Pigs Don't Whine

The sweat from her palms had seeped through the cheap, blue nylon. She’d been clenching the bunched cloth for a good ten minutes, her hands tensed and prepared. Every muscle along her forearms was flexed, and they all stood at odds to each other, as if each one was attempting to flee a sinking vessel. Perspiration gathered in tiny domes along the planes of her vanilla skin, and trickled in tiny rivulets down the muscular ridges. I remember one drop, which had pooled in the crevasse of her inner elbow, magnifying a dense cluster of her characteristic freckles. I was transfixed with that dot, that miniscule refugee from a body convinced that in the next several seconds, it might die. There was no simple explanation for that bead of moisture. It was more than the product of the searing, sweltering heat. It was not simply some biological response to the adrenaline, pounding through her mind and surging through her veins. There was something vile about it.

As if lubricated by that same perspiration, Anne’s eyes slid to her watch. The glowing digits flicked away, counting down towards zero. That was Anne. Everything in order, everything in its place. Flying in was a nightmare with this amateur drill sergeant. This had always been her idea, spreading the word. The idea had never needed a proposition, and the entire club had been talking circles around it before she finally brought it up. A flight to Kabul International Airport. An anxious night spent in a cramped hotel room. A rented Jeep outside a mosque, just after noon. A burqa. No tops. It really was any college feminist’s ideal spring break. Of course, it had all seemed so distant from the somewhat-dank futon couches of the air-conditioned lounge space under Werther’s Hall. It had never been real. This was crushingly, indisputably, impossibly real.

Just as the gravity of our situation permeated my mind, the LEDs in Anne’s watch fluttered into dormancy in a flash of milliseconds. I closed my eyes. As if from awfully far away, the Adhan snaked its way out of a speaker system that had clearly stood through a few presidencies. Deprived of vision and bolstered by a semester of creative writing courses, my mind went to work. In the dark, I could see those ancient words, dancing forth from ancient places, inviting everyone around into God’s arms. They smelled like camel sweat and felt like sand.

“It’s so whiny.” Dani sighed from the front seat.

Anne glanced at her, away from the growing crowd of congregants. “Whining is the sound that chauvinistic, discriminating pigs make.”

Pigs don’t even whine.

Continuing with her mismatched agricultural allegory, she gave me my queue “I think enough sheep have gathered. Time to blow some minds.” I nodded, and despite any misgivings, I tugged the canopy draped over the ribs of the Jeep free. With desert sunlight blanketing our naked chests, we stood. I raise a sign, Dalia raised a megaphone to her lips and Anne raised the burqa. Worshippers turned, agape. Eyes widened and a cry of shock competed with the farsi message crackling through the megaphone. “The burqa is discrimination! The burqa is bigotry! Women are humans too! Respect for all humans! End the oppression of the burqa!”

She tore the burqa then. With a giant, terrible, scratching sound, Anne tore it down the middle. First a hushed pause, then outrage. Like hyenas they sprang on us. With dull, reverberating thuds rocks collided with the Jeep and with our skin. Some shattered, some fell. We fell to our knees and car jumped forwards.

The car swerves and I see a tiny dome of scarlet pooling in Anne’s vanilla elbow. She swipes it away with the strip of blue cloth she still clenches, “Those dirty fucking pigs cut me!”  

***

We’d been back for four days and the campus was abuzz with word of our trip. Anne’s smugness was validated by a congratulatory article in the local paper, and the adoration of everyone in the Human Rights department. I’d dismissed my doubts as little more than momentary apprehension, and was content to live the liberal arts school dream. On today’s agenda, situated between Studies in Lesbian writing and Social Action and the Academic Essay, sat an interview with a local riot grrrl zine called FemNow. I’d never pick one of those publications up, but I’d certainly tell you I had if you asked. We sat, waiting for our interviewer in a small room off of the library. Minutes passed. Anne checked her watch. Dalia and Dani joked about a recent lecture. I picked at a scab on my elbow. Suddenly there were five of us in the room.

Her back was straight and her eyes were harsh. Shrouded in endless black fabric, the rest was a mystery.

Anne was quick to her feet, “Is this a joke? We protest the burqa and you come to interview us in one?”

“No,” the stranger retorted, “you are the joke, if you can spend thousands of dollars on airfare to protest something you can’t even recognize.” She gestured to herself, “This is a niqab, and you are a closed-minded bigot.”

I began to consider that perhaps the interview was a ruse. If it was, Anne was yet to catch on. Her eyes narrowed. I could see that she would regret whatever she was about to say. Anne had spent so long perfecting the art of feminism. It was, to be perfectly honest, all that any of us really knew about her. “How dare you wear that and claim to be a feminist? You are a slave to the oppression of men!”

“How do you claim to be a feminist? How can you stand there and assume that I am some subservient wench? Every day I choose to wear this, because this is how I choose to associate. No one is forcing me, and no one is controlling me. I am not brainwashed or ignorant, simply because I chose this garment over another. You are narrow-minded and ignorant, not me. You are brainwashed into accepting biased views and prejudice, not me.”

There was a hushed pause. Her gaze shifted from one of us to the other. With an air of premeditated determination, she drew a copy of our article out of her sleeve. Beads of perspiration glistened on her wrist. Her eyes met Anne’s, and with a shattering, decisive motion she tore it down the middle. Before the shreds of literature fell to the ground, she was gone.

Anne turned to gather her bags, “What a fucking pig.”