After a few minutes, she said, “By the way, I was talking to Maddy—Professor Madeline Okpara—and your name came up.”
“It did?”
“I told her about Renaissance Man and what you’re working on. She thinks it’s super interesting. She’d like to talk to you.”
“A history professor?”
Bisma shook her head. “Psychology.”
“That’s random.”
“She’ll give you stuff you can use. Trust me. And I found a place for us to meet her that you’re going to love.”
“It’s another library, isn’t it?”
She just smiled at me. “Are you interested?”
“Yes,” I said. “Absolutely.”
We met Dr. Madeline Okpara the next day at The Cheese Board, which is a perfect little spot in Berkeley. It is a cheese shop and bakery, but they’re known for their pizza. There is a set menu, so you can’t pick your toppings, but the crust is beautifully thin, the vegetables always fresh, and the hot green sauce they drizzle over the pies tastes like Jesus made it.
It’s a cilantro base with, and I’m pretty sure I’m right about this, serrano and jalapeño peppers to bring some heat. There’s a little garlic kick, and some lime to cut everything, and…
Bisma elbowed me, and I snapped to attention to see Maddy—that’s what she wanted to be called—smiling at me.
“Sorry,” I said, realizing that I’d been crushing on my lunch so hard that I’d missed what the professor was saying.
“Not at all. It is always nice to see young people passionate enough about something to be transported by it. Bisma tells me you’re a chef?”
“I work in a kitchen around chefs. I’m still learning.”
She nodded. “Well, I think it’s wonderful. Anyway, as I was saying, I’m really interested in how technology impacts the human psyche, and I think history is a particularly interesting field where that is happening.”
I glanced at Bisma, to see if she knew what her professor was talking about, and she said, “Social media.”
“I assume you are familiar with the maxim that history is written by the winners?”
“Sure,” I said.
Maddy paused to take a sip of water. “There is a corollary to that maxim, or at least there should be. The present, you see, is also written by the winners. When the Romans sacked Carthage, the Roman populace was insulated from Carthaginian voices. This has been the case for most of human history.”
“You don’t even have to go back that far,” Bisma said, as if I had any idea how far back the professor was reaching to pull Carthage, whatever that was, out of her hat. “Even Desert Storm happened in a very different world than we live in now.”
“This is true,” Dr. Okpara agreed. “The communal psyche of the conqueror has never before been persistently challenged by the narratives of the conquered in real time. It is an entirely new phenomena in human history, made possible, of course, by the Internet.”
“Okay,” I said, and took a deep breath. Bisma was always telling me it was okay to take my time before responding to a question or an idea, instead of rushing to say whatever seemed right. Time, she said, brought clarity, or at least the possibility of it. “So nowadays people who are wronged can actually speak up while they’re being harmed, which is different than how things were before. This makes it harder for governments oppressing other people to sell that oppression to their own population?”
Bisma gave me an encouraging nod.
“That’s cool and everything, but I’m not sure what it has to do with Churchill.”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with him,” Maddy said with a shrug. “It does, however, have something to do with your project. You see, colonialism wasn’t sold to the British populace as an enterprise of conquest. It was sold to them as a moral enterprise by which they were ‘civilizing’ the world and stewarding races who couldn’t take care of themselves. Improving them. Trying to get them to live the kinds of lives that the British approved of.”
“As Conrad points out in Heart of Darkness,” Bisma told me.
That sounded like a heavy metal band. Maybe Conrad was the lead singer or something. “Right. Conrad. Darkness. Totally got it.”
“Anyway,” the professor went on, “that kind of fiction is a lot harder to perpetuate now for any significant period of time. The truth is more difficult to suppress, in this age of lies, than it has ever been.”
“Like the claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the second war there,” Bisma supplied. “That came apart fast.”
“Not fast enough,” I said.
“In terms of history,” Bisma insisted, “it happened very quickly. There isn’t going to be any book written that will say those weapons existed.”
“She’s right,” Maddy said. “You see, the way the history of our time is written will be different than the way history has ever been written before. The narrative and the counter-narrative will have to learn to exist at the same time. It is remarkable, if you think about it.”
I frowned, trying to figure out how Bisma thought this would help me with Renaissance Man. I’d thankfully never come close to drowning before, but I imagined this is what it felt like. I was surrounded by information and it was getting a little difficult for my brain to breathe. Still, I tried.
Having awesome pizza helped. It was something real, tangible, and delicious that I understood completely.
“So,” I said after I was done with my next bite, “what you’re saying is that the British were able to let the Indians starve because they didn’t see things, didn’t see the Indians even, from the Indian point of view?”
“Precisely.” Dr. Okpara wiped her hands on a napkin, having finished her slice. “In order to justify oppression of the Other, one has to believe, and has to get all participants in that oppression to believe, that the Other is somehow fundamentally different. Do you think that the people who put my ancestors on boats and ripped them away from Africa believed that black men and women were just as human as they were?”
“No,” I said, “they thought they were better than the Africans.”
