the gaze

For about a year now I've been periodically emailing fellow volunteers with interesting or beautiful or thought-provoking pieces and excerpts of literature that deal with women or gender in the Arab world. This subject is what really awakened and focused my commitment to learning about the region, and it continues to inform and color my experience here. Often when I find myself particularly frustrated or angry with some aspect of gender dynamics in Morocco, I'll turn to writings from the women of this and other Arab or Islamic cultures to remind myself in no uncertain terms of their perspectives. Their voices provide the distance I need from my everyday life on the ground here, but are grounded in the cultures that produced them - whereas I will always be something of an outsider, no matter how well I've adapted.

So, I figured it's about time I started sharing some of these wonderful excerpts with my blog readers too...the one below resonates with some of my recent musings on the concept of the gaze. In the poem below, Syrian poet Huda Naamani uses words to challenge and manipulate implied power dynamics:

“I Take You an Orange” by Huda Naamani
Translated from the Arabic by the poet and Miriam Cooke

I take you an orange and I squeeze you holding you to my face
Spring you blossom in my eyes
A peacock's tail you gaze at me in the dark
I wear you gipsy garb I fold you a nomad's cloak
A flute grass and warmth of sheep flow with you
In the arms of mountains you paint the wreaths of heaven
And the pains of a goddess

A frame for me I carve you I gild you and
I fill you with roses
A fish I slaughter you, or a sun
I bake you
A star
Lightning flashes from your ring
Your eyes hang on my face coffee grounds honeycombs
Nigerian songs brush my neck, flocks of geese
Your word is suspended on the back of a door a duck's nose

[From Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke, Indiana University Press. ]

I particularly love the line "A peacock's tail you gaze at me in the dark," which, in a reversal from the poem's first few images, makes the speaker of the poem into an object even as she is describing - in a way, objectifying - the addressee. On reflection though, between the "eyes" of a peacock's ostentatious tail feathers (which, if you'll note, are absent from the eminently more practical peahen (if you have never seen a group of peacocks trying to attract the attention of a group of nonplussed peahens, I highly recommend it as light entertainment)) and the focused attention of the written word, the latter strikes me as the more consequential of the two "gazes."

It reminds me, actually, of a moment I had the other day. The weather was absolutely gorgeous - spring in Morocco is a wonder to behold - and I was cycling into town. As seems to happen so often here, just as I had reached the peak of frustration with something (in this instance, with a particularly steep hill), spontaneously appeared to vaporize my feelings of irritation. This morning it was seven puppies playing in the corner of an alley. But that day, it was a small flock of sheep accompanied by three or four small, spindly-legged, soft-nosed, bleating baby lambs.

I slowed down almost to a stop to watch them go by (it was not unlike my first experience hiking among delicate alpine forget-me-nots in Colorado, which, as one of my companions remarked at the time, was like walking through "minefields of cuteness"). As I slowed and stopped to stare, I realized that the young shepherd was staring, in turn, at me, transfixed, no doubt, by my funny-looking American bicycle helmet, odd clothing and pale skin. Or maybe just by my blatant staring at his flock. We were all caught in a curious triangle of eyelines, me, the boy, and the lambs.

Sometimes the stares bother me. But if there's enough beauty in the day, in the landscape, in my thoughts, or even in a new skirt sent over from home, sometimes that's all it takes to make me feel a particular shade of invincible, oddly indifferent to anyone's gaze. It is not about being merely impervious or stoically detached from reality, but about learning to manipulate reality to find in it whatever beauty I can.