Archives for September, 2005

Blogs (still a phonetically ugly word) are essentially deceptive. With my shaky PhD ambitions and handy computer dictionary/thesaurus, I can puff myself up as much as I like and no one online knows any better.
Bloggers have so much control over their media and contents, that even self-deprecation becomes meaningless. Then again, how often is self-deprecation, either off- or on-line, ever genuine?
My mind is beginning to run around in ever-shrinking circles, threatening to trip over trifling phrases trying to figure out where this tangent leads: how blogs create their owners; how the act of “personal writing” is adapted to generate mass appeal; how bloggers delineate and maintain separate identities, ones that differ from location to location, from site to site.
But that wasn’t the point of the article, and I couldn’t figure out those things on my own. (There should be English seminar courses on the influence of the Internet on literature. It’s obvious, for instance, how the printing press influenced Western European literature in the 1700s. We can highlight and post-it the conflicts between oral and written traditions in transitional works from that location and time. There is something much more interesting, infinitely more reflexive, and disturbingly narcissistic about studying the changes of the present day, especially when one is actively involved in those changes.
Still, I travel the tangent.)

No, what I meant to discuss was how you can build up an appearance of knowledge, because you restrict yourself to those things that you are knowledgeable about. And then, because you don’t want to look stupid, you only ever make passing remarks about things that out of your league. Your denial of ignorance becomes the paint spill that boxes you into a corner. It’s self-perpetuating, trying to be smart.
Still I ramble.

Specifically, I wanted to talk about my own ignorance, my envy at those who know the things I want to know, who wear that knowledge so comfortably, and my refusal to put in the time and effort it takes to acquire that knowledge, to patch together my own robe of many colours.
Because I can’t remember the names of books and authors. The other day I stumbled over James Joyce, knowing full well his name was a double J, he was Irish, he was famous, he wrote books I own. So it stings like pins and needles when these proper nouns roll off the tongues of the strangers two rows behind me.
And I can’t list dates, defining moments in history, draw lines in maps to show how the world once appeared to people long since dead and always deluded. I don’t take away from books stark memories of pivotal moments and lives.
And I listen to other people’s conversations, noting and forgetting their usage of words that I know, that I sometimes write, sometimes type, but somehow never think of saying. Today’s word was: pivotal. When I heard her say it, I blinked, knowing from the unfamiliarity of the jaggedness of its words in my ears, that I’d never said that word aloud. And yet, “discombobulate” was softer to me, smoother around its curves; it rolled comfortably around my tongue.
And then Basit mentions ibn Khaldun, who I never met in any paper I read. And this is a familiar shame, the sense that I am disconnected from a living history, that I’ve fallen without argument into to the velvet-lined boxes the institutions I attended had prepared for me. I, who am decently versed in post-colonial issues, draw to a screeching halt when confronted with proofs of my blindness to my own histories.

So what has my white-washed ignorance of important Muslim figures to do with the issue of honesty in blogs?
A: I am aware of (some of) my pretensions and there is one that is central to this website: that I have something worth saying, that I can say something that hasn’t been said before. And yet, I am also aware of the things I don’t know, the books I didn’t read, the ones that define popular culture. So how is it that I contribute to popular discourse without knowing their sources?
I’ve never read the Bible, never read “Black Like Me,” never seen a Torah, haven’t finished Cleary’s translation of the Quran. Haven’t re-read “War and Peace” or “The Pickwick Papers.” Deleted that novel I never finished years ago.
Presumptions of completion.
With these lists of negatives hanging over me, it seems what I do know is useless for being baseless. I lack the appreciation necessary to make these things I know worth knowing.
Otherwise they become fashionable bits of trivia, details to flaunt when parading one’s sophistication.
You sell out your knowledge. You become a sell out to your knowledge.

On Friday, in ENGL 346:

“Now, while we’re on the topic of our majors,” says the professor, leaning way back in his chair (and we weren’t actually on the topic, at all), “I want you to know that you are all,” he speaks carefully, enunciating each word separately, giving emphasis to every letter and space, “morally, intellectually, existentially,” and the hush encircling this tight ring of students nearly falls over itself with the sheer angle of its italics, “superior to your,” and now his voice drips pure disdain, the drops of scorn sparkling in the grey rain-soaked air, “friends in Phys Ed.”
Quite a different slant to those last words.
Our grins break into laughter, the giggles seeping out like air from a pierced red balloon.

