My (earnest, irate) thoughts

“If one person is harmed it is an unpardonable sin, but a whole people’s destruction is something to debate.”

Like most Americans, I was aghast when a British schoolteacher was jailed in Sudan for allowing her students to name a teddy bear ‘Muhammad’. Jailed? Seriously? I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. And, without my being fully conscious of it, Sudan was added to my ever-growing private list of places I’m unlikely to visit.

As usual, it feels impossible to be American and Muslim simultaneously. I feel emotions stirring within myself, warring against each other, and it’s hard to know which voices to listen to, let alone sift fact from fiction like grain from chaff. Which is why I’m (usually) curiously silent on the atrocities that happen in the Muslim world. Many native-born Muslims just dump the blame on the zionist bent of our media and government. They point out the wars America starts there, and the empty consumerist culture America exports there. And they demand, “What are we talking about? One teacher? What about Iraq? What about Palestine?” It’s politics, not religion. Then they go on with their day, justice served in their own minds.

But it’s not that simple for me. How can I fit comfortably in the position of Muslim apologist? Though I may, unlike most Americans, actually know where Sudan is, I, too, know very little about the lifestyle of the Sudanese: their culture, their history, their politics, their language, their families, their hearts. It hurts when an American says to me, ‘What’s up with this teddy bear nonsense? Your religion is crazy.’

That’s why I like reading the thoughts of Hamza Yusuf Hanson, born in Walla Walla, Wash., a convert to Islam of Jewish descent who lived in the Middle East for a decade or more. He is thoroughly American, but fervently Muslim, and he articulates the opinions that I think could bridge this gap, real or imagined, that exists between the warring worlds, that of political Islam and that of the secular West. Maybe there is no gap… or maybe the gap is being erased by folks like yours truly, wouldn’t that be sumfin’… but no lie, this world doesn’t always make a whole lot of sense to me.

Here, he writes poignantly about ‘The Real Teddy Bear Tragedy‘.

It’s no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am not well-suited to the typical American life. And, Kurt Vonnegut fan that I am, I can articulate why: the lack of an extended family. In God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, Kurt Vonnegut writes at length about what women and men really want, and why our nuclear families just don’t cut it.

OK, now let’s have some fun. Let’s talk about sex. Let’s talk about women. Freud said he didn’t know what women wanted. I know what women want. They want a whole lot of people to talk to. What do they want to talk about? They want to talk about everything.

What do men want? They want a lot of pals, and they wish people wouldn’t get so mad at them.

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a lot more people to talk to about everything. The groom got a lot more people to tell dumb jokes to.

A few Americans, but very few, still have extended families. The Navahos. The Kennedys.

But most of us, if we get married nowadays, are just one more person for the other person. The groom gets one more pal, but it’s a woman. The woman gets one more person to talk to about everything, but it’s a man.

When a couple has an argument, they may think it’s about money or power or sex, or how to raise the kids, or whatever. What they’re really saying to each other, though, without realizing it, is this:

“You are not enough people!”

I met a man from Nigeria one time, an Ibo who had six hundred relatives he knew quite well. His wife had just had a baby, the best possible news in any extended family.

They were going to take it to meet all its relatives, Ibos of all ages, sizes and shapes. It would even meet other babies, cousins not much older than it was. Everybody who was big enough and steady enough was going to get to hold it, cuddle it, gurgle it, and say how pretty it was, or handsome.

Wouldn’t you have loved to be that baby?

My two-year-old marriage to Yusuf has had more than its share of downs. Our conversations regularly lead to arguments, which ultimately lead to an icy silence. We spend a terrible amount of time feeling old and worn out, as if we’re 80 years old. And we haven’t even had children yet. Sometimes I doubt if we ever will. Life is so difficult already, and that would add this whole other layer. But then I wonder if, by not having children, we’re contributing to the dumbing-down of society; of those breeding, too many are really stupid. And I wonder if we’re making our own relationship worse; the loneliness piling up, causing us to increase the emotional demands we place solely on each other.

Yusuf and I are so different. For him, traditional gender roles are a fact, not an opinion; instead of laughing at his 1950s outlook, I am irritated by it. We’re both passionate overreacters, tortured souls who burn like Roman candles. In the thick of an argument, we have said terrible things to each other, unforgivable things, the sort of things people should never say if they plan on seeing each other ever again. We’ve vowed not to anymore, but it’s as if we’re sitting on this whole pile of hurled insults, a fetid dump of them.

Other times there’s a gulf between us of all the things we don’t say.

