The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel

by Mohja Kahf

  "Right. The type of nice kindly religious person that will very gently tell you you're going to hell," Ernesto replies. "They're in my diocese, too, believe me."

  That's the thing. That's what makes the scene so difficult to figure out, for Khadra, so full of contradictions-the people are good people, in many ways-grounded, kindly. Khadra loves the people. And then at the same time she cannot stand their worldview, can no longer stand to be inside it. It is stifling and untenable not because it is Muslim, but in the same way sincere and goodhearted hardcore Christians and Jews are wrong, and hardcore leftists, and militant rightwingers and pulpit pounders of any sort. Even Seemi when she gets up on her progressive soapbox.

  "Then help the viewer see all this," Ernesto says. "It's no use censoring yourself, Khadra. That's not how you get at the whole picture."

  The whole picture. What did Ernesto know about the whole picture? And what is Alternative Americas, anyway? Just another part of the mainstream establishment, poised to take ads from the big corporations, dependent on the marketing of itself like any other for-profit venture, or a genuine class act of the alternative media, an intelligent path to visualizing those whirled peas? Now Khadra finds herself wondering if working at the magazine is enough for her. Where is her life going, what is her task? How is she serving humanity? Okay, that's way overreaching, the ironic undercutter in her protests. That's Dawah thinking. That's the missionary in you, like Exercise 23 in the book showed, remember? All she has to do is keep her inner flame going inside its niche; that one little goal connects her always to all humanity. Fine, she thinks, backing down, nothing grand, then, and returns to the basic question: Is this work something she can do with her whole self? That's the only "whole picture" she has to worry about. Yes, she decides. It is. This assignment is from my whole self, anyway. She will get to the end of it and figure out where to go from there.

  She ties her hair back with a faded green bandanna. (She remembers how she and some of the other girls used to wear bandannas for their earliest stabs at hijab, because ordinary Hoosier kids like Allison Bone wore bandannas all the time and the Muslim kids hoped to pass for normal in them.) Khadra goes out in a modest jogging outfit-long cotton drawstring pants and a three-quartersleeve T-shirt-and chooses a path on the outskirts of hardcore Islamistan, away from the part of campus overrun by conference Muslims.

  God, she knows every inch of this place. It's a part of her. The stinky gingko tree-hers. Her Maryam tree, she called the mulberry -it let fall fresh ripe fruit upon her, like Maryam's tree in the Quran. There's the path where she biked with Joy and shouted about abortion. Here's where she waded in the waist-deep snowdrifts of more than one Indiana winter. This is where the mockingbirds used to swoop down and attack you as you ambled down the path, until somebody taped off a chunk of sidewalk and put up a handwritten sign, Mockingbirds Nesting, Do Not Disturb!

  She slows to a power walk, cooling down. Rounds a corner and there is Hakim, sitting on a stone bench in the twilight. She waves. He is there when she circles back. They find themselves segueing down the same path toward Lindley Hall. Her sweat is cooling off, but her cheeks are still a little flushed.

  "It's maghreb," Hakim observes.

  "Mmm hmm," Khadra says absently. She is confused by her sudden heightened awareness of his body. A sensation comes to her, a physical memory of bike riding with him when they were kids, leaning back into his chest, his grip next to hers on the handlebars.

  He looks at his watch. "Dang. I haven't prayed."

  "Oh-er-" Khadra looks sheepish. "I haven't either. If we hustle back to the Union, we can just about do maghreb in time."

  "Maghreb time is short."

  She knows that. She also knows that, as a traveler, she can slide over the time limit and pray maghreb when she does the night prayer later. And she knows Hakim knows it.

  "Wanna pray together? Here?" Hakim says, gesturing toward the grass.

  A warm glow suffuses from her belly. From the jogging. "Sure, why not," she says. They veer off the path to a woodsy spot behind Lindley Hall, away from pedestrians.

  "Got wudu?"

  "You bet."

  She unrolls her bandana and opens it into a little makeshift prayer scarf She does not stand behind Hakim-he glances around as if to locate her-but beside, leaving a few feet of grass between them.

  After salam, they stay sitting on the grass a little while longer, leaning back out of the upright prayer posture into a more relaxed position, each one looking down at his or her finger joints. Hakim gazes at her face as they begin to rise. He leans toward her-she draws back a little-he reaches out and brushes her forehead very lightly with the tips of two fingers.

