CHAPTER 3
Leaping In
Hypocrisy is the essence of snobbery, but all snobbery is about the problem of belonging.
-ALEXANDER THEROUX
Less than three years later I was free of family pressure and attending Oregon State University, my box retrieved from the attic. Now, I was ready to cannonball into what I assumed would be a perfect Islamic community. It would be great—all idyllic brother- and sisterhood, pure devotion to God and prayers. I’d be able to drink from the fount of religious knowledge and flower into Muslim maturity. And I would belong.
I immediately began attending the local mosque, a traditional Saudiesque Sunni institution complete with fully separated men’s and women’s sections. I began to wear a headscarf and long skirts, and continued my relationship with Ahmad, the Palestinian engineering student, but now, it was done in person. It wasn’t long, though, until members of the mosque pointed out that having a “boyfriend” was not acceptable in Islam, and that it would be better if I “didn’t mention it to the others.”
Unwilling to sin against my religion, madly in love with my hush-hush boyfriend, and lacking advice on finding a middle ground—after all, I’d only been “instructed” to hide the relationship—I immediately turned to what seemed the only sensible choice—immediate marriage. I was nineteen, full of religious fervor, and positive that I was on the right path. I even imagined that my new husband, Ahmad, a “born Muslim,” represented Islam incarnate.
I was primed to put both my husband and my marriage up on a pedestal—a perch all the more precarious for my lack of experience in the world. Therefore, I was wholly unprepared for the sometimes huge differences between Ahmad’s Arabic and Palestinian culture and “ideal” Islam, where things like sexual inequality, rigid gender roles, and complex behavioral nuances were beyond my experience or understanding. The Islam of books, private faith, and reason was what had captured my heart before I’d actually met any Muslims. Muslim culture—influenced by national customs, conflict, prejudice, and human interest, on the other hand, only confused me, as I was unable to distinguish the difference between them.
Take, for instance, the complete separation of the sexes in the mosque, where women had their own section upstairs and were forbidden to communicate with men during community elections, debate, lectures and the like. The exception was the option to send written notes, passed down to the “brothers,” who presumably would be moved to lust by the mere sound of a female voice or the fact that many mosques didn’t even have a “women’s section” at all, but were instead reserved wholly for men.
Even home life was a complex warren of manners and customs that I often found incomprehensible. Visiting other Muslim couples in their homes meant a complete separation between male and female guests, as well as complex and intricate hospitality rules and rituals—from the timing of the tea service to the manner of the slaughter of the meat being served. In fact, as the years went by, the sheer number of details and nuances of life in the dual-culture marriage I’d taken on was overwhelming—and almost exclusively one-sided.
In short, Arabic culture was Islam, and it was only after many painful lessons that I began to see that maybe there was a line separating the two—and sometimes the twain would meet.
Maybe it would have been fine—this difference between what I began to see as “pure” Islam and cultural Islam—if I could reconcile myself with the differences. Problem was, I never chose to become an Arab, or a Palestinian, and in spite of the things I admired about Arabic culture—family unity, hospitality, humor, and what seemed like a thousand other “positives”—many of which I found lacking in my own, there were also things that ate at my own sense of cultural identity which was not as easily or wisely shed as I’d supposed. I still loved things like English, American music, mixed conversation, and the assumption that women were (in theory) equal to men. Yet, in my Arabic-Muslim world, all of these things felt uncomfortably subversive.
Arab culture, and my naive and partially subconscious assumption that it was synonymous with Islam, was a force that wore at me, whether I understood it or not. Every time I served male guests their tiny glasses of coffee before the women (as was the “rule”), pretended to be shy and soft-spoken in Muslim company, yet outspoken in a class or with my own family, or even heard about something as extreme as honor killings or a terrorist attack on civilians somewhere in the Middle East, I felt my sense of certainty about my identity waver.
Still, I stuck it out. After all, my marriage, my three children and my place in the life I’d built meant everything to me. By my thirties, however, the opacity of my faith had all but turned to black. The pressure of life in my traditional marriage began to wear me down, but still I cooked, cleaned, had babies, managed to keep my figure, and learned when it was expected to keep my mouth shut and my eyes down. Whether it had anything to do with religion or not, I was determined to become as close to the “ideal” Muslim-American housewife as I could figure out to be. Alas, I’d sold my soul to become her. Still, I tried to ignore the loss until that day in my daughter’s Taekwondo class when I realized that one day she might become just like me.
CHAPTER 4
Tranquil Unease
The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.
-MAYA ANGELOU
I’m among the oddly populous group who somehow managed to become exactly what I hoped not to be growing up, in my case a duplicate of my stereotypical, 1950s housewife grandmother. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my grandmother like crazy. Imbued with the hard, tempered stoicism of her generation and her Scandinavian upbringing, she lived the life of a perfect homemaker. Dinner was promptly at four o’clock, and was always followed with cake, made to satisfy my grandfather’s sweet tooth and contribute to his sense of a smooth-running home. My sister and I would spend the odd week or two with Grandma over the spring or summer vacations, and the clockwork pace of her traditional home was a comfortable change from the latchkey, instant Ramen noodle days at my working mom’s after my parents’ extremely contentious divorce.
