My Accidental Jihad (10 page)

One morning, with another long day stretching out before us and very little to do, I sat on the edge of Fauziya’s bed, watching her prepare for a trip to the grocery store. I asked her to show me how she wrapped her head scarf so that it fit so snugly around her face and fell so elegantly to her shoulders. She selected a rectangular brown cloth from her closet, soft as a cotton jersey, then stood before me and tented it over my head, carefully lining up the edges. She swept it twice around my face and tucked it neatly beneath my chin with a pin. I hurried to the bathroom to examine myself in the mirror. With my hair no longer exposed, my blue eyes and long face seemed somehow even more so. The scarf hugged my face, warm and snug. It did not feel smothering, as I had assumed it would. Instead it offered privacy, warmth, and protection. I was startled by how different I looked—and how comfortable I felt.

The next time I joined Fauziya on a shopping trip downtown, I followed the steps she had shown me to wrap the scarf around my own head. I felt self-conscious when I stepped into the living room wearing it for the first time, but only Aliya stared wide-eyed and openmouthed from where she stood in the doorway. My in-laws smiled and complimented me. On Libyan streets the scarf was a reassuring barrier, protecting me from chilly coastal breezes and the curious stares of strangers.

One morning not long after, Aliya emerged from her bedroom with her white cotton tights pulled snugly down around her head, concealing all her hair. Flaccid leggings fell on either side of her face. Her four-year-old cousin stood by her side, his arm locked in hers, his own head swaddled in a towel. They explained to us they were aunties visiting for tea, so we offered them tiny cups filled with warm milk. While we stood in the kitchen, they sat at our feet sipping from them. Fauziya leaned forward and reached for my hand, as if she was about to break some difficult news. She wore a floor-length housedress and her thick black hair was swept into a high twist off her neck. Her gold earrings swayed like pendulums as she leaned in toward me.

“Sometimes you make me nervous,” she said, arching one perfectly shaped eyebrow. 

I froze, both taken aback and intrigued by her candor.

“Why?”

Her hands fluttered in the air as she reached for just the right English words to diplomatically express what she needed to say. Finally, lacking the vocabulary to soften her statement, she threw her hands into the air.

“You don’t act like a woman.”

In sweatpants and one of Ismail’s old running T-shirts, I leaned back against her kitchen counter, speechless. I had just fit a baseball cap onto my head and was about to lace up my running shoes. My plan was to jog a few brisk laps around the crabgrass field behind her home to get my aerobic exercise before spending the rest of the day indoors among the women.

Seeing my shocked expression, Fauziya rushed to explain. “You insist on doing everything yourself: always carrying your own bags, always making your own plans, always going, going, going. How can your husband treat you like a woman if you don’t act like one?”

Her comment struck me in a sensitive place. Back home, when Muslim friends hosted large mealtime gatherings, I was always offered a seat smack in the middle of a long table, the women to my left and the men to my right—a border zone I jokingly referred to in private with Ismail as the transgendered seating area. My seating assignment confirmed that others recognized what I felt in the company of our Muslim friends: I didn’t quite belong with the men
or
the women. I was most comfortable in the margins between the women’s gentle laughter and quiet intimacies and the men’s long-winded political or religious debates. Now I could see that my sister-in-law recognized a similar quality in me. But what had I done to call my femininity into question? Then I remembered when we had first arrived at her house, as I struggled to maneuver my heavy suitcase up the front stairs in the dark, her husband, Adel, had backed up the stairs before me one by one with an outstretched hand, pleading with me to let him carry my bag. In my exhaustion I had waved him off and plowed forward, focused only on finding the shortest path to bed. My shins were still bruised where the suitcase had banged against them.

“You’re pregnant,” Fauziya said to me now, slowly and clearly. She held my gaze and searched my eyes for understanding. “You should put your feet up and rest. This is the time for your husband to serve you—but how can he do that if you never lie down?”

