Shredding - or Shedding - Selima

Selima's last stand, ca 2005

How do we part with our younger selves?  We hope to do it with more grace than Miss Havisham of Great Expectations.  Some parts of my life seem so far away now as to be nothing but stories I tell. I am grateful that I was not a war criminal or something equally horrible that could be ascribed to "another" life.  I did little more harm than practice The Obscure Anatolian Boogie, as my ex-husband once called it in anger.  It was a great passion, which contributed to the downfall of that marriage, but brought some little wisdom, and many friends and experiences, including a trip down the Nile with a group of the similarly addicted.

I had studied with the legendary Jamila Salimipour in San Francisco in the '70's. Jamila knew how to teach and inspire the movement known as American Tribal Belly Dance.  It was quite a cult. I did not make it into the inner circle of her votaries, true believers, nor of the Mother Goddess's, which seemed to be part of the the package.  Though Jamila told a friend of mine that I wasn't made of the material of professional dancers, I was welcomed into another dance group run by one of Jamila's stars, the stunning Nakish, and performed with her group to the music  of the equally legendary drummer Vince Delgado, his wife, Mimi Spencer, and his daughter Devi-ja; both women died of cancer far too young. I took drum lessons from Vince, learning enough to understand the music a little  better. Their music was wonderful, and they were lovely to be with, as were the other dancers. I stayed friends with one to this day. 

I went to two workshops run by Jamila's daughter, Suhaila Salimpour, in Toronto in this century and both after My Big Illness of  2004, When I mentioned to Jamila's daughter,that I had not been one of the favoured, she laughed and said, "Maybe you didn't give her presents."  It hadn't occurred to me at the time. Suhaila was right!  Jamila was right. I certainly did not have the constitution to endure the slings and arrows of working in nightclubs, and dealing with sleazy club-owners, and thereby hang a few tales of folly. I had a ring-side seat at the underside of San Francisco's North Beach and Tenderloin districts. If I were a writer  ...   My life in "Show Business" can be summed up with a simple anecdote:  the  gig that paid $35 resulted my breaking a front tooth with a finger cymbal, requiring a $150 crown. It always seemed to work that way.  My first and favourite job paid $5.00 a night - a Persian restaurant in Oakland, run by two very nice Irani gentlemen. I cannot remember names now, but there were backgammon boards, a pleasant customers, and sometimes one of the brothers would play his drum and sing what I now realize was probably very old and traditional poetry.They gave me my stage name, "Selima", which was their grandmother's name. At the end of the night we would all eat the crunchy, buttery bits of rice at the bottom of the pilaf pot.  

 I danced for friends in Denmark and England, when I left my San Francisco life for the obligatory post-divorce travels in Europe and found a sisterhood of dancers in Ottawa, when I returned to Canada to stay with my parents and to save up to go to library school. 

I discovered I had some talent for teaching this beautiful dance while I was at library school in Ontario back in 1977, where I was recruited to teach one class a week  in an adult evening program. It kept me sane during that insane year. 

On stage at the Arts and Culture Centre
 in Corner Brook in the mid 80's

I brought the dance to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, when I was hired by the Newfoundland Public Libraries to be the district administrator for the West Coast. Corner Brook had a Lebanese community. They understood what I was doing but few others did. I became known as the belly-dancing librarian. I loved my dual personality and I was not alone. It wasn't long before the Internet appeared and I found a sisterhood of belly-dancing librarians.There is a vast literature out there on the topic, some of it quite hysterical. Consider the  florid text of the Amazon blurb for  John Norman's Dancer of Gor 

Doreen Williamson is a quiet, shy librarian on Earth. Like many other young women, she is distrustful of her attractions, frightened of men, introverted in manner and sexually inhibited. She lives within a quiet, lonely, dissatisfying, sheltered, frustrated desperation, distant from her true self, her nature denied, her only friends books and her secret thoughts. In the realization and enactment of a profound fantasy, after acute self-conflict, she dares to study a form of dance in which she is at last free to move her body as a female, a form of dance in which she may revel in her beauty and womanhood, a form of dance historically commanded by masters of selected, suitable slaves: belly dance. She must then dance, for the first time, before men. In doing so, she discovers her own desirability and that she may be well bid upon. Rediscover this brilliantly imagined world where men are masters and women live to serve their every desire.

