My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

  I told Ismail that I hated to hear him sound so bloodthirsty and tribal. He reiterated his feelings about Gaddafi, this time raising his voice and pointing his finger at me. When I tried to respond, he cut me off. His voice grew louder; his finger jabbed at the air. Nothing would move him from the barren ground of his hatred. Ismail uttered an Arabic saying, then translated it for me: It’s a goat even if it has wings. He meant to say he would not be moved from his position, no matter what—even, apparently, if all evidence pointed irrefutably to the fact that he was dead wrong. Crazy Libyan, I thought to myself as I got up and went inside.

  Ismail bore the scars of oppression like an old and debilitating injury, one that would force him to walk off kilter for the rest of his life—even though he had lived in the United States long enough to recite his favorite lines from Oscar-winning movies and become more familiar with Bob Dylan’s albums than I was. In college in Tripoli, he had listened to disco and smoked hashish and debated politics in dorm rooms. Then some students organized a political rally—and shortly afterward they disappeared. They were hung in the city’s main square before students who were forced to watch, and their executions were broadcast repeatedly on state television. If he stayed in Libya, Ismail realized, he would end up dead or in jail. So when he won a scholarship overseas, he left his entire family behind, crushing all their expectations for a firstborn son. The guilt for having done so flared up in him like a virus, causing him to frequently plummet into brooding, defensive, and overly apologetic moods. He often awoke in the middle of the night in a cold sweat, fighting with tangled sheets and mumbling desperately in Arabic. He was deeply skeptical of male authority in general—and politicians in particular—and he exploded if any look or gesture made him feel censored in any way. He could no longer distinguish between self-restraint and suppression.

  Gaddafi had encroached upon our marriage from the very beginning. On our first date, when we sat on a rooftop in downtown Chapel Hill watching the sun go down, my heart sank in disappointment when he told me his nationality. I had not been able to place his accent but had imagined that perhaps it was Spanish or Italian or even Moroccan. Each of those countries had its own romantic appeal; each lent itself easily to my fantasies. But Libya? It brought to mind a vague memory from my high school years: doing homework, I heard a television newscaster in the background announce that we had bombed a mad dictator in a decrepit, parched, terrorist-infested country called Libya—a nation that was so inconsequential, so obviously deserving of our attack and so incapable of retaliation, that this act didn’t even warrant further discussion at the dinner table or mention in social studies class the next day.

  Every hairpin turn, every dead end in Ismail’s life could be traced back to Gaddafi. Even thousands of miles from his homeland, he still felt that no Libyan could be trusted, so he did not maintain a single friendship with one. He had only occasional contact with family, because when he called them, the so-called brother leader made his presence felt on phone lines. In stilted, one-sided conversations, relatives offered only curt, paranoid responses to his questions. When Ismail was a child, his illiterate father returned each evening from his small shop with a brown bag full of money, which had to be stretched to feed and support a family of ten. Then one day Gaddafi had announced that private businesses now belonged to the state. Everything my father-in-law had worked so hard to build and maintain slipped like minnows through his grasp, and he had tumbled into a despair as deep as the ocean that now separated him from his son. He grew more violent and withdrawn with each passing year, a brutal tyrant over his wife and children in the small home that was his only domain. The oppression that spread through Ismail’s family was so pervasive and debilitating that I worried it would be passed on to our children like a hereditary disease.

  I read that in his final days, Gaddafi was increasingly disoriented—lost without his buxom body guards and fawning servants, his audience of thousands trained to chant his praises on cue. Driven from his lavish palace to the dusty alleys of desert towns, whisked in darkness from house to abandoned house by his loyal driver and a few protectors, he survived on rice and water. Rumors abounded about his whereabouts: He had escaped Libya through a secret labyrinth of underground tunnels. He had booby-trapped the entire city of Tripoli. He had a diabolical plan to take all of his people to hell with him. He had tormented his people for so long they had come to see him as invincible; only an ending worthy of a Hollywood movie could bring him down. But instead he made the most primal and predictable choice of all: he fled back to his tribe in the desert, to the town where he had been born and raised.

  It is said that he spent his last days reading the Qur’an. I try to imagine him cradling that holy book. Did he find solace in what he read? Not long after, bloody images of his broken body were broadcast to the entire world—but no video footage could show us what that book did to his heart, could reveal if it was broken wide open by what he found in its pages. Dirty rats, he had called the rebels who ousted him, shaking his fist at the television cameras, promising to hunt them down alleys and flush them from sewers. In the end he was found huddled in a drainage pipe, caked in dirt and blood, driven out reeling and squinting into the brutal light. Don’t kill me, my sons. He spread his arms wide, as if to embrace his attackers. In his final moments, when he fell to his knees and begged for his life, was he finally stripped of his illusions along with his torn and bloody clothes?

