My Accidental Jihad (12 page)

Now I lived in a suburban North Carolina neighborhood, in a town known as one of the most progressive in the state. Hybrid cars whispered past the neatly manicured lawns of identical homes; gleaming white mailboxes stood at attention at precise intervals along the sidewalk. Neighbors carried on heated listserv discussions about the ethics of free-roaming cats, the effect of chicken coops on property values, organic alternatives to pesticides for the community garden. Ours was an educated, liberal American community where rainbow-colored flags billowed in doorways and residents would have more easily sworn allegiance to diversity than to the American flag—but skin color in this neighborhood was a narrow spectrum of pale, like the palette favored by the Homeowners’ Association for exterior paint. Brown skin could be seen on these streets only once a month, when Spanish-speaking men in bright orange earphones marched down the street with weed cutters and leaf blowers. The residents closed their windows and drew their blinds to shut out the dust and noise. In the five years I had lived in the neighborhood, I could count on one hand the number of African Americans I had seen there: The woman who pulled into my neighbor’s driveway after she left for work each Monday to clean her home. The Jehovah’s Witness who appeared on my porch one hot, still afternoon in nylons and white square-heeled pumps, sweat stains darkening her polyester blouse. The men who hung off the back of the garbage truck as it made its way from house to house.

Once, at a neighborhood potluck in the cul-de-sac, I stood on a small island of grass ringed with asphalt, spooning macaroni and cheese into my mouth from a paper plate and chatting with our new neighbors. Recent retirees from California, they were clad from head to toe in pressed and immaculate white from their golf game earlier that day: pleated shorts and crisp collared shirts, bleached socks and fluffy sweatbands. Smiling broadly from beneath a visor that bore the name of a course in Maui, the woman told me she was very excited about the “diversity” in her new neighborhood. The word hung in the air between us, vibrating with hidden meaning. I felt like she was speaking to me in code; I had no idea what she was trying to say.

“I think it’s a wonderful, wonderful thing,” she beamed. As I listened to her, I mentally went house by house down our street, visualizing its residents: all white and middle class, every single one of them. And suddenly it dawned on me that she was referring to
my
family—to Aliya with her milky brown skin that darkened quickly in the summer. That’s when I realized that my family was on the other side of this invisible line; diversity was no longer an academic exercise but a too-small box into which people would try to squeeze my children.

Ismail was right: my discomfort about his bartering in the marketplace was not just about his wrangling over such a small amount of money. It was rooted in aversion to the strange little man with the cock-eyed stare, whose back was rounded like a turtle’s shell, who darted sideways like a crab through the alley. Unable to meet his one-eyed gaze, I had been nervously casting glances everywhere else: at the backs of other shoppers, at the dust hanging in the air around our ankles. So uncomfortable was I that even when he raised his voice to a shriek, I stole a quick, nervous glance only at his twisted mouth, then locked my gaze on the empty space just above his head, as if trying to erase his presence altogether. I wanted to believe that I was being compassionate and fair by giving him the price he requested, but there was another, less noble motive at play: to spend money rather than to engage a human being, to view him as a recipient of my charity rather than an equal, to use my affluence to buffer me from an unsettling world.

NOTHING ANNOYED ISMAIL
more than when I reached for something in the market—fresh dates on a branch, a gauzy scarf rippling with ocean colors, the tiniest Qur’an I had ever seen—and squealed with delight, calling out to him to come and see. Never, ever should I show my enthusiasm for a purchase, he said—because my naked desire made him feel as compromised as a boxer fighting with one hand tied behind his back. One afternoon Ismail wandered into a tiny stall fully in character: a disinterested customer, keenly aware of the flaws in the gold-embroidered children’s slippers on the table but possibly willing to take a couple off the vendor’s hands for the right price. (He wanted to purchase one pair for Aliya and one for her friend back home.) I hung back near the hanging tapestry that marked the edge of the stall, silent and watchful. The two men sized each other up with sidelong glances as Ismail circled a table piled high with cheap slippers. Then Ismail loudly announced that purchasing two pairs entitled him to a fifty percent discount—a claim that made the shopkeeper wince and snap his neck back as if he had been struck by an invisible hand.

