April 30th - Where Have All the Women Gone?
Dancing and Friday prayers.
Zaid’s sister Zainab got engaged today. Everyone was exhausted from dancing all afternoon at the party but it was the first time we’d seen each other in months so no one was too tired to dance some more. Tying sashes around my hips and their own, they moved the rug to create a dance floor under the ceiling fan.
You generally see the women in anything from long loose clothes, with or without a hijab, to a full on tent, gliding along like a black phantom with even their faces covered, but the underwear stalls in the market can be taken as fair warning of what might lie beneath.
The tassels of the sashes flicked wildly back and forth with the movement of their hips, their heads back, shoulders quivering, swaying down to the ground where they kneel facing each other shaking their busts, wiggling everything there is to wiggle, sensuous, sexual, energetic, whether the music is Arabic or western.
They do a clicking thing with the fingers, palms together, clamped by the thumbs, fingers outstretched, the first finger of the right hand making a loud clicking against the knuckle of the first finger on the left. There’s another rhythm, holding one hand above the other, clicking the fingers on one hand then the other then clapping the palm of the top hand against the closed fist of the lower hand so it makes a sound like a horse galloping.
Asmaa has been looking for work but can’t find any. She used to teach computing before Bibo, the younger child, was born, first in a public college then, after she had Mimi, in private lessons. Now there’s no work to be had; women, especially, struggle to find jobs because the sanctions and then the war have extinguished so many jobs. It’s boring and frustrating to be at home all day, especially for someone like Asmaa with good qualifications, not going out because there’s nowhere to go if you’re unemployed and it’s not safe to wander about.
“We do all the work of the house and then we chat on the internet and we download music and dance and we watch TV.” They know they’re among the luckier ones to be able to afford the internet in their house. I had to laugh at myself, watching TV with them, music videos on the Arabic channels, again a mixture of western and Arabic singers, gorgeous women in tiny clothes gyrating. Since the recent foreigner-kidnapping spate, we’ve all been disappearing under mountains of clothes, hijabs – the head covering, jubas – the long coats and abayas - the loose black cloaks.
When we were held in Falluja some of the guards were of the belief that even the most innocuous music could encourage dangerous sexual feelings in women. It was “haram” – sinful. We invented the term “haramovision” for all the raunchy dancing on TV when we got back. Asmaa and her sisters in law raucously told rude jokes, talked openly about sex. Like my friend Sabriya, their favourite channels are the sex channels, which they watch for both entertainment and ideas. “Iraqi women love the sex channels,” they both said.
Even Sabriya’s tiny house – a single bed in a square cabin of metal, a wooden extension built on to it and an outdoor kitchen and toilet – still has a TV. For those who can’t go out it’s a breathing tube to the world outside. Women have not completely disappeared: you still see them in the markets, on the buses, working in the banks, begging in the traffic queues. You still see them inside the universities. In Karrada you still see them, a few of them, dressed up and shopping.
But as Asmaa said, there is nowhere to go. The coffee shops are the preserve of men. The streets are dangerous. The shops are just depressing if you haven’t got any money to spend. There are no cinemas. There are few places where women can meet and just share gossip and company.
In the Sufi mosque at Friday prayers the women greeted each other with hugs and hundreds of kisses, whispering eagerly at the back while the kids frisked about, until a woman in a huge white outfit, the Prayer Police, came past to tell them to face the front, be quiet, keep their children under control. When she’d gone the chatter would start again.
Lines of women prayed, standing, bowing, kneeling, a young girl praying next to her mum, a smaller one going through some of the motions but mostly trying to balance on her head in some semblance of the bow from a kneeling position. A tiny, curly headed girl in a white frilly dress danced about, tumbled over one of the grown ups.
The Prayer Prefect came through the hall spraying rosewater on all the women’s faces, her own face now joyous, the severity gone, stopping to plant kisses on some of the foreheads, including ours, so the room smelled of roses and the breeze from the four fans on each pillar cooled our skin where it was wet and not swathed in abaya.
The imam’s voice was piped through from the men’s part of the mosque next door, asking for strength for the people of Falluja, calling on them not to give in to the Americans. Everyone moved to the front to stand close together for the final prayer and then the real business began of exchanging the week’s news. Men gathered outside waiting for wives and sisters and in-laws who were queuing for the return of their shoes, reluctant to cut short the only social occasion of the week.
Leaving the room, some of the women pulled down face coverings so that only their eyes were exposed, even the space between the eyes concealed behind a spur of fabric. Sabriya told us that in her neighbourhood the most heavily covered women are often the most promiscuous. Apparently there is a way of having intimate relations without, biologically speaking, losing one’s virginity.
And then they were gone, hidden away for another week and I went on to the tent camp because I promised to go back and play games again with the kids from Falluja. There are 97 families living there now and the overflow who can’t be squeezed in are staying in a school nearby. There’s a cooking tent now, so they’re not reliant on local people to provide food. The toilets are built and a water tank is working. The kids’ tent is due to go up tomorrow.
One of the children from the camp was killed yesterday along with another child from the neighbourhood. They were playing near the camp when they were apparently caught in crossfire between Iraqis and Americans, gunfire, mortar fire: no one seemed quite sure. Either way the trauma, the boredom, the constant closeness of death was all too evident on the kids faces as they greeted us with uproarious glee.
They were too manic even for a fairly raucous game like Cat and Mouse, so we played a lot of parachute football, made plenty of chances to just dance about shouting under the billowing rosy glow of the parachute and yelled “Boomchucka” a lot. The relief of having the children diverted for a while was all over the women’s faces, sitting in the tents. Some of the children still shrink from the helicopters, others rage at them as they thunder over, shaking the ground, churning the air.
