the sub-revolutions
“All your life, I watched you fight God, but you were always closer to his desires than I was. “
-The Thorn Birds
Anti-colonialism — colonial islam
They don’t want to see it…all the ways they’ve harmed their own and lived their hell prematurely. They’d rather decide the terms of their own purgatory. They think it’ll spare them the other, where they’re left no say over how they suffer. They live their lives as if they were cornered in an alley… and from afar, a man is eternally approaching with a knife. They are that certain of danger, that sure of imminent pain. So before he reaches them, they take the knife from their own pockets and stab themselves. And when he arrives after forever at their body, there’s nothing left of their lives to spill. They were pre-destinely doomed either way, only they preferred to do their own dooming, their own stabbing. That is the religion they follow, the course of optional hell they believe in, and the one they forced on us.
They are lazy with their gods. Crisis arrives at their door and they bury their heads in the lap of scripture, swallow numbing pills of divine direction. Grief makes children of us, and children love for their hands to be held, for their tears to be wiped, their bodies to be carried. For someone else to do life for them, until they are strong enough. For all of us lacking this tender presence, we’re force fed god on a spoon as supplement, and if nothing else, for some it answers the hunger. But it’s never answered mine. I’ve always needed more than god’s absence. His absent-presence.
When my grandpa died, religion gave my grandma directions on how to grieve. It told her she has to stay in the house for four months. She can’t see men. She can take only very little of what her husband left behind. She asks the women who visit in long black robes and pinned, colorless headscarves if it’s okay for her to see her son-in-law, to speak with a male relative over the phone. And they answer her, I’m sure not without relishing the sense of authority it gives them to answer the questions of a lost woman.
And a hundred other examples. A young musician feels alone in a white country, naggingly estranged from his surroundings, and far from his mother’s heart. He searches for comfort, finds a god in the thick beard of an Arab man telling him to come this way. Another young woman goes to college. Feels very alone. There’s none of her own people around her. She loses her mother to divorce and the black hole of the spiritual cults that lure just as many. Suddenly she decides that to have a boyfriend (whom she loves) is wrong. She wants to get closer to god. So I ask her what she will do. She turns to me in the car and says, I will dress more conservatively.
The wahabi God. Don’t I know him well. The “dessert god;” the oil god who tells us the road to heaven is filled with thick fabric (for women) and long beards (for men). God of the hypocrites ruling a country that works neck to neck with this one, viciously and hell-bent on undoing our whole region.
The Saudi religion is (intentionally) a passive one; it’s blind obedience disguised under the instruction to “surrender.” It silences the drumming desire for justice by dismissing poverty, sexual repression, and autocracy as god’s will. The poor complain, the young revolt, women demand better, and these costumed men storm the country, shoving god into gaping mouths, like the wafers priests land on the tongues of people who come for more than a tasteless cracker of god but take the little nothing given to them. It’s made one faceless mass of us all. This Saudi religion is another form of colonization.. spread through a quiet, subtle army of ideology. This colonization of the body is just as dangerous as the colonization of land. At least with land, there’s an external fight. But how do you fight something that lands inside you? How do you run from a sniper’s gun within in and against you?
Men and their animal
It’s carnal. A rushed conversation with the body. The man goes. The soul leaves, if there ever was one there. And all that presses over me is this hallow body with glazed eyes, a desperate grip that begs me not to interrupt. But I do, because I want the man, and the child in the man. And I want him to want my child too.
Except they never do. They don’t want the woman either, just the shape of her, the rhythm of her. When she stops, they look like irritated conductors working with an inexperienced musician. I blame myself of course, for not having rehearsed often enough, or well enough… or at all. I feel like a child who did wrong.
I’ve come to hate it all, the whole predictable script of every story, every new man. The initial meeting, the wavering hope that this one will act differently, the disappointment on that first night you discover you were wrong to hope, and then, the fading of them, one by one, when they realize your legs are locked against them.
The last one, like all the others before him, was hot and cold, wanting and disappearing. But when they come into your life, they destroy you. They touch you and tel you what you’ve been wanting to hear. They awaken that dormant, sensuous being in me, and then leave. And she’s left writhing with impatience, suddenly wanting men she didn’t want before..
But how can it ever feel right? Without love, without hineyeh, with everything happening so quickly, so silently! I ask them why they don’t say anything, and they never know how to answer. They never pause to lift their heads and look into your eyes, to hold you in their minds before they hold you with their bodies, to enter your essence before they enter you whole. Once, in a desire to punish this man who I’d felt wanted only my body, I wrote in a poem, you’ll enter her, and it will feel like the shore without sand, the cemetery without its dead. I hated his pleasure. I wanted my body to disappoint him. To crush him…
“If you really want to know people, start by looking inside their bedroom.” — Shareen El Faki
public affection & prison
How often did I come close to getting in trouble for nothing more than love?
It started when I was fourteen, and it hasn’t ended since. The first time, an Islamic teacher asked to speak to me after school and took me into a classroom. She had found out I’d been speaking to a few boys from class. She looked at me, and asked with all the sheep-like simplicity and easy cruelty of the righteously pious, Where has your innocence gone? At the time, all I was worried about was my family finding out. I only cared about her telling them or not. And she didn’t, more likely because she thought there wasn’t much of me worth saving than out of any concern over my getting in trouble for it. You only bother yourself with the ones you have half-hopes for. Luckily, she’d found none in me.
And since then, it’s been one cruel slap after another, for love. Only for loving. The next time I was sixteen. I was madly in love with a Palestinian with green eyes I’d met by the ferris wheel at a spring festival. It was hell for us, trying to find a way to meet. All the lies it took to get together… And the way I’d so anxiously watch the space around us when we were together, as if we were at war and I was watching out for death. Then, his father found out about the two of us meeting and decided to send him to Palestine. His punishment, our punishment, for loving was his exile, and my first death in love.
Then, there was Muhannad, and with him, a longer, crueler war began. We were banished from parks, asked to follow security for having my head on his shoulder, nearly taken to a prison in Tunisia for a kiss on the cheek, surrounded by two police vans for eating pizza in the mountains. The irony is they always caught us in our more innocent moments, never at our worse. It scares me. If that was their reaction to the most innocent gestures of love, what would have happened had they found us in other, less innocent times…
One shepherd found us in a moment like that. We’d walked pass him to get to the other side of the mountain; we wanted to kiss freely, without fear. He was holding me when I opened my eyes to find the shepherd standing there with his large stick in the air. We ran around the mountain back to the car, and when we got there, we saw him running towards us with that same stick, yelling. We managed to drive off just as he reached us. A near death experience — for love.
As if all the ones who’ve come after us aren’t just as in need of it, as if their desire for it was any less than ours. A Moroccan director once said, “When someone holds a mirror up to you, you smash the glass.” I think our love was a hellish mirror for them. I can see now that in going after us, as aggressively as they did, they were trying to crush and silence the desire that our public display of love awoke in them. Haven’t I gotten mad at seeing another woman display publicly all the things I yearn for and hide within? That rage, of the interior appearing before you, while you deny yourself that desire, is one of the worst kinds of rage. I know it. How can I not? When so much in me was crushed and not allowed outside? And for them too. Haven’t they once wanted the same, and were warned by others? Then, to see us acting out the scenes denied them, of course the fire and the rage. But then, what has it done for the way I love? Don’t I still love as if I were being chased by a shepherd and a blood-thirsty stick?
