‘Burqini’ street theatre vs. the ‘skinny bitch’ hegemony: Part II

Posted on August 27, 2011 by lizcameron

Typical beach umbrellas in Turkey (photo by Magnus Rosendahl, taken in Antalya, Turkey)

When I last left you, I was on my way to Kos Island, in Greece and, more importantly, was in the midst of a détente with Kenne and the chorus of dancing shadow puppet ladies, who vehemently opposed my plan to attach cement beach with burqini-based street theatre in protest of the anti-tall-thick-girl sentiments expressed there.  M. and his brother were verbally cavorting away, deconstructing all of the Galatasaray-Fenerbahce news of the day, and I was trying  not to get sucked into the lady-like non-burqini street-theatre argument going on around me.  I was feeling more and more like I should trash my plans – but not for the right reasons – to be a ‘good lady’ vs. being ok with myself.

Karagöz, thank goodness, showed up just as we took the right turn into the Şehir Merkezi (city center).  He was immediately surrounded by the ladies, who made an uncharacteristic non-moon-dance-inspired exit from the purse to surround him with their verbal lady-toned protest.  I felt in that moment that he was there to save the day – my fervor for the burqini was renewed before he even said a word, I knew he would be on my side.  “She is an agent provocateur, she is! You cannot change her mind, nor her character!”  Pointing upwards with the spirit of true correctness in his soul, Karagöz’s pointer finger extended towards the heavens as if it were a combination of Jack in the Beanstock and Pinocchio all in one.  I had forgotten his silly-putty body-stretching skills, and wished I had a few of those myself for the swim parade on cement beach, that would show them!

Dispensing with the pointing and re-engaging in his usual speaking-while-twirling stance, a significant feat for a miniscule waxy-paper puppet, Karagöz giggled with abandon and began the nonsense-rhyming that he uses when he is really, really worked up about something.  “The idea is superb, shock them with burqini reverb, they’ll think you’re smoking the good ol’ herb, they’ll make your actions into a verb!” The din from his insane rhyming and spinning crowded out the protests of the cluck-clucking and tut-tutting ladies with Kenne as ringleader.  I re-commenced reveling in this burqini-involved street theatre fantasy and decided to ignore the puppets for the time being.

As M.’s brother dropped us near the harbor, I set my protest-vision aside for the time being.  The ladies made their presence known as my purse bounced its way through the crowds of day-long-visa purchasers and onto the ferry, which was rocking from side to side in the water.  M. plopped down beside me at one of the stationary tables on the deck, and without hesitation, I revealed my idea.  His first reaction can only be described as one of pure horror.  “You are not serious,” he said, taking his glasses off quickly and wiping his brow, “are you?”

Sitting forward in my ready-to-convince mode, I worked on a parallel to explain my idea.  “I thought it might be a little bit like the ACT-UP protests around access to HIV medication in the late 1980s and early 1990s, you know, everyone shows up to the protest and simultaneously reveals their pink triangle t-shirts? You know, shock value?”  The parallel took a nose dive, as M.’s blank face reminded me that he had never heard of all of this, as he had lived in Turkey until 1993.  The high-speed ferry began to pull out of the dock and an elderly lady next to us almost fell down.  M. gallantly caught her mid-fall, before delivering her to the safe hands of what must have been a son or nephew.

As he returned to our spot, I realized that I needed to be taking a different tact.  M. just sat, defeated, looking at me, mouth agape.  I began the process again, “um, imagine their shock and awe when I emerge from the changing room in my burqini?  They wouldn’t know what to do with themselves!” I forced a laugh – hoping it would catch on like wildfire.  I had counted on M.’s counter-cultural stance, anti-etiquette bias and general embrace of shock value.  This was, after all, a man who loved to do anything that was NOT expected of him in social settings and prides himself on this.  Given that I am way more etiquette-interested than this man, I thought for sure he would be in on this plan.  I was surprised to find this was not so.

