Title IX in the RIM: Women and Physical Activity

It would be the first volleyball game in the history of Gnimlane. The net was up and boundaries measured and marked to a tee in the sand; the invitations had been sent to village bigwigs; and the “toubab circus” had arrived in town to show off some mean skills on the court. Diego, another Tagant PCV, had organized the event with the help of the local PE teacher and had invited myself and the other volunteers to demonstrate the game. It didn’t matter that few of us had ever played volleyball outside of high school gym class. It’s an American sport, we thought. How can we lose against Mauritanians? Little did we realize what lay in store for us during our two-day tourney.

To kick-off the event, we decided to run a few practice sets and give the growing crowd an introduction to the game. But, before we even stepped onto the court, the two other female volunteers and myself had another challenge to face. Turning my back to the horde of onlookers and kicking off my sandals, I gingerly began to untie my wrap skirt. I honestly felt like I was doing a striptease even though I was wearing a pair of pants underneath and had my hair conservatively covered. The crowd of Mauritanians round us feigned interest in the warm-up, but the circle they maintained around our female subset betrayed the true objects of their attention. Wide-eyed, some blatantly gawked at us and exchanged looks with friends. “Women? Wearing pants! How scandalous?!”

We had decided collectively to wear pants, as opposed to skirts, for the event. Add a bit of female empowerment to cultural and athletic objectives of the match. After all, we would be judged bizarre regardless because we were females playing a sport. Why not enjoy greater mobility if we’re already going to hell in a hand basket? Once we were skirt-less and prepped for the match, we weaved our way through the crowd and joined the others on the court. We began to practice setting up and serving the ball while simultaneously trying to retrieve the rules of the game from the recesses of our brains. By the end of our 30-minute warm-up, pip-squeak children, wearing broken sandals and confused grins, were beating balls with their fists and watching them sail over their heads, into stray camels and patches of date trees. I had to laugh whenever they got really frustrated because they would resort to soccer moves, juggling and kicking the ball around the court.

We played a few initial matches in which the toubabs were divided evenly between the two teams. We performed decently enough, or so we thought, and the Mauritanians culled from the crowd seemed to get a knack for the game as well. Then our friend, Dehan, grinning mischievously, threw down the proverbial gauntlet and announced that we would now have a Mauritania versus Toubab match. The crowd sent up a whoop, and children scattered in search of absent friends and siblings who might miss the spectacle. And what a spectacle it was! We began the match just as the sun began to dip in the sky and continued to dig, serve, set, and spike until the sun was a slit on the horizon.

Without going into too much detail, suffice to say, that while we were able to take one set of the three we played, the Toubabs suffered a pretty humiliating defeat at the hands of the Mauritanian team. Yup, we actually lost at our own game. Granted, their team was lead by two very athletic men, and I was a better cheerleader than player, but these are just excuses for the real reason we lost... I think my sister-in-law hit the nail on the head when she joked that our loss was Allah’s revenge for wearing pants in front of good Muslims. Tsk, tsk, hobaras (sluts).

In all honesty though, aside from the initial gawk session, the Mauritanians didn’t seem care that much about the pants. As toubabs, we often get a free pass to do things Mauritanians consider inappropriate. We, of course, earned a few snickers from the teenage boys, but we were never at risk for a public stoning. If anything, they were more shocked that we were using our muscles and playing the game at all! Given my experience there a few months ago, their shock at our athleticism wasn’t really a surprise. While visiting Gnimlane in November, I was asked by the Math teacher there quite literally if I could walk 1km to the school (<1mile).> He was one of the more progressive members of the community, well educated, and a big joker, so I immediately dismissed his comment with a laugh. Just a bit of routine female ribbing, I thought. However, after a minute of him looking at me expectantly, I realized he was serious. “Of course, I can walk there!” I cried. In the moment, it was easy to laugh off the experience and chalk it up to ignorance, but in retrospect, Hamoud’s question strikes at a larger issue. Mauritania is an incredibly gender-stratified country and, as such, men and women harbor deeply ingrained doubts as to women’s capabilities.

