Anglo-Saxon hips don't lie

From 6 July

“We have a word for it in Arabic,” Katti said. Listening intently, I traced her thickly-applied black eyeliner from one corner of her heavy-lidded eye to the other, following the high-arch of her silver-blue eyebrow ridge, her blackened lashes fluttering up and down at the bright headlights bearing down from the opposite lane and diffusing across the windshield. “You can’t see it, but you can feel it. People are not happy like they were in the old times.”

“Not happy?” I asked numbly, my thoughts still with the party we had left minutes before. At 6:40 P.M. I had leapt from a taxi and had darted through multiple lanes of traffic to reach Katti’s car waiting on the opposite side of the highway. Katti began merging into traffic as I was closing the door, and we exchanged Arabic greetings. Her twelve-year old daughter, Tuleen, meekly said “hello” from the backseat and cradled a bouquet of lilies in her slender, tanned arms. The car smelled like mint chewing gum. Katti had loosely tied a sheer black scarf to obscure the set of curlers wound tightly in her bronze hair. As she gripped the steering wheel, her golf-ball sized rhinestone ring stood out like a sixth knuckle. Silver high-heel pressing the accelerator to the floor, we sped toward Anoud’s party, and I turned my glance out the window, embarrassed by the alarmingly short hem of my friend’s sleeveless dress. Obviously this was going to be a segregated, or women’s only, party. We were late, and I was underdressed – or overdressed, depending how you looked at it.

And there was much to be looked at – but for female eyes only - in this private party of approximately two dozen Arab women and myself celebrating Anoud’s university graduation and her mother’s birthday. It was for female eyes only, and yet the sensuality of their dress, makeup and dancing startled me. Turning up the stereo-system volume, Anoud sauntered to the middle of the salon where the guests sat in a circle. A mischievous smile played across her lips, and Anoud began flicking her wrists, curling and uncurling her long fingers; the women began clapping with the beat, trilling her onward. Soon she was joined by a gyrating, swaying company: plant one foot on the first beat; shift the hips loosely around to the opposite foot; kick that foot out on the next beat; the spiraling motion consumes the torso, extends to the graceful arms, the furling braceleted wrists, slender fingers and manicured nails; pull the hypnotic motion inward again to the core; on the next beat plant the other foot and repeat. Imagine any “belly-dance” you’ve seen and now replace the beaded and fringed two-piece with “Western” party apparel. It was a dizzying array in which every few beats one woman would step out as soloist and the others would clap harder and faster for her, trilling and whistling: women dancing sensually to be appraised only by other women, young and single or aging mothers, celebrating their flesh, their femininity, smiling, laughing, caught up in the dance. My thirty seconds on the dance floor were an exercise in futility. These Anglo-Saxon hips don’t lie; they don’t do Arab dance.

“You can’t see it, but you can feel it,” said Katti as she drove me home. “Maybe because I work in human rights, I understand why women want to work outside the home. I work outside the home. Today, I haven’t seen [two of] my children, but it’s a compromise. I love my job. It’s exciting,” she said, smiling at her contentment. What Katti doesn’t mention is that she employs a live-in Indonesian woman to clean her home and care for her children on a two-year contract, but so do thousands of other Jordanians – women buying the labor of other women.

“But part of my mind is with the old way,” Katti said after a pause. “The woman must build her home, her family, before she can go outside and build other things, other buildings,” she said turning to me. “Why build other buildings when your home is falling down?”

“You can’t see it, but you can feel it. I don’t know what’s happening in Jordan. The people want to live the way they see in movies and on television. But now you don’t see your family anymore. Maybe you don’t even know your cousins,” she said, shaking her head.

Passing through downtown, I saw men in groups silently smoking argeelah, the water pipe resting on the broken concrete beneath their plastic chairs. A luxury vehicle with blue accent lights sped past Katti’s car, dull base pounding. All was bright and empty, alive yet dying. I saw silhouettes of thin men leaning in shop doorways, backlit from fluorescent lights revealing stores without customers. The men also stared outward into the night, seeing yet not seeing. This thing we were all watching, you couldn’t see it, but you could feel it.