Life in the Red Tent.

All aspects of identity are public facts here. Religion is printed on your state-issued identity card (Christian, Muslim, and Jew only, which is rough for the Baha'is). The district you live in is on your license plate. Countless other facts about you (religion, lifestyle, economic status, piety) can be communicated in an instant by the way you dress.
Of course, clothing communicates information like this in the States and everywhere in a similar fashion. More so than in America, though, these status markers inform the social scripts that you operate by. If you're a Christian you wear this, if you're a Muslim you might wear that. If you're from the lower classes, you do these kinds of things for fun and live like this, if you're from the upper class, you might do those kinds of things for fun and live like that. And—as westerners are always keenly aware—if you're a man, you socialize one way, if you're a woman, in another way.

Now, I'm always wary of discussing gender in the Middle East with people back home, whose mental image of life in the Middle East is more informed by Fox news than by first-hand pictures of life on the street in Cairo. It also must be reiterated that each country in the Middle East has distinct customs and cultural norms—you can't paint the region with one broad brush.

It wouldn't be completely accurate to say that the public sphere belongs to Egyptian men. After all, women attend university in as great of numbers as men, working as engineers and dentists and doctors without any stigma in the slightest—indeed, women must work, with the Egyptian economy in the state that it is. Even the most fully veiled women drive and can be seen walking in the street with friends and family at any time of the day or night. In the workplace, women are respected as equals and colleagues. They can choose who they marry. Though a thorough and substantive reflection on the role of gender in Egypt deserves to be had, I want to impress upon you, gentle readers, that Egypt does not fit neatly into any simple statements about gender in the Middle East.

My family in Maasara feels like a family of women. Part of this is simply for the fact that women generally socialize inside the house. While men and women both attend to their business outside the house and luxuriate inside with their families, when it comes to social time, men generally head out to the tea and hookah cafes, and women lounge with each other inside the house. Although the family occupies 3 apartment units, when my roommates and I come home, we can usually find all of the women (who are all related by blood or marriage) together in the downstairs apartment, chatting and eating and playing with the babies, taking care of housekeeping chores together, cooking, napping.

Another reason that it feels like a family of women is that the men really are gone. One young husband is working in Kuwait as a mechanic and forklift driver, and won't be back for another year and a half. His wife is all of 21 years old, with a daughter who's a year and a half old. Marcel's father has only seen her once. I asked if he was at least making a lot of money, to mitigate the difficulty of his long absence. No, they tell me. Maybe $200 a month. His brother got a visa to the States and is working in Nashville. They're not sure what he does, but they're hoping to apply for visas to go visit him. He sends pictures back sometimes. They don't know when they'll see him again.

But the women band together and have each other, the figurative village that's raising the child. And they have a raucous good time together. Every evening, once we've had a chance to rest and clean up after work, we put on our pajamas and join their warm, affectionate women time in the living room of their apartment.

2 nights ago, we were joined by a girl from Peace Corps Ethiopia who was passing through Cairo and needed a place to crash for the night. The women were amped. After tea was passed around and I had used up all of my Arabic vocab as a rudimentary translator, someone mentioned how the 5 year old girl was a sassy little belly dancer. Someone brought out a pan to use as a drum, and lo and behold, Lydia begins popping these hips like she came out of the womb belly dancing. Things escalated quickly—clapping and ululations, a small stereo and then an even bigger one were brought with bellydancing music cassette tapes, more pans for drums, and soon all of us (one very pregnant woman and our Peace Corp friend included) were belly dancing in the small room, beneath the life-size picture of Jesus on the wall.
We danced for an hour, until our clothes were drenched in sweat and our sides hurt from laughing and contorting our hips into unfamiliar movements. The 16 year old videotaped it, which we watched last night. Pretty BAMF, if I say so myself.
After we returned back to our apartment, after lots of kisses for the children and compliments for each other (so beautiful! so clever!), I thought to myself that this—this community of support, this time to care for and tease one another, this time to let our cares simply fall off our shoulders and out of our minds—is what sustains us here. Sure, the men have a lot of fun and can be more carefree, playing dominos and backgammon and smoking sheesha in the streets, roaming around and joking with each other outside. I won't pretend that I don't wish I could join in with that part of the culture, too. But give me life in the Red Tent. It's a healing time.

Last night, though, my roommates and I gained a very different insight into the reality for some women here. Now, I should say again that my family is Orthodox Christian, not Muslim, so what I'm saying here shouldn't be taken as proof for the oppression of women under Islam or anything like that.
Gigi is 29 years old and one of the married daughters in the family. Not that we have favorites in the family, but she's one of my favorites. She's also 7 months pregnant and shuffles around in that endearing way that enormously pregnant women do. We love her.
Last night we arrived back at our apartment late, at nearly 10pm. We heard a knock on the door and worried that someone in the family might come over to tsk tsk us for coming back this late at night. Instead, it was Gigi, and she just wanted to come in and chat with us. We got her two chairs so that she could elevate her feet—she had gone to the doctor a few days ago with high blood pressure, and her feet and hands are painfully swollen. Being a pregnant woman in the heat of the Egyptian summer is a rough state to be in.
Conversation ambles in fits and starts, thanks to the language impasse, from one topic to another. Somehow the subject of her husband comes up. Now, her husband lives in Cairo, but in another neighborhood. We were under the impression that she was back home with her parents because of her pregnancy, so that her mom could help take care of her—not unusual in Egyptian culture at all. Last night we got the fuller story, though. It turns out that this is actually her 2nd husband. She was first married at 19 to a man who, after the wedding, turned out to be a drug user. He also used to beat her. She said that they slept in separate bedrooms and never had a child together. They divorced a few years into the marriage.
She married again at age 27 to a man who was 51, divorced as well, with two children from the previous marriage (they live with their mother). I told her that I was so happy that, despite the horror of her first marriage, things were going well for her now.
No, she said. This husband beats her, too. That's the real reason she's home now, and the reason for her high blood pressure. The doctor had forbade her to live with her husband during the pregnancy out of concern for her blood pressure and health. But I knew that she and her mother had just taken a trip earlier this week to visit her husband—why had they gone?
It turns out that she had gone to ask her husband for money to visit the doctor for her pregnancy. He refused. Her father told her that he would pay instead for their own doctor to take care of Gigi. It turns out that when she went to the doctor yesterday, she found out that she was going to have a girl. My roommates and I were ecstatic. No, she said. Her husband really wanted to have a boy, and wants her to have an abortion.
The whole conversation was devastating for all of us. She said that she'll stay with her family for a while after the baby is born, and then wait and see what she'll do from there.
We asked her if this was common for women in Egypt—not necessarily, she said. The husbands of the other women in the house are wonderful husbands and fathers.
We told her that we're going to be her daughter's aunts, and we're already gearing up for the birth and the big party that happens one week after.
After Christmas, we'll be bringing back baby clothes and such for her—if any of you have things along those lines to donate, I'll be happy to get them from you.

In any case. There are no easy answers—it's been a lot to think about.
But for now, here are some reports from the Red Tent.