  The day he died my family slid into the vinyl booth of a restaurant in a mini-mall near our house, beside a window that looked out onto the busy parking lot. My children sat across from me sipping soda from red plastic cups and studying the flat-screen television behind my head. Suddenly they froze, their matching brown eyes as wide as quarters, glued to the screen. I swiveled around to see Gaddafi’s bloody face hovering over us on the muted television, begging for his life to the sound of the pop music that played on the jukebox. Then another image: rebels poking his bloody corpse on the ground with rifle butts. Ismail winced and turned away, horrified by the inhumanity of Gaddafi’s final moments. “That’s so wrong,” he mumbled, shaking his head. “So wrong.”

  All around us, parents and children glanced up at the screen with bored expressions and mouths full of food. They watched while raising drinks to their lips or dipping corn chips into watery salsa. A new song came on the jukebox, a child spilled a glass of milk, a waitress wove through the room with a pitcher of margaritas. Gaddafi was not one of us, so we had no reason to be disturbed by the images on the screen. We knew right from wrong. We knew who was human, and deserving of our compassion, and who was less than that.

  19 Surrender

  When Aliya was a newborn, I had danced her around our living room to the music of Free to Be . . . You and Me, the seventies children’s classic whose every lyric about tolerance and gender equality I had memorized growing up in Southern California. Ismail sat with her for hours on our screened porch, swaying back and forth on a creaky metal rocker and singing old Arabic folk songs, and took her to a Muslim shaykh who chanted a prayer for long life into her tiny, velvety ear. Early on we’d decided we would raise her to choose what she identified with most from our dramatically different backgrounds.

  I secretly felt smug about this agreement, confident that Aliya would favor my comfortable American lifestyle over Ismail’s modest Muslim upbringing. My parents lived in a sprawling home in Santa Fe with a three-car garage, hundreds of channels on the flat-screen TV, organic food in the refrigerator, and a closetful of toys for the grandchildren. I imagined Aliya embracing shopping trips to Whole Foods and the stack of presents under the Christmas tree while still fully appreciating the melodic sound of Arabic, the honey-soaked baklava Ismail made from scratch, the intricate henna tattoos her aunt drew on her feet when we visited Libya.

  The year she turned nine, we celebrated the end of Ramadan behind our local mosque. Children bounced in inflatable fun houses while parents sat beneath a plastic tarp, shooing flies from plates
of curried chicken, golden rice, and baklava. Aliya and I wandered past rows of vendors selling prayer mats, henna tattoos, and Muslim clothing. When we reached a table displaying head coverings, Aliya turned to me and pleaded, “Please, Mom—can I have one?”

  She riffled through neatly folded stacks of head scarves while the vendor, an African American woman shrouded in black, beamed at her. I had recently seen Aliya cast admiring glances at Muslim girls her age. I quietly pitied them, covered in floor-length skirts and long sleeves on even the hottest summer days, as my best childhood memories were of my skin laid bare to the sun: feeling the grass between my toes as I ran through the sprinkler on my front lawn; wading into an icy river in Idaho, my shorts hitched up my thighs, to catch my first rainbow trout; surfing an emerald wave off the coast of Hawaii. But Aliya envied these girls and had asked me to buy clothes for her like theirs. And now a head scarf.

  In the past, my excuse was that they were hard to find at our local mall, but here she was, offering to spend ten dollars from her own allowance to buy the green rayon one she clutched in her hand. I started to shake my head emphatically no but caught myself, remembering my promise to Ismail. So I gritted my teeth and bought it.

  That afternoon, as I was leaving for the grocery store, Aliya called out from her room that she wanted to come.

  A moment later she appeared at the top of the stairs—or half of her did. From the waist down, she was my daughter: sneakers, jeans a little threadbare at the knees. But from the waist up, this girl was a stranger. Her bright, round face was suspended in a tent of dark cloth, like a moon in a starless sky.

  “Are you going to wear that?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said slowly, in a tone she had recently begun to use with me when I stated the obvious.

  On the way to the store, I stole glances at her in my rearview mirror. The same type of lightweight scarf that had seemed so comfortable and easy to wear in Libya felt far more oppressive here in my hometown, weighed down as it was by judgments and assumptions. Aliya stared out the window in silence, appearing as aloof and unconcerned as a Muslim dignitary visiting our small southern town—I, merely her chauffeur. I bit my lip. I wanted to ask her to remove her head covering before she got out of the car, but I couldn’t think of a single logical reason why, except that the sight of it made my blood pressure rise. I’d always encouraged her to express her individuality and to resist peer pressure, but now I felt as self-conscious and claustrophobic as if I were wearing that head scarf myself.

  In the Food Lion parking lot, the heavy summer air smothered my skin. I gathered the damp hair on my neck into a ponytail, but Aliya seemed unfazed by the heat. We must have looked like an odd pair: a tall blonde woman in a tank top and jeans cupping the hand of a four-foot-tall Muslim. I drew my daughter closer and the skin on my bare arms prickled—as much from protective instinct as from the blast of refrigerated air that hit me as I entered the store.

