EVERYTHING YOU EVER WANTED TO KNOW – AND LESS – ABOUT SYRIAN UNDERWEAR
By Anna Sussman
Daily Star
d=1&categ_id=4&article_id=99231
Feb 11 2009
Lebanon
‘The Secret Life of Syrian Lingerie’ explores a known but nebulous
subculture
BEIRUT: Visitors to the Middle East are often drawn by Orientalist
fantasies of colorful, fragrant souks, veiled women navigating spice
bazaars and narrow alleyways. I was, at least, when I signed up to
study abroad in Morocco, seven years ago. What I had expected – mounds
of dates and embroidered leather slippers – was there in abundance,
and in abundance I shopped. There was also something unexpected:
stall after stall of the sleaziest underwear I’d ever seen.
For years after, the thought of doing a story about smarmy lingerie
ricocheted around in my head, but I never managed to deepen my analysis
past "veiled outside, sexy inside," a simplistic reduction that said
more about my ignorance than about the dynamic I would be attempting
to describe.
So I was intrigued when I heard of "The Secret Life of Syrian
Lingerie," the recent book by Malu Halasa and Rana Salam. The subject
of a whole book, I wondered? What all is there to say?
As Halasa writes in her opening essay "Competing Thongs: The Lingerie
Culture of Syria," this lingerie "embodies both fantasy and frustration
… reveal[ing] much about the changing sexual mores of the modern
Middle East."
Halasa and Salam should be commended, first of all, for seeking to
go beyond the simple conservative/trashy dichotomy that immediately
presents itself, although it is a recurrent theme. They do this by
treating the book as a "curated space," as Halasa put it, filling it
with a number of contributions from artists and writers: photo essays,
interviews, first-person texts, poetry and reportage. As in any group
show, some pieces are decidedly better than others, although it must
be said that they have found an impressive array of perspectives on
what could be considered a niche topic.
The esoteric theme was originally intended to be the subject of an
essay by Salam in "Transit Beirut," a 2004 collection of essays and
fiction writing edited by Halasa and Roseanne Khalaf, but Halasa
had bigger plans. They approached the head of the Prince Claus Fund
Library, inviting her to a "very swishy, colonial hotel" where Halasa
whipped out a giant bag of Syrian underwear. Laying the pieces out
on the table, no doubt to the horror of the hotel’s patrons, they
got the funding.
Salam, a celebrated graphic designer who grew up in Beirut but
went to Central St. Martin’s in London for college, was always
attracted to the underwear, which she used to pick up as gag gifts
for friends. She realized she was onto something by her friends’
reactions: "They would go crazy over them," she said. For her, this
book was a way of "capturing what is disregarded, giving it value,
glamorizing it." In this sense, it is an extension of her larger body
of work, which takes everyday items such as colorful Chiclets boxes,
and gives them the quasi-Warhol treatment.
Halasa’s essay begins by providing a magnificent overview on the
topic. She takes the reader from the souk stalls, where vendors keep
their "catalogues," cheap photo albums filled with pictures of Eastern
European women modeling the various available styles, to the factory
floors, and into the home of one of the photographers who snaps
the rather artless shots for the catalogues. She touches on gender
relations, the role of lingerie in keeping husbands faithful ("As long
as you get everything at home, you don’t get sidetracked and go to
prostitutes," one such husband tells them), and the politics of pretty
panties (after the October War in 1973, Gulf countries began investing
in Syria, stimulating the circulation of luxury items like lingerie.)
In focusing on the politics and economics of lingerie production,
Halasa winds up with a refreshingly original approach to the
topic. She reads Syrian history into bra fashions, recounting how
"border closures, corruption, and scarcity of modern materials and
machinery" meant that bras were not manufactured in Syria until the
1970s. Thong underwear with chirping birds and screeching cellphones
symbolize globalization and entrepreneurship to her; the inventive
use of Chinese audio chips to bring some aural flair into the bedroom.
