My Accidental Jihad

by Krista Bremer

  Love comes like a knife.

  Not some shy question,

  And not with fears for its reputation.

  I say these things disinterestedly—

  Accept them in kind . . .

  Love is a Madman!

  Working his wild schemes, running

  Through the mountains, drinking poison,

  And now, quietly choosing annihilation.

  My chest ached with the sweet pain of an overfull heart. When it was my turn to speak, a powerful and unexpected shyness arose in me. In a wavering voice, I thanked Ismail for showing me that love means surrender—and for giving me the incomparable freedom of being known and accepted as I was. I promised he would always have a home in my heart. When it was his turn, he thanked me for inspiring and challenging him, and he promised to keep growing and dreaming with me for the rest of his life. Our union felt as incongruous and unexpected as the shimmering black piano resting briefly in the shade of the tree—and it, too, required arduous work for fleeting moments of beauty and communion.

  After the ceremony we moved to the barn, where our friends had covered two long banquet tables with homemade dishes from their native countries: empanadas and baklava, kibbeh and Congolese stew. Our friend and his son played bluegrass as our guests ate. When people began making toasts, Aliya raised her hand, and someone lifted her up onto a chair so she could face the crowd. She took the microphone in her hands. “I feel very lucky to be at my parents’ wedding,” she said. “Most kids don’t get to do that.” A ripple of laughter rolled through the room. I laughed as well, but my chuckle was nearly a sob. Her words were a benediction; like the key I had been searching for ever since I met Ismail, they threw open the door to gratitude for every turn my life had taken. Nothing about my life resembled the future I had once imagined—and for years I had grappled with resentment or regret because this path had never been easy. Now I saw that every single struggle had brought its own gifts; every unexpected turn had brought me to this moment.

  Wendell Berry writes that guests at a wedding witness a death that shadows new life: two individuals die into their marital union the way a soul dies into God. The day after my wedding, when I returned to the abandoned barn to begin cleaning, signs of decay were everywhere. Brittle flowers turned inward under the harsh midday sun. Ismail and I went from table to table yanking them from vases of cloudy water and dropping them into piles on the ground. The long banquet table, yesterday covered in an unparalleled feast of offerings from a hundred friends, was covered now in crumbs and congealed spills that drew flies. Yesterday I had peeled this wedding dress from its plastic covering and slipped it over my scrubbed body, its pressed white layers hugging my scented skin. Today it had a blueberry smear across the skirt where a toddler had reached for me with a sticky hand, and a catch in the fabric where it caught the splintery edge of a wooden table. Its grimy hem skimmed over the gravel parking lot as I hauled it over my shoulder to my car. Today there were bottles to recycle, sheets to wash, payments to be made, children to be retrieved from the babysitter. The late-spring air prickled my skin like hot breath as we cleaned up the remains of our celebration. Today the heat was rising. Ours would always be a sticky marriage.

  22 Home

  Two hours before her first rock concert, Aliya was on the computer using the Internet to translate her fan letter to her favorite band, Tinariwen, into French. Formed more than thirty years ago in a Libyan refugee camp, Tinariwen produces a hypnotic blend of West African blues, reggae, and rock, all melted together as if they have been left out in the desert sun. The band members are Tuareg, nomads who have lived in the Sahara for millennia. After some of them rebelled against the Malian government in the early sixties, thousands of Tuaregs fled into Libya and Algeria, and an entire generation was raised in refugee camps, cut off from their traditional way of life. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, the founder of Tinariwen, was one of them. In the late seventies Western rock music reached the camps, and Ibrahim heard Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Bob Marley. As a boy he built his own guitar from a stick, a tin can, and a bicycle brake wire.

