Category Archives: Salaam Namaste

Borders, boundaries, blockades

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Conversations and Encounters, Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste

and it’s the way that we will forgive ourselves
and it’s the way that we will for no one else
– Josh Kelly, Amen

I call my friend Z one morning to tell her that I am skipping all my classes and instead studying at the cafe of her favorite Borders bookstore here in the East Bay, and that she is more than welcome to join me any time during the day. She shows up half an hour later with some apples and carrot sticks for us to munch on – I peer ambivalently at her choice of food, having already started on a candy bar – and greetings of, “Heyy, beautiful lady!”

“Okay, stop,” I mutter, and hug her tightly. Z graduated from our university in June, and I’ve barely seen her since. When I last saw her at the end of Ramadan, she urged me to call her up to hang out sometime. “I’m in the Bay all the time now!” she said excitedly. “Alright, will do,” I replied, but, later, thinking about the conversation, I realized, Wait, but I’m never there. Even though I live in the Bay, yes I know. But I’ve known Z since our second year of college, and there are very few people I make an active effort to stay in touch with. Z is one of those rare friends, and I had immediately thought of her when I planned my stakeout at Borders the evening before.

She has her laptop, envelopes and manila folders, and paperwork related to her ongoing graduate school admissions process. I’ve got my pile of books, lecture notes, and the only CD I ever listen to whenever I’m studying, Norah Jones’ Come Away With Me, because that’s really the only non-distracting, background-sort-of-music I own.

An hour or so into our study session, as we shift around in our chairs and start becoming distracted by book posters and the cafe menu, Z looks across the table at me and says with practiced casualness, “So Yasmine, I have a question for you. We never have this conversation, you know, so I figured I should ask today.” I squint suspiciously. “What conversation?”

She smiles knowingly, and I suddenly occupy myself with flipping through the pages of my book in exaggerated concentration. “Okay. So I have reading to do. Thomas More and the Utopians and their attitude towards boundless human happiness. And religion. Dude, this book is hella cool. I wonder if More was an undercover Muslim, you think?”

She is undeterred by my attempts at intellectual distraction. “Fine, here, I’ll write it down for you,” she says, smirking while I shake my head and go back to my notes. She hastily scribbles down a few lines and shoves the slip of paper across the table. I glance at it and roll my eyes. “God, why are you so predictable? Why do we need to talk about boys? Do you know how gorgeously simple and drama-free my life is just because I can’t be bothered to have conversations like this?”

“Come on,” she presses. “Let’s talk. Not like any of them are worthy of you anyway, but what are you looking for in a guy?”

“Um,” I say. “The guy version of me?” We both burst out laughing, and I explain, “No, wait, I have to tell you this story—” So I tell her about the morning Somayya and I were driving somewhere, having a conversation slightly similar to this one, and Somayya looked across at me and said, “You know what, Yazzo, I’ve decided what I need is a boy version of you.” “Me, too!” I exclaimed, but she corrected me: “No, what you need is a boy version of me,” whereupon we giggled hysterically the rest of the way to our destination.

Z laughs at our collective epiphany, but I can tell I won’t get away with any more delaying tactics. I sigh. “Okay. Someone who’s Muslim, obviously, because that’s very important to me. And I guess, basically, someone who’s a student of knowledge.” I laugh at the expression on her face, knowing instinctively that she’s thinking of mullahs and madrassahs. “No, nothing hardcore, don’t worry. I mean… Okay, it’s kinda like this: Someone who’s constantly trying to figure out who he is and how to improve himself and what the hell he’s supposed to be doing with his life, and how God fits into all that. That’s all part of the process of seeking knowledge too, right there. Just a certain, active way of looking at the world. Oh, and of course he has to be insanely weird and crackheaded like me, otherwise it’s never gonna work out. Does that all kinda make sense?”

“Of course it does. See, that wasn’t very painful, was it?” She pauses for a moment, ignoring me as I belligerently retort, “Yes, it was!”

“It’s funny,” she says. “You’re looking for someone who very much identifies as Muslim, and I’m looking for someone who’s not practicing at all. Maybe not even Muslim at all.”

“Why’s that?” I ask, somewhat stunned.

We sit there at Borders while she tells me her stories, much of which I knew already, but not the painful depth of it. Her hands are cold, so very cold, so I cover them with my own, and we sit there across from one another with our hands bent together and piled in the middle of the table. Her voice is casual and straightforward – deliberately so, I know – but her eyes are overly bright with pain and unshed tears.

She tells me what it has been like for her, growing up as the only child of a Bengali Christian mother and a Pakistani Muslim father. A mother who swallowed her own pain and taught her daughter the steps of making ablution, explained the intricacies of Muslim prayer, guided her through fasting during Ramadan, and drove her to and from Arabic lessons so Z could read the Quran on her own. And a father who, when Z asked, “Don’t we as Muslims have a responsibility and obligation to learn about other religious traditions so we can better understand and explain our own?” sternly, expressly forbade her to do so, yet neither practiced himself nor made any basic effort to teach her about Islam either.

Knowing that her culture is important to her, I ask whether she feels more of a connection to South Asian Christians rather than to South Asian Muslims. She shrugs slightly. “Maybe a little bit, but it’s always the same thing: the Christians don’t understand the Muslim side of me, and the Muslims don’t understand the Christian influence in my life.”

“Look at it this way,” she says. “Look at yourself, for example. You come across as very confident. You walk into a room knowing exactly who you are. You’re Yasmine, and you’re Muslim and Pakistani and American. I, on the other hand, can’t say any of that so easily. All I know is, I’m Z, and…and that’s all.”

“You know my car, right?” she asks. I nod. “That car used to be my mother’s, and she gave it to me when I started college. She had a bumper sticker on the back that said, in big letters, FEAR GOD, and a short, relevant verse from the Bible underneath. That’s all, nothing more.” She tells me about the time she rounded the corner into a university parking lot one day, only to find a group of Muslim male acquaintances gathered around her car, examining the bumper sticker and asking one another, “Hey, whose car is that?” “Wait, that belongs to Z, right?” “Oh yeah, her mom’s a kaffir, isn’t she?”

I flinch.

Z, to give her inner strength due credit, choked back her hurt, smiled coldly at the students and made the requisite small talk while pretending she hadn’t heard any of the previous comments. “But, Yasmine,” she says now, her hands still cold under mine, “I wanted to fit in so badly that as soon as they turned and left, I ripped off that bumper sticker and I broke my mother’s heart that day.”

