An Indian movie, “The Japanese Wife”, and my husband’s Indian family

Recently I remembered something Ravi had said to me shortly after we met, in January 1953. His remark so surprised me that the only response I could think of was “Really?” and he elaborated only a little. I let it pass, but it stayed in the back of my mind as I puzzled over why it was so and what it meant.

The memory returned many years later, as I was watching Aparna Sen’s movie, The Japanese Wife.

Ravi’s remark was to the effect that my friends and I, and other Americans he knew, talked about people in ways he had never heard before. He said that our talk about people and what they did and what they said went beyond mere gossip, that we carried on with discussion of the reasons why the person in question had said this or done that. He listened as we analyzed an individual’s personality, dwelling on details and complexities and his or her personal history with parents or siblings or childhood experiences that explained the personality. He had heard even ordinary people, outside the campus, use Freudian concepts when talking about people, concepts like the unconscious or projecting one’s feelings onto others.

This endless stream of personality talk that Ravi was discovering contrasted sharply with the gossip he heard in India. He said that back home people gossiped and decided whether the person under discussion was good or bad. A judgment was made and that was that. My adopted son, who is also Indian, said that in his community gossip was a sin, gonah, but people gossiped anyhow and passed simple judgments: good behavior or bad.

Ravi and I had been married ten years before I went to India. There, with his family for long visits, and later for work, I eventually understood what he meant by the difference in personality talk. At first I was overwhelmed by the size and nature of the extended family. It had what seemed to me an enormous number of family roles. There were different kinds of aunts, uncles, in-laws, grandparents, cousins and each had a title by which he or she was addressed, and each was in a different role relationship with Ravi. In a patrilineal and patriarchal society, for example, mother’s sister is a different sort of aunt than is father’s sister. A man’s sister is in his lineage and his children’s; this relationship to his children gives her a certain authority over her brother’s children. A woman’s children are not in her lineage or in her sister’s lineage, so mother’s sister can act on pure affection with her maternal nieces and nephews. Mother’s brother, also, is a different sort of uncle from the father’s brother. Birth order affects role. Ravi was the oldest son. He had a title, Dada, and the role of second father to the younger children. As Dada’s wife, I had acquired a title, Bhabi. An American woman who had lived in India while her anthropologist husband did research asked me how I was doing as Bhabi and I had to confess I did not know.  No one in the family had told me or explained the role, i.e. the behaviors and attitudes expected of me as Bhabi, and no anthropological study, all written by men, mentioned it. Once alerted I learned from watching the Bhabis in Ravi’s and other families. Apparently, I did all right; I helped Ravi fulfill his role as Dada, that being my responsibility. If we had lived in India I would have been under closer scrutiny and undoubtedly the subject of  much gossip. Or maybe not. India has changed and continues to change with increasing urbanization and development.

In a traditional society roles are made explicit to a person from childhood on. Ravi’s father, when living with us in the States, spent hours teaching my pre-school age son and daughter their role relationships to one another. My son, first born, must take care of his little sister and she should call him Dada, respect him and obey him. The children listened politely to Papaji and immediately forgot what he said. In India it would have been otherwise. Ideally, everyone grows up knowing what is expected of him or her within the family and in the larger society. A good person is one who fulfills his/her obligations to others. A bad person is one who goes his or her own way. Personality is recognized and appreciated but secondary to role. Individualism is not a value.

I can understand all this. Maintaining a family system, with control over each person’s contribution, is critical in a society where family is the primary, perhaps the only, stable organization and the source of security for the individual. All of life is subsumed in the family – men’s occupation, right of place on the land, learning of social and other skills, access to resources, contact with other families, status within the community and in the larger society. Until the 19^th century, even in societies with a state, the government did little for the people other than keep an infrastructure of roads and markets, if that. Religious organizations provided limited charity and expressed the cultural values.

Individualism is a luxury only the wealthy can afford. It is in modern industrial society that the average person is free from the strictures of narrowly defined roles. In modern society, family has come to mean the nuclear family. This is my culture, how I grew up. The legal social entity is the individual; you are yourself, not the son or daughter of someone, not someone’s mother, father, aunt or uncle. Modern social roles, non-family roles, are more numerous, more open, less clearly defined and continually changing. In our lives today we need to understand individuals in all their complexity if we are to live together in an orderly society, and that requires considerable thought and analysis of persons and personality to do it well. And that was the difference from past traditions that Ravi saw, thought about, and called to my attention.

In her films, the Director Aparna Sen displays a sensibility that reaches across cultures. The Japanese Wife set me to thinking again about the way roles operate in one part of India. The movie is based on the title story of “The Japanese Wife and Other Stories” by Bengali Indian author Kunal Basu. It was filmed in Bengal, in Kolkata and Sundarbans, and the Japanese cities of Yokohama and Tsukauba, Ibaraki, in present time and released in 2010. Sen gives us an authentic and beautifully photographed picture of the people, countryside and street life. I love the scenes where we observe the ayurvedic healer and his compounder, followed by a modern sector doctor and finally the prestigious medical specialist in a clinic in Calcutta/Kolkata. Throughout the story we see where traditional India meets modern India.

