Dumbarton Bridge

On several occasions since I've been here, I've driven to or through Palo Alto. Palo Alto, which is best known for being the location of an illustrious campus or two, is located directly across the bay from Fremont, where I live. The two cities are connected by Dumbarton Bridge, though it takes an equal amount of time to drive south and around the bay to get from one city to the other. Which is important information if you, like me, inherited your father's allergy to tolls, because Dumbarton Bridge has a west bound (Fremont to Palo Alto) toll. The bridge does not have an east bound toll, though, and offers a spectacular panoramic view of the bay and baylands, making driving home over Dumbarton one of my favorite activities in the bay area.

One distinctive aspect of the experience is actually the smell. San Francisco Bay sometimes emits a strong, fairly sulfuric odor. The smell comes from algae, which live in the bay and give off potent gases at times. The rhythm of those times remains mysterious to me. Sometimes the tap water here smells that way, too, which is generally regarded as a local source of dread. The earth-water smell has kind of grown on me, though. One recent night, while I was recovering from a cold, I surprised myself and found the smell bright and comforting.

The baylands are also a peculiar beauty. I happened to visit the peninsula baylands on my first adventure in the area, after picking up furniture at the Ikea in Palo Alto. I had unwittingly encountered and paid the toll on the way there, and wanting to make more of the trip, stopped at the nature preserve located near the bridge. At first I was unimpressed with it. The baylands are basically swamplands. But unlike the lush Great Swamp north of New York City, the baylands' foliage, like most of the foliage I've encountered in California, is primarily red-brown, with most greens falling closer to gray or olive tones. That, coupled with the local utility structures within visible range, gives the baylands a look I imagined for the post-apocalyptic world. The red-brown foliage also makes the landscape look a little bit Martian. Overall, the look is barren and eerie. 

One of the times I was driving over the bridge at night, the moon was full or near full and the bay was clouded with a dusky, orange fog. I don't know what made the fog orange. Maybe it was light, air pollution, or some other atmospheric effect. The sparkle of the water was entirely dulled by the fog, making the bay look more like a crater in the near-distant hills. And the color of the fog was close enough to red-brown that it looked somewhat like unsettled dust. That night, the bridge was a fortified structure, guiding me home after a storm on an alien world.

Swinging Door

"When we become truly ourselves, we just become a swinging door and we are purely independent of and at the same time dependent upon everything."

My mother has always told me I say too much, by which she means she would appreciate if more of what is in my head stayed inside my head. I have only followed her advice when I have done or seen things which have been outlined to require grave consequences if revealed, and in regard to those instances, I feel like I oppressed my soul for having taken part in something that must be hidden. Listen, I know that I wouldn't feel that way if those things hadn't been outlined as such, but they were and I do. So here's everything else.

If you don't do drugs, you will learn other ways to step back and look at your own life. You realize that's what you wanted in the first place, when you still had control. You will remember you always knew how to tear yourself away, if necessary, to open your laden arms and stop time to take stock-- what exactly are you carrying? Do you need all that? The questions have changed, and I'm getting better at making the assessment, but this act remains essential to maintaining sanity. It does matter what you step back into, too.

I need a close look, so I'm up late tonight. It's only 1:22AM in California. Still late for me these days, but I don't have to work tomorrow or the next day, I'm not tired because I didn't work yesterday or the day before. I don't have to worry about falling asleep late and missing the dawn prayer because I'm on my period, so excused this week. I'm not studying for a certification exam and I'm not in school or recovering from being in school. I haven't been in love in about 18 months. And my life has taken shape recently (read: I got my shit together) in a way that I had once imagined over twelve years ago and then completely forgotten about. Oh, and the world seems to be going to shit and I have never felt more calm about it. In other words, the universe has aligned and conditions for reflection are perfect. And I'm going to do that publicly because, don't you want to know how I did it all?

Awh, internal laudatory chorus. Stawpppp. It wasn't narcissism. I swear.

We've come a long way since the two whitest kids at my school asked me if I was related to Osama Bin Laden and if I believed in god, respectively. The other day, the whitest person at work asked me what the Muslim community thinks about ______. Chicken? Printer cartridges? Toilet Paper? I'm not actually sure. I faded out for a second and for that paranoid second, I wondered if he was asking me for A Reason and reassured myself-- this is not something I need to hide. Whatever he asked, I recovered in time to read him the first sentence of this paragraph, minus the bit about white kids. I think he got my point because he went on to express a bunch of sympathy for the disenfranchised (while maintaining a fiscal conservative stance). At least the one time that a non-Muslim POC bullied me, he had the awareness, in 2002, as a pre-teen, to put a towel on his head and imitate a muezzin. If I hadn't been terrified, I might have been impressed.

