Illustration by Kim Sokol
Illustration by Kim Sokol
By Erum Hasan
Briarpatch Magazine
March/April 2010
I was 14 years old, riding a Parisian metro on a Friday evening, no doubt bound for some teenage mischief. The peace of my journey was interrupted when a woman wearing a burqa entered the compartment, accompanied by her husband and young son. The three of them, visibly tourists, looked at the metro maps in clear view of everyone else in the car.
This is a scene that occurs many times a day in Paris: tourist families mapping out their routes in the web of the metro underworld. But this family was different; the protagonists were atypical. I remember my horror at the whisperings, the looks, the nudges, and even some finger pointing at the woman in the burqa. A woman sitting across from me sighed exasperatedly and mumbled something about “these Arabs” and how they treat their women.
I was embarrassed and angry at this family for having entered this very public realm of which I was a part. I didn’t want my co-commuters to be judging all Muslim women relative to this one with her covered face. It was challenging enough to be a Muslim teen in Paris without having to take on this iconic image of the burqa-clad woman that had disturbed the cultural uniformity on that metro car. Feeling resentment for her and the response she was eliciting, I looked away, hoping she would disappear quickly.