“And the British thought they were better than the Indians,” the professor said. “I believe future history will be different, though, because these narratives of superiority will be challenged by narratives of equality. The way we remember the world as it is will be entirely new.”
“That sounds wonderful, Dr. Okpara—sorry, Maddy,” I said, “but what about right now? I mean, racism is still a problem, even when everyone has a voice. People still aren’t equal. Why is that?”
“An excellent question. I would suggest to you that what is happening now is not the purview of historians.” She glanced at Bisma and smiled. “It is, rather, the domain of renaissance women. And, one supposes, all other genders as well.”
I didn’t say anything for a while, thinking about what the professor had said. There was something important here. I just had to figure it out.
Maddy smiled at Bisma. “Always a delight to see a mind at work.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Not at all. I was being perfectly sincere.”
“Thank you, Professor. It was super nice of you to speak to me.”
“It was fun. Besides, Bisma is an excellent student. I always make time for those when I come across them.”
“Still,” I insisted. “Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure, Danyal.” Then, turning to Bisma, she said, “I can see why you like him.”
“I swear to God,” Bisma said as we walked away from The Cheese Board, “I didn’t tell her that I liked you. Obviously. She just assumed.”
“So you’re saying you don’t like me? That’s a kick in the nuts.”
Bisma, who’d just stopped blushing, started going a little pink again. “No. I mean, yes. I just… you know, entirely platonically—”
“Bisma?”
“Yes?”
“I’m messing with you.”
>
She exhaled.
“Thank you for setting that up.”
“Not a problem. So what did you think?”
“She’s awesome.”
“But was it any help for the contest?” Bisma asked. “The question she raises is interesting enough to be your thesis.”
“What question?”
“Would Churchill, or the British, have acted differently if Indians had a voice and could have forced the British to see them as their equals, with lives that had the same value as their own?”
I scratched the back of my head. It sounded good. I didn’t think Tippett would go for it, though. He’d say the same thing that I’d said to Dr. Okpara. If white supremacy exists in our world, where everyone can potentially find their voice, then why would it have been any different for Churchill or the Britishers who set up the empire before him?
“It’s not enough to have a voice so you can speak up for yourself,” I said. “You need something more.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. What I do know is that Tippett will expect me to figure it out.”
Bisma’s hand brushed mine, like it had when we’d gone out together for the first time, but she didn’t pull away like she had then. I have to admit that I stopped thinking about Renaissance Man for a second.
She didn’t. “Well, at least we know to make the canvas bigger now, right? You can talk about… You’ve stopped listening to me, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Sorry.”
“And what shiny object caught your attention this time?”
“You.”
“Oh.” We walked in silence for a while, then she said, “What about me?”
“I just realized, you know, you’re helping me a lot, and there really isn’t any reason for you to. And I was just thinking I never said thank you. So—”
“It’s okay. This is what I do for fun.”
“Hang out at the library with dudes you’ve turned down for arranged marriage?”
She laughed. “Whatever. I didn’t turn you down. You turned me down.”
“I never turned you down.”
Bisma raised her eyebrows at me.
“I mean, okay, so I did. If I hadn’t, my mom was going to start making inquiries. I didn’t think you’d want her digging around in your past.”
She started to nod, then she shook her head.
“What?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I think my life would’ve been a lot different if I’d met you—someone like you, I mean—earlier. I think I could’ve been happy.”
“There’s still time to be happy, Bisma.”
“No,” she said softly. “I’m not sure there is.”
Sohrab texted to remind me that I’d promised to attend a lecture at the mosque by a big-time speaker. Honestly, I couldn’t remember making such a promise, but he insisted I’d done so earlier in the semester. His word was good enough for me.
I never did catch the name of Sohrab’s famous speaker, but that was because I arrived late. It wasn’t entirely my fault. I just went to the wrong mosque. When I finally got to the right place, finding parking was a pain. The lot was packed.
There is a cult of personality that builds up around Muslim preachers. They’re a lot like rock stars, with huge numbers of YouTube followers, lectures that sell out auditoriums, and devoted fans who dote on their every word. This guy, whoever he was, was apparently no different.
I tried to find Sohrab, but it was impossible. Eventually, I gave up and just decided to sit in the back.
The speaker was a slender, charismatic man, probably just over forty, with a habit of making dad jokes that, somehow, everyone around me seemed to find hilarious. He was articulate and engaging, and even though I didn’t really want to be here that much, I found myself actually paying attention. At least for around ten minutes, which I’m pretty sure is a personal record for me.
He was speaking about something called qalb-e-saleem, which can be translated in a few different ways: “A Sound Heart.” “An Unstained, Pure Heart.” “An Undamaged Heart.” It was a spiritual state that Muslims were supposed to aspire to, because on the Day of Judgment, according to the Quran, nothing would save people except for having a heart like that.
The rest of the lecture was a discussion about the practical applications that led to such a spiritual state, and I admit I zoned out, until the call to prayer was given, and the congregation rose to answer it.