I've lost track of details. Are things worse now than they were fourteen years ago? I think so. But I can't say I've been trying to keep track of everything. It takes a considerable amount of work to go from literary studies (academic analysis of written cultural artifacts) to maintaining and building data systems. (That's a horrible description of it. My profession is not good at descriptions of our work. I apologize. I work on distributed databases. Sometimes I say, hey, it's still a matter of understanding the organization of information. Or, like, you know, the basic human experience of understanding.) First, I had to change from being a person who engages through only observation, however creatively or intelligently I did so, to a person who takes initiative and moves both ideas and resources. I also needed both an art degree and a science degree. I also fell in love and broke my heart a bunch of times. I swallowed my pride. I treated depression with unsanctioned drugs. I moved halfway across the country, and then entirely across the country. I pursued esoteric religion.

So I can't fully tell you how I ended up back on the path I meant to take when I was fifteen, the person I wanted to be before I realized how complicated global politics was going to make my life. You can't contain my whole life. You don't need to. No one can. But there are some parts that are critical for us to share.

I do still occasionally catch the news. Sometimes it can't be helped. I don't exactly avoid it, but I also don't feel constantly threatened. I do care. I pray for the dead. I pray for the living. I give what I can to people who have lost their homes, their families, their livelihood. I hope to do more of that. I work because I can and it's okay that some people can't do as much.

But I don't have all the defensive arguments down. I refuse to. I understand why they're important to some people. But I need more than that, deeper and wider. Yet, I already have everything I need.

I'm not who I'm not. I'm not even who I am. Identity, or what I project, where I feel I belong or who I show alliance with or however you want to define it, is only a small part of the self. I think most people only use a small part of the self. And when you have very little, you are likely to hold what you have very tightly. And probably spend all your money on it. But that's not the point of self. The point is to let it go.



the quote at the beginning is from a zen member of my family

One day, I'm going to be a famous poet

In my last post, I said I applaud Mona Eltahawy for gaining the readership she's gained. Not only that, as explained by Altmuslimah, she got a discussion going. Not only THAT, but I hope she's paving the way for Muslim, feminist journalists and writers on the world stage. That part is only a hope so far because to do so, she can't sacrifice her identity for success. That said, she doesn't need to represent every Muslim feminist out there but selling herself out will likely only cause a barrier for anyone wanting to follow in her footsteps.

I've been thinking recently about gaining a wider readership. And by thinking, I mean thinking of trying to get to that point myself. I don't intend to go via news or publishing corporations. That's not the only way to mass communication. At least, if those corps don't come to own the entire internet, it's not. And I'd like to come at it from a community organizer's point of view, where successful mass communication isn't muddled with the attitude of "trying to make a splash" like it has been for Mona Eltahawy.

In the meantime, I don't want to get lost in Muslim feminism. There's more to me than that. I've had the fortune of growing up in country where ideas flow freely and I can't forget that side of myself. I want to be a part of that free flow of ideas and there's more to my ideas, more to ME than my Muslim and feminist ideas. I want to be a poet so I can take those pieces apart and sew them back together into my favorite outfit. And when I figure out how to be a poet, I want to know how to get people to listen. The people who need it, at least. Who wants to sit around at home in her favorite outfit?

These are big dreams considering my current readership (I appreciate each of you deeply) but I've always been a big dreamer.

To touch base with another side of myself, (but mostly to direct you to something wonderful) I recently watched the premiere episode of HBO's Girls. I had to see what all the hubbub in the female and feminist blogosphere was about. Unfortunately, I was pretty upset about it. I don't even want to talk about it. I'm not watching any more of it if I can help it. I'd rather re-watch ABG.

On Habibi, Graphic Novel

I almost didn't read Craig Thompson's Habibi. After reading a media critique article from a Muslim perspective media watch, I was assured it perpetuated stereotypically western interpretations of both Arabs and Muslims. What Thomspon does was labelled "self-conscious orientalism." Thompson is quoted to note on his orientalist aesthetic as being superficial, saying,

“it’s almost better to not see the words when you’re looking at them and you can just appreciate them for their visual aesthetic, rather than have the meaning of the words get in the way.”

which is exemplified by the filling of a woman's body with Arabic text, as if, says the article, "the meaning of the imagery will get in the way of appreciating the aesthetic." However, what rang most true to me was one criticism stating that Thompson's portrayal of Arab brutality is never "justified or made to face consequences."

I dread stereotypically western interpretations of Islam, especially since it has a tendency of confusing Muslim with Arab. But since I'd been interested in it before reading the criticism, I went with my gut and didn't cancel the inter-library loan I used to request it. When it arrived, I began reading it on a slow day at work.

