feminist movements in Algeria, or haven’t heard of them at all, and I think transmission happens that way. It’s not just activists who follow us on Facebook and Instagram, women come and ask us for resources, articles, book recommendations on women’s struggles and feminism in Algeria because it’s not only a very small literature, it’s also very little known. Saadia Gacem, who is part of the project and is also a member of a feminist association, often says that women in present-day collectives go looking for documents produced in the 80s, 90s, and even the 70s, for inspiration in formulating their own declarations, their own programmes of demands, etc. There are lots of things which are found in these documents, especially from 1989 onwards, it’s a turning point. There was then an interruption during the civil war in the 1990s, and then in 2019 when everything resurfaced again and we reoccupied our position within political space, some women drew upon the past to find tools, means to articulate their demands. During the hirak, there are many slogans from the 1980s, the 1990s, which reemerged, it’s all part of the same movement.
Bec Wonders: Really interesting. Awel and Lydia, do you have any favourite images or documents from your archive you'd like to talk about? For our listeners, these will be uploaded on the FiLiA website so do take a look.
Awel Haouati (translation): I just wanted to say that perhaps the images and the objects which struck me the most were those transmitted to me by my mother, because those are the first ones which I held in my hands. But I also wanted to say that, as we have collected more and more artefacts, we’ve noticed that the visual aspect is really important. Even when women produced their booklets in a very artisanal way, really just drawn by hand and photocopied, there is always an image, the visual aspect is always very present in the documents. For example, this is a booklet produced by a Women’s Committee at the University Halls of Residence in Tizi Ouzou in Kabylia for 8 March 1989. Written on it is Thighri n’tmetout, which means “the women’s shout”, it’s the name of a committee in a university halls of residence which subsequently became the name of a women’s collective, which was founded, amongst others, by Nabila Djahnine, a feminist activist who was assassinated in 1995.
Max Dashu: It’s stellar, it's amazing, and I had not heard of that woman, whose full name I did not get, I'm writing things down here because this is too good. But that was that was an amazing powerful image. I'm just really resonating with the photograph of the woman combined with the indigenous script. It's like re-indigenising Algerian culture, the anti-colonial symbolism of it is what really grabs me, you know, reclaiming core traditions. It makes me think, going back, of Dihya al-Kahina, and some of the figures of women’s leadership, there’s a shamanic dimension to it, her as a seeress and a priestess, and then she’s fighting the invasion of her country.
Lydia Saïdi: Yes, al-Kahina is also a figure that is talked a lot about in Algeria still today, during protests.
Aqui Thami: But I really like the images also, maybe we could – because I also collect a lot of grassroots works from every country that I travel to – so maybe Awel if you can share some documents that I can print here and keep in the library, that'd be really great.
Awel Haouati (translation): We’ve already made available some documents online – I can show you afterwards the project blog – but it would be a pleasure to send you some, and you can reproduce them and print them. Really we would be delighted to know these women’s documents are in India, it would be magic!
Bec Wonders: I'll leave some space here for you women to ask each other some questions. Have you had any thoughts or ideas you want to ask about each other's collections or projects?
Lydia Saïdi: A question for Aqui about the collection of books? How do you how do you do that? I mean, do you do buy books do people give books?
Aqui Thami: Yeah, I buy the books
Lydia Saïdi: How do you afford it?
Aqui Thami: So I'm a part of this artist collective called Bombay Underground. And even before the library, we used to do a lot of reading interventions around the city because the booksellers who used to sell books on the streets, and that's where I used to buy my books from, were forced off the streets because the municipal corporation thought that it was making the city dirty. And in the space where the booksellers used to sell the books, they have opened a big swanky bookshop with a café and everything, which is only accessible to rich people, which also means upper caste people, which also means the Arya settlers. So over the years of working with them, we've made very good friends, even though they don't sell books on the streets anymore. They have books that they have, and they know exactly what books I will like. And they are like family, so they are happy to give it to me for a nicer price than it would be in a big bookshop. Because I'm an independent artist, and I'm not on a gallery payroll, or a museum payroll, I feel like that has been a very personal decision to keep my practice independent, so that it remains what I want it to be and not turn from an artist into a maker and a producer where I'm constantly making things for the market. So even for the library, when we started there was a big foundation, a big business, one of the biggest businesses in India, who said they are happy to adopt the library because it so happens to be the first feminist library in South Asia. But I was not happy with that as I want the space to be funded by the people because I feel like, as much as I believe in this space and I need this space, people should also have the same desire to keep the space running. So all the monies that run the library are funded by the people except for the books, the books are mine, and the few contributions that are given by different women.
