(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

-"Song of Myself," Walt Whitman

Reading belle hooks is as good for my soul as reading Walt Whitman has ever been. I have been slowly working my way through Teaching Critical Thinking, savoring the fleeting chapters of "practical wisdom." In a chapter on how helpful stories are for the learning process, she shares one of her favorite stories. It goes like this:

"A student seeking to understand better the process of self-actualization goes to the teacher and says, 'I often suffer from a split mind, a lack of congruence between what I think, say, and do. How can I end this suffering?' The teacher tells the student that the potential for this split is happening inside everyone. For inside all of us there is a 'sick self and a self struggling to be well and they are in conflict.' When the student asks the teacher which self is winning the conflict, the teacher replies, 'whichever self you feed.'"

Philosophical, empowering, 100% belle hooks.

As I may have mentioned, I am terrible at taking advice. You cannot simply tell me what to do and expect I'll do it, even if I asked you for advice. I need to see the reason behind your advice and I need to see the values behind your reasoning, and I need you to acknowledge that I've thought about this so much already that it's a ridiculously complex issue that you may not fully understand unless you're in the mood for a very, very long story. At it's best, advice only helps to clarify my own reasoning and the values behind them. However, because we may disagree or, even more likely, I may feel that your advice doesn't take the culmination of my experience into consideration, I am still left with little confidence on my issue.

On the other hand, the best stories of wisdom rarely tell you directly what to do but help you think through your own complexities and, at the same time, are empowering. Even stories that don't resemble zen koan, just good, nuanced stories that aren't your own and help you get out of your own head and your own frame of mind help you figure out your own experience in a delicate comparison/contrast.

People are complicated, life is complicated, and that's why we need stories to help us learn.

Radical Heritage

In Bangladesh, it's considered patriotic to be radically political. If you don't have any passionate political opinions, it's because you don't care about your country. If anyone's tried to kill you because of your provocative ideas, you are considered a hero in general consensus for having made people think. This basically being Humayun Azad's life story and him being my relative, no wonder my mom is wary of my literary and political leanings.

Though my literary aspirations are in vernacular English and my political aspirations are in American local government, I am after all, a Bengali educated in English and raised in America.

Azad wrote the Bengali equivalent of The Second Sex, was an anti-military, anti-religion satirist and wrote both adult and young adult fiction in addition to political criticism. He also wrote on and studied Bengali language linguistics. The political bent in his fiction is to be expected because Bangladeshis well know, as everyone should, that language is political. His form, therefore, suits his function, which is always a selling a point for me. Though I don't necessarily see eye to eye with him across the board, I have to admit that the man was a badass.

Bengali language is seeped in literary tradition well beyond Tagore (who Azad claimed to be a misogynist/chauvinist) and Arundhati Roy. Merely exposure to the language, apparently, can cause literariness, such as with immigrant Jhumpa Lahiri (and, I suspect, Rohinton Mistry although I'm not 100% positive on his first language). I'm just scratching the surface here. If I mention Bharati Mukherjee, I'm probably crossing into the realm of writers most people have never heard of, if I haven't been there for awhile already. I just wanted to add another person, Humayan Azad, to my readership's consciousness. If you had doubts about my writing capacity before, now you can rest assured that it's in my blood.

The New Old Me

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”- TS Elliot.

In high school, I was exposed to this quote in a science class, and in that context, I interpreted it in terms of scientific exploration for the purpose of learning more about the human condition. Basically, I took it to mean that you cannot know yourself unless you know the world you live in.

With a bachelor's degree in English, I can think of at least 5 other ways to interpret this quote. Now, sitting in my high school bedroom, with a bachelor's degree in English, one of the interpretations is particularly compelling because it explains why my entire college career felt like an existential crisis.

When my mother explains my initial college dropout to her friends, she explains that Geneseo is too far away, so I couldn't endure the transition. Believing she meant I was overcome with homesickness, I disavowed her explanation, knowing there was more to it than the distance. And besides, that made me sound like a wimp. More specifically, it made me sound like the stereotypical, domestically inclined, Bengali, Muslim woman the American feminist in me adamantly resisted. Though breaking that stereotype is important to me, my resistance was not just a matter of principle. I knew that in America, the woman I aspired to be required not just competence but prowess outside the confines of domesticity.

