**may contain sensitive or graphic content
Three vignettes about unknowability and displacement.
stranger
I am standing there waiting for the train when he walks up, and when I see him next to me, the red stain on my lips seeps first across my mind as I reflexively take account of myself. That’s what I get for not having headphones in. That’s what I get for wearing makeup. That’s what I get for looking happy and forgetting entirely to put my bitch face on. The first thing out of his mouth is a question about whether I speak Spanish. They always think I speak Spanish. They barely ever know my true native tongue even exists.
I can’t leave, not with the big sign overhead blinking imminent (not imminent enough) arrival, and it is impossible to ignore him while I wait here. I could ask him to leave me alone but somehow that seems riskiest of all. He hasn’t been disrespectful at all though, so I decide that I should try to engage. The realization immediately strikes me that underneath everything, I feel like I owe him my time for simply not demeaning me right off the bat. That bludgeon is swiftly followed by all the faint attendant shame of feeling this sentiment at all. What an affliction. And so, for the rest of these uneasy moments, I am pinned with sharp, icy tacks to the air in that space, while I attempt to carry out my decision.
When I confirm that I can speak English, he asks me what my name is, and I refuse to answer. I tell him I don’t give out my personal information to strangers. The refusal feels like a transgression. He says he’s no stranger, and I dis – agree; and when I disagree, he argues, for several moments of back and forth as I insist in return. But that’s why he’s a stranger. A person who knew me would know better. He is a stranger and so am I. Stranger and stranger. His line of questioning then deviates to where I’m going, and when I nod in negation, he starts throwing out guesses. Am I coming back from work? Am I going home? Am I going to meet a friend? He retracts that guess as he thinks a little harder: no, you’re not going to meet a friend, you look too nice for that. My boyfriend? I contradict every conjecture and offer no other positive clue. I did not ask to be deduced, not in front of this dangerous chasm and in fact, not at all.
A low rumble rapidly crawls on its metal legs east towards my pinned form and culminates in a piercing gust of wind as train car after train car slides into its proper place in front of us. I step into the car immediately in front of me, hoping he isn’t going the same way as I am, but of course, I am not so fortunate.
Taking the seat directly across from me, he inquires about where I’m from. El Salvador? Guatemala? Always the Cen – tral American countries first. I’ve heard that before and I tell him so. He asks if I’ve ever been to New York, if I’m from the Bronx, and I, in turn, ask him why he thinks I might be from the Bronx. He tells me I look like I’m from the Bronx. Like my name is Crystal. When I inform him that neither is the case, he asks me if I am Latina. I tell him I am not, and he is skeptical, but he stops asking me anything, as if he couldn’t possibly think of another race I could possibly be. He doesn’t ask me anything for the duration of the trip, which fortunately has only one more stop remaining for me.
I turn all of this over and over again in my head for weeks. I think: my god, I should have let him believe I couldn’t speak English. No, no, of course not – you could have opened yourself up to a hate crime, if not from him, then from another bystander. I become a scale, built to weigh the possibility of gender-based street harassment against the possibility of a racially-motivated hate crime. This is the case despite the fact that he could not figure out my race. I have found that that is when people are most prone to this kind of thing, to reflexive nativism, to clutching their land while my own has slipped out from under my feet. For them, the unknown has become even more unknown. Even still, there is a distinct comfort in knowing that the divination of myself must be earned. I try to balance my relief with my alarm with my disdain with my unease. It takes up what is probably hours of my life, far longer than the initial interaction itself, to divine what I owe strangers on the street in the future.
And when my stop arrives, I leave a stranger.
sever
That’s the thing about unknowability and the subsequent falling through the cracks. The
universality, despite the contradiction. When I am
walking through the world, I am
unknown and unknowable.
A contemporary translucent and opaque.
I invite inquiry without opening my mouth; my existence
a question without interaction;
immiscible.
No seeking necessary.
But when I seek – oh, when I seek :
it’s the fucking same.
