Islamophobic Misreading is when you are an ESL teacher and your assistant principal says that he wants the newcomer hijabi girl to remain in your class because you may speak “Islam” and that you will know “how to handle these kinds of parents.”
When you explain that you don’t know any spoken “Islam” and your Arabic is limited to only a couple of phrases from Bollywood movies, he says that any commonality is sufficient.
At testing time (when the students are required to take their high-stakes tests even though they’ve been in the country less than a year) he says that as the student took the test (with the Egyptian Arabic speaker hired by the district as a translator) he noticed the student did not write in “hieroglyphics” but rather wrote in “normal” language of English letters in “fucked up phonetics.”
Islamophobic Misreading is when the Dominican man working at the restaurant called Caridad says to you, “Why you have a beard, no tienes calor? Where are you from?”
You answer one at a time, “I just like it. Yeah I get hot, but I’m from Florida. I’m of Indian descent.”
“Oh, India? You are trying to look like a real Indian?”
“Well, I’m not sure what you mean.”
“You should shave your beard, you’re a handsome guy. You are Muslim, right, you don’t want to look too Muslim.”
“Well, actually no, I’m not Muslim.”
“Oh, so you’re telling me that I can trust you.” He laughs at this for a loud thirty seconds.
Islamophobic Misreading is the public response to the death of Osama Bin Laden. You recorded in your journal:
i didn’t want to hear american reactions, or see the joy in the people dancing on the pavement rendering flags in a nationalist seizure.
a friend posts on Facebook “may god protect all the american troops and the christians in the middle east. and bomb those rag heads.”
obama says, “thanks to the tireless and heroic work of our military and our counterterrorism professionals, we’ve made great strides in that effort.”
while this is happening another drone dropped a bomb—dropped on the tribal waziristani hills raising the death toll to 109,895 civilian deaths.
i don’t understand words like collateral damage and civil.
whose agenda is this mysterious sea burial serving, why wouldn’t the body be sent to the family.
dear christian god teach me to turn the other cheek or to love my neighbor.
Islamophobic Misreading is when you are singing your Aji’s song and the words are Ultan-Sultan. You sing for your aunts and uncles and your father laughs and says to his brothers and sisters, “They must have been fullah with names like Ultan and Sultan,” unaware that his Muslim brother-in-law is sitting right there.
Fullah, or fullahman is the Caribbean Bhojpuri word for the Hindi mussalman or Muslim.
Your father profusely apologizes and your uncle says, “It’s too bad you think our relationship is so fragile that I wouldn’t be able to heal from the wound of your comment.”
When he leaves, the whole family starts laughing.
Islamophobic Misreading is when the principal at your school asks if you are allowed to shave your beard, asking also if you are keeping it for “religious” reasons.
The security guard in full police regalia, complete with a pistol, at the entrance to the elementary school says she wouldn’t know if your name wasn’t Mohammad Singh—her version of an arbitrary brown name.
She points out whenever she sees you that you look “more and more traditional.”
Islamophobic Misreading is sitting around a table with seven of your New York City Teaching Fellow cohort buddies after a day of intense swimming in the Pacific on a random beach in Costa Rica and one of your “buddies” says, “Islam is the worst religion, it’s so oppressive to women and the Koran is evil for promising murderers virgins in the hereafter.”
You ask him if he has ever read any of the Koran outside of the surahs the media publishes for its own ends, if he’s ever heard Hadith, or whether he’s considered the fact that women are objectified and suppressed in the West—that the covering, the hijab and burqa, can sometimes be liberating. In places where there is a growing atheism, virulent and itself oppressive when imperialistic—the new religion of the educated white people who once told brown folks that we were animals based on “science”—a woman who covers herself is clearly aligning herself with something, be it a belief in god or an identifier to say that she will be subjugated by neither a Western norm nor a meta-narrative where she must display her own body for the pleasure, enjoyment, and consumption of men.
He moves on to say that the Indians in Trinidad make a farce of Indian culture—that they are not real Indians.
