Justice!
What a ridiculous idea!
He’d suffered no end on account of this idea. However, his pain had led him to another idea that had relieved him somewhat and protected him from going downhill more badly than he already had. This new idea was that God is just even though life is unjust for the most part. If justice were achieved in life, there would have been nothing to explain Satan’s overweening pride, the creation of Heaven and Hell, or all the pain, anguish and despair people endure. He’d clung to this little faith to the best of his ability so that he wouldn’t stop believing in God’s justice, which he’d been on the verge of doing.
He’d been thirteen years old when the pain associated with his color first crushed him, and its impact had confused him for long years thereafter. At the time he hadn’t understood why it was happening to him:
‘How far do you think you’ll get?’
The question was posed to Malek one day by the middle school’s assistant principal after he’d called him to his office. He hadn’t understood the question. Besides, he had been so flustered, he hadn’t known whether the man was asking him the question in order for him to answer it, or as a rebuke. He hadn’t known until the man went on, saying, ‘They say your grades are high. So I’m wondering why you’re going to all this trouble. I mean, you know as well as I do that if you get the chance to finish high school, you still won’t get a chance to graduate from university. So why put yourself through all this? Give the chance to somebody else in this country. At the very least, return the favor to the country that took you and your family in. Otherwise, you’d be hanging around parking lots with a pail and washrag waiting for a signal from somebody to wash his car.’
He hadn’t known what to do or say. He hadn’t even known what to feel when he heard those words. The room kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller as he stood there, staring at some nebulous point in front of him.
Then finally the man had said to him, ‘Go back to your class.’
As he walked down the corridors, he could hear the sound of his ribs shattering like sheets of glass under the colossal pressure of the pain. He couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to him. By the end of the week he’d moved to another seat in the class because he couldn’t bear to look the assistant principal’s son Abdulaziz – who sat next to him and who, irony of ironies, was his friend – in the face. Every time their eyes met, he saw the words he had heard his friend’s father say leaping about like tiny flaming masses with scornful, demonic features. He didn’t want to hurt Abdulaziz because he wasn’t bad. At least, he hadn’t been during the two years he’d known him. They’d played and laughed together, concluded make-believe alliances, hatched little plots, and been harassed by their other friends. But there was no way it could go on any longer.
He opened up a deep pit inside himself and began throwing everything into it. He didn’t even wait to hear the sound of all those details crashing against the bottom of his sorrow and anguish. Then he moved away from the pit, the things inside it, Abdulaziz, and even himself. He no longer concerned himself with striving for what he wanted, since he’d concluded that he wanted things, but they didn’t want him, or that he wasn’t worthy to want anything. He was too young to bear the pain alone. But he couldn’t get anyone to share it with him, so he buried it and went on, the way children tend to do when pain is too great for them to endure.
He began giving up his dreams one after another. He started by not getting high grades anymore. Then he stopped being torn between studying medicine and studying engineering, since he’d thrown the pursuit of either of these goals into the pit he’d opened inside himself for all his hopes and aspirations. Never in his life had he met a black doctor. So what was the point of wondering whether he should study medicine or engineering?
He did his best to get into high school, although he no longer aspired to anything beyond finishing high school, then getting a job – any job – that would enable him to make enough money to leave this country once and for all. For years, bitterness had been building up inside him like salt stalactites in a deep, lightless cave, and over the years, everything over which his bitterness had accumulated had fallen to pieces. And together with the bitterness there was fear. He was terribly afraid, not wanting to meet the kind of fate that had met others of his race who faced situations like his: Ibrahim, whose brain had been damaged from sniffing glue; Ahmad, who’d been driven by provocative words to murder another young man in an altercation that had broken out between them; Hussein, who’d disappeared, after which they heard he’d been killed by anti-drug police . . . And the list went on. These were people who had been born to find that life’s fabric had been cut out for them in such a way that they had no choice but to squeeze themselves into it and go on, grateful and content, in the narrow margin left to them. And as they went, they had to be careful not to leave the margin for life’s mainstream, since otherwise, there were more people than they might think standing ready to give them a kick in the seat of the pants. It was unacceptable for a black to distinguish himself to the point where others were obliged to remain grudgingly silent as they watched him leave his narrow margin to join them on life’s broad highways and byways.
The dark fates he so feared weren’t restricted to members of his own race. However, they were more noticeable among them than they were among others. It was as though such fates attracted people of his race with an irresistible magnetic force, and he was afraid that some day he might find himself within their field, unarmed with anything but his anguish and despair.
Munis * the 8th of Wail,
the twelfth year after Desert Storm
1 a.m.
. . . Bilal, a slave to the Banu Jumah tribe among whom he had been born and raised, was later emancipated by Abu Bakr, may God be pleased with him. His full name was Bilal ibn Rabah and his mother’s name was Hamamah. He was sincere in his Islamic faith and pure of heart. His master, Umayyah ibn Wahb ibn Hudhayfah ibn Jumah, used to take him out in the midday heat to Mecca’s open country. He would issue instructions for a huge, heavy stone to be placed on Bilal’s chest. Then he would say to him, ‘You will stay this way until you die, or until you renounce your faith in Muhammad and worship the gods al-Lat and al-’Uzza.’ In response Bilal would simply repeat, ‘One, One . . .’ (Ibn Hisham, The Life of Muhammad)
‘One, One, One, One . . .’