  Aliya had been listening to Tinariwen for as long as she could remember. Her father relished their ballads about oppression and exile. Their love songs to Africa were like meandering paths that led Ismail back to the continent he left behind when he fled Muammar Gaddafi’s dictatorial rule. On his commute to and from his corporate job, Ismail turned their music up so loud that his car windows vibrated. On nights when we got tangled in a web of accusations and misunderstandings—when he looked at me and saw a selfish, materialistic American, and I looked at him and saw an overbearing, irrational African, and we each felt impossibly far from home—he retreated to the living room, cradled his head in his hands, and listened to this music as if it were counsel from a trusted friend. On those rare weekend mornings when he surprised us with a traditional Libyan breakfast, we listened to Tinariwen as we rolled pasty white dough between our fingers and dipped it into sticky date syrup as thick and black as tar.

  Aliya loved her father more than any other man in the world. So it seemed impossible for her not to love Tinariwen. She had been looking forward to this concert—held at a local nightclub that opens past her bedtime—for months.

  “YOU’RE TAKING HER to a rock concert? With a bunch of drunks?”

  Our friend Jamal’s voice rose in exaggerated alarm when he found out. It was early evening, and we were seated cross-legged on our carpet, drinking tea with him and his wife, Maryam. Aliya had just told him how excited she was about the upcoming show, and now he was looking at Ismail and me, smiling and shaking his head and making Aliya giggle nervously.

  Formerly a day trader named Sam who was raised Jewish, Jamal was now a devout Muslim who avoided most music and movies because he said they stole his focus away from God. He displayed only Islamic art in his home, avoided cookies that contained vanilla (it had a trace of alcohol in it), and refused silverware when he joined us for dinner, instead lifting curry and rice to his mouth with his fingers just as the prophet Muhammad did fourteen hundred years ago. Over the course of our friendship I had come to see how his strict practices polished his heart to a high shine. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, he was one of the most sincere people I knew. He was teasing us about the concert, but I felt the sharp sting of judgment in his words: I would be taking my daughter on a field trip to Gomorrah, a forsaken space where sweaty people guzzled beer and pressed together in the dark, getting as close as they could to an explosion of sound that made them briefly forget the world.

  Before we sat down to tea and almonds, Jamal and Ismail stood side by side in the fading light of our living room, hands crossed over their stomachs, and faced Mecca to perform the Maghrib prayer. But before Ismail began to recite, Jamal asked abruptly, “Do you mind if I check the direction of Mecca?” He pulled his phone from his pocket, tapped its screen, and studied it like a man lost in the wilderness. The app pointed straight as an arrow toward the Holy Land from anywhere on the globe. Jamal told Ismail they should reposition themselves a few degrees to the left.

  “Of course,” Ismail said, a smile tugging at his lips. He later told me that he would turn around and pray backward if Jamal asked him to: “As far as I’m concerned, we face Allah in any direction we turn.”

  I envied Jamal’s absolute clarity about his beliefs, his precise faith like a GPS showing him where he stood at all times. I didn’t have such clear convictions. Instead I clung to my splintered identity as if it were flotsam on a stormy sea. For years Ismail and I had been raising our children in the rocky terrain between my secular Western culture and his Muslim North African one, on the ever-shifting sands between ambition and modesty, desire and humility, self-determination and surrender to God. I was a part-time Buddhist who overlooked the prohibition against alcohol as if it were a bill I couldn’t afford to pay. I cared about environmental issues—but apparently not as much as I cared about a cappuccino in a to-go cup on a Monday morning or a house cool enough in summ
er to make my skin prickle and warm enough in winter that I could walk around barefoot. I was a feminist who expected her husband to make more money than she did, a mother who dreamed of taking her annual vacations alone.

  When I was around Jamal, I began to question the wisdom of raising my children in this disputed territory. Maybe our daughter and son needed solid ground beneath their feet as much as they did a roof over their head. Maybe they needed one of us to leave behind his or her old habits so they could finally settle into a single coherent worldview. But without his Islam or his African ways, Ismail would be a stranger to me—and though I loved him, I wasn’t sure I loved him enough to give up rock music, chocolate-chip cookies, or shorts in summertime.