Max Dashu: What you raised about independence, I think is so, so important, because funding has all the strings tied to it. And they want to control what you do. And then they dictate the direction and the flavour of it and the way it's delivered, and it's just not viable. And I can hear from what you're saying the sacrifices you are making to do this. And I think that's probably true for all of us, that in order to do this you're going to have to give up other things. Because somehow, if nothing else, you fund it, you buy the books, or, you know, whatever the storage materials are, what they cost, or even just the space itself, I mean that I think is an issue for all of us. Where do we put all this? And how does it get paid for, to put a roof over the head of the archives? I think maybe for a lot of us it lives in our house, but those questions, I think, are fundamental, and this is one of the reasons I was talking before about leaving college because they do want to control, and along many angles – women, class or caste, there can be religious issues, and then the business interests, which have had such an impact. We can look at the political movements, and the way that money has been a factor in shaping, in a lot of ways, what happens to women or women's movements.
Aqui Thami: Yeah, that's so true, especially with the funding coming to the Global South, they mandate a use of language, which I don't necessarily think is something that's organic to this region, or even applies to this region. And in fact, almost all of the women's organisations that take money from funding organisations abroad, be they the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, or the Ford Foundation or any other bigger foundation, it has really shaped in the past 10 years the women's movement in a direction which is not very organic. And it is just a reflection of what is happening in America, and even in the UK, which does not really help women here at all. And in all sincerity, its impact is taking the movement backwards. Like all the work that has been put into bringing women to where we are today, it has just taken us back so many years. So yeah, it's not just sad, but it's also, it might end up even diminishing everything. The work that we've done so far, and the women's movement may not remain to be anything at all. It's scary.
Bec Wonders: There's some huge issues here about who gets to shape archives and how to finance these projects. Awel and Lydia, how have you negotiated this terrain?
Awel Haouati (translation): From the start of the project we were clear that we wanted it to be an autonomous and completely independent project. Up until today, we have never asked for funding from anyone. Already the archives which are given to us, they are given to us for free, so there’s no purchasing or spending, or the archives are leant to us for digitising as I’ve previously said, so there are no outgoings for the moment. Obviously, we had to spend some money to buy a scanner, because we needed a scanner which was more or less professional to start the digital collecting. For that, we decided to raise the money through a crowdfunder. In Algeria, we don’t yet have a legal existence, we’re not an association, we’re not a foundation. For Algeria, we have a problem, which is if we create an Algerian association or a foundation and one day we make a request for funding to open a physical space – because for the moment we are digital and online but at some point, I would like to have a physical space. We could do it in one of our homes, but I think to sustain a space, have activities, screen films and organise events we need a bit of money. The problem is that if we create an Algerian association and foundation we risk finding ourselves facing the problems of the current situation, that is to say, the Algerian government readily targets associations which receive money from abroad, it is very politically sensitive at the moment. And at the same time, if we were to create a French association for the Archives of Women’s Struggles in Algeria it would be a bit contradictory. I don’t know. It’s a problem which we haven’t resolved yet. It’s true that it raises a lot of political and ethical questions which I haven’t worked my way through yet.
Lydia Saïdi: I don’t know if having foreign funding is that much of a contradiction, it depends what institution you’re talking about. We need to think carefully about our choices. There is also the specificity that we are collecting archives from associations – it’s true this is not our main priority – but we are nevertheless collecting archives which come from Algerian women’s associations based in France. There are many women who migrated after the events of the civil war of the 1990s and many of them continued their struggles in France or in other countries. Does that make them less Algerian than others?