The men came out to play as well, one or two recognising us from the mosque and the clinic in Falluja. Someone forwarded me a column from a UK newspaper sneering at the idea of a circus in Iraq at a time like this. Sorry, but you’re wrong. Play is what these people need, not just the children.
You generally see the women in anything from long loose clothes, with or without a hijab, to a full on tent, gliding along like a black phantom with even their faces covered, but the underwear stalls in the market can be taken as fair warning of what might lie beneath.
The tassels of the sashes flicked wildly back and forth with the movement of their hips, their heads back, shoulders quivering, swaying down to the ground where they kneel facing each other shaking their busts, wiggling everything there is to wiggle, sensuous, sexual, energetic, whether the music is Arabic or western.
They do a clicking thing with the fingers, palms together, clamped by the thumbs, fingers outstretched, the first finger of the right hand making a loud clicking against the knuckle of the first finger on the left. There’s another rhythm, holding one hand above the other, clicking the fingers on one hand then the other then clapping the palm of the top hand against the closed fist of the lower hand so it makes a sound like a horse galloping.
Asmaa has been looking for work but can’t find any. She used to teach computing before Bibo, the younger child, was born, first in a public college then, after she had Mimi, in private lessons. Now there’s no work to be had; women, especially, struggle to find jobs because the sanctions and then the war have extinguished so many jobs. It’s boring and frustrating to be at home all day, especially for someone like Asmaa with good qualifications, not going out because there’s nowhere to go if you’re unemployed and it’s not safe to wander about.
“We do all the work of the house and then we chat on the internet and we download music and dance and we watch TV.” They know they’re among the luckier ones to be able to afford the internet in their house. I had to laugh at myself, watching TV with them, music videos on the Arabic channels, again a mixture of western and Arabic singers, gorgeous women in tiny clothes gyrating. Since the recent foreigner-kidnapping spate, we’ve all been disappearing under mountains of clothes, hijabs – the head covering, jubas – the long coats and abayas - the loose black cloaks.
When we were held in Falluja some of the guards were of the belief that even the most innocuous music could encourage dangerous sexual feelings in women. It was “haram” – sinful. We invented the term “haramovision” for all the raunchy dancing on TV when we got back. Asmaa and her sisters in law raucously told rude jokes, talked openly about sex. Like my friend Sabriya, their favourite channels are the sex channels, which they watch for both entertainment and ideas. “Iraqi women love the sex channels,” they both said.
Even Sabriya’s tiny house – a single bed in a square cabin of metal, a wooden extension built on to it and an outdoor kitchen and toilet – still has a TV. For those who can’t go out it’s a breathing tube to the world outside. Women have not completely disappeared: you still see them in the markets, on the buses, working in the banks, begging in the traffic queues. You still see them inside the universities. In Karrada you still see them, a few of them, dressed up and shopping.
But as Asmaa said, there is nowhere to go. The coffee shops are the preserve of men. The streets are dangerous. The shops are just depressing if you haven’t got any money to spend. There are no cinemas. There are few places where women can meet and just share gossip and company.
In the Sufi mosque at Friday prayers the women greeted each other with hugs and hundreds of kisses, whispering eagerly at the back while the kids frisked about, until a woman in a huge white outfit, the Prayer Police, came past to tell them to face the front, be quiet, keep their children under control. When she’d gone the chatter would start again.
Lines of women prayed, standing, bowing, kneeling, a young girl praying next to her mum, a smaller one going through some of the motions but mostly trying to balance on her head in some semblance of the bow from a kneeling position. A tiny, curly headed girl in a white frilly dress danced about, tumbled over one of the grown ups.
The Prayer Prefect came through the hall spraying rosewater on all the women’s faces, her own face now joyous, the severity gone, stopping to plant kisses on some of the foreheads, including ours, so the room smelled of roses and the breeze from the four fans on each pillar cooled our skin where it was wet and not swathed in abaya.
The imam’s voice was piped through from the men’s part of the mosque next door, asking for strength for the people of Falluja, calling on them not to give in to the Americans. Everyone moved to the front to stand close together for the final prayer and then the real business began of exchanging the week’s news. Men gathered outside waiting for wives and sisters and in-laws who were queuing for the return of their shoes, reluctant to cut short the only social occasion of the week.
Leaving the room, some of the women pulled down face coverings so that only their eyes were exposed, even the space between the eyes concealed behind a spur of fabric. Sabriya told us that in her neighbourhood the most heavily covered women are often the most promiscuous. Apparently there is a way of having intimate relations without, biologically speaking, losing one’s virginity.
And then they were gone, hidden away for another week and I went on to the tent camp because I promised to go back and play games again with the kids from Falluja. There are 97 families living there now and the overflow who can’t be squeezed in are staying in a school nearby. There’s a cooking tent now, so they’re not reliant on local people to provide food. The toilets are built and a water tank is working. The kids’ tent is due to go up tomorrow.
One of the children from the camp was killed yesterday along with another child from the neighbourhood. They were playing near the camp when they were apparently caught in crossfire between Iraqis and Americans, gunfire, mortar fire: no one seemed quite sure. Either way the trauma, the boredom, the constant closeness of death was all too evident on the kids faces as they greeted us with uproarious glee.
They were too manic even for a fairly raucous game like Cat and Mouse, so we played a lot of parachute football, made plenty of chances to just dance about shouting under the billowing rosy glow of the parachute and yelled “Boomchucka” a lot. The relief of having the children diverted for a while was all over the women’s faces, sitting in the tents. Some of the children still shrink from the helicopters, others rage at them as they thunder over, shaking the ground, churning the air.
The men came out to play as well, one or two recognising us from the mosque and the clinic in Falluja. Someone forwarded me a column from a UK newspaper sneering at the idea of a circus in Iraq at a time like this. Sorry, but you’re wrong. Play is what these people need, not just the children.