Catarina’s Garden
Category: Travel (Miscellaneous) - Posted On: August 27th, 2008
I make my way through the underbrush keeping count of the dead and the living. Over the fence, Rome streams past. Not far beyond, I was told by the priest, lies the Mediterranean Sea. Five, no six, weeks in countries with beaches, and not even a lick of swimming. I laugh at myself as I shuffle along. Some things are only for dreams.
The edge of my nightgown collects barbed seeds; a few sneak their way through the toes of my shoes, seeking soil in my feet. I have resolved that each day I will find one more living thing. Today’s has yet to reveal itself to me. It is the afternoon of Day Six.
I think of Catarina alone in our room, laughing. She takes endless IV bottles into which the nurses inject thick fluid, cloudy white. She has rough yellow fingers and fine orange hair. It took three days to realize that no one else can understand her, either.
Changes have taken place in the yard since only yesterday. For three days on the sidewalk between the women’s ward and the trees, I have watched a bird, desiccating. Yesterday’s viscera no longer remains. Today even feathers are blowing away.
On one hand I count palmettos, thistles, butterflies. On the other, yellow grass, a carapace. Chips of bark, which from one angle appear whole, but from the side reveal themselves to be no more than rust-colored layers. My heart aches for the things which once were part of something living.
Points of confusion arise in the trees. Here, a cascade of needles sag against the ground, hiding pine cones of waxy green. The bough has broken but is not yet dried. You could mistake it for living. Ten yards away, another waits: withered, but still standing. How shall I count them? If neither will grow, then are they both dead? I stand sideways in the shade, half to think, half to hide.
You should be careful what you ask for, my conscience says to me. A shadow moves in a patch of grass, and stretches its paws at me. The lines of his form blend seamlessly into the background of moss and leaves. I hear Ibtisam’s voice in my head. All living creatures give thanks to Allah, and they do so endlessly. Don’t step on the ant, it’s making dua. I look the cat in the eyes. Is it true? Do you want to join me?
I go back to looking for the right place to pray.
Catarina squeals and tells the world I’m Chinese when I try to pray in front of her. Nieces and nephews crowd her bed in the evenings. The new ones try for a while to talk, before they begin repeating. How are you, Zia? How?
On Monday, the guests and I had a screaming fight over the state of our room’s door. “Everyone who walks by stares into our room.” I choked. “As if we were animals. They are…” I tried to remember the word. Is “malediti” a swear? “I have a need of some privacy,” I stared at the newspaper on my bed.
In the end, the door stayed open, and Catarina’s guests crowded around her bed. I went for a walk until they left, slowly up the hallways, past the chapel, to the bar to buy blood orange juice. When I came back to the room, Catarina looked at me and shrieked. “You are always eating.”
“No, you’re always eating,” I answered her crossly. She moved her hand in a drunken circle, laughing. Her lips folded down where her teeth should have been. “Are you hungry, Catarina?” She looked without focusing her eyes at me. “Bo.” “Catarina!” I tried to hear her husband’s accent in my head. “Are you hungry, bella?” Her forehead split into rays. “Gah!”
I took two plastic cups from her nightstand, and poured half of the juice into each. “Do you want some orange juice?” I tried to think of the word for cool. “E fresco.” She extended her movable hand toward me. I passed her one of the cups. Orange juice for old ladies. Alone in the yard, I allow myself to remember my Grandmother, drinking.
There are pine cones everywhere. Some, piled up at the bases of trees, make me wonder who has come this way before me. Have there been other women, terminally bored, who passed through these grounds, neatening? Some of the cones have been bleached light gray by sun or rain; under the pressure of my right foot, these crumble like daisies. Others are brown, their bract scales open; I feel between these for seeds.
There is a pine cone here for every possible fate. I am jealous of the beautiful ones, perfectly preserved, which sit just so at the edge of the trees. I am frightened of the broken ones, bright green, behind me. Dear God, say I’m going to last for longer than that.
Each soul stays on earth for as long as is its duty. I remember Serra in Turkey, holding my hand, as we walked through the alleys of Fatih. I asked her if Istanbul’s history of earthquakes worried her, if she was scared that she might die in one of these. “I believe that when it is my time to die,” she said, calmly, “nothing will save me.”
I think about coming and going, about those who have gone from me. The pain of remembering is always the same. Grasses swim, leaves grow bright. Tiny rainbows form around every source of light. Their souls were done, I tell my heart. You must stop resisting.
My scalp prickles with sweat and grime. Six days in the same underscarf, six days without washing. Six days of sleeping in hijab. Six days of Roman waiting.
The next time Catarina’s husband came to visit, I stood up and smiled at him. “Look, over here,” I led him to the window. “We have an air-conditioner in our room,” I said. “It is nice and cool, if you want to feel it with your hand.” He trailed his fingers in the sunshine, smiling. “They actually don’t have an air-conditioner out in the hallway,” I tried. “So it is cooler in here if we keep the door closed.” I adjusted the folded sheet I’ve been using as a sajada. And maybe I can say my prayers, when it’s just you guys looking at me.
He unwrapped the cardboard boxes on her meal tray. A lump of soft white cheese. Unsalted broth with tiny, gummable stars. Country bread, encased in a thin plastic packet. A bottle of apple pulp for a sweet. Catarina waved her left arm, shaking. “Mangia, bella. Va be’, mangia. Look, they’ve brought you stracchino. How lovely. Come on, Catarina. Eat.”
Ahead, in the sunshine, five stumps wait, cut off at the height of my knees. They are crowned with amber droplets, each fragrant, each unique. I crouch down at the first of these. Ants thin as the whites of my fingernails run along its face. I pick up a scrap of bark from the ground, and balance it in an age ring.
If you were my son, I tell the tree, I would call you Hamzah. My eyes travel around the circle, imagining. Hamzah, Talhah, Salman… Is it wrong to name children for the companions? Two more stumps remain. I think of bravery, of wit and redemption. Of Al-Hubab and Omar.
On Day Five at lunch, when Catarina’s husband came, he was changed. When the nurse came in to change her bottle, he backed out into the hallway. When he came back, his face was red. Silently, he folded himself into the seat at the end of our room.
He crossed his arms in his lap, and stared at the wall over Catarina’s bed. How did the two of them come to occupy such different places? I wondered then, watching. They must have been matched once. They must have been healthy and young, and in love, and carefree, once upon a time.
Tears made their way morosely down my roommate’s husband’s face. “How long have you been married?” I could not stop from asking. He looked up at me blankly. “How long…?” I tried again, uniting my fingers. “How long together?” Subtlety belongs to the mother tongue. His eyes opened up. “Thirty years.” He took a breath. “We were already old when we married.” He was not as sad, saying this, as I expected, listening.
I cannot dissuade the ants from entering the puddles of amber. Please, little ants, that way is your death. They were already old when they married. I wonder who is back in our room now, if Catarina is again alone. I think of her husband, bending to kiss her, without her dentures in. Is this what awaits me, when I get married? Will I ever have it so good?
Party for Ladies
Category: Uncategorized - Posted On: June 15th, 2008
The yard is awash with scarves. White, gold, pink and green, they secure my sisters within their folds. In the back, near the trees, two women with long black hair mind the girls. I wave to them as I put down my bags. Amani, in jeans, waves back. Welcome to the party.
I watch the sisters on my right sit and talk above glasses of soda. I was surprised, arriving, to notice in my heart my relief at their company. We are more than coworkers. Currents of common devotion run through our relationship. We pray, we eat, we teach, we fast, we sleep, we worry the same. I am shy about wandering into the middle of our conversational river. I decide to wash my face in the house, and to find a vase for the flowers.
I flit around inside, arranging baby tomatoes. Hanan, round and pregnant, sits at the dining room table. I join her, and we commence the conference of the black abaya. “Tell me, Sister Anna, your plans,” she says. I snap green beans in half, and line them up along the edge of the platter. As I have arranged them, they resemble a thick line of grass, a green fence. Hanan watches and fans herself. “It is so humid.”
We praise God for the weather. I let my guard slide down around my shoulders like a shawl. “I will be in Turkey from July 1 until July 31, insha’Allah,” I begin. “Insha’Allah,” she echoes. “It is a beautiful country, and you will have a good time there.” “Have you been?” I ask. She shakes her head. “I’ve seen it in the movies.” She draw ruins underwater with her hand. “What are you going to do there?”
“Two things, I hope,” I begin. “Turkey spans the intersection of Western and Islamic cultures. This is something which I am trying to navigate myself.” She nods. It is more comfortable to talk about this now that the year has past. “I hope to visit the masajid and the centres of Islamic education there, to see what I can learn.” She says nothing, which I take to be tacit approval. I reveal my other thought. “And I want to swim.”
“I love to swim. Maybe more than I love anything else, in terms of how it makes my body feel.” My cheeks grow warm. “I love to float on my back in the sea. If you look up at the clouds, it feels like you are flying.” I am shy talking about my physical self. It is easier to talk about time. “I like to think of it as four weeks,” I offer. “So maybe I can spend a week here, a week there.” She nods. “If I find four places I am interested in, then insha’Allah, I would like to do that.” I imagine Blake’s castle by the sea, and its submerged sister. I know in my heart what I’m looking for. Someplace where I can be alone, and not be responsible for anyone. I need an antidote to the school year. My being aches. I try to imagine how Hanan is feeling.
We speak of other things, of husbands, seduction and marriage. Through the screen door, Amani comes walking with a camcorder. She teases the women at the sink in Arabic. She makes as if to tape them, and then turns her attention to us.
At first, I think that Hanan will have none of this. “Khalas,” she holds up her hand. A stream of Arabic flows between them, causing Amani to finger the camera’s zoom. She scans the table between us, and then my hands. “Is that your dancing outfit, Amani?” I ask. She warned me at school that no one would keep her from dancing. She turns, and the ends of her tunic trail.
“No,” she says, dancing in a circle. “Hi, Sister Anna.” Hanan slaps the table and laughs. “Amani, turn it off. I have things I want to say, ya’ani,” she raises her eyebrows leeringly. “Bad things.” From the kitchen, Nadia’s ears pick up. She walks softly into the dining room, and stands with her hands clasped. “What is going on in here?” She takes stock of the situation. “Are you trying to scare Sister Anna?”
She looks at me. “What they’re talking about, it isn’t part of the deen. It’s cultural, ya’ani.” “Yeah, but this is who we are,” Hanan counters. “Dancing is important, and she needs to know about it.” Nadia looks at Amani until she turns the camera off.
Hanan commands my attention with the look in her eyes. “The dancing outfit, Sister Anna, that is a different thing,” she begins. “You know, in Syria, when they get married, they wear something like the belly dancing outfit underneath their clothes.” Amani interrupts. “The one piece outfits are good. Not the two piece ones. Those ones, ya’ani, they don’t leave anything to mystery.” She pantomimes.
