Burn It Down

by Lily Fyfe

  “Basic Math”

  MEREDITH TALUSAN

  I must have made a mistake, I thought in the face of my classmate Nathaniel’s ire. It was 2006, and I was a student in Cornell’s fiction MFA program, four years post–gender transition and undisclosed to colleagues in my new environment. He was giving a craft lecture for the fifteen other students, one of our class requirements in which we were supposed to discuss a nuts-and-bolts aspect of fiction.

  He’d handed out a set of graphs meant to illustrate various relationships between story structure and time. One of the graphs was inaccurate; it was supposed to illustrate flashbacks but was drawn with lines that implied time was moving backward, like a video on rewind. This isn’t how flashbacks work—you can jump back to another time, but actions move forward once you get there.

  I raised my hand.

  “Would it be possible for you to clarify the second graph?” I asked. I proceeded to conjecture that it might not accurately represent what he was explaining, and maybe there was a way to present it differently. I had spent two years as a technical assistant at MIT routinely designing figures like these and had pored through books and articles on how to present similar information effectively, so I knew how to make the graph more accurate. But I soft-pedaled my feedback for fear he would take it the wrong way. I’d learned since I began to present myself as a woman that it’s better to frame my criticism of men in the form of a question rather than as a statement, or worse, an assertion, so the man can correct himself with no damage to his self-esteem.

  Despite going out of my way to be deferent, Nathaniel took my question badly. He seemed affronted by even the implication of my challenge, so he re-drew the exact same graph on the board and repeated the exact same explanation he’d gone through five minutes before with the same inaccuracies, still diagramming exactly the opposite of what he was saying, making time move backward rather than jumping from point to point. And when he finished, he asked me whether I now understood.

  “I’m still confused,” I said, and hoped he would finally correct himself. Maybe I should have told him point-blank how the graph could be made accurate, but it seemed too late for that, since my first question had already rankled him.

  “This is basic math, Meredith,” he replied. That was when I thought for a moment that I must be wrong, before another part of me realized I was letting Nathaniel undermine my judgment just because he was a man. Even though he had so much less experience designing graphs than I did, all the unconscious messages I had absorbed about women being less capable at math had permeated my brain, and him invoking “basic math” activated my self-doubt. I sat in shock at myself while Nathaniel continued his lecture.

  Had this happened prior to transition, I would have simply pointed out his error, and if he questioned me, I would have insisted I was right and demonstrated why. We probably wouldn’t have had the confrontation to begin with, since he would have just bowed to a man with more expertise. But as a woman, my mind threw out all those experiences, at least unconsciously, at least in that classroom.

  I didn’t become a woman to simply absorb all of society’s assumptions about gender. I don’t think gender is something you can swap like a coat, one day deciding you’re a woman and therefore taking on all the trappings of womanhood and leaving behind the trappings of manhood. It’s more like an equalizer, with numerous channels that control aspects of how the world sees you; mine was once tuned toward a male default standard, and then shifted to female through transition. But I don’t believe you ever quite lose what you left behind. You take on your new role in a way that’s different from those who have been seen as girls and women their whole lives. Having been raised a boy meant that my mind consistently saw and refused to accept the many ways that women are made less because of our gender.

  But even while my conscious brain saw gender inequality for what it was, my unconscious brain absorbed the notion that I was automatically less capable than a man, even if this defied logic.

  Had this incident happened today, after fifteen years of womanhood, I would have navigated it the only way my gender could: I would have used every ounce of self-control to stay calm so I wouldn’t be seen as confrontational, yet I would have laced that calmness with just enough assertion that Nathaniel and my classmates would take my judgment seriously. If I was too nice, my ideas would be easily dismissed; too assertive, and I would be branded a bitch.

