June, 2009

I was recently asked to write a piece about writing The Writing On My Forehead for almuslimah.com What follows is what I submitted…

Story-Telling: The Allure and the Danger

When I was a child, I remember listening in on my mother and her sisters as they reminisced about their childhoods, interrupting each other frequently to point out details that one or the other of them might have forgotten. Together, right before my eyes, they were writing and editing the history of their family and mine. As I grew older, I understood why they interrupted one another. My brother, sister and I didn’t always remember things the same way. Even specific events we had all experienced together shifted in meaning for each of us. None of us retaining all of the details, we relied on each other to fill in the gaps.

As an adult, I saw the same dynamic play out among married couples recounting their favorite travel anecdotes, or sharing the girl-meets-boy tales of how they met. Again, interruptions were par for the course, sometimes gentle, sometimes downright nagging; though these interruptions sounded rehearsed, as if the details that one spouse remembered to add in were part of the officially authorized script. With more than several years of marriage behind me, I myself became a part of such seemingly scripted dinner party performances of memory.

That is the allure and the danger of story-telling—the solidification of memories, the construction of truths that we agree, together, to believe in. I always wondered about the role of those interruptions and of other details that might have gotten left out of the shared process of remembering. I reflected on the dynamics of story-telling because who we are—as individuals, as family members, as parts of our communities, and as citizens of our nation and the world—is not only a result of the stories we tell, but also the stories and the parts of stories that we don’t recall.

In the aftermath of 9/11, I saw the same process play out on a national scale; some stories were told over and over again so that they became a permanent part of the record of our collective memory, while others were laid aside, forgotten in the shadow of the mass, incomprehensible tragedy unfolding before us. Certain questions, too, were asked over and over again—why? why?—and the answers that eventually emerged as dominant would determine who we became as a nation, but not more so than the other answers, the ones that were submerged and silenced.

After 9/11 the short stories I had been working on were suddenly not enough. I came to regard all stories with a wary suspicion, seeing them as the result of meticulous pruning and weeding. I wondered what had been consciously or unconsciously left out of each story. Then, I found the voice of a character, a young girl, who constantly interrupted the stories her mother instructed her with to tease out inconvenient details which she would grow up to live her life by. Story-telling itself became one of the themes I tried to explore in the novel that would come from that voice. The Writing On My Forehead follows the journey of an Indo-Pakistani Muslim family whose members are scattered after Partition, from India to Pakistan, England and the United States. I traveled back in time though the eyes of the youngest daughter, Saira Qader. Living in America, Saira attempts to understand the tragedies of her family’s present by uncovering the secret and forgotten details of the stories of her family’s past. Saira’s older sister, Ameena, is satisfied with the official, authorized version of their history. Saira is not. By the time she is an adult, Saira herself has become a part of the game, a story-teller/journalist, constructing a history for herself that leaves out important details she would rather not confront.

On one hand, in writing this book, I wanted to tell a story about one family only, without trying to write a commentary on the state of the world. On another, more personal note, I was trying to come to terms with being an American Muslim in post 9/11 America. I used to think I had resolved the question of who I was, a hyphenated American comfortable in my own skin and at ease with the complexity of my heritage. I felt I was neither defined by the past and no longer twisting and contorting my sense of self in order to escape it. Now, that carefully cultivated complexity was being reduced before my very eyes. Stereotypes of Muslims—of Muslim women in particular—were nothing new. But those old caricatures were being imposed with renewed fervor and virulence, forcing me to revisit the old question all over again.

How does the individual quest to define oneself play out in the larger narrative of family history, social development, and political upheaval? What does the individual owe the group and at what cost should the debt be paid? These are universally human questions, played out again and again from one generation to another. In the end, heritage, duty, and the tension between family and individual all came into play when I began writing The Writing On My Forehead.

March, 2009

Another group of heroes I’ve recently had the privilege to get to know from around the country are independent booksellers. If ever a business was built on a labor of love, it’s theirs.

February, 2009

Every night, I watch the parade of Wall Street bandits, rich rogues all, marching across the screens of our newscasts, those indicted and those who went beyond mere creative accounting to construct labyrinthine mathematical formulas veiling financial immorality of a kind few of us can even try to understand without inviting aches to our heads—a game of hot potato for which the music has stopped, leaving all hands scalded. It’s easy to be baffled, to wonder where the heroes are. But you don’t have far to look to find them. Walk a few blocks from wherever you live and you’ll see a school, where teachers hold forth, guardians of the minds of our next generation. As a teacher myself, I have had the honor of knowing many of these heroes personally, and few people realize the dedication and hard work that go into one of our least valued professions. It hurts to hear of pink slips going out all over the country—despite all the rules of demand and supply that free market economists laud as the backbone of healthy commerce. We’re not laying off teachers because of a sudden decrease in enrollment. We’re laying off teachers because our priorities, to say the least, are screwed up. So while Wall Street bullies hold out their hands and claim the diminished wealth of taxpayers as necessary Band-aids to the wounds they inflicted on themselves and everyone else, and as we print up money as fast as we can to answer their needs, I wonder when and whether we’ll ever recover from the act of slamming doors in the fresh faces of new and enthusiastic teachers and I mourn the example we set for the kids they serve.

