If I Were Single

Salaam,

Insha'Allah, my fiance and I are to be married in less than a month and a half. While I make the final preparations for this stage of the wedding (a larger reception with family and friends will be held later), I also make preparations for the rest of our lives together.

Will I continue to take medicine call? Will I take OB call, even? How many hours will I work? It'll be perfect to transition out of doing urgent care during maternity leave if we try for babies soon, insha'Allah...

I also have begun to lament the things I have lost. I'm no longer singing as much and I haven't written seriously nor thought about my novel in many months. Part of me doesn't even feel like a writer anymore, and it's startling.

I've started to question everything else about my life, including my career choice, while I bring my family life into focus. I'm afraid I'm losing myself.

I don't want to.

There are things that used to be meaningful to me, and probably still are, but I haven't had time to explore them. And necessarily, we change with time, I do believe, but...in the case that, God forbid, I'm left to my own devices again, I want to make sure that I am true to myself and make time for the (other) things in my life that bring me joy.

So I wonder--what would I be doing right now if I were still single? What would I be planning, in contrast with what I'm doing now? And don't get me wrong, I don't wish to be single. As a perpetually single woman in my 20s, I did long for companionship and I've been happier than I've ever been in my adult life once I attained it. It just happened that the advent of this companionship coincided with the final stage of my medical training, so there are a lot of confounders at play.

For example, I perceive I have less time for myself in my relationship, but is it perhaps that I had less time for myself as a busy resident and as a first-year attending? I feel like I have changed, but is that perhaps because now I am a practicing physician, and before the relationship, I was not?

Anyway, life would be different, if I were single:

• I'd still be living in Seattle proper, instead of living in the suburbs to be closer to my fiance. Our family home is purchased, has 5 bedrooms and 3 bathrooms, and insha'Allah after marriage I will add my name and it will be our home. I'll be a sudden home owner. But for now, I commute 20 miles to work, which is 40 minutes at best during rush hour and paying 75 cents on the express toll lanes. In my old apartment, the hospital was a 7 minute walk away and my clinic was a 3 minute drive, about 1.5 miles away. 
• Obstetrics call would be easier. I'm on OB call this weekend, and I'm dreading it. The last time I was on OB call, I managed two labors and attended one delivery. I had to leave clinic a little early and ended up sleeping in one of the uncomfortable call rooms (beds aren't so comfortable for me anymore, after having lost a bunch of weight).  If I had been living 7 minutes away from the hospital like I used to, I would have gone home after the 11pm delivery and slept in my own bed for a while. But since my own bed is now 20 miles away, I often make the decision to sleep in the hospital if I'm uncertain of someone's labor course. On OB call weekends, that means that I'm potentially spending 48 hours in the hospital. It means that I could drop whatever I'm doing over the weekend with my fiance to drive into the city just to potentially miss a delivery. There's also the stress of his disappointment of not seeing me over the weekend because of my call schedule.
• I would make more of my own continuity deliveries. Two of my patients delivered over the weekend. One I wouldn't have made anyway, because it was precipitous. The other one, I could have made. It was on a weekend night. Again, if I were 7 minutes away from the hospital and single, I would make an effort to make more of my patient's deliveries. But my fiance and I had a bit of an argument a few months ago when I told him all weekend that one of my patients was in labor and that I wanted to go be there for her during delivery but he still ended up feeling like I was sacrificing our time. I was already on call enough, then I would sacrifice our time together when I wasn't even on call to be there for my patient? "All of your patients are special to you," he shot back when I argued that this patient was special. So when a patient goes into labor, I have to take him into consideration as to whether I'll go in for the delivery...which is fair. One day, insha'Allah, I'll also have babies to take into consideration, so maybe I'll stop giving my patients the impression that I'll be in for their deliveries. ...but if I were single, I would be all about dropping everything to make my patient's deliveries.
• I might be singing more. There is a family medicine band that invited me to sing with them, but they have practice on Thursday nights. Because I work late on Wednesday nights (until 9pm or 10pm or sometimes later, depending on urgent care), I usually do not want to spend any more time in the city than I have to, and I rush back on Thursday nights. I would like to sing with them eventually, but not with this schedule.
• I might hang out with Seattle people more. Again, not living in Seattle makes meeting up with Seattle people challenging at times. I factor the commute in prior to every get together now.
• I may go back to dancing samba. I still may check out the Monday night class at some point, insha'Allah in the New Year, but it'd be something to fill my time with.
• I might be planning a trip to Nigeria with my Dad in the upcoming year. My Dad got to travel to Nigeria after an over 30-year absence this year. I would love to travel with him, but not only are there the concerns of who will then be my husband, insha'Allah, but also, if I am pregnant or with small children, I definitely won't be able to travel for some time.
• I might be planning a trip to Salvador. I love Brazil and it's been 8 years since I've been (incredibly!). I would go with my new husband, insha'Allah, but...zika. Cases of microcephaly have happened more in the Northeast of the country. And even if I don't get a zika infection, I don't want to have to worry about that 8 week period in which he could carry it in his semen for family planning...

The rest are all big maybes. I don't know if I'd be writing more if I were single, if I'd get back to drawing, if I would be reading more or keeping up with medical literature more. There are also some potential negatives, like I may not have embarked in this body-transforming fitness journey (I've lost 40 pounds!), I may not have started running races, I may not be cooking nutritious food for myself--I may not have been taking such good care of my emotional, mental and physical health as well as I have been relating to someone else.

It is true that I'm not working as many hours as I imagined and minding my hobbies as much as I used to, but that's not a bad thing. I'm also taking care of myself much better than I ever have in my adult life. And those hobbies are not going away. I just came to a critical moment in which I am reassessing what I want to be in medicine, and my practice may change in a way such that I have more time to be all the other things that I want to be in medicine.

Mainly, now that insha'Allah I can now start planning a family, I realize how much this has always been a top priority for me that was for much of my life out of reach and how much I want to prioritize it now. It's more important than my career. I find myself putting some of those medical aspirations aside for a moment, thinking about the women who have said, "You can have it all...just not all at the same time."

But now that I am marrying, there are things that I want to bring back into my life. I want to bring writing back into my life first, and fiction-reading. This year, I have been reading only non-fiction. Literally, I have not read one piece of fiction this year, which is odd for me. I wanted to be a physician and a writer on the side, but I'm finding that I'm also a person who wants to do all of her jobs well, and I can't be a good physician right now with the hours that I'm working and also write on the side, and I'll be a horrible writer if I'm only writing on the side and not devoting more time to it.

I already don't feel like a writer anymore, and that's devastating for me.

And it's hard to to do either of those things well while making a family.

