An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir

by Chesler, Phyllis

I had a (quiet) crush on you but Abdul-Kareem was always behind you or close by. I remember laughing with you a lot. You said things . . . OUTRAGEOUS! I really felt at ease with you . . . except Abdul-Kareem was ALWAYS around and you seemed tight as a couple, “going steady.” I was old enough to know when not to waste my time.

  Ah well.

  How can Abdul-Kareem resist the pull of his culture, since his family is demanding that he surrender to it as the price for being allowed back in—especially since he has a foreign bride?

  I am a goner.

  The entire family (Abdul-Kareem and his brothers and sisters and spouses) attended another, much larger party. A garden party: About sixty people sat listlessly in the heat, politely yawning and smiling between mouthfuls of kebab, pilau, and sweets. The company was, refreshingly, “mixed” but the men and women sat separately.

  A German woman, Heidi, the wife of an Afghan engineer, rescued me. Heidi is twenty-two and has been living in Afghanistan for six months. We walked off together, through the garden and into an adjoining field, where we lay down, face-up, side-by-side. Heidi whispered, but then she bellowed.

  “I am bored, bored, bored. I have no real life here. I cannot stand it.”

  As foreign wives, we talked quickly and easily. In Kabul, I used French, English, and my knowledge of Yiddish to understand some German. Heidi spoke English well enough. We whispered because we knew that our conversation would be considered conspiratorial. We knew we could be interrupted at any moment, separated, and silenced.

  “Phyllis, remember always that no opportunity to act sanely, rather than traditionally, should be wasted.”

  She said this mischievously, but with a slightly mad and desperate grin. It was very hot. Heidi had brought two bathing suits to the party. There was a swimming pool at the other end of the garden where the men were planning on swimming later.

  “Let’s go now,” she suddenly demanded, “before it’s completely off-limits to us.”

  We undressed, put on the bathing suits, and laid back down in the grass to sunbathe, still hidden from the party. We dozed.

  Abdul-Kareem and my sister-in-law found us. They were both shocked, angry, worried.

  “Important people” are at the party, they hissed at me, people who would never accept my behavior or poor choice of companions. Heidi’s reputation is that of a “whore,” they said, and she was “ruining” her poor husband, who was the “laughingstock” of Kabul.

  They physically pulled me away from Heidi. And they kept talking: “Her husband’s family is not as important as ours is,” I was not to compare myself with her. They ride a motorbike, they have no car. They are both going to return to Europe or certainly, she would. He would have to send her “packing.”

  Ah—what could Heidi’s crimes have been? That she acted like a Westerner? That she believed women had the right to swim—or was it that she dared talk to men other than her husband? Afghan girls have been killed for far less, both in Afghanistan and among immigrants in the West. The standards for women are different here; the line a woman must walk is razor thin.

  The British-born author Alison Legh-Jones fell in love with Khaled, a “North African Arab.” She married him in an Islamic ceremony and lived with him in the late 1960s somewhere in North Africa. In her book, English Woman, Arab Man, she writes:

  After finding an Arab in my address book he decides it’s time to tell me what to do if a local man tries to pick me up. “Ignore him. He’s wondering how soon he can make love to you. If he doesn’t go away tell him you’re not a tourist. Say you’re married to an Arab and he mustn’t talk to you. If he’s a good man he’ll say ‘Excuse me, madam’ and leave you. If not let him talk to himself until he’s tired of looking silly.

  “If I see you talking to another Arab without my permission I’ll kill you. As soon as a girl is seen with an Arab everyone assumes they’re making love. Whatever you do, I’ll find out. I’ve got friends everywhere. There’ll always be someone watching you. As soon as one of my friends sees you with another man he’ll come and tell me ‘Your wife is no good. She goes with other men.’

  “Don’t speak to my friends either,” he adds. “They’re just as bad.”

  My own parents had also watched me very closely. They assumed the worst if I came home a few minutes late. The “worst” always meant that I’d been with a boy and had done “something.” Whatever it might have been could “ruin my life” and “wreck all their plans for me.”

