TRANS-gressing:
of beards, borders, and too-many-things
786
(WARNING: this is written in a disjunctive, non-linear style, interrupted by reflections and side-commentary. if it were possible, i would have written it with a "central" text in the middle and commentary all around it. but because i want to get this out there now, i'll have to wait for those refinements for later writing. i want people reading this to experience some of the disjunction described in the experience. this is also how i experienced it, with thoughts looping back and starting over and then being interrupted by new questioning. and yes, there are funny moments as when i thought maybe the agents were hungry because they all kept asking me if i had brought food from turkey with me). it also TRANS-gresses the literary practices of some canons.)
"slovo": for Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian word "slovo", translated in English as "word" becomes the screen on which multiple, morphing and highly-competitive socially-constructed views are projected.
"We are challenged to resist this erasure of the body, for we know that our bodies have always blurred the public/private split, have always blurred the boundaries of personal/political. When your body is on the line, you know that you are transgressing the public/private split in your flesh, by your very existence. When you can be arrested/detained because of looking 'Muslim' or looking like a "terrorist"
(but what do they wear,
and are you a terrorist if you wear a suit and a tie
and are clean-shaven
and a cisgender man
who is temporarily able-bodied
and light-skinned
and exude privilege and
entitlement and
run the planet's economy
to destruction with money-making schemes
or evaporate the waters
and disappear the air?);
when you can be arrested because of a 'difference'
(or they like to say, 'discrepancy')
between your gender expression and what your driver's license says,
when you can be arrested or detained for being a muslim praying in public or a jew laying tefillin or
arrested for being a practitioner of a First Nations' religion or
when you could be arrested (according to some proposed legislation in georgia)
for having a miscarriage
or when you can be arrested because of what you do with your body and with whom, you have to know that your body is political.
when the dominating culture expends incredible amounts of time, money, legislation and energy controlling and policing our bodies and the ways we decide to use them, then it is clear that our bodies are political. And that brings us back to the centrality and primacy of the body." dr. ibrahim farajajé, "loosening the canons"
i salute the many directions of the universe and ask permission of the people indigenous to this area to be here on their soil, on their lands, to be near their waters. And i call upon the ancestors, those beings of colour-filled resistance and resilience, those who allow us to live brilliantly and defiantly even in the face of those who would drain the colour from our lives and make us disappear with the stroke of a "delete" button.
i offer this piece to the blessed memory of our mother, audre lorde; may her memory be as a blessing for all generations and may oceans of mercy flowing from the heart of ar-Rahman enfold her forever. i thought thought of her piece, "is your hair still political"? as i went through the attempted depersonalisation of my usual experience with the border control/customs people.
i also offer this piece to the blessed memory of craig gerard joachim harris, one of the fiercest writers and artists-activists ever to exist on this planet. it is thanks to him that many communities of colour were able to being to talk about HIV/AIDS in truly revolutionary ways. anyone's struggle was craig's struggle. when things happened he wrote about them immediately and shared them with me by phone. he died in his very early thirties of HIV-related complications in november of 1991, long before email/twitter/facebook/tumblr/iPhones/cellphones/free long-distance calls, etc.. had he lived to see all of these media of communication, everyone in the universe would have known what he thought about everything. a consummate foodie before foodism was a thing, the world would have been invited to many a revolutionary mystical banquet!
before 9 September 2001, i referred to myself as a "guerrilla the!logian" and an "HIV/AIDS terrorist", as i was working as a religious scholar in the places and from the locations that were ignored, hated, and feared by many and because i used nonviolent/not-dangerous surprise tactics (like occupying the Mayor's office in the Occupied Territory known as the District of Columbia or being arrested for protesting the refusal of Haitian refugees in the early 1990s or for stretching out in the middle of an intersection to agitate for universal health care) to get people to re-think their unthought positions.
as the events of 9 September 2001 unfolded, i quietly deleted from my files anything that had "guerrilla the!logian" and "HIV/AIDS terrorist". i also knew that i could not write about the events in the way craig and i would have before that day. i knew that even the filtred critique that i offered would make me even more suspect and put me on even more lists. so, like true guerrillas, i had to go underground. In 2003, we were the victims of a life-threatening hate-crime. the slightest amount of critique or analysis makes us suspect.
