Looking Past The Uniforms

Let’s look past uniforms/unified clothing and see the individuality of the individual wearing it.

Around eight months ago, I moved to live in NYUAD, a community known to be one of the most diverse in the world. Throughout the past six months, I slowly developed a feeling of being unrecognized in this community due to a recurring situation. This recurring situation was that I would introduce myself/be introduced to a fellow classmate while wearing my abaya and hijab. A few days later, when I would see the same colleague again on my way for a quick exercise in my sports attire, they would fail to recognize me. This has happened to me more than once. Every time I greeted that individual, I’d reintroduce myself and he/she would look at me in surprise as the individual’s mind finally recognized me. Eventually, I got so accustomed to this that I would immediately follow my introduction with “you didn’t recognize me because I was wearing the abaya.”

For a while, this repeated encounter made me feel uncomfortable with myself and my own identity. I started noticing how many people I pass by looked away from me the moment their eyes caught the black material of my cloak, as if there was nothing more interesting in me, as an individual, but my cultural attire. However, this also made me realize how people appreciated my presence once they managed to look past their own perceptions of the ‘monotone’ abaya. This empowered me; it reminded me that it isn’t my fault that lots of people view me through their biases.

The amount of contemplation and introspection I did afterward regarding this issue directed me to think about people who we almost always see wearing uniforms. Security guards, waiters and waitresses, cleaners, and construction workers – especially construction workers – are often disregarded by many as if they are merely background noise to one’s life. It is almost as if their job description of serving overrides the identity each and every individual owns.

I had this one professor who, amongst his very first assignments – assigned us to meet and get to know the morning-shift security guard in the campus’s main building. Many of my classmates thought it was invading privacy and being bogus towards this man, but to me, he was urging us to break this barrier that our bias toward uniforms created. I learned this gentleman’s name, that he was from Pakistan, and that he has been working at this university for about five years. I also learned that he was firm but full of humorous sarcasm and that he had a couple of friends living in Sharjah.

Uniforms do not restrict an individual from expressing his/her individuality. It is people’s perception of such individual in such uniform that deprives one of his/her individuality. Derek Jarman, in his film Blue, speaks. “If the doors of perception were cleansed, then everything would be seen as it is.” I like to think that the doors of perception are rather locked by our biases and stereotypes, and opening them would mean perceiving things, and in this case, people, past their uniforms or attire. The only thing we need to do is find the lock on our doors.