  I have exchanged one jailor for another, one jailhouse culture for another, far more dangerous jailhouse culture.

  Have all American wives regretted their decision to marry and live in the Muslim world? No.

  In 1945 the tall blonde Californian Marianne Likowski Alireza married Saudi Ali Alireza, a member of the royal family. Once Ali was sure Marianne was not Jewish, neither he nor his family ever insisted that she convert from Christianity to Islam. She agreed that their children would be raised as Muslims. Marianne would enjoy a fairy-tale world of diplomatic parties, shopping extravaganzas, and extended vacations in the best hotels in Europe and Egypt.

  However, Ali told her in advance what life would be like in the harem, in purdah: that she would have to be fully veiled and that, with some exceptions, she would mainly participate in gender-segregated gatherings. Marianne did not aspire to be more than a wife and mother and understood that she, not her Saudi family, would be obliged to adjust. The presence of black slaves did not bother her; on the contrary she adopted the Arab view that such slaves were better off. At times Marianne’s frustration and rage kept her in bed all day, but essentially she fit in and developed loving, lifelong relationships with her male and female relatives. She gave birth to five children and flourished in an extended family in which everyone lived, dined, and traveled together. Her mother-in-law and sisters-in-law embraced her with unfailing and spontaneous warmth. They did not reject her as a Christian infidel or foreigner.

  Alireza’s book, At the Drop of a Veil, was originally published in 1971, a quarter-century after her marriage in California. It is a joy to read, and as I did so, I decided I would quote her at length as an example of how such marriages can work out. And then, in the book’s last ten pages, Marianne drops quite a bombshell. After fifteen years of marriage Ali suddenly tells her that he has unilaterally divorced her, Muslim style—and is taking the children away from her. By then their oldest daughter, Hamida, had just been married to her first cousin. Ali married a Lebanese woman and shipped all four children off to boarding school, first in Egypt, then in Switzerland. Marianne no longer had her American passport—Ali had locked it up the moment they first arrived in Saudi Arabia. Like me, Marianne was forced to enter America on a foreign passport. But she was a cool-headed and determined mother with helpful friends.

  On a vacation with her four children in Switzerland, Marianne planned and carried out a successful kidnapping and took them with her to California. At the time doing so was absolutely unheard of. I hereby salute her courage and resourcefulness. Marianne regrets nothing—and she still spends a few months every year in the kingdom visiting her relatives. She writes:

  I have fifteen grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. . . . People say it’s remarkable that I made my peace with life in old Arabia, but I say no. What is truly remarkable is that those around me helped me to make my peace . . . it was in my worst moments that they helped me the most, and then we laughed together. So, this is a story of people who proved that even though we came from worlds apart, we could give respect, tolerance, understanding, sensitivity, and love to one another and make a human bond. If I had it to do over again, would I? You bet! I wouldn’t have missed it for anything!

  More recently, in the twenty-first century, G. Willow Wilson, a young Colorado native, converted to Islam; she subsequently fell in love with and married a moderate Egyptian. In her memoir, The Butterfly Mosqu
e, she quite movingly conveys the sense of camaraderie and security that comes from living in a large, Egyptian Muslim family. Like Alireza, Willow sometimes becomes impatient and bored but expresses joy and excitement about performing everyday household tasks. I will not criticize these women for finding happiness in the Arab world; however, this type of restricted, protected, and utterly family-centered life did not work for me. Alireza and Wilson freely chose such lives; I did not.

  I have been here for two months and have been allowed out only five or six times. Is this imprisonment meant to tame me, break me, teach me to accept my fate as an Afghan woman? I want to go home.

  We thrash things out for hours the other night. Abdul-Kareem was not in the least bit understanding or guilty or apologetic. I discover that all along he has been editorializing what I say to family members when he translates my words. He says it’s “for your own good.”

  I do not understand why we are not living by ourselves as we have already done for years. I point out that he still has no job, is still completely dependent on his father for everything. He is also in a bad temper all the time.