TRAVELLING WHILE MUSLIM
WARNING/even wearing a suitcoat doesn't help. because it was a long trip, my act of conscious resistance was to wear a lunghi/sarong instead of pants so that i could at least be comfortable since i knew i'd get selected for special attention any way, so why not be comfortable?
last week, i arrived in the United States from Turkey via London; i was travelling with my soon-to-be 16 yr old child, rebabi Issa-Nessim (FB: Nessim Isa Enver). entry into the US is always a traumatic event, for crossing the border is never a smooth and easy thing, even though we both travel with US passports and were both born in the US. In the course of our lives, we travel to what someone must consider as "dangerous places": india, malaysia, indonesia, nepal, the emirates, etc..
we arrive in the great hall for the passport control. interestingly enough, before arriving at the control-stations, there are large flat-screens tv showing powerful images of the grand canyon, smiling refugees supposedly re-settled in the US: the visual field of meaning is that we are arriving in a land that is so powerful just through its physical beauty that it can "contain" all the people who want to get away from "dangerous places". i was busy taking that all in and making a note to discuss it with Issa after we had passed through the various checkpoints and were safely in our rental car.
"where are you coming from?", the agent asks
"from turkey", i respond
"are you carrying any food?"
"no"
"is he travelling with you", gesturing towards issa
"yes, he is my son".
something gets scratched onto the card and we go to the next checkpoint: same questions, accompanied by wordless scrutiny of the cards.
we gather our bags and are pretty much the last to leave the baggage area: not a good thing, i think to myself but try to stay positive and continue to send blessings of peace and tranquility to all working in this place. out of nowhere, another agent swoops down on us and snatches the customs declaration sheet (on which i worked in great detail, knowing that my care and attention to detail would be for naught), looks at it summarily and then asks very gruffly if issa were with me. mind you, he is standing right next to me; his body language indicates that we are together. and we do look somewhat alike.... this checkpoint merits us another glyph on the customs declaration and then we reach the last chekpoint. another again starts the same questions, looks at the customs declaration and......... out of nowhere, another agent appears, ignores the other agent, takes the papers from her and begins to question us directly.
he asks about food, money, what my job is, where i live, if issa and i were travelling together and if i had ever been submitted to a "secondary selection" . i was so weary by then that i said, "well, pretty much every time i fly into the san francisco aeroport."
"Please come this way" and i am thinking the whole time
WHEN IS RANDOM NOT RANDOM????
Maybe when all of the people having their bags examined at the secondary selection are brown people?
(my child has experienced this his entire life: he's almost 16 and associates re-entry into the country where he was born and lived for his early years with being treated like a "dangerous other". he was only 6 in 2001, so he is a post-9.11 muslim young person. he has grown up witnessing wars of occupation, displacement of populations and wildly rampant Islamophobia and he is one of the sweetest people i know, masha'allah). mercifully, he and i can keep a running commentary in turkish and french as we go through the ordeals!
my being stopped has been going on since way before 2001:
i suppose the first pretext was that i had dreadlocks, so this goes back to 1985: it's a documentary just begging to happen. dreadlocks then were the signifier of something destabilising to the dominating culture. in the 1980s, there were even islands in the Caribbean that one could not enter with dreadlocks unless one was a citizen of that island. Audre Lorde's piece on hair being political came from that time. i, too, will write another piece on that, reflecting on the wearing of dreadlocks in the US and elsewhere an act of cultural resistance. )
i've come at it from about every angle imaginable and at the end of the day, it is incredibly irritating to come back into the country of which one is a passport-holder and to be subjected to a kind of detailed scrutiny that i never experience anywhere else in the world! i just go into deep dhikr and see what will unfold each time. AND i still end up feeling as though i have just been made to feel "less than", especially when i look up and see all the other brown "others" being selected for up-close-and-personal special treatment. so, it's time for me to take this and turn my creativity loose on it and see what we can make. this is an important part of my constant re-creation of "bodies matter".)
he spends 10-15 minutes on the computer, all the while periodically looking up at us and asking questions. we are asked the same questions over and over again,
about food and money, over and over again.
i wanted to ask the agents if they were hungry
and/or needed money, but i knew
that could land me in a detention camp somewhere
off of the off-radar screen.
they send the bags through x-ray machines;
they only ask about the hard-drives and the
Turkish musical instruments that rebabi Nessim Isa Enver
was carrying for his concert.
