Arab and non-Arab women alike

by yixuejiaren Oft en by way of Arab men's inter-ethnic marriages or friendships, non-Middle Eastern membership represents a small but significant percentage in most such clubs. Non-whites, however, rarely frequent such spaces. In the few instances when I did see blacks or Asians in the three largest clubs of the col?nia, their presence was met with racist remarks. On one occasion at an Arab gala, a club director took note of two welldressed black men and muttered, "They're probably bodyguards." I asked how he could be so sure, and the response was, "They look it." Asians provoked surprise as well. On another occasion, when "Japoneses" entered a club, a 40-year-old woman joked, "They're in the wronses" wrong club! This is an Arab club!" Although exclusionary toward blacks and Asians, Syrian-Lebanese directors frequently claimed that the clubs of the col?nia buy tiffany earrings were "mixing" with society at large, reflecting the Brazilian nationalist ideology of mixture itself. Indeed, Club Homs was the site of the fabled "first performance" of the belly dance in Brazil, mentioned earlier, "mixing" together a non-Arab woman and Arab men.

These ethnic and gender moves across racial and sexual terrain are repeated in other venues that have popularized the belly dance in Brazil. Opening their doors in S?o Paulo during the 1970s, Bier Maza, Porta Aberta, and Semramis were some of the first nightclubs to showcase the belly dance for mostly Arab customers (not unlike their diasporic counterparts in the US; see Rasmussen 1992). Madeleine Iskandarian (a.k.a. Shahrazad Sharkey), also mentioned earlier, had worked as a hairdresser for nearly two decades when she began performing at Bier buy tiffany necklaces Maza in 1979, but before long she redirected her attention to developing her own body praxis and teaching students, Arab and non-Arab women alike.

Around the same time-in the late 1970s-Saamira, the non-Arab woman (of Italian descent, to be specific) who founded Oriente, Encanto e Magia, started dancing at Semramis and later at Bier Maza (she also founded the belly dance festival described later in this article). Saamira was typically accompanied by Arab male musicians playing the guitar- like oud, derbake drum, daff tambourine, and other instrumentsdaffff instruments, notably musicians from bands led by Wadih Cury, Emlio Bonduki, and most recently, Tony Mouzayek (discussed later as well). As these three venues closed down, another Orientalist-themed nightclub was founded in 1982, and by the end of the decade it had become the most buy tiffany rings famous restaurant-bar of its kind in S?o Paulo. Today "Khan El Khalili" is still run by a married couple, the husband a second-generation Syrian and the wife a non-Arab who was herself a former student of Shahrazad Sharkey. It is such relationships between Arab men and non-Arab women, as well as the marginalization of Arab women, that lies at the heart of the belly dance phenomenon in ethnic country clubs, national dance festivals, and the prime-time soap opera, O Clone.

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