But I can have it all, but not all at once. Right now, the thing that I put on hold is writing. For years, what I put on hold (in theory) was family life. Next, what I'll put on hold is medicine.

That is the topic for a later entry.

Nigeria Wasn't Ready

Salaam,

"Nigeria was not ready for the white man to leave."

Continuing my delve into racial politics...

My parents recently visited a cousin of ours, from my Nigerian side, no less, who was actually integral in my parents' first meeting. Dr. Nwachukwu, or Doc as they knew him, was the head of the Department of Afro-, Afro-American and Chicano Studies (or something like that) at the University of Michigan, Flint in the 1970s when my mother, a recent graduate from the University, was his receptionist for a time. My father, a young, 20-something chemical engineering student, used to visit his cousin Doc and nod to his young secretary before entering the room.

The young secretary would not pay this man much attention until they were set up on a blind date in a party in Flint years later. And the rest is history.

Anyway, after over 30 years, my family reunited with Doc, who now lives with his second wife and children on the east coast. My parents drove their with my Nigerian Uncle and Aunt.

Besides my grandfather's death, it has been a summer of reunions--reunions of brothers after 30 years (my father hadn't been back to Nigeria since 1984, so quite literally), reunion of much of my mother's family to celebrate the life of my grandfather, and now, reunion of family for the first time after my parents marriage made him family to her.

My parents had a great time at Doc's home. One of the things that he did was share his perspective of Nigeria years after independence to the state that the country is in now. And his thoughts were as above. That Nigeria was not ready for the white man to have left.

To hear that from a Nigerian, though second hand, was astounding.

After living in the United States and being not only a full professor, but a head of a department for some time, Doc decided on two occasions to move back to Nigeria. Once in 1980, but then he returned to the United States, and another time in 1989. Between those two visits, he saw what was of Nigeria's infrastructure continue to crumble and democratic governance cease (as Nigeria was well into dictatorship by the second visit).

Of all of the descriptions of decrepit infrastructure, weakening culture and fractured politics that he must have told, my mother clung to the following example:

Doc was in a Nigerian university, a full professor there, trained in the United States, everything, walking into the building. Ahead of him was a graduate-level instructor who also happened to be white. As the white instructor entered the building, the students hailed him, cheering for him, enthusiastic for his arrival. As Doc walked into the building, the students turned their backs on him.

My mother's reaction is perhaps the topic for another post. But the long version of her reaction was that...maybe he is right. If these students' reaction says anything about the sentiments of the larger society as a whole, maybe they were not ready for the white man to leave! Maybe whatever tribal divisions that lead to genocide and war in the 1960s, that continue to this day under the guise of religion, keep Nigeria from the good governance that would ultimately lead to their further development. Whatever petty issue kept the students from revering their black professor over the white TA are perhaps borne out in larger society, and if it's going to be like that, maybe things would run better if the President of Nigeria were a white man, unconnected to tribal politics and not any other type of brown person.

And coming to that conclusion is really, really sad.

However, this is the opinion of one man, one Nigerian-born professor who ultimately decided to make his permanent home in the United States.

But what is it? Was Nigeria not ready for their independence? A whole lot points to yes. And does that inherently mean that they were not ready for the British to leave?

Then there comes the key question--would it have been better for the British to have never come to Nigeria, or the Europeans never having come to Africa, colonized, anything? And if so, what would the continent look like now? What would the world look like now? Would there even be a United States of America without African slaves' backs on which to build it on?

These questions and assumptions are all fraught with problems, the main problem being that we are in the present now. Independence has been declared. The arbitrary lines have been drawn on maps and groups of people who previously had nothing to do with each other have been called Nigerians  for 54 years this October 1. Not ready to be independent or not, not ready to be ruled by themselves, with all of the tribal baggage that survived 60 years of colonization, this is the present reality. And brain drain is a mug.

They weren't ready, okay, but now what? What kind of leadership is needed, what kind of reform is needed, how to you combat corruption that is near institutionalized?

Since my father left, I will always be an outsider, looking in. And while my cousins seem to be more concerned about what the existence of ISIS means about the second coming of Christ and upholding homosexuality bans for the sake of Nigeria, I'm not sure they have any concrete aspirations for elevating the political situation of Nigeria, of improving infrastructure, actually.

These are just my family members, though.

I would love to read contemporary Nigerian political thinkers and their take on the state of Nigeria and the best direction of the future. If any of my readers have some resources for me, I'd like to read them. I recognize that the disappointed musings of an ex-pat must pale in comparison to people who are living Nigeria as a reality.

Or is it really that the only way that Nigeria will work as a country is if it is run by white people?

My Parents' Radical Marriage

Salaam,

On September 15, 1983, surrounded by my maternal grandparents and my Uncle Junior, my parents were married at city hall in Flint. My mother wore a modest, lavender dress, my grandmother's favorite color, and my father wore what I wager was one of the few suits he had at the time. My mother would later tell me that the reason why they married at city hall and that she wore a regular dress was because she knew her father was poor and she did not want to burden him with an expensive wedding, or any wedding at all, apparently.

However, it was also convenient, in the marriage of a Muslim woman to a Christian man, that their ceremony was not at all religious. There was no broom jumping, there was no palm wine. My grandfather did not give his youngest daughter away and my Uncles Donald and Temple were not there to see their youngest brother take a wife. And that's the way my parents wanted it. They often cite my brother's autism for the reason they keep to themselves but I have a feeling they've always been low-key.

And characteristic of the rest of their marriage, my mother's family ignored her requests for little fanfare and threw them a surprise reception after they married. My parents, who sounded very much like hipsters of their time, were gracious and excepted the reception as my father accepted his new family.

My father would travel back to Nigeria the next month and return in April of 1984, just in time to conceive me. He would not travel back to Nigeria in my lifetime.



Pictures from this day are in the front of my favorite photo album in my parents' house. It was my favorite as a child because it was the one where I saw the realization of my birth. It began with pictures of my parents marriage, the reception, my parents in their first apartment and soon transitioned to my mother, several weeks pregnant, her baby shower, and then my newborn pictures. As a child, I loved looking at baby pictures of myself. I was a really cute baby. But I always looked at the album in chronological order, including the three or four pictures in city hall of my parents, exchanging vows, my father accidentally placing the ring on the incorrect finger and my mother laughing, and the kiss with my grandparents clasping their hands and smiling in the background.



Already, their marriage was not typical. It was not in a religious sanctuary, a term my mother would use to describe one of the reasons she and my father chose each other. They didn't need a religious sanctuary to practice their respective faiths, she maintained. She remains un-mosqued as she has been my entire life, praying five times a day alone in the house's prayer room. My father is several years returned to church after never having set foot during all the time I lived at home and through my college years.

