I often hesitate to talk about my experience with gender relations or family structure in the so-called Middle East. I am afraid of the assumptions people in the U.S. bring to these conversations and the value judgments that they will make about whatever I tell them.
For example, the most common question I heard before and after studying in Egypt was along the lines of “Did you have to wear a veil?” The phrasing—“have to” indicating force or obligation—uses a simplistic framework of choice vs. lack of choice for understanding women’s attire in this region. I don’t think of clothing here as something that is a matter merely of mandate, neither by men nor by religion. The historical changes and contemporary variety of “covered” clothing support my position, though I won’t go into details here. (Algeria is a particularly fascinating example—check out Marnia Lazreg’s work if interested.) Instead I will share a recent conversation between myself, a few other internationals, and a local staff member, who I’ll call Muna.
Last Thursday Muna told us about her family. One of her sisters lives in California, and Muna told us that on her last visit to that sister, she took off her hijab (this is the style of head covering that is worn over the hair but not the face and ends at the shoulders). The other internationals in the room were shocked and intrigued by this revelation. One of them indicated that she thinks most women who wear the veil here in Palestine would also choose to take it off if they lived in another country. I’m not sure what her reasoning is for that hypothesis, but I think that the rest of Muna’s story complicates the idea.
First, Muna’s sister still wears the hijab, though she has lived in California for years. Second, Muna told us that she herself did not start wearing the hijab till later than her sister (although she is older)—after she saw how beautiful her sister looked—in addition to being convinced of its religious validity. Another interesting aspect to the story was that when Muna decided to take off her hijab for few days in Palestine her father was angry. Not angry that she took it off, but angry that she had started to wear it if she wasn’t convinced of it.
The other reason I am uncomfortable with questions about women’s clothing here and the choice vs. lack of choice paradigm is that so often when I am in groups of U.S. American women, I listen to them discuss their “need” to lose weight or the efficacy-to-pain ratio of body hair removal methods. Does the fact that our appearance guidelines are determined by corporate ideals (note that a PURCHASE-ABLE remedy exists for all our image woes) rather than a religious text mean we have an abundance of choice in the matter? Though I have heard plenty of women lament the gap between themselves and these ideals, I rarely hear them acknowledge it’s not necessary or necessarily desirable to meet the ideals.
All in all, variety in dress is always an interesting aspect of learning about new cultures, but I wish we could just get over the colonialist fascination with women’s clothing in the Middle East and move on to talking about more substantial topics. There are a lot more “barbaric” things happening around in this land, and they’re happening in the supposedly-“civilized” realm of politics.
Most of this post has been a long preamble that I wanted to write before sharing two recent “cultural moments” I’ve had where the ignorance my assumptions were displayed in plain view. So, dear reader, please take these stories with a grain of cultural relativism.
1) Over the weekend when of my male Palestinian co-worker compared on my good posture to his own slouching, I told him he should come to my yoga class. As soon as it was out of my mouth, I realized—as did the others in the conversation—that my suggestion was totally unrealistic. Although a co-ed yoga class is normal in my world, it is not here. The women wear more form-fitting clothing than usual, and hence we put a curtain over the glass doors so that they may have an exercise space free from men’s eyes.
2) Last week a middle-aged women who volunteers as a TYO bus monitor stopped me in the hall, saying something about my class and Labeeba, who she referred to as her sister. Labeeba, a student in my art and storytelling class, is at most 10 years-old, so when I mentioned this interaction to the program coordinator later, I said that the woman must have meant “sister’s daughter.” Not so, Chelsey pointed out—this woman in fact has a brother in another intern’s class. Although the age gap seemed enormous to me, the woman’s father may have more than one wife, making it possible for her to have a 10-year-old sister.
No comments:
Post a Comment