First Comes Marriage

by Huda Al-Marashi

  At the masjid, the Seyyid's voice, amplified by a tinny microphone, rang out into the parking lot. I watched my father, grandfather, uncle, and brother enter the door to the church's former nave where the pews now lined the walls and an enormous chandelier, donated by the Iraqi owners of a crystal shop, hung in the center. A curtain stretched across the area that had been the altar and divided the men's section and the women's section into drastically disproportionate parts.

  Peering in from the door designated as the women's entrance, I balked at the space. The elders sat shoulder to shoulder on the pews pushed against the wall, and the floor was covered with women and children, sitting cross-legged, knee to knee. I pointed out the obvious. “There is no room for us.” But Mama would not be swayed. We left our shoes at the growing mound by the door and waded through the sea of women and children, stopping to regain our footing in the spaces between their bodies.

  “Sallemi,” Mama said and prodded me to bend down and greet her friends with the traditional “assalamu alaikum,” followed by a kiss on each cheek.

  Mama's cousin Marwa had recently moved to the area and motioned for us to sit next to her. Space was made for Mama on the bench. Lina and I sat on the floor by her feet. Mama leaned in close and whispered translations of bits and pieces of the Seyyid's sermon, urging me to pay attention. “If you listen,” she promised, “you'll understand.”

  But I didn't understand. I just looked around me at all the new faces, so recently arrived from Iraq you could still see it on their faces and in their clothes, and I wondered about their stories. When they cried for Imam Husayn, stranded in the desert with his family, his children and siblings brutally murdered before he was beheaded and the tents of his surviving family set on fire, did they remember themselves? Did they think of all the times when they had to say goodbye, as a mother to her son, a daughter to her father, a wife to her husband, a sister to her brother?

  After the Gulf War, Southern California's Iraqi community doubled. With these new arrivals came customs that had long been forgotten. They reminded us of the different styles of black abayas, the open cloak and the pullover dress with trim of every color and design; of passing around trays heavy with saffron rice pudding and cups of cool, rose-water-sweetened sherbet; of the mourning ritual known as lutmiyya.

  The first year the women attempted the lutmiyya, I watched my mother as I had never seen her before. Standing in a circle, she slapped her face in time with a poetic nauha about Imam Husayn's suffering that two women at the microphone took turns reciting. The women's hands on their cheeks made the sound of a unified clap. Their faces reddened, and their silky abayas flowed with their every movement, making their bodies appear as if they were dripping in sadness. When Mama motioned for me to join her, I shook my head. I couldn't stand there pretending that I understood, that I belonged.

  The following year, Mama took my hand and brought me into the circle from the beginning. My heart pounding, I watched her for a hint as to what I should do. When she started to move, I copied her, bending so that my hair spilled forward while slapping my forehead with both hands. The movement of my hair brought a moment of reprieve from the summertime heat, a small breeze on my now sweaty neck. The muscles in my back warmed and loosened as we moved in circles around the room. Bend, slap, stand, and step.

  On my third revolution around the room, something amazing happened. I understood. After years of attending services in an incomprehensible world, one line opened up my world. The speaker called out, “Abd wallah, Ya Zahra. Ma ninsa Husayna.” At first it was nothing more than a tight knot of language, but soon that knot unraveled into distinct, entirely intelligible words: “I swear to God, Oh Zahra, we will not forget Husayn.”

  Each time she said it, the cries of the group grew louder, and the women in the circle no longer stepped, but jumped, bringing their hands high up into the air and then pulling them right down on the top of their heads. I jumped with them, beating each side of my head with my hands, and before I knew it, I was crying with a mix of emotions. Relief to have understood, overwhelmed by the power of the words I was saying, the weight of their meaning. I was promising Fatima az-Zahra, Imam Husayn's mother, that I would not forget the death of her son.