It was not surrounded by family and closest friends. It was surrounded by just enough of my mother's family to serve as witnesses--and my Uncle Junior, who, as my senior uncle on my mother's side, has attended nearly every major event in my life, from my birth to my graduation from college.

It was not traditional. My father, who was not raised in Nigerian traditions and couldn't explain them to me if I asked, did not dress in traditional Nigerian clothes on his big day and would not dress that way in the United States for another 30 years. My mother did not wear white. There were no bridesmaids or groomsmen. My mother had no engagement ring when she donned her wedding band. And that was it. Married.

But it was also radical. The Muslim daughter of Muslim parents married a Christian man, with the open approval of her parents, though she never asked for it. A Christian man who grew up sitting at his father's feet during sermons married a Muslim woman in spite of all of the things he believed about the Muslims of the north that were responsible for killing his people before the war. He also didn't seek the approval of his family.

When my mother tells it, she never balked at what my grandparents would think of her marrying a Christian man. She did not ask their permission to travel to Nigeria to visit my father in 1981. She told them, then she went. A woman previously sheltered by the strictest parents I've ever heard of in the name of the Nation of Islam traveled outside of the country for the first time to Nigeria, by herself. She has never asked them what they thought of the whole thing and it hasn't mattered.

My father doesn't tell stories about these things, but I imagine he didn't ask or tell very much. Not only did my mother not meet his family when she traveled to Nigeria (tell me more about that month long trip, Ma), but his family just found out that she is Muslim...two years ago? Over the phone? This tells me that my father did not consult his elder brothers, as my grandparents on that side had already passed.

That the children of two families who were essentially religious entities in their community could pull of an accepted interfaith marriage was pretty remarkable. That neither of these adults were hindered by what their family thought was fantastic. Their marriage exemplifies everything a love marriage can be for a Muslim woman, for an immigrant man.

And unlike various in each set of their co-religionists, they do not wonder if their marriage is valid. And they do not doubt that it is recognized by God.



Besides this very radical aspect of my parents' marriage, the interfaith without asking permission part, it is also otherwise unconventional. It was my mother who proposed to my father. And I believe it went a little something like this:

"Hey! Why don't we get married?"

And three years later, after spending most of that time with the Atlantic between them, they did just that. Prior to their marriage, their courtship face-to-face was 10 months total - 9 months in the United States, 1 month in Nigeria. They succeeded in having the longest long distance courtship I've personally known of.

They were set up on a blind date by a mutual friend they hadn't talked to in years. My mother was instantly taken at how my father was so friendly and outgoing that he talked to the DJ at the party as if he'd known him for years, yet he just met him. I don't know what my father was thinking, but I know that he's always adored my mother, and probably felt some semblance of that then.

They were set up but they had met before. My mother was a secretary at University of Michigan, Flint in the offices of Afro-American and Chicano Studies, where my father's cousin, head of the department, worked. My father would visit his cousin and bow his head toward my mother as he entered the office.

And somehow, this was totally unrelated to them being set up.

I don't know if my father dated previously, but I assume he did. I know my mother did. Her first foray into dating non-black men was another Nigerian who happened to be Chinua Achebe's cousin. The date ended, and Mr. Achebe seemed enthusiastic but I guess that was the last date.

(And to think, I may have been an Achebe...more than happy to be who I am!)

And of course, as goes without saying, their union was intercultural.


 
For all the ways my parents' marriage was radical, unconventional, special, it was also largely ordinary. It's an ordinary story of two people who loved each other and decided to spend the rest of their lives together. It's all about love, as Maurice White sings.

"Bound to fall in love one day. Surely, and you need it!"

They liked each other, then they loved each other, they married, they formed a family.

I don't know what it was about my dad, but he saw my mother transform from being a professional-minded woman who never aspired to have children to a mother who adored and nurtured us without interruption from the days we were born while still developing professionally. And I don't know what it is about my mother, but she anchored my father to a land in which he never intended to stay.

And the rest is history.

Nigerian Parent Invencible

Salaam,

Today, I was reading the wikipedia entry for Chiwetel Ejiofor (an actor I've admired since Dirty Pretty Things) and read about the tragic death of his father in a car accident in Nigeria, while he survived, and my heart sank.

It was the same way I was saddened to hear about a Nigerian woman, single mother in Michigan who was hit by a car as she crossed the street on her way to work and was killed.

If I ever have puff puff again, I'll probably cry over it as I remember how my mother, father and brother ate puff puff prepared by her at the last Nigerian wedding they attended.

I realize I'm really shaken by these deaths more than baseline because they bring my father's mortality into focus. My father is such a strong personality and a strong force in my life, I cannot imagine him suddenly and violently leaving, as in the likes of a car accident. In fact, God forbid! I pray when I do lose my father, it's not in such a way.

You cannot prepare for life and you can't for death but I'm just coming to terms with my grandparents dying. Sometimes I call my parents to make sure they're okay. I'm not ready for them to leave, but who ever is?

I've known a lot of Nigerians in my life...my father, aunties and uncles in that way that unrelated adults are aunties and uncles, and I see them as invincible, illogically so. I don't know if it's the inherent faith and God-fearing nature of so many of them, their ubiquity in my life for so long with little tragedy. It seems like they'd be here forever until they age and move on of natural causes.

There's something so alive, so vital about my father's presence in my life. Something about him that made me more apt to assume he was perfect for so long, even when I knew he was wrong. He's so steadfast in his faith and in his work as I suppose are many a first generation immigrant, like the auntie who made puff puff at the wedding, as I imagine Ejiofor's father may have been, a physician killed as he drove from a wedding in Nigeria.

And my heart sinks because they're not invincible, and I've always known it, but he feels so alive to me even when he's no where near me because of that presence his persona creates, and I'm not ready for it to be violently stripped from this realm. Not yet.



My father has commuted every day, one hour to work and one hour home, since the day after I was born, for 29 years now. I pray for his safe journey to work and safe return home, every day, for the rest of his life.

Colonial Injury

As salaam alaikum,

I've been going through quite the spiritual journey, such that the words above, my standard greeting for every entry, don't mean the same to me anymore. They don't mean the same to me anymore because of one question and one thing I learned from reading Muhammad by Martin Lings. The question is, how much of our vocabulary and, indeed, our very existence as Muslims has to be in Arabic? And the thing I learned from reading Muhammad by Martin Lings is that as salaamu alaikum is in the second person plural form, even when greeting one person, because it also includes one's two guardian angels.

