Days of Ignorance (14 page)

And to the extent that he was marginal, he was lost. For more than thirty years the only homeland he’d known was this sand that stretched from the Arabian Gulf to the Red Sea. Yet still, there was no room for him there.

11:30 p.m.

It has been said that Ham lay with his wife on the ark and that, in response, Noah cursed him, praying for his offspring to be disfigured. Consequently, a black son was born to him. This son was Canaan son of Ham, forefather of the Sudanese people. Alternatively, it has been said that Ham saw his father sleeping with his private parts exposed, but failed to conceal them. Seeing the state of their father, his brothers then covered him up. Consequently, Noah prayed that Ham’s sperm would mutate and that his offspring would be slaves to his brothers. (Ibn Kathir,
al-Bidayah wal-Nihayah
)

He spread his hands in front of his face, then began turning them over and examining them. He remembered how Leen had once rubbed the back of his hand with her forefinger, saying, ‘I want to see what’s under the color.’

The color! How far away color had taken him, though he hadn’t realized – as he moved away – how brutish he’d become before he met her. Then he looked at life through her and saw the ruinous end he would have met if their paths hadn’t crossed.

He didn’t often talk to her about color. Would she understand if he told her that he’d suffered so much that he’d stopped looking at his color and hurting, and that after she came along, he’d begun looking at it and feeling pain all over again? And if she did understand, wouldn’t she be pained herself?

His mother would tell him from time to time that he was the most handsome of her sons, and the one that looked most like her father. He believed the part about looking like her father. But he couldn’t believe that anything black could be nice to look at, and when Leen said to him, ‘You’re handsome,’ he laughed and said sarcastically, ‘But not more handsome than Majed Abdullah!’

She didn’t reply. Later she admitted that she regretted having told him how charmed she was by his looks. He responded the way he responded to others. He contented himself with a little smile of resignation as he listened to her, since she didn’t know what he’d been through on account of color. She hadn’t been with him on the day his friends raised a ruckus because he objected to their insistence that a certain actress was beautiful on account of her color:

‘Hey, man, it’s enough that she’s white!’

‘Damn, is she good-lookin’!’

He looked over at his four friends. All of them were black. He felt uncertainty pricking him like a hot pinhead. One hesitant voice against four convinced black voices, all of which were saying that whiteness equals beauty. Whiteness alone. Whiteness, even if it covers lackluster features or a malicious spirit, since whiteness would atone for all a person’s faults.

Iqbal, the Pakistani man who worked at the corner store near their house, was in the habit of greeting him cheerfully as ‘Blackie’. He would say it so unthinkingly, Malek didn’t feel as though he could get angry with him, or with the name. He had no choice but to disregard its sharp blade: the sharp blade of having color as his identity, the card by means of which people recognized him and which defined him for them. In his life, color had become a painful blow that he would never know how to return, not because he was weak or powerless, but, rather, because the other color had never been an insult or a dirty name. The inferiority of his color was as old as the hills, so old that he was in no position, now, to deny it even if he barricaded himself behind a thousand sayings of the Prophet or verses from the Qur’an. Consequently, he’d stopped hurting. He’d stopped viewing the issue as his own personal war. He’d even stopped getting upset when some angry driver hurled vulgar epithets at him through his car window for not moving faster when the traffic light turned yellow. ‘God damn you, kur!’ or, ‘Shame on whoever let you have a car, you slave!’

None of these labels –
kur
,
takruni
,
kuwayha
– hurt the way they had in long years past, when the lofty idea of justice still burned brightly deep inside him. In the beginning he’d never thought, even for a moment, that this ideal would disintegrate inside him along with his certainty that it could be realized. As it was, he’d lost his certainty of lots of things he’d once thought he was meant to experience and achieve.

Justice!

What a ridiculous idea!

He’d suffered no end on account of this idea. However, his pain had led him to another idea that had relieved him somewhat and protected him from going downhill more badly than he already had. This new idea was that God is just even though life is unjust for the most part. If justice were achieved in life, there would have been nothing to explain Satan’s overweening pride, the creation of Heaven and Hell, or all the pain, anguish and despair people endure. He’d clung to this little faith to the best of his ability so that he wouldn’t stop believing in God’s justice, which he’d been on the verge of doing.

He’d been thirteen years old when the pain associated with his color first crushed him, and its impact had confused him for long years thereafter. At the time he hadn’t understood why it was happening to him:

‘How far do you think you’ll get?’

The question was posed to Malek one day by the middle school’s assistant principal after he’d called him to his office. He hadn’t understood the question. Besides, he had been so flustered, he hadn’t known whether the man was asking him the question in order for him to answer it, or as a rebuke. He hadn’t known until the man went on, saying, ‘They say your grades are high. So I’m wondering why you’re going to all this trouble. I mean, you know as well as I do that if you get the chance to finish high school, you still won’t get a chance to graduate from university. So why put yourself through all this? Give the chance to somebody else in this country. At the very least, return the favor to the country that took you and your family in. Otherwise, you’d be hanging around parking lots with a pail and washrag waiting for a signal from somebody to wash his car.’

He hadn’t known what to do or say. He hadn’t even known what to feel when he heard those words. The room kept getting smaller and smaller and smaller as he stood there, staring at some nebulous point in front of him.

Then finally the man had said to him, ‘Go back to your class.’

