Double Bind

by Robin Romm

  Dear Diary,

  I want to fly into the sky and taste the clouds and dive into the sea, and meet God, if he still lives there, although sometimes I think he’s a she and she actually lives in the mountains, but that’s not what the Koran says so I must be wrong.

  I wish Ammi and Abbu would just let me have a proper paper round, that way I could bike around and give people their news, then they would read about the world because I had been at their doorstep, and it would be a real job.

  My father recoiled at the idea that I, his fifteen-year-old daughter, the good Pakistani girl, would ever want a job. When my white friends got jobs in cafés and doctors’ offices, I pretended to work, acting out scenes of being a retail clerk in my bedroom. I spent hours putting on different personas, imagining myself as different women, all free to make their own choices, all living out their own dreams. The more my parents prevented me from experiencing seemingly normal activities, the more I found escape through my imagination.

  When my high school offered me a summer expedition to Ecuador, I thought my time for independence had arrived. We were promised adventurous trekking up dormant volcanoes, digging a water drainage system for the locals, and immersive Spanish lessons. It was guaranteed to be the best trip of my life. I wanted to fund-raise alongside my peers and demonstrate my own physical aptitude in the fitness tests, but Abbu had different ideas.

  “It’s not healthy for a girl to know too much about being alone. Independence is a Western concept!” I looked at Ammi, expecting her support. I knew she shared my own adventurous spirit. “Jaanu, but what will I do without you? I will miss you too much. In our culture girls don’t do such risks.”

  In our culture, girls didn’t seem to do much of anything. Everything I wanted was always seen through the lens of how it would impact my husband. I hated being seen as a conduit for making a man’s life better. I wanted the freedom to do whatever I liked, the way my brother was permitted. He was being pushed into exciting school trips and extracurricular activities; he was being pushed into becoming a fully experienced, confident human being. He was taught adventure, and I was taught to venture home, always home.

  I didn’t have the words then to articulate the clear injustice of how my brother and I were raised; I just knew I didn’t like it. But the repeated roadblocks put up by my father began to wear on me, and I started to accept our apparent gender-based differences. I genuinely believed that I was not as physically or intellectually capable as my brother.

  I accepted the constant refusal from my parents for independence because I understood that in my community there was no space for such a girl. Pakistani girls didn’t go against their families. Pakistani girls that did usually ended up alone or dead. Although I was never in fear for my life, honor killings in the West are a very real thing. That women can be killed by their own families for having ambition, for wanting something more from their lives, speaks directly to the amount of silenced dreams among us.

  My parents wouldn’t have killed me, but they would have abandoned me, and that was a burden I didn’t understand how to handle. There were no examples of women from within my community who had done it differently, chosen to live for something other than family. My aunties and older female cousins hadn’t begun to reorient themselves economically or socially, and so for me the lack of role models was terrifying. I had no one to impersonate. The only options outside of “wifedom” always came from the Western outsiders, the ones I was constantly warned about. “Beta, these white women all have babies out of wedlock, and then their husbands all leave them because they are selfish. Just look at the divorce rate in the West, huh? All because women want to work!”

  As my parents’ hold on me tightened, my dreams and aspirations for a different life continued to boil inside me. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the possibilities for my future; of all things I could accomplish, of all the potential people I could impact. If I was only given the chance.

  At eighteen, I thought I had finally figured out who I was meant to be. “Doctor!?” Abbu exclaimed. “But that is seven years of your life. No one will marry you when you are twenty-five!”

  I wanted to be a doctor. It felt like a noble profession. I’d walk through a hospital in a white coat, saving people from life-threatening diseases, giving renewed hope to families. “If you are floating about in Africa, trying to heal the world, your children will go hungry and die!” Abbu insisted that I study psychology, so I could better understand the needs of the pious Muslim husband he would select for me once I graduated. Apparently, studying human behavior would improve my marriageability. Yet again, I was taught that learning how to support men was more important than learning how to support myself. I walked away from my dream to study medicine and signed up for a degree in psychology. The subject of my studies became less interesting to me because I had no power over choosing it. The only thing I cared about was the opportunity to leave. I convinced myself that I needed just three years of freedom—meeting new people, learning about the world, partying—and I would then return home and marry whomever my parents had selected.

