Finding My Place Page 14
In Nine Parts of Desire, author Geraldine Brooks recounts her experiences as a journalist in the Arab world where, as a female, it was easier for her ‘to get behind the veil than a male journalist’. I read an interview with Brooks where she was referred to as ‘an expert on the role of women in Islam’ because she had that glimpse into the clandestine lives of Arab women. I’ve lived in Australia for almost half a century and I am yet to be referred to as an ‘expert’ on Aussie women! I feel robbed.
The title of the book, claimed Brooks, is based on a quote from the Shiite religious leader Ali, who is reported to have said that God created sexual desire in ten parts, of which women were endowed with nine and men with only one – because us women are, you know, the receptacles of sexuality and really not much more. In contrast to our much more progressive Western sisters who get to wear things like funky orange pant suits and teeny-weeny polka-dot bikinis, us Arab and Muslim women were seen to be much more sexual than men and so we needed to be controlled by practices like having our genitals mutilated and our sexy faces covered. Our men were so unsexy – having lucked out with only one part of desire (probably the least sexy one too) – that all they could do was force their own unsexiness onto us by making us disappear in a cloud of black.
These books, and the fact that someone like Brooks was heralded as an expert, were just more proof to me that Western feminism had let me down, left me behind and totally misrepresented me and anyone like me. There was no space for me in Western feminism. For all the times I wanted to scream, ‘But I’m just like you’, I was being told, ‘No! You’re just like them.’ My voice, like the voices of other Muslim women, was muted by the feminist cry to save us – not just from our men, but from ourselves. I didn’t need saving. I needed relevance. I needed acknowledgement and I needed my own voice to be heard among the shouts and accusations of oppression and misogyny that shut me down. Instead, all my challenges were reduced to the imagery of the veil: the shroud through which the muffled voices of Muslim women struggle to be heard. As if somehow unveiling us would free us all and Western feminists could finally rejoice in their success of freeing the Muslim woman by belting out a chorus of ‘I Am Woman’. Meanwhile, the real struggles Muslim women faced both in Australia and overseas, were ignored and overlooked as Western feminists obsessed over the veil (which many Muslim women don’t wear anyway) and its underlying rationale of keeping us less sexy so that the unsexy men wouldn’t be tempted to do stuff like grab our pussies or have sexual relations with interns who don’t take their dresses to the drycleaners.
While Western feminists obsessed over how threatening the veiled Muslim was to the progress they had made in achieving their equal rights, I was left wondering about all the real battles that my friends in Egypt were left to fight on their own. Western feminism seemed able only to deal with us as veiled sheep, and a fully realised feminist objective was only possible once the veil, with all its secrecy and all its defiance, was removed. Where was the sisterhood that Nancy Friday had spoken of all those years ago?
Personally, I have never felt the need to veil. And I am the only woman in my entire family who chooses not to. My mother, sister, nieces, sister-in-law, aunts and cousins all wear the hijab. Some wear it in a more traditional form that also covers their neck and shoulders. Others, the younger ones, don a more modern style that resembles a turban – a colourful scarf tied at the nape and twisted to form a decorative band around the head. They also wear the latest fashion transformed into modest wear by the addition of a body suit underneath or long pants worn under miniskirts. I am in many ways opposed to the veil, not for any religious reasons or indeed any kind of feminist logic. I just don’t think it’s necessary. Call it pragmatism or call it cherry picking (as I have been accused of), but I don’t think I need to swathe myself in black in order to maintain my modesty or my dignity or have men take me seriously.
One day, as I was performing my mumsy duty of the daily school drop-off, I saw a woman enveloped in head-to-toe purple. She was wearing a form of dress known as the burqa – you know, that thing that the right-wing politicians and commentators occasionally get their undies in a knot over and want to ban because it’s such a ‘confronting’ garment that women are forced to wear and shouldn’t be allowed to choose to wear. It kind of looks like a fabric bucket upended over the wearer’s head with a narrow mesh opening over the eye area. It’s not a sight that’s very common in Perth, hence my surprise at seeing this rather large woman sauntering along in the leafy tree-lined suburbs of Perth’s eastern suburbs. She looked like a moving swirl of colour navigating its way through a maze of trees and scrub.
‘Ban the Burqa’ is a catchy play on alliteration, but it really means nothing very much. Banning the burqa, or any other type of dress for that matter, is not going to suddenly free women around the world whose bodies are used as political tools. It’s not going to lift the restrictions on women’s freedoms in countries like Saudi Arabia, where women aren’t allowed to travel or even undergo certain medical procedures without the consent of a male guardian. And it certainly isn’t going to help the conversation that Muslim women should be having about what the burqa represents for them.
