Women and the Hijab or Why Is That Man Shouting at Me?

by Grace Andreacchi

It was not without some trepidation that I set out on my first ever journey to the Middle East this winter. I’d be visiting Istanbul first, with my husband, and then we’d be undertaking an extensive tour of Syria with our two sons, one of whom has been perfecting his Arabic during a year at the University of Damascus. Due to unforeseen difficulties in obtaining a visa for Syria, I’d be on my own in Istanbul for several days.

Americans are not exactly flavour-of-the-month at the moment in the Islamic world, albeit with extremely good reason, but my own personal beliefs regarding war and peace wouldn’t necessarily shield me from the hostility aimed at the government of the country of my birth. And then there’s the whole issue of the Hijab. To cover or not to cover – that is the question. For many western women I suppose the answer would be self-evident – not to cover. To cover is to submit to oppression, to deny one’s fundamental freedom and equality with men, to betray one’s sisters, longing for the right to feel the wind in their hair. But I wasn’t sure it was all that simple. On the practical level, I wished to benefit from my time in new and fascinating places without the distraction of unwanted attention. A bit of research on travel forums yielded the following highly interesting results: Among western travellers, the men reported back (for both Damascus and Istanbul) no special dress was necessary for women, as plenty of local women wore western dress. But, and here’s where it gets interesting, the women travellers universally recommended that you cover, cover, cover. Long sleeves, long skirts, and yes – a headscarf were advisable ‘if you don’t want to be harassed’. And who does? So, as a matter of sheer practicality, I decided in favour of the Hijab, and also equipped myself with a couple of jilbab, or loose-fitting ankle length dresses from the Whitechapel market, London’s place for all things Asian. These were not ‘bin bags’ but quite attractive and comfortable gowns, not unlike a beach cover-up, that you simply slip over your clothes. I wasn’t sure whether I’d need them, but I liked the idea of having them, just in case.

In the event, I did wear the Hijab, and the jilbab as well, and the experience was an enlightening one in many ways. I did not find it ‘oppressive’, but liberating, and , in some ways, quite seductive. Dressed in this manner I became, in the eyes of my hosts, something I am, namely a respectable woman who is not interested in sex with strangers. Dressed in my ordinary clothes, which are, I can assure you, in no way outrageous by the standards of twenty-first century London, I would’ve been a whore on the make. I was treated with respect and even courtly deference by the men, and with sisterly solidarity by the women everywhere I went. Did they take me for a Muslima? Probably. Was this dishonest on my part? I hope not. The message I wished to give, which was wholly honest and true, was simply this – I am a decent woman.

What is a decent woman? How do we know one when we see one? However far we may have wandered from such Christian ideals as chastity and modesty in the west, the idea of respectability or decency still has some meaning. Dress is a means by which we give out information about ourselves to the world, and the code is different in every society. When you change cultures, you risk giving out the wrong signals about yourself. Add to this the generally low opinion of western women in the Muslim world, and you can see that such misunderstandings are practically inevitable. It’s true that many women, in both Istanbul and Damascus, don’t wear the Hijab, although far more do. Do these women suffer harassment? I’ve no idea, but I suspect to some extent they do, although not nearly to the same degree that a foreign woman, and especially a foreign woman travelling alone, would do. It’s also safe to assume that local women are familiar with nuances of dress that are beyond the visitor’s ken. Exactly which types of western dress are appropriate and when and where – it can get pretty complicated. The unwritten rules are always the hardest to learn and the easiest to break.

But above and beyond the practical side of the matter, I’m a bit puzzled by the glib assumption in the west that the Hijab is an instrument of oppression. I felt no compunction about wearing it – ‘It’s only a scarf!’ I said to my husband, to my sons, as they looked on, baffled and bemused. We seem to have forgotten that, as little as fifty years ago in our own culture, no respectable person, man or woman, was seen in the street without a hat. It was not unusual for women to veil themselves in the west, particularly women of high caste, or women in mourning, or, significantly, women travellers. A last vestige of this practice can still be seen in the persistence of the bridal veil, nowadays often worn as the bizarrely incongruous accessory to a dress that leaves the bride’s shoulders and bosom bare. In the last fifty years our dress code has changed so radically that it’s difficult to tell, on a Saturday night in London, who are the streetwalkers and who the innocent suburban girls in town for a night of fun. Only the deadness in their eyes gives it away, their clothes certainly don’t.

