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Final project

5-11-10

My project was born in fear and paranoia, mystery and judgement. I came to the project in ignorance.
Into a tunnel of darkness it has led me. I do not know if sorrow brought me to this subject, or if it has
brought me to grief. I began in a kind of innocence of curiosity regarding others. I had emerged from a
cavern of tyrannical depression to resume my studies, halfheartedly but with vigor, facetiousness. To
presume to ask, why, is far more than I can now assay.

My project has taken me deeper into silence and left me there in an unknown land. I am reminded of
samuel beckett. That words might fail you with my wordlessness. To go deeper into silence, as the depths
of the torture drill, the white phosphorus gas, I am gasping for words. The sand invades my throat. Smog
has pickled me from inside. I have no more words for this anymore, human rights, and other idealistic
tones.

What I chose, as if existing chooses itself, was to ponder something, and the ways and words were wrong
all. With english a written language, and one I despise, what I have to say is as of yet in languages
unknown to me.

I will not put my hands on the word “anthropology” as if it were different from exoticization, ethno-
essentialism, eugenics, colonization, and war. There is no ethical anthropology so far as I can see.
The word maims its subjects with the logos, strife. I will not abide by its rules.

And even worse, to force the ethnos out of me like a giant amoeba from my lips. It will not be done. I
cannot and will not use this word. It humiliates me. If science might have at what it has, I barely presume.

I entertained this course re: a re: the cult of personality, and leave it with no cult, and apropos money.
As refugee, I resist the refoulement to the blue collar world, when clearly I can see neither it nor the
academy prevail.
In limbo I write, deeper in the silence, than when I came.
If it is the accumulated neurochemical irregularity resulting from erratic appetites and attempts to
balance them, so I must undertake that fact too.
I go to the veil in tears, and leave in tears, and I flee again in tears.
Now deeper in silence, I cannot know allah, have not since my thirteen years understood ordered belief, is
not belief. I can know fear, and trauma. I can feel as a sarcophagus bound. Mummified, and preserved, for
love for paradise. My notes are all too clear. I began imagining a death warrant, but end in malaise and
disbelief. The digital ether has transposed realities. The 2003 era has passed. New words have come into
the propaganda. Islamism, a pernicious word connoting religious fanaticism.
I wonder daily of columbine, and anger, and the suicide bomber vest, and Baader-Meinhoff. For all I can
hope I will be hit by a bus, and never deliver this apology letter in lieu of a paper.

The digital landscape has altered everything.