I grew up with a strong drive towards achieving the same stability, that feeling of safe, predictable normalcy that traditional homes seemed to have, and it made my quick slip into homemaker after college seem inevitable. I didn’t admit it at the time—even to myself. However, I had an almost pathological need to be taken care of and made absolutely safe somehow, by a man. Of course, it was a decision based on fear, a powerful motivator. Then came the kids.
I imagine that I was like many women; I didn’t find the childbearing years to be exactly fertile ground for contemplation, and the birth of each child provided just enough exhaustion to make self-reflection seem unpleasant and pointless. So, too, by the time each child reached the magical age of preschool, my accompanying relief was just enough to mimic an illusion of well-being and even engender a willingness to consider planning the next child.
Before I knew it, though, twelve years passed, and when the inertia of early motherhood finally wore off, what was left was the sudden, frightening realization that “being taken care of” was really no guarantee of safety at all. Life could change for the worst in my old-fashioned family just as easily as it could for the more progressive. It was a lesson I learned when my oldest son’s liver failed one day.
This was to be a terrifying and confusing time. One day Ibrahim was a happy five-year-old, playing and going to school. The next day he was sick, yellow, on the verge of death, and literally at the top of the national organ transplant waiting list—and doctors couldn’t figure out why. Although he recovered spontaneously—and rather miraculously—without the liver he was next in line for, we never found out why it happened. All I knew was that as I later watched him hug his hero, Mickey Mouse, on his Make a Wish trip to Disneyland, I was one grateful but traumatized mama. His illness removed the illusion that living cautiously was a guarantee of survival.
So by the time I reached m
y mid-thirties, I had a pretty home, a stable marriage, three beautiful children that I loved, and a nagging feeling that something was wrong—as if I’d shortchanged my future somehow. I’d never held a job, nor had I accomplished any of my high school dreams, which included writing about the Holy Land, learning Arabic, and travelling somewhere alone. Anywhere.
But then again, so what? It wasn’t as if the world would end if I didn’t work, write or travel, and as Ibrahim’s health continued to improve and allowed our lives to move into a smooth pattern again, I let gratitude overtake the unease. I should be thankful and just carry on, I thought. As often happens in life, though, circumstances conspired to bring forth a change.
Like most Muslims living in the United States following 9-11, we faced a staggering negative backlash. We coped with a mixture of frustration, anger, and sadness, along with a general feeling that we should always be on our best behavior in public to prove that we were nothing like the monsters who flew the planes that day. Still, as the years passed, it seemed as if the feeling of otherness was growing instead of diminishing. And along with the rainy Northwest weather, which was itself dark, damp, and depressing, there loomed a growing feeling of alienation that began to threaten our family in unexpected ways.
Although my fear of being physically assaulted by non-Muslims diminished in the months following the 2001 attacks, the passing years saw a definite increase in a more subtle, almost psychological pressure. Like many other Muslim families in the area, we noticed more of what we called “incidents”—the insults, dirty looks, and cold-shoulders that wore down any feelings of well-being like drops of water torture. The kids and I were called “sand niggers” in the grocery store, and people would shout at us from passing cars to “go home!” (presumably to our Middle Eastern origins). Even worse, suspicious stares from our neighbors and snubs at the kids’ schools, sports activities, and other gatherings took a heavy toll on us all. Just as bad, though, was how the government treated us.
Our lives now felt strange and unsettled. Suddenly, we were required to do things in the name of “security” that were once unheard of, like reporting the details of our financial transactions to our bank manager, who was somehow deputized to interrogate us about the sources and uses of our personal funds. We even received calls from the Secret Service (although I thought it was a hoax and responded with full F-bomb fury—until I realized they were actually who they claimed to be), and Ahmad was ordered to report to our local Starbucks for a “friendly chat” with an agent from the FBI. This after being turned in by a neighbor under the new “citizen vigilance program.” His crime? Receiving Islamic mail in the community mailbox.
My husband had been a full citizen for at least six years, and I’d been born in the USA. However, it felt as if we were as foreign and out of place as our fellow residents saw us to be. At a time when I was becoming the least comfortable in my own skin, my outside world was now a mirror of my unease, and my older kids felt it, too. They even asked me to “please stop wearing that scarf” when I picked them up from school. The knowledge that I had, in essence, created them to suffer the same lack of belonging that plagued me made it all the harder to bear. That’s when I got the bright idea. Why not try out life in Palestine—it was their father’s homeland, and by extension, theirs as well. In theory a good block of time there—say, at least a year—might just be a good thing. The only catch was I’d have to do it without Ahmad, whose high-level Microsoft job required him to stay put.