Now as a prelude to my journey I did more than check a few travel forums. I read the Qur’an, and read it carefully and seriously, and what I found there surprised me very much. I found nothing that oppressed or demeaned women, or relegated them to second status. I found much that was beautiful, respectful, and admirable. The Hijab, or act of covering, is described as obedience to God [S33:36], as modesty (to protect women from molestation) [S33:59], as purity of heart for both men and women [S33:53], as Shield: ‘Allah, Most High, is Heaven, is Ha’yeii (Bashful), Sit’teer (Shielder). He loves Haya’ (Bashfulness) and Sitr (Shielding; Covering).’ The Hijab is righteousness, the Hijab is belief, it is the natural ‘bashfulness’ of women, and the ‘gheerah’ or natural dignity of the woman who does not wish to excite sexual interest inappropriately. These are beautiful virtues that take us very far from the mores of the secular west. However, they intersect closely with those of an earlier Christian tradition, which, while practically abandoned in Europe, still has some currency in the United States. St. Paul tells us: ‘In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with broided hair, or gold, or pearls, or costly array. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works.’ [1Timothy, 2, 9-10] Well, it’s hard to argue with good works, and handsome is as handsome does is an old but sound adage. St. Paul does spoil things a bit by going on to admonish us to ‘learn silence with all subjection’, and then to bring up that old business about Eve and the serpent, a convenient stick always. Still, why I’ve no intention of keeping silent so long as I’ve got something useful to say, I do rather suspect we’ve thrown the baby out with the proverbial bathwater on this one, that traditionally gender-specific virtues such as modesty and chastity have gone largely missing in our brave new world, and we are the poorer for that. There is an argument to be made that a woman has a right to her honour and dignity, to the beauty of her person as a private and sacred thing, to her sexuality and power over men as something serious to be taken seriously and used wisely in the service of God, not bartered in the marketplace. I’ve not space here to make the argument at length, but I’d ask the reader to entertain the possibility that such virtues, which have existed in most cultures and at most times, may not be intrinsically oppressive but rather enlightened and enlightening.

Whether you agree with any of this or not, you can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about a piece of cloth on a woman’s head. Why does it matter so much to so many people? Isn’t it a woman’s own business what she chooses to wear? Why is it always men kicking up a fuss about what we have or haven’t got on, and never, ever the other way round? In Turkey women are not permitted to enter public buildings if they’re wearing a headscarf (a policy currently under review). This cuts off the education of all those girls who choose to wear one, and make no mistake, many do choose to do so, sometimes for the reasons outlined above, sometimes for other reasons which may include an identification with political Islam, an adherence to a tradition with which they are comfortable, and no doubt many others, as subtle and manifold as the complexities of the human heart and the individual’s intersection with society. In France too, the doctrine of so-called laïcitéhas been interpreted to mean that girls and women are not to wear the Hijab in public buildings, including schools. All this can seem manifestly unfair to one brought up in the American tradition of ‘freedom of religion’, where the Amish children attend school in the quaint garb of yesteryear without raising a murmur. Meanwhile, women from the streets of Iran to the classrooms of Anatolia to the bainlieue of Paris and the airport queues of London are fighting for the right to wear the Hijab or the right to take the damn thing off.

At the heart of Orhan Pamuk’s novel Snow lies the dilemma of the Hijab. The plot centres around a writer who has come to a remote town to investigate reports of numerous suicides among the so-called ‘headscarf girls’, high-school girls who are killing themselves under pressure from the authorities to remove their headscarves. He puts the following speech into the mouth of one such girl. ‘If a lot of girls in our situation are thinking about suicide, you could say it has to do with wanting to control our own bodies. That’s what suicide offers girls who’ve been duped into giving up their virginity, and it’s the same for virgins who are married off to men they don’t want. For girls like that, a suicide wish is a wish for innocence and purity.’ (trans. Maureen Freely). Now, there are real problems for women living in Islamic cultures, there are evil traditions of oppression and domination, false and murderous notions of honour, a whole catalogue of horrors, sometimes justified, however unjustifiably, in the name of religion. But I don’t think we can just ignore the voice of that girl. We ought to listen, and try to understand what she is telling us. Salma Yaqoob, a British-born Muslim and political activist, has spoken eloquently of the ‘woman’s right to choose’. She sees the banning of the Hijab, rightly, as racism and xenophobia in the west, and insists that both banning and enforcement are equally oppressive, as both deprive a woman of the right to choose for herself what she will wear. [Salma Yaqoob,‘Women and the Hijab’, speech to the European Social Forum, 16 October 2004] If you doubt the racism and xenophobia, just try a little experiment – put on a headscarf and go for a walk in London. I sometimes wear one, just to keep my hair dry – it rains a lot in London, not generally a steady downpour but more of a persistent drizzle that soaks gradually into your clothes and hair, and a headscarf makes sense. The Queen often wears one, for example. And more than once I’ve had strange men shout insults at me such as ‘Go back where you came from!’ or ‘OOOOHH I can see your HAIR!’ and so on. There you are, men shouting at you again. In one part of the world they shout at you because you’re not wearing a headscarf and in another part of the world they shout at you because you are. Can’t win.