Islamophobic Misreading is when people observe your skin color and beard and hear a non-American accent in your voice. You walk into a store to buy yogurt, cheese, and bread and three women in hijabs smile at you and ask you in Urdu if you could help them get the paper towels down from the top shelf.
As you check out, the young white clerk asks you if you need a bag, and when you tell him, “Oh, it’s okay, thanks, I have my own,” he asks again in a loud and slow voice, pointing to the bags and to the three items he just scanned. You laugh and say in a slow loud voice, “THANK YOU, NO BAG, I HAVE MY OWN.”
He rolls his eyes and sighs, “I don’t speak Islam.”
Islamophobic Misreading is when a friend hears you say, “I’m from Guyana,” and says, “You can’t say you’re from Guyana, you were born in London.”
You feel it’s a bit imperialistic for a white person to tell you so definitively what you are and where you’re from. Your friend sometimes tells others about how “untraditional” your family is. Your friend has never had to explain a long history for people to understand where he’s from. He simply has to say, “My family was from Michigan before we moved to Florida.”
You have to say, “I was born in London, my parents are from South America, but we are actually of South Asian descent.” You cut corners by saying things like, “I am South Asian, I am Indian, I am Guyanese.” These answers change when you talk to different people. If the person is South Asian, you say, “I am Guyanese.” When you talk to a white person you say, “I am Indian,” to avoid their questions.
Islamophobic Misreading is when a white New York poet asks why you’re afraid to board the subway and then proceeds to ask, “Is it because you’re a terrorist?”
Islamophobic Misreading is the question, Can South Asian—presumably Muslim families—ever accept queerness without having first assimilated?
A New York therapist asked you what it was like “coming out” to your parents in your culture. You tell her that it was okay, even though your father will never fully come to terms with it.
She says with the understanding, do-gooder sparkle in her eyes, “That’s not good enough. You deserve a family that supports you despite what Allah thinks. You may have to eventually stop talking to them until they can accept you.”
You say that your mother’s cool.
Motioning to a picture of your family she replies, “Your mother is very modern, she even wears jeans!”
Your mother wears jeans, skirts, salwar kameez, and bathing suits. She often points out to you other South Asian men who may be queer whom she thinks you would find attractive. You joke about marrying doctors with property in the Virgin Islands.
Islamophobic Misreading is when Christians mock the Muslim belief in the Prophet’s flight to Medina, his literacy skills, or his conversation with Jibril, because Christians don’t rely on other people’s translations of texts done centuries ago, because Christians don’t handle poisonous snakes claiming to be protected by the holy spirit, because they don’t deny their children health care, believing either God will heal them or that an illness is God’s will, and because they don’t believe that they are waiting for a god to come from the sky and take them all “home,” like aliens to a mother ship.
Islamophobic Misreading is when the teachers responsible for the fifth-grade graduation ceremony move the only girl in a hijab from the front row that faces the parents to the back of the auditorium, claiming, “She doesn’t know the words to the songs very well and she is hunched over.” They keep, however, the newcomer Dominican boy in the front row who has just come back to school after several weeks of sick leave. He doesn’t know the words at all and will not be able to master them by the graduation ceremony two days from now. The newcomer Dominican student does not wear a hijab, often referred to in the school as a “headdress.”
Islamophobic Misreading is everyone expecting you to shave your beard since it’s not a religious act of devotion for you. You are trapped into elevator conversations by WASPy women saying things like, “Are you going to trim it with a buzzer first and then shave it, or are you going to just go and have someone else remove it for you?”
You obviously will not keep it since it makes you “look too Muslim,” (and “you’re an American, aren’t you?”) as a coworker points out as you leave the elevator.
Islamophobic Misreading is always being the person who is randomly searched by the TSA airport security guards. You start a collection of airport security slips that read, “Your luggage was chosen randomly to be searched”—two for every trip you take.
