As amusing as it may be to watch two non-Muslim women duke it out over the veil…

… I have to say that this argument between Naomi Wolf & Phyllis Chesler mostly depresses me.

When it comes to Wolf, I think she had her heart in the right place, but did make a few claims that rather romanticize the idea of hijab. For example, when she says:

It is not that Islam suppresses sexuality, but that it embodies a strongly developed sense of its appropriate channelling – toward marriage, the bonds that sustain family life, and the attachment that secures a home.

On one hand, I think Islam (at least classically speaking) is more more tolerant of the human body than, say, Christianity (being at least a nominal Christian myself, I do often think about this divide). Yet you can’t deny that not all aspects of veiling or purdah are all about celebrating family, some of them are there to celebrate prudishness, sexual anxiety, dehumanization of women, gender apartheid, and The Grand Tournament of Punishing Sluts. Who are sluts? Well, any women who don’t fit into whatever arbitrary standard of what is “appropriate” out on the street today. Something tells me that Wolf has never overheard, say, a clutch of women loudly discussing another for looking like a “slut” because her hijab does not cover her eyebrows. Maybe she will one day, and a dash of actual complexity will be introduced to her further writings on the subject.

Also, this:

…the Taliban were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women

No, just no. The problem with the Taliban is that they argue, via a barrel of a gun, that women are not human beings. I don’t believe it’s actually possible for an outsider to “demonize” the Taliban either, as they do a pretty good job of that themselves.

Of course, I agree with Wolf about the aspect of choice. I don’t care what Phyllis Chesler, or anyone else, feels about the veil, the burkini, the hot-pink catsuit I saw a woman wear on the bus today… You don’t get to tell anyone how to farking dress. I don’t care what you may think their reasons for dressing this or that way are.

Chesler’s attacks on Wolf framed the issue of “Burqa as ultimate feminist choice,” which was a smear tactic if I’ve ever seen one (could it be because I’ve experienced something very similar once upon a time?). Wolf may be a lot of things, but an idiot she is not.

Chesler does, however, have a point when she says that the Muslim world can be just as “debauched” as anything you’d ever see in the West; people just hide that sort of thing better, they don’t flaunt it, it’s all very surreptitious, but it happens. Closed societies deal with repression in all sorts of colourful ways. Considering the amount of so-called Muslim men that regularly tried to solicit sex from me while I was in Jordan, I just don’t buy Wolf’s insistence that society is somehow purer and human interaction is less explotative when most of the women are veiled. I found Wolf’s own wearing of shalwar kameez and headscarf in Morocco to be touching. Personally, I’ve worn the veil to escape sexual harassment, and no, it was not a “calming” or “serene” experience, it was an “oh crap, now I get to pretend to be someone else just for a scrap of respect around here” kind of experience.

I don’t like Chesler’s blanket, baiting statements about Islam, especially as Islam does often get confused with culture, but I’m not going to sit here and say that trying to pass as a Muslim for fear of something genuinely bad happening to me was a bit of wonderful cultural exchange I’d gush to my friends about. It would be as silly as expecting a woman who is, say, forced to take off her headscarf for fear of Islamophobic attacks to gush about it as well. I don’t mean to say that Wolf has no right to frame her experience as she sees fit – hey, I’m glad she enjoyed, I wish I could have felt the same, if only for a moment or two – but I do hope she at least realizes that when she says “choice is everything” she has to apply that to her own situation as well, and perhaps realize that choice can have a bit of a gray, fuzzy area around it.

Do you actively “choose” something when you are being bullied? Do you “choose” it when you are afraid, or even just annoyed?

I think it would be fair to say that we all make our compromises. I “chose” to step into a pair of high heels today to go shopping, I didn’t really want to wear them on this particular occasion, though. I had mean blisters on my feet, and knew they’d open up in those particular shoes. But I wanted to wear a short skirt and look taller, and I went for it anyway, and I paid for it too.

The little situation above might lack the drama and gravity of, say, veiling in order to not be beaten, but, regardless of what we wear or how we wear it, we make compromises and deal with consequences. And for women, both compromises and consequences tend to be just a little more severe than for men.

The publicity must be pretty good for both Wolf and Chesler right about now (and awww, look, isn’t it sweet? They both agree that porn is ba-yud), but if I was a Muslim woman watching all of this, I’d probably feel as though I was in a room full of people who were telling me to be quiet when the adults are talking.

On the metro. 9 p.m.