Many years earlier Malek had heard an actor repeat this phrase on the television screen, and for several evenings he’d watched the man being tortured without saying anything but, ‘One, One . . .’ Throughout that entire time he kept thinking about one thing: that the actor was a white man who’d been painted black. He’d noticed it from the way the color was distributed around the man’s lips, eyes and palms, and most of all, from the actor’s features, which bore no resemblance to those of any black man. Over time, and after seeing lots of white men painted black on the screen, he began to think that black people were so torpid, they weren’t fit to play the roles of black men or tell their stories, and that if he wanted his story to be told the way it ought to be, he would have to sit in front of a TV screen and see it done by white people who’d painted themselves black. In any case, the number of black people whose stories were worth telling was hardly worth mentioning. So why think this way?
He would try to think back to the time when he first became aware of the difference in his color, but he couldn’t. He remembered the first time he’d been violently crushed on account of his color and his situation. However, he couldn’t recall when he’d first looked at his color and seen it.
When he was in high school, he’d been sitting alone in the schoolyard one day when a classmate of his by the name of Husam came and sat down beside him. After running the tip of a pen through the sand in front of them for a moment, Husam said, ‘I’d like to ask you a question, but I’m afraid you’ll get mad.’
‘Go ahead.’
A heavy silence descended. Then Husam said hesitantly, ‘Wh
en a person’s black, how does he feel?’
Malek looked into his classmate’s face and, seeing no cruelty, restrained the impulse to blurt out an angry retort. He bowed his head as he thought about the question. He couldn’t help but notice the unspoken assumption that lay behind the question; namely, that black people are so different that they almost seem beyond the pale of humanity. They’re so different, they don’t feel in the same way people do, and maybe they don’t hurt, either.
He let out a slow breath. Then, without looking at Husam, he said, ‘Would you like to trade places?’
‘You want to know the truth, and you won’t get mad?’
‘Of course.’
‘Actually, I wouldn’t. When people call me Baqaya Hujjaj or Tarsh Bahr, it makes me really mad. So how would I feel if I were Tarsh Bahr and black, too!?’
His words were followed by an even heavier, more onerous silence, which was broken by Husam, who said, ‘I hope you’re not mad!’
Smiling, Malek looked his classmate in the face and said, ‘Why should I be? I’m a nigger, you’re some trash that washed up from the sea, and some other guys are ‘‘Serbian Bedouins’’. Everybody gets what’s coming to him from everybody else, and nobody’s better than anybody else.’
Husam laughed, but Malek couldn’t share in his laughter. He didn’t see anything funny about it. All he saw was something agonizingly painful that he couldn’t understand, just the way he couldn’t understand how the books he studied could tell the story of Bilal ibn Rabah with such reverence while, most of the time, his color and origins were treated with contempt. Accounts like these seemed so remote from what he experienced every day, he’d suspected for some time that he must be reading legends somebody had thought up out of his head. Nor had he found any evidence to convince him otherwise. He hadn’t found a single branch to cling to lest he fall headlong into the sea of racism in which life around him was floating: Bedouins – city folks; Hejazi – Nejdi – Qubayli – Khudhayri; artisan – businessman; 110 – 220; slave – kur – kuwayha – tarsh bahr – baqaya hujjaj.
Even his mother said to him, ‘Watch out for Arab girls, son.’
He’d never argued with her. It had never even occurred to him to argue with her. As he heard her say the words, he would observe a faint smile playing at the corners of her lips. It was a collusive smile that expressed her delight in his manhood more than a genuine attitude toward Arab girls. Consequently, he hadn’t felt any need to justify to himself the fact that he listened to her without questioning what she said. After all, life around him was going the way it was going, and if he stopped for a moment to modify its course, it would just trample him underfoot and go on. After all, he wasn’t a prophet or a wealthy man. He was a black alien.
1:15 a.m.
I loved her by chance despite the enmity between her people and mine
And never, by your father’s life, can my desire be fulfilled.
(’Antarah ibn Shaddad)
The first time he asked her if they could meet, he’d expected her to refuse. However, she surprised him by agreeing to it. It had been seven months since their first telephone conversation, during which time he’d been swept off his feet so thoroughly that he was ready to take a risk. He couldn’t contain his infatuation with her voice, which had a deep, calm ring to it. But what charmed him most of all was the way she said ‘Allô’.
Once he said to her, ‘You sound as though you’re of French extraction.’
A long ‘N-o-o-o-o, you!’ escaped her lips. Then she laughed.
‘No, really!’ he said. ‘You say ‘‘Allô’’ with an exquisite French accent!’
As on all the other occasions when he’d complimented her on her voice, her laugh, or her way of thinking, she made no comment. He assumed her silence was simply a way of not hurting his feelings. He thought maybe she was counting on him to realize all the barriers that stood between them, and that she didn’t want to be the one to cut him off.
