I have just returned from a trip to Saudi Arabia. As usual, it takes me a few days to recalibrate. It is amazing how sensitive we are to our environments, take the abaya for example. When I first arrive in Saudi Arabia, I feel like an alien in my black silk. In one sweep, just by wrapping myself in a physical symbol of Saudi culture, I am forced to slip into a different identity. Part of me rebels against this. I do not wear the hijab, surely it is hypocritical for me to cover up in front of men who have seen me head uncovered in London? Am I not pretending to be something I am not by wrapping myself in an identity that is not my own?
And there you have the crux of the issue for me. My Western side, the individualistic one, sees personal identity as the quest to show my individuality. Anything I do simply to conform and not because of deeply held conviction makes me feel lessened. But my Arab side, the collectivist one, sees the need to be a soldier of society. As the Japanese have a saying, the nail that stands out should be hammered in. In Saudi Arabia, a society just as collectivist as Japan, women are very much expected not to stand out in public. Hence the abaya, something that in one black stroke wipes out our identities. Standing in Riyadh airport watching a group of women sitting waiting, I could not tell anything about them, not their age, not the color of their skin, nothing apart from their general build — like pears, they could only be classified as small, medium and large.
I do not cover my face, I never have done, and neither did my mother or my grandmother. This to me seems to be enough of a stand to show that I am still a sentient human being. But day-by-day, I find myself feeling barer in my uncovered face. Whereas on my first day, wearing an abaya strikes me as alien, by the tenth day, I feel a peculiar sense of nudity to appear in public with every part of my body covered apart from my hands and face. Those few square inches of exposed skin suddenly feel fluorescent, because all the women around me are covered up, the fact that I am not singles me out and the way some men stare at me makes me want to run for cover.
When I think about it, it is both a question of perception and relativity. In my perception, covering my hair is conforming to cultural norms, covering my face is a negation of my identity, and the way I dress does not determine who I am as a human being. It is packaging. What I do is what makes me worthy or unworthy. I do not judge people by the way they are dressed, or at least I try not to. But a former colleague of mine once told me that where he came from, a woman with an uncovered face was quite simply a whore. He told me this as I walked side by side with him in my abaya with my face uncovered. I had not known what the Arabic word he used meant; he had had to explain it to me. I had looked at him with shock and horror that anyone should think this and that he should say it to me.
At first I was very angry with him for saying this to me, but then walking on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice and seeing prostitutes stand on the street in their mini-skirts and high heels made me wonder. We do attach labels to people because of the way they dress. To some extent, we all have uniforms. It is just how much scope you have to stamp your own individuality on your uniform. The businesswoman in her suit, the student in her torn jeans, the bored housewife in her designer labels, the prostitute in her lycra and fishnets. Every morning when we dress, we are putting labels on ourselves, from “I am successful” to “I am stylish” to “I am rich” to “I am available”, each person is conveying a number of messages by her choice of clothes. But as in any form of communication, the messages being conveyed and the messages being received do not always match. And across cultures, this gulf becomes more pronounced.
What I found wonderful in Jeddah was how women have started to stamp their individuality on their abayas. This is not new, but each time I visit, I am amazed by their ingenuity, by how they can come up with constantly evolving original ideas and designs within such limiting constraints. On my flight out of the Kingdom, I flew via Dubai. I took off my abaya and packed it in my bag the moment the fasten seat belts sign was switched off. Normally, on a flight to London, most of the other women on the plane follow suit, but not this time. There were only a handful of women sitting around me and all of them kept their abayas on. I felt so bare and awkward as I sat there in my jeans and long sleeved shirt. I felt more awkward than had I sat on a French beach in a bikini.
— Iman Kurdi is a Saudi writer living in London. [email protected]
