Sinai, Part Two: "Zay al-Atrash fi az-Zaffa"

Mohammad, one of the many young men hanging around our desert camp with no clear role or employment, agreed to take Sarah and me to a Bedouin farah, or village wedding party taking place near where we were staying in St. Catherine. On the way over, we had chatted as if we were all pals of the same age on the same page; you know, discussing our trip in the desert, whether or not I would marry Mohammad . . . the usual stuff.

Suddenly even this tenuous delusion of normality vanishes. Mohammad pulls his truck up next to the women’s tent of the farah and dismisses us.

“Here you go,” he tells us. “You will stay with the women. The harem. Listen, they’re welcoming you.”

Sure enough, waves of ululation emanate from the sea of seated women. Hundreds of eyes fix on us from their black frames. Welcome? I decide to take his word for it. Sarah and I disembark and approach the tent. Mohammad, our one connection to this massive family affair, drives off to join the men elsewhere.

As we draw near, hands begin to reach out to us, and a low chorus of “ahlens” rises from behind veiled mouths. The voices sound warm, and the kohl-rimmed eyes squint up at us in what looks like friendliness, but without smiles I still feel unsure. We grasp hands with each and exchange “ahlens,” moving down the line without aim until one anonymous handshake pulls us into the fray. Children stop in their tracks to stare at us, and whispers precede our steps between the seated figures. We smile with exaggerated warmth to make up for the uncertain expressions of our company and continue to pick our way through. I spot an open space and we sit, where bug-eyed little girls surround us within seconds. We greet them and introduce ourselves. Confused by our strange accents but too curious to give up, they answer our questions and continue to stare. I smile as big as I can in their solemn, inquisitive faces, and hope to convince them without words that I am a nice, normal girl who just so happens to talk funny and look radically different from everyone else they know. Try as we had to dress modestly for the occasion, we look around and realize that we have failed: although both clad in long sleeves and skirts on this ninety-five-degree desert day, our bright colors blare amongst our black-clad peers. The younger girls wore multi-colored hand-me-downs, but all the married women (roughly age twenty and up) blended together in a black wash of capes and scarves. Then, Sarah’s realization:

“Dude, I’m wearing the man colors.”

Her white shirt and skirt / new periwinkle Bedouin scarf combo had seemed suitable that morning, but now we saw that her attempt to wear her most Bedouin-friendly outfit had backfired in the most obvious way possible: only men, and all of the men, wore white and periwinkle. We stole uncomfortable glances at the white-and-periwinkle assemblage in the man tent. Oops. Yet another casualty of the fact that we only ever get to interact with males. Worse still, the playful, hippie-cool way that Sarah had slung the male headscarf around her waist probably offended Bedouin sensibilities even more than the misplaced colors. I attempt to salvage the situation and confide our error to nearby ladies.
“We just realized that these colors are only for men . . . we are sorry . . . Next time we will know better!” They laugh and tell us not to worry. Each asks us our names and where we’re from. I introduce myself as “Hanna,” hoping to cause less confusion than the first-person-pronoun-sound-alike “Anna,” but unwittingly pronounce it the opposite of the Arabic way, “HANna” instead of “HanNA,” so the name got whispered about and discussed anyway. Sarah, as usual, received surprised and delighted recognition for her name, which she merely pronounces in the Arabic fashion, “SAHra.”
“HER name is Sara too!” bursts out one of the girls, nudging a smaller one who hisses “Ssshhhhh!” and cowers in embarrassment. “This is an Egyptian name. Why do you have an Egyptian name?”
Sarah and I have long since abandoned attempts to explain that one could likely find Sarahs in most parts of the world. Such efforts always fall upon deaf ears; Egyptians seem to prefer leaving the pleasant conundrum of this blond, American Sarah to their imaginations.

By the time we have exchanged names with all the girls in our vicinity, a new row crowds in front of the first, the littlest ones hopping right into our laps. The lull of repeating our information over and over and the constant stream of new brown faces begin to blur the names together: Hanaa. Huda. Aziza. Salwa. Iman. Samra. Sara. Hanaan. Karima. Fatema. Some get bolder and start asking more questions. How old are you? Are you married? Most look surprised when I reveal my spinsterhood, unmarried at twenty-four. Sarah has kept up her charade as a married woman all summer, and has a ring to prove it. However, the notion of a husband far away in New York while his wife capers about foreign countries dressed as a man ends up sounding just as puzzling.
“You are married? Where is your husband?”
“Do you have children? Why not?”

