Awol Allo
In her seminal work “The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt identifies
political action as a power that comes into being the moment “people
gather together” and “act in concert.” For Arendt, “acting in concert”
and “speaking with others” constitutes the very conditions of politics
itself. Politics proper disappears the moment peoples’ ability to gather
together and act in concert is suspended. Following Arendt’s
injunction, we can say that whenever and wherever the freedom of
assembly and freedom of expression are legally suspended, politics
itself is suspended. It is not just democracy that is deferred under
these conditions, but politics itself. This is the situation in Ethiopia
today – it is not just democracy that is banned but also politics
proper.
Muslims protesting during Friday Prayers
For the last two years, Ethiopian Muslims have been articulating
narratives of resistance and struggle out of their ordeals to overcome
this kind of closure. Despite the government’s mobilization of state resources to suppress,
contain, or co-opt the visibility and audibility of this peace forms of
political critique and struggle, Muslims activists turned to innovative and artful
strategies of resistance to counter the exclusionary and silencing
logic of the system. In so doing, they created immanent possibilities
for change and transformation.
Very schematically, one can identify two broad forms/categories of
critique and/as resistance used by this movement to generate and present
a space for dissent and negation. First, it mobilized a strategy that
sought to confront the system on its own terms, i.e., on the very terms
laid down by the system and tried to expose the dissonance between what
is promised and upheld by the system. This is what James Scott refers to
as an elaborate art of resistance. Second, there were the symbolic
types of resistance – acts and gestures aimed at contesting the
narrative of the state through disguised, anonymous, and cryptic
strategies destabilizing to the narrative of the regime. The marriage at
Khality prison belongs to this later category – a cryptic form of
resistance
Marriage as Critique and resistance: A Reflection
On 5 May 2013, two of the inmates detained at the notorious
Kality Prison under terrorism charges, Khalid Ibrahim and Mubarak Adam, entered a marital union
with Muna Siraj and Halima Ahmed respectively. Reconfiguring one of the
least political of social institutions the state cannot monopolize and
coding it with a political meaning that unsettles and destabilizes the
narrative of the state, this protest movement refashioned marriage as a
weapon of resistance. By politicizing marriage, the inmates and their
brides enact a puzzle that unravels the certainty the trial seeks to
install and consolidate. Repurposing, to use the Brechtian term,
marriage as a public good that can serve as the mode and medium of
resistance, they use the event to destabilize the categories and images
that furnish the system’s remarkable resilience. But what is the real
political significance of this rather fugitive public enactment?
Muna Siraj and Halima Ahmed during the Weeding
D’Amato once wrote that ‘every tool is a weapon if you hold it
right.’ Where the constitution and the law are the very instruments
used by power to dehumanize and humiliate those who resist tyranny, Muna
and Halima turn marriage into a weapon to create a social space where
they can voice, even if offstage, their objection and moral outrage to
the government’s betrayal and abuse of its own laws.
If the notion of ‘speaking truth to power’ is still a utopian
politics, it is the only politics generative of what it names under
authoritarian systems. It is a politics that brings into being the very
struggle and form of politics that it ostensibly speaks about. In
deploying their weeding to enact a generative politics, Muna and Halima
are not merely refusing to accept the established modes of
categorization and control used to marginalize and dominate, keeping
those accused of terrorism invisible and inaudible, but also disrupting
the logic that organizes and structures the category’s economy of
representations. To effectively resist the kinds of logic and the modes
of reasoning that animate these categories and definitions, they not
only confront the state on its own terms (in courts) but also mock
it (marrying the ‘terrorist’) as a profanation of the image concocted
by the government. This marriage marks a moment of transgressive refusal
that mocks the state as to destabilize its subjectifying categories. It
is a public negation of the categorization and definition of these
individuals as terrorists.
Unlike everyday marriage, this marriage is a symbolic defiance of
authority. It is not merely a repudiation of the hegemonic
representation of the detainees but also a public affirmation of what
cannot be expressed in public. By consenting to a matrimonial union with
those accused of one of the most infectious and stereotypical crimes of
our time, the two brides are enacting the ultimate that performs a
parodic subversion of the state’s narrative. By publicly staging their
marriage with ‘accused terrorists’
they are not merely repudiating the state’s claim, but most
significantly, they are registering their support for the causes and
sentiments voiced by the inmates.
The marriage from behind the prison walls is an off-stage response to
the narrative of the state, and a subversive rejoinder to the
government’s narrative against the Committee and the Muslim community
writ large. To negate the narrative of the state, to undermine its goal
of humiliating and attaining total control over the Muslim community,
the marriage smashes the images depicted by the state. By getting
married from the prison cells, they are telling the regime that while it
can arrest their body, it cannot squash the yearning for freedom and
dignity. It does not merely repudiate that image; it goes beyond
repudiation to articulate a dissident culture of negation that animate
and organize marriage as a political action, contributing to the
production of a critical mass.
In vowing to remain true to the inmates who are facing a prolonged
sentence, the brides are enacting a symbolic reversal that reinvents a
public space for dissent. By engaging in an activity that is open
to them, those excluded from participation in the production of
narrative seek to expose their disdain for the defining lies of the
state from the margin. In an interview with the Deutsche Welle,
Mrs. Siraj said, “I am very pleased. I decided to do this because they
[the bridegrooms] were detained because they stood for something we all
believe in.” “More than anything else”, Mrs. Halima added,
“This is a day when we proclaimed their peaceful character.” By
engaging in a sacrificial marriage of this type, they are proclaiming
that the detainees stand for something bigger than themselves, and
reaffirm their faith and commitment in the values and principles
embodied by the inmates.
In this rather playful performance of innocence, marriage enacts a
corporeal struggle against indignation, and becomes a tool of political
struggle capable of obliterating gate-keeping narratives and
justificatory registers of the system. It not only contributed to the
generation of new political spaces, most significantly, it instituted
liberationist repertoires of resistance, ‘acts of hope’ that re-imagine
the political universe anew.
To sum up, then, no matter how omnipotent or omnipresent the system
may be, resistance is always a possibility. In fact, power needs
resistance in order for it to project and legitimize itself. Despite the
suspension of all avenues of dissent by the Ethiopian state, this
movement has achieved in less than two years what mainstream political
parties were not able to achieve in more than two decades. It did not
merely create a condition of possibility for dissent, it did more: it
created a strategic knowledge of negation. Whatever
transformative/emancipatory potential one ascribes to these artful
practices of negation, the passage from traditional protest forms to
these self-conscious and playful modes of resistance, marks one of its
key achievements.
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