Everything on (the) Line

20 Years of Social Movement Stories from rabble.ca

Sophia Reuss, Christina Turner, Sophia Reuss, Christina Turner

• Publisher: Between the Lines
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781771135450
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

On a chilly April day in 2001, some 75, 000 protesters flooded the streets of Quebec City to denounce corporate globalization and a neoliberal trade deal. From that wellspring of activist anger, energy, and hope came the founding of rabble.ca: an alternative news source and community space that reported on Canadian politics from the ground, catching the attention of journalists and activists across the country.

Since then, Canada has seen the rise of Harper Conservatism and its replacement by a Liberal government; a decline in union power; the stalled beginnings of reconciliation with Indigenous nations; the birth of Black Lives Matter; an invigorated climate justice movement; and more. These stories of activist struggle lie at the heart of Everything on (the) Line, a collection of rabble's most incisive articles from the past twenty years.

Editors S. Reuss and Christina Turner guide readers deftly through rabble's deep and storied archives, combining critical analysis with new essays from celebrated activists and writers such as Russell Diabo, Nora Loreto, Phillip Dwight Morgan, and Monia Mazigh. Each vital selection marks a flashpoint in Canadian politics—and an opportunity to reflect on the social movements that have challenged capitalism, racism, settler colonialism, and patriarchy over the past two decades.

2001–2005
Section 1: From Antiglobalization to National Security

Collateral

Monia Mazigh and Barâa Arar

My mother often tells the story I repeated as a child of my father’s rescue plan. I thought we should find a helicopter, fly to Syria, and bring my dad home to Ottawa. Clearly, as a kid, I did not understand artificial borders, helicopter piloting, or geographic distance. But children are not supposed to know what any of that means.

“What were you doing that day?” journalists kept asking me. They wanted my words for the story they were writing. As if a young mother with an eight-month-old infant and a four-year-old preschooler can remember what she has done or eaten the previous day. It wasn’t even a question asked by other parents at playgroup or by a nosy neighbour. It was asked over and over by journalists, a new class of total strangers, after my husband was arrested by the American authorities in New York. And the day they were asking about was not any day in the year. It was September 11, 2001. The day that the twin towers of the World Trade Center were attacked and collapsed, and the day the world swirled into the War on Terror declared a few weeks later by US president George W. Bush.

But I didn’t have the privilege to reply, “I can’t remember.” As a Muslim woman with a husband arrested by the American authorities under suspicion of terrorist activities in the wake of 9/11, I didn’t have the audacity to tell them to get lost. I didn’t have the luxury of looking them in the eyes and asking them: “Do you remember what you were doing that day?” I had to dig into my memory and keep turning that painful screw in my brain and revisiting the past twelve months, day after day, week after week, month after month. Trying to remember, trying to put together the pieces of the puzzle, trying to make sense of the Kafkaesque journey into which I had been catapulted.

That became my life after my husband, Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was arrested on September 26, 2002.

This was the life of a wife looking for impossible answers. It was the life of a mother who tried to give her two young children an impression of normalcy and preserve what was left of their innocent lives while thinking about how to make ends meet and, above all, find justice for my husband, arrested by the American authorities, abandoned by the Canadian government, imprisoned and tortured by the Syrian regime.

But even answering the journalists’ questions didn’t make my husband spontaneously reappear.

Allowing those hungry eyes to feast on my private life didn’t bring me any closer to freeing my husband from the dungeon he found himself in. Even after telling them that that morning, I was four months pregnant, in the kitchen of my suburban Ottawa home, with Radio-Canada on as usual, preparing breakfast for my daughter and most likely thinking about a deadline for my research work at the University of Ottawa, my words weren’t enough for the insistent journalists or the apathetic politicians involved in my husband’s case.

Perhaps they were expecting me to tell them that I was in my basement, concocting some dangerous recipe to terrorize people, or reassure them I was waiting for instructions from my husband to tell me what to do with my day.

I have a hard time remembering moments from my childhood. I don’t remember 9/11 like other people my age. I was five. Not young enough to justify misremembering but not old enough to understand the implications of that date, both politically and for my personal life.

What I vividly remember is the footage of the planes crashing into the twin towers, the one that aired on CNN and every other major network, for what seemed to be eternity. If you close your eyes and picture 9/11, this is probably what you remember. It’s a wide shot, taken from afar, as the towers burn and eventually implode. When I think of 9/11, that is what I first think of.

But that is a sanitized memory. It is an attempt to objectify the event, distancing myself from it, pushing away what it meant for my life. The American news media successfully mythologized the event so that all of us have the same image of that day.

Ironically, that day, on 9/11, my husband was in the US, in Silicon Valley, with his American colleague selling MATLAB, a software created by an American company named MathWorks. He worked for MathWorks, and his job as a telecommunication engineer took him and his colleagues across the US and around the world to convince tech and engineering companies to buy their products.

But on September 26, 2002, all his trips came abruptly to a halt.

The Americans arrested him in New York at JFK Airport, interrogated him, strip-searched him, blindfolded him, shackled him, and sent him to the Metropolitan Detention Center, where the lights were kept on for twenty-three hours a day. Then, two weeks later, they drove him in the middle of the night to an airport in New Jersey, where a ghost plane was waiting for him.