  THERE WAS ANOTHER reason Aliya was buzzing with excitement about this concert: her father had promised that she would get to spend time backstage with Tinariwen. I didn’t understand how he could make this promise, since he had no connection to any of the band members. He appeared never to have considered the possibility that he wouldn’t be able to fulfill it. Instead he’d been asking Aliya what she planned to discuss with her idols, leading her to believe that they would welcome her like a member of their tribe. With such unrealistic expectations, how could she not end up disappointed?

  When she was younger, Aliya used to take pride in her father’s Libyan upbringing, bragging to her friends that he was raised in a mud hut and watching in awe as he turned rusty bottle caps and old string into spinning toys, sticks and deer pellets into whirling helicopters. But lately she’d been less amused by his African ways. They’d been going head-to-head over how many pairs of shoes a sixth-grader needs (One, he said), whether she should have a cell phone (Are you kidding me?), how she should respond to him when he called her (Yes, Baba), and how much she should get paid for watching her little brother (When I was your age, I took care of five siblings for no money at all). I was worried that tonight he would finally fall from the pedestal on which he had been teetering ever since she entered middle school.

  An hour before the show, Aliya was standing before her open closet, studying her wardrobe, trying to choose just the right outfit in which to meet her favorite band. Perhaps one of her new head scarves: the pink one with shimmering gold thread that caught the light, or the gauzy yellow one from Morocco that made her face look like it was swaddled in sun. On our back porch one afternoon last summer, a Muslim friend of ours showed her how to sweep her hair beneath a scarf, pull the fabric tight and low across her forehead, and tie a neat knot at the base of her neck. When she was done, Aliya turned to me and scanned my face as if it were a mirror. She looked like a North African queen, eyes like dark chocolate nickels, lips so full and perfect that the moment I first saw them, the day she was born, I knew her middle name would be Rose.

  Now she was contemplating her head scarves, neatly folded in her closet beside her hoodies and T-shirts, trying to decide which one to wear tonight. Each time she walked out the door with her head covered, the grown-up world around her divided in two. Some of our friends showered her with compliments, whereas others cast nervous glances in her direction and avoided mentioning it. She was either a beloved member of the Muslim tribe or part of a herd, broken of her American independence and corralled into Islam. But Aliya was unfazed. She understood what she was wearing: a soft, colorful cloth that made her feel beautiful; a symbol of the modesty she carried in her heart, whether her head was covered or not; a sign of the faith she had been learning from her father’s example since the day she was born, just as she had learned how to make date cookies scented with rose water.

  Aliya came downstairs a few minutes later wearing jeans, a FREE LIBYA T-shirt, and a head scarf her aunt gave her. This year she had shed the last of her baby fat and grown skinny and moody and long. Tonight she looked part Muslim revolutionary, part American preteen—which, of course, is exactly what she was: a girl balancing, sometimes gracefully, sometimes awkwardly, between her father’s world and mine.

  WE PULLED INTO a strip-mall parking lot, empty except for the band’s tour bus, which was backed into a corner and cordoned off with yellow tape, each glowing window blocked by a curtain. In our house Tinariwen may have been the biggest band of the twenty-first century, but in our southern college town it was a little-known African group playing world music on a Sunday night at a club that shared its lot with a pizza place and a convenience store.

  Before I had even removed my key from the ignition, Ismail and Aliya jumped from the car. They crossed the lot and began talking to two men in black leather jackets who were smoking outside the bus—part of the road crew. Ismail smiled and shook their hands while Aliya hung back, clutching her carefully folded fan letter. Despite Ismail’s friendly greeting, the leather-jacketed men didn’t let them past the tape. One craned his neck to get a look at this four-and-a-half-foot-tall girl in the FREE LIBYA shirt and head scarf.

