These girls weren’t telling me the story that I had believed about them. As I sat alongside, helping them to reflect on their drawings and make connections between their history, their faith and their identity, I realized they were rewriting a part of my story. It wasn’t just a privilege to have these girls come and attend the summer school; it was a privilege to encounter them, to listen to them. They opened up about the prejudice they felt others held towards them because of their dress, and their stories moved me.
And on the second day we were to see these reactions unfold before our eyes. We were sharing the small campus of studios with another summer school, this one attended by eighteen-year-old school leavers. So, when we took our lunch out into the small grassy area outside the cafeteria and collided with the older, hot-pants-and-skinny-vest-wearing students, it was the stuff caption competitions are made of. Our girls needed to let off steam, but they weren’t taking any robes off in the process. So, as a teenage version of “What’s the Time Mr Wolf?” ensued and veiled girls raced and shouted and black robes billowed, the other tutors and I sat back to watch the reaction of the older students.
Having just listened as the girls had told us how keenly they felt the judgement and misperceptions of strangers because of their religious clothing, I wasn’t surprised by what I saw. While our girls continued to laugh and race, the mouths of the older girls were covered in hands as whispers passed back and forth; quiet stares gave way to sidelong looks of snide incredulity. It was the kind of reaction that anyone might have on crash-landing unexpectedly in someone else’s subculture, but I felt protectiveness for “my” girls, as I was beginning to see them. Over the small lawn I caught the eye of Aliya, but her calm smile told me those instincts were premature. It wasn’t our girls who were acting insecure; there was no evidence right now that they doubted themselves because of how they were dressed or perceived. I wished the same were the case for the girls perching on the walls, whispering and looking on.
Throughout their art, their reflective notes and poetry and even in their stalking of Mr Wolf, it was evident that these fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds had discovered something of what it means to inhabit their own place in the world. Their way of seeing themselves was not in comparison with celebrities or cover girls or any other image of beauty plastered onto our cultural wallpaper. Their hijabs were like a pre-emptive strike on the temptation to derive their value from the approval of men in the way Western women were persuaded to by marketing companies and celebrity obsessions. These girls leaned into their self-image as modest and therefore beautiful, and they derived great strength and purpose from it. But if I was hoping to hear them say that they were made to wear it then I was going to be disappointed. The only hint I detected was when they talked about wishing their hijabs were more colourful and had prettier designs. I made a mental note to invite Novice Joy the next time we ran this summer school. The following day one of the girls arrived in a bright pink hijab embroidered with tiny white flowers. “This course is making me feel differently about what I wear, and this pink one says what I feel.” She beamed shyly.
And yet they were instructed to wear it. No matter how much they insisted it was their choice and they were freely choosing to embrace their covering, it was all the same a cultural construct of beauty and worth valued by their world; just a different one from the one I had listened to when I was their age.
Theirs was upheld by elders, imams, fathers and mothers and peers; mine by a cacophony of bullies, preachers, godly wives and supermodels. But all of us, whether hot-pant-wearing kafir or Islamic schoolgirls in niqabs, were carving our niche into a pathway already hewn for us, whether through the force of religion or of liberal capitalism. And all of us would trip and fall again and again as we tried to match up to the perfection set for us because each of us would, in our own way, mistake that contrived perfection for the kind of love that could dispel our shame and doubt and fear.
On the final morning I sat at a table with four girls as they told me about the kind of Islamic love songs they were allowed to listen to. Songs whose lyrics were reminiscent of the choruses we sang at Bible camp about our love for God. I wondered if the choruses we sang about being in love with Jesus would translate to Mohammed; I smiled to myself at the possibility that that’s what they had been singing over the fence at Islamic Youth Camp all those years ago.
But even if our desire was directed towards very different leaders, it soon became clear that they weren’t so unlike me at the age of fourteen. Their chatter, which had begun with love, soon crossed over into the fears they had about judgement and punishment.
