On enforcing modesty...

Last time I wrote about how culture is created, its seems fitting that a news article I read
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6213854.stm made me think about the effects of the culture that surrounds us. The article is concerned with the authorities in Iran clamping down on non-Islamic dress, specifically on women who are not covering their heads enough. It seems to me that the authorities have the wrong end of the stick entirely. A police forces power to enforce behaviours has nothing on how the culture you grow up in will shape everything about you: everything from your mindset to your three piece suit. What will truly change something as personal, and as unenforceable as what you choose to wear and how you choose to wear it, (sans major human rights violations) is not the written law of land but the invisible ties of culture – like the ether of old, they permeate everything but cannot be grasped. Growing up watching every women we know covering their hair or wearing a chador is what will lead us to follow suite, not the threat of prison. Sure, some will have to stay within the law to try to survive but what use is enforcing modesty through police intervention? Oppression will not succeed where culture fails when it comes to dress codes. At best it will only help promote a kind of lip service to the kind of dress the authorities wish to promote.

How else can we explain the millions of women and men (of many faiths, nationalities and persuasions) who choose to dress in a certain way – a way in which they have been brought up to feel comfortable – no matter where they end up living? And make no mistake this remark applies equally well to the Dutch lady I know with tight pants and necklines below sea level who works in Rwanda, as it does to those who dress more modestly than most in Europe. I was neither brought in a Muslim nor in an extremely religious family but I am not comfortable in a swimsuit in public. This is not a body image issue either, I’m no cover model and I’m comfortable with my shape, I simply feel rather naked in a swimsuit. Our sense of modesty, decency and comfortability with different levels of undress or overdress is, for the most part, something we have picked up and had drummed into us (in a very subtle way) all our lives. I doubt any amount of beach bumming in Brazil will ever make me adopt a topless thong in public. Over time I may become more comfortable in my one piece in Rio, but I’m likely still to feel out of it in Europe - just as some Malaysia women I saw at my university in Ireland gradually shed their veils only to happily take them up again on returning home. There was a very interesting article in Jeune Afrique magazine a few years ago, comparing the extreme cover-up of the female form, mainly in Arabic countries, with the extreme exposure of the female form in many Western countries. There was an insightful editorial probing the question as to whether both might be indicative of oppression.

I’m not entirely sure where my sensibilities come from – sure, some of it must be attributed to growing up in a reasonably cold and very rainy place, where skimpy was a heath hazard. But many more people I know from Ireland are ok with swimsuits and plunging necklines under their raincoats. Certainly much of my dress sensibilities were picked up from my family and neighbours. And no doubt I was affected by my time travelling as solo female, when it was materially advantageous to attract as little attention as possible. This theme has continued here in Rwanda, where a conservative local dress sense couples with the fact I will stick out anywhere no matter what I wear, conspire to keep in trousers, long skirts and modest tops. On one or two occasions when I’ve strayed from this even in a small way, like a knee length skirt or a top which shows a couple of inches below my collarbone, I’ve had more stares than I care to deal with. Sometimes I find the general leering at women here, might be enough to send me reaching for my chador …if things were just a little bit different. But try to tell what I should wear, modest or not, and like any person who values their free will, I’ll react strongly against it!

On culture, community and a sense of belonging

M turns into the sofa where he has been sleeping…I’ve tried to get him to move to bed but he’s not interested…meanwhile I am watching a movie and A is in the half awake-half asleep fitful rest of the chronic insomniac, curled up on one of the armchairs as usual. P has disappeared somewhere and in the middle of all this I feel something that I haven’t felt in a long time….a sense of belonging, sense of family.

Its hard to say what caused the meltdown, but somewhere around my three year anniversary in Rwanda, I found I just couldn’t cope on my own anymore. Working environments here are a constant source of low level stress, mostly related to coping with frustration and bureaucracy. Eventually the frustration turns inwards and you no longer remember what it was like to not to feel frustrated. It was bad, real bad, and a few of my friends were worried about me. Having too much time on my own to think was making things infinitely worse, so I abandoned my quiet little house where I stayed alone and temporarily moved in with P and M. These days A is semi permanent visitor to the house and N stays when he is in town, which is 2 weeks out of every month. There are four bedrooms but there’s never really an overcrowding issue as A is mostly nocturnal and N has a habit of crashing on the sofa and forgetting to go to bed.

We all have our problems, we fight, we drink, there’s lots of drama in the house but we put up with each others shit and it feels like family. Albeit a somewhat screwed up, emotional, semi alcoholic, insomniac family – but we’ve kinda created our own norms of behaviour in the time we spend together. I have a few other close friends in Rwanda but I don’t know how many of them would have had me around in the state I was in. We eat, sleep and play together and its nice, I feel more balanced. I had never lived alone before I came to Rwanda and I’m pretty sure now that I’m not cut out for it.

As we spend more and more time together, we develop our own unique ways of communicating with each other and our own in-jokes. Often it will only take a facial expression to have two of us in hysterics and the others wondering what went on. We are creating our own culture, it’s a micro version of what happens to and with human societies everywhere…all you need to spend enough time with each other and culture emerges. It emerges out of a shared experience of living. This phenomenon is easiest to see with couples, they quickly develop a “culture of two”. The longer they are together the more developed it becomes and the less those external to it can decipher what goes on. If culture is a way of relating to people, a way of feeling connected, of having something exclusive…a feeling of belonging and inclusion in something bigger than yourself, what then might be the flip side, the alternate state?

I think it was Robert Pirsig, author of “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, who described madness, insanity, as the Culture of One – the state of having nothing or no one who can totally relate to you, no one who can share your experiences. It must be truly awful to be stuck in a Culture of One despite having people around you…like solitary confinement, even in crowd. It certainly seems that people need people in order not to go crazy and certainly my recent experiences have shown me just how important a sense of community and the company of others are in keeping things on an even keel.

Over the last few months, I’ve also become aware of the effects of invisible process of adjustment and acclimatisation which I have undergone in the past three years. Its so gradual that I think it takes looking back over a long period to see just how far you have come from where you were. While on holidays in Europe last year, one of friends asked me when I was going home and I gave him the date. He paused for a moment and I asked me did I mean Ireland or Rwanda? To me in was a strange question, Rwanda was of course home. Ireland is “just” where I’m from. This feeling of belonging manifests itself it many ways. I used to squabble over moto fares, now I willingly give a couple of hundred francs (100rwf=10p, 15c) over the odds and I tip more. I feel some kind of belonging, that I’m part of what’s going on and it makes me more generous in terms of time, money and the almost daily frustrations of living here. Over the past weeks P’s house has taken on the role of home and where I pay rent is my house. Although I can’t easily explain why or when this change took place nor what exactly has been my trajectory on the path to acclimatisation. I have a feeling such things are never discrete events, more of a gradual shift in your thinking…like aging, you don’t see its effects until you try to compare photographs of yourself some time apart.