Archives for July, 2005

Some part of me needs to be
Taken out behind the barn and shot
By some other part of me.

I’m not sure which part is writing this.
Perhaps that will become clear
Once we make it behind the barn.

What then? The ribbon of film runs out
And you think: In one sense you’ve lost yourself,
But in another you haven’t because

Who is this you you’ve lost?
Said another way, who was that you
And who is the you who feels the loss?

- Michael Barrish

Originally posted September 17, 2004

The kids watch TV indiscriminately. Besides the usual cartoons, which I monitor from feminist and anti-racist perspectives, they watch the news, documentaries, whatever everyone else is watching.

I had left BBC on this morning and exited the room for a short while just before BBC began a feature on Africa. When I returned the two of them were staring at the TV with wide-eyed horror.
The feature was on child soldiers, I don’t know where specifically. Abdullah said, with his mouth slack, something about one of the the boys now on the screen having had to take another child’s brain out, something about blood. The presenter is talking about “unspeakable horrors,” explaining that these children must either commit these atrocities or have suffer these deaths themselves.
As he speaks, the camera scans the faces of the children. They are all boys, and all but one stare back at the screen blankly. One seems to smile; he’s handsome.
The camera returns to the presenter, who informs us he is about tell us the story of another child, a girl. He warns us that the story is disturbing, that if there are children in the room, it would be advisable to ask them to leave.

I change the channel. We are now staring at the complacent face of a Conservative MP talk about same-sex marriage in the House of Commons.

Aishah appears close to tears. Abdullah is draped over a chair on the other side of the room, seems to be holding himself away from the TV.
For the rest of the day the three of us are irritable. I keep trying to decide what my stance on childhood innocence is, whether or not there is such a thing, whether or not I do the right thing when I let the kids watch things about the real world that reveal more evil than any of us are capable of comprehending.

I remember waking up one night when everyone else was asleep and switching on the TV. This too was Africa, still unnamed. A group of soldiers surrounded a young boy, were kicking him as he lay on the ground, screaming. The TV was on mute, but in my memories, it’s as though I can hear him. They stripped him of his clothes, tied his arms, his legs. They kept beating him. I see him now, curled on the ground like a feotus, and the soldiers arranged around him in a circle; they are laughing.

I was shaking, crying, sitting there on the floor in the flickering light of the TV.
This was the during the first month we spent in Canada, before I enrolled in grade nine.
The image of that crying boy has blurred over time.

I do not cry now, when I watch the news. Still the sickening lurch of the stomach is there. Still the unfocused anger and guilt. Still the question – why does God allow this?
The answers are always too glib for me to connect to the reality of the atrocities that we continue to allow.

And yet, concretely, what can I do? I stump myself with this question, effectively silence my conscience.

My father often speaks of having to own up to one’s sins on the Day of Judgement. He often speaks of caring for the poor, for family. And yet, it seems to me, if God is Omnipotent, and if we are God’s vicegerents, then our responsibility extends worldwide. We will be held accountable for the fates of people we never met. I truly believe that, but when has belief ever amounted to anything. I don’t know what to do, how to help. How to save the world.

We have three computers in the house. There is the laptop that I have appropriated (it’s really for my mom) and two desktops. Over the years, we’ve shuffled the hardware around a lot. Right now, the upstairs computer has the oldest monitor in the house. We bought it, an LG, when we were in Saudi Arabia, so that makes it at least 6 years old. In the computer world, that’s archaic. It’s practically an heirloom.