  Being a good Muslim woman at an English university took effort. One night, in an attempt to fit in with my new cool friends, I found myself in an Irish bar, knocking back vodbulls, dancing awkwardly to Oasis, and eventually throwing up all over my Converse sneakers. It was the bartender who saved me. He carried my limp body back to my all-female dorm, put me to bed, and left a handwritten sonnet under my pillow.

  In the following months, I felt like I was living in a watercolor painting. The bartender, Brendan, visited me every night with freshly picked roses and foil-wrapped mints. He told me he missed his family and wanted to earn enough money to buy his parents a house. I told him I wasn’t allowed to talk to boys, and that I dreamt of doing something meaningful with my life. It was the first time I let a man touch me without feeling afraid or aware of my need for modesty.

  My father had so feared this—that I would become loose, drunk, and English; that I would lose my way. He wanted me safe, tucked away under his guidance. I was becoming the westernized girl Abbu had always feared, and I loved it. Everything about this new experience of love was alive, and I felt like I was finally spinning in the direction I wanted to go in, one in which I could make my own choices. It was liberating. What became scary to me was the future. Now that I had witnessed what living independently could mean for me, I didn’t know how I would reconcile my family with my freedom. How was I supposed to navigate the rest of my life?

  In the midst of my mind-blowing love affair with Brendan and with the uncovering of my new self, Ammi was diagnosed with breast cancer.

  I sat with Ammi, night after night in her hospital room, feeding her mashed sweet potato and listening to her breathe. I could feel her changing. More and more her gaze would wander out of the window, staring for hours into the distance.

  “Ammi, what are you looking at?” I wanted to see what she saw. “Ammi!” I almost shouted at her. “Look at me! I’m right here!” I shook violently at the realization that my mother was leaving. She turned to me slowly, a soft smile appearing on her face. “Nado, my sweet Nado, maybe . . . maybe we can all be astronauts?”

  When Ammi took her last breath, my twin brother and I sat beside her. It’s hard to describe how that immediate burst of grief flows over you, where half your body is no longer in the room, transcended to another realm it seems, like a hovering translucent balloon. The other half of you, stuck to the walls, like mud. I couldn’t tell if I was floating or falling.

  After Ammi died, the fabric of my family, of everything I knew and understood fell apart, and I didn’t know how to repair the fractured fragments of myself, let alone of anybody else, and so I left. I was barely twenty. The good Pakistani daughter would have stayed with her family and supported them in their grief. She would have understood her obligation. But I wasn’t a good Pakistani girl—I didn’t know who I was.

  For the next ten years, I was lost. My ambition
had always been denied, and in my solitary struggle to find it, I couldn’t. I didn’t have the tools to manage the new freedom I had. I worked different jobs and studied various subjects but nothing seemed to ever take shape. I was taught to always live in the shadows of someone more powerful, and I struggled to find power in my own life. I lied about the shitty relationships to my family, lied to my friends about why my body had started to look like that of a skeleton, and lied to myself about why I had stopped dreaming. It wasn’t until I could barely look at my reflection in the mirror that I had to reach deeply inside and pull out the lost seed of desire.

  I started writing in my diary again. I filled journal after journal with what could have been, working through the guilt of my mother’s death and the shame of leaving my family.

  Those diary pages allowed me to see myself, and the more I wrote, the more I wanted to share it with others, and when my writing group urged me to tell my story of a traditional woman who struggled to find her own freedom, I listened.

