Evening Star Newspaper, December 8, 1929, Page 116

_20 Lifting An Englishwoman Reveals the Routine of Life in the Forbidden Rooms of Moslem Households— A Connection Betzwween Romance and A votrdupois—Primitive and Highly Sophisticated Oriental Wives. BY ROSITA FORBES. ENERALLY speaking, the harem is as commonplace as the select of mid- dle-class seminaries and there is as little romance about it. There is a great deal of placid eommon sense among the women of the Arab East, but the only romance is in their religion, or in their passionate attachment to the race whose continuity they guard as an undying flame. Once, in Yemen, I spent some time in a mer- chant’s harem, waiting for a caravan that was delayed by sickness and drought. There were three wives and a number of feminine relations of all ages, with the usual quota of Abyssinian slaves. ‘The Arab women were very small, of scarcely more than child’s stature, pale, small-boned, slender, with the most exquisite feet and hands. All were expressionless and wore the same kind of clothes—a bright orange cotton shirt to the knees, over a red-and-white striped waistcoat, and a long fringed kilt twisted round the hips and fastened, apparently, by magic. Their silver jewelry was so heavy that it made grooves in their wrists and ankles. ““We all slept in the same room, a huge, bare, mud-walled apartment on the roof. A wide bench ran round three sides of it, and on this we spread carpets and the hard little bolsters that serve as pillows in the East. HE SUN woke us before 6 am. and we trooped to the bathroom, a mud-walled chamber, empty but for a vat of water in one corner and a groove in the floor to carry away the waste. We stood in a line, scrubbing each other's backs with a paste that smelt of mari- golds. Then there was breakfast to prepare. It consisted of goats’ milk, honey, a very thin unleavened bread that could be folded up like a sheet of paper, and rice. It is discourteoys to usz more than the thumb and first two fingers of the right hand in eat- ing, so henna-tinted fingers, that looked abso- lutely fragile, had, by constant practice, acquired the strength of talons. ‘Then there were children to tend; clothes to mend and wash; prayers to be said, perfuncto- rily, for the Arab woman is not so devout as her lord; some one’s hair to be dyed bright pink in a herbal paste; hands to be painted with a lacy mitten of black by means of a sharpened quill; toenails to be reddened, and 50 on. All too soon the day's great work began— d&yer! It appeared to be a simple meal and it was always the same—mutton, rice, and unleavened bread—but it took twenty women most of the morning to prepare it. To each one of us was intrusted a special task. For instance, one woman would blow the fire, her head flat on the ground. Another would mix the dough. A third would pour relays of it on to a flat pan. A fourth would stir this into shape. And a fifth would lift off each sheet in turn, pulling it while still warm into the necessary thin- ne:s. The food was piled on huge leather trays and sent to the men’s quarters. We ate the remnants that returned, ot trimmings shorn from the original mountains of flesh and grain Afterwards there was a general relaxing. Most of the women went to sleep, their turbans pulled over their faces to keep away the flies. Some just sat, completely motionless, their minds, I am convinced, as blank as their ex- pressions. I once asked a Yemen woman: “What do you do with yourselves all day?” Shz answered: “We eat, we sleep, we talk. What else is there?” The whole of an Arab woman’s day is punctu- ated by her children. They are with her in everything she does—in the crook of her arm while she cooks, on her knees while she talks, leaning against her while she does her hair. There is no jealousy among co-wives. They deovote as much love and care to each other’s children as they do to their own, We used to say our sunset prayers on the reef, before descending to prepare the mer- chint’s supper and our own. The babies were slung in cotton scarves, like hammocks, under- neath the benches and, when the evening meal was finished, more mutton, rice, and pumpkin sprinkled with red pepper—we would sit above them, our bare feet turned outward, knees flat on the rug. A long-stemmed water-pipe would be handed round. With a handful of melon seeds to crack and an occasional pull at the pipe, we winld sit interminably, scarcely talking, never moving. One by one, the women would take their heavy turbans off their heads and wrap th>m around their feet, curling up like animals to sleep among the cracked seeds. - SUCH is the life of the most primitive Arab women. Yet they are content. The last thing they would want to do would be to leave their harem. The romance of a Moslem woman's life is in her children. Talk to her of love and she prob- ably will not connect it with a man at all She will apply it to her sons, her family, and her co-wives. If a fortune-teller visits the harem—a crone, incredibly bent and withered, who traces the future in the sand—she spsaks of motherhood, not of wifehood. Where the palmist of the