I didn’t want out of my life, or my marriage—not completely, anyway. But I couldn’t deny that the thought of such a long span of time away from being a wife and all that it entailed—the daily major and trivial allowances, compromises, and maneuvers required in any intimate relationship—was alluring. As scary as such a long, solitary sojourn in Palestine seemed, I also knew that I might find some narrow slivers of time, opportunity and resources that I needed to make a go at a measure of a satisfying life for myself. Yes, I’d decided. It was a good move. Leaving my husband behind in America so I could live in the Holy Land would allow me the space I needed away from the uniquely cultural pressures of my marriage. It would also give me relief from members of my husband’s local extended family, which consisted of a singularly high-maintenance motley crew of cousins, nieces, and brothers—all successfully immigrated to the United States, married and blessed with kids of their own.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care about them all, especially the kids, but my rabid desire for what I then understood to be a “perfect,” stable family life also compelled me to be the whole gaggle’s social manager. That meant arranging birthdays, Thanksgivings, Islamic holiday dinners, babysitting, play dates—as many and as perfectly designed as I could. It was exhausting, especially because it was all very one-sided (a fact that somehow failed to dawn on me). I was the easy one, the welcoming one, the family “yes girl.”
Sure, it was my own damn fault. I certainly wasn’t doing it all out of the goodness of my heart. I believed that by so doing, I’d be cementing my place in the family, in spite of my “otherness.” Add to that a meager sense of boundaries, and I became a fantastic, beautifully designed doormat. In fact, at one point, I even allowed my husband’s cousins and brothers to move into our home (at the time, a one-bedroom apartment), necessitating that I wear my scarf (required in their presence) twenty-four hours a day.
And then there was the fact that I’d never lived on my own. Sure, I loved my husband, but there is something to be said for waking up in the morning and deciding what you want to do with your day without discussing it with anyone, or even imagining what their preferences might be. I suppose that for many who have lived alone, this is a dubious benefit, but for me it was a completely novel experience that held great appeal; here was a large span of time in which I could make all of the decisions, tiny or large, without taking another adult’s opinion or preferences into account. Of course, I would still have to please the kids, but I was the mom calling the shots. It was a whole different ball game.
Most important of all, though, was the fact that my kids were growing older, and I desperately wanted them to somehow belong in a way that was eluding me, in spite of my best (if misguided) efforts. I knew that I wanted them to be as comfortable with their Palestinian identities as they would someday be with their American ones. This would give them the option to live in either of the cultures when it came time to start lives of their own. Perhaps they could even combine them somehow. I knew that they deserved to know both worlds, and I reasoned that living a year or so in Palestine would probably be long enough for the kids to bond with their family, learn the language, and figure out the culture.
Yes, it was a good plan, I convinced myself, and during the months leading up to our departure, it became my mantra.
It was a typically cool May morning in Seattle, and Ahmad took his time loading our giant suitcases into the minivan. Although he told me that he was excited and grateful that I was willing to take the kids to bond with his mom and dad and the rest of the clan in the family village, I knew that Ahmad was nervous about my ability to stick it out and learn to take care of the kids in a complicated and sometimes dangerous place.
But the hardest thing for him to face was the fact that he would soon be spending a huge chunk of time alone, able to see his wife and kids only through a choppy Skype connection. As for me, I was still crying in our upstairs bathroom—trying to recover from the panic attack I just knew my mother had wished on me the moment I’d told her about my plan to haul her beloved grandkids to the Occupied West Bank. In spite of months of relative confidence, that morning saw me convinced that I was about to make a horrible mistake.
Glaring at myself in the mirror, I cursed my eyes and their tendency to swell like a boxer’s after anything more than two consecutive tears. It’s normal to be nervous, I tried to convince myself, finally chewing up a Valium while I held a cold, wet washcloth against my puffy eyelids. Problem was, I knew that the chances of me sticking i
t out for an entire year in the West Bank, let alone Safa, the tiny village where my husband grew up, were slim.
There was no denying it…even Ahmad, who had no choice but to stay at home and work anyway—you don’t just give up and leave a good job behind for a year, especially in a bad economy, seemed to readily join the betting pool against me, even making the occasional snide remark about my slim-to-none chances of holding down a job, taking care of the kids on my own, and traipsing around one of the most dangerous regions on the planet.
Only days before, I’d been able to confidently argue with my mother in favor of my plan, yet right then, with only a couple of hours left before our flight, my mind seized on the realization that she and Ahmad were probably right on the mark. I didn’t speak the language well, barely knew his family, and tended to be anxious; an affliction hardly likely to subside in a war zone. Add to these the fact that I’d never done anything on my own during our short visits there with Ahmad alongside—where I’d only managed to distinguish myself as a shy, clinging, wide-eyed coward who never even went out to buy a Pepsi on her own—and you could see why I was truly the sucker bet.
All Roads Lead to Jerusalem Page 2