  The first time I performed, my acclaimed one-woman show, Burq Off!, the Black Box Theatre in the East Village was sold out. Jewel-toned fabrics hung behind me, like the insides of a Bollywood circus tent. Draped elegantly, falling into pleats, like my mother’s saris used to. My hair was tightly pulled back into a French braid, with black high-tops on my feet and a red scarf wrapped around my neck. For ninety minutes, I transformed into the twenty-one characters of my past, taking the audience on a journey about a little Pakistani girl who dreamt of becoming an astronaut.

  Not once did my eyes look to the floor like a modest Pakistani bride. They were wide open and staring into the eyes of my audience, taking them all in. It was the first time I had been on a stage performing something I had written, something I had spent months rehearsing, and although every cell in my body was jumping with fear, it also felt perfect. There were moments where I left my body and watched myself perform, but throughout it all, as I told my story to hundreds of people, I knew that that stage was exactly where I was meant to be. I couldn’t believe it. I was a performer. Everything just made sense.

  During the standing ovation, Abbu, who was sitting in the front row walked up to me on stage, a bouquet of flowers in his hands. “Nadia, I am so proud of you. Look what you have done.”

  Recently, while I was on the phone with my twin brother, he said something that shook me: “Nadia, as soon as people don’t feel that they’re needed anymore, they die. That’s what happened to Ammi. Don’t let that happen to you.” It sounded severe, but it also vibrated with truth. Our ambition, our desire for definition and recognition is essentially us creating our own need in the world, our own space, and our own truth. I always wanted something big to need me. It wasn’t enough for me to only be needed by my husband and children, and because my community didn’t support that, I had to create a new space for my existence. I had to create a new need. My ambition wasn’t to become something necessarily, like a doctor or an astronaut or even a performer; those ideas were goalposts in my attempt to self-define. My biggest desire was to become myself.

  After the first run of Burq Off!, I told my team that we must take the show to as many places as possible, that it needs to become recognizable in its own right. I wanted to go on a world tour. They thought I was delusional. How could a brand-new performer with no industry support take her one-woman show on a world tour? After fifty shows and two continents later, I’ve made a believer out of my team and more importantly out of myself. Turns out Abbu was right: I was meant to be on stage, just not the one he had in mind.

  The Snarling Girl: Notes on Ambition

  ELISA ALBERT

  A funny thing happened when I published my first book, more again when I published the second, and still more yet again with the third: People began to treat me differently. The typical exchange opens with a disinterested “What do you do?”

  “I’m a writer,” I say.

  Here a very subtle sneer: “That’s nice. Have you published anything?”

  “Yup.” I offer up my abridged CV.

  Suddenly they stand up a little straighter. A light goes on in their eyes.

  A moment earlier they were talking to nobody, a nothing, but now they’re speaking with somebody, a person who matters.

  “Wow,” they say. “That’s amazing.” And sometimes: “I always wanted to write a book.” And sometimes: “I have a great idea for a book.” And sometimes: “Maybe you could help me write my book.”

  This dynamic awakens a ferocious dormant animal, a snarling girl with a big mouth, too smart for her own good, nothing to lose, suffering privately. She’s me at fifteen, more or less. When she is ready to stop suffering privately, she’ll become a writer.

  Oh really, she says. Now I matter? Wrong, motherfucker: I mattered before. (Also: Nope, can’t help you write your book, best of luck.)

  She’s a little trigger-happy, this snarling girl. She is often accused of “not living up to her potential.” She is neither inspired by nor impressed with prep school. The college admissions race leaves her cold. Her overbearing mother berates her about crappy grades and lack of ambition. (O-ho, the snarling girl says, you want to see lack of ambition? I’ll show you lack of ambition!) Where she is expected to go right, she makes a habit of veering left. She is not popular, not likely to succeed. Her salvation arrives (maybe you saw this coming) in the form of books, movies, music. She obsessively follows the trail of breadcrumbs they leave behind. Here is a neat kind of power: She can be her own curator. She can find her way from one sustaining voice to another, sniffing out what’s true, what’s real. In her notebooks she copies out passages from novels, essays, poems, and songs. She Sharpies the especially resonant bits on her bedroom walls. This is how she learns to trust herself. No easy feat. These are epigraphs to the as yet unwritten book of her life, rehearsals for the senior page she is keen to assemble. These stories and lines and lyrics are companionship, proof that the universe is much, much bigger than her radioactive family and rich bitch west LA and Hebrew school and Zionist summer camp. Behold: She is not crazy! She is not alone! She is not a freak! Or, rather: She is crazy, she is alone, she is a freak, in the glorious company of all these other crazy, lonely, amazing freaks.