I turned around and explained to my sons that if I were to walk alongside a woman swathed in a burqa wearing what I was wearing that morning, which happened to be a tailored below-the-knee skirt and button-up shirt, I would most likely go unnoticed, while she would be stared at. And that was my point. I don’t need to cover myself from head to toe in order to claim some kind of victory over men. I don’t need to rejoice in covering my body in order to express my freedom from social expectations and be respected for my brains instead of my boobs. And I don’t need to constantly prove that I have the right to wear what I want and argue that I should be allowed to choose – not with Muslim men, not with Muslim women and certainly not with politicians and commentators. For all the victories that we claim to have achieved in the West, we are still way too obsessed with what women wear – whether it’s a burqa, a bikini, bike shorts or a badass pant suit (how’s that for alliteration!).
17
A Plus
When I finished school at the end of 1984, a common topic of conversation was how George Orwell’s vision of the future in his book 1984 had or had not come to fruition. Orwell’s dystopia, where people’s lives are lived in and ruled by fear, where history and reality are distorted to perpetuate that fear, and where every move and emotion are monitored and controlled, had been and gone by the end of the 1980s. Occasionally, I would come across an analytical piece that reflected on Orwell’s future vision and drew parallels to the world we now found ourselves in. A world where computers were increasingly playing a role in the ways we communicated, in our social lives and in the ways we marked time.
As the end of the 1990s approached, Big Brother was incarnated – but only as a reality television show where groups of horny twenty-somethings were thrown together in a house and made to do stupid things while viewers shovelling cheese-flavoured popcorn down their bored throats watched on from their living-room sofas – quite unaware that they were actually Big Brother.
In between the constant replays of the hit song by the artist once known as Prince, that made us all want to party like it was 1999, the greatest topic of conversation on the airwaves was the dreaded millennium bug that promised to wipe us all out of our technological existence and plunge us back into the dark ages before the internet and flip phones. There were stories of people who had stockpiled water and cans of food amid fears that time itself would stop because computers, which were infinitely smarter than tin-foil hatters named Billy Bob and Goober, would not cope with a series of zeroes. Even though I didn’t believe the doomsdayers and joined in poking fun at them, I must admit that I added a couple of extra cans of baked beans to the shopping list that week. You know, just in case the computers really did cause a wrinkle in the time–space continuum and dinosaurs roamed the earth again. That said, if I was going to be ea
ten by a dinosaur, I’m not sure that a can of baked beans would make any difference. Of course, the clocks ticked on and we all awoke on 1 January 2000 to a world that was pretty much the same as it had been twelve hours earlier.
I remember being around eight or nine and using my fingers to calculate how old I would be in the year 2000. Back then, thirty-three sounded so old and I don’t remember just how I must have imagined myself at thirty-three. I couldn’t tell you if my life was working out the way I had imagined it would. I might have thought that I would be getting around in a flying car to a home serviced by domestic robots that wore blonde wigs or bow ties depending on their gender assignment (because that’s the only way you could tell the boy robots from the girl robots). The 1990s, for the most part, had been devoted to marriage and children and a shitload more turmoil than I would have liked. I hadn’t travelled, or written that book I had wanted to write. I hadn’t made large strides in my career or solved the problems of the world as I had imagined I might. I remember looking at some images of refugees fleeing a war-ravaged country somewhere in Africa. Endless lines of mostly women and children with bare feet, and all their belongings piled pathetically in their emaciated arms – their miserable lives carved for eternity in their miserable faces. I cried. Sitting there in my comfortable home with my comfortable shoes and my freshly washed hair, I felt a profound sense of guilt and a fire in my belly that rose up and heated my tears. I resolved that day to one day go there and help those poor souls. One day, when I was done with marriage and motherhood and all the things that tied me to this earthly existence, I would pack up and head somewhere where I could live out my days in relative obscurity, helping those who I might have been but for the grace of God.
I entered the new millennium as a mother and a new wife. I wasn’t looking for love when I met my second husband. At the age of twenty-seven, I had resigned myself to a single life, where all my time and energy were devoted to being both mother and father to my children. My parents regularly issued a stern warning that I should not be thinking about frivolous things like men and relationships – not with two boys to raise. My mother told me cautionary tales of others who had remarried, only to find that the conman/conwoman they had fallen for was only after their fortune, leaving them and their children homeless and destitute. I don’t know where they got the impression that I had any fortune to be conned out of. It’s not like there were pots of dollars buried in my backyard surrounded by the shitty second-hand fencing.
My friends, on the other hand, all seemed to have an eligible bachelor in mind and made several attempts to get me to meet them. My life was like one of those matchmaking game shows. The one where the male contestant has to try to guess which secret the female contestant is hiding in her baggage. Is it a) not one, but two young dependants sucking greedily at her teets, b) a brief encounter that almost led her to become Mrs Donkey, c) pots of money haphazardly buried in a backyard surrounded by shitty second-hand fencing, or d) all of the above.
I met Dennis through mutual friends and we embarked on an on-again off-again relationship that spanned several years, with me holding onto the hope that Dennis would marry me. He eventually did, but only after I issued him an ultimatum. I got the call from my father one evening to tell me that Dennis had come to visit him to introduce himself and ask for his blessing for our marriage. My father was pensive and he seemed to choose his words carefully.
‘Why do you want to marry him? He has nothing. No house, no car. Does he even have a job?’
