My Accidental Jihad (19 page)

Now I was seriously considering whether his bursting onto the bus would qualify as breaking and entering. Aliya was biting her lower lip and looking back and forth between us. She could probably have used some guidance, but I was at a loss. Respecting personal boundaries was like a religion for me. I wasn’t one to show up unannounced or to barge through closed doors, and I had a hard enough time asking friends for favors, let alone strangers.

It was a small comfort for me to discover while in Libya that Ismail was not unique; many Libyans had this endearing, maddening blindness to personal space. Perhaps the reason I was so guarded is that I never lived among extended family. I knew relatives mostly through the presents that arrived in the mail and the thank-you cards I sent in return. Though it was true that by maintaining my polite distance I had successfully avoided imposing myself on others, it was also true that my husband had many more friends he could call in the middle of the night.

Looking exasperated with both of us, Aliya took our hands and pulled us toward the open doors of the club. Inside, we found a spot at the edge of the stage, and the opening band began to play. A few minutes later, when I turned to ask Ismail and Aliya if they liked the music, they were gone.

T
H
E
O
T
H
E
R D
A
Y
,
when I was walking home from the grocery store with Aliya, she said out of the blue, “Sometimes I feel bad for Dad, because people here don’t understand him very well.” She wasn’t talking about his accent but about the way he is perceived: the way her friends scrunched up their noses at his spicy food or retreated from the sound of his loud voice, the way her teachers spoke patronizingly to him, the way some of our friends squirmed when his eyes filled with tears in a culture that had little room for crying men. She understood that to be an immigrant was to live in a country of misunderstandings, to be obscured by stereotypes and prejudice.

Then Aliya cocked her head at me, considering me thoughtfully for a moment. “People misunderstand you too, Mom, because you sort of hover in between places, so they don’t know what to make of you.”

It was true. Ismail was not the only immigrant in our family. To make this life with him, I’ve had to leave behind much of my upbringing, putting an ocean of differences between myself and loved ones. Ismail would never play golf or watch sports on television with the men in my family, and they would never see the world from the point of view of the colonized, the stateless, and the oppressed. A gulf divides them, forcing me to commute long distances between their realities. Each December, when Ismail needed to be reminded how to celebrate Christmas, I felt homesick for the country I had left behind, where holiday rituals never had to be taught. Between the two of us we now had twice as many holidays to celebrate, one of us always the determined apprentice to the other.

Even some of my old friends regarded Ismail with skepticism. I’ve had to accept their general discomfort around him and their assumption, in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that he was a controlling Muslim husband. At a party one night a Cat Stevens song came on the radio, and an old friend grabbed my arm. “Oh, I love Cat Stevens!” she said.

“So do I.”

“I couldn’t believe it when he went off the deep end into that whole ‘Yusuf Islam’ thing. I was like, ‘Dude, what happened to the peace train?’ ” She rolled her eyes as she tilted her glass to her lips.

I wanted to say,
I
s
l
am
is
h
i
s
p
e
a
c
e
t
r
ain.
He
g
ot
on
i
t
a
n
d
r
o
d
e
aw
a
y
,
a
n
d
h
e
’
s
b
e
e
n
on
i
t
e
v
e
r
s
i
n
c
e
.
But she probably wouldn’t have heard me; she was standing on a distant shore where Islam and peace were categorical opposites, a place where I once lived but to which I could never return. Sometimes I still missed its soothing homogeneity, its bright illusions of superiority and invincibility.

And yet I still looked like I belonged in that place, whereas my husband and daughter looked like they belonged to each other, with their big dark eyes and cafe-au-lait skin. Everywhere I went, it seemed, couples were paired up like two of a kind on Noah’s ark: toned men and women jogging down the street in matching spandex; ruddy-faced couples in identical team colors hauling their cooler to a football game; Muslim couples in flowing garments touching their foreheads to the ground in prayer. Sometimes I wondered if Noah would even let Ismail and me on the boat, or if he’d stop us as we walked up the gangplank, pointing out as gently as he could that we were not, in fact, a matching pair.

So I had often felt alone—just as I did right now, standing in this crowded club in the dark.

After a forty-five-minute set the opening band bowed and left the stage, the lights came up, and there were the leather-jacketed men onstage, unrolling cables, adjusting mikes, and tuning instruments for the band. A murmur of anticipation coursed through the room. Just before the members of Tinariwen made their appearance, Aliya’s hand slipped into mine. Her eyes were blazing.

“Guess where I’ve been, Mom: hanging out on the bus with the band!”

Behind her Ismail beamed at me, one eyebrow raised as if to say,
W
h
o’
s
d
o
u
b
t
in
g
me
n
o
w
?

Later he would tell me what happened. He and Aliya wandered back outside, where they found the drummer standing beside the bus, smoking a cigarette.
“
A
s
-
s
a
la
a
mu
a
l
ay
ku
m
,
”
Ismail said, his hand pressed over his heart.
P
e
ac
e
b
e
w
i
t
h
yo
u
. The man looked up, startled, as if recognizing the voice of an old friend. When Ismail said he was from Libya, the drummer held the door of the bus open and urged them to come inside.

They climbed the narrow steps to find the rest of the band seated at a small table in the back. Ismail greeted them in Arabic, his hand over his heart, and told them how much he and his daughter loved their music, and about Aliya’s letter. She held out the folded piece of notebook paper, damp and creased from her sweaty fingers, like a crumpled white flag. Ibrahim, whose charcoal Afro hung like a storm cloud over his weathered face, who saw his father executed when he was just four years old, stood up to retrieve it. He bowed his head and put his hand over his heart in gratitude. Abdallah, one of the guitarists, called for the rest of the band to listen as he read her letter aloud:

I am elev
en years old and I hav
e been listening to yo
ur music for my whole
life. I want to tell
you how much I love it; t
he sound of your musi
c is unique and wonderf
ul. I am so excited
I can barely write this
letter because I know
I will be seeing you ton
ight. My dad is from L
ibya. You are my heroes.
I hope that one day I will
have a band like you
rs.

