More Honesty Please
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.
Posted by on 12/07 at 04:48 AM
Nice dissection of Crittenden. I didn’t read her article, but I sense from your critique that she did something that is hard to cover: coming up with a good idea (dressing up like a moslem and going about in public) then park it there. The problem with good ideas is that they can create lethargy of thought, as if the ideas themselves are enough to deliver the goods. Got to fight the impulse and take it all the way with thoughtfulness and a willingness to say what you never would have predicted.
Posted by
Ibrahim on 12/08 at 07:01 PM
Thanks Ibrahim. I think you’re right--I think we writers have a tendency to come up with a good idea and immediately anticipate its outcome. To park it, as you said. It’s easy to treat real life as you would fiction; to come up with the end of the story as soon as you come up with the beginning. (I think about 70% of modern journalism is ‘fictionalized’ in such a way.) It’s an understandable impulse as it makes for better writing (real life is too complicated to be cohesive, as often as not), but it’s very dangerous.
Posted by Willow on 12/08 at 09:48 PM
Crittenden’s piece is pretty awful. Orientalism, yes, and other things too. I notice in the video that she speaks of what she felt wearing her “outfit” in the second person, as if her own one week experiece was just what it feels like for every women who normally dresses this way. But those other women do seem to be invisible or not really real—to her. She says, “When I see a woman entirely masked in black cloth, I can’t help but wonder what it must be like to be her—and what it would be like to be fully cloaked in my own life. The garment is at once so alien and so personal, so mundane and yet so fraught with meaning.” She might have better things to say, even cirtical things about this garment, if she didn’t reduce the lives of these women to the clothes they wear in public.
Good piece, Willow.
Posted by Priscilla on 12/09 at 02:12 AM
I’ll just say this - I’m so glad you’re blogging again.
Posted by
Muse on 12/09 at 12:38 PM
Thanks, M. 
Posted by Willow on 12/09 at 08:54 PM
I wrote a little on her article on my blog. The main thing to me was just how SILLY the whole thing was. Dressing as someone else for a few days while not leaving your own safety bubble? THAT’S supposed to be hard hitting undercover journalism? Her cardinal sin wasn’t stupidity, inconsistency, or vapidity, though there were plenty of all three; it was being fucking boring.
Posted by
Dave on 12/10 at 09:36 PM
I actually read your piece and thought it was hilarious and well-observed as always. It wasn’t the boring-ness that turned me off, however--I can live with boring, but that level of insincerity makes my skin crawl.
You’re not based in Barcelona, are you?
Posted by Willow on 12/10 at 10:21 PM
Ah, no, I’ve been there but I’m currently based in Flagstaff Arizona with plans to live in China in the next year. My blog name is a play on/combination of two things; the Shia slogan “Every Land is Karbala, Every Day is Ashura” and the brawls on May Day during the Spanish civil war; the Anarchists would go out and fight the Stalinists, since they considered them not that different from Franco’s Fascists, in the streets in Barcelona. This may be part of why the Fascists won, but I still like it, and it fits in with my ideals.
Posted by
Dave on 12/10 at 10:41 PM
This kind, of journalism is so outmoded for the very reasons you describe. Mostly because she had nothing to lose, was never in any danger, and felt exotic and watched. An exhibitionists delight. Since the days of Black Like Me, and Gentleman’s Agreement, such journalism has gone downhill as the news media has become more and more fractured along political lines, and more and more an entertainment vehicle.
Ya Haqq!
Posted by
irving on 12/10 at 11:15 PM
Crittenden aside, when you said:
“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”
BUT here’s something to consider...by putting yourself in the shoes of the subject that you’re studying, depending on how long you do it and how committed you are, don’t you gain an insight into their world? Maybe it’s fair to say that anthropologists will never be able to experience the world in exactly the same way as the people they live amongst, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that observers can’t empathize or sympathize with the lives of the subjects that they live amongst. And doesn’t that ability to empathize and sympathize with others bring you closer to objectivity in your understanding of them?
Posted by Asad on 12/11 at 04:24 AM
willow, there is a critique of crittenden’s “experiment” at the anti-racism blog Racialicious. Read the comments as well.
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