“Like a lobster in boiling water”

The 40-year-old French artist Bérangère Lefranc (photo) performed a little experiment regarding the importance of fashion; she wanted to test for herself just what it’s like to live under a genuine Afghani burka. On that side of the “romance of the veil,” she lived through the humiliating, misogynous, earth-shattering, burning-hot reality called ‘burka.’ Lefranc says regarding her experience with the “cloth prison,” “I had fear, I sweated, and I felt like a lobster in boiling water.”

The Frankfurter Rundschau writes:

“It was hell,” the 40-year-old recounts; she has written a book about her experiences behind the veil, and next week it appears on stands in France. The green eyes, the long, slender nose, the full lips, the small gap between her incisors — everything was hidden from view. But even though the people on the street didn’t know what kind of person was hidden under the burka, they passed crushing judgment anyway.

“I experienced looks of disdain,” the artist tells. Men spat in front of her, passers by gave her the finger, spoke in a nonrespectful way to her. Fearful children ran away. Some brave ones would have squeezed her to see whether she were a ghost. The watchguard at the supermarket refused entrance.

The self-righteous person would shake a finger at the Islamophobes and put the blame on them, but the “cloth prison” is not uncomfortable just because of the Islam critic. The burka was created with the purpose of turning the woman into an object: without rights, humiliated, a thing. And we haven’t begun yet to consider the elevated temperatures under the veil.

“I had fear, I sweated, and I felt like a lobster in boiling water,” she remembers of her time under the veil. It was even a good five degrees (celsius) warmer in her cloth prison than it was without.

Lefranc has written about her burka experiences in a book called “Un Voile” — “A Veil.” She doesn’t wish to grapple with the current political debate, though. She’s an “artist” and an “atheist.” She will say one thing, though:

“Those who wish to wear a burka of their own free will must have good reasons for it, and those who are forced to do so have my most heart-felt sympathies.”

The recommendation submitted by an examining commission to the French parliament on Tuesday that would ban the burka from public buildings, buses and trains doesn’t go nearly far enough, the majority of French people feel.

(Translation of German PI-Article by Anders Denken)