Romeo and Juliet and Iraqi Women
This past weekend I saw once again Franco Zeffirelli's magnificent 1968 film production of Romeo & Juliet. I love that movie, Olivia Hussey as Juliet was my first real boyhood crush. It was a school movie rented by our English teacher, which meant for my adolescent Muslim self an unprecedented peek at female semi-nudity. Quite a formative experience at 13, which if that makes me a hopeless nerd then so be it. I yam what I yam and that's what I yam, as Popeye would say.
But aside from all of that, what did cause me to want to see it again was how much the play (usually the more modern version with Leonardo Di Caprio and Clare Danes that I like much less) resonated so strongly with Iraqi women I knew. It all sort of made sense. Fundamentally, to the Muslim Iraqi women I knew, the movie was about a trapped WOMAN, and the doomed love arises out of that singular fact. Romeo, Iraqi women will point out, isn't the one with the problem. I guess his parents might care, but we don't really know what they'd actually do, it's not he who is forced to marry another woman, his banishment doesn't arise from his love for Juliet, but rather a set of circumstances that led him to kill someone else. Really, the problem here is that if Juliet goes off and marries this guy Romeo who her parents are adamantly opposed to, there will be a high price and she doesn't have much time before having to marry someone else. In fact, they all but force her to marry another man, threatening her with abandonment if she fails to obey them. And of course she says she will do that and then, as the only possible escape, fakes her own death, and we all know what happens from there.
I guess the point is, it's a story that resonates quite well with Iraqi Muslim women, it more or less parallels much of their own lives. They don't really get to marry who they want. In a sense they do, they have wide measures of choice given to them if they are urban, educated folk (those are the people I know, I will confess). A large number of men they might know are fine, but then again perhaps if Juliet didn't want to marry Paris but some other Capulet, then maybe her father could be persuaded too.
The issue isn't "someone else" it's who that someone is, in both the story and in the lives of Iraqi women. Could, say, an Iraqi Muslim marry a Christian? No. (Or in reverse, a Christian marrying a Muslim is equally not really accepted, witness the girl from the Yazidi religion brutally stoned for wanting to marry a Muslim). Christian friends are very common but marriage is unthinkable, the parents will not permit it. And if they don't permit it, it can't happen. What choice is available? Pick up and run away? Where? How?
And aside from the logistics, there is the upbringing. Iraqi Muslim women, like Hussey's Juliet, aren't exactly independent. Yes they are half of any college graduating class, law, medicine, engineering, you find tons of women. Yes, often they work. But their lives are carefully circumscribed, go to school, come home right afterwards. Maybe if lucky they can hit the souq with their girlfriends, but only during the day. Maybe a class trip. But a trip alone, say, to a nearby city, for whatever reason? A daytrip with a few girlfriends? Very rare, largely unthinkable. I've made a point of bringing men and women law students to the United States from Iraq for any number of activities, and the extent to which they, and the women in particular, are terrified of doing almost anything on their own (not just going down the street, even calling downstairs and asking for another pillow) is striking. You can't expect someone raised that way to defy their parents and strike out in another city with a guy.
And yes, often this is defended as part and parcel of "Islam". That allowing women to go out, to see the world, to act independently will lead to any and all sorts of nefarious evils, most prominently premarital sex and teenage pregnancy, not to mention (for some folk) rape if they aren't properly covered. (Immodestly dressed women who sway seductively are like uncovered meat to which cats --that's the rapists--are naturally attracted and cannot be blamed for attacking, according at one point to Australia's chief mufti, to the embarrassment of enough Australian Muslims to get him suspended).
That is NOT to say that American Muslim women do not at times read text very, very differently (and I mean devout women who take the religion seriously), or, conversely, that Iraqi Christian women aren't in many ways trapped like Iraqi Muslim women (they are freer, but it's all relative, American Muslim women have way more independence than Iraqi Christian women by and large.) Of course culture has something to do with it, the very point of this blog is that the texts of the religion come into particular cultures and are shaped by them, even as they shape them, and what comes out is far more complex and nuanced than a distanced and autonomous interpretation of a Book, it is the ever evolving work in progress of a breathing people. And so yes Islam depends on place and time, but in quite a few places, in this time, it is used as part of a system that fosters female dependency.
And so when Iraqi Muslim women see Juliet, they get her. They understand the dilemma, they can easily imagine what it feels like to be in her situation, in love with one man with whom union is impossible, unable to escape, forced to take dramatic and extreme actions and ultimately doomed to fail in them. I remember well in my tenth grade English class being forced to endure a lecture about the mores of Elizabethan England and how Juliet can't really leave very easily, and how limited women's choices are, obey parents or be a prostitute, and that's great the teacher did that, but who is going to internalize all of that? The whole thing becomes less accessible the more that this kind of exposition is necessary. No English teacher in Iraq provides that exposition. It's like explaining why Juliet needs to eat, it's already internalized and understood.
And so what's the point of all of this? Basically, in contradistinction to a notion of a clash of civilizations, in fact in many cases some of the differences between the West and Islam aren't necessarily as stark as they might first appear. In this case, it's not all that foreign. To understand this singular aspect of women's circumstances in Iraq, to get it at least to the degree to be able to begin to approach it, to start the process of empathizing and connecting and establishing bridges and networks across the seemingly yawning divide, you don't have to start with Islam 101. All you need is a little bit of Shakespeare.
