Much like the practice of belly
dancing, henna is considered to be women’s art and activity, shrouded in
mystery behind closed doors in the world of women – inside the home. The theme
of women and their relationships with each other, and with men, regarding their
crafts and how they use them engulfs much of the women’s behaviour. Much of
their lives are dependent on the men, predominantly the head male of the house
hold. This extends into the outside world, beyond the home, which is considered
the man’s world. “Patriarchal hegemony does not exclude the existence of
sectors or tactics that permit greater or lesser freedom, nor do all women
experience it in the same way,” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 13) . This pillar of social structure is being
challenged however due to a new market of income opening with the influx of
tourists into Morocco, particularly with relation to tourist sector henna. Women
have begun to extend themselves beyond their place indoors, into the outside
world, which is causing some shifts in the social power of gender within
Morocco.
“…the presentation of culture ‘is
a communicative medium to shape reality, to construct it in order to achieve
specific ends’ (Peteet 1993:52).” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 47) .
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| Henna on the street |
In Morocco, much like everywhere,
spaces contain meaning regarding how they are used, who has access to them, the
rituals performed in them, the economic and social contexts that are embedded
in them, and how all of these connects to other’s lives. “The house and the street
are not just places however, but metaphors or reference points that orient
Moroccan women’s self-presentation through speech and action,” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 46) . The repetition of
these actions in these places will reinforce these metaphors, such as what is
said between people, the mannerisms necessary to communicate depending on
location, and other symbols like dress. This has been carefully and
strategically orchestrated in Moroccan culture, so that a woman may not be able
to exist outside of these constructs without risking her reputation. For
instance, for a woman to be on the street too much without reason would call
into question her actions. Occasionally, when ends cannot be met and more money
is needed to feed the family, women will resort to prostitution, a transaction
that typically happens on the street, and ruins reputations (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 65) . If a woman is
spending too much time on the street, people would assume something like
prostitution, ruining a woman’s future prospects in a whole host of areas.
In the past several decades,
tourism has been increasing in Morroco, and with the high influx of tourists
coming to Morocco, those outside of the domestic economic sector have been
reaching into the pool of international visitors for monetary opportunity.
However, those who have access to this pool of income are almost exclusively
one group of people; the “local actors who benefit most are male” (Kelly-Spurles
n.d., 62) .
This is mostly through the gendering of jobs, and those who have access to
interact with the unknown tourists. Women have been taking to the streets of
Morocco to offer their stills as henna artists, selling take-away-souvenirs to
tourists in the form of henna designs, in order to make some money.
However, it is more difficult
than simply setting up a stall in the plaza and calling tourists over with the
promise of a personalize design. Women are typically not able to speak with
individuals outside their own kin group, which is often symbolized by the way
they dress. One way women who are moving to the tourist sector to find work are
working around this is by adopting religious idioms, such as the veil or the hijab (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 56) . This way, they may
avoid some negative attention they may attract for working outside the home, by
adopting a more formal style of dress. However, if henna is to be sold to a
tourist, the women need to do more than dress conservatively; they need to
interact with the tourists and make the henna art readily available.
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| Beautiful henna on her left hand |
Tourists rarely ever want to
spend an enormous amount of time in one place while travelling; they have a
limited amount of time in the area and want to make the most of it by seeing
all they can. A henna artist could invite a tourist to their home to perform henna;
however that is almost worse than working on the street in the open, because
now someone outside the kin group is in the home and this could be easily
misunderstood to be prostitution. Having been a tourist in several countries
where I did not speak the language, I noticed most other tourists will stick to
the main pathways where the streets are wide and there seems to be a lot of
activity. Women who wish to work in the tourist henna sector must move to these
public areas in order to interact with the tourist to make a sale. Thus, due to
tourists rarely ever being invited into a private home, or leaving the main
streets, the henna artists are forced to go where the tourists are.
“Female artisans,
operating from a weak base and lacking institutional power, aim to expand and
solidify their use of public space. Socially constructed space is engaged here
as both a context that reveals power relations and structures women’s actions
and as a process in which they participate, as their actions alternately
reinforce and resist it (Low, 1996; Erdreich and Rapoport, 2006),” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 56) .
The enormous shift in Moroccan
culture, from one where men domimate the working work, to one where it is more
likely to find men and women in the same work place, doing different jobs, but
behaving in a similar fashion in order to make the most of the economic opportunities
opening up with so many tourists wandering through the streets and urban areas
of Morocco. This can be discomforting to some people because even if a woman
was in the most moderate of costumes, her mere presence in a market or a wide
main street challenges the traditional placement of women’s work, which is
traditionally in the home. By placing women in an outdoor setting, and have
them behave in a businesslike manner like the men, it disrupts patterns of
gender.
Tourist sector henna artists will
challenge additional gender structures by applying henna to the bodies of men,
removing another symbol that is particular to the art of henna – which is
typically exclusively applied to the bodies of women. “The hadith show henna on
the hands and feet as distinctively feminine” (Kelly-Spurles n.d., 31) . I find it odd that
henna would be considered exclusive to women as it had originally been meant as
a form of cooling the body because it had chemical properties where, if applied
to the palm of your hand and the soles of your feet, the wearer would feel
cooler than they really were. It would hopefully be assumed that this form of
air conditioning would be available to both sexes, and in some parts of the
world it is, but in Morocco it is primarily a women’s activity. Perhaps,
because of the elaborate artistic and craft attributes which are culturally
primarily considered to be women’s work, it had been handed over to the women
as a pass time which evolved into and included ceremonial practices and
symbolic implications with the style, placement, and application of henna.
Whatever the case may be, the placement of henna on the bodies of men challenge
the ceremonial and gendered meanings of henna practice.
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| Women in the work force |
The
placement of women in the streets of Morocco challenges gender structures in
Moroccan culture, such as the role women play in the economic market of Morocco,
where their ‘place’ is in home or the outside world, as well as which gender
may wear henna. With tourists visiting cities like Marrakesh, women are taking
to the streets in order to dip into this economic opportunity to help support
themselves and their families. The presence of women on the streets, behaving in
manners of masculinity, and acting as an active participant in the Moroccan job
market changes the way Moroccans see the role women play in their own social
setting. Tourist sector henna has been criticized quite a bit throughout this
blog so far, but in some ways it has brought a bit of equality to the streets
of Morocco, allowing women to move around more freely than they had before.