We first meet a teenage boy, Snehmoy, and a Japanese girl, Miyaki, becoming pen pals, writing in English, a language neither of them use often except for their correspondence.  It is like their private code. In their letters they express thoughts they can tell no one else. Together they create a rich life in their own little world and become close friends.

Both live without a large family, Snehmoy with his aunt and Miyaki with her mother. Both are poor but not poverty-stricken. Snehmoy is Brahmin, from the priestly caste, and possibly from the only Brahmin family in the town. As a Brahmin, he is sent to school and is hired as a teacher in the town’s school. He has a small but steady salary and the house where he lives with his aunt gradually improves in comfort but not in lifestyle and Snehmoy continues to wear traditional clothing. Miyake’s father has died and she runs a small store out of the house, seemly with approval from the neighborhood, where she lives with her mother. The sense is that her family and community are middle-class.

The story revolves around Snehmoy and Miyaki conducting their lives as if they were married to one another, and their marriage makes sense to me. Miyaki initiated the idea but Snehmoy accepted it immediately. Travel to be physically together is impossible for him because the expense is beyond his means and for her because of a daughter’s responsibility for the mother. They exchange letters, photographs and gifts, and after about fifteen years of their pretend marriage, he can telephone her. The marriage continues despite complications because it is a fiction they need for their relationship; in neither culture is such a warm, close, long-term friendship between a man and a woman within the cultural norms. It is simply unimaginable; a man’s life and a woman’s life could not connect in that way. The only way they can be so emotionally close, at least in a respectable manner, is to be married.

Snehmoy’s aunt tries to arrange a marriage for Snehmoy to a Brahmin girl but when the girl is presented to him she is too shy to show her face and he cannot bring himself to be disloyal to Miyaki. I wonder if the lack of a male relative in the family allowed Snehmoy to resist the traditional marriage. He tells his aunt he is already married and her one question is about the bride’s caste, “Brahmin or Kshatriya?” Nothing else. Everyone in the town knows of Snehmoy’s fictional marriage. It has become the center of his life, but no one discusses what he is doing or why. Years pass. The girl first presented to Snehmoy has married another man but is widowed and has a son. The aunt takes the two into her home because the dead husband’s family does not want the widow. Apparently, Hindu widow remarriage has become socially acceptable; the aunt obviously wants the young widow’s marriage with Snehmoy. We see a pretty young woman wearing the widow’s white sari, following the widow’s restricted diet and self-denial. As a respectable woman, she is shy and covers her face with the end of her sari before Snehmoy, but when she is out in a larger town with him, selling her gold jewelry to buy the items necessary for her son’s initiation ceremony into his adult Brahmin identity, she is competent and efficient. Snehmoy is attracted to her but he resists; he must be loyal to his wife. The story moves toward a tender resolution.

In traditional societies the tale of a couple in love invariably ends in sad disappointment, or in tragedy, like Romeo and Juliet, if marriage between them does not suit the rules of who marries whom. Romantic love must not shape how the all-important family is formed and sustained or how kinship ties are created. Aparna Sen creates a fascinating picture of two individuals using the symbols of traditional marriage to circumvent family expectations. They keep alive a very private, individualistic relationship, against the rules, with resulting complications.

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The early 1950s and a new Black community in Madison, Wisconsin

I wrote this initially, some nine years ago, as an account of how Ravi and I met but the context may be of interest to others.

Ravi came to our American university life in 1951 from Bombay, speaking English fluently, well read in American political and economic history and largely uninformed otherwise about my society and my culture. His sole contacts with Americans before arriving in the U.S. were the librarians at his beloved U.S.I.S. library and the Embassy personnel who interviewed him for his Fulbright Scholarship. Images of England and the colonialism he deplored had been far more salient for him than anything American. Now he lived in a student dorm, sharing a room with boys who had never traveled outside Wisconsin and had never even heard of India. He observed and listened and was slow to judge.

I doubt that Ravi ever fully understood how different I was from other women students. In the 1940s and ’50s a girl did not work her way through school, especially working as a waitress late into the night. Every undergraduate girl student I knew lived in a dormitory or a sorority house where the doors were 

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Overview of an Indian-American marriage and living as expatriates

Living across cultures is something I’ve been doing for a long time, since 1953, the year I married a young man from India. I won’t say much about my life before Ravi, except to offer a possible explanation of why, in that White Anglo-Saxon Protestant dominated and very conservative period of our history, I, although a WASP, decided I would be happiest living with a brown-skinned Hindu agnostic from the other side of the earth. I met him, of course, on campus. We both were students. Nearly everyone I knew was a student. I had no other life. Because I could not afford to live in a dorm like other women students (we were called girls), I rented a room off-campus but spent all my time, except for work, on the campus. I dated a number of young men, all of them students and all of them White. Most were from a middle class family background and most were on their way to  a successful career. My girlfriends were Jewish and I liked dating Jewish fellows, mostly because they came from New York. I had never been to New York but intended to get there one day.

I had grown up Midwestern, lower working-class, looking and behaving like any other child in that setting but at base very different. I had neither a mother nor siblings but did have a father until I was fourteen, when he disappeared completely. When I was five years old, circumstances, such as my mother’s lack of income, and I suspect, moral pressure from his father, required that he come and take me with him. (I looked like Dad and Granddad, which may have been a factor.) He placed me with families and moved me, regularly, almost every year, from one bland, nondescript small town to another. With each move I adjusted to the new family and to the new kids I met at the new school. I began life as an outsider, sufficiently if sparingly provided for, a closet foreigner, most at ease when others recognized me for my true identity: as an outsider busy learning and trying to understand.