Afterward, I found Sohrab leaning against a wall in the mosque’s courtyard, staring up at the night sky. The moon was dying and hoping to be reborn at the same time.
“How’s it going?”
Sohrab seemed to think about it for a moment, then let out a shaky sigh. “I don’t know. It is frightening to think that Allah will look at our hearts one day and know the darkness within. The things we did. The things we failed to do. We’ll be able to hide nothing from Him when the Final Judgment comes.”
“Well,” I said, “He’s like… All-Knowing, right? So it isn’t like we’re hiding anything from Him now.”
Sohrab looked at me out of the corner of his eye, then began to laugh. It echoed around the emptying mosque and became a horrible sound as it folded upon itself, carrying on after he had fallen silent. “It’s amazing how simple wisdom can be, isn’t it?”
I frowned, unsure if I’d just been insulted. “I guess.”
“It’ll be different, I think, to stand in front of the Creator, and to have Him ask you why your heart wasn’t pure, why you fell into sin. Don’t you agree?”
“I don’t really think about that stuff.”
“What do you think about?”
“Food. Girls. Music.”
He shook his head. “All of those are dangerous.”
“And God created them all.”
Sohrab didn’t take it as a joke. “As a test, you know, not as a diversion.”
“I’ve never been very good at tests,” I said, and then attempted to change the topic. “Hey, I’ve been meaning to ask you, was it true what you said in English that time? About getting the fragment of a bomb that had gone off for your sixteenth birthday?”
“Of course. I never lie. Remember when we went to Pakistan a couple of years ago?”
A whole summer without any Kaval Sabsvari sightings. Hell yeah, I remembered. It had been brutal, and not as hot as usual.
“Anyway, my mother’s father lives in Afghanistan. Kaval didn’t get to go, but I went north to visit him. When I had a birthday, my cousins gave me a piece of a spent bomb. Every boy there gets one when he turns sixteen.”
“That’s weird.”
Sohrab let out a sigh. “It’s a joke. When there is a drone strike, and the Americans end up killing a bunch of people along with the person they were actually aiming for, they just say any boy or man of fighting age that died was an enemy. That way when dead civilians are counted, the numbers look better.”
“Really?” I asked. “Why would we do that?”
“Because Americans care about perception more than they care about the truth.”
“That’s not true.”
“No? Have you heard of Khataba?”
I shook my head.
“It’s a village near where my grandfather lives. American soldiers thought that a party celebrating the birth of a newborn baby was a terrorist gathering or something. They stormed it. Killed five people, two of them pregnant women, one a teenage girl. So what did they do? The soldiers took knives and dug the bullets out of the women. They said that the men they killed were bad men. That the women had already been tied up and dead when the Americans got there. They tried to make their own victims seem like monsters. Do you know why?”
“No,” I admitted softly.
“Because they only care about what things look like, not what things really are. They tell stories that make them look noble and innocent, because if those are the only stories people hear, then those are the stories they will believe.”
/>
I stood beside him for a while, staring at the deepening night. Then I said, “We. Us.”
“What?”
“You kept saying ‘they’ when you were talking about Americans. We’re American too, you know. It isn’t ‘they’ and ‘them.’ It’s ‘we’ and ‘us.’”
Sohrab nodded and placed a hand over his heart, his tired eyes fixed again upon the unlit heavens above.
I groaned as I got into my van and turned the ignition. How did Sohrab get through life with a head so full of heavy thoughts all the time? I didn’t want that much truth in my life. I just wanted to be happy, and people who know a lot of stuff can’t be happy. That’s why they say ignorance is bliss. It’s in the Bible.
No, seriously, what tree was it that Adam and Eve were forbidden to eat from? That’s right, the tree of knowledge. I’m just saying, that’s worth thinking about. Just, you know, not too much.
The problem with thoughts, though, is that they’re contagious, and even though I didn’t want them, I’d caught them from Sohrab. It’d be a while before I was cured again.
So I sat there, brooding on my way home, trying to figure out how to help Sohrab, because my friend did need help. Unlike Zar, I didn’t think that his being religious was, by itself, an issue. The real problem was that religion was the only thing Sohrab ever seemed to think about anymore, and nothing anyone said that wasn’t connected to Islam seemed to get through to him.
Some people, even if their beliefs were outdated or imbalanced or just wrong, seemed to be unable to appreciate the validity of other experiences.
I could tell my dad over and over that it was okay to be a chef.
I could tell Kaval that going to college to get a high-paying job wasn’t the only way for a man to be worthy of her.
Bisma could tell all her marriage prospects that her past didn’t define who she was.
None of it would matter because the people we were trying to convince could only hear one story, which seemed perfect to them.
That’s why it wouldn’t have mattered to Churchill if the Indians had possessed a voice. That’s why it didn’t matter to racists today, to bigots today, that there were black and Muslim and queer and other oppressed voices. They just embraced the narrative they’d always embraced. The existence of other narratives didn’t change anything.
More Than Just a Pretty Face Page 16