Awel Haouati (translation): Can I just add something? In fact, the contradiction is not so much foreign funding, it’s more about whether to found a French or an Algerian association. If we were to create an Algerian association, that would risk blocking all possibility of making funding bids, whilst a French association – I can see a contradiction, or a political problem that would need to be resolved, even though it is true that we have documents from Algerian women who produced them both in Algeria and in exile. And maybe academic or research funding could be a good compromise, a worthwhile compromise between no money and money which comes from official institutions.
Max Dashu: I'm not against taking university funding. It's only a question of – and I don't know to what degree this applies in Algeria or in South India – but in the Anglophone world, there's a huge amount of ideological control in the universities. And you know, a lot of feminism has become very contested through that, and women's history, in particular, is taking huge hits. Because with the rise of high theory and this imposition of this ideological template… women's history, they don't have as many courses, it's not a subject in conferences, or when they put out calls to hire professors, it's not a category that's listed, they’re listing, you know, gender studies in the forefront. And something like women's history – forget archaeology – is just not even in the picture. So it's more a question of: can you function within it? I'm not saying you couldn't, but it's a question of what the climate is in the university you're dealing with. Maybe they would be very interested, and I think a lot has to do with the way you pitch it to them. Like, for example, if you say, these are indigenous perspectives, or you put it to them in a way that they can welcome, and not just in the framework of women, they may be more likely to be willing to fund that. The real question is, what kinds of controls does their funding have? What kinds of strings are attached to it? But I don't think there's an absolute position about any of these, I'm not saying don't take the funding, or that it couldn't be done, but those are issues that are going to come up. What are they going to demand from you, in terms of what language you use? How is your project structured? What kind of activities do you do? All of that. If there aren't strings attached, then go for it. Because you're offering something, it’s not only them that have the control, you're offering a grassroots thing, and there is a way to pitch it to them. That this is something of value, because it is not a hegemonic discourse. It is coming from women of the grassroots and there is an academic argument to be made for that, but you just have to carve out space.
Aqui Thami: Yeah, to add to what Max said. You also have to convince them that what your project centres is good enough for them to invest in the project because there's also this constant ask of like shifting the centre of the feminist movement from women to include a larger category of people, which I am not particularly happy with when it comes to funding. The question is brought up again and again. Like it's not enough that the work centres women, it has to be like inclusive of everyone and everything.
Bec Wonders: Right, exactly. Something interesting Awel mentioned is the role of diaspora in shaping archives and knowledge. Do you think this plays out similarly or differently in the Indian context?
Aqui Thami: So, with India, like I said, context is so, so important, not just with India with South Asia and this region as a whole. When we talk about the diaspora of South Asia, we have to understand that the diaspora is mostly upper caste people, which means they are Arya, it means people who have had enormous wealth so that they were able to travel from India to settle abroad. And so, you know, when you talk about South Asia, there is no POC, you know, the category of POC does not exist here, because everybody is brown, everybody is a Person of Colour. But there are other categories, other social hierarchies, which are in action and which are – well, not to be reductive of the race politics in the West, but things have been very, very, extremely harsh for indigenous people and other people here, because the caste politics and religion are intertwined. So when the diaspora is writing, they are mostly writing about their assertion of their Hindu identity or their brownness and that politics, and they want to celebrate that. It is something which is already widely celebrated in India, in South Asia, we have national holidays, we have like holidays for 10 days and 20 days for Diwali, and for Holi, and for every other Hindu holiday. It does not really make sense. It's not political. In fact, it goes hand in hand with the right-wing ideology. It's not anything that brings about change. So the things that are deemed as very political abroad, like in the West, is just something which is like just mainstream here. And I don't know if I wouldn't necessarily want to include that in the library because it does not again, do anything to help women's liberation. Even Spivak, she comes from a family of landlords, and she's upper caste, and she's never been a subaltern. And though she claims this place of subaltern, similarly with Arundhati Roy, she was never – in fact, she writes about Dalit women's experience and the experience of indigenous people without giving back. She's one of the best-selling writers, but there has been no giving back to the community of indigenous people. And she writes a lot about communism and Maoism and women in the tribal belt. And yes, so it feels extremely extractive, it does not feel correct, and it does not feel nice. And the question is not about if they are Indian, the question is about, what are they doing to give back because being abroad, it definitely means that they have better access and better resources than women here because it's a fact that Indian women are contesting systemic violence. So, what has been their contribution to extend their sisterhood and build a bridge?