My mother is a gynaecologist/obstetrician. For as far back as I can remember, we have had women calling us, friends, family, friends of family, all wanting to discuss at length various parts of their bodies with my mother. Some of these women had never met my mother, and yet were willing to divulge intimate details about their bodies.
It was the kind of bizarreness that characterises most of my life, those details that you’re born seeing, that you notice only because they’re absent in everyone else’s stories.
Long distance calls, conversations in Tamil, English, Arabic, Singhalese, and all about female bodies and their intricacies.

So it was with bemusement that I read the full-page spread that the Toronto Star ran today on breast cancer among Muslim women. The central argument of the article is that cancer, particularly “female cancers,” is prevalent among Muslim communities because of a taboo that forbids Muslim women of speaking of or touching their own bodies. In light of my own experiences as the daughter of a female doctor and someone for whom medicine has often factored in as a career choice, I found this argument hard to swallow. It simply did not match up with my personal experiences with women who were, I used to think, only far too willing to talk about bodily fluids with my mother. (During social gatherings, too, no less.)

About a third way through the article, the writer cites a 1999 report from the Olson Center for Women’s Health at University of Nebraska Medical Center, which reported that that “the mortality rate from breast cancer for women of colour is 31.2 deaths per 200,000 people compared with 26 deaths per 200,000 in white women”. This is the first of two sentences in the entire article that cite statistics of any sort. It’s a risky idea at best to use such a limited set of numbers to back up a lengthy article – especially when these numbers are concerned with race-based observations and the claim in question is concerned with faith-based observations. The implication, one that reflects popular discourse, is that “Muslim” is a race or a group of non-white colours. As any white Muslim can tell you, that’s simply not true. (And exactly where would white Muslim women fit into this picture about breast cancer? On which side of the coloured and faithed fence must they sit?)
Additionally, the three women whose stories that the writer describes in this article all appear to be of South West Asian origin. Returning to the colour-faith connection, this article further restricts “Muslim” to “brown.”
And yet “Muslim” is so much more complex that. The Muslim women who this article attempts to represent come in a range of skin tones. They come from diverse cultures. You cannot reduce their reactions to a topic like cancer with three stories, all of which share more similarities than differences.
It would take a huge leap of faith to believe that Indonesian Muslim women ascribe to the same views as Somali Muslim women. It is a leap, however, that people are too eager to take.

The article’s second statistic is that “48% of Rexdale Women’s Centre clients over 50 have never had a mammogram.” Who these women are, where they come from, what their financial history has been like, details of any sort are not given. So I don’t see what we’re supposed to do with that sentence.

The real question, the one that this article does not answer, is how many Muslim Canadian women have cancer? How many of these were treated in time? How can hospital systems better reach out to women who aren’t educated about breast cancer?
Before assumptions can be made about how Muslim communities react to cancer, we have to have the facts. The numbers are the first step and they were conspicuously absent in this article.

But I don’t mean to attack the very real pain that any cancer patient must go through. I couldn’t do that, not with my own life glaring at me now with an intensity and a blurriness that was absent mere months ago.
And I will never deny that if I were ever to get cancer of any sort, “female” or otherwise, it will not be to “my community” that I turn to for help. The reasons for this, however, are neither cultural nor religious. It is simple cynicism, a pessimism that pervades my interactions with people who are “like me,” but whom I don’t particularly like.
How easy is it for anyone to open up to anyone else about their troubles?

There will be friends you tell, friends who may or may not be of the same faith, the same colour, the same culture. These are friends who will not look at you with sickly sweet and condescending pity. They will not patronise you, will not doom you to eternal despair. You do not suspect these few people, your friends, of an ill-concealed spitefulness that makes their every offer of help bitter to you. Everyone else, however, you are not sure of.
Everyone else you do not tell.
Though everyone else be “your people.”

Envy is something common to all people, immigrant or not, Muslim or not, brown or not. We all know envy; it tightens all our lips in much the same ugly ways. Pettiness, perversity, plain meanness: these are things we all know and despise in others, slow to recognise in ourselves. These are the things we fear in others most in our moments of vulnerability.
And who among us would open up to people we do not trust?
And does that change when you’re Muslim?
Specifically a Muslim of South West Asian origin?