“Someday, when you get married, I’m going to get one for you, Sister Anna,” Hanan says. “When I got married, I had three.” I wrack my brain for a way to lead this conversation back to safe territory. “But that’s different in different cultures, right?” I ask. I feel like a bull in a lingerie shop: prudish, stubborn and mean. Hanan leans across old wood toward me. “It helps,” she says. “I can find you an outfit which is going to help. A lot.”
Amani agrees. “Sister Hanan, before she got pregnant, she was a very good dancer.” She leans against the china cabinet. “You should have seen her with the scarves.” Hanan rolls her eyes toward the ceiling. She denies nothing.
From the business end of the kitchen, the clatter of spoons on a dish saves me from needing to think of a reply. Sahla is ready. “Who else are we waiting for?” she asks in Arabic. “Maymuna only,” Hanan replies. Sahla balances a plate of rice in her hands. “Enough, the grilling is done, let’s go. All the rest are ready to eat.”
I feel a twinge of guilt in my chest. Was my slowness with the vegetable platter delaying my sisters’ nourishment? We carry dishes outside and line them up on the picnic table. It is a spread worthy of a soccer team; there is more food and more variety of food than the score of us could hope for.
For an hour, we devote ourselves to eating. Eggplant, lamb, chicken, shrimp, cream, rice, peas, salad, dates, bread. Cake of unfathomable sweetness, and scalding, spicy coffee. Very little conversation is made, besides to children. Amatullah, eight months old, winds up on the blanket with me.
She climbs into my lap in fits and starts, like a girl up a crabapple tree. Tiny fingers, almost transparent, drift toward my ribs. She swipes her hand at the fine black tassels which hang from the abaya’s collar. Nails of heroic thinness pull against threads but fail to hang on. She looks at me, unblinking, with an open mouth.
While I play with the infant, I think about the differences between my Arab and non-Arab friends. The variation in how love is expressed among these groups is vast. Their traditions are unrelated. I consider my relationship with Susan. She and I have, I would say, a deep friendship. I performed most of her wedding ceremony; she keeps most of my secrets.
Still, we do not hold hands, we do not kiss, we do not say “my beloved”. We do not dance for one another. What holds us together is something different. Very dry, very talkative, unromantic; our nod to affection is in signing all of our private letters “love”. By contrast, the ladies from my school breathe kisses and hugs. They tease, they get cross, they interrupt, but they rarely leave off touching.
I am meditating on the impossibility of inhabiting both worlds when from the steps by the grill, Hanan and Amani lead the charge back inside. The sisters scatter into corners and bathrooms, shedding cloak for dresses and scarves for hair. I let the other sisters go before me, to see what they are wearing.
When it is my turn, I stand before the mirror in the bathroom, and wonder if my dress is too short. After a few valiant attempts at straightening out my hair, I consign it to waves. The humidity, ya’ani. I turn off the light. Much more presentable. I slide out of the bathroom on silent feet. From the doorway to the dancehall, I hear the pulse of a drum. Amani has picked up her instrument. Now no one can stop her from dancing.
Nimrod-ish Behaviour and How to Avoid It
Category: Uncategorized - Posted On: April 25th, 2008
This one is for my most beloved brothers. May Allah guide and bless you always, accept your good deeds, and give you Jannah.
Let’s say that you are sitting in Harvard Square, on a sunny afternoon. Perhaps you look from your spot on the grass, and you see a sister. For the sake of argument, let’s give her a nice hijab. Something easy to wear, something in white or blue. Maybe an abaya too, and an under outfit (of which you can see, at most, the ends of her sleeves and trousers). She would likely wear socks, outside of the house, and sensible (if worn out) shoes. Because she is impervious to heat, she wears a jacket too.
When the sister finishes talking to her newest, elderly friend, she will slowly take her leave. She will rise and walk away. One approach that you might take involves following her into the middle of the street and saying, by way of introduction, “Are you Muslim? Because if you are, then I am about to do the rudest thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.”
Your shy and honorable sister will find this perplexing. What kind of question is “Are you Muslim?” Surely her manners and style of dress have already made this clear. Does anyone observe formal hijab for their own amusement? Are you asking if, perhaps, she plays a Muslim on TV? She is even more confused about your desire to misbehave.
Believe it or not, your sister does not want you to do anything rude. Whatever temptation might be leading you to speak of poor adab, she prays in her heart that you (and she) can resist disgrace. She is all for covering the mistakes of other people, when she sees them, and letting Allah be the judge. She hopes that you would do the same thing for her. At this point, your sister starts to feel afraid. She will try to place your accent, to figure out where you are coming from. No beard, short sleeves, fitted pants. Are you Croatian? Israeli? American?
Imagine that our beloved sister actually just wants to go home. She has overdone it with walking today, all the way from Central Square to Mount Auburn Cemetery and back. She is terrified of snakes, and had the misfortune of watching one winding its way around a cormorant’s neck. It’s belly flashed silver above the mud-brown Charles. She hated the water then, imagining it squirming. From nowhere, now, she remembers, and fears asphyxiation.
You are not helping. “Actually, I am Muslim too,” you say. “And I know that the hardest thing for women in America is to dress themselves properly. But I look at you, and I see that you are doing perfectly.” You follow her as she turns down Mount Auburn street. “I want a woman who covers up,” you explain, “And you look like a good Muslim girl. So I thought, if you’re not seeing anyone…”
For the first time, she interrupts. “Actually, I am. I’m all set, insha’Allah. Thank you.” She clear her throat in the way she’s learned from the Algerians. “Jazak Allahu khayran.” She is trying hard now to leave you, while living up to her name. Grace, grace, ever grace, she prays silently. You clench your hand, and cluck your tongue. “Oh, man,” you complain.
The nerves in her neck draw tight.. “Actually, there are lots of sisters in America who cover up.” She pretends that her feet are interesting, and begins to hurry up. “Like you?” you ask. You don’t understand that she feels naked, discussing her clothing. She catches the hem of her cloak against her foot.
“If you mean sisters who wear abaya and hijab like me, then yes, there are lots of them.” She pauses. “For example, everyone at my place of work does. But I think you have to be involved in the Muslim community if you want to meet them.” For a minute more, you walk by her. “I have five years of work experience you say,” and she begins to feel old. You press a folded paper into her hand. “Here, this is my phone number and email address.” You ask her to open it. “Can you read my name?” She nods, and her lips are white.
When she is finally alone, the sister will pull her accoutrement closer to herself. She will look at her shadow, and wonder. She will try to forget all that you said, except for one thing. “I know the hardest thing for women in America is to dress themselves properly,” she replays your voice.
Then she thinks, for the rest of the walk home, about how you are wrong. What could be easier than a long loose cloak, and not having to spend even a minute worrying about your hair? Her clothes do not press on her belly, or squeeze her where she shouldn’t be squeezed. The easiest thing of her whole walk today, she decides in her heart, was figuring out what to wear. She straightens her scarf under her chin, pats her tired ears.
She tries to figure out, while she is alone, what the hardest thing really is. Loneliness? Waiting? She remembers her friend. Getting old? She is grateful to have faith in heart. Maybe that’s the hardest thing, she thinks while she unlocks her door. The times when your iman is low.
Angela Ann
Category: Uncategorized - Posted On: April 24th, 2008
Angela Ann pinches her brow with sunlight on her arms. I play with my straw. The sour tea has given way to thin cubes of ice. I crush these at their finest ends, into splinters I can sip. A fine pink blush spreads over the other woman’s ears. “It is too hot in there,” she says. “But I can’t turn the air on.” Her eyes waver. “I can’t.” She surveys my face. “I think it’s because I’m getting old.”
“Surely there are building management people whose responsibility it is to fix this sort of thing,” I say. I let my voice trail away at the end. I do not want to tell a stranger what to do. “Maybe your son could help you to talk to them.” I imagine that she is my beloved aunt. If she were mine, I would talk to the building management people for her. The problem, it seems at first, should be easy to solve.
Angela Ann’s brown eyes wail. They are broad and wide and angular, the shape of green almonds. She lies beyond my knowledge of racial categories, with skin of the palest, pale gold. Her wrinkles are dense and fine. “My son would be heartbroken if he knew,” she says. “He does everything for me, already.” Her arms are thin as spindles, on the inside of her shirt. In the folds at the shoulder of her blouse, I see a flat ridge of bone.
Her voice drops, and I strain through my scarf to hear. Two buses, one after the other, roll up JFK street. She turns on the bench to face me, and unfolds her arm. Her accent is soft, Bahamian. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve been here for so, so long.” She laughs, and looks at the space on the bench between us. “I’d just like to go,” she says. “My health is in crisis now,” she doesn’t pause to give me time to ask. “I think I would just like to go along with it, and to let that be that.” She draws her arms in, shivering. “But I don’t know what happens when you die.”
I do, I think to myself, and I wonder if I should tell her. Is there a way I can talk about heaven? I decide that it is better to listen to her for now. She stops talking, and turns away to cough. In profile, she could be my grandmother. A perfect match, but for the eyes. “But my son, my son,” her voice is louder, as if she has shaken the mucus from her lungs. “He is an only child,” she says. “And he would be destroyed.”
My tongue may as well be bound to the bottom of my mouth. “He took care of me everyday,” she says. “He bought the apartment in Harvard Square, so that I could be close to things.” She pauses, and her voice breaks. “I can’t ask him for anything else.”
I struggle to say something. I think of the hadith of the man who came to Prophet Muhammad for advice about who he should focus his caring attention on. “Your mother,” the Prophet replied. “Who after that?” the man persisted. “Your mother,” came the answer again. And then a third time. “Your mother.” I want to share this message with her, but I do not know where to begin.
What is the difference between teaching first graders and septuagenarians? I am afraid, when I imagine my words, to tell her about Prophet Muhammad. I do not want to be mistaken for a proselytizer. Even more than that, I do not want to say something wrong. I cannot recite the hadith perfectly from memory, and I fear for what might get lost. I remember what the Shaikh said, about not relating ahadith unless you know for sure what they mean.
I try a roundabout way. “You know,” I try to speak clearly. “Muslim people believe that we must always, always help our mothers. In fact, your mother is the person you should help the most in the world, according to Islam.” “Is that right?” her eyes are curious. “Definitely,” I try to look confident when I nod. “From my perspective, it sounds like your son is behaving like an excellent Muslim child.”
Her mouth reddens with the arrival of tears. “He is excellent,” she says, dissolving. For a moment I am worried that she will not like my comparison of her son to a Muslim. My mouth is a tool for digging myself into trouble today. You should not be ashamed to ask for care from your son, I tell Angela Ann in my heart. It is his duty to help you. He probably loves helping you. She gives no indication that she has felt my message. I try again, aloud. “Your son does not want you to be uncomfortable.” I face her. “I am sure that if he knew about the air being a problem, he would want to fix it for you.”
