th<\/sup> century Italians —\u00a0that they would\u00a0piously feel that a viewer’s\u00a0clothing was\u00a0disrupting their fiction. Perhaps it says something about the artistic poverty\u00a0of the opera class that its elite performers can\u2019t recognize the strange parallels of passion and anachronism mirrored across\u00a0the footlights that night. The bustier and tophat-wearers gazed out into the front row, and saw a black gown and niq\u0101b reflected back.<\/p>\nIt couldn\u2019t have been more twistedly perfect, unless of course the opera that night had been Strauss\u2019 Salom\u00e9, and the soprano had stopped the dance of veils to demand the woman in the front row strip down or leave.<\/p>\n
Here we see Europe, reconstructed and curated for tourists, meet the \u201ctourist from the Gulf State\u201d, who is most likely spending oil money \u2013 \u20ac210 of it for her front-row seat \u2013 and blink. Did the singers\u00a0forget exactly how they are filling up their cars and the furnaces of their heritage ch\u00e2teaux? Aren\u2019t those front-row seats and luxury boxes usually occupied by executives of the Total Soci\u00e9t\u00e9 Anonyme oil Corp., who spread the values of Libert\u00e9, Equalit\u00e9, Fraternit\u00e9 and postcolonial neoliberalism throughout their Gulf outposts while so suavely veiled in their Cardin and Gaultier?<\/p>\n
Next time I\u2019m in Paris I think I\u2019ll go to the Bastille in a full burqa sewn from several tricolour French flags, with a little visor made of fine French lace, just to see what happens. I\u2019ll either be ejected or given a slot at Fashion Week.<\/p>\n
Of course, I can\u2019t say I personally understand the niq\u0101b. I don\u2019t know what it is like to move through the world under a covering I feel compelled by belief or force to wear. Perhaps because I have always been obliged to perform my face in the open. But what would my face feel like if I weren\u2019t using it to present whatever I thought others wanted to see? Does the niq\u0101b-wearer not have to perform? To smile when she doesn\u2019t feel a smile? Does her jaw feel relaxed? Are her cheeks soft and neutral? Can she speak in a voice unaltered by forced expressions? Does the veil constitute a kind of portable room of her own? Can she speak for herself?<\/p>\n
To so many, the niq\u0101b seems to be\u00a0a shimmering black box. Who\u00a0has the code? Muslim scholars agree it is nowhere near obligatory as a religious commitment. Many outsiders revile it as a sign of patriarchal control. Many insider-wearers claim it frees them from colonialist sexual objectification, preserving their attention for God. Some older-school feminists worry that these women are only expressing the freedom to be subjugated and possessed. The phrase \u201cStockholm Syndrome\u201d is bandied about. But some newer-school feminists hear their reports more generously, and insist that the empowerment of women is best served by listening carefully to what they say, regardless of how it grates on one\u2019s values.<\/p>\n
Many prominent beefy white men see the niq\u0101b as a security threat, or proof of intent to defraud. In Australia, some parliamentarians want to segregate veiled women who visit the legislative chambers into the enclosed areas normally reserved for noisy children. It\u2019s unclear whether they think that children and veiled women are equally likely to be suicide bombers, or that if the women are bombers it\u2019s better they blow up some noisy children while they\u2019re at it. Of course, given that any eco-terrorist could strap explosives to her chest under her hippie poncho if that was her thing, a security check that democratically scans everyone entering the premises is the only smart solution.<\/p>\n
In Canada, Jason Kenney, who struggles nobly with the oxymoronic role of Conservative Minister for Multiculturalism, claims that the words a woman speaks in her Canadian citizenship ceremony won\u2019t work if she speaks them through a niq\u0101b. Prime Minister Stephen Harper has recently agreed. Apparently the ghost of John A. MacDonald needs to see your face to assess your honesty in reciting the pledge.<\/p>\n
Judges sport such\u00a0snappy black robes. Are there many of them who are concerned that a woman might play a recording of her oath beneath her\u00a0veil? Or worse: a recording of someone else reciting the oath? She could do it, I suppose, with a small beat box, which would be kind of cool. She could go further and beat box it out while standing under the portrait of the Queen, whose crown demurely covers much of her bluish perm. Who isn\u2019t in a veil?<\/p>\n
And what if the judge is visually impaired, and wouldn\u2019t be able to see the veiled woman\u2019s mouth moving anyway? There are so many ways in which the magical thinking of statecraft can be confounded!<\/p>\n
The covering is powerful in the most ambivalent and unreadable way. As it conceals the face, it also hides the power that conceals the face. It might be consented to, it might be forced: no one can really say, case by case. (Although it\u2019s hard to consent to anything so pervasive, and certainly when you\u2019re a pre-teen.) The niq\u0101b\u00a0wrests power back from the consumer-surveillance state. it\u00a0renders the person unreadable by facial recognition software. Security video cannot track the wearer, and Facebook cannot market to her based upon photo-tags. It removes the wearer from our facial economy. It insults so many expectations of freedom, even as it shows so many freedoms to be hollow.<\/p>\n
