what's that tat?
emily asked about reactions to my tattoo.
my little cousin Rashad, who is 5, thinks it's the neatest thing ever: "She has a drawing on her back!" she shrieked to her dad, my uncle the doctor, when I reached over for something and my shirt reached with me. "A drawing! On her back!" - she giggled like a maniac and wouldn't leave my shirt in place after that.
my aerobics instructor, who is very "europeanized," likes it a lot - she told me this after class one day, after I'd bared it in the course of our bends and lifts.
my oldest cousin, the one who saw it while we were in the hammam, is slightly shocked. and nobody else has seen it - I don't think - because in actuality, tattoos here are pretty much taboo.
I didn't think they were. My grandmother is covered with them: little blue ciphers on her cheeks and forehead and arms and legs (tattooed arms and a gold front tooth - with her sleeves rolled up, she looks like a pirate). women of her generation, from the countryside, who grew up before the second World War, wore them as signs of beauty, as a kind of makeup.
[a while back we asked my grandmother how she got them. she told us that when she was young, girls - teenagers, preteens - tattooed themselves whenever they had the time and material: sometimes with needles and ink, but more often with thistles for puncturing and soot or ash for color. my grandma rocks it hard core.]
after independence, Algeria was injected with a dose of (non-violent) fundamentalism in the form of Egyptian radicals who came to teach Arabic to the newly-liberated masses. Algeria wasn't radicalized right away - not like during the 80s and 90s - but people started differentiating between practices that were acceptably "Islamic" and practices that were not, and tattooing was tossed into the "not" pile.
my uncle the doctor tells a sort of funny story: in the late 90s, or maybe early this decade, a woman about my grandmother's age came to his practice begging him, in tears, to recommend her to a dermatologist who could erase her tattoos - all of them - because like my grandma, she was covered, and because she'd learned that tattooing was sinful, and she was afraid of going to hell.
my uncle, who is sometimes extremely wise, put on his religious-counselor face and told her, father-confessor style, that God would accept her if she atoned for her tattoos with a fast and with prayer. so she did, she fasted and prayed and was at peace after that. which was a relief, because a dermatological intervention would have been substantially more painful. sometimes medicine and theology mix well :).
my little cousin Rashad, who is 5, thinks it's the neatest thing ever: "She has a drawing on her back!" she shrieked to her dad, my uncle the doctor, when I reached over for something and my shirt reached with me. "A drawing! On her back!" - she giggled like a maniac and wouldn't leave my shirt in place after that.
my aerobics instructor, who is very "europeanized," likes it a lot - she told me this after class one day, after I'd bared it in the course of our bends and lifts.
my oldest cousin, the one who saw it while we were in the hammam, is slightly shocked. and nobody else has seen it - I don't think - because in actuality, tattoos here are pretty much taboo.
I didn't think they were. My grandmother is covered with them: little blue ciphers on her cheeks and forehead and arms and legs (tattooed arms and a gold front tooth - with her sleeves rolled up, she looks like a pirate). women of her generation, from the countryside, who grew up before the second World War, wore them as signs of beauty, as a kind of makeup.
[a while back we asked my grandmother how she got them. she told us that when she was young, girls - teenagers, preteens - tattooed themselves whenever they had the time and material: sometimes with needles and ink, but more often with thistles for puncturing and soot or ash for color. my grandma rocks it hard core.]
after independence, Algeria was injected with a dose of (non-violent) fundamentalism in the form of Egyptian radicals who came to teach Arabic to the newly-liberated masses. Algeria wasn't radicalized right away - not like during the 80s and 90s - but people started differentiating between practices that were acceptably "Islamic" and practices that were not, and tattooing was tossed into the "not" pile.
my uncle the doctor tells a sort of funny story: in the late 90s, or maybe early this decade, a woman about my grandmother's age came to his practice begging him, in tears, to recommend her to a dermatologist who could erase her tattoos - all of them - because like my grandma, she was covered, and because she'd learned that tattooing was sinful, and she was afraid of going to hell.
my uncle, who is sometimes extremely wise, put on his religious-counselor face and told her, father-confessor style, that God would accept her if she atoned for her tattoos with a fast and with prayer. so she did, she fasted and prayed and was at peace after that. which was a relief, because a dermatological intervention would have been substantially more painful. sometimes medicine and theology mix well :).