Hijab Butch Blues E-Book

Lamya H

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 382

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

'A masterful, must-read contribution to conversations on power, justice, healing, and devotion from a singular voice I now trust with my whole heart' GLENNON DOYLE, author of Untamed **Roxane Gay's Book Club March 2022 Pick** When Lamya is fourteen, she decides to disappear. It seems easier to ease herself out of sight than to grapple with the difficulty of taking shape in a world that doesn't fit. She is a queer teenager growing up in a Muslim household, a South Asian in a Middle Eastern country. But during her Quran class, she reads a passage about Maryam, and suddenly everything shifts: if Maryam was never touched by any man, could Maryam be... like Lamya? Written with deep intelligence and a fierce humour, Hijab Butch Blues follows Lamya as she travels to the United States, as she comes out, and as she navigates the complexities of the immigration system - and the queer dating scene. At each step, she turns to her faith to make sense of her life, weaving stories from the Quran together with her own experiences: Musa leading his people to freedom; Allah, who is neither male nor female; and Nuh, who built an ark, just as Lamya is finally able to become the architect of her own story. Raw and unflinching, Hijab Butch Blues heralds the arrival of a truly original voice, asking powerful questions about gender and sexuality, relationships, identity and faith, and what it means to build a life of one's own.

Leseprobe

Published in the UK in 2023 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

First published in the United States in 2023 By The Dial Press, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by Grantham Book Services, Trent Road, Grantham NG31 7XQ

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India,7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City,Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-178578-849-9eBOOK ISBN: 978-178578-850-5

Text copyright © 2023 Lamya H

The author has asserted her moral rights.

Hijab Butch Blues is a work of memoir. It is a true story based on the author’s best recollections of various events in her life. In some instances, events and time periods have been compressed or reordered in service of the narrative and dialogue approximated to match the author’s best recollections of those exchanges. Names and identifying details have been changed.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Book design by Susan Turner

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

For my beloved family, chosen and bio. For J.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

PART I

MARYAM

JINN

ALLAH

PART II

MUSA

MUHAMMAD

ASIYAH

PART III

NUH

YUSUF

HAJAR

YUNUS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

And when Ibrahim said, “My Lord, show me how You give life to the dead.”

[Allah] said, “Have you not believed?”

[Ibrahim] said, “Yes, but just that my heart may be satisfied.”

—The Quran, 2:260

This is my favorite verse in the Quran. Even Ibrahim, a prophet who talks to God, who has received revelations and miracles—even this prophet has doubts. He turns to God and asks gingerly, Will You really bring me back to life when I am dead? I believe in You, God, but there’s a part of me that is unsure. My heart hesitates. My mind has questions. And I can’t help but ask them.

I, too, have questions for God—when I’m falling in love with a woman, when I’m figuring out my gender, when I move to the U.S. for college away from everyone I know and can’t make sense of why I feel so wrong. Like Ibrahim, I, too, can’t help but turn to God with my questions, my doubts, my anger, my love. Like Ibrahim, I, too, hope that my heart may be satisfied.

PART

I

MARYAM

I.

I am fourteen the year I read Surah Maryam. It’s not like I haven’t read this chapter of the Quran before, I have—I’ve read the entire Quran multiple times, all 114 chapters from start to finish. But I’ve only read it in Arabic, a language that I don’t speak, that I can vocalize but not understand, that I’ve been taught for the purpose of reading the Quran. So I’ve read Surah Maryam before: sounded out the letters, rattled off words I don’t know the meaning of, translated patterns of print into movements of tongue and lips. Read as an act of worship, an act of learning, an act of obedience to my father, under whose supervision I speed-read two pages of Quran aloud every evening. I’ve heard the surah read, too—recited on the verge of song during Taraweeh prayer in Ramadan; on the Quran tapes we listen to in the car during traffic jams; on the Islamic radio station that blares in the background while my mother cooks. This surah is beautiful, and one that I’m intimately familiar with. The cadence of its internal rhyme, the five elongated letters that comprise the first verse, the short, hard consonants repeated in intervals. But although I’ve read Surah Maryam before, my appreciation for it has been limited to the ritual and the aesthetic. I’ve never read read it.

