This morning as I was driving out to my regular Friday morning coffee shop date (with myself) I picked up a slight Filipina lady carrying a shopping bag the size of my bum (=big). Rather than drop her at the bus stop, I decided to just drive her to her destination. Heck, it’s Friday, I have no commitments, and that bag is enormous. On the way into the city we chatted about Doha, family, traffic, etc. I asked her about the bus she’d been planning to ride, mentioning I’d been told women don’t usually ride the buses here. She related an incident in which a man stood too close to her (in the space reserved for women) in order to, basically, bounce his genitals against her as the bus bumped along. After asking him several times to move, she finally jabbed him with some kind of knitting needle/pin/pointy thing that she keeps handy for just such occasions, and yelled for the bus to stop so she could call the police. She laughed as she told this story, but said it wasn’t the first or last time this had happened, and that she keeps her pin in her bag at all times. With an apparently low (and likely unsteady) income from cleaning houses, she has no choice but to continue to take the bus, constantly putting herself back in a potentially uncomfortable, unsafe situation.
Her laughter really struck me as odd–who laughs at being a regular victim of sexual harassment? She was clearly upset about these incidents. Her laughter had a twinge of despair, but still, she laughed her way through it, just as my Lebanese friends laugh their way through descriptions of nights spent in bomb shelters, lives changed, loved ones lost. A Beirut friend explained to me once that laughing through the post-war years is the only way to keep from entirely falling apart. And of course, she laughed through that statement, too.
Do we use laughter in this way in my own American culture? We say laughter is best medicine–but i think we mean it in the sense of perking up cancer patients a la Patch Adams. I can’t say I’ve seen laughter used to lighten the mental anguish load among my own small circle of friends and loved ones. That said, my family is a stoic, analytical, privileged bunch (myself included). We in white america are taught to deal with our tragedies and traumas by confronting them head on–go to therapy, talk it out, don’t bottle things up…never bottle things up…I wonder, is this always the best advice for dealing with pain?
Of course, I wasn’t thinking about any of this while we we driving up to the bustling Filipino Friday market area this morning. I was thinking that I never even knew there WAS a bustling Filipino market area in this city. I was thinking, with a twinge of regret, of how little I really know about this city and the lives lived in it.