And that point is a good illustration of where I am in my spiritual journey right now, in my regard for my religion. I've got a love-hate dichotomy I'm working through. Yes, hate. It's a strong word that I seldom use, but when people or parties try to or succeed in bringing impurities into my religion or otherwise attempt to disrupt my faith, yes, that is a thing of hate. Not for the people themselves, but for these impurities that, try as you may, you cannot wash off. Like the sensation of blood on Lady Macbeth's hands.

Yes.

There are so many things I can talk about relating to my spiritual journey, but I've been doing a lot of reading, of scholars and historians, on everything from Qur'an hermeneutics and exegesis to the origins of "shar'ia" as it is popularly known. I just started that book, actually. But it's apparent, over time and in growing in my faith, that by being in possession of what we know as the final revelation in book form that we have, yes, insha'Allah carefully preserved over time, we also assume that the spirit of our religion has been preserved over time, and it has not been. It cannot be, implicit in our nature as human beings. So all we can do is do the best we can to preserve it's spirit and understand God's intention for us more than 1400 years later, which is harder than preserving text and recitation fidelity.

And I may talk about different elements of my journey later.

What I mainly want to talk about is something apparent to me after watching Fela! last Wednesday. First of all, I still want to delve into his life. I only knew him peripherally from my father having his music on audio cassettes that he brought with him from Nigeria...that, and of his gyrating women on stage. There's so much more I want to learn. But it was interesting how he spoke of his grandfather, and his European hymns and how he hated that his grandfather kept him from learning about the traditional Yoruba religions, which resonated more with him.

That made me think of two things. Fela's grandfather was like my Nigerian grandfather, head of his church in Nigeria. My father grew up at his feet every Sunday, learned the Anglican hymns "in the tummy," as he always says, and still has a preference for that style of church music over the "hollering" African American style my mother grew up with as a Southern Baptist. It made me realize how much my father was not a revolutionary in Nigeria post Biafran War (and even then, he was "rescued" from combat) and how he may represent that colonialist spirit that Fela saw in his grandfather...and how much that contrasted with my mother, at the very same time, young black Mos in the Nation of Islam, doing drills, wearing her Nation hijab and uniform to school every day and believing, perhaps more than any of her other siblings, in the word of the Messenger, that there was no "spook god" and "no pie in the sky when you die." Believing in the black man and militantly so. They were so different, and had they met not at the time they did, as they were both relatively distant from organized religion, though my father moving farther away and my mother moving back to it...I wouldn't be here. Subhan'Allah! Heh.

The other thing it made me think of is...how important it is for us to have our own religions, and how much injury was done in the spread of the Abrahamic faiths in the course of conquering and colonization that those of us who unapologetically reject colonialist attitudes may never overcome.

One of the bigger criticisms of the Nation of Islam is that they rejected one "white man's religion" for another. So more contemporarily, Europeans enslaved us and "stripped us of our language and our culture," took away our original religions, condemned them as heathens, and replaced them with Christianity instead, further adding insult to injury by using the Bible to justify our enslavement and to encourage our obedience while being so subjugated. But, what of the Arabs, who were Muslim, and their brutal enslavement of Africans, their conquering of Africans, their spreading of Islam over our original religions? So, why take on that religion over Christianity as if it's any better?

My answer to that question is...the Nation of Islam was a movement out of nowhere, so I don't know! Who was "Master" Fard Muhammad, anyway? Where did he come from, and where did he go? These are all good questions! I wouldn't bring this fact up to my grandfather at his age, because it would resonate with him, but as most of my family who is still Muslim has been Muslim longer than we were in the Nation, our reasons for being Muslim now have a lot to do with other things than avoiding the religion of conquerors and colonizers. And our reasons for being are probably all individual, unique.

Then, I think about other of my friends' attitudes towards the Abrahamic faiths. They view them as "imported religions." African solutions for African problems, they say, and part of the root of the problem is akin to the ubiquitous white Jesus...that Africans benefit more from a religion with their own face. The imported religions are not indigenous and are just part of the problem of Africans looking outside for the answers to their needs.

And I hear them, and I hear this argument. But I thought to myself...I thought, am I possessing a colonial attitude by choosing a religion that does not have an African face? Am I colonialist, buying into cultural imperialism by my acceptance of Islam?

Nope.

That was an easy answer.

It's all rooted in my beliefs. I believe that every community, every every community, got prophets. Everyone did. They weren't just in the middle east, though the texts and traditions of the Abrahamic faiths focus on that region. And it wasn't only those of the middle east that accepted their prophets (and many of them didn't, as the books tell). But we don't have record of who else did, and who those people were and where they lived. I don't at all believe in the superiority of any ethnic or language group, even of my own beloved people, West Africans and Diasporans. In accepting Islam, I did not accept it because of it's "Arab face." I accepted it because it answered questions that no other religion I'd encountered answered for me. The religion (not those who practice it), stressed the importance of multiculturalism, that we were made different peoples (and different genders) so that we may learn to know one another. So that we can learn from each other. Islam was not meant to be a religion to replace people's cultures but to enhance the good of them and to mute what was not good for our spiritual journey through this life.

When I came into Islam, it did not have an Arab face. Despite the fact that I prayed in Arabic, I didn't really think of Arabs as Muslims until high school. All the Muslims I knew until then were all black Americans, so the religion had an African American face for me until really college, when I really started getting to know non-black Muslims. Islam was removing my shoes in my Grandparents house, greeting them with as salaam alaikum in an unabashed American accent, tying my scarf behind my head with my neck and chin exposed in my aunt's Islamic school down the street while one of the boys in the school led salat. Islam was my mother praying deliberately in English and reading to us select stories in the Qur'an in English and teaching us who God was, what it meant for Him to "beget not, nor is He begotten," and the subtle beauties of creation.

The Islam I grew up with had an African American face, and when I learned of the last sermon of the Prophet (saw) and ayah 49:13, it had a multicultural face. We're all related, I used to say in late high school and college. I knew we humans functioned far from the ideal...but I didn't realize how far from the ideal we actually functioned. I started learning in college, and I continue learning...

So, for me, spiritually, I've never needed a religion with an African face. But just because I don't doesn't mean I decry the want and maybe need of those who do. And as much as I believe in my religion, I know we all find our own path to God, or searching for some type of divine if not God, or denying all divine and contenting ourselves with the material. I don't think it's our place as humans to deny that right of anyone, as long as their practices don't harm you in any way, though we may otherwise offend each other. And honestly, I have not studied the history of Islam in the Continent to understand how it was spread, so I can't really speak to that.

