On my recent trip to the arab world, a beautiful world, where everything is new and shiny, a world that shimmers with undying passion, I was touched by the burkha. What I witnessed was not a vain, unadulterated faith that soon became a confinement, or a tradition that cannot be questioned, I saw the blackness of the fabric, as it flowed from head to toe, not just hiding but also accentuating what they want me to see.
Doe like eyes, done up with a practiced hand, I wondered what hand would have done that, almost like an artists making the brush dance till creates what’s imagined inside the mind. Camouflaging the truth behind the kajal, allowing peeks and flickers of the reality through them, every flutter telling another story. These black forms floated around, knowing exactly what they wanted me to see, the exceptionally manicured hands, the live eyes, that designer watch and formidable heels. Everything else that mattered, everything else that was real, was shadowed. Those desires, those emotions, the heart, the mind, were all hidden.
I asked myself why hide anything, why something that belongs to me, inherently is a vice? Why being myself can in itself be a threat?
I see these women and men and I wonder, why wear a burkha, what don’t they know, is it that what you cannot see you do not consider? Then I must too wear a burkha…masking my life in my various expressions, hiding truth and beseeching lies. Showing what I want the world to see. engineering perception. I too wear the burkha, protecting the vulnerable part of me. Just mine I can see. Its as black as it should be, opaque and it allows nothing.
will the fullness of time, ever fade this black? I do not know.