  Because I was new to womanhood, I didn’t know I was supposed to let Nathaniel’s blatant insult to my intelligence go. Or, if I couldn’t let it go, I didn’t know that I was supposed to complain about it with women friends behind closed doors so as not to ruffle feathers, to get sympathetic hugs to ease my distress while allowing men to continue treating women the way they wanted. I didn’t know that part of being a woman was accepting that it’s a man’s right to preserve his ego by publicly insulting a woman’s intelligence even when he’s objectively wrong. And that a woman who takes umbrage over such an act would be unreasonable, nitpicky, even hysterical.

  Yet what I didn’t know consciously I still manifested outwardly as I stayed quiet through the rest of Nathaniel’s lecture, only turning to a friend for confirmation that he was wrong after the class was done. Nathaniel left without talking to me, even when he could see that I was visibly upset, and did not make any gesture of apology over the following days. As I mulled over the incident, I found myself unable to keep quiet about it and fumed over the fact that, as a gesture of care, I babysat Nathaniel’s children for free once a week so he and his wife could go out, another one of those kind things I’d observed good women do with no expectation of anything in return. Nathaniel and I instantly ceased communication; I’m sure it hardly surprised him when I didn’t show up to babysit his kids and when I told colleagues in our small program that we were no longer friends.

  This incident also opened a dam in me, and I decided that I could no longer tolerate the many other instances of sexist behavior I observed in my classes. I pointed out to our fiction workshop professor that he allowed Nathaniel to talk significantly more than he did other people in our workshop group of two men and six women. I also pointed out to that workshop leader and other faculty how Nathaniel gave feedback like he was a professor and not a fellow student, often explaining other students’ work from a position of authority rather than as a colleague. I refused to let him and other men interrupt me when I spoke, something that the other women in my program routinely allowed. I became the raging feminist, the one who was quick to point out every instance of gender inequality I observed. But in a social environment that had little interest in creating a microculture where men and women were actually treated equally, this was seen as a great disturbance, and people began to dissociate with me for fear that professors would no longer favor them if they observed that I was their friend.

  Near the end of the school year, I had coffee with one of the women who had distanced herself from me, to clear the air and talk about what happened. She was one of the few other women of color in my program, and it disappointed me that she not only withdrew from me but also actively took Nathaniel’s side and maintained a close friendship with him. We sat outside on a bench during a warm day in May, after the harshness of Ithaca’s winter.

  “I just don’t understand why you made it such a big deal,” she said. “I don’t understand why you told other people you didn’t want to be his friend.”

  It was then I realized that I was being punished not just because I overvalued my intelligence as a woman, but because I valued that intelligence over wanting everyone to get along, which is what women are supposed to value above all else. Doing otherwise made me unwomanly. To get along in the world as an intelligent woman, I had to carefully balance these two often-conflicting values, being seen as an intellectual equal while not compromising the harmony of whichever group I belonged to. This was going to take a lot of work, and it’s work that I’ve done and have continued to do ever since—because the way society
treats women gives me little choice.

  But it was too late for me at Cornell. I was still an MFA student, but I’d alienated the chair of my program—who took great pride in building a model environment and bristled at any challenges to it—so that I wasn’t invited to the big party she threw before school started every year, a clear gesture of displeasure that didn’t go unnoticed. Writers in MFA programs rely on the support of professors for connections and recommendations, so her lack of support, along with that of other professors in my department, severely compromised my chances of being introduced to the right people, being guided toward the right fellowships—everything I needed to continue my career as a writer.

  The writing career I’ve built has been entirely independent of that MFA program and its professors. After many years of feeling like I had sabotaged myself because I was unable to swallow the sexist norms I encountered there, I was able to find like-minded people through the internet, who confirmed that they had had similar experiences, some of them editors who gave me opportunities to demonstrate my abilities.

  I continue to look back at that moment, when I thought myself to be less intelligent than I was in response to a man’s challenge, and I realize now that it wasn’t just me absorbing social conditioning I could only describe as negative. It was actually my mind trying to protect me from the risks of believing myself to be fully equal to men, despite being a woman. It was my mind trying to force itself to believe I was less, because it would be to my own immediate benefit to believe that, even if doing so collectively kept women down.