All I can say that...conquering and colonization caused injury to the people involved that is not easily healed. As Muslims, we believed that no prophets came after Muhammad (saw). So what right do non-prophets, that is, those who do not get revelation directly from God, have to spread their faith as superior to anyone practicing any other religion? What right do they have to come into your home and call you heathens? I personally believe in one God that created us all, and though we may approach Him in different ways, that does not make our God distinct from one another. We just understand Him and approach Him in different ways. I do not believe in spreading religion by force. But does that mean I relinquish my religion because it was spread by force? No. Nor do I think Christians who hold fast to their faiths should relinquish it because it was spread by force and used to subjugate their enslaved ancestors. Nor do I assume that all Christians see the white Jesus, or value Christianity because of any aspects of a European face.

A lot of ugly has been committed in the name of religion. Ugly and evil. In the name of Christianity and Islam, I know. Conquering a people and forcing them to stop practicing their religions and giving them a sense of inferiority in their culture and what is native to them is un-Islamic, even if one's religion is essentially un-Islamic. Even among the converted, that does them no good. Even among the converted in the United States that are told that aspects of their culture and very beings is haram, they go through a process of Arabicizing, if I may make up a word, rejecting their friends and family in search of an essential Islamic culture which does not exist. Stripping one of their language and culture in favor of...no substitute is very injurious and counterproductive to their reception of the message.

And I'm not making this point to facilitate conversion. I'm just saying...I understand my friends who seek a religion with an African face. Muslims may balk at this because it reminds them of the many nations who rejected their prophets in the name of their ancestors...or, the story of Abraham himself, seeking God in objects and recognizing that, in their transient natures, they could not be his Almighty. In destroying his father's idols...and so much of African religions have to do with exactly those things as Muslims that we try to avoid...polytheism and following the way of ancestors.

These Muslims don't realize that most of them are following the way of their ancestors, and not all their ancestors have done in the name of Islam has anything to do with Islam, and some of it is actually harmful...

You know.

But I think an essential part of knowing who you are is knowing where you come from. And it doesn't mean, as a African Diasporan, that I have to know what "tribes" the people on my mother's side came from, as I know I'm Igbo on my father's side. I know more generations back on my mother's side than my father's side, actually, ironically. I'm saying this because essential in even understanding Islam is understanding the context, pre-Islamic Arabia. And I think that the essential colonial injury that makes accepting of the Abrahamic faiths from being easily palatable to many of us is the way it was presented, spread, forced in many ways without validating the strengths of the cultures that it entered.

I didn't suffer this injury, this stripping of a sense of self. A sense of self was injected into me by my formerly black nationalist family and by having a Nigerian father from a young age. So I looked for a religion with a multicultural face, and I found an Islam that is not widely practiced. And I hold fast to that. For those whose sense of self was stripped or whose culture was devalued...the quest continues for a religion with their face.

And no one's sense of faith should be threatened by the spiritual quests of another.

[uncensored]: Interfaith Marriage on a String

As salaam alaikum,

(X-Posted)

“All is change with time / the future none can see / the road you leave behind / ahead lies mystery!” – Stevie Wonder, “All in Love is Fair.”

My mother told me the other day, “You know, I think your brother’s autism saved our marriage.”
Being single in a time of intense want—for a fulfilling relationship, my own marriage, my own family—has made me hyperaware of other people’s marriages. Over the years, I’ve noticed that many marriages, at one point or another, hang by a string. Sometimes the couple recognizes this fragility and this motivates them to make it work. Sometimes couples don’t even know that they’re there, and it comes and goes without their knowing.

I feel like my parents are there right now.

My mother is Muslim, my father is Christian. They met as part of a blind date, became friends who discovered they loved each other. My father’s visa expiration and a youth service obligation led him back to Nigeria, leaving my mother in the United States to pine over him and wait with bated breath for his letters for the next three years. And they married upon his return to the United States. They were Muslim, several years converted from the Nation of Islam, and Christian, the son of Nigeria’s head of the Faith Tabernacle Church, but love conquered all and brought them together.

My mother later told me that their shared values and their conviction against the need to attend a “religious sanctuary” were some of the key practical elements that made the interfaith aspect of their marriage work early on. This was less romantic to me, but it seemed to work out.

Growing up, my parents never argued, at least not to our hearing. My mother sometimes lamented not going out as much as they used to, and my father sometimes complained when his food wasn’t ready when he came home from a long day of work, but that was it. My mother prayed and read her Qur’an daily and my father watched his favorite televangelist, and everything was fine.

They maintained this balance in our home until the summer in 2005. I was 20 when I came home from college and decided, in the worst of ways, to tell my father that I was Muslim. I told him, between tears and snot, that “I will never be Christian.”

And things were never the same in my parents’ house.

During the worst of times, when I was home for New Years’ that same year, my father blamed my mother for my brother’s autism. “If the family had been united in faith and prayer, he could have been healed.” It was surreal to watch my mother run up to their room, weeping. My father seemed unrepentant.  He returned to his office in the basement without a word to me. My parents never argued like this. My father had never said such mean things. I had never seen my mother cry. What was happening?

What did I do?

I initiated the stringing of my parents’ relationship. My being Muslim is unacceptable to my father. He’s embarrassed by it. When he goes to church these days and they ask where his family is, he gives an elaborate excuse and tells them that I am Christian when they ask.

I’m sorry he feels that way. I find God best in Islam. This is how he allowed my mother to raise me. This was the way my extended family practiced. I wish my father would accept me.

He loves and accepts my mother. He reflects with sadness that there were some churches he couldn’t attend because some would not consider him Christian because he had a Muslim wife. And I told him that there are Muslims who would most certainly question my mother’s Islam in the same way. But my father loves my mother, and my mother loves my father, and they are dedicated to each other and to their family, both my brother and me.

He loves me, but he does not love my Islam.

My father was so upset to tell his elder brother, my uncle in Nigeria, that I was “leaning toward Islam.” He told him two weeks ago. He can’t bring himself to ever call me Muslim.

“This is huge!” my father told me. “You don’t understand…Nigeria is a big country but mine is a small community. What would people think? They would think this isn’t me. They would think that this can’t have come from the son raised by his father, the son who sat at his feet for every sermon.  After the way that I was raised…”

It’s also that I’m Muslim, as were the people who killed my people just prior to the civil war in my country.  My father doesn’t understand how I can be Muslim when “The Igbo and the Hausa do not see eye to eye.”

I try to fix it sometimes. Maybe I shouldn’t be so loud about being Muslim. I told my father, “I’m sorry. If I had known it was such a big deal…”

“It’s not a big deal.”

But Daddy, it is a big deal. All you described to me are big deal things….

It’s my fault. Sometimes I feel like my brother really is the unifying factor. My parents may argue sometimes, but if my brother misses his medication and has a seizure, my parents will run to the scene, catch him as he falls and pray over him for the duration of his tonic-clonic convulsions and post-ictal state as he struggles through slurred speech to tell them that he’s okay.

