Loop-de-loop

LOOPING: connect the beginning to the end to allow for continuous repetition.

How to say "nausea" in Derija? I hate having to mime it out. It reminds me of those months when my sister was having morning sickness, and my two year old nephew would walk around hunched over imitating someone throwing up.

It's my first day in heels. So far I'm doing okay. I reroute when I know I'm approaching a "problem area" - the saggy arms of a muddy park where the heels sink in; full hips followed by confusing and surprising slopes; the cracks in the skin of the sidewalks that only I seem to trip on; of course, the endless hills of the city (the unmentionabls). I know exactly which spots to avoid and will take my chances after enduring three months of Buffalo snow-weather, when dreaming of a sunny Tangier got me through the sludge. Now I'm dreaming of the sweaters that could have kept me warm in the wind of the beaches of the Atlantic.

If I manage to not trip and fall, I am positive that I will either fall asleep or vomit in public because espresso puts me to sleep and because I have been drinking the local tap water. Can I really be expected to spend $2.00 a day on bottled water? $60 / month? With that much money I could buy a whole pair of jeans that won't fit me. Plus, the more contaminated things I consume, the more ready I will be for an eventual trip to Kashmir. Incidentally this approach already proves that I have already started to get comfortable with the infamous Kashmiri logic. Somehow all of its unexpected twists and turns always reminds me of those looping straws from Fantasy Island (an amusement park, not a strip club). I guess along those lines it also reminds me of a faulty roller coaster. In either case, I'm looking forward to making loops out of straight lines and disregarding the linearity of cause and effect until it makes no sense at all and I will say it like I believe it and then repeat it until I believe in it. It is what we were born to do.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

It's not that Tangier doesn't inspire me, because it always will. But even the idea of being "inspired" is somewhat alien. After two years in NYC I seem more concerned with people rather than places because I keep personifying the city.
There is a man who makes maps based on the haunts of William Burroughs in Tangier. He draws maps of the city based solely on where he used to go. It is what it is, but I'm excited for soundwalks. It is never entirely possible to document the spirit of a city, but a combination of sound and visuals and oral history can preserve different facets of the community and also support my self-indulgence in making and tracing maps as art projects.

A city is a character, not to be confused with having character, or what my mother means when she says in her Kashmiri accent, "he is just a character. Just a character."
So, a map of sound is sort of like following someone around and recording what they say. Or recording their breathing noises and other sounds a body makes. But that sounds gross so I'll say it the first way.

Abuse

Is Tangier abusing me in the night?
The harassment has changed.
Today a local midget called me a cheetah. A West African man called me a "meanie."

Living at the Andalusia has treated me okay except for waking up with random bruises. One above my left eyebrow that will definitely leave a scar and looks like I've been branded. The other is a huge purple bruise above my left hip in the shape of Africa.

Tangier is upset with me but she'll get over it. This was never meant to be forever. Breakups are painful. And she is a psychopath.

compartment 1

I missed my train by a few seconds. Fatimah was upset and I told her that Allah just didn't want me on that train. I was already remembering that I forgot to buy a notebook or a pen for the five hour train ride, when a man with a bag came into the station cafe and put little notebooks with pens attached on everyone's table, then came back around to see who wanted to buy one. Ten dirhams. And a three color pen! Allah clearly wants me to use this time to reflect on things and to use my red pen to edit out the bad stuff.

In the Casa Voyageurs Cafe, everyone is only paying attention to the news on TV, even those of us that only understand the pictures.

TRAIN 1, Compartment 1: the mission begins. One crying baby, her parents and a young couple. I smiled at the baby which turned out to be a deadly mistake. She was more of a cookie monster than a baby. They all immediately started talking about the crisis in Egypt- I understood the vocabulary but not the content. They were arguing politely and finally agreed to disagree. Eventually we all caught on that the younger guy didn't really speak derija, and the conversation switched to English. I tried to audio record and also accidentally filmed my hand making a cheese sandwich and then holding it for a long time. I didn't talk much because I didn't know enough about the situation to comment because I only understood the pictures.
The cookie monster was inappropriately caressing us all and the only thing that kept her quiet was scribbling in this notebook. She eventually resorted to singing everyone to sleep and I gave the "I-did-my-part" look and wouldn't look up.

