by Mohja Kahf
She marched Khadra up the stairs and pushed her into the bathtub ("Don't go anywhere!" she yelled at Eyad, "You're next!"). With the water running hot and hard even though their father always said "The Prophet teaches us not to waste, even if we are taking water from a river," she scrubbed and scrubbed her daughter with an enormous loofah from Syria. "We are not Americans!" she sobbed, her face twisted in grief. "We are not Americans!"
Who were the Americans? The Americans were the white people who surrounded them, a crashing sea of unbelief in which the Dawah Center bobbed, a brave boat. (There were black people who were Americans, but that was different.) You had your nice Americans and your nasty Americans. And then there was the majority of Americans; the best that could be said about them was that they were ignorant.
White-haired Mrs. Moore was a nice American. She belonged to a church called the Friends and they invited the Muslims over for a pancake breakfast. Which was a very American thing to eat, and which was nice of them.
Nasty Americans: You had Orvil Hubbard and his cronies, Vaughn Lott, his sons Brian and Brent, and Mindy Oberholtzer and Curt Stephenson and all the other kids at school who tormented the Muslim kids daily while the teachers looked the other way.
Regarding ignorant Americans, "Well, just look at how nine hundred commited suicide in Jonestown, Guyana, with Jim Jones." Khadra's father remarked when that story broke on their old shadowy TV. "Following false prophets."
"Wasn't he from Indiana?" someone said.
Allison, the girl down the street who was nicknamed the Bone, was a typical American. "That's a lost girl," Khadra's mother observed. "Look how she is allowed to roam the street, no one caring for her." Allison had run away from home three times. She hated her stepfather. She got into fights. She kicked and cussed.
Generally speaking, Americans cussed, smoke, and drank, and the Shamys had it on good authority that a fair number of them used drugs. Americans dated and fornicated and committed adultery. They had broken families and lots of divorces. Americans were not generous or hospitable like Uncle Abdulla and Aunt Fatma; they invited people to their houses only a few at a time, and didn't even let them bring their children, and only fed them little tiny portions of food they called courses on big empty plates they called good china. Plus, Americans ate out wastefully often. Khadra's family ate at home (except once a year on the Eid holiday, when they went to the all-you-can-eat-for-$2.95 steakhouse).
Americans believed the individual was more important than the family, and money was more important than anything. Khadra's dad said Americans threw out their sons and daughters when they turned eighteen unless they could pay rent-to their own parents! And, at the other end, they threw their parents into nursing homes when they got old. This, although they took slavish care of mere dogs. All in all, Americans led shallow, wasteful, materialistic lives. Islam could solve many of their social ills, if they but knew.
Also, Americans did not wash their buttholes with water when they pooped. This was a very big difference between them and Muslims.
"It's appalling. Because no matter how much toilet paper you use," Wajdy said, stirring three teaspoons of sugar into a small glass of mint tea for TEta, "you cannot remove all traces. Water is a must.
Teta couldn't agree more. They called her `Teta' even though she was not Wajdy's mother but his aunt. She had raised him after his mother's early death and he loved her like a mother. Her visit brought the scent of laurel soap, sabun ghaar, into the house. A greeny, tree-bark smell. She stacked the bathroom with the cakes stamped "Made in Aleppo. "
"But can it really be true?" she asked, her plump frame comfortably settled on the faded couch in Khadra's little living room. Above her, a green crushed-pile prayer rug thumbtacked to the wall featured a threadbare image of the Ka'ba on one half and the Prophet's mosque on the other. "How can they stand to go around with a smear of shit in their crack all day?"
"Believe me, it's true," Khadra's father said. "One of the Dawah workers used to work in the laundry of a big hotel. Big fancy executives stayed there. What do you think he found on their underwear?" He sipped his tea.
Teta grimaced. "No!"
"Yes!"
"If that is how it is with their high classes, their common people must be even filthier!" she retorted.
"And they think they are more civilized than us, and tell us how to run our countries." Wajdy shook his head. The Western imperialism and high-handedness endured by the far-flung Muslim peoples of the world were that much more outrageous in light of the fact that its perpetrators did not even know how to properly clean their bottoms. Khadra's father got up to close the curtains, or else the Shamy family, sitting in the energy-saving fluorescent lights of the living room as night came on, would soon be exposed to the eyes of the Americans.