When I graduated high school, I was confident I could achieve my desired manner of prowess. In high school I was widely known and well liked (enough to be voted class president) despite being pretty nerdy and definitely not classically popular. I was perfectly happy with the place I had cultivated for myself and  believed it could be replicated in the world at large.

However, in my belief, I failed to take into account the reality of my situation. In high school, when I wasn't in school, I was always home or with my family. For me, unmonitored outside world interactions were limited to school hours and school activities, limited internet, books, TV and a handful of birthday parties my parents reluctantly gave me permission to attend. I was actually jealous when my peers started working because I felt even further behind in "real" life experience. I worked to gain experience by joining as many after school activities I could possibly interest myself in. Unfortunately, my opposition gave me a false sense of accomplishment and lead me deny my home life as a major element of my identity. It wasn't until I lived away from my family again that I understood the extent of my social impediments or their consequences.

Sitting in my room today, I am not nearly as inclined to escape it as I one was. This is not because I've become complacent. Just moments ago, I realized my college years were spent in frustration and self-hatred because, after my initial failure, I was forced out of any notions of worldly experience. This lead me to question the viability of my identity and aspirations outside the sequestered world of my high school years, since they had been conceived within it. Could I still be who I happily was and follow my dreams? Or did I have to be whoever I had to be and do whatever I had to do to survive in the "real world"? Unschooled in the former and afraid of the latter, I avoided answering questions I could barely formulate and lost myself in the world I had once myopically believed to be my own.

In the world beyond my parents' house, I have learned a lot. As a teenager, I invested a lot of emotional and  ideological energy against my confinement, not just to break a stereotype but again, because I didn't want to be a confined woman. That sense of rebellion became as much a part of me but so did my confinement. However, because I was in denial that my confinement defined me, I could hardly lay claim to my rebellion against it. Out in the wider world, I had to face the harsh reality that my confinement had defined me to a point of stultification in a world without forced restraints. Struggling against the identity formed in my sequestered upbringing, however, increasingly distanced me from the positive outcomes born from my confinement--my desire to grow, my sense of purpose, and my motivation.

I have to accept that, no matter what happens, a part of me will always be a girl who lived a sheltered life.

Park 51, Muslim America and my purpose in life

 Park 51, also known derogatorily as the Ground Zero Mosque, recently asked its Twitter followers, myself included, to email their website's editor if they were interested in blogging for them. I decided I might as well shoot them an email. My email, which was perhaps inappropriately long, described my own relationship with Ground Zero, how it was similar to that of Park51's, how it was formative to my identity as an American Muslim and how all this might be pertinent to Muslim Americans and Americans at large.

Writing that letter reminded me of the way I felt when I was in seventh grade, the way I felt when I was in high school and my intensively formative relationship with 9/11-- a relationship I'd unknowingly and unwillingly grown out of. I don't think my parents understood the impact of 9/11 on a young Muslim hijabi just finding her place in the world, considering their protests to my interests. I know I could have tried to persevere in my interests regardless--and I kind of did, but I really had no idea what to do or any system of support to guide me. It was not an abandoned interest, it was a dream deferred. And you know what happens to those.

Whether I am given the chance to blog for Park51 or not. writing that letter to them revived my dream and reminded me of what I believe to be my purpose in this life. Whether I had known it as exactly as I know it now, I'm not sure, so maybe articulating my blog ideas actually made me realize my purpose. Derailed from my purpose, I had no motivation.

In my letter, I said,

Whether we like it or not, 9/11 and it’s enduring aftermath are an integral part of the American Muslim identity. However, the historical evocation of our entrance into the general American consciousness is still in our hands to mold and this is an opportunity that must not elude us.

I may have less options for how to approach this than I might have had if I had pursued this in college. However, I do well with making do with what little I have. Thank you, Park51.

Guess who's back?