  If I had learned to make myself small, then I could have had a chance to get along in the world, to hope that a mentor would someday discover my abilities and usher me into success at which I as a woman would marvel in wonder, conditioned to see my talent as a pleasant surprise rather than a quality I knowingly possessed. Making myself small as a woman would have been to my benefit, but I’m glad that I overcame the unconscious temptation to lessen myself, because maybe having fought and continuing to fight—often against my own best interests—would mean that fewer women will need to make themselves less in the future.

  The Color of Being Muslim

  SHAHEEN PASHA

  I’ve seen my rage as a color since I was a little girl. It started as a game to describe those emotions I didn’t yet have words to express. When I was a tomboy with a bowl cut, my rage would float in front of me in shades of blue and dark green, like the ocean I saw at Coney Island. As I became an angsty teen, with large breasts shrouded behind extra-large sweatshirts and my mother’s frequent admonitions to hide my rapidly developing figure ringing in my ears, my rage took on the hues of the night sky; purples shimmering beneath the surface of my respectful demeanor.

  Pakistani-American Muslim girls in my world did not openly rage against their parents, their older siblings, their teachers, handsy store clerks, or the procession of meddling aunties who ruled our lives. To openly express our anger was to be too American, it was to be disrespectful. So I let the colors dance—a veritable prism in my mind’s eye—and marveled at the many shades that emerged every time I swallowed an angry retort or disappeared into my room to avoid a conflict.

  But it wasn’t until I met Baseemah that my rage took on the steady shade of red. Not just any red; a deep blood maroon that developed over time and screamed of pain and disillusionment, stifled sexuality, and a sense of otherness that ran through my veins. To me, it was the color of being a Muslim American.

  I first met Baseemah as a fifteen-year-old high school sophomore in Brooklyn. I walked into Spanish class and there she stood. She had ebony skin, perfect teeth, fitted jeans that gave just a hint of seductive curves, and a red headscarf wrapped around her head like she was a queen. It was the color of Pakistani brides and rubies. It was the color of defiance. And it suited Baseemah. She was confident, radiant, unabashedly Muslim. She was beautiful.

  Until that day, I had never seen the beauty in hijab or in being Muslim. In my youth, my Muslim identity was less about religion and more about a cultural expectation within my Pakistani community: pray, learn to read the Arabic letters in the Quran even if you don’t understand the meaning, fast during Ramadan. Rinse and repeat. As I became a teenager, additional rules came into the mix: don’t wear clothes that highlight your figure, don’t go to prom, and don’t even think about dating. I couldn’t really tell whether the restrictions were based in Islam or my parents’ own deep-seated fears that we would somehow lose all ties to our Pakistani roots.

  So, I prayed five times a day and put my faith in a God I didn’t really question. I didn’t see what was so special about being Muslim. To me, it was another aspect of my life that made me different and weird, like my Pakistani identity. They were interchangeable. But hijab was never part of that mix growing up. Not for me and certainly not for most of the other girls in my community, who paraded around Pakistani parties and festivals in colorful Salwar Kameez suits with our hair flowing in the wind, hoping to catch the eyes of the boys while avoiding the gossipy glares of the hovering aunties.

  With the exception of a few conservative girls I knew in our circle who had started covering their hair, hijab was what women did in foreign lands filled with camels and dust. Head coverings, beyond the flimsy, sequined chiffon scarves we wore with our Pakistani outfits, belonged to backward villages or were props in the insipid Bollywood movies I watched as a kid. They were certainly not beautiful.

  But on Baseemah, an African American Muslim girl with a sense of fashion that would rival any top model’s, I saw hijab as a statement, an anthem of Muslim identity. It was a color and a song and I wanted to envelop myself in both.

  Baseemah and I became friends and I began to seriously consider wearing hijab. Each day, I would try on a scarf in the bathroom before leaving for school. And each day, I would chicken out, stuffing the material back into my drawer.

