by Ali Eteraz
At some point in the middle of the decade Ali Ansari started to wonder why there were no Muslim men performing in porn. He figured the answer was that there was no demand. No one got off on the idea of seeing a Muslim boning a white girl. He wanted to know why not. The answer he settled on was that America simply didn’t recognize Muslim masculinity. The only image of Muslim men America saw was of those at the receiving end of invasion, at the receiving end of the torture like at Abu Ghraib, or simply exploding themselves out of desperation. The Muslim was the butt of humiliation. Ali Ansari decided he wanted to change that.
And so Talibang Productions was launched. Ali envisioned a Muslim version of the interracial porn that he had made with Blake Nails. Husband humiliation. Cheating wife. Forced entry. Abduction. Inexplicable erotic romance in the men’s section of the mosque, with the entire congregation. He imagined nothing less than a revolution in the way the Muslim man was viewed by America.
In order to find performers, however, he had to do the hard task of wading into Muslim communities. He started by getting a hold of some cab drivers and chefs, but all of them were new to the country and wanted visa sponsorships before committing to anything experimental. Ali then turned to the second-generation youth, finding them at Sufi orders, Salafi mosques, progressive circles. He hit the big conventions, the ethnic speed-dating services that parents set up to get their children married off, and the lecture circuit where the Islamic pundits peddled books that blamed American consumerism for all the world’s ills. It turned out that finding Muslim guys eager to get into pornography was not very easy. Even more difficult was the persuasion that followed. He had to convince men who had attended mosques and listened to sermons about chastity their entire lives to unshackle themselves from their restrictions. It was next to impossible. Even the promise of touching naked white girls wouldn’t convince them.
In the end, the only group of Muslims he found who didn’t care what their community thought about them were those loosely affiliated with the Gay Commie Muzzies. They were open to performing for Talibang Productions. But as aspiring intellectuals they could only do porn ironically. It had to be meta. It had to be self-reflexive. It had to have something that undermined the very idea of “pornyness.”
At first Ali was resistant to these requirements. But as a playwright without players he had no other choice than to consent to the limitations that his performers imposed. Within a few months of working together, Talibang Productions and Gay Commie Muzzies put out their first video, entitled Gangs of Abu Ghraib. In it, a fictional and much hotter Lynndie England was put on a leash and passed around from cell block to cell block at Abu Ghraib prison. That was when Ali met Tot, who ended up playing the Iraqi prison guard who groomed Lynndie to share her body with the prisoners. The entire thing was filmed at Eastern State Penitentiary.
The film ended up being a modest financial success. There were ten thousand downloads and nearly a thousand people paid to subscribe to Ali’s video channel. He was pretty sure most of these subscribers were Muslim kids around the world. The bloggers hailed him for pushing back against the image of the Muslim male as abused, hungry, tortured, subservient. He had gotten the image of the naked victims of Abu Ghraib out of people’s minds and replaced it with machismo. Galvanized by the reception, Ali quickly directed The Terrorist, which was about a skinny Muslim guy with a small penis who started sleeping with white women and found that, compared to the men they had been with before, his penis was massive. Partly because of the uniqueness of the venture and partly because of the international network that the Gay Commie Muzzies possessed, Ali started making a good deal of money. Subscriptions made it necessary to come up with new projects, of which Osama and Ayman in the MILFline was the newest.
But while everyone agreed that Ali Ansari had the exceptional ability to turn the War on Terror into a joke, he hadn’t actually set out to be a jester. Deep down he still longed to make sizzling and serious works of interracial erotica, to introduce new shades into the American spectrum, to create a new sexual aura for the Muslim man. He firmly believed that until the Muslim man was also given the right to access the beauty of the white woman, all the platitudes of American equality would remain hollow.
During his narration, my thighs started touching against Candace’s. Her legs were light and delicate, belonging to someone inclined to flight, someone used to running, someone adept at escaping, very unlike Marie-Anne’s legs, which were powerful pillars, rooted, sedentary. I hadn’t been with a woman this light, this tiny. I wanted to pick her up and lay her down.
“Would you be interested in being in a movie?” Ali asked Candace. “There is some demand out there for hijab-domme. Putting white guys in leashes while wearing a veil. That kind of thing.”
“Leave her alone,” I pushed. “She’s not crass like you.”
Candace laughed. “Actually, I’m pretty crass. Which is why I first need to ask whether you sleep with your performers.”
“I keep it business . . . Now that we’ve taken care of that, what about gang bangs?”
“Sure. But only if it’s with nineteen guys and I represent New York.” She emphasized the number for my benefit. “But you know, even if Islam allowed it, I could never do porn. I can’t take birth control, and your guys can’t do condoms.”
We all laughed and the moment passed. But I held onto it. I feared that some kind of connection had formed between Ali and Candace; as if they both realized they shared something—the ability to take everyday motifs and make some kind of a social joke about them. I was grateful when Ali saw a pretty East African girl with a shaved head and went toward her to do his strut and worship.
