Mythologizing the West

From San Diego/Los Angeles, CA


Paul Theroux notes in the beginning of The Patagonian Express that travel feels very different when it is undertaken overland, that there is something particularly important in understanding how the land progresses and changes and evolves as one goes across it, rather than just landing in a plane, experiencing the earth as disjointed territories and pieces rather than a slow evolution.

On the East Coast, it’s easy to get anywhere – the cities are fairly close together (100 miles or so) and the land is contiguous, interwoven with packed freeways. The East Coast itself (at least the Northeast, where I have now lived for over 2 years) has a sense of being together, being intimate, in that it’s difficult to ever get out and get lost somewhere without running into a housing development, civilization, freeways, stores. There are a few nature preserves, such as the Delaware Gap, but even that is a narrow strip of “wilderness” and when you kayak to the end of it, the end is signaled by crossing under a freeway overpass. East Coast cities are vertical – New York built upwards, creating a constellation of skyscrapers. They are beautiful, monuments to greatness in many cases, and illuminate the night sky. But the sky becomes so hard to see in New York, too many buildings obscure the broad arc of the sky.

The sky is so much bigger here, on the West Coast. You can see the sky, no matter where you are. It is blue and deep and light. It is not heavy, dense, dark. My experience of space in California is completely different than my experience in New York: in California, I want to be outside, to smell the orange and eucalyptus trees. To sit by the tiger lilies while looking at the mountains in the haze of the distance. The buildings here are closer to human scale, they are not imposing physically. As a result, the distance you travel horizontally on the West Coast roughly equal the distances you travel vertically on the East Coast. It’s just a very different way of being.

More people have cars here, because these distances are greater, and things are more spread out. There’s more space in the West, more room to expand. More freedom, more air. The spaces are more stark, there is more contrast. There are mountains, valleys; the East has rolling hills, no sharply contrasting landscapes in texture and size (excepting Maine).

The West has a long history of being mythologized as a space of freedom, for pioneers, for dreamers, for the sons and daughters of families that didn’t have important last names or dynasties…the place where the American dream stands, where anyone can make their future and fortune. The exhibition at LACMA, “The Modern West,” looked at the ways that artists mythologized the West and created a visual language to explain the sense of possibility and creative opening they felt here. The West is also rough: it is a ragged, demanding place to live that. Los Angeles, as a city, should not exist; there is no water to sustain it, so it had to be stolen from elsewhere (see Mike Davis' City of Quartz, Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert). Anyone who has visited Yosemite understands the awesome and awe-inspiring intensity of living in a landscape so beautiful but dangerous. The history of the West includes lawless vigilantes, cowboys, and rough “Wild West” towns, people who wanted to live outside strictures of society. Perhaps this epitomizes the inherent danger in freedom: if you are constrained, there is little risk; if you are free, you are also free to make the wrong choices and take yourself down a path of no return. The wide open spaces of the West open that opportunity.

I know that I play into this, that I fall under the lure of the “wide open West” idea. I know I idealize Los Angeles, because I was doing interesting work with the Getty <here's one of our projects, I did the video for this> and my two best friends from Seattle U were living there to attend USC (still reside there). So for me, LA was a place where I had fulfilling, stimulating work, I got to travel, and I had great friends. In my memory, it has become something so mythic it could never have been real. I have edited out the traffic, the eating disorders of the women I saw in Whole Foods, the odd surreal nature of living in a place you recognize, deja-vu-like, because you’ve seen it on tv somewhere. I’ve redacted the unreal relationship to the land and water, the beautiful topiary and manicured lawns that depend on siphoning water to render the city livable, beautiful, vibrant. In my mind, even though I know these things to be true, they have melted away.

I have to admit a predilection towards the desert, too. Perhaps this is vestigial from my childhood in Albuquerque, but the desert feels like home. My childhood weekends were filled with visits to Mesa Verde, Pueblo National Monument, Santa Fe. The mesas and brush of the desert, long brown and ochre expanses dotted with the occasional cacti or magnificent tree, with imposing stark peaked mountains in the distance, feels comfortable. My cousin, who has spent 20 years in Seattle, can’t imagine living in the desert; to her, it is beautiful in its way but not bearable past a few days. The lush verdant greens of the Pacific Northwest are home to her; the desert alien. In a way, I am biased towards the desert, it is inescapable the way I feel at home here. I cannot make it not feel this way. Tennyson was right, “I am a part of all that I have met.” And I met the West when I was so young, and fell in love with her, and have never managed to fall out of love with her again.

