In search of fatima, p.30
In Search of Fatima, page 30
Miserably, I prepared to go to Bristol in October 1958. My mother was unexpectedly sympathetic. She had once tried to point out to my father that I had a literary bent and was not cut out for medicine – as she said, “Look at her, she’s either writing or telling stories the whole time” – but he had ignored her. “Never mind,” she told me as I packed my case. “It’s a good and honourable profession. You won’t regret it, you’ll see.” Siham came with me to Bristol to help me settle in. We went up by train and then found our way to the lodgings which I had been assigned by the University accommodation office. Because I had been accepted at medical school so late, all the places in the university halls of residence were already allotted. However, there was a number of so-called university approved lodgings where students lived with a family, usually in twos or threes. It was to one of these that Siham and I were directed, a house in the Redland part of Bristol, within walking distance of the University. And it was here that I got my first real taste of English xenophobia.
The landlady was a portly, middle-aged woman called Mrs Briggs. She had a thin, insignificant husband and was clearly the power in the home. With me were two other women students, one studying to be a vet and the other taking languages. I shared a room with the latter, which was quite comforting, since it was what I was used to at home, and she and I got on reasonably well. Both girls were English, which made me conspicuous to Mrs Briggs. Siham told her that I had never been away from home and asked her to look after me. When she left, I felt desperately frightened and alone. I had never learned to be independent, partly because such qualities were not cultivated in a typical Arab family such as ours, and partly because of the legacy of my uprooted childhood. Leaving me to the tender mercies of Mrs Briggs was an unhappy decision in the circumstances.
She never lost an opportunity to refer to my foreignness. Often, when I came into the sitting room, she would break out into song. “Maybe it’s because I’m a Londoner, that I love London town …” With her broad Bristol accent, she was anything but a Londoner. “I don’t suppose you have anything like London where you come from?” she would remark with seeming innocence. At other times, she would ask if I had got used to the cold yet. “Have you ever seen snow before? It’s really hot in your country, isn’t it?” Clearly there was something inferior about a hot climate and anyone with no experience of cold temperatures was somehow substandard. When I told her that it often snowed during winter in Jerusalem, she looked at me in disbelief and with disapproval, as if I were trying to usurp some distinction reserved only for the English climate.
One evening, I came home late, which meant half past ten at night, in the company of a theology student I had got to know. We stopped by the gate and he kissed me. We lingered for a minute or two whispering and then he said a respectful good night. I let myself into the house, unaware that I was being watched. The next morning Mrs Briggs said she hoped I was not going to carry on outside the house as I had done the night before. “Only it upset Mrs Dickens opposite something rotten. She says to me, ‘hot country, hot blood, my dear, that’s what it is’.” Then Mrs Briggs, giving me a knowing look, added, “I know you can’t help it, but we all have to try and control ourselves.”
My room-mate, who didn’t like Mrs Briggs any more than I did, chiefly on account of her awful cooking, left at the end of the first term. I wanted to do the same but had nowhere to go. So Zandra, the veterinary student, and I stayed on until the summer. In that time we became good friends and decided to find our own accommodation. In the autumn, we moved into a small basement flat off the Whiteladies Road, which was dark and indescribably damp. But we hardly cared, since we were now free of Mrs Briggs, and our new landlady, a retired English nurse married to a Chinese, a most unusual combination in the overwhelmingly English Bristol of the time, left us alone. We had our own entrance at the front and the back, and a small overgrown garden for our use.
For the first time since I had come to Bristol I began to enjoy university life. My first year, spent completing a pre-medical course, was undemanding. I had a leisurely timetable and few lectures. Zandra and I kept house together, cleaned and shopped for food and cooked. She soon discovered that I ate no pig-meat and had never drunk alcohol. “Not even cider?” she asked, amazed. Such Muslim dietary traditions are commonplace in Britain today, but were wholly unfamiliar at the time. Someone like Zandra, reared in Norwich, would never have come across either the Muslim or the Jewish prohibition about pork. “You’re not going on like that, are you?” she asked.
This struck a responsive chord in me. The truth was that my previously warm relationship with Islam had changed. My devotion to religious ritual, which had started during my time at the convent, had largely dissipated by the time I was sixteen. I had by then become enamoured of humanist philosophy and spent hours discussing God and religion with my Jewish friend, Leslie Benenson. But this was a form of intellectual conceit and neither of us connected it with everyday life. However, I continued to mull it over and by the age of eighteen felt ready to take a conscious decision about religion and the existence of God.
I decided that as there was no evidence for God’s existence I could not logically believe in him and I was not bound by any religious system to which he was central. By extension, I could not accept any of the ceremonies and rituals which accompanied a belief in God, whether they belonged to Islam or any other faith. So I stopped praying and fasting. Nevertheless, the effects of my Islamic dietary conditioning regarding pig-meat and alcohol lingered.