Islamophobic Misreading is your complicity when you ask your sister to cover her shoulders and bra straps with a sweater in eighty-six degree weather because you are in a very conservative neighborhood and you assume she will be harassed on the streets. She refuses to see your point and replies, “Don’t tell me what to do, this is America. I thought I was free.”
Islamophobic Misreading is when your one student who usually wears a hijab takes it off to put on a baseball cap for the fifth-grade field trip to Chelsea Piers and another teacher says to you, “Wow, she is becoming more American. I almost didn’t recognize her without her headdress.”
You tell her it’s a hijab and that she and her sister wear it of their own volition. She says, “Someone should tell them that they are free now that they are in America.”
Islamophobic Misreading is when you do not “pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America” because you don’t believe that “with liberty and justice for all” is true at all and another teacher watches you and asks you to stand outside so none of the students sees a teacher not pledging, modeling dissent, due to your “religious reasons.”
Islamophobic Misreading is President Obama refusing to go to the Swarna Mandir, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, because he didn’t want people to see him covering his head “like a Muslim.”
American Guyanese Diwali
I buy marigolds and paper pictures of the three devas, I light the diyas into prayer, that every new home is a Diwali. To feel home, the art of where I’m not from, the batiks, the women playing three instruments, I wish I had that many hands, one would be fully in my pants, the others would be at the chowki and belna, the others would be a mystery, what books would they thumb through and realize this is no mirror. I have never been vain enough to think everyone here is a guitar or the fingerpicking “Born in the Land of the Mighty Roraima” was an actual creation story. A loud outer metronome keeps the boys in line. Even now I keep my Aja’s scissors sharp enough to keep the boys in rum line. Every time I strike a match om my om breath om blows it out. Every time I intend to fulfill dharma, I pick up a flute and play jai jagdish hare, victory to god of the universe and my navel string aches from a garbage dump or an animal’s belly. I am as inauspicious as a vulture: a father’s son who is not a son. Every time I strike a match it is not a sun.
Aji Recording: Love Beat Handsome
LOVE BEAT HANDSOME. Na care how yuh deh. But when you love somebody you love ’am. You Aja been get twenty-two year an’ me been one lil chile wha’ jus’ a grow up. Dem days me been happy. When me live a me muddah in law house, me been real happy.
pardesi sajanwa ke aaya re
adar karo pardesi sajanwa re
An’ when spring wata does come, rivah side wata does come ’e been a swamp. Whe’ abi house been deh been a one swamp. So battam de house wata does always come. When a spring come, ’e a full a battam house. So much wata ’e does get. Me does take one piece a sal’fish an’ tie ’em pan twine—bab twine. An’ me does sit doung pan de step, de house step an’ does get one bucket an’ one basket. An’ me put da hook, da bait pan de twine an’ duck ’em in de wata.
An’ big big sharigah does come. An’ when ’e a bite de bait, ’e a run wid ’am. Yuh lif’ ’am easy easy an’ tek a basket an’ yuh a swim ’am out. You a cetch ’am an’ take a grass knife an’ bore ’am an’ yuh put ’am in yuh bucket. Leh ’e na run. When ’e get a bore ’e na run. So yuh bore ’am an’ put ’am in a basket.
An’ in de bucket. An’ when yuh get half bucket an’ come a yuh house—yuh come out from de wata an’ pan de step an’ yuh come pan de landing now. You clean ’am, you wash ’am, yuh cook, an’ you eat. Me does bail ’am wid coconut milk. Sometime you a fry ’am wid black peppah. Same kine sharigah wha’ bite yuh han’. Da same kine sharigah.
If yuh see a big big one, too—yuh cetch ’am an’ you a cook. Dem days a done. Yuh cyan’ get dem back. De battam house. Wha’ dem a call a basement he’ abi call ’em battam house. When de wata gan an’ de place a dry, yuh a dab ’am—dab da battam house wid cow dung an’ mud. ’E does be shine shine. Every day abi does siddung an’ eat righ’ deh, me an’ you Aja an’ ’e faddah an muddah. An’ Lalloo, too. Cook upstais an’ eat a battam.
