by Eboo Patel
I harbored a deep frustration that discussions of books lasted only until the bell rang and were limited to essay assignments and test questions. I remember a mechanical back-and-forth in my high school English class over whether Thoreau had been justified in going to jail to protest the Mexican-American War. The year before (1991), America had invaded Iraq. The people lazily arguing Thoreau’s side, including the teacher, did not connect the two. In fact, hardly anybody in my school voiced concern about that war, and certainly nobody suggested we take Thoreau’s idea seriously and protest by going to prison. But suddenly I was embarrassed that I had unthinkingly worn a shirt that said SADDAMNED to school during the war. I wasn’t clear about whether I thought the invasion was right or wrong, but I had become acutely aware that I had never even asked the question. I looked at “Civil Disobedience” in a different way, and it in turn shed new light on the world around me.
That was the beginning of a broader shift in my thinking. In my head, I loved ideas. In my gut, I knew they counted only when they were connected to reality.
Lisa was different. You could tell just by looking at her. She didn’t join the other girls, who gathered in giggling clumps in the hallway, and she didn’t seem lonely walking alone. She was quiet in class, but you could tell she wasn’t shy. Every once in a while, she would answer a question, and then it was obvious that she had a unique intellect.
Lisa’s family moved to Glen Ellyn sometime during my sophomore year. Generally, there was a buzz about any new girl in the boys’ locker room, but Lisa did not wear the type of clothes or flash the kind of smile that attracted such attention. She went unnoticed for several weeks. It was my friend Ariel who first mentioned her in our group. It was a Friday night, and we were completing our usual routine of basketball at the YMCA and 59-cent bean burritos at Taco Bell. The conversation turned from taunts about athletic skills to comparative class rank. Karthik wagered that he was in the top five, rattling off his closest competitors and outlining a strategy to overtake them.
“You’re forgetting about Lisa,” Ariel said.
“Who’s that?” he asked, perturbed.
“She’s smart,” Ariel responded. “She’s smarter than you. I think she’s smarter than me.” Which meant that he was in love with her.
I wish I could say that our courtship was romantic, or at least deliberate. But I was devoid of all sophistication in such areas. For all I know, Lisa was working her designs on me. But however it happened, I was suddenly skipping out of afterschool Jeopardy battles with my friends and instead giving Lisa a ride home every day.
I was a little embarrassed about my car, a 1973 Oldsmobile Cutlass, on which I had spent my life savings of $400. My dad called it “the Cuban canoe.” Green paint and brown rust warred to lay claim to the exterior. The driver’s side window closed only partway, which meant it was freezing in the winter. The front seat was all one, separated only by a squeaky armrest. My tape deck had gotten stuck with the Who’s Quadrophenia lodged inside. Sometimes it wouldn’t turn off, which meant that “The Real Me” rang loudly in our ears the whole ride home. Lisa never said a word about it. She would slip in on the passenger’s side, place her books at her feet, click on her seat belt, and say, “I’m ready.”
I prayed that we hit both red lights between Glenbard South High School and her home a mile and a half away. That meant that our conversation about Dante’s Divine Comedy, which we were reading in advanced placement English, or the film we had seen in our Contemporary American History class could last an extra ninety seconds.
“Look if you like, but you will have to leap,” W. H. Auden wrote. And one day I did.
There was no pacing in my room and practicing in front of the mirror, no eternal deliberation or consultation with close friends, no sense of momentous decision, just a blurting out. After Lisa had placed her bag at her feet and before she clicked on her seat belt, I said, “I think it is time that maybe we were more than friends. Do you?”
She looked at me. Then she looked at the ground. Then she looked back at me. “Yes,” she said. “No,” she said. “Maybe,” she concluded.
She reached for her seat belt and then stopped. She lifted the armrest that separated the passenger’s side from the driver’s side, slowly scooted over, and sat quietly next to me. “I’m ready,” she said.
We caught both red lights that day, but we didn’t do much talking. We were together. Each of us had leaped, leaving one world for another.
I was ready to leave my world of Jeopardy battles and Taco Bell arguments. Lisa was not the type of girl who wanted to hang around and watch my friends and me play basketball and brag to each other. And I was tired of all that anyway.
But Lisa’s hesitation in the car belied a much more complex and challenging issue. Lisa was a Mormon. She believed that God had given Joseph Smith revelation, that Mormons were the chosen people, and that America was the promised land. She had dreamed about meeting a husband in church or at Brigham Young University, perhaps a returned missionary who spoke multiple languages, had converted half a dozen families, and had developed a love for the literature of the country where he had been stationed along the way. They would go to PG-rated movies together and drink milk shakes afterward (never coffee or tea; caffeinated beverages were forbidden). They would be married in a Mormon temple and have six children.
