Homeland Elegies(35)

Shafat’s eventual divorce and remarriage are, I believe, inextricably linked to what happened that night. For it wasn’t long after that when he began his unlikely affair with a churchgoing Virginian woman named Christine. There’d been rumors he was going to church with her on Sundays and was thinking of converting to Christianity, rumors that would later be confirmed by the official change of his name to Luke. At that point, he and my mother were no longer speaking, but one of his sons would confide to me that “Luke” had tried to get him to convert as well and that one of his arguments for conversion—to his own son—was that he, “Luke,” finally felt safe in this country because he finally felt like he belonged. Much of this I learned long after the dream I had that night in Scranton—the marriage was still pending; the conversion and name change still not official—but the underlying conditions shaping my uncle’s life were part of a social logic that long predated it and that shaped my life, too. I believe my run-in with Trooper Matthew the previous afternoon activated the pertinent semantic nodes along my own associative lattice, to borrow Mary’s metaphor again, yielding a dream that drew on the abuse of my uncle as an echo of my own bodily fears of the law in a post-9/11 America. But the dream was more than just an echo. For in it, I saw suddenly revealed a wider perspective on the failure and threat of our lives as Muslims here in America, a failure and threat my uncle Shafat would eventually believe he could solve by adopting the Christian faith. You see, we—Muslims—lived in a Christian land. That’s how we saw it, at least in the families I knew. We lived in a Christian land, but we didn’t understand Christianity. We didn’t understand it; we didn’t respect it. We thought it a makeshift, misbegotten offspring of the Judaic creed, an aggrandized misinterpretation founded on an ontological absurdity: that God would need a son, and that that son—supposedly divine—could perish in the flesh at human hands. All this and its attendant obfuscations—the Holy Trinity, the Immaculate Conception, the shell game of transubstantiation—we took for silliness. But here was the paradox: in order to flourish in this new land, we had to adopt its Christian ways, ways that befuddled us and that we disdained, ways we saw reflected in almost every aspect of American life. It might be hard for a non-Muslim American—an agnostic or atheist, or a secular humanist—to understand the perspective I’m describing, in which a sole signifier (“Christian”) is used to stand in for the totality of American life. For indeed, where some might see modernity or individualism or mercantile democracy or the heritage of the Enlightenment or an irreducibly complex and endlessly heterogeneous nation, we saw Christianity. To us, it was all Christian. Not just the churches and their ice cream socials and Friday fish fries; or the bacon at breakfast; or the wine with wafers on Sundays and with everything else all week long. Not just the place names and first names drawn from the Gospels and the roll of Catholic saints; or the painted eggs in April and pine wreaths and winter sleds in December. No, I mean also the department-store sales in January and the interest-charging credit cards used at them; and the vacations spent at the beach driven by the bizarre urge to darken one’s skin; and the shrill perfect fifths of a violin; and the notion that running a piece of toilet paper along your anus is enough to keep you clean; and the discomfort of working with a blade of cloth tied to your neck so tightly you can barely breathe; and the bikinis and knee-high skirts; and, of course, the needlessly happy ending to every story. I don’t think we were exactly wrong to see things as we did. After all, it was even in the language we spoke here, its plain, unadorned beauty, its range of short, percussive verbs, its oracular strength, a language of the sermon and of world making, in tone and lexicon not just borrowed from the King James Bible but also shot through and through—even today—with the simple, active robustness of the Anglo-Saxon Christian Lord. And yes, the founding fathers had sued for religious freedom, a value much vaunted and advertised—which should have put us at ease—but of course we would learn (at school, at citizenship training) that those white-wigged Protestant fathers had mostly been making room in a new republic for competing factions of their various protesting Christian persuasions. Even the Enlightenment itself, the alleged origin of this national experiment, even this could not be divorced from the European Christian culture to which it was a response. And the secular humanism that resulted? The evolved-to-some, mutated-to-others fruit picked from long-tended orchards of Christian learning. In my dream, I saw an encapsulating mise-en-scène of our kind’s failure to understand—let alone flourish in—this Christian land, an unwilling participation in its symbols, its rituals, and, as ever, our resulting disappointment. And though Father was depicted in my dream’s first part as open to the Christian experiment—supportive of the mixed marriage, if you will, happy to see it “stamped” with the faces of the Christian saints—I was angered by his willingness to play along. Like my mother, I was resistant. Then: we make our way along a hilltop path, gripping poorly built crosses, our ragtag pilgrimage ending on high ground bearing the trace of my father’s father’s Islam but where, now, there’s a Christian miracle we don’t understand. The empty grave is no proof to us of new life, only a reason to complain that one of ours has been lost to us. Like my uncle Shafat, the dead man has forgotten his native land.

The dream appeared to sum up a dilemma not only of my childhood but also of my life even as I sat scribbling in that coffee shop in Scranton, no longer a practicing—let alone believing—Muslim and yet still entirely shaped by the Islam that had socially defined me since 9/11. But putting it like this only points to the partial truth. In my dream I saw a more integral one: that as much as I worried about my place in America as a Muslim—and, yes, I had good reason to; all American Muslims did; that terrible day in September foreclosed our futures in this country for at least another generation—as much as it bothered me, as much as I felt a victim of what this nation had become for us, I, too, had participated in my own exclusion, willingly, still choosing, half a lifetime into my American life, to see myself as other. I’d woken that morning into a lingering mood of failure that mirrored a sense of defeat I never didn’t feel, however subtly, and once I unlocked the connection between my uncle Shafat’s saga and the dream’s final mention of Kashmir—another land divided and at war with itself—this frame of failure made mournful sense. Wasn’t it the inheritance of my own unwillingness to find my place, my spiritual defiance repaid in rejection, in the rootless, haunted sense of having foundered in my life as an American? I don’t think it was just self-pity that caused me to shed a tear on that coffee-shop toilet seat. I was finally face-to-face with the deepest dimension not only of my own American dilemma but also that of all my kind.