In the meantime, utter strangers continue to accost my mother, wanting to list each and every one of their pains and aches and bumps.
Even the ones in their “female unmentionables.”
While I stand aside, silent, slightly bored and no longer as uncomfortable as I once was.

Immigrant societies are charged with identity issues. And, as is always the case, it is the women of these communities who stand as the ultimate symbols of those many identity crises.

For instance, what does it mean to be part of a culture? What exactly is a culture? To this day, I have not found a satisfactory answer to that second question. Do shared ways of thinking constitute cultures? It has to be more than simply clothing styles and food preferences.
For the purposes of this post, I will assume that a “culture” is defined by the people who profess to own (is that the right word?) it. And these people are often grouped together based on purely physical things: phylogenic traits, clothes, accent, etc.
But having such superficial markers means that collective identities are also only very vaguely defined. In my dealings with various Muslim communities, I find that such identities are forged merely as lists of don’ts, in much the same way that any minority or newly-created identity is. For instance, most teenagers will tell you they aren’t their parents. Similarly, many of the kids of colour I knew would tell you they were such-and-such, because they weren’t white.
So this one of my central claims: that many Muslims and many Muslim communities define themselves as not being nonMuslim. One of the things that I’m implying by saying this is that many Muslim communities do not, in fact, define themselves by Islam. The prevalence of female genital mutilation, forced marriages, and the dowry system among Muslim communities all prove my point. These are all things explicitly forbidden under Islamic law and these are all things that too few Muslims are able to avoid. This post, however, is concerned with a seemingly trivial issue: the pervasiveness of gossip within immigrant Muslim communities and how this affects the lives of Muslim women and, thus, these same Muslim communities.

At this point I need to return to my argument that it is women who are the fundamental representatives of their groups. It is similar reasoning, after all, that led Malcolm X to proclaim, and absolutely correctly, that the progressiveness of a nation is best determined by the evaluating the overall educational standards of its women. Additionally, English literature, historic and contemporary, is rife with female figures who represent Good and Evil, and usually one to the exclusion of the other.
So it should not be news to anyone that it’s always women who are judged harshest, even when they’re innocent.
But what has that to do with Muslim identity crises?
Two separate issues, both uncomfortable, had me searching through the Reliance of the Traveller for the Islamic rulings on gossip. I have always found the phrase “harmless gossip” painfully oxymoronic. I don’t see how anyone can believe that slander and falsehood can be harmless. One may assume a personal attitude of invincibility, but gossip ruins lives and jobs: that isn’t harmless.
The rulings are explicit: it is neither permitted to indulge in nor to remain in the presence of gossip.
I needed that stark reassurance. But I can’t immediately jump on the victim-bandwagon here, because the rulings go on to state that if in the presence of someone who is gossiping, one must make the other person stop. In other words, I’ve got to be proactive here.
It’s simply not enough to squirm while someone bashes someone I’ve never met and then come home and whine about it on my blog. I’ve actually got to defend this person I’ve never met.
And the thing is, maybe if more people did that, so many people like myself wouldn’t hate the communities they come from.
Any immigrant Muslim woman who tells you that she is totally unaffected by what the presiding Aunties and Uncles of her community may say about her is either unbelievable lucky or telling an unbelievable lie.
It is this fear that is so prevalent among so many Muslim women that is sapping Muslim communities of their strength. One the one hand, you have women who are afraid of reaching their full potential, because their communities and their own families are likely to watch their every move with narrowed eyes. What to do if they come home late from classes? Even though they drove home alone, even though they rushed home as soon as they could, they’re going to sneak in the back door, hoping no one noticed. Because if anyone sees them religiosity-laden curses will rain down on them and their families: what kind of family lets their daughter roam the streets? Who knows where she’s been, who’s she’s been with, what she was doing. They all say their studying, but they just want some “freedom,” they just want to be Westernised. What are they studying anyway, what’s it worth if they’re not decent?
And it hurts hardest when their level of faith is attacked.
And on the other hand, you have the Muslim men who slip off the hook for those very same sins that their sisters were falsely accused of.