  "Piece of grass," he says, holding out his open palm to show her. Smooth smooth man. They walk back, not talking much, the late afternoon buttering into evening. Butter, too, is his low voice beside her, his gait of smooth restraint.

  "Hey-listen," he says, just before they part. "We're all going out to root for Hanifa in the race tomorrow. Me and my folks. Want to come?"

  Is-is she being asked on a date? A date with the imam? She giggles inwardly. No, she corrects herself quickly, it's a family thing. He's asking me as a friend.

  "I'd love to," she says, smiling widely.

  She has time for a quick shower before her next shoot. Under the water, s! e thinks about Hakim. What is happening? In soooo confused, she -ould hear herself telling Seemi. She wishes she had a girlfriend here to talk to. It's too much to explain long distance. What is too much to explain? Has anything really even happened? Was that a lace moment, praying beside him on the grass? Does he feel it too, or is it just her? Is she imagining it, projecting, ohhhh what what what.

  Okay, she says to herself, be your own inner girlfriend, think this through. Say it's real. Say it's lace. Then what? Hakim? Does she really want to go back in time to someone from her childhood, from the old mindset? But he isn't, any more than she is. Just because he grew up in it. He's on some kind of journey, he's somewhere betwixt and between, like she is. But he's an imam. Yeah, so? Got anything against imams? Nooo, Khadra doesn't. But what about him being freshly divorced? What is it Americans call that in dating terms-oh yeah: on the rebound. She knows all about that, and that it's potentially dangerous. Getting someone on the rebound is something to avoid. But clearly she is having trouble avoiding Hakim.

  Khadra, with two cameras hanging from her shoulder-because she wants both color and black-and-white shots of the concert-heads for the auditorium to get some shots of the curious band her brother is in, The Clash of Civlizations.

  The Civ (they go with that for short to avoid confusion with The Clash) does events both in and out of religious enclaves, although the religion people like them because they have a rep as a "straightedge" or "clean" band. No lyrics about the thrills of drugs, drinking, or promiscuous sex. They've been busy practicing for their Dawah conference debut, working out versions of their songs without instruments, to meet the requirement that all entertainment conform to the most conservative of Islamic standards so as not to offend any of its constituency.

  She gets there only to find Jihad slumped against a large amp. Garry is packing up. Brig and Riley look glum.

  "Man," Brig says, shaking his head. Khadra snaps his expression in grainy black and white as she waves hello.

  "What's wrong?"

  Just then, an announcement comes over the PA system: "Brothers and sisters, the concert in tonight's Entertainment Program, The Clash of Civilizations, has been cancelled. Repeat, The Clash of Civilizations is cancelled."

  "But why?" Khadra says, as she keeps snapping. Their postures are the very picture of boy-band dejection.

  "We've been fatwa'd," Garry says. "We've been given the of Salman Rushdie."

  "Oh my God-you got a death threat?" Khadra says. She stops shooting.

  "Not that bad," Jihad hurries to assure her. "The uncles just shut us down," he says, disappointment in his voice.

  "But why?" Khadra s
ays again.

  "It's not us, it's about some girls who went before us," Brig says, wrapping an orange extension cord. "We weren't even here."

  "Somebody explain to me what happened," Khadra says. She knows too well how little support for any kind of arts there is in the Dawah community. Why had she let her hopes rise when she heard they actually tried to put together an arts segment in this year's conference?

  "Okay, you know that girl group that performed this afternoon?" Jihad says.

  "You mean Hijab Hip Hop with the Nia Girls?" Khadra says. She'd seen the flyers. She loved their name.

  "Right," Jihad says. "So okay, there's this rule that girls have to stay behind the podium when performing."

  Khadra's jaw drops. But why should I be surprised, she thinks.

  "Yeah. I kid you not. Only their head can show above the podium. `They are not to dance and not to make their voice suggestive and seductive,' and all that, right?"

  "Whew," Garry says.

  "So, but it's a rap group, okay?" Jihad goes. "You can't just stand stock still on one X mark on the floor and rap. You move around."

  "She moved around, like-like this"-Garry moonwalks to demonstrate-"and they said she was dancing," he says.

  Khadra smiles. She would've liked to see it.