My Islam reminds them of their difference, the very real theological difference between Jesus as personal savior and Prophet Jesus, between God in three persons and God, the one, the only.

“You know, I think your brother’s autism saved our marriage.” my mother told me last week. She then explained that the social isolation from the Nigerian network in our state probably kept her from having uncomfortable run-ins with Christians who would disapprove of her Islam. It probably saved her from arguments with them that may have jeopardized her relationship with Daddy. But she can’t know that…

…and I actually don’t believe that to be true. Their love has always been more than shared aversion of religious sanctuaries held together by my brother’s autism and epilepsy. They are each other’s best friend. They don’t pray the same but they do pray together. They have similar dreams and goals for their children and they love us more than they are able to express. They came together in strength following a diagnosis that was all the more devastating in the 1980s when professionals knew so much less about autism. They’ve stayed together in a marriage unmarred by infidelity and separations, physical or emotional violence or any real discord. They did it! They are achieving interfaith marriage!

It wasn’t just autism. I realize my mother just said that because their marriage is hanging by a string right now, and they don’t know it. It’ll pass. I don’t know how or when, but inshAllah it will. Both love and are dedicated to this family too much, to my brother too much. Maybe one day inshAllah I’ll get married and leave my father’s figurative house and my father won’t feel so responsible for my being Muslim anymore. He can concentrate on loving his Muslim wife instead of trying to convert his Muslim daughter.

Marriage is hard, and interfaith marriage is just one type of hard that a couple can face, that I may face one day, whoever my husband may be. There is no one way to do things, so there is no how-to. This is just one way. It may hurt to tell it sometimes, but this is actually a story of success. Success…on a string.

This Non-Muslim Business

As salaam alaikum,

Back when I first started going out with B, I wrote a journal entry called The First Conundrum in which I outlined my problem - for our first date, B had invited me to go to the First Annual Nigerian Conference at Harvard for the 50th anniversary of Nigeria's independence. I liked him and I wanted to go, but on the same day, there was a conference being held at the Boston ISBCC by the founder of the Ta'leef Collective, a project which I am very much a fan of that really creates a forum for reverts and, as I call them, Muslims at the fringes to have dialogue, to learn about Islam, to return to the masjid in a way they wouldn't have before.

It was a one-day intensive for young Muslim students and professionals. It would have been perfect for me...but instead, I went out on a date.

So I liked this guy, I was Nigerian, it would be a great event, but I also was interested in what dude had to say, and he would only be in Boston for a limited time. In a sense, I was making a decision between my Nigerian identity and my Muslim identity.

I decided that I didn't do a whole lot with my Nigerian identity, so I chose that over the ISBCC event. Of course, it was also a decision to try dating, so I went there.

And thus began something that will impact the decisions I will make for the rest of my life. I began dating a non-Muslim, an issue that I had turned over in my mind but something that I assumed would never happen.

And now another non-Muslim, a Christian, is interested in me, and at the cusp of something else happening, I'm just going to have to take a time out.

For one thing, the way that B and I broke up had unnecessary drama cultivated by him, but besides that...he broke up with me because he needed space, and he didn't want me to wait for him. He'll need to be with himself for a long time. The thing is...the point that we got into our relationship, even with the unnecessary elements of our breakup, I still cared for him, and I still do. I want to check in on him, touch base with him periodically, all of these things.

Just talking to this guy I'm currently talking to, and he's a nice guy, I realize that I can't be doing that if I'm ever in a relationship with someone else. Like, that's a big no-no, still talking to your ex. I mean, it's all inevitable. If I don't end up with B I'm going to end up with someone else, so eventually our friendship/contact/whatever is going on right now would have to end. I just worry about him and want to check in on him and make sure he's okay and not continuing to go at life alone.

It's especially after a conversation I had with this other guy, and he was talking about what he felt constituted cheating...

The other big issue with this other guy is that he's not Muslim, and he'll have not Muslim expectations for a relationship that I did not fulfill with B...okay, let's be frank. He'll want to have sex. I did not have sex with B (haha, I feel like Bill Clinton right now), but let's say that before him, I had never kissed a man, and that's no longer true. I don't have to do that with anyone else, I realize. I don't regret the intimacy I had with him, and at the same time I do not regret that we did not have sex, by my demand.

I realize that if I cross that line, a lot that makes up my morals, my values, who I consider myself to be will dissipate. A lot of people remark at how different I am from most women they know (non-Muslims), and I think a lot of it has to do with my integrity in that regard. Not my virginity--I never liked that construct. But, the standards I live by, and how I struggle to uphold them...it's not the standards themselves that make me, it's the struggle that has shaped me.

But non-Muslim men have this expectation of sex in relationships that is real, and I understand now why so many Muslims see dating as synonymous with sex in this country because, oh Muslimahs, if you survey your non-Muslim friends, that's usually the case. My roommates of old and new, most of my friends...it's all true. They all assume that sex is part of a relationship...

So I don't think I can relate to non-Muslims anymore. I think the reason that B didn't pressure me to much is because he's a softy. Other men will not be as patient or understanding.

The issue is, it will take a very specific type of man to make a match for me. Even if I were to assume the manners and the dress of a hijabi again next month, I'm not the Muslimah that most Muslim men would expect out of a woman who wears the scarf. I once tried to fit into what I thought was the mainstream American Muslim world in college, and I didn't. I failed miserably.

I don't want to fit in, at the end of the day. I've never fit in really anywhere, and I love who I am. I just wish I had a way to go about finding a life partner without having to compromise my values any more than I already have, but for me, that seems a little bit impossible.

I don't know. Pray for me, as always.

[uncensored]: The Song I'll Stop Singing

As salaam alaikum,

Sometimes, there are songs that I start off singing and then I decide to stop singing because I either no longer like them or I just can't get with the lyrics.

An example are the following lyrics to this song that used to come up on my Pandora from Toquinho: "As vezes quero creer mas não consigo. É tudo uma total insensatez. Aí pergunto a Deus, 'Escute, amigo. Se for pra desfazer, por que que fez?"

Which translates: "Sometimes I want to believe but I'm not able to. It's complete nonsense. Then I ask God, 'Listen, friend. If it tends towards entropy, why did you make it?"

It's a question a lot of us encounter on either side of the believing pole as we develop spiritually, but I can't bring myself to sing lyrics such as these. While as part of my spirituality, I don't cut out the music, I am media literate and spiritually literate...I don't take things into my body that are more harmful for me than good, and that includes music with lyrics that are "not edifying," as my parents told me.

So while I am a believer alhamdulillah and while I don't cognitively shake when I hear lyrics like that...why would I take it into my body?