‘I don’t need those things, Baba,’ I replied, ‘I have those things. I got those things on my own. I don’t need him for that. I love him.’
So I married Dennis in a small religious ceremony attended by my parents, my brother, Hosam, and his new wife, and my children (one of whom was not very happy about it) and presided over by a local sheikh.
From the very beginning, Adam wasn’t too happy with my new relationship. I’m still not sure whether it’s because he happens to be an extraordinarily good judge of character or whether it was just Adam being the older son and protector. Somewhere among the collection of photographs stored in an old shoe box, in a drawer that never gets opened in a room that rarely gets used, is a picture of my sons on the day I got remarried – Karim’s face stretched in a broad smile and Adam’s crumpled in a defiant frown.
Those first few years of marital bliss were mostly happy years with our new blended family (Dennis had a son from a previous relationship) of three boys all under ten. If you stood far away and squinted and tried really hard to imagine it, we were kind of like the Brady Bunch – but actually not. Even during the happier years, it often felt like we were just playing house. Though we lived under the same roof, our lives remained separated by a cultural divide that even the years together couldn’t bridge. Our kids went to different schools even though they were of similar age. We raised them quite separately, even though they were all in our care.
My boys and I never really felt fully accepted by Dennis’s family, and though I can’t speak for him, I don’t think it’s entirely wrong to say that he and his son never felt fully accepted by mine. Dennis’s mother wasn’t particularly fond of ‘foreigners’.
Picnicking on the shores of the Indian Ocean one summer, I started a conversation with my mother-in-law about just how beautiful Australia was. ‘Look at all this open air and space. This has to be the best country in the world, don’t you think?’
Adam chimed in. ‘Yes, but, Mum, all this space and we’re still standing at the shores waving “go back, go back, we’re full”.’
I thought that was very witty of my then fifteen-year-old. Very insightful! My mother-in-law, on the other hand, was not impressed. ‘So we should,’ she started, ‘all those people coming here on boats and invading our land. They’re nothing but queue jumpers.’
‘Which queue?’ I asked. ‘There’s no orderly queue to stand in line for when you’re escaping war and your house has been bombed.’ Normally, I would’ve bitten my tongue, sighed, smiled and walked away, mumbling something about being surrounded by stupid under my breath. But not today.
‘I don’t know which part of Arabia you went to school in, Anne, but in this country that’s not how we do things.’
Arabia? Arabia! ‘Well, funny you should mention that because first of all, you need to know that Arabia is a land that only exists in Disney movies along with genies and princesses named Jasmine, and secondly, I went to one of Sydney’s top private schools.’ And then I sighed, smiled and walked away mumbling something about being surrounded by stupid.
I’ve thought a lot about intercultural marriages and the various claims around them – those that argue that they don’t work and that the challenges of finding compromises in fundamental values and principles are too overwhelming for any couple. And those that argue that intercultural and interreligious marriages are breaking down barriers and stereotypes and contributing to social harmony. Dennis and I didn’t get married to break down social barriers. I don’t think anyone goes into a relationship with those kinds of lofty ideals – just as nobody gets married knowing that it will inevitably end in divorce. I wonder if the failure of my second marriage was a symptom of that intractable cultural divide that seemed to loom over us even in happier times. But I know it was more than that. It sounds so clichéd – but we just grew in different ways from the two young single parents with high hopes and dreams for our children.
I knew it was over around halfway through my second marriage. But I stayed because I didn’t want to be a two-time loser. I convinced myself that I could hold on to whatever was left, even if it was just a tiny fraction of hope. I told myself every day that I had to be patient and that with patience I could see it through. Most of all, I made myself believe that I had to stay for the sake of my sons, who would forever be scarred by their mother’s inability to keep a husband.
It was like I could only value myself as a person by being in relationships that were hard work. Like I needed to
be with someone who would make me constantly want to seek his approval because that gave my life purpose and meaning. It dawned on me one day as I stood in my kitchen waiting for Dennis to come home and notice how shiny the kettle was. I had wasted a whole hour getting that fucking thing to sparkle just so that I could get a ‘well done’ from him. And as I stood there waiting for my A plus, I realised that my whole life had been about getting A’s from the people around me. He didn’t see the shiny kettle – didn’t even notice it. Instead, he found something to complain about. I don’t even remember what it was – the oven or the fridge or the dinner or something. I walked away with a big, fat F. I think that was the day my marriage ended, though it was many years before I finally left. The day I woke up to the fact that I was never going to get an A plus from him no matter how hard I tried or how shiny that stupid kettle was. It was the day I realised that I was no longer craving his approval – I didn’t want or need the A plus from him anymore – I learned to find it in other places.
I am in awe of two kinds of people. The first are those people who have managed to stay married to the same person for an entire lifetime. I once met a couple who first met when they were just thirteen years old. Fifty years later, they were still married and still each other’s best friend. I have never seen the appeal of marrying one’s best friend. I’ve never desired the kind of relationship where you do everything (literally everything) together. I have never understood why anyone would want to spend every holiday with their partner. Don’t they ever feel like they need a holiday from their partner?