Category: Blog

a new kind of ladies' night

 
 
“What goes on at ladies night?” This seems like an ordinary question; men are often mystified about those nights the trustworthy and stable women in their lives run out with girlfriends, dressed to the nines, with a shouted “Don’t wait up,” over the shoulder as the door shuts in their face.
            In certain states in the Middle East, it is perpetually ladies night due as non-related women and men are gender segregated. For Muslim women, ladies night means complete freedom, as they discard hijab, the veils that cover their hair in observance of Islamic dictates for female modesty.
            The subject of this particular ladies night inquiry, however, was the ladies only, invite only, evening of a fashion show hosted by Virginia Commonwealth University’s branch campus in Doha. The male faculty and staff were barred from this occasion for the entirety of the show’s annual run. They are all required to leave the building mid-afternoon the day of the show. As of spring 2007 there are no male students at VCUQ, though the first male students are allowed to enroll in fall 2007. They will likely also be left out of the ladies only evening, made even more precious by their inclusion into the school. The questioner, a male faculty member who had taught at VCUQ for three years, looked up at me and I was mystified.
            “Well, not that much, really,” I said. This was true; as in any religiously conservative environment, Hindu, Christian, or Muslim, ladies night takes on a much more sedated atmosphere.
            “We just watch the show… It’s the same show the next night too, right?”
            My friend nods. He seems as frustrated by my inability to supply information, as though I’m holding out some secret, refusing to share it with him because of his maleness.
            “Well, no one has their hair covered.”
            He looks up again.
            “Actually, no one wears abayas.”
            He is suddenly really interested.
This is probably because every mall, restaurant, and classroom in Qatar is filled with abaya clad females and this all you see of Qatari women unless you are related to them. (The designer abaya industry boasts top names including even Christian Dior.) Or unless you are invited to a ladies only gathering.
            In Islam, a woman only has to cover her hair when around non-male relatives. For the student or working Muslim woman who chooses to, this can mean every moment that she is outside her house; or even inside her house if someone other than her father or brother is in the room. Women who “cover” (which usually means covering their hair, but can also extend to their whole face) adopt a variety of styles in how they carry out this practice. The Qatari approach to female “covering” is an abaya a black robe with long sleeves long enough to cover feet also and a shayla, scarf, about two to three yards in length, that warps around hair, ears, and neck, hiding any space down to the collar of the abaya.  This is how ninety-eight percent of Qatari women dress.  
I drove home that night and shook my head at my friend’s slightly dilated pupils. There are no cameras, not even cell phones with cameras, allowed at this or any other gathering where women will be “uncovered.” This ensures everyone can have a good time without worrying photos of her hair, body, or face, will show up on the internet, or even worse, be blue toothed around the country. After all, there are only about 150,000 Qatari nationals. It is a really small country and we all know how we feel about photos of ourselves… so a prohibition on photography might be always be a bad idea.
I thought back to my first Ladies Night fashion show, the previous year, when I had only been in Qatar for about six months. I was shocked at what was underneath those abayas and shaylas. Behind the black of the robes and headscarves were designer labels I’d seen only in magazines or on the red carpet. This was the first night I saw my female students and almost didn’t recognize them because suddenly, instead of looking at a face, I was looking at an entire head, with hair, ears, neck, in short, everything “uncovered.” That night I was electrified and a little embarrassed at my own shock, given all my feminist sensibilities.
            The women were… stunning. And I was staring at everyone and everything like a blind mouse given a promised few hours to see.
            “Mohana, hi.”
            I turned and smiled politely at a beautiful young woman. I had no idea who she was.
            “It’s me. Hala.”
            “Hala! Oh, wow. Look at you. Your hair is beautiful!”
            Was there a more idiotic thing I could have said? Other than blurting, so that’s what you really look like, probably not. Clearly she wasn’t hiding her hair because she needed daily Rogain treatments. She was observant of Islamic tradition; she was “covered” in public like a respectful Qatari female. And she was drop dead gorgeous.
            It went on over the course of the night as student after student approached me to say hello and I was bedazzled by the mascara, bold shades of blue eyeliner, perfectly blow-dried manes, curled, straightened, artfully arranged and satin evening wear. The actual models on the runway were only mildly interesting in comparison to the menagerie of women I knew, students, faculty, staff, who I literally saw in a different light that evening. They were chatty and friendly, eager to know what I was up to with summer only a few weeks away, boisterous. After the show, the murmur of voices rose to a dull roar as everyone piled into the reception area to eat, gossip, and compare jewelry.
            The next day, back at work and in the daily grind, the previous evening seemed like a secret we shared; like I was having a dalliance with many women, all once, because I had seen beauty behind closed doors.
        &
nbsp;   This was all before I learned about the other variations of ladies nights; weddings, as most wedding receptions in Gulf countries are single sex, henna parties, where artists apply the dye in all designs and styles in a festive gathering, and of course, dancing lessons.
            Of course, my friend can’t get into any of these.
            And I like a good friend, rub it in.
           