Anyway, I’ve been working on my portfolio, soon to be uploaded to likethewind. Everything is going pretty well, though I wish I’d learned PHP like I’d intended months ago; it would automate a lot of things that I have to do by hand now.
What’s not going well is the colour scheme. It’s a basic light green and white colour scheme.
Upstairs, the light green is a hideous, nauseous, neon atrocity that borders on yellow. And yes, I understand this is an old monitor, so I shouldn’t worry too much. But I have a few doubts that I can’t shake off :

1. I’ve done all the designing on the laptop. All it takes is to tilt the screen slightly to totally destroy colour contrasts. This is an issue with all sites and most laptops. What this means is that I can keep angling the screen until I get any site to show decently, and so I have no real guarantee that the colour brightnesses and contrasts of my own sites are actually alright.
2. Not everyone is on the bleeding razor edge of technology – which is perfectly normal. There’s no real reason to keep “updating” your computer every year when it isn’t central to your life. However, this means that there is the possibility that someone will visit ltw with a monitor long past its prime. There’s no reason to subject them to the horror that my site presents itself as in that situation.
3. None of the other sites I visited on the upstairs computer hurt my eyes. They show up fine on all three screens; they’re thrown off only slightly by the LG. So I’m clearly missing something.

And so, as always, I turn to Google and my bookmarks. I unearthed the following resources; hopefully they’ll help me get through this. I need this folio up ASAP.

• excerpt from Chapter 2 of “Web Graphics for Non-Designers” – Using Colour
• The Return of Design – Color Schemes (excellent resource)
• mezzoblue – Colour Schemes – from he of CSS Zen Garden fame.
• And all that Malarkey – Creating colour palettes – uses Macromedia Fireworks MX.

When I go to see him, he is scared, but he does not cry, although you can see that he is holding back, that it is what he will probably do as soon as I leave. Carcinoma, he tells me. Carcinoma, they call it.
A month goes by. The carcinoma gets worse, spreads slowly, a labourer toiling for daily wages.

- A Witness to Life, Terence M. Green

Strange how these things happen, like over-exposed scenes from almost award winning movies.
Dry eyed, holding her, because this is what we do.
The idea that this is natural does not escape me. And it isn’t fear that seeps in between the cracks. Not yet, though I expect the time will come for that, too.
No, for now, I don’t know why the tears sometimes force themselves out, leak singly down my face.
Sometimes, there are blurred premonitions of what awaits us, but these are quickly painted over.

In the meantime, the world continues to roll on. The details of living are no less mundane for now being threatened.
There is a deep-seated sense of wonder, almost awe, at the inconsequential way these things happen.
There wasn’t even a soundtrack.

A few days ago I turned 20. And on that inconsequential day, I firmly resolved to put my adolescence behind me. I knew this would require a change in mindset before anything else. It would mean, among other things, getting up when fallen. And standing even when beaten.

Yesterday, I said goodbye to the little brother. The night before we’d argued like it was any other day, the same bitter flame of irritation flaring in both our eyes. At that moment, it was real, and his leaving was still something not yet faced.
Even now, I haven’t yet had to face his absence, his silence being partially cloaked by the cousin’s presence.

What followed was a night of hell, familiar in its mundane pounding.

The next morning, after having gotten under 10 hours of sleep in the last two days, I accompanied my parents to the hospital. My uncle drove, because I still don’t have my G2.

The news wasn’t surprising; my father has cancer.

It was like a scene out of a movie. And still life grinds on, in its routine, heart-breaking way.
Still I watch, as much an outsider as ever. As stung by the routine ugliness as ever. And nothing changes, really.

He’s due for a CT scan, and then surgery. Only after the surgery will we know if the cancer has spread. His older brother, the one who gave me peanuts so many years ago, who looked just like him, died of cancer when I was in elementary school.

Meanwhile, my parents want to move back to Toronto, to return to the old neighbourhood, from which I’d thought myself freed, finally. I swallow my dread, because this can’t be about me, not now. And yet, the prison walls draw ever closer and there’s nothing I can do about anything, being bound by debilitating guilt.

I won’t be made to feel guilty for something I had nothing to do with.

But this madness, this cannibalism permeates the air, the water. The very light we see by is poisoned by our inability to comprehend the blood that flows, in other people’s veins, on the walls. Splattered on the walls that are scattered on the ground.

