Muslim Girl Page 3

  That inferiority complex really seized me by the throat for most of my upbringing. It wasn’t just that I struggled to break out of the mental limitation of how far I could go, but the feeling even surfaced in little everyday concessions like letting someone else take the last seat because I was second-rate and thus not worthy of sitting in it. Or letting kids cut me in the lunch line in the cafeteria, not just because I didn’t feel I deserved to speak up, but also because they were loud and cocky and I was crippled by the fear of the ridicule I’d suffer if I did speak up and say, Hello, I’m here. I am a person, too.

  In fifth grade, we had a science project called Project Earth, in which we collated 1,000 pages of assignments we did throughout the year into one big binder to submit for a final grade. It was the biggest project any of our nine- and ten-year-old selves had ever done. Of course, it was out of 1,000 points, and the lucky few fifth graders who scored 1,000 out of 1,000—if there were any—were spoken of throughout the halls like urban legends for years after they left for middle school. But there was more: The kids who scored the coveted 100 percent were given the authority to decide the order that our classmates would be launching the makeshift rockets we built in science class for the school-wide outdoor watching party at the end of the year. Every year, the entire elementary school poured onto the playground for the day, faculty et al, and we got to watch the fifth graders launch their pretty, handmade, and hand-painted rockets one by one. Sometimes they shot into neighbors’ properties and were gone forever, other times there was failure to launch, and the rest of the time we would run to find where the beautiful creations had landed, yards away. But each year, it was our great send-off for the fifth graders, much to the delight of the rest of the school.

  Lo and behold, I and two other students opened our graded binders to be greeted by the mythical “1,000” in red Sharpie with a circle around it. In the weeks that followed, we would meet up and sort the deck of index cards with our classmates’ names written on them, deciding the order in which everyone would launch the rockets that we had excitedly been working on for months.

  This is where that inferiority complex kicked in. We had decided that the three of us would go closer to the beginning so we wouldn’t have to wait so long. I offered to go second. Now, why did I choose No. 2 instead of No. 1? It might be easy to hypothesize why. Maybe I was too nervous to be the first to go. Maybe someone else needed to warm up the audience before my turn. Maybe the thought of being the first to go was a lot of pressure, what with the chance of my rocket not launching. But I posit that my offer to go second was an intentional repression of my inner eagerness, the dulling of a girl of color’s ambition, and a manifestation of the way I viewed myself. Something inside me told me that first place was not an option for me. It was reserved for somebody else. It was like it was some sort of expectation ingrained in me that second was the highest I could go. There had to be someone before me, someone above me.

  For the first rocket launch, one of the other students selected a girl in our class named Roxanne. She was a beautiful girl, somehow always with sun-kissed beachy hair, blue eyes like the ocean, and perfectly tanned skin—yes, even at ten years old. She somehow possessed this supernatural confidence that made her the coolest girl in our class every year. She was my first best friend in school, and our moms would bring us together for countless pool parties and movie dates throughout our childhood. Until, in typical schoolgirl fashion, I somehow became shunned and the outcast among the rest of the girls in my grade, and she replaced me with a cooler companion. She was the same girl who, only a couple of years earlier, in third grade, had gone up and down our morning line as we were waiting for the bell to ring our school day into session. She stared into the faces of each one of our classmates, going down the line, saying, “No, no, no, no . . .” until she landed on me: “Yes! You have it!” I wasn’t sure whether to be excited or scared, so I asked her what it was that I had, and she responded, “You have a unibrow.” That was the first time I was introduced to that undesirable feature that I unknowingly possessed, and I went home that day crying to my mom that I had a unibrow. Thus began my lifelong insecurity with my body hair. It’s cool, though: Bushy brows are a thing now, apparently.

