Read Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village Online
Authors: Elizabeth Warnock Fernea
Tags: #Social Science, #Ethnic Studies, #General
Nour probably never been in a restaurant like the Auberge
before, but also that this was one of the few times he had eaten
with his father and perhaps the first time he had eaten with
any woman, much less a Westerner, since he had been a child
at his mother’s side. His father confirmed this in the next
moment.
“It’s time Nour learned some foreign ways,” said Sheik
Hamid, “well enough to get along, anyway, don’t you think?”
Nour smiled dutifully. “Yes, Father,” he said, although he
could hardly have felt more at ease by having his lack of
experience pointed out to us.
Being with his father, Nour was duty-bound to be silent
except when spoken to, a duty which he fulfilled that evening
to the letter. But he seemed totally bewildered by the food and
table service and kept glancing at Bob to see what was to be
done with the array of spoons, forks and knives arranged in an
unknown pattern around his plate. I kept comparatively quiet
myself, Bob volunteered a few jokes and Haji responded with
some of his own.
The dinner passed in relative calm and we were relaxing
over coffee when the trio finished and a large dance band
came on. As we ate, more and more people had slowly been
filtering into the Auberge and now many of the small tables
around the dance floor were occupied. When the band started
off, brassy and loud, a few couples ventured out to dance, in
rapid succession, a rhumba, a waltz and a slow fox trot. A
Charleston retired most of the dancers, but three active
couples remained and Haji laughed uproariously at their
antics.
“You see,” he pointed out to Nour, “that’s the sort of
woman you find in Lebanese night clubs. You can always tell
a woman of that type by the kind of clothes she wears.” He
glanced briefly at me, and then jerked his head in the general
direction of the dance floor.
Nour followed his father’s gaze and his eyes widened. I,
too, followed Haji’s eye, from my own reasonably
conservative dress (high neck, three-quarter sleeves) to the
décolleté cocktail dresses on the dance floor. And suddenly
seeing through the eyes of Sheik Haji Hamid the couples
gyrating frenziedly around, the women in tightly fitted low-cut
dresses kicking and twisting in time to the music, I was
embarrassed for my countrywomen. I was embarrassed partly
because they appeared ridiculous and partly because of what I
knew the sheik was thinking of them.
We could never have explained to Sheik Hamid that the
majority of those lightly clad, madly pivoting women on the
dance floor were respectable married women dancing with
their husbands, or proper embassy secretaries out on a date.
He simply would not have believed us. Just how firmly fixed
his ideas were we learned by his attitude toward us in relation
to the activity on the dance floor. It did not occur to him that
we might want to dance, or that Bob and I were ever
participants in merrymaking of this sort. He talked to Bob and
Nour in confiding tones, as though he were an old roué
introducing his sons to the fleshpots of Monte Carlo.
I suppose I was flattered, for I had apparently shown, by my
restrained conduct in El Nahra, that all Western women were
not, per se, wanton, but I had done this by generally observing
Hamid’s own customs toward women. How many years
would it have taken, I wondered, to convince Sheik Hamid
that I was a respectable woman if I had not worn the abayah in
El Nahra, if I had sat with the men in the mudhif, ridden
horseback in blue jeans and wandered through the suq and the
village as I pleased? How many years would it take, I
wondered, before the two worlds began to understand each
other’s attitudes towards women? For the West, too, had a
blind spot in this area. I could tell my friends in America again
and again that the veiling and seclusion of Eastern women did
not mean necessarily that they were forced against their will to
live lives of submission and near-serfdom. I could tell Haji
again and again that the low-cut gowns and brandished
freedom of Western women did not necessarily mean that
these women were promiscuous and cared nothing for home
and family. Neither would have understood, for each group, in
its turn, was bound by custom and background to misinterpret
appearances in its own way.
At this moment Haji Hamid leaned over and nudged Bob,
indicating a particularly curvaceous blonde in black who was
being whirled around by a young Iraqi somewhat shorter than
herself.
“There,” he said, “look at that.” From his tone, he might as
well have said, “Look at that tart and her client.”
To my horror I recognized a girl Bob and I both knew well.
Her partner was also an acquaintance of ours.
The gulf that divided us from Haji Hamid never seemed
greater to me than at the moment when I realized that we
could not introduce him to our friend. He had already made up
his mind about her, and the fact that we knew her would
detract from our reputation, not improve hers.
The sheik must have caught a hint of my consternation,
although I tried very hard to act as though nothing had
happened. Yet I was terrified that the girl would come over, to
confront us, as it were, with the absurdity of our position.
Perhaps I could do what such a situation demanded, but I was
not sure; I was afraid that our evening would be ruined and
something else indefinable spoiled forever.
“I think your wife is tired, Bob,” said Haji. He consulted his
gold wrist watch. “We should go home.”
Home we went, avoiding the dance floor on the way to the
door. We were not noticed. The Oldsmobile delivered us to
our mushtamal, where with many thanks and a great sense of
relief we bade Haji Hamid and Nour good night.
We talked until very late that night. The dinner party had
dramatized, a little more effectively than we might have
wished, the difference between the sheik’s world and ours. It
had also made us realize that our presence in El Nahra had
done little to resolve those differences. We admitted to each
other that we had both had somewhat irrational and idealistic
notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one
set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had
not basically changed anyone’s attitude, except perhaps our
own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal
ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have
hoped for, and perhaps it was enough.
