Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up by Caren Osten Gerszberg & Leah Odze Epstein

Author:Caren Osten Gerszberg & Leah Odze Epstein [Gerszberg, Caren Osten & Epstein, Leah Odze]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, Self-Help, Essays, Substance Abuse & Addictions, Alcoholism
ISBN: 9781580054119
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2012-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Rivers of Wine

Could I come to peace with my relationship with drinking? Living with truth on other issues, from sexuality to identity, allowed me to free myself from the duplicities, contradictions, and shame that so often constrain us as Muslims. Following the news in recent years, I felt angry as we went deeper on the path of self-righteousness and indignation at the supposed faults of others.

The men who plotted the kidnapping of my friend did the five daily prayers—the five pillars of my religion—and they renounced drinking alcohol as an act that isn’t pious; the men who killed my friend did so in the name of my religion yet cursed anyone who drank alcohol. The man who fathered my baby went to the mosque for his Friday prayers and in his cell phone had the number of a bootlegger, but he did not stand beside me when I brought my baby into the world. He considered me illegitimate in the eyes of my religion because, while foolishly in love, we weren’t married when we conceived our baby. Others called me a criminal in the name of Islam for having a baby out of wedlock.

I chafed at the bridle that constrained free will and critical thinking in Muslim society. It made me angry, and the contradictions in how haram and halal were enforced baffled me. When I went on a pilgrimage to Mecca in the winter of 2003, I knew sobriety and temperance were part of the culture around me. But I also knew that in the land of the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia, men and women sit in their BMW and Mercedes-Benz luxury cars, crossing a bridge into Bahrain for alcohol, prostitutes, and drugs. It was clear to me that many Muslims lived a different private life away from detection.

The most puritanical societies, including Saudi Arabia, seem to be defined by these contradictions, the letter of the law extremely rigid and dogmatic but the actual practice of the people often violating those edicts. For women particularly, but not exclusively, the restrictions and repression breed not always compliance but rather conflict and dissonance. I lived this way myself from my late teens into my late twenties—a double life, secretly satisfying my curiosities about men while lying to my parents because I knew that I was crossing boundaries that weren’t supposed to be crossed. I couldn’t live with the lies, deceit, and hypocrisy after my marriage fell apart, when I realized that we aren’t meant to suffer so deeply just to deny our true selves and to realize societal, parental, and external expectations for ourselves. I decided then that I wasn’t going to live with contradictions in my own life.

In any society governed by oppression and rules that don’t make sense, there will be rebellion, even if it’s expressed privately. To express such rebellion publicly is to me the sign of a mature individual and a mature society. In my experience, public disclosure allows for healthier expression and resolution. My experiences

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