Occident predicts a husband, the desert seer prophesies many sons. This one thread is found throughout the East. It links the brainless, pussycat women of Yemen to their highly educated, polyglot co-religionists of Egypt, Turkey and Syria. Otherwise there is no more similarity between Bedouin harems and those of the Mediter- ranean merchants and pashas than there is between the hut of a Hopi Indian and a flat in Park Lane. ‘The majority of educated women in the East are as discontented as those of the extreme West, but for a different reason. They are still struggling for the independence we have won, but do not know how to use. In Egypt the movement has meant higher heels and thinner veils, but it has not breached the wall between the sexes. Occasionally, a pasha’s daughter sees her fiance before mar- riage. A’ mutual friend arranges that they shall visit the same shop at ths same moment, ' or the man is waiting at an arranged corner and the girl leans from her carriage with veil blown aside. But this does not always happen. In Syria, the women have had to fight for the independence of their country®as well as their own, so they have acquired a sense of proportion, lacking as much in the West as in the East. I have two great friends in Damascus, Zarifa and Nazek el Abed. When I first knew Zarifa her father had arrang>d her marriage with an elderly pasha. “How can you bear it?"” I asked. “What a lot of importance you attach to men,” mocked Zarifa. “But he already has a wife!” I protested. The beauty cond2scended to be serious for a moment. “We share our husbands,” she said, “but we never share our children.” She pointed an accusing finger at me. “You waste your mother- hood. You give your children to strangers, to nurses, governesses and schoolmasters; we keep ours for ourselves.” One day she invited me to a harem party. By the way, the harem is not a mysteriously curtained-off place, overburdened with cush- ions and reeking with scent or incense. The word is taken from haram, which means for- bidden to strangers—except one or two_rooms near the front door, called the “selamlik,” or men’s quarters, where the host receives his visitors. The present-day harem is furnished like any Western house, only there is nothing soft about it. Cushions in the East always seem to be stuffed with young potatoes. * PARTY to which I was invited took place in a Louis XIV room, stiff with gilt and pink brocade. The girls wore European evening dresses and pearls. We ate a great many sweet cakes and drank iced water. There were music and singing. One woman played a guitar. Her sister sang Turkish songs to an audh. Others performed what they call a “story dance,” much like Russian ballet and very well done. The party finished with a rather learned discussion on psychology, and my hostess quoted authorities in French, English and Itallan. It was not at all unlike a meeting at an educational club. In fact, America, where the club habit is most highly developed, seems to me to resemble pretty close the harem life of the East. I remember a heated discussion in Damascus with Nazek. This daughter of El Abed Pasha was, at 24, the feminist leader of Syria. She had founded orphanages, girls’ schools, and a woman's newspaper, yet she wore the double black veil that completely hides the face and is so thick you can hardly ses through it. At that time Damascus had an old-fashioned pasha who disapproved of change. By this order, the police were armed with enormous scissors, with which they slashed the clothes of any woman who was immodest enough to show the least bit of wrist or ankle beneath her all-enveloping black habbara or cloak. “It's monstrous!” I commented. Nazek looked at me, amused. “Surely it is a trifle, not worth bothering about; but then, in the West, you do make an awful fuss about THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, BD. C, DECEMBER 8 =7 =) | ) / il T the Veil on Harem Mysteries gl ! = = V) - ! 4 "/(/"v :I/‘J/u' 4 g / [ i / / A man is waiting at the arranged corner and the girl leans from her carriage with the veil blown aside. trifies.” I remained dumb. “You are so occu- pied in doing things,” she continued, “that you have no time to be anything at all.” I roused myself to defend our civilization. I drew a picture of what I considered an ideal married life. I spoke of love, comradeship, and mutual interests, of doing everything to- gether, of how an English husband expected his wife to golf with him and hunt with him, to share his play as well as his work. Nazek listened with a comical expression of dismay. “Are all European husbands as trying as that?” she asked. I told her of our man friends, our business Interests. “How busy you must be. Do you ever have time to think?” she queried. And then, with a laugh, “It seems to me the great difference between us is that we spend our lives making one man happy; you spend yours making many men miserable.” Afterwards we went up on the roof. There ' was an exquisite view of the famous apricot gardens that frame Damascus, and, beyond them, the gold of the desert. “Don’t you ever want to gzt out of all this? To