26
Leave-taking
We were on pilgrimage ourselves, back to El Nahra to
celebrate the feast with our friends. Instead of the knocking
train, we had allowed ourselves the luxury of a taxi ride from
Baghdad, and the car sped through a countryside that was
shorn and green, for the harvest was nearly finished. In a few
fields we passed, clouds of chaff still rose into the air from the
threshing circles, where the fellahin led their strings of
donkeys around and around to trample the wheat and the
barley. We knew that the harvest was finished in the area
around El Nahra, because Nour had written Bob that the
annual division of grain between Sheik Hamid and his
sharecroppers had already taken place. The yield had been
good this year. It was May 1958. In Baghdad, pundits declared
the undercurrents of revolution stemmed by the news from the
countryside. In a good year, revolution was less likely. But we
did not think much about revolution that late spring morning.
After three months of hard paper work in Baghdad, the
prospect of a holiday with the tribe in the peace of El Nahra
was very inviting.
The problem of accommodations had been neatly solved,
and what I had feared would become a quarrel between Selma
and Laila did not even develop. Laila wrote to say that since
we were guests of the tribe, it was only right that we stay with
Sheik Hamid and his family. She and her sisters would expect
me for lunch. Bob would sleep in the mudhif and I was to be
housed in the harem—but where, I wondered? The apartments
of Bahiga and Kulthum were too small, and they could not put
me in Selma’s own rooms because that was where Haji slept.
“Are you looking forward to going back?” asked Bob.
“Of course.” I spoke more sharply than I intended and he
looked down at me.
“You don’t have to be so snappish,” he said. “I just
wondered how you felt. After three months of city living, it’ll
be quite a change. You haven’t forgotten how scared you were
when we came down the first time, have you? I was really
worried about you.”
“No, I haven’t forgotten.” But it seems so long ago, I
thought, when I was somebody else and hardly knew Bob. I
looked back at my old self patronizingly, mentally patting that
frightened bride on the head. Poor thing. She certainly had
been worried and unsure of herself. I could still recall vividly
my overpowering embarrassment as I had sat without abayah
in the Diwaniya station and people had pointed at me. The
frustration of not being able to understand what was said to
me. That circle of unfriendly women in Selma’s quarters,
whispering behind their abayahs and giggling—at me? Sheik
Hamza goggling. Sheddir spitting out my good bread on the
floor. And the chastening realization that the women had
pitied me. Pitied
me
, college-educated, adequately dressed
and, fed, free to vote and to travel, happily married to a
husband of my own choice who was also a friend and
companion. The idea of a husband as friend had never
occurred to my friends in El Nahra, and as for the rest, none of
it meant much beside the facts.
“Poor girl,” Kulthum had said, summing it all up. No
mother, no children, no long hair, thin as a rail, can’t cook
rice, and not even any gold! What a sad specimen I must have
seemed to them. I smiled again at my image. What kind of
charity combined with compassion had persuaded them to
take me in?
Bob spoke again. “What are you thinking about?” he asked.
“Only that the first trip seems ages ago,” I answered. “It
seems quite natural to be going back. I’ve missed my friends.”
Bob put his arm around me. “I feel the same way,” he said.
By the time we reached Diwaniya, the wind had come up
and the clear sky was darkened by a fine cloud of rolling dust
and sand. A strange brown pall hung over the countryside.
Shopkeepers in Diwaniya were slamming down their metal
shutters and animals were being herded home through the
streets, ominous signs that this would be a big storm.
“What a shame,” said Bob, echoing my own thoughts. “The
feast will be ruined.”
We transferred to another taxi and for the last time headed
out across the plain to El Nahra. The shrine of Abu Fadhil was
shrouded in a mist of dust, and the horizon was gradually
disappearing as the wind strengthened and raised more and
more sand. In an hour, when we neared El Nahra, the clump of
palms at the edge of the village was only a vague dark mass in
the moving swirling clouds of dust. We drove down the main
street just in time to see the fluorescent lights turned on,
although it was scarcely four o’clock in the afternoon. The
canal was murky in the dulled light. Few people were out by
the time we turned the last corner and passed the wooden gate
in our wall, locked and double-locked against intruders, I saw
in sorrow. We were deposited in front of the mudhif; here
sand beat against the taxi like fine hail and behind the huge
arch of the mudhif the shadowy palms were tossing back and
forth on slender trunks.
“We’re going to get the full blast of the storm here,” said
Bob. “The wind has a clear field all the way across from the
desert. I hope it lets up soon. Oh look, there’s Nour coming
down from the mudhif. I’d better go.”
“Have a good time,” added Bob, and he was gone, running
back with Nour to the shelter of the mudhif.
Ali, the old gardener, helped me out of the taxi and for the
first time the full force of the wind hit me, whipping my
abayah around my legs and flinging sand into my face. I
pulled my abayah close for protection, Mohammed took my
bag and I was ushered into the compound.
“She’s come!” shouted a figure, whom I recognized in the
dimness as Amina. She dashed forward. “Beeja is here!” she
called.
“Ahlan wusahlan,”
said a voice. Samira, I thought.
“Ahlan, ahlan,”
another called. Bahiga.
“Beeja,” cried Laila and took both my hands. She stood off
and looked me over quizzically. “You came back.”
“Of course I came back,” I said, trying to be matter-of-fact
and smiling at that sharp sidelong look of Laila’s.
Fatima shook my hand. “We told you, Laila,” she chided.
Kulthum’s voice was heard scolding. “What are you
standing out there in the wind for? Can’t you see that Beeja