Some, including Nabil, have expressed doubt that we uncivilized Americans understand the difference between “(haram) boyfriend,” “engaged,” and “married.” Sarah had told him many times that Jeff, the love interest that visited her for a week, was her husband. He reacted with incredulity, then joy, his opinion of her much augmented. After the visiting husband disappeared, Nabil immediately asked Sarah when we could expect the first baby.
“Not yet,” she confessed.
“But why?” he pressed, baffled.
“Well . . . he’s in New York, and I’m here!”
“But he was just here for a visit. Sooo . . .” Nabil makes abdomen-bound gestures, indicating that a week’s visit provided ample time for a man to inseminate his wife. Indeed, why else would he visit? Since Nabil’s wife and family live in a village hours away from Cairo, I suppose this method of reproducing is familiar to him. Sarah’s excuses must have made him suspicious, because he later approached me to clear things up.

“Are you married?” he wanted to know.
“Not yet, not until I finish my studies,” I gave my standard answer.
“And Sarah. She is married?”
“Yes, Sarah is married, al-humdu lillah.”
“But she is married or she is just engaged?” he pursued, eyes narrowed.
“Married, since a year ago. You have met her husband, right?”
“Yes. I have met him.” Whew. He’s on to us.

The girls at the farah do not pose further questions as to Sarah’s married life, however. They show more interest in our jewelry, of which they fondle and inquire after each piece. If they recognized a Bedouin piece, they wanted to know where we had gotten it and how much we had paid. For objects of unknown origin, they wanted to know from what country they came, who had given them to us. I found myself recounting the histories of my signature lavish jewelry collection with great animation and embellishment. To my surprise, they took more interest in the beaded bracelet my sister Emma had made than the necklace she had brought me from Peru, since it looked Bedouin. I was asked to affirm its origin multiple times. By later in the day I had understood that jewelry always provided one of the first objects of interest and exchange between women. More specifically, one should come to Bedouin engagements ready to part with any item she may be wearing, save perhaps her wedding ring. Even the oldest women reached out of their cavernous cape sleeves to finger my rings and bracelets. I would try to follow suit, but if I allowed my eye to linger on an object, it was immediately and irrevocably foisted upon me. The little girls and old ladies that eyed my Great Aunt Flo’s silver ring with covetous interest must have thought me quite dense not to have taken the cue and handed it over, but I stood strong. In the end, I managed to get off okay: minus two bracelets, plus one ring and one necklace. Fair’s fair.

Sitting with the women in the tent however, we have not yet reached the point of exchanging gifts and continue exchanging information. An older girl leans through the little ones to introduce herself. Aziza, aged twenty-one, already married for almost a year. She wears a long black cape with red trim and a black knit scarf pulled across her face. Brown henna coats her fingernails. She sounds friendly but again, without her mouth I remain a bit disconcerted, since the intensity of her stare hits me ten times harder isolated that way. Mouth or no mouth, I reckon that as far as she’s concerned I may as well be from another planet: flowing golden hair in broad daylight, skinny as one of their ten-year-olds (at twenty-one, Aziza had already begun to look quite matronly), a bright pink skirt, unmarried and unattached, and saying that she had wandered all the way here to Egypt just to learn a different language. Aziza digested all of this with no comment however, instead deducing that I must find this whole spectacle new and fascinating. Perhaps caught up in the sudden discovery of her novelty in the eyes of this outsider, she grabs my arm.

“Would you like to see the party?”
“Er, yes, is this not the party?” I try not to sound horrifically stupid.
“No, no of course not. This” – she gestures across the seated figures – “is just so we can greet one another.” Was she giggling behind her veil?
“Ah. Well then, yes, of course I want to see the party. I have never been to a Bedouin party before.” I give a disarming smile for both of us.
“You will come with me, in a little while.” She informs rather than offers.