I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling defensive and unsettled by her words. This pregnancy had brought on exhaustion like a leaden weight I dragged with me everywhere. The only way I knew how to deal with fatigue like this was to bend into it and press forward; I feared that if I stopped for even a moment, it might swallow me whole. With a full-time job, a young daughter, a marriage, a fitness routine, and an active social life to maintain, I couldn’t afford to be sidelined. Even when Ismail had suggested this trip to Libya during my first trimester, I had not paused to consider how difficult it would be to make such a long journey while I was so nauseated and tired. Pregnancy, as I understood it, was no excuse for laziness. At my last prenatal visit, my doctor and I had brainstormed ways to combat my enervation—with a cup of coffee in the morning, a good diet, regular exercise. There was no reason I couldn’t continue running through my second trimester, she said. Perhaps I should also consider prenatal yoga for relaxation and stress relief; I seemed a little tense.

So I had signed up for a local prenatal yoga class. Once a week I left work just before 5
P.M
. and drove to a nearby studio, a backpack of workout clothes slung over my shoulder and a rolled yoga mat beneath my arm. Expectant mothers in yoga gear unfolded from minivans and station wagons and convened in a room with gleaming hardwood floors and a wall of windows. We sat in a circle on colorful mats, our bottles of filtered water beside us. Our instructor, heavily pregnant with her second child, sat before us like a spandex-clad fertility goddess, her back ramrod straight, her skin glowing and flushed like she’d just stepped from a sauna. She was a feast of feminine curves: breasts the size of cantaloupes spilling from a tank top like a second skin, a watermelon belly she cradled with freshly manicured hands, buttocks so high and round it was as if she had breast implants in her rear end.

The first night of class, she asked us to introduce ourselves one by one around the circle. Several women offered their own names and then, patting their swollen bellies, proudly added,
Th
is is Lily.
Th
is is Jackson.
Th
is is Olivia.
The rest of us nodded and smiled as if genuinely pleased to make these tiny new fetal acquaintances. Caressing her belly, the instructor encouraged us in a singsong voice to close our eyes and
connect
with our babies, to
invite
them into the world and to let them know how
welcome
they were. I stole glances at women smiling blissfully with eyes closed, rubbing their midsections in gentle circles like the Buddha’s belly. I chewed the inside of my cheek. I checked my watch. Beneath my old cotton T-shirt, my midsection was thick like a tire, not round like a moon, and I had no idea how to be a gracious host to my womb’s tiny guest, which I only knew by the names
exhaustion, indigestion
, and
bloating.
The class had not even begun, and already it was beginning to feel more stressful than my day at the office.

I quickly discovered that prenatal yoga was not about relaxing, exactly: it was about relaxing
into pain.
This was a critical distinction. As we contorted and panted and the blood rushed to our faces, our instructor encouraged us to notice our breath and befriend the burn in our muscles. The only moment of stillness came at the very end of class, when the instructor dimmed the lights and turned up the sound track of waves breaking onto shore, and for five minutes we curled up on our sides in a modified child’s pose. My heavy, tired body melted into the floor. I closed my eyes, grateful for my first restful pause in twelve hours. I craved silence as much as stillness, but over the sound of breaking waves, the instructor began to tell us about her experience of childbirth. Over the course of the entire six-week class she never ran out of instructive anecdotes from her moment of bloody glory. We learned about the doula who baked cookies and eased her in and out of the tub, the husband who burned incense and massaged her lower back, the professional photographer who dimmed the lights and caught it all on film. Among these women, pregnancy felt like a competitive feat of endurance and style, a proving ground for our womanhood and our marriages.

I thought my job was not to surrender to pregnancy; instead I forced my pregnancy to submit to my busy life. But the moment Fauziya suggested lying down, I realized that was what I most wanted permission to do. With every inch of my being, I ached for rest. I wanted to curl up on her soft bedspread in the middle of the day with a cup of tea and a book, to stare out the window and contemplate the crabgrass field or doze back into the pillows. I wanted to stop mincing time like an onion into tiny, symmetrical units; I wanted the hours to ooze and puddle like syrup, sweet and slow. I wanted my to-do list to evaporate like steam from a kettle. For just one day I wanted to curl up on the couch and watch the soap opera of the improbable arc of the sun: the joy of its brilliant rise, the mournfulness of its fall. And I wanted to eat,
really
eat, not what was most nutritious but what pleased me most, to relish flavors and fullness and then to stretch out, sleepy and satisfied. Perhaps in Libya, stranded among family for days with nothing to accomplish and nowhere to go, I could finally do just that.