My big shoulder-bag, one of the stars of this essay, doesn’t lend itself to traveling with an iPod if I don’t have a coat with pockets on. On the metro, coming back from spray-painted, moonlit Obolon’, I ended up having to stuff it in the waistband of my jeans as I stood by the door, and then un-stuffing it and stuffing it back whenever I wanted to skip a song.

The man in front of me was watching with purely automatic interest each time that I raised the curtain of my pullover and drew it down again. His ears were plugged with headphones, like mine. There were interesting scars on his cheeks, possibly the kind you get when you’re trying to be a badass. Besides us, there were women with plastic bags and blond hair showing its darker roots, also like mine. There was a man in a tracksuit. There was an older woman with an amazing pair of milky breasts flowing out of her ruched shirt, an almost exact replica of which I’d picked up for one of my aunts in London, in Oxford Street, in the best time there is to be in London (which is May), when things still seemed as though they would not change.

And I could see in the eyes of the people riding the metro with me their loves, loves that were alive and loves that were gone, loves that were biting the earlobes of other women in cafes with bad music on the riverfront, loves that were half-sleeping under asters and garbage in dark cemeteries and half-wandering the distant, cannibal curves of Andromeda, and they were all crowded there, in bloodshot eyeballs and dilated pupils, standing on tiptoe, peeking out.

I wanted to turn and look at my own dark reflection in the door, and instead I clung on tightly to the handrail, and imagined that the outline of my body was not present in that horrible doubled-up world on the other side the glass. That I could not, even if I would allow myself, turn around and greet my own eyes, tinged with the dirty dishwater colour of the passageways below this ancient city. That the only person in the mirror was the man with the headphones and the scars. That I wasn’t part of this picture at all.

And I remembered a different metro ride, also at the crackling, smoky start of another autumn. Yura and I were going to an outdoor gym across the river, light backpacks swinging from our shoulders. The round lamps on the train were the colour of marmalade. The train bounded out from the earth, onto the bridge. The city glittered faintly beyond the glass, its lights always making me think of stolen jewelry.  I had been looking forward to going to the States later in the week, but a terrible sadness had been rocked awake inside of me, as I complicated leaving my friend, leaving the city, climbing the thin air above this river, while inside little pockets of warmth on the bridge, Yura and other people I care about would continue to go back and forth, listening to their MP3 players, berating a sneering someone for not giving up his seat to a hugely pregnant woman.

I thought, “how lucky I am to be inside this moment, instead of some other one.”

And last night, with the cool side of my iPod pressing against my stomach, and the cool glance of a strange man there as well, in that place where I’m used to having only warm hands, I thought, “I am lucky to be inside this moment too.” I didn’t sound too convinced to myself in my own head, but then an argument erupted over a sneering someone pushing another sneering someone into someone who was not sneering and only minding their own business thankyouvermuch, and the inhabitants of the train car blinked back their collective memories and turned to watch.

Tuesday music: the first of September edition

Today is the day that schoolchildren begin their year around here. The anniversary of Beslan. The symbolic (if not scientific) beginning of autumn. The day the harvest of a particular grain begins (damned if I remember which one right now). I walked all over town in high heels, my feet are torn all over the place, my body sore, I saw a Jack Russell terrier wearing pearls, and I’m happy.

Swagger – Flogging Molly
Angel Dream No. 4 – Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers
Malena – Astor Piazzolla
Nothing’s Gonna (Change Your Mind) – Badly Drawn Boy
Hussel – M.I.A.
One More Time – Daft Punk
Too Bad About You – Eleni Mandell
The Ohio Song – The Brak Show
Quicksand – La Roux
Lenochka – Soncekliosh

“Sing a little song of loneliness,
Sing one to make me smile.
Another round for everyone,
I’m here for a while.”

Here are Soncekliosh with the “Lenochka” video. I think you can figure out who they’re channeling here, at least part of the time:

Fast girls

There’s a certain time of day, when the unkempt stadium across from my building is divided equally by light and shadow. Today, I came out at just such a time. After my usual warm-up, I found myself winded fairly quickly, the wind whipping me with my own hair (“cut your hair, Nat,” my track coach used to say, and I did eventually, coach, but now I’m growing it back).

As I came around the bend, exiting the shadow and entering the light, I found myself flanked by two short, wiry men. One I had caught up with, the other one was catching up with me. It might have been the knot in my shoulder, drumming against my nerve endings in an increasingly belligerent way, or it might have been the feeling that I was about to drown from my own spit in my mouth, but I imagined suddenly that we were three horses, bridled and steered very roughly by the laws of physics.

