The Wonder Chronicles: 2
Photo by Kai Oberhäuser on StockSnap
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On the Total Eclipse of the Sun
I am not a nudist by lifestyle. But for political reasons, I will try most anything.
And sometimes, that’s how wonder finds you–when you’re on the doorstep of trying most anything, which in my case meant knocking on the door of an apartment where I would join my first clothing optional party in Cairo, Egypt, in December 2013.
“Look into his eyes, look into his eyes,” I told myself when the owner of that apartment and co-founder of the Egypt Nudist Society opened the door, completely naked.
When I was younger, my body was an afterthought. When I started my period at six months past 11, my body changed so much that I barely recognised it. I think that’s where my estrangement from my body and its wonder began.
That nudist party in Cairo, when I was 46, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, in the throes of perimenopause, was the start of a conversation that brought me back to that wonder of my body.
In the beginning was the word. And my eyes said “Look! Look now at these magnificent bodies around you.”
The human body is wonderful!
As I eased into being naked among others, I looked at more than my fellow nudist party goers’ eyes. I took in their bodies in all their wonder and knew that my body was adding to the communal wonder.
Because for every refrain of “Look! Look now at these magnificent bodies around you,” I heard the response “And your body too is magnificent!”
To be naked among others is to enter a community of vulnerability–disrobed, disarmed–and risk–will they judge my body; we are all naked in a conservative country that is under the dictatorship of a military-backed regime.
Wonder is in the eyes of those who will try most anything. Vulnerability and risk are its heart and mind. I’m mixing too many metaphors, I know. But being naked in a room full of other naked people will do that to you.
My eyes were full of wonder!
Vulnerability and risk are the heart and mind of wonder and will fuck whatever preconceptions you brought with you to the party. When the woman who had been sitting directly across from me went into the room where we had all left our clothes and came out to say her goodbyes in hijab–only her face and hands showing–fuck me! What?!
The human body is wonderful!
I wore hijab for nine years when I was younger. My hijab, I recognise now, was the sound-proof wall I had erected between my body and my self. It allowed me to hide from myself as well as men, whose hands and eyes were the source of a noise that stole the wonder of my body from me before I could ease into it.
That nudist party, my first but not my last, that woman – hijabi by day, nudist by night – demolished that wall. I went home lighter and able to hear, at last, my body again.
Look at your body! Really look. Listen to it. Can you hear it?
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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