I am fourteen the year we read Surah Maryam in Quran class. We, as in the twenty-odd students in my grade, in the girls’ section of the Islamic school that I attend in this rich Arab country that my family has moved to. It’s not a fancy international school, but my classmates and I are from all over the world—Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Germany—and our parents are always telling us to be grateful for our opportunities. Mine are always reminding me why we left the country I was born in a decade ago—a country where we lived next door to my grandmother and a few streets down from my cousins, where I remember being surrounded by love—to this country where we don’t know anyone and don’t know the language and my mother can’t drive. My parents are always listing reasons we’ve stayed: better jobs, more stability, a Muslim upbringing. Which includes an Islamic education in school.

Twice a week, my classmates and I have Quran class. We line up in the windowless hallway outside the room where we have most of our other lessons—a room we’ve decorated and claimed desks in and settled into. From there, we begrudgingly make our way to a drab room in the annex called the “language lab.” The name is deceptive; it’s just a regular classroom outfitted with headphones and tape players, recently appropriated from the boys’ section in an attempt at a more equal distribution of the school’s resources. But gross boy smells—sweat and farts and cheap deodorant—still linger in the windowless room, and it’s a five-minute walk away on the other side of the school’s campus. Understandably, the rate of attrition is high for these trips to Quran class. Girls duck out to the bathroom along the way and fail to rejoin the procession (“Miss, I really have to change my pad, but I’ll be right back, wallah”), or feign ignorance of where class is being held (“Miss, someone told us the language lab is closed this week so we waited in our classroom the entire time”), or pretend to have gotten lost (“Miss, I really thought I had to take a right at the stairs and by the time I figured it out, it didn’t make sense to disturb the lesson”). It is unbelievably easy to skip Quran class.

I, on the other hand, never skip Quran class. I go to every single one without fail, not because of religious devoutness, but because that’s the kind of ninth grader I am. Too scared to cut class and a terrible liar. An overachiever, hell-bent on getting good grades and ranking first in my class. A nerd, hungry to learn about anything and everything; an avid reader, fascinated by the storytelling aspect of Quran class and eager to know what happens next; a clown, unwilling to give up having an audience for the jokes and convoluted questions and inappropriate remarks that I offer in class, preferring the laughs and groans and eye rolls of my classmates to being with myself, to the thoughts that pulse through my solitude.

But also, there’s this: I’m bored. I’m thoroughly bored by school. I’ve figured out that each class contains only about ten minutes of actual learning that I need to pay attention to at the start of the period, and then I can tune out. I’ve figured out that my teachers are puzzles that can be cracked with a little effort at the beginning of the semester: which teachers reward acting like you’re trying hard, which ones have soft spots for quick-witted students, which ones just want everyone to be quiet in class. I’ve figured this out: once I listen for a bit in class and grasp the new material and win over the teacher, I can spend the rest of the time doing whatever I want. Sometimes this means decorating my pencil case with correction fluid; other times it means reading contraband novels under my desk. Sometimes it means disrupting the class: coming up with pointed questions of existential importance that I just need to ask the teacher now. But mostly, it means whispering with—and distracting—whoever ends up sitting next to me.

This Quran class is no different. We are slogging through Surah Maryam painfully slowly, about ten verses at a time. The only part of class I enjoy is the beginning. We start by listening to the recitation of the verses in Arabic. One of the girls in my class is a Quran aficionado and brings in tapes of reciters with lush, melodious voices. I put on my headphones, close my eyes, and for a few minutes let the sounds wash over me. I lose myself to the tune set by the rhyme, I let myself be moved. This part always comes to an end too soon. The teacher stops the tape and takes over, reading the verses one by one in a stoic monotone, each word clear and well enunciated. And we follow, mimicking her tone and reciting lazily, most of us just mumbling through and letting the Arab girls who know what they’re doing take up the bulk of the aural space.

