No, I don't mean the title of this post to be irreverent to the Moslem faith. Rather, I mean to speak of coming out of our shells, something I experienced other people doing and something I myself experienced over the last week. The CMUQ orientation week 2007, themed "CMUnited," taught me quite a few things about one's desire for insularity and connections.I would venture to guess that almost every single college freshman across the entire globe at some point experiences social discomfort, feeling of insularity, or a desire to hide their true self from the rest of the world. I remember having felt this 5 long years ago, but the emotion is much too familiar to forget. In fact, I was reminded of it quite abruptly on the first day of orientation. We started out on Sunday afternoon with the official welcome reception to which all the parents were invited. As droves of families of all sizes came in the huge glass double doors of the Intercontinental Hotel, I was stricken with fear. Is it culturally appropriate for me to just approach this group of men and talk to them? Is it stupid of me to expect everybody to speak English? Are they going to even want to talk to me b/c I'm American or White or whatever they might judge me by? I circled the reception room cautiously hoping someone would engage in eye contact enough to break into a conversation, but instead I just uncomfortably stalked about the room. The same feeling came over me the next morning at breakfast when I found table after table crowded with unfamiliar faces of women in abayas or men in thobes (not all of them of course), to which I responded by finding the nearest table with the fewest number of students who proudly exhibited their national dress.
But then I thought to myself, "these freshmen are just as nervous as I was as a 1st year." No matter what they were wearing, no matter whether or not their faces looked engaging - they were still dealing with the same emotions I had dealt with 5 years ago, and with which I was dealing at that very moment. And that was the turning point for me. I realized that the instinctiveness of human emotion is what ties us all together, what creates the bonds which reach across culture and ethnicity and religion, and that humanness ultimately allows us to see each other for who we really are. Realizing that made it much easier for me to step out of my comfort zone, take the risk of becoming exposed, and reach out to others in the same predicament.And as I stepped out from behind the veil under which I was hiding, I found that every single student was more than willing to meet me half way, out from under the veil they'd been hiding under... which was ultimately the veil that we all shared in our basic human nature.
2 comments:
Try playing with the idea of veil as protection from something else versus protection of oneself. It seems that you're using the protection of oneself version in your post. As I've been reading (shallow as it may be), the veil in Muslim communities is to protect women from the unwanted and disrespectful glances of men who are strangers.
It seems to me that a veil of privacy can separate us or keep us from connecting with others. But, it can also be a protection until we determine that the other we are encountering is sincere and worthy of our trust.
Perhaps the challenge you faced in orientation was quickly creating a sense of community that allowed for the kind of trust that invited everyone to take risks with each other. Ultimately, it sounds like you were successful after you began to force yourself to move into an assumption that others would respond positively to you. What's important is that we have the opportunity to raise the veil when we believe trust is there or when we believe the risk cannot hurt us so badly that we can't recover. You and the students you encountered were willing to take that risk and you all benefited from it.
That's an excellent point! The veil is definitely meant as a way of avoiding unwanted attention. I guess I didn't make myself clear enough - it's not that the students were attempting to keep me and others out, but rather kept themselves guarded because that's what humans naturally do in stressful or unfamiliar situations. Our first instinct is to protect rather than become vulnerable. And in that IS what a veil does, what you acurately pointed out is the function of a veil - to keep out what's not welcome. It's just a difference in the point of view you take.
It's funny, b/c with women who really do choose to wear a veil, they tend to unveil in situations which either a) they feel no threat of unwanted attention or b) they find that their veil actually creates a disconnection between themselves and others. An example I've heard often is of a businesswomen (who chooses to veil herself) who will unveil in the company of western men b/c she knows that it will create a barrier in their communication more so than it will keep out the unwanted attention (b/c western men don't react publicly the same way to women as arab men might). That's only one example, but I think it illustrates the idea of the social veil quite interestingly.
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