She shakes her head. Her hair moves like a coal, burned most of the way to ash. It is fine and white on top, and still blackish underneath. She feels me watching her. “I will be seventy-five in July. I have a green card now, but I will never be an American.” She hugs her knee in her hands. “Seventy-five.” She laughs.
“You look beautiful,” I tell her. For a moment the longing is sharp, in my nose. She is so much like my Grandma was 18 months ago. She shakes her head, and her voice dries out. “Thank you.” She catches my eye, and nods ever so slightly. “I’m mixed. And I’m Seminole Indian, too.” Her back straightens. “Do you know Crazy Horse?” she asks. “Yes,” I answer. “I do.” “What he said,” Angela Ann begins, “is what I’m going to do.”
I wait, because I cannot fill in the gaps by myself. “I will fight no more forever,” she says in a low proud voice. “That’s what the Chief said, and that’s my plan now.” She stretches her back. I think of telling her that she has her Chiefs crossed, that she is quoting Chief Joseph, not Crazy Horse. Then I measure her half-crooked smile, and it takes no time to change my mind.
She is thin as a tomcat, but smartly dressed. Her nails are filed, much longer than mine, and glossed shiny-clear. I picked her to sit by because she was a woman, and because she was beautiful. From across the yard, the space next to her shone empty in the sunshine. I carried my tea, then still full, carefully in one hand.
“May I please sit here?” I asked, standing at the edge of her feet. She smiled, and offered me my choice of space. We were silent then, for minutes, women with shadows, drinking tea. At last, from the end of the bench, a thin voice spoke to me. “Do you know what time it is?” I shook my head. “I am sorry to report that I do not.” She shrugged then, indifferent. “Oh well.”
“What time to you think it is?” I asked. Her face brightened. “I think it might be five,” she said. “That sounds right,” I smiled. “Maybe it’s five, then.” She leaned toward me and smiled. “It’s too warm now.”
“It won’t last,” I said.
It has been an hour now. We’ve covered the war, the Pope, nuns and Muslims. “And do you know what else they say?” her eyes shine with intrigue. She lowers her voice. “They say that maybe 9/11 was an inside job. You know, some of the firefighters there, they wondered. They said they didn’t think it looked like it was caused by an airplane.” She whispers. “There’s a conspiracy theory for everything.”
She leans forward to cough. “I’ve just been here for so long.”
I try to figure out what I can give her. Then I think of Amani. “Have you ever considered tutoring?” I ask. “There are many young people out there who would love to have someone as patient as you to help them learn how to read.”
“My son suggested that,” she shakes her head. “It’s hard for me to get out. I don’t know.” My mind skips away. If they only met once, it would make all the difference. She flexes her toe. “You know, the medicine I take, it makes me have a headache. They know the cures for some things, but they have medicine for everything.”
The sun slips down in the sky. I need to go home and pray, before the sunset comes. I look at my papers from the cemetery, tucked into my bag. I feel my wallet for a pen. “Angela Ann, if you had to recommend a book to a second grade girl who was having a hard time, what would you recommend?” She sucks in her cheeks, considering. I try to help. “The girl I’m thinking of likes history, and biography.”
“Is she white or black?” The question surprises me. I wonder how her recommendations might vary with color. “She’s Egyptian,” I answer. “I guess she’s not really either one, black or white.”
Angela Ann smiles at me. “You can take my phone number,” she says. “And my email too.” “That would be great,” I tell her. “I will tell you if I get a good answer,” she smiles while I write. “But for now, I would say an educator like Mrs. Randall. She saw that African American students weren’t receiving a good education, so she devoted herself to educating them. She said she believed in education for everybody.”
Her eyes cloud up with tears again. I wonder if I should touch her. I pat her elbow lightly. “I will email you,” I tell her. “Insha’Allah.” I try to smile at the sky. “I need to start walking home, or I am going to miss my prayers,” I say.
Angela Ann is aghast. “Don’t do that! That’s one thing my father told me. He died in 1947, but I have his journals. He says that every day you should make time to spend with God as you understand Him.” I press her hand as I stand. “That’s very smart.”
“Good bye.”
Membrillo (Fugue, 3)
Category: Faith, Travel (Miscellaneous) - Posted On: March 25th, 2008
Chiapas, 1999.
The bus has been stopped for several hours before we abandon the pretense of sleep. My cheek is numb from resting against the window’s edge. Next to me, Alison pinches herself awake. Her right hand holds fast to the pressure point between the thumb and forefinger of her left hand. I know that this pose means she has a headache, and that she seeks to banish it. I have neither water nor food nor medicine to offer, and so I make my silence my gift to her.
The top pane is held in place with levers. I pry them loose and slide the square of glass down. The morning air is black and sour; outside, something is burning. The fumes are sticky; after I inhale, my mouth tastes of petrochemicals. I jam my head and shoulders through the window and press my feet to the floor. In this configuration I can partially straighten my legs. It almost feels like standing.
My eyes ache in the dull light. We are no longer stuck near the river. Tires melt at the highway’s edge, and the day smells worse than the night. I turn my neck to study the road behind us. A procession of trucks, single-file, stretches back beyond the range of my sight. It is not just we who are stopped. Everyone is. I imagine the line reaching back in time, over the mountains, to Mexico City. I imagine it coursing through Zacatecas, Real de Catorce and Monterrey. Perhaps it runs all the way back to Texas. On the Interamericana, momentum has ceased. There is ennui before us, and death up ahead.
I turn to study the head of our procession, to discover what has stopped us. One hundred meters away, the highway is blocked by a human line. It is composed of farmers with their market bags. The line widens at its middle, until it is perhaps twenty people deep. Across the highway’s concrete width, it forms a barricade.
I wonder at the impulse which has grabbed hold of the hearts of the people. How did they erect their line, and why? Did they spread across the highway one by one, or did they rush upon it together? How, at night, did they make themselves visible? How did they convince the first vehicle to stop? A woman, standing on the barricade’s edge, sees my awkward form. She raises her hand above her head and splays her fingers in a V. The peace sign. I kiss my hand and return the gesture. All of a sudden, I am shy. I duck back inside.
I cannot imagine that the campesinos will live, so displayed, for long. The Mexican authorities have a certain calculated anger at the best of times. How might they react to such a purposeful disruption, especially when there is no pay in it for them? My heart falls to my stomach. Perhaps it is better not to see. I settle myself back in my seat, and begin the process of stretching with my right foot. I go all the way up each leg, tightening and loosening each muscle in turn. Blood tickles its way through my skeleton. I review last evening.
I was conscious through the night of episodes of pulling. We left Oaxaca City in a blackness lit only by suspended mini tvs. A motorcycle movie, violently B-grade, served as our lullaby. I woke up on the state border when an inspector came through. He gathered young men from the back of bus, and quietly marched them away. We pretended not to watch.
I drifted away again when the waiting became too long. Around midnight, we slid down the edge or a riverbank, nose first. Our remaining men heaved themselves out the front door. The driver rocked the bus back and forth, and twenty five pairs of hands resolved to pull it free. This is the last thing I can remember.
They must have been successful, for we are no longer in the mountains, nor even in the hills. The land beyond my window is flat. I wonder how far we traveled between the riverbank and the blockade. Are we nearly to San Cristobal, or have we only just begun? I flatten my tunic’s wrinkles between my fingers. When I take my hand away, it smells of salt and stale sweets. Days of riding have left me flushed and crumpled. I am reminded of caving-in fruit.
In the next seat, Alison stirs. She has managed her headache as best she can for now. Her voice is husky, soft. “Where are we?” she asks. “I don’t know,” I tell her. I have a question of my own. “What time is it?” She unfolds the cuff of her blouse to check. Our official timekeeper, wearing our official timepiece. “7:15,” she answers smartly. “What’s going on outside?” “A protest,” I begin. “Or something like that, I think. Traffic is backed up behind us for as far as I can see. And there are people, men and women, blocking the road ahead.” Alison nods without comment. There is much worth protesting here in Chiapas. Poverty, greed, murder and corruption curse the country’s deep south. The land is too rich, and its gardens too bountiful for the state to remain obscure. Its prizes are widely sought.
I wonder if there has ever been a time when the forests and the lowlands of Chiapas were approached in the spirit of grace and harmony. Why has God sent us here? My pulse picks up as I look outside. I am sure that there is something here that we are meant to see. I resolve to meet the protesters first hand, without an intermediator of glass.
Alison has come to the same conclusion.”Let’s get off the bus. We can go, stretch our legs, and buy something for breakfast,” she suggests. What goes unsaid is more exciting. From outside, we can see the blockade. I straighten my skirt as best as I can, and tighten the laces of my boots.
Then I follow Alison off of the bus. Outside, there is a convention of passengers. Men, smoking, stand in twos by the exhaust pipe. Women hold babies on their hips in the early sun. Some change diapers on the road’s hard shoulder. I am glad for my red scarf, tied down tight over my hair, obscuring the disarray into which I have fallen. Alison looks smart enough in long, long green; only the hem of her homemade skirt is beginning to fray.
We are a minute’s walk from the blockade. We sneak up the sides of stopped cars and trucks, past windows where bored children press their faces out to see. The sides of the road are flecked with white, where garbage has begun to accumulate. I catalog the filth as pass it. Two packages of chips, a cigarette box. Candy wrappers, scraps of tinfoil. Pages of the newspaper, showing yesterday’s headlines. One folded diaper, then another. The noise increases steadily as we approach the front of the line. From up close, the protesters are small.
They look as if they have met on their way to market. They are ready to bargain; each has bags of rice, or corn, or coffee beans. Some balance their wares on their heads. Others let their burdens rest, like children, at their feet. These are not the mestizos of the North. They are dark, with the eyes of the prematurely aged, and not a soul is above five feet. They stand, blocking the highway like a blood clot plugging up an artery in the brain. Perhaps sixty percent of the assembled farmers are men. They are bare-headed and thin. They wear white. Women and boys form the rest of the assembly. The women, round and small, are wrapped in blankets of cobalt wool. Strands of pink, yellow, red and black run through these; from where we stand, they are like cracks in a fire opal. Like fissures of uncommon brilliance. Young men stand together in self-conscious groups, wearing t-shirts and cotton pants. There are no small children, save those bound to their mothers’ backs.
At the center of the clot stands a black-clad man. A single square of white marks his throat: a priest. I imagine the world from his perspective. Ahead of him, a line of trucks wait, each endowed with sufficient force to flatten him under its wheels. To either side stand farmers. Behind him, something heavy dips and rises slowly along the horizon. A pair of olive monstrosities churn the land in their path to dust. The trucks are coming.