I squeeze her arm and say thank you. Her insertion completed, Aziza turns back into her circle of peers and the little girls close in on us once more. Soon the real reason for the gathering becomes apparent: a foray of men arrives carrying large silver platters of something edible. As far as I can tell, it looks like the rice from the day before. The women have shifted into circles into which the messengers deposit the platters. Sarah and I find ourselves in one in which no platter has yet arrived. Mutterings arise among the women and the eyes on us make me fear that our circle has been somehow singled out for punishment due to inclusion of whiteys. Fortunately, these worries dissipate before breaking into a full-out confrontation when a platter arrives at last. If we had been the cause of its tardiness, this did not discourage the women from insisting that we eat first, faster, and more than everyone else. The contents of the platter could best be described as Bedouin grits: sticky starchy something or other speckled with brown grease. It was quite bland and we weren’t very hungry, but we assured them all that it was delicious. I asked Aziza if she knew how to make it too and she said of course, with no small degree of pride. If the men in ‘Aid’s village had looked amused at our attempts to eat with our hands, the ladies tittered outright. I tell them that it isn’t that strange for us, that there are some American foods that one eats with the hands as well, but there must be something fundamentally wrong with the way I go about it because merry eyes remain fixed upon me for the entirety of the meal. In retrospect, it occurs to me that it must be my insistence upon licking my fingers after each bite that does me in. They seem to just wait til the end, which I suppose makes more sense; my incessant finger-licking must strike them as persnickety and useless. I must observe, however, that they looked pretty funny too, grabbing big handfuls of gritsy goo and stuffing them under those masks. Not a shining moment in Oriental feminine mystique.

After the male messengers returned to clear the platters, Aziza announces that it is time to go. Where? We haven’t a clue, but we get up and follow her, a gaggle of awed little girls on our arms, at our sides, and in our wake. Newcomers appear and ask the same questions, often getting interrupted by our longer-standing fans. The few facts about ourselves that we have provided glimmer around us in a confused game of telephone.

“They are from America.”
“HANna and Sara (yes, an Egyptian name!).”
“No, Anna and Sara.” (I had accidentally given my real name a few times.)
“They live in Egypt.”
“Twenty-four and twenty-five.”
“The bracelet is from her sister. Her sister in America.”
“She has three sisters.”
“No, three brothers!”
“She is married, but no children.”

We trundle thus across the village, looking down as we pass wandering men. I wonder what they think of their daughters’ and sisters’ new charges. It occurs to me that I am unsuited to any of the present categories of female. Although older than Aziza, I probably have more in common with the teenagers. However, due to this perceived peerdom, the teens seemed shyer around us, which left us with the little girls. I alternate between feeling tall and ungainly or skinny and runty, both versions clad in scandalous bright colors.
“Can you dance?” the girls want to know. “Do you prefer Bedouin or Khaliji (from the Gulf) dancing?” Um. My belly-dancing course last year at Union Square seems worlds away. The notion that one would learn to dance by “paying money” to “take lessons” “on the way home from work” would no doubt strike these ladies as absurd. So I just said no. “You have to teach me,” I tell Aziza, whose eyes twinkle out at me in response.

Upon entering a cement-block house, our guides scatter and shed layers of modesty. New ranks of women surround us. Ahlen. Ahlen wa sahlen. We shake hands and ride the current to a back room from which dance music blares.
We crowded into the dance room, which was smaller than my bedroom and populated by at least forty females. A massive boombox surrounded by sticky tapes sat on a dilapidated dresser standing in the corner. Older women line the walls, with an inner ring of seated children demarcating the dance floor. This leaves only enough space for about three girls to dance, but turn-taking appears to be the norm anyway. Those not dancing clap their hands and let loose the occasional ululation. A song ends and an older girl who looks like Aziza only in a tight-fitting gold top and casually slung headscarf, barges from the dance floor through the crowd to man the station, intercepting requests and yelling back commands. Sarah and I plaster ourselves against the back wall, next to the black-veiled, baby-toting mothers, in hopes of establishing our position as observers.