And it is simply not enough to say that’s the way the world is, especially when you too indulge in the slander that is destroying the self-esteem of so many Muslim women. If you’re Muslim, and the Reliance of the Traveller backs me up on this, you can’t just stand by and let someone, female or not, be backstabbed.
And you can’t live your life in fear of what the soul-suckers will say, because then you condone their lying. More importantly, you’re sending out the message that you will let your version of Islam, an Islam that is meant to protect the innocent, an Islam that is meant to be just, be dictated by people who hate.
And who needs that kind of a faith?
But this is a part of modern Muslim identity is accepted unquestioningly by so many Muslim communities. The issue of slander and backstabbing is relegated to Sisters’ Halaqas on the weekends, because the fact that we drip self-hatred when we turn on our fellow believers is not something our leaders feel is important enough to talk about.

I am so bitter.
Try as I might to distance myself from these issues by using convoluted sentence structure and multi-syllable words, this is all very personal. I hate that people accepted as religious don’t think twice about slurring Muslim women. I hate that my life should be dictated by hypocrisies that are so deeply entrenched I see no way of escaping them any time soon. I hate being attacked on a daily basis simply because I am Muslim and a woman, as though these constitute sufficient reason to second-guess everything I do.
Forgive me my bitterness, then.

And dammit, if you’re a decent human being, if you pretend to know anything about evil, think twice the next time you want to backstab someone.

I find myself chafing inwardly when in the presence of these people who have come to define my university experience. I grow unwieldy bristles that project sharply and inelegantly into my conversations, wondering whether my understanding of myself is really so limited as this group would imply.

I distance myself as soon as I can.
I am much happier sitting on the pavement alone, almost waiting for someone, a book dangling from my hands.
I people-watch, smile at random things, luxuriate in simply observing. String words together in my mind to match the beautifully smooth skin of the nervous girl on the edge of her frosh group. Watch the beads of light dangling from my eyelashes change colour with the passing clouds and people.
A young man only a few years older than myself mutters “This is so strange” as he lifts his bicycle and takes it with him into the building. Later I wonder at his choice word: strange and not weird. I am still sitting outside when he comes back out, with or without his bicycle. I see him walk away, caught between the sharpness of the world seen through my lenses and the blurred world outside that boundary.
The heat seeps in through my bare feet on the pavement and drenches my face like a steady, unbreaking shower.

I am content.
This is what my being in limbo should be. A choice of words and colours. A solitude smooth inside me.
I resent being assaulted with trivial details of names, times and places to be. Am sickened by the rush of words stuck at the back of my mouth.

Later the sunlight will sneak beneath my eyelids, become fists enclosing my eyes. Will vibrate inside my head, allowing me no respite.

After the tsunami, though I never made a conscious decision to do so, I mostly avoided news coverage of the disaster. I was particularly wary of being inundated with images that I couldn’t handle. This continues still. I suppose I’m afraid of being hit close to home, when that is exactly what happened halfway across the world.

It must have been a similar reflex that kicked in with Hurricane Katrina. I avoid the TV and veer away from sites about the hurricane and try and bury my shame for doing so under political arguments.
Only today did I find myself peering at the TV as BBC does a week’s review of the damage.
This is most definitely not Mogadishu, for if it were, it would still be distant. No, these people speak language I can understand and they wear clothes in a fashion that is familiar to me. And so watching these images is more dangerous for my precarious sense of peace than listening to those translations of mournings in other languages.
And these people say the things that I stumbled to say, the words that got entangled in my mouth: that it is difficult to believe that people ever lived where there is now only destruction; that the aftermath is unreal for being real; that you still see what used to be, even though you’re staring, open eyed, at the ruins that are.

When they scream for help, it is in English.
And even still, their grief is the same, intrinsically human, international.

It is the same: wide-eyed toddlers, some alive. Screaming children, alone. Silence in between the things said.

Two men were found floating on a bed in a flooded house. A 90-year-old man and his 85-year-old brother, found alive, after floating for two days.
In his youth my maternal grandfather spent two days in a tree after a storm flooded Gampola.
Less than a year ago, my child cousin, named after my mother, spent a day in another tree after the tsunami hit Gaul.

It is not a geographical distance that is traversed, but one over time and language.