Divorce is permitted in Islam but it’s written that, of all permissible things, it’s the one God hates most. I imagine it is a last resort, for adultery or alcoholism or abuse — not for people who haven’t heaved anything except scorn. But if you have a sharp tongue, maybe you know what I mean: sometimes violent words cause more damage than a punch to the gut.

Anyway, Yusuf would be the first member of his family to get a divorce. I would be the first member of my family not to.

It’s one of a number of glaring differences in our outlooks, stemming from our earliest childhood memories in very different places. Yusuf has memories of playing kickball in the street, climbing trees to eat the sour cherries, telling stories to make his friends laugh. He remembers his older brothers disappointing his parents, and it left an impression on him. He made a concerted effort from a young age not to bother them: cleaning up his own messes, doing what he promised, never letting himself get worn down or sick. By the time he was a teen, he was practically grown-up already: dutiful and respectful toward his parents, who he considered wise.

I remember reading in my room, serials about the Sweet Valley twins (identical opposites with eyes the color of the Pacific ocean). I remember that sinking sensation of walking up to my friends, and realizing they’d just been talking about me. I remember being secretly happy when I got sick because my mom stopped everything to dote on me. I remember very few fights, except during my rebellious teenage years when my parents stopped knowing anything.

He never imagined marriage could be this hard. That’s one thing we have in common.

In marrying Yusuf, I gained an extended family. But they live in Ankara, and it will take years for my pitiful Turkish to allow me to have a conversation. Though even without my comprehension, their love for me was so vast that they stared all the time, grinning foolishly, chattering, gesturing wildly. I was jealous that I lacked their emotional security, their steadfast belief in their family’s love. I was lonely in my non-Turkish-speaking bubble, but surely I could learn enough not to feel left out if we ever live there.

In marrying me, he gained a family. And they live here, but only my mom has shown any interest in helping us with our marital woes, though she admits our situation is over her head. My stepfather stays out of it, my grandparents stay out of it, and my brother stays out of it; at first I didn’t assume this was total detachment and disinterest, but now I know that it is.

I attempted to force a family for us here, visiting my grandmother or inviting my parents for supper. But it always seemed so fake: talking about the weather like strangers, platitudes (”Nobody said marriage is easy”) and jokes. Members of my family always trying to lighten, to diffuse, to skip past unpleasantries, as if the point of life is to avoid frowning. I can’t make them real; being phony with them comes so easily that I wonder if I was ever real. And there’s the rub: in joining them in their phoniness, I’ve lost any desire to contact anyone. I remember one really bad fight, where I thought my husband and I were really getting divorced — this is it — and my brother and my baba looked into my sobbing face and said nothing, and didn’t reach out to hug me. They just looked confused.

Though there are many real things we could discuss, several members of my family can’t really understand my husband’s English (how hard are they trying, I wonder) and they’re introverted (better adapted to their situations than I) and there are simply not enough of them… our personal flaws glare dully for each other, unfiltered, not lessened by the more people I think we need.

I think this because of my family’s faces, all glowing happily the night before the Turkish wedding last summer. Hundreds of people smushed together in my in-law’s driveway, spilling out into the street, wearing their best clothes, happy tears streaming down their cheeks. My brother and Baba laughing as they danced in the street, Mom making good friends with a Turkish lady who appointed herself my mom’s bodyguard against the other hundreds of women who wanted to hug or shake hands. Even me, feeling ridiculous in my Aladdin costume, but serene as I surveyed the insanity surrounding me. As Baba put it, “I have never seen 500 people have such a good time without any alcohol.”

And I think of how things might have been, if we were African or Latino… or even if I were Turkish and we lived in Ankara near his family. Maybe one day we can. I have always been able to clearly picture my home with more people — more warmth and more hassles and more drama and more laughter. Once I got it, I’m sure I would want to kick myself for having wanted it. But I would also love it, because for me, more is always better than not enough. Especially for something I feel short-changed on: love.

A Turkish friend was saying to me one thing she likes about America: how people mind their own business. In Turkey, she was saying, family members give their opinions whether you want them or not, they really butt in. So I told her of the flip side to that privacy… that when they leave you alone, they leave you alone.

Maybe Western civilization will evolve out of the nuclear family, shedding it like we discarded other things when we found something better: typewriters for computers, cassettes for CDs. Maybe I can figure out a way to come to terms with my not being born into a family of ten, but I’m hardly hopeful. I am so defensive and prickly, always fretting that I look or sound stupid, overwhelmed by crowds, seeking time alone even though I am unbearably lonely. I worry that my occupation is so individualized and detail-oriented and that it’s making me autistic. This is not normal, but how to fix it?