Things Are Good Now

by Djamila Ibrahim

  “If you could go back in time, where would you go?” you asked me.

  “I guess as a Black person, I’d say Africa before the Europeans discovered it,” I said, putting discovered in quotation marks to impress you, “but as a woman … ”

  “Just like Black history didn’t start with slavery or colonialism, women weren’t always treated as second-class citizens. At least not in all cultures,” you said. “So that this-is-as-good-as-it’s-ever-gotten-for-you narrative is misleading at best.”

  You stopped to unfold another poster. “Take, for example, the concept of gender and sexual fluidity. In many Indigenous cultures, this was a well-understood and respected aspect of human behaviour. Until the Europeans forced their rigid biblical views on them, that is. Muslim conquerors weren’t any better.”

  You moved and talked so fast, I needed a moment to grasp all that you’d said. “Okay … so where would you go then?” I asked.

  “If I could, I’d go back to the time when Yodit Gudit ruled the Abyssinian kingdom,” you said, as though it were the most obvious answer. “I’d be one of her generals or something.”

  I didn’t know who or what you were talking about. “Oh yeah?”

  “Queen Yodit gets a bad rep ’cause she burned down some churches and shit. As we know, history always sides with the winners, in this case the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, but I think she was awesome, a real trailblazer.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean women had it better back in the day though, right?” I said. “Look at the U.S. and Obama. According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, there are a whole lot more white supremacist groups now than under Bush.” I hoped this would make up for my ignorance of Ethiopian history.

  “Well, Yodit ruled for forty years. That’s almost two generations,” you said.

  “Still.”

  You weren’t listening to me anymore. “Can you imagine that? Forty years of continuous female leadership? I mean, not the same woman the whole time, of course, but … ” You leaned against the wall beside a large print of Rosemary Brown. You swivelled a roll of duct tape around your index finger, your eyes full of possibilities I couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  That’s when I first fell in love with you. The first time I felt that, with you as my friend, I could become more knowledgeable, more worldly. But our friendship really took off that day when the girl who sat across from you in history class suggested you ask your parents to hire a babysitter to take care of your younger siblings so you could attend the school dance together.

  “It’s not your friggin’ responsibility,” she’d said.

  I thought I read a hint of condescension in your smile as you listened to her. You had your arms folded around a binder with a picture of young Angela Davis and her glorious afro adorning its plastic cover. As soon as the girl left, you looked at me and laughed out loud, your body folding in two. I giggled uncomfortably.

  “Imagine that,” you said. “Asking my poor immigrant mother to hire a babysitter with the money she earns counting pennies in a freezing parking lot booth so that I, her teenage daughter, can attend a school dance.”

  I joined in, picturing my own parents’ reaction to such a suggestion. And that shared laughter felt so warm and familiar, it was as if we’d laughed together many times before, in another lifetime.

  “I can’t believe nobody intervened,” Mark said, breaking my train of thought.

  Elaine grabbed small plates from the kitchen cupboard. “With all the fear mongering and scapegoating politicians spew these days … Remember the barbaric cultural practices hotline?”

  Mark put a slice of pizza on my plate. “True,” he said. “Problem is we do denial too well in this country.”

  “Reminds me of Ursula Le Guin’s story ‘The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.’ Have you read it?” she asked me.

  “No,” I said, staring at my slice of pepperoni pizza. It lay across my plate, drenched in oil and melted cheese. It made me think of skin ulcer.

  “It’s about this society where the citizens’ happiness depends on one child’s constant suffering,” Elaine said. “Everyone knows what’s up but they turn a blind eye to preserve the status quo.”

  “Right,” Mark said. “What bugs me in that story is how the few who empathize with the child choose to leave the city instead of trying to fix things.”

  “A lot of liberals fit that description. They talk the talk, but when shit goes down, they’re MIA,” Elaine said, picking at her pizza crust.

  I wanted to tell them I couldn’t care less about Le Guin or their opinions on the matter, but I didn’t.

  Frank Ocean’s “Wiseman” was playing now. The sadness of the song melded with my own.

  “Should we go to Selam’s?” Mark asked.

  I shook my head. “She won’t let us see her.”

  I thought of the time you’d locked yourself in your room for two days after your grandmother’s funeral, refusing to greet well-wishers as was expected of you. You shared your joy and outrage freely but you confronted your hurts and pains privately.

  When I was little, whenever I heard my parents talk about what they’d endured and overcome before they made it to Canada, I’d assumed that I, by reason of being their offspring, would have inherited their courage and resilience as though these were a pre-installed computer program that could be activated when necessary. But I was always afraid. Of things I could imagine — loneliness, rejection, disease, violence — and of things that existed only in dark corners of my mind, outside the realm of words or logic.

  When I confessed this to you, you told me you’d read something about children inheriting their parents’ trauma: “For example, children of survivors of the Holocaust who’d never faced any violence themselves showed signs of stress disorder.”

  It didn’t matter whether this was true. I was grateful to you for giving my irrational fears legitimacy.

  “But I’m too cautious for my own good sometimes,” I argued, hungry for more affirmation.