Lydia Saïdi: And your members, can members also participate in the act of selecting books that you can or cannot collect? I mean, do you do that personally or do you also have conversations with other people to select the books?
Aqui Thami: So people who come from universities and people who are studying gender studies and cultural studies and basically the university-going crowd. So they ask me, “Why is this seminal reading not in the library?” And I just tell them that it's possible for you to make your own library, to build your own library, and add the texts that you would want to have. Because if they think it's important reading, that needs to be shared, then yeah, it's not difficult to put mind and money and resources and do it yourself.
It's not always pleasant, though, existing online has been really hard, because I've got constant rape and death threats, and my address has been published. And you know, again, like coming back to the context, I'm indigenous, which means that if I disappeared tomorrow, there will be no rallying around for me. You might be coming across petitions for freeing artists and poets who have been incarcerated in India, if I disappear tomorrow, there will be nothing like that. So yeah, it feels even more scary, having to constantly face all of these. Online spaces have been extremely toxic. I feel like these are the spaces where people have a lot of free time and they just like to attack people there. But even offline, I’ve had to face not just people who are the right winger. And then there's also been resistance from the Communist Party, unofficially, like members coming in and saying that it is a divisive tactic and the library's dividing people, and it should just focus on the workers’ movement, and things like that. And, of course, the feminists who have been popular, who have been leading the movement, most of them are upper caste. And so resistance from them is something that hurts the most. When I started, it really felt terrible, because these were the women I looked up to. And then having no support from them, or even them saying that this space does not feel intersectional and making statements like that, when I am a whole indigenous person! One would imagine that it's just the men and the right-wing people who are against the space. But I have faced as much of opposition from people who claim to be feminists and well-read and all of that.
Max Dashu: I'm still just reeling from what Aqui saying here, because that's just like, you're so contested, from so many directions, and for them to accuse you of not being intersectional is just mind blowing to me. I mean, not that they did it, because I know how this stuff goes. But it's just like you have the communists, you have the Hindutva fanatics, and then you have the women who are supposedly feminist allies who are saying you can't do this. And that, to me, just shows how contested women's authority is. And especially indigenous women, especially Global South women, working class women, “you don't get to say those things”. I mean, the sources that you are using – I have a lot of books in my library, or things that I photocopy, I don't agree with them, but they may have valuable information in them. So you can't really have an ideological text because you're just drawing on all kinds of sources. Those kinds of challenges are ridiculous, but they're very repressive. And I really feel for the situation you find yourself in especially because of the personal dangers that you have faced and your family and community face. Unacceptable.
Bec Wonders: Well, totally Max, and I think, like exactly what you're saying is that they cannot handle women’s authority. And that is the power of collecting women's history and archives, right, it’s reclaiming the authority. As soon as you put a collection of women's work together, it becomes dangerous, it becomes contentious. And then you add all kinds of other political factors in and it really is quite a dangerous situation. Awel and Lydia do you do you recognise any of these difficulties for you or, or how are you thinking about the politics of the physical space and digital kind of components?
Awel Haouati (translation): We haven’t encountered these kinds of problems for the moment, perhaps because we don’t have a physical space. We only exist on Facebook and on the blog we have on Hypothèses. So we haven’t had a negative reaction, or rejection, for the moment it’s quite calm, even indifferent! Even in terms of the media, we’ve existed for two years now and no Algerian newspaper or online media outlet has expressed any interest in the project. Nobody, apart from the women who give their archives, who are still activists, or young women on social networks who are curious, but I would say in turns of media attention, it is total indifference. And for the moment I have the impression that our project is not seen as being problematic. I know that feminist collectives and associations have sometimes been on the receiving end of quite violent attacks during the hirak, the ongoing popular protests since 2019, but I have the impression that when we’re talking about the past, archives and history, it comes across as inoffensive.