I heard the sounds of Karagöz cracking up, and I could see Karagöz spinning with laughter, waiting with bated breath with each spin to see what M. would do or say next.  “Brilliant,” he cried, “you are a genius!  You have even stumped the master trickster, this M. fellow of yours.”  Solemn now, as if grey clouds inhabited his usually firm sparkle, I realized that M. was somehow sad all of a sudden.  All M. said was “I support you in whatever you need to do, if you really feel you must put on a burqini, then fine, but I think you are just great as you are.  Who cares what they do or say? Why do you care so much? Why do ladies check each other out so much, I mean, really?  Who cares?”  Slumping back into the hard but smooth plastic chair rooted to the floor, he began massaging his temples with a fury.  “My eyes hurt, I am getting sick, maybe it was a breeze last night from the window on my neck, but I should not have brought you here, it is too much for you, this locked-community scene, all of these rich skinny ladies, this is not the place for us.  It is my fault you are feeling this way.    Um, by the way, don’t you worry that you would get carried away by a current in all of that material if we were out floating far from the cement beach? I mean, really?”

My mental balloon, buoyed by my excited idea about the burqini, was losing steam – and fast.  I could see that I had not successfully appealed to M.’s usually flamboyantly-resistant, favoring the trouncing of tradition side that I had counted on.  He has always bucked tradition.  As a child, he waged epic battles around his father’s insistence that he wear short pants given that so many around him did not have the funds for fine clothes.  Deeply sensitive to this, the fight against the short pants still dominates his clothing choices – which hail towards threadbare, soft cotton t-shirts, worn-in jeans and generally dressing completely down.  Dressing in any way shape or form that is for someone else’s pleasure, unless he is 100% ok with it, is not ok with him.  It is a bone of contention in our relationship that has started to soften some on my front, but we were just at the beginning of that journey at the time of the events written about here, which shall be chronicled elsewhere.

That day, as we sped along towards the gated compound outside of Bodrum, I decided to change the topic – and made my maiden voyage of tea-ordering in Turkish.  M. revived a bit with this event, and with the tea. As I practiced my verb conjugation out-loud with M., with much hilarity on his part, the high-speed ferry bounced along towards Greece, making the unfamiliar sounds of Turkish words bounce in my throat.  My grand plans for burqini street theatre slipped away bit by bit into the trembling waters around the boat streamed off across the Aegean.  In my meta-mind, above the Turkish lesson conversation, I felt myself getting closer to my more self-esteem-builder-oriented feminist roots – of being who you are, not being a slave to fashion or the unhealthy messages poured down upon women by the beast of dominant society media.  Perhaps it was all of the stolid tourists around me, including an embarrassing gaggle of somewhat sneaker-loaded and loud ugly Americans combined with beer-drinking Germans to boot.  Perhaps it was just getting away from the cement beach scene.  “I don’t need to do this burqini thing, I just need to be me,” I thought…and then….I saw the lady emerge from the ferry bathroom in her burqini – ready for the beach on Kos Island, I thought…hmmmm (to be continued)…

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‘Burqini’ street theatre to combat the “skinny bitch” hegemony (Part I)

Posted on August 23, 2011 by lizcameron

Two ladies in 'burqinis" from http://ilovehishmatheblog.blogspot.com/

Once there was and once there wasn’t a lady who went on the search for the perfect burqini (a.k.a. hashema, odema in Turkish, per a reader, thanks again!).  If you are wondering what in the world I am talking about, you may need to read my previous posts here and here to understand what the heck this is all about.  A ‘burqini’ is actually the name of a specific product, it terms out, made by the Ahiida company, but is also becoming a term that is used to sell a range of “Islamic bathing suits.”  Taking Fatima Mernissi’s explanation of Islamic feminism as a frame here, the use of a burqini is one ‘arm’ of hijab, or the practice of modest dress in Islam in which the goal is to allow for people to focus on the content of character and words of a woman vs. their body.

