Days of Ignorance

by Laila Aljohani

  When he’d seen Malek two days earlier, he’d realized what a tremendous burden it is to be the father of a girl like Leen. However, he’d had no choice but to say to him what he’d said that evening: ‘Forgive me, son, but I can’t just cast my daughter aside and let people destroy her.’

  ‘But sir, are you saying that if you let her marry me you’ll be casting her aside?’

  ‘Not at all, son. But you’re enlightened and perceptive, and you know what I mean. The problem isn’t with you. It’s with the people who have no compassion. And I can’t expose my daughter to that kind of treatment.’

  ‘And what concern are other people to us? You can stop them in their tracks. This is your daughter, sir, and her happiness is more important to you than other people. Or am I wrong?’

  ‘Of course it is, son. But . . .’

  ‘But what, sir? You’ve given me your answer without even thinking. And without consulting your daughter!’

  ‘No offense, son, but it’s simply out of the question. I’ve told you that I can’t let my daughter be treated that way.’

  ‘Is it because I’m black, sir?’

  The question remained suspended in the void between them as he thought about how to extricate himself from the snare in which it had landed him. If he said no, he would be lying, and if he said yes, he would hurt Malek. But he was, in fact, black. And if he didn’t look at his color, other people would look at nothing but his color. They would harass and ostracize Leen, and she wouldn’t be able to bear it because they would never stop. Every time they saw the two of them together they would get that hateful, disapproving look on their faces, since a lot of people in his country, when they saw a black man and a white woman walking together, wouldn’t think they were husband and wife. Suspicions and questions would haunt them wherever they went. He wanted to tell Malek this, but he couldn’t find the words he needed to say it without hurting a man he was meeting for the first time.

  ‘Don’t send me away disappointed, sir.’

  ‘God is the one who brings happiness, and there’s bound to be a girl that’s right for you somewhere out there.’

  He didn’t know how the phrase had slipped out, but it had. Malek smiled forlornly, saying, ‘I’m not going to consider this a final answer. Take your time, sir, and think about it. And I’ll be in touch with you again.’

  The father’s smile, puny and wan, seemed to contain a glimmer of approval. But as Malek turned to leave, he caught a glimpse of the bruises that covered him, and at that moment he wished he hadn’t lived to see that day. He’d already known that life was ugly. But he’d never thought it could be both ugly and depraved.

  He wondered if he was rejecting Malek because he was black, or because other people would reject him. For a moment he suspected that he was being pulled into the mire along with the others, and that all he had looked at was color. But how could he do otherwise?

  Oh God.

  Up to that point in his life he’d never had to put his convictions about people’s color or race on the line. But now he was faced with an onerous test, and whether he passed it or failed it, it would be excruciating. He remembered sitting in gatherings where someone would tell the story of so-and-so’s daughter who was engaged to be married to a half-breed, a Barnawi, or to somebody from the Falata tribe, the Hausa tribe, or whatever. He would listen quietly to the other men’s comments and complaints, then say without a moment’s hesitation, ‘Listen, everybody. It’s a matter of destiny, that’s all. If her family approves, that’s it. Nobody has any right to interfere. You can’t judge people by their color.’

  Ha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a!

  He laughed bitterly as he heard himself spouting platitudes, the ones you read in books and hear on soap operas, and as he slaughtered his daughter with the frightening reality that she thought she could face alone.

  ‘You can’t judge people by their color.’

  No, no, no, no. No matter how many times a person might say it, it still didn’t make it true, because people here did judge others by their color, their tribe, their race and their ethnic origin. And he was no exception to the rule. He hadn’t succeeded in being that exception. Leen thought people would raise a ruckus for a while, then get distracted with their own lives. But she was wrong. She would remain under their watchful eye forever. She would be sickened by their curiosity and their occasionally dirty, revolting insinuations. And she would be even more sickened when she saw the way they treated her children.

  If he said yes, things would spin out of his control, and his daughter would be lost. He had prayed to God not to afflict him through her, and now he was about to lose her once and for all. But no, he couldn’t lose her now. Not now. Not now. Not now.

  7

  What’s under the color

  As virtual war broke out in Qatar in preparation for a US military strike against Iraq, US forces in Kuwait completed their preparations to take part in any conflict that might erupt in the region. According to Colonel Kenneth Gantt, Commander of the 9th Field Artillery Regiment (‘Battlekings’), his forces in Kuwait ‘are expecting a telephone call from US President George Bush commanding us to move to topple Saddam Hussein’. In a press statement following maneuvers that took place yesterday in northern Kuwait, Gantt added, ‘We are ready to use force at any time, and we are fully prepared to do so.’

  Dubar * the 7th of Wail,

  the twelfth year after Desert Storm

  Hajjaj ibnYusuf asked for the hand of ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far’s daughter, Umm Kulthum, for a dowry of 2 million dirhems in secret, and 500,000 dirhems in public. ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far agreed to the marriage, and Hajjaj took Umm Kulthum to Iraq, where she lived with him for eight months. When ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far went out as an emissary to the Umayyad Caliph ’Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, he stayed in Damascus. While there, he received a visit from al-Walid, ’Abd al-Malik’s son, who came to him mounted on a mule accompanied by a group of men. ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far welcomed them warmly.

