by Mohja Kahf
Khadra counted out her days in George Rogers Clark High School where, for four hundred and forty-four days, she was a hostage to the rage the hostage crisis produced in Americans. It was a battle zone. Her job was to get through the day dodging verbal blows-and sometimes physical ones. By the time she got home, she was ready to be crabby and mean to anyone in her way.
"Why are you such a sourpuss?" her mother asked sharply, when Khadra snapped at Jihad.
"And what's wrong with your grades?" Wajdy demanded. "A C in English composition? You used to get As."
"She's prejadess," Khadra retorted.
It sounded like an excuse, but the comp teacher was prejudiced for real. Whenever Khadra wrote an essay about how hypocritical America was to say it was democratic while it propped dictators like the Shah and supported Israel's domination of Lebanon, "and then they wonder why people over there hate them," she got big red D's and Mrs. Tarkington found a reason to circle every other word with red ink. As soon as she turned in a composition on a neutral topic, no politics or religion, the Tark gave her a big fat A. It was that black-and-white.
Khadra felt a jab between her shoulder blades. Her books slipped to the floor An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X
"Oops," said a voice behind her. She whirled. Brent Lott and Curtis Stephenson. She was cornered. The whole school was at the rally in the gym. She could hear the pep squad's war whoops in the distance.
Curtis grabbed Malcolm X off the pukey green floor.
"Give me that." Khadra glared.
"Take off your towel first, raghead."
"Give it!"
"Why don't we take it off for her?" Brent Lott's hammy hand clamped on the nape of her neck, yanking her backward. The scarf went down around her shoulders. If Mindy Oberholtzer's little pleated cheerleader skirt had been ripped off, so that she'd been rendered half-naked right in the middle of school where people could see her, she might have felt as mortified as Khadra did then.
"Look, raghead's got hair under that piece a shit," Curtis crowed.
Brent yanked again.
"Cut it out, jerkoff?" Khadra yelled, swiping uselessly at his arm behind her back. Ow-the topaz scarf brooch opened, poking her skin, drawing blood.
"Want me to hold her down for you?" Curtis grabbed one of her flailing arms.
"Stop it!"
A ripping sound. Brent stepped back, waving a piece of scarf. Khadra lunged-tried to grab it-her scarf was torn in two, one strip in Brent's hand, the other wound tightly around her neck.
"I hate you!" she screamed.
`I hate you!" Brent mimicked in falsetto. "It's just hair, you psycho!"
"What a psycho," Curtis echoed. The two boys ran down the hall, the thump of their Adidas'd feet merging with the clatter of the pep rally.
Khadra knelt and started collecting her things. Algebra, Hola Amigos 11, her binder with all the papers falling out of it on the floor, My Antonia crumpled on its face.
"I hate you! I hate you! I HATE you!" she screamed at their receding figures.
Mr. Eggleston came out of his room down the hall. Silhouetted by the daylight streaming from the double doors at the end of the hallway, he shook his head, gave her a look of mild disapproval, and went back inside.
Mama was going to freak out, Khadra knew. "Where is your scarf? Why did you take it off?" Her father would say gravely, "But why were you talking to a boy anyway?" They didn't get it, they didn't get anything. She slid to the floor, her back against the cinder blocks. After her breathing got back to normal, she shoved her stuff into her locker and kicked it shut, wiping her face with the back of her hand. She would not cry in this hateful school. She never should have let them get to her. Hated herself for that.
The scarf. It was a mess. She didn't want to give anyone in this building the satisfaction of seeing her bareheaded. She shoved her disheveled hair under it. The brooch from Aunt Khadija was broken. Great. There was a smear of blood on the folds of the scarf where the brooch had poked her. Just great. That'd never come out.
She needn't have worried about her mother's reaction-when she got home, Ebtehaj was in another world. She and Aunt Trish were focused intently on the news of the day: ". . . massacre ... Sabra and Shatila ... allege that Israelis allowed Phalangist forces to enter the camps at ... Red Cross estimates ... death toll rising ......