The eating of pig-meat is totally prohibited by the Quran, and Muslims are brought up to adhere to this injunction. The case of alcohol is slightly different. The Quran did not forbid its consumption in the same way, but only at the time of prayer. Since Muslims pray five times a day, this meant in effect a near-total ban. The Prophet followed up the Quranic dictum with a clear and absolute prohibition, since when the drinking of alcohol became forbidden to all Muslims. How far these laws were obeyed in practice depended on a number of factors. By and large, the prohibition on pig-meat was more strictly adhered to than that on alcohol. Many a Muslim who broke the ban on drinking nevertheless baulked at eating pig in any form. This was possibly because the aversion to the meat was constantly reinforced by references to the animals’ unclean habits and omnivorous appetite. People who were considered ugly or dirty were frequently compared to pigs, reminiscent of such English sayings as “eating like a pig” or “making a pig of oneself”. But whereas the latter expressions can be light-hearted and even a little humorous in the English context, in the Muslim case they are always censorious.
On the other hand, adherence to the prohibition on alcohol depended on such things as class, educational level, exposure to the West and gender. By and large, poor, uneducated people observed the ban faithfully and, conversely, the wealthy, sophisticated classes did not. Those who had studied in Europe and were exposed to western society also picked up the habit of drinking. And women in any of these categories were more likely to adhere to the ban. This was not only due to the fact that women in most societies tend to be more conservative, but also because of the position women occupy in the traditional Muslim family. A moral licence which these families permitted to the males was usually withheld from the females. Many a girl might grow up seeing her brothers drinking alcohol, making sexual liaisons and indulging in behaviour which would never be allowed her. My own family was essentially no different, for we all knew that Ziyad drank alcohol and went out regularly with girls. But Siham, and later I, had to keep any boyfriends we acquired secret. And neither of us was supposed to drink.
But now I found myself psychologically ready to break these taboos. I would embark on eating pig and drinking alcohol, but I did not look forward to the regime I had set myself with any relish; these were not to be pleasurable indulgences but deliberate acts emanating from the intellectual stance I had adopted about their significance. On Zandra’s advice, I tried bacon first, found it tasty, and moved on to ham and finally pork, which I enjoyed least.
Next came alcohol. This proved more difficult, for I disliked the taste of every form of drink I was offered. Eventually, I settled for cider which I found tolerable. At least it meant that I could hold my own in the pub and thereby break another taboo. Pubs were a core English institution; every neighbourhood throughout Britain had them, but I had never gone into one before. There was a cultural horror at the idea of places whose sole raison d’être was to provide people with intoxicating liquor. My mother used a derogatory term for them, khammara, literally meaning “winery”, but implying a place for drunkards. Even today, pubs excite feelings of revulsion amongst devout Muslims, who see them as temples of the forbidden.
The remaining taboo related to sex. Throughout my adolescence in London, I had conducted my excursions into the world of romance, such as they were, with the utmost secrecy. In this matter, my sister was no less vigilant than my parents. Although she herself had a boyfriend she judged me too young to do the same. And she had no hesitation in showing her feelings. One night, after I had been at the Polytechnic for a year, I went out one night with a group of new friends I had made; amongst them was a boy who had shown a marked interest in me. I knew it and was thrilled. When the others went home, he walked me to the tube station. But we dawdled along the way, holding hands and leaning against each other. When we reached the station, he put his arms round me and we kissed.
In the excitement, I had forgotten the time and saw to my horror that it was after ten o’clock and much later than I had intended. The train took a long time to arrive and by the time I got to Brent station it was just after eleven. I walked the short way home from the station panting with anxiety. As I drew up to the house, it was dark, and I thought with relief that everyone was already in bed. All I had to do was go in quietly and no one would be any the wiser. But as I turned my latchkey gently in the lock and pushed open the front door the hall light suddenly came on. There, standing before me in her nightdress, was Siham, an unmistakable look of wrath on her face. I started to say something, but she slapped me hard across the cheek. The blow caught the side of my ear and made me go temporarily deaf.
“Where have you been?” she said in a harsh whisper. “You said you’d be back at nine. I’ve been worried sick.”
We went into the kitchen where we could speak without waking up our parents. I stammered something about the tube being late. But she was having none of it. “It’s that boy, isn’t it?” she said balefully. “I’ve seen you giggling with him. Now, understand that we don’t want any of that business. I don’t mind you having mixed friends, that’s all right. But not this sort of thing.”
I could have asked what she meant by “this sort of thing” and what she thought I had been up to, but of course I understood her in the same implicit way in which I understood my parents’ moral restrictions. No one in the family had ever said, “You cannot go out with boys, even if you just hold hands, because you might end up having sexual intercourse with them. And that is the worst thing imaginable for any unmarried daughter of ours.” But that is what they meant and I instinctively knew it. Siham’s admonition was only in line with this attitude, but I was shocked and hurt. I had expected her to understand my adolescent romantic explorations and not see them as some prelude to a life of promiscuity. My cheeks smarted with the beating and the humiliation, and I knew that so long as I remained in London, I would have to lie and dissemble in front of her just as I did with my parents.
