Kathleen Tighe
The Cover Up
“We start out as little bits of disconnected dust.” (Naomi Shihab Nye)
A 16-year-old girl in Tehran is in a coma after boarding a subway train with her head uncovered. Stories conflict. Armita Geravand’s friends say they were confronted by officers for not wearing hijabs, the head coverings worn by Muslim women in Iran. Argument ensued and an officer pushed the 16-year-old; she fell and hit her head. The official explanation is that the girl fainted because she had skipped breakfast. In either case, Armita was dragged from the train, unconscious.
I flashback to my abaya, the black polyester baglike garment now collecting dust in the back of a closet. I had once cloaked myself in it to avoid harassment. That was all so long ago: I left the Middle East 22 years ago, more years than that Iranian teenager has been alive. In all those years, has so little in the lives of women changed?
*
I had been in the Kingdom less than 48 hours, still jetlagged, when Dan, my husband of two weeks, announced we should go shopping.
“You’ll need an abaya,” he said.
Before agreeing to move to Saudi Arabia, I’d done my research. Muslim women were required to wear abayas and head scarves in keeping with the teachings of Muhammad, the ones that advised women to “guard their modesty,” to display “their beauty” only to their husbands and family members. But I was not Muslim, and according to the US State Department, American women in Saudi Arabia did not have to wear abayas and veils as long as they dressed with respect for the local culture.
“I packed lots of conservative clothing,” I responded. “Long skirts, loose-fitting blouses. I’ll be fine.”
Dan said sometimes it might just be easier to throw on an abaya. “If you attract attention, you’re asking for trouble.”
I sighed. Maybe it was exhaustion from jetlag and the heat, but it all felt like so much to deal with. Already I’d yielded my passport, to be held in our employer’s government relations office for as long as we remained there. With that move, I’d surrendered identification. Dan’s passport was replaced by an iqama, the Kingdom’s residency card for foreigners, but they were issued only to men. As his spouse, I was added as a dependent to his document. The message was clear: he was responsible for me, for my actions, for my travel. If I wanted to move about outside our home, I could do so with my husband.
And now it seemed I must buy an abaya.
I’d read The Handmaid’s Tale.
Hold on. This is not Gilead, I told myself. Take a breath. I knew these things going in, I knew living overseas, living in the Middle East, would require flexibility, and I was prepared to flex. The adventure would be worth it.
Apparently flexibility and adventure included shrouding myself in black.
We went shopping.
That first year we lived “on the economy,” as it was called, meaning we were in an apartment in downtown Khobar instead of living on one of the many housing compounds reserved for Westerners. Our building was typical of the concrete structures that sprang up around the desert country as its population grew. It was unremarkable—an open-air lobby populated by feral cats, a single elevator that rattled unnervingly as it ascended, an overwhelming impression of utilitarian grey.
Our apartment on the sixth floor was pleasant, though, with spacious carpeted rooms, their large east-facing windows overlooking the Corniche that lined the coast. I loved watching the sun rise over the Persian Gulf, its light casting a pink glow over calm turquoise water and a cloudless sky, and I sometimes opened a window, despite the oppressive heat, to listen to the morning prayer call ringing out over the city.
The neighborhood was urban, shops and businesses lining the street on which we lived. Just one city block away was Al-Shula, a two-story mall that formed the center of the downtown shopping experience for both locals and expatriates.
Al-Shula was a single rectangle occupying a city block, its stores lining a hall that wound around the building. Scant lighting revealed a dark, smokey place, filled with men ambling the halls, staffing the shops, loitering near the tea shop that served only men, a place that seemed to me to say, you may shop here if you wish, but perhaps you’d rather leave it to the men. In its western-facing corner, a small grocery store offered fruits, vegetables, boxes of UHT-treated milk, cases of pop. Other shops sold sandals and athletic shoes, camera equipment, incense and perfumes, plastic laundry tubs and various household goods. On the second floor, we passed shops hawking bootlegged music cassettes of popular hits—Dire Straits, Guns ‘n Roses, U2, Michael Jackson—but you could also score classical and jazz recordings there. The cassettes, encased in clunky plastic meant to withstand searing heat, were stacked in boxes for customers to peruse. Plastic permeated the air, and tinny-sounding Arabic music wafted from a small radio. Playing pop music in public was haram, forbidden.