  Why do I have to ask twenty times for even the smallest thing? I am desperate for a tin of Huntley and Palmer biscuits or for a can of tuna fish.

  But my nagging hunger is not as awful as having lost the man I once knew and trusted. He really doesn’t seem to care that I am miserable. He spends all his time with his brothers when he is home. Just as they do. His eldest brother never talks to his wife.

  He is slipping away from me. I am a burden, a liability. He can’t even be bothered to buy a contraceptive. He is putting me at great risk. He is hard, indifferent.

  Abdul-Kareem is waiting to be told what he can do next. He is waiting for his father to fix it up with the King and the government for him to become Somebody Important. But first, they are watching him carefully.

  I am an unhappy and complaining wife. It is the only thing that makes him uncomfortable enough to hit me, yell at me, stomp out of the room.

  He has begun to hit me.

  Had I known that something like this could ever happen, had I known that we would have to live with his mother and brothers, I would never have come here.

  Dear Diary: Thank you. Had I not written some things down, I would never have remembered that I had been asking that he use contraceptives.

  I have no memory of Abdul-Kareem’s hitting me—yelling at me, yes, avoiding me, yes—hitting me, no. I would not have remembered this if I could not read it here. Worse than any slap or kick Abdul-Kareem might administer, worse, even, than refusing to use a condom, is that my very Western husband has confined me to a very Eastern harem. I am in purdah, however posh. And he acts as if this is all quite normal.

  My female relatives drink tea; eat luscious fruit, nuts, sweet, sticky cakes; entertain their many, mainly female, relatives who come to call. They also sew, cuddle infants, prepare young children for school. Above all they supervise the servants. This alone can be made into a full-time occupation.

  The servants and the daughters-in-law usually bear the brunt of the oldest woman’s or highest-ranking wife’s frustrations. And her frustrations are many. I had known something about female-female cruelty in the West, but I learned even more about it in Afghanistan. Forty years later I published a work titled Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman. It has a global perspective.

  I have been talking about living in a harem. Let me explain what that means.

  A harem is not a brothel, as so many Westerners erroneously believe. It is merely the women’s living quarters. Male relatives can join them—but no male nonrelatives may do so. It is hardly a den of eroticism.

  Western men have never been able to visit a harem—it is forbidden to them because the women are sacred (property), which must be kept separate and apart in order to protect them from strange men. Because foreign men have not visited the women’s quarters, their imaginations have run riot. True, like a brothel (or a women’s prison) a domestic harem is an all-female and a female-dominated environment. But it is more like a celibate nunnery or a nursery and sewing room. It is not a place where seductions and orgies take place. Historically only Western women travelers, who were allowed to visit domestic and imperial harems, have been able to render a more accurate report.

  Eventually, like prisoners everywhere, so-called protected women are blinded by the light; their eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. The outside world seems dangerous, certainly unfriendly to women. Hence understandably, women become claustrophobic and agoraphobic. Women may even become anxious when they are outdoors.

  I have begun to internalize the unspoken rules: Wait, and watch what the other women do before acting. Even I feel a bit too daring when I make my escapes into the city. I am beginning to experience as taboo, dangerous, what would be perfectly acceptable behavior back in New York. I am also getting used to spending my days at home, reading and waiting for the men to return.

  It is impossible for a Westerner to imagine the deadening torpor of a protected life under house arrest. Eventually, one is grateful for the smallest outing outdoors—a lovely picnic in a burqa, being allowed to watch the men and boys fly kites or swim.

  I am looking at a photograph taken in 1865 that is titled “Sweet Waters of Asia.” Four harem women and two female servants are having a picnic in a park on the eastern shores of the Bosphorus; the women are wearing full hijab and niqab—their faces are entirely covered except for their eyes. I hope they are smiling. They are sitting on the ground on a tablecloth with bags and baskets of provisions nearby. It is unclear whether these are paid models or simply ordinary harem women who have agreed to pose for the photographer, one Basil Kargopoulo.

