Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one’s own despised and unwanted feelings.
The following day, I received a nasty email from America in which Ahmad demanded I start acting like a “good, Muslim woman,” presumably more like my sisters-in-law. What they had told him I wasn’t exactly sure, but from his “good woman” remark I realized that his anger wasn’t aimed at the possible dangers we could have faced on the road or even in the city at night.
Clearly the real issue was my desire to go anywhere according to my whim. It was completely alien to the family, something that had never happened before. Although I could understand the discomfort that my relative independence caused, it was still frustrating to be forced to battle their nebulous belief that a “good woman” stays home, or if she did go out—especially at night—she always went under the “protection” of a man.
Now, it wasn’t that I didn’t understand the cultural forces at work. I knew very well that this was the dominant attitude of many Muslims before I’d arrived in Jerusalem. What did surprise me, though, was the venom in the criticism, the implication that I’d done something not just unwise, but shameful. After all, Ahmad had regularly “allowed” me to go out alone at night in America (where nobody in Safa would know about it), yet he seemed to think nothing of insulting me for my forays over here. And he hadn’t bothered to ask me about my side of the story. It was enough that his parents didn’t like it.
Still, as I sat there at the kitchen table, staring in shock at the email, I realized that for once I was as angry with the criticism as I was hurt—no small change, considering how sensitive I was to any criticism from him when I’d been back in America, and even how much the previous “running around” email succeeded in wounding my feelings.
I knew for sure that I was going to continue our excursions out of the village. If I didn’t, I would not only have virtually nothing to write about, but I would be bored out of my mind. And then there was the thought of falling in line with the “ideal Safa womanhood” bullshit (much in the way I’d embraced some of the other cultural practices I didn’t agree with over the years). The very thought got under my skin.
Still, I had to be practical. After all, I’d scarcely been here six months, and I certainly didn’t want to alienate everyone in the family, so for a while I tried to employ a bit more subtlety, making a special point of being home before sunset.
I strongly resented the pressure to conform to Safa standards of ideal womanhood and the huge difference between being an Arab and being a Muslim. After all, the world’s Asian/Pacific Muslim population far exceeds the Middle Eastern one. The thousands of other cultures around the world that call themselves “Muslim,” from China to Bosnia to Sub-Saharan Africa, each have their own cultural quirks that are quite separate from Islam as a faith. I was a Muslim and had no problem being judged on the basis of my religion (which I chose and willfully embraced).
However, I would not willingly take on the cultural expectations the family had for me as a woman. I knew I wasn’t doing anything “wrong,” but it was still frustrating. I’d expected Safa to be at least on some levels a “haven of belonging” that I hadn’t found in America, but it wasn’t, and the thought that there might not be such a “place” for me anywhere began to intrude more and more into my carefully maintained view of the world.
For all of my growing internal bravado, though, I was becoming lonely. Lonelier, even, than I had been in Seattle—where I’d been plenty lonely. It wasn’t fun being the only Muslim mom on the local PTA, or at the neighborhood BYOB block party. That was bad enough. But now I was in an unfamiliar place and under the pressure of so many major changes: being alone, working, trying to manage the house, the kids, the language…I was terrified that the loneliness might transform into a too-familiar dark shadow of depression and anxiety, and I knew that I could not afford to “lose it” here.
In desperation, I fell back on my oldest and most dysfunctional coping mechanism: trying to please as many people as possible. Like a woman possessed, I worked my ass off, ferrying family members to the doctor, bringing them groceries, letting them borrow my car—even though it was illegal and could get me arrested. I did everything I could to score points and fit in.
Still, it seemed that no matter what I did, someone wanted more. There were so many of them, and each seemed to think they—and only they—deserved a piece of me, complaining when I took this one to the doctor or another one to the store in town. It actually seemed that my strategy was beginning to backfire.
It all finally came to a head one night on a trip to the local grocery. Up until then, my usual routine would be a general announcement that I was going to the store and if anyone wanted to come, ahlanwasahlan, “Welcome.”
“If you can fit, you can come,” was my motto. Usually this meant puttering the short distance to the “supermarket” hole-in-the-wall, the car stuffed with kids on a candy mission, blasting music and laughter into the low Judean hills.
The kids and their cousins loved these outings, and the competition to be one of the chosen few to go sometimes led to meltdowns. I tried to be as fair as I could, rotating turns between the seemingly endless supply of cousins. One night, though, the lot of them tested my patience, instigating a “who gets to ride with Auntie Jenny” kid brawl after I’d managed to wedge at least twelve of them into the Polo like a clown car.