be free?” I said ipcoherently, waving an arm at Mount Hermon. “Freedom,” said Naz:zk, “is inside us. You are much less free than we are.” I was silent. It is true. We are prisoners of a thousand habits, of our work, of our business, of our restlessness, of our dissatisfac- tion. The best of the Eastern women are free because they are content. TWO small boys toddled on to the roof. “It's time for lessons,” she saild, and laughed back at me over her shoulder, a child clinging to each hand. Nazek, although progressive in spirit, is en- tirely _happy among the children, for whom she has done so much. She has no time for the longings that agitate her Western sisters. Hers is the typical Eastern viewpoint, all but incomprehensible to the women of the West. She has found romance in her sons. But the women of the West, surrounded by every luxiry ‘except romance, are still groping. It is groping that has made a traveler of me and that sends me back time and again to the East. There are no hours in the wilderness and no signposts of custom and advisability. There are no bills and telephone calls, no invitations to answer, engagemants to fulfill, markets to watch, trams to catch, no boilers to burst, no rlecessity of making conversation and no ends to make meet. The food is so bad that it doesn’t matter. There is no need to mend the rent yesterday's rocks tore in your sleeve, be- cause tomorrow's thorn-forest will certainly make a bigger one. There is so much time in which to say anything that you put it off till tomorrow, or the next day, and probably never say it at all. In fact, there is nothing to worry about. Of course there is hunger and thirst, death, treachery and elemental nature, but these things are too big to disturb us. It is the petty fears and petty triumphs which destroy us. Happiness is crushed between the things we think we must do and the limitations by which we think we must abide. At Yemen, I left the hospitality of the mer- chant’s harem to enjoy my independence through renting the vacant harem portion of another house, from whose flat roof at sunset there was a marvelous view of wind-whipped sand and sea. - For weeks I hardly moved out of one immense whitewashed room, furnished with a rope mattress, a chair and a table; and every evening, when the hours devoted to chew- ing kat were over, I was visited by stern-lipped sheiks or weedy townsmen who wanted to know what manner of lunatic I was, for, of course, “all women who had no men to look after them must necessarily ba lacking in sense.” I had to buy a long-stemmed water-pipe, and while I sat stiffly on the chair whose fourth leg was splintered and bound with scarlet cord, self-conscious because of the crumpled European clothes to which I had returned, the procession of the curious wandered in to crouch on the vivid carpets and take turns at smoking. After the first week I had made friends with the few who could understand my Arabic, and from these I heard strange tales of a land which is still beyond the ken of travelers. In exchange I told of English customs, which by force of environment began to seem to me as outlandish as they did to my amazed and in- credulous audience. “It is not decent that a man should be seen in the street with his women,” said the quadi with such emphatic dignity that I squirmed. “What charm can a woman have unveiled?” asked a merchant. “When there is no mystery, where is attraction?” “By Allah, no man shall look upon my sister in my house!” exclaimed an emir, thumping his knee. “I would die twenty deaths before a woman of my race should talk with a stranger,” cried a young man. IN ARABIA they have no use for charm un- adorned, and in order to prove the supe- riority of local beauty over anything English T had described, a wealthy merchant took me to his harem to assist at the bridal toilette of his youngest daughter. The girl sat mute in a corner while relatives and slaves fussed around her. First her fringe and the top of her head were dyed bright pink with a paste made of marigolds and sweet herbs. Her back hair was left dark and twisted into plaits soaked with oil. Where her eye- brows had been, long fine lines, like butter- flies’ antennae, were painted across her brows. Her nostrils and the insides of her ears were reddened with a pointed stick dipped in henna. Her fingers, which for days had been bound at the tips—a more effective and more enduring method than the metal clips of Paris—were colored orange, like the palms of her hands. The wrists and the knuckles were decorated with a sort of Batyk work to resemble a dark lacy mitten, her toes were steeped in scented scarlet, and kohl was used to accentuate the three necklaces of Venus on her throat. The same blue kohl was employed for her eyes— but inside the lids, between eyelashes and eye= ball, so that the irritation it caused produced a liquid swimming effect. “Wallahi! She is beautiful!” murmured the handmaidens, sitting back on their heels to regard this work of art. Only the pale skin, very smooth and dusky olive, remained unmarred, and the slight ime mature figure, for the bride was only thirteen.