Homeland Elegies(71)

Then one day, as I struggled to make headway at my writing desk, I clicked on her name to find her profile again. What popped up on-screen was only her small square photo and, beside it, a thin box I could click to send a friend request. It had taken months, but she’d finally gotten around to unfriending me.





Footnotes


1 Removing pubic and armpit hair is a unisex Muslim custom that dates back to the Prophet’s supposed enjoinder about necessary hygienic practices. According to one tradition, the practices are five: shaved pubic hair, circumcision, trimmed mustaches, clipped nails, depilated armpits; according to another, the practices are ten, and the five more added to the previous include brushing one’s teeth and using water to clean oneself after both urination and defecation.

2 Details differed depending on who you heard the story from, but, in broad strokes, it went something like this: When Armstrong stepped out onto the lunar surface he heard a voice crying out a sublime, otherworldly song. He didn’t know what he was hearing, but he never forgot it. Years later, during a trip to Egypt, he heard the Muslim call to prayer for the first time and realized that was the song he’d heard on the moon. Praise of the Muslim God. One variant of the tale depicted him as hearing the call to prayer not just on landing but also in the rocket ship on the way to and from the moon; still another cast Buzz Aldrin in the role of resident Judas, who heard what Armstrong did but denied it for the sake of his dissembling Christian tribe. Every version of the tale ended the same way, with Armstrong adopting the faith. I’d been hearing the story—now in one form, now in another—since I was a boy, and Asha’s father had been writing to famous Americans about it for almost as long. She said she wouldn’t have been entirely surprised if his obsession had played some part in the State Department’s decision to issue an official response in 1983: “While stressing his strong desire not to offend anyone or show disrespect for any religion, Armstrong has advised the Department that reports of his conversion to Islam are inaccurate.” The State Department letter wouldn’t do much to stanch the rumor. When Armstrong died, in 2012, I heard more than a few complaints from family members (and others) that none of his Western obituaries referred to his conversion. I understand the stubborn attachment to this silly tale. It makes sense of the moral conundrum presented by those images of American boot prints pressed on the face of our holiest of holy symbols, the moon, which orders our years and toward which we lift our hands in supplication whenever the curved sliver of its renewed light appears again in the darkening sky. Yes, the West may have been sophisticated enough to get there, but what it heard once it did was still all about us…

3 Zamzam—a holy well in Mecca allegedly revealed to Hajar, Abraham’s wife and Ishmael’s mother, brought forth by her thirsty infant’s restless foot. It is a common Muslim belief that the water confers health and blessings; a 2011 BBC investigation revealed it contained dangerous levels of arsenic.





VII.





On Pottersville


Just remember this, Mr. Potter: that this rabble you’re talking about—they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath?

—George Bailey, It’s a Wonderful Life





I’ve known Mike Jacobs—a Hollywood agent of some renown—for almost fifteen years, and his politics have always baffled me. Mike is black, but he didn’t vote for Obama in either 2008 or 2012. As he put it: he only ever saw in then candidate Obama (and later President Obama) a man of color whose personality was riven with concessions to the white majority—of which, of course, Obama’s mother was one—concessions Mike believed impaired his ability to know who he was as a black man in America. When Obama won the first election, Mike predicted that he would be an ineffective president and, more important—at least to Mike—a terrible advocate for blacks in this country.1 (For the first six years of Obama’s presidency, it was hard to argue that Mike had been wrong about either thing.) In 2008, Mike would have voted for McCain but for the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket; he left his ballot’s vote for president blank that year. In 2012, he voted for Romney. I have not been able to make good sense of how Mike squares his predilection for Republican politics with the fierceness of his advocacy for black life in America—he donates more money than most people I know earn each year to black causes in our country—though he explains it with recourse to some variation of the usual Republican talk about taxes, self-reliance, and learning to fend for yourself.

I’ll get to that part later.

Mike grew up among the poor in Alabama. (His father was a lawyer, and while they were not better off until Mike was in his late adolescence, they were never as poor as their neighbors.) As a child, Mike saw firsthand a cycle of dependence and frustration fostered by handouts. The most significant issue facing black Americans, he believes, is that ours is a country designed through and through to keep them down. In order to change it, black Americans don’t have to just recognize that fact—most do—they also have to change the way they think about themselves and their lives because of it. And now I quote him, because there’s too much at stake if I get the paraphrase wrong:

I hate that quality about us, always waiting for someone to save us, make things right, cut us some slack because we deserve it. Sure, we’ve been through a lot, and it’s hard to be “us.” I’m not denying that. But they’re not gonna change this country for our sake. We have to do that ourselves.