  I looked at the women in the circle around me, and fragments of stories I'd heard—of families rounded up in the middle of the night and deported to Iran in their pajamas, of sisters and brothers disappearing from their schools for not joining the government's party, of fathers accidentally run over on sidewalks in broad daylight—flooded my mind. Soon this ritual that had bewildered me, maybe even embarrassed me, made so much sense. All atrocities deserved this much, for people to bear witness and cry, to vow they would not forget.

  I wished, with more regret than longing, that I was a little less American and a little more Iraqi. If only I spoke better Arabic, I could have understood the details of these stories rather than their outline. I could have told the world about the suffering contained within this room.

  Each time I brought my hands up to my face, I slapped myself a little harder. The tender skin on my face stung, but it was a good hurt, a small burn to remind me how lucky I was to only know such inconsequential pain.

  At times, I glanced at the women outside the circle, lightly beating their chests or sitting in the pews and crying quietly. Within our own tradition, these lamentation rituals were still the subject of some controversy, and I wondered if the women looking on thought the lutmiyya was too extreme. Suddenly I saw Diana and Nadia, and my teachers and classmates, in my mind. What would they think if they saw me here beating myself? And then Hadi appeared right next to them. It would be so much easier to marry a boy who understood this, who had stood on the other side of the curtain and beat his chest, too.

  When the lutmiyya was over, we fanned our abayas to cool down and moved about the room, exchanging hugs and kisses with the wish, “May God accept your prayers.”

  I brought my hands to my lower back and stretched. This soreness was likely another reason why some of the women in the room did not participate.

  Mama smiled at me and said, “I am proud of you, hababa.”

  One of the women who had stood in the circle next to Mama approached us and complimented Mama on her beautiful lutm, on raising the kind of daughter who would stand in memory of the Imam. Mama and her new friend's approval wrapped me in such warmth that the tug to be more Iraqi overwhelmed me. In that moment, I would have gladly given up my accent-free English to have our dialect of Arabic take root in my mind. I would have given up my American place of birth to at least have a clear, defining mark of being from somewhere else stamped into my passport. How refreshing to abandon all my expectations of a relationship that looked American but followed Iraqi rules. It would be so much easier, I imagined, to be a foreigner clearly from another place, the owner of one set of values, rather than this life within a single body constantly toggling between two minds.

  As much as our mothers may have wanted Hadi Ridha and me to wind up together in the future, they didn't want to see us together until that appointed day. If Mama caught me talking to Hadi, she'd pull me aside and say it was unsuitable for a girl to talk to a boy. It made her look interested, and a girl should never appear interested in a boy. Mrs. Ridha would tell Hadi that it was inappropriate to approach a girl who was a guest in their home; it made him appear as if he was on the make. And neither one of us wanted our siblings to see us talking to each other either. Showing an interest in a member of the opposite sex was ayb, shameful. On the rare occasions we teased about an Al-Marashi kid being paired with a Ridha kid, it earned us a firm scolding, a lecture about how marriage was not a joking matter.

  But every now and then, Hadi and I paused in the hallway and exchanged a few words or continued to carry on a conversation after our siblings had gotten up from the couch. Other times, Hadi would come into Jamila's room under the pretense of having something to say to her and then he'd stay, chatting with me. When we talked, it was alway
s about banal things—my sophomore and junior years in high school, his first couple of years in college, our summer jobs, and, most recently, our favorite cars. Hadi's first car was an old BMW, and ever since I'd told him I wanted my first car to be a zippy red BMW convertible, it became the thing that we shared.

  Once when crossing paths in the hallway of his parents’ house, Hadi stopped and said, “So yesterday I saw a red BMW 325, and I have to agree with you. It is a really nice car.”

  “That's why it's my favorite,” I said and leaned against the wall. I knew Hadi and I would talk until someone appeared, and we'd scatter like a pair of startled birds. But stealing these moments still felt like a necessary risk. Ever since Mama had asked me if I liked Hadi, I felt as if I were trying him on, as if he were a pair of shoes and I was wandering up and down the aisles of a store to see if he fit.