I am afraid of becoming immune, unresponsive. Of becoming one of the untouchables. Of being able to drive by the remnants of homes and livelihoods without any understanding of the lives that made these things real.
I am afraid of becoming part of the faceless mass that stands by in uncomprehending apathy while lives are scattered like so many shreds of confetti. Does it matter if those lives where there beside you, shared the same colour passport, whether those lives called some other piece of sky home?
Yes, of course, it does. This is what we call reality.

Reality, what we swallow. Like the vitamins we take everyday because we can’t be bothered to forage out carrots and apples and kiwis from our fridges and supermarket aisles.
Today, someone will die. Here, have a reality pill. You will never meet her, never know the way she clenches her hands while walking, the way her eyelashes lie languidly on her cheeks when she sleeps. And so you will not be touched; that is as it should be. She didn’t really matter, anyway. Starving to death, dying of AIDS, scraping by on welfare, shot to death, torn apart by a bomb.
Today bombs went off, the world over. But first, you need to make sure you’ve taken your daily dose of reality. Then you can face the onslaught of mere blood and flesh that pockmark the globe. And here, it was close to home. It was almost you. So here, you are allowed to express rage and wonder and fear and grief. But there, that’s too far away. So why should you care, especially when those victims come so close to be your enemies.
We divide our grief into portions, their sizes proportional to the amount of reality we swallow every day.

I’ve given up on the world.
I’m sticking close to home. Where, simply by my presence, I can affect some sort of change.

• and let not the hatred of others to you make you swerve to wrong and depart from justice. (Ali)
• and do not let the hatred of some people hurt you so much that you are not fair. (Cleary)
• and let not hatred of any people seduce you that ye deal not justly. (Pickthal)
• and let not hatred of a people incite you not to act equitably. (Shakir)

I get the usual question, “Is your family ok?”
And I give what is becoming my standard response.

No one in my family was killed, and this is surprising because my father’s side lives in Pottuvil, which is right next to Galle, which was one of the most publicised spots in the country after the tsunami. In fact, one of my cousins, 6-year-old Shifa, lived in Galle.
School had just finished when the waves hit, and Shifa and her classmates had just begun heading home. I have her on video. The quality is crap and it’s dark, but it’s clear that her face is perfectly straight as she narrates her story. The class teacher, on seeing the oncoming waves, collected the kids and put them all up in a tree, and only then climbed for safety himself.
Of the the 30 kids in her class, only 6 survived.

She now lives in Pottuvil, with the rest of our extended family. Her parents worry that sending her back to her old school, which has reopened, would be traumatising.

I remember that night, after she told us her story for our “records,” she had nightmares and woke up crying.

So this is the story I tell people when they ask how my family is. And a few days ago I got the strangest response.
The woman I’d been speaking to looked at me with a look in her eyes that made me uncomfortable; it was almost a hungry look, something slightly savage.
“Did she grow?” she asked.
Confused, I stammered, “She was six at the time -”
“No, I mean, did she grow … mentally?”
“Oh.” I paused, Shifa’s face in my mind’s eye. She was one of the few people I’d been comfortable speaking Tamil with my whole month in Sri Lanka. I only ever saw her at night, when she was home from school, and so her memory is inextricably linked with that black, sequinned sky.
“I don’t know.” Something about the question made me withdraw, made me regard this woman with something like distrust. “I’d never met her before, I hadn’t known she existed, so I don’t really know whether she grew or not.”

And I couldn’t place what it was about that seemingly innocuous question that troubled me. The understanding of it comes and goes in blurred flashes. The sense that this was a romantic question, a breath-takingly naive question, the sort that we ask when we have no idea whatsoever what we’re really talking about. As though something holy had been betrayed, trampled on, photographed by blind tourists.