It was the only realistic policy I could think of at the time. But its effects on my sexual development were far-reaching. Because in families such as mine the subject was hedged about with secrecy, no one taught me how to conduct myself with men. I had no experience or guidance to help me navigate sexual relationships and developed no psychological antennae with which to pick up danger signals. Thanks to my parents’ fears for my chastity, I ended up more vulnerable to the very thing they feared than if they had prepared me for it honestly and openly from the beginning.
However, I was unaware of these things as I sat in Bristol happily alone and far away from what I considered to be my family’s stifling prohibitions and constraints. And I was determined to tackle this issue just as I had the others. Of course, it would not be so easy, since I could not simply pick up a boy as easily as I had picked up a glass of cider. I went out a couple of times with the theology student, once to the pub and once to his hall of residence where he showed me the textbooks he would be reading for his course. But he was by way of an experiment and I went on hoping someone more exciting would turn up.
In those days, girls were expected to be passive, waiting for the call of the “right man”; the knight on the white steed who would storm into our lives and transform us forever. To have approached a man first or shown interest in him before he himself had made advances was considered fast or even tarty. So Zandra and I shyly put ourselves about, hoping to be noticed.
To my breathless excitement, someone took the bait at last. The young man who asked me out was a third-year medical student, which put him into a desirably senior and sophisticated category. I remember that he was dashing with a slim, lithe body and striking blue eyes, and I thought him very attractive. He invited me to his flat for dinner, saying he was a good cook and did I like spaghetti? He said he had three flatmates, but they were all going to be out that evening. I was madly flattered, dying to accept but nervous to go because we would be alone in his flat, and I wondered what that would mean. Of course I had no idea how to handle such situations and did not want to ask for advice, since it would reveal the true extent of my inexperience. My dilemma was simple: if I went, might he think me cheap and easy for agreeing to be alone with him the first time he had ever asked me out, and if I didn’t, would he ever contact me again? I decided that what I needed was some ploy which would permit me to accept his invitation but put a brake on any “intimacy” during the evening.
So I remembered my knitting. In my last year in London, Siham had taught me to knit and although my skills never amounted to much, I would sporadically have spurts of enthusiasm when I embarked on making a jumper or a scarf, more often than not left unfinished. When Zandra and I moved into our flat I started knitting again, this time to make a cardigan. I usually kept my knitting in a beige linen bag and as I looked at it, with its bulges and needles sticking out at the top, it struck a note of such homeliness that I felt it would surely dispel the hottest ardour.
On the appointed evening I dressed as well as I could, which was not easy since my clothes were drab and unexciting. This too was a legacy of my conservative upbringing, where the power of dress to seduce men was well recognized, and exposing the body as required by fashion was taboo. It was not that my mother covered herself or us in the manner so commonly seen amongst Muslim women today, but we had a strong awareness that certain parts of the body were private and must never be displayed. The colour black was regarded as especially dangerous, a view not confined to my family. In my fourth undergraduate year, I recall being taught by one of our senior gynaecologists that women patients dressed in black underwear were usually up to no good. “With that sort of woman,” he would say darkly, “you can expect anything.”
When Derek, as was his name, came to pick me up, I made sure that I had tucked my knitting into my bag. It was a short walk to his house, a large Edwardian property on several floors, all let to students. The flat he lived in was on the first floor, with spacious rooms and large windows. The sitting room he showed me into was inordinately cluttered and untidy. He sat me on the sofa and offered me a drink. He told me he had prepared everything in the kitchen beforehand and I must say as soon as I was hungry, because it wouldn’t take a second to cook our meal. All the while I imagined he was eyeing me with a mischievous smile.
No sooner had he gone to get the drink than I quickly took out my knitting, reasoning that if I introduced a prosaic tone early on in the evening it would serve to halt any undesirable advances. There was no doubt about its effect. When Derek came back, he stopped dead in his tracks and stared at me knitting placidly on the sofa. His flatmates were likewise mesmerised. As they came in, one after another, and he introduced them, they looked from me to him with ill-disguised astonishment. As they quickly excused themselves, I heard them burst out laughing on the stairs.
Zandra too burst out laughing when I told her. “I can’t believe you did such a thing,” she said. “How could you be such an idiot?” I felt stupid and gauche and, needless to say, the affair with Derek went no further. The incident affected me deeply, the more so when I saw others of my peers going about confidently with boys and making what appeared to be easy, unflustered relationships. I tried my luck again, first with a student reading English and then with another who was not at the university at all and whom I met in a pub. Each of these also ended in disappointment and a feeling that it was due to some failing of mine.
I began to look back with resentment on the constrained upbringing and inhibited childhood which had thus disabled me. Until then, I had accepted the uncomfortable, joyless environment of my home in London with resigned equanimity. Privately, I used to call my parents “the Anti-Life League”, but more by way of a joke than in anger. Otherwise, I scarcely ever questioned their behaviour towards us, which I took to be as natural to them as the colour of their hair or the sound of their voice. But now, away from home and trying to adapt to the norms of a new society, I began to feel differently. I dwelled on the assumptions with which I had been reared and found them severely wanting. I could not accept my mother’s confined traditional thinking or my father’s conservatism. Siham’s watchfulness over my morals, in loco parentis, was no better.
