I accept that I don’t fit the typical gender roles constructed in this village. I travel alone. I go to the weekly market when I wish. I have financial independence. I wear jeans. I may as well be a man. But then again, I also know how to weave. I sometimes wear skirts. I can apply mascara. Perhaps I am a woman. I have a feminine name. I do laundry. Or at least I try to.
Many of the daily chores in the village are clearly assigned by gender. Men lay brick, women knead bread. Men buy vegetables, women care for the children. Men do the shopping, women gather the firewood. I waiver between these roles nearly as much as I waiver about their relevance to my work here. In my experience, the confusion is never more clear than when it comes to doing laundry.
For sixth months at the beginning of my service, I was living in an apartment on my own. I would occasionally take my laundry down to the river to wash, partly because of its novelty and partly because I wanted to see what it entailed. How hard was the work? How clean were my clothes in the end? I enjoyed it, despite the guilt of sending more Tide downstream, and the result was clean clothes. It also became evident that the main factors in washing clothes by the river were A) having to haul the heavy, wet clothes back home and B) the social scene. For a lot of women, washing laundry in the river is hard work but pleasantly social. At first, I longed to be a part of that social scene, to be “one of the women” and share in the local news. But then I quickly rescinded that desire. Instead of joining in on the gossip, I became the gossip. Women would whisper and stare in amazement. Sarah washes her clothes?! Self conscious and paranoid, I would overanalyze how much soap I was using, how thoroughly I rinsed and how many pairs of underwear I had to wash compared to the other women.
Often times, I’d simply wash my clothes in my apartment. I could wash a while, let some things soak, cook lunch, and finish up. I had only to haul wet clothes from my washin’ spot near the bathroom faucet into the spare room I used for hanging wet clothes as I had no rooftop access. Clothes were clean and no one had to know.
Well, all of that’s changed now, and I’m facing The Great Laundry Debate head-on. Somewhere around Ramadan last year, I moved in with a family. I decide that I hadn’t integrated quite enough yet, and I needed to get a fully authentic Moroccan experience. I love living with this family. My relationships in the community feel better connected, and a somewhat organic flow has started to develop between my work life and home life. But now my ambiguous gender identity is even more apparent. I’m continually faced with choices in which my decision to act or not act has an effect on others in the household and either deepens or refutes all sorts of conflicting stereotypes about being female or American or educated or “wealthy.”
We’ve awkwardly made some headway. I’m not expected to cook meals or knead bread, but I do read books to the kids and I did make spaghetti for lunch the other day. I help when what’s needed is painfully obvious and I stay out of the way the rest of the time. Because it seems that there’s this other role for me. It’s a unique place that includes brushing my teeth with the kids, explaining the wonders of internet, teaching the six graders in the community about art and geography, and setting up workshops for the women in the weaving association to learn new crafts and skills. Ok. That I can handle. Feels less gendered and more me.
But I really don’t like someone else to have to wash my laundry. Shortly after I moved in, I asked Zahara when she planned to go down to the river to wash. I told her that I didn’t mind washing my clothes, but it can be lonely to wash by myself all the time. Really, I was hoping to pick up some tips from her and to see where this family typically did their washing. She assured me that she’d be going down to the river after awhile and that I could go along. But, as the matriarch of the house directed me sit down for tea and a snack, Zahara took my clothes along with the huge pile gathered from the household and went to the river to wash.
On that particular occasion, I marched down to the river after my tea and snack with my own bucket, fuming. I took back what were rightfully my soiled digs, and muttering to myself, washed my own clothes all by my own self. It still pains me to say that after I finished washing my clothes, Zahara washed them all again. The only saving grace on that day was that the women got into a discussion about pads and tampons. They don’t use tampons. Don’t know what they are. Well, well. I know what they are, and wasn’t shy to explain it to them. Scooped up my ego and I was on my way.
Months have passed now and I continue to struggle to do my own laundry. I’ve been duped every attempt along the way. One time, I tried to sneak up to the roof to wash before anyone knew. No luck, Zeyneb showed up toting a new bucket of water and proceeded to wash, rinse and wring at lightning speed. Only things I got to wash were the few pieces that I had been sitting on.
What’s absolutely exhausting in all this is not beating the detergent into the clothes or hauling buckets, it’s trying to figure out the why in it all. I drive myself crazy trying to figure out why they are so head strong to not let me wash my own clothes. Or why am I so stubborn not to let them? Do they think I do an awful job? They think I’m to fragile for this kind of work? Do they think that I’m somehow better than them and that I shouldn’t be sacrificing some virtue? Is my role elsewhere? Do they continue to see me as a guest? Do I get in the way? Is it rude that I don’t offer to help wash all of the household’s clothes the way other women in the house do? Because admittedly, I really want to wash my own clothes, but washing the whole household’s clothes is crossing some personal boundaries for me. A cultural flag does get thrown at the juncture for me, I’ll accept that.
Despite the many unanswered questions, there was a shift last week. I managed to dodge the decoy of sitting down for tea, and accompanied Adjo down to the river bed with a small load of clothes. With my own buckets and soap, I didn’t have to rely on anything from anyone else. I positioned myself behind Adjo so that I could survey her techniques without her analyzing mine. Hamdullah! (Thanks be to God!) I managed to wash all of my own clothes. I even managed to wash a jacket of one of Adjo’s daughters, and helped Adjo with her rinse cycle. Naturally, she washed twice as many clothes as I did in the same amount of time, and I broke one of my buckets, but that just helps me to keep my ego in check.
We took our wet clothes back to the house, Adjo’s kids helping with the load, and we hung them on the line on the wide open rooftop. Most were dry when the stars came out. I gathered my clothes, in fear that someone else would gather them and fold them for me before morning. Then, I stealthily brought Adjo’s clothes inside, so that no one would realize that I was helping and try to interfere.