Contemporary Arab Art: Zineb Sedira

Silent Sight, 2001 from zsedira on Vimeo.

ZINEB SEDIRA
Lately I’ve been working on a number of academic projects in addition to my job, and that has kept me from updating the blog. Rather than remain radio silent, I thought I’d share a snippet of the presentation I’ve been working on for the Middle Eastern Studies Association conference, which focuses on representations of the veil in contemporary art from the Middle East.

The photography and video installations of Zineb Sedira often focus on identity politics. Sedira has used her work to explore questions of belonging and ancestry; she was born in France to Algerian parents, and later moved to Britain. Her earlier work tended more toward the autobiographical, examining family dynamics, with more recent work focusing on the geographies and landscapes of identity politics. Silent Sight, 2000, is a video installation where the camera brackets a woman’s eyes, and a thin wisp of the Algerian haik (veil), so that they inhabit the entire field of view. The woman’s eyes blink, and look to the left and right, towards the frame of the white haik; the viewer immediately focuses on the woman’s eyes and the haik blends into the background. As “Veil” curators Bailey and Tawadros remark, “Here it is the woman’s gaze and the control of her own gaze that takes precedence, while the veil dissolves into a white haze.” Thus, the veil becomes invisible, not a hindrance or restriction upon the woman, and exists as one chosen element of a multifaceted identity as the viewers examine body language. Here the veil doesn’t cover but instead clarifies and focuses attention on the body (at least parts of it); and this focus is not directed to a gender-specific anatomy. The audio accompaniment to the video recounts this experience of limited visibility due to the veil from another perspective; the narrator, as a child, “struggling to interpret her mother’s feelings from beneath her haik. The spectator, who only has access to Sedira’s voice and eyes, is encouraged to replicate the process of establishing trust within a limited visual field.” The narrator recounts an experience from childhood when she failed to recognize her mother because the haik obscured her mother beyond recognition. Here the audio and the video reveal two separate and distinct subjectivities: critic Rachel Epp Buller describes, “The soundtrack plays on the emotion of this moment: sometimes Sedira’s voice shakes, or becomes strained or unclear...This random rhythm – eyes opening, blinking, then closing – matches the moments of silence and speech, white it is the gaze, fixed or lowered, that keeps us in the time frame of the video and in the present tense of its duration.” The narrator comments that she finally accepted the veil was her mother’s “home,” invoking images of domesticity and an almost Victorian “angel-in-the-house” perspective. Instead of unilaterally supporting this assertion, however, the young daughter’s inability to connect to her mother because of the veil could be read as the veil preventing feminine roles (that of motherhood) while simultaneously playing into them (socially respectable veiled woman). Critically, however, the important intervention made here is to reconcile two potentially opposing viewpoints (for and against the veil). The veil is not a symbol of feminine submission, or a backwards, “uncivilized” woman; it does not render a woman invisible, but acutely visible. In a single physical experience, the viewer’s senses recount different stories: the audio portion gently presents a story of frustration, difficulty and isolation in a relationship because of the veil whereas the visual portion affirms the agency and power that veiling can afford. The viewer’s senses are split and yet dually embodied.

Sedira also explores the veil, and the question of anonymity and visibility, again in her photographic installation Don’t Do To Her What You Did To Me, No. 2, 1996 (above). This series of photographs shows Sedira in varied stages of veiling and unveiling, thus making the act of veiling visible and demystified, stripping it of mystery. Epp Buller further comments, “Using herself as the photographic subject, Sedira asserts through her series the individual identities of women despite their veils, which in turn combats Western mythologies about veiled women. As the artist herself asserts, ‘The unveiled woman is seen as an individual and civilized subject, a far cry from the over-represented and culturally constructed veiled woman, who is considered anonymous, passive, and exotic.’” In this installation, Sedira shows a woman in various states of veiling, performing multiple identities simultaneously, and thus breaking the dichotomy. Sedira has developed the metaphor of “veiling-the-mind” as she produced work questioning and probing the veil. This metaphor, she writes, explains “the (mis)reading of cultural signs; to counteract the Western view of veiling, I try not to resort to the literal veil in my artistic practice. Instead I refer to veiling-the-mind in order to explore the multiple forms of veiling in both Western and Muslim cultures.” Sedira uses her work as a space to explore and expand the definition of the veil, rendering it more catholic and philosophical and moving it to a mental, rather than physical, plane.