A few shacks, a fountain, and two trees mark the intersection of the blockade with the highway. Their general state of decrepitude indicates abandonment. The trees have not been picked all season; withered mangoes hang, like yellow bats, from its branches. Still others, soft and brown, litter the ground. The fountain is the same; there is not so much as a trickle of water in its basin, and the rings of mineral salt built up around its edge indicate that it has not been used in quite some time.
People used to live here, but they don’t anymore. I wonder how the farmers picked this spot for their demonstration. I look down the line of shacks for a sign, a name, anything to give context. There is nothing, as if the place is not meant to remembered. A woman with a picnic basket stops before us, and leans against the fountain.
“Membrillo?” she asks. The confection, like a thick fruit roll-up, is sold in shades of brilliant red and green. It is made of squares of congealed guava paste, pressed between plastic-wrap sheets. “How much for two pieces?” I ask her in Spanish. She mutters something, which I strain to hear, and take to be fifty centavos. The price seems high; then again, we are foreigners. I reach into my coin purse, and take out a peso.
The woman is offended. She looks at my money, and clucks her tongue. “Not fifty,” she says. “Fifteen.” She leans forward, until our heads all but touch. “Let me see.” She reaches into my coin purse, and picks out two small grubby coins. Once silvery, they have faded to blackish grey. A five centavo piece and a ten centavo piece disappear into the folds of fabric at her waist. Then, proudly, she opens the basket’s lid.
She lines our palms with glittering slices of warm fruit paste. I am ready to thank her when a man, clad in green, appears on the edge of my vision. He moves quickly, striding toward us. The woman scurries away. “You, both, go back to your bus,” he says. His English is crisp. There is an air of finality about him. He is thin, with a neatly clipped beard and sunglasses. “It is not safe for you here,” his voice hints at malice. “Go away, now.”
By the time that we again find our bus, the trucks have arrived. Slowly, slowly the human line begins to move. The farmers hoist their wares to their heads, until, so bedecked, they stand taller than their captors. I open our window all the way. The army begins to march.
Afterward (Cambridge, 2008)
I will never forget how they looked, marching away. I leaned out of our window as they left and cheered the farmers on. We shared a communion of peace signs, until the last of them passed.
It took us 30 hours in total to reach San Cristobal; after hour 18, the women (for it was mostly women left on the bus at that point) began standing in the aisles, peeling fruit with their teeth. One, eight months pregnant, ripped the skin from a mango as we swerved down the rainy mountains. We stopped together, after 24 hours, to eat in a valley of mists and long white birds. The vignettes could continue ad nauseum.
A woman with curly hair left her infant in my lap for an hour, while she washed, and stretched and talked. As I held her child, a fat-faced boy with big eyes, I thought about the farmers’ faith.
In the spirit of courage, the campesinos stood against forces significantly more well-funded and armed than themselves. They rebelled against unjust laws and man’s evil rule. They were organized around their faith. They believed in their own redemption. They did not initiate violence, but instead were committed to peace.
This is the best modern example that I can find of how faith should be lived. Of how liberating belief can be.
Phone Home
Category: Uncategorized - Posted On: March 21st, 2008
I started writing a weekly post for othermatters.org; you can read all about it at that site on thursdays, insha’Allah. i intend to publish more “current event”-ish articles there, and more dreamy anna-trips here. following this note is a reprint of the article I submitted to the othermatters community this week.
“How are the First Graders?” my mother wants to know. It is her second question, after “How are you?” “They’re doing very well,” I reply. “Their reading is coming along.” Twelve hundred miles away in Iowa, I can hear her laughing. Her voice is coppery over the line. An ambulance streaks down River Street, howling unintelligibly. It must pass before we can speak again. “I read your card to the children,” I tell her. “They were excited that you mentioned them. I think it made them feel good to be represented in print.”
“Of course it did,” she sighs. “I just can’t stop thinking about them.” Her voice trails off, and I shiver. I have been holding myself stiffly in the deck chair, with my cheek flattened against my phone. The Blackberry is the wrong form factor to sit snugly inside a hijab, and my hands are turning light blue-pink. “They wanted to know if you would be coming back soon,” I tell her. “I told them ‘insha’Allah’.” As soon as the expression leaves my tongue, I am nervous about using it. For a moment, she is still. “Do you spell that i-n-s-h-a-l-l-a-h?” she asks.
The roof of my mouth floods with the pressure of blood. I train my eyes on the strands of dead hops that hang light brown over the edge of the railing. Some long gone brewer-herbalist left them planted in the plot with the grapes. They climb on thick white nylon string to the second floor balcony. They whisper in the breeze like Japanese lanterns; when I crush them between my hands, they leave a smell of clean, soapy, bitterness. I would wash with them. They are beautiful in the cold.
I am proud to hear my mother pronounce the name of God. “Yes,” I say. “Insha’Allah. God willing. There’s an epiglottal stop between the words that can be hard to hear. I might spell it i-n-s-h-a-apostrophe-A-l-l-a-h. Insha’Allah.” Curiosity gets the better of me. Why is she asking about spelling? “Did you read that somewhere?” I ask. “Yes,” she replies. The phone goes dead for a long moment, and when she speaks again, it is in the low, patient tone which she reserves for talking about books. In her conversational menagerie, books are creatures of endless fascination. Mysteries especially. She adores, devoures, inhabits them. “Have you read ‘The Kite Runner’?” she asks.
A little part of my belly groans. I have not, though I have been meaning to. Time for reading slips elusively away, even more than time for writing does. The question is one I receive often, from older non-Muslim ladies. My mother is fascinated by the novel; a year ago, at Grandma’s deathbed, she carried it in her purse. Indeed, The Kite Runner forms a critical piece of her picture of the Muslim world. Before I can say “No,” she presses on. “The author of the Kite Runner wrote another book. That’s where I read ‘insha’Allah.’ So far it is nice, you know. Not like the first one. And it all takes place in Afghanistan.” She draws a breath. “Khaled Hosseini is the author’s name,” I say. “right?”
She agrees. “They say ‘insha’Allah’ all the time in the new book. It’s called ‘A Thousand Splendid Suns.’” “You did a good job pronouncing it that time,” I say. “At least according to me.” I stop short of mentioning my pride in her. “Your book sounds interesting, Mom. I will try to check it out, when I have time to read.”
The conversation shifts to her parents, to her mother, now dead. “You know Grandpa finally got Grandma’s ashes back from the University of Iowa,” she offers. “I didn’t know,” I say. My mother, a stern advocate of cremation, terrified me as a child with stories of the efficiency of burning. I have never approved personally of the practice; it seems so much more beautiful to me to return to the earth. Still my mother, with Scottish grimness and Midwestern surety, made her wishes vehemently clear. She is to be cremated.
When my Grandmother died last April, she donated her body to science. I imagine first year medical students cutting her, and am jealous, even, to know that they saw her again. “What do they do when they are done with her?” I asked my uncle at her funeral. He paused. “They will give us back her ashes after a year,” he said.
So it has been a year. I am surprised, hearing my mother say it, that so much time has passed. My vision wobbles. I am glad for the air’s chill. “Are you going to have a burial?” I ask. “Well!” Her voice is indignant. “Now I’m not sure what we will do.” she lowers her voice. “Do you know what they told Duncan, when he went to pick up the ashes?” I cannot guess. I imagine a great incinerator, filled up with human remains. How are they separated? This is what I have always feared about cremation: that one might be scooped up along with the remains of someone else, or swept out with coffin ash.
My shoulders ache in apprehension. I listen to my mother breathing on the other end of the line. Something has gone wrong, and she wants me to ask what it is. “No, what did they tell Duncan?” I rise to the bait. She coughs. Her voice comes quickly, rising at the end of each statement, in an exasperated lilt. “They told him that they can’t really keep the people separate! They just put a whole bunch of people in there and burn them and scoop them out and you get what you get!”
I do not know what to say. I did not expect things to be different. Still, the heart clenches up, listening. Inna lillahi wa inna ilahi raji’un, I tell its walls. Ashes to ashes, dust unto dust. In my mother’s voice, I hear surprise. “I just don’t know what we are going to do with her now,” she says. “I mean we can have a burial or a scattering, but,” her voice catches on a note just below a wail. “She would just die, knowing that part of her was being scattered someplace weird with someone else.”
I imagine Grandma as a flock of birds, little green sparrows, being let loose in the wind. It doesn’t seem so bad for her to be mixed up with someone else’s ashes, if she can fly away. “I’m sorry to hear it,” I say. “Can you guys have the ceremony anyway, though?” She clears her throat, again, with the tired coughing of a sixty year old who has been coughing out dust all her life.
“We’re going to have it in June,” Mom says. “Or at least we were planning to. But Grandpa is doing worse. He keeps asking me when it will be, and I keep telling him. Maybe we’ll just bury the ashes, the three of us, on the anniversary of her death in April. Maybe sooner is better. I don’t think he can make new memories anymore, anyway.”
“How is Grandpa doing?” I ask. The mention of his name makes my chin shake, ashamed. “Is he still mad at me?” I ask the second question only in my heart. In my mother’s pause I watch rain drops trace their way down the black, oily shingles. I look in other people’s windows, across the yard, for something to train on my eye on. It is too much to hope that he has changed his mind, but part of me prays he has forgotten.
“He is awful, when it comes to you,” my mother replies. “We had two conversations, recently, about you being a Muslim.” After a moment, she presses on. “We just yelled at each other, both times,” she says. “He was saying terrible things about you. He was saying terrible things about all the Muslims, about them wanting to kill everyone.” I can hear her shaking her head on the other end of the line. “Terrible.”
I want my mother to defend me. “Did you tell him about how you came to school with me, and how nice everyone was?” I hold onto hope that Muslim manners may prevail. I remember my mother, blinking owl-eyed at the First Graders, falling in love with them. “Anna, he just doesn’t want to hear it,” she says. “But he is not going to talk about you that way anymore,” she continues. “I won’t let him.” Her voice grows stronger, angry. “I won’t let him say anything about you.”
“What I figure,” she says above the roar of static on the line, “is that you put your head down to the floor in prayer five times a day. You care about having a relationship with God. Or Allah. However you call Him.” “Thank you, Mom,” I try to speak lightly.
“It was good enough for me,” my mother says, “when I learned that Muslims believe in the second coming of Christ.” She is fading out. I trace my finger around the doorknob’s filigree, eager to go in, eager to stay out. “I consider Islam to be pretty similar to Catholicism,” she says, with love in her voice. Catholicism is her religion, and the religion of her father. “That is more than good enough for me.”