Basically, I had been spending the past two weeks in a locked beach compound near Bodrum, with a lot of very well-off folks and a range of ladies that would in 2011 parlance refer to themselves with what I am surprised to say is actually an honorific –  “skinny bitches.”  See the bestseller info here.  Although this took place in 2004, as I am recounting this in retrospect, I take the liberty of using this term so embraced by the likes of Bethenny Frenkel, and others.  It has, I realize, become an accepted term of honor in the pop culture of the day, along with skinny jeans, skinny milk and skinny cocktails.  These skinny ladies had a lot to say about my weight, thus my dreaming of burqini post.

In any case, it was 2004, and I must admit, although I think my body was just fine at the time, I really got into a complex as a result of the actions and comments made (and not made, but intoned) by the lovely ladies at the cement beach.  And this is what led to my interest in donning a burqini for my very own self – so that people might focus more on me and my words than on my bikini body – or lack thereof.  I had become interested in the burqini as I had seen ladies at a public beach outside of the gated compound wearing them…M. had snorted at the sight, thinking it was ridiculous.  I, of course, had run to the Internet café to learn all about it, and to try to relate it back to Fatima Mernissi’s work on Islamic Feminism (see my previous post here for more information on all that).

However, let me focus on my search for the perfect burqini for now.  So, after hitting on the idea of the burqini as a central element to some sort of feminist-revenge cement-beach-located street theatre, I spent a great deal of time pouring over my memories of the community activism I engaged in during the 1990s in New York City during the infamous welfare reform era.  As part of a student activist group, we had hoots and hollars worth of fun planning and conducting street-theatre protests with large-scale costuming events, quirky and poignant hand-made signs and interesting chants.  All I could think of was watching the reactions of the ladies on the swim parade to my donning an Islamic bathing suit, a.k.a. a burqini and strutting my stuff in exaggerated form over to the water before throwing myself in with abandon.  If I was really this ‘obese,’ at 5 feet ten inches and 160 pounds, maybe a burqini would save my fellow females from the horror of having to check me out on the way to the water each day (again, you can get the recap here).

While I was thinking these thoughts one day on the couch, having forgone the day’s activity of to-ing and fro-ing from cement beach in favor of a trip to Kos Island with M.  I was waiting for him to catch up on the latest gossip about his futbol team with his brother, so that we could make our exit.  I took out my Turkish grammar book while I waited, and caught the din of the shadow puppet dancing lady chorus began biting their nails.  It was a sound that was new to me – and quite alarming en masse as it was.  The tiny chomping and soft chipping of shredding nails reverberated off of the adobe-like walls of the outdoor living room in which I was ensconced, studying my Turkish verbs and gazing out at the view as I repeated them in my head.  “Gidiyorum, Gidyorsun, what was the next one again?  I wonder if I could make a verb for ‘to burqinify’.”

Bending over to take a pen from my purse to work on my verb conjugation, I caught sight of one of the shadow puppet dancing lady chorus.  “We’re all for performance, m’lady, don’t get us wrong, we love us some performance,” the frog-voiced leader said with conviction from the usual spot inside my cavernous purse, her filmy veil floating a bit in the breeze, “but this does not sound like a very NICE performance for your audience.”  A murmur of agreement ensued from the pockets of my purse, so I shut it fairly quickly.  I made a mental note that not only did the dancing lady chorus have the ability to use their x-ray vision to see events beyond the purse but also had the magical ability to hear my thoughts.  “This sounds,” a meeker voice said, “like you really want to show up all of these ladies because they are so appearance-focused.  Isn’t that the point of being a lady?  To look pretty and please those around you with your kindness?  This street theatre thing, it does not sound very kind to polite society.”

Before I could respond to the little ladies through the top of my purse, slouched next to me on the white canvas couch, Kenne made her appearance.  “I will not tolerate this notion of a burqini street theatre protest, as you call it,” she said with the firm conviction of a matriarch on parade.  “You will fit in here, if that means losing weight to be as skinny as they are – even if you are judged just right elsewhere.  When I had to join my husband’s family’s home upon my marriage back in the year 1382, I had to make do with the expectations in that household, and this is the lot of women, really, isn’t it?”

