buzz-cuts, tichels, hijabs, and yellow stars

It's been a good few days, with some fatigue and other annoying symptoms (e.g. nothing tastes normal, and the inside of my mouth feels coated in a weird way) but it's all manageable. After a nap today I felt up for my first swim of the season in Lake Wingra. Lovely! 

Since my last post I've been thinking more about how losing my hair has provided me with a variety of new experiences of my identity. In Jewish settings recently, I’ve been told that my head coverings make me look like I’m an Orthodox Jewish woman (married women traditionally cover their hair around men other than their husbands; the covering is called a tichel).

Without any head-covering or earrings, I look, to myself, more masculine; a lot like my brother Ari; or like a butch lesbian. I've been appreciating in a new and different way how all the pioneers who have disrupted gender norms have helped create a world where I feel the freedom to choose this option (especially now that it's getting to be summer!) Thanks, guys! (or should I say non-guys & non-gals? And thanks, too, to Demi Moore, Sigourney Weaver, and Natalie Portman who have made bald women hot...). My swim in Lake Wingra today was without a cap!

In secular settings, to people who have experience with cancer, my covered head with no hair at all showing around the edges reads as a badge announcing I have cancer (e.g. my dental hygienist, a TSA security official…). 

And then there was last Wednesday when I looked like a Muslim (see my post of 6/3). All of these different ways of appearing in public (along with the prospect that I may soon have the option to appear flat-chested, small-breasted, or buxom) have me thinking a lot about identities, and how we signal them to others, both consciously and unconsciously.

Speaking of looking like a Muslim last Wednesday, I did have breakfast with my friend Nasra the next day. Not only did she like the idea of non-Muslim women putting on hijab in solidarity and to experience what the oppression is like, but it’s already being done around the world! Nasra’s daughter organized a Hijab Day on campus, and my search today turns up the 3-year-old “World Hijab Day” movement: “Before you judge, cover up for a day.” 

In perusing the World Hijab Day Facebook page, I read many entries that I find challenging. Some are fervently religious ones, which I have a hard time understanding, and even some which push my “intolerance-of-fundamentalist-intolerance” buttons. 

I appreciate though that the page’s masthead invokes the much-used proverb I referred to in the title of my last post, about walking a mile in another’s shoes before judging them. I looked up the origins of this quote. Some people attribute it to Harper Lee in To Kill a Mockingbird (which I just re-read in preparation for the new/old book by Harper Lee that’s finally just out). However it is apparently originally from a Cherokee or Algonquin prayer that went something like, “Oh Great Sprit, grant that I may not judge my neighbor, before I have walked for a day in his moccasins." 

Other posts on the World Hijab Day page include links to and commentary on various news stories from around the Western world:Women in hijab being attacked, Muslim girls being sent home from school for wearing hijab (or even, in at least one case, for wearing long skirts!)  These stories, for me, relate to another, deeper reason I am pursuing this topic.

That is the other image that was reverberating for me as I wrote my last post: That of the gentiles who wore yellow stars in Europe during the Holocaust. While I’m not going to try to compare and contrast anti-Muslim oppression with anti-Semitism (at least not in this post!), as a Jew who grew up on stories of the Shoah and the gentiles who did (and did not) stand up against it, the resonance for me is very deep. I knew, as a child, and have known ever since, that I wanted to be one of the ones who stood up. 

So, while we’ve missed the official World Hijab Day (Feb. 1) this year, (and I myself am probably not up for the upcoming 30-Day Ramadan Hijab Challenge, designed mostly I think to encourage Muslim women who do not wear hijab to try it), Nasra and I are cooking up an event for June 26th. Our tentative plan is that Muslim and non-Muslim women will gather over a (fasting) lunch hour to meet one another, and if not already wearing one, put on a hijab to wear for at least part of the afternoon. Then those who can will get together again in the evening to take off the hijab (which the hijabi Muslim women will likely be willing to do since it is a women-only event), share our experiences with wearing them, and break the Ramadan fast together. The times & locations are TBA but if you’re a woman in Madison and are interested, mark your noon and evening hours on June 26th and watch for the event on my Facebook page. (Note: when I say we are cooking up the event – Nasra and her friends will be doing most of the actual cooking, though I might see if I can get in on the action to learn, because when they cater an event it’s a really amazing spread!!)