Ostranenie

I first came across this term while reading my favorite psychologist, Lev Vygotsky.  Simply put, he defined it as "the process of making the familiar unfamiliar" , and pretty much dismissed much of what passed for poetry to this realm.  I think a lot about expression, that chance to share what is in my mind and heart with others.  I also think about George Orwell who admonished me to avoid "pre-packaged phrases." Those trite intersections where we think we connect but do so superficially, perhaps in a premeditated panic preferring the sloppiness of syntax and the gross manipulation of metaphor to a moment's awkwardness and the exposure of a brand new bit of our hearts. I think a lot about expression.
When I struggle to share what is in my heart, Countee Cullen, my favorite poet comes to mind, and his lamentation to poetic irony: "Yet do I marvel at this curious thing: To make a poet black, and bid him sing!"  Being Black in 1925 blessed with talent and passion and cursed by the muting mechanism that gave him the pain to forge his bittersweet melodies of faith and race. I too know irony - after a half century of trying to protect my heart and to stifle the soft nuances of the human pain and ecstasy that I flirted with but never embraced, I now need to open my heart and ask others in, and I know not the language of invitation, the argot of love.  I think a lot about expression.
I felt this terrible need long before I understood its calling. And maybe I didn't fully understand until this evening when two young women (whose combined age is about a decade less than mine) asked me a few simple questions.  Enas asked me why I converted, and Ayesha wondered aloud how one changes the world.  Simple questions from pure hearts -  no obfuscation, no cliches - providing a backwards byway to lead me back out of my aphasic angst.  I am thinking a little less about expression.
"I saw so much pain and suffering in the world, I no longer wanted a faith to explain it to me, or one that somehow favored me over those others less fortunate than I, but one that taught me how to humble myself and to look to my own heart, my own behaviors to make the changes I so wanted desperately to make in the world" was my response to Enas who is bravely preparing a lecture to give to a group of Christians about 9/11. I want to live this sentiment, not to profess it.  To do so, I need to know how to access my heart always, ready to share it without mediation or recompense.  I am feeling a little more comfortable with this pulmonary prose.
Ayesha was perhaps the first person to ever hear initially from my heart.  I answered her question without the meddling, calculating overcoat of cognition that displaces me and my heart from the human contact I have shunned for so long.  I cannot reconstruct the syntax or morphology of the sentences, but I do recall the ardor of the exchange, the warmth of her heart.  I am no longer thinking at all.
I have so far to go, so far.  I don't need to make the "familiar unfamiliar" as I am not sure there has ever been anything familiar in my heart to contort. I don't need "pre-packaged  phrases" to communicate cosmetically at arm's length (forgive me this one time) with my brothers and sisters, pining instead for the elegant romance of risk and disclosure no longer comfortable with the disengaged espial of espionage.  I am feeling.
Sadly, this is as close to poetry as I get, but I am ready to sing.


..