Not to be. “Dance, dance, dance!” plead all of the girls, tugging at our hands. “Ru’si, ru’si, ru’si!” was to become the phrase in Arabic we heard the most often that day, with “Ta‘ibti? Ta‘ibti? Ta‘ibti?” (“Are you tired? Are you tired?” etc.) a close second. Resistance is futile. We allow our waist-height charges to drag us into the ring. The Aziza look-alike, who later turns out to be Aziza without her face scarf and cape (embarrassing . . . but really, how can one tell?), lunges to our rescue and starts laying out the moves. We try to imitate her, but pale in the shadow of her aggressive femininity. Her arms and hands trace suggestive circles around her pulsating shoulders and bosom, her bare feet skip and kick beneath undulating hips, her eyes fix us with a saucy self-possession. All eyes follow our interpretations of this example. I imagine how my skinny, jerky version of this sensual performance must look to them. Were they laughing behind their veils? Were they wondering how two grown women from this rich foreign country had gotten this far without learning to dance? I wonder if they pity us, or take pleasure in their evident superiority in this domain. No matter; if only in the interest of entertainment, our lacking in grace posed no obstacle to the general commitment of our hosts to keep us dancing. The staunch ring of bodies around the dance floor frustrated any attempt to escape. Bolder partiers, mostly the younger girls, begin to take turns challenging us to hip-wiggling duets. Those little vixens-in-training showed no restraint. Their lips fixed in impetuous confidence and their eyes fixed on us, they set their bony hips whipping back and forth with the mechanical speed and intensity of a washing machine. Some have tied scarves around their hand-me-down jeans, or around their t-shirted shoulders. They are hot, and they know it. I shake it back the best I can, to their squeals of delight. We lean into each other and away, alternately grinning and exchanging sultry glances. The older women observe this interaction from the wings. Do they resent our domination (albeit forced) of the dance floor? I shoot them smiles that I hope convey a rueful yet enthusiastic appreciation for their party. Their eyes twinkle back. I think they like us.

I notice a lone boy of about twelve years, dressed, of course, in the same outfit as Sarah, enjoying the proceedings. Seated in a chair at the outskirts of the circle, his eyes devour the spectacle with obvious pleasure. Just as I am beginning to wonder what the cutoff age may be for male inclusion in female gatherings, a furious grandma answers my question. She storms out of nowhere, grabs the errant spectator by the ear and drags him from the room. This punishment does nothing to dilute his impish grin, which pops up moments later at the room’s one tiny window. Apprehended once more: another old woman slams the shutter on him, and the temperature in the room quickly rises. A slight scuffle of window opening and closing ensues. Sarah and I continue our enforced performance. Since the handful of favored songs, each at least seven minutes long and based on the principle of theme-and-variation, has by now begun its second rotation, we have our moves all ready. More specifically, we are ready for Aziza’s moves, which include hefty hip-wallops at choice cadences. After the first few sent us sailing into the human wall, we now slap ‘em right back at ‘er. At last, Aziza declares that it is getting hot and suggests that we take a break. She leads us into another room, where she flops down on the floor and leans against the wall. We do likewise. The room slowly but surely fills with staring girls. Silence reigns.
“Do you wear any makeup?” Aziza studies my face.
“No, not usually . . . I don’t really know how to put it on.”
“I will do your makeup.” She commands a girl to fetch her bag, still considering my naked features with bemused inspiration. Her messenger reappears within moments and the artist sets about her work.
“I am doing the bride’s makeup tonight,” she boasts, fishing out a palette of colors I can sooner picture in a pack of highlighter pens than on a human face. I elect not to voice this observation to Aziza and surrender myself to her vision:
“Mashi, al-fanaana,” I say. “Alright, Miss Artist.” This sarcastic linguistic performance tickles Aziza, who repeats my words under her breath, chuckling. “Mashi, al-fanaana. She actually knows all of these words. How about that . . .” As she continues to murmur about me in the third person, it occurs to me that she likely does regard me as more doll than person, which would explain the shamelessness with which she applied magenta eyeshadow to my lids. She painted my face with decisive strokes, blending the edges with her thumbs. To her credit, the color matched my inappropriate bright pink skirt exactly. I look out of my new magenta eyes at Sarah, who is suppressing laughter. Not so fast, Atwood: Aziza has the same medicine for you. A few expert strokes later, our faces match both my skirt and each other. We thank Aziza and bask in the admiration of our company.
We soon discover that Aziza’s vision extends beyond the makeover.
“Would you like to dress up like a Bedouin girl?”
Small messengers scatter to amass black frocks and Aziza’s firm hands tie us in tight: an over-cape snapped up to our throats and black-knit scarves wrapped first around our heads, then across our noses. I feel like I’ve been gagged. The girls breathe oohs of admiration, or perhaps surprise: wow, just one black scarf and these two weirdos actually look normal! Aziza stands us up against the wall for pictures. We try to pull her in and she reels back.
“Not me, ma‘lesh,” she murmurs. “Mamnoua’ for us, photography. Forbidden.” Ah. We thank our lucky stars that we had not busted out the camera while in the dancing room, unwittingly transforming our companions into sinners with one fell click.
After our photo shoot, Aziza hustles us back onto the dancefloor in our new garb, no doubt eager to show off her handiwork. You’ve got to be kidding, grumbles my sticky, sugar-infused body, already sweltering under the black polyester cloak. But she is not kidding; in we go. The eyes register surprise, and perhaps laughter. I force one little girl to admit that we looked prettier before.