  I think my science teacher, Mrs. Rabii, sensed that I was holding myself back. When she came to check on the completion of the index card deck the day before Rocket Day, she asked, “Who’s going first?” saw Roxanne’s name, and asked if none of us wanted to be first instead. I met her with silence. But that was the first moment that I ever imagined myself being first; the fact that it was offered to me like it was just as much of a right due to me as it was my peers opened my mind to picturing myself first. Being second was a cap I had placed on myself that I had never encountered, identified, or been aware of before. I stayed silent in that moment, but after I went home, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  I want to be first, I told myself. That was it—I had to be first. I planned to wake up early the next morning so that I could get to class first and change the order of the index cards. Even though I set my alarm, I couldn’t sleep that night. I lay wide awake, in a sweat, watching the clock creep closer and closer to Rocket Day. When it hit an early-morning hour that was acceptable to appear in school, I booked it. But, when I got there, the stack of index cards was already in the hands of the other 1,000-point students, who were looking over the arrangement one more time before we went out onto the playground. Mrs. Rabii came over and ­noticed some type of unsettled nerve in me, because she turned and, ­almost nonchalantly, asked me, “Do you want to be first?”

  “Yes,” I said. And without hesitation, without so much as looking up, she grabbed my index card, moved it to the front of the stack, closed the box on the cards, and that was that.

  That’s all it took. I needed to decide that I wanted to be first. That I could be first. That I, too, deserved to be first.

  * * *

  1W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Chicago: A.C. McClurg & Co. [Cambridge]: University Press John Wilson and Son, Cambridge, U.S.A., 1903; Bartleby.com, 1999.

  Chapter 2

  When I enrolled in an all-girls public school in Jordan, I didn’t expect to memorize the picture frames on the principal’s walls after my umpteenth trip to her office because our class leader kept looking for any reason to give the American girl a demerit. This time, it was because I had decided to wear the metallic ­olive-green jacket that I had just gotten for Eid, our Islamic holiday, over my lame schoolgirl uniform. Our uniforms were usually cut the same—the summer we got to Jordan, I had mine tailored and asked the man altering it to give it a dropped waist, to make it somewhat unique—with a short green pleated skirt flirting above its owner’s pair of blue jeans, or black pants, or maybe even white or navy slacks. On the day that I wore a magenta button-down shirt on top of the uniform, with the top button strategically undone to show a hint of the silver heart necklace I was wearing around my neck, I learned that jewelry wasn’t allowed either. I had gotten a hang of the strict dress code by the time Valentine’s Day rolled around, when I took off the bright red scarf I was wearing right before I got to school in the morning and shoved it in my bag as I walked into class so I wouldn’t get in trouble. Red? On Valentine’s Day? Do you have a lover or something?

  “Amani, you know you can’t wear bright colors on top of your uniform,” the principal gently told me, as if my American sensibilities had to be tiptoed around. I could tell she was annoyed seeing me in her office every week and did her best to dismiss the other girls picking on me. “It’s against the rules.”

  The uniforms were the least difficult part of school for me to get accustomed to. When my father decided to uproot our entire family and move us back to his home country, he thought that enrolling us in an English-curriculum American school in Amman would defeat the purpose. This was an opportunity for me and my little brothers to not only meet our extended family, but also becom
e acquainted with our culture, language, and country of origin. What better immersion than to, you know, throw me into eighth-grade-level ­Arabic textbooks when I could barely understand the conversational vocab my dad spoke to us at home? At least my little brothers were at an age where it was still somewhat acceptable to learn the Arabic alphabet.

  My father had finally decided to make the move because he wanted to take some of the pressure of Islamophobia off of us. He actually did it. Minorities commonly joke about leaving the country if a certain leader is elected or if an event takes place that could prove adverse to their respective communities, and it wasn’t until years later that I realized that’s exactly what we ended up doing. My father didn’t want us to be ostracized, to have to endure the extreme judgments of our peers or bear the horrible weight of being vilified by our society. He heeded his brother’s concerns about falling victim to violence and refused to place us in harm’s way. He hoped that by taking us to Jordan, he would provide us with a valuable experience that would contextualize our lives in the greater world around us.