Growth?
Like it’s something you casually mention in small talk. How one’s soul grows, whether in leaps or bounds, after spending a day (that’s how long the child was missing) in a tree, watching people die. How children’s memories are imprinted with bodies being washed away, and the realisation that parents are as mortal and unreliable as everyone else.
As though these were things I could succintly put into bite-size sentences to make it easy for her to understand, easy to swallow, to digest.
As though really, it was for her own growth. Her own search for meaning, and she wanted to find it in someone else’s tragedy.

I think that her question unnerved me, because it reminded me of the problems I’d had with our alms-giving in Sri Lanka. We all think that there is power in helping others, that some sort of beauty must surround us because we help others. It becomes about us, not about the action, not about the victim. It’s not as obvious as, say, a celebrity donating a few thousand to some “exotic” charity while reporters and photographers crowd around. It’s much more personal than that, and much more systemic, too.
We’re out to save the world, as though the world were an entity that cannot live without our help. We’re out to save the world, because we think that unless we have seen death first hand, we cannot grow. We do it for purely selfish reasons; we want to grow.

I don’t know what it is; still it eludes me. Why I felt so uncomfortable when I taped the things we did, why I draw back when people assume an understanding they can’t handle. Why this understanding eldues me.
Surely I don’t have to go half-way across the world to understand myself.
And surely, you don’t need to devour someone else’s most private moments to come to terms with your own emptiness.

The purpose of any organisation is debatable. What you think a group of people is supposed to do is representative more of yourself than of that particular organisation. The same holds for any MSA.
These are what I think all MSAs should attempt to accomplish, in order of importance:

1. Provide a safe space on campus for religious activities for all Muslim students
2. Do social work with the local Muslim community
3. Generate positive images of Muslims

As to the first, providing essential services for Muslims, Queen’s University Muslim Students’ Association does pretty well. A few years back, a lot of people, many of them women, would have argued otherwise. It’s gotten better, though. Sure, it’s not perfect and I don’t expect that it ever will be. The one thing I have learned is that there is no such thing as The Association, meaning that there is nothing that defines any organisation, particularly QUMSA. At any one moment in time, an organisation is only ever defined by the people who influence (and who may or may not be on the exec) that organisation. So with a change of administration comes a new QUMSA (to some extent).
Right now, QUMSA maintains a prayer room, where daily prayers are held every day, five times day. Every Friday, Jummah is held in a hall that is usually large enough to accomodate all the attendees. The prayer room and the Jummah hall are in the John Deutsche University Centre, so that it’s conveniently close to almost everyone on campus. (Accessibilty is another issue. The musallah can only be reached by stairs.)
Every weekday in Ramadan, there are Iftars in the the Musallah. The Iftars are cooked for us by the local Muslim community, who look after us very well. On Sundays, a bus rolls by the JDUC to take anyone interested to the Islamic Society of Kingston, the local mosque, for the weekly community Iftar. On Saturdays, you’re expected to fend for yourself.
During Ramadan, the musallah overflows with people and shoes and food. It’s my favourite time of the year, because you don’t often get that sense of community during the rest of the year.
Also, we have our own Frosh Week, designed to fit in with larger Queen’s faculty frosh weeks.

Secondly, does QUMSA have a community outreach program?
No.
This year some of the exec are interested in working with the Ministry of Community and Social Services to provide Islamic services to Muslim foster kids in the Kingston area. Whether or not this works out will depend on whether or not the rest of the exec show a little bit more enthusiasm.
Last year thre were murmurings of blood drives and visiting patients in Kingston General Hospital (which is right on campus) and things of that nature. Invariably, the response was “that’s a good idea, we’ll see.” And then nothing happens. It’s that lukewarm attitude of “do it yourself then” that irritates me.
The thing about QUMSA is that is mostly made of people who are not from Kingston (I, for one, still don’t consider myself a “Kingstonian.”) A lot of them are international students; they leave the country once their program is over. Most of them are from out of town; they don’t even spend their summers here. That’s the only way I can justify the lack of interest in community outreach. I figure that they don’t feel like they have any real connections to this place and so they, quite simply, don’t care. And after all, it’s a whole lot easier to donate money to some charity that’ll help people you’ll never see than it is to actually meet the people right here at home who need that same help. That sense of distance is important to alms-giving, because it helps maintain the idea that the person who gives is intrinsically different from the person who receives; it is assumed that there is power in giving.
Once you remove that distance, things get more complicated. You actually have to meet these foster kids, many of whom may have only grudgingly agreed to meet you. You have to talk to people whose bitterness closely mirrors your own complacency. Whose pride offends your belief in the rightness of your in/actions.
And it requires more effort. From university students at various stages in their education. You’re asking them to take time out from their endless labs and papers and brown-nosing to do things that may not be all the rewarding.