Left alone with Candace, I let myself imagine being married to her, because marriage was the only way I had ever known how to understand a sexual connection with a woman. If Candace took me home, her parents wouldn’t make up excuses to try to keep us apart, because they would know that inclusion was better than exclusion. With Candace I could talk about how un-American I felt. We could even play word games about it. With Candace I wouldn’t have to believe that acts of prejudice against me were my own fault. With Candace my friendship with Ali Ansari and his theory of the American yin and yang wouldn’t be something I would have to hide. When Candace saw me wronged she would fear that the same thing might also happen to her. Marie-Anne didn’t offer any of that. How in the world had we lasted ten years? We were so different, situated in distinct levels of the American caste system. She came from the priestly class, from those who were presumed to be born with access to divinity. I was from something far lower. Perhaps even an untouchable place. My one hope had been to merge my dirty blood with her pure blood and dilute myself in a new generation. Even that hadn’t worked out.
I was just about to fashion all my thoughts into an indirect compliment when Candace looked at her phone and face-palmed.
“Shit.”
“What?”
“I just remembered. I have to get some footage of this thing in Old City.”
“You need to go?”
“I do. The story was my idea.”
I took one more shot of whiskey and paid the tab. Ali Ansari was nowhere to be seen so we went outside without him, staring at one another. Far down the street I glimpsed an old church I hadn’t noticed before, its walls caved, its glass shattered. In the faint glow of the restaurant’s sign I turned to Candace and tried to kiss her cheek.
Before I could make my move, however, she grasped me by the collar and hopped a couple of times. “Why don’t you come with me on this thing?”
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
She put her right hand in the air and made a C. Then she lowered it to her chest and nodded.
She called it “stamping crescents on the heart.” It was meant to replace “cross my heart and hope to die.”
* * *
The time before dawn. We headed out. Our fingers laced together, a stitch to fix the wound of
loneliness. We were a unity and before us the contradictions of North Philly spread out in every direction. Here there were lofty pillars and buildings that seemed like they were carved out of rocks. There the earth had been leveled, pounded, and crushed as if rank upon rank of icy angels had been tumbling to their demise in Philadelphia.
We caught a cab in front of the Divine Lorraine. The driver was an old man in a skullcap blasting Koranic recitation on his radio. He was happy to see Candace and said salaam to her. She replied effusively and touched her palm to her chest. When I failed to respond, she gave me a little rap on the knee, and had me offer the driver blessings of peace. The man’s English was not very clear; but from the sound of it he wished us well for the sacrament of marriage and for avoiding the fate of the shameless people who only wanted to “fuckchu.”
Without any traffic we flew across the city, the driver weaving through the numerous potholes, nearly running over a pair of homeless men stumbling onto Market Street. Candace took a mini–video camera from her purse and tried to pull a shot.
We disembarked at the Federal Courthouse on Market Street. The Philadelphia History Museum was just about coming to life, a solitary worker in the cafeteria mopping the floor. Candace directed us toward Independence Hall, where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were hammered out and presented. The horse-drawn carriages that took tourists around Old City had started to arrive. The breeze that swept off the Delaware River wasn’t as intense as usual. It was also humid. A slant of light from the cloudy sky cut at the buildings in Camden.
I asked Candace where we were going. She asked me if I remembered Ken Lulu, the guerrilla marketer. It turned out that after she converted, he revealed to her that he was also Muslim. Ken was short for Kenz, which meant Treasure, and Lulu meant Pearl. When she left Plutus she had delivered to him the names of a couple of her clients. In return she had requested his help for a vision she needed to execute. I asked her what it was, but she just pointed the camera in the direction of Constitution Hall and put a finger over her lips.
Suddenly, without warning, I heard the beginning of the Muslim call to prayer. Clear-throated, well-pronounced, loud, but with a slight musical accompaniment behind it. There were a total of seventeen lines recited. Then the call, rather than ending, transitioned into a rhythmic drumbeat, followed by a symphonic melody featuring a flute and piano. The composition sounded similar to some of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody, except there was a chorus of men chanting “Hu! Ya Allah!” at regular intervals. Much like Boléro by Ravel, which began pianissimo and rose to a crescendo to fortissimo possibile, the chant expanded over the ostinato rhythm of drums, which stayed constant through the piece. The end came in the form of an explosive “Hu!” that rang loud, true, and immense throughout Old City, a reverberation. My pulse raced from the rhythm, my blood felt as if it might explode out from my cuticles. My cheeks were hot enough to make the rest of my skin feel cold. A deep exhale escaped my lips.
The sound, however, was not the entirety of the piece, or even its primary vehicle. The action was in the visuals, a light show projected onto the walls of Constitution Hall. As the call to prayer and music played in the background, a giant Allah written in Arabic appeared on the wall, winking and blinking, ominously gaining in size, until it sat at the top of the building in big bold lettering. After that, one by one, ninety-nine pieces of Arabic calligraphy appeared on the wall, flickering and expanding in size like the initial Allah, but disappearing after a second or so. The music picked up and so did the pace of the projection. The names scrolled to various corners of the wall, like birds upon a tree, almost as if they had been etched into the redbrick monument, until they started to coalesce, the calligraphy interlocking to create an eight-pointed arabesque, then breaking up and reorganizing in the first Allah that had appeared on the wall, expanding and contracting like a beating heart. A beating. Heart.