The next part of class is the translation. We read the English meaning of the Arabic words we’ve just recited, with everyone taking turns reading one verse aloud from our government-issued Qurans. I deliberately sit near the back of the class so we’ll be done reading before my turn comes, so I can skim through the translation of the verses we’ve read and then blissfully tune out the rest of the lesson. Today I’m composing a note on my calculator to my best friend, with whom I’ve been trying to come up with a code using numbers and symbols and the smattering of letters on the keyboards of our scientific calculators—then someone in the first row reads the translation of this verse aloud:

And the pains of childbirth [of Isa] drove her [Maryam] to the trunk of a palm tree. She said, “Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.” (19:23)

I stop writing my note, stop looking at my watch, stop trying to decide what I’ll eat for lunch, stop breathing for a second. Because this verse is saying that Maryam wants to die. Maryam, of the eponymous surah we’re reading, wants to die. Maryam—who has a whole chapter devoted to her in the Quran, this woman beloved to God, the mother of a prophet, held up as an example to mankind—is saying she wants to die. In this difficult moment of childbirth, of birthing the prophet Isa, who will go on to birth the entire religion of Christianity, this Maryam is talking to God, complaining to God, screaming in pain to God that she wants to be in oblivion, forgotten. That she wants to die.

II.

I am fourteen the year I want to die. Nothing has happened to precipitate this feeling, but that’s part of the problem: nothing happens in my life. I live in this country my parents moved us to when I was four and my brother was two—away from everything and everyone we knew. Nothing happens here, but I suppose that’s part of the draw for my parents: no political upheavals, no wars, all of which they’ve lived through back home.

Nothing happens in this country and nothing happens in my life, this life I’ve never had a choice in. Not in having been born, not in having been moved, and certainly not in the mundanities of my everyday. I wake up in the morning. I go to school. I study the subjects that were chosen for me by virtue of my good grades. I come home. I do chores, I do homework, I go to bed. I can’t go anywhere without my parents because there is no other way to leave the house, no public transport, no method of travel that doesn’t involve my father driving. When we go out as a family, it is mostly to dinner parties at my parents’ friends’ houses: stuffy affairs segregated by gender and age where the other teenagers both bore me and ignore me. We come back from these parties and I brush my teeth and go to sleep and wake up and repeat all these actions to prepare for a future that I never asked for, the days blending into each other in a life that I never asked for, this life that’s never been my own.

So I want to die. Not dramatically, not in some big performative way—although sometimes I cannot stop thinking about the beauty of cutting myself. How satisfying it would be to run a razor down my arm in two sharp nicks lengthwise; how satisfying it would be to watch the tracks left by the blade fill slowly with blood and spill over. The splendor of this image, red trails down my forearms, would be the last thing I’d see before fading out.

But I don’t actually want to die like that, and I don’t want to die tragically, either, in the myriad ways I can think of. Not from cancer or some other fast-acting terminal disease. I don’t want that kind of attention, my body wasting, my friends wailing, people visiting to ask for forgiveness, people saying their final goodbyes. I don’t want to die painfully, nor by deliberate accident. Not hit by a car that I’ve thrown myself in front of, not falling out of a roller coaster where I’ve forgotten to wear a seatbelt, not slipping through a window I’ve intentionally left unlatched. I don’t want to die in any of these ways that would leave people grieving, would leave behind shock waves and melancholy and the certainty of pain for others.

What I want instead is to disappear. Stop living, more like. I just want to stop being alive. It’s a constant ache, this wanting to disappear. A craving that’s always there, even when I’m with my friends, even when I’m outwardly joking around or playing games or making people laugh. Even when I’m doing things that have previously brought me pleasure, even in situations where I look like I’m having fun. I just don’t want to do this thing called living anymore, and this feeling both creates and fills up an emptiness inside me. I want my parents never to have had me, I want my friends never to have known me, I want none of this life I never asked for. I want never to have lived at all.

So I practice disappearing, I practice disappearing all the time: at home, at school, at a dinner party my parents drag me to one Friday night—a wedding anniversary celebration for their friends. I’m sitting with the women and girls in an ornate living room where we’re curtained from the men so everyone can remove their hijabs, and I’m immeasurably bored. The other girls my age go to a different high school, and I have nothing to add to their rambunctious conversation about teachers, cafeteria food, and how to sneak makeup past their draconian monitors. Everyone else—the married women, including my mother, who is a few seats away—is engaged in a lively discussion about making samosas using frozen spring roll wrappers. I don’t want to be here, all dressed up in an itchy sequined shalwar kameez that my mother insisted I wear. I’d do anything to be anywhere but here, sitting in this living room among these people who are talking, eating, happy.

My mother gets up to refill her plate and stoops beside me, outwardly smiling as she whispers angrily in my ear, “Lamya, you need to talk to the other girls. Can you at least try to have fun?”