I'm realizing that even after a year and a half my writing style hasn't changed at all. Maybe Tanja hasn't either.

BFFs

It's a new year and inshallah each new year will continue to bring a visit to our beloved Tanja. Everything is wet and clean from the rain. The ocean stays the same. I've stopped caring about scrapes and bruises because they help me remember things, so I appropriately only brought slippery boots and summer clothes so I have an excuse to carry around a blanket in my oversized purse and spend hours in cafes inappropriately cuddling with it.

Themes for the coming months:
-bias: run against the grain
-basting: sew a temporary stitch to hold things in place
-butting: bring two edges together to touch but not overlap
-beeswax: keep the threads from breaking


-"back to basics": avoiding men who might want to marry you and simultaneously try to find someone to marry you;
while the romantic and cinematic side of you wants to return to the Muneria where everything is blue, in the spirit of new beginnings, go to the hotel across the street instead;
sit closer to the fire in the public oven to keep warm in the winter;
make a bun in your hair and hide a microphone in your hijab;
Do your job.


I don't need to give up all of my old haunts or habits, but I feel older and less preoccupied with constantly having new adventures because it is no longer my job to do so. I am here to listen and work.
And eat. And pray. And not-love Tangier all over again.
He's broken up with me too many times.
But can we at least still be friends?

EID MUBARAK

Sitting in the back hall of the only mosque of suburban Buffalo, with all the women and kids and babies and candy, I re-lived the old days. Not the really old days, when we sat in the Buffalo Darul Uloom, constructed from the remnants of a long-since attended church, and not Parker, as we lovingly refer to the little house on Parker St. which served as the only Masjid in Buffalo for most of our lives, but the "newer-old days," of sitting in the back row at Heim mosque with all the other Muslims living closer to suburbia than the weird part of downtown where the other two masjids were located. It used to be the random Kashmiri aunties who would dramatically rise up from their front row seats to yell at the small children for screaming during khuthba (sermon), but on this Eid there was a handful of 8-12 year old children walking in turn through each isle with a handmade sign that read "PLEASE BE SILENT! KHUTHBA IS ALSO PART OF PRAYER!"

A sandwich board may have been more effective, and cuter, and may have won over some sympathy. This attempt at a solution was generally disturbing the crowd and keeping us all from hearing what was actually being said in this lecture. So once again, I have no idea what the Imam talked about today, but I do know a sheep died in our names and I can only hope it will bring us some sense of peace this year.

Previous Employment

Jack was something like a friend. His thick Brooklyn accent was always a welcome change to the British voices that always seemed to be mocking me in some way, gossiping about each other as they slipped in and out of the dreary apartment adopted by the British Library. They asked me about who had been in, who checked out what book and who hadn't paid their dues. I caught on to the social humiliation that comes along with not paying ones library dues and promptly crafted a very large sign listing names of those with delinquent fines and exactly how much they owed. Another sly move was for one member to pay the dues of another, initialing beside the name and putting a single line through it so it remained legible. I only bothered to remake the sign every few months because as much as I deplored public humiliation, I was a responsible librarian and determined not to let Margaret down. She was, after all the only member of the board that supported me taking up the position. She said I reminded her of herself. Always a good reason to hire someone. Fathers trust their daughters to men who are like them, and the library was Margaret's only child- she trusted me with it.

I knew I was going to be a good librarian. At least I had the wardrobe. The space only consisted of two rooms and was quiet and out of the way and I was pretty comfortable with alphabetical order. I never make my patrons feel like they have to justify their choice of reading material (it only encourages stealing / book-pants-ing). I never stole money or books, only book covers and postcards that fell out from between pages of them. None were from people I knew or addressed to people I knew, so I guiltlessly held on to them. None of them included anything more than short notes amounting to updates on the state of the weather.
Plus, I was a "great reader," or had accidentally began to masquerade as one. There was nothing worse to the Brits than to have an unacceptable answer to the ultimate judgement, "do you read?" It felt like a trick question at first, and took a few months for me to learn that this would make or break you. "Of course, I'm a librarian" was not enough. I had to cite books- my favorites, classics and what I was currently muddling through. And I had to keep up on what everyone else was reading so I could report to the others.