I was waiting in Heathrow on a layover a few months back. There were several niq\u0101b\u2019d women at the gate. I was fascinated. They seemed to share a secret. I could hear them laugh and chat in softly pharyngealized staccato. They looked through each other\u2019s glittering bags of duty-free. I could see their eyes smiling, but I might have been making it up. Their husbands or brothers walked together down the marble hall, arm in arm, in impeccable silks and linens, discussing things quietly.<\/p>\n
As I gawked, I noticed that the robes and niq\u0101bs were all delicately lined with tiny rhinestones. They might have been diamonds. Their hemlines draped graciously over Prada slippers. It seemed that the niq\u0101b can also be a fashion, intimating beauty too transgressive to be seen. I totally intruded upon them with my stare, which is regrettable but also funny, because surely at least part of the point of the garb is to avoid an unwanted, othering male gaze.<\/p>\n
When I see the niq\u0101b worn by women lugging their vegetables home to the public housing complex where I go to swim I don\u2019t feel the same things at all. So my brain is clearly colluding wealth with independence and poverty with oppression in a way that wouldn\u2019t survive close scrutiny. But in that moment in the airport, suspended between times and cultures, I found the garment simple, powerful, and inscrutable. Some day I hope to become friends with a woman who wears a niq\u0101b. Isn’t this part of what this about — that Jason Kenney and Stephen Harper only have a certain circle of pasty friends? How much wider is my circle? If I made friends with a woman who wears a niq\u0101b, maybe I would\u00a0understand it better. Perhaps I might understand\u00a0what might sometimes be a strange inversion of my own power as a white man.<\/p>\n
Isn\u2019t my own white male face a kind of mask? Do I wear it with as much confidence as some women might wear a niq\u0101b \u2013 knowing it will project a certain meaning and allegiance without effort? That it may just take certain vulnerabilities completely off the table? My privilege allows me to walk through the world far less concerned about smiling, appearing deferent, or averting my gaze. I am male and white: both hide whoever I am\u00a0behind an unearned attribution of power.<\/p>\n
Perhaps when I am uncomfortable with the niq\u0101b it is because it infringes upon this strength. I guess there\u2019s a greasy bit of Aussie PM Tony Abbott within me: he said he found the veil \u201cconfronting\u201d. At\u00a0least he is transparent about\u00a0his othering reactivity. Suddenly, Tony and I see the draped contours of a face that needs to project no effort or deference towards me, because it is hidden. How dare a person hide from us? How dare this<\/em> be their expression or erasure of gender? How dare they wear\u00a0a mask more impenetrable than our own? The danger isn\u2019t in the explosives that are not strapped around her waist. It is in the specter of what we cannot understand and control.<\/p>\nRemember when 80s supermodel Kelly LeBrock did that Pantene shampoo commercial where she hair-flipped and gazed into the camera and purred \u201cDon\u2019t hate me because I\u2019m beautiful?\u201d I had a dream last night in which the opera-niq\u0101b woman, black cloth fluttering in the stage-wind, gazed at the camera of my mind and said in perfect Oxford English \u201cDon\u2019t hate me because I don\u2019t give a shit about whether you think I\u2019m beautiful.\u201d<\/p>\n
There\u2019s this meme popping up in racist Facebook threads that shows a woman in a black burqa standing on a sidewalk, flanked by two black bags of garbage. The caption says: \u201cHello Mrs. Abudullah \u2013 nice children you have there.\u201d<\/p>\n
That just about says it all, doesn\u2019t it? Here is a woman whose faith or circumstance or even politics has covered her from view, and it enrages people\u00a0so much that that they\u00a0toilet the stresses of their\u00a0own veils upon her. And they\u00a0hate her children, who clearly spoil the fantasy of a living in a world they\u00a0can understand.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no wonder that some of them will not sing, to give her two dreamy hours of Verdi\u2019s homage to La Triavata \u2013 the \u201cfallen woman\u201d.<\/p>\n
Singers: the show must go on. Consider the veil, the robe, your foundation makeup, rouge, wigs, and all your Jaguars burning up gas. It\u2019s all a fucking show, except for those who are hungry.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Next time I\u2019m in Paris I think I\u2019ll go to the Bastille in a full burqa sewn from several tricolour French flags, with a little visor made of fine French lace, just to see what happens. I\u2019ll either be ejected or given a slot at Fashion Week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"slim_seo":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,21,23,24,1],"tags":[412,413,414,415],"class_list":["post-4558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activism","category-articles","category-blog","category-featured","category-uncategorized","tag-bastille-opera-house","tag-jason-kenney","tag-niqab","tag-stephen-harper"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4558\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/matthewremski.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}