I spent a few days in Istanbul and a couple of weeks travelling in Syria – this hardly makes me an expert. But I discovered something by wearing the Hijab than I could not have discovered in any other way. When I had it on, I was exactly the same person as I was when I didn’t have it on. I was just as intelligent, just as curious, just as funny, just as observant, just as critical, just as everything, just the same! I see women in Hijab differently now. I’ve tumbled to their secret. They’re just like the rest of us.

Grace Andreacchi was born and raised in New York City but has lived on the far side of the great ocean for many years – sometimes in Paris, sometimes Berlin, and nowadays in London. Works include the novels Give my Heart Ease, which received the New American Writing Award, and Music for Glass Orchestra, and the play Vegetable Medley (New York and Boston). Stories and poetry appear in both on-line and print journals.Her work can be viewed at http://graceandreacchi.com.

Elegy by Mary Jo Bang

Graywolf Press, 2007
Review by G.A. Banks-Martin

How To Mourn A Son

On March 6, 2008, Elegy, Mary Jo Bang’s fifth book of poetry, won The National Book Critics Circle award for 2007. The book, an extended lament for the poet’s deceased son, reminds us that death, while final for the dead, must be contended with by the living daily; nightly. For after the lost is announced, and the body reduced to ash, the narrator states my mothering lips are stitched/ Shut by sorrow.

The early poems, pages 3- 36, are concerned with beginning the mourning process. Here three critical points arise: mourning goes on night and day, no one really understands, and there is no relief. These stanzas from The Cruel Wheel Turns Twice best illustrate the first idea:
A bus slithers by
A din. The aluminum morning takes on more tension
And becomes a metal rod
Straight from a tunnel, dropped in a gate groove.

Disappointment. And again. The End gate
Opens and it’s, Please
Come back. Please Be. Then nothing. Only end-

Less night taking off from the smooth tarmac slate.
The potpie clock, its stock of twelve numbers,
A stew for the weak and the weary.

The poem ends And daylight a gift tied with some tinsel, however, the gift, is simply a break from night. Likewise, Landscape With The Fall of Icarus is a description of the guilt that consumes the day. The poem explores the last moment mother and son spends together. The mother struggles to remember which train she watched her son ride away on and declares:
That car should be forever sealed in amber.
That dolorous day should be forever

Embedded in amber.
In garnet. In amber. In opal. In order

To keep going on. And how can it be
That this means nothing to anyone but me now.
This poem’s last line is one of the many lessons offered; mourning is personal and worked out in isolation. In addition, we begin to hear whispered, if you do not understand; if you think I can just get over it, you are either very young, or inexperienced. We will hear this whisper throughout the rest of the collection. We will hear it even, after we reach the final turning point, the last line of Now, The body as ash/ is inadequate. We will hear it whispered in every line including the very last Goodnight. The ordeal comes/ To its periodic end/ Which simply means/The ahead is again. Many will say that it is a cliqued message but it is a necessary message because we cannot speak of such lost with the level of purity, honesty, and simplicity, as Mary Jo Bang does in Elegy without experience.

Hagiography by Jen Currin

Coach House Books, 2008
Review by Elizabeth J. Colen

Years of Words Blown to Bits

Jen Currin’s Hagiography works backwards. From Death to Birth, with Childhood and two Intermissions between, we are treated to a lyrical voice that makes strange connections and allows the reader sometimes only scant assistance between great leaps of imagery and idea. The beautiful language in the first section includes the lines “Once in a forest I cut myself / and claimed I was the knife.” In this we see the confidence and control Currin displays throughout. The poems maintain an almost wholly consistent tone from start to finish that lets us know that knife is sharp.

Often the poems feel like lists, corralling supposedly disparate items—such as (in prose poem “I Drink to Our Ruined House”) “Wings in our teeth. Breast to breast. We will marry in burnt swaddling clothes. Let it be known in the city of our distraction. In debt like the moon. The phone’s celestial ringing. The piano hushed”—into one poem. While sometimes I failed to find the common thread, my interest in the fresh images she shares never waned. The genius of her titles (“The Bridge Melting Behind Us”, “The Stove Refuses to Cool”, “The Hand Is Equal Parts Healer and Fool”) and the worlds she exposes allow a reader to let go of making perfect sense and give permission to live within the sense of sound. To me this inventorying found its culmination in “The Town in Her” where the list of parts creates a whole that allowed me to go back and reclaim meaning in poems that had previously mystified. As soon as one stops searching for a link and instead uses images as puzzle pieces with which to shape one larger image or idea, a magic to these poems begins to emerge. In “The Town in Her” we are given strange bits of an unsure love—“An eyelash on the toilet seat”, “Shallow kisses weigh down the quilt”—affirmed in the last stanza: “I love her and do not need to.”

