Almost every black grandmother I know smokes. I once hugged a friend’s grandmother while she was holding a cigarette, and it burned a mark onto my t-shirt. After which she took a long drag, looked me up and down and said, “You gotta watch that, honey.” I have known some who put out their cigarettes, look down at them with disgust, and say, “I swear, I’m gonna quit one of these days,” which we understand to mean, “I swear, I’m gonna die one of these days.” My particular Black generation is the one who, if they are lucky, have two (or more, in some cases) generations of living women that survived despite being pressed up against all manner of relentless tragedy. It’s why we laugh at the stories of the grandmother who takes no shit, but we know not to laugh too long. It is the unspoken fear, the unspoken knowledge of what many of these women gave. We know that if the officer’s gun didn’t kill them, and poverty’s hunger didn’t kill them, and the violence of marginalized and silenced Black men didn’t kill them, there is no measure of swallowed smoke that will shake them free of the earth quickly and easily.
There is pretty much no violence in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history. It is an uneasy conversation to approach, especially now, as we are asked to “behave” in the midst of another set of Black bodies left hollow. The Southern Black church has always been a battleground in this history of violence. Most notably, of course, during the Freedom Summer of 1964, but even beyond. The church, if we are to believe that it still exists for this purpose, is a space of ultimate humbling and vulnerability. In the South, the Black church is also a place of fear. To attack the innocent where they feel most secure is cowardly, of course, but it is also a reminder. There is no safety from this. There will be no reprieve from the sickness that spreads and calls people to take up this level of violence. There will be no calm before the storm. There will only be the storm, and then another, louder storm. It will follow you to your homes, press itself between your sleeping children, hang over your shoulders at work, and yes, it will walk into your church, pray to the same God as you do, and then stand up and open fire. There is no way to talk about this without talking about the history of instilling fear in Black people in this country. Without closing our eyes and feeling the warmth from a flaming cross. Or smelling a wet body, limp and descending from a Southern plantation tree.
The weight of this tragedy hung over me on the day after the Charleston shooting. I slept two restless hours in an Ohio hotel, spending most of my time rolling over to scroll through news feeds and news stories. I mostly thought of grandmothers. I thought of the grandmother who told her 5-year-old granddaughter to play dead so that the killer would pass her over. So that she might live long enough to see her name grow fresh in the mouth of someone she loves. It is impossible for me to imagine that this is the world we live in. One where Black girls must learn to play dead before they learn to play the dozens. But it is not impossible for me to imagine what her grandmother has lived through. What she knew that we did not. Survival is truly a language in which the Black matriarch is fluent. Much like this country’s violence, there is no survival in this country that can be divorced from this country’s history. A grandmother who has maybe stared down death more than once, passing that burden on to the child of her child. I don’t know if there is a name for what it is when you are moved to praise something as impossibly sad as this. I don’t know if it can be found in a church, even as a little girl is not among the dead inside of it. I imagine that I am writing this because I don’t know these answers. I think of this child growing up and knowing what it is to escape death. Wrapping herself in the trauma of that. Knowing at such a young age that to be a Black woman in America is, in a way, to feel like you will survive until you decide to stop surviving.
But, the Black people who pray still must pray. In a good Black church, all manner of sweat, holler, and joy lives in the walls. I’m not sure what it is to set foot in a place of worship where you saw members of your community fighting against an inevitable death. I imagine that to be impossible. I prayed last night in a hotel bathroom. Like many of us, nothing draws me to prayer quicker than desperation. Not knowing what to do with my hands, my heart, or my mind. Sometimes, I don’t even know what I’m praying for. Last night, I think I prayed for a Southern Black church that didn’t also smell of smoke, of cooked flesh. Where the memories weren’t of burial. Where Black children could fall asleep in the front row, their small bodies still, but breathing.
My grandmother began to smoke more as she got older. When she moved to her own apartment, down the street from my childhood house, I’d visit and see empty packs of More cigarettes littering the table. Occasionally, when she’d tell me that she was thinking of quitting, I never knew if she meant the cigarettes. I’m not sure that she ever stopped, though I don’t imagine she did. She died in the South, in Alabama. I don’t know what smell rises off of the trees there after a storm, but I like to imagine that it’s the same smell that is rising in South Carolina today. The way I’d like to imagine it, our grandmothers are with us, even when they’re not with us. Teaching us how to pray. Teaching us how to survive.