Fauziya wanted to know what I planned to do when the baby arrived. I proudly explained to her that my plan was to negotiate a longer maternity leave than anyone at my office had ever secured: eight whole weeks at home with my newborn. Knowing that I would be pushing the limits with my request for so much time, I would build my case methodically. I’d determine my dollar value to my employer, tally my financial contributions to the organization over the past four years in an Excel spreadsheet. I’d lay out plans to avoid taking time off all year so I could use my paid vacation days when the baby came. I’d emphasize that immediately after the baby was born I would make myself available by phone or email for any urgent needs during my absence.

Fauziya listened closely. And who would care for my baby when I returned to work? she wanted to know. I was not yet sure. I had already been investigating local day-care providers and was particularly interested in one that had very good ratios—only four babies per caregiver—but could barely afford it on my current salary.

Why not just quit work? she asked.

I shook my head. That was simply not an option—not with our debt and mortgage and the high cost of college education. Plus Ismail’s job always seemed uncertain; he worked for a corporation that laid off staff even in years when the company turned extraordinary profits. It had simply become too difficult for an American family to enjoy a middle-class life on just one income.

“Besides,” I added a bit too quickly and defensively, seeing her doubtful look, “I like working. Earning my own money gives me freedom.” Fauziya cocked her head slightly, and I could have sworn I saw pity flash across her face.

Later that week, at a museum of Roman artifacts where a gleaming marble bust of Gaddafi was shamelessly on display beside an ancient and chipped one of a Roman emperor, Ismail purchased me a copy of
Th
e Green Book,
Gaddafi’s rambling political manifesto, which was mandatory reading for all Libyans, the number-one best-selling book in the country for decades. On our drive home I thumbed through the book, reading aloud Gaddafi’s “solution to the problem of democracy.” Proclamations like “Labour for wages is the same as enslaving human beings” or “Popular rule does not mean popular expression” reminded me of the epiphanies that coalesced in the thick marijuana haze of a college dorm room: seemingly brilliant to an addled mind, utterly incomprehensible in the sober light of day. I did my best Gaddafi imitation, and Ismail laughed and shook his head, keeping his eyes on the road.

Scanning Gaddafi’s manifesto for more outrageous quotes to read aloud, I fell silent when I read these words: “To demand equality in carrying heavy weights while the woman is pregnant is unjust and cruel . . . as is demanding equality in hardship while she is breastfeeding
.
” The words tugged at a knot deep in my chest; something in me began to unravel. The text blurred as tears sprang to my eyes. I had not expected to discover plain truth here, in the unhinged proclamations of a mad dictator; I did not expect to find myself in grateful agreement with this tyrant.

Ismail glanced over at me, startled to see my expression turn from silly to serious. Everywhere I turned back home, I saw advertisements for products and services that promised to help me juggle work and family, to make me sexy and successful and make motherhood easy—as if serenity could be bought in installments as long as cash flowed as steadily as the milk from my breasts. In nine months I would be sitting in the only secluded space in my workplace: perched on the toilet in the cramped employee bathroom, pumping milk from sore and swollen breasts to freeze for my newborn, who would spend his days with a stranger on the other side of town. At least Libyans knew the face of their tyranny: his bulbous nose, his flamboyant style, his vacant stare. Fear permeated my life as well, forced me to yield what was most precious to me, strangled my sense of possibility. And I didn’t even know where it came from.