"Omar heard from his cousin in Tripoli it was several thousand," Aunt Trish said, worried. Her husband's brother Muhammad lived in Sabra. Was he among the massacred, or just temporarily unreachable because of all the terror?
All of Omar Nabolsy's brothers had been named Muhammad, out of some fancy of their slightly unhinged mother, whom their father indulged. There was Muhammad Ali, Muhammad Taha, Muhammad Khair, and plain Muhammad. When things started to get confusing in the household crowded with Muhammads, he'd put his foot down and named the last boy Omar. But since the Nabolsys had been thrown to the four directions by the Palestinian diaspora, and there seemed little chance of the Muhammads ever reuiniting in their city again, it didn't matter so much anymore.
Nothing mattered to Khadra, except surviving the minefield of each day.
"Why can't we befriends now? ... Its what I want. Its what you want. " But the horses didn't want it-they swerved apart; the earth didn't want it, sending up rocks ... the temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds ... they said in their hundred voices, `No, not yet, "and the sky said, "No, not there. "
-E. M. Forster, A Passage to India
Livvy and Khadra could no longer meet each other's eyes. Not since the Hellfire Showdown. It was after Livvy's Christian youth-camp revival where she rededicated herself to Jesus. Livvy was sharing the experience with Khadra as they lay on their stomachs across Livvy's purple checkered bedspread, twirling their ankles in the air, Debby Boone playing faintly on the bedside radio. Livvy kept saying "God's Son this" and "God's Son that." Each time she said it, fingernails scraped against a blackboard in Khadra's head.
She finally put her hands to her ears and said, "Stop!"
"Stop what?" Livvy said.
"You don't understand. That's the worst possible sin in my religion, okay?" Khadra said. "That whole son of God thing. I can't listen to that anymore. Even listening to it is, like, a really big sin."
The conversation deteriorated from there to:
"Am I going to hell? According to what you believe, am I going to hell?"
And each one had to admit to the other: Yes.
"Because you're not Saved," Livvy said tearfully. "You haven't accepted Jesus as your Savior. The best I can tell you is, some Christians believe in limbo, but that's really only for children who die young. Like, unbaptized babies. I'm not sure how old the cut-off is. Maybe you'll die young?"
"You want me to die young? Well, guess what, Livvy, you're going to hell too," Khadra said in a quavering voice.
She wasn't sure on this point. Sometimes her mother and father said Christians and Jews could possibly make it to heaven. It was in the Quran. But on the other hand, the Quran was also pretty clear that you couldn't go but to hell if you associated a partner or son with God. That was idolatry. Denying God's oneness. The biggest sin.
Livvy put her head down on her Paddington Bear and cried. Khadra went home feeling miserable. After that, Livvy and Khadra could only look at each other across the lunchroom with big sad eyes and weren't friends anymore.
She missed Hanifa, but they'd grown apart this new school year. All Hanifa did in her spare time these days was take apart and put back together the engine of a junked Ford Pinto she'd found behind the train tracks, sometimes with the Jefferson boys, Malik and Marcus. And get in trouble with her parents for taking the family car on joyrides-she didn't even have a license! Last summer, Khadra'd caught her friend in some unlslamic behavior on the back seat of the wrecked car, and gave her a good talking-to for it.
"What was she doing?" Tayiba had wanted to know, when she heard about Khadra's tirade.
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br /> "I'm not at liberty to say," Khadra'd said primly. "That would be tale-bearing." Of course, her vagueness only made worse the whispers in the community.
And now Hanifa had been absent from school for a while. Khadra and Tayiba heard a rumor that she was getting ready to go live with her non-Muslim grandmother in Alabama. Hanifa looked sullen when she answered the door. Khadra followed her to the threshold of the living room. "What's going on?"
"I don't want to talk about it," Hanifa said. "I want to lie down."
Khadra was hurt. Hanifa closed her eyes. Fingers of afternoon light filtered in, but Hanifa lay in shadow, her face smooth and not giving up secrets, her legs stretched out on the sectional sofa. In shorts. She was listening to music. Unlslamic music.
