Quantico’s Yasmine Al Massri Discusses Hijabs and Feminism

Yasmine Al Massri has a unique story. The actress was born in Lebanon; studied fine arts and multimedia in Paris; taught different workshops about the body and movement to women in Budapest and Qatar; started a family in California; worked in Canada, Puerto Rico, Algeria, Tunisia and the city of Ramallah in the West Bank; and most recently relocated to New York. She’s been enmeshed in cultures that are as different as the characters she plays on ABC’s show Quantico—Muslim twins Nimah and Raina Amin. And now, she wants to set a few things straight, in her own words:

"It means a lot to me to play Nimah and Raina on T.V. because there is a big misrepresentation of what the Arab culture is about. Cleopatra, Ashtar, Zenobia, the most beautiful women in history come from this part of the world, and those women were strong, they were leaders of empires, and they had an amazing sense of sophistication. A woman’s beauty is a very big part of Arab Literature and poetry. I grew up with those stories, and all the things I learned about taking care of my skin and hair I learned from my grandmother, my mother, and my aunts. Women are very connected to their bodies; they do their own wax with honey, they get together to thread each others eyebrows. I remember my mother would peel an apple, and she would put the skin on her face. My grandmother would eat an orange and scrub the skin on her hands. My aunt used to put honey and eggs on her hair as a mask. When I come back from set, I always keep going back to olive oil as a makeup remover, all those things I learned from them.

In Quantico, I want people to see positive, strong, American females who are originally from the Arab world. I see the show as an opportunity to show two different [characters]: one of the twins, Raina, is devoted to her religious beliefs, and the other one, Nimah, is not religious at all, she is ambitious, career driven, and strong. The script allowed me to portray who they are in a way that makes people relate to them both and connect with them through their humanity and not where they come from. It is also the case of every character on the show.

The other reason why I am passionate about playing those two different women is the fact that they represent the world I grew up in, in the Middle East, where not all women are veiled. I never had to wear a hijab. But the veil has always existed in our culture way before religion. It was tradition, fashion conditioned by social class, and there’s a difference between tradition, religion, and culture. I feel like the media has smashed all this together. The relationship to each varies from one country to another.

I have built Raina's character out of my own personal education and experiences. In Beirut, for example, my mother started wearing [a hijab] when she entered into her 50's. Many women there wear the hijab as a social statement that allows society to identify them in public as married, or that they've come from a conservative family, or they want to keep the wrong attraction away. When I shot a movie in Algeria called Ayrouwen, we lived in the desert of Djanet for three month, and the bedouins, called "the blue men," covered their heads because of the dust and heat, the men there even had a culture where they never show their faces, so their scarves hid everything on their faces except for their eyes. The people of Djanet were all Muslims but when you enter the village, there’s a big sculpture of a woman’s boobs. I was so surprised when I saw it arriving from the airport. The whole society is matriarchal and women choose their husbands and they propose to them.

There are many more great stories I can tell you about that, but the only story that I will never defend or accept about my culture is the man who uses god to order a woman to cover herself against her will. I cannot believe that any religion or law would deny a women her right to choose how to dress or who to be as an individual.

I remember this funny story about a workshop I gave in Qatar about 'movements, ideas and emotions', and the relation between them. I did not allow any men's participation in it because I wanted the women in my class to feel free and safe to take off the veil. In the Gulf countries, wearing a hijab and abaya for locals is a must, disobeying it would be a shameful act. I wanted to work with women who live with two layers of clothing: one very luxurious covered with another layer that is the abaya. Only when you are in your intimate world, when you are with women, or family, can you take it off. I wanted to give them a space to connect where they can 'feel, think, and act' (which was the name of the workshop) beyond the public veil. The workshop was a great success, many women who were not veiled attended it also, and I got a lot of complaints from the guys who were unhappy about not being able to do it!

I hope that in the future, the governments in the Arab world will protect human rights more, and support communities that are socially progressive. I hope they will create initiatives and ways of thinking that will empower women, so every little girl can chose the way she wants to dress, the person she wants to be, and the role she want to play in building her country. I think it’s possible.”

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