The only way I could have fun at this dinner party is if I wasn’t here, so I decide to make that happen. I spot a mirror on the opposite wall, where everyone else in the reflection is talking, eating, happy. I position myself near a corner of the reflection and slowly edge myself out. Slowly move out of the frame inch by inch, to the left at first and then down, slouching lower and lower on my chair so I’m no longer in the reflection and the scene is left intact. Looking at the scene in the mirror—everyone else still gathered, talking, eating, happy—makes me feel strangely relieved. As if these people never knew me, as if I had never come to this party, as if I had never been born.

I practice disappearing with my friends, too. At school, on the bus, at a mall one evening that my friend bribes her brother to drive us to. None of us are ever able to go anywhere—we never have rides—and going to the mall by ourselves feels like we’ve lucked into a treat. We get to spend three whole hours together without our parents around, three hours to do whatever we want, three hours of something approaching freedom. My friends and I are giddy; we’ve been planning this outing for weeks. But when it finally happens, all they want to do is go into stores and try on clothes, shoes, and jewelry. I follow them around obediently until suddenly, I want to be anywhere but there, I want to disappear. So I grow quiet slowly over the course of the evening, lowering the volume of my voice by a fraction of a decibel every time I speak, until I’m saying things that are barely audible, until I’m saying things that no one notices, until finally I’m saying nothing, sometimes moving my lips but mostly doing nothing at all.

I try to go the entire evening without anyone noticing that I’m not talking, and I almost get away with it. But then, at the end of our allotted time, we’re waiting in the parking lot for my friend’s brother to pick us up, when one of my friends says something.

“Lamya, are you okay? It’s not like you to be so quiet.”

“Yeah. I’m fine.” Embarrassingly, my voice croaks from disuse, but I’m secretly pleased that my desire for disappearing is manifesting in physical ways.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. How are you doing, though? You haven’t updated us in a while about that boy you have a crush on.”

My friend squeals, happy to talk about this boy who lives in her building, whom she gets to talk to for a few minutes every morning while they’re waiting for their respective school buses. I know I should be sad at how easy it is to deflect her question, but that’s not what I feel. I don’t really feel anything; I haven’t felt anything in months. It’s fascinating how busy my friends are with being the center of their own worlds. And my parents have never been very involved or perceptive of my inner life. I get good grades and I don’t act up, so they’ve never needed to understand me—unlike my brother, who gets mediocre grades and struggles with making friends, and therefore gets all of their focus and attention and energy. (Decades later, my mother will throw out a casual remark about how easy I was as a teenager and I’ll be shocked anew that she never knew, that she never even tried to know.) Once in a while, when people notice that I’m less of myself and ask if I’m okay, I tell them yes, of course everything is okay. I don’t tell anyone that I’m tired of living, that I’m hungry to disappear.

Partly because I don’t know it myself: I don’t have words for this feeling, just nebulous thoughts about this thing that is not talked about in my family, my culture, in Islam. My mother’s cousin is found dead in his college dorm room when I’m really young, and even years later there’s a deafening hush around his death. Who knows what happened, everyone says. It could have been anything—heart attack, stroke—no one knows what happened, he just died, that’s all. The intensity of the ensuing hush swallows all questions. Suicide, we’re told once in a while in Friday sermons, Islam classes, halaqa reading circles, is the work of the devil. It’s cowardly, one of the biggest sins, punishable by hell, takes one out of the fold of Islam, means no funeral prayer, no Muslim burial, audhubillahi minnash shaytan arrajeem. But that’s not what I’m struggling with, I tell myself; that’s not what this is. And it’s not, not really; these feelings that I’m having, that I’m hiding, are different. I just want to erase myself retroactively. Like Maryam, I don’t want to kill myself, I want to be in oblivion, forgotten. I want to die.

III.

Maryam has had it rough. It’s no wonder she wants to die. Her life was decided for her before she was born. Her mother, pregnant with a child she’s convinced is a boy, dedicates the baby to God. Maryam’s mother swears an oath to the Divine, turns to the heavens and gives her unborn son to a life in service of God. This child is Yours, she tells God. This child will worship You, will live a small life, a simple life, a quiet life in Your mosque, will spend his life serving those who worship You. And God accepts this gift.

And then Maryam is born, born a girl, born wrong. Her mother is distraught, laments: What did I do to deserve this, to have birthed a girl? A girl who cannot live by herself, who cannot protect herself, who is now pledged to the mosque, who is now pledged to God? But God is the best of planners, tells Maryam’s mother not to worry, that her gift is accepted, that Maryam has been chosen for the service of God.