Jack came by every other Monday and sat in his usual spot with a stack of books he picked out in the first five minutes he was there on the table beside him, to sort through for the remainder of the three hours I was open. He almost always accidentally checked out a book he had already read, mostly because a lot of the books had been donated by him. He took a trip back to Manhattan every year to see his doctor. He never explained to me what was wrong with him, nor did he ever mention a family. When I announced that I was leaving Tangier to go back to school in the city he came to see me on a Wednesday before I left. He could hardly breathe as he was coming up the stairs and I could hear him panting before he made it to the top. It was labor. It sounded like labor. It sounded like lung cancer.

He had lent me a book of essays by Robert Fisk and we would talk about politics and the war. We talked about the exchange rate and New York. We talked about the election and he hated Hilary Clinton and called Obama "Osama" by accident, regularly. Most days he would come with Lucia, a blond Englishwoman in her seventies who dressed like she was in her twenties and had recently been dragged down rue de Fez by a motercycle after refusing to let go of her purse for a drive-by thief. Jack paid her dues for her because she was flat broke although she never looked like it. He never initialed the sheet so I never put her name on it. In the last months before I left he refused to pay and the two of them played a cat and mouse game, leaving messages with me and spying on each other. A month of this passed and I never saw Lucia again. I was pretty sure she wasn't much of a reader.

He said he came to say goodbye and at first only insinuated that he might never see me again. I gradually caught on and he gradually became less cryptic and eventually told me he was dying. He wasn't going to make it much longer. So when he said goodbye he was really saying goodbye. I said maybe I would see him again in Manhattan. He didn't answer me and changed the subject. He did this a lot and I assumed he hadn't heard the last thing I said. I think that is what happened here. I wasn't sure what was appropriate to do. A hug was out of the question and there was nothing between a hug and just saying goodbye from my seat behind the desk and plus my legs were mounted across the grill of the space heater that I hid under my desk because it was the middle of December and the walls were made of cement. When he finally decided to leave I locked the door and cried just a little bit, just in case I never saw him again, I knew I would remember that he said goodbye and that I cried.

The next time I saw Jack was a year later. He was walking through the Petit Socco slowly, in a bright purple gondora that reached just above his ankles. I had never seen him wear anything that didn't resemble safari gear. He looked like an old senile man who wandered out of the house in his pajamas. He took a front seat at Cafe Tingis just like he ordinarily would, ordered a coffee and smoked a cigarette. I know he looked directly at me but there was no recognition, but I refuse to believe it was because of my hijab or his adversity to it. I thought of going over to say hello, but what if he was actually senile and didn't remember me? I wasn't about to cry in the Petit Socco and I'm no good at seeing people outside of their normal state against their free will. This I knew, Jack was alive. He was smoking, purple and pining for Lucia.

