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Home  >>  Submit Here  >>  Essays and Creative non-fiction
By bintarab
Published: December 1, 2008
Updated: March 2, 2010
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Part I: I do NOT have a uni-brow. Or hairy arms.
(350 words, minus the title which I chose for lack of better inspiration)



Arwa wanted to remove all the hair from my arms and leave them bare like hers or like those of every other girl living in the dorm. I still don't understand why it was so important to her.

"No," I told her, "I'm rather attached to my hair."

She didn't laugh. Maybe it sounds funnier in English, or maybe she didn't think this was a laughing matter. Even after a year of living in Jordan, I couldn't figure out how to tell a joke or be sarcastic in Arabic; when I tried, no matter how I exaggerated my tone, people took me literally or assumed that I'd misspoken. Dante never imagined such a torturous hell: for a New Yorker, to be deprived of sarcasm is like having one's tongue shredded.

Arwa insisted so much that I eventually gave up trying to be witty about it.

"No," I told her flatly.

She tried a different tack. "Let me pluck your eyebrows."

"No."

Arwa had Greta Garbo eyebrows: impossibly long and rounded, she tweezed them into a thin line that accentuated their expressiveness. The right one moved independently of the left, so she could frown in confusion on one side while the other arched high with surprise. There was no way I could pull off that look.

Besides, I do NOT have a uni-brow. Or hairy arms.

One day Arwa came back to our dorm room after having spent the weekend with her family, and she proudly removed her headscarf to show me the transformation underneath. I gaped. Why would a woman who covers her hair in public have blond highlights put in? Who was she trying to impress? Her arms also confounded me: she always wore long sleeves, so who would ever notice whether they were bare or not?

But Arwa was happy with her new look. She felt beautiful, and it didn't matter that no man other than her brothers or uncles would ever see it; she wasn't doing it for the 'male gaze.' She'd done it for herself.

Made me wonder which of us was the truly liberated one.



Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9: part one of two

9: part two of two

10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17 18 19 20



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