Although on the university campus I had friends and fit quite well into a number of social circles, my self-definition was not that of a 1950s White middle-class young woman. Almost everyone I knew, except for Ravi, expected me to think like other girls, “girl” being the term for an unmarried woman, and considered flattering for a woman of any age because it implied she looked young. When I said I liked working, didn’t mind supporting myself as a waitress, and in the future wanted to teach in a university, Ravi did not tell me, as other young men had told me, that after I married and had a nice house set in a green yard with a white picket fence around it I would forget all that. When I told him my professors advised me to continue on into graduate school he did not laugh and say that the only girls who got a Ph. were those who couldn’t get an M.r.s. Nor would Ravi expect, as was the custom in those years, that if I married while still a student, I, being female, would drop out of school, take a job to support my husband until he finished his professional training and then gratefully give up salaried employment for domesticity. Soon after we met, he surprised me with a gift, a book in anthropology. He had discovered the one Chinese restaurant in the entire city and spent more than he could afford to take me there because he thought I would appreciate a new and different cuisine. We danced to Latin American music at the International Club parties. There was no end to our conversations or the subjects we discussed. He was brilliant and handsome and fun to be with.

Ravi and I married and went on to graduate school together, but I had a glitch in my plans for the Ph.D. In the summer of 1954, a car hit me and broke my leg. I was hospitalized for nearly a year. Nevertheless, we carried on. In summary — We had two children. Ravi finished his Ph.D. in Political Science. I did anthropological field research, finished my Master’s. We both taught at the university, he as a Professor, I as a part-time Lecturer. Ravi’s brothers came from India to live with us. In the mid-1960s we began living abroad. Ravi moved from university teaching to serving as an haut fonctionnaire, a civil servant in an international organization based in Paris.

With our first move abroad, on his research grant to Somalia, I began, unintentionally and without realizing it, my life as an expatriate wife and as a mother whose children, including a boy from Mogadiscio, were growing up in the expatriate life. It was both rewarding and frustrating. The travel meant seeing art and architecture I had not dreamed even existed. I lost a career but managed to do fascinating sociological research, to publish a bit and hope my consultancies in public health programs were useful for at least some of my colleagues across the several countries where I worked. I came to know remarkable people I could otherwise never have met, but would always move on and never again see them. That is the hardest part. I miss my friends. Mostly, I miss Ravi. How I lost him is described here, in the final paragraph of an analysis of romantic love and marriage. Above all, as a mother, I’ve wondered whether I made the right choice for my children, if perhaps they would have been happier in a normal, settled lifestyle. They think not, and of late the world is catching up with us; my children and I are totally comfortable as citizens in the new global society and economy.

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The Hijab and Burqa

As a personal protest against the hijab and its current popularity in Mogadiscio and elsewhere, I am posting a drawing and two photographs of Somali women in Mogadiscio as I remember them from the 1960s. Their traditional dress was graceful and sensible.  And they were just as Muslim, just as devout and just as virtuous as women today in hijab.

There is nothing intrinsically Muslim about any mode of dress. The hijab, for example, was, and in some places still is, the dress of the Catholic nun. The burqa, covering the woman totally and isolating her from public life, has been worn through the centuries and across the globe, in ancient Rome and Greece, medieval Europe, Hindu India, and incidentally, in the original Mogadiscio that became the Italian Mogadiscio’s casbah, Hamar Wein. Veiling is an urban phenomenon, done in cities and towns, and until recently, only by families wealthy enough to afford the luxury of keeping their women secluded inside the narrow bounds of the residence. An ordinary woman hauled wood and water to the home, worked in the fields, tended animals, went to market to bargain and buy and to sell produce she had grown or made herself. Why should she be encumbered by excessive, useless layers of cloth.

In the 1990s, seeing videos of women in Mogadiscio desperately seeking a safe place in the ruins for their children, I assumed they were covering themselves in robes as a way to avoid the gaze of marauding males. Now, with peace and civility returning to the city, it seems that nearly all women are in the hijab, and a few even in burqa. I see photos of girls in white hijab at school and women everywhere in colorful robes, covered all but for the face and hands. It is the current fashion.

In my view, the hijab can best be understood as an international fashion. Explaining why women adopt it and why I find it objectionable are beyond my purpose here. I simply present images of Mogadiscio’s lovely Muslim women as they dressed decades ago and as I knew them.

I discussed here the technology pictured in this 1847 etching. Now let us regard the individuals shown.

The couple standing center left in the picture are noticeably different from other people shown. They are somewhat lighter skinned, as were a number of lineages in the original Mogadiscio. They would have been descendants of men from Persian and Arab lands who came by ship to trade in Mogadiscio, married Somali women and settled in to become part of a distinctive urban culture. Mogadiscio was the northern most of the East African coastal cities, extending south to include Mombasa, Zanzibar and, finally, Sofala in Mozambique.