             

In search of a word…

For the past week or so, I’ve been looking for a word. Yes, it sounds crazy, not a pair of glasses, or car keys, or even a misplaced phone number. But a word. The word I was looking for was – I thought – “asture.” 

But it came up with the red squiggly line underneath it which means spell check thinks it’s misspelled. 
So I clicked on the red squiggly and this is what spellcheck offered me:

Assure
Astute
Pasture
Satire
Azure
 
None of these were the one that I wanted. I was typing away, happily meeting my NaNoWriMo goals, when I wanted this word “asture” to describe the boss in the novel I’m writing. I meant, purposefully sparse, a no nonsense man. I Googled it, figuring the internet dictionary would know exactly what I meant.
 
Turns out the Internet (and Google) have their limits too. This is what I got with a search for “asture”: lots of links explaining the word pasture.
 
I was getting desparate: had I made up a word? I am moderately dyslexic when it comes to spelling and numbers – things reverse themselves – so I turned to my tried and true source for all things literary: my undergraduate English professor.
 
Here is the email I wrote her, subject line, “What is the word I mean?”:
 
Asture? The word that means sparse, plain, reserved.
 
Would have been in Jane Eyre to describe that orphanage where her friend died from TB.
 
I can’t find it and the dictionary thinks I mean ‘astute’ which I do not.
 
Did I make this word up?
 
Help!
m

Everyday she is now living her dream of being in the Big Apple, teaching and walking around everywhere, or taking the subway, right in the middle of the city that pulses with life. After decades in North Carolina, raising three children, and teaching at a small liberal arts college, she threw off the shackles of domesticity and made me dream come true. Needless to say, with her in NYC and me in Doha, our correspondence is more precious than ever.
 
As I waited for her response, I posted to a NaNoWriMo (http://www.nanowrimo.org/user/234858) forum, WORD OF THE DAY, which offers everyday a word to work into your section for that day. There were funny ones such as flies, or cut, or purple, and there were interesting ones such as abandon, or precise, or betrayal. Having stumbled onto the forum, I was ten or twelve words behind. I busily started writing in the past suggestions but I was still stumped by the specter of “asture.” So I wrote the forum moderator, a similar, but increasingly desperate plea to figure out what word I meant. (For more on my NaNoWriMo: http://mohanalakshmi.livejournal.com/2813.html)
 
She (I’m assuming, not entirely sure that is a woman) wrote me back a polite message with various permutations of words that were close to the spelling of the word I wanted, and some that were not:
perhaps you mean:
astute: shrewly discerning, acute, wiley – someone who quickly picks up what is going on from minimal information

aesthete: one who makes overmuch of the ‘sense of the beautiful’ generally someone who is not a part of the real world of emotions and dirt

apathy: indifferenct to what appeals to feelings – dont care about anything

aloof: removed in distance or feeling from, reserved stand offish, not involved

Was her tone slightly…. Impatient? 
I waited, knowing I would be vindicated by my now urbanite mentor.
 
Her opening line:
 
“I’ve never heard of it in my life.”
 
What? I thought. Eeek! I

’ve invented a word, and not only that, a word so obscure that even my most favorite literature teacher in the world hasn’t heard of it. I despaired and felt foolish. Perhaps the forum leader on NaNoWriMo was right to edit me. Perhaps I was a dolt, searching for a word that didn’t exist, stubbornly bothering people who had better things to do – like write with words that everyone knows, for example.

 
Then, in the typical intellectually curious fashion that she used on me all four years of undergraduate to bolster a burgeoning interest in graduate school, she recounted an episode of something similar happening to her:
 
But then I was teaching a poem by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper called “Bury Me in a Free Land.”  It’s in one of those used-to-be-$1, now $2 Dover editions.  One stanza starts, “I could not rest if I heard the tread / Of a coffle gang to the shambles led.”  I’d never heard to coffle and didn’t get around to looking it up.  Then the day I was teaching it, I went and left my book at home, so found it on the internet and printed it out.  There, the line read “Of a coffee gang to the shambles led.”  That sort of made sense – maybe a coffee plantation on a Caribbean island.  I made a point about how Dover can’t afford to do careful editing and still keep the price down.  Then in the middle of that night I suddenly remembered coffle, went to dictionary.com, and learned it’s a line of prisoners chained together.  So the next class, I had to make the point that the internet is even less trustworthy! 
 
Love,
 
I put this all behind me and kept going on NaNoWriMo, kept going with daily tasks like work, laundry, having a dinner party, cleaning up. 

My husband has recently started going back to school to complete a bachelor’s degree that fell by the wayside when he was offered full time employment as an undergrad.

 
“How do you know so many words?” he asked me one night while I was typing busily on the laptop on NaNoWri
Mo.
 
He was at the dinning table, typing on his latest assignment on his laptop.
 
“Reading,” I mumbled, “I read a lot and you always learn words that way.”
 
“Do you stop and look up every word you don’t know?’
 