Islamish

My new ipod shuffle is so inconspicuous it's the sort of thing I could crush up and put in my grandma's oatmeal, undetected. Something so small it hardly changes the taste of things. A tinge of bitterness followed by a clump of brown sugar makes it better. Can't even taste it.
It's September 14, 2010. Nine years ago I was in high school and my yearbook advisor was yelling at me for not capturing the faces of our students as they watched the news a few days before. At the time I agreed with him, Why didn't I take pictures? In retrospect, I can see that although I do frame everything that happens to me in life as a story to be written, 9/11 was too confusing to be thinking as a journalist.
And ten years later. It is hard to feel that we aren't moving backwards. Assuming that moving forward entails universally acknowledging that Islam is a religion, not a political ideology or a cult. At the same time, the definitions don't really matter, it's just words. And to hear the same people that were the first to defend Islam after the attacks, years later asking if it is inherently dangerous "by definition," is mostly because in 2001, many Americans didn't know enough about Islam to question if any of the things they didn't know about it weren't true. In our newly enlightened age, most of America now knows so many things that give them an excuse to talk, any one of which might warrant suspicion, hatred or book burning.
I am not a political person, although as a theory major I have to at least admit to being a political body. I am Muslim. I do know this for sure. I can't say that "killer fundamentalists" as I like to call them, are either Muslim or non-Muslim, the same way that I would choose to ignore anyone who claims that homosexuals or prostitutes can't be Muslims. The phrase, "who are we to judge?" should resonate with Muslims most of all, considering that it is the basis of our daily lives. We are not the judge. More importantly, there IS a judge.
I don't like to debate. I'm not quick on my feet. More of a monologue kind of girl. My voice was made for it. I am told it is soothing, and good at putting people to sleep. And debate has too much to do with vocabulary. Why pit words against each other? Let them be a family.
I recently heard a man who had sadly majored in 'Creativity" at Buff State refer to himself as "an ideas person." The walls of his bedroom were papered with interpretive maps of his brain. I am a "words-person." The term "Islamism" is baffling to me. It is redundant and reminds me of "exorcism." It is listed in Wikipedia under a special series on "Criticism of Islam." But in the same way that I can call it inappropriate, I would say that language is fluid enough that this word can mean anything to anyone, and language is playful enough that made-up words and titles are entitled to make fun of me. I like to think they're having a good time.
If not for the coining of this term to mean awful things, I might have at some point referred to myself as an "Islamist." Now, in such a situation I will have to resort to "Islamish." It reminds me of the trail of goo behind a snail.
Being Islamish is to agree to play the game where we pretend that we can take the proper noun of a religion and add "ist" to create a whole new genre of terrifying people, then to take the root word and add a little disclaimer- I believe in Islam, which is a way of life, and so as the world changes, so will my lifestyle. Not to be mistaken for Muslimish, because that is something different entirely and more reminiscent of a fictional Kosher dessert.
I know. Even the -ish is redundant. Isn't it liberating? You can never really know which things fall under the Ish category. It's like saying I am a student of X. As a student, I am a critic, and I am still learning. I am a student of Middle Eastern Politics today and in ten years I will be a small business owner. Ish involves room for more. A space that can be filled or left alone. An empty seat at the back of the plane. An empty seat at the front of the bus.
"Islamism" used to mean Islam. As we increasingly became confronted with what is also known as political Islam (if I have to be a political body, why doesn't he?) it was readopted. We.
That's right I said it.
Irrespective of my fondness for the third person plural, wanting to be part of something that you're part of, the We here is problematic. Is my We the same as your We?
I hear everyone talking about this Islamist threat, separating the Islamists from the Islams, the (m)islams. I agree, We as Americans should accept those moderate muslims as ones-of-us. But I won't put too much weight in the pronouns. It all depends on which room we decide to wander into at the party. I don't mind being a she or an it or a part of they. I know when I'm being talked about because no one stops talking when I walk into the room.

DIRECTIONS

I discovered that my first home in Tangier looks exactly like the sanitorium in Halloween. Hotel MHrsa. I am going to live there again some day and be who I was then. It's as easy as that. Didn't you know that?
It would have been a great room for seventeen people on a roadtrip, but for just me on a crisp night in the middle of December and a creepy mustached concierge who wouldn't help me with my bags and the not so subtle noises from the room next to the communal bathroom, it was somewhat sinister. The bathroom was a hole in the floor in a closet with a lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling making shadows of the spiders that looked like bigger, scarier spiders.

It might seem like a nostalgic longing for the time- a first arrival in a new city- but I think I do actually want to stay in that hotel again. It's like the horror films. I know how creepy it is but I also know it is relatively safe. And familiar at least in my memory and reconstructed imagination of it. Plus I want an excuse to say skeevies.