Well, she was related to non-Muslims, wasn't she? She was related to this music, to Lionel Ritchie, to some old non-Muslim grandmother in Alabama. She could just up and leave this life she had where Khadra was her friend, where you abided by the Total Islamic Lifestyle, and go off somewhere else. Be some other person. Leave Khadra in the lurch.
Something snapped in Khadra and she raged at her friend, "You're going astray, you know. Soon you'll be just like any American. You're going to hell, you know!"
Khadra didn't really know how she walked home. She just remembered her outburst, Hanifa's blank face, and then being exhausted, sobbing, in her bed at home.
Then, one day, she heard Hanifa was gone. Khadra's already tight world was one person smaller.
Aunt Khadija teared up when Khadra asked about her. Folded a fitted bedsheet-struggled with the corners-"I just can't figure out how to fold these anymore," she said, her voice getting stuck in her throat, the sheet in a heap in her lap. Khadra, sitting cross-legged on the Al-Deens' sectional sofa, rolled a pair of tube socks together and absently reached into the basket for more.
"But where did she go, Aunt Khadija? Why did she leave?"
Aunt Khadija murmured something about Hanifa going to stay with her grandmother in Alabama, and didn't want to say any more. Khadra smoothed out a cotton crewneck undershirt and picked up a pair of shorts, then realized they must be Hakim's, and quickly put them down.
"Never speak her name again," Ebtehaj said when Khadra said how strange it was about Hanifa.
"She's having a baby," Eyad said to his sister, later, in private. He had information from Hakim.
Khadra's jaw dropped.
They are a people who take the earth for a carpet, its dust for a bed, and its water for perfume; they take the Quran for a watchword and prayer for a covering
-Ali ibn Abi Talib, The Peak ofEloguence
Wajdy and Ebtehaj always viewed their stay in America as temporary. That was part of the reason they were always reluctant to buy many things; they'd just be more attachments to leave behind when the time came. Money saved buying beat-up furniture in America was money that could be spent back home in Syria one day. Who cares what you sat on if this was not home? If your walls were white and bare, or had only a tacky prayer rug with some faded image of mosques pinned up, and your children craved beauty and form, let it be a lesson to them on the value of plainness and the fleeting nature of the life of this world compared to the next. The plan was to return to the House of Islam, ramshackle as it was.
But the return kept getting postponed. First there'd been college degrees to be earned, for learning was a virtue for man and woman, and to travel in search of learning, yea even unto the West, was loved by God. Then there was Islamic work to be done in the Dawah. Wajdy's idea had been to set things on a good course, train his replacement, and leave. But year piled on top of year, and soon two whole children, Khadra and Eyad, had practically grown up, with Eyad in college and Khadra in high school. And Jihad was halfway through a childhood spent in America only by default.
Meanwhile, things were on fire in Syria. "Islamists and Freemasons, landlords, shopkeepers, workers, and peasants, conservatives and revolutionaries, Syrians and Palestinians-nearly all opposed the regime. " The Islamic movement was getting stronger all the time, by word-jihad and deed-jihad, by peaceful means and by the taking up of arms. By any means necessary. The government was punishing those who opposed it-and even those who didn't, since whatever flimsy rules of evidence and legality had existed before were jettisoned in the face of this onslaught-by means of sweeps, mass arrests, executions, rape, and torture.
Wajdy attacked the Syrian dictator constantly in The Islamic Forerunner and urged support for the Islamic movement that sought to overthrow him. Just to express this opinion privately, much less to publish it, was a capital crime in Syria, so this exercise of freedom of speech made Wajdy a "terrorist." If he were ever caught in Syria, he'd be sent to the reeducation camps in the desert.
Whenever Teta got home from one of her American trips, the mukhabarat-horrible men with enormous power, loathed by everyone-hauled her in to question her about Wajdy. When did you see him? Where? Why? He's my nephew, for heaven's sake, a nephew I raised, like a son to me. Who are his associates? What are his activities? Who else did you see in America? What are their political beliefs? For hours and hours they kept Teta sitting in their office, talking to her roughly, as if she were a criminal. They even threatened to put her in Mazze Prison to try to coerce Wajdy to come to Syria.