Trying to tamp down her anger (perhaps disgust?) at me, I saw Kenne was taking a different tact, she was working hard to gently twist her face and words into a kind and engaging approach designed to draw me out, and towards her side in the matter, clearly. “You need to go to that salon again,” the lady chorus cried with renewed conviction, as if they had hit on just the right solution that had eluded them before, “perhaps another waxing? Or hair dyeing? Or eyebrow shaping?  Maybe you need to tattoo some eyebrows on that right-side, it is a little thin by nature, a thyroid problem, perhaps?  The salon always leads us to feel better and not worry so much about what is the natural parade of women checking other women out.”  They have a point, I thought, I do always feel better after the salon visit, but perhaps without the wax torture.  Why does it take the salon for me to feel ok about myself around here?

“Ready to go?” M. asked me – stretching out his hand to pull me back from my self-infused reverie. “Yes, I’m ready, um, do you think we could do a little shopping on the way home today – I could use a new, ahem, bathing suit.”  The chorus of dancing shadow puppet ladies sighed as we walked up the steps to the car.

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I dream of “burquini”

Posted on August 22, 2011 by lizcameron

An Australian woman in a burquini - hijab/modest dress for swimming

I’m up in the night again, a month into the visit, no way to blame the jetlag for this sleeplessness. I am thinking about the swim parade the next day, of course. M.’s brother has convinced/conned us to join them on the cement beach for the morning. I am not sure why he wants us there, but I know that these brothers share a deep bond, despite living vastly different lives and making vastly different life choices. I have grown used to the sibling rivalry exuding from big brother to second brother (M.) – these last few days, it has been in English, for my benefit, I presume.

Madras swimming trunks that are in a lot better shape than M.'s

As I twist and turn, trying to get myself back to sleep amidst the too-tangle-prone sheets, I go over yesterday’s cement beach scene in my mind. I am trying to figure out the English-language hazing of M. by his brother. It usually involves the requisite teasing about threadbare, but favorite, madras cotton swim trunks worn year after year. I am guessing that this should be an indicator that it is my duty to “retire” the madras trunks in favor of something else. “It’s too early, I think,” I say, attempting to join the fun, “for me to be retiring his swim trunks.” Kenne pops up out of nowhere, and relays this dictate “if you are meeting the family, it is not too early, in my humble opinion!”

Ladies enjoying the water in burquinis a.k.a. islamic bathing suits (from Der Spiegel)

It is only then that I realize that Kenne is now ensconced in her Islamic bathing suit, keen to leave her early Ottoman Empire attire for something more modern, something I learn to refer to as the “burquini.” After engaging in a few twirls, the plasticated fabric covering her in grey-ish lavender glory, she bids me adieu, and jumps off the tanning chair, jaunts across the cement platform and for once, screams at the top of her lungs like a Japanese fighter pilot crashing into a U.S. ship in the middle of the Pacific on a suicide mission…and she’s over, swimming in the Ege Deniz, or Aegean Sea, to her heart’s delight. “OK, I think,” I guess I am on my own now.” Hacivad clears his throat, reminding me of his presence. “Remember, dear girl, this action of Kenne’s may be the lesson – as the common people say, ‘let’s blow this popsicle stand’ and get in the water, whatever a popsicle is, I don’t know!” Hacivad stores his paper under his chartreuse parasol, strips to his pants, and heads for the water.

If the matter of the threadbare madras bathing suit is a parallel to the torture of the swim parade, I think, M. sure has elephant skin and an ego made of steel. “Perhaps,” Karagöz says from his sleepy place next to me on the air-conditioned-cool of the pillow, “perhaps you just need to buy a BURQUINI!” He jumps up at full riot stance at the mention of the Islamic bathing suit, as if he was faking sleeping. “A burquini – now that would really shock them, that would be WAY more shocking than your out-of-style bikini, second-rate pedicure and cancerous growth in your tummy story.” Giggling, I relax as fantasy images of me in a burquini on the swim parade. Slowly, the relaxed muscles around my smile assist their cousin muscles around my body to relax and ease back into sleep as Karagöz whispers: ‘ If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em, on your own terms”

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