Graeme Wood describes teaching at a totally burqa’d university in Yemen:
… When I entered the classroom and saw fifteen students who looked identical in every way, I burst out laughing, and never totally regained composure. The utter neutrality of their aspect was disarming to say the least. After a few minutes, I started asking them questions in English about their lives and why they wanted to learn English. “I am a pharmacist!” chirped one of the bolder students, so I turned to look through her eyeslit and ask whether she thought Yemeni honey had medicinal properties. Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: I was talking to the wrong student, six desks away. This drill happened about twenty more times in the next hour, and even though my sonar triangulation improved a little, even by the end I could narrow down blurted answers at best to a clump of five or so students. I ended up accidentally excusing women with no cars to check on their parking, and letting women with empty bladders go to the lavatory. In every case the errors lasted only seconds, but the experience was still totally bewildering.
Only Samuel Beckett, or perhaps Monty Python, could do justice to this scene.
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Beckett’s friend James Joyce captured the inner truth of these students, each one of them “a batlike soul, waking to the consciousness of itself in darkness and secrecy and loneliness.”
May 14th, 2010 at 6:14PM
But I think you have missed the key point:
“Instantly fourteen black-gloved hands shot out to point at one of the other women in the room: ”
All the burqa’ed women seemed to have no problem identifying who spoke. 20 times in an hour and they tracked it fine. Is that a soul walking in darkness and loneliness? Just because we do not know how to read whatever individuality is projected through a burqa, does not mean none exists.
Whether countries/people with no tradition of the burqa need to learn to read one is a different issue, naturally.
May 14th, 2010 at 8:34PM
I guess the point you’re identifying is misery loves company.
May 19th, 2010 at 4:28AM
Qatar is building itself a world-class university campus – by asking foreign universities to start colleges in “Education City”. I once was invited to Carnegie Mellon’s computer science college there. I must say the buildings are magnificent – fanciful, brand new, and not too many students yet.
It’s indeed weird to have all these young women wearing veils. To some extent, it is uncomfortable – because you can have people looking at you while being unable to look at them.
I wonder what it would be like teaching in such conditions.