  Hadi added, “I know. Like I have the Nissan now, and it's a great car, but it's just not the same. A BMW is different.”

  Hadi wore a pair of slightly shrunken white jeans and a denim shirt straight from the dryer. The top of his mullet was plastered down with mousse, its tail a black puff of frizzy hair that inspired me to self-pity. Of all the Iraqi families in California, my family had to grow close to the one whose son had a wild animal growing on his head.

  With frustration and boredom creeping into my voice, I said, “Yeah, well. I wouldn't know. Never driven one.”

  “You could've driven mine,” he said.

  “Right,” I answered.

  “Hey, I offered.”

  “You offered, and you also know why that would've never happened.”

  Hadi was finally talking to me as if we did not belong to the kind of Muslim families who would've deemed my sitting in his car inappropriate, but I gave him no credit for the flirtatious hint.

  “I'll have to buy you one,” he said.

  “You will?”

  “Yes, I will.”

  “How would that work?” I asked. “I don't think your future wife would like you buying me a car.”

  “She'd understand.”

  “And why would she do that?”

  He paused, and I wondered if I had been too forward. But Hadi didn't seem frustrated by my question—only surprised.

  “She just would,” he said with a smile.

  Standing there, with all the wisdom of my sixteen years of age, I resented Hadi for trying to be respectful, for trying to say something without saying anything at all. In my mind, the one thing Hadi had going for him was that our families’ friendship afforded us these stolen moments to write the opening of our relationship together, and I wanted him to say something daring, something that proved that in spite of his unkempt hair and wrinkly clothes, Hadi could deliver a story that I could not have had with anyone else.

  Because although no one had come forward and officially asked for me yet, there'd been what I'd heard Mrs. Ridha call haraka, or activity. There was the boy who met me at a dinner at a family friend's house. My siblings and I had gone with my father since my mother was working, and in her absence, this boy had chatted with me all evening. He'd asked me if he could stay in touch, and when I couldn't find the words to say no, I told him he could write me a letter but that he'd have to put a girl's name in the return address. As soon as I said the words, I heard how this one little act of deception made me complicit in his attention. I heard the gossipy aunties in my community whispering to each other, “How did he get her address unless she gave it to him?” I heard my reputation crumbling.

  As soon as I got home, I told my mother everything. She clucked her tongue and shook her head. “I knew I shouldn't have let you out of my sight,” she said before calling our host and asking her to end things.

  Then there was the family friend who came to visit. The mother caught me on my way out of the bathroom, my hair still dripping wet from the shower, and asked me right there in the hallway to my bedroom if I liked Sylvester Stallone because she had a son who looked just like Sylvester Stallone. The question itself stunned me. No self-respecting Muslim girl would admit to an adult in the community that she liked a man even if he was an actor. Weeks later, she returned with the Arab Sylvester, who must have been in his twenties, but at the time, with his car and his full-time job, he seemed decades older than me. Later my mother learned through the community grapevine that our family friend's desperation had been driven by her son's American girlfriend. I was her last-ditch effort to introduce him to someone from a shared religion and culture.

  And months later, there would be the first boy I actually liked, from a family that matched ours in every way. His family had been visiting our seaside town for the weekend, and on the evening they joined us for dinner, the boy and I talked for hours about school and our classes. In that short visit, he was far more direct in suggesting that he liked me than Hadi ever was, but with email and cell phones years into the future and with letter-writing already having proven itself far too risky, there was no way we could stay in touch.

  I was content to wonder if one day this new boy might be another potential, but Mama was concerned. This boy was not Hadi, and his mother was not Mrs. Ridha.