A
d
el and Fauziya wrestled the bucket seats of their rusty hatchback forward so Ismail and I could fold ourselves into the back, knees to chest, on a bench seat with foam padding bursting from torn vinyl seams. We were on our way to the desert mountain village where my brother-in-law’s Berber family lived. There were no seat belts and none of the three young children in the car—my daughter, my niece, and my nephew—had seats anyway. Instead they clambered from lap to lap as we drove: small bodies tumbling from the back to the front, tiny hands grasping the steering wheel for balance, feet teetering across the emergency brake as if it were a balancing beam, cheeks pressing up against each dusty window. It was like taking a road trip with three feral cats.

For two hours, we drove on a two-lane road that cut through an endless arid landscape and then climbed a steep mountain pass. We had to shout to hear one another over the whining of the children and the car’s overtaxed engine, which buzzed like a fat, low-flying mosquito in our ears and rattled the car’s tinny doors and floorboards. In a tiny cluster of homes in the middle of nowhere, my brother-in-law swerved off the road and parked in a ditch beside a house built into the side of a mountain.

A round-faced woman with a bright smile welcomed us at the door, a small child clutching at her skirt and peeking out from behind her broad hips. Somewhere behind her, animated voices bounced off bare walls. She led us down a dark hallway to a narrow, crowded room with only one high window on its far side. Beneath the window, seated on a floor cushion as if it were a throne, sat the family patriarch, holding court over a circle of men. A separate, noisier circle of women and children filled the other half of the room. The only piece of furniture was a seventies-era television with rabbit ear antennae that towered over us on a wooden stand, its volume turned all the way down.

When I turned to find my seat among the women, I saw that the room contained one more piece of furniture: flush against the back wall was a narrow metal hospital bed on rusty wheels. A white sheet concealed the bony outline of a skeletal figure. Her wizened face stared unblinking toward the ceiling: sunken cheeks, gaping mouth, unseeing eyes as pale and washed out as the blue-white desert sky. She looked like a corpse—but then air wheezed from her lungs with a high-pitched whine that sounded like a leaky balloon. This was my brother-in-law’s dying grandmother.

Never in my life had I seen anyone this close to death—and certainly not in a bed placed like a buffet table along the wall of a crowded party. This woman looked like she belonged in an intensive care unit, under twenty-four-hour supervision by medical staff, with machines to monitor each labored breath and frail heartbeat. Images from our long drive through the desert flashed through my mind: nothing for miles but dust and sky, olive trees and cliff faces, the occasional passing car. What could possibly be done for her in such a remote area, in this barren home that lacked good lighting or even a decent chair, that seemed to lack everything but family and food?

I was clearly the only one alarmed by her condition; everyone else was totally relaxed in her presence, chatting with her or maneuvering around her bed. Dying was apparently as much a part of a busy Libyan household as all the other chaos of family: the eating and drinking and playing and reprimanding now taking place in this small room. My brother-in-law went straight to his grandmother and kissed her head. Next Ismail approached the bed. He covered her bony fingers with his hand, knelt down, and kissed her forehead and spoke to her. He pulled me toward him and gestured silently that I should greet her, so I mumbled something self-consciously to her in English, feeling awkward and trying to avoid staring at those milky eyes.

I was offered a seat on the floor almost directly beneath the hospital bed—if I leaned back, its metal leg prodded me in the back, reminding me not to get too comfortable. A huge silver platter with the circumference of a truck tire was placed at the center of the circle: dinner was served. On either side of me women leaned forward and reached into a mountain of fragrant rice and chicken parts, dipping their slender fingers into an oily yellow sauce. The rattling breaths of the dying grandmother mingled in the air with the chatter of women and the giggles of children. A baby wriggled free from its mother’s lap and crawled under the hospital bed, grasping its rickety metal frame and trying to stand on fat legs. As she always did at gatherings like these, my sister-in-law Fauziya sat by my side, eating and gesturing animatedly, throwing her head back and laughing without ever losing contact with my body—her warm thigh against mine, her hand resting for a moment on my leg, her fingers squeezing my arm, guiding me gently through this daunting afternoon as if maneuvering a blind person through heavy traffic.