My mind pastes website links together, not words. There is a new way of writing and thinking, which
occurs in digital spaces. To ask for a retranslation back into a vernacular I never mastered, exceeds
possibility of performance. I cannot write in such a constrained atmosphere, secret unto ourselves. I can
only dream of the publishing of my digital veil, on scribd, and as the final entry on my blog notebook
http://hijabniqab.blogspot.com/, begun march 7th 2010.
I was tortured in asylums and fled. The rape and strangulation was or was not the worst, I cannot decide.
My distinct disinterest in showing my face anywhere has prevailed through the crisis begun may 2008 or
2000 or 1998 or 4, years of agorophobia, hikkikomori, torturous to my nerves, the struggle to appear, to
be seen, as though, I exist, with wants or needs, to speak. In the silent speech of appearing, what is worn is
of consequence. Agora being the marketplace where women are bought and sold.
Thick layers upon layers, no matter the summer heat, my heart is so frosty, I am so cold. I am drawn to
burka, and burka to me. In it I see eternal things, color, mystery, mother, love. Told so long to feel love a
crime, it might be that I feel attraction for the women so veiled, and that revealed, I feel an ape to lay
claim to the gargantuan terms “ethnography” and “anthropology.” in those words, I see no end of lies.
Better it were I think to say, repressed lesbian love poem, or suicide note, or veil fetish even, or human
rights document, but not ethnography. A blog. Thoughts, meditations on the veil. Meditations on a
mystery, except there is no thou, no they, no it, no other. I can't have that false separation between us.
When they dropped white phosphorus on the citizens of falluja, or when she torched herself with petrol
and set herself alight, that is the only moment of -graphy and -ology I can wager.
Genocide studies, suicide studies, war studies, rape studies, trauma studies. But I cannot lift myself from
this fog which tortures me daily. To speak, an impossibility, as speech maims, and interrupts. In a few
blithe moments I could saunter up the veiled “woman” and ask a battery of questions. In fact, it was in
tears, I pleaded, please do not judge me, I do not judge, I feel sorrow for islamophobia, I am not the
purpetrator. I think you look beautiful.
Islam hides people away sometimes far away from music even. Running away for a song, I found my
contact, again in tears, I felt so naked before her, so unprotected. I told her I wanted to dress as she. And
music a crime, koran is the only music. I think I understood.
And so to men, as if I believe in such things but yes. To men. I can rarely speak to any women of any
culture. Being raised by a father and two brothers, I do not understand the ways of women. They terrify
me with their cruelty and I do not feel myself to be one of them, but something inbetween. That I am
subject to the discrimination and harassment offered to them with many international varieties, does not
make me feel anymore woman than I do. And if I were demonstrably man, I hope my concern for human
rights would be no less passionate. I could not imagine having feelings for a woman or a man who cared to
participate in any kind of chavinism, racism, cruelty. I lose interest so quickly. The conversation
terminates with the parameters of stone and hamhanded categorizations. I will not build castles out of
ham.
If it were my duty to inform, as cultural translator, I might explain the differences regionally, in dress.
This I have on my blog. I longed for a tutor to help indoctrinate me enough into this discipline to allow me
to participate in its rites and antics. My desire for a more eloquent elucidation of what is meant by
“ethnos” were met with neglect, which I have learned to associate with love. I would rather myself retreat
back into the veil, to demonstrate, silence is my right, you call me woman, and so then I refrain from
speaking with unknown men, especially they who insult women's bodies.
Allah does not sanction this and my brothers are sorry this has happened. I want to know shariah, but
now know another shariah, the shariah of hunger, depression, a different kind of honor killing, bulimia,
and drills. My dentist, who repairs the wreckage of my teeth, gasped in fear regarding islam. As a coptic
christian from egypt he fears for human rights, and the annhilation of the coptic tongue. As the woman
holds her tongue, or has it cut out, or ripped out, she must be reminded “you have no case” which is to
say, slyly phallocentrically, “you have not what I have” which is absurd to say. Thank you for putting me in
your gendered binary sorter.
That men might veil, or unveil, and that the veil might connote many things including wealth, speaks not
to the inflated value of the propagandistic associations encaptured in the burka bashing which seems to be
the fools way to exclaim “aha! I am not a misogynist!!!! aha! I make my woman show her face! Aha! See
there, see there!” to accuse, accuse, accuse. And so the cultural imperialism, which both robs from Islam,
and defames Islam, puts its bets on other misogynies. If any of the male-dominated religions could
separate ourselves from the banality of war . . . into the transcendence of male deity worship? Male
dominated religio-civic conflations?
I stand suicided, honor-killed. I do not exist, I write this from the grave. Indeed raped and stranggled I
was to silence. And so silent again, I am not comfortable talking of these things with you digital anonyme,
and teacher. Teacher, it was when I needed guidance that I got none of it. And relying on the psychic
sphere can only do so much. When I wanted to ask you how I can be more sensitive in approaching
women in Islam, you shouted at me “tits and ass” and I lost all appetite for life and for this conversation.
That my words be wrong for you, as yours were for me, preposterous and cruel, so let it be that I am slain
by the many cruelties, the barbarities, that are especially reserved for that thing called woman. And
special tortures they have for man, i've heard, and so. A torture I will not undergo, is aping anthropology,
when I can make no sense of its words and agenda. Similarly I question constitutions, catechisms,
constructions, cars, civilizations, parties, epithets.
As anthropology is a certain luxury permitted to a certain scholastic class, I do not feel endowed with the
possibility of expressing it. I am stuck in the strife of my nihilism, and tired of writing for deaf ears. If you
care to hear my thoughts of veils and veiling, and my research you might find it at the blog address
http://hijabniqab.blogspot.com/. But it does not belong in this paper.
