I've had this post in the back of my head for a while, but the Apostate wrote a post on the difference between super-white women (exhibit A, me) and brown women traveling in brown-people countries.
In my country, people are judged according to the expectations placed on them. In Pakistan (or Mexico, or India, or Egypt, or anywhere where I can pass for a native) the expectations leveled at me would be the exacting ones that all natives have to put up with. But in these same countries, a blonde woman will be excused - she will be expected to be eccentric; “western” behavior will be acceptable coming from her, which might mean she is allowed to be herself. She will also be respected and feared to some extent, since white people are seen to have more power (more money, more influence, more connections) even if they don’t really. Another colonial legacy.
She hit it on the nose. She misses the corollary, that they also expect the blonde women to be just like the ones they see in porn (sorry, boys, ana muzawaja. 3ndi theleth atfal!). But I can stay out until all hours of the night, dance as I will, make crude jokes, without a problem. I do try to refrain from dancing on the street to music from cars. I, and my American friends, are used to being the only women in all-male groups, or even resturaunts, and it's not looked at askance.
Now I've never actually been a brown woman, especially in Egypt or Jordan, so I can't speak to the experience. For that, read her post:
I still look like a Paki, but because of where I live (the United States) some Western privilege has rubbed off on me. So now I could go back home and be “eccentric” and I might be forgiven for wanting to be myself and do my thing. But I would have to make sure I somehow communicate to everyone around me that I am an “America-return.” I would do this by constantly wondering what something costs in dollars, dressing casually in western clothes, managing to bring up my place of residence in casual conversation, getting sick from feeding on street food, etc.
Street food will slaughter your delicate developed-world digestive system.
But I can talk about being clearly American. I can wear less clothing (and do - I feel so bad for women in long-sleeves in 85 degree weather...), I can rent my own apartment and have big parties, again, stay out til all hours of the night. People also refuse to speak to me in Arabic, explain things to me like I'm 2, and inflate the prices of everything I want to buy.
As I mentioned earlier, this really bothered me when I first returned to Jordan, to the point that I thought about covering my hair to fit in better. Now I've re-adjusted to handling the foreigner dynamic and just accepting that this is how I'm going to be treated. The better you speak the language the more it helps... in some situations. Some people cannot stop thinking that because you didn't grow up in the country, you don't know anything about it.
Still, there are elements of the experience I can't put my finger on. The Apostate got a lot of it: we can't imagine what it's like to actually be held to the expectations of the society we're in, because we are so exempted. At the same time, I'm not clueless. I know when I'm the only woman smoking argila at midnight downtown. At the same time, I'm having fun, and getting to know the country better than I would be sitting at home watching Turkish soap operas.
The badia was actually where the foreigner exemption hit me most strongly. My friend's badia host-mother actually sent her and me, uncovered, to the grocery store, since she couldn't go. Because she's a woman. I went for long walks by myself through the countryside, which my family encouraged me to do, though they'd never let their own daughters go.
We, two young women, wandered to a nearby farm and petted the sheep while a bedouin guy fed the horses. When we returned, the mother asked us if he talked to us, and when we said no, she said 'Good.' We were in his farm -- if it wasn't socially appropriate for him to talk to us, how was it appropriate for us to be there??
At the same time, those sheep were damn cute and I'm glad I went. I'm always wondering how much of the culture I'm missing because I am clearly not part of it, and whether it's cheapening my experience or just making it different.
0 comments:
Post a Comment