It got me thinking of all the other advertisements and White people imagery I’d noticed in my limited travels through the Arab world. It would appear that when the message is fun, relaxation, convenience or fulfilment, the preferred spoke models are of the more pasty variety. Stroll past any “Coming Soon” boarded storefront of any mall in Kuwait, Bahrain and the Emirates, or skim the brochure of any health spa, hotel, restaurant or shopping center and the gleaming, naturally pink complexions of attractive Crackers staring back at you with placid blue and green eyes. It’s like they’re saying, “Look, look, live here and live like White people.” “Drink this and you’ll laugh like White people.” “Don’t you want your banking experience to be like the White people? They never have to wait in line – see how they’re smiling?”
I wonder how many smiling White people the proprietors of such ads have actually encountered in the Middle East. I’m certainly not one of them. I've got a well-practiced angry face that I wear everyday in Kuwait. I forget to turn it off, sometimes, after I've left the country. I still remember reactions from beach goers with vacation buzzes when I was in Thailand. Someone actually stopped me to ask what was wrong... "Did something bad happen to you?" they wanted to know. The look is one of defiant indifference and slightly hateful complacency. It takes about as much work to perfect as Zoolander's "Blue Steel." It's my only armor in an amorous and sexually repressed world where men assume a woman solo is a woman soliciting.
I'm not the only one with a Blue Steel, everyone around here, talking about Kuwait now, looks slightly hateful and indifferent. Eye contact is either a personal insult or a personal invitation and a smile, my God, a smile is practically a public display of orgasm. I'd venture to say that both genuine smiles and orgasms are rare for women in the Middle East. An increase in one would probably lead to an increase in the other and so far, I haven’t seen it. In fact, I can count on one hand, using only three fingers, the number of times I've seen people with the look of bliss about them. I'm talking about just random occasions when a person looked happy for no reason at all; everyone beams when the first bottle of real Johnny Walker Red comes out.
Occasion One: Marina Mall, the local cruise spot for adolescent boys of all ages and gaggles of girls whose layers of skin-tight clothing are surpassed only by the layers of make-up they're wearing. The husband and I were at the food court, waiting for a movie to start and I couldn't stop myself from noticing a young-middle-aged woman with her family seated near by. Trying to figure out why my gaze was so drawn to a very normal-looking woman in a very normal situation, I realized that she was smiling. She smiled at her kids and her husband. She looked bright and happy. It was the first time I'd seen this since moving to Kuwait.
Occasion Two: Stuck in traffic on Arabian Gulf Street, I looked toward the seaside, as I often do when traffic is slow, to see if I could separate the color of the sea from the sky. The coast to horizon of Kuwait is like one big yawn of faded blue-gray, but today I saw something that made me laugh out loud. Not in an “I laugh because I need to find humor so that I don’t cry” kind of way, no, it really gave me the giggles. A large-ish woman, wearing a black abiya and hijab, had turned out of the morning rush hour, parked her car in front of a small playground and was vigorously pumping her feet back and forth, swinging gleefully on a yellow, dinosaur-headed swing-set.
Occasion Three: At a "beach party" hosted by a friend's event management company I was coerced into being their photographer for the day. The day’s activities were many of the typical picnic games I remember playing as a kid: dodge ball, volleyball, tug-of-war, potato sack races, and others. People in their early twenties in America would not have paid $50 for boys and $35 for girls to attend such an event, especially without free alcohol and definitely not if alcohol was prohibited. But these kids ate it up. There were around 150 young people, running around like 5-year-olds on a pint of ice-cream and pound of cake frosting. One guy in particular, had an overload of good feelings and stopped mid-bolt to scream. Eyes wide, fists clenched, he dropped to his knees still screaming joyfully, not knowing what else to do with the foreign emotion.
Which brings me back to my observation of White people representing fun; is happiness really a foreign emotion to some people? A day outside on the beach, playing games with a mixed (“mixed,” meaning boys and girls together) group of friends seems pretty normal to me. Exchange the beach setting for a wooded park or sunny field and you’ve covered the leisure activities of most American youths. We think nothing of talking and laughing in the presence of girls and boys we know and don’t know – it’s not even really classified as “fun;” it’s just normal. Compare to the three marked occasions of happiness in three years of living in Kuwait.
Maybe it just looks unnatural to have smiling Arabs on advertisements and “fun like White people” is just more believable. I don't know, but can anyone tell me where they at?
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