Over a towering pile of thin plastic soles and frayed gold thread, the two men shot offers back and forth with escalating intensity that suggested the contest had become personal. A fine, continuous spray of spittle flew through the air between them. Suddenly the vendor swung around to face me and reached out as if he would cradle my cheeks in his hands. He addressed me in heavily accented English.

“Madam, how long you are with this man?”

“Six years?”

My voice, full of insecurity, trailed off at the end. Was my uncertainty about the intimate turn of this conversation or the vow I had made to Ismail? I instantly wished I could take the words back, restate them with more confidence.

He looked at me with big, sad eyes and swung his large head slowly back and forth in pity, grunting and clucking his tongue, his leathery face creased with compassion.

“So sorry, madam.
So
sorry.”

He fluttered the fingers of one hand in front of his lips, as if trying to pull at the tangled thread of words in his mouth. I watched those undulating hands like a cobra watches the slow-moving tip of the snake charmer’s flute. Finally he spoke, clumsily drawing out his rusty English:

“Thirty years I am in this market . . .
thirty years
!
”

With his arm raised, his index finger pointed straight up to the sky, he paused to allow me to absorb this: three decades in the dark corner of a narrow, dusty alley; thirty long years spent piling cheap shoes in precarious stacks on a wooden table and haggling over a few dollars in the hot Libyan sun.

“Never, never,
never
did I see a man like this.” He leveled his index finger at Ismail’s chest like a victim identifies a criminal in a courtroom. Ismail watched our exchange, smiling and unfazed, looking very much like a wise man or an idiot.

The vendor locked eyes with me. His black eyes drilled straight into mine, into the darkest center where I kept my secret heartache. When two people commit their lives to one another, Americans offer champagne and bath towels, kitchen appliances and well wishes in flowery script. But this was the very first time someone had offered me pity or sympathy for predicament of my marriage, had ever acknowledged the suffering contained in this difficult union. I felt totally exposed. This man could see all the secrets I carried: my petty misunderstandings and accumulated resentments, the lonely nights I lay on the narrow edge of my bed, tense and sleepless.

On those nights I lay utterly still, face to the window, as Ismail slept. Through a crack in the curtain my neighbor’s back porch light shone like a lighthouse beacon, just beyond reach of this turbulent marriage, where colliding expectations led to towering waves of loneliness and despair. I stared at that small, bright light and wondered about our neighbors: high school sweethearts from a small town only a couple of hours away. They had attended the same university; during basketball season they wore matching jerseys and hung the flag of their alma mater on their porch. Each October they propped on their lawn a scarecrow in a rakish straw hat, and it beamed at us with relentless good cheer each time we passed by. Its smile was as bright and unchanging as our neighbors’ when we saw them weeding the lawn together, heading to the gym in matching nylon sweatsuits, or sharing sections of the newspaper on their porch on weekend mornings. In December they emerged bundled in sweaters to follow one another around their small yard, one holding lengths of plastic green wire aloft while the other navigated around the bushes, stringing small colorful lights over each prickly shrub that bordered their walkway. They looked like brother and sister—their pink-white skin painted from the same canvas, their identical accents creating a harmony of soprano and bass lines. It must be so much easier, I imagined, to pair up like two of a kind on Noah’s ark, to choose a mate cut from the same cloth and to pave a future smooth as asphalt, covering so much common ground: faith, food, television shows, politics, hobbies, humor.

When Ismail’s behavior was particularly maddening to me, I told myself that cultural differences were the source of our misunderstandings. It comforted me to imagine that even when he seemed the most impossible to understand, his behavior made sense somewhere very far away, on the other side of the world. But now I was seized with a terrifying thought: what if he was in fact maddening on
both
sides of the world?

Seeing my worried expression, Ismail said something to the vendor in Arabic, and the two men looked from one another to me and burst into laughter, shaking their heads like old friends with a long-running joke between them.

To me, it seemed unbearably intimate to engage a stranger this way, eye-to-eye and countering his demands with my own; it was hard enough to do this with my most close-knit relationships. I’d spent the last six years waiting impatiently, and with mounting disappointment, for Ismail to decipher longings that I expressed as a lingering gaze, a crestfallen look, a pregnant silence. I thought that was the way true love was supposed to work: if he adored me, if he stared deeply enough into my eyes, he would understand desires I couldn’t articulate or even fully understand myself. After so many missed cues, off-base assumptions, and cyclical arguments, we were finally learning to convey our needs and desires to each other—in a fumbling and awkward way, like stiff-legged toddlers who stumble and jerk as they take their first halting steps forward.

