Al-Nady Al-Leila (The Night Club): Folk Ballads and Prostitution

Al-Nady Al-Leila (The Night Club): Folk Ballads and Prostitution

I never thought I would be able to say that I shared a stage with Iraqi prostitutes doing Iraqi folk dances. But sometimes life throws you curveballs, and suddenly you find yourself packing into a car full of “dancers” heading over to the seedy part of town where the restaurants are decorated like Christmas trees and you can buy liters of vodka in the parking lot.

It’s a pretty well known fact that the huge wave of Iraqi refugees into Syria has been accompanied by a dramatic rise of Iraqi prostitutes. That’s actually an understatement. They’re dominating the prostitution scene here, to the point that the once well known, stereotypical Russian dancer has become a much rarer phenomenon. Iraqi prostitutes, with their condition more desperate, are basically driving down the market. According to most news articles, Saudi cars pour through the Jordanian-Syrian border each weekend. I noticed the phenomenon myself when I was crossing over the Jordanian border a few months ago—though I didn’t know then why. Putting up with the 6 hour drive to Syria, they come for a weekend of decadence at the “Night Clubs” where all kinds of dancing and favors and “apartments accompanied with a beautiful maid” are freely available.

As was pointed out to me by researchers at Thara , a women’s rights organization here in Syria, it’s basically impossible to know the number of Iraqi women who’ve turned to prostitution, other than the fact that it’s a pretty remarkable amount, especially considering that Arab societies are rather conservative and try to avoid acknowledging such trends. But there a lot of disturbing causes and effects surrounding the Iraqi prostitution scene. One researcher told me that he’s convinced that the noticeable rise in unnamed honor killings reported in Syrian papers is linked to Iraqi prostitution, with many women suffering the worst fate after trying to quit or rebel against their pimps. Meanwhile, we know that Iraqi prostitution is a direct cause of both the dearth of work options for refugees in Syria, combined with the fact that so many of the families coming into Syria are fatherless and often brotherless, uncleless—the men were all killed in Iraq. Even if a female head of household found a job at a factory or something—how could its small wage support her and, say, her three kids, and maybe a mother or a sister? Prostitution is basically all that’s left. And unfortunately, it’s not just the mothers and older sisters who are going…

So last week I got the chance to visit a night club where Iraqi “dancers” work. It was a very under the table thing. My friend and I were invited to tag along with a reporter and a family of Iraqi prostitutes. (That’s right, a family. Sometimes prostitution rings are family operations, with the mother or aunt working as the pimp for her nieces, daughters, etc.). We had to pretend to be “Bohemian-type Europeans, of low moral fiber.” Easy enough. But it was harder than I expected when the family’s door was opened by Marwa*, who couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than my sister Lexi—maybe she was 10. Maybe. Marwa was wearing a halter top, mini skirt, black tights, and knee high boots. I didn’t need to ask if she was coming with us to the club or not. Her mother says that Marwa “only dances, nothing else,” and she brings in a little extra cash that way. I don’t know if that’s true. I hope so. I do know that the night I was there, a man approached the mother about Marwa and she flat out refused despite his persistent raising of the price.

It’s hard to express though, how normal otherwise Marwa’s family looked. Her grandmother wore hijab. Some of their cousins were visiting and chatting and laughing as the women prepared to go out.

In turn, the weird thing to me about the night club I was at was that it didn’t look like the den of vice I expected, but almost the opposite. It had a bizarre, parallel universe kind of “family feel”. Many of the women seemed very close, and would come over to each other at the beginning of the night to hug and ask about each other’s lives. The waiters all knew the children of the family I came with (Yes, some bring their children. I guess it’s hard to explain your situation to a baby sitter.) They would come chat with them and give them candy. The “night club” looked more like a big Arab family restaurant, with long wooden tables, a live band and a little stage. When the mother of the family I was with would disappear to another table, to work out some deals I’d guess, her little son or daughter would run over to pester her. And it didn’t seem to bother her or her client! They would chat with the kids a little bit, and send them off again. Also, the dances aren’t routines, they’re “voluntary”, so if you were really, really stupid you could think that maybe these scantily clad, heavily made up women were out for a night of dancing. It just wasn’t the scene I expected to see.

While I was at the club, the family encouraged me and my friend to dance with them on stage -- to reinforce our role as the crazy, immoral Europeans. It was really important to fit in and act like we were just out having fun, as being caught as “researchers”, not to mention American ones, would have been problematic, to put it lightly. We felt like we didn’t have another choice, so we went up once when the dancers were doing the relatively harmless dabke. “Dabke” is a traditional Arab folk dance, and every country has its unique kind. (It actually looks a lot like the hora, if any of you are wondering!) Of course we did Iraqi dabke, and so there I was not only holding hands on stage with prostitutes, I was trying to figure out their folk dance as well. (By the way if you’re wondering, luckily no one mistook me or my friend for prostitutes, which was a good thing! I guess we were too bad at dabke…)

That’s another interesting thing about these clubs—there’s a lot of traditional Iraqi music, ballads or pop. And when the women aren’t dancing they might sit at a table and sing along together, waving their arms with the music. Circling around, I tried to focus on the music and the Dabke, which if I hadn’t been on stage at a night club with prostitutes, and thinking every five minutes what my parents would say if they could see me now, could have been really fun. I turned to my right and left and looked at the girls of the family I was with, they smiled back. Aside from the moments when they’d periodically break out of the line to shake their behinds, I could almost pretend I was just in a women’s dance circle at a wedding.

I think that’s sort of what you have to do, to get through the night. Whenever they dance, the women often hold hands and go in pairs. Perhaps listening to their traditional, beloved music, singing along together, in some ways is a way of mentally escaping the reality they’re actually in. You hold hands but you’re not there together anymore. You have to be somewhere else.

*Obviously, this was not the girl’s real name.