We came to a row of clothing shops, mostly T-shirts and jogging outfits for men, but there were a few dedicated to women’s clothing. To my surprise, a number of store windows featured racy lingerie, colorful bras and lacy panties and sheer baby doll pajamas displayed not on mannequins but on wire hangers. It might seem that sex was absent in this world where all of the men were garbed identically in thobes, white shirtdresses falling to their sandaled feet, their heads wrapped in red-and-white checked gutras draped over a skull cap and held in place with an iqal, a black cord coiled twice around. The women floated about resembling, for lack of a better description, black tents, and it was impossible to guess at how men and women related to each other. They did not hold hands, walk together, converse. Not in public anyway. The lingerie shop reminded me that public appearance is hardly a glimpse of this secretive society, that its strict dress requirements, ruled by strong admonitions in the Koran, served to shield private lives from curious onlookers.
Dan and I stepped into an abaya shop and I looked around uncertainly. A salesman glanced at us with disinterest. A wide array of styles was displayed: capelike abayas with bell-shaped sleeves and coats with zippers or buttons fastening the front; simple polyester abayas; abayas trimmed with lace and tassels. All black. In one of the hottest countries on the planet, women swathed themselves in black. In Afghanistan and Iran, women wear dusty blue burkas; Egyptian women wear more colorful shifts called galabayas. How did Saudi Arabia’s uniformity of black originate? I don’t know, but one source claims it is because black blocks any possibility for the shape of the body to be seen.
I selected a polyester abaya shaped like a long shawl, easy to pull over my clothes, to thrust arms through its triangular sleeves, tying the long front ends to keep it closed. It felt awkward, cumbersome, and suffocating despite its loose fit. I hoped I would not have much use for it.
A few weeks later, Dan was working one Thursday morning, and I found myself on my own. Thursdays were essentially Saturdays to us—the first day of the weekend in the Muslim world before their holy day on Friday. We’d been filling our Thursdays with sightseeing—a visit to a camel market in Qatif, flamingo-spotting on the shoreline, drives along the coast to see the progress on the Causeway that was being built to span the Gulf to the island of Bahrain. We enjoyed afternoon walks along the Corniche to the swanky Meridien Hotel where we would stop for tall glasses of refreshing iced tea with mint leaves.
On this Thursday, I decided to go shopping. My choices were limited. I could not drive—women were not permitted—and I was not yet comfortable with hiring a driver for the day. Anyway, I did not need to. The mall was just up the street. I thought I could buy stationery; I’d been writing letters home on the same yellow legal pads I used to create my classroom lesson plans, but real stationery gave my trip a purpose. To the mall I would go.
So many memories of those days have become hazy with time, but this one remains visceral:
I adjust the abaya so that it completely covers my jeans and T-shirt, pull a baseball cap low over my face, and brace myself to step into the murky shopping mall. I keep in mind my goal, pretty paper at the stationery store I’d spied on the second floor. But honestly, I am here simply to do it, to enter a mall in the middle of the day and walk with intention through its cigarette smoke-filled halls, past the throngs of men, mostly men, too many men, to ignore their curious gazes, their leers, their predatory stares, their righteous indignation that I would dare to be here, to do what women everywhere else in the world do freely, go shopping by themselves. Just three months earlier I was riding the F Train from Park Slope to Manhattan every day as I had done for years and nothing ever happened—except that one time we were packed in so much like sardines we held each other up without needing the overhanging straps, and the man behind me pushed up against me again and again, panting into my ponytail, making the two girls sitting on the bench seat in front of me snicker—but it was only that one time, and that was, oh, maybe six years ago, and now I am scared to walk through this rundown little shopping mall? I take a deep breath and reach for the door.