  I wonder: How do they eat all the food they’ve brought? Do they smuggle it up under the heavy material that covers their noses, mouths, and jaws? Or do they flip the mask up when no one is looking and take a hurried bite—as if it is too shameful for women to eat or to be seen enjoying themselves in public?

  Some early nineteenth-century British female travelers to Egypt and Turkey noted ironically that harem-confined women did not have to wear restricting steel corsets as the British women did. The Brits envied and sometimes romanticized the loose Turkish clothing, which was not only comfortable but also never went out of fashion.

  Look: I’ve admitted that I spend my writing days dressed in flowing caftans. And I wear ethnic jewelry, which in the last decade I have color-coordinated with my filmy blouses and my nail polish. Yes, I could pass for an Eastern woman in another era. I steer clear of exotic excess—no time for it, but I appreciate it in others. Despite my strongly negative view of the burqa, I rather like the colorful and often shimmering kerchiefs that some religious Muslim women wear to great advantage. They are stunning with their many earrings, bracelets, and necklaces.

  Ironically the nineteenth-century harem dwellers could not believe how confined their female Western visitors were in their corset stays, hoops, and bustles, which the Eastern women insisted on examining in detail. However, the Western reports showed us the price exacted by imprisonment in the harem.

  In 1837 on a visit to Istanbul, the British-born Julia Pardoe noted that the Turkish harem women were indolent, childlike, and uneducated, and could only “live in the moment.”

  How very Zen of them!

  In 1846 the British-born author Harriet Martineau visited the Arab Middle East. She writes about the harems of Cairo:

  Everywhere they pitied us European women heartily, that we had to go about travelling, and appearing in the streets without being properly taken care of—that is, watched. They think us strangely neglected in being left so free, and boast of their spy system and imprisonment as tokens of the value in which they are held. The difficulty is to get away, when one is visiting a harem. The poor ladies cannot conceive of one’s having anything to do. All the younger ones were dull, soulless
, brutish, or peevish. . . . There cannot be a woman of them all who is not dwarfed and withered in mind and soul.

  In 1865 the British governess Emmeline Lott also described the confined Egyptian women as apathetic, leading lives of “irksome monotony,” which they bear by “puffing on [opium-laced] cigarettes constantly . . . [these are] the caged beauties of the East.”

  If women are weakened both physically and intellectually, and if they also believe that they are worth less than men—they will certainly be grateful for male protection. A woman reared in a harem knows that a woman is not valued for her educated brain or fearlessness but rather for her obedience, chastity, marital fertility, her ability to birth sons, and her willingness to live with cowives without complaint. Many harem women were happy to have cowives, slaves, and daughters-in-law because they needed help with the household and child-rearing chores—and with their husbands’ need for sexual pleasure and more sons. The harems that Martineau visited represented another world, another set of values.

  Toward the end of the twentieth century, my colleague Fatima Mernissi published a rather enchanting book, Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood. She describes growing up in a large, wealthy, sunny, polygamous harem in Fez, Morocco, in the 1940s.

  For her it was an active, busy quarter peopled by magically philosophical, loving, and high-spirited women who concocted elaborate homemade beauty treatments that they applied to themselves and to each other; they also visited the hammam (the public Turkish baths) and the occasional movie—and always en masse, all together. Mernissi also presents the harem as a refuge for female relatives “in trouble,” such as abandoned wives and war widows. She describes a Berber horsewoman, Tamou, who could ride and shoot as well as any man and who, upon seeking refuge, was asked by all the cowives to please consider becoming a wife, too; they so loved her company! (She accepted their offer.)

  Tamou was a war heroine from the Rif Mountains. She rode in on a “Spanish saddled horse” wearing a “man’s white cape”; Tamou had a Spanish rifle, a dagger at her hip, and “heavy silver bracelets with points sticking out . . . the kind you could use to defend yourself.” She had a green tattoo on her chin and a “long, copper-colored braid that hung over her left shoulder.”