Allah (swt) made us so wonderfully...we make associations. Towards the end of my relationship with B, I started hearing the song in my head, "Silly fool, how'd you lose such a good thing," lyrics from Teddy Pendergrass, in reference to him, and also "Next Lifetime" by Erykah Badu when I started to realize that he wasn't the one. Our minds make associations like that, and since I listen to a lot of music, I make a lot of musical associations.

So I don't want to be going through a trial in life or witnessing the hardship of others and hear, "As vezes quero creer mas não consigo..."

But that's not the type of song I'm talking about. The type of song I'm talking about is like the one I wrote about in one of my chapters of RMD (it's been a long time!), a Desirée chapter called, "The No-Sex Violators." It goes a little something like this:

   No sex before marriage. At fifteen, this was just another song that Desirée heard her parents sing. It wasn’t one of their favorites yet, but Desirée knew it soon it would be.

The school is Godless was Desirée’s mother’s favorite tune these days. If her mom could, Desirée knew that she would forbid her from tenth grade health class because of the way they taught sex outside of the context of God. If her mother knew about the whole putting the condom on the banana thing, she’d probably be appalled. Desirée appreciated her teacher’s respect for her ability to make her own decisions, at least, with the safe sex curriculum. It was all in principle, though—a different principle than the one that made her refuse to put the condom on the banana she was given. She felt as if she were being mocked. In reality, she didn’t know what she stood for as she dodged the condom water balloons made by the guys in her class and made her way to Western Civ during passing time.

 No sex before marriage didn’t mean much to her because marriage at that point seemed so far away. It seemed a near impossible feat. She couldn’t even get a boy who was worthwhile to like her, so marriage and, she guessed, sex, were far away.

Oh yeah, putting the condom on the banana in health class...haha, Desirée chapters at some points were more autobiographical than fiction. This was one of the points. I didn't tell my mother until years later about putting the condom on the banana...and I did not participate. I figured I wouldn't be having sex any time soon...

...though as my roommate maintains, I just avoided having a teenage pregnancy. And it's true...I was a bit of a boy-crazy little girl. I had a different crush every year from the time I was five until I was 12. That last one, seventh grade, was a heavy one because the estrogen had kicked in...I had been menstruating for two years and puberty was behind me. I was ready. Me and this boy were going to get married at 20, move to Detroit and I was going to have a boy that I would make his junior. Yeah. I also got propositioned for the first time at 15 while at a conference in a hotel away from home. I knew nothing about birth control and was not that concerned that I didn't know. Teenage brain alert!

The little boy tried, too. He was 16...had his eyes set on me. I felt validated, as a teenage girl would, but I think what happened was this other guy who liked me, who was 14, kicked the other guy out of my room, telling him to, "stay away from [his] woman!" Yeah. Shenanigans.

But I digress.

So songs are powerful, whether they're actual songs or figurative songs, our own personal refrains that we repeat at intervals, that we're known for...

My mother's picked up her grandmother's: "Be thy labor, big or small. Do it well, or not at all." I'll pick up my grandmother's...no, not "I'll beat your ass until you shit," but maybe the, It'll be alright, "Eat a little shit, won't hurt," refrain. Me gusta.

But from here on out, actually, I vow to stop singing the following songs: Guys are all full of crap, men aren't worth two craps, the quality of men is zero right now, there are no good men out there...and all variations. Chose your favorite. I personally like the two craps one.

Why am I going to stop doing that? Because I realize what I've always known...it's not true!

I know it's not true, because if I didn't know it was true, I wouldn't be so frustrated by so many of the men who are before me...I would be resigned. If I didn't know it was true, I would have given up long ago. If I didn't know it was true, I wouldn't have been willing to take the L with B and taken the chance in that relationship...

It is not true!

I'm also going to stop singing, "All the good ones are already married" song, because that's also not true.

I look at this guy in my global reproductive health class. He's a really smart OB/GYN from Nigeria (Igbo kwenu!) and I'm really inspired by the work he's done and the perspective that he brings to the table. He's one of the good ones, yes, and he's already married, yes.

But then, there's this other guy. I've gotten to know him in the course of my year here...I think he was in my roommate's ethics class. He's a funny guy, usually sits with us during lunch and distracts us from work telling us stories about what it's like in Nigeria...he has one of those personalities that pops, really. I've gone to a couple of public health school parties and people have commented about us together...our interactions and whatnot. And at first I dismissed it, like, oh, that was just us acting silly. But now, the tone has changed now that he knows I'm no longer with B...who he met when we went out for the first time to Harvard's celebration of the 60th anniversary of Nigeria's independence...gala...I know, that's a long name. Anyway...

He's a physician in Nigeria, he's going to go back to Nigeria to complete his training after he's done with the MPH, and we're all done in about 3 weeks. I'll be his facebook friend, so we'll keep in touch. I've purposefully kept myself at bay because I feel like he may like me and I don't want to encourage him, but I'm to this event that the Nigerian student organization (that mysteriously I was not invited to join) is putting on this evening...

...and I was coming home to eat after an interview this morning and I just had to stop myself and reflect...wait, this is a good guy. I don't see him in class because he's in a different major, but he probably has a lot to offer. He's funny, he's kind...haha, he reminds me of a short, young, Nigerian Santa Claus, haha. He's shorter than me. And here I am, doing what I know how to do best...keeping myself aloof and avoiding.

He's actually not unattractive...you know, besides been a little short-n-stout, but you know...there's also the thing of him going back to Nigeria soon...and me thinking of him more like a cousin than someone I'd be interested in...more like a friend.

So no, there are good guys around! I'm friends with many many of them, and most of them are not attracted to me, but sometimes, they are...and I'm the one who doesn't respond. I pass them by because, realistically, someone better will come along for these guys, someone who shares the passion for them, someone who fits into their lives...but they are good men.

I'm just not going to like all good men, and not all good men will like me. That's fine.

But the more I've sung the song about no good men being around, the more I've come to believe it, being blinded to the fact that most of my guy friends are good men...including the brother friends, these are good men who, if they were so interested and if I were so interested, I wouldn't mind...I guess, going forward toward a nikah?

Haha, I'm still not sure what to do in terms of courtship with Muslim men...I think it's all a very individual path.

But yes, let me stop believing that so I can see more all of the good men around me, so maybe next time I'll pay more attention when there is obvious interest.

So I'll stop singing that song.

Hilarity!

As salaam alaikum,

So yes. B has to meet my friends, because they're starting to say ridiculous things. People are demanding pictures of him, and I'm like, umm...am I supposed to carry around pictures of him? Are we supposed to have taken pictures together? People really want to meet him. In due time...sometime after Thanksgiving, I'll invite him to a gathering of friends.

