February 1, 2005

• Here are two blog entries from 2003 I thought new readers might enjoy...

  
  

  
  

  
  

  Thursday, May 15, 2003

  
  

  
  

  
  
  
  
  

  Pearlbamboo Runs Smack! Into Embassy Culture - Islamabad and Lahore, 1977 I'd been in Pakistan doing PhD research for 2 1/2 years, getting ready to return, when I heard that the United States Agency for International Development (AID) wanted someone to do a study on the role of village women in family decision making about farming and associated activities.  I was the only western woman in the country who had the requisite language skills. I applied, with terrific recommendations.  I interviewed with the delightful Mormon agricultural economists and rural sociologists who were running the irrigation management project that would fund the study.  All was good to go.  No. Finally the word came down that I was guilty of sexually inappropriate behavior.  I went to Islamabad to see the Mormons to see what I could do about this strange tale. They told me that the story was out that I, together with my friend Arif, who often traveled with me and my little boy as insulation and protection and because he was my friend, had been thrown out of a prominent hereditary religious leader's guesthouse in the middle of the night at gunpoint.  Of course this meant I was a woman of questionable virtue, obviously not the one to question village women on behalf of the US Government about how decisions were reached on how much to spend on wheat seed. Yes, I'd been thrown out of the gentleman's house, together with my little boy and Arif  - at gunpoint  - and in the middle of the night.  I'd refused his armed guard's invitation to visit the fellow in his boudoir.  I had told this story, part of the perils of doing research in foreign lands, as a bit of a laugh, to a fellow Berkeley scholar, then a foreign service officer in Islamabad.  He or his wife had retold it to make it sound obscene, told it to the head of AID and who knows who else. An embassy is a bit of a hot house culture, given to gossip, to telling stories that make the rounds as entertainment when there was no television, to fabrication or embroidered truth, to witch hunts...   The Mormons went to work, satisfied that they really wanted me for the job, and, I think, a bit disgusted about what was happening.  They had an Urdu speaker call my best Pakistani friend, a woman whose husband was highly placed in the federal government and at whose home I often stayed when I visited Islamabad.  She knew nothing of the problem and so could not dissemble.  She told the interviewer, "She is like my sister.  I am honored to know her and would be honored to have her visit my village.  If she did I would introduce her to everyone there.  She's taken the trouble to speak our language and learn about our country and our religion, our culture.  She is a wonderful woman, a good woman, my American sister...."  Armed with a transcript of this interview, backed up by AID Washington, where it had just become illegal to try to deny someone employment because of factors not bearing directly on job qualifications, those wonderful aggies beat down the head of AID and the gossip mongers.  They wrote me out a contract which I signed about 4 seconds after it came out of the typewriter in fear that something would happen again if I waited a moment longer. I hadn't visited my friend or stayed with her while this mess was going on, not wanting to chance bringing controversy with me into her home.  With the signed contract in my pocket, I took a cab over to her house.  I explained why I hadn't been visiting, why she had heard from my friends in Lahore that I was depressed and ill, for this took 4 months to resolve.  She knew all of this but didn't know why I hadn't come to see her, that I wanted to protect her and  her family should the gossip get nasty.   I'd been frightened because I didn't know how to fight smoke, felt powerless, betrayed by my fellow Berkeley scholar, helpless, was running out of money.  She told me later that all this showed in my face.   She asked me in, sent the servant in the car to pick up my bags.  Settling me in her living room, sending my little boy off with her ayah to be fed and to play with her children,  she studied me carefully, then called the servant to bring afternoon tea.  When it came and we were comfortably disported about on cushions on the floor, she poured the tea for me, insisted that I eat the delicacies prepared to go with it.  Then she smiled the smile of a lioness, though she was short and plump and looked more like a teddy bear.  "This AID man is very stupid.  Doesn't he know that you are my sister and that my tribe fights blood feuds?"  I thought perhaps I should dampen down that idea a little and started speaking...  "Yes, yes, but he did something against you and he can't do that," she interrupted.  "You are my sister.  I won't permit it.  We won't kill him but I have an idea...." One of the children came in crying.  