A small crowd had formed during the light show. They snapped pictures and made videos. People as far away as the courthouse and the Liberty Bell Museum had stopped in their tracks to witness the projection. Even a pair of security guards posted in the area were riveted. Each time a word passed over the building I felt my insides collapsing and then exploding out into the city. By the end I felt like I had been splattered upon the streets.
Candace turned off the camera, gave a thumbs-up to Ken Lulu in the distance, and turned toward me. “You aren’t saying anything,” she pressed.
“I’m at a loss for words.”
“Is that a good thing?”
I didn’t know. This was the most intriguing thing I had seen in a long time. To place, in today’s paranoid and prejudiced world, the name of the God in the tongue of the terrorists, onto the walls of America’s most hallowed building, was nothing short of audacious. If this was Candace’s personal attestation of faith, it was more powerful, more inventive, more astonishing than any other spiritual rebirth.
I pulled her against my dark body. She was light.
* * *
The apartment was still when we entered and stayed still as I pushed Candace against the wall and we threw tongues and sighs upon and into each other. A boiler gurgled in the walls and a high neighbor blasted James Blake’s falsetto into the halls. Midkiss she pushed me away; as I told her I missed her lips, she retreated toward the bed and my arms elongated and tore her clothes. Underneath she was all rib and clavicle and sternum and bone. Her spine a series of edged diamonds going down her back. My fingers filleted through the rest of her. Her hands measured me like she was a seamstress. I dug into her gaps and spaces, prodding, testing, confirming her frailty. She was sparrow. I was snake. She was doll. I was child. I had never squeezed anyone so hard. I wanted to take her gasps from her. We got naked and I opened her up. There were no barriers between us, manmade or divine.
* * *
I woke up with my face toward a wall. Candace wasn’t in the bed. The room was humid because there was no air conditioner. There was a poster of Kunta Kinte looking down at me. It was the scene from Roots where LeVar Burton is whipped by his master because he refuses to change his name to Toby. I met Burton’s eyes and thought of Marie-Anne. This was the first time in our marriage that one of us had stayed out the entire night while the other was at home.
Candace came out of the bathroom. She wore a full-length purple dress with heels and had cinched a pale purple scarf around her head. There was a chunky bracelet on her right hand and a thin rosary around her left wrist. She brought a cup of coffee and a kiss and sat down on the edge of the bed.
“You didn’t want to get up for the morning prayer? I tried waking you.”
“I’ve never done it,” I said, taking hold of the cup and her waist.
“It could be something we do together,” she said.
I heard the sound of a bus sloshing in the distance. I pulled her in and leaned around to look at the rain. “There will be a lot of things we’ll be doing together.”
We headed out to Strawberry Mansion and ate halal food at Crown Fried Chicken. Candace was convinced that meat tasted better when the blood was drained from it. We walked up 33rd Street and she pointed out John Coltrane’s row house. Under the influence of a Wahhabi magazine that started showing up magically after her conversion, Candace had become convinced that music was the tool of Satan and stopped listening to it. It was Coltrane who had brought her back. Prior to her return to jazz she had always feared that her love for it had been conditioned into her as a consequence of her parental nationalism; but to rediscover jazz because it was a source of transcendence, a method of attaining closeness to God, was quite another discovery. When she had come to Islam she thought it erased everything that came before it, like Muhammad erased the Ignorance. But then she realized that Muhammad kept wearing the same clothes, speaking the same language, using the same names as the Ignorance. If he could keep all those things, couldn’t she at least keep jazz?
“When a Muslim child is born you are supposed to speak the call
to prayer in their ear. I intend on playing Coltrane to mine.”
I had never shared with anyone other than Marie-Anne how much I wanted children. Candace’s comment made me grow despondent and my insides wilted into melancholy. Years ago in Love Park, Richard had introduced me to the concept of quantum entanglement. It occurred when two particles, despite being thousands or billions of miles from each other, looked and behaved in the exact same way. Einstein, a skeptic of entanglement, had called it “spooky action at a distance.” Whereas Richard had meant to teach me the concept as a way of elucidating modern electronics, I had tried to read human intimacy into it. If only I had some way of finding the other simulacrum of myself, somewhere out there, maybe in a distant galaxy, maybe in some other time period that existed concurrently with ours. It would mean so much. Perhaps if I knew I had been replicated I wouldn’t care so much about reproduction.
“Time for prayer,” Candace whistled. “Shall we?”
“Shall we what?”
“Shall we pray?”
“Where?”
“Right there.” She pointed to an abandoned lot, full of glass, mounds of dirt. The shingled roof from the shattered house next door had slid off and made a staircase into the lot.
“In front of the whole world?”
“All the world’s a mosque and all the men and women are merely prayers.”
“I think you might be plagiarizing.”
“I don’t think so. The Prophet Muhammad said, The whole world is a mosque. If anything, Shakespeare plagiarized him.”