Conflicting Identities
The French government passed a law in 2004 banning the wearing of conspicuous religious symbols in primary and secondary public schools, further securing France as a secular nation. While the law didn’t target specific symbols, it did affect one group more than others: Muslim girls. Suddenly these young women were faced with a tough choice: Take off their headscarf at school, denying their religious and personal identity, or stop going to school.
“I’ve always been interested in identity issues, in particular the way religion shapes identity. We live in this world where cultural or physical borders become so blurry, and I want to know how that affects the way we identify ourselves.”
This deeply personal struggle intrigued Rositsa Atanasova ’07, who wondered how these girls dealt with what seemed conflicting identities: French citizen versus Muslim woman. “I’ve always been interested in identity issues, in particular the way religion shapes identity,” Atanasova says. “We live in this world where cultural or physical borders become so blurry, and I want to know how that affects the way we identify ourselves.”
An international student from Bulgaria, Atanasova has studied eight languages, including Greek and Hebrew. She wanted to add Arabic to her list and found a yearlong program in France, which also presented her with the opportunity to examine the Muslim veil issue. She obtained a Lilly Project grant to interview Muslim women at Sorbonne University and make a documentary film.
“Behind the Veil: A Quest for Identity” revealed an interesting divide between the young women who chose to wear a headscarf and the secular adults around them. Atanasova wanted to focus on high school girls affected by the national law, but because of difficulties finding them and getting permission for interviews, she spoke instead with university students who no longer were bound by the law and had chosen to wear the headscarf.
Asking the women whether they consider themselves French or Muslim, Atanasova found their answer was often “Both.” Many wore the scarf for personal reasons, not because they were submissive to their beliefs or wanted to make a political statement.
But outsiders, including several professors Atanasova interviewed, tended to see wearing the headscarf as more of a political choice and a strong Muslim identifier from women rejecting France’s secular nationality. “It might be a generational thing,” Atanasova says. “How do you even define French? Older generations still have a definition of what it means to be ‘purely French,’ and I don’t think they’re ready to face that France has become multicultural and multiethnic.”
The women Atanasova interviewed often said they felt the headscarf was comforting or that it acted as a shield between them and the world. “Here we have an emblem that others say symbolizes political radicals, but they all had different reasons for wearing it. The fact that they said they were both French and Muslim, to me this was the clearest evidence that they’re not militant. If they were, they would negate the West. Many of them said very good things about France and how it had changed their lives.”
As for Atanasova’s own vocational journey, the classics major loves languages, philosophy and experiencing other cultures — so many rich possibilities from which to choose. But her Lilly Project presented another possible path: film-making. Her eyes light up when she talks about her first experience making a movie.
“It was an amazing means of combining everything I love,” she says. “The satisfaction is that the final product speaks to so many people. And it’s been good to return to doing art, an interest I discarded for much of college. That’s what the Lilly Project’s about. You have some general sense of what you want to do when you start, but you don’t know what you’ll get out of it.”