III
Homecoming
17 Betrayal
A month after we returned from Libya, an ultrasound technician handed me a small black-and-white picture of a baby with a tiny penis. I squinted at the hazy image, then turned it sideways and reexamined it in the bright light of the hospital corridor. Until that moment, I had felt like a babushka doll, hiding within me a smaller version of myself. I had imagined tiny ovaries growing next to my own, a tiny womb somewhere inside of mine. I was raised in a family of four girls. When my sisters and I are together, we speak a private language composed largely of different pitches of laughter that causes our exasperated father to demand to know what’s so funny. I am most at home when I am sharing clothes, secrets, and a bathroom with other women. So when I became pregnant for the second time, I looked forward to giving my five-year-old daughter a sister. It was difficult for me to accept that I was carrying a boy.
With the women in my family I felt porous—as if I absorbed their thoughts and feelings through my very own skin. They did not have to tell me they were angry or excited, nervous or depressed; I could feel it in the way they held my gaze, in the spaces between the words they spoke. Five years after her birth, my daughter and I remained tethered to one another by an invisible cord through which her moods coursed straight into my bloodstream. But with men it was different: their skin coarse and impenetrable, their expressions blunt or inscrutable. I stumbled into moments of intimacy with Ismail that were startling and unexpected; no sooner had I felt them than I began to feel the loss of him as he retreated back into his separate world. It seemed we were always in a state of approach or retreat, moving toward or away from one another, our intimacy a moving target.
A few weeks after we discovered I was carrying a boy, Ismail and I invited a friend to dinner who casually asked us if we intended to have our son circumcised. To me, the answer was obvious. We had just prepared a detailed birth plan with our midwife, outlining a strategy to cushion our son’s transition into this world: the lights in the birthing room would be low; my baby would rest on my chest immediately after birth; he would stay with us at all times in the hospital. Why would we go to such lengths to minimize trauma and then subject him to a painful and unnecessary procedure? As I shook my head, I was astonished to see Ismail nodding on the other side of the table. It had never occurred to me that he might have a different opinion, though it should have, since he’d been raised according to Muslim traditions.
But Ismail had reinvented himself when he had moved to the United States; he’d cast off the outward signs of his background—the style of dress, the diet, the language—and transformed himself from a traditional North African Muslim into a progressive middle-class American. He relished his new freedom to openly date women, to jog down the street in running shorts, to protest the government. But some traditions can’t be discarded as easily as a wardrobe or a cuisine; not even Ismail knew that circumcision was in his blood until he discovered he had fathered a son.
Ismail had rejected those aspects of Arab culture that seemed most oppressive. He had explosive arguments with his father in which he defended his sisters’ right to choose their own husbands, and years later he admonished those husbands to help their wives with the household duties. While the rest of the men sat waiting to be served, Ismail insisted on working side by side in the kitchen with the women in his family. He was skeptical about the oppressive aspects of American culture as well: debt, for example, which he feared would make him an indentured servant to corporations. He objected to American standards of feminine beauty, which encouraged women to develop eating disorders or have plastic surgery to conform to the culture’s unrealistic expectations. He refused to be defined by his job, and he struggled to maintain a balance among work, home, and community. Given all of this, I found his position on circumcision as nonsensical as demanding a dowry for our daughter on her wedding day.
“Why on earth would you want your son to be circumcised?” I asked Ismail, unable to suppress the judgment and incredulity in my voice. Our guest had left, and we were in the kitchen. I was loading the dishwasher, and he was wiping the counters.
“Because it’s what the men in my family do,” he replied curtly.
“Yes, but why?” I turned to face him and crossed my arms over my chest, awaiting his response, but he refused to meet my gaze. Instead he kept his eyes locked on the counter as he wiped in slow, thoughtful circles. He had no answer. My practical husband, the scientist who trusted reason more than intuition, the one who had shaken off so much of his oppressive background, was inexplicably tied to this particular ritual from his past.
Ismail believed that the truth was verifiable and that disputes could be resolved by studying the facts. When we disagreed, he often prefaced his strongest argument with the phrase “The bottom line is . . .” He said these four words with absolute confidence, as if he were standing on rock-solid ground. I found his certainty maddening. To me, the truth was not solid, but liquid: it slipped easily through my fingers, reflected the light in different ways, and took the shape of the countless perspectives that tried to contain it. Because he liked to back up his arguments with data, Ismail often concluded with “I’ll send you some links.” The next day he’d email me his online sources.