There were raised eyebrows and whispers within their Muslim community when Z’s mother recently gathered up her faith and courage and once more began attending church regularly, after so many years of not doing so. At social gatherings, the Muslim women politely ask one another, “Where is Z’s mother?” and the answers will range from “Oh, she had a prior commitment,” to “Oh, she wasn’t feeling very well today,” but what no one will admit is that she was not invited in the first place.

And then, as Z reminds me, there was the Muslim graduation picnic held this past June, co-sponsored by the Muslim Students Association from the university and the Muslim community members within the city itself. It was an event well attended not only by Muslims, but also by many non-Muslim university officials and administrators, community leaders including those involved in city council and interfaith activities, and community members including passersby who randomly decided to stop by on the spur of the moment. I was humbled and honored to see such amazing, supportive presence from the non-Muslim community, especially when several of them stood up to warmly proclaim that they were there to show solidarity with us Muslims.

I thought everything was going well, until a former MSA president reached the part in his speech where he began firmly cautioning the Muslim students present against “emulating the kuffar.”

I learned later that evening that Z left the picnic soon afterward, in tears, hurt beyond words to hear such harsh condemnation of the so-called “kuffar,” a category which obviously includes her own mother, the woman who, while admittedly non-Muslim, had raised Z to be far more aware of Islam and its religious traditions than her Muslim father ever had. Sick and disheartened, Somayya and I repeatedly asked each other, “What the hell was he thinking?” for days afterward as well. It was painful and disappointing to hear such rhetoric from someone I had held in such high esteem as an exemplary brother in Islam, and I lost a massive amount of respect that day for, ironically, someone whose work on interfaith councils I had always very much admired.

“It comes back to the conversation we started with,” Z says. “I refuse to marry anyone who disrespects my mother simply because she’s not Muslim. Who’s to say that non-Muslim men aren’t more tolerant and open-hearted than any of the narrow-minded Muslim men I’ve met so far? Why wouldn’t I want to emulate my mother? How would you feel, Yasmine, if you were married to a non-Muslim man and you had to teach your children about his religion at the expense of your own?”

“I think it would break my heart everyday,” I say in a small voice.

Sitting as we are with our piled hands and miserable faces in the middle of the Borders cafe, we probably incite some curious glances from fellow cafe patrons, but I don’t know, because all I can see is through the tears in my eyes is the sadness on her face. “I can’t even begin to imagine,” I say, “what a huge heart your mother must have.”

And there is more, but I think this is already more than enough. I hesitate to post even this, mainly because Z doesn’t know about my weblog, and her stories are not mine to tell and share. And also because I feel I may just be preaching to the choir, so to speak, because as bloggers most of us are already in the habit of choosing our words carefully, painstakingly.

But I write this because I hate the word “kaffir,” and I hate how it comes so easily to some Muslims even as it makes me flinch, and I hate that we contemptuously turn away the very same people we accuse of not understanding us, without giving them a fair chance to know who we are, without granting them credit for making the beautiful effort of shared human spirit and outreach that we ourselves as Muslims rarely make a point of with other communities. Who the hell are we to be critical then, when we accuse others of stereotyping us and disliking us and being ignorant of who we are, of the vastness of our humanity and traditions, and of what Islam in its pure beauty truly stands for? And I guess what I’m really just trying to figure out is –

When did we ourselves become so damn self-righteous and judgmental?

Sanctuary speak-outs

Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste, Suckool

One of the courses I’m enrolled in this quarter is a Community & Regional Development class entitled “Ethnicity and American Communities.” If I had to pick one single class I were absolutely in love with during my entire university experience, this would most likely be it. Interestingly enough, the other likely contenders fall into the category of classes related to social and ethnic relations as well. This is the stuff I love.

In a lecture hall that holds nearly 150 seats and a sea of diverse faces among which it would otherwise be quite easy to become just another anonymous figure, our professor – a woman with a sharp, elfin face and purple streaks in her white hair, whose wide, gleeful grin for some reason reminds me of my grandmother’s – has successfully managed to help us not only get to know one another, but also to put our heart and soul into speaking honestly and sharing our thoughts, opinions, and experiences as applicable to the course. CRD 2 is a safe space, and, judging by the discussion, directness, and dialogue we’ve achieved just over the past few weeks, I don’t use that term lightly. I am constantly humbled by the stories my classmates share with us, and entrust us with.

During the latest lecture, our professor mentioned she was concerned about the fact that many students had made references to “colored people” while writing their weekly reaction papers for the class. I would find that laughable – who in their right mind still uses the term “colored people”?! – except I know what a painful, shameful history those words have had in the United States, and how emotive the phrase still is for many people. Looking around at the sea of faces in the lecture hall, I saw a variety of expressions: amused, shocked, embarrassed, cringing.

“We don’t say ‘colored people’ anymore,” said the professor gently. “Who knows what the correct term is – today, at least?”

There was a smattering of laughter as someone called out, “People of color!” Some white people looked slightly confused; the “colored people” smiled knowingly in amusement.

The professor scrawled both phrases on the chalkboard and turned back to the class. “I know, it sounds like the same thing, doesn’t it? Who knows what the difference is, between ‘colored people’ and ‘people of color?'”

I don’t know how common the usage of “people of color” is outside the United States, but even I myself had never heard of the term until I started college, and only thought about it closely for the first time when I was designing workshops for the Women of Color Conference last spring. Perhaps it’s all semantics, but I think the modifier makes all the difference: “colored people” is passive; “people of color” denotes ownership and active choice. What’s wrong with referring to “colored people”? It implies that there are two standards for people (those who are colored, and those who are…not), that one group is the norm (clean, untainted, and wholesome) and the other is…not. Guess which is which.

Last week I read my “What Did You Think?” poem aloud in class. Later, a white classmate who walked out with me remarked in response to the poem, “You know, maybe I’m just not judgmental enough, but I wouldn’t even look at you and think you don’t know how to speak English.” I smiled in amusement. “You’d be surprised,” I answered. Here’s something that’s true: The reactions I get from strangers when I’m wearing jeans and what my father calls my “retro hippie dress with the strings” (also labeled the “river rat gypsy dress” by my brother) are different from those I get when I’m wearing more ethnic clothing such as pants and a Pakistani top. It’s human nature to assume, to jump to conclusions, to judge without context, and I suppose I’m fortunate that my experiences with people in that regard have more to do with what I’m wearing, the way I speak, and how I carry myself rather than specifically with the color of my skin.