But in the marketplace, Ismail showed no trepidation, no doubt or misunderstanding. He faced vendors squarely, engaging them intuitively in a dance of challenge and compromise: pressing and yielding, voices rising and falling, until the balance of power was reached and a deal could be struck. I wanted to learn to speak that language.

A
fter my first few days in Libya, I recognized a pattern: at any home we visited, Ismail would stay by my side for the introductions, then disappear into another room with the men and leave me alone with my female relatives for hours. If I went in desperation to find him, I faced the critical stares of patriarchs who could not believe my audacity to have entered the men’s room and interrupted their conversation. They scowled at Ismail like restaurant patrons do at the parents of poorly behaved children, silently imploring him to take control of his charge. So instead I stayed put. Here, there would be no escape for hours, so I tried to surrender to my circumstances. The circle of women closed around me like a tent. I took a deep breath and studied the hands around me—refilling a teacup, resting on a thigh, tucking a strand of hair beneath a head scarf. I listened to the rustle of long dresses and smelled something buttery and sweet in the oven.

In the United States I spent most daylight hours in an office tapping on a keyboard until my wrists ached. I equated travel with being outside—surfing waves, walking city streets, hiking narrow mountain paths—and I had looked forward to spending my vacation in the sun, exploring Libya. But nearly all my time in Ismail’s native country would be spent inside the crowded homes of women who called me sister, aunt, or daughter. While other foreigners took guided tours of Roman ruins or were whisked into the desert on air-conditioned buses, I sat thigh-to-thigh with my relatives at social gatherings that often lasted as long as an entire workday. Hours and days slipped past in a blur as I lounged on floor pillows, lulled into a stupor by the steady hum of Arabic, the whistle of boiling water, the tinkle of porcelain and laughter.

The women chatted and stared at me with naked curiosity while I smiled politely and sipped my syrupy-sweet green tea out of a tiny glass cup, never understanding a word that was spoken. One day, while I sat with these women for five hours straight, a twisting in my gut forced me to rise abruptly and step over them as I rushed to the bathroom. As I sat on the toilet, the cold, damp tile soaking through my socks, I heard a whispered conference outside the thin door. The knob gently turned and a hand appeared through the crack in the door, offering me first slippers, then toilet paper. When I emerged several minutes later, curious faces turned toward me in unison to stare. I returned to my place among them on the floor, mute and miserable, the gurgle and groan of my stomach my only contribution to the conversation.

Watching my mother-in-law raise herself slowly from the floor and shuffle into the kitchen, I felt sorry for her and her daughters. Their days passed mostly in these cramped rooms; their lives revolved in a tight orbit around their families and their faith. They would never know the thrill of boarding an airplane alone for a destination they’d never seen; they’d never have a credit card in their name or enjoy the endorphin rush of a hard workout. My long runner’s legs jutted like sharp outcroppings among the soft hills of their bodies. Back home, my hips were too broad to fit into designer jeans, but Hajja was right: in Libya I was far too skinny. None of the women I encountered were as angular as I was. I’d taken up running in college in Southern California after I’d tried to tamp down my homesickness and anxiety in the cafeteria with bowl after bowl of pasta and ice cream and sugary cereal. The fifteen pounds I’d quickly gained horrified me, and I began to run each morning along the edge of the Pacific, my feet sinking heavily into the sand. I ran until my chest heaved and my legs turned rubbery, until I doubled over to catch my breath. I ran until I no longer felt the fear that pressed against my rib cage like a tumor. Running had been my religion ever since, my path to a fleeting sense of peace and well-being. I’d run through painful breakups, cross-country moves, the completion of a master’s thesis, and a persistent longing I couldn’t name.

As far as I could tell, the only exercise routine my sisters-in-law maintained was their five daily prayers, when they stood erect, then bent at the waist, then knelt and prostrated on the floor, placing their foreheads on the ground facing Mecca. Yet somehow without the benefit of daily aerobic exercise, they glowed as if endorphins coursed through their veins. Curled up on floor pillows like cats, their low laughter a contented purr, they were far more relaxed than my fit and toned girlfriends back home, who needed at least one drink to unwind this much.