And so in my efforts to protect our unborn son’s penis, I borrowed his strategy. I printed stacks of articles about the drawbacks of circumcision for Ismail to read, confident that once I’d educated him, he would change his mind. He piled these articles by his bedside and read them one by one, his brow furrowed, while I lay in bed beside him, studying his face as he read.
“What do you think?” I pressed him after he finished an article that detailed the pain of the procedure and the future potential for diminished sexual pleasure. He put the article down and rubbed his eyes.
“I want my son to be circumcised,” he said simply, shrugging his shoulders.
“In Arabic we call it tahara, which means ‘purification,’ ” he explained. “For Muslims, this is a way to follow in the footsteps of the prophet Muhammad. It is an honor and a rite of passage.”
“Should my son also follow in the Prophet’s footsteps by being illiterate? By having multiple wives? By sleeping on a rough mat and giving away whatever coins he finds in his house at the end of each day?” My voice was rising; the conversation was deteriorating rapidly.
No scientific study or public-health message could change Ismail’s mind. Circumcision was what men in his family did, and he needed his son to be a part of that lineage. He made me feel that if I prevented the procedure, I would be breaking one of his last and most important connections to his heritage.
Part of me wanted to honor my husband’s wishes. Over the course of our marriage, Ismail had accepted many of my idiosyncrasies: my difficulty with apologies, my desire to sit down and write rather than clean house, my need to disappear alone into the woods to clear my head. He didn’t ask me to back up these behaviors with data. Instead he watched our daughter when I disappeared. And when I returned, rather than waiting for the apologies he deserved, he broke the tension by reaching for my hand. He accepted me in spite of the fact that I confounded him, and I felt I should do the same for him. But I also wanted to protect our son.
One day, as we were leaving our couples therapy, I offhandedly asked our secular Jewish therapist if he’d had his own sons circumcised. “Of course,” he said without hesitation. But like my husband, he could not provide a clear explanation for why he had done so, though he did offer that the circumcised penis was more “attractive.” He and my husband nodded knowingly at each other. Ismail and I had spent many hours in this therapist’s office, and this man, so adept at analyzing the subtle ways in which we caused each other pain—our tone of voice, our choice of words, our avoidance—now spoke as if cutting away the most sensitive part of a baby’s body made perfect sense and required no further consideration.
At the end of one of my last prenatal visits, just after my midwi
fe had finished measuring my belly, I asked if she knew where I could get my son circumcised. I may as well have asked her for a cigarette. She stared at me long and hard, as if she suddenly didn’t recognize me. Then she began to tell me in slow, measured tones that the procedure was not medically necessary. She pointed out that it was no longer covered by some insurance policies; by the time my son was in high school, more than half of his peers would be uncut. She talked about hygiene and sexual satisfaction. She even told me about support groups for men who mourned the loss of their foreskins and about kits men purchased on the Internet to help regrow them. She asked me to consider this decision very carefully.
NOTHING COULD HAVE prepared me for the sight of my newborn son naked, his penis curled like an inchworm on the bright red apple of his swollen scrotum. The skin of his genitals was glistening and raw and appeared so paper thin that I worried it would tear at the lightest touch. It seemed to me like a defect: such vulnerable organs exposed rather than shielded beneath muscle and bone, and for the first few days I avoided touching these parts of him entirely.
But before long I became intimate with the male body in a way I never had been before. As a young woman I’d regarded men’s bodies as a dangerous neighborhood I rushed through in the dark, heart pounding, eyes closed tight. Once, in my early twenties, after I’d had a lover for several months, I’d caught sight of his penis in the morning light and gasped in alarm. “You’re not circumcised—I can’t believe it!” He’d replied with equal alarm, “And I can’t believe it took you so many months to discover that!”
With my newborn son, Khalil, I came to know the male body as precious and vulnerable. I was falling in love with his soft apricot ears, his tiny red toes, his sweet, milky scent—and, yes, his penis. Intoxicated by a mother’s love, I saw every part of him as perfect. One day, sitting in a cafe with Khalil curled against my chest, I looked around and thought: each man in this room was once this small and pure. My eyes grew damp as I studied the barista pouting over the espresso machine, his faded jeans slung low on his hips; at the elderly man in the corner hunched over a newspaper; at the gregarious college boys clustered at the next table. I felt a surge of tenderness toward them all.