  ‘But I do not welcome you!’ retorted al-Walid.

  ‘Wait a moment, nephew,’ ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far replied. ‘I do not deserve for you to say such a thing to me!’

  ‘Oh, yes, you do,’ retorted al-Walid, ‘and even worse!’

  ‘And why is that?’

  Al-Walid replied, ‘Because you took the best of the Arabs’ womenfolk, the highest-ranking of the women of ’Abd Manaf, and gave her in marriage to a lowly servant of the Thaqif tribe.’

  ‘And for this you find fault with me, nephew?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘I swear to God,’ ’Abdullah replied, ‘no one has less right to blame me for this than you and your father do. The governors who preceded you took care to preserve family ties, and they recognized my rights. As for you and your father, you refused to provide me with financial support until I found myself ridden with debt. I swear to God, if a pug-nosed Ethiopian slave gave me what this “lowly servant of Thaqif” has given me, I would give my daughter to him in marriage, and I would use the dowry money to pay off my debts.’

  Saying no more to him, al-Walid turned his mount and departed. He then went to see ’Abd al-Malik.

  ‘What troubles you, Abu ’Abbas?’ ’Abd al-Malik asked.

  ‘You have given so much power and authority to this lowly servant of Thaqif that he has taken the women of Banu ’Abd Manaf in marriage.’

  Seized suddenly with tribal fervor, ’Abd al-Malik wrote a letter to Hajjaj telling him that no sooner had he set his letter down than he was to divorce Umm Kulthum. So he divorced her. However, Hajjaj never ceased to provide her with material support, and he continued to treat her with dignity until she passed out of this world. He also maintained his ties with ’Abdullah ibn Ja’far until his death. Not a year passed but that Hajjaj sent him a caravan laden with money, clothing and rarities. (Ahmad al-Abshihi, al-Mustatraf fi Kulli Fann Mustazraf)

  Her father said, ‘I can’t put my daughter in harm’s way.’

  M
alek couldn’t go on arguing with him for long. How could he when Leen’s father had given voice to the very thing that had kept going through his own mind ever since he met her? He’d even spoken to her once about it. Maybe he hadn’t said it in exactly the same words. However, he had said it, and she had heard it. He didn’t believe she had thought of it in the way he had. On the other hand, maybe she had, but had assumed – stubborn woman that she was – that she was up to the confrontation.

  He remembered how, at the time he’d said it, she’d been sitting across from him with a smile on her face. He’d resisted an urge to place his fingers along the base of her neck, over her right collarbone. He’d continued to observe her breathing, mesmerized by the way her delicate skin went up and down so evenly. He was gripped momentarily by a certainty – a certainty that later became constant – that she had been made for him to love her. He hadn’t thought about where this certainty had come from or how it had come. However, he knew that if he had met her in another place, he would still have loved her, that if he had met her in another time, he would still have loved her, and that . . . if his skin were a different color, he would still have loved her. When he took a careful look at his certainty – with her sitting tranquilly across from him as though life had yet to touch her with pain – he smiled, since he realized how fragile this certainty was, and how easily it could be destroyed, how very easily it could be destroyed. Even so, it flowed through his deepest parts as though he’d been made to embrace it.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ she asked him.

  He said, ‘I was thinking about how, even if my skin were a different color, I would still have loved you.’

  She knit her brow slightly, then asked, ‘Why is it that when you look at us, all you see is the color?’

  ‘I see what you don’t see, Leen.’

  He blew the smoke from his cigarette far away before saying, ‘I don’t know exactly what it is that makes you so different. But you’ve swum far away from life’s filth, and when I met you and got close to you, I smelled the fragrance of your heart. Your heart smells like apples. That’s why I’ve held onto you. I didn’t want my heart to turn into some fetid swamp. I was being carried away toward a life of filth since I thought I didn’t have anything left to lose, and that I should hurt others the way I’d been hurt. But then you came along, and now I should keep you from getting hurt. That’s why I see the color.’

  ‘Nobody has the power to spare others harm. I’m bound to suffer my share of it no matter how much it happens to be.’

  ‘But I mustn’t be a cause of harm to you.’

  ‘If you really don’t want to harm me, then you mustn’t die.’

  Falling silent for a moment, he buried his cigarette butt in an ashtray in front of him. Then he said, ‘All right, then. You die.’

  With a mournful smile she said, ‘So my dying wouldn’t hurt you! Al-l-l-l right. Tomorrow I’ll die, though I hate ordinary death.’

  She laughed, and so did he.

  He wished he could call her on the phone right then and say, ‘Why don’t you die now?’ And she would say, ‘OK, I’ll die, even though I don’t like ordinary death.’

  Then he would laugh even if she didn’t. He would look for his cheap cigarette lighter so that he could light a cigarette that he would put out before he’d smoked even half of it, since he’d lost hope, and it was impossible to find any solace.

  For as long as he’d known her he’d tried not to get carried away with his dreams, since he reckoned he knew more about life here than she did, and that he should be careful not to let hope do them in. Curses on hope. So, after her father had tactfully turned him down the evening before, he understood what she meant when she said, ‘I’m not going to torture myself with hope twice.’