“The judgement I really don’t want is the ultimate one where you get buried in a pit with snakes and everything. That’s at the end of the world”, the girl next to me explained. My knowledge of the Islamic version of Judgement Day was zero but, going on past experience, I felt I had a handle on just how troubled this girl could be. Absorbed in colouring the layers of her dress design, she talked to me about the three levels of punishment and how she hoped she would never experience eternal banishment into this dark, snake-ridden pit. Underneath her robes and piety she was just as worried as I had been about failing and falling into the wrathful hands of God.
As I listened to her, it struck me that a tea party with the nuns might be a very good idea. To introduce them to the sisters who had been more like mothers to me and who had the strength to love, in the name of God, everything that people brought to them. But there would be no such Welsh field trip; these girls just had me and the other facilitators, so right now it was down to me to be the older sister, able to hear and hold all the fear she wanted to name. By the time she had finished describing these punishments her colouring motion had become languid, as if her energy had drained away.
I asked her to imagine she had a child.
She nodded.
“And imagine that child began to rebel against you and act in a way that you’d taught her not to.”
More nodding.
“Then this child begins not just acting out but actually seems to turn against you and reject you. How would you feel about your child, do you think?”
“I’d feel sad and I’d want to do all I could to bring her back to me.”
“Yes. I think you would do everything you could to bring your child back to a good relationship with you.”
She nodded. “I would.”
“I think that’s how Allah feels towards you. Unstoppable love.”
She smiled in recognition.
“And from everything you’ve told me you want to be in a good place with Allah …”
“Yes.”
“So it sounds like you and Allah are after the same thing then?”
She smiled at me, her enthusiasm returning in the vigorous nod of her head.
“You know, we’re both going to mess it up, no matter how much we want to do the right thing? Even though you’re wearing the right clothes you’ll get it wrong at times.”
She sighed and nodded.
“But if Allah is Allah then we can trust that we’ll be met by mercy and kindness and it’s not down to us to be perfect on our own.”
“That would be idolatry.”
“Yeah, it would, like we were saying we are OK on our own and we don’t need love and understanding and forgiveness.”
“Mmmm”, she agreed.
“So that pit of judgement with all the snakes in it that you mentioned: don’t think about that – it’ll just sow fear. Think about having a heart that stays open for Allah to pour His love into.”
The Jewish interfaith facilitator turned round from her table and nodded, smiling. “Amen.”
That afternoon as the girls presented their finished designs I read an inscription on a piece of fabric:
I thought only Muslim women were modest and I thought only modest women could be truly beautiful. Now I know that’s not true. I know that women can be faithful and devout and modest even without veils, even outside of Islam, and
that is beautiful.
Epilogue
If I had been designing an outfit for the Empty Hanger that week I wonder what my storyboard would have looked like as I gathered the fabric of my beliefs, experiences and hopes into a design. We’d asked students to bring with them an object that was significant for them as a starting point for their designs. And so I would have brought the wooden cross, carved for me by Sister Clare when I became an Associate of the Community at Ty Mawr. On one side it had etched the shape of an open-armed figure; it captured entirely the fearless posture the sisters embodied, but it was probably meant to be Jesus on the cross, or the resurrected Jesus showing he has overcome failure, guilt, fear and death with Life. Showing that love can clothe and transform all that we are.
I thought about all I was, but we can never really observe ourselves; we only see ourselves reflected in the beauty we recognize in others and in the things that bring us to life and cause us to lose ourselves in a vision beyond. We catch glimpses in the wounds that make us wince when bruised by others, and how they remind us that it wasn’t meant to be like this; that we’re not yet Home.
So, if I had been designing my outfit for the Empty Hanger, there would have been, first, a trail of falling leaves cut from the fabric of a damson suede mini-skirt, from the black plastic bin-liner of my underwater blob costume, from the insipid blue gingham of a student nurse’s uniform and from ugly, black, clerical polycotton.