Ghost planes belong to private corporations subcontracted by the US government to render “suspected terrorists” to other countries where they can make them disappear, torture them, or indefinitely detain them. So, even if these planes physically exist, they are “off the radar” of institutions like the International Air Transport Association. In a nutshell, they cannot be held responsible for breaking international law. They fly in the sky unbothered by any extra scrutiny; they do the “dirty job” of governments.

Very few people have heard about these planes. In Hollywood movies, the war on terror is usually described as a story of heroes. Brave and handsome American men loaded with machine guns and helped by drones and sexy blonde women in their mission to kill as many terrorist brown men as possible and save as many oppressed Muslim women as possible. Like the oppression of those who were impacted by these post-9/11 “national security measures,” the men who were sent to prison for crimes they didn’t commit, the women who lost their male relatives to torture, waterboarding, killing, the children who missed their fathers and suffered in silence at the sight of their overwhelmed mothers, my husband, my kids and I were part of one of these untold dark stories.

I rarely talk about my father’s case. Not because I am ashamed, but because telling the story is exhausting. Whenever I know I am going to meet new people, especially mutual friends, I ask someone to fill them in beforehand. Casually mentioning your father was falsely accused and incarcerated is not a fun party trick.

I wrack my brain for memories from my father’s absence. I remember living in a small two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a rental community in Ottawa. I remember my maternal grandmother, always around, almost omnipresent, ready to give me an afternoon snack. I remember my brother in his highchair, crying until he fell asleep. I remember my father was absent, but it was a passive absence—a void. I felt my mother’s absence more definitively. Whereas I did not see my father consecutively, my mother came to me in pieces during the time she was fighting for his release. My mom became a single mother abruptly and unwillingly. I now know that it is her education, her perseverance, and her sharpness that helped soften the blow. My mom’s steadfastness and resistance to the system is exactly why we did not become absolute victims of it.

I went to school like everyone else, had birthday parties, and cake, and presents like everyone else. At the time, I don’t think I registered that I was different. As an adult, I know that forces far more powerful than a five-year-old girl can understand were shaping a big part of my and my family’s story.

I did not yet know we were becoming collateral damage.

Neoliberalism isn’t only about markets and corporations. It isn’t only about goods and commodities. In a sense, neoliberalism commodifies people. It treats them like merchandise. Especially if these people are the “others,” those who were declared “enemy combatants,” those who happen to be caught in the cracks of this war on terror, those who, if one day found innocent, will still be called collateral damage. Neoliberalism’s ultimate goal is the erasure of our humanity. With noble targets like efficiency and profits, it creeps under our layers of democratic institutions to erase the tracks of the abuse conducted by governments.

So, what happens to you and your family when you become collateral damage in the war on terror?

You disappear. First, physically and later, morally. My husband disappeared. For weeks I didn’t know his whereabouts. No one from the Canadian government could answer my question: where is my husband? Then, when he reappeared, he was in prison in Syria. However, I was never told where exactly in Syria, the name of the prison, the precise location. Those details may seem unimportant, but for a family in darkness, they can be a vital source of light. When the “system” eliminates these details and prevents you from even knowing the name of the prison where your husband is and its location, in reality, it is sending you an encrypted message. Your husband, or your father or your son, doesn’t matter in this world. He is worthless. And by extension, you are worthless too. You don’t deserve any answers, even the most basic ones.

I have moments of lucidity, but what I remember is not ideal. In the days following my father’s arrest, we—my mom, brother, and I—were stranded in Tunisia, waiting for paperwork so my newborn baby brother could come back to Canada with us. My father’s whereabouts were yet unclear. This was before Twitter and text messaging, and everything moved slowly. You could go hours without hearing from a loved one, days even.

My mom was busy at the Ministry of the Interior in Tunisia trying to get an authorization to leave needed for my brother’s temporary passport. How do you explain that the father of your child cannot be present to sign because you don’t know where he is? My mother was late picking me up from the neighbour’s house, where I was staying. They told me to eat spicy couscous they prepared, and I was upset because I don’t like spicy food. I remember the moment I saw my mom and ran into her safe arms. I am not the only one with these stories. All children experience abandonment, but not for the same reasons.

My sixth birthday was the one I spent without my father. It was a bone-chilling night in February. My homemade birthday cake, strawberry shortcake with chocolate on top, was on top of our fridge. Someone tried to open the freezer, and the cake collapsed onto the floor. I remember everyone scrambling to fix it, tears welling up in my eyes. My paternal uncle, who resembled my father in face and figure, was with us that night. Maybe he thought he would be a stand-in. Maybe he was just being an uncle.

Just like with my birthday cake, the people closest to my family scrambled to make everything okay. My mother tried to maintain a sense of normalcy. Parents around the world hope to do that for their children in times of uncertainty. Sometimes I wonder if that is helpful or destructive. Because what we lived through was most definitely not normal.

The war on terror and the national security agenda that accompanied it in the US and Canada had two sides, both ugly. The obvious side: brutal and visible, where governments would go fight the “terrorists” on the ground, torture them, and kill them. Even if Canada didn’t send troops into the Iraq War launched by the US after 9/11, the federal government still sought to appease the belligerent US on other matters like missile defence.

But there is another insidious side to this, equally brutal but not visible to the public eye. One that many governments conducted against their own citizens (or sometimes refugees or permanent residents) of Muslim faith with apparently legal tools: antiterrorism legislation. Many of these citizens were stripped of their constitutional rights, so even if they still physically exist, they don’t enjoy their rights anymore, they become second-class citizens.

They become subhuman.

In order to prove that you...