memory wrote:I don't think there is anything wrong with a woman covering her head provided it is her choice and in line with her beliefs. I do not think it's OK for someone to force a woman to do so. I also think it's very sad that people judge a woman based on her head covering.
Agreed.
I am not Muslim, but I am often mistaken for Muslim because of how I dress. My culture descended from Persian Jews, that later converted to Christianity, but retained a close attachment to it's roots, thus I wear what people often amuse to be "Muslim dresses" or "Muslim veils" etc. I frequently get bullied and sometimes called a terrorist, simply because I wear long floaty caftans and a scarf on my head.
Interestingly, none of the other women in my family (there are 400 people in my family) dress in our traditional cultural dress, most of them opting to "dress like Americans", and as a child I too was raised to "dress American", so why did I switch to the way I dress now?
Well, my grandmother (my mom's side) and I were very close, and she dressed like this. For her is was not anything to do with religion. She was an orphan in the 1920s and because she was not white, she was sent to be a farm hand for the Shakers of Sabbath Day Lake, who took in hundreds of non-white children to run their massive sheep/wool farm for them, throughout the 1800s and into the 1950s (stopping only when child labour laws forbid the pratice)
So, my grandmother grew up being the washer girl on the farm, cleaning all the clothes and stuff for the Shakers, but, like all the other orphans on the farm, dressed in very shoddy rags (The Shaker Village of Sabbath Day Lake is a museum today, if you ever visit it, look at the photos of all the little girls on the walls, look for the little girl, sitting beside the wash tub and scrub board - that's my grandmother). The Shakers themselves, wear very well dressed, dressing similar to the Amish, but not as plain, and yet they treated the orphans like slaves and made them dress as slaves, the little girls were also barefoot, not allowed to wear shoes. This had a big impact on my grandmother's perception of cloths.
My grandmother was strong willed and wanted to wear the same clothes and shoes as the adults she washed for, and so would wear them sometimes. Resulting in her being locked in a closet for days on end, and only allowed out if she recited the alphabet in Z to A order correctly.
At age 18, my grandmother saw a bus coming down the road (a rare thing in Maine back then) and made a dash for the street, got on the bus and went to wherever it was going, which turned out to be Portland, Maine. In Portland, she met a Canadian, who was sneaking moonshine into America, and got involved with his gang of rum runners, and having been denied of even basic clothing her whole life, she got swept up in the "flapper fashions" and her gangster boyfriend was buying her tons of fancy dresses and furs. They got married, had 12 kids, in the 1950s he "got saved" gave up his gangster life and joined a group of radical Mormons (not the standard LDS types, but the extremist Fundamentalist types), in the 1960s he moved the family to Utah and married a second wife so my grandmother divorced him and hitchicked her way back to Maine.
Once in Maine again, she found herself alone and once again, with nothing - just wearing the clothes on her back. At this point she decided she wanted to know who she was and where she came from and made an attempt to find her birth family. (She had a sister and brother, she had not seen since she was 3 years old and they were the only ones she remembered.) She found her grandmother (a Kickapoo on a reservation in Kansas) and through her found her sister (in an institute after a horrible accident at age 12 left her close to brain dead) and her brother (in Rhode Island). Her mother had died when my grandmother was 3, and had been an unwed mother, each of her 3 children having different fathers. (which was very unusual in the 1920s).
It was in the 1970s that things changed dramatically for my grandmother, in terms of how she dressed, which would in turn effect me and how I dressed. Her Kickapoo grammy died shortly after she meet her, but my grammy, was fascinated by her Kickappo culture, especially in how the women dressed. They wore very distinctive long floatly dresses, with ruffled skirts, and billowing sleeves, often with quilting and patchwork (very similar to the Seminole of Florida, but with more "bling" and frills). Grammy immediately adopted this way of dress, feeling that it was her way of honouring her grandmother's heritage.
In 1973, my grammy, did the most radical move yet, when she one day, decided she was going to meet her favorite singer Don Ho, and packed her bags and hopped on a plane to Hawaii. She meet Don Ho and for a few months lived her dream as his girlfriend (the photos of him with a heavy set round faced laughing woman wearing long pig-tail hairstyle, that's my grammy in those pictures). Their whirlwind romance lasted about 6 months, not sure why it ended. But while in Hawaii, my grammy went on a mad dash shopping spree and when she returned to Maine a year later it was with enough bright-eye-popping coloured Hawaiian muumuus and Japanese Kimono to fill an entire department store. Hundreds of them. This became her entire wardrobe for the rest of her life (she died in 1994), and when she died, I inherited everything she owned.
In the 1980s, I had begun to do more in depth research into our family history. My Kickapoo grammy was the only "outsider" in the family. The rest of the family was many generations (at least 15, [back to the 1400's where the paper trail ends] probably many more) of never having married outside the clan/tribal unit.