A broken home

This summer I've been in Chicago and, though it's the seventh day of Ramadan, I have yet to visit a mosque. When I first went to college, I realized I had unsettling apprehensions about visiting a mosque to which my parents do not belong. I realized I didn't know how to belong to Islam or the Islamic community as an individual dissociated from my family. I was afraid, for awhile, that I wanted so badly to dissociate from my family that unconsciously, I was attempting to dissociate from everything I associated with my family. For a long time after leaving home, I designated my religious practice to times and spaces I shared with my family.

The weird thing is, I have long been disillusioned by the Islamic community to which my family belonged. I say belong in the past tense because that community has become so fractured that it's hard to say if it exists anymore to the point that my family, being Bengali, can belong to it. What broke my heart about that community was the very racist/nationalist sentiments within it that turned Muslim brothers and sisters against one another. What broke my heart about that community is that it treated its members like they did not belong.

At first, I didn't understand why the people of my community could not look past their differences and realize their common ideal was one of peaceful surrender. Their conflicts tended to flare up over the appointment of the Board of directors and that of the Imam, the religious leader of the mosque. The race of the Imam, the language in which he should give Khutba and the power he should have in the community were all viciously argued over, at times resulting in physical confrontations between grown men.

Where was this thirst for power, a thirst so maddening that it involved petty racism and blind hatred-- where was is coming from? Many of the members of my mosque were distinguished members of local society outside the mosque. They are doctors, lawyers, engineers, pharmacists, city-council members, hospital board members, volunteers, soccer moms, interfaith leaders, and hardworking, exemplary citizens. Some of them are the downtrodden, clinging to Islam and Allah for some serenity in this life. All of them, outside of the mosque community, as respectable people.

Despite that, as Muslims and minorities, they are of a disempowered group. They work so hard to show to outsiders that they are okay and that they belong here, that they care about America as much as they care about their own well-being, that they are optimistic and level-headed. However, a part of them knows that outsiders do not perceive them as such. A part of them knows that it is impossible to overcome the racial casting endowed them by the majority culture and it is enough to be utterly disempowering.

This is a narrative of domestic violence where the domicile is the mosque and the members of the family are the people who worship in that community. Unlike in domestic violence narratives, it is apparantly easier to begin a new and separate mosque than it is to begin a new home without the abusing members of your family. But I believe, to a certain extent, the emotional scar of a fractured family is the same in both cases. It always hurts to know you cannot trust those with whom you have a deep bond-- those people that you supposedly should be able to trust unquestionably.

Many of the families in the community, like my family, are also fractured. The parts reflect the whole on every level. The American Muslim is a fractured identity, broken from inside and out. What I didn't understand at the beginning of college was that, this American Muslim identity is mine.

Knowing the larger social context, knowing that like Indigenous America, immigrant America, gay America, Black America, female America, rural America, urban America, conservative America, liberal America-- Muslim America is fractured by the America part, the part that includes all of these people fighting to belong to one America-- one huge dysfunctional family, finally makes me feel at home, sometimes, in my own skin. We are each a kaleidoscope, reflecting every color, though in a different way. We are each a mother, father, brother, and sister all in one. And this is the American identity that is mine. 

I have finally begun to feel comfortable with my religious beliefs and have even begun, though slowly, to practice them in my own right.

"In the world, in my body"

Eve Ensler on the interconnectedness of our bodies and world in which we live. Contains mature content.

Grapefruit

At first, I thought I was about to gain some street cred for my love of grapefruit soda. Instead, I found out 50 cent made the same mistake as my dad did when my dad was fresh off the boat. Hilarious. Ansari is awesome.

Reasons for disliking people:

There are two reasons for disliking people:

1. Because they are too busy loving or hating themselves to care about you.
2. Because you are too busying loving or hating yourself to care about them.

I rather choose liking people because the logical variety is more interesting. 

In either reason, the cases of loving are less damaging than those of hating.

Depression is when you are forced to hate someone and the better reason is the first but you mistakenly choose the second. Luckily, this mistake only effects you internally, a realm over which you can have complete control. If you can learn to trust yourself, again.