Germ of new life

Newborn in Haiti

Germ of new life, whose powers expanding slow

For many a moon their full perfection wait,—

Haste, precious pledge of happy love, to go

Auspicious borne through life’s mysterious gate.

(Anna Laetitia Barbauld)

Sometimes, after a thing has happened, I can look back at it and realize that it worked perfectly. I feel that way about my marriage; all the little moving pieces fit together right at a time when any one of them could have thrown the whole thing off. A birth, two nights ago now, was like this.

Worried about slow fetal development, the doctors scheduled an induction two weeks before her due date. As if to prove that her body knew exactly what it was doing, and that the baby was right where he needed to be, she went into labor two days before it was scheduled. She could barely feel her contractions, though they expected labor to pick up and move quickly at any moment. I arrived at the hospital to find her and her husband chatting calmly. “Oh, you didn’t need to hurry!” they laughed. About a half hour later, the contractions had strengthened and moved into her lower back; she was unable to talk through them. The mood changed, became quieter. Her husband put on The Burda, a beautiful poem in Arabic that gave a rhythm to her swaying. The midwife had a lavender and clary sage massage oil that I used to rub her back, applying counter-pressure during contractions. Very quickly, she started to feel the urge to push.

Time moves differently in a delivery room. I look at the clock and then am startled looking again, an hour having passed. I don’t know how long it took, certainly no more than two hours from when I arrived to the moment the baby did. It happened quickly, but there were places where time stopped.

The baby was small and feisty, all squall, an Apgar score of 9. I cried a little, hearing his first yop. He immediately calmed against his mother’s breast and quietly observed, little eyes blinking and searching. The midwife told us that a mother’s body regulates the baby’s temperature; a woman’s body will spontaneously heat up if it senses the baby’s temperature is too low. Things like this floor me, grip my heart, fill me with awe. He seemed content there, as if this was just a change of scenery, nothing to be afraid of.

I am reminded of how much I love this work.

A very good and old friend of mine, my oldest friend even, told me that she is 12 weeks pregnant. Another friend emailed me the images from her first ultrasound, titled “waving!” I am filled with so much joy at all this life in orbit around me. I’m counting time in trimesters, in birthdays, first steps, first words. I can count on two hands the number of pregnant friends, on one hand the number who have just given birth. I know they’re pregnant the moment before they tell me; the tone of voice they use, the pause before they begin. For the first-time mothers, which make up most of my friends, I am aware of the threshold they are crossing. Pregnancy is that liminal state of knowing/not knowing/unknowing, of remaking. Anthropologist Victor Turner called the threshold, the limen, “a realm of pure possibility where novel configurations of ideas and relations arise.” It can be unbalancing, frightening, unreal, or too-real, but it can come back into balance, it can bring a new center, can be an umbilicus to other worlds. I have been rolling the word alterity around on my tongue; during the birth, the external fetal heart rate monitor kept slipping, such that the screen would regularly display his heartbeat, then hers, then his. Another pregnant friend remarked to me that she has only ever known herself one way, has only ever related to her body as hers, has only ever been her-self. Women cross boundaries so beautifully.

 

Giving my immune system a hug with herbal flu treatments

Happy thing: tomorrow morning I’m flying to San Francisco, and since it’s for work I’m staying in a fancy-ish hotel (as opposed to couch-surfing) and my meals are covered (yay, no shoe-leather soup or cardboard sandwiches!).

Sad thing: My husband has given me the flu. Oh, and my flight is at 5:30 am. Which means that I have approximately 12 hours to completely recuperate. Otherwise I’ll be that horrible person on the flight that everyone gives dagger eyes.

I’ve been doing the following, and can recommend any of these to others to treat a viral infection. Incidentally, the flu is a virus, and treating it with antibiotics is not only not the correct approach, but it’s harmful to one’s body: a single antibiotic treatment kills off nearly all of the bacterial flora we have going on in our guts, and we need those little guys. Friends don’t let friends kill bacterial flora.

1. Taking tinctures of echinacea/goldenseal  for immunity, yerba santa/plantain for sinuses, and ground ivy for sinuses. I’m particularly fond of the yerba santa, as I can immediately feel it working.

2. Lots of teas with reishi mushrooms and astragalus for immunity, anti-viral sumac, marshmallow and slippery elm for my throat, licorice for the adrenals, comfrey for sinuses, and ginger to warm me up.