This paper is done with trying. All I wanted was lecture, words, and somewhere to go. A relief from the
pencil-pushing logicians in the paralegal department, a place to remember old words, against alzheimer's.
But as the struggle to exist has superimposed itself on the glass, I can see no way, no way other than
silence to have out what I have to say about veils and veiling, and american misogyny or european
misogyny calling islam misogynist.
We have no right, to presume such a thing, our eyes inward, at CEDAW dead words on a dead page so far
as the USA is concerned, unconcerned with equality bent on hate and greed. If women were paid on par, it
would cancel another cheap labor bonus of the new slave system, rot. The women I spoke to spoke of
mysticism and safety and prayer. The men I spoke to from within Islam were shocked that exploitative
pop culture is construed as freedom. The crass consumption of naked flesh on billboards bears no
similarity to the dignity of the burka, the protection. And my contacts fled in fear, mostly afraid of
immigration status reprisals, or existing. No one cared to videoblog, least I, about something so profound.
Explain the heart of mystical silence, in words.
And what is woman was revered, or shown. She as the ostentatious display of leisure became the
embodiment of an aristocracy, and so call this aristography, and a travel diary, for travel I can't afford.
As per a political documentary, some women chose freedom from the veil and work, some are sold and
trafficked.
Aren't we all. I have no way to find words to describe another's silence. The silence, after death, is the
silence of this paper. As the koran written on flesh, flesh due lashings earned death for theo van gogh, the
internet has changed everything, and my blog can't get me killed fast enough, to end the sorrow I have for
islamophobia and all war, all cruelty to all persons, all women, all male dominance pageantry.
As women are that which are hidden, they are that which is good. And there is no inbetween i've heard for
that love that dare not speak its name. Can awoman in islam love another woman, I do not know. Can any
person be trapped in a culture, imprisoned financially, into a life, a marriage, a paper, a school of thought?
Let me leave it to the unapathetic to liberate the free. In islam I feel immense freedom for the feminine to
occur, the erotic preservation of her form, replete with mystery. If it were I, I would be dead perhaps, as I
was nearly here too, of one misogyny or the other, one hate crime or another.
I won't fit into this page anymore except to say, no, no, no, I am so sorry, never again, I cannot abide the
tyranny of the limited wordscape, I need pictures not words.
My picture attached you will see, and free humanity, and the art of fashion designers who use nihilism
and repression to sell to hungry women, things they do not need, more sophisticated corsets, crueler
shoes---hijab, privacy, being unavailable to the public consumption of women, a marketplace, fashion.net.
And as women speak with eyes and mind to each other, this that we see, is there is no otherness, we are to
each other the same, I veiled for the cold, and she for the cold world, both of us laughing at the inanity of
things and the doomsday pronouncements of a sarkozy or the clinical human rights specialist, colonizing
with a certain magic, to relate his own story, upon woman, a screen. She cannot wear this, and I have no
language for it. I lost language weeks ago, and struggle to force myself to eat, against the uncertain cruelty,
of more endless days, determined to throw spit in my face, my unveiled face, when occasionally I feel, and
remember, hope. Hope for equality, freedom, a genderless, androgynous future, where the gender
spectrums parade themselves in many hues, unknowing of the old code, accepting of themselves, and
many gods or none, and no words of cruelty for anyone.
I am sorry sorry it has come to this. Take this as the introduction for the lengthy blog which details
numerous conversations, researches. Or ignore the blog and shred this in a fit of anger. Cover your head
with it I don't care. File it under tits and ass, as that is clearly where it belongs. The gutter with our gutter
tongue and gutter imperialisms.
And so it goes, with the assertion of “you have no case” when I asked for respect, the easier comment
might be, you have no face, or no life. And these few words I offer here too, will be similarly dismissed in
the hostility of tone, which demonstrates little but a will to live, if to live is to hate, and so my will is nigh
for all this testament and toil of living and hating.
Send me back to the gas.
To say “you” gives me no freedom in the transpersonal. And so annihilated, as though on a playground
fight might you say, your words are wrong, everything you ever say will be wrong, your face is wrong, your
gender. Your ideas of yourself are wrong. Your suggestions are met not with a socratic ear but with
animosity and spite, neither so atmospheric for this great obscurant anthropos philo sophos logos graph
game.
bagram. Untrained, my ear can only parrot back the negativity I have heard. And yes I can and will go
back to my digital universities, to hear great tales. But the human wish for a teacher, a figure, of guidance
and inspiration, has been met with the changing needs of changing times.
I will not seek hatred or tolerate abuse for long, for money, or glory. My hermit's den has far more glory,
in the freedom of my mind to dwell as coequals with the ghosts, and when going out into the smog and
gutter epithets, a cloak will protect me, out of the arbitrariness of weaving and cloth technos. Allah.
So much oprression in the genx, it was like the fifties, hung up to dry and so educated despite itself, high
on its own greatness and oral tradition.
And BBC tells me today there is torture in a secret separate prison in Bagram. Goodbye. Be kind. That
ahimsa shut my flapping face, and told me not to talk, so too might I plead a religious exemption, now as
ahimsa burrows itself in my skin like a greedy lice, making everything impossible. And so too, I will erase
the webtrail of your cruelty for an “A,” call it extortion, or fair dealing, brutality. Or will you wear it like a
veil?
My source at the islamic center asked me out, and when I pleaded the crime of bisexuality, he exclaimed
he could overlook the sinfulness. Does my veilessness expeose me to such onslaught? And if I were veiled,
would I have set the tone by a presence both mysterious and foreboding, demanding a clean tongue?
Would you have dare utter in my presence . . .?
My soul is tired by this.

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