So Maryam spends the first few years of her life in her mother’s house, with her family—just a few years, not a lot. Long enough to learn to take care of herself, to learn how to survive. Long enough to love and be loved by her siblings, by her mother, her father, this child who was always destined to leave. Long enough for it to hurt when she leaves, this child born a girl, born wrong, whose life was never her own.

Then one day when Maryam is old enough, she is taken to the mosque where she is to spend the rest of her life. All alone, a child still, she is to spend her life in constant devotion to God: praying salah and fasting and reciting dhikr. And between these acts of worship, she is to maintain the mosque: sweeping and dusting and cleaning and refilling the water urns. All day, every day these routine tasks. No one for company except stray wanderers, and once in a while, her uncle Zakariya, who only visits because he has to. He has lost the drawing of lots for who has to take care of Maryam, when the men of the family fought among themselves not to have to be responsible for her, to bring her food, and to check in on her once in a while.

Maryam settles into this life alone and far from everyone she loves. She’s made peace with herself and her circumstances, and finds herself loving this worship, this solitude, this closeness to God. And God is good to her. God keeps her safe and protects her and feeds her with fruit sent from the heavens, trays laden with more food than she can eat that just appear on her doorstep—until. (Always, there is a turn, an until.)

Until God sends an angel to tell Maryam, Hello, guess what, you’re pregnant. You have been chosen and you’re going to have a child. Not just any child—a prophet. Prophet Isa, in fact. Jesus. A prophet who will go on to lead billions, who will found the entire religion of Christianity—this is the prophet who is growing inside you. Maryam is a teenager in most versions of this story. She’s still a kid, this Maryam, she’s never had sex with a man. She lives on her own and prays all day, away from all her people, away from men, and suddenly there’s a child growing inside of her. And not just any child, but a prophet. Maryam’s life was never her own, and now neither is her body. It is God’s vessel to carry a child she never asked for.

Maryam bears it, of course. What else can one do when chosen by God? Maryam’s body grows bigger, expands and distends. There is no mother to watch over her, no coterie of women to take care of her, advise her, answer her questions about the aches and soreness and swelling—the numerous ways in which her body is changing. And as Maryam grows bigger, she also becomes mortified. It’s hard to hide her pregnancy, and she understands enough of the world to know that no one will believe that God put this child inside of her. She is embarrassed at what people will assume happened while she was alone in the mosque, what they will say about her character, her family. So when she gets too big to hide her condition, Maryam leaves the mosque that is her whole world. She sneaks away from her small, simple, quiet life and goes somewhere far away in the desert to give birth. Alone. Always alone.

And that’s where we are with Maryam in Quran class. With this child who is with child, giving birth alone under a tree in the middle of the desert. She’s in ripping, searing pain like she’s never known before. And she is entirely alone. No midwife to remind her to breathe, no mother who has gone through this before to comfort her, no attendant to see to her needs. Maryam is hungry and thirsty and tired. She’s angry, too, and she knows that this birth, this agonizing pain of labor, all of this is the easy part. The harder part is yet to come, when she will go back into town and face her people with a baby in her arms. What will they say about her, about this baby and where it came from? Who will believe her when she says it’s an act of God? What will they do to her? It is all terrifying, so she turns to the heavens, to God, in pain and, maybe for the first time in her life, in rage. For all that she’s been through and borne, for all the ways she’s been wrong and wronged, for all the ways in which her life has never been her own, she screams, Oh, I wish I had died before this and was in oblivion, forgotten.

She’s had it rough, Maryam. Of course she wants to die.

IV.

I am fourteen the year I realize I am gay.

Realize is a strong word. It’s not exactly something I realize in the conventional sense; it’s not a sudden epiphany, or even something I have language for yet. It’s more of a steady gathering of information, a piling up of block upon block until suddenly a tower appears. A tower that is no longer part of the background, a tower that—unlike a scattered set of blocks—is no longer ignorable. And gay is a strong word, too, and not one that I know yet to use for myself. Gay is a hush-hush thing, not to be talked about seriously, only to be used as an insult. What I’m noticing in myself, though I don’t quite have the word for this, either, is desire.

