Guests of the Sheik: An Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

his best, but in the end it was a
    problem I had to solve myself. We were very happy together
    in our little mud house. If only I could make some kind of
    breakthrough with the women, I thought. For one thing, I
    spent at least four hours a day with them. They were a major
    factor in my life, whether I liked it or not, and my only
    company, except for Bob and Mohammed. I felt very strongly
    that we must have some common humanity between us,
    although we were from such different worlds. But how to find
    it?
    Things reached some sort of climax when Bob was invited
    on a long trip to visit one of the farthest-outlying clan
    settlements. The sheik’s brother and his oldest son were going
    across the fields thirty miles on horseback, and would be gone
    at least two days and one night. I did not mind spending the
    time by myself, but the sheik decided it was not proper or safe
    that I stay alone at night, and decreed that Amina, Selma’s
    servant, would sleep in the house with me. At that particular
    stage in my relations with the tribal women, a servant from the
    harem to watch my every movement as I brushed my teeth,
    washed my face and went to bed was the last thing on earth I
    wanted. But there was no help for it. The sheik said she was to
    come, and she came.
    Poor Amina. I think she relished the night with me even
    less than I did, but there was no recourse for her either. She
    came at suppertime, and sat on the floor beside me, watching
    me as I ate. Then followed the hour when I usually read or
    wrote letters. Amina continued to watch me. A half hour of
    this intense, silent scrutiny was enough. I gave up, made tea
    and offered her some, and tried to talk. She was not very
    communicative, but she drank the tea. Mohammed came to set
    up a camp cot in the living room, beside the bed where I slept.
    Amina was to sleep on the cot and I was to wake her at five,
    so she could go and milk the cows. Mohammed bade us good
    night and departed. I wanted to undress and climb into bed
    but, feeling shy, went into the kitchen to change into my
    nightgown. Amina followed me. I came back to the living
    room; she did likewise. Apparently the sheik had warned her
    that things would go badly with her if she let me out of her
    sight for a single moment after darkness fell. I wondered
    whether she would accompany me to the toilet. She started to,
    but stopped halfway down the path to allow me some privacy.
    I came back, undressed as I had seen my grandmother do,
    putting the nightgown on over everything and gradually
    discarding clothes from beneath its protection, while Amina
    watched. I got into bed. Amina wrapped herself in her abayah
    and lay down on the cot, pulling up the blanket which I had
    offered her. Once more I got up to turn on the light and check
    the alarm, and at this point Amina spoke.
    “Is your husband kind to you?” she asked. I said yes. She
    sighed, and burst into tears. I was appalled. I was trying to
    make up my mind whether to go over to her when she stopped
    dead in the middle of a sob, sat up cross-legged on the cot,
    dried her eyes on a corner of her tattered abayah, and launched
    into the story of her life.
    How I wished then that my Arabic were letter-perfect! For
    the story poured out of her in a torrent of words, punctuated
    by occasional sobs. I caught perhaps a third of what she
    actually said, but she repeated so much that the outline was
    finally made fairly clear to me. As the tale emerged, I was
    tempted to break down and cry myself.
    Amina was a slave, but she had not always been one. As a
    girl of fifteen, she had been married to a sixty-five-year-old
    man. Not even her father thought it was a good match, but
    there were twelve children in her family, and never enough
    barley bread and dried dates, the diet of the very poor, to go
    around. Her marriage brought her nothing but grief, for she
    nearly died delivering a stillborn son, and then her husband
    died, leaving her penniless. Her own family was