In your dreams, Mr. Norman!  I  think I can safely say I have never lived to serve anyone's every desire.  

I began to teach in Corner Brook.  I loved teaching. I loved analyzing what people were doing with their bodies and trying to find new metaphors to explain how to improve each movement.  Occasionally I went away to workshops, including the one on the Nile, and two with Suhaila. Eventually, I had enough students to form a little performing group, which we called the Turkish Delights. I loved my students, women of a variety of ages, all in the middle of life in its various manifestations.  Marriage, child birth, divorce, major injuries and illnesses visited us.  

Somehow the bond formed by our group helped us through these. 

After a  a life-changing illness of my own - a Staph infection, I tried to keep going, but in spite of the tremendous support of the group, it became too much. I was grateful when a native Corner Brook woman returned from Ontario where she had studied belly dance with a good teacher during her recovery from cancer, and was keen to share what she knew. The timing was good. One of the projects I'd undertaken just before I got sick  was to attempt to create Isis wings for all my group  (see above). These wondrous creations are circular veils which  attach to a band at the neck and have dowels in the two side hems, which can be manipulated in great spiraling circles as you dance.  Everyone was enchanted with the ones I had bought from a professional in New York, and wanted their own but they were very expensive. I used my set as a pattern. I spent many hours crawling about the floor with yards and yards of organza, cutting out giant circles and hemming them, which I am sure used up miles of thread. 

After much experimentation and expenditure of money and time, I discovered I could have them pleated by a professional pleating Company in Toronto. The first quote I got was from a group in Montréal, who returned my first set saying they were too large for their pleating machines.  I took one set in person to a company in Toronto, then sent eight more sets to be done later when I found they could handle it. The dance I was supposed to choreograph was sabotaged by my illness and the dynamic in our group had shifted. Everyone had agreed to pay for the wings, but when they finally arrived, people had drifted away, and only a few  of my faithful adherents actually purchased them - probably more out of kindness to me - and recognizing the investment I had made. I managed to perform a dance with the gold ones I had purchased after I "recovered" from the infection, and one of my students had a friend at art school who wanted to make a short film of the dance and interview me. I agreed to do this provided that I would be given a copy of the video. With a great deal of effort I got my act together for the filming; the student was unhappy with the quality of her photography and asked if we could do it again. With even more effort and pain, I managed to oblige, but my student who was supposed to give me a copy of the video never delivered it, and also went away with my best costume, which I had loaned her -  a minor betrayal in the cosmic sense, but a disappointment,  because it would've been one of the few pieces of evidence for my old age to prove what I had done in my flaming youth, which by then, was pretty well burnt down. But it has been my habit to practice ephemeral arts. 

The garden is going on without me. Here are some of the earlier group and some new additions performing my choreography to Zagharuta Helwa by Maza Meze of Toronto at the International Women's Night dinner in Corner Brook, which it was my pleasure to attend several years ago when I went back for a March Hare week-end. 

 I greatly respected my teachers and loved the dance, and I believe I conveyed that to the many audiences for whom I performed for over 25 years.

As for the now unfortunately named "Isis" Wings, the rest of them sat in my closet for years, and moved with us to Nova Scotia while I tried to think of what to do with them. Then Randi, a dear dancer friend from Ottawa, came to visit and when she saw the wings she said they would be perfect for the Propeller Dance Troupe in Ottawa. I knew Propeller Dance. It had been co-founded by a storytelling friend, Alan Shain. Their motto is "If you can breathe, you can dance." I knew this would be the perfect home for the wings so I packed them in a huge plastic tub an entrusted them to the bus. In September, Randi sent an email with the attached photo of the wings - now alive and flying again. My heart soars with them. To read more about this wonderful organization see http://propellerdance.com/

PS Added Feb 2, 2025
  I have no videos of my dance life other than a bad digitization of an old VHS home movie, converted to DVD than onward. This was long before the ubiquitous recording ability we have today. It is like the old Nasruddin story, "the soup of the soup of the soup." My favourite part has always been playing the finger cymbals. I cannot seem to imbed it on this page, but you should be able to reach it with this link. 