3. Eating weird but powerfully anti-viral dehydrated sumac and taking an amazing elderberry syrup.

I’m not better yet, but I’d like to think that this herbal regimen is helping me get better faster, and preventing me from getting much, much sicker. And hopefully, with a little luck and a lot more sumac, I’m going to beat this thing before heading to the airport…

 

Clearly I am insane

I was going through some old computer files and found this sheet of notes that I took while chatting with a friend who is a specialist in the Hanafi fiqh of menstruation, shortly after I converted. It continues to be useful, and hilarious. I have no explanation for the cat-mouse scene, or happy stars, but they make me smile.

 

 

Food Culture

I’ve moved quite a bit over my lifetime, and when people ask me where I’m from I respond with whatever state, or country, best fits how I feel in the moment. I spent significant time in suburban Maryland, with which I have the least affinity. I lived in India as a child, went to high school in France, and spent a year each in both Cairo and Doha. I feel varying degrees of fondness for each of those places, but the one city that scoops me up in her sweaty embrace and covers me in kisses is New Orleans, where I spent seven of the best years of my life. When people ask, that’s usually where I say I’m from. New Orleans is special. Tamar Taylor, an artist, wrote something I’ve always thought summed it up best:

The allure of the city is inigmatic [sic] and subjective. For me it resides in dichotomies: joy/tragedy, devout/hedonistic, criminal/hospitable, arrogance/humility, apathetic/spontaneous, corrupt/generous, elegant/seedy, eccentric/mundane–one could go on and on. It is the fact that these dichotomies are not polarized that sets New Orleans apart…

I grew up there, in the sense that I started learning how to live, and it’s where I discovered Islam. It’s also where I learned what food really tastes like (note–I might have learned this in France had I not been such a sulky teenager), where I learned how to give directions based on restaurants instead of street names, and where I found out what food culture means. By the time I left the city, I took pride in the fact that a good percentage of my daily conversations were dedicated to food. I spoke with friends, colleagues, and strangers alike about where to go to get the best po-boy (Parkway Tavern, oyster), who had the tastiest french-fries (Delachaise, because after all, what doesn’t taste amazing fried in duck fat?), which was the best restaurant lost in the storm (Marisols, R.I.P.), and how to cook seafood gumbo. New Orleans is the sort of place where you can spend every weekend at a different food festival (strawberries, shrimp, crawfish, oysters, gumbo, mirlitons, po-boys), or overhear cops arguing with all seriousness about whose mama bakes the better king cake. And speaking of king cakes, the king cake eating ritual (in which a cake is shared, and whoever gets the plastic baby baked inside is lucky, or the king, or buys the next cake) is an essential aspect of the Mardi Gras season and not to be trifled with. The point is, New Orleans is where I learned what it meant to be part of a living, breathing, vital food culture.

Food cultures are important. Famed food writer M. F. K. Fisher wrote “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk.” To me, a food culture galvanizes these connections into a meaningful network, where food is about place, pride, identity, and pleasure. Not the exotic pleasures of taking a bite of something new, but the pleasure of the familiar. I can give an example that I suspect many can relate to, especially women, who tend to have a particular relationship to food preparation and gatherings. Half of my family is Polish, and for each holiday on the Polish Catholic calendar specific foods are shared. As a child, I always ate pierogies, mushroom soup, and smoked fish on Christmas Eve for a dinner called Wigilia. All across the world Poles are eating these foods on December 24th of every year. Pierogies are dumplings typically filled with some combination of potato, caramelized onions, slow-cooked and deeply flavorful mushrooms, and cheese, topped with butter, more onions, and sour cream. They’re simple enough to make: prepare and roll out the dough, prepare the stuffing, fill, pinch, boil, fry, but it takes a certain finesse to ensure that they don’t come out looking mangled, or burst during the boiling stage. I have finally come to a point in my life where I can make a perfect pierogie, and for this I am immensely proud. Every bite I take of a pierogi that tastes just like my mother’s, or my grandmother’s, I count as a great triumph. It calls to mind holidays and gatherings throughout my life, and the pleasures of familial communion.