Because I could not join the conversation, I began to focus instead on the silent images scrolling across the grainy television screen on the opposite side of the room. Pale-faced soldiers in bulky camouflage, weighed down with ammunition, were herding together dark skinny boys and men. In their heavy black boots, the soldiers swaggered and stomped, gesturing with guns toward captives who knelt in the dust. The crouched men stared up at the steely faces of soldiers whose eyes were concealed behind mirrored sunglasses that appeared to block out suffering along with UV rays.

Suddenly, close-up shots of bloody, broken brown bodies began to scroll across the screen—images I had never seen on American television. Back home, war was a televised spectacle of the latest military technology: tanks rolling single file down abandoned roads, jets lifting off from aircraft carriers, rockets sizzling like fireworks through a nighttime sky. War was young men returning home as heroes to ecstatic, beautiful wives; kneeling, arms open to embrace clean, delighted children. On Libyan television war was a dirty affair—grittier than a reality TV show, bloodier than an R-rated action flick. Brown faces young and old, naked with rage, teemed in a rundown street. The camera panned in on a child’s corpse lying in the dust beside a puddle of blood black as oil. A woman covered in cloth wept and wailed over the tiny body, her face naked with grief.

I glanced nervously around me. Thankfully, I seemed to be the only one watching television. What must people who saw images like these on a regular basis think about me when I flew halfway around the world for a short vacation in the country they had never been allowed to leave, when I sat impatiently among them in my jeans and tennis shoes? When they opened their doors to me, did it occur to them how much I resembled these soldiers on television? Why did they continue day after day to offer me the very best of what they had, to kiss my cheeks and cuddle my child and smile at me from across the room with such love and acceptance?

Raising his voice to be heard over the din, the patriarch turned and addressed Ismail. He gestured grandly toward me with one hand, and his voice rose with a question. The room fell silent as the guests turned first to me, then back to Ismail to await his response. I shot a quizzical look at Fauziya, who leaned over and whispered, “He just asked Ismail what his American wife thinks of our country.” Like everyone else, I turned my face expectantly toward my husband to await his response.

Ismail shook his head slowly from side to side and screwed up his face into an expression of disgust, as if he’d just tasted something foul that he needed to spit into a napkin. When he began to speak, Fauziya’s hand tightened involuntarily around my arm, and she let out a little gasp. The bright smiles in the room flattened into tight lines and pursed lips. I could feel my husband’s betrayal in my bones.

“What’s he saying?” I whispered to Fauziya. She was hanging on his words, her mouth shaped into an
O
of surprise. She shook her head quickly back and forth, as if trying to jolt herself from a bad dream. When I repeated my question, she turned to me hesitantly and bit her lip. I could tell she was torn between her sisterly allegiance to me, which demanded she tell me the truth, and her reluctance to translate out of a desire to protect me. “He says you hate it here,” she whispered curtly, offering only a brief summary of what Ismail was still taking his time to elaborate upon in great detail with a theatrical voice and animated hand gestures.

I watched his eyebrows rise and fall, his lips curl into a frown, his tea-stained teeth flash between his thick lips. I watched him pause to lick chicken grease from his fingers, then crack a joke that made the rest of the men snort and chuckle and steal glances in my direction, their round bellies jiggling beneath their tunics. I trained my eyes on his face so that when he caught my gaze he could see he was lined up squarely in the crosshairs of my fury. When our eyes met, he jerked his gaze away like yanking his hand from an open flame.

My rage was a loaded gun I held close to my chest for the rest of the afternoon in this crowded room. As the women around me socialized, I sat alone with my resentment, fantasizing about my first opportunity to pull the trigger. That moment would not come for several hours, not until we left this crowded room, not until I had escaped this suffocating circle of women who seemed to only be at peace when my mouth was full of food. Oblivious to my anger, they plied me with plate after plate of chicken, followed by syrupy-sweet green tea and buttery pastries. I gnawed on my anger as I stuffed my queasy stomach. Safely enclosed in the circle of men, Ismail was avoiding eye contact with me altogether. Somewhere between the crowded house and the overfull car, I imagined, in my first private moment with him, I would launch my retaliation.