So when wata come in now, a ting na mess up? ’E na nasee? So you cyan’ do nutting. You cetch de crab an’ t’ing an’ you a cook. One time me an’ you Aja been cetch about one hundred crab. You siddung pan de step wha’ you come doung fe go a battam—same step you siddung. De wata been so much so you take a sal’fish an’ tie ’am an’ so crab a come an’ hook onto de sal’fish. An’ so you na cetch ’am?
Abbi been get one barril, punchin abbi does call ’am. So me does full ’am in deh. An’ every time you a mek soup you tek about five-six a dem an’ me a clean ’am an’ me a wash dem an’ me a mek soup wid ’am.
When nobady na deh a house. When you Aja alone—me does cetch ’bout three-four a dem from de barril, clean ’am, an’ fry ’am wid black peppah. An abbi two been siddung pan de coungtah an’ abbi two a eat like a hell. Me faddah in law na been vex. But you know, you mus’ respec’ zat you na go show dem wha’ you a do. Abbi been get a respec’ like da—dat you cyan’ eat in front a dem. So when dem come me a t’row ’way all de crab bone an’ ting.
Me muddah in law does tell me, “Beti a you cook crab tiday, right?”
Me tell ’am, “Yes, Ma.”
“Arright”
“You want it? Leh me cook fe a you?”
’E sah, “Na beti, me go cook.” So wha’ she wan’ she go cook. Buy hassa sell every day.
Me been a de only datah in law far ’em, ’e na been get no more. Lalloo been married when ’e done dead an’ t’ing. So ’e na know none. Me a de only one. An’ me been a lovin’ fe all ’e family, all ’e cousin an’ ting. But dose days done.
gayi jawani phir na aye
chahe dudh ham litah kha
Days gan, you can do wha’ you want to but you na go get back da. Da gan.
Sangam / Confluence
LIVING IN QUEENS, my love for Bollywood reawakened and I remembered how much the color and dance enticed me. At eight I’d been bewitched. I sat with Aji in her Scarborough tenement eating phulauri and drinking Kool-Aid. On her TV, a bootleg VHS copy of the 1964 film Sangam hummed. Aji told me that sangam was the confluence of not two but three rivers: the Ganga, the Jamuna, and the mythological Saraswati River, which dried up, or perhaps never flowed, but is a crossover from the universe that guides our decisions, where stories live and breathe. This merging of three dark bodies of water is sometimes translated as “confluence,” where waters mix. In the film Sangam, Raj Kapoor, Vyjayanth
imala, and Rajendra Kumar play out what would become, in my mind, an archetypical love story—one of the ways that brown people like me are supposed to lap one another with their waters into a confluence. More than this, I would realize later, the undertow pulled the film’s threads of homoeroticism out into the open ocean—something that would happen to me.
Aji interpreted the Hindi in the film, giving me the gist in Guyanese Creole. This was the first Hindi movie I’d ever seen, and her translations were not exact.
What haunted me about this film was that Sundar and Gopal—both men—seemed as though they wanted their brown bodies to meet, though Radha was the object to be desired. At eight years old, I could see but not yet fully understand how this love could work, or what it could actually be.
“Dis bai seh he go sit Radha ’pon he plane,” Aji said of the quarrel between Sundar (played by Raj Kapoor) and Gopal (Rajendra Kumar) who attempts to seat Radha (Vyjayanthimala) on his plane. These two men love the same woman. Sundar grows up to become a pilot for the Indian Air Force, and Gopal, after returning to India from studying in London, stays behind as Sundar goes to Kashmir on a dubious mission.
Aji explained: When Gopal and Radha hear that Sundar’s plane was shot down and that he is MIA, they allow their love for each other to bloom. But Sundar lives and returns to demand Radha’s hand, who acquiesces. Eventually Sundar finds a letter from Gopal to Radha and is so vexed, he vows to kill Gopal. Eventually Gopal shoots and kills himself with Sundar’s gun so that nothing will come between Sundar and Radha’s love.
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