ALL WRAPPED UP LIKE A BURRITO

The first thing I did when I got to Amman was call my mother to complain to her that this "jilbab phenomenon" everyone was raving about- yeah, guess what- TRY WEARING IT IN THE WIND! I elongated and punctuated the words "in-the-wiiind," to capture my subject. Half the girls here are wearing niqab although they don't wear it at home, as a sign of respect and accommodation to the situation. I respect that completely, but it is still odd to hear them complain about it. "Sometimes the niqab gets caught in my mouth as I'm breathing" etc.

They have adopted it, dealt with it, complain about it, and it usually blows off their face as we walk to school anyway. I realized within hours that it only upset me because I didn't want to hear women complaining about it, I wanted to hear all the tales of glory and joy that come following an open and visible spiritual transformation. But if a girl is complaining about her hijab, it is because it is, at the end of the day, an article of clothing. And clothes can get annoying. I should equate it with someone else complaining that their heels are killing them, they can hardly sit down with their dress on, or even at the most simple level, in an effort to look cute on a chilly spring night, they are just so cold.


When you wear a jilbab, you feel religious. My form of burqa was sunglasses because honestly, I have asthma and my nose is not attracting anyone anytime soon. There I was in the barely bearable summer heat of the city walking up hills at noon, with all that fluttering and exposing of curves, and it felt so hypocritical. I was embarrassed every time I passed by a man and was still honked and whistled at. I didn't pay as much attention to whether men were paying attention to me- (largely because the women here are so ridiculously beautiful. YES frustrated Muslim unmarried men: if you want beautiful children, here's your ticket).

It only took a few days get used to the niqabs all around me at school, because it's not that difficult to read people by their eyes alone. My point: Tyra, as the queen of smizing, you would be an amazing niqabi. But I can guess what she might say. Probably something similar to what one of my dear sisters said before she became Muslim - "what's with all these poor women wrapped up like burritos? Giiiiiiiiiirl?"
"Women parading around looking like batman" is another one of my favorites.
Wait, I can be a superhero?

I have to admit, sometimes illusions of grandeur are tempting. I can tell when people are intimidated by me and I can tell when they are intimidated by my mother, who acts as though she can see straight through you and wears a jilbab and headscarf. The headscarf is mostly a constant reminder to "be good," which is a kick in the butt that I honestly need from time to time. There there's always Vanity smurf, who I grew up with, and always wondered about. Almost every time I looked in the mirror I wondered if I was admiring myself, when really most of the time I was seeing images of my mother and how similar we look and completely terrifying myself. For me to adopt hijab because I am scared of hell is fine with me. For me to adopt it because I want to make a stand is fine as well. To adopt it just because I can feel something tugging down at me saying 'this is it,' is fine with me too, if I think it will contribute to making me a better Muslim. Whatever reason we start to wear hijab, it is part of God's trajectory for us to get to where we are supposed to be.


I will admit, my intellectual attraction to the ideas of Saba Mahmood in Politics of Piety did had a huge effect on me, not that it was written as an invitation in disguise for young confused Muslim women to go out and wear the veil and see how it changes them from the outside-in.

She posited a motivation for wearing the veil in the idea that religious practice can change one's religious comportment. I was surprised to read about this new perspective from within academia (or anything new regarding Muslim women), although it is similar to what our Prophet, peace be upon him, taught us about fake it til you make it. It inspired me to try. I know a headscarf does not equal a law abiding Muslim, but at the point where I am at in my spirituality, it can't hurt?

This concept is much more well articulated by Janan Delgato in her article in response to a NYT article. Delgato writes, our need to "dismiss once and for all the ill-conceived notion of universality of desire; Not all women find fulfillment and happiness in the same life choices... A second step is not to insult each other’s intelligence. Muslim women have not been brainwashed into Islam, nor are we waiting for anyone’s help to awaken from our supposed 'false-consciousness.' Islam is our informed choice."
I have read these articles so many times, and it is generally always the same debate, except that lately there is legislation at stake around the world and protests for mosques to be built here in the US. Didn't we get over this?

