Thursday, September 6, 2012

BROWN GIRL BURDEN #1: Aunties and Unibrows

   


I've always thought that a woman's face is as fickle as the moon. Somedays my face is smooth and free of hair and then one morning I wake up and notice a slight curve of peach fuzz sitting above my upper lip defying every pluck and rub. I am a freakishly hairy beast. Objectively I don't mind. When I see a fellow brown girl with a unibrow on the metro or at the grocery store, I smile enviously in admiration. I wish I could get away with that. I objectively think the unibrow is beautiful. Frida, my inspiration and my light, has the fiercest brows in the history of prominent brows. For Halloween every year, I grow out my unibrow for 2 months as an excuse to rock a single brow.

                                             


















 (see the similarities)



Aunties hate the unibrow. They can't bear to see it. They cringe at the sight of the fat caterpillar resting above my eyes. I scare them. I am not only unattractive to them but I let the cat out of the bag about our freakish hairiness. When my mother picks me up from my university in Washington DC to drive me back home to Pittsburgh, we do not drive home. Rather, we make a pit-stop to Roopali Aunty's BROWS r' US salon boutique to pluck away my mother's embarrassment.  Coming to Cairo, I thought my brow would be free from prejudice. I was in for a rather fabulous surprise. 

Here in Cairo, all the women around me- hijabi or not, old or young, beautiful or ugly- have beautifully arched  brows.  Now I have been in Cairo for a week, unibrow in full bloom. Today the landlady visited our apartment because our air- conditioner had been broken. Her hands fluttered all around the apartment and the kitchen and my room mates and I and then they landed on my forehead. While discussing the AC I noticed how uncomfortable she was  when she looked at my face. (Aunties react in one of two ways to unibrows- staring or completely ignoring. Both are supposed to shame you with a blunt force.) She kept mentioning a salon she had to go to so I took the hint. While we left the apartment together for the salon across the street (it seemed this was quite an emergency) she kept asking me if I ever noticed my unibrow. I nodded and said yes. She huffed telling me that she would never let her daughter walk out of the house like that and from now on she would be my 'Egyptian mother' and that she (I quote) "would not rest until my brow did not look like a jungle". I almost laughed but before I could, she took me by the hand as we crossed the street. We entered the salon and she plopped me into a leather seat and waved the beautician over frantically. The aunty pointed at my face and described ( in Arabic so I could not even understand) every correction to my eyebrows that needed to be done. The beautician turned to me and started her work. The heat of the salon and the sharp pricks of rolled thread made me wince. The aunty laid her hand on my shoulder and peered quizzically into my face the whole time as a gesture of her support and that 'everything will be for the best'. Finally it was over. The aunty took my chin in her palm and turned my face from one side to the other. She then grunted with approval with a hinted smile. SHE PAID. She sat in the leather seat where my torture was taking place. It was her turn now.  She nodded that I could go home now. (I still do not know the lady's name)

On my way home, I grinned secretly and admired my neatly defined symmetrical brows in the reflections of taxi cab windows. Nothing like the passive aggressive love from an aunty. It does not matter where you are in the world, aunties who dread unibrows WILL FIND YOU. Sure its a burden but its one I will bear by rolling my eyes with delicately shaped eyebrows sitting on top of them. 


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