Treasure of Shaam, 0, Treasure of Damascus, Treasure that cannot be altered by time
No matter how far you go No matter how long ago Come to me, my love will be unchanged by time
-"Ya Mal al-Shaam," Damascene folk song
When Teta visited, she opened her suitcases and out poured Ali Babas treasure, gifts from Syria without measure. Red roasted Iranian watermelon seeds in striped paper sacks, "birdnests" and sesame cookies in oval wooden boxes. Little mechanical eggs that whirled open to reveal a baby chick if you kept pushing the lever. Aleppan woolens for Jihad, Chinese pajamas for Eyad, and cotton nightgowns for Khadra. Embroidered with little cherry clusters, they made her dream of reaching upup-up to pick plump fruit from a tree spread against a turquoise sky.
TEta also passed on to them the gifts sent by others. Aunt Razanne, Ebtehaj's elder sister, always sent updated photos of her children, while they, in turn, sent little tokens to their American counterparts, a cartoon Roddy cut out of Tintin or Osama comics for Eyad, a red red rose on adhesive paper from Reem for Khadra's dresser mirror. And letters to Ebtehaj on crinkly sky-blue airmail paper, fat ones from Aunt Razanne, skinny ones from her father.
Jiddo Candyman, Ebtehaj's father, sent candy-coated chickpeas and rock candy, smelling of rose water. They were from his candy factory. "So you won't forget in America what sweetness there is in Syria!" he scribbled on the brown paper bag. But when he sent a picture of himself with a skinny, elegantly coiffed and made-up woman, the two of them sitting in faded Louis XIV armchairs with gilded edges, Ebtehaj snatched the photo from her daughter. Later, Khadra found the skinny lady's side of the photo snipped to pieces in the wastebasket.
"That's Sibelle," Teta whispered to Khadra. "Your mother's Turkish stepmother."
Wajdy took Teta downtown to see the sights.
"I have seen the capitals of Europe, the palaces of Topkapi and Versailles," she said, "and you want to show me this-?" she pointed to the Merchant's Bank Clock at the corner of Meridian and Washington, with its nifty digital display of time and temperature. She sniffed.
"Fine," Wajdy said. He took her to Monument Circle to see the great suspended pendulum at the State Museum. The pendulum she found mesmerizing. They stood in the circle for over half an hour watching it swing, almost reach, swing, almost reach. Wajdy had to pry her hands off the circular railing and gently pull her out of the pendulum's sway. Her scarf, which she wore old Damascene style, pulled back so the crown of her head showed, had slipped even farther back on her glossy black hair.
Testa was tenaciously raven-haired. When silver roots started to come in, it was time for a trip to Kmart and a box of Miss Clairol. She emerged, fierce and sleek and black-haired again, and singing. "I'll be buried with my hair as black as coal, When Igo down, I will go down beautiful"
Inanna opened the door for him Inside the house she shone before him Like the light of the moon Dumuzi looked at her joyously
-Diane Wolkstein & Samuel Kramer, Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth
Zuhura was getting engaged to Aunt Fatma's brother Luqman. They had first met at Uncle Abdulla's dinner. Luqman had then sent his sister Fatma to inquire with Zuhura's family. A meeting had been arranged that
had begun with each looking shyly at the other and had ended with them talking animatedly, ignoring the other family members in the room, who, in any case, slipped out quietly during the interview.
First there would be an engagement party, to be held in the Fallen Timbers community room. There would be a wedding after the academic year finished. Luqman attended the city branch of IU. He was trying to persuade Zuhura to transfer to the city campus; she was trying to get him to transfer to Bloomington, but nothing was decided yet.
Zuhura was featured in the college paper for being the first Muslim woman to head the African Students Organization at IU. Her mother proudly showed Luqman the article. "The first Muslim woman in hijab," Ayesha said, tapping the photo.
"You're going to drop that African student group when we're married, right?" Zuhura's fiance said.
"What?" She drew her hand out of his. She was living on coffee and No-Doz tablets-she had to, to keep up with as many classes as she was taking this semester-and everything made her tense.
"Isn't that rich pampered Nigerian athlete in it?" Luqman said. "It's all men. Why you want to hang around men?"