Even so, he found himself being inexorably drawn to her. He threw caution to the wind, along with his silence and his unending desire for life to go away and for his present to be transformed into a past that he could leave behind and never look back at again. To his surprise he suddenly noticed that life had begun awakening inside him, and that he’d begun to change. As he realized this he felt afraid, because he had deep feelings for her, but didn’t know what lay hidden around the next bend.
He’d changed so much that, after having laughed at the love stories in songs, soap operas and movies, he caught himself picturing her on his pillow or repeating her name, feeling for a fleeting moment that his mind was devoid of everything. It seemed as though her name was being repeated like the murmur of a pearly ornament suspended from the ceiling of his room. If a puff of air touched it, it would tinkle with a mysterious faintness that resurrected vague memories from their resting places. Her name resurrected memories that had been hiding in places that, until that moment, he couldn’t have identified. One of them seemed like a memory of him fleeing from someone down an unidentified street, laughing and soaking wet. Another showed him standing at the door to their house wearing new clothes while his mother flitted about the house, spraying rosewater out of a spray can. In another he was sitting in a room, very little of whose furniture he could recall, as his mother handed him a plate of Labaniya, saying, ‘Happy New Year, son.’
He wanted to tell Leen about all these images, and others too. He wanted badly to let her see what he saw every night when, enclosed within the walls of his room, the details of his day would leave him and all that would remain was her voice, her words, and her laugh. This was why he’d asked her if they could meet. He’d prepared himself for the worst, since he hadn’t expected anything but either a sharp no or a subtle rebuff. But instead, she’d shattered all his expectations. In fact, ever since he’d met her she’d been shattering his negative expectations.
‘All right,’ she’d said. ‘Why not?’
And now, in the darkness of the night and the sorrow that enveloped his soul, he closed his eyes and remembered how awkward he’d felt when she sat down across from him and he saw her face for the first time. He’d sat back in his chair slightly so as to give himself more distance across which to contemplate her. The strangest thing he’d realized when he saw her beauty was that he’d been counting on her not being beautiful. In fact, he’d hoped she wouldn’t be beautiful! As soon as he realized this, he knew that desolation had eaten away at him so deeply that he’d become small in his own eyes, afraid of having to pay the price for receiving what he really deserved. However, at that time he hadn’t wanted to think about desolation. He was so anxious, he had wanted to say what was on his mind, all at once and without stopping. True, the coffee shop hadn’t been crowded. He had chosen a rather secluded corner, and had asked the waiter to surround their table with room dividers that would insulate them from the world around them. Even so, anxiety had been tearing him to pieces, since curiosity was the order of the day, and their contrasting colors were certain to arouse both curiosity and suspicion. So how would he be able to protect her from others’ crudity if he couldn’t even protect himself?
Later, when it became possible for them to meet far from others’ inquisitive gazes, he told her that her beauty had rather taken him by surprise. It wasn’t a dazzling sort of beauty. Nor, however, was it an ordinary beauty or the kind of beauty one could easily forget. When, long after their first meeting, he passed the tip of his forefinger over her lower lip, he thought he would never recover from it, and that he would go on thinking about her even if he went into a coma some day.
1:20 a.m.
When night had fallen Yahya heard the screams of the women whose men had been slain. He asked what it was he was hearing, and when someone told him, he said, ‘After daybreak kill the women and the children.’ They did so, and the killing went on for three days. In his camp there was a commander with three thousand black soldiers who took the women by force. By the third
day Yahya had finished slaying the people of Mosul, and on the fourth day he rode out with spears and drawn swords. As he departed he was waylaid by a woman who took hold of his mount’s reins. His companions wanted to kill her, but he forbade them. She said to him, ‘Are you not from the tribe of Bani Hesham? Are you not a paternal cousin of the Messenger of God, may God’s blessings and peace be upon him? Do you not deem it beneath the dignity of Muslim Arab women to be raped by black men?’ Making no reply, but moved by her words, Yahya had one of his men escort her to a safe place. (Ibn al-Athir, al-Kamil fil-Tarikh)
From the time he realized he was falling for her, he’d made a point of letting her know what color he was. His intense concern about the matter made him realize that he viewed his color as a handicap that he felt obliged to inform her of before she discovered it for herself. But, although he spoke to her about his color, he postponed telling her about the matter of the ‘absolution’. He’d thought he would tell her about it later, but he never had, not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he hadn’t known where the path would lead them.
By the time he met her, he’d despaired even of his despair. He’d been living his life without expecting to get anywhere. He went on because he had to go on. Four years after finishing high school he’d decided to postpone the idea of emigrating indefinitely. After all, how could he emigrate when the salary he collected at the end of every month seemed like so much salt that dissolved in the sweat on his palms: a few grains that he clutched tightly in his fist only to find that when he unclenched it, he had barely enough to meet his personal needs and those of his mother and his brother. His father had died long before. He’d died so long before, in fact, that he’d forgotten many of his features. His maternal uncle had supported them for years, but as soon as Malek got a job, the situation had changed, and he’d become the household’s sole breadwinner.
Days of Ignorance Page 11