My arguments with Ismail about circumcision were the only dark shadow in the early weeks of Khalil’s life. Our discussions unsettled me; normally compassionate and open-minded, Ismail became like a stubborn patriarch. When I offered what I thought were compelling reasons to forgo circumcision—the trauma, the risk, the unnecessary violation of our son’s body—he stared blankly at me, as if I were speaking a foreign language. Up against hundreds of years of Muslim tradition, my arguments felt flimsy and disposable, like cheap plastic up against concrete. I was being worn down. Inside my head I heard the voices of my own ancestors, especially the women, whispering that there was no other option than to submit to his male authority, that a wife’s role was to honor her husband’s will.
One day a mother on the playground told me that her two sons had been circumcised by a wonderful Jewish doctor who had come to their home, used anesthesia, and allowed the father to hold their baby during the brief procedure. She said that he was very skillful. “In fact,” she added in a confidential tone and with a touch of pride, “several doctors have commented to me about what a good job he did.” I wondered what an exceptionally well-circumcised penis looked like.
But I was encouraged by the idea of doing it in our own home, that my son would not be strapped onto a “circumcision board,” which looked like a neonatal torture device. So one morning, with my sleeping son curled against my chest, I called the doctor the woman at the playground had recommended. A receptionist answered the phone.
“I need to make an appointment for a circumcision,” I said nervously. “I was hoping . . .”
“Can you please hold?” she replied in a bright monotone that made me wonder briefly if she was human or digitized. The line clicked and then tinny, vaguely familiar classical music was piped into my ears. I ran my fingers along my baby’s back and toyed with the idea of hanging up. A moment later she was back on the line, thanking me for my patience.
“I’d like to schedule a circumcision to be done at my home,” I said nervously. Her reply was brisk.
“Is your son Jewish?”
And then: “I’m sorry, ma’am, but our doctor only performs house calls for Jewish babies. If you’ll hold for just a moment longer, I’ll schedule an office visit.”
Sitting on hold, cradling the phone between my cheek and my shoulder, I looked at the baby sleeping at my breast. Khalil was too young and pure to belong to any religion. He was all of them. But I was exhausted by this conflict that had hovered over my marriage for months. I wanted to accept Ismail as he had always accepted me. And I needed to put this discord behind us. If this was going to be done, I wanted it done quickly. When I was connected with the receptionist, I made the first available appointment.
The doctor’s office was located in a complex that also housed a tax accountant and a real-estate broker. We arrived early. I stood glumly behind two others in line waiting to check in. Each step forward added to my misery. When it was my turn, a ruddy-faced receptionist with pink lip gloss smiled sweetly up at me.
“Don’t worry, mama—your baby will be just fine,” she reassured me in the same soft southern accent I had heard on the phone. I nodded, my eyes welling with tears, but her words were no more comforting than an inscription on a Hallmark card. On the wall behind her hung a framed picture of George W. Bush, along with an inscription thanking the doctor for his contributions to the Republican Party. In the movies, bad things happened in dark places, with skewed camera angles and ominous music playing in the background, but in real life suffering was often perpetuated in locales like this waiting room with its soothing music and color-coordinated furniture.
The nurse called my son’s name, and I handed him to Ismail. I was able to give my permission for him to be cut but not to be there with him while it happened. I sat on a small chair in the hallway, sobbing into my hands when I heard Khalil scream (in response to the injection of anesthetic, I later found out). I wanted to rip the pictures off the walls; to howl at the receptionist, who smiled blandly at me from her station; to claw my way through the door to the examining room. My heart pounded against my ribs. It felt as if I sat doubled over in that seat for a very long time, but the procedure lasted less than five minutes.
After it was over, when I heard my husband call my name, I rushed into the room—a histrionic and tardy savior—and grabbed my son from Ismail. I cradled Khalil in my arms and offered him my breast, wanting him to believe I was not responsible for his pain. My relationship with my son had so far consisted of an unadulterated flow of love and nourishment. With this first betrayal, I planted our relationship firmly on this earth; in the soil of ambiguity and loss. My husband and the doctor tried to reassure me that the procedure had gone well, but I pushed right past them and fled the office with Khalil, imagining I could run fast enough to slip back into the past. My husband called out to me to wait for him at the elevator, but I was already halfway down the stairs.