  I waited by the entrance to the club, where a poster of the band was taped to a darkened window littered with the tattered edges of last week’s fliers. In the picture the musicians stood in a desert beside a parched tree whose spindly branches reached toward them like black claws. The wind pressed their colorful ankle-length robes against their bodies, and layers of cloth covered most of each band member’s face. A pure blue sky floated above, and the Sahara beneath their feet was like a brilliant white carpet. The North Africa of this poster was a barren but beautiful place where people bloomed from nothing and grew like cacti in the harsh desert sun. It was as much a fairy tale to me as the North Africa of Ismail’s childhood, where mothers nursed one another’s children and people brought livestock into their homes to keep them warm on cold desert nights. These stories had nothing to do with the Africa I saw in the news: a land of tyranny, civil war, and widespread health epidemics. The Libya I discovered when I visited there in 2005 bore little resemblance to the tragic yet idyllic Africa of my imagination.

  As the parking lot began to fill up, the men in leather jackets stubbed their cigarettes out on the oil-stained asphalt and disappeared through the bus’s narrow door. People were milling around outside the club. A man in a Grateful Dead T-shirt ran a hand through his stringy gray hair. A woman swished past in a floral skirt. Traffic hummed relentlessly in the background, car exhaust thickening the cool night air. Aliya was still holding her fan letter, trying to determine her next move. Time was running out; the opening band would start to play in fifteen minutes.

  “Give me the letter,” Ismail said, holding out his hand. Aliya yanked the ragged piece of notebook paper out of his reach, eyeing him with suspicion.

  “What are you going to do with it?”

  “I’m going to get on the bus and give it to the band,” he said with such calm, clear conviction that it almost made trespassing sound like a rational thing to do.

  A familiar apprehension arose in me. Ismail had a way of plowing through personal boundaries as if he didn’t even see them, then reacting with genuine surprise when I pointed out his faux pas. Not realizing that grown-ups in the United States usually kept a polite distance from children who weren’t theirs, Ismail reached out for neighborhood kids, mussing their hair or reprimanding them as if they were his own, never noticing the nervous looks of their parents. At dinner parties, Ismail would casually ask the host how much he paid for his house or bemoan U.S. intervention in the Middle East. The other guests would suddenly notice their empty glasses and excuse themselves.

  Years ago, at a stuffy restaurant where couples sat at small round tables and whispered over flickering candles, I told Ismail I was pregnant with our second child. His eyes filled with tears, and he swept his arms wide as if to embrace the entire room. “Hey, everyone—we’re going to have a baby!” he boomed, as if these strangers were part of his extended family, as if his joy were like champagne that he could pour and share with everyone present. An awkward silence followed as people looked embarrassed on our behalf.

  Now I was seriously considering whether his bursting onto the bus would
qualify as breaking and entering. Aliya was biting her lower lip and looking back and forth between us. She could probably have used some guidance, but I was at a loss. Respecting personal boundaries was like a religion for me. I wasn’t one to show up unannounced or to barge through closed doors, and I had a hard enough time asking friends for favors, let alone strangers.

  It was a small comfort for me to discover while in Libya that Ismail was not unique; many Libyans had this endearing, maddening blindness to personal space. Perhaps the reason I was so guarded is that I never lived among extended family. I knew relatives mostly through the presents that arrived in the mail and the thank-you cards I sent in return. Though it was true that by maintaining my polite distance I had successfully avoided imposing myself on others, it was also true that my husband had many more friends he could call in the middle of the night.

  Looking exasperated with both of us, Aliya took our hands and pulled us toward the open doors of the club. Inside, we found a spot at the edge of the stage, and the opening band began to play. A few minutes later, when I turned to ask Ismail and Aliya if they liked the music, they were gone.

  THE OTHER DAY, when I was walking home from the grocery store with Aliya, she said out of the blue, “Sometimes I feel bad for Dad, because people here don’t understand him very well.” She wasn’t talking about his accent but about the way he is perceived: the way her friends scrunched up their noses at his spicy food or retreated from the sound of his loud voice, the way her teachers spoke patronizingly to him, the way some of our friends squirmed when his eyes filled with tears in a culture that had little room for crying men. She understood that to be an immigrant was to live in a country of misunderstandings, to be obscured by stereotypes and prejudice.