Furious, I stopped the car in front of Huda’s house and ordered all of them, including my own, out of the car. There was nothing too strange about that, especially given that many of the other parents in Safa beat their kids. I was mad, but I hoped they would learn that their candy runs were not guaranteed benefits from the American aunt.
That’s why I was so shocked when my mother-in-law asked me the next day why I called the kids “Arab Dogs”—one of the worst insults in the Arabic language—during the melee. Now, I do have a temper, and I was known for hurling f-bombs back in America at the occasional racist or homicidal lane-changer. But I do have some scruples when it comes to nasty insults: I save them for the grown-ups. What my mother-in-law repeated to me was an outright lie.
I was so mad that I demanded to know the source of the accusation, thinking perhaps it was one of the kids out of his mind from sugar withdrawal. When she told me instead that Asya and Sa’eda were the sources of the information, I felt a white-hot anger flash through me.
I wanted to wring their necks! Although a part of me wasn’t surprised that Asya had come up with such a thing, I really couldn’t understand Sa’eda’s involvement. They picked on the wrong princess this time, damn it. There was no way I was going to let it go. In fact, I was so upset that I took it to the extreme and brought in every witness I could find, including all the kids, parading them into my in-laws’ kitchen where they all gathered to hear me rant in my (surprisingly improved) Arabic.
“You’re a liar, Asya, and you know it.” I yelled. “I’m going to call Ahmad, and I’m going to make you swear to God that I said it.” Asking a religious (or even a quasi-religious) Muslim swear to God about anything is a dire thing, and they take it very seriously. “Swear it, Asya.”
Asya’s face froze ever so slightly while she thought it over, presumably considering the otherworldly consequences of sticking to her story. “Maybe I didn’t hear you right…” she started.
At that, I fixed her and Sa’eda (who sat cowed and mute the entire time) with the ugliest glare I could muster, turned and went home vindicated—sort of.
I should have felt better, but despite my victory, I couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone had been pretty darn quick to believe them against me. I’d been in Safa for months now, but I was still the “outsider,” a piece of sand in the shorts of the homogeneous village. I began to realize that no matter how hard I tried, or how many times I ferried my sister-in-laws’ kids to the store, took people to the doctor or dentist, tried to look like a Palestinian, dress like one, act like one, marry one…or give birth to three children…I would never be one of them. Not really.
Sure, I felt sorry for myself, although I should have understood that I was a big change for them all, a real shake-up for them and for their lives, and I couldn’t really blame Asya for being a bit of a snappy puppy. During other circumstances I might have given her, or them, a pass. But alone, tired, and trying to navigate this new life myself, I wasn’t prepared to be Madame Understanding. I was prepared to mope, kvetch and court the paranoia that was probably inevitable. Unfortunately, this was exactly when my father-in-law stopped coming over to supervise the still-ongoing construction outside or my during kids’ bi-weekly Arabic lesson (taught by a man in my living room at night, no less)!
I took it as a clear signal that my husband and his family didn’t care about me—after all, custom said that the entire family’s honor was threatened by leaving me alone with the workers, to say nothing of the tutor. It simply wasn’t done—ever. So, instead of thinking of any of the other possible reasons for my father-in-law’s lapse of duty (like, perhaps, his fondness for long afternoon naps), I seethed in a stew of resentment until I finally decided to stop telling him when I left the village, a respectful gesture I’d been careful to make until then.
It only took a few days of this before my father-in-law called Ahmad again to complain about me, only this time he suggested Ahmad should possibly marry another wife. In Islam and in Palestine, a man can marry up to four wives, but the practice is generally uncommon, especially among the younger generation. Although I’d been a Muslim for more than a decade, I’d never met a polygamous couple in Safa or the United States. It was so unusual, in fact, that almost everyone in the family was shocked when Khalid married his brother’s widow—but that was how it turned out.
The day Jamal died was like any other, they said. Married three months before, Jamal was serious about making as much money as he could scrape together to support his new wife. So when he went out that morning to go antique hunting in the hills outside of Jerusalem, nobody thought to say any special goodbyes. The next time they saw him, he was gone: killed almost instantly when his car rolled over just north of the city. His son was born six months later.
It was then, and at my father-in-law’s insistence (at one point, he smashed out all of Khalid and Asya’s front windows and drove them out of their house), that Khalid “stepped up” and married Sawsan to keep her and the baby in Safa, instead of going back to her family in a distant village as custom otherwise demanded. To add insult to injury, however, Asya found out just like everybody else the afternoon Khalid returned from signing the marriage contract, Sawsan in tow.
