Border Patrol

Gina Wisker

(Saudi Arabia December 2009)
 
At the border patrol, in the armoured car I
am forced to wear black
from head to toe, with special reference to covering my hair
which could inflame.
It seems. But I am
transported to The Handmaid’s Tale
Offred in the headgear, head down,
silenced, irate, surprised at
cultural shift – so soon unable to own her own bank account,
drive a car,
own her own name,
make decisions. I am
walking several paces behind a stranger. Already guilty as charged
of travelling and eating
with these men – neither father, husband, son nor brother. There’s no desire permitted
in this desert where each man
a sheikh in his own kingdom
patrols the borders of respectability. The law of the father presented
as protective paternalism, an exact power
scrutinising my unruliness disguised
as conformity. We scan our fingerprints
Mine rejected three times. It took a year
To get this far.
Even my photo was turned down, over and over
until I looked just like my mother
as I do now.
An undercover feminist
bordered by convention.
A stranger in disguise in a land of sand.
Head to toe in widow’s weeds.

---

Sandscape

Gina Wisker

What here is the nature of dissidence?
Sawn off trousers in the Holiday Inn
Where veiled women can only eat with relatives
My questioning silent, my temporary collusion like
turning the armoured car on the dirt road
leaning out from the wheeling, open truck  
insurgents, revolutionaries wielding Kalashnikovs. 
Bandit in disguise.
I’m reading the runes in the dunes.
Turning the sand timer upside down again.
Shifting the sand picture to its new shapes.
Merely mirage.
A temporary veil removed, a
new moonscape on the dunes
their ever shifting nature a tourist delight but
If you’ve bought the sand picture
and focused your camera
the tenuousness and ephemerality –
first an approaching sandstorm, a wall, a
blizzard. Eventually leaving much buried.
Much dead.
And no trace.

---

Oasis

Gina Wisker

Into the drained pool
falls the subdued light, into
the tranquil Gulf sea, becalmed.
There is no stir of life.
Across the box hedges and the palm trees only
the cries of Saudi children
led by their black clad mothers
forbidden the beach, the pool, the unveiling.
I engage past with present – offering
on the step between sand and water
between then and now
maybe nothing at all.
Lightening followed
by dry rain.
Brief rainstorm in the
parched desert.
A conjured oasis merely in
a thousand miles of sand and sand.
A sand road across sand and more sand
trickling through a sand timer
till it stops. 
This is no way forward in an endless desert;
these revelations, a momentary flower.
No no oasis even. Gone now, emptied, drained in the half light it was
all a mirage.

---

Veils

Gina Wisker

 
Astonishingly it rains here
where no rain was imaginable and the shafts of lightning
over the Gulf light up
dark yellow air. The sandscape
revealed like hidden faces
from behind veiled curtains of black.
Released from a shared space, the Saudi women
turn out to be graduates from Birmingham,
Leeds, Essex. They’ve all day
held their own the right side of the divider, the
white robes on the left and black robes on the right. No dialogue.
No conversation. No consent. No dissent. But now
they’re sharing intellectual secrets mixed like cross-stitch
with the domestic.
We finish at 3
so they can return to cook,
read Shakespeare and write articles
on postcolonial dramatists. Each
discretely picking up the final black
that hides all but their eyes and covering
their animated smiling faces
for another day.
For their own space.

---

Screen

Gina Wisker

Drawn here to this arid place,
drawn to the kingdom and the room
of the split screens the
lowered eyes
the white and black it is
no longer merely black and white for me
It’s full of fireworks.
I subdue them with words.
Translate the explanations
played out in the scrawls on the sand
the sifting snails the
tiny hidden sandworms
processing the seawater and the sand.
Laundering the grit,
leaving the most troublesome
smooth.

---

Sand in the Kitchen

Gina Wisker

Suddenly there’s sand in my kitchen.
I’m sweeping it up and wondering
is it grit to stop the snow, to stop me
sliding and slipping?
Falling headlong?
Whenever I write
It’s ‘The Wasteland’ again.
Snow on hedges
in the enclosed the secret
Garden.
And at Christmas
remembered children’s cries
mingle with the shrieks of my mother
refusing to budge
up, down, in or out.
Whatever.
They pick up their coats and flee. There’s now
too many footprints in the snow
and no use crying
over spilt sand.