Selima's Dance at Julie Rank's Dance Studio Recital 1987

"South Riding" by Winifred Holtby - an excellent read

   I’ve just finished as satisfying a novel as I have read in a long time: "South Riding" by Winifred Holtby, published in 1936. I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, but I like to follow coincidence where its leads. It started with seeing the recent film version of the early part of Vera Brittain’s autobiography “Testament of Youth,” a book which I’d had on my reading list for a long time. It should be required reading for everyone who thinks there is anything glorious or desirable about war. From there, I became curious about the group of women students who ended up with Vera Brittain at Somerville House, Oxford, after World War I, and their service in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the Red Cross. And thus, I came to Winifred Holtby who died at age 37, four months after finishing this book, which became a best-seller, and vow to read more of the books re-published by Virago Press. Oxford professor, Valentine Cunningham, has praised Virago for “trawling most impressively and fruitfully in the novel catalogues" of the 1930s for women's fiction to reprint.” This is a good place to start. 

    According to Brittain’s daughter who wrote the preface, “South Riding” was born of two powerful factors in Holtby’s life: her deep roots in the Yorkshire country side and her fascination with the comedies and tragedies of local government.” Holtby’s own mother had been deeply involved in municipal politics. As Mrs. Beddows, one of the novel’s most sympathetic characters, observes: “All this local government, it’s just people working together - us ordinary people, against the troubles that afflict us all ” - hardly the stuff one associates with great literature, but then as now, it is often at this level, that concrete things are accomplished. The tensions of conservative and progressive vie with opportunism and less than noble motives to produce enough drama to engage the reader from chapter to chapter. In the process of shedding light on a range of social issues such as education, unemployment, building projects, poor relief and the mental hospitals, Holtby has created a large cast of believable and complex characters, who experience life in all its varied joys and sorrows. Sarah Burton, a veteran of the nursing volunteers in WW1, the chaotic 20's, and principal of the local girl’s high school life is a graduate of Cambridge. She is convinced of her progressive principles, but her situation brings her into conflict with the local gentry, represented by Robert Carnes, a noted sportsman. It is slowly revealed that in the post-war period, the life of the gentry is in flux, as is Carnes' own life. 

   Sarah is well aware that the possibility of war has not been removed in spite of her advocacy of the League of Nations, an activity shared by both Holtby and Brittain. Throughout the novel there are hints of the growing dangers posed by Germany and Hitler. Holtby and Brittain had experienced young fascists first hand in their travels in Europe.
The novel reaches its conclusion as the community is set to celebrate the 25th Jubilee of George V. Sarah, cynical of such “ballyho”, finds herself caught up anyway in spite of receiving a letter from a socialist friend who has left the municipal government to fight on a larger stage: 

"I can’t rejoice here. We have miles of docks with grass growing between the truck lines. Men I used to know as the finest workmen in the world, skilled artisans, riveters, engineers, are rotting on the dole. Oh, no, they don’t starve; but they suffer from heart disease, T.B., and worst of all, perhaps, hopelessness. And the tragic sickening fact is that their only chance of re-employment lies in this arms race. They can return to life only by preparing for death."

From the perspective of the 21st century, many of us perceive the two decades between the two great wars as a mere cease-fire in the proceedings of international carnage, and find ourselves hopelessly watching the loss of meaningful work for so many people on the planet, and the near enslavement of others. In my own country, where we’ve heard recently of both government and unions trying to quash news of an enormous job-creating arms deal with Saudi Arabia, these words are as fresh as when they were written.

South Riding was made into a BBC mini-series in 2011. I think I’ll have a look for it.