For Stanley (Fugue, 2)
Category: Islam, Travel (Miscellaneous) - Posted On: February 25th, 2008
1999, Valle, Honduras
We travel backward through the night. As the truck picks up speed, we scoot away from the tailgate. Stacked along the back of the cab are bags of cement mix. I brace my feet against the side of the truck, and push my back against the pile of bags. The edge of my backpack catches against the lip of the first layer of bags; my hips and shoulders sigh with the relief of their weight. I unbuckle the pack’s waistband, and slide my arms out of its straps. Then carefully, I bend my knees and inch forward. The pack slides down to the floor of the flatbed. Fifty one pounds gone. My pulse is sickeningly strong as the blood reenters my hands. For a moment, my head swims.
Next to me, Alison wriggles free of her pack. “Are you okay?” I ask. I’m not sure what else to say. Sorry I got you into this mess? I hope we don’t get kidnapped? Are we having fun yet? Her cheeks lack even a trace of pink. She nods, eyes on her pockets. “I’m fine.” From her coat pocket, she draws out her rosary. I can hear it before I see it; the soft clinking of stones, one on another. It is time to remember God.
I follow her example. My own rosary is tucked into my waist pocket, with my passport and credit card. It is a handmade affair, with blue glass beads strung on dental floss. The thread joining them wears thin in places; filaments peel away like hairs between its decades. I weigh its symmetry in my hand. Five sets of ten beads, going in a circle, without a middle point. I could not bear to string a crucifix on its end. Its glass is the temperature of me. In the transference of heat from my flesh to the beads, my belief is alive.
On the road, I do not mind my sense of dislocation from my mother’s faith. In the United States, I am uneasy appropriating Catholic rituals to aid me in worship. I cannot say the Our Father or the Glory Be without omitting words. Even the Hail Mary bears alteration. I commit an ammended form to memory. I am a spiritul amputee. What is wrong with me, I wonder, that I cannot accept the Catholic faith? Why do tales of Jesus seem to suffocate my heart? I feel the worst kind of invisible, standing in church, remapping rituals, leaving out words.
The thing about Catholic rituals is that they are the only rituals I know. It is good to be away from home: whatever I practice while on the road, it will be ignored, or chalked up to American perversion. There is something about being technically lost which removes the hesitation from my practice. It is a profound relief to be free of the accrutrement (people, streets, rooms, things) which reinforce my sense of who I should be. Plummeting through the lowlands, sweltering near the sea, my heart, here homeless, is free.
We stream through a confluence of fireflies, so quickly that their lights leave streaks of white in my eyes. Our wheels churn dust in a wave behind us. It is anemic yellow, the color of crushed bones, but stained taillight red. We are a shark, I decide as I pray. We devour the road.
Hail Mary,
full of grace,
the Lord is with Thee.
Blessed art Thou among women,
and blessed is the fruit
of your womb…
By the fiftieth time, my mind is in San Pedro. By the fifty-first, in Santiago Atitlan. I see kites across the sky, box kites of grey and red, pulled on mended thread by scores of laughing boys. Inside the church, the saints are dressed in robes of Mayan wool. Red and pink, orange and green. The icons have black hair. They carry armloads of corn. Jesus dies in the corner, mouth bruised in agony. Other martyrs, ornately tortured, lie gasping under glass. There are no windows, just whitewash, and only a few candles burn. At the front of the church, in a sideways question mark behind the altar, holes mark the places where bullets ate Fr. Stanley Rother away.
In memory, a little girl sidles across the pew to my side. “Maximon?” she asks. Her voice is plaintive. She carries a photograph in her hand. A half-person of papier mache sits on a polished wooden chair before six candles. His eyes are squinted shut under the brim of a wide black hat. His hair hangs red against his cheeks. Turqouise, lavendar and gold scarves decorate his chest; underneath, he wears blue-black wool. A cigar smolders in its mouth. He is malevolent: a force to be appeased, to be soothed through offerings of alcohol and tobacco. Venerating an angry god is hard for me to understand.
Electric churchbells out in the square announce the coming hour. I offer the girl a granola bar. She takes it, scowling. “Come see Maximon,” she says in the slow, clear Spanish of the Quiche. I am about to refuse her when Alison nudges my hand. The war has only been over here for three years. Over the forty years previous, thirty-six have seen war. Perhaps, says, Alison’s quiet stare, there would be no harm in going along with the girl’s wish. We leave the church, with its homespun saints, and wind our way out of the city. The sounds of the orphange have died away by the time we reach the first avocado tree. The little girl sucks on the end of her hair, until it hangs in lank black spears down her back. Somewhere ahead waits her punishing God.
A chunk of rock strikes the back grille. I am pulled back to the night, away from my prayer. Next to me, Alison begins to sing. “Two of us riding nowhere, spending someone’s hard earned pay…” I cannot help laugh. She writes our songtrack using Beatles tunes, and hums snatches of it to me at night. “We’re on our way home. We’re going home,” her voice is alto deep. My own is higher. “You and I have memories longer than the road which stretches on ahead,” I join her on the bridge.
When the song has died away, Alison turns toward me. “Do you remember, last summer, when we went to hear Mozart’s Requiem?” Hence begins is a ritual we have created; a stylized invocation of memories, in which one of us calls to mind a shared event, and the other helps to fill in the details. It is like a sort of verbal crosstitch, incomplete until every last detail has been sketched in broad pixels.
I do indeed. We were living together on Commonwealth Avenue, on the second floor of an MIT fraternity. They, each May, needed tenants to fund the exodus of brothers to their summer jobs. As we walked to Boston Commons one Sunday afternoon, we passed an old Baptist church. On a sign in its front yard, we read an invitation: Mozart’s Requiem, 7 pm. “We went home and dressed up,” I remember outloud, “As we imagined one would if one were going to the orchestra. Long black skirts, hair twisted up. Long, white blouses. Black heeled boots.”
I can tell in the dark that she is smiling. “It was a warm night, of course, and we walked through magnolia trees,” Alison volunteers. “We went all the way up to Clarendon, and the branches were silver and green.” I can see the sky in its deepening shades, and downtown’s tower of glass, reflecting cirrus clouds. “When we got to the church, the door was open. We walked inside, expecting a line, or a place to pick up our programs.” She pauses for a moment. I enjoy the recollection of that instant, of not knowing what was going on, but being committed, together, to finding out.
“All the lights in the church were off, except for those over the staircase. Up it we went.” She stops. It is my turn to tell. “We made it all the way to the third floor, walking up in a slow circle, before we found the musicians.” Alison nods. “Two hundred, maybe three hundred people sitting in a practice room, arranged in four groups.”
“There didn’t seem to be any place for us spectators to sit,” I continue, “so we stood inside the doorway, against the wall.” I remember the warmth of the room, filled close with people on a summer night. Unairconditioned. “Then the music director saw us,” Alison fills in. “‘Please have a seat,’ he told us. He pointed to the group on his left. ‘These are the sopranos.’ Then, he stretched his hand to the group in front of him. ‘These are the altos.’”
“I was too embarrased to sit by myself,” I say. Alison agrees. “I was too embarrased to leave.” In the end, we sat together in the alto section, where I did not belong, but where we could hide together. Shoulder to shoulder, behind a stand lain with xeroxed sheets of music, we did our best to sing. The rehersal lasted three hours; the memory still brings water to my eyes. For a long minute we laugh, and the night seems to listen.
Can the men in the cab hear us? I swallow my mirth; silence begins. We sit, quietly watching the night streak by. According to our guidebook’s map,we are not far from the sea. The raindrops expand with this thought until they are heavy enough to be heard, imploding against the dust. Other drops plink against the truck’s metal sides, like hammers on piano wire. We sit, warm in the dark, and wait for Choluteca’s lights to rise.
A bump in the road reminds me of our current predicament. It is the absence, not the presence, of information which inspires daring. I am thinking about the differences between planned and unplanned adventures when the truck kills its engine. We drift to the side of the road, bouncing over rocks as we slow to a hault. The storm has gathered force: eddies of dust spin rise from the earth on their own accord, and spin away to the sea.
When we have ground to a halt, the man sitting on the passenger’s side of the truck opens his door. He slides, feet first, to the ground. For a moment he stands, smoothing his jacket down. Then he climbs over rocks to the tailgate, where we are still silently sitting. He knocks his fist against the grille by way of warning. “Climb out,” he says.
2008, Cambridge
I decide two things. First, I must create a working definition of Liberation Theology, if I am to study it in the context of Islam. Second, I must come to better know my adopted faith. I can list the six pillars of belief. I can teach the five pillars of Islam. I am conversant in basic Sira. I can recount the stages of Prophethood. I feel drawn to certain chapters of the Qur’an, and recite them regularly with heart and tongue during the five daily prayers. Surat Inshirah, Surat al Asr, Surat at-Teen. Through my embrace of these verses, I have done some of the work necessary to establish in my heart a place for my faith to grow.
But could I explain my faith in the most simple terms, if I sought to share it with someone else? And if I cannot explain it to someone else, how do I understand it myself? Today is a day for collection, for drawing together, for studying from above. I set upon these tasks with happiness; between driving, chopping, eating, I codify the rules of life which I saw lived in Central America. So that I might commit them to memory, I recite them to myself. As soon as one idea is formed and articulated, the head of my heart’s queue is replaced by another. I decide that, first and foremost, Liberation Theology requires faith.
It is not a quiet faith, lived silently in praise, nor a despondent faith based on guilt and punishment. It must be committed to change. Liberation Theology is an active embrace of the world’s oppressed and poor. It requires the recognition of each person’s invaluable humanity, and it establishes as its basis the belief that God’s messengers have been sent to teach us to be free. So begins my definition: Liberation theology is the recognition of the humanity of the most oppressed, and a belief in the emancipating, redeeming messages conveyed by Allah, through his Prophets, to creation.
Moving on. When I reflect on the legacies of the Liberation Theologists as lived in Central America, I am struck by the intimately local aspect of their struggles. The priests and nuns, the bishops and laypeople who struggled during Salvador’s civil war were not engaged in a universal campaign to end theoretical suffering. On the contrary, they were working to help specific people, in a specific struggle, to better their situations. My definition grows. Liberation Theology is practiced on the local level.
The last facet of this theology which is obvious in Central America is its commitment to structural, organizational change of the systems perpetuating injustice. In addition to serving the oppressed in their struggles, Liberation Theology seeks to remedy the causes of their oppression. From Guatemala to Nicaragua, Liberation Theologists are active in government, and in protest.
I can think of nothing more to add, so I turn to my next goal. Alone in my room, I open the Qur’an. My favorite copy is dark green, with thin, gold-edged pages. I do not, at first, know where to begin. Between my fingers, it is an ocean. A million grains of quartz define its shores; I pray that through their perfect shapes, I might find guidance. Bismillah Ar-Rahman Ar-Rahim.