The woman with the man is dressed exactly as were women in Mogadiscio in the 1960s and her hair is covered in a similar manner. I knew the dress as garessa but it has been called by other names. It is a five meter length of cotton cloth tied at one shoulder, over the breast and wrapped to form a shirt. It is ideal for the climate, light and comfortable. I wore it at home.

I was able to enlarge the etching to see details not visible here. I think the woman sitting in the far background is wearing a garessa; the white of her dress seems to continue over her right shoulder. With the picture’s enlargement the woman at the spinning wheel seems to have her dress simply wrapped and her right breast is showing. She may have her hair covered. The woman sitting in front of the mill has a cloth wrapped like a skirt and another length across her breast and holding her baby. Most women in the 1960s wore a length of cotton cloth over the head and shoulders when outside, and so did I, to draw over the hair and across the face for protection against blowing sand. It could be used, as well, for carrying a baby.

The man with the woman in garessa is probably her husband. He is in a dishdasha, a traditional garment worn for centuries by men throughout the region. It is tailored; someone has sewn it for him. He wears a cap, quite like those worn in the 1960s, and sandals, the only person in the picture who is not barefooted. The ultimate symbol of his status and power is the spear he carries. The woman holds something significant in her hand but I cannot determine what it is. Her garessa seems very fine. It is fringed and the folds at the waist and the way it drapes indicate a quality cloth. Ibn Battuta, visiting Mogadiscio in the 1300s, wrote of imported silken robes. She wears two beaded necklaces, and if the longer one is like other traditional antique Somali jewelry, its pendant is in silver. She is elegant and they are a handsome couple.

A photograph from the 1960s. Women near the river behind Mogadiscio are loading wooden containers of camel milk to sell in the markets of Mogadiscio.

Young women are on a stage, circa 1966, probably at the new theatre built by the Chinese Embassy. They may have been singing for an audience. They are dressed in their best, and their garessas have more cloth and heavier cloth than for every-day wear.

This photograph from the 1930s is of women in northern Somalia. Their dress is essentially the same as that of women in Mogadiscio in later decades.

A note added in May 2018 — This essay is about my thoughts concerning Somali women. Please read my experience with women in the hijab in America six years ago.   irissansfrontieres.wordpress.com/2012/11/14/thoughts-on-the-hijab/    Things may have changed since then with younger women. I would like to have comments and feedback.

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From Mogadiscio’s Past

Mogadiscio is an ancient city, dating from the 900s C.E. and this 1847 etching shows a part of the technology that made possible its long history as a prosperous city-state and a center for trade.

The etching’s central feature is a mill, essentially a huge mortar and pestle, for extracting oil from sesame seeds. A blindfolded camel is tied with a rope from a belt around its middle to a mechanism where a man sits at the back, wielding a stick to prod the animal forward, around and around, setting the pestle in motion. The man seated on a board in front reaches into the mortar and keeps the seed mash moving. Oil collects in the bottom of the mortar, to be scooped out.  The container with the lid and cloth cover may be for the oil. For a video of the process, here.

Three figures, two men standing in front of the mill, holding poles over what looks like a wooden container, and a woman with a baby, are, most likely, also involved in the oil making process. When I enlarged the etching I saw many details more clearly but still could not tell exactly what the woman is doing. Most probably her activity is related to the milling of the seeds. If so, she has in front of her a bundle of sesame plants and is opening the seedpods. Until recently, sesame plants were harvested before the seedpods were fully ripe; otherwise, the pods matured in the field and burst open, scattering the tiny seeds far and wide, to be lost in the soil. (I’ve read that the popping sound of the pod opening may be the origin of “open sesame.”) The woman is collecting the seeds and will set them out for drying.

For the next step in processing the seeds let us look at the background in the etching. We see there a cluster of buildings: a round stick-built, conical thatch-roofed, one-room house surrounded by smaller wattle-daub structures. A man, a woman and two kneeling pack camels are shown. The woman is sitting on the ground with what may be a large shallow round basket, the sort used for winnowing. Seeds she may have would be sorghum, coffee beans brought to Mogadiscio by traders, and sesame seeds.

The two men standing in front of the mill may be threshing the dried seeds, pounding them to break their brittle cover. Someone will take the de-hulled seeds to the woman with the winnowing basket. She will stand, tossing the seeds high, over and over again, for the wind to blow away the chaff. The seeds will then be ready for the mill.

For centuries Mogadiscio was famous throughout the Indian Ocean trade area, and as far away as Egypt, for its cotton cloth. In the mid-foreground, to the left in the picture above, a man sits weaving cloth on a horizontal loom. Under the sheltering roof a woman spins cotton that would have been grown in nearby fields. I included in my book, Tales of Mogadiscio, etchings from the same period, one of a man weaving and another of women spinning. In the 1960s, men in the original Mogadiscio, then the casbah of Italian Mogadiscio, still wove the traditional cloth, sitting under a cloth canopy, using the traditional loom. I once saw a small spinning wheel lying on the ground near where the weavers sat and a man told me it was still being used. Unfortunately, I did not see women spinning.