As he walked down the corridors, he could hear the sound of his ribs shattering like sheets of glass under the colossal pressure of the pain. He couldn’t tell anyone what had happened to him. By the end of the week he’d moved to another seat in the class because he couldn’t bear to look the assistant principal’s son Abdulaziz – who sat next to him and who, irony of ironies, was his friend – in the face. Every time their eyes met, he saw the words he had heard his friend’s father say leaping about like tiny flaming masses with scornful, demonic features. He didn’t want to hurt Abdulaziz because he wasn’t bad. At least, he hadn’t been during the two years he’d known him. They’d played and laughed together, concluded make-believe alliances, hatched little plots, and been harassed by their other friends. But there was no way it could go on any longer.

He opened up a deep pit inside himself and began throwing everything into it. He didn’t even wait to hear the sound of all those details crashing against the bottom of his sorrow and anguish. Then he moved away from the pit, the things inside it, Abdulaziz, and even himself. He no longer concerned himself with striving for what he wanted, since he’d concluded that he wanted things, but they didn’t want him, or that he wasn’t worthy to want anything. He was too young to bear the pain alone. But he couldn’t get anyone to share it with him, so he buried it and went on, the way children tend to do when pain is too great for them to endure.

He began giving up his dreams one after another. He started by not getting high grades anymore. Then he stopped being torn between studying medicine and studying engineering, since he’d thrown the pursuit of either of these goals into the pit he’d opened inside himself for all his hopes and aspirations. Never in his life had he met a black doctor. So what was the point of wondering whether he should study medicine or engineering?

He did his best to get into high school, although he no longer aspired to anything beyond finishing high school, then getting a job – any job – that would enable him to make enough money to leave this country once and for all. For years, bitterness had been building up inside him like salt stalactites in a deep, lightless cave, and over the years, everything over which his bitterness had accumulated had fallen to pieces. And together with the bitterness there was fear. He was terribly afraid, not wanting to meet the kind of fate that had met others of his race who faced situations like his: Ibrahim, whose brain had been damaged from sniffing glue; Ahmad, who’d been driven by provocative words to murder another young man in an altercation that had broken out between them; Hussein, who’d disappeared, after which they heard he’d been killed by anti-drug police . . . And the list went on. These were people who had been born to find that life’s fabric had been cut out for them in such a way that they had no choice but to squeeze themselves into it and go on, grateful and content, in the narrow margin left to them. And as they went, they had to be careful not to leave the margin for life’s mainstream, since otherwise, there were more people than they might think standing ready to give them a kick in the seat of the pants. It was unacceptable for a black to distinguish himself to the point where others were obliged to remain grudgingly silent as they watched him leave his narrow margin to join them on life’s broad highways and byways.

The dark fates he so feared weren’t restricted to members of his own race. However, they were more noticeable among them than they were among others. It was as though such fates attracted people of his race with an irresistible magnetic force, and he was afraid that some day he might find himself within their field, unarmed with anything but his anguish and despair.

Munis * the 8th of Wail,

the twelfth year after Desert Storm

1 a.m.

. . . Bilal, a slave to the Banu Jumah tribe among whom he had been born and raised, was later emancipated by Abu Bakr, may God be pleased with him. His full name was Bilal ibn Rabah and his mother’s name was Hamamah. He was sincere in his Islamic faith and pure of heart. His master, Umayyah ibn Wahb ibn Hudhayfah ibn Jumah, used to take him out in the midday heat to Mecca’s open country. He would issue instructions for a huge, heavy stone to be placed on Bilal’s chest. Then he would say to him, ‘You will stay this way until you die, or until you renounce your faith in Muhammad and worship the gods al-Lat and al-’Uzza.’ In response Bilal would simply repeat, ‘One, One . . .’ (Ibn Hisham,
The Life of Muhammad
)

‘One, One, One, One . . .’

Many years earlier Malek had heard an actor repeat this phrase on the television screen, and for several evenings he’d watched the man being tortured without saying anything but, ‘One, One . . .’ Throughout that entire time he kept thinking about one thing: that the actor was a white man who’d been painted black. He’d noticed it from the way the color was distributed around the man’s lips, eyes and palms, and most of all, from the actor’s features, which bore no resemblance to those of any black man. Over time, and after seeing lots of white men painted black on the screen, he began to think that black people were so torpid, they weren’t fit to play the roles of black men or tell their stories, and that if he wanted his story to be told the way it ought to be, he would have to sit in front of a TV screen and see it done by white people who’d painted themselves black. In any case, the number of black people whose stories were worth telling was hardly worth mentioning. So why think this way?

He would try to think back to the time when he first became aware of the difference in his color, but he couldn’t. He remembered the first time he’d been violently crushed on account of his color and his situation. However, he couldn’t recall when he’d first looked at his color and seen it.

When he was in high school, he’d been sitting alone in the schoolyard one day when a classmate of his by the name of Husam came and sat down beside him. After running the tip of a pen through the sand in front of them for a moment, Husam said, ‘I’d like to ask you a question, but I’m afraid you’ll get mad.’

‘Go ahead.’

A heavy silence descended. Then Husam said hesitantly, ‘When a person’s black, how does he feel?’

Malek looked into his classmate’s face and, seeing no cruelty, restrained the impulse to blurt out an angry retort. He bowed his head as he thought about the question. He couldn’t help but notice the unspoken assumption that lay behind the question; namely, that black people are so different that they almost seem beyond the pale of humanity. They’re so different, they don’t feel in the same way people do, and maybe they don’t hurt, either.

He let out a slow breath. Then, without looking at Husam, he said, ‘Would you like to trade places?’

‘You want to know the truth, and you won’t get mad?’

‘Of course.’

‘Actually, I wouldn’t. When people call me Baqaya Hujjaj or Tarsh Bahr, it makes me really mad. So how would I feel if I were Tarsh Bahr and black, too!?’

His words were followed by an even heavier, more onerous silence, which was broken by Husam, who said, ‘I hope you’re not mad!’