What can we say? We believe in our religion. It is a personal choice. The experience is different for everyone I know. At this point I can take a breath and relax with a cold and lemony fizzy drink on our rusty lawnchair and say, I'm doing this for you, God. Let's both hope for the best. Let's make some honey. The halal way.

Black Sheep

I might call myself the black sheep, all shifty eyed and wandering from the flock, but we all wear black all the time anyway. Didn't whoever made that rule understand that women always look better in black anyway?

COGITO ERGO SUM

The girls met for fruit and fruit juice at apartment B and we had an interesting conversation about what it means to be Muslim. One thing that has really struck me about my present company, although we don't have the same taste in music or heel size, we have really meaningful conversations that actually make me retreat to my room and think twice about.

What do you have to be to call yourself Muslim?
Two days ago while waiting to get the mandatory HIV test in order to extend the Jordanian visitors visa, I read a paragraph in a book on Shafi' Fiqh about it, which was both cryptically and comfortably vague. I think a lot of us (American Muslims, "regular" Muslims) are asked on a regular basis, and some of us can think of an answer on the spot but I've never been good at improv. But I don't have an issue with being rehearsed. It means you have practiced. And religion is practice. And practice makes perfect.

Why do I need to explain myself? I think (I am a Muslim) therefore I am (a Muslim.)
Ya Jam3a! Sm3a! That was the sound of me thinking. Wait, Musim women can think? Let's rethink this...


(Variation of Q.1) So what does it mean to be Muslim? The list of questions I have prepared are the ones I need to ask myself and others, which in the modern world of course requires a voice recorder. I went to Radio Shack yesterday to try and find one but since I have already lost three in the past three years I'm starting to feel like I might not be meant to have one. Also, there is a feeling amongst the girls here that most people don't really care what other people think, they just want to make sure you don't get lost. This may be because I have a tendency to wander off.

PLEASE BE SURE TO HAVE A LIST OF QUESTIONS PREPARED

I can only remember my first days in Fez because
a) they were ridiculous
b) I started writing from day one.

Amman Street fashion: I can't say I'm impressed with anything so far except for the widespread meticulous attention to personal hygiene. We were told at orientation to "try not to be weird." I don't think this rang any alarm bells in anyone except me, judging from the lack of darting, shifty eyes.

It's always fun to see other people's first impressions of a city that you love. I don't think I was ever outright mean to anyone who looked like they did not love Tangier enough, but I probably had little respect for them. Here in Amman I have a newfound appreciation for these pitiful wanderers, especially after taking up this new project of "trying not to be weird."

Upon embarking on an unfamiliar place, like a new house or the nursing home your son is about to commit you to, they say to have a list of questions prepared. I have local resources here, but no idea what to ask these gems. This is why I will never succeed in journalism. I never know where to start. Aren't you supposed to start from the beginning? Same reason I failed at philosophy. How could I read Derrida if I hadn't read Heidegger if I hadn't read Hegel etc. In the end I had to assume Derrida was the origin of what I believed about literary theory. Funny, because in the end, even that bastard didn't believe in origins.
In its own language, a lack of a beginning only served to reinforce my faith in God.

Given my penchant for origins, I figured I would start at wst-al-medina. or at least that's what I heard the taxi driver call it (city center?). There are tons of western-style cafes with beautiful Jordanian girls with tatoos on their forheads saying "don't even think about trying to find a husband in this country srsly you don't even have your nails done."

I now know that this must be one of my many random gaps in common knowledge, but hijabis smoke sheesha in Jordan. The most baffling thing about this to me is the combination of smoke and fruit. How can so many people enjoy this ridiculously habit? Maybe this is how atheists feel about us God-fearing believers. Or like how I feel about people that listen to the Pixies.

There are ashtrays everywhere but it appears men go out of their way to smoke only where there are no ashtrays. Like the very small enclosed places where I buy my batteries. And we all go home smelling like fruity smoke. It's a lose-lose.

Open Letter

Okay Jordan, I get it, we're not the best of friends. I am not particularly charmed by your Western ways and not your "Oriental" ways either. Let's make a deal. Disorient. We can be like the Black Eyed Peas and get confused and then get ashamed and then censor ourselves on the radio.