I was hooked. Thompson is a talented story-teller and artist. Though it is true that there a few Arabs who are portrayed as bad guys, there a lot of Arab good guys, too. For example, Zam, one of the main characters, becomes a eunuch in order to understand his sexual attraction to Dodola, his beautiful childhood rescuer, whose rape he witnessed after learning that she sold her body to feed them. Dodola is also a storyteller and the audience's source of an incredible amount of Islamic tradition, through the telling of stories from the Quran. Many stories serve to compare and contrast Islam and the other Abrahamic faiths, but many just serve to glorify Islam's value of storytelling and creative thinking. Though her child marriage to a scribe is the source of Dodola's literacy, in the scribe's insistence on teaching his young wife to read and write, he treats her as an equal and gives her the tools she needs to save her life over and over after he is killed by thieves. 

Things like that make me think Thompson's comment on having "the meaning of the words get in the way" was taken out of context. I don't really see him using orientalism merely as an aesthetic in much of the novel. The Quran itself is a written version of oral tradition, and in a lot of ways, Thompson's Habibi is the graphic version in addition to an interpretation for contemporary audiences, both on account of its format and messages conveyed. I also like that Thompson's narrative includes Islam in both the problems and the solutions faced by the world today, such as environmentalism and racism.

The reason I say that the criticism on Arab brutality spoke loudest to me is because I feel like many people are overly sensitive to negativity in nuanced portrayals of Muslims. True, the newsmedia usually zeroes in on negativity to the point where nuance is squeezed out of the picture. However, limiting media to only glowing portrayals of Muslims stifles nuance AND internal criticism, which can certainly be suggested by non-Muslims, such as Thompson, as well as Muslims.

An Important Note For My Audience

My sister made a comment, off this site, about my previous blogpost and it, along with a comment about my fiction, has triggered a serious breakthrough.

In my last blogpost, I passingly mention a story I wrote when I was in first grade. In the story, I teach my sister how to run because she afraid to do so. My sister commented that the story sounded like "The Scarlett Ibis," by James Hurst, which both of us read in our own due passage through Mrs. Geiger's ninth grade advanced English class. Interestingly, "The Scarlett Ibis" was the first story in which I was able to understand the idea of a literary theme.

I don't know if it was the sparks that surround my comprehension of that idea, but it made me realize that I've lost my ability to tell a good story. My sister ignored my entire narrative about myself as a writer and singled out the part that was most important to her. Telling a good story is all about knowing what your audience wants to hear. It's a way of making an argument that does not call out to objective fact, as academic arguments do, but which is a subtle use of yellow journalism, shared consciousness, and emotional intelligence. It is  not an introspective act. Rather, at it's best, in my opinion. it encourages introspection and demonstrates a method of expression for those wary of the institution certified methods but who believe current conditions, whatever they are, can and must be improved. Telling stories, as any griot could tell you, is an exercise of community leadership.

Rewind.

I've lost my ability to tell a good story. Telling a good story is all about knowing what your audience wants to hear. What would they find interesting? What matters to them the most? And most important of all, who are "they"?

It takes me a long time to judge and cater to an audience. I watch and listen carefully. I start by talking to one person. Slowly, I infiltrate. Eventually, I become the person who knows and talks to everybody and thinks of them as all a part of on one large, dynamic, never-ending puzzle that I finally learned the key to solving. It takes me a long time but with slow and diligent work, including late nights spent imagining conversations with people I have yet to speak with and telling trial stories, which some people call "lies," to help me judge my audience, I can figure it out. And to be honest, it's the most interesting work in the world.

But I don't just want to study people like they are lab mice. And I don't do it because I want everyone to like me. I watch them carefully so I can function as best as I can in the community. I've mentioned my mom's self-consciousness about this before but I think it also has to do with having a sense that you are different in a way that most of the people around you might not understand. The difference between my mom and I is that I have never been ashamed of being different. In fact, I find it far more realistic to think of being different as something that's just, well, different.

Accordingly, people react differently to difference. As someone different, I realized I really needed to know my peers and accept their difference before I should expect them to accept mine. It's a trust breeds trust sort of thing. Also, because I feel more different than the usual amount, I felt it's something that needs to be done with extra care than the usual things I do. It is utterly important for me to be a part of a community. It is the only way I know how to function. It's only when I know everyone's stories that I can tell them my own and it's only once they know mine that they can properly become a part of it.

Once I am a part of a community, I am fully invested in its dynamic. Accordingly, the greatest pain I can suffer is the feeling that the community I am a part of does not have my own or even its own best interests in mind. If someone is doing something that hurts someone else in the community, I am restless until there is some resolution.