***

“So where would you like to travel, if you traveled?” I seize another quiet moment with Aziza to extract more of the personality behind the cloaked dancer.
“I don’t know. It doesn’t really work like that here.”
“Yes, it’s very different. Hard for me to understand.”
“Here, you see, women don’t travel by themselves. Once you get married, you stay in the house and you are in charge of your house. The man brings the money. This is how it has always worked here.”
“There are some families like that in America too.”

Other women begin piping up with questions for us. How long have our people been in America? What is our heritage? Is it cold in America? How cold? I fear my enthusiasm may have clouded the clarity of my answers, but my audience did not seem to mind. They hold on to my every word, then whisper amongst themselves. Aziza takes particular delight in our performance, and from time to time murmurs under her breath, “What fun . . . this makes me happy, talking to these girls.” I squeeze her arm, then offer her two of my small beaded bracelets that she had been admiring. Her joy soon transitions into speculation, and she voices her even greater appreciation for my earrings. I manage to escape with them, especially since we have to leave the farah rather suddenly. Mohammad appears out of nowhere and says yella. He wants to take us to another wedding, his aunt’s, where the dancing and name-memorizing and fending off of single sons and brothers would (and did) begin afresh, where we can allow swarms of new women to coo over us and little girls to wrap our faces in various forms of coverings, shrieking with glee (all convinced that we looked much more beautiful that way), where we can try to avoid more sugary tea . . . Sarah looks a bit cross-eyed at this prospect and I feel woozy, but there is nothing for it. We try to infuse our now hurried good-bye to Aziza with compensatory affection, promising to come back later that night if at all possible.

“You won’t come back.” Aziza has already turned away from us and corrects us in a flat voice. “You won’t ever come back. You will stay there.” Our protests fall on deaf ears and we can do nothing more but follow Mohammad. Aziza does not watch us leave.
Back in the truck, Mohammad resumes his usual flirtation, the separate tents and flocks of black veils all but forgotten. He turns to me with a grin.

"You liked the farah? So when are we getting married?"

I had told him earlier that I would on no account marry him unless he could come up with ten good reasons. And maybe break off his current engagement.

***

After another three hours of dancing, either in intense duos with little girls or in awkward, bird-like mating sequences with Mohammad's unmarried cousins (most of whom looked younger than me), the crowd suddenly mobilizes. Sarah and I find ourselves squashed into one of the many vans promenading through the streets of Saint Catherine in the zaffa. In this part of the wedding ceremony in which all members of the party drive around hooting and hollering and honking their horns in a rhythm three months in Egypt has forever engrained in our heads: "Beeeeeep, Beeeeep, Beep-Beep-Beeeeeep!" Zaffas are in fact so loud that they have made their way into a popular saying: "Zay al-atrash fi az-zaffa" means literally "Like a deaf man in a zaffa" and metaphorically, "one who has no idea what's going on." It occurred to me as we clamored through the serene desert village that the proverb had rather coincidental significance for Sarah and I in that moment. As my head pounds under the eight-hour attack of dance music and squealing little girls, I worry that it might become even more relevant.

The ladies surrounding us ululate in intersecting streams. Since I do not know how to ululate and have no gusto left for the night, I simply compliment the woman next to me on hers. She laughs, denies it, then pauses and thanks me. Perhaps they do not see ululating as a skill at which one can excel. In the back, a pre-adolescent boy leads the troups in a number of chants, some of which involve shouting "Allahu akbar!" As our dilapidated van hurtles through the desert night and the chorus of voices thunders back to his shrill crowing, it occurs to me that the outfit would fit right in on an American newscast or movie about the Middle East. Beware, the terrorists are running amok in the night with their women and children! Little would the apprehensive viewers know that we were in fact just on our way to the third wedding celebration taking place that summer night in Sinai. "Allahu akbar!" I chirp back with as much enthusiasm as I can muster. Man, these people's appetite for partying puts this American girl's to shame. Sorry, Mohammad, even if I wanted to marry you, I don't think I'd have the energy for another one of these to-dos any time soon.