Sedira also plays on the veil in another religious background. Sedira photographs herself wearing a haik in her Self-Portraits or the Virgin Mary series, 2000 (above). The title of the work blurs the Algerian haik with Christian veils, calling attention to the historic similarities in veiling practices between Christianity and Islam; it also highlights the sexualized nature of women’s bodies as religious saints, and perhaps alluding to the way women artists are similarly singled out for their gender. In this series, the veiled woman is visible, but barely; the photographs contain little contrast between the background the subject, the whiteness at once suggesting an ethereal invisibility, transparency, but also absence. Thus, Sedira employs a color that is the sum of all colors, with no discernible competition between different strains of light, hinting towards a synthesized, pluralistic approach; simultaneously, white references a disturbing colonial history and is evocative of absence, loss and invisibility.
Commenting on her own work, Sedira writes, “At first sight, my artistic practice refers to the veil as a visual motif. But the veil is never purely a physical code, delineated and present; it is also a transparent and subtle mental code.” Here Sedira encourages the viewer to think of the veil as a subjective mental idea, unique to each wearer. She also notes in her catalog essay for “Veil:”

“The visual art in “Veil” has many readings, but I wish to foreground that of transgression. All the artists in this project communicate the personal and the collective, with photography, video, words, installations, and sound as their media of expression and inscription. My ambition for such a dialogue was, and still remains, the need for a critique that enables a renewed lexicon with which to articulate the complexities and subtleties - the ambiguities and contradictions, the generalities and specificities, the similarities and differences - of veiling...such a lexicon could then speak to and about the paradoxes of the veil.”

Sedira’s work transgresses stereotypes, shattering binaries by weaving them into rich tapestries of plurality and simultaneity. While her work references common assumptions and stereotypes, she toys with them to challenge them rather than submitting to them. Furthermore, Sedira’s work does not play into easy tropes of East/West distinctions. Her work has drawn on loaded imagery of the veil and women in domestic capacities, but the messages underpinning their presentations are complicating rather than essentializing.
-Elizabeth Harrington, 2010


(La maison de ma mere, 2002, above)

For other thoughts on Sedira:
http://homepage.mac.com/kmcspadden/IStudy.html

http://libcom.org/library/documentary-representations-british-european-muslim-women-essay-review

Seeds of a Fruitful Endeavor

Kamala Visweswaran, citing Leila Ahmed, cites women writers' tendency towards metaphors of seasons, growing, and nature. Here I give in to the pull of this tendency, as the turning of the season to autumn has sparked more contemplative reflection.

Fall inherently turns us to thoughts of preservation, to thinking about saving things, plans for harvesting, and the natural cycle of life- things grow, they die, the earth turns again. Loss, quiet, renewal, exuberance and abundance. Watching the leaves turn in my neighborhood in south Brooklyn has shown me visually how fast the fall is flying by and I feel unprepared for the heavy cold season approaching. The air is still brisk, with jackets becoming a necessity only recently - and as this year has tended, the fleeting season hasn't wanted to depart on time. Last week, we had days at 75 degrees that were anachronistic of two months past. I remember the end of February this year, when we were so ready for spring, and looking to March for salvation, and the final week of the month brought a record-breaking blizzard. Perhaps this is the legacy of 2010.

I can see many intersections that come together around questions of saving things: whether it's harvesting and preparing for the winter, saving our country and the upcoming elections, and questions in my job about documentation and preserving in material form the work we do. I have also recently explored the work of professors Fred Myers, Haidy Geismar, and Craig Campbell, who all focus on art and material culture and how it is represented or deployed. And most concretely, my parents are packing up their house in Virginia for a move to Nebraska, sifting through their belongings and making decisions about "what stays and what goes." Sifting and sorting seem to be the order of the season.

