by Mohja Kahf
Maryam was successful and independent, and had recently become engaged to a schoolteacher named Latif. While they saved up to marry in two or three years, Maryam shared a spacious apartment in a gentrified downtown neighborhood with a white Catholic girl and a gay Latino Muslim man named Raul/Rasul. She knew him from college; they'd been in the Young Republicans club together or something.
"Wait-Latif doesn't mind that you share personal space with a man?" Khadra asked. The roommate was wearing a dark navy suit when she met him. He didn't act like what she expected a gay man to be like, but then she had rather limited experience other than on TV. He was kind of dour and serious. Kind of-well, straitlaced, frankly.
"I didn't say Latif doesn't mind," Maryam said, shaking out her neat dreads. "But it is what it is, you know? Housing isn't easy to find. This is what works for me, and Rasul is part of the deal, is all." She now gathered her tightly wrapped locks at the nape of her neck into a large jeweled hairclip.
"Plus, he's gay," Khadra murmured. A nineties Three's Company scenario, except the roommate here really was gay.
"If anything, the problem in this set-up is Deanna," Maryam said.
"Because she's not Muslim?"
"It would be okay if she wasn't, but knew enough about the culture not to do annoying things. She's-well, I don't mean to be stereotyping, but-she's the poster girl for clueless white insensitivity."
"Like what?"
"Like last week she put bacon bits in the potato salad. You couldn't tell because they looked like the red skin of the potatoes. Rasul had a fit. I didn't flip out-I just stopped eating it. Midmouthful. She knows we don't eat pork-she just wasn't thinking. She goes `Oh! Did I do that?"' Maryam rolled her eyes. "There went the potato salad. I was hungry, too."
"That's nothing you can't work out. Bitsy and I had bacon issues." Her own roommate went out of her way to eat as much bacon as possible, in reaction to the Arab-imposed bacon-ban oppression to which her people had been subjected for centuries. Once she'd ordered pepperoni on a pizza she and Khadra were splitting, and Khadra had paid up her half in advance with her last cash. This meant she was broke until payday two days later.
"What did you do?" Maryam said.
"I picked the pepperoni off my half and ate the damn pizza for two days."
"The desert island scenario, right? If you're on a desert island and there's no food but pork, and it's eat pork or die: pork becomes halal."
"Or in my case, the drippings, after I picked off the actual pork. My butt was broke! But my parents would have picked death," Khadra grinned. "You know why they won't buy fresh deli meat?"
"The slicer," Maryam said. They laughed simultaneously.
Maryam said, "I'm ready. Shall we go?" She was deeply religious but not a regular mosque-goer. She dropped in on one occasionally. Didn't think it was necessary to attach to a mosque scene at all, didn't find it troubling not to "have" a mosque. She had a zawiya at home, a clean, well-lit corner where her prayer rug was spread.
This friend mapped Muslim space in a way new to Khadra. Maryam's thing was service. Service to the poor is service to God. "That's the Sunna," she said. "I don't have to be working only with Muslims or on Muslim issues or Muslim this or Muslim that. By representing impoverished defendants, I'm manifesting Muslim values in my life. We don't need a ghetto mentality."
She argued with her father about this, since his position was that Black people should "Do For Self," following the philosophy of Elijah Mohammed. Patronize each other's businesses, build their own alternate institutions and networks. Not get co-opted by mainstream America.
"A Hoosier, huh," Latif said, shaking Khadra's hand when Maryam introduced them. "IU?"
"Yeah. For a few years," Khadra said.
"My brother went there."
"Yeah, huh?"
Latif picked up her bummed tone. "My brother didn't like it much either. He had his heart broken down there. The most gorgeous girl in the world, he used to call her. He was gonna bring her up to Philly, meet the folks."
Khadra said, "What happened?" imagining some typical American girlfriend-boyfriend break-up story.
"Oh," Latif said. "She up and dumped him. Her parents wanted her to marry a Kenyan guy or something like that. Someone from the Mother Land, you know."
Something stirred in Khadra's mind. "Kenyan?" she said.
"That's right."
"Are you sure she was from Kenya?"