In his book Blithe Tomato, a series of reflections on farmer’s markets and farming in Northern California, Mike Madison writes:

With enough repetitions, a certain perfection creeps into things. The pianist who begins her daily practice by playing some of Bach’s Goldberg Variations finds that after thirty years she has not become tired of this piece. Indeed, it continues to reveal new depths. This is not just because of the complexity of the relationships between each note and all the other notes. It also has to do with the ten thousand previous performances, some on joyful days, others on grievous ones, which have somehow permeated the score so that every phrase is laden with layers of memory. And our lunch of tomatoes with basil and grilled aubergine on toast is similarly freighted. It is not just a July lunch, it is also an unconscious echo of all those other Julys, the ones before we had children, when things were simpler, and then when the children were small and their little faces crumpled into dismay and betrayal at their first taste of aubergine. We’re not actively thinking of these things at lunch; but they are an unacknowledged condiment that flavors the experience. (136)

Food cultures are not static. Buying a tomato at the grocery store twelve months out of the year is the death of true food culture, because food changes as seasons change. Those of us who shop at farmer’s markets know that what’s available in March is not what’s for sale in September. All of the New Orleans festivals I mentioned above are harvest festivals, corresponding with the peak harvest of a particular fruit or vegetable, and thus are scattered throughout the year. Madison’s tomatoes, basil, and aubergine are July staples. Because they are as much about place as they are about taste, true food cultures situate us indelibly where we are, which is why shawerma in Egypt is different from Palestine, and each Palestinian village has it’s own way of making maqluba.

Lately I’ve been thinking about food culture in the United States, and what has happened to it over the last century. In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, her chronicle of a year on an Appalachian farm with her family, Barbara Kingsolver writes:

The main barrier between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude. The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy. The virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans. Furthermore, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example. Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know it’s true value. “Blah blah blah,” hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now. We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires. (31)

Kingsolver argues that to revive, or to reconnect with a true food culture means eating locally and seasonally. In eating with the seasons, we become aware of a different kind of abundance. In celebrating harvests, in admiring the color and flavor of a backyard vegetable or crawfish boil, in growing our own food, in witnessing the absolute miracle that is the emergence of a shoot from the speck of a seed, and in sharing that abundance with the people around us, we fully live in place, and together wade through bounty.

I originally wrote this post for Beyond Halal, a project on Islamic law, ethics, and food, but wanted to share it here.

 

Indian Pipe: People, Plants, and Prayer

I recently completed my apprenticeship with the Boston School of Herbal Studies, which culminated with the exchange of all the various herbal products that students had been making throughout the year. I had made a variety of tinctures (in a nutshell: by soaking herbs in a menstruum, typically vodka or apple cider vinegar, for an extended period) and I received a variety in return, as well as teas, salves, soaps, and even a mugwort, lavender, and flax seed eye pillow, which I am never very far from in bed.

One of my favorite gifts so far has been a tincture of Indian Pipe, Monotropa uniflora, a strange little plant that grows in the woods in the Northeast. It lacks chlorophyll so the entire plant is a ghostly white, and instead of growing to face the sun the flowers bend over towards the earth. We learned in class that it is used for pain and especially intense pain, but it can also be used to induce or support meditative and strange, but not unpleasant states. The tincture is an unusual violet shade, and the flavor reminds me of sweet dark soil. It’s also taken medicinally as a nervine, antispasmodic, febrifuge, and likely other things as well. The roots are used, and the flowers are notoriously delicate; they essentially disintegrate upon handling.

Indian Pipe in Massachusetts

I went for a walk in the woods a few months ago and kept spotting Indian Pipe. Herbalists believe that if one is drawn to a particular plant, then there’s something there worth exploring. Indian Pipe is hard to find if you don’t know what to look for, but my eyes kept falling on it. At one point I sat down with the plant quietly and just listened. There’s an idea in Islam that all plants and animals and even inanimate objects are engaged in the worship of God, that they are naturally in a state of pure submission (and various prophets and saints were acclaimed to have been able to tune into the speech and states of other created things), and that’s what I bring to these quiet little chats with plants. Believing that we are all here with a purpose, I asked the plant what it had to teach. The impression I got was one of black earth, the worms crawling inside, the secretive movements of life beyond what we could see and where we choose to look, and of connections between life and death. When I had the opportunity to try Indian Pipe as a tincture in class, I had a similar sense of the plant. I also had the feeling that my perception just sort of sat like a bird on my shoulder, and then went to the corner of the room and took in the space and conversations inside.