By the time we finally escaped that room, I could barely contain myself. But the entire herd of our extended relatives, everyone except the dying woman, poured out into the street, circling around while we folded like circus clowns back into the tiny car. As soon as the engine revved up and we pulled away from all those faces pressed against each dusty window, I exploded.

“What the hell were you thinking?” I sputtered in Ismail’s ear as the mosquito engine whined to life and the children began to squirm and crawl.

“I was just telling the truth!” he shot back—both of us pretending our angry whispers could not be heard by my in-laws inches away or the children scrambling over our laps. “All I’ve heard from you since we’ve gotten here is how much you hate this place!”

This was an exaggeration and a low blow, but I could not deny that I had cursed his native country. When we’d passed through airport customs and the sullen official had tucked Ismail’s passport into the pocket of his workshirt, he’d mumbled to Ismail that the passport would be returned in a few days’ time via the cousin of a brother of the husband of a neighbor. Somehow, even though we weren’t even yet sure where we would be staying, he was confident that he would be able to find us. “
Mish mishkla
,” he’d said, shrugging and waving us through the line.
No problem.
It was the most popular phrase in the Libyan vocabulary, I quickly discovered, one I heard many times a day—always with a cavalier shrug of the shoulders or a wave of the hand—and always in response to the most bizarre and maddening predicaments I had ever encountered.

When my husband’s passport was not returned to us, and no one could tell us what had happened to it:
No problem
.

When our taxi driver missed an exit and swung a U-turn on an eight-lane freeway, driving headlong into oncoming traffic along a narrow shoulder for a half mile:
No problem.

When I stepped out of a hotel room into the hallway to find a solid torrent of gray-black water pouring straight through a hole as big as a dinner plate in the ceiling and rapidly flooding the hallway, the hotel employee shrugged, seeing my alarmed look:
No problem.

When my relatives’ half-built house lost power at night, turning as black as the bottom of the ocean because each gaping window frame was sealed with black plastic and no one could find a flashlight:
No problem.

When my sister-in-law spent two hours one evening applying intricate traditional henna designs to my hands, encasing them in mud and sealing them in plastic bags and instructing me to sleep on my back like a starfish so the designs would remain intact, and then in the middle of the night I was overcome with explosive diarrhea (from food Ismail had bought from a street vendor, insisting it was
no problem
to eat) and I stumbled desperately down the pitch black hallway toward the bathroom, pawing at my pants with plastic mitts:
No problem.
I sat on the toilet, cold sweat pearling on my forehead, as my sister-in-law coaxed me from the other side of the door to let her in, reassuring me that helping me to wipe myself would be
no problem
.

That was the night I lay in bed staring up at ceiling and said flatly to Ismail:
I fucking hate this country.

I rarely swore in the United States, but Libya brought out a desperate, unhinged aspect of myself I usually kept carefully concealed from everyone but Ismail. Now I was swearing like a sailor to a captive audience of six relatives, the youngest of which was four.
Fuck you,
I mouthed quietly at Ismail over the heads of the children between us. Fat, furious tears spilled down my cheeks. I turned to the window, pressed my face against the cold, dirty glass, and began to sob. My sister and brother-in-law stared straight ahead, as stiff and blank-faced as crash-test dummies. The children watched us with big, curious eyes. Twelve ears were perked up and waiting to see how Ismail would respond.

I knew better than to curse Ismail. My most recent American boyfriend had been relatively unfazed by profanity; our late-night drunken arguments became swearing contests, erased from memory the following morning. But such was not the case with Ismail. His dignity was his most precious inheritance; he could not bear for it to be smeared by profanity issued from the mouth of his wife. When I called him names or provoked him by cursing, he became as incensed as a tribal warlord, willing to fight a bloody battle to reclaim his honor. My raised voice did not rile him, but a single expletive wounded him deeply and prolonged an argument for hours. I spent that time in a cold, dark place, pounding on the closed door of his heart and begging for him to feed me scraps of forgiveness.