The Mysterious Case of Aafia Siddiqui: Gothic Intertextual Analysis of Neo-Orientalist Narratives

Intertextual Readings: Narratives as Texts

IR understandings of intertextuality are owed to Roland Barthes’ idea of ‘intertext … as “multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and crash”’. ⁴⁹ Furthermore, Barthes argued that, ‘things come to have meanings by virtue of their being a part of a culture’. ⁵⁰ As such, this article argues that the Siddiqui narratives are texts that ‘blend and crash’ with the texts of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea in ways that collapse and subsume Siddiqui’s personhood within gendered neo-Orientalist structures.

Where Kristeva uses intertextuality to ‘demonstrat[e] the inherent instability or contingency of meaning’, ⁵¹ Lene Hansen’s understanding fixes identity. ⁵² For instance, texts are ‘simultaneously unique and united: each … weaves a series of differentiations and juxtapositions’. ⁵³ One is able to look at how the texts on Siddiqui fix neo-Orientalist assumptions of US superiority/Muslim inferiority whilst simultaneously making different arguments. The West’s author-ity over the Orient is a discursive narrative. ⁵⁴ Even though the Siddiqui narratives disagree because the different authors of ‘stories present different agendas for action’ ⁵⁵ each is reliant upon gendered neo-Orientalism. The dissimilar narratives reify or refute particular structural hierarchies and thus narratives begin at varying if not opposing starting points. ⁵⁶

Furthermore, Michael Shapiro argues that the value of texts ‘is … not to be discerned in their correspondence with something, but rather in the economics of possible representations within which they participate’. ⁵⁷ Thus, beyond the framing of Siddiqui within neo-Orientalism, this researcher has observed how the Siddiqui narratives tract with the gendered and post-colonial gothic elements of Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea and the economies of representing her as different characters from both novels. Intertextuality ‘function[s] as an inscription device that draws together a series of things/documents and orders them in particular ways’. ⁵⁸ It ‘implies a particular understanding of what texts are and how they generate meaning’. ⁵⁹ By drawing upon Gothic literary analysis that focuses upon how Jane Eyre upends gender hierarchies and then how Wide Sargasso Sea brings this challenge to colonialism, this article acts as an ‘inscription device’ to read Siddiqui through Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea.

Gendered Gothic: Jane Eyre

Caesarea Abartis highlights the ambiguities of the gothic genre through her brief explanation of Jane Eyre:

Jane is an impoverished orphan who is neglected and abused by her aunt. Jane eventually becomes a governess to a child at Thornfield Hall where the master is Edward Rochester, a moody, brusque, older man. She almost marries Rochester before the secret of the third floor is made known: Rochester has a wife – demented and bestial. Ultimately, of course, Jane and Rochester marry, but only after his first wife has died in the fire which destroys the manor and cripples and blinds Rochester in a poetic punishment for his bigamous desires. ⁶⁶

These are Gothic elements that feed into disquieting oxymorons: forcefully naïve female characters, threatening protective male characters, and supernatural realities that confront and engage the reader.

Gothic novels subvert gender-ideal types to make these intrusions. ⁶⁷ If patriarchy’s construction of the public sphere insists that middle- and upper-class men alone are in possession of rationality and thus the only people capable of exercising justice, ⁶⁸ Gothic novels no longer afford the reader with such certainty. The heroine may be naïve and the male protagonist strong and bold, but their other character traits upend patriarchal moral ordering, creating ambiguity. In Gothic novels heroic masculinity is complicated as male protagonists are alternatively helpful and strong or troubled and violent. ⁶⁹ Jane describes Rochester as ‘mood[y] [and] hars[h]’ with a ‘fault[y] … morality’. ⁷⁰ Rochester’s masculinity is secured by his demeanor but undermined by his morality. ⁷¹ In many Gothic novels the female characters are trapped by a patriarchal society, but the (good) woman still becomes the hero-ine: Jane does what is right – fleeing Rochester’s desire –within her quiet, plain femininity. ⁷² The reader is able to trust ‘plain’ Jane’s moral challenge of both ‘moody’ Rochester and the patriarchy only because her femininity is untainted.