Bec Wonders: So briefly going back to what Aqui said about how various debates between women can be shaped by social class, regional belonging and political allegiance, do you see this happening in the Algerian context as well?
Awel Haouati (translation): When we say, “archives of women’s struggles”, we are putting aside a certain number of women. And we need to underline that the documents which we are collecting were produced by women, or groups of women, who define themselves as progressive, democrats, often in opposition to Islamist political tendencies. We need to make that more explicit than we are doing at the moment. It bothers me a bit to say “struggles of women” when we know that it is just a small category of women who see themselves as democrats and we don’t take into account a number of women’s struggles which are otherwise defined. But these are not just well-off women, the bourgeoisie, there are also working-class women. Often it is educated women, women who have been to university, women who have studied who founded the collectives – either women who were trade unionists in the UGTA (General Union of Algerian Workers) or women who began organising in the 1980s around the first debates and campaigning against the Family Code. The moudjahidate – women who participated in the anti-colonial struggle 1954-62 – were amongst the first to position themselves very clearly, to say “We want our rights and we are radically opposed to the project for the Family Code”. Then they were followed by women in trade unions, or at universities. But it’s just one small category of women. I would like people to use our archives to study the question of how these women positioned themselves in relation to other women, and indeed in relation to Islamist women because I know there were conflicts when the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) began to grow in strength, there were conflicts within the women’s collectives. Some women said, “We need to open up the dialogue with Islamist women”, and others said that it was out of the question to talk to those women. But there were women who said “No, they are women too, we need to reach out to them and we can’t move forward without them”. It created a great deal of conflict in the movement and that’s one of the reasons why it broke up.
Lydia Saïdi: There was one difficulty we had, or actually it was a debate we had, about sharing archives on social media, and how to be very careful about what archives happen to mean, in a particular context. For example, we had a discussion about whether or not to share some archives which were about a female Algerian minister, a former feminist, who is currently in prison as a result of the hirak, and who in the early 2000s was coopted by the political system. The path she took in the 1980s and the one she had subsequently were so different that it raised a number of questions for us about the impact of publishing these archives today: could they be misused, or would they be misunderstood? So we decided not to publish the documents in the end.
Awel Haouati (translation): We were worried that it would be interpreted as an attempt at political rehabilitation, even though that wasn’t at all what we were seeking to do. These are things we have to think about with the archives. There was another post we did and afterwards we removed it, because we were besieged by comments. I posted an extract of a TV debate in 89 or 90 between this woman who would become a minister, at the time she wasn’t minister of course, she was a feminist activist at the time, with a former female war veteran and a leader of the Islamic Salvation Front, Abassi Madani. I shared an extract of a debate between these three figures and the page was – at the time it was basically unknown, it had 2000 likes but the posts were not shared much, it was manageable. But the video went viral, it was shared hundreds of times, and there was a wave of comments, a lot of anger, a lot of criticism, people were going crazy over the video, some were insulting the feminists as neo-colonial hawks, women were attacking the words of Abassi Madani. As a result, we’re careful. We removed the video in the end because the comments – it was even attracting trolls – it was unmanageable. So we talk about what we’re going to post. There are archives which are more sensitive than others especially in relation to the 1990s.
Max Dashu: I think we have to curate it very carefully. Because you have to manage these reactions. And it can be gruelling and harrowing. People can even report your page and try to get it taken down. You know that’s social media, the nature of social media. And the problem is people don't even read the whole post, they just react, they see one thing and they go off and they react. So I think that it's necessary to take a certain amount of care, because not everybody is going to have the patience to go through a more complex discussion of this, there's all these angles to things. And a lot of people don't have the ability to grasp that. So I think that it's necessary to take care. And I would not blame you for taking down that video because you have to consider the viability and survival of what you're doing. And if that's a choice you have to make at times, then I've had to be careful about things that I post also, there are things I would like to post about that I won't, because it's going to be open pit warfare if I do. And this just goes back to the contested nature of women's history. I mean, this is very old. You know, in the mid 20th century, the charges of bourgeois feminism were used as a club to shut women up about violence against women, about male privilege and male domination. And I think that, legitimate anti-colonial critiques can be wielded in that same way, illegitimately, in order to shut women up. So we have to be really strategic about how we do this. And I think it's a process where maybe you can open the door a little bit here and there by looking at one aspect of it. And even actually addressing those complexities, you know, of how could someone who was an activist in the 80s and 90s… you know, there were reasons to join a government in order to try to institute change, but then you become co-opted. And there's a lot of complexity to how all that plays out. Not everybody's ready for a complex conversation, however. A lot of people are going to try to get a few kicks in, at a women's perspective. I guess it comes with the territory. That's why this is so political, why women's history is intensely politicised in all kinds of ways.
