Her name is Marina Jaber but to many she is "the girl on the bike", a young Baghdad artist inspiring Iraqi women to exercise their rights one pedal at a time. In Iraq's conservative society, the young woman cuts an unusual figure when she rides her red bicycle in the streets of the capital, her long black hair swaying in the wind. What started off as an art project became a social media meme and then a civil society movement.
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 Jaber posted of herself cycling alongside an old man riding his own bicycle and staring at her in reproving disbelief made the rounds on Iraqi social media last year. "With that old man, I found my answer. For more than five minutes, I was riding next to him and he kept looking at me. He didn't seem to like it," Jaber said.
Jaber instantly became an inspiration for many girls and women across the country yearning to lead their lives the way they choose and not bow to more or less recent social, tribal or religious restrictions. Hashtags started spreading on the internet and Jaber was overwhelmed by the response she got. "I received a lot of messages... mostly from young girls. Maybe they needed somebody to stand up for their rights," she said.
Her red bicycle became the centrepiece of her installation at an exhibit in Baghdad last year and Jaber's action joined a long global history of cycling as a symbol of women's emancipation. In England, suffragette Alice Hawkins once famously rode down the streets of Leicester to promote women's rights -- scandalously wearing pantaloons. 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 defies society and her mother's disallowance by buying the green bike of her dreams with the prize money from winning a Koranic recitation contest. 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 from across the country started posting pictures of themselves on bicycles and dozens have joined group bike rides in the streets of Baghdad, which are closed off to traffic by police who escort the cyclists. "It's not illegal for a woman to cycle in Iraq but because of the war we Iraqis stopped doing a lot of things we used to do... we are too busy with death," Jaber said.
