Pondering Feminism in Sana’a
Joshua Foust on Apr 17 2008 at 7:31 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs
Over at Jezebel, my friend Moe scored a great interview with Sarah, an American woman who relocated to Yemen to work at a newspaper there.
No talking in the street, no laughing…what if you just went into the middle of the street and laid a really loud fart? Do you get caned for laughing, like in Singapore for graffiti?
Well, if you were Yemeni, your whole family would probably disown you because you disgraced them or some like bullsh*t. I have to go though, I’m meeting a friend for dinner and women aren’t supposed to be out after sunset. But it will cost less than two dollars!
Somehow, much like their much-missed series That’s So Janes (which interviewed me on Central Asia sometime last year, and Michael Totten—at my suggestion, I feel I should add—a few weeks after that), it’s goofy and funny and still informative.
Even more interesting: in the comments, Moe gets slammed for part of her last question, of which there were two relevant parts—can Islam be saved, and will she help al Qaeda blow up fashion magazines. These are clearly meant to be half-serious (especially the big about fashion magazines, given Jezebel’s beat), but readers really focused in on the Islam question. Which doesn’t make sense: many Islamic scholars are in fact debating the role of Islam in the modern world, and whether they can be reconciled. And I’m almost certain that’s what Moe meant.
Ahh, well. It’s funsies I guess to be over-sensitive to these sorts of questions nowadays. I wonder what Sarah’s relationship is to Jane Novak, another well-known Yemen blogger-journalist?
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Some of the slamming seemed opportunistic to me. Let me prove I’m a good person: “How dare you suggest there is something wrong with Islam!”
The complaints about colonialism felt like more of that combined with a complainer who’s never been out of the states and so has an over exaggerated notion of the romanticism of the exotic… as if foreign is different in some fundamental way than not-foreign. On the contrary, what has struck me most about being overseas is how quickly “exotic” disappears. People are very much people. Everything is mundane for the people living it. No one thinks of themselves as exotic.
If I had to be annoyed by something in the comments it would actually be the breathless, “Oh you’re so brave, I could *never* go live in a place like that,” declarations. But that’s because I have an attitude problem.
Makes me think of Drew Barrymore waxing poetic about taking a dump in the rain forest.