Behnaz Babazadeh: The Bitter Sweetness of Reinventing Burqas
By Behnaz Babazadeh
“…that is how to create a single story. Show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, and that is what they become.” — Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
In the United States, burqas stand out; like a bikini-clad or scandalously-dressed woman in the middle of Afghanistan, they are marked as inappropriate. And in the larger West, the burqa is shrouded in layers of myth and misunderstanding. It is this mystery — of how something seemingly benign in one country would be seen as inappropriate in another — that fuels the artist and designer Behnaz Babazadeh to create dialogues about cross-cultural biases between East and West.
Babazadeh spent her girlhood in Afghanistan and Iran, moved to the United States at age seven and now resides in the Washington, D.C. area. She remembers family members wearing burqas throughout her childhood, although the practice was not something she indulged in herself.
Nevertheless, she felt connected to the garment and while growing up in the United States, she witnessed how often it was misrepresented and met with silent scrutiny. “I was instructed not to wear my headscarf when I first came to this country,” she said. “But I didn’t know how important that moment was until later.”
Through an American lens, burqas actually have the opposite effect of their original modest intent for women: to draw less attention and to be seen as proper. In the U.S, burqas stand out; they are often seen as red flags of the supposedly peculiar and the other.
Babazadeh’s personal history with the garment allowed her to recognize that this view of the burqa is what the Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie deems the myopic “single story.” As an artist and designer, Babazadeh wanted to better understand this iconic symbol of her heritage. And, as an Afghan-American living between cultures, her double-consciousness compelled her to explore the multiple stories of the burqa.
“How do you shift this negative expression of my culture?” she questioned. “How do you change the conversation? How do you make a different dialogue happen?”
The answer came wrapped in something that most people desire: candy.
