Homeland Elegies(16)
The abandonment of Afghanistan and the first war in Iraq sent a clear message: whatever the Americans said meant nothing; whatever they promised was a lie. If you paid in blood to help them manage their interests, they poured money down your throat and invited you to Washington to fly your shawls and head scarves like flags of freedom; when you tried to manage your own interests, then your Islam was backward, unruly, oppositional, an excuse to kill you. Warnings about American influence were nothing new for Muslims of the Levant and its eastern beyond, and some had long been advocating resistance, violent or otherwise; for many more, the first Gulf War was a moment of truth and gave fresh, decisive life to the old argument that the West’s welcome was predatory and that Westernization would cost Muslims their land, their beliefs, and their lives. Osama bin Laden was only the fiercest, most partisan spokesman for such views, which had (and continue to have) deep support in much of the Muslim world. Case in point: above the patients gathered daily in the waiting room of Latif’s Peshawar clinic, a framed photograph of the holy mosque in Mecca hung, and alongside it, a portrait of bin Laden.
How do I know this? Because I saw it on CNN.
In late June of 1998, my father was traveling home from a medical conference in Key West. He had a layover in Atlanta and some time to kill before his flight to Milwaukee. As he settled in at a bar near his gate, he looked up at the screen, where he was as shocked as you can imagine to see the name and the picture of his dear friend from medical school. TERRORIST SPIES KILLED was the title running under the story. Father asked the bartender to turn up the sound. Then he pulled out his cell phone and called Mother back home. After that, he called me.
The story reported that two brothers allegedly operating as spies for a Muslim terrorist network—the media had not yet taken to calling the group by its chosen name, Al Qaeda—had been killed in a pair of raids that were creating diplomatic complications with the Pakistanis. It wasn’t clear who had carried out these so-called raids, which—Father was to learn—consisted of nothing more than a bullet in the temple for Latif and Manan as each left home on a morning in early May. (Father said it was widely rumored in Pakistan that this was the CIA’s preferred method for local assassinations.) The CNN piece showed the nondescript two-story exterior of the clinic as well as the faded pea-green walls of a waiting room full of Peshawari poor—mostly women with children—where the camera lingered on the portrait of bin Laden. For CNN, clearly, this was the salient detail that conveyed the essential meaning of the story: poor brown ignorant hordes flocking to a malign manipulator who was stoking their rage against the forces of freedom and hope.
The report failed to mention that Latif was an American citizen.
Mother was distraught at the news. She took to bed, and she didn’t leave her room for days. Father was worried and asked me to come home. I obliged, but my presence did nothing to comfort her. She didn’t want comfort. I date my mother’s intensifying anti-Americanism to that summer, the summer when, in response to attacks on two US embassies in East Africa, Bill Clinton bombed a Sudanese medicine factory. When Mother—herself a doctor trained in the Third World—learned that the factory had been responsible for producing every ounce of Sudan’s tuberculosis medications, she was particularly incensed. She already despised Clinton for his indiscretions with Monica Lewinsky, and the attack on the factory came three days after Clinton’s disastrous address in which he admitted he’d been lying about the affair all along. She saw in this sequence a murderous cynicism: an American president under political siege distracts the nation by killing Muslims.
In the last weeks of summer that August, she wrote in her diary of America as a foreign place, a place she didn’t recognize, didn’t like. She wrote in bitterness, even rage, and when writing about it wasn’t enough she picked up the phone and unloaded to me:
“Doesn’t know what ‘is’ means. What kind of nonsense is that?”
“That’s not exactly what he said.”
“That is exactly what he said.”
“He meant he was referring to the present tense. That technically, at that time, when he was speaking, he was not in a relationship with her.”
“I’m not an idiot. I know what he meant.”
“I wasn’t implying you were an idiot, Mom.”
“Legal nonsense.”
“He is a lawyer. They both are.”
“With his fat nose and his fat wife.”
“I’m not sure what that has to do with anything—”
“Clinton is a liar. If he wants to lie about putting cigars where they don’t belong, that’s one thing. To kill people around the world to distract everyone from his lies, that’s another.”
“I don’t know if that’s what he was doing—”
“Of course it’s what he’s doing.”
“They just bombed our embassies, Mom.”
“You think that came out of nowhere? Hmm? When you push people and push them, and take advantage of their goodness and hope, when you use them for your own goals and throw them away, what do you expect? Do you expect them to send you roses?”
“That’s one way of looking at it.”
“What is the other way?”
“It’s politics. Nobody’s anybody’s friend. Everybody is using everyone else.”