November, 2008

The pipeline for my novel, from book deal to publication, has been unusually long. Original dates were pushed back in the face of an unusual election season that dominated our headlines and heartstrings—a good thing, too, given my own obsession with the democratic process reborn and rejuvenated before our eyes. A couple of days before we knew the outcome, I wrote a reflection piece about one aspect of the election for my local newspaper. Here it is:

No Religious Test

As I write this, the light at the end of the election tunnel is blinding. Whatever the results on the night of November 4th, more Americans have been engaged in the democratic process than ever before and the long, hot boil of this particular election has brought to surface questions of citizenship that the nation has wrestled with since its very conception. Along the journey of figuring out who our next president will be, we began a conversation about race that dredged up some of the unresolved pain and residue of the racism that formed the basis of our “our peculiar institution,” whose ugly legacy we still live with. We came closer than ever before to nominating a woman to the highest office of a nation that did not allow women to vote when it was first begun. Through it all, while answering the call to live up to the best of our ideals, we have also had to bear witness to the ugliness of failures along the way. The media, which is supposed to inform us and save us from our own ignorance, was instead our mirror—often giving us a view of how far we fall short of what we want to be. We may have cracked the glass ceiling seventeen million times over, but pundits still felt the need to compare Hillary Rodham Clinton’s voice to the sound of a wife nagging her husband to take out the garbage. Barack Obama’s steady and even temperament—what turned out to be the core of the content of his character—may have won out over the color of his skin in how voters finally judged him, but not without having to negotiate media minefields of prejudice, as in one interview where he was asked how much his “cool” style had to do with his race.

What does it mean to be an American? Who gets to vote? Who will be the demos in democracy? These are all the questions that the founders of this nation answered unjustly, leaving succeeding generations to sort out the consequences of their failure.

Yet the one defining question of American identity and citizenship which the framers of the Constitution got right is the same one we got gravely wrong in this election—religion. Article VI of the Constitution states: “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States…”

During a Republican primary debate, moderators saw fit to ask the candidates which among them believed in the Bible as the inerrant word of God. This was clearly a coded question. Whether a voter was reassured by the answers given, or frightened, or merely amused, said more about the voter than the candidate. Yet it was a question that should never have been asked to begin with. What a candidate believes in as a matter of faith—be it Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, Zeus, a more conventional deity, or none at all—should be of no concern to the voter. You can argue with that fact—you can say that creationism versus evolution is an issue relevant to educational policy, for example, and that the voter has a right to ask about policy. But the Bible is a distraction from the real questions at hand. How does the candidate think science should be taught in school? What will be the criteria by which she enters into war? What does he believe the role of government should be in times of economic crisis? The fact is, belief and faith are too complicated, too easily misunderstood, and too open to interpretation to elicit the clear answers for the clear questions we should be asking. Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush are both born again Christians who shared almost nothing in common in terms of the policies they pursued in the Oval Office. What a candidate says to herself when she closes her eyes and contemplates the abyss beyond this life is ultimately not relevant to her capacity to lead. The policies that a candidate pursues may be informed by faith, but to ask what the particulars of that faith are is to breed hypocrisy and establish a test that our Constitution specifically forbids. Like it or not. Ask a candidate what they will do. Ask a candidate what they believe in about policy and worldview. Don’t ask them about their religion or lack of it—it’s too easy to draw false assumptions, subject to our own bias, on what we think they might mean. It encourages candidates to lie, to tell us what they think their constituents want to hear. And it animates our own prejudices.

During this election, voters became voyeurs, peeping into private spaces of worship, arguing on the finer details of what constitutes a Christian and whether a Mormon qualifies, hearing out of context snippets of angry sermons, and passing judgment on witch-hunting preachers offering prayers of protection—the public forum of politics encroaching on the personal right to worship in a way that our founders wisely sought to avoid. Religious labels became epithets, the most politically damning among them—the false accusation of being a Muslim—was one that required repeatedly awkward clarifications, “No, he’s a Christian, not a Muslim.” Only the occasional afterthought sought to affirm that what he is or isn’t shouldn’t matter anyway—the most poignant example one expressed by Colin Powell, who said:

But the really right answer is, “What if he is?” Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer’s no, that’s not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?

Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? Given the context of our times—the way in which our country was attacked seven years ago and the wars we are waging as a result—this is certainly a more loaded question than others we might ask. Is there something wrong with being a Buddhist in this country? A Jew? A Hindu? There shouldn’t be. But as long as we let the de facto test of religion remain in place, in defiance of the highest law of the land, there will always be right religions and wrong ones—leaving no place for those who espouse no religion at all.

October, 2008

On the brink of the launch of my first novel, I feel a bit like I’m living in an action shot of a movie someone has set on pause, like I’ve felt the bump and climb of the rollercoaster car and am stuck at the top, waiting for someone to get the ride going again. That’s on the one hand. On the other, I am humbled to be here at all—and the view from the top of the roller coaster is amazing.

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