When the etching of the sesame mill is enlarged, the man sitting inside the fence seems to be holding a musical string instrument. The legs of the stool he sits on are narrow and carved in a way that indicates the stool is city made rather than being one of the rough wood and untanned leather stools used in the bush. With enlargement the fence around the roofed area looks neatly made, suggesting the whole is a substantial and well maintained structure. The man at the loom is sitting before a stone wall, the remains of a substantial building, a reminder of Mogadiscio’s past as a major city-state on the East African coast. I quote Ibn Battuta’s description of Mogadicio in the 1300s here.

I imagine the scene depicted in the etching is located on the margin of Mogadiscio, away from the city center as described in the Tales of Mogadiscio. I comment here on the individuals in the picture.
(etchings from Enrico Cerulli’s History of Somalia, 1957)

 

This blog post is from 2012. More recently, in reading and reflecting on another land from my past, Indonesia, I suddenly acquired an additional insight into the history of Mogadiscio as a coastal city-state. Indonesia is an island nation and its cities were part of the Majapahit Empire, a thalassocracy, a reality, a word entirely new to me. I define and discuss thalassocracy in this blog post,one in a series of essays on my experience in Bali.

Thalassocracy is from Greek, thalassa, meaning “sea” and kratein, meaning “to rule”, thalassokratia, “rule of the sea,” to rule by controlling sea lanes, a state ruling over maritime realms, a sea-borne empire.

I realized then that Mogadiscio had been part of an Indian Ocean thalassocracy. On the history of Bali blog post, I wrote, “Not until the 1960s was I anywhere near the sea, but when I did get there the experience was serious. I lived in an ancient city-state, daily visiting the harbor and the buildings that had once been part of an Indian Ocean commercial empire. I was in Mogadiscio, the northern-most of East Africa’s coastal city-states, where men in dhows sailing the monsoon winds from India and Arabian lands came to trade, continued down the coast to other city-states, including Malindi, Mombasa, Zanzibar, Kilwa, and last to Sofala, then sailed north when the monsoons turned back toward India. I do not know if any one of the coastal city-states in the region controlled the others as in an empire, but before the Italians came to Somalia at the beginning of the 20^th century, the Sultan of Sohar in Oman, but living in Zanzibar, controlled much of the trade, or at least taxed it. I included the photos of Mogadiscio’s Customs building and Omani residences in previous essays. Notes, pictures and my photographs of the original Mogadiscio are here and others are here and here.”

 

 

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Tales of Mogadiscio

As I wrote in the Introduction, a number of my posts are footnotes to Tales of Mogadiscio, my recently published book about the city at a time, in the mid-1960s, when a government and a national economy were being established for the newly independent Somalia. The book is a series of stories and a great deal of background describing a large number of people I knew in Mogadiscio. Most of the chapters focus on one individual — an elderly American teacher I admired, a strong-minded traditional community leader with whom I worked on a project for his community in Mogadiscio’s casbah, a bright and energetic young man in the Indian community, the Yemeni shopkeeper with whom I carried on conversations while buying groceries, the beautiful daughter of a prostitute, an enterprising businessman in that peculiar local economy, and especially, the boy who came home with us and became part of our family. Finally, the most vivid character portrayed is the city itself, ancient and modern, handsome in its architecture, lively in its many and diverse communities. I wrote about female circumcision as I knew it in Mogadiscio and discussed where and why this dreadful practice originated and continues into modern society. In a final essay I returned to my anthropological mode of observation and reflected on Somali culture before it was overtaken by the present, continuing chaos and anarchy.

I thoroughly enjoyed living in Mogadiscio as it was then — the original, thousand year old urban community and the Italian colonial layout and architecture that Somalis had taken over. Who could have imagined it would one day disappear. It was a lovely city, and as I wrote in the book: “With Somalis conversation was continual, clever and usually well informed, including about events outside Somalia. … I delighted in the back and forth of the talk, the argument, the verbal exchanges for the sheer pleasure of it. Language is the art form of a people whose material possessions are what they can carry in their hands or on the back of a camel. I have never encountered, before or since, so many individuals in one place who argued and analyzed so well.” I love to talk and was happy in the company of others for whom good conversation was essential to the good life.

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The Cinema in Mogadiscio

In my “Tales of Mogadiscio” I describe movie-going in the chapter “Learning to Dance.” I wrote there about seeing a Bollywood film with a friend from the Indian community and about going alone to see “The King and I.” At home in Wisconsin in the 1960s, for my husband, Ravi, and me, much of our social life centered on seeing and critiquing movies with other couples who also were cinephiles. In Mogadiscio, the movie scene was something else. The theatre buildings were like nothing I knew at home but that was hardly surprising.  What did impress me was the nature of the audiences. For the Bollywood film I was the only woman. The American film was in a different theatre, one patronized by Europeans, where a few women, most accompanied by a man, where in evidence.

Movies were a major entertainment in Mogadiscio, but mostly for the men.  As in many traditional communities, social life in Mogadiscio followed gender. The home, whether a house, apartment or wattle-daub shelter, was the place of women and girls and small boys. Typically the man ate and slept at home and socialized outside. The movie theatre was a place for him to go, when he could afford it, to meet friends and make new friends and afterwards take a stroll, stop at a café, talk until time to return home and to bed. All the films, other than those from India, were in Italian because the movie was either made in Italy or its sound track was dubbed into Italian. Men had the advantage over women of hearing Italian, still the language of business and government, and of seeing and thinking about sights and sounds and relationships from the world beyond their borders.

