Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village (12 page)

“Well—”

“I know he’s not too beautiful, but he was only thirty

pounds, and it seemed the best way to avoid borrowing the

sheik’s horses all the time.”

I nodded. It did seem reasonable. But who would feed him

and water him?

“I’ve already thought of that,” said Bob. “I’m paying a man

to feed and water him every day, and he can be tethered at the

mudhif.”

So it was. Bob was very pleased to have his own horse, and

except for occasional visits to our garden to crop grass, the

horse was completely cared for at the mudhif.

Meanwhile I was having my own troubles. These were

serious, but they were hard to define, and I could not at first

describe them even to Bob.

At this time we had been in El Nahra for two months. Bob

had made many friends, not only among the tribe, but also in

the town. He felt his study was going well, and he was

enthusiastic and full of plans.

But I felt I was getting nowhere. I had conscientiously

visited a number of houses in the settlement, some of them

several times, had been welcomed and treated to tea and

gossip in each. But not a single woman had come to call on

me, and even in my own visiting, the women and I were still

saying to each other approximately the same things we had

said on the first occasions. My direct questions on subjects in

which Bob was interested were parried by polite remarks. As

my Arabic improved, I could often get the drift of

conversations and understand occasional fragments. It seemed

to me that many times the women were talking about me, and

not in a particularly friendly manner. If I could have been

certain they were talking about me, and understood exactly

what was being said, then I could have dealt with it, replied to

the comments and brought it out in the open. But the terrible

thing was that I could not be certain. Were they talking about

me or not? What errors in etiquette or custom had I

committed? What in heaven’s name were they
saying?
My

uneasiness grew in this atmosphere of half-hearing and part-

understanding.

I tried to tell myself that the women did not come to see me

because they were busy with household chores and children,

and that they seldom went out anywhere; this was all true. I

realized that my novelty value was wearing off, and I was not

developing any close relationships with the women which

might have replaced it. Why? I did not know.

Finally I talked to Bob about it. He tried to help, pointing

out that among the men, tradition prescribed how strangers

were to be greeted and treated, but that this was not true of the

women, who did not see a stranger from one year to the next,

and were certainly not accustomed to dealing with them for

long periods of time. Bob and I rarely visited together, so we

had little opportunity to compare impressions of the same

situation, which might have corrected my judgments and

dispelled some of my doubts. He suggested that he speak to

the men about having their wives visit me, but this I vetoed. I

felt that if the women had to be forced by their husbands into

coming to see me, they might better not come at all.

We discussed the situation very rationally, and I could even

explain it to Bob, saying that of course the language barrier

made all communication doubly difficult and was bound to

exacerbate the situation in which I found myself. There was

no doubt that the women did not answer direct questions.

There was no doubt that they did not come to see me. But was

there actual hostility? Unfriendliness? Coolness? I felt

definitely that there was, but I had to admit that my isolation

and loneliness might very well be magnifying this

unfriendliness into a ridimulous and unrealistic bogey. But it

was there, nonetheless, and I came to dread the daily visits,

the tea drinking among the whispering, the smiles which now

seemed artificial and insincere. And the giggling behind the

abayahs. Twenty women, giggling, with their eyes fixed on

me. Or were they?

Bob took me into Diwaniya, and we went to the movies. He

stayed home in the evenings to read and play chess when he

should have been in the mudhif, interviewing. He knew how

miserable I was and he did his best, but in the end it was a

problem I had to solve myself. We were very happy together

in our little mud house. If only I could make some kind of

breakthrough with the women, I thought. For one thing, I

spent at least four hours a day with them. They were a major

factor in my life, whether I liked it or not, and my only

company, except for Bob and Mohammed. I felt very strongly

that we must have some common humanity between us,

although we were from such different worlds. But how to find

it?

Things reached some sort of climax when Bob was invited

on a long trip to visit one of the farthest-outlying clan

settlements. The sheik’s brother and his oldest son were going

across the fields thirty miles on horseback, and would be gone

at least two days and one night. I did not mind spending the

time by myself, but the sheik decided it was not proper or safe

that I stay alone at night, and decreed that Amina, Selma’s

servant, would sleep in the house with me. At that particular

stage in my relations with the tribal women, a servant from the

harem to watch my every movement as I brushed my teeth,

washed my face and went to bed was the last thing on earth I

wanted. But there was no help for it. The sheik said she was to

come, and she came.

Poor Amina. I think she relished the night with me even

less than I did, but there was no recourse for her either. She

came at suppertime, and sat on the floor beside me, watching

me as I ate. Then followed the hour when I usually read or

wrote letters. Amina continued to watch me. A half hour of

this intense, silent scrutiny was enough. I gave up, made tea

and offered her some, and tried to talk. She was not very

communicative, but she drank the tea. Mohammed came to set

up a camp cot in the living room, beside the bed where I slept.

Amina was to sleep on the cot and I was to wake her at five,

so she could go and milk the cows. Mohammed bade us good

night and departed. I wanted to undress and climb into bed

but, feeling shy, went into the kitchen to change into my

nightgown. Amina followed me. I came back to the living

room; she did likewise. Apparently the sheik had warned her

that things would go badly with her if she let me out of her

sight for a single moment after darkness fell. I wondered

whether she would accompany me to the toilet. She started to,

but stopped halfway down the path to allow me some privacy.