  You’d think that given everything I was going through in school and how hard it was for me to fit in, I would have welcomed the move with open arms, but it was a difficult one. The night before our flight, my dad found me lying on my stomach on the hardwood floor of my newly empty computer room, clutching a pillow and bawling my eyes out. “Baba, it’s going to be okay,” he told me in the dark, with only the secondary light of the kitchen streaming in and outlining his silhouette. “It’s going to be like a new adventure.” My dad gave me the expectation that the society I’d be entering was ultra-conservative, and so, on our way to the airport, I broke off the press-on nails I wore to impress the girls at my school and tried my best to prepare for an experience where I could not imagine what to expect.

  Our arrival in Amman was like the grand return of a lost child home, one that demanded the utmost celebration. As soon as we landed, we were swept up by the overwhelming tides of family. In the airport, my brothers and I greeted and shook hands with people with unfamiliar faces but easily recognizable warmth—smiles we had never met, speaking a language we could barely understand, but knew we were related to somehow. We met one of our dad’s two older brothers for the first time, Ummo Khalil, whom we always heard about but could never place. We all squeezed into Ummo Khalil’s small van as though it were a clown car, and off we went to his house, where dozens more family members were waiting for us. The air around us smelled of gasoline and wrestled with the aromas of shawarma roasting on spits and Arabic coffee fresh off the fire. These smells mingled with minty hookah smoke dancing in the streets, just like the chaotic cars that knew no traffic lanes and tempted the fates of any pedestrians who dared cross the roads. The shouts and honks of traffic had their own rhythm against the sounds of Arabic music wafting in through the van windows, only to be drowned out by my uncle turning up the recitation of the Qur’an emanating from his car radio. All the stores flashed colorful, brightly lit signs in Arabic in bold text, or cursive font, or were transliterated in almost unreadable English letters. The pedestrian walkways could barely contain the throngs of people out and about on that Amman night. There were Jordanian women who looked like they’d stepped out of a European fashion catalog or window display, sporting dyed blond hair and wearing tight, faded jeans and colorful tube tops. They created a modern mosaic among more women who were covered head to toe in white or black veils and neutral-colored long robes, as well as trendy young hijabis in eye-catching headscarves and matching tunics and heels. The adults tripped over gleeful children in summer clothes as they played games of tag, or soccer, or with new toys right on the sidewalk. Young men with gelled hair, wearing button-up dress shirts and polos, chain-smoked their cigarettes on street corners and catcalled pretty girls, occasionally catching the glares of overprotective fathers with big beards walking past them with female members of their household. At one stop light, where we found ourselves gridlocked bumper to bumper with the rest of Jordanian traffic, the van right next to us was just as packed with men—one of whom held a tabla, or Arabic drum, on which he played an impossible beat that ignited the rest of his company in a loud song, rocking their vehicle back and forth with off-key lyrics and uncontainable laughter.

  It wasn’t until we pulled into my uncle’s parking lot that my little brother Ameer realized the man driving us was our relative and not a taxi driver. When we climbed out of his van, we were once again hit by the ever-present smell of gasoline before being suddenly surrounded by a flurry of my cousins and aunts and uncles. They pulled us into eager embraces and planted sloppy kisses all over our faces. Each one of them introduced themselves to us in a frenzy of names and faces that would take me days to remember. Except for one girl who surfaced before me like a long-lost sister I had always known but never met.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked, her big beautiful brown eyes blinking long lashes at me, the same shade of reddish brown as the forelock of hair peeking from beneath a prayer scarf that she had thrown on in a hurry to meet us outside. “I’m Serein.”

  Of course I knew who Serein was. She had stolen my name. Or, rather, her parents had. She and I were the same age, living our separate lives on opposite parts of the world, only to hear about each other growing up through my father’s stories from family visits to Jordan through the years. She was born months before me, so her parents were able to steal the beautiful name that my dad had originally picked for me. Serein. I always regretted that I could have been called a variant of Serena—the civilian name of my favorite childhood superhero, Sailor Moon. Almost poetically, ­Serein’s face was a milky tone that, for the many coming months that we’d become inseparable, would inspire her suitors and admirers to compare her visage to the moon.

