Story

 

Addressing some thoughts upon dress.

I live in a Northern mill town. I've lived here forty years but I don't come from round here. I know and am surrounded by the history of the place but it's not my history. Generations of my family didn't build this place, nor are their bones resting in the local graveyards. The weather and the landscape has got into me over the years, I've planted trees and scattered seeds, my future might live on here, but the old history will never be mine.  

When my son was very small, I had to take him to the eye clinic regularly. The waiting room was mainly full of elderly people, alot of whom were brought in by the day ambulance and had to wait until everyone else on their route had been seen before they could go home. 

On one of these visits, I was sat next to an elderly lady who began chunnering about something or other rather grumpily. I couldn't hear her properly, she was obviously just talking to herself, but I got her gist when I caught the phrase ' she's probably ugly as sin ' and at the same time noticed a woman standing at the reception screen wearing a burka who seemed to be having some difficulty making herself understood.  

I was at once struck by the beauty of the highly embroidered garment but also the ominousness of the grille which provoked many connotations of combat and imprisonment within me. I began to feel both sorry and frustrated that the woman appeared to be having difficulty making herself understood.

I looked down at my son, sitting beside me and he too was transfixed by the lady waiting at reception.

I could tell that the receptionist was not making much effort to understand the lady in the burka and this was drawing the attention of everyone else in the waiting room. 

The old lady next to me continued to chunner and folded her hands I felt rather smugly over her ample stomach. I shot her a look I hoped might feel like daggers and stood up, taking my child over to the play area. He didn't usually like those areas because children often behaved in rough ways that disturbed and confused him, but I found a book and we sat for a while together trying to extract some respite and joy from its ragged, sticky pages until it was our turn to be seen.

I never asked my son about that incident, but years later we did have a rather heated discussion about my dislike of women covering their heads and faces. I confessed to him that I feared it exacerbated the already  existing and annoying perceived hierarchy among women determined by how we dress. Clearly upset and shocked by my opinion, no doubt taking it personally though I didn't mean it that way, he retorted that I should give men some credit for having brains of their own, which pleased and amused me. 

Yesterday, as I watched brave women in Iran burning their headdresses, I was put in mind of the bra burning symbolism which arose out of the civil rights movements in the sixties. Perhaps every town should have a regular trash can event when we can all stand and throw things away that we feel symbolise oppression in our troubled societies. 

                                                                          🍃🍃