"Yeah. Suddenly Tariq was into all things Kenyan. Put the flag up in his room and everything."
Khadra was silent for a minute, puzzling. How many Kenyan girls could there have been at IU in the mid-seventies? "What else did your brother say about her?"
Latif tried to remember. "Tariq talked about, he used to go out to rallies with her and holler and all that, but mainly just because he wanted to be with her. Tariq's not that political, see."
Khadra's head was spinning. Zuhura, whom I never really knew. Ya Zuhura.
Bitsy would never say what her Iranian name had been. "We changed it when I got my citizenship," she said.
"Why?" Khadra said, wondering who "we" was.
"Oh," Bitsy shrugged. "So we could do things like, you know, order pizza without the guy on the phone getting all confused, I guess."
There was a pause. You changed your name-your name-for the pizza guy? Khadra thought, but didn't say it.
"And job applications and such," her roommate continued. "Makes things just a whole lot easier."
"Why Hudnut?"
Bitsy shrugged. "We picked it out of a phone book at random."
I bet at random, Khadra thought. After you skipped the tries that landed on "Hernandez" and "Nguyen."
"But why `Bitsy?' Is that short for something? Elizabeth?"
"No," Bitsy said. "Nothing. Just Bitsy."
"What did your name used to be? Basima?"
"No."
"Beetah?"
"No."
"Banafsheh?"
"No."
"Berokh?"
"No."
"Can I borrow your canvas tote bag this afternoon? I'm going to the farmers' market."
"No. Get your own."
A letter came addressed to Fatima-Zahra Gordafarid.
"My God, Seemi, I think I know Bitsy's real name," Khadra said. "Look at this." The letter had a yellow forwarding label on it. Khadra rummaged through her desk for the lease. It was under a book of prints by Sebastiao Salgado: Photographer Activist. The old address on the letter, which you could still partially read under the yellow label, matched the "former place of residence" Bitsy listed on the lease.
"Whew. From a great name like that to Bitsy Hudnut?" Seemi said. "Fatima-Zahra Gordafarid. Whew."
Where are my lovers? Where are my tall, my lovely princes
-Naomi Long Madgett, "Black Woman"
Khadra was still working at the morgue job. One day she called Seemi from work. A local Muslim university couple, both professors, had been murdered recently and it was in the news-terrible, tragic-and there were Muslims in and out of the morgue. Mosque to morgue and morgue to mosque, to police station-the scene was hopping. Tense.
"What is it? What's wrong? Are you okay?" Seemi said, responding to the urgency in Khadra's voice.
"I'm okay, if I can catch my breath. Oh, my God. You'll never believe who walked in here right past my desk just now."
"Who?"
"I don't know."
"I'm going to come over there and murder you, Khadra," Seemi said.
"I don't know, but he's an African god." I'm holding out fora poet till the morning light ...
"Say an astaghfirullah for your blasphemy."
'4staghfirullah. "
"Good girl. Now go on."
"Just this absolute god in a kufi. A tall beautiful man, Seemi. Like-like a column of poetry. Chisled out of onyx with broad shoulders and the Face of Intelligence, radiating energy and power throughout this rinky-dink, sterile place. And I am about to fall over. Just fall over right here be
tween the corpses. Oh. My. God. Help me, in the name of the Almighty."
Seemi was laughing her head off. "Stop hyperventilating. You'll hurt yourself."
"How can I meet him?" Khadra demanded, panicky. "What do I do? I can't let him leave this building and not know his name-what if he never comes back? What if I never see him again?"
"You don't know anything about this man. What if he's married?"
Khadra flashed on fantasies of "second wife"-hood-but only for the barest instant-I've just committed a feminist sin, she thought with chagrin. But if it was the only way to have him, would she consider it? Of course not-but then, why did she even go there for a second-yeee! Stop!
"What if he's not?" she said to Seemi.
"Okay. Girlfriend at work here. What's he there for? Do you know his business? Can you get involved in it in any way? I mean, you do work there."
"Okay, okay, that's good. Think, Khadra, think. I don't know what he's here for, but I know who he went in to see. Dr. Pap- padapoulus. I think-he could be-I think he's one of the mosque people-the committee people working on the Fayyumi murder."