  My older male cousins rushed to carry our luggage upstairs as more family led us to where dinner was waiting. As soon as I ascended the staircase, I was hit by the intense smell of Middle Eastern home cooking that was like both my mom’s and grandma’s kitchens on steroids. Serein’s mom welcomed us into the largest room in the house, where the biggest silver platter I had ever seen was set on the ground and appeared to take up the circumference of the room. The platter was filled to the rim with rice, yogurt, goat, almonds, and parsley—a delectable Levantine concoction called mansaf. Dozens more relatives jumped to their feet to greet us, introduce themselves, and immediately seat us on the carpet at the edge of the platter so we could eat, insisting that we must be famished from our long trip. When I asked in English where the utensils were, and my dad said that we were to eat the mansaf with our hands, I was so overwhelmed by the culture shock that I ­politely excused myself and ran into Serein’s nearby pink and white bedroom. That first night, she and I stayed up until dawn, when the morning call to prayer echoed in the empty streets, filling each other in on everything we had missed from each other’s lives before we finally met.

  Though we were technically the same age, through the help of Serein’s schoolteacher mother she was able to skip a grade, so she was always one year smarter and one year wiser than me. She vehemently valued her education—eventually earning the highest degree in our extended family—and took great pride in the power it wielded, especially among her male counterparts. She never lived outside of the Middle East, yet somehow spoke perfect ­English, and she acted as both my translator and tutor, as well as my inspiration, to master my eventual bilingualism in school. She not only translated the language for me, but also the culture: Serein respected culture but not tradition. She was already well-versed in my lifestyle from all the English movies and music videos she watched on her family’s American satellite. Our friendship kicked off with us exchanging the most popular music from our respective societies: I introduced her to Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together,” and Ciara’s “1, 2, Step”; she introduced me to Nancy Ajram’s entire Ah W Noss hit album, Tamer Hosny’s “Kol Mara,” and, at the time controver
sially risqué female singer Ruby and her hit single “Leih Bedary Keda.” She taught me how to use public transportation and assertively asked the bus driver for my change back on a large bill. One afternoon when she came home from school, she showed me the nearby Internet cafes in her neighborhood where teens would go to send secret messages to their lovers. Late one night at her house, while her parents slept in the next room, we snuck into her brothers’ bedroom-turned-video game den where the boys were up playing Dragon Ball Z on my little brother Faris’s coveted PlayStation 2. Serein had the exciting idea for all of us to pool together our money and quietly send one of her little brothers down to the late-night corner store to buy us soda and snacks to enjoy among ourselves—a rare indulgence in her busy household. When her older brothers bullied or disrespected me, she would be the one to mediate with timeless grace and self-assuredness.

  It was on Serein’s rooftop, overlooking the neighborhood mosque right next door, that I met Tamara in the cool blue twilight of the setting Middle Eastern sun. I remember it creating a purplish tint on her head as it gleamed off her dark brown hair, precariously revealed in plain sight with her headscarf undone and settled around her shoulders. Tamara’s headscarf always inevitably found its way off her head. She was our oldest female cousin on my dad’s side of the family, the daughter of his eldest brother, Ummo Yahya. Ummo Yahya was really strict and conservative, two attributes that met Tamara’s young and indomitable Arab woman’s spirit to ignite total rebellion. Serein spared me no hilarious or badass story of her adventures with Tamara growing up. Tamara always dramatically lined her hazel eyes with heavy, authentic kohl that stung when applied and was as black as the long, outwardly modest dark robes that she wore to conceal the tight outfits underneath. She never consistently went to school, busied by housework and early marriage instead, and had crooked teeth that knew not what biting her tongue meant. Her voice was deep and, to some, almost offensively loud in public spaces when it so-called immodestly attracted the attention of men in the street. Still in her twenties, she had already married and divorced a number of times—one divorce was already taboo enough for some people—because she had absolutely no problem walking away from Arab men, even husbands, who did not treat her with the respect she demanded. And she had no problem commanding the opposite sex, either. Many men were eager to impress and cater to her, and her uninhibited pride in her sexuality became a lightning rod of contention among conservative members of our extended family.