After weeks of constant work, I finally had a quiet few hours last night for prayers and zikr. I wanted to see what Indian Pipe could bring to this. In prayer, in ruku’, I kept thinking of these little plants bent over. It occurred to me that they are constantly in this state of ruku’, of acknowledging their smallness before the divine. This is the part of prayer where the words suhbhanna rabb al-adheem are recited, glorified is the Lord, Most-High, and I thought of them whispering this. I also felt that I was surrounded by these plants, praying in congregation with them. It was a lovely vision. Throughout, I felt relaxed and clear and engaged.

It’s not something that I would want to use regularly, but I’m happy to have it on my shelf and in my life.

 

Silly questions I am asked at weddings.

There’s a thing that happens to me at weddings more than it happens anywhere else. Maybe it’s the somewhat increased sense of intimacy that people seem to have, that we’re not quite strangers simply because we’re there for the common purpose of celebrating a mutual friend’s love for someone else. They come up to me, maybe ask a warm up question, and then go straight into “So! You’re Muslim?” There are various permutations of this awkward question, and usually no follow up. “You’re Muslim?” “Uh, yes.” “Oh.” End of conversation.

I’ve been to two weddings recently, and this happened at both. In Arizona, a woman clearly too uncomfortable to ask about the Muslim thing just pointed to what I was wearing (a lovely, carefully-planned ensemble) and asked “So! Do those colors have some meaning in your culture?” “Uh, I was sort of going for an Arizona-sunset theme.” Awkward silence. Incidentally, she was wearing a black dress and had I been a different sort of girl I would have pointed out that in our culture that’s the color we wear to funerals. At the most recent wedding in New Orleans, I was chatting with someone when a guy walked up, cut right in and asked “Sunni or Shi’ite?” I stared blankly at him, not sure of whether I’d just heard him correctly. “You are Muslim, right?” “Oh, um, yes, uh, Sunni.” End of conversation. Later on I’m getting a glass of water from the bar and a beady-eyed fellow sidles up cautiously and asks how I know the bride. “We went to school together, and I’m so happy to see her getting married. He’s such a wonderful guy!” “Are you Muslim, or did you become Muslim?” “Um…oh, uh, I’m Muslim.” End of conversation.

There is a part of the brain, I’m sure, that regulates rude behavior. That’s generally why we don’t go around saying things that make other people feel unwelcome or uncomfortable, and why we hasten to correct unfavorable impressions or misunderstandings. Why does that slice of brain matter seem to shut off in my presence? On the one hand, I’d rather people ask the questions they have and realize that I’m a friendly and approachable person who is willing to engage in conversation, and to be, perhaps, the first Muslim they’ve met, and for them to understand that Muslims can be normal, friendly, approachable people too. On the other hand, people, before you ask that question, please, please ask yourself whether you’d ask someone in a yarmulke “Oh! Are you a Jew?” or whether before even asking someone’s name you’d ask “Catholic or Protestant?” It comes off as ignorant and obnoxious.

One last vignette. I was sitting with a friend at the New Orleans wedding when the father of the groom sat down and asked our names. Then, he turned to me and said “Are you Muslim?” Sigh. Yet again. “Yes.” “Well! Asalaamu alaykum!” Smiling broadly, I replied “Alaykum salaam!” “Kayfahalluk?” Beaming now, “Alhamdulillah!” “Tamam!” He went on to explain that he’d spent ten years working in Dubai and sincerely enjoyed his time living and traveling in the Arab world. We had a lovely, charming conversation and he singlehandedly made up for all the other silly questions that other people had asked and restored my faith in humanity. Love it when that happens!

 

Reason to celebrate.

I went to the most amazing party this past weekend. I rank it up next to the Dada Ball, a completely ridiculous party I went to in New Orleans in 2004–which I have long considered the Best Party Ever.

Anna and her partner Ben were celebrating their 10 year anniversary, but it was also a celebration of their families, their communities, their friends, of creativity and art and music and zines, and also a way of bringing people together to introduce cool people to other cool people and to see what happens next.