  “Caution is good,” you said. “Heck, I could use some of that myself sometimes.” You laughed.

  There was this aura about you that inspired trust and confidence. You made me believe that I — the fearful, indecisive girl who’d always stuck to challenges she knew were manageable — had chosen Morpheus’s red pill of my own accord. I believed in your belief in me. We became inseparable. We shared everything: books, music, idols, hairstyles, clothes. I called us twins. You named us SPLiF: Short People Liberation Front. We rarely quarreled, but when we did, it always surprised our friends how easily we made up. Inevitably, one of us would say: “We’re all that we got.” And the other would reply: “And that’s not a small thing.”

  “Hey, girl, chill,” Elaine said, patting my hand. “You look like someone poisoned your food. I’m sure Selam will be fine. She’s a warrior. One way or another, she’ll make those men pay.” She pushed my plate closer to me.

  We all smiled a little.

  This much I knew. There was so much willpower and righteousness beating inside you, it radiated through your words, your eyes, your skin. Even back in high school, you wouldn’t allow anyone to demean you, or let hatred or willful ignorance slide. One day my neighbour, a lonely woman in her fifties, told us to go back to our country because she thought we were being too loud.

  “Who the fuck do you think is going to pay for your retirement if we go? The children you didn’t have?” you’d yelled at her while I stood frozen in place.

  And that other time when this Asian guy asked me what the big fuss was with Angelina Jolie’s adopted Black daughter’s hair.

  “Hair is hair, right?” he’d said, with a smug smile.

  “You should’ve asked him if he’d tell the thousands of Asian women going under the knife every year that eyes are just eyes,” you’d said when I told you about it.

  It a
nnoyed me that you could be so quick on your feet. I said, “I told him to imagine people waving their fingers right in his face again and again, and then each time, complimenting him on his normal vision as though to say the shape of his eyes was not a defect after all.”

  In reality, I’d been so dumbfounded I’d just stared at the guy. There was such a confidence in his tone that it made me think that maybe I, and Black people in general, were just overreacting after all. I’d struggled to string words together to convey my thoughts before I half-heartedly mumbled something about deeply ingrained racism in the history of the United States.

  But willpower alone can only sustain you for so long. As my mother always said, the world doesn’t tolerate audacious girls. I tried to imagine your attacker — a teenager or a grown man? — pulling on your veil from behind while his friends hurled racist insults at you, you tripping on your long skirt as you staggered backward. I pictured the glare of naked hatred on his face, his mouth contorting, about to froth with satisfied lust. The obscenity of it all. I imagined your shock. Did you turn around and hold his stare? Did you curse at him? Or did you blink away, ashamed of what transpired between you, of your vulnerability and his power? Would looking away have erased what took place, rewound time so you could’ve crossed the street and avoided what happened? I pictured you on the ground, holding your hijab in your lap as though it was your soul just torn out of your body. I imagined you being surprised by how much the hijab meant to you even though you’d only been wearing it for a month. Did you cry? I hope you did, Selam, even if it was only later on, in the confines of your bedroom. Otherwise this shit will eventually tear you apart.

  I grew up in a strict Pentecostal household. My parents’ incontrovertible faith dictated the words I spoke in the house, the thoughts I thought. Their beliefs laced all my adolescent interests with sin, whether it was music, dancing — other than swaying to church songs — alcohol, cigarettes, or sex. You grew up in a non-observant Muslim family. Your mother had been a doctor back home and a women’s rights activist and had only taken the hijab after she’d moved to Canada because she’d felt isolated. “The veil,” you told me, “is her way of connecting with her past and of finding a community.” She was your hero. I envied you. I took it for granted that you’d share my contempt for all religious dogma, but to my dismay, you were full of wonder for everything faith related: Bahá’í, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism. For a while, all you talked about was Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology and the roots of all religions; then it was all about Karen Armstrong and her History of God, then onto Irshad Manji. I started to see your insatiable curiosity about spirituality as a character flaw. Why would a girl as intelligent as you waste her time with the irrational world of religions? Your obsession even scared me sometimes.

  You dismissed my budding atheism with a sweep of your hand. “Pfff. That’s wack,” you said.

  You couldn’t see that you’d hurt my feelings. Back then, nothing seemed to be personal with you. “Any rational person would know that the world would be a better place without religion and the hive mentality it incites,” I said.

  You rolled your eyes. “Have you heard of Richard Dawkins and his followers? It’s no better than a cult. A bunch of trust fund kids or white, middle-class men who are quick to dismiss POCs’ and poor people’s need for community, while they themselves live and work surrounded by people who look and think like them, and institutions that protect their interests and well-being.”

  As usual, the words tumbled out of your mouth so quickly that I only understood all that you’d said after you were gone. It took me even longer to find holes in your argument, but by then we had moved on to agnosticism.

  “Also, why don’t you ask your parents about the Derg’s atheist government they fled from or read up on Russia’s or China’s state atheism?” you said.

  With you, I was always behind the curve.