And as I was thinking this, bright bubbles of pain exploding in my mind, two little girls rode off the shaggy grass and passed our troika on the track, the rhinestones in their barrettes sparkling crazily in the sun. One was on a bike, and the other was on skates, holding on to the back of the bike. They were screaming with laughter, the cautionary cries of the lady minding them rolling off them like distant thunder. There was no point in trying to outrun them, and I felt the other members of my troika slowing down around me as well. All we could do is gasp and wheeze along, and watch.

At my finish line, the men ran on ahead. I stretched my arms as I walked, and watched two blue-eyed puppies half-fight half-play by the shabby green construction fence. The first yellow leaves crunched underfoot. The girls were racing each other in the opposite direction on the track, their peals of laughter like the littlest church bells. I didn’t want to go back to the finish line, but I told myself we all have our purpose at any given point in life. Someone’s is to sparkle, someone’s is to sweat. I stood at the finish line, and wheezed some more and gave myself and my muscles a minute for self-pity, and then I started a new lap, running straight into shadow that, although waiting for me, hadn’t yet swallowed the entire stadium.

Synesthesia: I has it

Leave it to me to be inspired by  a Cracked article about how certain mental conditions could potentially get a guy laid (hey Cracked, when are you going to start helping ladies to get laid? Just sayin).

Nabokov had it. Tori Amos has it. Yours truly has it, though she’s not nearly as awesome as the other two people mentioned here.

Seasons, months, numbers, days of the week, letters of the alphabet, symbols, mathematical equations – they all have different colours, styles, and attitudes. 11, for example, is very pretty and cold, and a jerk, but also honest somehow. And if you ask me to explain, I can’t. 11 is a complicated number, and we have a complicated relationship, is all. It’s as if all of these things are tarot cards, and I am forever reading them, arranging and rearranging them in my head.

Wednesday is cherry-coloured. Saturday has the sweet, grainy texture of Palestinian knafeh. E = mc2 is like a green scarf unfurling on the wind. The letter A is very forthright, the letter B is like an old relative, and don’t even get me started on the Cyrillic alphabet. These are not even exhaustive definitions, by far. They can go on forever.

It’s a pretty way to think and feel, but it can also get a bit crowded in my head. I think it’s why I like to turn off so much, just stop inhabiting myself for a while. I think it’s why I have such a temper too. The circuits overload.

It is said that synesthesia is associated with high levels of creativity. I certainly believe that. But there is a certain form of discipline that must come when you’re angling for genuine creative output, and sometimes, marshaling these numbers and letters can be tough. They make the margins of things crowded and fuzzy, and they can be distracting. For me, it’s why trips to so-called places of power are necessary. My head is cleared from the flotsam and jetsam when I’m up at the Glastonbury Tor or St. Cyrill’s church in Kiev.

I realized recently that I don’t have a place of power to go to in Amman. The closes I’ve gotten is my friend’s house, up on a hill, looking out toward Israel & Palestine. But I’m rarely up there, so rarely, that mind continues on its merry way, spinning tragic love stories between upper-class 5 and sweetly naive 9, for example. And then I wonder why Amman is even harder on me than it should be.

What is a place of power? I’m not sure. I think it’s something that bends time and space, or at least perception, a little bit. Where the atmosphere begins speaking to you, and it’s like tuning into a whole other wavelength, where everything becomes clear and clean, or as clear and clean as it can be, and a very strong current fizzes along and washes the insides of your mind and the cracks are patched up for a time being by invisible hands. It’s not necessarily a place of worship, but it’s beautiful, harshly or otherwise. You’ll laugh, but the freaking Mall of the Emirates was that for me in Dubai (and who knows? You can argue that malls are their own places of worship).

I don’t know if I didn’t look hard enough in Amman. Or maybe Amman is just a different place altogether, somewhere where my mind can never really come to rest. All I know is that the synesthesia overwhelms me there. Instead of a quirky gift, it becomes a weight I drag around with myself, along with all of the other weights. It becomes meaner too. 11’s jerky tendencies become downright cruel, for example. Saturday is so sweet that it turns into a sugar coma. Sundays become bottomless and desperate, like an enormous bat-cave.

So if you ever run into me in Amman, give me a number of a letter or a vague concept, and who knows what story might emerge?