I can’t slaughter a goat but I can roast a leg of lamb.
Yael Malka/ Alice Mongkongllite / BuzzFeed
Last year, around this time, I was struggling. My Pakistani husband had moved back home to Lahore. We had both been living in New York so he could do his MBA. He graduated, our marriage failed, and I decided to enroll in a writing program online so I could stay in America on a student visa, which would buy me some time to figure out what the fuck I wanted to do with my life. I definitely didn’t want to go back to Pakistan, the Land of that Judgy Aunties and crappy infrastructure. I was working three jobs to cover rent and trying to write my novel at night. And that’s how I completely forgot about Bakra Eid, one of the biggest holidays in the Muslim year.
In my defense, I was busy: teaching English by day, interning at a magazine, and freelancing my editing services. It was a constant hustle. Despite all that, the anonymity and freedom New York afforded me was a relief. I felt privileged to be here even if I did inhabit spaces that were alarmingly white.
In the chatrooms for my online MFA program, fellow writers would ask me things like, “What is biryani?” Or, my favorite: “I really want to be transported to this character’s hometown, so can you talk a little more about the smells, the sounds, and the food?” It was all about the food. “Something that’ll really make the exotic nature of this city real to me.”
But I didn’t want to. No one had explained to me what apple pie was growing up, yet I was expected to have a perfect grasp of the Western literary canon that went on endlessly about Christmas and Thanksgiving feasts. Now, I was the one writing. I wanted the privilege to write “biryani” without explanation. I didn’t want to have to exotify what was ordinary to me, for someone else’s comfort.
There was a boldness in my replies that came easily from behind a screen. When I wrote back to my online workshop peers, I would say things like, “I think the audience I’m writing for understands what I’m saying.”
But the same boldness evaded me in real life, when I would walk into the offices where I read transcripts and wrote stories. There, they could see me and the color of my skin. And despite being light-skinned, depending on what was in the news that day, I would feel more or less vulnerable.
I bent over backward to explain myself. “From Pakistan,” I would say. “Not a terrorist,” I almost added. But I didn’t — the joke would only be funny if racial profiling didn’t exist.
I developed an inner filter. I rarely wore salwar kameez. Before talking about any cultural practice I would ask myself, Does this make us sound violent? There was already enough of that in the news. So I stopped talking about Bakra Eid, the day Muslims all over the world slaughter goats and feed their friends, family, and those in need. I got tired of explaining why I wasn’t eating from dawn ‘til dusk during Ramzan. Explaining Ramzan would mean claiming my Muslim (but not terrorist!) identity. When did I become so fiercely protective of it? I was keeping it tucked away so deep inside of me that it started to disappear. I stopped fasting altogether.
One Tuesday night last fall I got a text from H, a fellow Pakistani writer who was supposed to be meeting me at 9 p.m. at my apartment in Astoria: “Running late.”
It was 8:45. She was still an hour away. She was always late. I was pissed.
“FINE,” I wrote back, exasperated.
“By the way, Eid Mubarik,” she wrote.
I stared at my phone. How had I forgotten? Then I remembered the multiple missed calls from my parents that week. Shit.
“Fuck. I totally forgot.”
No response, she was on the train.
I thought about it for a second, then wrote, “Let’s go to Jackson Heights?” She would get it when the Q train came above ground.
The author with her family celebrating Eid in the Eighties.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/1QOtNVB
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