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Sunday, January 04, 2004
Women & Traffic Wrecks, amongst the Saudis :: From print edition, New Yorker, 1-5-04 :: The Kingdom of Silence, by Lawrence Wright. "The self-effacement of an entire sex, and, in consequence, of sexuality itself, was the most unnerving feature of Saudi life. I could go through an entire day without seeing any women, except perhaps some beggars sitting on the curb outside a prince's house. Almost all public space, from the outdoor terrace at the Italian restaurant to the sidewalk tables at Starbucks, belonged to men. The restaurants had separate entrances for 'families' and 'bachelors,' and I could hear women scurrying past, hidden by screens, as they went upstairs or to a rear room. The only places I was sure to see women were at the mall and the grocery store, and even there they seemed spookily out of place. Many of them wore black gloves, and their faces were covered entirely -- not even a pair of plummy, heavy-lidded Arabian eyes apparent. Sometimes I couldn't tell what direction they were facing. It felt to me as if the women had died, and only their shades remained." ...................... A Saudi journalist: "We have the highest number of [traffic] accidents in the world, and we don't even have alcohol." Now if traffic were as heavily policed as women's clothing and behavior....... More Offline:: "Einstein said the arrow flies in only one direction. Faulkner, being from Mississippi, understood the matter differently. He said that the past is never dead; it's not even past. All of us labor in webs spun long before we were born, webs of heredity and environment, of desire and consequence, of history and eternity. Haunted by wrong turns and roads not taken, we pursue images perceived as new but whose provenance dates to the dim dramas of childhood, which are themselves ripples of consequences echoing down the generations. The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance the images and events, but some of us feel it always." Greg Iles, The Quiet Game
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