Sometimes the family would all sit together in church on Sunday morning; other times the kids would sit separately, giving Lisa and her husband spiritual couple time. Their home would be a magnet for the neighborhood kids, dozens of them gathering to play board games indoors or capture the flag in the neighboring woods. Lisa would bake for them. Her husband would run a business, have the priesthood (meaning he was a male in good standing in the Mormon church), serve with distinction as the bishop of the local ward (meaning he was in a position of leadership among the Mormons in a certain geographical area). Their kids would be adventurous and mischievous, but correctable. If they were caught sneaking soda pop, looking at girlie magazines, or swearing with their friends, they would gently be told that Mormons don’t do that, and then they would stop.
When the kids grew up, Lisa would take a job teaching literature at the local college. She would have been writing this whole while, mostly essays for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal, but now she would focus more seriously on short stories and poetry. Her family would scrape by but be happy. Perhaps they would live abroad for a few years, serving as advisers to young missionaries. When old age came, they would welcome the crossing into the next world, where their temple wedding would ensure that they would all eventually be reunited forever.
Instead, she met me, an overly long, too-skinny, Indian Muslim who cussed frequently, enjoyed R-rated movies, and was acquiring a taste for coffee.
The battle between my Muslim upbringing and my male hormones was resolved by Lisa’s Mormon values. One evening, when Lisa and I were sitting close to each other in my basement, she sighed and said she had to do something. She took out a piece of paper and a pencil and drew a stick figure. “That’s me,” she said. And then she carefully drew a circle over the body, leaving her neck and face, her hands and arms up to the shoulders, and her legs from the knees down outside the lines. “Inside is out-of-bounds,” she told me.
As that aspect of our relationship was limited, we spent our time on other things. I finally had someone to share my secret life of reading with. Lisa and I spent summer days at the park, reading to each other from our favorite books. If we saw a late-afternoon movie, we would spend dinner comparing the characters in the film to those in the books we were reading. Her poetic imagination made connections between literature and life that I never saw.
First love is infinite in its variety but singular in its effect. Whether it is a religion, a drug, a book, or a person you fall for, you can expect to emerge on the other side nothing less than totally transformed. And so it was for me with Lisa. My life until that point had been dominated by an obsession with m
y own success. And yet, as I watched Lisa excel in class after class, club after club, her intellect and character so clearly superior to mine, I found my heart, in spite of myself, rooting for her. Nobody was more surprised at this than I was. Prior to Lisa, I had thought I was capable of only competitiveness. But with Lisa, perhaps because of Lisa, I discovered vast regions within me. It was as good a preparation for my future recommitment to Islam as anything else.
Lisa’s religiosity focused on truth. Basically, Mormons had it and others didn’t. It was not Lisa’s choice that it was this way. She did not control truth; that was God’s to give. Did she believe it? Did she follow it? Those were the relevant questions. I could tell it pained her sometimes. My grandmother, my mother’s mother, lived with my family while I was in high school. She was as sweet as they come, joyful and pious, cackling loudly at all sorts of jokes when she wasn’t praying her tasbih, sneaking pinches of chewing tobacco when my mother wasn’t looking (it helped her stay awake, she insisted), and joining my brother and me in clearing the driveway of autumn leaves with the household tool that fit her hand best: a spatula.
“Will she not go to heaven?” I asked Lisa, a bit defiantly, one afternoon.
Lisa turned away. She was too smart not to have asked herself the question, but she couldn’t bear the answer. “She will go somewhere good,” she finally said. Lisa’s answer satisfied me. I could tell it said more about her heart than Mormon theology. I decided her heart mattered more, a conviction that has shaped my life and work ever since. I have been close to many Mormons over the past decade, and I still don’t know how Mormon theology regards true believers of other faiths. That moment with Lisa taught me a lasting lesson about the sociology of religion: the heart of even the most ardent religious believer will provide more accurate clues to his or her behavior than the theology of his or her faith.
In a relationship that lasted just over a year, she never made me or my family feel inferior because we were not Mormon. Although I knew she wanted nothing more than for me to convert, she was never condescending or inappropriate in her approach. She mentioned a few times that I could go to church with her, and she gave me a copy of the Book of Mormon, but the discussion never went much beyond that. She let the occasional swear word pass without rebuke and even agreed to see a couple of R-rated movies (although she made me fast-forward through all the “good” parts of Frankie and Johnny with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer). But I knew that a future with Lisa required conversion. I told Lisa that I was reading the Book of Mormon and that I was going to skip basketball with my friends one Sunday morning and join her at church, but I never did. I was in love with a Mormon, but I was agnostic about Mormonism. In fact, I was agnostic about a lot of things by the spring of my senior year in high school. I felt that Glen Ellyn was a town full of walls and those walls were closing in on me. I was ready for a new world.
I cried like a baby the night before Lisa left for Brigham Young University and swore that our long-distance relationship would make it through college. I bought a hundred dollars in phone cards and even explored academic programs at Brigham Young. But when I arrived at the University of Illinois, I felt like my lungs had expanded overnight. Champaign-Urbana was less than a three-hour drive from my home, but the air felt different.
The more I immersed myself in that world, the more I realized that it was my natural habitat. Every interesting film I saw seemed to be rated R, and upon leaving the theater I couldn’t help but think, “I couldn’t have seen that if I was with Lisa.” The books I was most fascinated by were critical of America. I tried talking about it with Lisa, only to be reminded that, for Mormons, America is the land of milk and honey.