The criteria we use in saving things is important, I think - I imagine, perhaps naively, that what we choose to save reveals something about who we are. Collectively, as a nation, but also down to the familial level. Perhaps that's why this natural cycle is so beautiful - it clarifies what is important, what is worth being around, in, keeping. It is sobering to look at friendships, jobs, habits, and belongings and evaluate what is helpful to us, and what can be discarded - getting rid of what is no longer useful does not mean the act of discarding is not painful.

I have read, between Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle & other literatures about the crisis in farming and especially around seeds. Producing heirloom vegetables has become difficult, with corporations like Monsanto putting patents and prohibitions on farmers who have grown similar crops (see Vanity Fair expose here). I came across a local "seed bank" - like a library, but for seeds - a way to keep a record, reproducible if and when needed and desired, to promote and sustain generations of natural diversity. Here is a link to the Hudson Valley Seed Library, folks who are saving the seed legacy of the possibilities for growing plants in our area.

Seeds is a lovely metaphor for fall, the idea of something with explosive and powerful potential locked away underground, that something can look like nothing but then surprise us with its bounty, that the surface doesn't always tell the whole story, challenging us to look - and to dig - more deeply. John Butler wrote a song called "From Little Things Big Things Grow." Here he relates the story of an Australian who fought the government and big interests for his land, sitting in his struggle for 8 years, in a simple environment - waiting for the seeds of justice that he had planted to grow. The song is a great exhortation to plant seeds, however small - but to realize that change takes time, and that everything beautiful, good and true takes time to root, to flower, to reach full glory. It requires patience (not my strong suit), but ... nothing is possible without the seed. So we should plant seeds of hope in our speech, in our everyday lives, in every manner we can, striving for what we believe in, knowing that every small act is potentially the genesis of something deeper, wider, and more vibrantly beautiful than we can possibly imagine.


from The Airlie Center
Warrenton, VA
11.1.2010

Taco Crawl: Experiments in South Brooklyn

Taking a cue from the ever fabulous "pub crawl" or "bar crawl," E and I decided to have a "taco crawl." Sunset Park is full of taco stands, trucks, and restaurants - each with their own flavor or style (cooking traditions from many Mexican states are represented here within a ten block radius) and claim to fame. So we invited some of our favorite friends who also enjoy gustatory delights and exploration to come on the first annual Taco Crawl in Sunset Park.
We began at Tacos Xochimilco, named after an area of Mexico City, south of the city center. Xochimilco (pronounced So-tse-milco in Spanish) means 'a place with flowers' in Nahuatl. We didn't see any flowers, but we did see some great greens: as habitual, our taco odyssey started with green and red salsa.




After some carne asada and al pastor deliciousness, Jahi decided to taste a gordita.
Like a taco pillow, filled with taco delights! Xochimilco had great food, and really spicy salsa, but plan on being there for a minute - worth the wait, but they usually have only one cook and one waitress working. You can find them across from the well-known Tacos Matamoros, at the intersection of 46th and 5th Ave.

After Xochimilco, we headed down to the truck we'd seen often parked outside the Key Foods at Sunset Park. Tacos Bronco - you can find the truck after 8p on 5th Ave at 44th Street. You'll recognize it immediately, because the truck creates a halo of white light into which eager taco-hunters crowd like moths to a flame. The truck is incredibly popular, so they have four guys turning out the goods inside the truck, and two 'handlers' outside it who take orders and pass the steaming plates of luscious tacos to the appropriate consumer. I can't recommend these guys enough - they gave us two free tacos to taste, as well as a cup of soup - they said they didn't recognize us, and thanked us for coming. About ten minutes after we ordered, they began to pass out plates to us. I tried my usual, the enchilada (spicy pork), as well as the al pastor. In a culinary innovative delight, these al pastor tacos - which are cooked with pineapple and thus have a juicy, rather sweet flavor - Tacos Bronco puts chopped fresh pineapple onto the tacos, along with giving you a grilled sweet onion.



Here are foodie friends Chris and Katharine pre-Bronco!