I find myself fascinated with this person who happens to be a woman, an economics teacher at my school. She’s Irish, in her early thirties, has two boys, and an Arab husband. Rumors of marital discord and an air of tragedy surround her. And also, she is beautiful. Has long blond hair that she never ties back, wears fashionable dresses cut to show unexpected slivers of skin. Her smile is difficult to extract but worth it for the way it spreads across her face, the way that it crinkles her eyes. She is always put together, always precisely on time, thorough in her lessons, and impossible to stump with questions.

But that’s all I know about her. She is annoyingly private. Refuses to answer even mundane questions like How old are your kids, what neighborhood do you live in, what’s your favorite kind of food, what books do you read? She proves to be entirely undistractable and exasperatingly efficient with her lessons. I try really hard to figure her out, and that’s how my fascination starts. She is a challenge. The more she brushes off my questions, the more questions I come up with. The more unreadable she is, the more I want to know her, the more I want to decode her. My straight A’s in her class don’t get her attention. My sitting in the front row doesn’t get her attention. My extra reading, my asking thoughtful, difficult questions about the subject matter doesn’t get her attention. Nothing works.

So I take to pranking her instead. Slip a tablespoon of salt in her coffee when she steps out for a five-minute break in the middle of a double lesson. She spits the coffee out, makes a face, and laughs tightly. Usually she has a great sense of humor, but she’s very serious about her coffee. She is definitely not amused by the “note from my mother” I hand her—it’s a contraption that sets off a paper clip/elastic band/cardboard cacophony when opened, resulting in a loud buzz and eliciting a loud scream. She is livid when I put petroleum jelly all over the door handle that leads into our classroom, so she both can’t get in and ends up with a sticky, gooey mess on her hands that she has to run to the bathroom to wash off. The other girls in my class are delighted. I’ve never been more popular, more frequently stopped in the hallways, sometimes even by the cool girls, for conversations and ideas for pranks. Everyone thinks I can’t stand this teacher, a convenient story that I don’t challenge. I can’t have anyone know that’s not true, that all I want is for her to look at me, to notice me even a fraction of the amount that I notice her.

I’m not even sure what I’d do with her attention, let alone what I want it for. I’m filled with questions, not answers. What is her life like? What does she do when she’s not teaching? What makes her so sad? I just want to be near her, converse with her, be there for her and her sadness. She makes me feel all these confusing things that I’ve never felt before. A warmth when she’s around, this weird feeling that starts somewhere underneath my rib cage and dries out my tongue and dampens my palms. A hyperawareness of her coordinates at all times, like there’s a long invisible string connecting us. A yearning to be seen by her. And this tingling, this weird sense of pleasure in parts of myself where I’ve never felt anything before.

Whatever this is, I do know it feels a lot like what my friends say they feel for boys—this wanting to be near, wanting to touch, wanting some sort of connection, some intimacy. I’m good at pretending; I play along with my friends when they talk about feeling these things for boys. Of course, I say, of course I feel these things, too. There’s this one boy who lives a few doors down who is appropriately a few years older, and I tell everyone who will listen that I feel these feelings for him. But it’s not true, I don’t feel that way about him. I don’t want him to look at me the way my friends want their crushes to look at them. I don’t want to dress up for him, or talk to him or about him for hours. And I definitely do not want to do any of the things my friends tell me I should be doing to get his attention.

It’s because I don’t feel anything like that for him, or for any boy, really. And why would I? Boys are stupid and smelly and I play sports with them on my street every evening, so I know their world well. I can’t stand their posturing and their dumb jokes about how they’re better than girls, can’t stand the way they don’t have to help out with everyday chores, can’t stand how much they get away with just because they’re boys. I’m friends with them, these boys. I hang out with them all the time, but I don’t feel anything resembling the feelings other girls describe. Until I find myself having these feelings for this older woman, this teacher.

Even without words like gay and lesbian and queer, I know instinctively that these feelings are wrong, out of place somehow. These all-consuming feelings that make me see this woman when I close my eyes to sleep at night, that make me find ways to casually inject her into every conversation I have with my friends, that make me so curious about her—whatever these feelings are, I know I must keep them to myself and never share. That’s what I tell myself on the good days. On bad days, I am embarrassed at my reactions, mortified at how my body responds to the presence of this woman. I am acutely ashamed. All year that I’ve been having these feelings, not a day goes by that I am not terrified that someone will find out, paranoid that people can see through me, to this core of me that is wretched and wrong. I feel more alone than I ever have. I don’t want this, I don’t want to live like this. I want to die.

