For Arab women, belonging is never given. It is negotiated, clawed back, stolen in fragments. It’s a constant reminder that the places we come from often demand our silence before they offer us acceptance.
We are told to obey first, to prove worthy second, and to disappear when our truths don’t align with the script. We are told that loyalty means swallowing shame, that honor means shrinking desire, that belonging means playing small.
But we refuse.
Defiance is not always a fist in the air — sometimes it’s the audacity of wanting more than survival. Sometimes it’s choosing not to wear silence like a veil. Sometimes it’s daring to ask questions about faith, sex, power, and freedom, even when the answers are not “acceptable.”
We’ve been warned that wanting too much is dangerous. That saying too much is betrayal. That naming what was done to us will collapse the family, dishonor the community, shame the bloodline.
But here’s the truth: families collapse when silence rots them from the inside. Communities fracture when women are forced to carry secrets they did not choose. Cultures erode not because women speak, but because they are smothered into forgetting themselves.
Belonging, for us, is not in submission. It’s not in perfect daughterhood, wifehood, or motherhood. It is in the act of existing, messy, visible, unapologetic. It’s in taking up space that was meant to suffocate us, and insisting that we belong not because we obey, but because we are here.
To belong as Arab women is to stand at the intersection of reverence and rebellion: honouring what shaped us while refusing to be buried by it. It’s to love our cultures enough to demand they stop breaking us. It’s to name the violence disguised as tradition, the control disguised as love, the silence disguised as dignity.
We do not belong because we fit neatly.
We belong because we refuse to be erased.
And in that refusal; loud, unashamed, controversial — we find our truest home.