Still, there was nothing she could do. Asya had six kids, no job, no education, and a family that thought it better if she just swallowed her pride and accepted her fate. Maybe they thought she’d get used to it. She didn’t. It was more than a decade later, and Asya was just as bitter about the marriage as she was that first day—she just got better at managing the bile.
Like most people in the family, I didn’t hide the fact that I thought the idea of Khalid marrying Sawsan was a mistake. But, as people like my father-in-law hastened to point out, polygamy is a part of Islam. Still, I guess I just saw it from a different point of view.
Polygamy is allowed in Islam (but is not legal in several Muslim countries), and although many non-Muslims know about the practice, few understand its place in the religion. Unlike the fundamentalist Mormon sects we hear so much about in the United States, plural marriage is not considered a path to heaven; in fact, it’s not even recommended in the Quran, which states, “…marry women of your choice, two or three or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with them, then only one.”
Of course, many polygamous men preferred to “forget” the tail end of the verse, and it showed. After all, it would take a rare bird to be completely fair to more than one spouse or lover at a time, and Khalid—nice as he was—wasn’t that kind of bird. In fact, considering all of the tears, fighting, and hurt feelings I’d seen between the three of them (not to mention the kids) in the barely half-year I’d been on the scene, the only real result of their union was two broken homes instead of one.
As for the wives, they were about as far from the “sister wife” ideal as you could get; although they could put on a terrific show for outsiders. It was odd, but I suppose they just got tired of staying in a state of constant turmoil, so they sat together at night outside my mother-in-law’s house, worked together if the occasion demanded it, even laughed together sometimes. But separate them and place one before a sympathetic ear, and the rage fairly poured out of them—Asya, because her husband of twenty years, and presumably the love of her life, had married Sawsan. Sawsan, for her part, knew damn well that she had been taken on out of duty. Both women felt humiliated in their own way, and I felt the whole situation was pretty much unsatisfactory to everyone involved. That, and to be honest, it simply grossed me out.
Such was my mindset when I heard that my father-in-law was encouraging my husband to marry another wife. I’d overheard this little tidbit from my mother-in-law as she chatted with two of Ahmad’s aunts about him over cups of thick, Arabic coffee. I’d been rounding the corner with a cup of my own when I heard her say, “Abu Ahmad (Ahmad’s father) said he should marry a girl from here…”
I froze. In fact, at first I wasn’t sure if I’d heard her right, and I waited a few seconds for my brain to translate and re-translate the words, standing like an idiot with my coffee cup in my hand.
I had no idea if she’d simply forgotten that I was within hearing distance, assumed I couldn’t understand, or perhaps wanted me to overhear. But by the time I’d processed the comment enough for my face–and mood—to darken, I knew that she knew she’d made a terrible mistake.
“Did you say that Abu-Ahmad told Ahmad to get married?” I asked.
“No..no..sweetie,” she answered, “We just want you to have another baby…Just one more son…”
How I hated them!
Although I knew Ahmad wouldn’t do such a thing, or expect me to stand for it, I was so hurt, depressed, and frustrated that I holed up in the house with the kids for weeks. When I wasn’t at work I was at home, maniacally painting trompe l’oeil murals on the bare cement walls and crying myself to sleep at night. I refused to see anyone.
It wasn’t even that I believed they were serious about Ahmad re-marrying. In fact, I suspected it was a kind of passive-aggressive “shot across the bow” to get my attention, up the ante, and show me who was boss. Still, even when Ahmad tried to calm me down on the phone when I brought up the subject, joking about it while at the same time urging me to try and “fix things” between myself and the family, there was no way I was going to budge. I wasn’t going to be “the bigger person.” Instead, I made up my mind that I was going to stay on my own, completely separated from them. I was convinced as only someone isolated in a new family, community, culture and language can be convinced, that I was an abject object of hate, envy, scorn and annoyance. I was just too hurt and insecure to re-engage, so I became more isolated and angry, wallowing in self-pity.
I worked, took the kids places, and spent hours alone on a hidden balcony high on the house, drinking my Starbucks stash and watching the clouds and their shadows moving over the hills and valleys on their way from the Mediterranean sea. I also spied on my wicked sisters-in-law during their nightly strolls on the road in front of my house, straining to hear the subject of their conversation, and convinced it was me.
I knew it was pitiful for a thirty-six year-old woman to hide in the shadows watching the “in” crowd go by. But as determined as I was to show them all that I didn’t need them anyway, I was also scared, lonely, and hurt. I was just too stubborn to let it show or to pack it in and leave for home, which I probably would have done eventually if a falafel sandwich hadn’t changed everything.