Archives for February, 2008

The poet is a faker
Who’s so good at his act
He even fakes the pain
Of pain he feels in fact.

- Fernando Pessoa, “Autopsychography.” trans Richard Zenith.

I’ve been asked a couple of times over the last few weeks about my/the hijab. It’s not a question I get asked often¹. As a result, it’s not a question I am used to answering and is therefore not a question for which I have easy, rehearsed answers.

And in this regard, my headwrap is like everything else about me: its reasons unravel easily; I have no explanations that don’t sound suspiciously like excuses; I am conflicted; I wish I knew the fundamental, unassailable why or cared enough to create that alibi; I am confused and I am tongue-tied and inarticulate.

Like everything else about me.

But you needn’t believe that. This is different, this is special, this attracts attention. You have questions. This is not like everything else. This is different, this is jarring, this invites questions. You ask questions.
And in this regard, it is like everything else about me: the questions and the attention and the contradictions.
I don’t know if you believe me.

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Every natural science, even physics itself as Max Planck has said, is based on an act of faith, and without this faith no science could presume itself into being: a faith, first, that there is a causal order in nature and the universe; a faith, second, that there is some unfailing relation between the formal organisation of the human mind and the formal organisation of nature; and a faith, therefore, that the human mind is capable of discerning and describing the ordered processes that rule the natural universe. But why should any of these be true, except perhaps the last one if the first two are?

- James Olney, “A Theory of Autobiography,” Metaphors of Self: the meaning of autobiography.