A few days ago, during one of my perpetual phases of non-thinking, I turned on the oven and placed the top of my index finger right up against the broiler to check whether it was hot enough. Who in their right mind does things like that, really? So now I sport a small, circular burn on my finger. It’s going through a healing stage, darkening with each day that passes. I find myself glancing at it during odd moments of the day, regarding it not as a blemish but just something interesting and out of the ordinary. (After all, it means at least some tiny bit of my skin tone now matches my mother’s, and we all know my mother is the best.) And while my little brown burn mark is such a trivial thing, it’s made me realize that darker skin catches the eye more often when it’s something unusual or uncommon. I may find it intriguing, but the sad fact is that a seemingly inconsequential thing like the color of one’s skin has, both historically and currently, been grounds for prejudice, disrespect, hate, and raging atrocities.

It breaks my heart on a daily basis – through workshops, forums, film screenings, discussion panels, and in-depth conversations with strangers and people I know – to realize the extent of discrimination and racism and intolerance that still exist in our world today. And it’s not all just about race and ethnicity. There’s also gender, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, religion, and a multitude of other assumptions and characteristics by which we define ourselves and each another.

A few evenings ago, listening to the Chicano/Latino panel talk about their lives and experiences and frantically jotting down scribbled notes whenever their stories reminded me of incidents and conversations from my own past, I was struck again by a thought that has crossed my mind often during the last couple of years that I’ve been involved with issues of race/ethnicity and diversity: that the colors may vary and our experiences differ across the board, but ultimately, at the core of our humanity, our stories somehow reflect one another’s.

The point was driven home even more effectively by a couple of activities we carried out during class. The first one was an outdoor activity for which we trudged out to the edge of the wide lawn next to the building, all 150 of us standing in a huge group, shivering in the cold late afternoon wind.

The professor called out instructions, reading through a long list: “Step to the side if you are _____. *pause* Pay attention to who is standing with you. *pause* Pay attention to who is not standing with you.” We found there were three Arabs in the class, including the teaching assistant. Later, there were three Muslims up there, including me and not including the Persian guy with the Turkish name who’d introduced himself to me the week before. He met my gaze levelly, nonchalantly as the professor instructed us to “pay attention to who is not standing with you.” There were about a dozen people up there at the middle of the lawn when she called for those with disabilities, whether they were physical or learning or God knows what else. And even though, as I’ve mentioned before, hearing loss is a part of my life but doesn’t define who I am, I thought, What the hell, and walked up to join them. When she called for those who had grown up in working-class households, I stayed back and marveled at the sea of people that pushed forward.

When she called for those who had ever been arrested or been in jail, we all held our collective breath. Eight students walked up – two were African American, most were white and there were surprisingly more women up there than any of us had expected. When she called for the Asian American/API group, we walked to the middle, then turned back to see who remained beind, letting out a round of laughter because the majority of the class was standing shoulder-to-shoulder with us. A non-Asian student later referred to us as “the mass of the class.”

It was an extraordinary way to get a visual sample of the class demographics. There were people walking up for categories I never would have expected by looking at them – a simple reminder not to judge one another.

The second activity was back indoors. We had two minutes to individually complete the following exercise:

1. As a _____, what I want you to know about me is _____.

2. As a _____, what I never want to see, hear, or to have happen again is _____.

3. As a _____, what I expect from you as an ally is _____.

My quick answers:

1. As a Pakistani Muslim woman, what I want you to know about me is I choose to cover my hair, I am not oppressed, my ethnic clothing is not called “pajamas,” I am not a terrorist, my nationality is American, and I’m versatile not confused [thank you, Fathima!]

2. As a Pakistani Muslim woman, what I never want to see, hear, or to have happen again is laws passed to limit my personal right to wear my headscarf, the Gujarat riots, terrorist attacks including those of September 11th, people being victimized or labeled because of outer appearances

3. As a Pakistani Muslim woman, what I expect from you as an ally is tolerance, acceptance, asking for explanations up-front instead of assuming, and respect for my individual right to practice my religion

The fun part was when we got segregated into groups based on our racial/ethnic identity, to share our answers. The other students in my South Asian group were all non-Muslim Indians, and it was interesting to note that my response was the only one dealing mainly with religion. Not to say that non-Muslim Indians aren’t religious, but that was an observation nonetheless. And then we had to choose someone from the group as a spokesperson, to combine a few of our answers and read them to the class. “I nominate her,” said one of the guys, pointing at me. “Hers sounds complicated.”
“Thanks a lot,” I laughed.

The professor called this process of sharing with the class “sanctuary speak-outs.” It was a powerful experience, not only reading my group’s answers but also listening to the statements recited by other groups. What made it even more meaningful is that, at the end of each group’s list, the entire class was asked to repeat back whatever they had heard, thus effectively validating the group’s experiences and declarations. A Filipino student simply announced, “What I expect from you as an ally is to open my fridge.” When pressed for an explanation, he said his measure of a really good friend is that the first thing the person does when he walks into his house is open the refrigerator and help himself to food. This level of comfort, disregard for useless social niceties, ease in one another’s presence, and “feeling right at home-ness” is something he wishes more people would aspire to in relationships with one another.

You’re all welcome to open my fridge any day. There’s a lot of cheese and fruit juice in there. And the kitchen cupboard has two boxes of chocolate truffles, too, if you’re interested.

Use the comment box to fill in your own blanks for #1-3. What do you have to say for yourself?

Fill the spaces with wood in places to make it feel like home

Casa420 and Familia, Salaam Namaste

Last Saturday, while I was volunteering at a painting competition at the art center and drawing henna designs on little kids’ hands, the father of one of the children leaned over and asked curiously, “Where were you born?” I smiled sweetly and answered, “Berkeley.” And while it was the truth, it was quite obvious that that wasn’t the answer he had been expecting to hear.

With friends, I always laughingly append the answer with, “And that just explains everything, doesn’t it?”