I turn to Surat al Baqarah, for it was this Sura which moved my heart from silent to public practice. Usually when I read this Sura, I start at the beginning. Today, I start from the end. In the last two ayat, the Amana Rasul, I see belief explained. Muhsin Khan’s translation of these verses is a beautiful one.
2:285
The Messenger (Muhammad SAW) believes in what has been sent down to him from his Lord, and (so do) the believers. Each one believes in Allah, His Angels, His Books, and His Messengers. They say, “We make no distinction between one another of His Messengers” - and they say, “We hear, and we obey. (We seek) Your Forgiveness, our Lord, and to You is the return (of all).”
2:286
Allah burdens not a person beyond his scope. He gets reward for that (good) which he has earned, and he is punished for that (evil) which he has earned. “Our Lord! Punish us not if we forget or fall into error, our Lord! Lay not on us a burden like that which You did lay on those before us (Jews and Christians); our Lord! Put not on us a burden greater than we have strength to bear. Pardon us and grant us Forgiveness. Have mercy on us. You are our Maula (Patron, Supporter and Protector, etc.) and give us victory over the disbelieving people.
I have found a new light. Painstakingly tracing the page’s black lines, I begin to reread.
Fugue
Category: Travel (Miscellaneous) - Posted On: February 18th, 2008
This piece is the first part of a series, insha’Allah, about Liberation Theology and Islam. If it is far from complete, at least it is a beginning. It describe a trip which I have not discussed before, taken in 1999, to Central America.
El Salvador, 1999.
The man is certainly dead. He lies face up across the sidewalk; his feet hang motionless above the gutter, like leaves drifting down from a tree, frozen in the air. Treadles and needles hum while we wait; this quarter, abandoned by the Coca Cola company when their bottling facility closed, houses the city’s tailors. The street is lined with openings into the sewing warren. Bobbins of white thread spin as we pass. The tailors do not look up. They are immune to concerns for the dead.
Alison and I hesitate. How shall we pass by? I do not want to study the man’s face, frozen under a heavy white mask of mucus. At last we jump down into the street, avoiding the swirls of black water which foam up from the grate, and walk wide around the feet of the corpse. Pneumonia? TB? Alcohol? I wonder what kills a young man by drowning him in his own humor. We do not talk on our way to the bus station. Now and again dogs pass by; they are thin, and bald in places from scratching. Alison’s face, set pale beneath her scarf, reflects my own worry. Will they find him before the police do?
We hasten away. The Salvadoran police are their own sort of terror. Two nights ago they circled us in a white van, boy-men younger and the bigger than we, dangling machine guns from the van’s side door. I wondered then if they would scoop us up, into the van, where we might disappear. As the lights of the market were unplugged, long white mosquito nets fluttered like moths in the breeze. A mountain of smoldering fruit, plastic and husks of corn began to glow. We hurried along the street, willing ourselves invisible, to the delight of the police. At last, near the miracle of angular rooftops marking our hotel, they drove, sirens blaring, away.
The trickle of black water becomes a river of ammonia. We are nearing the station now; I am glad for the feeling of my passport tight against my stomach. The last of the tailor’s shops sits overlooking what is more or less a dump. An elevated walking bridge stretches above it; at the bridge’s terminus, I can see the roofs of old Blue Birds. We climb up the steps to the bridge’s main platform, and find that it is inhabited by people. They lack legs, arms, eyes; some have bodies which end at their ribs. It was the same in Guatemala. They watch the movement of the garbage below. Dogs and children rummage through garbage in the sun.
It has been only seven years since the end of the last civil war. One fifth the country’s population was exiled during the twelve-year battle. Another fifth became homeless. 75,000 people died, and 18,000 disappeared. The Salvadoran government, emboldened by funds and troops from my country, bombed the capital city. The nation has stabbed itself in the eye. I try to imagine the same thing happening at home. Were Washington gutted by US bombs, would we ever recover?
In the past seven years, much of the city has been rebuilt. Graffiti covers new concrete walls: paintings of Archbishop Romero. Black fists. Quotations and threat. I translate them with my lips. “If they kill me, I will be reborn in the spirit in the Salvadoran people.” “We are not American Puppets.” “My blood will be the seed of liberty.” Below us, a painting of a brown-skinned woman with smooth black hair is stained the color of rust. She stands mute before a sea of smaller women, each a different color. Pink, blue, purple, red, they raise their fists to a cadmium sun. “Because we give life, we struggle to change it.”
We struggle. I repeat the word to myself. A thick white cross marks the end of the bridge. A wave of noise rises up from the parking lot. We stand together for a moment, studying the cross, readying our spirits for the ride. God willing, today we will reach Honduras. Each time we cross a border, I feel the same fear. Will we find a bus on the other side? Will we be able to change our money? As new accents are introduced, will we be able to understand them? Across the city, amplified church bells wail at the middle of the day. El Salvador has faith.
The bus station is a cacophony of plastic, diesel, salesmen and children. El Salvador is more modern than our last country, Guatemala, was. There witches sat by the edge of the road, with white sheets spread before them: snake bones, rats’ skins, lumps of blood-red resin for burning on a coal. Small bundles of sticks, naked dolls stuffed tight. Here, the old ladies sell cigarettes and candy. I watch four of them sit together in the shade of the stairs. They rest on their baskets, eating bread, and drinking from plastic bags. I would like to interview them, but the crowd has other ideas. As Alison and I reach the ground, the pulling of hands starts.
We are surrounded by men who shout out city names. Guate, Guate, Guate. Apopa, La Libertad. La Canoa. Puerto El Triunfo. A crowd of boys pushing bicycle rickshaws circles the bus men. A man with an earnest face stands on the edge of the group. “Adonde vas?” he asks. “Where are you going?” “Santa Rosa de Lima,” Alison shouts back to him. He points in the direction of a white bus, strung with portraits of Mary and Jesus. “That’s the bus,” he says in Spanish. “Better hurry, it’s leaving.”
Apologizing with my heart, I push through the men. A young boy hangs out of our bus’s open door. He says something to the driver, and the vehicle shudders to life. We run the last twenty yards. As its tires begins to roll, the boy catches my hand. I scramble up, blindly, into the belly of the bus. Behind me, Alison’s feet scrape the floor. For the moment, we are safe.
Cambridge, 2008.
I wear down the Internet with searches for the intersection of Liberation Theology and Islam. I cannot stop remembering the dogs, the police, the dead men. Our trip, nine years ago, was funded by an MIT grant. I would find out, I promised my committee, about Central American working women’s dreams. I imagined, before we set out, divining a list of priorities from the responses of my interviewees. If everyone I spoke to said that she dreamed of clean water, then I would know what I should work on. Or perhaps they would dream of schools, little concrete things, roofed with sheets of tin. Painted white. So to would this dream clarify priorities. Vaccinations, birth control, electricity. Whatever I could imagine them dreaming about, I could imagine myself championing. It felt good to know that I would so soon be useful. Happily flush with cash, I brought Alison along. We left Texas by bus in June.
We did not find what I thought we would. Time and again, woman by woman, a dream was repeated. The first woman who voiced it to me was Carmela, short haired and round, cracking eggs at the edge of the lake. “Quieres canela?” she asked, pinching brown powder between her fingers. Vocabulary failed me. She offered me her hand. It smelled of fire, of ground wood. Italian cookies. Cinnamon. I thanked her. “What do you dream of?” I asked, as she sprinkled it onto the yolks. She looked up. “Friends,” she said after a moment. “I dream of friends.”
Sometimes your heart fills up with more than one feeling at once. This is uncomfortable for me; my heart is less able to multitask than are my other sensing organs. I can run my hand over Biskit’s back, and feel both her coat and her bones. I can bite into a stuffed grape leaf, and taste brine and rice and lemon all at the same time. I can even look out of my window and take in both the rooftops and the sky.
When I remember the women of El Salvador, and the repetition of their dreams, my heart seems to swell. I am ashamed to have imagined that their dreams would be different from mine. I am sad to know that loneliness transcends national lines. And I am glad, too, to know that what these women want the most is something I can give, even without funds. I wonder how to make a living out of befriending the lonely. Then, I think of faith.
Border, Goascoran River, 1999.
There is a kilometer of no man’s land between the two countries. The bus lets us off at Salvador’s end. Ahead there is a bridge; the Goascoran River runs swift underneath its span. We have gone 120 miles in seven hours; now, facing a border crossing, darkness has come. The last yellow light of day swells into a thundercloud. It hovers at the edge of the bridge. Soon, the rain will come.
A man at the border station on the Salvadoran side stamps our passports slowly. Out in the yard, another man holds handfuls of bills. We buy lempiras from him; for ten USD, he lines my palm with threadbare bills. In ascending order of value, they are red, purple, brown and green. We pass through a door between halves of the station. Welcome to Honduras.
Here, again, our passports are taken. A guard with a black mustache disappears with them into a glassed-in room. He pours over them carefully, looking for stamps. At last, with a frown, he flips to a blank page. Then he asks for ten USD. My hand shakes. It is common practice at stations like these for moneychangers and guards to cooperate in a sort of genteel mugging. All the money one changes on one side of the fence is requested again on the other. I imagine the station filling up with confiscated bills. Should I say that we don’t have it?
I look at Alison. Her eyes are tired, green. While I am wondering what to do, the sound of an engine approaches. A red pickup rolls into view, from the direction of the bridge. Two men, dressed as ranchers but wearing silver, line up behind us. I pay the guard half of our money. “Are there any more buses tonight?” I ask him. He shakes his head. “You will have to stay here.” His stamp is precise.
The yard beyond the station is black, little more than an expanse of packed dirt, with children at its edges. Perhaps a dozen rush forward at our arrival. “Come to my house,” a little girl says. The whites of her eyes are wide. “No, come to mine,” cries a boy. Two dozen hands half-push, half-pull us toward an embankment. It is too dark to make out their homes.
Suddenly, two white beams of light pierce the yard. The red truck from the other side of the border rolls through an open gate. The driver yells at the children, who disperse, and then directs his attention to us. “Get in the truck.” We do not move. His passenger leans out of his window. “The buses are over,” he says. “You can ride in the back.”
I consider our options. “What do you think?” I ask Alison. “I don’t want to stay here,” she says. “But I wish that we had a knife.” The thought of weaponry scares me. I don’t know how to use a knife, nor would I want one used on me. The driver opens his door, and walks around to the back of the truck. He lowers one end of the tail grille. I wonder if he understands English, and hope that he does not.
My heart beats against my ribs as we climb inside. I lean on my pack, near the rear of the cab, and together we pray.
Mansfield by Rain
Category: Islam - Posted On: February 3rd, 2008
The choir loft has been painted milky green, and the walls are trimmed with jade. Two feet beneath the balcony, a floor has been erected from arch to arch. It is carpeted with the color of grass. Here and there, lines of tape course diagonally across the floor. Marwa comes to me to read Qur’an. My wrist shakes uncontrollably: small bones flutter under layers of black.