9/11

As I am preparing for the impending "event"  this weekend, I am struggling to conceive a name for the coming commotion - remembrance, observation, dedication, anniversary, celebration, admonition, protest, demonstration, denigration, degradation, vilification, attack........
Ten years ago, thousands of people died during a small window of time for absolutely no credible reason at all.  Ten years later, thousands of new people use the senselessness of those deaths to reify their own biases, ill-constructed truths, and ugliness - a horrible epitaph betraying the grossest of all manipulations. They take the twisted malice of a few individuals, soak it in the thoughtless sentiment of an undifferentiated tragedy, patch it together with their emptiness and angst, then spit it back at us as some sort of cockeyed cogent appeal to our empathy and patriotism. And despite our unease at the malignant ripple drifting through the rhetoric betrayed by the slight sneer, the spectre of 3,000 murdered souls raised so maliciously mutes our decency and the authors of this profanity walk away thinking they have created consensus.
It occurs to me that I am perhaps going about this business backwards - maybe I should invite these people over for a fight now. Might as well ostensibly spill blood over surrealistically silent television images a decade old than anything else I guess. So they can come over, and I will fight for my failures as a father, and they can fight for the women they have beaten, the people they cheated, the raise they didn't get, whatever - we can mix blood as Muslims and Christians, playing at a holy war that will relieve none of us from our true pain.  Now is as a good time as ever, for I do not want to wait until I pull in front of them in traffic, upset them on a golf course, bump into them coming out of a restaurant, etc. 
Who "owns" 9/11?  Do I as an American?  Do I not as a Muslim-American?  Do you need to hate to own it?  Is there a mortgage other than being born on this soil?  Can I own 9/11 and not Oklahoma City?  If I own either or both, what do I do with them? Who owns the 9/11 site?  Who owns the right to determine the zoning rights around it?  As a Muslim recently asked, "How many strip clubs, adult book shops, and liquor stores have to be between the site and the first mosque erected?"  When we invoke the tragedy of this terrible event, we do so for what purpose?  Perhaps the next time we hear something started with "9/11", we should look at the instigator and wonder if we would care to listen to him/her about any other subject at all.
I am not advocating that we ignore or forget that terrible day.  I am simply asking what we should do with it now, and if we should consider taking it out of the hands of the villains who grabbed it up seconds after nineteen evil men put those buildings down.  No one died that day in order that the rest us could hate a billion of our brothers and sisters around the word, a few hundred even laying broken and destroyed in the same rubble. Their souls should not be preserved in hatred.  My Muslim heart hurts as much for those victims and their families as any other - more so than the cowardly heart hiding behind a microphone and a war cry. If your heart revisits that day, and pulses for vengeance and retribution against a sea of faceless humans, I will pray for you, I will pray for the of us.
I can remember a time in this country when we held our hearts while we sang our National Anthem then recited our Pledge of Allegiance proudly.  Then, in times of darkness with heavy hearts, we would observe a moment of silence with solemnity and grace.  Sometimes thousands of us standing together, not one wanting to distinguish himself in his vanity of grief.  Silence. Maybe the only thing I can conclude about 9/11 these days is that 9 out of 11 of us probably shouldn't talk at all.  Silence. Silence

Rain

It's raining, probably because Enas is not smiling much these days. I was reading various Hadith late last night, and I came across the following:
Anas ibn Malik said, “While we were with the Prophet of Allah, upon him be peace, it began to rain. The Prophet opened his cloak so that the rain could fall on him. We asked, ‘Why did you do that?” The Prophet replied, “It has been with its Lord very recently.“
I have not been able to track down the exact Hadith, but it is a beautiful sentiment nonetheless!  It has been raining here a lot lately, and I have been thinking of rain and other things. Of all of God's blessings, I am guilty of neglecting this the most.  Rain is His gift that I ignore or avoid, and I have never thought that I was squandering another renewed miracle, as I have sunrises, sunsets, and cool summer breezes.
When I am not running from the rain, or casting suspending spells towards it on the golf course, I do acquiesce to it late at night when it is softly imploring me to sleep, relentlessly caressing my window, rolling up in velvet cascades streaming across the pane, pleading to wash away the vexations of my day. And no matter my mood, I surrender to its song, and settle in for a warm and peaceful slumber.  Callously I suppose, I awake the next morning, feeling alive and rejuvenated, eager to tackle my day, forgetting to thank my God for His sacred sedative.
Unlike my insomnia, I don't give my grief to the rain, I sometimes take it to it. I can remember the few times in my life when my world seemed to be folding in around me, and I was drawn out into a slow and heavy downpour, releasing everything to the steady, pulsing massage. Like a dozen iconic movie images, I stand for awhile staring into the distance, then gradually up to the heavens letting the rain wash down over me, knowing nothing else to do.  There is no time in this embrace, no humility or hubris, no defiant curse invoking wrath, no whimpering plea for release - just the crushing commune of a broken man and his patient, merciful God.
Now, I miss the rain when I am missing her. A soft drizzle that would buffet me gently and ease the provocation of my memories.  I would drag out those artifacts that populate my world, those ambushing reminders that bring me back to her reluctantly a hundred times a day, drag them out with me into the rain, letting them pucker and bleed eventually rinsing clean, giving them back to the earth that we stole them from.
Tomorrow maybe, just to walk out into the wind and mist without love or pain or misplaced grief, just to revel in this precious gift, God's newest grace tangled and mingled with the tears of joy on my face.

*I have started the movie Blade Runner a hundred times, yet had not seen the end until last night. This scene, where the protagonist (Harrison Ford) has just been rescued inexplicably by the villain (Rutger Hauer) in the rain, is one of the most beautiful I have ever seen.  Hauer, plays an android that has desperately fought his mandatory termination at the hands of Ford, whose job it is to protect mankind from the inevitable consequences of self-aware "replicants" who dare to approach human emotion and the threshold of a soul.  In his last moments, this near human teaches the man that love and pain are bargained plain, and lost "like tears in the rain."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAJGM8c6Wg4

Buhkari Hadith 1:33

The Prophet said, "Whoever has the following four (characteristics) will be a pure hypocrite and whoever has one of the following four characteristics will have one characteristic of hypocrisy unless and until he gives it up.