Lisa came with another world, and at Brigham Young, she was becoming more immersed in it. I could no longer lie to myself or to Lisa. I did not know what direction I was going in, but I knew I had to let my lungs expand. Lisa began asking more frequently whether I was reading the Book of Mormon, and I stopped lying to her. I cried like a baby, again, when Lisa told me that she needed to move on. But I knew that we both already had.
3
Identity Politics
All creatures come into the world bringing with them the memory of justice.
J. M. COETZEE
My first college memory is at the gym. There are three basketball games going on—a black game, an Asian game, and a white game. I am confused, but not about who I am. I know I am white. I have spent years making myself so. That is why I started playing basketball in the first place. It is what the popular white kids at my school did. I figured the physical defect of my brown skin would be overlooked if I perfected a fifteen-foot jump shot. The basketball court, to my eyes, was a big bucket of skin whitener.
I looked at the black and Asian kids. They seemed so comfortable. They shouted at one another up and down the court in a distinct flow, ran pick-and-rolls and give-and-gos in their own unique rhythms. Didn’t they want to play on the white court? Hadn’t they spent years studying the white game so they could make its moves their own? Isn’t that what it means to be colored in America?
The world has never seemed so new to me as it did during those first few months of college. My first lesson was on race. I was stunned to learn that not everybody wanted to be white. I remember seeing a Korean girl I had gone to high school with across the hall at the Illini Union. “Kristen,” I called out. But she didn’t turn around. “She went back to her Korean name,” a mutual friend, also Korean, later explained when I told her about the incident. “She won’t answer to Kristen anymore.”
“What the hell is that about?” I asked.
“It happens to a lot of Koreans when they go to college. They become more involved in their own ethnicity and culture. They hang out only with other Koreans.”
She was using college as a place to de-whiten herself. The more I looked around, the more I realized that she wasn’t the only one. Cafeterias were balkanized by race and ethnicity. Unlike in high school, where the popular (mostly white) kids sat at one table and others longed for a place there, people wanted to be where they were. In fact, they were fiercely proud and protective of their own zones.
Every residence hall, in addition to having a general student council, had a black student union. I had a class with the president of the black student union at Allen Hall, where I lived during my freshman and sophomore years, and was impressed by his intellect and passion. “Why don’t you run for president of Allen Hall Council?” I asked. “I think you’d be great. I think you’d get elected.”
“Fuck Allen Hall Council,” he responded. “Everything I do, I do for black people.” The black kid sitting next to him didn’t even turn to face us. He just nodded.
I remember the moment that this made sense to me. During the first semester of college, I found myself entranced by a beautiful young woman in my geology class. It goes without saying that she was white; that was the definition of beauty to me. Class after class, I looked for my opening, and one day I got close enough to flash a direct smile at her and approach. She shot me a look of disgust, turned around, and began walking the other way with a group of equally beautiful, equally white girls.
I remember thinking, “Well, I shouldn’t have tried anyway. Girls like that don’t go for guys like me.” And then I stopped in my tracks. What did I mean by that? Basically this: pretty white girls don’t go for brown guys. My skin color, my ethnic name, the food my mother cooked meant no access to certain circles. I had learned that rule at a very young age and lived by it for many years. Violating that invisible code risked the punishment of ridicule.
For so long, I had simply accepted this as a fact of life. But college gave me a different framework in which to see race. The problem was not with my skin; it was with her eyes.
Having swallowed the pill of white supremacy whole during high school and allowed its poison to spread through my body, I suppose it should have come as no surprise that I would accept uncritically the first elixir that presented itself. Th
at elixir was identity politics, and it was in full swing during my undergraduate years.
The grand idea of identity politics circa 1994, or at least the way my crew and I understood it, was this: the world, and one’s place in it, was entirely defined by the color of one’s skin, the income of one’s parents, and the shape of one’s genitalia. Middle-class white men had built a culture, an economy, and a political system designed to maintain their own power. First they called it Western civilization, then they called it America, and now they were calling it globalization. These people were the oppressors. The rest of us, the oppressed, had been pawns in their game for far too long. A few heroes over time had picked up on this, and the bravest among them—Nat Turner, Lucy Parsons, Stokely Carmichael—had revolted. The rise of identity politics was the beginning of a new age, a great intellectual liberating force that allowed us not only to understand the true workings of the system but also to perceive and return to our own authentic selves.
Our authentic selves were, of course, totally determined by our ascribed race, class, and gender identities, which shaped everything from one’s politics to one’s friendships to one’s tastes in food and music. To be black was to be liberal, at least; if you knew anything about your history (which, to us, meant a brush with Marcus Garvey or Frederick Douglass), you were awakened to your true political nature, which was to be radical. A black Republican? No such thing. What of Colin Powell and Clarence Thomas? We had two explanations: they had been duped by the white power structure (and therefore weren’t really Republicans), or they were willing to sell out their own people for personal profit (and therefore weren’t really black).