She hands me the mushaf. Its cover is gold on green. It is familiar in my hands. An identical copy came with my classroom. She has opened it to a Sura that I do not recognize. I sound out its title. Al Mutaffifin. We sit knee to knee on the carpet, and in the hissing-sweet voice of a person losing her baby teeth, she reads.
I keep pace with my eyes. “Kalla inna kitaba al-abrari lafee AAilliyyeena.” The deeds of the righteous are written down. Marwa stops at ayah 18. “Actually, that’s all we know,” she says. I smile, ready to tell her how proud I am when a brother from the front row begins the call to prayer. The syllables stretch long; they sink, and they rise. God is greater, God is greater. I hug Marwa and whisper to her. “You are amazing, mama. I am proud of you.”
A thin line of women shuffles into place beside us. Marwa runs away, replaced by her big sister. Naima, the religion teacher, sits on my other side. “Are you feeling better now?” she asks. I try to whiten my eyes. “Yes, thank you.” She blushes a little, and rubs her hand along my back. “We’re sorry,” she says. “We were laughing because of the picture of Hamza that you had open on your desktop, not at you. I don’t know if that’s why….” her voice trails off.
Great tiered windows stand bare before a leaden sky. Ahead of us, the men draw in. A little boy kneels against his father’s side. I think of telling Naima that it wasn’t the laughter which hurt. It was their manners. After thirteen years, my heart is still homesick for my culture. Allah, forgive me. I don’t want to be here, where you have written that I should be. Ya Allah, send me home.
My mouth aches. I measure the musalah with my eyes. It is built in a former church, way up near the ceiling, in a space normally reserved for air. In its marriage of Catholicism and Islam, it reminds me of my heart. There are perhaps 12 men, 9 women, 4 children. The imam, Brother Sofiane, stands up and begins to pray. I do not recognize his dua. There are words I know, like bid’ah, hamd, rabb, siraata, Musa. I feel close to understanding the rest. I lean forward to listen.
After two minutes, he switches to English. “All innovations to our faith are wrong,” he begins. “There is no adding nor taking away.” Naima shifts her weight from her feet to her side. We are so close that I feel her muscles stretch. “There are people who die before they ever live.”
“There are people who move through the world in their physical bodies, long after their hearts have died. There are people like animals, who care only about eating and drinking. There are people who do as the beasts do, who cannot laugh, believe, or love.”
“In other words, there are people who have no impact. And yet, among our history, we know of people whose impacts have far outlasted their physical selves. Our prophet Muhammad, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, is alive today. His impact stretches on. When we speak of him, we use the present tense. This is what I mean by life.”
“The question is, how do you make an impact?” He takes me in with his eyes. So often I wonder about impact. It is a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, as Pamuk says, which drives me to write. I want my impact to outlive me. I want my words to touch hearts after my hands are gone. Sofiane seems to know. “You have an impact by committing yourself to the path in service of the one idea, the one thing, you believe in.” He does not say what this one thing should be. There is, in his lack of specificity, an acknowledgment of the individuality of our paths. “You have an impact when you sacrifice everything.”
“For the person who has committed himself or herself to a path, there are certain obstacles which may arise. There are things which cause us to hesitate, to lessen the strength of our impact. If you are going to sacrifice everything, you should know about these obstacles. You must recognize them, if you are to press on.”
The musalah is silent. Now and then a brother enters from the door near the qebla; he takes his place silently, walking face down, as if loathe to be noticed. The children who are present are silent. No one runs or laughs or cries. The creak of trees blackened by rain divides the afternoon.
“The first obstacle concerns the fruits of your labor. You may find, through your sacrifice, that you underestimate the length of your path. Indeed, our paths are infinite. We attach your hopes to swift reward. We expect immediate impact. We forget that making a change to the world takes a long, long time.”
He puts his hands in his pockets. In his coloring, he is like me: pale eyes, dark hair, tallowy skin. It is inexplicably comforting to be addressed by a member of the Ulema in whom I can see my physical reflection. I want to feel that my appearance is normal. I do not want to always look like the outsider. “Hazrat Habab, it is reported in a sahih hadith collected by Bukhari, was once asked about the difficulties that he had faced during his life. By way of offering a response, he pulled up his shirt, and showed his interrogator his back.”
“There were holes. He had been tortured with burning rocks, over which he was dragged, until the flesh on his shoulders and spine baked away. His scars were deep and terrible.” Naima shivers next to me. I wonder if Marwa is listening, and if she is afraid. “The Prophet Muhammad, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, used to turn red in the face when he was angry. When he heard of Habab’s performance, he blushed. He called Habab to him. ‘Be patient, Habab,’ he told his companion. ‘Have you forgotten that before your time, there were tribes of men who buried their believers in earth up to their necks, and then left them to die? Have you forgotten that there have been tribes who split men in two with their swords? Have you forgotten that many other people are worse off than you are?’
“Within Habab’s lifetime, Islam had spread across the Peninsula. The fruits of his labor came, and were greater than he had expected — but first, he had to wait.” My heart pangs at this. I think of Kafka, who died before he was considered great. I wonder if it is vanity, comparing myself to him. I wonder at the status of my proposals. Do they wait on someone’s desk? Have they already been binned? Will they ever tell me? Will I ever know? In Sofiane’s words, I hear advice. It is not worth stopping on my path to care.
“A chief cause of failing to make an impact is giving up because your reward has not yet come.” My feet have fallen asleep. I want to move without anyone knowing. “The next obstacle that may greet you is feeling outnumbered, like a stranger, alone.”
It is one of the miracles of the Holy Qur’an that when one opens it to a given page, one always finds a personal aspect to the message there given. Hearing Sofiane speak now, I feel the same privacy. “When Islam began, when the Ummah was born, the Muslims were as strangers. ‘Islam began as something strange, and it shall return to being something strange, so give glad tidings to the strangers,’ Prophet Muhammad said. If you feel like a stranger now, that is good. It is a sign that you are on your own path.”
“Remember Prophet Musa, alayhi salaam. Firaun gathered 70000 magicians before him, with the intention of proving Musa to be no better than an enchanter. The magicians threw down their staffs, and by means of illusion caused them to appear to wiggle like snakes. Then Prophet Musa threw down his staff. With the grace of Allah, it was transformed. It became a real snake, and quickly, it gobbled up all of the magicians’ sticks.” I see Yul Brenner as Firaun, and am struck then by the continuity between the Christian version of the story, and Islam’s completion. I have never heard this story from an Islamic perspective. I am glad that what I have learned already is complemented, not replaced.
“Prophet Musa was surely outnumbered. He was a stranger, and he was alone. But when Allah’s miracle shone through him, he showed others the path to Islam. So powerful was Allah’s sign, that even the magicians converted. They knew full well that the remainder of their path on earth would last less than twenty four hours. Still they sensed that it was better to offer themselves to God and to die than to continue in the service of Firaun. Through his position as an outsider, Prophet Musa had a great impact. As a stranger, he brought change.”
Then I remember Pierre, old and black, who told me about light. “The rest of the body needs the eyes,” he told me. “You do not fit in. You will not fit in. But you are light. You recognize light. Because of you, other people can see.” In Brother Sofiane’s words, I hear the same message delivered to my heart. I try to reconcile my strangeness with my current vocation. At school we do not want the children to feel like outsiders. Our traditions are almost understated because they are cast as so familiar. We present Muslim culture to our students as if it were the most normal thing in the world. And yet, we live in America. Here, when contrasted with the majority, our traditions are indeed strange. I wonder if my students will be angry when they find themselves on the periphery. I wonder if they will be disappointed with me.
My mind has wandered while Brother Sofiane begins his last point. “Finally,” he says, “you might feel jealous of other people’s resources. You might look around you, and you might be overwhelmed by what you don’t have. You might feel it unfair that you must so keenly struggle when the others around you seem to enjoy such ease. This happens to us in Islamic schools.” I reflect on my bank account, on my ailing car, on weighing of the price of meat against the price of gasoline. I feel the hunger in my stomach of weeks of letting transportation win. Yes, I feel jealous.
Brother Sofiane is tranquil. “Do you forget,” he asks, “that Allah multiplies the value of our deeds by ten, by twenty, by one hundred? In the balance, it is not our material wealth which fills the scales. There are people who make six figures. There are people who make much more money than we do. But you might be surprised to find that your quality of life is better than theirs. You might forget, when you sacrifice, the magnification of blessings.”
“Remember the Ansar. They came to Prophet Muhammad jealous and complaining. ‘Why do you give money and camels to the other tribes, but you give nothing to us? Our lives are impoverished. Where is our reward?’ Prophet Muhammad, sal Allahu alayhi wa sallam, admonished them. “Surely the reward I have given to the other tribes is much less than the reward that you will have. They have been given material things, camels and money, because this is all that they have earned. But you, oh Ansar, your reward will be great. You have been here, with the Muslims, since the beginning of the migration. You have been honored.’”
Sofiane pauses to bring his point home. My heart spins like a pocket watch. “We wonder, as Islamic school teachers, why we sacrifice everything.” His voices rises. For a moment, there is almost anger in his tone. “If you want to leave and make a lot of money, if this is what your heart tells you to do, then go. Then this is not the right place for you.” My cheeks burn.
He softens his voice. “But if you stay, you will be building the future of our religion. Without teachers, there will be no next generation of Muslims. If you stay, this will be your reward: you will see our Islam carried on.” He slows down. The khutba is coming to an end. “I do not say this to make you feel good, I say it because it is true. Being a teacher is following the example of Prophet Muhammad.”
He stops, and his voice drops to almost a whisper. The dua marking the end of the sermon begins. He holds up one finger while he prays. There is little I understand in the prayer. He asks for peace upon Prophet Muhammad, and upon Prophet Ibrahim. He asks for peace in our hearts. He recites from the Qur’an words concerning patience. At last, we smooth our faces and stand.
It is time for communal prayer. There are precious few Surah which I recognize upon their recitation. It is one of my weaknesses as a Muslim that my knowledge of the Qur’an is still so shallow. At school, I am learning a new Surah, with my students. In my heart, I speak to Sofiane. “Brother, would you please read Surat al Ala as today’s short sura?” I want my feeling of connectedness to stay with me through the end of the prayer. I cover my heart with my palms as we begin.
We sing “Ameen” at the end of Surah Al-Fatiha. Brother Sofiane briefly pauses. Then his voice picks up, ringing.
Sabbihi isma rabbika al-aAAla
Allathee khalaqa fasawwa
Waallathee qaddara fahada
Waallathee akhraja almarAAa
FajaAAalahu ghuthaan ahwa.