So yummy. And, the sign is correct - each taco a whopping $1.50. Brooklyn is the best.

After Tacos Bronco, it seemed ludicrous to try more tacos, but...we did. Heading down Fifth Avenue, we popped into Tacos California, at 47th and 5th Ave. They have stellar, smoky, melt-in-your-mouth carne asada. They also have creamy, luscious shakes.

This was the only place where the waitstaff only spoke Spanish (the other places showed serious American English influence, unfortunately) but we viewed this (correctly) as a harbinger of the great tastes to come. Our waitress had a great attitude, and helped us order in our fragmented Spanish. So, they get bonus points for her good humor.

By this point, we were averaging about 5 tacos each (you have to taste the different kinds at each place, that's the point!) and were starting to fill up. I remembered that Rico's Tacos has amazing 'tacos arabes' - regular tacos but on a harina-flour tortilla and a special sauce. If I have to describe it in words, it's like a taco fell in love with a falafel sandwich and they made a baby. It's incredible. So we went, attempting the nigh-impossible - but unfortunately Rico's was out of tacos arabes by the time we got there (10pm). Lesson learned: tacos arabes are popular, as is Rico's in general, so get there early! Their "regular" tacos are anything but, by the way - they have amazing, spicy, juicy carne enchilada and al pastor and buche and asada tacos...worth the stop. Find them near the wall mural of a pig smiling, roasting in a pot, and the big tacos sign with the arrow at the intersection of 51st and 5th Ave.

Full, we decided not to get some more tacos, and instead bought some beers and headed back to the apartment to digest. We'll be figuring out sites for next year's crawl, but in the meantime, here are some other places you can go to taste delicious tacos in this neighborhood:

Tacos Matamoros
Downside: lots of us gringos know about this place.
Recommendation: Great tacos al pastor & carne enchilada. They also have margaritas, and delicious nachos. Go on a work day, to avoid the crowds of gringos. The food is a little bit spicier on work days, too...or perhaps that's just the imagination at work.
Located at: 46th and 5th Ave. Look for the neon light that has an outline of the taco and emblazoned with "Hot Taco."

Eclipse Mexican
Lots of flavor, but not real spicy. They have a vegetarian menu, and offer definitely gringo Mexican food. Whereas some of these other places have menus on the window, or a cardboard sign, this is a place that is fully clean and you can take your parents there.
Located at: 4th Avenue and 44th

Happy taco-hunting, my friends!

Experiments in Brooklyn - DiFara Pizza!

Di Fara is a pizza legend. It's the kind of place where the service is unbelievably shitty, and the place so run down you can't even throw out your trash - in short, it's not the cleanest place you've ever eaten. It took us twenty minutes to even figure out how to order, the service was so bad. A standard pie is $28, without toppings - individual slices are $5. It's cash only. They can afford to be rude, though - if you're patient enough to actually wait for the pizza, you're happily surprised. There is a slogan on the wall: "Worth the wait!" It's definitely delicious pizza - recommend going on a weekday afternoon if you don't want to wait.



That being said, the crust was magnificent - thin, fully baked, lightly crispy, but not overdone. The cheese was melted, mostly, except for the handful of grated parmesan that DiFara throws over the pizza right when it comes out of the oven, before he cuts fresh basil with scissors onto the steaming, glorious pie. Yes. The end result is delicious - fresh, made just for you, cheesy and crispy but not heavy...we'll be back. When, I'm not sure, but I know we'll be back.

On Samson & Delilah: Indigeneity, Strength, and Community

This month, BAM screened an Australian film called "Samson & Delilah." Because E has automatic radar for anything Australian that comes through NYC, he knew about it, and we went to see this incredible film. It is spellbinding, difficult, and worth the struggle.

Samson and Delilah movie trailer HD from Trinity Films on Vimeo.

Samson & Delilah are two Aboriginal teenagers in a devastated indigenous community outside Alice Springs, Australia. Struggling with family, being a teenager, and negotiating their identities, events transpire that lead them to leave their community and go to the city, Alice Springs. Once there, they are homeless, and unable to understand or negotiate the ways of Australian city life. Delilah undergoes horrifying treatment, and in the end, they leave Alice Springs and go to her family's land, "her country." The tale is heartbreaking, especially because - as we learn only halfway through the film - Samson has a speech deficiency and much of the communication between the two teens is nonverbal. The filmmakers deftly highlight the nuances of nonverbal communication, whether it is Delilah's grandmother's hysterical responses to Samson, or Delilah's own physical reactions to the events that happen to her.