My other grandmother (on my dad's side) was steeped in the traditions (superstitions, folklore, etc) of her culture. She and I were very close, but I was only 8 when she died, so my memories of her are few. Her grandmother had kept a Bible (giant Medieval Bible weighing close to 40lbs) in which our entire family history has been recorded - all marriages, births, death, ect, for well over 200 years. I inherited the Bible when she died and so, this allowed me access to tracing our roots, and what I found shocked me...
...most of my family (400 people) are quick to tell you they are white. Many can pass for white. They get VERY defensive and angry, if you say something like "but you don't look white, you look Middle Eastern/ Jewish/ Iranian/ Iranian/etc". Well, we do look Middle Eastern. We do look Egyptian. We do look Jewish. We do look Iranian. Growing up, I always wondered with the adults got so angry at people (I mean really angry - not beyond holding a person down and beating them up for saying they were anything other then white).
It wasn't until I found out what had happened to our family in the 1930s/1940s because of Hitler/etc that I realized why the aunts and uncles flew off the handle and were so adiment at going overboard in telling people they were white, and why they became so angry over being told they looked Middle Eastern. Fact is, we WERE Middle Eastern decent - Persian to be exact.
The more I dug into our family tree, the more secrets I uncovered, and the more I understood, what they were so scared of, what they were trying to very hard to hide. Large portions of our family had been gathered up and slaughtered in the 1930s and 1940s. More had been massacred in the 1800s. More in the 1700s. More in the 1600s. Even more had been killed in the 1500s. Our family had a massive history of being murdered every place we lived. Thousands - literally thousands killed at every turn. My family has a 400 year history of being on the run, desperately trying to find a safe place to hide, simply because of our race. And so in the 1950s, the entire family made the radical decision to "be white Americans", raising their children as white, and not telling them they were NOT white at all. It astounded me that their fear was so great, their terror so deep, that they would make this massive decision to "change" their race.
It was than that I suddenly realized what my grammy had been talking about all those years. Like I said, she died when I was 8, so I had few memories of her, but I do remember her insistence on not abandoning the traditions of our ancestors, how very upset she was by what was happening, she kept saying we must not turn our backs on their suffering and our traditions must not die. She was adiment that I not let anything happen to that Bible and the truths it contained, saying so much of our families history had been erased already, it was the last bit of evidence that held the truth of who we were and where we came from. She begged me to hold on to the traditions of the family and not follow in my aunts and uncles footsteps "do not become an American" she would say "we are the last, don't let our traditions die with me". I had no idea what she was talking about or what she meant, until I started looking up the names of my ancestors listed in that Bible.
I traced my family history all the way back to Persia, where I found out that we started out as Jews, but had been cast out of the House of Israel, because the men had taken Persian wives. All the Jewish men who had married Persian women, had been rounded up and cast out of the family, cut off completely and chased out. The Jewish men took their Persian wives and half-Jewish/half-Persian children and fled for Mongolia. From Mongolia they wear enslaved by Scandinavians. When they escaped they fled to Alba (Scotland) where they lived in peace for a few centuries. In the 1400's they fled the Christian invaders, going to Egypt. In Egypt the locals called them "The Gypsies" meaning the people who live among the Egyptians. In the 1500s, they were gathered up by white Europeans and slaughtered, put on slave ships, and sold into slavery along side black Africans.
In the 1930s & 1940s 90% of the entire Gypsy population was masqueraded, along side their Jewish brethren. People often ask, why did Hitler gather up the Gypsies along side the Jews, but it is because the Gypsies are in fact Jewish themselves - by race, but no longer by religion.
Once I knew, who we were and where we came from, I started asking the older members of my family about it and, some reluctantly admitted that, yes, this was in fact our history, this was who were were, this was the secret they were trying so desperately to hide from the white people. Others in my family went hysterical, angry that I was able to find out the truth, and made a lot of wild threats demanding I tell no one what I had discovered, insisting that we MUST erase our past and become white in order to survive.
And that's when I made a very radical move, to honour both of my grandmother's wishes and not let the truth of our past die with them. That's when I discarded all of my "white American" clothing, and started wearing the cloths I had inherited from my two grammies. I went so far as to contact designers of ethnic clothing in Persia and Egypt and have them recreate historically accurate replicas of clothing worn by my people. Which is how I came to wear what Americans often translate as "Muslim" clothing, but what is in fact Persian and Egyptian clothing, in the Jewish tradition, and yes, includes head coverings.
So, for me, wearing these clothes is not about religion, but rather, about not letting the memory of who we are die, not letting hate mongers win, not allowing fear to bury our culture. My people are scared to be open with their race, they fear they will be gathered up and murdered if they openly admit that they are Persian Jews aka The Gypsies, and that's wrong. No one should have to pretend to be a race they are not, simply to protect themselves from hate crimes and threats of death. That is why I wear the veils and scarves, because I'm not going to let hate, eradicate my culture, the way it has eradicated so many other indigenous people, now lost forever. I dress like this to honour those who died, and take a stand for the rights of those who come after me, that they may live in peace without having to hide who they are from the world they live in.