We were sidetracked and she didn't tell me the details. The following morning, I dressed in my finest western clothes, took my briefcase, and was dispatched to the AID building to meet with the Mormons in her husband's Mercedes, white lace curtains shielding me from view in the back seat, a little metal flagpole for his minister's flag attached to the front fender, federal minister's plates on the car.  I usually took a motorcycle ricksha, so this was quite a step up for me.  The driver was a family retainer with a big handlebar moustache, 6'4", dressed in fine cotton shalwar kamiz, the big baggy pants and long shirt you see Afghan men wearing in TV news clips.  He sported sandals turned up at the toes and an ivory turban with part of the front pulled up and out to make a fan going up from his forehead, a gold brocade cone fitted into the center top of the turban to give it height and lift it out of the ordinary everyday style.  He drove in stately progress to the AID building, his turban and a rifle by his side on the front seat.   We pulled into the AID parking lot and were followed in by an older model black American Cadillac with diplomatic plates, the number revealing that it belonged to the head of AID himself, that very gentleman who had found me unfit to deal with Pakistanis because of my  tarnished morals.  Now, a federal minister's Mercedes didn't show up there very often, probably never without his prior knowledge, an appointment in advance.   He had his driver let him out without parking first, pulling his car in right behind mine.  My driver got out, his bandolier around his chest, placed his turban carefully on his head, making him seven feet tall, walked around to my side of the car, opened the door and took my briefcase in his hand, though he did not help me out of the car.  Propriety dictated that he not touch a female not of his family.  Grinning inside about the amazing confluence of forces that brought the AID director there just behind me, I walked into the building, the driver, carrying my briefcase, towering over 5'2" me in his regalia, bringing up behind.   We reached the elevator.  The driver had figured out what was happening even before I told him and he was chuckling too.   As the head of USAID in his navy blue suited, black wing tipped glory chugged in, a little breathless, trying to reach the elevator while I was still there to encounter him, my driver bowed, extended his hand with my briefcase, and said, "Mame Sahib, shall I return for you at lunch?"  I launched into Urdu, knowing that the AID man could not understand a word.  The driver grinned at me from under his turban with his head still slightly bowed, bowed lower, from the waist, and promised to return for me at 1:00. I swept into the elevator, followed by the head of the United States Agency for International Development, purveyer of and believer in malicious gossip.  He was virtually panting, lusting to know who I was that I should be delivered to his building with such pomp and circumstance.  In a curtained Mercedes with a federal minister's plates, no less. "I'm Joe Blow," he intoned, extending his hand.  I raised my eyebrows in distaste and looked at his hand as though it were crawling with cockroaches, his rolex replaced with poisonous snakes.  "I'm Pearl Bamboo," I responded, with a decorous, unyielding smile.  My eyes pinned him as though he were one of the butterflies in my childhood collection, the elevator the collection box.  Oh, the poor man.  He'd been gobsmacked by life.  In a panic he began stabbing at elevator buttons, hitting them all, his eyes skittering to the floor, the walls, anywhere but on me, confined by the fates with me in this little metal box. He got off on the next floor and had to climb several flights of stairs to get to the top floor where he worked.  Or didn't. My visit with the Mormons over, I went back to my friend's house for lunch, for the driver returned at 1:00, .  She was then and probably is still in strict purdah.  She had never finished elementary school.  She had travelled at that time only to Karachi and Islamabad.  She had learned some English from TV.  Many Americans would say she had a diminished life.  I never really saw her that way, not even when we would take the curtained car to the movies, various children in tow, and, all covered up except for me, head to the curtained boxes reserved for women in purdah.   I will say that I know no man who could have concocted a more perfect, more elegant revenge for a friend than sending me with her driver to show the AID boyo a thing or two about the real balance of power.   "Oh, I would have done it every day you were in Islamabad until this happened," she grinned that night over my favorite spinach curry.  She'd had it prepared for me because she knew I loved it and that it always made me smile. pearlbamboo ©2003

  Sunday, November 16, 2003

  
  

  Don't You Dare Grab My Ass - 3 years in Pakistan

  
  

  thebish's comment at the end of my blog about gender, homosexuality and Islam about his female friends in Turkey being seen as "easy women" brought up some memories...