I love Berkeley. I’m not there very often and, admittedly, I’m still not an expert at figuring out my way around, but if you leave me at the corner of Bancroft and Telegraph, I’m all set to go. From there, I can navigate my way to anywhere. There is only a small, select group of people I can tolerate shopping with, yet I’m content browsing for hours on my own and Berkeley is optimal for such an experience. I’ve bought candy from small corner shops and eaten it all while walking down the street. I’ve sat in cafes while drinking hot chocolate, watching the world walk by my windows, waving at people I happened to recognize. I’ve conversed with sidewalk vendors and returned the genuine, crinkly-eyed smiles of homeless people at the corners and tried on flip-flops and handled dangly earrings and slathered on lotion at the Bath & Body that’s now gone. I’ve taken my sweet time walking slowly from the BART station to the campus, inadvertently eavesdropping on people’s conversations, inwardly amused at the juxtaposition of buildings.

“Telegraph is overrated,” a girl said dismissively to me recently. I remember raising an eyebrow and making a curt, snappish remark in response. Perhaps my Berkeley experiences are not truly indicative of what it’s like to actually live in the town and know the place like the back of one’s hand, but the very fact that I don’t live there makes me appreciate it more, maybe. Berkeley is weird and wonderful and whack, and the fact that everything there is all slightly shabby and imperfect, eccentric and unexpectedly out-of-place, is what makes it all the more appealing.

I can see myself living in Berkeley.

I was in Berkeley recently to have lunch with a friend. Walking back to our car afterwards, I stopped abruptly in the middle of the sidewalk, hands on my hips, craning my neck upwards, and exclaimed loudly at no one in particular, “I love those bay windows!” It was a three-story house, two of the levels made up of the wide bay windows I couldn’t help marveling at. My friend, who had obliviously continued walking ahead without me, stopped and turned back, a bit disconcerted by my sudden display of enthusiasm. I suppose she didn’t know that it’s a habit I have, this stopping dead in my tracks whenever something captures my interest.

The Berkeley building reminded me of how much I miss our old Victorian home with the bay windows and soaring rooflines – the tall, dilapidated house we spent over a year taking apart and rebuilding, knocking down walls and taking out excess doors, retaining the old moldings and doorway carvings, polishing the hardwood floors until they gleamed, reveling in the sheer glory of the house, a vast expanse of space and light. We remained there for only two more years after the year of renovation.

There are college students living there now, and a Volkswagen Jetta parked in the driveway. They sprawl on sagging couches on the wide front porch, littering it with six-packs, and the elegant bay windows sport posters of rockstars. My father’s geranium plots and brick borders, once intricately laid out and lovingly tended, are long gone, replaced by a patch of grass and nothing else. I miss the ingenious placement of those red geraniums, so vivid against the gray and white of the house.

I also miss our behtuk in the village, and the way the multicolored shutters shimmered in the afternoon sunlight. I miss the smell of rain, and the indescribably peaceful feeling of sitting on the rooftop and gazing down on the village. And my bebe and how she refused to acknowledge me as “Yasmine” and stubbornly persisted in calling me by my middle name, always.

I miss the miniature rose bushes from the house we lived in before that, and the level, green lawn. I miss watching the sunset from the laundry room window, and standing on the back porch to gaze at the stars, and reading so many more books in one year than I have collectively since then.

And before that – well, before that, there was this, and I came back, didn’t I?

They say you leave behind pieces of yourself, too, in every place that you live in and leave. I, of all people, know how true this is, having abandoned bits of myself everywhere, gradually shrugging off the qualities and habits and personality traits I found lacking, ill-fitting, awkward, unnecessary, or even, yes, embarrassing. But I also think one learns to pick up pieces, too, and so it becomes not just a matter of leaving behind pieces, but of learning to resourcefully substitute new ones for every bit you discard.

The individual self is a jigsaw puzzle.

Or maybe I’m just a sentimental fool.

And if I ever want to find out, I’ll watch the movie

Casa420 and Familia, Salaam Namaste

It’s 9 a.m. on Wednesday morning and the brother and I are sitting in his dentist’s office. I’m poring through National Geographic and Sports Illustrated, shivering from time to time because I’m sitting right beneath the air-conditioning vent. (Who in their right freakin’ mind turns on the AC at 9 a.m.?) He’s sitting next to me, scribbling down notes for…what? a short story? a film script? This boy never goes anywhere without pen and paper. When inspiration strikes, he’s always prepared. These days, I’m finding we have a lot more in common than I would have ever imagined.

From time to time, we glance over at each other and crinkle our noses or shrug our shoulders in response to the silence in the waiting room. The only other people there are a middle-aged couple sitting across from us and an old lady a few seats down, all of them staring intently either at magazines or the ground, as if making eye contact with strangers would kill them.

The door is opened, the brother’s name finally called. “Good luck, buddy,” I say, patting him on the back. He stuffs his pen and scraps of paper in his pockets, his tall frame crossing the room to where the dentist’s assistant stands waiting with her clipboard and professionally solemn expression.

At the door, he stops abruptly and turns back to me. “If I don’t come back,” he drawls gruffly, his arms spread out theatrically, “…SELL THE DOG!” The couple across from me start guffawing. Even the little old lady cracks a smile. I slump in my chair, giggling uncontrollably. “Don’t worry,” I manage to gasp, “I’ll make sure to properly dispense of your possessions.”

“And…and…!” he continues dramatically, still in character, “Tell everyone I love ’em!” I shake my head, still giggling, as the door closes behind him.

“Is he getting his wisdom teeth pulled?” asks the man across from me knowingly. I nod. For the next several minutes, the waiting room is filled with laughing glances and barely suppressed grins and chuckles.

It’s a gift he has, making strangers smile.

Afterwards, his mouth stuffed with gauze so that he can barely speak coherently, he turns to pen and paper once again. “Did they laugh?” he scribbles, then shoves the paper across the table at me. I grin and recount, with sufficient glee, all the reactions he missed. He mumbles disdainfully, “The assistant actually asked me, ‘Are you really selling your dog?'” I laugh harder.