“You’re too skinny! Eat!” Ismail whispered in my ear late at night, gently pinching my thigh and pulling me closer to him beneath the covers. He was teasing, but I knew that deep down he agreed with his mother. I had always known him to be effusive with his compliments, but his praise of my figure often included a baffling invitation.

“I love every inch of your body,” he might say. Then, after a brief pause: “And I sure would love more of it to hold on to—ten, even twenty, more pounds. Anytime you feel like relaxing and spreading out a bit, you go right ahead.” He’d wink and smile, and I’d stare at him in mute confusion. Growing up in California in the seventies, I learned to define feminine beauty as bronzed supermodels with bellies as taut as drums. I thought women were supposed to be light as air, diaphanous as angels, luminous and lean. But these round Libyan women, so solidly planted on the earth, were undeniably lovely. Their soft, concealed bodies; their bright, open faces; their infectious laughter and big gestures; their calm, inviting presence redefined loveliness for me. Watching them, I finally understood how Ismail defined beauty.

My mother-in-law, Hajja, kept close watch over me, her one good eye meeting my gaze while the other cloudy, unseeing one stared over my shoulder into the distance. Her eye was irreparably damaged from a beating she sustained at the hands of Ismail’s father—a violation that my husband was still unable to forgive decades later. He told me his illiterate mother, with her wall-eyed gaze and her weathered, tattooed face, was brilliant—that she was the reason he had made it all the way to the United States to earn his doctorate. Each night when he was a child, his father returned from the market stall where he worked and dropped an oily, wrinkled paper bag full of that day’s earnings onto the floor where the family was gathered. Each night, Hajja stole a small handful of bills from that bag and stashed them in her room, saving the spare change to buy pieces of gold, which she then squirreled away until her children needed them most.

Though she had never even learned to read, she was determined that each of her four daughters would finish college. When her daughters were students at the university, she cajoled neighbors and friends into driving her across town to campus so she could introduce herself to their professors and inquire about their academic progress. When Ismail was a teenager doing his mandatory service in the Libyan army, his mother convinced a neighbor to chaperone her to the military barracks so she could visit him. She approached the gates cradling her newborn son close to her chest: the last of thirteen children she delivered. Middle-aged by then, she shuffled down the road like a grandmother. Nearly two decades of childbirth, nursing, parenting, and grieving lost children had aged her physically, creased her face, and collapsed her shoulders into the weight of her heavy breasts. But she was also steely-eyed and fearless, as tough on the inside as a street fighter. She stopped at an iron gate where a sullen army officer sat in a plastic bucket seat in a small room.

“I’m here to see my son,” she announced, shifting the slight weight of the newborn on her chest.

“No visitors,” the army officer barked. He waved her off like a mosquito without even looking at her.

“I need to see him. I’m here to show him his newborn brother,” Hajja insisted, planting her feet and straightening her shoulders.

“No visitors. Go home!”

When she raised her voice and reiterated her demand once more through the narrow window, he leapt from his chair and exploded through the door, kicking and swatting at her like a stray dog. She shielded her infant with her arms and backed away as he hurled limbs and insults at her. She found refuge from the blistering sun in a nearby drainage ditch, where she sat cross-legged and fuming with her baby until her neighbor returned to deliver her home. She never forgot the face or name of that army officer, a petty Gaddafi man from her hometown. More than three decades later, during the uprising, she called us at home in North Carolina to report triumphantly that he had panicked and fled the country like a dog with its tail between its legs.

Ismail often wondered what his mother might have accomplished if she had been born into a different culture, a different era, a different country. They had a running joke between them: when she shared her opinions about the world with Ismail, and he complimented her intelligence, she held up her thumb and pointer finger as if to measure a tiny sliver of air. “If only I had the tiniest bit of education—just this much—I would have been unstoppable,” she would say.

Hajja flew in a plane only twice in her life: to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, to perform the Hajj—the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca—and to Italy, an hour-long flight over the Mediterranean, to visit her sister whose husband worked briefly at the Libyan embassy in Rome. She spent her first day ever outside Libya wandering down narrow Italian cobblestone streets. When she grew tired, she squatted down on the sidewalk and drew her thin cloth over her head to rest. A few moments later she heard a sound like a tiny metallic raindrop—
plink
—hitting the ground nearby. Then another, and another. A few coins rolled across the cobblestone and settled near her feet, and she realized that the Italians walking past assumed she was a beggar. When Hajja told me this story, she slapped her hand on her thigh, threw her head back, and laughed, her gold tooth glinting in the light.

