100 Books, #39: Guests of the Sheik
Sep. 21st, 2014 03:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerMy freshman year of college, I took an immeasurably dull class about the History of the Middle East: the kind of class where I could have read the textbook and achieved more entertainment and information retention. It was worth it, however, because one of the books we read was Elizabeth Warnock Fernea’s Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village.
Despite the title, Fernea’s book is really a memoir more than an ethnography. In fact, before it is anything else, a delightful and well-written fish out of water story: in the 1950s, Fernea spent the first two years of her marriage accompanying her husband on his research trip in El Nahra, a village in Iraq, even though neither of them spoke much Arabic at the beginning.
Fernea finds it hard to adjust. Although she's in El Nahra with her husband, their social lives are quite separate, and her limited Arabic makes her seem weird and kind of hilarious to the local women. “They did not find me sympathetic or interesting or even human, but only amusing as a performing member of another species. I tried to feel tragic, superior, ironic, above it all - but failed utterly and wept again.”
Fernea's breakdown when she realizes how utterly she has failed to connect with the local women is the great crisis of the memoir. As her Arabic gets better and one of the local girls becomes her best friend and her sponsor, Fernea becomes a small part of an interlocking web of women in El Nahra.
One of the reasons the book stays with me so strongly, I think, is that it is one of the first nonfiction books I read where relationships between women - the relationships of mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, co-wives, teachers and their pupils at the local girls' school - are central to the book. They are peripherally involved at best in the great movements of history. But for Fernea, they're important and interesting because they are there: their existence is justification enough.
The other reason the book has stayed with me is because it remains one of the best models I have read for writing about difference. How do you write about people from a culture very different than your own without making them seem totally alien - or, conversely, without eliding the differences in order to make the foreign seem to be just like us?
The book's great strength lies ultimately in its modesty. Fernea makes no sweeping statements about the nature of Iraq or Islam or the relationship between East and West; she simply writes about her experiences as a young woman spending the first two years of her married life in El Nahra with her husband.
Don't make sweeping generalizations, and don't make the people you meet into mere examplars of your generalizations. They are not just Representative #1 through 10 of the local culture; they are individuals with individual personalities. Tell specific stories about specific people, and let patterns emerge from that. Admit it when you don't understand something rather than speculating fancifully about what it might mean. And don't pass judgment.
Near the end of the book, Fernea writes of a conversation she had with her husband not long before they left Iraq. “We admitted to each other that we had both had somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone’s attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough.”
Despite the title, Fernea’s book is really a memoir more than an ethnography. In fact, before it is anything else, a delightful and well-written fish out of water story: in the 1950s, Fernea spent the first two years of her marriage accompanying her husband on his research trip in El Nahra, a village in Iraq, even though neither of them spoke much Arabic at the beginning.
Fernea finds it hard to adjust. Although she's in El Nahra with her husband, their social lives are quite separate, and her limited Arabic makes her seem weird and kind of hilarious to the local women. “They did not find me sympathetic or interesting or even human, but only amusing as a performing member of another species. I tried to feel tragic, superior, ironic, above it all - but failed utterly and wept again.”
Fernea's breakdown when she realizes how utterly she has failed to connect with the local women is the great crisis of the memoir. As her Arabic gets better and one of the local girls becomes her best friend and her sponsor, Fernea becomes a small part of an interlocking web of women in El Nahra.
One of the reasons the book stays with me so strongly, I think, is that it is one of the first nonfiction books I read where relationships between women - the relationships of mothers and daughters, sisters, friends, co-wives, teachers and their pupils at the local girls' school - are central to the book. They are peripherally involved at best in the great movements of history. But for Fernea, they're important and interesting because they are there: their existence is justification enough.
The other reason the book has stayed with me is because it remains one of the best models I have read for writing about difference. How do you write about people from a culture very different than your own without making them seem totally alien - or, conversely, without eliding the differences in order to make the foreign seem to be just like us?
The book's great strength lies ultimately in its modesty. Fernea makes no sweeping statements about the nature of Iraq or Islam or the relationship between East and West; she simply writes about her experiences as a young woman spending the first two years of her married life in El Nahra with her husband.
Don't make sweeping generalizations, and don't make the people you meet into mere examplars of your generalizations. They are not just Representative #1 through 10 of the local culture; they are individuals with individual personalities. Tell specific stories about specific people, and let patterns emerge from that. Admit it when you don't understand something rather than speculating fancifully about what it might mean. And don't pass judgment.
Near the end of the book, Fernea writes of a conversation she had with her husband not long before they left Iraq. “We admitted to each other that we had both had somewhat irrational and idealistic notions of being examples, of bridging the gap between one set of attitudes and another. Now, of course, we knew we had not basically changed anyone’s attitude, except perhaps our own. With our friends in El Nahra we had established personal ties, as individual human beings. This was all we should have hoped for, and perhaps it was enough.”
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-09-22 11:56 pm (UTC)Yes. Excellent guidelines.
Sounds like a very interesting book.
no subject
Date: 2014-09-23 01:26 am (UTC)