Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
“Well—”
“I know he’s not too beautiful, but he was only thirty
pounds, and it seemed the best way to avoid borrowing the
sheik’s horses all the time.”
I nodded. It did seem reasonable. But who would feed him
and water him?
“I’ve already thought of that,” said Bob. “I’m paying a man
to feed and water him every day, and he can be tethered at the
mudhif.”
So it was. Bob was very pleased to have his own horse, and
except for occasional visits to our garden to crop grass, the
horse was completely cared for at the mudhif.
Meanwhile I was having my own troubles. These were
serious, but they were hard to define, and I could not at first
describe them even to Bob.
At this time we had been in El Nahra for two months. Bob
had made many friends, not only among the tribe, but also in
the town. He felt his study was going well, and he was
enthusiastic and full of plans.
But I felt I was getting nowhere. I had conscientiously
visited a number of houses in the settlement, some of them
several times, had been welcomed and treated to tea and
gossip in each. But not a single woman had come to call on
me, and even in my own visiting, the women and I were still
saying to each other approximately the same things we had
said on the first occasions. My direct questions on subjects in
which Bob was interested were parried by polite remarks. As
my Arabic improved, I could often get the drift of
conversations and understand occasional fragments. It seemed
to me that many times the women were talking about me, and
not in a particularly friendly manner. If I could have been
certain they were talking about me, and understood exactly
what was being said, then I could have dealt with it, replied to
the comments and brought it out in the open. But the terrible
thing was that I could not be certain. Were they talking about
me or not? What errors in etiquette or custom had I
committed? What in heaven’s name were they
saying?
My
uneasiness grew in this atmosphere of half-hearing and part-
understanding.
I tried to tell myself that the women did not come to see me
because they were busy with household chores and children,
and that they seldom went out anywhere; this was all true. I
realized that my novelty value was wearing off, and I was not
developing any close relationships with the women which
might have replaced it. Why? I did not know.
Finally I talked to Bob about it. He tried to help, pointing
out that among the men, tradition prescribed how strangers
were to be greeted and treated, but that this was not true of the
women, who did not see a stranger from one year to the next,
and were certainly not accustomed to dealing with them for
long periods of time. Bob and I rarely visited together, so we
had little opportunity to compare impressions of the same
situation, which might have corrected my judgments and
dispelled some of my doubts. He suggested that he speak to
the men about having their wives visit me, but this I vetoed. I
felt that if the women had to be forced by their husbands into
coming to see me, they might better not come at all.
We discussed the situation very rationally, and I could even
explain it to Bob, saying that of course the language barrier
made all communication doubly difficult and was bound to
exacerbate the situation in which I found myself. There was
no doubt that the women did not answer direct questions.
There was no doubt that they did not come to see me. But was
there actual hostility? Unfriendliness? Coolness? I felt
definitely that there was, but I had to admit that my isolation
and loneliness might very well be magnifying this
unfriendliness into a ridimulous and unrealistic bogey. But it
was there, nonetheless, and I came to dread the daily visits,
the tea drinking among the whispering, the smiles which now
seemed artificial and insincere. And the giggling behind the
abayahs. Twenty women, giggling, with their eyes fixed on
me. Or were they?
Bob took me into Diwaniya, and we went to the movies. He
stayed home in the evenings to read and play chess when he
should have been in the mudhif, interviewing. He knew how
miserable I was and he did his best, but in the end it was a
problem I had to solve myself. We were very happy together
in our little mud house. If only I could make some kind of
breakthrough with the women, I thought. For one thing, I
spent at least four hours a day with them. They were a major
factor in my life, whether I liked it or not, and my only
company, except for Bob and Mohammed. I felt very strongly
that we must have some common humanity between us,
although we were from such different worlds. But how to find
it?
Things reached some sort of climax when Bob was invited
on a long trip to visit one of the farthest-outlying clan
settlements. The sheik’s brother and his oldest son were going
across the fields thirty miles on horseback, and would be gone
at least two days and one night. I did not mind spending the
time by myself, but the sheik decided it was not proper or safe
that I stay alone at night, and decreed that Amina, Selma’s
servant, would sleep in the house with me. At that particular
stage in my relations with the tribal women, a servant from the
harem to watch my every movement as I brushed my teeth,
washed my face and went to bed was the last thing on earth I
wanted. But there was no help for it. The sheik said she was to
come, and she came.
Poor Amina. I think she relished the night with me even
less than I did, but there was no recourse for her either. She
came at suppertime, and sat on the floor beside me, watching
me as I ate. Then followed the hour when I usually read or
wrote letters. Amina continued to watch me. A half hour of
this intense, silent scrutiny was enough. I gave up, made tea
and offered her some, and tried to talk. She was not very
communicative, but she drank the tea. Mohammed came to set
up a camp cot in the living room, beside the bed where I slept.
Amina was to sleep on the cot and I was to wake her at five,
so she could go and milk the cows. Mohammed bade us good
night and departed. I wanted to undress and climb into bed
but, feeling shy, went into the kitchen to change into my
nightgown. Amina followed me. I came back to the living
room; she did likewise. Apparently the sheik had warned her
that things would go badly with her if she let me out of her
sight for a single moment after darkness fell. I wondered
whether she would accompany me to the toilet. She started to,
but stopped halfway down the path to allow me some privacy.