The ‘Dark Secret’: Wide Sargasso Sea

In American Gothic literature, unease also stems from the threat of the ‘other’ from a less-civilised locale. ⁷³ American Gothic literature demonstrates that ‘darkness and grotesque’ exist in society and erode notions of exceptionalism. ⁷⁴ The South with its racist legacies is often the setting because it reflects a particular ‘otherness’, granting a separation from ‘everything … the nation wants to disassociate itself’ from. ⁷⁵ Colonial protectorates served a similar purpose, playing on the dark legacies hidden in Manifest Destiny. A good example of this is Francis Ford Coppola’s post-colonial exploration of the Vietnam War in Apocalypse Now (1979), which is, of course, a borrowed plotline from Joseph Conrad’s criticism of European colonisation, Heart of Darkness (1899). ⁷⁶ It is not difficult then to see Afghanistan today as a new colonial frontier for the US and the War on Terror as a neo-imperialist project with not-so hidden darknesses.

Colonisation and imperialism are rooted in (white) Western superiority as premised on progress, rationality, and morality – all characteristics colonised peoples supposedly had no access to. ⁷⁷ The supernatural elements in Gothic fiction introduce doubt towards this bias by probing moral ambiguities. ⁷⁸ To that end, many Gothic novels employ a ‘dark secret’, which is often the cause of perceived supernatural events that have a logical explanation behind them. ⁷⁹ Returning to Jane Eyre, the reader’s suspicion that Thornfield Hall is haunted is proved false when Rochester’s wife is discovered. Yet, the dark secret is bigger than just one person, one occurrence, or one turn in the plotline. I argue that the dark secret is emblematic of larger social ills, such as gender or colonialism.

Wide Sargasso Sea rewrites Rochester’s wife, Antoinette Cosway, as a wealthy Creole woman who no longer has a place in post-slavery Jamaica under British imperial rule. Antoinette describes herself as caught between the Englishness her mother aspires to ⁸⁰ and her family’s previous history with slave-trading. ⁸¹ Rochester is torn between desire and disregard for her: ‘Creole of pure English descent she may be’ but her ‘long, sad, dark alien eyes’ ‘are not English or European’. ⁸² Her ‘alienness’ is also found in her acceptance of obeah, ‘witchcraft’ imported from Africa through the slave trade. Several times she is described by others as a ‘zombi’ or zombie. ⁸³

When Antoinette professes her disbelief in God, Rochester tries to bring her ‘back’ into the Western/Christian fold by suddenly re-christening her Bertha. ⁸⁴ Yet it is too late, this is the night that Antoinette breaks with reality; subsequently Rochester secretly brings her to England to be confined in Thornfield’s attic. Antoinette is a colonised person who has failed to live up to the civilisational and gendered expectations of Victorian England and thus must be contained. The deeper secret is not necessarily Antoinette’s captivity but the legacy of gendered colonial imperialism.

The Soccer Mom

The first innocence narrative conflates the expectations of the American ‘soccer mom’ with the neo-Orientalist assumptions of Muslim womanhood. The concept of the soccer mom emerged in the 1996 American Presidential election as the group that could swing the vote. ⁹⁷ ‘Soccer moms’ typically are well-educated white women in their 20s to 40s who have careers and children, married to professionals, drive a sports-utility vehicle, own a home in the suburbs, and attend church regularly. ⁹⁸ When Siddiqui came under suspicion and then ‘disappeared’ in 2003, her family told the US press that she was simply a ‘woman with children, wearing a hijab, [and] driving a Volvo’. ⁹⁹ (In disparagement of this the New York Post ran the headline ‘Al Qaeda Mom’ ¹⁰⁰ .) While neither Jane nor Siddiqui perfectly fit the mold of the American soccer mom, elements of it linger within both of their stories. A lazy reading of Jane would align her as a soccer mom of the Victorian era: a well-educated (for a woman) governess combining career and children (even if they aren’t her own). A deeper reading would trouble this assumption of belonging. Jane faced significant rejection and abuse as an orphan. Her place in the Thornfield household was dependent upon either her employment by or her romantic relationship with Rochester, both of which implode when Antoinette/Bertha is discovered.

It also took some time for Siddiqui to arrive at this ill-fitting American-dream lifestyle and the arrival at it is only ‘known’ through what her family and friends have asserted. A Boston Magazine article very carefully highlights her soccer mom qualities, doubting this woman could have smuggled African conflict diamonds for al Qaeda. Siddiqui ‘is a 29-year-old mother of two, consumed, like other Boston moms who volunteer or work outside the home, with the minutiae of everyday life’. ¹⁰¹ She is genteel as ‘a deeply religious woman, she picks up Korans from a local mosque and distributes them to inmates in area prisons’. ¹⁰² The article secures Siddiqui’s upper-middle class status: she ‘hosts play groups in her apartment on the 20th floor of the Back Bay Manor in Roxbury’; takes care of her sister’s children; and Siddiqui ‘does the grocery shopping and prepares meals for her children and [doctor] husband’. ¹⁰³ In other words, Siddiqui was not terribly different than any other Greater Boston soccer mom.