  We’d settled on agnosticism after watching an interview with Margaret Atwood. There was something alienating and brash about this affirmation that made me feel still edgy and different enough while making me feel closer to you. This assertion also gave my resentment against my parents’ blind faith an intellectual outlet. I even wrote a paper in my social sciences and humanities class in grade twelve that sealed my decision to study political science at the University of Toronto. Do you remember it? It was titled “The Pentecostal Church’s Insidious Exploitation of Africa’s Most Vulnerable.” You chose to major in biology to follow in your mother’s footsteps and become a doctor.

  We were getting ready for our first frosh week party when you said, “We can’t prove whether God exists or not. Heck, we might even have invented It the day our ancestors first buried their dead with their belongings, but that shouldn’t be the end of the road, right?” I knew it was a rhetorical question. I should have known your restless mind couldn’t settle on anything for long. But I was having too much fun to bother so I shrugged and let it slide.

  Do you remember that party, Selam? How you, I, Elaine, Mark, and so many of the friends we grew up with danced and sang along to our favourite songs? We jumped along to Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright,” our arms around each other’s backs, repeating the chorus: “We gon’ be alright.” Do you remember the energy, Selam? The joy? Nothing could have touched us that night. Nothing could have broken that circle. It was like the coming together of the tribe. By the end of the night, your voice was hoarse and my toes hurt from the high heels I wore, but we were beaming. We’d finally made it to university and the future was a blank page thirsty for our ink. Plus, I was about to move to my own place. I felt I could do or be anything. It was the best night of my life.

  “I think we should go see her,” Elaine said. “Even if she doesn’t want us to. We should still try.”

  I nodded.

  “Let me get my things,” Elaine said and went to her bedroom.

  Mark took the box of leftover pizza and our plates to the kitchen.

  I sat by the living room window and called you again. Then I tried to replay our last fight so I could understand how we ended up estranged. Once in a while, I looked at my cellphone, hoping against hope that you’d at least text me.

  The day you announced you were thinking of wearing the hijab, we were at Mark’s parents’ house celebrating his nineteenth birthday. You, Elaine, the guy you had a crush on, George, and I were in the backyard for some fresh air while Mark and the rest of our friends partied inside.

  “I love that Erykah Badu look, Selam. It suits your face,” Elaine said to you.

  “I’m actually thinking of taking on the hijab,” you said. “I usually find hats constraining so this is kind of a test run to see if I can handle covering my hair and ears all day long.”

  “Good one,” I said and followed Elaine to the patio set.

  “I didn’t know you were Muslim,” George said, sitting beside you.

  I watched the light from the candles on the glass table bend and swirl in the rich brown of the rum and coke in my hand. “She’s just saying that. She changes gods the way others change underwear,” I said, remembering your last change of heart.

  “I am a Muslim. And I do intend to wear the veil,” you said, holding my gaze across the table.

  “But you’re not. I mean, religion is not a gene. It’s not automatically inherited. And the hijab? Why would you do that?” I asked. Your constant ideological flip-flopping was taking its toll on me.

  “Because,” you said and turned to George, “Islam is the religion my parents were raised in and I want to reconnect with that part of my heritage.”

  “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard you say,” I said. I shouldn’t have confronted you in front of our friends, especially George, but your announcement felt like a personal affront to me, intended to spite me. “Where is this new pronouncement coming from?” I continued. I took a big gulp of my drink.

  �
�People change. They evolve,” you said to me and turned to George again. “I’ve always been interested in spirituality. The hijab is an external expression of my connection to the Divine.”

  “Whatever. Is that why you’re not drinking?” I said. I leaned to the side. “And that dress,” I continued, my eyes on your shapeless, long-sleeved, maxi dress.

  You ignored me. “Hijab is about modesty,” you said to George. “I think that’s a commendable —”

  “I’ve got news for you,” I interrupted. “Wearing a hijab in a country where the majority of people don’t makes you stand out. That’s seeking attention, not modesty. You’ll get more stares than I do in my jeans and T-shirt.” The rum and coke was getting to my head. “Remember how you used to make fun of girls who cover up?”

  “It’s not the same thing,” you said. “I made fun of hijabis who wore tight clothes, too much makeup and perfume. I made fun of the incongruity of their choices. But hijab when worn modestly, as intended, liberates women from men’s gaze.”

  “Oh please, spare me,” I said, taking another sip. “Why is men’s lust a woman’s problem anyway? Also, I’d be insulted if I were a man. Wouldn’t you?” I said, turning to Elaine and George.

  George cleared his throat.

  “Okay. You two take it easy,” Elaine said. “Can you do this another time?”

  “And wasn’t that you who said hijab sexualizes women as much as bikinis do?” I clawed at the table.

  “Let me ask you this: When was the last time you left your room feeling at peace with your appearance? Or felt that men actually listened to what you have to say instead of —?”

  “Oh, you think men are going to listen to you because you suddenly show up looking like a nun? You’re delusional.”

  “Why are you so flustered anyway? What is it to you?” you asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe it has something to do with seeing my best friend submitting herself to religious dogma and calling her newly found servitude progress,” I pressed on.