Zuhura's brow furrowed. She had a good answer, almost as scathing as one of her mother's reproofs, but she was beginning to see that her argumentation talents, while they suited her career ambitions, were not the skills needed for becoming Luqman's wife.
Bolts of patterned cloth that Aunt Ayesha called leso arrived. Aunt Ayesha would write, on the edges of the cloth, secret messages in Swahili meant only for Zuhura, to be read on her wedding night. Zuhura's darkest ebony skin was soon flawless, softened and cleansed by the special baths her mother drew for her using ingredients sent by Kenyan relatives.
"I'm going to get my hair braided," Tayiba said, her nostrils flaring with excitement. "Zuhura's having hers done, and my mother said I could do it too."
"So?" Khadra shrugged. "I braid my hair all the time. You don't need a hair stylist for that."
"Not braided like your hair," Hanifa said impatiently. "Braided like our hair. Tayiba-can I do it too?" Her eyes lit up, catching the sunlight. She was tired of the way she usually wore her hair, drawn into a poof on top her head. That was the style she'd graduated to after the multiple pigtails of childhood held with gumball hair holders that bounced this and thataway as she and Khadra had raced for the ice cream truck.
"It's expensive," Tayiba said importantly. "You got to get permission."
Hanifa ran home to do that, and her mother said yes, and she came back jubilant, the red sashes of her sundress fluttering behind her like pennants.
"Can I watch?" Khadra asked Tayiba.
"Sure," Tayiba said magnanimously.
Khadra sat and watched Tayiba's enormous untrammeled hair go down into orderly braided rows for about half an hour before she started to get restless.
"Why can't I braid my hair too?" she whined when she got home. Her mother had vetoed it. Eyad was pushing jihad in his plastic Big Wheel on the tiny back patio.
"What, like the tribe of Zunuj?" Teta said from her lawn chair. Eyad looked up at the odd word, Zunuj. Teta stroked Khadra's coarse brown hair. "Such pretty hair, not like that repulsive hair of Abeed, all kinky and unnatural."
Khadra pushed her hand away angrily. "You can't say that."
"Say what?"
`Abeed, "Eyad chimed in. "That's haram."
"Again with the haram, this child. What did I do that's haram this time, hmm, te'eburni?"
"It's haram to be racist," Khadra protested. "Eyad! Isn't it haram to be racist?"
"Yeah. You can't say `abeed. "' He gave Testa a look that reminded her rather of his father in his teenaged years, when he started getting religion.
Testa looked bewildered. Hurt. "What? That's just what we say in Syria. I am not a racist."
It had been Testa who first noticed Khadra's breast buds coming in. She shared Khadra's bedroom during her visits.
"You're going to have magnificent boobs, just like mine," Testa told her.
"I am?" Khadra looked uncertainly at Tetas sagging bazoomies. She knew their dimensions well, from when Testa called her in to scrub her back during her weekly bath. Although Testa's back was turned, a modesty cloth on her lap, Khadra could see her heavy breasts hanging down her sides. They were monuments of Khadras childhood.
"Like me in my prime," Testa amended, straightening her posture. "Women in my family have always had good ones. Not itty bitty almonds like your mother." She broke into song:
I can see into your heart, and its a beautiful green place You are connected to my heart, can you follow the trace? God is beautiful, loves beauty, loves the heart you cultivate
Teta had a song for everything and loved music. But Khadra's parents felt that music, while not outright haram, tended toward frivolity and the forgetfulness of God. Instead of music, they listened to tapes of melodious Quranic recital and nasheeds-songs with voice only, no musical instruments whose permissibility was questionable. Songs in male voices celebrating the Islamic resistance movement of Syria on cassette-Abu Mazen crooning sadly for Muslims to "awake at last from their long night, and make again the world right" and Abu Rateb lamenting the suffering soul in prison:
Like a candle, like a candle burning in the night crying, melting itself down to its heart of light.
Nonetheless, Khadra's father kept a small stash of Um Kulsoum and Fayruz and Abdo and Nazem cassettes.
"From my jahiliya days," he confessed, "my time of ignorance, before I woke up to Islamic consciousness."
"Why don't you throw them away?" Khadra's mother said.
