Biography | Biographical Scholarship | 2005
By Gillian Whitlock*
Author, Womens Studies

In Transit

What does one do but recoil at the sight of the burqa on the cover of Latifa’s life narrative My Forbidden Face? In November 2003 in the Newslink bookstore at Melbourne airport I was taken aback by a massed presentation of autobiographies—called a “block display” in the book trade—which pushes books of a kind before the customer. In fact there were only three different books on display: Latifa’s My Forbidden Face, Jean Sasson’s Mayada: Daughter of Iraq, and Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. These were arranged en masse, which drew into sharp relief the icon which presents these as books “of a kind,” and which elicits that conditioned response to the veil. Stretched across the back wall of the bookstore were multiple images of veiled women—the totally effaced woman in the burqa on the purple cover of My Forbidden Face, the more erotic sexualized gaze over the chador on the glossy black cover of Mayada: Daughter of Iraq, and the dark monotone of the young veiled women in chador on the sepia cover of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Dozens of copies of these books were presented together, and all had been published in the preceding year. These images are haunting. How can one resist interpellation as a liberal Western consumer who desires nothing more than to liberate and humanize “Latifa” by lifting the burqa and bringing her alongside us, barefaced in the West? How does one begin to learn a more nuanced language which makes the veil a vehicle for a reflective and ethical practice of cross-cultural engagement? These are questions that are immediately raised by the production and carefully targeted marketing of these life narratives in the West, and they raise intractable problems about the practice of communicative ethics between women. To reach across cultures in sight of the veil requires what Iris Marion Young calls a spirit of “asymmetrical reciprocity,” a strategy which recognizes and attends to difference, and which resists the ethnocentrism that is so powerfully and strategically evoked by the mass marketing of these images of absolute difference in these times of Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms (41).

Through “Latifa,” the pseudonymous autobiographical narrator of My Forbidden Face, the reader can vicariously assume the burqa:

I look at this garment, its woven cloth flowing all the way down to the ground from a loosely fitting bonnet which completely covers the head. . . . But what really frightens me is the little bit of embroidered latticework around the eyes and the nose. . . .

I can feel the rustle of my own breath inside the garment. I’m hot. My feet get tangled up in the material. I’ll never be able to wear this. I now understand the stiff robot-like walk of the ‘bottle women’, their unflinching look directly in front of them. . . . These phantoms that now roam the streets of Kabul have a terrible time avoiding bicycles, buses and carts. It’s even worse trying to run away from the Taliban. This is not a garment. It’s a moving prison. (40–41)

Afghan women’s life narratives rarely offer this kind of subjective and emotional response, and for this reason My Forbidden Face is one the most popular of a series of Afghan life narratives which have been published in the recent past.¹ To pull Western eyes under the burqa in this way is a powerful rhetorical strategy; it elicits both sympathy and advocacy that can be put to quite different political and strategic uses.

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