I came back, undressed as I had seen my grandmother do,
putting the nightgown on over everything and gradually
discarding clothes from beneath its protection, while Amina
watched. I got into bed. Amina wrapped herself in her abayah
and lay down on the cot, pulling up the blanket which I had
offered her. Once more I got up to turn on the light and check
the alarm, and at this point Amina spoke.
“Is your husband kind to you?” she asked. I said yes. She
sighed, and burst into tears. I was appalled. I was trying to
make up my mind whether to go over to her when she stopped
dead in the middle of a sob, sat up cross-legged on the cot,
dried her eyes on a corner of her tattered abayah, and launched
into the story of her life.
How I wished then that my Arabic were letter-perfect! For
the story poured out of her in a torrent of words, punctuated
by occasional sobs. I caught perhaps a third of what she
actually said, but she repeated so much that the outline was
finally made fairly clear to me. As the tale emerged, I was
tempted to break down and cry myself.
Amina was a slave, but she had not always been one. As a
girl of fifteen, she had been married to a sixty-five-year-old
man. Not even her father thought it was a good match, but
there were twelve children in her family, and never enough
barley bread and dried dates, the diet of the very poor, to go
around. Her marriage brought her nothing but grief, for she
nearly died delivering a stillborn son, and then her husband
died, leaving her penniless. Her own family was destitute.
Most of the members of her husband’s family had died, and
those who were alive did not want another mouth to feed. No
one wanted her. What was she to do? At this point Sheik
Hamid heard of her plight. He had then been married to Selma
for three years; she had two sons and needed a servant. Hamid
bought Amina from her father for twenty pounds, and gave
her to Selma.
“And never have I had such a good life as since I came
here,” she averred. “Why, I can have as much bread as I want,
every day, and rice, and sometimes meat. Selma even gives
me cigarettes. And Haji-” here she raised her hands and her
eyes to heaven and launched into a flowery eulogy of the
generosity, the greatness, the goodness which were peculiar to
Hamid’s character.
“Do you ever see your family, Amina?” I asked, knowing
that even through woe and poverty and separation, family ties
are not soon severed in this society. The question was a
mistake. Amina began to cry again, and between sobs she said
she had not seen her family for seven years.
“But oh, Haji, he is a good man. There is no sheik in the
Euphrates Valley as good as Haji.” She went on and on like
this until she finally ran down. She was worn out and so was I.
The recital had taken at least an hour. I suggested we might
sleep, and she agreed. But when I turned out the light, the
sound of muffled sniffling came to me through the darkness.
“What is the matter, Amina?”
“Nothing,” she replied, but the sniffling continued.
“If your husband is really kind to you,” she said
inexplicably, “get a lot of gold jewelry from him while you
are still young. You never know what will happen.”
And before I could reply she was snoring loudly, fast
asleep.
Bob came back at 6:30 the next evening. I had no time to
recount the tale of Amina, for several members of the clan had
returned with the men, and were eating in the mudhif. Bob
was expected to make an appearance, and he changed his
clothes and left. Not more than five minutes after he had gone
there was a loud pounding at the gate. I thought he had
forgotten something and ran to open it. Not Bob, but seven or
eight black-veiled figures greeted me—the women! They had
come at last. They marched up the path, giggling and
whispering to each other like a bunch of schoolgirls on a field
trip to the zoo. Not until they were all inside the house and
had removed their face veils did I know who had come:
Selma—yes, Selma, the social leader of my little settlement—
and Sheddir, wife of Ali; Laila, one of the sheik’s nieces;
Fadhila, sister-in-law of Mohammed; two women I did not
know; and Amina, my roommate of the night before. Aha, I
thought, the business with Amina was not a waste of time,
perhaps she has told them I am not such an ogre after all. I
smiled at her in gratitude, but she was talking to Selma and
did not respond.
No one paid any attention to me. They gazed around them,
at our wardrobe with its full-length mirror, at the postcards
and the calendar I had pinned up, at Bob’s brick-and-board
bookcase, at our narrow bed against the wall. I decided to let
them look, and went to make tea, returning with seven glasses
on a tray. Everyone refused. I offered it again. Again I was
refused. Suddenly I was angry. This was a great insult, not to
accept tea in a house where one was visiting, and they knew it
and I knew it and they knew I knew it. I said, as sweetly as I
could, “How is it that you receive me into your houses and
insist that I drink your tea, but when you come to see me, you
only want to look, and not accept my hospitality?” There was
a shocked silence.
Selma rose to the occasion. “The women are shy,” she said.
“They know your ways are different from ours, and think they
should refuse the tea, since it is their first visit to your house.”
She knew I knew she was making up every word she said,
but I once more appreciated her tact and kindness in a difficult
situation. “But,” she said grandly, “I have been to secondary
school in Diwaniya and have read about the West, I know
your ways are much the same as durs, so I will drink some
tea.”
The crisis passed. Sheddir also accepted a glass, and
Fadhila, but the others still refused. I passed around cigarettes.
As I had thought, this was too great a temptation to resist, and
everyone, even those whom I had never seen smoke, took a
cigarette.
“What do you do all day here by yourself?” asked Fadhila.
“I cook, and clean the house.”
“Why don’t you do your washing in the canal as we do?”