But he couldn't bring himself to put them in the trash. In moments of weakness he would still turn them on and put his hands to his forehead and go "Ah, ah" in delight, and dance with arms outstretched, in spite of himself. For in song lies the mystery of Being. Even Ebtehaj had been known to smile at moments like these and sway in Wajdy's open arms, in spite of herself.
I was a hidden treasure, and I loved to be known.
-attributed to God in a Hadith Qudsi
Zuhura's henna was to be held in the community room of the Fallen Timbers Townhouse Complex. An engagement party was womenonly, of course. So they could remove their headscarves and coverups at the door and enjoy an evening dressed as they were within the home, with their hair out and their bodies as attractively clothed as they wished. However, an obstacle to this was discovered the morning of the party: there were no drapes on the large picture windows of the community room. To solve this problem, Uncle Yusuf bought plastic tablecloths-Aunt Ayesha made him get them in colors that coordinated with the decorations. Khadra, Hanifa, Hakim, and Eyad worked to tape them up on the glass. Hanifa switched on the radio while they worked and Kool and the Gang sang "Ladies' Night" Then the Commodores came on.
"My grandmother's a cousin of one of the Commodores," Hanifa boasted.
"Nuh uh," Khadra challenged.
"Yeah huh, she is too. She's Lionel Ritchie's cousin. He grew up right in her hometown, Tuskegee, Alabama. She's known him since he was a baby."
After which Khadra ran home to get dressed.
She was thrilled when Ebtehaj seated her at her own dresser mirror, where she made up her face every day before Wajdy got home. Then he'd lift her hand to his lips and say, "Thank God for the blessing of Islam!" Little compacts of make-up and circles of blue eye shadow and small plush jewelry cases stood in neat rows. The kohl came in a brass vial with a filigreed stopper. It had been a gift from her own mother, who had died when Ebtehaj was fifteen.
"Like this," her mother said, sliding the metal applicator into the vial. It came out with a fine dusting of kohl. "Khadra, what are you doing?" Ebtehaj giggled. Her daughter was blinking rapidly and trying to roll her eyes backward into their whites. "You don't have to do that to put on kohl, Doora."
Khadra basked in her mother calling her by her baby nickname.
"Just-here, you hold the kohl rod-now slide it through so it touches the rim of your eye. There."
&
nbsp; She looked at herself in the mirror. She saw a magical creature, something from the stars, a Princess Leia.
"And what about earrings?" Ebtehaj said, stepping back and surveying her handiwork.
"Gold hoops," TEta, who'd been overseeing, said. And stepping up, she opened her palm and supplied them.
"TEta! They're perfect!" Khadra cried when she put them on, turning her head to see in the mirror. Time to move up from turquoise babygirl studs!
Hanifa wore gold hoops too, and a long poly-orlon dress like Khadra's, with bottom ruffles and yoke ruffles and eyelet and rickrack, only she filled out her dress more-she was already wearing a bra. The Haqiqat sisters, Insaf and Nilofar, came paisleyed and bangled and bespangled in ghararas of green and saffron, tangerine and purple. Tayiba arrived as Khadra and Hanifa had never seen her before, elegant from her silver beaded hair to her feet in blue satin pumps. She looked like a model.
But Zuhura-Zuhura was stunning. Her braids, gold-beaded in dazzling constellations, clicked pleasantly when she turned her head. Her lower lip had a mauve sheen that matched her eyeshadow. Her body was plump and glowing with health, as if she'd just stepped out of a sauna. Her gown was cobalt blue woven with bronze so that it seemed to be a different color with every shift of light, like a night sea with schools of fish under the surface.
Flowers arrived from the fiance, deep red coxcomb and fragrant tuberoses, and were set around Zuhura's seat. Tall vases of pussy willow cut from the Dawah Center backyard graced the guest tables. Rose petals were scattered in the bride's path by well-wishers, Aunt Khadija's idea.
"Bismillah, bismillah, " Aunt Fatma said, kissing her fingers and waving them in a circle around the bride-to-be to ward off the evil eye. Ebtehaj and other ladies kept on the look out for grown-up girls who might make good matches for the bachelors they knew, friends of their husbands and such.
Khadra was glad she'd brought her camera, her first, a cheap 110mm she got for Eid. She snapped pictures of Hanifa and Insaf and Nilofar and was about to take one of the bride but Aunt Ayesha shook her head.