1. Whenever he is entrusted, he betrays.
2. Whenever he speaks, he tells a lie.
3. Whenever he makes a covenant, he proves treacherous.
4. Whenever he quarrels, he behaves in a very imprudent, evil and insulting manner."

Wow!  A good friend had shared some interesting Hadith with me over Ramadan, and I decided to read some more tonight and started with this one, randomly I thought. Nicely, I had been thinking of writing a post today about trust, truth, motives, and conduct, but didn't like how it was coming together.  I deleted it and decided to read a Hadith instead - now my thoughts are clearer, and most likely more honest. Before I read this though, I spoke to another friend who challenged me about the way I sometimes express myself, and I am therefore being much more careful to disaggregate ego from honesty.  A lot to think about!
I fear this post will be long and it will be painful - painful not for me but for anyone who reads it, as it will contain a lot of ugliness, and the contrition I now feel reflects much that is unpleasant.  Also, this will be an analysis without prescription or prognosis - I just want to arrest these awful afflictions in my heart, later to deal with their disposal.
1. Whenever he is entrusted, he betrays.
I have been very blessed lately, as I have been entrusted with the support of many new friends from Jordan, Morocco, Palestine, and Syria. Some are here as students, some on various faculty exchange programs, and some are still at home, corresponding with me via the Internet. It feels so good to be on the other end of this equation finally, the one who provides support and reassurance to someone who is alone and/or out of his/her element. And if the term "pay it forward" has any purchase, then I have accrued a great deal of compounded interest I need to account for.  Ironically, I don't think they understand this when I try to defer their gratitude with my debt.
Many, but not all, of these friends are women who are younger than I, in the early stages of their careers.  And although they can entrust me with their friendship and openness, this wasn't always the case. I have been teaching/advising/mentoring students for more than twenty-five years, and many of them have been women. From the beginning, I often noticed the conflicting attractions I felt - the need and satisfaction of helping them, and the haunting whisper of their goodness and vulnerability.  I never offered my assistance based on a woman's physical attractiveness, but I was often aware of it, and on a few occasions, lost the perspective I was duty bound to maintain. Worse, I believe there were times when I  took advantage of the desperate and near sided gratitude that mistook patience and kind assistance for empathy and love. Never with malice or ill-intent, sometimes even deceiving myself with notions of authentic affection, but certainly without any responsible concern for the depth of emotions I dabbled with. If nothing else though, I loathed the fact that my needs were ever more than philanthropic.
I don't have those inappropriate thoughts now, but the soft echo of those blurred lines still resonate faithfully. And deep down, there is a small piece of me that knows not its age, nor its absurdity, and if set free, could still embarrass me and betray the trust I now hold so dear.
2. Whenever he speaks, he tells a lie.
I am honest, yet I lie.  I have conquered the hubris and insecurity that drove me to produce exaggeration, extrapolation, and equivocation.  I do not lie for advantage, evasion, or elation.  When I speak, the direction I take is true and constant, yet I lie.  I lie in that I often do not speak about that which I should. I don't address emotions or issues that trouble me, and instead, redirect my dialogue and environment away from the place where I cannot tolerate honesty. I am articulate enough, persistent enough, and stubborn enough to prevail in this enterprise consistently, probably deluding myself with the notion that no one notices.  More likely darkly aware that no one cares.
3. Whenever he makes a covenant, he proves treacherous.
I don't break many covenants, but I have broken one recently that has haunted me.  When I made it, I knew it was the most important of my life, would be the hardest to keep, and would define me as a ethical man. It was to be a noble covenant, one few men could guarantee.  Yet I broke it with the pathetic guise of a larger, more virtuous trust.  In my cowardice, I could not face my failure honestly, and created a lie that convinced neither me nor the beautiful soul I had embraced, promised, and betrayed. And instead of the enduring respect I longed to salvage from the lost relationship, I settled for the unceremonious dismount of my "high horse."  Poetic justice.
4. Whenever he quarrels, he behaves in a very imprudent, evil and insulting manner.
I think when I quarrel, I believe I am at my most honest, yet secretly know I am not.  I manage my passion with logic and restraint, lying in wait for my adversary to lose her composure, then deftly ignoring the context, and belittle or humiliate the emotional reaction.  I also tend to try to set the tone and conditions of the argument, not understanding or respecting an alternative, no matter how genuinely presented.  By doing so, I believe I am increasing the likelihood that I will prevail, forgetting that doing so is precisely the reason I will lose the relationship I want to maintain over the very exercise I pretend that will strengthen it. When I argue, I profess equanimity and composure but I expose a brute and a bully. I cannot now imagine why anyone would engage in such a slanted and dishonest process with me.