  Here are her notebooks, all in a row.

  They live in my little study now, above shelves full of my books, galleys, audiobooks, foreign editions, literary journals, anthologies, Literary Death Match Champion medal, a plethora of newspapers and magazines in which I’m celebrated as this amazing thing: a writer. A novelist. Legit. But witness, please, no coincidence, the notebooks occupy top shelf, above that stuff. Spiral-bound, leather-bound, fabric-bound, black, pink, green, floral. This Notebook Belongs to: Elisa Albert, neatly printed in the earliest, 1992. Fake it till you make it, girl! The notebooks have seniority. Here is how she began to forge a system of belief and belonging, to say nothing of a career. Am I aggrandizing her? Probably. I am just so goddamn proud of her.

  Ambition. The word itself makes me want to run and hide. It’s got some inexorable pejorative stench to it, why is that? I’ve been avoiding this essay like the plague. I’d so much rather be writing my novel, my silly secret sacred new novel, which will take a while, during which time I will not garner new followers nor see my name in the paper nor seek an advance from the publisher nor revel in the hearts and likes and dings and dongs that are supposed to keep my carnivorous cancerous ego afloat. I will simply do my work. Hole up with family and friends, live in the world as best I can, and do my work.

  The work: This is what I would like to talk about—the work, not the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. And maybe I can float the possibility that the work is best done nowhere near the hearts and likes and dings and dongs. Maybe I can suggest that there is plenty of time for the hearts and likes and dings and dongs once the work is done, and done well. Maybe I can ever so gently point out that a lot of people seem addicted to the hearts and likes and dings and dongs, and seem to talk about and around writi
ng a hell of a lot more than they actually do it. Maybe we can even talk about how some self-promote so extensively and shamelessly and heedlessly and artlessly that their very names become shorthand for how not to be.

  I mean: ambition to what? Toward what? For what? In the service of what? Endless schmoozing and worrying and self-­promotion and maniac flattery and status anxiety and name-dropping are available to all of us in any artistic endeavor. But the competitive edge is depressing. That thinly (or not at all) disguised desire to win. To best her or him or her or him, sell more, publish more, own the Internet, occupy more front tables, get tagged, have the most followers, be loudest, assume some throne. Is it because we want to believe that we are in charge of our destiny, and that if “things” aren’t “happening” for us, we are failing to, like, “manifest”? Or is it because we are misguided enough to think that external validation is what counts? Or is it because of some core narcissistic injury, some failure of love we carry around like a latent virus?

  Perhaps it’s because knocking on doors like we’re running for office is a lot easier and simpler than sitting alone with our thoughts and knowledge and experience and expertise and perspective, and struggling to shape all that into exactly the right form, during which process we take the terrible chance that we might get it right and still no one will care. Maybe we are misguided enough to believe that what’s most important is that people care, regardless of whether or not we get it exactly right. Maybe getting it right doesn’t even matter if no one cares. Maybe not getting it right doesn’t matter if everyone cares. If I write an excellent book and it’s not a bestseller, did I write the excellent book? If I write a middling book and it is a bestseller, does that make it an excellent book? If I wander around looking for it on bookstore shelves so I can photograph it and post it online, have I done good? If I publish a book and don’t heavily promote it, did I really publish a book at all!?