Yet, she was just different enough to warrant some defensiveness. The imam at her mosque stated in an interview: ‘She was an American girl. Put that down: Aafia Siddiqui was an American girl’. ¹⁰⁴ Friends and peers describe her as ‘academic’ yet ‘faith’ driven, ‘passion[ate] about Islam’, and ‘kind’. ¹⁰⁵ This positions Siddiqui as bound to her faith, in effect veiling her. Veiling holds that faithful Muslim women are oppressed ¹⁰⁶ and Siddiqui’s family used this to defend her innocence and establish her husband as the al Qaeda operative. ¹⁰⁷ Her sister stated that he is a ‘wifebeater’ and ‘marrying him was Aafia’s biggest mistake’. ¹⁰⁸ Thus disparate conceptualisations of Siddiqui cohere: she is the ideal American woman, i.e. a woman with both career and children, but one held back by her less progressive, sinister, and subversive radical Islamic husband. ¹⁰⁹ The soccer mom narrative falls apart, however, when Siddiqui is not seen between 2003 and 2008.

Lady al Qaeda

In 2004 John Ashcroft ‘listed [Siddiqui] among the seven most wanted Al-Qaeda fugitives’. ¹¹⁰ The ‘Lady al Qaeda’ moniker emerged in the media, from sources as varied as the New York Daily News, The Christian Science Monitor, and Al Jazeera, and found resonance with its audience through gendered neo-Orientalism. ¹¹¹ The Lady al Qaeda narrative is used to present Siddiqui as someone who has betrayed American exceptionalism: how does an audience make sense of a woman who ‘looks’ like a soccer mom but whom the government and media insist has been helping al Qaeda since the late-1990s?

As neo-Orientalism post-9/11 is dependent upon the ‘new barbarism’ thesis, the Lady al Qaeda narrative is premised upon prior family ties to a particular Islamic ‘tribe’. Siddiqui’s family were Deobandis, a form of political Islam that had supported the mujahedeen in Afghanistan and then the Taliban. ¹¹² This is seen as a radicalising context for Siddiqui, which corresponds with statements from Siddiqui’s ex-husband. ¹¹³ From the start of their marriage, Siddiqui had ‘a more fiery character than he wished. “She was so pumped up about Jihad”’ he told a Guardian reporter. ¹¹⁴ To a Pakistani journalist, he said, ‘She got hysterical fits when she became angry and would physically attack me …’ and that ‘he found her opinion toward Jihad to be of an extreme nature that … made him uncomfortable’. ¹¹⁵

In order to explain her disappearance between 2003 and 2008, the audience is meant to believe that Siddiqui marries into one of the most politicised families in Pakistan after her divorce. Divorce lends credibility to Siddiqui’s guilt: in 2002, ‘Aafia was a scorned and lonely creature, a divorced woman in Pakistan’. ¹¹⁶ Divorce coheres with some of the more gendered rationale for women’s involvement in terrorism and political violence: that women become involved in terrorism when they have lost their social standing and respect in Islamic societies. ¹¹⁷ Thus, when the ‘scorned’ Siddiqui is introduced to al Baluchi she marries him. Supposedly al Baluchi involved Siddiqui in the Baltimore-DC attacks. ¹¹⁸ When she goes underground with him in 2003, her status as Lady al Qaeda is sealed. ¹¹⁹

She was found with ‘various sealed canisters of chemicals and gels’ as well as the ‘Anarchist Arsenal’ and a list of US targets. ¹²⁰ Her PhD in neuroscience (focusing on learning disabilities) is misrepresented as ‘neurobiology’ ¹²¹ and was implicated as of intrinsic value to planning future al Qaeda attacks. ¹²² And when she opens fire on US personnel in Ghanzi, she is the embodiment of Lady al Qaeda:

[Siddiqui] was standing there, pointing the officer’s gun at his head … She fired twice, shouting “Get the fuck out of here!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Nobody was hit. After the translator wrestled with the woman, the second soldier drew his pistol and fired … She went down, still kicking and shooting that she wanted “to kill Americans”. Then she passed out. ¹²³

According to a witness, Captain Robert Snyder, ‘[Siddiqui was] a vision of hatred … shooting at us. Shooting at me’. ¹²⁴ She is Antoinette, who, in a fit of ‘madness’, attacks Rochester, rejecting ‘Bertha’. ¹²⁵ Through this Siddiqui text, the audience is presented with a similarly colonised woman who has already rejected the ‘better choice’ – her promising American future.