And as I tell you,
they will presume you are the cracks themselves.
cw: violence, hate crime, lynching, mass shooting
compactor
I decide when I’m 14 that I am not a Muslim anymore. It doesn’t fit and I don’t know that I ever truly believed. I always feared there might be a god, but that’s no way to live. I hide it from my family for seven years. In 2010, I hear about Asia Bibi, the non-Muslim woman accused of blasphemy and sentenced to death by hanging. I hear about the assassinations of two public officials, Shahbaz Bhatti and Salmaan Taseer, following their support for Asia and public opposition to the blasphemy laws. I hear about Salman Taseer’s murderer gaining the public support of 500 imams for his murder, and about the shower of rose petals his supporters rained on him on his way to court. I hear about the protests that rise up when this man is sentenced to death for the crime of murdering a governor, and I hear about his funeral being attended by 25,000 Pakistanis, and I hear about his grave being turned into a pilgrimage site. I hear about Mashal Khan, suspected of blasphemy and consequently stripped naked, lynched, thrown from the second floor of a building, and shot by a mob under the eyes of 20 policemen present at the scene who managed to intervene only before his body was set on fire. I fear these people, who were supposed to be my people, more than I ever feared god.
I find myself in leftist spaces. I need these spaces, and desperately. But it is difficult to get these people to understand. They don’t truly know the wave upon wave of colonialism that my homelands have gone through. The only kind they recognize is European. I think about how adults would pinch my wide nose as a child to make it look less South Asian and more Arab. I think about the time I was told my eyes looked Arab, and all the other times a feature of mine was called Arab as a way to compliment it. I think about how Pakistanis boast about and uphold supposed Arab ancestry, even when they have no evidence, because they think it makes their lineage closer to the prophet and therefore to god. The way our sense of racial inferiority and distance from divinity sits upon our shoulders when we bow our heads west, the mandated five times a day. When I bring up the various predicaments of non-Muslims in Muslim-majority countries, the people in these spaces wave my concerns away even as they proclaim their attempts to be more cognizant of the world outside the West. Or they argue back blindly, as if I don’t already know all of their objections. They think even turning their heads to look will make them complicit with white supremacy and white conservatives. They don’t want to believe or admit that this is a problem. My people are dying. These were supposed to be my people.
I find myself in atheist spaces. I need these spaces, and desperately. Again and again, I find animosity directed with great focus on Muslims. The people in these spaces don’t understand the conditions that have led us here. They don’t truly understand the poverty, the daily violence you get acclimated to, the history of being subjugated again and again until you’ve been erased. I see their unworthy idols advocate for racial profiling and frame our struggles as some sort of war with the civilized West on one side and Muslims globally on the other. I think about the drone strikes the country of my birth has been subjected to for upwards of a decade now, about all the different geopolitical pestles it has been mortar for. I think about the fact that, where I was born, there has been a military coup every 20 years since the first coup, which was 10 years after it was formed. So many of the people in these spaces refuse to see any of this. They don’t want to believe or admit that this is a problem. On Friday, the world watches a live-streamed video of a gunman murdering more than four dozen Muslims inside their mosque. My people are dying. These were supposed to be my people.
I find myself in Desi spaces again, the ones I’d all but left out of fear and alienation. I need these spaces, and desperately. I go to brunch with some other South Asians. I’ve been dying to be around other brown people, to be seen and understood as the kind of brown I really am. The conversation turns to the current tensions between India and Pakistan. Hindutva nationalists, now in power, have been inciting violence against Muslims, with the result being gruesome and unimaginable horrors. They spend several minutes commiserating about how their parents talk about Muslims and the supposed dangers they pose. My friends make sure to express their disapproval. I don’t know what they tell their parents. I become extremely conscious, very suddenly, that I am the only person at the table whose family is Muslim, whose name is Muslim, even as the ummah disowns me. My people are dying. These were supposed to be my people.