Burkinis and belonging: 'It's this feeling the beach and hijab don't mix'
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Version 0 of 1. When I was 13, I started wearing hijab. I had always loved swimming but had to give it up until my mother bought some Lycra fabric from Lincraft and sewed me a fluorescent pink-and-blue two-piece wetsuit with a matching swimming cap. The local pools refused to admit me wearing the suit but I was free to go to the beach. So go to the beach I did. And yet the feeling that I belonged at the beach, that it was a public space in which I was “in place”, sometimes eluded me. The belief that the beach is open to all runs deep in Australia. Wendy Garden, the curator of last year’s art exhibition On the Beach, wrote that beaches occupied “a privileged place in the national psyche”. “The beach is seen as a great equaliser, where racial, social and gender differences are subordinate to the common pursuit of pleasure in the surf and sun.” But like many of our public spaces, the iconic space of the Australian beach has always privileged a white sensory landscape. What looks and feels and sounds and smells as though it belongs is a function of power relations. Since last summer, events in Europe have sharpened potential conflicts over who and what belongs on the beach. After the terrorist attack in Nice in May, French mayors banned women from wearing burkinis on the beach in dozens of resorts and promised to defy a court ruling that the bans were illegal. At least one woman was fined by police for not wearing an outfit deemed to respect “good morals and secularism”. No such legal moves have been seriously proposed for Australian beaches but the climate is far from relaxed. Speaking to Muslim women from diverse walks of life about their relationship with the beach, what is striking is how their bodies, specifically their dress, have become the dominant site for contests over what is considered “in place” and “out of place” on Australian beaches. Whether it be a hijab over a rash vest and activewear leggings, or the burkini, it seems that the “Muslimness” of this form of dress has the capacity to provoke wary and sometimes hostile reactions. Many of the women I spoke to had a sense that their burkinis and hijabs were considered “out of place”. The staring, the double looks, the raised eyebrows. “It’s this feeling that the beach and hijab don’t mix,” says Sarah, a 28-year-old lawyer (all interviewees asked for full names to be withheld). “People are locked into thinking there’s only one way to dress and enjoy the beach.” Samah laughs when she tells me that before owning a burkini, she wore tights, a long shirt and hijab to swim in and “lay on the sand”. “One time a guy looked at me while we were in the water,” she recounts. “He shook his head with pity and said, ‘Isn’t it a shame you can’t enjoy the sun?’ I laughed it off and responded that I was enjoying the sun. “Mind you, the guy was wearing a long-sleeve rashie and swim cap. I had more skin exposed than he did!” Growing up in Queensland, the beach has always been part of Aisha’s life. But when she started wearing hijab, she says she stopped feeling comfortable because of “how people would stare”. She opted for secluded beaches despite her concerns about swimming in places with no flags or lifeguards. “It was the only way I could feel at ease to swim,” she says. For some the beach has become the opposite of the peculiarly relaxed space of Australian myth. Hana, a 25-year-old journalist, was on the northern beaches of Sydney last month and interpreted the stares she received as a kind of “disgust” that questioned her right even to be on the beach. She says she decided against wearing her burkini and “watered down” her outfit of swimming cap, black tights with board shorts on top and long-sleeve rash vest, to make it less “confronting”. “I can go anywhere in Australia and I feel so comfortable,” she says, “but the beach is the one place that I am fearful of because of the reaction I always receive.” The norms and rules that have been allowed to dominate Australian beaches mean a bathing suit is internalised as natural, much in the same way that in India it is perfectly “natural” for women to wear saris and swim in the ocean. In Egypt, women jump into the Mediterranean wearing their hijabs or niqabs without issue. Another woman, Az, says it is not the job of Muslim women to prove they belong on Australian beaches. What is needed is to hold the mirror up to society and understand why we deem some forms of dress acceptable and others unacceptable. Yet many Muslim women do struggle to overcome the attitudes of others. Sana spent years on what she describes as “a journey of confidence-building” to wear a burkini at the beach. For years she chose not to wear it because she grew up “with a feeling that only people who dress and look a certain way have claim to the beach. The beach is a space which, due to so many societal factors, is synonymous with whiteness, blond-haired, sunburnt-white skin and definitely not fully dressed women.” This is about much more than bikinis v burkinis. Muslim women are particularly aware that what they wear on the beach and how they behave can be used as ammunition for wider culture wars about a mythical “Australian way of life” and “Aussie values”. Anisa is married with three children and her concerns about being a “hijabi at the beach” have deepened since the French bans. “Some women are brave and don’t care,” she says, “but I feel so self-conscious and as though people are judging me and my husband because he’s wearing ‘appropriate’ swimwear whereas I am fully covered. “You can almost feel how they are viewing us as this controlling Muslim man and his poor oppressed wife – if only they knew the real dynamics!” A cultural studies professor, Suvendini Perera, has argued that veiling has become the ultimate marker of cultural difference and that the veiled Muslim woman is “a kind of limit-figure for the nation in the values debate”. It is the awareness that their bodies are repositories for other people’s narratives and stereotypes that burdens all the women I spoke to. And yet many Muslim women resist the negative responses of others to lay claim to their beach space. Abs tells me she “self-counsels” herself: “I constantly tell myself not to care what others are thinking of my appearance. This self-counselling empowers me to enjoy myself and my time with my children.” Samar is just as resolved to ignore the “stares and weird looks” and “rock the burkini when I’m swimming”. For Layla, for whom the beach “washes away stress and anxiety”, presumptions that she cannot swim and is “weighed down” by her burkini only make her laugh. It’s not simply that these women use the beach in spite of being positioned as “out of place”. They seek to redefine “out of place”, challenging dominant assumptions and sensory reactions to their presence. Layla’s relationship with the beach has evolved from a site of resistance to the staring and comments, to a place which she says she has “trained myself to think of as my space too”. |