  The same year I mulled over my secret desire, a van filled with explosives detonated under the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Six people died and a thousand more were injured. I learned about it that evening when I flipped on the television and was met with static on the screen. My father was worried. He smoked cigarette after cigarette and listened to the radio in silence. I didn’t understand why until after the first arrests were made, confirming that the attackers were Muslim. I was running to class when the blond junior varsity track runner I had secretly crushed on for a year bumped into me in the hall. “Oh, I better say sorry to you or you’ll throw a bomb or something into the school,” he said, backing away, his hands held up defensively. “You all are fucking nuts.”

  I watched him back off laughing, my smile fading fast. I turned into my social studies class, searching for Baseemah. I couldn’t find her. It wasn’t until I heard her soft voice in my ear that I realized she was sitting behind me, her hair pulled back into a ponytail, her scarf nowhere to be seen.

  “My dad said it wasn’t a good idea to be so visible as a Muslim right now,” she said. “It makes more sense to look like you, you know, not religious or anything.”

  In that instant, her red—the jeweled color I had seen Baseemah wear the first day we met—became the darker shade of my muted, internalized rage. I seethed inside, wondering what it would feel like to smack the white boy who insulted me and leave a red handprint across his fair skin. Would it fade away slowly or turn into a bruise, rimmed in blue and purple? I knew I would never find out, but I found solace in the fantasy.

  My relationship with Baseemah also changed that day. In her exposed hair, I felt a subtle accusation of cowardice and privilege for my ability to blend among those who hated us, without having to give anything up. We never talked about it, but we drifted apart. I mourned the loss of our friendship and silently raged against the circumstances that tore us apart.

  It was a voiceless rage I carried for years. At first, it took aim only at the Islamophobes who made me feel less American despite my blue passport and New York birth. That was an easy rage,
unambiguous and pure, directed solely at people who demeaned my faith and identity. They chose to hate me without knowing me. So I detested them back. But, even in that hatred, I found myself trying to maintain a delicate balance that was exhausting.

  Anger as a Muslim American is a precarious emotion, layered and complex. Too much anger and you’re seen as unstable, a threat to society with jihad coursing through your veins. You’re the terrorist-in-hiding, just waiting for the right spark. Too little anger, and you’re seen as a passive player, unwilling to condemn the atrocities of a handful of people who have somehow become the mascots of your religion, and therefore complicit in their crimes. And whether I showed my anger or not, I was still representative of that inexplicable Islamic world, governed by strict rules and seemingly odd restrictions on the pleasures of beer and bacon. I was guilty by my association with an Islamic diaspora that somehow kept breeding terrorists who filled endless news cycles with their cries of Allahu Akbar.

  But I’ve got a secret to share. I never really belonged to that world either. It’s not that I didn’t want to belong. But after I moved on to college, away from the strict rules of my parents, I wanted to explore outside of the sheltered world my family and community had created. I didn’t want to hide it, like so many others did in my community, living double lives that their parents knew nothing about. My inability to lie made me vulnerable and different. An outsider within my own Muslim community.

  So, I reinvented myself. Prayers that had once anchored me suddenly seemed out of place in my life, providing little comfort as I began to search for who I was outside of my religious and cultural identities. But it was my sudden awareness of my body and my desires that truly plagued me. I had grown up with a firm understanding that such pleasures were off limits until marriage. But as I explored my autonomy as a woman, I questioned why my sexuality was haram. I was conflicted. As much as I wanted to feel a man’s hands encircle my waist at a New York club, I couldn’t enjoy the sensation when it happened. Inevitably I would pull away, caught up in initial feelings of guilt and shame. And then those emotions would darken to anger. Anger at him for violating my space and anger at myself for being unable to feel pleasure in his touch, as my mother’s voice rang in my ears, telling me that Muslim girls didn’t behave this way. My self-inflicted anger was bright, almost orange, like a flame.