Aqui Thami: Yeah, I totally agree. And I keep wondering why we don't have a canon, why we don't have women's works, even in the West, being celebrated when we have like, Kant, and we have, you know, all these philosophers who are men and who have, like even Aristotle, we know that he was problematic and Plato and all of these men who did terrible things, and did not even think of women as people, and yet, they are still given that space where they are just prescribed reading everywhere. Whereas for women's work, so much of it is just scraped off because like, “Oh, this is this does not fit the current political discourse. And so nobody should read it as it is problematic and nobody should value it”. Especially the university, whenever I go to the university, and I talk to people from the Gender Studies department, and they look at me, like I have totally lost my mind if I'm talking about Andrea [Dworkin], or like, even that book Backlash by Susan Faludi, and they think that these are works that should never be brought into the campus. And if people read it, then they'll convert into being terrible people and, like, why?! There’s no space for creating works, like a canon of women's works at all, we not given that space. And I don't know how Western feminists think about or feel about this. But for me, as someone who comes from the history of not being allowed to do cerebral work, not being allowed to read and write and create, it feels like this has, like it is decisive, you know, they have made sure that we don't have a body of work that we can go back to.
Bec Wonders: I just want to highlight this idea of canonising women's history. And it reminded me of something I think that Gerda Lerner says, which is, you know, the past 5,000 years of patriarchal society, have in part functioned because men have convinced women that we have no history, that we don't have heroines, we don't have documents, we don't have records. And if you don't have that kind of collective identity that's rooted in the past, it's so hard to sustain any kind of movement and political momentum.
Max Dashu: Well, I would say that this contested nature of women's knowledge, women's memory, our ability to have figures and models and examples to identify with, this is something that all oppressed people always need, they need to have a cultural memory, to take us out of the great demoralised state that we find ourselves in. “You don’t have anything” the Shah of Iran told Oriana Fallaci, “you’ve done nothing, nothing!” And it's not true. But the fact that there is so much pushback to doing it just shows how huge our task is and how important it is to have a cultural memory that we define, to have a canon and you know, that's a very academic word, but it's just like having in our consciousness that it has been otherwise, that we are not only colonised and controlled people. And I think that with indigenous woman, the irony is the invisibility of indigenous women in the historical record, especially the academic historical record, is exactly countered by the fact that these are the cultures where women's sovereignty, women's self-determination, the matricultural societies are all, at least in modern times, in the indigenous world. And there's actually more leadership, more models for us to draw on of female authority and power and communal, collective, association of women, as a group, that’s really a core area, that's been a core area of my research, because that's where the juice is, and not in the empires and not in the colonising powers. And they've tried to convince us otherwise. But that's why documenting this is so important.
Bec Wonders: Well, thank you so much women. We're coming to the end of the episode. We've covered history, politics, struggles, caste, class, race, religion, practicalities, women's space, academia, activism, gatekeeping, conflict, objectivity, complexity, and so much more, all in the context of women's archives. I mean, if that doesn't say something about the nature of women's archiving, I don't know what will. We hope that this conversation made your feminist world a little bit bigger. We'd like to thank Max Dashu, Aqui Thami, Lydia Saïdi and Awel Haouati for speaking to us about their archival projects and expertise. Special thanks to Natalya Vince for doing the French to English translation. You can visit the FiLiA website for links and documents connected to today's discussion. We'd really appreciate it if you could spread the word on social media or leave a review of this episode wherever you listen to podcasts to get more women listening and connected. Hope to see you next time for another conversation about women's history.