The Grey Lady Appears

Once Siddiqui defied capture, the innocent soccer mom narrative no longer has any validity, as it would appear that Siddiqui was indeed underground for those five years. Instead, the Lady al Qaeda narrative seems all the more plausible. Thus, a new innocence narrative has to be sought and the one that emerged was the Grey Lady of Bagram. Upon return to the US, her mental condition was fragile and each side interprets Siddiqui’s mental health as evidence of her guilt or innocence.

A US government conducted psychological evaluation of her at Carswell in 2009 suggests she has ‘Delusional Disorder of the Paranoid type’ and that ‘some of her beliefs’ are consistent with ‘radical political ideology’ while other ‘beliefs exceed political theology’. ¹²⁶ An otherwise well-balanced Guardian article stated ‘she manipulated health workers’ ‘and three of four [mental health] experts determined she was malingering’. ¹²⁷ (Although the Carswell psychological evaluation negates this). ¹²⁸ Further, the reporter indicated that she was ‘scuppering’ her pre-trial hearings by

interrupt[ing] the judge, rebuk[ing] her own lawyers, and [making] strident appeals … [.] … Previously she had tried to fire her lawyers due to their Jewish background. ¹²⁹

Alternatively, her defense claims Siddiqui was unfit to stand trial: ‘Siddiqui was “going crazy” – prone to crying fits and hallucinations involving flying infants, dark angels, and a dog in her cell. “She’s in total psychic pain” said her lawyer’. ¹³⁰ International Justice Network, an independent non-profit that provides legal assistance to survivors of human rights abusers, found that her ‘mental and physical health continues to deteriorate’ from her ‘solitary confinement’ at Carswell. ¹³¹ For those who believe in her innocence, these actions indicate mental frailty due to torture. ¹³²

Still, supporters like the International Justice Network and Victoria Brittain have to contend with this vitriolic Siddiqui. When they argue Siddiqui’s behaviour was a result of her diminished capacity, Siddiqui ‘tranforms’ fully into Antoinette: she cannot be held responsible for her actions as they are due to her torture and her unstable background as a Muslim woman. It may seem strange to construct Siddiqui as a captive woman à la Antoinette but the post-colonial/neo-Orientalist parallels are there. Like Antoinette, Siddiqui is a person of colour who was ‘presented’ with the advantages of a Western life: educational and/or economic opportunities that should have allowed her to leave behind her ‘backwards’ non-Western (Islamic) existence. Instead, just as Antoinette was, in the end, associated more with obeah and Jamaican culture than with being English, the Grey Lady narrative is somewhat dependent upon the idea that Siddiqui maintained stronger ties with Islam than with the (more progressive) West. Antoinette was locked away in Rochester’s attic because she was guilty of noncompliance with gendered and classed expectations of her as an English wife. Thus, Siddiqui’s imprisonment in Bagram for five years falls into line with Rochester’s treatment of Antoinette – an attempt to deny the challenge to this superior political system and to force compliance with it.

Bagram Theater Internment Facility is the largest detention center in Afghanistan and located within US Bagram Air Base. ¹³³ Bagram, like Abu Ghraib, is known for having tortured inmates. Free Detainees, http://freedetainees.org/, a non-profit website dedicated to raising awareness about prisoners associated with America’s War on Terror, described Siddiqui’s imprisonment at Bagram in 2008:

Prisoner 650 is a Pakistani Muslim woman held by the American military for many years without trial in the notorious Bagram Prison in Afghanistan. Her screams have reached the ears of many ex-inmates and others who have visited the prison. They all claim that the screams still haunts [sic] them. They have labeled her the Grey Lady of Bagram jail …

According to British journalist Yvonne Ridley ‘her haunting sobs and piercing screams’ led ‘male prisoners to go on hunger strike for six days in protest of her treatment’. ¹³⁴

The Grey Lady narrative is premised on the belief that Siddiqui had been held from 2003 to 2008 at Bagram. Her advocates argue that Pakistani and US forces intercepted Siddiqui and her children on their way to the train station in March 2003. At this time,

a spokesman for Pakistan’s interior ministry and two unnamed US officials confirmed [her capture] in the press. Several days later, however, Pakistani and American officials mysteriously backtracked, saying it was unlikely Siddiqui was in custody. ¹³⁵