  
  

  All foreign women under 50 are, I think, in much if not all of the Muslim world, having been one in Pakistan in my 30s in the mid 1970's before the upsurge in fundamentalist Islam, assumed to be "easy."  

  
  

  The cosmos, in these countries, is divided into private space (the home) and public space (just about everywhere else.)

  
  

  A woman's place, of course, is in the home (we are not so far away from this in our own culture - one of the enduring themes of my life has been to break out these very confines).  Wearing a veil renders women invisible in public space and with a veil they may transgress on public space without much of a problem.  The veil itself signifies that they are women of honor and not available, even for a cup of tea.  (Although our strictures were never so complete, we too have had, until very recently, relatively speaking, in our own history, dress codes that stringently separated "nice girls" from their opposite...)  The foreign woman is not veiled, her honor not protected by brothers and uncles and cousins.  The only available social category for her, therefore, is "easy."

  
  

  I got so tired of being groped in Lahore that I carried a brass tipped hardwood cane and would wield it to discourage gropers.  If the groper was on a bike, I stuck the cane into the bike spokes if I was fast enough.  Went through a lot of canes.  (I should add here that I was groped almost as badly in India by Hindus and Sikhs in the early 70's when I was living in Delhi.)

  
  

  I actually came to think that there should be free porno movie viewing stations with curtains on every block, to divert some of that unsatisfied sexual energy.  I'd been there a long time by then...

  
  

  The worst encounter, though, with this was loosing it at a fellow in front of Lahore's High Court building (designed by Kipling's father and a building I was particularly fond of).  As I passed by he muttered, "Foreign women have small tits."  I had just found an old, extra thick Vogue magazine at a book stand and had it in my hand.  I lost it.  I used the old Vogue to whack at him until he was on his knees.  A policeman grabbed the guy, heard what happened, then whacked him a bit himself.   Some days.....

  
  

  In contrast, there was the motor ricksha driver, a fierce looking fellow, so fierce that I had hesitated to take his ricksha.  When a young fellow reached through the little back window of the rickshaw to grope me, he chased him, running the ricksha up on the sidewalk, over sandals laid out for sale, cigarettes, soaps, other knicknacks on little sidewalk shops, until he pinned the fellow against a concrete wall and the fellow had his shoes on his head, indicating that he knew he had really truly done a bad deed.

  
  

  The ricksha driver jumped out, grabbed him, lifting him by his shirt, and slapped him twice, shouting, "This foreign woman has come here to learn about our country and has learned our language.  You bring shame on us all....shame on us all."   He added a few choice expletives, shook him till I thought I could hear his teeth rattle, and let him go, tossing him to one side, at which point shopkeepers started chasing him.  

  
  

  The driver then apologized to me, apologized for his countryman, started up the ricksha, backed it away from the wall and took me safely home.

  
  

                                  _______________________

  
  

  For those without the visuals - a ricksha is a little 3 wheeled motorscooter covered with a metal pipe frame over which is stretched waterproof canvas to make a little cab.  In this photograph, the passenger section has a little black door with three diagonal stripes on it.  

  
  

  When I was in Pakistan, many of them were vividly painted.  At one point, irritated with the guy I was seeing, I considered renting space on the backs of several rickshas, sort of getting there before Calvin Klein had the idea to put young men in their undies on buses, and hiring one of the ricksha painters to do his portrait.  He was from a very high class family, sometimes given to pretentiousness, and I could think of nothing more satisfying at that moment than having his likeness putt putt-ing around town on the rear end of this humble conveyance.

  
  

  Wisdom ruled.  I didn't do it.  

  
  

  pearlbamboo

  
  

  ©2003

  
  

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  If you are interested, I've written more on gender - male/female and homosexuality and Islam - in a blog on October 16, 2003

  
  

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  There is a story of the other journey I had to make to get from there to here on August 6, 2003, called "Sunday Afternoon."

  
  

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