Elif Batuman writes an intriguing piece in this week's New Yorker about visiting Turkey and the ineffable sense of alienation she experienced, walking about towns and cities, how she was treated, or more accurately, ignored, and treated as a non person. But then, without thinking much about it, she happened to put on a head scarf while visiting a holy shrine and forgetting about it, she walked around town with her head covered, and her world changed.
Without her head scarf she would sit in a restaurant, an unescorted woman, and be ignored; no waiter approached, and other diners stared. Wherever she went in the headscarf, both men and women smiled, offered help, and generally made her feel welcomed and embraced. Bare headed, she was shunned and if not despised, at least she became a non person, at worst a pariah.
She felt she had compromised her Western, enlightened values when she conformed to the convention of the head scarf, the symbol of male oppression, of infantilization of women, but then she began to ask herself, what was so dreadful about conformity, about simply accepting the practices of the group in a small way?
It is a stunning piece about what happens when the individual accepts Groupthink, and the revelation is there are benefits as well as risks.
She asks important questions, and they are in a sense trans cultural: any American girl facing American high school conventions has had to deal with dressing a certain way, looking a certain way.
Maud once upbraided Mad Dog for suggesting that as long as immigrants dressed like Americans, looked like Americans, spoke like Americans, they were, in fact, Americans. Maud asserted, quite rightly, none of this should be necessary to be accepted as an American.
But listen to Ms. Batuman on her own confrontation with the demands and rewards of conformity:
When I went into a store, a man held the door for me, and I realized that it was the first time anyone had reached a door before me without going in first and letting it shut in my face. Most incredibly, when I got to a bus stop shortly after the bus had pulled away, the departing vehicle stopped in the middle of the street, the door opened, and a man reached out his hand to help me in, calling me “sister.” It felt amazing. To feel so welcomed and accepted and safe, to be able to look into someone’s face and smile, and have the smile returned—it was a wonderful gift.
How long can I keep wearing it? I found myself thinking, as the bus lurched into motion and cars honked around us. The rest of the day? Forever?
I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to me sooner to try wearing a head scarf—why nobody ever told me it was something I could do. It wasn’t difficult, or expensive. Why should I not cover my head here, if it made the people who lived here feel so much better? Why should I cause needless discomfort to them and to myself? Out of principle? What principle? The principle that women were equal to men? To whom was I communicating that principle? With what degree of success? What if I thought I was communicating one thing but what people understood was something else—what if what they understood was that I disapproved of them and thought their way of life was backward? Did that still count as “communicating”? And now a glimmer appeared before me of a totally different way of being than any I had imagined, a life with clear rules and duties that you followed, in exchange for which you were respected and honored and safe. You had children—not maybe but definitely. You didn’t have to worry that your social value was irrevocably tied to your sexual value. You had less freedom, true. But what was so great about freedom? What was so great about being a journalist and going around being a pain in everyone’s ass, having people either be suspicious and mean to you or try to use you for their P.R. strategy? Travelling alone, especially as a woman, especially in a patriarchal culture, can be really stressful. It can make you question the most basic priorities around which your life is arranged. Like: Why do I have a job that makes me travel alone? For literature? What’s literature?
It is a thought provoking piece. It may help explain why some Islamic women choose to remain in bondage, allow themselves to be treated like children or possessions. With Hillary Clinton running for President, with the New Year's Eve Cologne attacks by Muslim men directed at unescorted German women, Ms. Batuman's article offers a sort of explanation, if not a convincing defense of just going along to get along.
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