Immediately, I am enveloped in smoke. This is the hangout for the foreign men, mostly from Asian countries, who work in this Kingdom, leaving behind their wives, their families, their homes, who are now without any other entertainment possibilities on their day off besides the occasional soccer game; for the young Saudi men, too, teens, early twenties, not yet family men but not children either, who cannot date, at least not publicly, or go to bars as there are none, so they gather in swarms to wander the mall, check out the latest music in the cassette stores, ogle the black-garbed women who occasionally glide by or the Western expatriate women with their faces boldly bared, their hair, too. I feel rather than see their stares, my eyes cast down, my steps quick as I head to the central escalator. I will myself to breathe calmly, I am safe, I am in control, I am a strong, independent woman and I will not be intimidated, but my shaky knees tell a different story. In the stationery store, I rapidly peruse the disappointing selection of paper, a few boxes of overly-sentimental floral sheets, some blank notecard-and-envelope sets. I settle for one of those, hand over a few riyals to the bored Arab man at the cash register, and make a beeline for the exit. I had thought I might look for some new music, maybe stop at the grocery store for oranges, perhaps even order a pizza to go from the corner Pizza Sheikh stand, but my feet have whisked me out of the mall and before I even think about it, I am heading back up the city block to the refuge of our apartment.
I wonder now at my timidity. I am embarrassed by it. But I was newly arrived in a strange place, so foreign to everything I knew, and the stories I’d heard were frightening. Not far from our apartment was a building most expats knew from the rumor mill—it was there a Filipina maid had been thrown out of a top floor window after being raped. Those who’d been in the Kingdom much longer than I were quick to share advice: “All American women are viewed as whores here. Remember that when you’re out in public.” “Don’t get into an elevator if a man is already in it.” “Rape is always the woman’s fault here. Men cannot be expected to control themselves, so women must not put themselves in a position where a man will lose control.” “In a police report, it takes two women’s testimony to equal one man’s.”
Was this true? Was it fair? Undoubtedly some of it was, but surely not all of it. Just as I knew New York City was generally safe, it also could be very dangerous. But in New York, I had learned to negotiate that risk. Avoid certain neighborhoods. Don’t turn down dark streets. Don’t get into a crowded subway car…ever again. Here, I was uncertain. I did not know all the risks, but I sensed them all around.
It took time to feel comfortable, but as I met other expatriate women and joined them on shopping trips, my confidence grew. They, too, were wary but determined to seek some semblance of normalcy in their lives there, a feeling of independence, and going shopping without husband chaperones came to symbolize that. They all had stories. There was Kim, a fellow teacher, who shared a supermarket experience.
“So I’m in the canned vegetables aisle, looking for…oh, I don’t remember now, maybe peas or carrots? I am wearing my abaya, mind you, like I always do, and I feel something near my foot. I look down, hoping it’s not a rat, and there’s a guy, lying on the floor, trying to look up my abaya!” She shrieked with outraged laughter in her retelling. I tried to picture the scene and couldn’t. It was too ridiculous.
Another story from Sara, the mother of an eight-year-old girl with long blonde hair. “We were on King Khalid Street, waiting for the light to turn green. I had Audrey by the hand, ready to cross. A fully-veiled woman stopped me, grabbed my arm, and said, ‘Your daughter should wear an abaya.’ This made me angry. I shook my head no, and told her, ‘She’s a little girl. She doesn’t have to.’ The woman said, ‘It’s not for me, I say this. It is for her own safety.’”
What was it like, to wear an abaya? I try to recall and am confronted with conflicting emotions. On the one hand, it was just a piece of cloth, hastily flung over other pieces of cloth, unnecessary layering in a hot climate, but loose-fitting and not a big deal. On the other hand, my husband never had to wear one. He, and other men, could walk freely in short-sleeved tees, without fear of confrontation. There was a subconscious niggling, a little voice that whispered this is not fair, this is not right, but I could not pay that voice too much mind if I intended to stay there. Perhaps if I could have viewed it as a costume, like the ones I once wore for Halloween—fun, the donning of another persona, imagining life as someone else, if only briefly—but that was not really possible. There was no creativity, no imagination, no choice. Cover up, or face the consequence.
We heard stories of women having their legs struck by the switches carried by the Mutawah, religious police charged with protecting the community’s morality. They prowled the streets looking for transgressions. Too much leg, bare arms, bright red lipstick could be viewed as violations. I never knew anyone, though, actually struck by a Mutawah.
The power of the Mutawah to instill compliance through fear would last until 2002, after I’d already left the Kingdom, when 15 girls in Makkah died in a school fire. The Mutawah were blamed for hindering the girls’ escape because the girls were not wearing abayas or headscarves. Some say the influence of the Mutawa has dwindled since then.