"Well, what are you waiting for? Get your butt over to Pap- padapoulus's office and have something ready to ask him. Take a clipboard. Look professional. Get introduced."
"Okay-okay-good plan-right, right-thank you, and God bless you for ever and ever!"
But he was gone by the time Khadra made it there. The mysterious African god would remain a mystery. "But he's out there, somewhere," she told Maryam and Seemi.
"That's right," Maryam said. She rolled her eyes to Seemi and said, nodding her head at Khadra, "Incurable romantic."
The potential for love, in the City of Brotherly Love, had proved itself only a corner-turn away, Khadra felt. She went out every day with a sense of openness to whatever dazzling niches of light the city would show her next.
Khadra happened to have hijab on when Bitsy came home, a rather formal navy one, because she was getting ready to attend a social function with Maryam. She was beginning to see that, of the covered and uncovered modes, she preferred the covered, after all, and she wore it more often than not. It was a habit-hah, she thought, no pun intended! She was never going back to being a stickler about hijab. But it was something her body felt at home in. She knew this now from letting her body speak to her, from the inside out-rather than having it handed to her as a given.
`Assalamu alaikum wa rahmatullah, Fatima-Zahra Gordafarid! Where have you been?" she said to Bitsy cheerily, holding up the letter with the old name and the yellow forwarding label on it.
She was immediately sorry she had done so. A look of terror came to Bitsy's face and she faltered, almost looked like she was going to faint.
"What's wrong? What's wrong?" Khadra said, helping her sit down on the futon.
Bitsy wrenched away from her grasp. "Bas! Leave me alone!" she screamed, and then snapped something else in Farsi, startling Khadra with her vehemence. She pulled her knees to her chin and huddled on the futon.
"I was just teasing," Khadra said quietly, "just taking a guess that that was your name."
"Go away," Bitsy said coldly, but she was shivering. Khadra covered her with an afghan. She almost seemed to be having some sort of episode. Khadra twisted the hijab off her head and threw it on the coatrack, it beginning to sink in that Bitsy seemed to have some had sort of visceral response to seeing her in hijab, something physical and involuntary.
"I'm-I'm so sorry," Khadra said in a subdued voice. "Is there someone I can call for you, a family member?" She rummaged through the desk drawer and found the lease-it listed an aunt and uncle in California, but no parents. "Do you want me to call your aunt and uncle?" she asked, sitting down beside her and touching her hand. Gingerly, in case she recoiled. "Can I call your parents for you?"
"My parents died in '78," Bitsy said dully. "Killed by the Islamic Revolution. I was really little. I remember running through the street, terrified, and being surrounded by women dressed like you are dressed right now, and Islamic phrases ringing out all around me. It was the scariest time of my life."
"I'm so sorry," Khadra whispered. The same revolution she cheered back in high school, and took bruising kicks on her body for. Now here was its dark underside.
"My aunt and uncle brought me to America and raised me. Away from all that."
"I shouldn't have teased you," Khadra said. "About your name, or anything. I'm so sorry about-all of it."
Khadra was still on the lookout for love, after the god who got away.
"At least he showed you how alive you are," Maryam said.
"There's something not right about how, in city single scenes, we meet men apart from the families they come from," Khadra said. "It's too anonymous." She thought of Baker, with his heavy, sloping way of coming into a room, how she met him in the midst of children and raw meat and cilantro in Im Litfy's kitchen, how sweet that was. Tobacco smells, and music, and him, with his wholesome Arab good looks in the middle of all that. She thought about joy's brother often. About how there'd been a slim window of opportunity to get to know him better, just for a minute, and then she was getting married, and then after her divorce, she'd heard he was getting married.
"Just the way single people tend to segregate themselves by age group throws off the social balance," Maryam agreed. "Bunch of heartless twenrysomethings, confused thirtysomethings."
"Yeah. I need to be around people of different ages, around some souls that are a few cycles older in their spiritual life. And around children," Khadra added. "I miss having children in my life. Not talking about having them, I mean-there'll be time for that, I hope. Just being around them."