V.

The week after reading about Maryam wanting to die, I look forward to the next Quran class. I’m jittery as the time approaches, and eager to start walking to the language lab. As usual, my class of twenty-two girls whittles down to a little more than half as we wind our way through the school building to the annex on the other side of campus. The other girls are unhurried when we get there. They take their time choosing seats and chattering and settling, but I’m fast: notebook out, pen out, headphones on, ready to start the lesson. I’m jumpy. Hyperaware of everyone and everything, anxious that I’m being transparent, that everyone can tell that I’m craving the next installment of the story of Maryam, that I’m leaning in so as not to miss a word, that I’m grasping at everything I can learn about this woman who complains to God and wants to die.

But today is a review lesson, the Quran teacher tells us, to prep for our midterm the week after. I’m devastated. I’ll have to wait an entire week to know what happens next while we recap the thirty or so verses we’ve already read, and then review the recitation, the hard words, and the English translation for our upcoming test. Someone in the front row starts reading the beginning of the surah aloud and I sigh, slip into my usual half-listening mode. I nudge my best friend sitting next to me and ask to borrow her multicolored pens for doodling—then someone reads the translation of these verses aloud:

And mention in the Book [the story of] Maryam, when she withdrew from her family to a place toward the east.

And she took, in seclusion from them, a screen. Then We sent to her Our angel, and he represented himself to her as a well-proportioned man.

She said, “Indeed, I seek refuge in the Most Merciful from you, [so leave me], if you should be fearing of Allah.”

He said, “I am only the messenger of your Lord to give you [news of] a pure boy [Isa].”

She said, “How can I have a boy while no man has touched me . . .” (19:17–19)

I stop. Stop doodling, stop calculating how many minutes till the end of class, stop thinking about the bag of chips in my backpack, stop breathing for a second, my body caught in a moment of clarity that shoots through me and suspends my thoughts. Suddenly, my arm raises of its own accord, and before I’m aware of making any conscious decision, I’m speaking, my voice higher than usual and breathless. “Miss. Miss. Did Maryam say that no man has touched her because she didn’t like men?”

There is a pause. Two seconds of shocked silence before my classmates break into titters. Some roll their eyes. This sounds a lot like one of my infamous questions that derail the class, and some of my classmates are annoyed that I’ve interrupted their get-out-of-jail-free summary of the classes they’ve skipped and the things they need to know for the midterm. But I am grateful, so grateful for the tittering. It conceals my earnestness. I’m grateful for my earlier antics, that I get to play off this question as a moment of clowning instead of a sincere, burning desire for an answer. I need to know: Is this a thing? Are there other women like me, who don’t like men? Who would tell a handsome, well-proportioned man-angel who appeared before them to go away? Who have never been touched by men? Who don’t want to be touched by men?

The Quran teacher, a matronly Sudanese woman in her sixties who has always been kind to me, doesn’t seem to read anything into my question, and mercifully she does not skip a beat in her answer.

“No,” she says. “It’s because Maryam had taqwa, she had God consciousness in its highest state of being. It’s because Maryam was pious and loved and feared God. She knew that the Divine was watching her even if no one else was around, knew that the presence of God was everywhere even if she couldn’t see God. Maryam didn’t want the privacy of her situation to tempt her into doing something with this beautiful man, something God wouldn’t be happy with. Isn’t that an excellent lesson to learn, girls? Don’t ever forget that God is watching. When you’re around boys, God is always watching. If you’re alone with a boy, God is watching. If it’s just the two of you somewhere, then God is the third. Remember Maryam, girls. Maryam turned to God. She asked the man to go away because she had taqwa.”

But I know. I know differently.

VI.

Maryam is a dyke.

Isn’t it obvious? Doesn’t it make sense? She lives alone in a mosque with no one else around, no one to monitor what she does or whom she meets up with, and not a person in the world for company. One day, a handsome and well-proportioned man comes to her door unannounced. No one will know if he stays awhile, no one will know what they do together. But before he can even talk, Maryam asks him to leave. No, thank you, she says, please don’t talk to me. She would rather have her solitude than the company of this handsome man. Eventually, she lets him stay—but only because he says he’s an angel. She hears him out because he’s an emissary from God. Laughs heartily when he tells her she’s going to have a baby. Who, me? she says. No man has ever touched me. No man.