Mogadiscio’s first movie theatre, Cinema Italia, page 111 in “Tales of Mogadisico,” opened in 1934. It was for Italians only, no Somalis. In later years it burned down and was replaced by a typical Mogadiscio white stucco building, the Cinema Nazionale , eventually to become the theatre most patronized by foreigners and the more affluent Somalis. By the 1960s five more movie theatres had been added to the city, varied enough in accommodation and style to suit the income and interests of all the men and the relatively few women in the city who ventured from the home for a social life in the public arena.

Cinema Centrale and Cinema Missioni were added in the city center, but Cinema Nazionale remained the star. Because the building was roofed, cushioned seats were arranged row after row on a floor sloping upwards from the screen, both on the main floor and in the balcony. A ticket cost two shillings and even more for the balcony.  All other theatres were open air.  Metal chairs with folding wood seats were bolted to the floor, secure against being stolen or thrown about in a fight. A white wall served as the screen. The Cinema Centrale showed the same films as the Cinema Nazionale to the same upper income clientele but its ticket cost one shilling. Cinema Missioni was larger, showed European and American films for one shilling, mostly to Somalis. Toward the western side of town three movie houses flourished. One of them, Super Cinema, had two tiers of benches for seating. It served primarily a neighborhood of Sunni Indians. The Shia Indian community had counseled its sons against exposing themselves to the world of sin and temptation shown on screen.

Another sort of film in Mogadiscio caught my attention. The U.S. Information Service kept several eight mm projectors and a collection of documentary films about America to show on special occasions in the USIS library. Why not try showing the films to people outside the library? I had always used documentary films for courses I taught in the university. With permission from the USIS library staff, one of the Somali employees showed me how to work a projector and set up a screen. I borrowed them and we selected a few films that Somalis would enjoy. Friends from several Embassies also let me borrow their colorful, attractively made propaganda documentaries.

The Jama Mosque and street scene in Hamar Wein

I took the projector, screen and a film, one about the 4^th of July, to a Koranic school in Mogadiscio’s casbah, Hamar Wein. The Somali teacher had heard about the USIS films and I promised to show one in his classroom. During the film the children, all boys, jumped about in front of the screen, waving their arms, shouting to one another. The teacher did not welcome such excitement and we had no repeat of the experience.

Next, with Aziz as my assistant, I arranged to show movies in my house. I took advantage of Ravi being away on a field trip and turned our living room into a mini theatre for a calmer audience. They were women from Hamar Wein, the wives, mothers, daughters, nieces of the men with whom I worked on a project for paving the streets of the old city. I drove the older women to my house in Ravi’s elegant Fiat 2000 and Aziz helped me arrange taxis for the others.

A home in Hamar Wein

These were traditional women from a still traditional community. At least half were in the veil. Since they spoke only Somali and the language as yet had no officially accepted alphabet, none were literate. They were familiar with the radio. If a man left his radio, and it was his radio, at home during the day the women listened to Somali music, as we did in our house, or to readings from the Koran. Mostly likely in the evening the man of the household took the radio outside to catch the BBC newscast and talk politics with his buddies. Television had not yet appeared in Somalia. Access to cinema? For a few of the older women the films in my living room may have been the first they had ever seen. One woman sat clinging to her daughter until she was assured the situation was safe.

They laughed and laughed at a scene in the Sudanese Embassy’s film that showed a man riding a camel. Somalis do not ride camels.Perhaps they thought the man on the camel looked silly. The sight of a woman milking a cow surprised them.

In Hamar Wein, where a woman can keep a cow, at the back wall, to milk

Cows were kept in Hamar Wein and women milked them, so something I failed to notice was different enough that it merited a long discussion. During the American film the women sat quietly, saying nothing as scenes of forested mountains, fields of wheat, streets lined with skyscrapers unfolded before them. Never had they seen anything like this and they may never even have heard of such things.

It soon became evident to me that although the Somalis and I were looking at the same images on the screen, we perceived them differently. What were they seeing? What were they thinking? I had not anticipated this. With the women, we had no interpreter. Aziz was still a child, twelve years old, and his English not yet adequate to this level of complexity. Even if the women had wished to talk with me about the films, I doubt that a bilingual man would have sat with us in our ladies cinema party and I did not know a bilingual Somali woman to ask for help.

At the school, concerning the boys’ response, the teacher and I were hardly more than acquaintances and we were speaking Italian, a second language for him and a new one for me. We found no common ground on which to discuss the film and decide what the children could learn from it, so we said little about it to one another.

My attempt to give the children an addition to their education and the women a sample of the entertainment their menfolk regularly enjoy resulted in less than a resounding success. At least, they understood that I meant well.

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Cooking for my family in Mogadiscio

As I wrote earlier, here, a number of the posts I write are footnotes to “Tales of Mogadiscio,” a book of stories about Mogadiscio in the mid-1960s, in a time of peace after independence and before the all-consuming warfare. This footnote is an account of the expatriate wife’s first concern — cooking for her family.  In Somali in the 1960s and Turkey in 1968 until ’72 we were “on the economy,” without PX or import privileges. Fortunately, I arrived in these two economies different from mine at home already cooking in a style and with ingredients available almost anywhere and with a husband and children accustomed to it: our family food was Indian, other modes additional. Grocery shopping at home was a chore; when I was setting up house abroad it was an adventure. It was a way to learn the culture and I enjoyed it, except in the open markets, where bargaining was usual. I hate bargaining.