"Yeah."
"Let's go to the Sufi lodge for potluck."
"Let's."
The head of the Sufi order was an ancient woman from Bangladesh, whom everyone called Mukhtar Bibi. She was such a little shrunken apple, you might almost miss her, sitting and guiding the dhikr serenely. Until she spoke, that is-then you leaned forward to catch every word of her sohbet. And Khadra did a double take when she met the imam at the dergah: the Cowboy Imam. Clyde Seymour was a softspoken white man with a droopy gray-blond mustache and a cowboy hat, which he hung carefully on a hook when he led the prayer, slipping a white kufi on his head in its place. His wife, Julia Orin, looked like Freya the Norse goddess, with a tall, Scandinavian build and hair of pale yellow turning iron gray tumbling down her shoulders, and rough reddened skin on her face and arms and collarbone skin.
Julia and Clyde had been students of Bibi since 1961-since before Khadra was born. You could tell at once that there was unconditional love and sweetness there, the sort Khadra'd had with Teta. Bibi treated the couple with tender, if occasionally sharp-witted, concern, and they doted on her. Just being around the odd little "family" they formed made Khadra want to do cartwheels across the prayer space of the dergah.
She did it, too, once when she thought the place was empty, five cartwheels in a row, right across the middle. Then, out of nowhere, she heard thin peals of merry laughter, and turned to find Bibi wreathed in smiles, almost not visible in a heap of rugs and cushions in the corner.
"Turn, beti, turn," the sheikha said. "Wherever you turn, there is the face of Love."
Khadra was there to learn from Julia some dhikrs with which to ground her city days and nights. Children entered the masallah with their parents and crossed the bay where she and Julia were sitting, each choosing a thick, shaggy sheepskin from a pile by the hearth. Then they picked a spot, threw the rugs down, and lay reading by themselves or talking quietly while their parents prayed. Khadra was reminded of Jihad "floating" in the back of the station wagon when he was little. Talking to God and floating.
Jihad called her often. She picked up when she heard his voice on the machine. She enjoyed hearing about his life, being able to tell him what to expect on the PSAT, and holding his hand when he found out what their parents didn't tell him, either, about Shiism.
"It's nice talking t
o you. It's kind of like having a parent who isn't clueless," he said when he phoned to complain about their parents disapproving of his band (music was not a serious pursuit, they said, and certainly not a godly one). "A younger-much younger!parent," he added when she protested.
"Anger, Avoidance, Rebuilding," the self-help book said. It was called Recovery for Adult Children ofMissionaries in 25 Easy Exercises. It had been dog-eared and scribbled on by others before it passed into Khadra's hands. She curled up on a sheepskin rug herself, to read. Okay, let's see, where I'm up to: "Avoidance." That explained going off to Syria, Khadra mused, and moving to Philadelphia as soon as she got back, and needing be far away from the old scene of community and family. Just to have the space to think, and God knows she couldn't do that around her mother, bless her heart. Ebtehaj was just so-so Ebtehaj.
The phone calls from her parents during that time, she'd ignored, let her machine pick up. The messages ran along the lines of. "Disobedience of your mother will bar your foot from touching heaven. What's the matter with you? Why you are in defiance of God?" and "When you are coming back to the pale of God? We are worried." And her favorite: "Are you dead or alive? Call soon."
She had a dread of going back to Indianapolis and Simmonsville and Bloomington-the whole central Indiana scene. Tayiba had reported that her daughter Nia was in the same school system now-she herserlf was on a Dawah committee to improve the representation of Islam in schoolbooks-and it was supposedly a whole different world. Teachers were into this new multiculturalism curriculum and words like "celebrating diversity" and "tolerance" tripped off their tongues. Khadra didn't buy it one bit. She didn't believe it could all really change that much. Yeah, right, she thought. If only it were that simple.
"Oh, get over high school already, Khadra," Tayiba said during one of their phone calls. "People do. You're, what, twenty-six now? Twenty-seven? People grow up." She was content and well adjusted, and didn't understand why everyone couldn't be as reasonable as she.
That was so unfair. "It's not about getting over high school," Khadra protested.