And I know, I know she was pious. I know that she was always aware that God was watching. But there’s no hesitation, not even for a second, when she turns him down and bars him from her space. It must be because Maryam doesn’t like men. Not handsome ones, not well-proportioned ones—these things don’t even register for her. No man has ever touched her, she says. She hasn’t let them, she hasn’t been interested. Maryam is a dyke.

Or maybe she isn’t, who knows—dyke isn’t even part of my vocabulary at fourteen, and maybe I’m reading too much into this story, these few lines of a text that’s been around for fourteen hundred years. But what I do know is this: Maryam is something, somehow like me. I feel different that day after Quran class. Relieved, at first, after the embarrassment dies down, after I’m done playing off the question as intentional, after I’m done receiving high fives in the hallways from my classmates for my joke. I’m relieved that no one has caught on and I’m relieved that I’m not the only one like this. And after this relief comes elation. There are other women like me in the Quran. Women who are uninterested in men, who are born wrong, living lives that are entirely out of their control. Women who rage, rage to God no less, about wanting to die.

It’s so acute, this elation, that it spills out of my body and into everything. I’m bouncy and chatty the rest of the day; all my classes and interactions feel joyous. My bus ride back from school is joyous, and when I get home, even my lunch is joyous: my mother has spent all day making me meat-free nihari, and I know this is a truce flag in our fights about my recent vegetarianism, which itself is also joyous. The elation grows and grows, and it hurts how much I want to tell someone, anyone, about my joy, maybe even my mother, to whom I never tell anything. I find myself wondering if I should I tell her over lunch about Quran class, about what I’ve discovered about Maryam, maybe what I’ve discovered about myself.

But I hesitate. Just for a second, and in that second, my mother sits me down at the lunch table, hands me a plate, and doles out a large portion of stew. She must have noticed my joy, but misreads its source. Looks at the steaming hot bowlful of the meatless version of my favorite food in front of me and smiles. “Don’t worry, Lamya,” she says. “We’ll find you a vegetarian husband.”

A what?

Her words puncture the joyousness of the day and my elation steadily seeps out. I will myself to press my lips together tightly, close my mouth so nothing will escape, but it’s too late, I’ve already said it, and emphatically, too. “I’m never going to marry a man, Mama.”

My mother laughs and doesn’t skip a beat in her answer. “Of course you will. Everyone does. How will you live if you don’t get married? Who will take care of you? Who will love you then?”

I clam up, my joy entirely deflated. I don’t say anything to my mother in response, just eat my vegetarian nihari in silence. Usually this is when I’d start wanting to disappear, start wanting to die, but something feels different that day. Something has changed, something entirely new feels possible. I stay quiet, but I’m buzzing on the inside. I want to find out the answer to my mother’s questions, not just for myself, but for Maryam, too. How did she live? Who took care of her? Who loved her then? And me. How will I live, how will I create a life for myself? Who will take care of me, who will I take care of? I’m curious about these questions, and curiosity is not compatible with boredom or a desire to disappear.

I am fourteen the year I read Surah Maryam. The year I choose not to die. The year I choose to live.

JINN

I.

It’s late—later than I, at seven, have ever been allowed to stay up on a school night. My parents are at a holiday party for my dad’s work and they’ve dropped me and my brother off at Asma Aunty’s house for the evening. Asma Aunty doesn’t have the same rules as other grown-ups: she lets us stay up late and eat ice cream on her couch. She always has the best stash of toys and movies and snacks even though she doesn’t have any kids, which makes her the favorite of my mother’s friends. Tonight, after my parents leave, she puts on Aladdin as my brother and I jump up and down and cheer.

“Wait,” she says, hitting pause on the remote as the opening scene begins. “You’re not going to be scared, right?”

“No way,” I say. “We’re big kids now!”

“We’ve seen it before! We know that things like genies and magic are pretend!” my brother chimes in.

“But genies aren’t pretend,” Asma Aunty says. My brother and I stare at her, eyes as big as the chips we’re eating. She looks back at us, just as astonished as we are. “Are you telling me no one has ever told you a jinn story?”

My brother and I shake our heads and put down the bowl of chips, eager to catch every word.