August 9, 2014
It is early, and inside of an airplane sitting outside of the San Francisco Airport, a mother is asking a person two seats ahead of me to switch seats, so that she can have a window seat for her son, and he looks at the world outside of this metal container that is dragging us back to somewhere in the waiting Midwest. I have this fear of heights, but I do find the appeal in looking out of windows during flights. In Oakland, where I spent the past five days reading poems in hotel rooms with friends that I only get to see a couple times a year. Two nights ago, one of them ran up to the roof of the hotel at night and looked over, everything below was an impossible darkness. It’s that kind of height I find myself uncomfortable with. Some would tell me not a fear of heights so much as a fear of falling. Planes work if you can manage to not think of the machinery. The way I walk into a store and buy what my body is demanding without thinking of the labor that carried the product to that moment. But, this mother wants her son to understand the world from this height and the person in the window seat she wants isn’t moving. So she is loud now, shouting in the name of her child, who also isn’t moving, and who seems preoccupied with the small screen in front of him, where two cartoon characters are wrestling each other over some treasure. I am thinking of what it must be like to not have a desire to get close to heaven at a time like this. A time when there is just a hint of morning coloring the sky as the waning darkness fights against it, making it so that everything above is the color of blood pushing its way across a dark surface. This is the part of the flight I live for: being pulled into the impossible beauty above and feeling like I could touch it if I wanted to. I’m not particularly excited about going back home today, though I do miss it. The dying summer and covering the Midwest in a kind of heat that doesn’t afford anyone the mercy of Oakland’s proximity to water. It is one thing to love where you’re from and miss it, and another to fall in love somewhere else and then have to pull away. When the mother gives up on the person two seats ahead of me, she makes eye contact with me and my precious window seat. I pretend to not notice, nodding my head along to imagined music coming out of my detached headphones. But I’m a poor actor, and have no luck convincing her of my being oblivious to her suffering. Standing over me, she pleads, explaining that her son has never even been on a plane before, though has loved watching them from below. And she wants him to have a window seat so that he’ll be maybe be less afraid. And I know that I have been afraid and found comfort in seeing. In the turning of my head to that which I fear. And so I surrender my seat and I watch the eager mother carry her son in her arms, to that which she thinks will make him whole. I push myself into an aisle seat and prepare for the long flight home, considering that perhaps life is too short for fear. There is always going to be something outside, waiting to kill us all.
Fear In Two Winters
When people squint a
t my name on something in front of them and then ask where I’m from, I tell them “Columbus, Ohio.” When they look again and then, perhaps more urgently, ask where my parents are from, I tell them “New York,” smiling more slightly. Occasionally, I’ll get a person who asks where THEIR parents were from, and I humor that as well. No one has ever gone beyond two generations before me, but I look forward to the day where it all plays out: me in line at the bank, or at a deli, someone attempting to trace my lineage to a place they feel makes sense. Me, eventually saying, “Well, I’d imagine Africa came into play at some point, but now I’m here, so who can say really?”
What people are asking in this exercise is never about where I’m from. The question they’re asking is “why doesn’t your name fit comfortably in my mouth?” and we both understand what this is asking, and my toying with the asker usually doesn’t win me any points. The answer they are digging for is less exciting: my parents converted to Islam in the 1970s, when many young black American-born New Yorkers found their way to the religion. A desire for reconnecting their roots to something that felt more like home than Christianity. My father, before Islam, was Catholic, though I’m not sure of my mother’s religion. They took new names. The name “Abdurraqib” means “servant of the observer” in Arabic. It is hard, even now, for people to imagine that any Muslim people are not people who came here from another country. In the mosque I went to as a child, I felt most comfortable because I didn’t have to repeat my name to anyone I spoke it to, but I did have to apologize for my flimsy Arabic, or my distance from tradition. In this way, I was often too Muslim for one world, but too steeped in American culture for another. But the person who has to prepare themselves to yell out my coffee shop order as a line grows, snaking behind me, is asking where my parents are from. So they are asking how I got a name like this. So, today, I simply say, “It’s Arabic.”
The distance between curiosity and fear is tragically short. They are, like sleep and death, within the same family, a quick nudge pushing one directly into the other. Because it has been so long, what people maybe don’t remember about Muslims before September 11 is that there was always curiosity that felt like it could take a sharp turn into fear at any minute. My freshman year of high school, I found myself pressured by teachers and administration to come to school without my kufi, the traditional male head covering. I was told it was “a distraction,” as it sometimes led to other students snatching it off and running through the halls with it. The school attempted to lean on its “no hats” policy, which caused my father to come into the office, with Islamic texts by his side. This was in the late ’90s, when a public school surely should have had to reckon with students of different faiths before, but seemed unequipped to do so. When they were met with resistance, when it was begrudgingly decided that I could still wear my kufi to school, the curiosity shift happened.
