One day during the warm up I noticed once again that the group of Arab students seemed to be ungrounded and having a difficult time using the weight effort (In the Laban Movement Analysis framework weight effort is associated with asserting oneself and making an impact in the world. It is about determination and claiming of self.)
So we played a game. I asked them to push against each other with the palms of their hands one saying yes and the other no. Then I asked them to gradually raise their voices and allow the sounds to emerge from deep within. One woman, 24 years old and a mother of three, who married her cousin when she was 17, had a hard time. The sound that emerged from her throat was weak and lacked conviction. I stepped in and asked her to push against me encouraging her with my own voice. Slowly an aching sound began to surface gradually growing into a deep scream. It seemed she had never been allowed to raise her voice as a young woman. Her scream went on and on. The other students looked over giggling nervously, surprised at her audacity. Then some of them joined in. Later she referred to that moment as: “the day I found my voice.”
This same woman has a beautiful singing voice and years later when she became one of our facilitators she would sing a song that the group loved called “Hope”. She also insisted, even though everyone spoke Hebrew, that the Arabic language be spoken along with Hebrew in all our meetings. At times this was harder for the Arab women to accept. Some would say: “Why does she want us to speak Arabic? Does she think we are stupid and can’t understand Hebrew?”. As part of internalized oppression speaking Arabic, their own mother tongue, became connected with being stupid. Often in our groups the Arab facilitators would support the Arab women in working through these issues and announcing to the whole group in Hebrew and Arabic that: “I am a proud Arab woman.”
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