I believe I should read a Hadith and challenge myself to find the truth and applicability within.  Moreover, it would be very vain of me to pass over one lightly, imagining that the potential negativity applied elsewhere.  If there are warnings and admonitions, they are not intended for the ignorant in iniquity or the majority that make me an anomaly - they were written for me, and only me.  I will reread what I have written here, without self-pity or remorse, and I will make plans.  There are weaknesses, there are sins, then there is the special obscenity of hypocrisy - a sin that breeds atop another sin.  This is simply a comeuppance that will hopefully preclude the permanence of a portent I cannot afford.

"They Hate Us Because We Are Free"

I have thought about this post all day, maybe all  my life. I have also come to the conclusion that if write this well, it will not be a popular post, but once again I am trying to express some very complex thoughts I have about American culture, Islam, terrorism, and the human heart.

I remember President Bush saying this quite awhile ago, and I remember having mixed thoughts about this declaration.  Mixed in that I know no one hates us because we are free, I wasn't sure who "they" were, I have no real idea what motivates the mind and heart of a terrorist, and I don't know what you tell your people in times like that when you are the president.  I must say, as I have before, that every American president is "my" president.  I can't pick and choose my leaders and pretend that I am not part of this society, yet qualify as beneficiary of its many advantages, and not culpable too for its sins.

I am writing this post today, as I heard that provocative statement on a commercial at the same time I was contemplating the many protests and revolutions occurring in the Middle East.  Do these people who are risking their lives in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and other places hate freedom?  When was the last time an average American in the USA had to risk his life for his freedom?  Patriotism without risk, freedom without fear, liberty without peril, combine to make a vapid mind, one long since shuck of the true sacrifices of its heroic ancestors. Maybe "we"  hate "them" for their valor and courage in their quest for freedom - we may think that we would do the same, what our forefathers did, what hundreds of thousands are doing in the Middle East, but we just don't know. Maybe we have been shamed, and we hate or despise ourselves.

I have never met a "freedom hater" in my many travels.  I have met people who hate Americans, at least those vocal ones who travel like petulant divas, or the many who stay at home spewing malice and incredible ignorance about the world around them from their rusted and corrupted epicenters. No they don't hate us because we are free, but they and we might hate us for the unconscionable act of usurping the term, treating it like a dime store badge, and then professing the strawman we have built as a shining model for the world.  They don't hate us because we are free, but perhaps they hate us for squandering the treasure that their sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, friends and peers die for everyday.

I don't begrudge President Bush's attempt to assuage our terrible pain and grief, for to speculate any sort of critical or complex thought at that moment would have been disastrous - our pain demands hate and loathes love.  As I mentioned earlier, I cannot replace his attribution for terrorism with another, as I have no idea why these men who kill innocents with zeal do so. Perhaps it is just the "they" I keep coming back to, not knowing how inclusive the term was intended to be. Once again our pain seems to prefer undifferentiated and unilateral retribution, rather than the redemptive process of a patient and ethical sorting of good and bad constituents on either "side" of this war. But the latter would destroy the notion of sides, and the excruciating ambivalence would be far too great a burden to sustain the negative nurturing of our pain.

Perhaps it is time to examine this term "pain."  I am sure there are many people in America and around the world who have felt genuine and devastating levels of pain over the horrific results of terrorism. Theirs is not the sort of pain I spoke of above, or that which I will address now - they will deal with their pain, and the loss of innocent and guilty lives will play no part in their recovery. But there are those who profess pain for these terrible events, who secretly smile, knowing that the authentic pain of others may just be enough of a distraction for them to slide in their hatred and vitriol up under the grief, creating a simple answer, a simple suspect for an incomprehensible crime.

I am very tired these days, and my patience is gone.  Anyone who starts a sentence with "Muslims" is most likely an idiot - whether the subsequent syntax suggests positive or negative assignations to the faith, or at the very least, is incredibly ignorant.  Maybe each of us needs to hate, feel better about it when we find kindred souls "we" and necessarily need the anonymity of "them" to keep it hot and eternal. Whatever the reason, whatever the need, freedom has nothing at all to do with it, and to suggest so denigrates the one secular concept that could save us all.