And above it, around the template of a naked figure, would be a tunic made from pieces of tartan trousers that had once belonged to a punk boy, from a nun’s wimple and a pink-and-white hijab; and a white plastic dog-collar, smudged with red lipstick.
Acknowledgments
Massive thanks goes to a whole bunch of people who in their different ways enabled, persuaded, cajoled and encouraged me to write this book.
Caroline Chartres, who waited years for me to get my act together and write it all down – thank you for all your support, patience, wit and vision along the way … and for enduring all the early attempts to tell it: it was therapeutic, for me at least.
Rosalind Waters, who relived so many of these events far more often than she wanted to; willingly reading and re-reading countless passages, who prescribed me tea/champagne/gin at what I felt were very inopportune moments when I was busy having an authorial crisis, and who generally encouraged me to keep going. Thank you.
Enormous thanks go to Elizabeth Gowing who is one of the most awesome women I know, and who became my writing buddy even though it meant reading an awful lot about God and not enough about the adventures she was hoping to hear more of, and whose brilliance has inspired me in writing and so very much beyond. Time for some new pebbles?
Similarly heartfelt thanks to Emma Karran who so generously gave time to remember many of these events and more, and who with great wisdom and humour helped me piece the memories and conversations back together … .
It was a privilege to have Robert Wilton involved in the writing process, and I am full of thanks for his readiness to make comments and suggestions, and to celebrate any and every milestone that could be found along the way. There are, hopefully, many more to come.
Thanks also to Jamie Birkett, Kim Storry and Ellen Williams, and to Matthew Waters, Jeff Stuckey, Vicky Harper, Chris MacGregor, Siona Stockel, Merryn Gamba, Caroline Bruce, Derek Mills, Helen Hawkins and Charles Hawkins, who each in their own way offered much-appreciated support and input.
I have loved the poem Muddy for a long, long time, and I am hugely grateful to Patrick Hobbs for letting me reproduce it at the beginning of this book – it really says it all.
These acknowledgements wouldn’t be complete without thanking Alastair Jepson, who has championed me at every step, and encourages me to get up and keep going at every hurdle over which I trip.
Joachim Woerner, without whom this story would have been a sad and truncated version of what it is and probably not worth telling, thank you for everything.
Thanks also go to Vanessa Bruch, the Catalan equivalent of Mary Poppins, without whom this book could not have been written. Thank you for becoming part of our family and for being the love of Raphael’s life while I was locked away for hours on end.
Dad, you’ve been unwavering in your encouragement to write this story down and I am so grateful for that. Thank you for all you have done to make this the story that I can tell.
Nick, I am so grateful for everything you have done to support and encourage me in writing this book. I hope the full extent of my fundamentalist childhood will be a shock from which you can recover! Thank you for knowing when to laugh and when not to …
Finally, having spent most of these writing months locked away in my study ignoring my friends and sending only the occasional text blaming The Book for my absence, I am thoroughly glad to have the chance now to thank – for all their encouragement and enthusiasm, and for keeping my number in their contacts list – Jane Addis, Juliet Barwell, Sal Bermejo, Chris Blockley, Tamsin Bond, Sasha Gibson, Jenny Lincoln-Jones, Erica Wax, Tori Welsh, Kate Wiggs and Ben Wright …
Copyright Permissions
Excerpts from the following are reproduced by kind permission of the copyright holders.
“I Am A New Creation” Copyright © 1983 Thankyou Music (Adm. by Capitol CMG Publishing excl. UK & Europe, adm. by Integrity music, part of the David C. Cook family, [email protected])
“Muddy” by Patrick Hobbs, from Paper Hands (Shaftesbury: Dancing Blue, 2001), copyright © 2001 Patrick Hobbs.
Extract from the account of Lieutenant Colonel M. W. Gonin originating from the memoir in the care of the Imperial War Museum under the reference Documents.3713.
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© Joanna Jepson, 2015
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