  As soon as his family left our house, Mama appeared in my bedroom and sat down next to me on my bed. She told me Jidu had complained about our guests’ son. “Is this the way people do things?” he'd said. “If they had wanted to come see Huda, they should have announced their intentions first.” And Bibi had wanted to know, “Did they ask you for her, hah? Will you give her or not?” The only person who didn't think anything of our guests was Baba, and that was because he'd been too absorbed in his own socializing and storytelling to notice.

  When Mama finished reporting the news from downstairs, I was in a state of disbelief. “Are you serious? They said that? How come people can't talk in this house without everybody assuming things?”

  “What do you want me to tell you?” Mama said. “That's the way we do things.”

  “I know,” I replied, leaning back onto my bed. “But it isn't always a good way.”

  “Maybe it isn't,” Mama acknowledged. She ran her hand along my comforter for a moment and then asked, “So did he say anything to you?”

  “No,” I said. “What could he say?”

  “I don't know. I'm just asking.”

  “Did his mom say anything to you?” I asked in a voice I hoped conveyed only curiosity, no interest.

  “No.”

  After a pause, Mama asked, “Do you like him?”

  I shrugged, trying to make it seem as if I didn't care either way. But I could tell by the jumpy way I felt inside that it was too late. I wanted Mama to like this boy better than she liked Hadi; I wanted to feel as if I had options. But just as that thought brightened in my mind, our friendship with the Ridhas clouded over it.

  “Anyway, let's see,” Mama said as she got up to leave, but apparently by see she meant, “Let's check in with you every few days to see if you are still interested in this new boy.”

  To each inquiry, I'd answer, “I don't know. I barely even know him,” partly because it was true, partly because I thought it was wrong to admit I liked him.

  One afternoon that conversation went in a direction that stunned me. She'd picked me up from school, and we were on our way home when she said, “I talked to Ibrahim about this situation, and he didn't like the idea. He thinks Hadi is a better person for you.”

  “What?” I said, my voice sharp. “There is no situation yet. Nobody's even asked for me.”

  “I know. We were just discussing things in general, and he said that Hadi's the kind of guy you'd want to marry your sister, and I thought you should know that.”

  “What makes him think that?”

  “The same reasons I think that. He's kind, Hudie. He'd be good to you.”

  I pressed into the headrest, quiet, confused. It was one thing for my mother to like Hadi and another thing for Ibrahim to like him. Growing up, Ibrahim had been so indifferent to me, his annoying middle si
ster, that it made me desperate for his approval. When we were kids, he traded me his broken, tired old things not for my belongings (those he just took) but for days of servitude. One time, he offered me a purple mechanical pencil in return for a month of me being his servant. Then there was the promise that he'd tell me the one thing that I actually did well if I served him for another month. I agreed to both miserable offers as if they were great deals, but at the first month's end, I found myself crying over a nonworking pencil, and at the end of the other month, I was left with a laughing older brother who claimed to have forgotten my only talent. And now my mother was telling me that this brother who was a whole foot taller than me, who picked me up off the ground to get me out of his way, thought about whom I should marry, that he cared that my future husband be a certain kind of person.

  Mama continued, “So after I talked to Ibrahim, I started praying, ‘Dear God, you know best. My Hudie is the best girl, and she deserves the best person for her.’ And then I started thinking maybe I should make an istikhara about whether I should encourage you to be with Hadi. Just for me to know if I'm doing the right thing.”

  My stomach tightened. In the Shia tradition, the Quran can be consulted under the guidance of someone trained in interpreting its verses. Although most people only seek this kind of direction in matters of the utmost importance (if at all), my family sought it out regularly. Relatives at home and abroad would call Jidu and ask him to undertake an istikhara on their behalf before accepting a job, traveling to a new destination, or buying a car or a house. Because the practice was so commonplace among our relatives, I wouldn't question it for years. I wouldn't even think to ask Mama why she'd made an istikhara about a boy who hadn't even proposed to me yet, because all I could feel then was burning curiosity. I wanted to know what God wanted for me; I wanted one piece of the puzzle that was my future to fall into place.