Sindi

I decided to do a post about each of my daughters this holiday season, one before Ramadan, the other after Eid.  I flipped a coin, and Kesho came first (see the link below)  with Sindi second.  It is Sindi's time now!

For a long time, I figured Sindi was destined to be a weirdo.  She was always very earnest, but she swerved a bit around middle school. She took to wearing mismatched socks, and would've been a "goth" if she knew what that was.  We were quite concerned about her, but time took care of this slight detour. 

Sindi is the younger of our two daughters, and she was always serious and at times irreverent. She  looked after her older sister, and was very responsible from an early age. I didn't know how to communicate with her for a long time, and when I did learn, it involved mostly listening. I remember coming into the living room one evening seeing sitting in the middle of the floor with a forlorn look on her face.  When I asked what was wrong, she replied "I have no car, I have no money, I have only Kesho!"  I didn't know what to say to that, so I went back to my room.  On another occasion, I came back into that same room to find her singing a Johnny Cash tune, just in time to hear her belt out "I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die", and once again had no response other than retreating back to my room.

As Sindi grew older, she remained serious and developed a degree of impatience with the world around her. She caught a curious disease many young intelligent people are susceptible to, Preposterism - a term coined by Jacques Barzun for the condition where one just cannot understand why the rest of the world doesn't see the blatantly obvious around them.  Sindi was constantly frustrated by this, the ineptness surrounding her.  But like many critical people, she was driven by a large, caring heart and endless compassion for the less fortunate.  I saw this from an early age, and it has not waned.

Sindi is developing into a very intelligent and compassionate young woman who is learning to cope with her less astute peers and parents.  She is very diligent about most things, and has an usually clear sense of her morality and ethics.  Her world is still a bit dichotomous - things are either trivial or massively important, but she is learning a little more about human politics.  She wants to go to London and study after high school, and I have no doubt she will.  I am not sure if she knows exactly what she will do for the rest of her life, but it will be done with a lot of gusto and laughter.  I am very proud of her and I cannot wait to see what life has in store for her, or more likely, vice versa.

Beauty

I was talking to a very lovely young friend the other day, and she mentioned that she was often uncomfortable when men complimented her, as she was never sure whether or not they did so with "tricky motives."  That started me thinking about beautiful women, and how men react to them.  We talked for awhile on the subject, and I came to some interesting (if not personal) conclusions. It occurred to me that men react to the beauty in a woman in at least three different ways, and that I had probably experienced all three. The first is a possessive reaction - he wants to have her beauty, to keep it, to control it, to take it away from the rest of the world.  Her beauty is an acquisition to be put away on a shelf, like a purloined piece of art, providing him the perverse pleasure of taking it out of the sun, letting it fade and decay, all  his. Even though he may display her beauty on his arm now and again, it is just another gesture of his dominant suppression. If he manages to convince her, she will surrender her beauty to this emotional erosion, giving him the satisfaction of watching it slowly die.

The second doesn't want to possess her beauty, but he does want to be near it.  He wants to admire it, to warm himself in its luster. He may have fleeting fantasies about having her, keeping her beauty for himself, but he knows this is impossible, he wouldn't begin to know what to do with it. The pleasure he knows admiring her eventually is corrupted by the pain of wanting her.  And on a random day, a random issue, a random comment will derail him, and the man she thought of as a close friend will strike out at her briefly and incomprehensibly, then flee in humiliation.

Finally, there is a man who sees her beauty, and wants to bring it in close and  tangle it up elegantly with the good and pure things he feels in his heart. He doesn't want to steal her beauty, or to own it exclusively, only to embrace it, let it connect the disparate constituents of  his soul.  Her beauty will fill the empty parts of his chest, will create the vessel he is meant to be - his soul, her beauty will manifest themselves in the exponential capacity of love. His love, her beauty will be conjoined, and his chest will rise and fall with the softness of a winter's sigh each moment he looks at her.  And if she takes her embrace back from him, he will find he has no internal systems of his own, no network of emotion or grounding rod for his pain - he will once again be hollow, but with the bitter sweet memory of  the consonant corporeal entity he once thought was his heart.

I have been these three men, and I have possessed, admired, and enmeshed the beauty of a woman.  When I finished my thoughts with my young friend, she asked me "which number are you now?"  I thought about it for a bit, then replied........................