It is the Surah my heart asked for. I stand and listen and pray, and in the recitation, I sense my reward. I am finally beginning to understand.
(Warning, this piece is about love)
Category: School, Islam - Posted On: January 23rd, 2008
Here’s a piece, perhaps not quite done, which I am working on for Baraka’s anthology. Her topic is Muslim love and dating. Subhan Allah, there is little I feel less prepared to discuss. My knowledge of these things is like my knowledge of driving stick shift: I can tell you in theory how it works, but have never succeeded in practice.
The pedal vibrates under my foot with the highway’s dips and hills. It is morning, before seven, and the sun is in my eyes. I have thirty more miles to go. I pause in my remembrance to adjust my seat. Saffiyah’s misbaha is heavy in my lap.
For a few miles between towns, Route 95 runs due east. This morning, day comes earlier than I can remember it; light burns up the road ahead, and even with the mirror pulled down, I cannot see.
I concentrate on the reflection of the lane’s white broken stripe. It comes in flashes, here and there, just enough to steer by. I wonder if everyone around me is blind, too. There must be something to be done. What have I overlooked? How can we speed on together, if none of us is sure of the limits of our path?
It is one of my morning mysteries. The road rises around a copse of oak trees, great and bare and black. In the autumn, water vapor rose up their trunks in clouds of white. I loved it then, watching the mist crawl heavenward, while the leaves fell down. In it there seemed a balance between generation and sleep. Now, in winter, the land is only good for waiting.
I know what the earth waits for. Seeds, rain, the growth of shoots. The slow journeys of the worms. Few things in my life have hit with the endless crushing boredom of late winter: moving back to America. Crossing the Pacific. Graduating from MIT. A bus trip, when I ran away, from Boston to Boulder. The same bus trip, six days later, when I came running back.
In those days I learned an approach to patience, involving a world of blue light. First in your mind, you have to see the smallest pinprick of blue. Slowly, slowly, hold it there. Concentration fuels this flame; when you have established a firm enough grasp on the light to trust it not to die, then you must see it begin to grow. It becomes as big as a marble. It grows to the size of a cue ball. Slowly, it must expand in your mind’s eye until all else has given way.
When your whole mind is full of blue light, then you may move within it. The world inside of you will have become perfectly, cobalt clear. Somersault. Cross the street. Deliver mail, watch passersby. Everything is safe.
I am nodding off. Driving is not the best time for this exercise. I shake myself. Wake up, Anna Marie. A purple-black sun burns the inside of my eyelids when I blink. Today I am too tired for news or عَرَبيْ. Without Saffiyah to read Qur’an, I am left remembering.
She sat in the front seat, serenely in white, every inch the Imam’s wife. I was nervous and proud to be driving her, as if gone were the Muslim Pinocchio girl, and transformed in her place, the real me. In the rear view mirror, I watched Aanab asleep in her big sister’s lap.
With her niqab pulled below her chin, Saffiyah studied me. “Did you always want to be a teacher, when you were a little girl?” I asked. She smiled, piling hand wipes in the change trough. They were lemon-scented, stamped with red.
“When I was a girl, all I could think of was my family,” she said. “Even before I knew them, I loved them. I loved my husband before we ever met. I loved my sons and my daughters before they were born. When I thought of my future, I could only dream of them. I felt them coming to me long before they arrived.” She extracted two thin packets of gum from her purse. Opening one, she unwrapped and passed a piece to me. The other she lay to rest atop of the hand wipes. A present.
“I decided to become a teacher so that I could be near them as much as possible. I thought, this way, I could stay with them during the day. When they went away to school, they would still be with me.” She smiled serenely into her mirror, watching her daughters. “Now I have been here for ten years,” she said. “I have written a book, and I have studied English. In the meantime, my other children were born. Now, I have five.”
Then as now, her conviction moved me. For a few minutes I sat quietly. I have resisted wholeheartedly loving my future family, because I am afraid that I will never find them. I fought to push away my American fear of failure. “Sister Anna,” Saffiyah spoke, “What do you do when you go home?”
I did not need to think long to answer. “When I go home, I write.” She nodded, waiting. “What do you write?”
My answer came out all bunched up. “I went to Oman a few years ago, to learn about Islam and ‘Araby. I have written a set of essays, maybe sixty-thousand words, about being there. It started with taxi rides, and grew until it talked mostly about me.” Saffiyah nodded, but stayed quiet. “And now, I guess I write mostly about Islam in America. I write about the things that happen in my life.”
“This is very good,” Saffiyah said. “You write so that other people will learn from your experiences. You write to share what you know, about Islam and living. This is dawah.” She opened her purse, and took out a package of clear plastic. “When you are in the car, remember God. You can make dhikr with these.” A set of stone beads, like black pearls, rested in the palm of her hand. In my hesitation to take the gift, Saffiyah saw my doubt. “It will help you to reach out,” she said. “It will give you strength to share.”
I drift back to the morning’s drive as the first signs of my exit appear. Resting against my stomach, I feel Saffiyah’s beads. My heart struggles. I cannot concentrate on dhikr. I keep thinking about love.
I permit myself to fantasize on only one of my three highways. The last leg south, where the speed limit increases, I sweeten my morning with dreams. Dear husband, I think to the world. I love you wherever you are. Dear children, I say to myself. You are in my heart.
The road is straight enough to check my hijab. With one hand, I unsnap the visor’s mirror. I steal a glance. My undercap and scarf are more or less straight, and more or less unwrinkled. I look the same as always, save the rounded flesh between my eyes and cheeks. There, like ripples cut in sand, run a fan of tiny lines. I wonder if what Joan said is true, if teaching really does make you old.
Vanity, be gone. I push the feeling away. “Auzu billahi min ash-Shaytan ar-Rajim.” I collocate memories and dreams, like charms on a bracelet. My favorite two, warm and worn, are of the house and the smile.
The house sits between two fields, one orange and one green. Cabbages grow in rows near the road. Around the bend, pumpkins give way to corn. In Autumn, a stripe of sunflowers marked the edge of the vines; now, they are bare stalks. I still think they are beautiful. I have been taking pictures with my eyes for almost 100 days.
The geese walk thick as thieves in the shadows of its awnings. The house is for rent. It is three miles from school; it is small, delicate, white. It is attached to a plant nursery; the second day I visited Sharon, I stopped in to ask its price. A heavy-set man in front of the pesticides welcomed me. “What can I do for you, sweetheart?” he asked. How Iowan he seemed, as if he could be my uncle. Ours is the habit to love with our words.
I prepared my excuse. “I am looking for nontoxic spray to get rid of aphids, if you have anything like that. Something that might possibly be used around cats and children.” The man plucked over to a shelf, and handed me a spray bottle. “We have neem, if you like, which is organic. You can read the label.” He paused. “Is there anything else?”
I steeled myself. “Also I was wondering if you happened to know how much that house rents for.” Embarrassed, sort of, to be asking after something unaffordable. He rang up the spray, and smiled at me. “Maybe $2100?” he said. “I’m doing some work on it at the moment. But it is adorable. You should see it.”
A cat stalked across the counter, and offered me its head. I ran my fingers along its neck, and watched it spread its paws. “Thank you,” I said. “Another time.” Behind the cash register, rows of pine and ivies ran across a stone turtle brigade. I left slowly, and a round brown dog shuffled by to say hello. I held up my hands, willing it not to touch me.
The man saw and understood. “Casey!” he called, “Come back here.” Wagging her tail, Casey sulked back to her owner’s knee. I walked out through the garden, back up the road to my car. As I passed the house, I looked inside. Everywhere were signs of care. The empty cupola, windows streaming sunlight into a tiny room. A mosaic of plate glass windows, one replaced with a slice of red, another with Seven-Up green. Two rose bushes and a weather vane. A yard, with grass to mow. I passed it sadly then, thinking of how quickly it would go to someone else.
Months have passed, and the house still stands vacant, as if it were waiting to be mine. I approach it in daydreams, but never alone. It is only half my dream. The other half is my memory of one particular smile.
Early on Eid ul Fitr, the wind in Roxbury ran cold. A carnival of books and sweets filled the parking lot behind the mosque; down near the street, rows and rows of colorful robes sparkled in the morning sun. Inside on a concrete floor, a thousand women prayed.
The Imam spoke of America, and our place in it. His voice reached out to the strugglers, and pulled us to our feet. “For all of you who are not sure, we Imams have your back. For all of you who struggle, we are here for you. You are part of us. You are welcome. You will not be turned away.”
I could have wept with the feeling of welcome. I followed the women downstairs after the khutba, and wandered across the lot. Alone, I fingered books and headscarves. I sounded out verses, printed in black and gold, of the Holy Qur’an.
After ten minutes, I was cold. I wandered to a rack of abayas. Crimson, wine, green, and black, they whispered sleeve to sleeve. I held their price tags one by one, each more expensive than the last. I rounded the rack, to check those hung in back. There, from across the parking lot, I felt someone smiling at me.
There are angry smiles, sad smiles, scared smiles, toothy smiles, toothless smiles, tired smiles. There are friendly smiles, easy smiles, open smiles, baby smiles. In Iowa, as with winks, smiles form half of our social currency. Of them, I am a connoisseur. I am also expert in their practice.
The smile I felt from across the lot was of the very best sort. A person, standing with his family, looked up and caught my eye. He beamed at me. I did my best to return the kindness, and went back to looking at clothes. After a few minutes, happier, I readied myself to go.
As I walked down toward the sidewalk, I passed two people waiting at the masjid’s edge. A man, perhaps my age, and a woman wrapped in pink, older. I did not know them at first, until the man opened his mouth to speak. He was neatly dressed, with longish hair, wearing glasses with round frames.
“Are you Anna?” he asked. As he spoke, his smile returned, and I recognized him from the lot. Subhan Allah, I thought. “Yes,” I said, “I am.” I willed the man to say his name, but he did not. “Listen,” he said. “I just want you to know that I really like your writing. Prose, as you write it, is rare.” He paused, and I tried to thank him. I wondered at the etiquette of asking strange men their names. “I write for Octopus Crime,” he said. I waited, but no more information came. “Keep up the good work.”
I thanked the man, and smiled at his mother. Slowly, I started back home. After a month of fasting, my spirits felt inexplicably high. A hundred “what if” thoughts fought for space in my brain. With the slap of my shoes on the sidewalk, I wrestled them away. “If Allah wills, you will be friends,” I told myself. “What could you want besides that?”
What indeed. I slow down, entering Sharon, and try to return to today.
“A smile is charity of the heart,” I tell myself as I pull my car into its space. The school lot is empty, save Dalal’s van. I wrestle my backpack from the backseat, and put on the parking brake. As I prepare to meet the day, I put away my secret thoughts, of empty houses and friends. Inside the building, other people’s children are waiting. They are more tangible than mine.