Later in the morning, I introduce him to Switchfoot, whom he finds intriguing. During the afternoon, he urges me watch the music video for Junoon’s Ghoom Tana and patiently helps out with Windows Media Player’s issues. This is my spiky-orange-haired brother we’re talking about, the one who absolutely loves the Pixies and tells me about random, obscure bands I’ve never heard of before, so I’m amazed at this newfound “ethnically aware” side to him. I counter that the music video for Fuzon’s Khamaj is cooler, “cooler” being Yasmine-speak for “this is the only other desi music video I’ve voluntarily watched in the past five years even though I have absolutely no idea who Fuzon is,” so we check out that one in turn. Since it’s shot in black-and-white, and the video concept has to do with auditions, directors, and films, he’s suitably impressed. I tease him for stealing the daddy-o’s old “Best of Muhammad Rafi” cassettes. He shares his pudding and cinnamon applesauce and mint ‘n’ chip ice cream with us.

A good time is had by all.

postscript Due to popular demand, and because I r…

NineToFive outside the 925, Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste

postscript

Due to popular demand, and because I really want to update but can’t since I have highly annoying papers to write, I’m instead posting my article that was published in the South Asian magazine on campus. Long-time readers may be interested to know it’s an edited and slightly more formalized version of this post from April 2003. The “infamous poem” is having issues being uploaded properly, so I guess I’ll have to resort to other measures. It’s 2 pages (with 2 columns per page) on a Word document, so that’s a lot of scrolling if I just simply post it here. Let me know if you’re up for it.

[M is for Multiculturalism]

As an undergraduate student, I currently hold an internship with the campus Multicultural Immersion Program. A subdivision of the university’s Counseling Center, the Multicultural Immersion Program is an intensive internship geared towards educating and training selected student leaders in workshop development and implementation in the areas of race relations, intercultural communication, and related diversity issues. As campus diversity facilitators, we’re required to put together workshops and presentations designed to foster understanding of multicultural issues.

People constantly, curiously ask me why I’m a part of this program. My way of looking at it is that people need to be educated. About me, about you, about themselves.

My story: I was born and raised in the United States, and spent eighteen months living in Pakistan, my parents’ homeland, when I was 13-14 years old. In the process, I learned to accept the inevitable truth that Pakistan was also my own homeland, even though I hadn’t been born there. Before living in Pakistan, I had considered myself neither wholly American nor wholly Pakistani. This predicament placed me in an uncomfortable state of limbo, although, as a child, I think I tended to lean toward the Western culture I grew up surrounded by. My ambivalent attitude, however, changed after living in Pakistan. Through first-hand experience, I absorbed details about Pakistan and its religion, culture, and customs, as well as about the people and their way of life—also my way of life during the time I was there. Hard work and a complete immersion in the Pakistani culture were the starting points towards the discovery of my roots. Life in Pakistan taught me to appreciate the best of both East and West, and to consequently reconcile the two.

But I’ll be fair and admit that life in Pakistan wasn’t always perfect. For eighteen months, I missed “real” chocolate, had cravings for Bakers Square cream pies, cursed the fact that the electricity went out a dozen times a day, cringed at the lizards on the walls and the cockroaches in the bathrooms, prayed that I wouldn’t fall into the well during my amateur attempts at drawing up water, and put up with the stereotypical “desi aunties” who visited us in a nonstop stream for eighteen months (ostensibly to welcome us to the village, but their bluntly-put ulterior motives were more along the lines of obtaining American visas for their sons/nephews/grandsons/brothers/etc.).

It really wasn’t until after I returned to the U.S. that I appreciated how much the time I spent in Pakistan increased my depth of world knowledge. I’m exceedingly grateful not only to have had the opportunity to broaden my horizons, but also to have been blessed with the ability to integrate aspects of two very different cultures into my life. My pride in my Pakistani heritage has given me a self-confidence and sense of self-worth that I cannot but believe I would have lacked otherwise. While the process of reconciling my two identities was a long and difficult one for me, I feel that I have finally reached a point in my life where I am fully comfortable with my ethnicity and heritage, to the extent that I have lost the defensive feeling that initially characterized my responses to peoples’ questions about my ethnicity or religion. Now that I am secure in my own racial identity, I am able to interact with people of other ethnicities and educate them about my race and religion without feeling defensive or suspicious of their motives in expressing interest in these topics.

As individuals, we all fashion our own sense of identity, and the process often takes years, even a lifetime. Each of you probably already know this from your own experiences. But in the end, though, it’s difficult to find peace and contentment in one’s personally chosen identity if the rest of the world doesn’t understand it at all. What good does that sense of personal content do for you then? Living in a self-enclosed bubble doesn’t prepare one for real life. Even in our modern, forward-thinking world today, people stereotype each other’s identities, or scorn and mock them, or deliberately refuse to further understand them, and in the process they belittle something that is inherently precious to each individual, no matter how widely each person’s sense of identity differs from another’s. It therefore remains to each individual to educate the rest of the world about his identity, so that others can understand it does matter.

I personally feel that educating the people I come across throughout my daily life is an important step towards enhancing intercultural relations in our society. In one of my sociology courses, I once watched a video called The Way Home, in which dozens of women were separated by racial identity and then left to talk among themselves about their experiences within the definitions of that category. One of the things that struck me the most was hearing an Arab woman, tired of the association of Arabs with terrorists and oppressed women, say in exasperation, “We accuse people of not understanding us, but at the same time we refuse to speak out about who we really are.” Exactly.

Last year, I enrolled in Sociology 30A, the first in a two-part series entitled “Intercultural Relations in Multicultural Societies.” One of the topics that hit closest to home for me was that of incorporating immigrants into the society of their adopted homeland. As my professor explained, there are three methods of incorporation: exclusion (immigrants are viewed as second-class citizens or temporary guests in their adopted country, and are “segregated” from the natives), assimilation (immigrants learn a new language and culture, completely giving up their old ones), and multiculturism (immigrants are bilingual and bicultural).

When the professor asked the class at large to express their opinions regarding immigrant assimilation, many students raised their hands and brought up a point on which I agreed: that immigrants should most definitely make an attempt to learn the language of their adopted country, because only then will they be able to interact with their neighbors and colleagues. The same students also added that while language skills are essential, immigrants should be allowed to retain their ethnic identities as well. While I was nodding my head in agreement over the previous students’ responses, the professor called on another student in the back of the class.

Listening to the next student speak, I found myself taking offense at what I perceived as his lack of respect for cultures and heritages beyond those of America. I disliked his condescending tone when pronouncing, “In order to survive in America, you have to walk the American walk and play the American game, and in order to play the game you have to speak the language and wear the same clothing as the American people wear.” Continuing further, he held forth his personal view that it was perfectly fine for immigrants to speak their native languages and wear their ethnic dress while in the privacy of their own homes, but when venturing out into public, the same immigrants should be required to wear American clothing and speak English.

