Weaponising Hijabs
Pakistani writer Sabyn Javeri’s debut novel was a pulpy political thriller, though few in South Asia would contest that our politics is anything but pulpy. If it weren’t that the consequences of the machinations of politicians were inevitably tragic, you might even enjoy the drama, a wild soap opera with twists at once cliched and surreal. For Javeri’s follow-up, a collection of short stories, she settles on the hijab as a unifying motif, a protagonist/ antagonist looming over her characters’ lives.
The hijab, Javeri shows, is a garment intended to erase women, to deny their particularity, their individuality. But that very invisibility can be enabling, subversive. Frequently, though, the consequences for revealing some flash, some kindling spark of spirit are devastating. In one story, a young girl gets a sexual thrill from lifting her abaya to flash a shopkeeper. Eventually, she is married off to this man, 14 years her senior, and what had been a game for her, turns sinister. “But mere clothes,” she reflects, now confined to a single room by her husband, “are not enough when one’s mind is insecure. The body must not only be covered up, it must be locked up.” The grand guignol conclusion to this story might have been dismissed as melodramatic, had Javeri not so convincingly laid the ground for horror.
Sometimes the subversiveness of Javeri’s characters can feel forced, the English woman of Pakistani descent, say, whose sexy boots under her cloak hints at her personality, at her sapphic desires that she suppresses (those desires being ‘haraam’) with an arranged marriage. Sometimes, as with a girl tempted to join ISIS because she is ‘humiliated’ by her glib American professor, Javeri tries too hard to be ‘topical’. And her binary (oppression/ subversion) treatment of the hijab is ultimately reductive.