The leap from fear to anger can be even shorter, particularly when people feel the need to defend otherwise abhorrent actions. On the morning of September 11, 2001, I woke up in my freshman college dorm and started to walk down the hallway. It was my new friend Brittany’s birthday. In the early stage of college, finding and clinging to new friends is vital. Brittany played volleyball and I played soccer, so our teams had to show up to campus early to train. She was from a small town in Ohio, telling me on our second night at school that she had only ever seen a few black people in her life. This was casual, not something said while sitting, fascinated in my presence. She would talk to me about her town and all of its moral greyness. When you are not surrounded by any black people, and therefore not directly threatened by their presence, it becomes harder to justify seeing black people as threatening when you encounter them in real life. Brittany and I got along because we were both escaping, like most people on our small, suburban campus. We bonded in the fact that we weren’t escaping things that were especially harmful to us. All of our siblings had gone to college. Our parents supported our dreams. We were two athletes, playing sports in college. Brittany simply wanted to escape the mundane of her small hometown. And I wanted to escape what I, at the time, imagined as a strict Muslim household. One that restricted my pleasures, my ability to fully dance into my rapidly changing personality. With me, freedom was emotional, and mental, not tied to geography. My father’s house was a ten-minute drive from our college’s campus. And yet, I lived in a dorm. On the top bunk that I jumped off of on September 11 to start down the hall to Brittany’s room. I got her a card and a small bag of candy that she liked. As I walked that morning, I noticed all of the doors in the hallway were swung open, and people were sitting at the edges of their beds, unusual for a Tuesday. In one room, a boy on the baseball team was holding his crying girlfriend. In another, someone on the phone with their mother, asking to be told that everything was going to be okay. When I got to Brittany’s room, she was sitting on the floor. We watched the second plane hit the building together. We watched the smoke swallow the sky. We watched, as the people jumped, and jumped, and jumped.
By the time I got to college, I had largely stopped practicing Islam. I still participated in Ramadan, the act of fasting for 30 days in an attempt to cleanse the mind, body, and spirit. I relied on that, and the structure it provided. I stopped wearing a kufi, stopped praying daily, unless I was visiting home. I spoke little to no Arabic, which I was always self-conscious about doing anyway. It felt easier this way, fitting in without having to offer explainers. I was making the curious parts of myself invisible in the hopes that curiosity never turned to fear. When I look back now, I find it amazing that I didn’t imagine the path that the September 11 attacks would set us down, and how that path would open up the door to global violences against Muslims. The greatest emotional impact on Americans toward American Muslims is that it took curiosity out of the timeline. There was now only fear, turning rapidly to anger. In an age before rapidly updating social media sites, I would read about attacks on Muslims in schoolyards or mosques being set on fire, sometimes days after it happened. I would worry about my father, going to work in a state building every day. And my sister, studying in Madison, Wisconsin. Beyond that, I felt oddly divorced from it all. As if, when I stopped answering the calls to prayer, I inherited a type of safety. By the end of September, when all of the reports and findings about the background of the attackers were being rolled out, news reports would have large banners at the bottom asking things like: “DOES ISLAM HATE US?” and when professors called my Arabic name out in class, it was easy to imagine the fresh and sharp stares I got as something else, something less burning.
The thing about praying five times a day is that it gives you five distinct opportunities to talk to God. To bow and ask for forgiveness, even if you’re only returning after an hour. I was bad at sticking to a prayer schedule as a child. When you are young, and everything outside is beckoning, it’s hard to not look at that which brings you inside as a task and nothing else. But I appreciated the idea and routine of it, nonetheless. Even when it didn’t feel useful, the persistence of bringing myself before some higher power and asking to be made clean, again and again. In the months after September 11, 2001, I found a quiet spot on campus to pray Maghrib prayer in almost every evening. Maghrib, the sun prayer, was the only one my family consistently made together. It worked out, logistically: Maghrib is made at sunset, so during most times of the year, it was made at a time when my entire family was home. There’s something mythical and perfect about it, about praying the sun into its resting place every night, waking up and getting to rise with it in the morning. I was the only Muslim on my college’s campus. I would pray in a room alone, and then ask forgiveness. I found myself, often, foolishly praying for the country’s mercy, as if I could push my back up against a door that was already being broken down from the outside. Brittany went home for winter break, back to her town where there were no black people and certainly no Muslims. When we came back to school in January, she barely spoke to me. We faded into the background of each other’s li
ves. Some things, it seems, are inescapable.
On the day the new president signs an executive order banning refugees from countries that have primarily Muslim populations, I step out of my car and head to terminal 4 at the John F. Kennedy International Airport. It is still cold, and the sun isn’t out. The sun hasn’t been out much since the new president was inaugurated eight days ago. It came out briefly on the east coast the other day, just long enough to see what it had been missing. I began to wonder if someone I love prayed the sun into its resting place and forgot to wish it back. On the way here, I stopped to get tea and someone asked about my name, where it came from, where my family is from. I was patient this time. I explained, thinking of the friends I had accumulated since college: Muslims with families that, unlike mine, were refugees from some of the countries on the list of places that America was now banning refugees from. People with loved ones from these countries, not all of them citizens. People who were afraid, wondering if they should sever their own ties with this newer, even sharper America.
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us Page 18