PEDAL POWER
The ‘girl on a bike’ liberated women across the country, now men are getting in on the act too after a war that curtailed so much
Iraqi women take up cycling to reclaim their rights, and a normal life,
BAGHDAD // Marina Jaber has become better known as “the girl on the bike” after inspiring other Iraqi women to exercise their rights, one turn of the pedal at a time.
The young artist cuts an unusual figure as she rides her red bicycle through Baghdad, her hair flying in the wind. What she started as an art project soon became a social media meme and then a movement. Women now gather regularly to cycle in Baghdad and break ground in Iraq’s conservative society. Or is it old ground? “My mother and grandmother used to ride bicycles, it used to be normal,” Ms Jaber said.
During a visit to London last year, she rode a bike and felt so proud. Then she asked herself why it had elicited such a response.
“It’s only a bike,” the 25-yearold said. “It’s a simple thing. It should be normal.
“Does society just not allow us to do certain things or does it start not accepting those certain things because we stopped doing them?
“That was an important question that had been on my mind for a long time.”
To find the answer, Ms Jaber started cycling in her neighbourhood and made that a project for a contemporary arts institute called Tarkib – an Arabic word which can mean installation and assemblage.
A picture she posted of herself cycling alongside an old man on his bicycle as he stared at her reproachfully did the rounds on Iraqi social media last year.
“With that old man, I found my answer,” Ms Jaber said.
“For more than five minutes, I was riding next to him and he kept looking at me. He didn’t seem to like it.
“Then he stopped looking and went about his business. All the people in the area got used to it, they stopped looking at me. I understood then that I am society. If I want something, I should start doing it.”
Ms Jaber became an inspiration for girls and women across the country who yearned to live the way they chose and not bow to more recent social, tribal or religious restrictions.
“I received a lot of messages, mostly from young girls,” she said. “Maybe they needed somebody to stand up for their rights.” Ms Jaber has become part a long history of women using cycling as a sign of emancipation.
In England at the turn of previous century, suffragette Alice Hawkins travelled the streets of Leicester to promote women’s rights – scandalously wearing trousers.
More than a century later, the symbol is still potent in the Middle East, as exemplified in the 2012 Saudi film Wadjda, about an 11-year-old girl from Riyadh who defied society and her mother by buying the green bike of her dreams with prize money from a Quranic recitation contest.
Ms Jaber’s story also echoes that of Bushra Al Fusail, a photographer from Yemen who started her country’s first female cycling group in 2015 to affirm women’s rights and protest against the war.
In Iraq, women started posting pictures of themselves on bikes and dozens have joined group rides in the streets of Baghdad, which are closed to traffic by police who escort the cyclists.
“It’s not illegal for a woman to cycle in Iraq but because of the war Iraqis stopped doing a lot of things we used to,” Ms Jaber said. Men have joined the group rides. “It’s liberating for a man too,” said Mustafa Ahmed, an army officer. “Everyone looks so happy, the city even looks more beautiful like this. It feels like the normal life we want.”