First, they are talented artists and extremely creative people, which you can get a sense of at her comics blog. Anna also makes zines, which is something I did in high school but let it die there. She is an adult who makes zines. For those of you who grew up with 90′s zine culture, photocopying and stapling and distributing your own personal magazine is something special. The two  created a zine prior to the party that she sent out to all the guests that explored the idea of marriage and relationship, and most significantly why the two of them aren’t married and don’t want to be married. It was fascinating. Then they made a second zine for the party which had info on why they made it alcohol free (quoting a straightedge zine-maker who wrote extensively on the topic of “intoxication culture”) AND the zine included a short bio of all the guests so that even if we were all meeting each other for the first time, no one was a stranger. When we arrived at the ridiculously amazing Jamaica Plains Spontaneous Celebrations community space we were assigned “conversation buddies” that we had to seek out–these were little slips of paper with the other’s person/people’s photo plus some interesting things to talk to them about. Our conversation buddies were both artists and political activists, so we talked about fiber arts and Occupy Boston and made fast friends. The party included vegetarian and vegan fare by Puddingstone Kitchen, poetry readings of Rumi and Rilke, a performance by Ben’s dad, who wrote a song for the occasion, and by Ben’s band, and then a sing-a-long with Ben or his dad on the piano.

It was so damn beautiful. Everyone’s heart was radiating and the room was full of this internal heart fire and light. I burned right up in it and became part of the love vapor, like everyone else.

The party made me realize how important it is to celebrate things like community and love and relationships and friends and harvests and traditions, old and new (like walking around the tree! You had to be there.); all of those things that change and all of those things that stay the same. When my husband and I got married, we had a small and very modest, very private ceremony. It was beautiful and spiritually meaningful and was full of baraka, blessing. But it wasn’t exactly a celebration. We had just met a month before (life is funny!) and neither of us were into big weddings. We also felt that we could have a ceremony and then a party later in the year. For various reasons, including being overwhelmed at just having married this awesome stranger and a massive dose of family politics, we didn’t. Insh’Allah, we’ll take the time and energy to pause at some meaningful point in the future to put our love on display; for each other, for our families, for our friends, for our communities, and have us a real nice sing-a-long hoedown.

Mad props to Benanna.

 

Becoming “The Other.” Or not?

There’s a funny alchemy that takes place when I see someone for the first time without their scarf when I’ve only ever known them wearing one. I only see some of my covered female friends in public places or at mixed-gender gatherings, and therefore only see their faces framed by scarves. The alchemy does different things. There’s the way that my eyes trick me into believing that the scarf somehow organically grows from another woman’s body and is so much a part of her that seeing this particular full moon of face is natural, and seeing her without her scarf means that some strange nakedness is, for the first time, exposed. There’s that. There’s a privilege of female camaraderie I feel in women’s spaces, where we are comfortable and exposed to one another in this way.* There’s also a sense, to me, of equalization when I’m with other women who are covered. It’s almost as if the absence of hair removes a way that we are physically different from one another. We are more like each other, bonded in this sisterhood of cloth. This is my personal perspective, of course, which stems from having come into this community from the outside and remaking myself to become more like the women that I now feel so similar to. (I also love and relate to my uncovered friends, but the fact that I’ve even singled out covered women as a group I feel connected to is worth exploring–another time, another post).

A good friend of mine whom I’ve known for over a year was at my apartment the other night for a gathering. She stayed after the men left and sat there while I unwrapped my hair and combed it out. It was, despite a recent haircut, flat and rough and sitting funny, and I was to some extent a mess as I always am after I’ve worn a scarf all day. She looked at me and laughed and said “why, you’re a little white girl!”

Me, on left. Oh look! A dark-skinned man leading two hyper-privilaged ex-pat American children on a camel in impoverished India!

I’ve been thinking about what my friend said. Of course she knew that I am “white,” that my family’s background is Polish and French and Swedish. She herself is South-Asian, “brown.” She has told me that her hair is thick and black and curly, but I’ve never seen it and can’t imagine her unframed, at all. So, there is this other alchemical process of removing my scarf as well, where I went from being something–being Muslim, being undifferentiated, being de-raced, I don’t know–to being “white.” By becoming Muslim and especially by wearing a scarf I have done something to how other people perceive me, though am only now beginning to untangle this perception and what it means to me.