A passer-by at Cafe Aroma recommended a book to me that reminded him of the book I was reading. I have given in to the fact that I will probably have a lot of conversations with strangers so long as I decide to do my work here. The last guy came over to my table to tell me how impressed he was that everything on me coordinated perfectly. "I'm fascinated. I mean, just the amount of time that must have taken you!"
I looked up the book. The author seems to generally argue that urban space is divided into places and non-places. He counted the metro and the supermarket as non-places. Transient spaces that engender no sense of belonging. I suppose a one night stand with a hotel would fall on this side of the line.
It is clear this man has never had a one night stand with a building or a room, but it appears he has had a love affair with a city. If only he knew how much could happen in a super-market! And entire languages can be learned on the train. And I could assert the place-ness of hotel MHrsa with my hands tied, which hopefully they won't be. It feels like mine in its status as a historical landmark in my personal timeline. Maybe there's more to his ideas than that, but I'll pass regardless.

As I embark on a journey of thick description, I am looking forward to indulging in the small details of the local. I can write about the patterns of the cracks in the pavement without shame! Perec asks "how do you know your city?" and gives a set of directions for how to do it, specifically how to get it down on paper. I'm good at paper and following directions. I don't get lost on purpose because I don't need to. I'll keep a pencil to the ground to trace a line so you know how to find me. And at the very least it will make for a good set of instructions for an embroidered representation of the city shaped like a pelvis or a dress fitted around the pelvis.

COSTUME JEWELRY

As an avid Madonna fan and with two older sisters, I became obsessed with fashion at an early age. This quickly led to a subconscious act of "costuming." I've had my ups and downs. In third grade I was addicted to a glamourous pair of velvet stirrups that in retrospect, yes, were absolutely fabulous. This was, however, soon after followed with borrowing my sister's heels and my mother's blazer and sauntering into class to find that I was wearing almost exactly the same outfit as my homeroom teacher. Not even the cool teacher- the other one.
Years later, yes, I probably own an identical pair of white pumps, but generally choose more carefully and opt for a rotation of sailor, farmer, shepherd's wife and "French."

This eventually led to the lure of disguise in general. The infamous veil. Wigs. Girdles. Sunglasses. People that buy the entire outfit including the shoes on the mannequin in the storefront window. Things acting in the place of what they aren't, or speaking for someone else. By naming ourselves that thing, what's the difference?
A name is a name.

An earring is an earring.
At fifteen I got my nose pierced and convinced my mother it was an attempt to be more cultural. The school promptly kept up with the times and decided that nose rings, along with earrings, must be removed for gym class. My mother generally agreed with me that this requirement was unnecessary for my intellectual development and had given me a stack of notes for whenever Ms. K would invent a new sport that involved boys coming into contact with girls. The stack of notes came complete with her signature so that I wouldn't have to wake her up at 7am with a pen in hand. "Pssst! Mom! I think we're swimming today!" I composed concise and vaguely threatening excuses, including,- For religious reasons, my daughter cannot participate in (- insert imaginary sport name -) today. Then I would put in my nose ring and look for some heels.

I didn't feel bad about this flawless plan of ours because she would usually just have me sign things for her anyway. It wasn't forgery if there was verbal consent for one thing to pretend to be another by disguising itself as the thing it was supposed to be. Supposedly.

I got my ears pierced when I was eight. Before that I used stick-ons. Most days one of them would fall off and I developed a habit of reaching up to both of my ears every couple of hours to make sure they were still both there. This habit, though compulsive, comes in handy ten years later in the world of clip-on earrings. Costume jewelry in general. My nose is still pierced but I'm saving it for a ridiculously oversized giant gold hoop ring with little bells on it in case I ever get married, keeping my word to remain cultural.

I only wear clip on earrings simply because they are more beautiful and go better with my wardrobe. They look just like the real thing. Transforming clip-ons to their true/false nature of being "real" earrings is my new plan B for becoming a useful member of society. Part B.a) Devise a way to wear earrings with hijab.

Plan A: Chief of Fashion Police.