There is a honey store named after me but with an extra F. I am always either a brand of honey in a non-politically threatening country or a pharmacy in the middle of Iraq.
"Al-ShiFFA" Honey.
Everytime I see it it's like just seeing a giant F!
F-YOU SHIFA!
SHIFFFA!

There is a scar on my foot the shape of Africa. To the dot. If playing connect the dots. Jordan, you gave it to me.

ASH BDDK?

Isn't that what we're all asking? I spent six JDs to get driven around Amman to find some landmarks for my new map. (Dinos aren't inspiring me as they should in the embroidery department lately). I saw three Starbucks. Cultural centers. Shopping malls. Traffic circles. Most things looked like government buildings. Up near Shari'ah Mango I found a beautiful little crack in a wall with a view of the city like little post-it notes layered over each other on my wall when I have eight thousand things to do. I don't know how many thousands of people are in Amman. I can't even identify the prominent physical features of the local residents. I still don't know which traffic circle I live closest to. And most importantly I need to find something to do between the hours of 3:30 - 6 am. (While the gym is technically a two bedroom apartment that I have the key to, it is "closed" then).

To be clear, Amman is more like stacks of the post-its that Dad gets free from the pharmaceutical companies. Those are all one color. Guess which color.

صار

I am becoming the kind of woman that takes pride in her home.
This morning I cleaned the kitchen floor tiles with a sponge that may as well have been a toothbrush. The garbage leaked yellow and someone had dragged it across the floor. I got on my knees to clean that disgusting mess and when my hand grazed past the water cooler I felt a tingle. When I reached back behind the cooler I felt a jolt like sizzling streak up my arm and the loud humming noise of the cooler stopped and the machine turned off.

I think I stole the powers of the water cooler.
I am either going to die or I now have the power to heat, cool and dispense water at will. I am becoming one of the X-men.

It is enough to have Amman outside of my windows. I can calmly take care of my own things inside, unaware of the world out there and who those people are and what the signs say. Along with my heart, I think I left the knot in my stomach in Tangier. There is something about this city that is just interesting enough to keep me content and just boring enough that spending a day at the apartment cleaning, cooking  NPRing, writing, reading, working, googling miscellaneous questions, instant cappuccino and serious arabic homework multitasking, doesn't feel inappropriate. In fact, I have as of late been feeling particularly munaasiba. There is no imaginary street kid tugging at my sleeve asking me for a euro and beckoning me towards the Kasbah.

It is safe to say that my relationship with cities can be self-destructive. Of course Tangier was the love of my life, and that held a certain kind of pressure. It was a destructive relationship. But I know I'll be back. Because they always come back.

And it was too tempting to play a part. It was like they wrote it just for me like directors do for Penalope Cruz. I didn't know exactly what I was getting at, but I had some help from my friends. The help is what dragged me down in the end. You are, in the end, just like the company you keep.

Everything feels brown and simple and I am enjoying the simplicity of it. I have only been here for a week but I can imagine never leaving and not feeling bad about it. If I stayed, it would be because this is the type of place God wants us to live. This is a desert.

I joined a gym. It might break me if I wasn't one of the X-men. Took a walk down to Souk-Al Medinah, a small shopping area a short walk from Hay Alkharabsheh and bought single pieces of fruit from a few of the vendors. I bought a titleless film for a dollar starring Miley Cyrus.

This time last week I was in Budapest. The women don't usually go to the mosque in Jordan unless there is a women's area and they don't reappropriate it on Fridays to accommodate the men. I could get all dressed for it and look for one. I could keep a set of clothes with me in my purse just in case I'm out of place. Which is usually a safe bet.

HUNGARIAN FORINT (HUF)

He huffed and he puffed and he blew your house down.

It took me an hour to convince the personnel at the Ferihegy airport that they weren't allowed to lock me in the airport overnight. A boy who looked like the alienesque guy from SNL gave me a voucher for a cab after watching me cry for ten minutes. Everyone outside the airport doors seemed genuinely disturbed and the crying upset them.
I was escorted to the nearest hotel which turned out to be fully booked with a drunken wedding party. The second place had a room for me with a little black box hanging precariously in the corner, occasionally playing English music videos.
The alleycats looked like albinos.