Khalil fell into a deep sleep as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot, and we drove home in silence. Our son’s foreskin was wrapped in a piece of gauze and tucked into Ismail’s shirt pocket. I had been restless and angry on the way to the clinic, but now I felt raw, overwhelmed with grief and a crazy desire to somehow fold my baby back into my body. At home I curled around him in bed while my husband knelt beneath the young fig tree in our garden, said a prayer, and buried the foreskin in the earth.
Two years later, thumbing through a parenting magazine, I came across an article condemning circumcision. The author explained that by tickling both circumcised and uncircumcised infants on the penis and gauging the intensity of their laughter, scientists had determined that the circumcised penis is less sensitive than the uncircumcised one. I thought about how much I’d hated being tickled as a child, even as I’d laughed un
controllably. I thought about my own sensitivities, which have brought me equal measures of joy and pain. I thought about the way my circumcised husband’s face crumpled with pleasure during lovemaking and the warm tears I felt on his cheeks afterward. Could the quality of our sexual experiences really be reduced to the number of neurons that fire when our genitals are stimulated? Lovemaking, that morass of sensuality and spirit, didn’t conform well to scientific research. But later that evening, after our children were in bed, I showed the article to Ismail. We sat out on our porch in silence, watching the night fall and cloak our home in shadows. After a while he told me he wished he had been able to listen to me better.
18 Liberation
A few weeks before Gaddafi was captured and killed, I sat with Ismail on our back porch after the children had gone to bed. The plaster Buddha on the small stone table between us cradled a glowing tea candle in his lap. A bullfrog lowed from across the pond, and the cat at our feet hissed at an unseen threat in the woods.
“I cannot wait until Gaddafi is dead,” Ismail said flatly, staring into the darkness.
I studied his tired eyes and the deep lines on his face. I covered his warm, heavy hand with my own.
“If Gaddafi were sitting as close to you as I am right now, close enough to touch—if you could look into his dull, disoriented eyes and his aging face—would you still wish him dead?” I asked. Ismail looked over at me briefly and then down again at the tabletop, fixing his eyes on the dying flame in the lap of the Buddha.
“If there is such a thing as pure hatred,” he said, “it is what I feel toward Gaddafi.”
Whenever I said I hated anything when I was a child, my mother winced and sharply drew in her breath. “Please don’t hate,” she would say, as if the word itself stung her flesh, and my sister and I would glance at one another and try not to laugh at her extreme sensitivity to the word. But once I saw the pure blank faces of my newborn children, their pristine gazes unblemished by darker human emotions, I understood how she felt. Even years later, after my children had grown moody and odorous and sullen, after I’d caught them lying or seen them disappear behind slamming doors, I still wanted to scrub the stains of darker human impulses from their skin. I pored over spirituality books and dreamed of a house that contained no rage or hate. Once, following a suggestion from one of these books, I announced that our house needed a peace room—a small, safe space to which any of us could retreat when the flames of our anger threatened to overtake the house. We did not have a room to spare, so instead I found a narrow space in the basement beneath the stairs, just high and wide enough for a child or grown-up to sit cross-legged beneath the underside of pine steps. I covered the cold tile floor with a blanket and a pillow and hung origami peace cranes from the floorboards overhead. I imagined making my way down the stairs the next time my husband raised his voice or pointed his finger at me; imagined the cranes gently tickling the top of his head as he sat cross-legged fuming over yet another library fine I had incurred. When my toddler daughter threw herself violently to the ground, as if her body were an outfit she wanted to cast off—when she screamed until her face was beet red and snot ran in rivulets from her nose—I gently suggested she take a little time for herself in the peace room. She never went willingly, so I had to carry her there, kicking and screaming. Her flailing arms sent origami paper cranes flying through the air. I had not realized how difficult my plan would be to implement. The peace room remained empty while anger erupted all over the house. Still, I clung to my vision of a family that resolved conflict peacefully and honored the humanity of others—even dictators of faraway countries.
My Accidental Jihad Page 15