HAH
But aside from all of that, what did cause me to want to see it again was how much the play (usually the more modern version with Leonardo Di Caprio and Clare Danes that I like much less) resonated so strongly with Iraqi women I knew. It all sort of made sense. Fundamentally, to the Muslim Iraqi women I knew, the movie was about a trapped WOMAN, and the doomed love arises out of that singular fact. Romeo, Iraqi women will point out, isn't the one with the problem. I guess his parents might care, but we don't really know what they'd actually do, it's not he who is forced to marry another woman, his banishment doesn't arise from his love for Juliet, but rather a set of circumstances that led him to kill someone else. Really, the problem here is that if Juliet goes off and marries this guy Romeo who her parents are adamantly opposed to, there will be a high price and she doesn't have much time before having to marry someone else. In fact, they all but force her to marry another man, threatening her with abandonment if she fails to obey them. And of course she says she will do that and then, as the only possible escape, fakes her own death, and we all know what happens from there.
I guess the point is, it's a story that resonates quite well with Iraqi Muslim women, it more or less parallels much of their own lives. They don't really get to marry who they want. In a sense they do, they have wide measures of choice given to them if they are urban, educated folk (those are the people I know, I will confess). A large number of men they might know are fine, but then again perhaps if Juliet didn't want to marry Paris but some other Capulet, then maybe her father could be persuaded too.
The issue isn't "someone else" it's who that someone is, in both the story and in the lives of Iraqi women. Could, say, an Iraqi Muslim marry a Christian? No. (Or in reverse, a Christian marrying a Muslim is equally not really accepted, witness the girl from the Yazidi religion brutally stoned for wanting to marry a Muslim). Christian friends are very common but marriage is unthinkable, the parents will not permit it. And if they don't permit it, it can't happen. What choice is available? Pick up and run away? Where? How?
And aside from the logistics, there is the upbringing. Iraqi Muslim women, like Hussey's Juliet, aren't exactly independent. Yes they are half of any college graduating class, law, medicine, engineering, you find tons of women. Yes, often they work. But their lives are carefully circumscribed, go to school, come home right afterwards. Maybe if lucky they can hit the souq with their girlfriends, but only during the day. Maybe a class trip. But a trip alone, say, to a nearby city, for whatever reason? A daytrip with a few girlfriends? Very rare, largely unthinkable. I've made a point of bringing men and women law students to the United States from Iraq for any number of activities, and the extent to which they, and the women in particular, are terrified of doing almost anything on their own (not just going down the street, even calling downstairs and asking for another pillow) is striking. You can't expect someone raised that way to defy their parents and strike out in another city with a guy.
And yes, often this is defended as part and parcel of "Islam". That allowing women to go out, to see the world, to act independently will lead to any and all sorts of nefarious evils, most prominently premarital sex and teenage pregnancy, not to mention (for some folk) rape if they aren't properly covered. (Immodestly dressed women who sway seductively are like uncovered meat to which cats --that's the rapists--are naturally attracted and cannot be blamed for attacking, according at one point to Australia's chief mufti, to the embarrassment of enough Australian Muslims to get him suspended).
That is NOT to say that American Muslim women do not at times read text very, very differently (and I mean devout women who take the religion seriously), or, conversely, that Iraqi Christian women aren't in many ways trapped like Iraqi Muslim women (they are freer, but it's all relative, American Muslim women have way more independence than Iraqi Christian women by and large.) Of course culture has something to do with it, the very point of this blog is that the texts of the religion come into particular cultures and are shaped by them, even as they shape them, and what comes out is far more complex and nuanced than a distanced and autonomous interpretation of a Book, it is the ever evolving work in progress of a breathing people. And so yes Islam depends on place and time, but in quite a few places, in this time, it is used as part of a system that fosters female dependency.
And so when Iraqi Muslim women see Juliet, they get her. They understand the dilemma, they can easily imagine what it feels like to be in her situation, in love with one man with whom union is impossible, unable to escape, forced to take dramatic and extreme actions and ultimately doomed to fail in them. I remember well in my tenth grade English class being forced to endure a lecture about the mores of Elizabethan England and how Juliet can't really leave very easily, and how limited women's choices are, obey parents or be a prostitute, and that's great the teacher did that, but who is going to internalize all of that? The whole thing becomes less accessible the more that this kind of exposition is necessary. No English teacher in Iraq provides that exposition. It's like explaining why Juliet needs to eat, it's already internalized and understood.
And so what's the point of all of this? Basically, in contradistinction to a notion of a clash of civilizations, in fact in many cases some of the differences between the West and Islam aren't necessarily as stark as they might first appear. In this case, it's not all that foreign. To understand this singular aspect of women's circumstances in Iraq, to get it at least to the degree to be able to begin to approach it, to start the process of empathizing and connecting and establishing bridges and networks across the seemingly yawning divide, you don't have to start with Islam 101. All you need is a little bit of Shakespeare.
HAH
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