The cats in Amman look relatively healthy and there aren't many. When I look out my bedroom window I can convince myself I'm in Tangier. The building across the street is encased in three tiers of curved wall like the one that says Tanger Danger across from the Cervantes. Except this one is a parking garage and I'm pretty sure they sell heroin out of the back windows of the one inTangier.
The sky behind it fades into white at the horizon so the hill looks like it was cut out of a magazine and glued on.

We prayed at three different masjids on a tour of Amman today. We drove through mountains. They could have been sand dunes. If I were in a better mood I might describe them as compiled mounds of diarrhea. Everything here is the same color.
My polaroid is lost in my lost luggage. I brought my last five packs of film that expired last year and travelled through as many airport security lines as I have, except they had to be huddled up in the corner of my carry-on trying to stay quiet like battered children hiding in the attic. I can see them wincing in the past tense.

The film is damaged enough that ninety percent of the pictures are sepia toned brown squares and ten percent are vague outlines pushing through a sepia toned cloud. I like these. I like them enough that I keep these packs of expired film with me and make sure they are hand-checked at security and wrap my polaroid in shawls and towels so I can pack them for faraway countries to return with eighteen brown squares representative of that country in sepia tone.

It's called the white city but really everything is brown. What I mean is, nine times out of ten I can take a picture of something and that thing will be brown. There is wisdom in the losing of it. I would have been driven to look for flashes of color or starkly contrasting objects. I wouldn't have noticed much else. Plus, what's the fun in a picture that doesn't know how to lie?
I have another camera back home and I'll save the film for October when the berries ripen in the backyard.

PROJECTS

There is always a folder on my desktop called "PROJECTS." It's more encouraging than anything realistic, like a folder titled "YOU ARE DOING THINGS."
In 2005 I took a mother-daughter bonding trip to Kashmir with the intention of 1) studying for the GRE and 2) doing "a project."

Project is my favorite word, because it can mean anything. I think of newbies all the time. Science experiments (spurred from Madeleine L'Engle), diaramas (based on nostalgic memories of looking out my parent's bedroom window and wondering, "what's out there...?"), recordings of people that make me wish I didn't have the memory of a goldfish, and self-improvement efforts that in being projects at all make me feel good about myself to the point where I don't have to follow through.


My project in Kashmir in 2005 was to write a meaningful piece on the plight of Kashmiris, accompanied by photographs. I did not come prepared with a list of questions. I assumed I knew what I was supposed to want to know. I asked all the right questions to all the right people. After all I had nothing else to do but drink tea and read Salmon Rushdie. In the end, my aunt who teaches English and could articulate it with all the nuances I was missing, informed me that I didn't really get it. People needed food and jobs. As for Azadi, people hardly talked about it anymore.

Not the case today. Some people say Kashmir is not a war-zone because we don't resort to violence, we adopt non-violent protest. Others, including the Indian media, only refer to the stone-throwing by young boys as the proof that Kashmir needs to be tightly secured. Based on what my own family has had to endure, I'm not sure I can ever say that Kashmir is not a warzone, and my information is not based on articles in the newspaper, its just based on what my family says. Which is biased based on experience, versus being biased based on the particular books or articles one reads.

All I can do is break it into pieces.What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? How can we approach the general lack of education about Kashmir and Godwilling it will not resort to the possibility of a parallel to why most Americans now know what Islam is? How do we know what to believe from anyone when there are so many conspiracy theories? I know these aren't the questions that kids my age schooled in international relations or foreign policy would ask, but since I decided to spend five years reading the literary theories of dead white men (and the occasional woman), these are my questions.

I tried to interview my mother yesterday, a list of questions prepared, as we sat through our noon-day yukney (lamb with milk curry and every possible amazing spice you can imagine) bliss. She kept contradicting herself or asking why I cared or asking how should she know?

I don't read all the articles. They all contradict each other. But I talk to my family. I suppose this goes hand in hand with my obsession with oral histories- wanting to record what real people are going through, not just considering the official signings and dealings of complex political situations. I am not saying that this information is not important, but it's just not what I'm interested in. I remember reading about the Muduwannah reform in Morocco a few years ago, and there were countless documentaries on how the actual change in law was 1) protested by many 2) not implemented 3) many didn't even know that there had been any changes.