I believe my disbelief and irritation were fully apparent from the look on my face, and I saw others sitting around me glance nervously towards me during the student’s discourse. While I sat staring at him with my eyebrow raised in utter exasperation, those around me were busy taking in my headscarf and semi-ethnic form of dress (jeans and a Pakistani kameez). Before the student in the back raised his hand and shared his views, I hadn’t been planning on putting forth my own opinion of immigrant assimilation, because I felt that the students who spoke prior to him had already emphasized most of what I also thought about the situation. However, this particular student’s patronizing view towards assimilation, and his firm belief that all immigrants should be required to hide any vestiges or signs of their ethnic backgrounds while in public annoyed me enough that I raised my own hand and stated my own views on the matter. Although I now somewhat regret the sarcastic and combative way in which I began my “obviously I speak fluent English and wear my ethnic clothing at the same time” approach to addressing the other student’s views, I am glad that I had the courage to speak up when I disagreed with what he said. While I firmly agree that immigrants should make every attempt to learn the language of their adopted country, I just as firmly believe that no immigrant should be required to compromise his ethnicity and heritage just to fit into the cookie-cutter patterns dictated by society.

Although I was born and raised in the U.S., my parents and relatives did a commendable job of ensuring that I never lost my sense of identity in terms of being a Pakistani Muslim. As a result, I consider myself to be bicultural and multilingual. While strangers may take one look at me wearing my native dress in public and instantly judge me as a “fresh off the boat” immigrant who most likely does not speak a word of English, I am completely comfortable in my identity as a woman who has learned to integrate both the East and the West into her life.

I’ve learned that it’s all about compromise. And it’s about “optional identities” too, in which people take the best of all their cultures and make that their identity, picking and choosing from their various identities that which they specifically wish to incorporate into their lives. Balancing or juggling identities is often a circus act, and eventually one becomes proficient at the pick-and-choose aspect of optional identities. In the end, I think, it’s all about choosing the most appealing from everything that one is handed, and making that our own personal way of life.

UPDATE: Check out Annie‘s May 11, 2004 post for an interesting perspective.

the problem lies elsewhere, always, of course

All-Star Crackstar Squad, Salaam Namaste

the problem lies elsewhere, always, of course

My friend, H, is a Cuban-American convert to Islam. His roommate is an international student from Saudi Arabia. They’re both good-natured and funny, and most of the time they get along really well, but once in a while they’ll burst out with the arguing and aggravate each other to no end. A few evenings ago, for example, they had a tense disagreement about some irrelevant issue.

H is a softy whose conscience eats away at him whenever someone is upset with him, even if it wasn’t his fault in the first place. So he approached the roommate and apologized for whatever he had said in anger the other night. He then looked expectantly at the other boy, anticipating some sort of reciprocal acknowledgement or apology. Instead, his roommate stared back belligerently and retorted, “So. What do you want me to say?”

H’s theory is that the roommate has never in his life been expected to apologize for anything wrong he may have said or done, and so the concept of apologizing is foreign to him. I responded that while apologizing takes strength, humility, and courage, the notion is not a given in every society. I think the ability to apologize varies based on one’s culture and upbringing. I, for example, hate apologizing or otherwise admitting I’m wrong. This may be due to my strong-willed, temperamental, stubborn Pukhtun roots. Or it may be due to the fact that I’m the rebel child of the family, and conformity has never been my strong suit, even when it comes to admitting another person’s viewpoint may have some merit. Or the fact that, when I was a child, my father used to impatiently tell me to stop crying, because crying was a sign of weakness, and so I’ve come to associate crying – and by default, apologizing – with weakness, and who the hell wants to be weak anyway? Or it could even be because there is no specific phrase in my Hindku dialect that one could use to say in a straightforward, uncomplicated manner, “I am sorry.”

Is the ability to apologize with ease based on one’s culture and upbringing?

Discuss.

Random conversational tangents are always welcome, as usual.

[Comments.]

“And those foremost (in faith) will be foremost (in the hereafter)” [56:10]

Loss and laments and letting go, Salaam Namaste

I, who supposedly never cry, watched my face crumble in the mirror as I stood before it early yesterday morning, arms raised in the act of wrapping a scarf around my head, my mother standing next to me as she relayed the message.

I left the house less than ten minutes later, and cried all the way up to school. Not sobs; I don’t sob. Even during the rare times that I do break down enough to cry, I never lose control enough to sob. Instead, there was an endless stream of tears that I had to constantly wipe away. I stabbed at the buttons on my CD-player, expecting to hear Matchbox Twenty, and was grateful when Surah Ya-Seen spilled out of the speakers instead. I flipped back and forth between surahs Ya-Seen, ar-Rahman, and al-Waqi’a, reciting along in a voice thick with tears.

I was dry-eyed and calm by the time I got to the university parking lot exactly an hour later. My tears are always short-lived, perhaps because we’re usually so geographically far away from the sources of grief, but mainly because, after losing so, so many loved ones over the past few years, there is eventually, sooner rather than later, a sense of numbness during times of sorrow.

[D found me at the library computers later that morning, doing some research for an assignment. Never one to waste words, she peered into my face and demanded, “Why are your eyes red?”
I could have said, “I washed my hair this morning, and got shampoo in my eyes,” and it would have been true.
I could have said, “Cold weather always makes my eyes water,” and that would have been true as well.
But instead I chose to go with the third truth, the real story, and felt the tears crawl back. She hugged me, then leaned back to look at my face. “Remember when your grandmother died two years ago, and we walked out in the middle of bio lecture because you were so sad?”
I offered up a watery smile. “I really traumatized you that day, didn’t I?”
“Yeah! It was good to know you actually have feelings though,” she said with characteristic bluntness. “But you really scared me. The whole day, I went around thinking, ‘Oh my God, Yaz is crying. The world must be ending, if Yaz is crying.'”]

