SophiaBoutilier's Blog

Going Under Cover

“Call me, we’ll go clubbing”, said the moon faced girl seated on the floor in full buibui and hijab.
I didn’t know what to say, so I settled for “umm, okay, I guess”. Typical, awkward, non-committal answer. How Canadian of me. Nearly offensive, really.  But she couldn’t be serious, Muslim girls don’t go clubbing. Right?
Of all the assumptions to confront, expand and discard, that of Muslim women has been perhaps the most significant so far.  Ever portrayed as prisoners, locked behind a veil, Muslim women are denied agency far more in North American media than in their very homes and cities.  Particularly in light of the increased intolerance and stereotyping of Islam that has taken place in the last decade, women are often seen as the powerless victims of a backward and cruel social system.  Even those accepting of the religion shake their heads at the disempowerment symbolized by covering one’s head.
I took a course in university on multi-cultural education. The professor, who I won’t name here for the sake of privacy but who was fantastic, did not teach us how to teach, but rather, to think, to criticise, to be self-aware. One lecture was devoted to the screening and discussion of a video called, if my memory serves me, “The Headmaster and the Head Scarf”. It was a documentary on the controversy in France over the banning of religious symbols in schools. One girl’s comment struck me. She described girls at her school wearing skin tight jeans with g-strings hanging out and asked the interviewer if this was not oppression. Is it really freeing to package one’s body in a fashion dictated by the preferences of men or magazines? Perhaps not. Perhaps it’s not how much skin one shows or hides, but how much one feels in control of one’s own presentation.
Such sentiments were echoed by my co-workers one day over lunch. “They should take themselves and their low-rise jeans back to Nairobi”, one declared empathically of dancers performing on the back of a truck to sell some product. “We’re not interested in that here.”
Dress can be a powerful medium of expression. The trousered woman is still a symbol of empowerment – free from the confines and inconveniences of her skirt. My presence in an office where women wear hijabs and buibuis to work, means that I report in long skirts and blouses or loose pants and long tunics. It’s an adjustment. In many ways it’s also a relief. There is comfort and freedom in obscuring the shape of one’s body from public scrutiny. The amount of time and energy consumed by this topic is truly staggering. And yet, although wearing a buibui hides the shape of a woman’s body – the hallmark of sex appeal in Canadian culture – such women are not then damned to feel ugly or oppressed. What an interesting parallel I have just created; indeed, a woman who can not devote herself to looking beautiful must be oppressed, is that not her raison d’etre?
In my first week in Mombasa I noticed a woman stepping down from the curb. As she held up the side of her robes her foot emerged sporting an elaborate 4 inch high-heel. Whether she considered such footwear treat or torture can not be known and should not be assumed. Imagining that the extent of clothing a woman wears is inversely correlated to her level of agency is simply ethnocentric. Perhaps this woman enjoyed her flashy shoes. Perhaps she felt bound by gender norms to be taller or more graceful. Perhaps her feet hurt. The choice is not for the onlooker to make. It is, or should be, for the woman herself.
From scanty Nairobi fashion trends, the conversation soon turned to matters of hair removal – a topic that unites many women around the globe. The details of waxing, done where and by whom, were shared by all present.
The fact that their bodies are rarely accepted in their natural forms, hair and all, is part of a set of gendered conditions that frequently serve to disempower women. Nevertheless, it’s equally true that many women embrace and enjoy these conditions. I myself think that mascara makes my life better. Now I’m being tongue-in-cheek of course, but I am not a feminist who believes in dividing people based on their personal aesthetic. My point about the waxing, is that I could have had this conversation with a group of women in a thousand different places in the world. The fact that these were Muslim women was not the source of this gendered cultural preference, nor of a particular disempowerment limited to this group. At one point a colleague piped up, “my husband refuses me to wax”. Her comment was not meant to imply that her husband controls her life, but served as a reminder that she was not bound to altering her appearance simply (although these things are far from simple!) because of the fact that she is a woman and a Muslim.
What is too easy to forget, particularly when information is served up through a limited narrative, or “narrowtive”, is that people are free agents and make decisions for themselves. When there is only one thing on the menu, there may seem little choice in what to eat. But there is no question that other food exists.
There are, of course, situations where people are without the minimum means to make choices, and to me, this is the goal of development, to provide the foundation for choice. Oppression exists in many forms and must be addressed, not assumed.
As development workers and laypeople it is overly simplistic and arrogant to assume that others in situations “less developed” than ours, do not make decisions every fraction of a second, just as we do, steering and calculating the paths we follow in life. We must make the decision not to accept limited portrayals of people or situations just because these are readily available. Indeed, much goes on behind the veil.

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