I have been a part of some toxic communities. I have also been a part of communities I did not feel utilized what I had to offer it and therefore, did not have either my own or it's own best interests in mind. Maybe that makes me sound full of myself, asserting that I can differentiate what is best for a community. To be honest, after a certain point, I become too invested and I can no longer tell. What I've never been good at is abandoning a sinking ship. I think of it as good as being my own and if it's going down, so am I.

Of course, it only takes surviving that a few times, probably fewer for some people that others, that you have the choice to not go down with it. I, on the other hand, took so long to learn that, that when I learned it, I decided to maybe just find a different form of transportation.

However, this blog is not called "Introspective Commentary." Despite that, that's what it is. And to be honest, when I write fiction, it is really nothing more than introspection, either. My number one fan, maybe my only fan anymore, has told me that it is stream of consciousness, which for some reason never occurred to me before he pointed it out.

As I said before, in my last blogpost, my sister singled out the part of my post that was most important to her. Introspection, which is perhaps my own opinion (and that explains away my personal dislike of stream of consciousness narration), is often done to figure out what's most important to a person. For some people, just figuring things out, anything at all, is what's their most important thing. For me, the thing that was most important was my function in a community. I do not believe it was something that came from being a self-conscious teenager, though being one helped me figure it out. I think it's something I honestly believe to be the most important thing that there is and my recent introspective phase has come out of disillusionment with the idea.

However, introspection is not a vehicle of achieving what the title of this blog seems to imply and what I have in previous posts implied is most important to me. I am not trying to define new values for myself. I am in a battle against myself to get back to the way of life I prefer over this one. I'm not trying to get things back to the way they were. I am trying to resist the disillusionment, cynicism, and general closed heartedness/mindedness caused by disappointments outside of my own control and return to learning from my mistakes and then moving on.

I am trying to be someone who tells good stories, again.

Me, the writer

This the story of a developing writer I refer to as me.

In kindergarten and first grade, my school had a book binding program which spurred the story teller in me to write dozens of little stories for novelty of having them published alone. I can only remember one of those stories, in which I teach my younger sister, who in the story is afraid, how to run. In second grade, I had a poem published in one of those anthologies that publish kids' poems to get parents to buy the publication. I remember reading every poem in the book and only finding two or three I thought were as good as mine. In third grade, I wrote poems that first resulted in my teacher's accusation that I was a budding plagiarist but eventually lead to her admiration. She was really into Christmas-- we had a 12 ft tree in the classroom, and she kept the poem I wrote about it. She had me read it to the class and when, at the end they sat there in silence, she exclaimedd it was the silence of admiration. I half believed her but vowed never to share my poetry with my peers again.

My grandfather visited from Bangladesh when I was in third grade. My grandfather was a lawyer and is gifted, as good lawyers are, with his words. He had a special gift for story telling and has always taken his time to tell me stories he's read. He told me stories from 1001 Nights, Shakespeare, and the Quran, among others. This influenced me greatly as both an aficionado of stories and as a writer. 

In fourth grade, perhaps in an effort to show off to my classmates in a way they could more easily appreciate, I switched to mainly academic writing. I wrote academically with ease and can only remember having a problem with it in ninth grade, which I attributed to my teacher's insanity. However, I later realized that my ninth grade English teacher had taught me deeper literary analysis than I'd ever experienced before and was just having trouble fitting my newly complicated thoughts into the old 3-5 paragraph essay format. I got that figured out pretty soon, though and could bang out a 5 paragraph essays in 45 mins from only having read the book/story/poem/play by my senior year. Regents preparation had given me the formula to do that and SAT essay practice had given me a vocabulary so sharp it impressed even very well-read teachers.

Writing continued to be easy for me until my first semester as an English major and second semester as a writing tutor. I began to struggle with it because I began to lose touch with the formula I had come to depend on. I saw too many possibilities and didn't know how to choose from among them the one best suited to my purpose. I don't know how my fellow tutors dealt with the exposure to such a wide array of equally viable writing styles.

Meanwhile, I was taking increasingly difficult and more writing intensive classes. I needed time to figure it out. I needed time to write papers 30 different ways or at least think through 30 different ways to approach my argumentation. I didn't have that kind of time and I sort of floundered. In fact, I regressed. In my need for experimentation, I ditched half my vocabulary and dipped from near eloquence to an incoherent mess. It didn't help that I was studying post-colonial and vernacular literature as an American immigrant minority from a previously colonized country. It doesn't help that I was unable to verbalize my thoughts and feelings to the people I thought I loved and trusted for fear of their utter disappointment. In fact, my writing was only clear when I clearly understood my own identity, which was rare. Such radical introspection doesn't always make for good grades, especially when you're struggling with the conventions that earn you your grades. It was, as they say, a recipe for disaster.

I promised I'm not saying this to create an infinite loop, but the story continues from the beginning of this blog.