Abdallah knelt down, took Aliya’s hand in his, and spoke to her in Arabic.

“We are honored to receive this letter from you,” he said. “This is the beginning of a long friendship between you and Tinariwen.”

Then they invited her and Ismail to join them around the small table, and the drummer poured them strong, sweet green tea in glass cups like the ones that warmed my palm every day I spent in Libya. For nearly an hour Aliya sat sandwiched between her father and Ibrahim, cradling a steaming cup while the men chatted and joked in Arabic. When a member of the sound crew popped his head onto the bus to announce that it was ten minutes until showtime, Ibrahim told Aliya that if she grew tired during the show, she was welcome to return to the bus to rest, and that our entire family could come back for more tea after the show was over. They left her a folded blanket and showed her where to lie down.

Ismail did, in fact, have powerful connections to the band, connections called “Africa” and “exile.” He understood what I’d failed to grasp: that when he led Aliya up the narrow stairs of the tour bus, he was leading her back to the deserts of North Africa, where those who have been driven from their homes recognized the longing in one another’s eyes, where unexpected guests were treated like nobility and children like family.

Ismail had a habit of beckoning to our son and daughter when they were beyond his reach, saying, “Give us a kiss.” Before our children disappeared upstairs to bed or after they had said something funny or sad or when the light hit their faces just so and he was pierced by their innocence, he reached out to them from where he sat alone:
G
iv
e
u
s
a
k
is
s
.

I sometimes wanted to correct his use of the plural pronoun, but I held my tongue because I knew he didn’t learn to speak English until well into adulthood, and I found his unconventional grammar endearing. I had, however, joked with Aliya about her father’s expression.

Aliya used to kiss us both every night before bed, but lately she just drifted up to her room when we were unaware, and it wasn’t until I was lying in bed myself that I realized I hadn’t kissed her all day. The other night she was halfway up the stairs when Ismail called after her, “Give us a kiss,” and she turned slowly and made her way back down, feigning reluctance but smiling anyway. First she kissed his stubbly cheek, then the air beside him, as if an invisible person were sitting there. She looked at me and giggled at our private joke. Ismail smiled quizzically at us.

“What’s funny? Did I say something incorrectly?”

“It’s just that it makes no sense to say ‘us’ when you are sitting there alone,” I explained. “When you say it that way, it sounds like you are referring to the imaginary friend by your side.”

He grew quiet, contemplating this.

“But it’s a direct translation of what we say to children in Libya. It wouldn’t be right to say ‘Give me a kiss,’ excluding all the other adults in the room.”

I recalled how, when I was in Libya, my mother-in-law’s house was crowded day and night with hordes of relatives eager to see Ismail’s American wife and child. Each time we entered the home, my coat was slipped from my shoulders, and five-year-old Aliya was swept from my arms and passed around the room like candy for everyone to taste. When she was finally returned to me, her plump cheeks were rosy from being pressed to so many lips, squeezed by so many hands. It wasn’t just relatives but also shopkeepers in the market, waiters in restaurants. Once, an elderly Iraqi refugee we met on the street cradled Aliya’s smooth cheeks between leathery hands and spoke to her in a steady stream of Arabic, ignoring me altogether, as if they shared a secret.

N
O
W
I
B
R
A
HI
M
,
T
H
E
lead singer, walked onstage, his silken tunic covering everything but his cowboy boots and the hems of his gold-threaded pants. Deep lines traversed his face like well-traveled paths. He scanned the cheering crowd with the somber love of a father watching his children sleep. Then he leaned into the microphone and spoke.

“The best language in the world,” he said in French, “is music. When I try to speak any of the others, it’s a catastrophe.”

His fingers plucked the strings of his guitar as if they had a life of their own, and he began to sing, his gravelly voice gaining momentum like a rusty engine turning over and then humming on an open road. As he sang “
S
u
b
h
a
n
A
l
l
a
h
” (“Glory be to God”), the drummer kept pace, becoming a frenzy of motion, his hands slapping and pounding and sliding across animal skin. At the foot of the stage, a man whose beefy shoulders were black with tattoos closed his eyes and nodded in emphatic agreement with the sound. Aliya’s skinny body bent toward the music like a sapling toward the sun. She crossed her arms over her chest, as if holding herself back from falling into the ocean of rhythm. Then her hands found each another and she began to clap.

Onstage a gray-haired dancer swayed his hips, his arms twisting and gliding through the air. The light in his eyes was brilliant. When he raised his hands to clap, I couldn’t help but do the same; when he moved to the music, so did I. His joy fanned out around him like wildfire, setting ablaze in me a fierce longing, a hunger far too voracious to be satisfied by food, drink, or touch.

I believed that Allah could be found in the precision of Islam’s rituals and the punctuality of its five daily prayers. But Allah was here, too, in this darkened club—in the red electric guitar swishing against a silken djellaba, in the brown fingers that strummed the chords. Allah was in the frenzied palms of the drummer slapping against a gourd as smooth and hard as stone. Allah was in the joyous old African man with the dancing feet of a child, gently coaxing us to peel off these stifling layers of craving, anxiety, and self-doubt and show our naked selves. Allah was the music, and we were swimming in it; it was washing us clean, its rhythms beating in time with our hearts. The air in the crowded room smelled of sweat. The bottle in my hand was growing warm. We didn’t have much time—the song was already almost over, and soon we would all return to where we came from—but right now the old man was beckoning, inviting each of us to step inside the music, if only for a moment, and make ourselves at home.