More Honesty Please

December 07

Recently, Huffington Post blogger Danielle Crittenden started a series of posts documenting a social experiment: for one week, she is wearing the all-encompassing black niqab while going about her daily life in Washington, DC. De rigeur in Saudi Arabia, the popularity of the niqab has been steadily rising throughout the Islamic world for the past couple of decades. With true participatory vigor, Ms. Crittenden has taken it upon herself--literally--to see what the deal is with the veil.

Already, the apologists will cry foul: wearing niqab is not mandatory in Saudi Arabia. To which I reply: it’s not mandatory to wear a shirt on the NYC subway either, but what woman is suicidal enough to go without one? Social pressure is every bit as real as legal pressure, and there is often far more grey between the two than we like to admit. Just as women in the west are forced by convention to cover their breasts--a thing unheard of in some African countries--women in many parts of the Muslim world are under increasing pressure to cover their heads, if not their faces. The pressure does not come entirely from men, nor does it have to do entirely with religion. But it’s there, so let’s not pussyfoot around it. On this point, Crittenden is right.

Moving on, however, I have a bone to pick with her. I understand the nature of blogging--it’s gonzo journalism at its best and worst. If you don’t find the most obscure facts and make from them the most outrageous generalizations, you won’t get anywhere on the internet. I love blogging and I’m at peace with its inherent biases; I think the internet is plural enough to make it all come to the same thing at the end of the day. But Ms. Crittenden’s experiment carries a whiff of something a little bit more insidious than bias: a willful exoticizing of her subject matter, and furthermore, the fact that she considers human lives and the influences that shape them ‘subject matter’ to begin with. I know this beast; I have fought it myself. There is in our society a deeply ingrained idea that you can study people like you would study ant colonies or cell division--we like to pretend that the scientist is not affected by the fact that she herself is human, and believes she can achieve true ‘objectivity’; that she can resist being changed by what she studies. It is a chilly and dehumanizing philosophy--so much so that we must balance it out by cleaving paradoxically to its opposite, and engaging in an almost erotic kind of sensationalism, allowing ourselves to be carried away on the exotic trade winds and alluring kohl-darkened eyes of our ‘research’.

Yes, I am talking about the O word.

Orientalism is not a term I use lightly. Far, far too often it has been oversimplified to the point of meaninglessness, and used as an ugly slap in the face against any white scholar or pundit a postcolonial happens to disagree with. Edward Said’s books are so purposefully complicated and free of any convenient generalities that even his devotees seem to miss the boat sometimes, and replace his urgent observations with canting, divisive drivel. I don’t like to use this word. But in this case, I feel it’s warranted. Crittenden belies her own intentions by packaging the veil with FGM, misogyny, oppression and honor killing in one paragraph, then closing out her piece by breathlessly describing herself swathed in the niqab:

I startled at my own reflection: all that was left on my head were a pair of intense blue eyes peering back. I was about to become entirely invisible.

...Really? Because a minute ago you said women who wear the veil stick out--you notice them; are a little afraid of them; they pop up like beacons in shopping malls. A woman in niqab is not invisible. She’s a walking billboard for her ideals (and probably knows it). She wears a uniform no less striking than that of a punk with a green mohawk and multiple piercings. You’ve admitted it yourself. Yet now we pull out the shiver-inducing rhetoric: in the veil we are so enchanted with ourselves that we describe our very own eyes as “intense”. (I hope the vanity here is apparent enough that it needn’t be unpacked.) And we are suddenly not a beacon foretelling the polyester invasion--no, we are invisible.

Invisible because it’s true, or invisible because the word is a convenient literary trope, and will produce a very particular reaction in the reader? The first few paragraphs make Crittenden’s real opinion clear as day.

I don’t think Crittenden’s experiment or her writing is willfully malicious. It would be much easier if it was--then I could simply condemn her. But this is a much more complicated issue, one that is surreally difficult for even the most liberal white writer to navigate; assumptions so deep and impulses so inbred that they are not simply part of our culture, they are part of our very personalities. Getting away from them is a harrowing process--I still catch myself falling back into the role of clinical anthropologist at times. It seems like it shouldn’t be a difficult thing to sit down in front of your computer and ask yourself “Why am I undertaking this project; why am I using this kind of language; what is my real intention?” before you launch into anything touching culture and religion, but it is. It is insanely difficult to even ask the questions, let alone arrive at honest answers. But if these issues are ever to be resolved, that honesty is essential. I do not see that honesty in this series.