I came back, undressed as I had seen my grandmother do,

putting the nightgown on over everything and gradually

discarding clothes from beneath its protection, while Amina

watched. I got into bed. Amina wrapped herself in her abayah

and lay down on the cot, pulling up the blanket which I had

offered her. Once more I got up to turn on the light and check

the alarm, and at this point Amina spoke.

“Is your husband kind to you?” she asked. I said yes. She

sighed, and burst into tears. I was appalled. I was trying to

make up my mind whether to go over to her when she stopped

dead in the middle of a sob, sat up cross-legged on the cot,

dried her eyes on a corner of her tattered abayah, and launched

into the story of her life.

How I wished then that my Arabic were letter-perfect! For

the story poured out of her in a torrent of words, punctuated

by occasional sobs. I caught perhaps a third of what she

actually said, but she repeated so much that the outline was

finally made fairly clear to me. As the tale emerged, I was

tempted to break down and cry myself.

Amina was a slave, but she had not always been one. As a

girl of fifteen, she had been married to a sixty-five-year-old

man. Not even her father thought it was a good match, but

there were twelve children in her family, and never enough

barley bread and dried dates, the diet of the very poor, to go

around. Her marriage brought her nothing but grief, for she

nearly died delivering a stillborn son, and then her husband

died, leaving her penniless. Her own family was destitute.

Most of the members of her husband’s family had died, and

those who were alive did not want another mouth to feed. No

one wanted her. What was she to do? At this point Sheik

Hamid heard of her plight. He had then been married to Selma

for three years; she had two sons and needed a servant. Hamid

bought Amina from her father for twenty pounds, and gave

her to Selma.

“And never have I had such a good life as since I came

here,” she averred. “Why, I can have as much bread as I want,

every day, and rice, and sometimes meat. Selma even gives

me cigarettes. And Haji-” here she raised her hands and her

eyes to heaven and launched into a flowery eulogy of the

generosity, the greatness, the goodness which were peculiar to

Hamid’s character.

“Do you ever see your family, Amina?” I asked, knowing

that even through woe and poverty and separation, family ties

are not soon severed in this society. The question was a

mistake. Amina began to cry again, and between sobs she said

she had not seen her family for seven years.

“But oh, Haji, he is a good man. There is no sheik in the

Euphrates Valley as good as Haji.” She went on and on like

this until she finally ran down. She was worn out and so was I.

The recital had taken at least an hour. I suggested we might

sleep, and she agreed. But when I turned out the light, the

sound of muffled sniffling came to me through the darkness.

“What is the matter, Amina?”

“Nothing,” she replied, but the sniffling continued.

“If your husband is really kind to you,” she said

inexplicably, “get a lot of gold jewelry from him while you

are still young. You never know what will happen.”

And before I could reply she was snoring loudly, fast

asleep.

Bob came back at 6:30 the next evening. I had no time to

recount the tale of Amina, for several members of the clan had

returned with the men, and were eating in the mudhif. Bob

was expected to make an appearance, and he changed his

clothes and left. Not more than five minutes after he had gone

there was a loud pounding at the gate. I thought he had

forgotten something and ran to open it. Not Bob, but seven or

eight black-veiled figures greeted me—the women! They had

come at last. They marched up the path, giggling and

whispering to each other like a bunch of schoolgirls on a field

trip to the zoo. Not until they were all inside the house and

had removed their face veils did I know who had come:

Selma—yes, Selma, the social leader of my little settlement—

and Sheddir, wife of Ali; Laila, one of the sheik’s nieces;

Fadhila, sister-in-law of Mohammed; two women I did not

know; and Amina, my roommate of the night before. Aha, I

thought, the business with Amina was not a waste of time,

perhaps she has told them I am not such an ogre after all. I

smiled at her in gratitude, but she was talking to Selma and

did not respond.

No one paid any attention to me. They gazed around them,

at our wardrobe with its full-length mirror, at the postcards

and the calendar I had pinned up, at Bob’s brick-and-board

bookcase, at our narrow bed against the wall. I decided to let

them look, and went to make tea, returning with seven glasses

on a tray. Everyone refused. I offered it again. Again I was

refused. Suddenly I was angry. This was a great insult, not to

accept tea in a house where one was visiting, and they knew it

and I knew it and they knew I knew it. I said, as sweetly as I

could, “How is it that you receive me into your houses and

insist that I drink your tea, but when you come to see me, you

only want to look, and not accept my hospitality?” There was

a shocked silence.

Selma rose to the occasion. “The women are shy,” she said.

“They know your ways are different from ours, and think they

should refuse the tea, since it is their first visit to your house.”

She knew I knew she was making up every word she said,

but I once more appreciated her tact and kindness in a difficult

situation. “But,” she said grandly, “I have been to secondary

school in Diwaniya and have read about the West, I know

your ways are much the same as durs, so I will drink some

tea.”

The crisis passed. Sheddir also accepted a glass, and

Fadhila, but the others still refused. I passed around cigarettes.

As I had thought, this was too great a temptation to resist, and

everyone, even those whom I had never seen smoke, took a

cigarette.

“What do you do all day here by yourself?” asked Fadhila.

“I cook, and clean the house.”

“Why don’t you do your washing in the canal as we do?”