We lived twice in Mogadiscio, first in 1963-64 and again in 1966-67.  I describe our first house in the book. It was a small, simple but agreeable structure situated on a broad, dusty, unpaved road on high land behind the city center. We had piped-in brackish water and electricity for the ceiling lights and to run the tiny refrigerator in my tiny kitchen. Across the road from us lived a number of United Nations families, most of them Indian, with the husband/father a specialist in one of the many U.N. technical assistance programs for the Somali government. All our houses, each set in a walled compound, had been built before World War II by Mogadiscio’s Italian colonial government, built for Italians and certainly not for Somalis. With Somalia’s independence, the Italians abandoned their Mogadiscio homes and returned to Italy. Somalis and foreigners moved in. Our neighbors’ houses were larger and better equipped than ours. Perhaps our house was intended for a bachelor or a lower income family.

Our second house, also set in a walled compound, was new and built for foreigners in the style of a conventional European house, with a large living and dining room, two bedrooms and a bathroom, laundry facilities and a proper kitchen. We hired a cook to help me. Asha and Ahmed, the boyessa and guard for our first house, returned to us. Ravi, my husband, had a higher income this time, but we were still “on the economy.” This meant that unlike other foreign families, we were not being provided by an Embassy or the U.N. or a corporation with the accoutrements of an expatriate middle-class lifestyle — housing, furniture, trained servants, car and chauffeur, recreational facilities, import privileges, language lessons. I managed largely because the local Indian community helped us. The Indian men had adopted Ravi as one of their own, even though they knew from his name that he was of Hindu origin and they were Muslim. It helped, also, that Ravi, having grown up in India, found Mogadiscio and Somalia familiar territory, familiar socially, economically and in the level of technology. He quickly adapted and patiently watched as I learned to cope with keeping house and caring for family in this new and strange world.

A note on the book and it being a memoir —  Hamar Wein is the name of the original Mogadiscio that had become a casbah to the Italian colonial Mogadiscio. I spent my free time in Hamar Wein with its people and learning about the ancient city. (If my original plans had held, I would have written my Ph.D. thesis on the thousand year old Mogadiscio.  Instead, our expatriate life took over and I became involved with primary health care.)

As with most memoirs, I assigned new names to everyone and two of my characters are composites of several individuals in the story being told. In two chapters I substituted a fictional character, Katherine, for myself. I honestly do not recall why I wrote The Yemeni Alimentari chapter in the third person but once written decided to keep it that way. In The Streets of Hamar Wein chapter I needed to simplify a complex set of circumstances involving a large number of people and found the story easier to tell if I distanced myself emotionally by inventing Katherine.

I wrote the following for The Streets of Hamar Wein chapter but did not include it in the book — —

The next morning Nur had come to the house to practice his English with Katherine.  Dan had left for the office and the children were in school. Asha was sweeping the floor in rhythm to a Somali song on the radio. Katherine had asked Nur to sit in the living room and wait a few minutes while she finished her work in the kitchen.

Providing food for her family and for entertaining was Katherine’s most time-consuming responsibility. On that day her cook, as usual, was late. Asha had brought vegetables, bananas, mangos, papaya, and goat meat from the early morning market. Katherine shopped in the alimenatari, the small grocery store owned by a man from Yemen, and in the Indian stores, but for meats, vegetables and fruits from the local open markets, she depended upon her two Somalis, Asha and the cook. Given the time and effort it would have taken for her to learn how the markets functioned and for the venders to accept dealing with a foreign woman, a White one at that, she accepted behaving like a Memsahib and let her servants shop for her and probably take a small cut while doing so.

Katherine cleaned and washed the onions, garlic, potatoes, carrots, spinach and celery root. The children were warned not to eat any uncooked food or unpeeled fruits or vegetables. She had already cleaned and cubed the goat meat and placed it in the undersized, kerosene-fueled refrigerator. She measured rice onto a plate, picked it over for stones and bits of dirt and put it in a bowl for washing and soaking.  She set out spices for the evening meal. She would have the cook make a curry. Since aged beef and, in this Muslim land, pork were unavailable, Katherine did her best to persuade the family that good food included more than roasts and hamburgers and hot dogs served with a salad; they were learning to enjoy Italian and Indian cuisine as their daily fare. She occasionally varied their dinners with fresh tuna when it was available and the cook had time to walk to the house from the fish market at the shore.

The family would need bread for the midday meal. She would have the cook make soup. If he had forgotten to buy bread on his way to the house she would have to pick it up herself from the Italian bakery. She checked on the supply of flour and Dutch powdered whole milk and made a note to tell Asha to buy four eggs the next morning, if they were available in the market. As much as she despaired of cooking in the tiny, poorly insulated oven of her small propane gas stove, she would bake a cake in the evening, after the heat of day had dissipated.