Late one evening, exhausted and jet-lagged, I excused myself from a large social gathering in the main room and retreated to Hajja’s bedroom, where I lay down on a thin cushion on the floor. Just as I closed my eyes, the door squeaked open and she padded quietly into the room. Her joints creaked and popped as she gathered her dress around her and lowered herself to the ground by my head. I opened my eyes to see her smiling at me from only inches away.

A rush of panic came over me as I squeezed my eyes shut. The strange language, the foreign smells and tastes, the social gatherings that lasted longer than a full workday—these aspects of Libya I had been able to handle. But a mother-in-law who sat only inches from my face watching me sleep—this I did not think I could bear. In my family, we considered personal space to be sacred. At family gatherings we tiptoed carefully around one another, ever fearful of becoming an imposition. Firmly believing the adage that fish and visitors stank after three days, we limited our visits to weekends—even when we flew across the entire country to see one another, even when we hadn’t seen one another in months. As guests in one another’s homes, we pounced on the first opportunity to clean a dish or clear a table, anything to minimize the burden of our presence. And we never, ever opened closed doors.

After a few moments, I heard a long sigh and the soft rustling of cloth. I opened my eyes to see Hajja first rubbing her tired eyes and then tugging loose the thin head scarf she had worn since my arrival. She swept it from her head, and long, spindly strands of hair came tumbling down around her face. To my great surprise, her hair was an electric red—a rich, playful, utterly unexpected color. Noticing my wide-eyed look of surprise, Hajja began to laugh—an explosive cackle that opened up her face and shook her pendulous breasts in her lap. Pointing to her hair, she repeated one of the few Arabic words I understood:
henna
. I nodded and reached out to touch a long strand that had fallen across her shoulder. Her hair was as silken as a child’s. I wrapped a strand around my fingers while Hajja held my gaze, smiling. All my awkwardness, all my resistance to the strange and relentless intimacy of this place, disappeared.

During my last week in Libya, my sisters-in-law insisted on dressing me in traditional clothing. With my eyes closed, I felt fingertips sweep through my hair as someone brushed it; I felt warm breath on my cheek as someone else stroked eyeshadow gently over my lids. My sisters-in-law spent hours decorating my feet and hands with intricate henna designs. No one stopped to answer a text message, make a phone call, or check email. No one grew antsy because she needed to run errands or get to the gym or have time to herself. Each gave her time and attention lavishly, as if these precious resources flowed through her blood like the oil that coursed beneath the Libyan desert. I drank in the intimacy in the room, and it warmed me from the inside, loosened the tension in my neck, turned time into something warm and fluid, in which I was completely submerged.

Seeing the faces of my sisters-in-law crowded around mine, I was overcome for the first time with envy. I could not imagine living as they did, confined mostly to their homes and subject to the will of their husbands—and yet I ached for the intimacy they shared, for their selfless generosity, for their abiding faith and the slow pace of their daily lives, devoid of my typically American concerns: balancing career and family, saving for retirement, trying to stay fit and thin. They would never experience the freedoms I enjoyed, but neither would they have to correspond with their closest relatives by email from thousands of miles away. They would never negotiate eight weeks’ maternity leave with a boss who viewed that arrangement as generous or leave their tiny babies with a stranger for eight hours while they sat in an office across town. They would never worry that the lines on their face made them less marketable in a tough economy. They would never know the persistent sense of failure or the creeping despair that comes from doggedly chasing the elusive dream that women can be everything at once: sexy and youthful, independent and financially successful, extraordinary mothers and wives.

They turned me in circles, wrapping stiff, gold-embroidered cloth around my body, then covered my head in even more cloth and girded my neck with an ornate gold necklace that hung all the way to my waist. I liked to wear clothes that showed off my best features (long legs, narrow waist) and minimized my worst ones (small chest, big bottom). But beneath these concealing layers of cloth, my body was no longer divided into good and bad parts; it was a seamless whole. I had always equated feeling sexy with feeling beautiful, but swaddled in this material I felt entirely different: hidden and safe.