But throughout my time there in the 1990s, plenty of American women heeded the stories and chose avoidance. They never left the security of their housing compounds, except to make their way to the airport. They refused to explore the country, its cities, its desert, its beaches. Fear was too great. I did not come here to cower in fear, so I continued to venture out, to the mall, the supermarket, hotels for coffee, restaurants for dinner. On weekends Dan and I drove into the desert to camp. We took long weekends to visit other cities, to tour the mountains of the Asir Region and to marvel at the remains of the early Nabateans at Mada’in Saleh. And I didn’t always wear my abaya. I grew secure enough, in knowing the places to go and the places to avoid, that I often headed downtown dressed in long skirts, loose blouses buttoned high on my neck. I even occasionally donned pants, though always with a long shirt, often one of my husband’s, worn like a tunic. I moved with caution, but without fear.
*
It has been over 20 years since I left that part of the world. I’m told it’s changed but it is unclear how substantive that change is. There are the stories, the proclamations, the polished public relations images released for Western consumption, and then, there are the realities on the ground. We departed just as the Internet was exploding, and doubtless that has had a huge impact on the society.
By the time my family and I left, Al-Shula Mall had burned to the ground, but newer shopping malls had already proliferated, two- and three-story structures with multiple wings, glass-fronted entrances, glittering escalators, food courts with American fast-food restaurants, Western brand-name clothing stores. Ample lighting. Coffee shops and cafes with family dining areas, where single women can enjoy lunch without fear of reprimand. There are actually movie theaters now, where once films on videocassettes were smuggled in to bypass the censors who would delete objectionable scenes. It is hard to imagine now that these everyday aspects of life were once unthinkable there, yet that was the Arabia I knew.
Still, I am skeptical. Are the changes indicators of genuine social shifts, a recognition of the equal rights of women, a sign that a younger generation is rejecting the mores of their grandparents? Or are they superficial window-dressing, small appeasements to modernity, to the siren call of consumerism as promoted on social media? Occasionally I see headlines out of Saudi Arabia like the recent story from Iran—perhaps not of young girls harassed and beaten on subways for failing to wear hijabs, but of public beheadings for political dissent or drug charges.
Women can now drive, a right finally granted in 2018, a move the government claimed they instituted to increase women’s employment, but women’s rights groups say it was their work that brought about the change. A leader of the movement, Loujain al-Hathloul, was imprisoned for three years, charged as a terrorist. She was finally released in 2021 but she is still banned from traveling.
My feelings about the place are complicated. My family and I had such good experiences there, and my children, now adults, recall their early years as ideal. My own warm memories are chilled by the knowledge that the jets of 9-11 were commandeered by Saudis, following the lead of Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin-Ladin. I am repulsed by the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the Washington Post journalist, and the considerable evidence that his killing was coordinated by the nation’s top leaders.
And yet, while I deplore its autocratic government, its absolute monarchy, the archaic laws that keep women second-class citizens and refuse to accord rights at all to LGBTQ people, a whisper of “hypocrite” rises in the back of my mind. My own nation, the one I prize for its progressive movement toward greater equality and opportunities for all people, is itself experiencing a conservative backlash repealing the progressive efforts of the past half-century, a religious right movement spreading intolerance. A political dissident in Riyadh is imprisoned and in Florida teachers are afraid to say the word “gay” lest they lose their teaching licenses. A teenager is grievously injured on an Iranian train for failing to cover her head, while a little girl in Mississippi is forced to bear the child of her rapist.
In Iran, Narges Mohammadi is imprisoned for “spreading lies about the state.” She has been awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight oppression against women.
And also in Iran, two weeks after boarding a subway train without a headscarf, Armita Geravand has died.
“I was so dismayed by a recent news story about the death of a young girl in the Middle East from an altercation involving the issue of a headscarf. The story brought me back to my long ago experiences living in Saudi Arabia, to my mixed feelings then, and now, about conforming to a cultural expectation to ‘cover up.’ Thus, my creative nonfiction piece, ‘The Cover Up,’ was born.” —Kathleen Tighe
Kathleen Tighe is a Michigan-based writer of creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. Her work has appeared in The Write Launch, Collateral, Wild Roof Journal, Dunes Review, Still Life, and Qua Literary and Fine Arts Magazine. Kathleen is currently working on a memoir linking her experiences in Saudi Arabia with contemporary issues in the United States. Her website is kathleentighe.com.