When it comes to daily life, sometimes the actual law is not what governs the experience of the people. I was curious, so I did what I am totally mediocre at, and asked someone about it.

These are small excerpts- [I "re-spelled" some of this person's words to make them more clear, mostly making it less slang and more understandable to those unfamiliar with English slang spelling. Most things I left as they were.]

"It's almost a month since all this started and our chief minister is holdng an all party meetng tmrw.....guess he was sleepn tll now. The only thng he did waz called in army...to impose curfew."

(Which is still going on).

"...ppl say indians say we kashmiris want to merge wid pakistan but its not true - most of the ppl in kashmir want a autonomous state...evn ppl posting on facebook r under surveilence now..."

I told my mother about my conversations with my family. She doesn't know what facebook is or how I even communicate with them through email, and especially, why I am asking questions about the current conditions. But as things get worse I think she is catching on. For now I am no official reporter, I can only report the situation on the ground as told to me by my family.

Meanwhile mom says, "This is hardship they have to go through. Kya karan? It's not up to us."

The Moroccan: Juz Wahid.

In the spring of 2001 my mother's knee replacement surgery left her heavily drugged on Lortab and other colorful round pills she kept in an Ibuprofin bottle re-labeled MOTHER by my father on a piece of scotch tape in slanty illegible doctor handwriting. He writes over each letter a few times to make it more clear but actually it looks like the words are vibrating.
I was living with two Spaniards on the other side of the world working Tuesdays and Thursdays as a librarian for the British Council of Tangier. The Brits let me work there even though I am American and most of them never bothered to learn my name even thought they sat in the chair across from me for the full three hours of my shift confiding in me with restless skeletons in the closet or samples of their fiction-writing. They called me "the Moroccan."

I would call to my mother late at night from the Cinematheque when it was still early in New York, to keep up on things. I wanted to know who was getting married and who had died and how they died and who had to perform the burial cerimony. Our Kashmiri community was growing again and was probably bigger than it was at its peak, around the time I was born. Most of the older kids moved away and we didn't really know the new additions that well and didn't know who any of the kids belonged to when they were running around our house at dinner parties breaking things and hiding people's shoes.

When the pain was more acute, my mother would admit her relief at the gradual lack of her social obligations, or even having to adhere to social graces. At some point between '99 and '02 she started to refer to the Kashmiri dinner parties that had formed our social lives until we reached high school as "those weird gatherings." We stopped hosting them. It had been a tradition since the small beginnings of a community in in our small town, and back then we mostly talked about the war. The men would gather in one room and smoke and argue, and the women would drink tea in the next room and make tea for their husbands and talk about their husbands. The kids would set up an assembly line in the basement and make friendship bracelets to sell at the yearly Islamic Convention for the KKK : "Kashmir Kids Klub." We were young.

Most families arrived in the neighborhood between '75 and '80 and all had stories about the blizzard, mostly getting trapped at the hospital or getting trapped at home without their husbands and with two little kids and they didn't speak English yet. She says it was terrifying then but now we can laugh about it, thinking of her there at home confused and frantic and probably cold and taking care of the kids. She likes to tell the story about a different woman who once put laundry detergent in the dishwasher and her kitchen overflowed with bubbles. My mother is one of the only women in the community that is not a practicing physician. We enjoyed having her at home when we were growing up and now my older brother insists on marrying a girl who will do the same for him and for his children, and I am regularly encouraged to practice hosting tea parties for my impending fate since I am not a doctor and clearly going nowhere.

I managed to stay close enough to my mother to warrant calling her every couple of days from Tangier. After the surgery the conversations became mostly one-sided, as though she were sitting alone at home all day and the only time she had a chance to speak to anyone but "cat" was when I called her. The only times I didn't call was when we took trips across the strait to Spain. I can't even imagine how much she would worry if she pictured me on that rocky boat floating from the lips of Morocco to the little lips of Spain, munching on a frozen cheese "sandweesh," watching the waves redirect the boat mid-smooch.