Warwick Thornton, the director, is from Alice Springs and shared in a Q & A after the movie that he felt an obligation to share the struggles of his local community, not to publicize them and cause shame, but just to be able to discuss them openly. For Thornton, film is a way to create community. The filmmakers had a premiere on a football field and bussed in people living in communities outside Alice Springs, feeding them and encouraging them to comment on the film afterwards. Thus, film becomes a way of enacting and living social responsibility, connecting communities, and opening dialogue about the ways that communities can effectively reach out to those struggling within them. Thornton commented that these teens' situation was local, but also global: "There are Samsons and Delilahs on the corners of Brooklyn. Do we notice?" He emphasized the importance of showing kindness and being open, as a community, to the struggles of people that are often marginalized because of how "we" (and here, yes, I am normalizing) perceive them. We see poverty, dirt, prostitution, homelessness, alcohol and drug abuse - not people, like us, in trouble.

Thornton also commented on the title of his film, saying that he had long ascribed the name "Samson" to the male protagonist but had not named the girl. He chose Delilah (or, rather, his wife did...) because of its irony - in this film, Delilah makes Samson stronger, rather than the Biblical story wherein Delilah weakens Samson, stealing his strength. Thornton said that he did this purposefully, to showcase the strength of native women - how they often carry their communities on their backs, building them - and rarely get the credit.

As we walked out, E and my amazing friend Norah were silent. I wanted to be able to have words, but I didn't. The film had stunned us. E commented later that the movie made him want to get more involved in our community (later events in the Southwest further reinforced this desire). Norah noted to me recently, three weeks after the screening, that the movie was still with her.

I am reminded of a story in Paul Rogat Loeb's amazing book "The Impossible Will Take a Little While." In it, Danusha Veronica Goska writes in her essay, "Political Paralysis," about the importance of using the power we have. She writes that we may never know how the small powers we have may change the lives of those around us, if we but exercise them. This movie has inspired me - and I daresay most who see it - to examine their social responsibility - to use the powers we have, whether it is voting, recycling, riding a bike or taking public transportation to reduce the carbon footprint, to feeding the hungry...there are so many ways to make a difference in the world. We cannot expect to change the world through inaction - we must start, even if it feels small, to make some contribution to our communities. We never know where the ripple will end up...and that is the beauty of the thing, that change is electrifying, like a current, like a ripple. Every day is a choice.

To find out when and where the movie is screening near you, check out the film's website here.

On Bullying, Contested Bodies and Marking Difference

Bullying has been much in the news lately, unfortunately. The recent suicides of young students has drawn attention to the dramatic and detestable negative powers of bullies. Many more eloquent than I have commented on this, and expressed many of my sentiments. Notably too Dan Savage has created the It Gets Better Project, as a way to reach out to those who feel marked by their difference and ridiculed for it. Again, I have little to add to those who have already spoken about their sadness, their desire to support those who get bullied and to sit in solidarity with them, and to those who demand this kind of behavior STOP. Immediately.

I went to a talk at the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute last week. It was a debate between reputed scholars Saba Mahmood and Joan Scott on secularism, religious liberty, and sex. Mahmood, who you should definitely read if you haven't, argued in her critical work The Politics of Piety that resistance is not the only form of agency. Intervening in scholarly traditions that have painted a person's agency or self-articulation as either succumbing to dominant, normalizing forces versus resisting them, Mahmood argues that this is a simplistic and non-useful way to look at the way agency works. In this talk, Mahmood discussed how often times, discussions of secularism locate themselves on gendered bodies. In plain talk, discussions of the "secular state" versus "freedom of religious expression" show up in fights over abortion, gay marriage, women's reproductive rights, etc. We do not see examples of straight men's bodies, and these mens' control over their own bodies - these discussions don't come up. These bodies are all gendered or non-hetero-male bodies, and control over them becomes an issue: does the government get the final say, or does the religious community? In this formulation, however, women's bodies and those practicing non-heterosexual behaviors are defined as "opposite" the norm - and straight men become the norm. It is precisely this kind of thinking, which manifests itself in othering behavior, that has so insidiously reared its ugly head in the bullying.