There is a reason I put the anti-racist movement last. I figure that if you do the first two things reasonably well, you’ll have basically covered the third.
Every Ramadan for the last three years now, QUMSA has participated in the national Fast-a-thon, where nonMuslims are invited to fast for a day. On their behalf, QUMSA contributes some hefty sum of money to a local charity. I forget how many people pledged last year, but of them 100 showed up for the Iftar. In turn, we donated $1000 to the university food bank. It was a feel-good event, and we even had a couple people show more than the usual interest in Islam and Muslims afterwards.
Every year we also hold a token Islamic Awareness Week. We put up posters, get a speaker or two, show some movies. Last year’s theme was Diversity in Islam. The timing sucked – it was too close to final exams – and so not as many people showed up for the movies as we would have liked (we showed Malcolm X and A New Life in a New Land).
And that’s the extent of our formal anti-racist efforts.

Again, my opinion is that if we were more attentive to our duties to the needy in our local communities, I wouldn’t feel like such a hypocrite when we put up posters about Islam protecting the rights of the poor and the elderly and such.
That’s not to say that I think the individual members of QUMSA fail in their duties as Muslims; that isn’t for me to judge. However, who we are as individuals and who we are collectively as QUMSA are two very different things. More needs to be done in QUMSA’s name in order to prove that Muslim communities, as opposed to Muslim individuals, are capable of following their own laws. And that’s the thing – up until this point, I never really believed that “communities” existed. I could not see how a group of people was supposed to take on a personality. But once you create an organisation that is supposed to represent a group of people, you are insisting that this community is real.

Near the end of last year, one of America’s more publicised Arab Muslim-haters visited campus. The speaker, who doesn’t need to be named because she was that generic, spewed forth run-of-the-mill hate and blatantly false statistics (Muslims breed at the rate of 50 kids a family). What followed was a flurry of letters to the editor, some from Muslims, some not, some from QUMSA, some not.
I couldn’t help but feel, even in the midst of our righteous raging, that we needed a more consistent anti-racist effort to combat things like this. Two major events a year and a few letters to the university paper just don’t cut it.

So what is the Muslim community at Queen’s like?
If you were an outsider, quite honestly, I don’t think QUMSA could tell you.

I believe in grassroots movements, in people working as individuals. Once you get constitutions and executives and agendas, you lose part of the essence of your movement.
But once upon a time, I was a kid fresh out of high school, and I thought that QUMSA would be my gateway into a whole new revolution. And I suppose it was, but the revolution was far more personal than I’d expected.

I don’t regret joining QUMSA. I’m often frustrated by its members, but that’s a given. I’m often frustrated that I don’t do enough, but that’s given, too.
So I dunno. I’m QUMSA’s Publicity Officer this year. So I suppose this post should have been much more positive. But that would have been lying.

Basit had a post on representing the Muslims of the future. Right now, QUMSA is not the sort of association that thinks that far ahead, and that’s my basic problem with it.
Even more fundamental than that is the suspicion that the failings are all mine. If I were a better person, a better Muslim, a better activist (these things not being exclusive), simply by the force of my belief, things would be better. That’s naive, yes, and egocentric, too. But it helps keep the apathy somewhat at bay.