  "The uncles closed in pretty fast after it got reported up the chain of command," Jihad goes on.

  Of course, Khadra thinks. The body of a woman or girl is enough to bring the whole thing to a crashing halt. It's like a lever-what did that Greek guy say? Give me a lever and I can move the whole world? What can transform the self to love? It is beauty. Ibn al-Arabi knew. Back in Syria, the poet knows.

  "They had some sort of emergency meeting," Jihad says. "Uncle Kuldip shows up and he, like, sort of apologizes to us but he says they've already heard a lot of complaints from conference-goers about the entertainment segment and the coordinating committee just made a snap decision to cancel the whole thing."

  "That sucks," she says.

  "He says not to feel discouraged, just that it's too soon to spring it on Islamistan, the conference goers can't take this much change yet, we have to understand. And so on. Give me a break," Jihad harrumphs.

  "That really sucks," Khadra says. "Hang on a sec, I have to make a phone call." She finds a pay phone in the hallway. "Uncle Abdulla? ... Yes, and so I'm coming after all, but is it okay if I invite Jihad along?"

  She has to hold the receiver away from her face while Uncle Abdulla sputters "How can you even think you need to ask such a question, you are like my own children, you must come, you and your brother, I will be very upset if you don't come," etc., etc.

  "Great, and also, there's his friends-a Muslim boy named Garry and the Whitcomb twins, remember the Whitcombs from next door to us in the Timbers? Is that okay?"

  Uncle Abdulla goes off into another torrent of welcoming phrases and reprimands-how could Khadra question his hospitality? And on the occasion of the aqiqa of his first grandbaby? His door is open, his table is for all. She returns smiling, warmed by his voice; she knew she could count on the kindliness of Uncle Abdulla.

  "... so guys, if you want to come, you've got an open invitation," Khadra says to the members of the band. They look doubtful. She takes jihad's arm. "Look, I need you to come with me. I'm not driving that evil road to Simmonsville by myself. Come on! I've got room for all of you," she says to Brig and Riley and Garry. "You'll get good food out of it, anyway. At least the evening won't be a total waste."

  "It was always good food at you guys' house," Brig says.

  "Anything that wasn't Mom's endless casseroles with the Campbell's-soup sauce was good food," Riley grins, and Brig punches him in the arm for being a traitor to their mother like that, but he adds, "With the potato chips on top. Don't forget the potato chips."

  "I dunno, I kind of liked the potato chips," Jihad says, lifting the amp onto a dolly.

  -Wallada bint al-Mustakfi, twelfth-century poet of Islamic Spain

  In the car, Bette Midler sings "From a Distance" on the station Khadra is tuned to, but the boys are smirking and stifling snickers and finally they blurt, "Aaargh! Enough!" and she lets jihad tune the radio. After blips of news-FBI Director Fox revealed that Muslim groups in the United States have been under federal surveillance since 1972-of the UN resolution holding Serbian political leaders personally responsible ... overt policy ... systematic mass rape of Bosnian Muslims-calling the Vance-Owen plan grievously inadequate-he finds a heavy-metal station. She grits her teeth and tries to hear music in the noise of their generation.

  She'd been only half-joking when she told Jihad she didn't want to be alone on this stretch of road. Even though she'd trekked all across the country on her own, this is the road where Zuhura died and it still freaked her out. Whenever she sees a group of white men, or even just one white man, who looks small-town or rural or lowerclass urban-she admits there is class prejudice in her feeling-in short, whenever she sees Hoosiers of the male persuasion who look like roughnecks, somewhere in the pit of her stomach she freaks out, even if she hides it well. Whether they are paunchy middle-aged men with balding pates or guys her age smooth shaven as Randy Travis, or boys her brother's age, some terrified cell in her lower gut flinches and some buried part of her flashes on Zuhura curled naked in a ditch with her henna'd hands, Zuhura's rapists and killers still out there, never caught: the police didn't care, it could be anyone. Is it them? Coming up behind me in the white pick-up? Then the pickup passes. Not them. Then another one sidles up next to her, with a rifle rack in the back. Is it them? Who's hunting me? Who is hunting me, who I cannot see? Jihad, and his friends in the back of her little hatchback Rabbit, and the music, even the awful Metallica, keep the terror deep down muffled in her gut where it can't come out.