But as Halasa herself admits, focusing on production left her entirely
in the hands of men. The lingerie is sold by men, almost always
designed by men, and photographed by men, often to the detriment of
the women who wear it (although it is a female designer who at one
point proffers a new style made of burlap, a questionable fabric
choice for intimate wear.) She realized as she left Syria in 2005,
after spending a month there researching the book, that she had very
few women’s perspectives on the topic, something that Chronicle,
her publisher, later asked her to correct.
Some insight into women’s lives and thoughts is provided by Noura
Kevorkian, an Aleppo-born filmmaker who set out to make a documentary
about "Syrian lingerie and the women who wear it."
Kevorkian, who grew up in Lebanon, Syria, and Canada, kept a diary
during her filming, and like a lot of diaries, this one features
some pretty bad writing. For example: "I grew up Christian in the
Middle East. These women [presumably she is referring to Muslims]
were my neighbors. Yet a number of contradictions about their lives
perplex me, and I am determined to find out their meaning."
Despite her us-them positioning, she does manage to befriend a family,
going often to the house of Umm Fathi, a fully covered mother of
nine. Umm Fathi’s sister Muna has internalized the prevailing wisdom
on marital relations, telling Kevorkian "If you were married, you
would know that if you don’t keep your husband happy in the bedroom,
he would go out – whores, mistresses, and worst of all, he could
marry a second wife."
Her essay is given a lift by the photography of Issa Touma, an
Armenian artist based in Aleppo who also runs its most controversial
gallery. The black-and-white images of Aleppan street scenes and women,
taken by someone deeply rooted in the city, counter her strongly
"outsider" perspective.
Kevorkian’s essay is followed by an interview with the dissident
author and democracy activist Ammar Abdulhamid, whose first novel,
"Menstruation," deals with a young Islamist who can smell women’s
menstrual blood. It is one of the highlights of the book, with Halasa
asking thoughtful, pointed questions that provoke equally thoughtful
replies, which add up to a comprehensive briefing on gender relations
in Syria. He and his wife now live in the US, where he is a fellow
at the Brookings Institution. To no one’s surprise, he dismisses
Victoria’s Secret, one of his wife’s favorites, as "lame." Back in
Syria, he says, there "is simply much, much more."
The book closes with several photo essays. The first, "Up Close:
Intimate Still Lifes" by Gilbert Hage, is accompanied by women’s
insights excerpted from interviews done by the photographer and
activist Eugenie Dolberg. While brief and often superficial, they
represent a range of views on the topic, and the mix of different
voices with endless shots of these intimate absurdities shunts the
reader back and forth between sexual fantasyland and the actual
thoughts and ideas of Syrian women. The photographs are simply
terrific: Hage sets each piece or set on a plain, brightly colored
background, letting them speak for themselves.
By contrast, "Modeling Lingerie: Product Photography from Lingerie
Manufacturers" puts the underwear back onto the female form. These
product shots almost always feature Eastern European models, who
find the work and pay more pleasant than their usual jobs, often
as bar hostesses. Between the banal backdrops and the models’ dour
expressions, it is clear that, as Halasa points out, "These photos
are not designed to titillate." Instead, they are designed to show
the product, fluorescent lighting and cellulite be damned.
The variety of ways in which Halasa and Salam have explored the topic
of Syrian underwear is an achievement in itself. At times, however,
it feels like a weakness, as though some elements, like the last
essay "Coda: A Room of One’s Own," were thrown in just because they
vaguely related to the theme. "Coda," described as "self-portraiture
and poetry" by Iman Ibrahim, looks like a series of stills from some
kind of ImanCam, that she keeps trained on her bed all the time as
she writhes around in her sheets and plays with lightbulbs. I found
the poetry that captioned the photos far more thought-provoking
and open-ended.
Halasa, who also recently completed two other books with the help of
Prince Claus Fund, "Transit Tehran" and another book on the Iranian
photographer Kaveh Golestan, wants to take a bit of a break. Are there
any other similar topics that Salam has in mind for a book? The secret
life of Egyptian socks, for example?
No, she said. "Nothing beats this topic."