How can we accept difference, and hold a community of various different practices, without the fear of that difference? I would call for tolerance, but after reading Wendy Brown's Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire, I can no longer advocate for tolerance. I advocate a space where all identities can be respected and shared, even and especially when they conflict. Even in New York, though, a city full of different identities and traditions, I have found troubling encounters with difference. Two nights ago, I got on the R train coming home from the gym after work. The train was full of commuters, so I boarded the train in a crush of people. After I sat down, I looked around and surveyed the car. I didn't immediately notice anything noteworthy, but then I saw a large black lump sitting in the seat across and diagonally from me. It is fairly common to see women wearing hijab or Hasidic dress, but I have never before seen a woman (and here, I am presuming this person was a woman) wearing a full burqa, with a mesh covering over the eyes, either here or in Syria or Tunisia. She wore a full black chador, with a cape covering her form so that I couldn't see her arms, and she had her purse and bags under her cloak. I felt guilty, after all my training in Middle East Studies, that she had been so invisible to me, and that I was so highly aware of her difference. Ashamed of looking at her more than I looked at the other passengers, I tried not to look at her (although I have problems with this, too - I was avoiding her more than I did anyone else on the train, thus treating her differently, further marking her difference). I began to be aware of others' reactions to her, people doing double-takes and staring openly. I wondered if she felt uncomfortable with the attention she garnered; I wondered if she was used to it or liked the extra attention. It has been argued that some Muslims have begun to dress more conservatively, and more "Islamically" (problematic, another post) post 9/11 to assert their identity (ies) in the face of anti-Muslim sentiment and behavior. I wondered if she rode the train often. These thoughts felt distressing - I was imagining her personality because of her dress, defining her on one expression (perhaps chosen, perhaps not) of an identity. I was not seeing her as a whole person. I was essentializing her, and in wondering whether she took the train, I was falling pretty to the idea that the woman in the veil must not know where she's going nor how to negotiate South Brooklyn geography or society. I admit this not because I am proud of it, but because I am deeply ashamed, that after my academic training and after my time in the Middle East, I'd still catch myself thinking this way. It troubles me, because I know better. Period. And I am always frustrated when I play the role of cultural ambassador, advocating for respect and understanding towards Middle Eastern cultures to my fellow Americans who don't know as much about the region as I do, who have never been, who haven't studied Arabic, whose questions make me sad about the lack of knowledge about the world in general and the Middle East in particular. How, then, can I judge these others for mistakes I still myself commit, for ignorance I fall back on when confronted with something, or someone, outside my comfort zone?

In watching the other passengers negotiate this woman's presence, I saw some passengers got up and moved to other seats, or passed through the car, tripping on other passengers, as they stared at her. It was an uncomfortable ride, not just because of the MTA's orange plastic seats, but because of the social norms, fear, and tensions that were laid bare. I was uncomfortable with myself, for my marking of this woman's difference, for my reaction, for my lack of being as postcolonial/evolved/understanding/generous as I'd like to be. I did not bully this woman, but I did mark her as different with my behavior, just like everyone else on the train. So I am led to wonder, what can I/we learn from this profound discomfort? Is this discomfort an integral part of accepting an increasingly interconnected world community wherein each person carries many identities that articulate themselves across and into other identities, challenging our easy assumptions about people, the world, the way things are? Perhaps, like adolescence, this strange in-between-ness means that is fertile ground, that there is a space of transitioning, and if we can learn to accept that things are not always the way we imagine them to be, we can see more fully the world around us, holding our experiences with dignity, and without judgment. And that starts with me. I can't control the behavior of others, but I can work on my own.

I realize this little post will not convince swarms of people to change their behavior, especially since someone far more famous asked the same question I am posing many years ago. In honor of John Lennon's 70th birthday, I will end this post by asking you to:

Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world


PS: Another great book on difference and the modern era is Rabbi Jonathan Sack's The Dignity of Difference.