She checked the drinking water in the large zinc barrel that stood outside the kitchen. Ahmed, the guard, would have to watch for and flag down Mogadiscio’s one water truck when it was next in the neighborhood. The brackish piped-in water was acceptable for all uses but drinking and cooking. Katherine filled a pan with water and set it on the stove to boil. She had saved four Johnny Walker Black Label whiskey bottles to use for the drinking water because they were square-sided and fit neatly on the refrigerator shelf. She checked on the milk in the frig and noted, with exasperation, that the milk woman had again brought the day’s supply to the house in a wooden container instead of the glass bottle Katherine had given her; the milk again had a smoky taste the family did not like and wasn’t good for the yogurt Katherine made each morning. She daily reminded Asha to check but the milk woman regularly forgot to use the bottle, or pretended she had forgotten. It occurred to Katherine that she might give the woman an additional bottle but her own small stock of glass bottles and jars had been diminished lately by breakage.

Asha came to the kitchen door. She said, in Italian, “Signora, the Hamar Wein man is still sitting in the living room.”

Katherine thought “Oh dear!” and said, in Italian, “Make tea for us and I will see him now.”

A second omitted account is of the ways in which women from the Indian community of Mogadiscio each day prepared and served the family’s food. Nearly all the Indians lived in Hamar Wein — —

In most Indian homes the woman cooked over two charcoal braziers, preparing rice and a vegetable dish, maybe a third brazier for making tea. Meat was a luxury. Like our house, most had piped in water, but their drinking water was brought to the house from a mosque well and they did not boil it.

One Indian household I visited was a large and prosperous family. The head of the family was an older man. He, his wife, their sons and daughters-in-law, unmarried daughters, grandchildren and an additional kinswoman or two lived together in a single house. Women prepared rice and a vegetable curry (onions, garlic, small hot peppers, potatoes, carrots, spinach, okra, eggplant and spices), sometimes with meat. The rice was cooked in an aluminum pot over a charcoal fire in one brazier and the curry in similar pot, over charcoal in the second brazier. The woman used a large spoon to ladle food from the pots onto each person’s thali, a small tray. Everyone ate with their fingers. At mealtime, the men and older boys sat at a table and the women served them.  After the men had eaten the women spread a large cloth on the floor and set thalis and food on it for themselves and the girls and small boys.

In Aziz’s home (Aziz is the boy who came into our family), at mealtime the family sat on a mat on the floor. The mother first gave the small children their food, then the father and older brother. Finally, after the men had finished their meal, she and oldest girl sat down to eat.

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Introduction to my blog

I write mostly about having lived across cultures in a cross-cultural marriage.  In 1953, I married a fellow student, Ravi, a Fulbright Scholar from India. He and I continued on to graduate school together, taught at the university, had two children and adopted another. In the mid-1960s we began living abroad.

I write also as a woman who had originally intended to become a professor but was diverted by reality to another goal. I had grown up working class poor in the Great Depression, moved almost yearly from one small town to another with no mother, with a father who was far from angelic, and with his father and father’s second wife as my only kin. At sixteen I discovered a university I was determined to attend, so a year later moved to the campus and waited tables in a restaurant there to support myself, pay tuition and buy books. I loved school and was totally enthralled by my anthropology and sociology classes. From graduate school on I loved teaching and doing research, felt comfortable in academia and wanted never to leave it. Instead, I became an expatriate wife. I followed Ravi in his pursuit of career, was mother and sometimes teacher to our multi-moved children, made a home for us in each place we lived and managed, somehow, to create research projects for myself and publish academically from them.

In 1972 I returned to the States with the children, for their schooling and mine, but with changed expectations for myself. I had been living in developing countries, in close touch through my anthropological studies with on-the-ground realities, with people who were suffering from preventable, or at least treatable, illnesses. I ceased thinking of myself as an academic. I entered a graduate school program in the design and management of family planning programs and continued on for an MBA in hospital and health care management. Out on the job, I changed again, to a focus on primary health care, especially on programs for women and children. In the meantime Ravi had joined an international organization. In 1976, the children off to college, I moved to Paris to be with Ravi and to work, on a consulting basis, part-time, in international public health. Other than the U.S. and France, the countries where I lived and worked were Somalia, Turkey, India and Indonesia.

Obviously, much of what I write is memoir, but I live in the present and would like to think I can write about the past in ways that bring useful information and insight into matters that concern us today. Among the matters that concern me is government but will not write about politics. I am liberal/progressive but mostly pragmatic. Besides my fascination with different cultures and with living cross-culturally, my interests include public health and the changing nature of health care, the environment, art and architecture, movies, plus holdovers from my anthropology days, especially human evolution.

In 2012 I published a book, Tales of Mogadiscio, from my experiences in Somalia during the mid-1960s. It’s a series of stories and essays, stories about individuals from the city’s many and varied communities and essays to provide context and background for understanding them. A few notes and comments are added here, like footnotes, describing events and observations I could not fit into the book’s narrative flow. I write about my time in Turkey, living and doing research there and later as a consultant, evaluating rural health care projects for UNICEF and WHO, in India, Turkey and Indonesia. However, thinking about Ravi growing up in India, his identity as Indian and American, our lives together in Paris and elsewhere became so fascinating that it took over for a while. The nature of the blog changes and follows my shifting interests. Currently it is with my time, from 1978 into the early 1990s, working in Indonesia as a consultant on primary health programs.

To contact me — irissansfrontieres@yahoo.com

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