  As we maneuvered our cart down the aisles, shoppers glanced at us like a riddle they couldn’t quite solve, quickly dropping their gaze when I caught their eye. In the produce aisle, a woman reaching for an apple fixed me with an overly bright, solicitous smile that said, I embrace diversity and I am perfectly fine with your child. At the checkout line, an elderly southern woman clasped her bony hands together and bent slowly down toward Aliya. “My, my,” she drawled, wobbling her head in disbelief. “Don’t you look absolutely precious!” My daughter smiled politely, then turned to ask me for a pack of gum.

  In the following days, Aliya wore her head scarf to the breakfast table over her pajamas, to a Muslim gathering where she was showered with compliments, and to the park, where the moms with whom I chatted studiously avoided mentioning it altogether.

  Later that week, at our local pool, I watched a girl only a few years older than Aliya play Ping-Pong with a boy her age. She was caught in that awkward territory between childhood and adolescence—narrow hips, skinny legs, the slightest swelling of new breasts—and she wore a bikini. Her opponent wore an oversized T-shirt and baggy trunks that fell below his knees, and when he slammed the ball at her, she lunged for it while trying with one hand to keep the slippery strips of spandex in place. I wanted to offer her a towel to wrap around her hips, so she could lose herself in the contest and feel the exhilaration of making a perfect shot. It was easy to see why she was getting demolished at this game: Her near-naked body was consuming her focus. And in her pained expression I recognized the familiar mix of shame and excitement I felt when I first wore a bikini.

  At fourteen, I’d skittered down the halls of high school like a squirrel in traffic: hugging the walls, changing direction in midstream, darting for cover. Then I went to Los Angeles to visit my aunt Mary during winter break. Mary collected mermaids, kept a black-and-white photo of her long-haired Indian guru on her dresser, and shopped at a tiny health food store that smelled of patchouli and peanut butter. She took me to Venice Beach, where I bought a cheap bikini from a street vendor.

  Dizzy with the promise of my own bikini, I thought I could be someone else—glistening and proud like the greased-up bodybuilders on the lawn, relaxed and unself-conscious as the hippies who lounged on the pavement with lit incense tucked behind their ears. In a beachside bathroom with gritty cement floors, I changed into my new two-piece suit.

  Goose bumps spread across my chubby white tummy and the downy white hairs on my thighs stood on end—I felt as raw and exposed as a turtle stripped of its shell. And when I left the bathroom, the stares of men seemed to pin me in one spot even as I walked by.

  In spite of a strange and mounting sense of shame, I was riveted by their smirking faces; in their suggestive expressions I thought I glimpsed some vital clue to the mystery of myself. What did these men see in me—what was this strange power surging between us, this rapidly shifting current that one moment made me feel powerful and the next unspeakably vulnerable?

  Now I imagined Aliya in a bikini in only a few years. Then I imagined her draped in Muslim attire. It was hard to say which image was more unsettling. I thought then of something a Sufi Muslim friend had told me: that Sufis believe that our essence radiates beyond our physical bodies—that we have a sort of energetic second skin, which is extremely sensitive and permeable to everyone we encounter. Muslim men and women wear modest clothing, she said, to protect this charged space between themselves and the world.

  Growing up in Southern California, I had learned that freedom for women meant, among other things, fewer clothes, and that women could be anything—and still look good in a bikini. My physical freedom had been an important part of my process of self-discovery, but the exposure had come at a price.

  Since that day in Venice Beach, I’d spent years learning to swim in the turbulent currents of physical attraction—wanting to be desired, resisting others’ unwelcome advances, plumbing the mysterious depths of my own longing. I’d spent countless hours studying my reflection in the mirror—admiring it, hating it, wondering what others thought of it. It seemed to me that if I had applied the same relentless scrutiny to another subject I could have become enlightened, completed a doctorate degree, or at least figured out how to grow an organic vegetable garden.

  One afternoon I tried on designer jeans in the crowded dressing room of a large department store, alongside college girls in stiletto heels, young mothers with babies fussing in their strollers, and middle-aged women with glossed lips pursed into frowns. One by one we filed into changing rooms, then lined up to take our turns on a brightly lit pedestal surrounded by mirrors, cocking our hips, sucking in our tummies, and craning our necks to stare at our rear ends. When it was my turn, my heart felt as tight in my chest as my legs did in the jeans. My face looked drawn under the fluorescent lights. Suddenly I was exhausted by all the years I’d spent doggedly chasing the carrot of self-improvement, while dragging behind me a heavy cart of self-criticism.

  Aliya at nine was captivated by the world around her—not by what she saw in the mirror. Th
e previous summer she stood at the edge of the Blue Ridge Parkway, stared at the blue-black outline of the mountains in the distance, their tips swaddled by cottony clouds, and gasped. “This is the most beautiful thing I ever saw,” she whispered. Her wide-open eyes were a mirror for all that beauty, and she stood so still that she blended into the lush landscape, until finally we broke her reverie by pulling her back to the car.