Persistent rumours culminated in a press conference held by Ridley in Afghanistan that was meant to force the US to name Prisoner 650. Lt-Col Rumi Nielson-Green, Director of Public Affairs for the region, denied that any woman, specifically Prisoner 650, was being held at Bagram in July 2008. ¹³⁶ The Ghanzi capture happened ten days after the press conference. Thus, the Ghanzi capture is considered to be a fabricated story supported by the claims that there is no physical evidence linking Siddiqui with the gun that shot the soldier. ¹³⁷

Because of these mysterious circumstances Siddiqui has become an innocent martyr in some of the Pakistani press. ¹³⁸ (Although some articles in the Pakistani press uphold the Lady al Qaeda narrative from a gendered perspective: to promote her guilt and her ex-husband’s innocence). ¹³⁹ After her conviction in 2010 the Pakistani government asked to have her repatriated from the US, referring to her as the ‘daughter of the nation’. ¹⁴⁰ She is an international ‘symbol of American injustice’ ¹⁴¹ and ‘another example of the US government’s high-handedness’ towards Pakistan and Afghanistan. ¹⁴² This doubt and tension solidifies the Grey Lady narrative, exemplifying the tensions inherent in the gendered hierarchical relationship between the US and Afghanistan and Pakistan in the War on Terror.

Gendered Neo-Orientalism, the Gothic, and Aafia Siddiqui

Neo-Orientalism orders the narratives, serving the particular agendas of the various authors of the narratives and supporting the gender hierarchy. Paralleling the gendered and post-colonial Gothic logics with the gendered neo-Orientalist elements demonstrates just how damaging this discursive structuring is as it fixes the various identities in totalising ways – a monolithic view of the US and an essentialised view of Siddiqui. Yet, employing Gothic intertextuality has a redeeming feature as well.

Bonnie Honig explores Gothic literature’s contributions towards democratic thought and practice. ¹⁴³ According to Honig, the Gothic heroine explores ambivalence to ‘discover the truth’. ¹⁴⁴ This act of ‘detection teaches them agency’, making the heroines less vulnerable to immediate and structural threats. ¹⁴⁵ Readers of Gothic novels,

can discover that the devices used by Gothics to heighten our sense of uncanniness … are devices that work on us everyday and that we, as democratic agents, do not just have to yield to them. Instead, we have some power to explore, unmask, detect, and even expose them. ¹⁴⁶

The Free Aafia movement fills the role of a Gothic heroine – it employs the more subjective social media to explore, unmask, detect and expose undemocratic activities. Siddiqui’s advocates continue to believe in a world where human rights matter, and thus they refuse to turn a blind eye to torture and detainment. This real-life ‘Gothic heroine’ gives voice to ‘cultural contradictions’ subverting American exceptionalism. ¹⁴⁷ The Free Aafia movement-as-Jane ‘provides us [the reader] with … a healthy caution to be wary of authorities and powers that seek to govern us’. ¹⁴⁸ As such, the Free Aafia movement challenges not just America-as-the-male-protagonist but empowers citizens to rethink their complicity. Yet we can also see that the Free Aafia movement has its own agenda in presenting Siddiqui in such a light – she can only be a victim if there is an assailant.

Scripting America as a ‘male protagonist’ is not necessarily new, ¹⁴⁹ but it is relevant. In the War on Terror, America has projected a masculinity of an exceptionalised protector of women. The Bush Administration argued the war in Afghanistan would not just rid Afghanistan of the Taliban and the world of al Qaeda, but the Western forces would also liberate the veiled women. ¹⁵⁰ Yet, as Cynthia Weber rather presciently wrote, the War on Terror resides within a contradictory moral framework. ¹⁵¹ The War on Terror was meant to serve as a way of exporting American democratic values. ¹⁵² If the Grey Lady narrative is true the honorable and romanticised reasons for going to Afghanistan crumble. No longer can America claim liberal exceptionalism nor can it claim that it is free of gender troubles. The possibility that American soldiers tortured and secretly detained a woman on an air base – not events that happened erroneously in the heat of battle – opens the door to more shame, disquiet, and horror in a post-Abu Ghraib environment. Thus, the Grey Lady narrative connotes uneasiness towards American counter-terrorism policies, including the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as torture and detention, which upsets the image of an exceptional United States that the Bush and Obama Administrations insist it is. ¹⁵³