Homeland Elegies(17)
“What’s your point?”
“Pakistan took the money. For years they took it. What do you always say to me? Don’t ask anyone for money and don’t take it if they offer. It always comes with strings.”
“The only strings were to beat the Russians.”
“Apparently the strings also included not bombing US embassies.”
There was silence on the line. “You’re different,” she said.
“Different from what?”
“From the child I raised.”
I had never heard her say this. But the resignation in her voice made me think this was not a new thought.
“Maybe that’s because I’m not a child anymore. I’m twenty-five.”
“Latif was right. The longer we stay, the more we forget who we are.”
“Uncle Latif is dead.”
“You think I don’t know that?!” Her tone was sharp, wounded.
“I just mean, maybe it’s better to still be alive, Mom.”
“When we used to take you to the masjid back during the war, you were the first to put your allowance into the box for the mujahideen.”
“I always thought it was going to help Uncle Latif.”
“And that essay you wrote in class…”
“Essay?”
“About Gaddafi.”
“Mom. I was in middle school—”
“You called him a hero.”
“Because I didn’t know any better.”
“What you knew then is better than what you know now.”
“Do we have to talk about this?”
“He was the only one speaking up to the West.”
“Is that why he bombed the plane to Scotland? Killed all those passengers? To speak up to the West?”
“You don’t think they kill our people every day? Look at what they did to Latif. Who was doing their dirty work. He was their citizen! Can you believe that? They kill one of their own citizens who was fighting for them?”
“Maybe he wasn’t anymore, Mom.”
“Wasn’t anymore what?”
“Fighting for them. Maybe that changed. Maybe that’s the reason—”
She cut me off, her wounded tone intensifying: “They don’t have the courage to face death themselves, so they make us face it. Then they throw us away when they get what they want.” She paused; I stayed silent. When she spoke again, it was quietly; she was seething: “That man is not wrong. Our blood is cheap. They run around telling everyone else about human rights. But not for them. Look how they treat their own blacks.”
“Mom.”
“Turning us against each other. Making us spill each other’s blood. Just like the British.”
“Mom.”
“Taking what we have. Oil, land. Treating us like animals.”
“Mom.”
“He’s right. They deserve what they got. And what they’re going to get.”
These last words were the lines that would end up in my play.
The man she was referring to being right was, of course, bin Laden.
Later, after the attacks in 2001, she would never admit to having said anything of the kind. Understandably. I think most of the Muslim world could not have imagined how terrible redress would feel, when it came. Not only to Americans but to those in the Muslim world as well. For despite our ill usage at the hands of the American empire, the defiling of America-as-symbol enacted on that fateful Tuesday in September would only bring home anew to all the profundity of that symbol’s power. Despite the predations on which it was predicated, the symbol sustained us, too. Many have disdained the American response to the attacks as childish, have seen these years of vengeful war as the murderous tantrums of a country too young, too protected from the world, too immature to understand the inevitability of death. But I think the matter is more complicated. The world looked to us—and now I speak as an American—to uphold a holy image, or as holy as it gets in this age of enlightenment. We have been the earthly garden, the abundant idyll, the productive Arcadia of the world’s pastoral dream. Between our shores has gleamed a realm of refuge and renewal—in short, the only reliable escape from history itself. It’s always been a myth, of course, and one destined for rupture sooner or later. Yet what an irony: when history finally caught up to us, it wasn’t just we Americans—or even mainly we Americans—who would suffer the disastrous consequences.
III.
In the Names of the Prophet…
Di qui nacque che tutti i profeti armati vinsero, e i disarmati rovinarono.1
—Niccolò Machiavelli
1.
I have an uncle named Muzzammil, who, for a fair stretch of my childhood, went by “Moose”—the least rejected of the countless attempts to simplify the phonetic conundrums of his name to those with no working knowledge of Punjabi. Since he immigrated to the San Diego area, in 1974, there’d been periods lasting from minutes to months when he was called, in no particular order, Muz, Muzzle, Mazz, Muzzy, Musty, Sammel, Sammy, Maury, Marty, and Marzipan, which led to Al, and then Alan—I kid you not—and, of course, Moose. The last was coined by a fellow biochemist newly appointed at the lab in La Jolla where Muzzammil worked, an Italian named Ettore, who’d dealt with his own travails in New World pronunciation of an Old World name and came up with the moniker that would stick. There was certainly something apposite about it. Moose was a plain, largish man with a flaring Roman nose that drooped to a bulbous end; his shoulders drooped, too; and, yes, there was a kind of homely, even lumbering majesty about him. We, American-born kids of our Pakistani-born parents, also struggled with saying his name, for though of course he was never Moose to us, our parents said his name one way, and he offered it to us—native American speakers with our own varying levels of Punjabi incompetence—in the bizarre, labored accent he’d come upon to make himself sound more American, his diphthongs flattened by ever-widening contortions of his lips, his affricates shoved so far forward he couldn’t seem to get through a sentence without baring unnecessary teeth. It wasn’t just hard to gather a coherent, repeatable sense of what he was saying when he said his name—I always thought it sounded a little too much like the brand-name laxative fiber my father used to take, Metamucil—it was also sometimes hard to understand what he was saying at all through that tortured soup of bizarre signs and sounds.