THOUGHTS on the translation from text to images of the diaries of five women. Four from the Middle Eastern countries of Iran, Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinian West Bank – and one American – myself. From July to June of the following year each woman kept a journal of a single day – the same day – on the first of each month.

Fall of 2008 found me finishing the artwork and animations for the web version and the twelve large-scale exhibition drawings for the MAIDEN VOYAGES project. I feel I’m emerging from a three-year-tunnel. I knew the five diaries would take time and thought to execute. And though I was fueled by the challenge of pulling together five very different narrative strands into a coherent whole, the sheer range of diverse lifestyles depicted made the challenge particularly daunting. The process has answered some of the questions I had at the beginning of the project and raised new ones.

I began the process of translating lives into images intrigued by the implications of an artist from one culture attempting to articulate memories of another. Also, because the project couldn’t help but be influenced to some extent by my own subjectivity, I questioned whether the result would evolve more as biography than as autobiography. The (unintended) potential for cultural blunders by a Westerner were huge. I remember promising each woman at the beginning of the project that I was qualified to tackle the cross-cultural project because of my many years spent traveling, working, and teaching in the Middle East. When the year’s worth of journals were complete, I also remember my horror when I realized just how out of date and non-specific my actual experience of the ‘other’ was. So I spent last winter in an interesting quest to ‘re live’ the lives, journal entry by journal entry, of my anonymous (to me) women. I photographed as many of the locations and situations the women described as possible. Mindful that the Festival of Mary in Bethlehem, Israel would not be the same as the same celebrations in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I combed the memories and photographic archives of the Palestinian community. I was unceremoniously ejected from a shopping mall in Amman, Jordan for following and photographing Jordanians going about their daily lives. And I accumulated an astonishing array of newspapers, candy wrappers, magazines, and tea bags – in short – the detritus of everyday life from four different countries.

Nevertheless, my images could not help but be interpretive. The images I chose to draw were selected as much by my own curiosity (and my desire to share) about what goes on beneath the chador as their choice of what to tell me. I was acutely aware of the West’s newly evolved sense of ‘Orientalism’. The proportional perception in the West that as women become less physically distinguishable in the East, there is a corresponding rise in their mythology as victims and sequestered innocents. I was determined to bring a measure of reality to the equation. The very real women profiled in ‘Maiden Voyages’ are so diverse in terms of class, geography, ethnicity, religion and age that mythologies and generalizations become meaningless. All would passionately reject victimization based on gender. All are college educated and three have full careers.

During lectures and discussions about the project I’m repeatedly asked to summarize the commonalities and differences I found among the women. My education in specific cultural difference these past two years resembles a bottle rocket. And any observations into the commonalities among women are confined to these five women. If nothing else, I hope the drawings communicate the range of personalities involved and how individually human they are. There are only surface commonalities between the cultural lives of the Coptic Egyptian and her Christian Palestinian counterpart. And although the Jordanian and Iranian are both Muslim their differences are far more compelling than their common religion. The Palestinian Christian practice of arranged marriage had more in common with the Iranian Muslim. Not a single woman shared the same holiday, yet the holidays they individually celebrated were richly described. Three of the journals focused on June engagements. The Coptic Christian described her role in a Muslim girlfriend’s ceremony - similar in result - but different in practice from the ‘Jaha’ ceremony described by the Jordanian Muslim. And both stood in contrast to the Palestinian’s attempts to duck her own threatened betrothal.

Interestingly, I found out more about my own cultural and feminine differences. Because the sampling is so small, I don’t know whether it’s because of my age, (I am 20 years older than the oldest of the four) ethnicity or my culture. But the Egyptian, Jordanian, Iranian and Palestinian were all adults, still living with their parents and in daily contact with extended family. I live alone, my brothers and my son live in other States. Family reunions are confined to the Christmas Holiday. The womens’ descriptions of shopping , showering, make up and dress were a common theme and proportionally more frequent than mine. I thought all these examples were solid sources of East/West difference until question and answer sessions during college lectures illuminated just how exclusive my minority position was! So summaries continue to be illusive.

I’m looking forward to the next phase of the project. As the web version starts to gain a virtual audience and the drawings and sketchbooks to tour in exhibition I hope to amass critical reactions from Americans on the web blog and from panel discussions. I would like these to serve as the basis for cross-cultural dialogue when the project tours in the countries of the Middle East. Ultimately, I hope to use the strategies learned from these five diaries in a series of residencies and workshops with people from diverse cultures to create more visual diaries – small but honest glimpses into the lives of real people. So please – look and interact with the site – then contribute to the blog or write me your reactions at valerieb.hird@verizon.net!