Another scene. It’s spring of 2010. I’m in a car in Qatar with another friend who is South African of Indian descent. He’s a stand-up comedian who frequently jokes about race, particularly about “White People.” “White People” doesn’t refer to the color of a person’s skin, but they’re often connected. “White People” refers to the way a person relates to others, refers to how power is manifested in relations between people, refers to who assumes power and who defines those relations. It is, famously, a “state of mind.” My friend plays with this category because it is very easy to laugh at and about precisely because it is fraught with tension. He tells me nonchalantly, “You’re not white anymore, you’re Muslim.” I feel good hearing it. I am not “White People.”

Of course, I am “White People” too.

Another scene. I’m at the airport on 9/11/11. I approach the security checkpoint. I hold my breath, nervous that there will be a problem traveling on 9/11, but actually I’m always nervous when I travel these days. I make an effort to smile and be patient and pleasant. A female agent pats me down. She is polite and as she feels my scarf and head we laugh about how I “know the drill” and get this “all the time.” I finish and collect my bags and go to the gate. It has been easy. On the same day in Detroit, an Arab Jewish woman is pulled off a plane, interrogated, and strip-searched after the two “brown” men sitting next to her get up to go to the bathroom multiple times. Passengers reported to crew that the three were engaged in “suspicious behavior.” She wrote on her blog that she felt “violated, humiliated and sure that I was being taken from the plane simply because of my appearance.” Another columnist, remarking on what happened, writes “the sight of a dark-skinned person on a plane triggers such a leap.” Though I am almost always directed to whatever line has the backscatter machine, even if I am singled out for how I dress, even if I feel nervous or humiliated at security, there is a huge difference between how I am treated (and subsequently how I feel) and how other dark-skinned Muslim or Muslim-seeming people are treated. Do people treat me differently because I am not a “brown” or “black” Muslim? Do people treat me differently because, at the end of the day, I am “white?”

Of course, I am also not “White People.”

To the woman who laughs with me while patting down my head, feeling the folds of the fabric that locate my identity as visibly and undeniably Muslim: I am, and I am not “Just Like You.” I am you because we are both American. We are both women, with seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious experiences of discrimination in our shared society. We are both white women, with seen and unseen, conscious and unconscious experiences of privilege in our shared society. We both work, care about our families, vote, get sick, have babies, have hobbies, have parents, have memories, have fears. Who knows, maybe we both like Tori Amos and sushi and comics. But I am not like you because when you touch my head, when you pull me out of line, when you run the backs of your hands over my breasts and between my legs I feel like A Suspect. Who I am, by virtue of the religion that sang clearly to me through the confusing din of what it means to be human, puts me in a category of people that are “dangerous.” No amount of smiling erases that, though being so wonderfully compliant makes this process go easier for the both of us, doesn’t it? I’ll admit something that I feel ashamed about. I’m not myself in those situations. I’m the smiley girl going through security, smile-smile-smiling! my way through a process to prove that I’m not The Enemy, not The Dangerous Other, not A Suspect.

Sir, I am terrified of you. And you're terrified of me! Isn't that funny!

I don’t yet know what I’ve become in becoming Muslim, because the image is still fuzzy. As it sharpens, however, I am becoming aware of racial and gender categories that I never before considered. Having stepped into what felt to me like both a new and a deeply authentic, old self upon converting, I took on an identity that is intensely charged in my society. In some ways I have crossed over to “the other side,” what some people make careers of painting as a clutch of freedom-hating, inherently untrustworthy, completely un-relatable non-humans. In that sense I have become The Other in the same way that people of color–brown people and black people of all religious and ethnic backgrounds–are The Other. Or people who are not “White People,” who are not the norm, who are excluded from the norm by virtue of their religion or sexual orientation or ethnicity or whatever else. This has changed me. I’m afraid of things I was never afraid of before. I’m sad about things I was never sad about before. I feel solidarity in ways I never felt before. Example: lately, I’ve been feeling mad solidarity with Mormons. (Guys – I feel ya! Hang in there!)

In other ways, ways I haven’t even addressed here, I am still “white.” This is in relation to the non-Muslim American community and the Muslim American and overseas Muslim communities that I regularly interact with–and to the privileges I am afforded among both.

Fundamentally, what I have done is completely normal, and I am only one of many, many people who are untangling who they are as a result of what they have become (or, perhaps, always were). We are a nation of cultural mutants, transforming ourselves by experimenting with or wholly embracing different sexual identities, religious identities, sub-cultures, and so on, as a means of coming into our own. In the crucible of culture, I am remade; me, not me.