  "It doesn't make sense," Jihad says. "We're going to eat dinner with the people who run the organization that just cancelled our concert.

  "Not technically. Uncle Abdulla retired from the Dawah years ago," Khadra says. "He went back to his degree field, electrical engineering."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah. He had to, to support two wives."

  "Two wives?" Brig says incredulously.

  Riley says, "You guys really still do that? We're the ones who always take the rap for it!"

  "He and Tante Mirvat never had a civil marriage. Just an Islamic one," Khadra says, keeping an eye out for the turnoff. "I suppose that means in this country they'd be considered having a common whatsit?"

  "Common-law marriage," Garry says. He's pre-law. "No, they wouldn't. Because he's legally married to the first one. The second one'd be his mistress and that's all. She has no legal protection."

  "Oh," Khadra says. "That's disturbing. No wonder Mirvat has been on Valium since the Reagan era."

  But obviously there is detente now between the two women because they both are there, in the Dawah Center backyard where the aqiqa is being held. The place is strung with Chinese lanterns in the summer night. And there's Sabriya, once a little curly-headed girl who used to climb on her daddy's head during prayer and make the whole congregation wait. Now Sabriya, the new mother, lies on a lounge chair on the women's side of the lawn. In her lap is her oneweek-old infant girl, honoree of the day, wearing tiny gold earrings like any Arab baby girl. She basks in a nimbus glow, the spun fabric of a womblike existence. Her will is still undifferentiated, sloshing around gently like yolk in the egg of family life unbroken.

  Sabriya's mother, Aunt Fatma, sits sentry in an Adirondack chair next to her. Tante Mirvat keeps her distance at a table over by the towering lilac bushes. Her two lisping little boys run around in white dress shirts and carefully creased pants while everybody else is wearing jeans and sitting on the grass amid the crabapple trees. The bank of tiger lilies is in bloom, obscuring the chain-link fence. The aqiqa crowd is thinner than what it would normally be because of people siphoned off to the conference in Bloomington.

  There are two identical buffets (on long folding office ta
bles covered with plastic tablecloths), one for men and one for women. Great chunks of boiled lamb lie atop large platters of rice. A roast leg of lamb centers each table. Kabobs of grilled lamb and vegetables, fried samosas, and rhubarb pie from Mrs. Moore make up the rest.

  "Do you think that's right, do you? For one woman to have her own fancy American car and the other woman has no car, is that Islamic? You are supposed to spend exactly the same amount of money on each wife, that is not Islamic!" Aunt Fatma is holding forth.

  "What can I do if I married a woman who has her own independent source of wealth?" Uncle Abdulla had told her over and over, when she fumed that Tante Mirvat tooled around town in her own Lincoln Town Car. "I didn't buy it for her, are you kidding, can I afford that kind of car?"

  "Khadra!" Aunt Fatma calls, spying her. "Look at you! You've come home at last," she says, pulling her into an embrace. Khadra feels the tug and knows Aunt Fatma wants her to stay on her side of the yard, but she must say hello to Tante Mirvat too; it would not be right. Khadra has taken too many brightly wrapped Eid presents from Uncle Abdulla's second wife not to acknowledge her, and she knows Aunt Fatma knows this and will forgive her.

  Sabriya plumps the infant Mona in her arms and, of course, Aunt Fatma says to Khadra, "May you be next, marriage and a baby, and this time, no waiting!"

  "I stayed for the children," Aunt Fatma says a little later, in front of Sabriya. "Your mother convinced me. Your mother, bless her heart." And Khadra knows what she's hearing: more bits of Shamy legacy, for good or ill. "I sacrificed my pride, my self. For the children," Aunt Fatima says.

  But later in the evening, she pulls Khadra back behind the pussy willow and says, "If I had it to do again? I would leave him. We didn't have an arranged marriage, no matter what people may think. We were in love. We ran to the riverbank to meet each other. We had something most people never have, something like a treasure from God. Now? What's left of that treasure? He's taken it all and given it to that one. I don't hate her. But I do blame him. He didn't know how to treasure love. He let it slip through his fingers. He did not appreciate the worth of my love. It was gold, my love! Pure gold!" she whispers, suddenly fierce, squeezing Khadra's arm so hard she breaks skin. "You don't do that to love. No. No. It hurts. It hurts." Her voice gets throaty and she turns her face toward the lilacs.