Semiotics: First Lady's scarf & shock of hair: Laura Bush's visit to the Wailing Wall and the Dome of the Rock
On a mission of connection with the warring sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, where religion is interwoven into everything, America's First Lady, Laura Bush made a visit to holy sites. She was jeered and heckled at the Wailing Wall, where she left a prayer-note in one of the crevices; and she was waved off, crowded, jostled, and go-homed during her visit to the Muslim place, the Dome of the Rock, where she removed her shoes to walk deep into the interior. In the imagery that poured out around the world after her bravery and composure and success in mission, one detail somehow made a lasting impression on me.
I noted in the AP photo shown here (for the purposes of semiotics analysis and study), the black scarf that one of the reporters told us she "clutched." And I noted how exactly it sat there on her head, revealing (if by accident) or flaunting (if by design) a great lock of blonde hair. Or should I say, a great shock of blonde hair. To my eye, the contrast of the black and the gold-blonde composed a sign of just how Mrs. Bush was present* to her hosts, just what was the deference she offered to the strictures of other ways of living and of controlling women's behaviour - especially in the holy places. Now, of course, Christianity in many of its ancient traditions apply a text from St Paul to the covering of women's hair in church. But Protestants, and the latter designation includes me and presumably the Methodists to whom the First Lady is presumably affiliated, we do not normally have rules or enforce them regarding the covering of the head for either gender or the covering of the hair in the case of women.
*If I recall correctly, Yasser Arafat's wife (a convert to Islam from Christian faith) also sported blonde hair; and am I imagining that the Queen of Jordan (another convert) had the same hair-colour preference. I don't know what the head/hair-covering practices of these great ladies have been. But there are numerous streams within Islam, by not means universal, that find the revealing of a woman's hair to be a tremendous burden for men, an unfair temptation of their ability to avoid uncontrollable sexual urges. Be that as it may:
Bush covered her head partly. She covered it in a colour appropriate to her situation, which required modesty and therefore the best canadidate would be black. Black seems to be a universal colour of religious deference and acknowledgement of the necesssity of a pious decorum in certain contexts. But it seemed to me even immediately on first viewing that there was a line between her black scarf and the front great lock of her hair, there was a line beyond which Lady Bush would not hide her womanly gift of a brite powerful natural headress, her gold-blonde hair (whether the colour is natural or not, doesn't matter, not to me at least, not to the semiotics of the imagery sent out around the world, in any case). This semiotic structure of black scarf and gold-blonde hair divided by a distinct line between deference and Western Protestant Christian individuality: the unofficial ambassador, Laura Bush, was expressing at one and the same time both her deference to her Muslim hosts and their hosts' faith at one of the great sites of their faith - while at the same time not utterly altering her identity as a Westerner and a Christian woman and a First Lady of a largely Christian but hi-ly pluralist society, embracing rampant secularists to whom hair-covering rules reek of superstitition and observing such rules for them a craven disloyalty to the dignity of autonomous Man, er, Woman.
Still, there is in her appearance something very American; perhaps with the other two factors, it's the brite lipstick that adds a punctuation mark to her way of making her presence asserted in her own right. - Owlb
Sorry, no live-link yet here; click on the blue title above for the story and original AP photo in its CBC online context
No comments:
Post a Comment