*At this second thought, however, I balk a bit. Am I not myself in public? Am I not myself around male friends? So much energy is spent on affirming that I am myself with and without my scarf, that’s it’s only a bit of fabric…A thought to explore for another day.

 

The Morning After

What a long night.

What a long, long night.

1. Knowing a couple ahead of time is important.

2. Language is important.

I wouldn’t turn down a request to volunteer with a stranger in need, but having worked with this couple last night, I can see how important it is to get to know people. It’s not just about comfort–that wasn’t the issue, but it certainly could have been–it was about expectations and preparation. It’s valuable knowing whether a couple has prepared for a birth (mentally, emotionally, physically, nutritionally, etc), because it lets me prepare myself. I know what techniques to draw upon, for example. Last night they had zero preparation, and it became clear that they had zero preparation for what to do after the baby arrived. This was a far cry from the experiences I’ve had working with and communing with people for whom preparation is a major component of pregnancy.

Language…had she delivered vaginally, or had I accompanied her for the cesarean, we could have communicated in those moments. There was empathy, and touch, and eye contact, and smiles, but it was in between words in another language. There was so much going back and forth through her husband, through a translator over the phone, through a family friend who showed up late, that not being able to speak her language became an impediment because I was no longer part of the team, or so it felt. The focus was on translation, and on the people who could do it, and those people in turn offered their support to her, such that what I was able to do in the moment was reduced to a hand on her arm or a smile, but I mostly felt like I was taking up space. What I was able to do was to take time to confirm that her husband understood what the nurses were saying, and to explain things to him slowly and clearly, which in turn he could explain to her.

Without going into detail, I’ll say that it was intense, educational, but a little sad. I couldn’t stay for the surgery and had to work today, so I haven’t seen her, so insh’Allah all are well.

At some point I’d like to write about what it’s like watching a c-section take shape (I keep thinking of dark clouds bundling together, the obviousness of approaching bad weather), but not tonight.

 

Blind Date

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, due to the fact that the last couple months and particularly the last couple weeks have been insane. I’ve used the word “overstretched” to describe how I feel to people. Stretched is a nice word, implying challenge; overstretched is not. But I have an hour right now to write, and something that I need to write about and to understand better by writing it.

I got a call on Friday from an OB caseworker at a clinic that I’d offered to volunteer with. She had a couple set to be induced this weekend, both immigrants, he speaks English, she doesn’t. Her induction is tonight, though I just found out that there are some early signs of labor happening. It’s exciting, it’s a little scary, it’s a lot of things.

The one thing on my mind right now is: how do I prepare to step into this incredibly intimate experience with two strangers? How do I enter an intimate experiential space with a woman who doesn’t share my language? Does it matter that we don’t speak the same language–will other, alternative, languages present themselves? There’s the language of context, where we assume what we’re communicating based on where we are, what’s happening, what happens in that place. There’s a language of sympathy, read in facial expressions, in a touch, a laugh. Then there’s translation; presumably her husband will be translating everything for her. What will that feel like? What will the dynamic be?

And, strangers. For the last birth I attended, I knew her as well as I could know someone that I’d been meeting with a handful of times, sessions where she’d describe what was happening between her and her OB, what she’d been practicing in classes, laughing about her husband setting up a crib, things like that. I didn’t really feel that I knew her until I stepped into the delivery room and witnessed a wide range of intense emotions and deep, deep sensations, with zero social niceties. It was about as real as real gets. It was awesome. There was a moment of strange fusion during the birth where I felt connected, to her, to the baby, to God, to other women, to other children, even to myself in the future and any children I might have (insh’Allah). I don’t know how to describe it in any other way. And maybe it didn’t even matter that we’d met a few times before, because it wasn’t me as a personality that she needed, it was companionship through fire itself.

I can do that, again, and again, and again. I think. I hope. And maybe it’s easier that they don’t know me as me. To them, I’m likely another in a set of characters they’re interacting with around the birth–caseworker, midwife, doula. They don’t need to know me, or that I’m a volunteer full of my own fears about experience and inexperience, or fears about my capacity for witnessing good and bad, joy and suffering alike. I can just be what they need, when they need it. Which is in about six hours…