Habits

Walking along Wine Street when I first arrived here, so named because it was at one point the avenue where many of Bristol’s wine merchants had their shops, I noticed a group of Catholic nuns walking ahead of me, dressed in full habits, flowing robes, headpieces, long sleeves, the old fashioned nun’s habits that you no longer see, other than in old films like “The Sound of Music”.

Odd, I thought, I wonder if there’s an old order here in Bristol, a nunnery who’s members still dress in the olden way.

The Number 2 bus runs along Wine Street, and because it’s a double decker, it pushes a mass of air in front of it as it moves along the street. Passing the nuns, it swirled their habits in a diesel breeze and I heard them giggle as they gripped at their garments, flapping in the passing wind.

Then the nuns turned to cross the street and I realized they weren’t nuns at all, they were Somali women dressed in traditional Somali Muslim attire.

Context changes everything.

Of course, because I had first perceived them in familiar terms, familiar they remained (and you know, a nun’s wimple looks an awful lot like a proper hijab.)

What could have been African strangeness became a variation on a known theme instead: in the space of a few moments, of a few visual transitions, they became nuns with black faces, then Somali women, then Somali Muslim women and then I saw them as just one more variant thread in the tapestry of the city.

This is how “otherness” becomes familiar.

I am “other” here, but until I open my mouth and my Canadian accent betrays me, I could be just another stout Yorkshireman, in Bristol to visit family, or a greying grandfather from London, passing through on my way to Cornwall.

“Otherness” depends on who is looking for it.

A few days later I was walking along the same stretch of Wine Street (where, by the way, there is no longer a single wine merchant) and I noticed a group of Muslim women approaching me, wearing head scarves. Now, I speak neither Arabic nor Farsi but, as they approached, I had a Twilight Zone moment when I realized that, somehow, I could understand the language they were speaking.

And then I understood the “somehowness” of it: they were speaking Polish, which is close enough to Ukrainian that I can usually understand much of it.

They were not wearing Muslim headscarves, or hijabs: they were wearing plain old ordinary headscarves, the kind my mother used to wear, the kind that Eastern European women, Poles, Ukrainian, Lithuanians, Russians, have worn for generations, the headscarves so ubiquitous among older Eastern European women that they even have a name: a “babushka” means either a grandmother, or the headscarf she wears.

Context changes everything: Nuns? Somali women? Muslims? Polish women?

“Otherness” is in the eye of the beholder.

(The people in the photo, by the way, in case you were wondering, are Christian nuns.

Photo credit: Copyright:<ahref=’https://www.123rf.com/profile_photografier’>photografier / 123RF Stock Photo</a>)