The day passed in a blur. I grieved for her calm, even smile and the deep creases at the corners of her eyes. For the mysterious way she drawled her words as she spoke in Hindku. (Where did she pick up a drawl? I always wondered.) For the way she always pronounced my name as “jussmeen.” I laugh, remembering that now; she was the only one who could get away with it. I grieved for her youngest daughter – my little sister’s age – who lost her father recently, too. I grieved for all the times she listened to me haltingly, stumblingly learning to recite the Qur’an from her other daughter, and for when she said, “We used to be able to hear your daddy’s recitations from across the galli every morning after fajr. What a beautiful voice he had.” I grieved for her serene presence, her dark henna-dyed hair, the bread she used to bring us from the tandoor on the roof of her house. For her long, cool verandas that we escaped to during the summer months. For the late afternoon that her youngest daughter and my sister and I played cricket in her courtyard in the pouring rain, and she overrode my mother’s entreaties to come home with the gentle, “Let them play.” For the joy she took in her grandchildren. For the eighteen months when I lived just across the narrow galli and took her family’s very presence for granted – nearly ten years ago now.

I knew things had already changed by the time I visited three-and-a-half years ago, for a mere two weeks.
“Boboji,” I said to her, “I miss Baba” – our beloved Baba of the mischievous grin, our Baba of the potato kabobs, eggplant pakoras, and Chinese fried rice, who spent entire days refining his creative culinary endeavors while she smiled the indulgent smile of a wife who knows best to stay out of the kitchen.
She gripped my hands tightly. “I know,” she said wistfully. “The house seems lonely without him, doesn’t it?”

[“Grief is personal,” I once snapped at a concerned friend, soon after my grandmother’s death.
“I don’t know, that doesn’t sound healthy to me,” he said dubiously. “It’s always good to let people see you shaken or rattled every once in a while. Lets people know you’re still human and not an alien. Wait – you are human, aren’t you?”]

What inexplicably hurt me the most was that I couldn’t remember how I had said good-bye to her when I was returning to the U.S. Did I hug her tightly enough? Did I thank her for being a source of calmness and sanity for my mother during all those years she had to spend away from us? Did I thank her for her daughter, who patiently taught us to recite the Qur’an and read and write Urdu with staggering fluency? Did I thank her for her sons, who, following in the footsteps of their father, uncomplainingly filled prescriptions and delivered medicine for my grandmother? Did I thank her for her husband, who was a surrogate father to us during those eighteen months? Did I know then that every detail of her face would be imprinted on the back of my eyes even years later?

But I think I’m done grieving now. Already, yes. I’ll have to let her go eventually, and it may as well be this soon. After all, all I truly have to offer are prayers. So – May God grant her a reunion with Baba in Jannat-al-Firdaus, the highest level of heaven. May He reward them for the love they showered on us, the decades during which they somehow shifted from neighbors and friends into people close as family. May their marriage of patience, strength, faith, and affection be an example for all of us. May their generosity always live on, multiplying infinitely. May He bless all their families, and guide them through their sorrow. Ameen.

Inna lillahi wa inna ilayhi rajioon.
Surely we belong to God and surely we will return to Him.

Not what i was planning on posting about – but, hi, i’m back

Conversations and Encounters, Salaam Namaste

Yesterday, we went to this wedding shindig thing about 90 minutes away. Although I’d been to fourteen weddings in the course of the eighteen months I lived in Pakistan, this was the first Pakistani wedding in the U.S. that I can remember attending. ‘Twas fun, even though we didn’t know most of the people. Actually, my sister and I did a great job of just walking up to people and introducing ourselves. We met lots of new cool people in the process. And whenever I got bored, I amused myself by playing peek-a-boo with all the little kids, or grabbing my sister’s arm and exclaiming, “Aww, look at that cute baby!” Lots of cute babies in attendance. My kinda event. But good Lord! – Pakistani women really need to get out of this immensely unattractive habit of staring, and soon. That I do not find amusing at all.

In hindsight, the most entertaining part of the evening was when I unsuspectingly got waylaid by a group of single-minded aunties. See, here’s how it happened: I walked down to the end of the room to hug a family friend and ask how she was doing. After she had moved on, I was about to take another step when I found my arm firmly grasped by some old lady at the table I was standing next to. Without slackening the grip on my arm, she jerked her chin towards the empty seat next to her, almost physically hauling me into it. Shocked and surprised, I was about to open my mouth to speak, but she beat me to it. As I jerked my arm out of her grip, she directed rapid-fire Urdu questions my way: “Where are you from? Some Muslim country? Do you speak Urdu?”

Oh, great, I thought. And as she and the three other women across from us stared at me expectantly, what came out of my mouth was, “Nahin, maala sirf ligga ligga Urdu raazi,” which, of course means, “No, I only know a little bit of Urdu” – in a mixture of both Urdu AND Pukhtu. Oh yeah, I’m amazingly slick, what can I say.

Thankfully, my sister wandered by just then and was put on the spot as well. The old lady stared at us, looking puzzled. “Where are you from?” she repeated. “Are you from a Muslim country?”

I almost laughed. “I’m from Pakistan,” I said, this time in real Urdu.

“Pakistan?” She peered closely at me. So did the three ladies across from us. “You don’t look Pakistani,” they said doubtfully.

“Really?” I said. “Where did you think I was from?”

“Maybe India?”

“No, I’m Pakistani.”

The old lady looked me up and down. “You’re from Karachi, aren’t you?”

“No,” I said, “I’m from _______.”

“___… What?”

“_______,” I repeated loudly, with as much patience as I had left. “It’s the name of a village in district Attock.”

“Ohh, Attock!” said the ladies across from us. “We’re from Behboodi [a nearby village]! What’s your father’s name?”

We told them. “Ohh!” they said again, now smiling widely all of a sudden. Everyone knows our father. I’m so glad we have some connections, otherwise I can see how this conversation could have degenerated into misunderstandings and lip-curled vicious remarks as soon as our backs were turned. Or maybe I’m just generalizing. Unfortunately, I do know far too many people like that, though.

“So if you’re from _______, why don’t you at least know how to speak Hindku?” demanded one of the women. The sudden shift from agreeableness to disdain and condescension was too much for me. “I do speak Hindku,” I said with obvious annoyance, gladly reverting to fluent Hindku. “Perhaps if you had started off this conversation with Hindku, we wouldn’t have been having so much trouble.”

The old lady next to me, being a fluent Urdu speaker and a non-villager, was feeling left out of the loop of things by this time. She grabbed my arm again to direct attention her way, moving her hand in a circular gesture to signify my headwrap and scarf. “Why do you wear those so tightly?” she asked. “Doesn’t that cause you any takleef [trouble/annoyance/inconvenience]?”