"Trying to intimidate me," she said to Khadra when she told the story the next year. "But they don't know me! I am one tough cookie. I know no fear. I am the salt of the earth, I am," she sang, dropping her voice to a macho baritone and thumping her abundant bosom. But she looked tired. What indignities they really put her through, she never hinted at. And she never once reproached Wajdy. "My dissident boy," she called him proudly, over the kitchen table in Fallen Timbers.
Then the Hama massacre happened. Twenty thousand Syrians were killed, thousands dragged off to prison, thousands more wounded, and seventy thousand left homeless because the government razed half the city. Even though the resistance was beaten down in the first ten days of fighting, the government forces kept pounding and pounding the city as collective punishment for its rebellion. The wound was deep, and affected everyone in Syria, no matter if they were pro-government, pro-opposition, or neutral. Fear was in the air, and explosive anger. In The Islamic Forerunner, Wajdy let loose with fiery op-eds condemning the Asad regime.
TEta decided not to risk travel abroad that summer, and that was the end of her long lovely stays with Khadra and her family. "I'm too tuckered out for this," Teta told them over the phone. "Te'ebruni, such a long journey, and the stress.... And you will ever be at sea, no harbor in your destiny," she said, and started singing Abdul Halim's Nizar poem, "The Palm Reader." Here Hayat Um Abdo, her neighbor and best friend, tried to take the phone from her, but TEta yanked it back and finished the song:
After that there was only the telephone. May you bury me, lovesies, may you bury my bones, call me.
The spirit is truly at home with itself " when it can confront the world that is opened up to it, give itself to the world, and redeem it and, through the world, also itself. But the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate ... that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You.
-Martin Buber, I and Thou
There had always been the telephone, providing its staticky line to Syria. Such communication, however, was rare and extremely expensive. If Eyad and Khadra came home from school and their mother was shouting at the top of her lungs "WE'RE FINE, FINE! THANKING GOD! MISSING YOU!" then they knew there was a phone call to Damascus going on. You had to talk real loud on an overseas call. And you took the phone call standing on edge. You couldn't read a book or eat a snack while a phone call to Syria was in progress. Everyone stood at attention. It was a major family event, like a childbirth or a hospitalization. And indeed, aside from the two Eids, you mostly only phoned Syria when events like that happened, like Jihad's birth the year after they moved to Indianapolis, Wajdy's appendec
tomy and, on the other end, the births of Mafaz, Muhsin,' and Misbah, the younger siblings of Reem and Roddy, those model Muslim children.
The phone call to Syria followed almost exactly the same script year after year, except instead of bulletins like "JIHAD'S TEETHING!" they began to say things like "KHADRNS IN HIGH SCHOOL NOW." and "EYAD GOT A SCHOLARSHIP TO COLLEGE!"
"We don't have that," Hakim said one day to Khadra, when she spoke of having to hurry home because there was a phone call to Syria.
"Huh?" she said.
"We can't phone home like you all," he said. A dog-eared book of poems by Marvin X was under his arm, a black book with a star and crescent on the cover. Fly to Allah, the title said. Ever since Han- ifa'd dropped out of sight, Hakim had acquired kind of a hard edge, read militant black authors, and talked tough about "self-discipline," as if to distance himself from what she'd done, an undisciplined thing. "This stuff's for real," he liked to say of his new reading matter. That was what he was after, whatever the latest book in his hand: what was for real. Where was it to be found?
"Who? What are you talking about? Who's `we?' and who's `you all?"' Khadra thought his quest and even his newfound fierceness noble, but was frustrated by how it locked her out. Not that they saw much of eath other, other than in the context of time their families spent together. Past a certain age, girls in their community didn't hang out with boys. This sometimes had the effect of lending a mystique to the few interactions they did have, whereas constant familiarity might have dulled down their views of each other to a sisterly-brotherly boredom.