As you might have gathered from my previous entry on body image or from Oprah’s recent interview with a Mauritanian woman, the concept of women being active, much less playing sports, is a kind of anathema to this culture. Ideal women are immobile masses and good Muslims focused on the hearth and home. A few months ago, I read a book called Feeding Desire about a group of Moors in Niger. In it, Rebecca Popenoe, an anthropologist and former Peace Corps volunteer, creates a window into this culture in which largess is beauty incarnate. Contradicting the western mentality that places obesity and laziness in direct correlation, she notes that, “women’s work is the work of the stomach.” By increasing their body mass, women increase their families’ social and physical capital and thus contribute to their own welfare and that of their families’. This type of social arithmetic understandably seems very foreign to our western mindset besieged by skinny models and diet fads. Indeed, it may be hard to believe women can increase their sex appeal by eating more, but it’s true. In the land of the Moors, cankles are cool, asses attractive, grossesse gorgeous, and fat is oh so fine.

Given how closely this society clings to traditional mores and perceptions of beauty, I have not yet confronted the issue outright. Between lectures on the beauty of stretch marks and having balls of cous-cous shoved in my mouth, there just never seems to be an appropriate time to discuss the health risks associated with obesity. Instead, I have to tackle the subject in a more indirect manner, namely through the promotion of exercise. With both men and women, I talk about ways to faire le sport - walking instead of taking a taxi, gardening, stretching, etc. I then go on to explain what it does for your heart and rave about how good I feel after I exercise. My audiences usually smile and nod. Surely, some dismiss my rants as Western mumbo jumbo, but, more often than not, the individuals with whom I’m speaking already know that exercise is good. Sometimes, they’ll even boast to me how far they walked that day and nudge doubtful onlookers, emphasizing, riadh zeyn is-siha! (sports are great for the health!). Yet, as with most every other issue here, the real obstacle remains converting knowledge into action, especially among women for whom playing sports necessitates a revolutionary spirit and much more planning.

Before exercising, women must think about several factors which could influence their activity. Specifically, they must consider what they can wear to allow for both mobility and cultural sensitivity (pants under a melafa?), where they can exercise out of sight of men, when they can find the time to do so, and what exercises they can actually do in the middle the desert, sans equipment. In light of these obstacles, it is no wonder so few women choose to exercise. Thus, in addition to informal conversations about the benefits of exercise, I also try to demonstrate feasible activities for women – walking or running at the airport in the morning, dancing, and gardening.

For example, at 6am each morning, my alarm goes off, mingling with the static-filled prayer calls from the nearby mosques. As much as I want to hit Snooze, I always groggily pull myself out of “bed” (i.e. get up off the ground) and prepare for my morning run. I’m not going to cloak my runs at dawn in altruism; I run for my own sanity and so that I can feel somewhat accomplished even if I drink tea for 6-hours a day. That said, I like to think my runs have a dual purpose – maintaining my own health and illustrating women’s capacity to exercise and push themselves. The men walking home from the mosque have grown accustomed to my shadowed figure jogging past. They no longer point their flashlight at me and query, dhaak shinhu? (what the hell is that?). Based on the comments I receive from women in the market, I also know that those men go home and talk to their families about the strange female toubab they saw running that morning.

More exciting than my morning runs though is the weekly ballet class I just started to teach at the Girls Mentoring Center. I’ll admit the classes are a little unorthodox. We often mélange traditional Moor dance with ballet’s plies and ronde de jambes, and we do warm-up to Estelle feat. Kanye West and floor exercises to Chris Brown. It’s more than a little odd, but I’m so ecstatic to see these young girls embrace activity and exercise that I just kind of go with the flow. We’ve only had two sessions thus far, but the girls really seem to enjoy the classes. They pull me aside afterwards to show me their perfected chainé turns and petition me to bring back my own dance videos from the States. Based on my interactions with this younger generation, I know that a progressive perspective will guide their response to issues like obesity, nutrition, and exercise. There is hope on the horizon, but in the meantime, another generation of women remains handicapped in their levels of activity.