Also central to a reading of Hagiography is paying attention to the subtle, intelligent shifts in point of view. Most of the poems are written in second person. The insistence/presence of “you” wanes and waxes, burning particularly bright in the Intermissions, which operate as love songs. The second person shift at the close of the first Intermission forces the romantic “you” to merge with the reader “you”—“You will read this with both of your hands.” After this the book begins feeling more intimate when we (“you”) become party to the next intimate scene when the following poem begins “I tell the teeth of your mouth: / I waited for you and the devil never came” and ends with “Your shoes get too tight…” And in the next poem when the narrator says “The sun flexed its muscles across your back” we can almost begin feeling the heat.

Taken as a whole, the book seems to want to move backwards in an effort to reclaim what we lose in the course of living: “For a spirit to enter a bottle, / there must be this— / years of words / blown to bits.” One may also take note of all the spirits populating the final (Birth) section as proof that the entire book has taken place after death, the long remembering of things that came before. While there are no saints overtly referred to within the course of Hagiography, one may also begin to believe that “you” and “I” and the other entities within are the saints never mentioned by name.

Theory of Orange by Rachel Simon

Pavement Saw Press, 2007
Review by Metta Sáma

“Free association is or “Everything that irritates us about others, leads us to understanding ourselves.”: a review of Rachel Simon’s Theory of Orange”
–Metta Sáma

Rachel Simon’s debut collection, Theory of Orange, 2005-2006 Transcontinental Poetry Award winner, judged by Dean Young, opens with the (false) promise of a “Recipe for Success”. Simon leaps from “eighth-grade embarrassment” to “a new apartment” and back again to “desired birth order[s]” and “compar[ing] childhoods”. This “recipe” seems to comment on poetry-making, book-making, as well as poet-making: “burn it in your cheeks for when doors/swing toward you faster than your arms can brace./Befriend lost children in the produce.” (3) The ironic title and attitude creates a light, self-conscious tone for the book.

A voice and brain-driven poet, Simon honors the frustrated leaps that permeate her world. In poems such as “When You’re Not Allowed To Daydream”, “Anxiety”, “Autobiography” and “Humid”, the jumps invite. In the prose poem “Daydream” she writes: “One can live for years without knowing the teaspoon is inaccurate. Call the bureau of weights and measurements. They’ll understand. In massage school I learned to rub a full belly in clockwise motion…” (1. Not only is the prose form a wonderful tool for these leaps, Simon’s humor has a mental, emotional, and psychological organization, creating a delightful and capricious symphony. In other poems free association works well for Simon’s tone, but don’t compel me to return to the lines and engage on a level beyond quirky, and often, predictable brain play.

Simon’s line, voice, and emotional range are most memorable in the poems “Rope” and “Present Tense”. These elegies to a friend who died young are heartbreaking because Simon gives way to the heart, the spirit and the body, as well as the mind. The lines are lumpy and the stanzas achingly untended, the language splinters, and I believe in all of the creaks. From “Rope”: “I can’t picture you opening the door of the hardware store/comparison shopping rope gauge, fingering/the textures, picking the blend that felt best rolled in your fist.” And ends: “Two years later,//two years in which I’ve pressed my face/into a pillowcase every night/I’m told you used a bedsheet, spun and knotted”. This poem honors the Simon seen earlier, the poet daring to take risks by moving from one idea/situation/image to the next, seamlessly and unpolished. Unlike the poems in which brain play is a short crutch, the shifts here feel entangled and real and powerful and muted in grief.

Many poems fail due to their floppy line and inert line breaks. There is no sense of identity in the lines as units, nor in the line breaks as tension and revelatory moons. While I enjoy free association, Simon’s thoughts on the page feel forged and lackluster. I’m more interested in seeing where these thoughts connect, instead of seeing that a poet can imagine queerly. The book, as a whole, feels staged, fretful, self-conscious, and anticipated. The poems often end abruptly or go on longer than necessary. Yet, Simon is a poet worth waiting for, precisely because she is self-conscious, fretful, stagey, predictable, and like any great young poet, willing to fall hard.

Metta Sáma is a book reviewer and poet. She previously reviewed Celia Homesley’s first book for Hercircle.

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