  Once he’d become aware of his situation, he’d stopped dreaming altogether, since at some point he’d realized that his dreams, however small they might be, were too big for someone with knotty circumstances like his. It had taken him a long time to comprehend the fact that his father hadn’t committed some sin by not attempting to obtain an ‘absolution’, and that his own failure and disappointment had nothing to do with what his father had been thinking when he arrived more than fifty years earlier. He’d emigrated from his country to . . . God, his dream to be near the Sacred Mosque in Mecca. He hadn’t left his homeland for the sake of an ‘absolution’.

  This has been God’s land ever since the creation of Adam. So who would drive God’s creatures out of God’s land?

  Had this been his father’s logic? He didn’t know, and sometimes he hoped never to know. All he knew, and all he experienced time and time again, was that when it came to proving someone’s identity, people didn’t think about God, God’s creatures, or God’s land. All they thought about was official papers: the little magnetized card, the disgusting rectangular ‘family book’, and the passport with its green cover displaying two swords uprooting a palm tree in shiny gold. And every time the question revolved around identity, he had none of these documents in his pocket. He was so marginal that when a traffic policeman checked his identi­fication at a traffic light, he even disapproved of his wearing traditional Saudi garb. After looking at his license, he would say, ‘Well, well, well! You’ve even got yourself looking just like one of us! Let me see your residence card.’

  And to the extent that he was marginal, he was lost. For more than thirty years the only homeland he’d known was this sand that stretched from the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea. Yet still, there was no room for him there.

  11:30 p.m.

  It has been said that Ham lay with his wife on the ark and that, in response, Noah cursed him, praying for his offspring to be disfigured. Consequently, a black son was born to him. This son was Canaan son of Ham, forefather of the Sudanese people. Alternatively, it has been said that Ham saw his father sleeping with his private parts exposed, but failed to conceal them. Seeing the state of their father, his brothers then covered him up. Consequently, Noah prayed that Ham’s sperm would mutate and that his offspring would be slaves to his brothers. (Ibn Kathir, al-Bidayah wal-Nihayah)

  He spread his hands in front of his face, then began turning them over and examining them. He remembered how Leen had once rubbed the back of his hand with her forefinger, saying, ‘I want to see what’s under the color.’

  The color! How far away color had taken him, though he hadn’t realized – as he moved away – how brutish he’d become before he met her. Then he looked at life through her and saw the ruinous end he would have met if their paths hadn’t crossed.

  He didn’t often talk to her about color. Would she understand if he told her that he’d suffered so much that he’d stopped looking at his color and hurting, and that after she came along, he’d begun looking at it and feeling pain all over again? And if she did understand, wouldn’t she be pained herself?

  His mother would tell him from time to time that he was the most handsome of her sons, and the one that looked most like her father. He believed the part about looking like her father. But he couldn’t believe that anything black could be nice to look at, and when Leen said to him, ‘You’re handsome,’ he laughed and said sarcastically, ‘But not more handsome than Majed Abdullah!’

  She didn’t reply. Later she admitted that she regretted having told him how charmed she was by his looks. He responded the way he responded to others. He contented himself with a little smile of resignation as he listened to her, since she didn’t know what he’d been through on account of color. She hadn’t been with him on the day his friends raised a ruckus because he objected to their insistence that a certain actress was beautiful on account of her color:

  ‘Hey, man, it’s enough that she’s white!’

  ‘Damn, is she good-lookin’!’

  He looked over at his four friends. All of them were black. He felt uncertainty pricking him like a hot pinhead. One hesitant voice against four convinced black voices, all of which were saying that whiteness equals beauty. Whiteness
alone. Whiteness, even if it covers lackluster features or a malicious spirit, since whiteness would atone for all a person’s faults.

  Iqbal, the Pakistani man who worked at the corner store near their house, was in the habit of greeting him cheerfully as ‘Blackie’. He would say it so unthinkingly, Malek didn’t feel as though he could get angry with him, or with the name. He had no choice but to disregard its sharp blade: the sharp blade of having color as his identity, the card by means of which people recognized him and which defined him for them. In his life, color had become a painful blow that he would never know how to return, not because he was weak or powerless, but, rather, because the other color had never been an insult or a dirty name. The inferiority of his color was as old as the hills, so old that he was in no position, now, to deny it even if he barricaded himself behind a thousand sayings of the Prophet or verses from the Qur’an. Consequently, he’d stopped hurting. He’d stopped viewing the issue as his own personal war. He’d even stopped getting upset when some angry driver hurled vulgar epithets at him through his car window for not moving faster when the traffic light turned yellow. ‘God damn you, kur!’ or, ‘Shame on whoever let you have a car, you slave!’

  None of these labels – kur, takruni, kuwayha – hurt the way they had in long years past, when the lofty idea of justice still burned brightly deep inside him. In the beginning he’d never thought, even for a moment, that this ideal would disintegrate inside him along with his certainty that it could be realized. As it was, he’d lost his certainty of lots of things he’d once thought he was meant to experience and achieve.