The most ridiculous thing ever was said by my classmate and friend, my roommate's best friend, yesterday morning:

"Isn't that, like, against the law in their country of origin?" Aaaaahahahahahahaha!

Poor B. His friends are all normal people. My friends are all crazy.

My friends my scare him a little, actually. That's okay. It'll build character...especially when he meets my ex-roommate.

...she'll probably think he's gay.

(I told you my friends were crazy!)

Muslimah Goes Nigerian?

As salaam alaikum,

[The title of this entry is dedicated to my father, and his memories of "Broadway Goes Latin." Heh.]

{Currently Listening: Try a Little Tenderness (Live) - Otis Redding}

So, I didn't end up going to the presentation by the guy from Ta'leef project. I had a full day of class on Friday and while I thought the presentation would have been enlightening, ultimately I wasn't in the right spiritual place.

I reasoned it like this. I've spent the last seven years of my life (the first four more than the last three, lets say) developing my identity as a Muslim. I am also Nigerian. My view of Islam has always been that it's not meant to supplant our cultures but enhance our cultures...enhance in the sense that it brings out more meaning to the positive things embedded in our culture and helps us avoid the deleterious.

Admittedly, while I'm comfortable identifying as both Igbo Nigerian and Muslim, I'm not comfortable identifying as both of them at the same time...as in, in the same breath, in the same sentence, in the same context. Well, taking it a step further...I'm comfortable letting Muslims know that I'm Igbo, but not as comfortable letting Igbos know I'm Muslim.

Case in point: no one of the members of my family in Nigeria know that I'm Muslim, and they just found out that my mother is. I mean, I'm sure it'll be a hump to get over, but once they meet me and see how I live and get to know my values, it shouldn't be an issue. No one in my family is super religious or super proselytizing as I can tell.

But anyway, these were all things I used to rationalize not going to the young Muslim intensive, but in the end, participating what I will call from here on out the Nigeria conference has been the clear choice.

It was a real conflict for me, though, because I'm funny about a lot of things. Probably in college, the clear choice would have been the intensive because I am, after all, Muslim first. The thing about that attitude now is that I'm not only Muslim first, but Muslim stronger. Because of my fear of being a Muslim Igbo around Nigerians, I have done my fair share of avoiding certain Nigerian events (especially in the days of hijab), and I cannot say that in that time I've not developed some damaging and unfair ideas about Nigerians...and when I say Nigerians, I mean Nigerian men.

Well, heh, actually, my attitudes about Nigerian men have nothing to do with religion and presumptions made about religion. It has more to do with how so many of them I've encountered (usually those born in Nigeria and who lived there for some time) have had negative game, have done stalkerish things, and in general did not know how to act.

But it's not fair to blanket them in this stereotype and I don't think that's fair...not that I think I've ever blanketed them in the stereotype, which is partially why seeing a Nigerian man now.

So, B...I spent most of yesterday with him. The more I get to know him, the cuter he is, seriously. He excused himself, saying he didn't talk a lot. I told him, no...I talk too much. I have this nervous habit of filling empty spaces in conversation with randomness. I'm really outgoing...somehow, after a childhood of shyness I've become an extrovert...so I think people can't tell that when I talk a lot, I'm actually nervous. But he's...interesting. Like, on one hand, he portrays himself as an awkward PhD student, but on the other hand, he doesn't really carry himself like he's that awkward...

...either that, or he's putting up a grand effort and making a great front...he could have fooled me!

So yesterday, we went to two panels. One was on Media and getting messages to Nigerian Youth. That one was excellent. Then we had another one about Nigerian professionals in the diaspora. I joked to my roommate that they didn't really need that panel because Nigerians are already overrepresented as professionals for the less than 0.1% of the US population that we make up, but it was a great panel, including a man who may just be my first role model, Dr. Chidi Achebe (yes, Chinua Achebe's son). Dude has got to be one of the smartest people I've ever encountered and has done amazing things in Boston, like starting up a community health center in Dorchester. I mean, seriously, masha'Allah!

Then we hung out, then I went home to change to look classy classy and go to this gala in the evening. It started about an hour and a half late and ended an hour and a half late, but it was beautiful. I liked it. It was also terribly random, as they opened up the dance floor to dancing to Nigerian music (which I need to listen to more of...I definitely like it more than what's out right now in the US) before the end of the program, which, in favor of leaving on time, I think we didn't have to do.

But man, one thing I have to tell my father...no one eats foo foo with their hands anymore! I was excited to have real foo foo (my father's imitation Cream of Wheat/mashed potato foo foo comes amazingly close to yams, though, bless his heart!) and then, people were just cutting it with knives, spooning the soup onto the fork, and eating it. I was like, exclamation point, dude.

I felt sad for my dad a little at that point...he hasn't been back to Nigeria in so long. He's here all alone in the United States, and hasn't seen any of his family members since 1984 when he completed youth service. Add to that his misunderstanding why I'm Muslim (first him thinking it was my wanting to be South Asian, then thinking it had to do with black nationalism) and it was, before he got in contact with his friends, a very lonely road.

Anyway, the gala was a lot of fun...the most fun I've had in a long time, I don't know since when. I looked around, and I saw my people, some in traditional dress, some not (me included...I've never worn any Nigerian clothing), and I was comfortable. I felt at home, and I felt a greater obligation to my people than I've felt before...especially after the media panel, where I met the founder of SaharaReporters, Omoyele Sowore.

I've never believed in only supporting Muslim causes, because I feel like in doing that, you'll get the majority of Muslims, for sure, but you miss so many more believers. Haha, this journal is not going to change from Invisible Muslimah to...I don't know, Nigerian Chronicles, from Half to Whole or something, haha, I'm just going to work harder to reconcile my culture and my Islam, because ultimately, that will make both stronger. I'll go from Muslim first and stronger to Muslim first and strongest.

With my ethnicity and my religion no longer at odds [which I believe I can do, if I work at it...example, my race and my religion have never been at odds, though they could be with the stigmatization of black Muslims in many communities, black people among non-black Muslims and an ugly history of some early Muslims in the slave trade], I'll no longer feel so conflicted about being an Igbo Muslim, and I'll no longer feel the need to renounce my Nigerianess in favor of being Muslim, which is no doubt a pathway I could have taken, but I think it would ultimately do more hurt than good in this life and yes, the life after, because all of the pain it would cause me and others. That was never an option for me, though...

Subhan'Allah, it's taking me so long to realize that, but I guess I'm on my way now...it may be an unconventional road that I'm taking right now, but since when has anything about me been conventional? Adorei!

Wasalaam.