I looked up.
 
“I don’t really have to anymore. But I used to. Sometimes I’d circle them and then come back.”
The rest of the evening went in companionable silence and we both reached our requisite word counts.
 
A few more nights go by and I’ve forgotten all about my quest for this word that no one else seems to know but me.
 
And last night, tucked in bed, feeling a little achy from a cold he had likely passed on to me, I read. I read because I always have read, ever since I can remember, from eight or nine, my mother taking us to the bookmobile to get our weekly allotment. I’ve read things she didn’t want me to read, romance novels before she thought I was ready for them, and this is how I found about many things about life as an adult she would rather have kept secret (but that’s another story).
 
So I read last night, like nearly every night for a ten thousand nights.
 
And that’s when it happened:

In the middle of SUITE FRANCAISE by Irene Nemirovsky there it was:

“Mentally Charlie reproached her for this – he liked his maids to be thin and a bit austere – but she looked about thirty-five or forty, the perfect age for a servant, when they’ve stopped working too quickly but are still fit and strong enough to provide good service” (223).
 
THE WORD! Used EXACTLY as I meant it to describe the boss in my novel!
 
I circled it, dog-eared the page, and went to bed with a smile on my face.
 
Now even Google knows what it means:
 
“Austere, bleak, spartan, stark all suggest lack of ornament or adornment and of a feeling of comfort or warmth.”
dictionary.reference.com/browse/austere
 
Thank you, Mom, for sharing with me the love of reading.
Thank you, mentor, for giving me the courage to ask questions.
 
Now, back to that novel, and that austere boss character….

Some Random Thoughts on Class and Gender in Doha

I’m working in my office and a student, wearing nikab, a face veil that drapes in front of the face and covers everything except a woman’s eyes, which a friend who lives here affectionately calls a ‘ninja mask.’ (in case you need a photograph: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/niqab/). 
A side note: many nikab clad women drive wearing these veils, despite the fact that the limit peripheral vision enormously. This is not just my un-hijabed opinion. When I was talking about this with another student, one who wears a shyla, a headscarf that covers hair, neck, and ears, she agreed and said this is an opinion that her father shares: women driving wearing nikab are not necessarily the safest (a whole new angle to women driving stereotypes).

 

But back to this particular day, she is wearing nikab and comes in to ask me to use my cell phone. She has to use my phone, she tells me, because her parents won’t let her have a phone. They think it’s “bad.” Yet, they think it’s okay for their daughter to walk into a stranger’s office (I have never seen this student before, expect on the first occasion that she came to use my phone) to ask to use the phone. This seems a discrepancy to the issue of modesty, which is what they seem concerned with, if her dress and lack of phone are any indication.

 

“You remember me?” She asked, as though surprised.

 

“No one else has asked to use my phone,” I respond. And it’s true. An area of the world where workers can SMS in to bosses that they aren’t coming to work, and people break up via mobile phones, not to mention use Bluetooth technology to make assignations with strangers in public, her not having a phone stand out.

 

Other issues?

 

At a mini-conference this week, I asked a few co-workers to help assist in taking microphones to audience members who had questions for panelists, I was confronted with the divide between acceptable forms of work and unacceptable forms of work. This is determined by status and image of course.

 

“Aren’t there any servants to do it?” One asked me.

Servants? Was work an extension of her home?

 

Let’s flash to the sight that greeted me as I got out of my car earlier this week: two women who work in the kitchen of our building, bringing tea and making copies, scurrying into the parking lot to get two grocery bags from staff in my building. The bas had the contents of the other women’s breakfast.  They were items that could have been stuffed into my tote bag that was slung over my arm. I watched as the procession, the staff in front, and the tea ladies in back, proceeded into the building.

 

Back to the microphone handler search: Of course I had to start with the women because the men were too dignified to do this task.

 

Of the few I asked, most pointed to their long abayas, the hems of which were dragging on the floor, and said they couldn’t run because they would fall. This is how dress marks us in our everyday lives here; the thobes and abayas don’t allow for running, pushing, lifting, or any other semi-manual labor. They make for great gliding however, as women’s feet are hidden, and girls from a young age learn to walk in small, mincing steps, designer handbags dangling from the crook of their arms. There isn’t any sense of the egalitarian idea of shifting identities – I may be a plumber during the day but at night I can be whatever I want, all I have to do is change my clothes – you are what you wear, essentially.

 

There were two volunteers, eventually however, and this was even more interesting. One was sharp: the microphone was right there when someone needed it. She moved swiftly (even in her abaya) and stood to the side as the speaker said whatever was on his/her mind. The other was much more timid. And although she stood against the wall and made to approach several speakers near her, she never did actually hand the microphone to anyone. She was shy and the distances too far for her to travel.

 

“I might meet my husband,” one person said, as I asked her why she didn’t want to help us out (it was a long day and these handlers were on their feet for an hour at a time).

 

In the end she turned me down; I guess he’ll just have to wait until another day.