I resisted an impulse to roll my eyes. “No, it doesn’t cause me any takleef,” I said impatiently, stuttering through my limited Urdu once more. I was trying to explain the concept of hijab to her, and my reasons for wearing it, but my limited Urdu was getting in the way. Not only that, I was distracted by the ladies across the table loudly asking each other, as if we weren’t even there – “Are they single? Or married?”

My sister retorted loudly, “No, we’re not married. We’re in college.”

A few seconds later, we finally managed to escape.

Yes, that was an interesting exchange. As we walked away, my sister laughed, “They probably think we’re so stuck-up – we were trying to speak Urdu with the village women, and talking about how we go to college.”

“Good!” I said irritably. “Serves them right for putting me on the spot like that.”

Usually, I’m known as the queen of sarcastic rejoinders and cold comebacks that result in flustered, embarrassed silence, but it’s awfully difficult to tell someone off if you don’t even speak the same language.

Later in the evening, a girl asked me, “Where are you from?”

“Oh, I came up from the Bay Area,” I replied, my standard response all day, since the majority of the wedding guests were from local towns.

“No, no,” she said, “I mean, what country?”

“Pakistan.”

‘Really?” she said in surprise. “I thought maybe you were Kashmiri. Or Palestinian.”

Hi, my name is Yasmine, and I think I’m starting to have an identity crisis already.

Oh, and the evening only served to confirm that I still need to learn now to gracefully accept compliments. I’ll get it right one of these years, don’t worry.

I’ll put that on my to-do list. Right up there with speaking Urdu without making a fool of myself.

Ramadan mubarak to you all

Loss and laments and letting go, Rockstar and Crescent, Salaam Namaste

For all my joking that my mental age is in the single digits (and, hey, it is, okay), all I really want is to be fourteen again.

I was still two weeks shy of my thirteenth birthday the year I traveled to Pakistan, in the midst of Ramadan, for what would ultimately become an eighteen-month stay. That first Ramadan in the village passed in nothing more than a jet-lagged stupor. We kids stubbornly slept through iftar, and then remained wide-awake following suhoor, bundled up in heavy quilts against the numbing late-February cold, tossing paper airplanes back and forth across the vast, dimly-lit room as a means of passing time. The daylight hours were spent staring shyly, uncertainly at an endless sea of curious faces, fellow villagers who came out to see this family from America.

I was fourteen by the time Ramadan rolled around the next year. The village had become home by then, and that’s the Ramadan I remember most clearly, the one I compare all others to, the one I seek to regain in terms of simplicity and spirituality. The months leading up to that Ramadan were interesting, to say the least. Mainly, I remember the hours spent in learning to read and write Urdu, and learning to recite the Qur’an in Arabic. I remember picking up Urdu with staggering fluency, surpassing my teacher’s and father’s and even my own expectations. And once I ran out of Naseem Hijazi novels and short story anthologies and magazines and poetry in Urdu, I turned to Urdu hadith collections and translations of the Qur’an. I still recall reading my first set of hadith in Urdu, and the feeling of epiphany that came with it, the sense that I had finally grasped the essential nature of what it really meant to be Muslim, and what was expected of me now that I possessed that sacred knowledge.

During that second Ramadan, I completed the recitation of the Qur’an three times, in Arabic, supplemented with full translation, so that I could understand exactly what it was that I was reciting. But most of all, though, I remember the prayers. I had never been in a masjid, much less prayed in jama’at. That, unfortunately, just wasn’t done in the village. Instead, I used to pray taraweeh, the night prayers, in our long, narrow behtuk, lights dim and door closed, my tasbeeh carefully placed on the chair next to me, a small handful of date pits on the floor next to my prayer rug, to help me keep track of the raka’at. Some nights I’d pray out in the courtyard, on the marble slab created for that purpose. Either way, more often than not, the electricity would go out, and my mother would have forgotten to bring me a lantern, and so I’d be left to pray in utter darkness, which only served to enhance my prayer and make the experience more beautiful.

Six months later, I was back in the U.S. After a year or two, things began to change. I let them. Life got in the way. I somehow let that happen, too.

I sat in halaqa yesterday morning and didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Everything I’ve been learning over the past several years, through conferences and lectures and halaqas, is stuff I already know. Or, actually, stuff I used to know, before I let myself lose that edge of clarity I once took for granted.

And that is the most frustrating thing of all, to know that if I stretch just a bit further, I could perhaps grasp that clarity once more, and to yet also know, at the same time, that I’m just not trying as hard enough as I have the potential to.

Last night, I went to pray the first taraweeh of the month in jama’at at the masjid, as I usually do now. I walked out of there nearly two hours later, with the soles of my feet aching from standing so long and my knees tingling from rug-burn, yet elated at having captured some of that closeness to God. Not every congregational prayer can do that for me. Mostly, I’ve found praying in jama’at to be distracting. What I usually need is solitude, to enhance my level of concentration.

This morning, I prayed fajr in solitude, hearing aids and lamps and overhead lights all switched off, door closed firmly against the rest of the house. I prayed surrounded by absolute silence and inky darkness, and at some point I could feel that sense of peace…not exactly flooding back – that would be too simple, now, wouldn’t it? – but more as if tentatively pressing back against the walls of the room, simply there if only I reached out, concentrated just enough.

Earlier today, driving up to school, I listened to Shaykh Ali Abdur-Rahman Al-Hudhaify’s recitation of Surahs Ya-Seen and Ar-Rahman. Reciting along easily, I was surprised, as always, by how I’ve unconsciously managed to memorize most of those Qur’anic chapters merely through sporadically listening to them on my more stressful days. And I wonder, if I’ve managed to do that much unconsciously, think of how much I could do if I just put my mind to it.

My goal for this Ramadan, then, is to regain at least some of that clarity and focus and discipline from the year I was fourteen, so that my prayers become less routine movements and rote memorization, and more personal conversations with God, just as they once used to be.

Whatever your own goals for Ramadan, I hope you find within you the strength and dedication and drive to fulfill your goals, and to maintain and implement those changes following Ramadan, too. May your fasting become a manifestation of patience. May He accept your repentance and make it sound and permanent, and grant you guidance and success in following the straight path. May He purify your intentions, accept your fasting and tears, forgive your sins, and bless you with mercy and peace during this month and throughout the year. Ameen.