but yes, i did have food from turkey: i was carrying MEVLANA JELALUDDIN RUMI's writings with me! the MATHNAWI can feed the world and then some. i was carrying a tomb-covering/chador from the tomb of our saint, Gharib Nawaz, the friend of the poor, Hz Moinuddin Chishti.
did i carry more than 10000 US$ out of turkey and into the US?
i had something beyond money, the riches of all of the prayers of the
evliyalar, of the tzaddikim, of the lovers of LOVE
i can understand how people can become disoriented in interrogation just by being asked the same questions over and over again, in varying configurations, especially when you are tired and hungry and worried about the turn that things might take. there is nothing rational going on in the questioning.
i started to think: am i saying something wrong? is something not clear? is there a reason why they ask this over and over again? is there something wrong with me?
would any of this be a problem if i were of another skin colour and of another religion? that's the importance of knowing about racialised islamophobia in the US: it pre-exists today's situation by almost 100 years, if not more, but then no one ever bothers to ask US born African-descent Muslims about experiences of racialised Islamophobia. US-born African-descent Muslims were always under close government scrutiny. but then, US-born African-descent Muslims are not considered to be interesting/their problems don't even exist, because US-born African -descent Muslims are insignificant, not important, not real Muslims except if they are in the select number of "good Muslims" who get to be spokespersons if and while still considered acceptable.
there were countless discussions post 9.11 by muslim men about why one did not have to have a beard, or only a beard of a certain length, etc.. it wasn't just an internal question: it was a discussion that ensued because some people decided to remove all signifiers that could identify them as "muslim", and we know that that word does not even have a clear field of meaning in the US, especially when people confuse Sikhs with Muslims and attack them. but those are yet another set of FB notes and blog-typings.
so, this is where muslim "embodiments" trouble and 'queer' normative notions: muslim men are considered at once hyper-masculine AND, at the same time, "effeminised" (used in some discourse to mean "submissive, passive, etc.) . ABU GHRAIB played that out in disgustingly graphic fashion. so, muslim facial hair becomes a troubling signifier.
a beard can get you in lots of trouble these days,
or at least make you spend more time with the border-control people than you would like,
especially if you are brown and look "muslim".
not looking like the "right thing"
different skin colour, different religion,
my gendering would be considered differently
(not hyper-masculinised and not needing to be controlled and "effeminised", as they say)
and my beard non-threatening,
just the sign of some delightful and harmless eccentricity.
but if it's religious,
it's trouble.
and if it's Muslim religious,
you better get ready to get whipped.
it's another KUNTA KINTE moment...
in this troubling of identities, in this policing of identities, in this defining of identities, in this labelling as dangerous because of identities, there is a deep connection for me with realities of hijra/transgender/intersex/genderkweer lives. and imagine the mix when people are both genderkweer and muslim, facial hair again arises as something that "troubles" existing notions of embodiment
for TRANS bodies
TRANS gress
MUSLIM bodies
TRANS MUSLIM bodies
transgress
go beyond the boundaries
go beyond the borders
of a limited notion
of bodies
of identities
and, of course, some transgender people from the US cannot even do international travel if there is a "difference" between their gender expression and what is on their "identity" papers. i know that in Pakistan, the Supreme Court directed the government's registration authority to create another category for hijras. The Indian Govt created a new category for hijras on their ID cards. And these are the "dangerous places"???
bodies
shifting
sifting
things don't match up with the card
what you see is not what you get
because you don't "get" (understand) what you see
what you 'get' has nothing whatsoever to do with what you see
in has to do with what it is that you decide you are perceiving
as the end result of generational mixities, some of us have looks that are fluid
making us look like you could be from many places;
this makes us look suspicious
no one believes that we were born where we were born
(oops: too many things!)
"Muslim names"=
too hard to pronounce
and before some well-meaning person tells me that i am demonising and othering the people that work on the border, that i am not perceiving them in their complexities, etc.: well, first of all, there is a power dynamic and in this relationship they have all of the power and i, as a simple brown-skinned Muslim holder of a US passport, have none in that moment. i can ask for all of the supervisors that i want, but they can still do what they with me under the pretext of some security thing because i had a "dangerous and aggressive attitude".
i own the fact that i, too, have more privilege and entitlement than others: my gender expression matches up with my ID papers, i do have a job, i do have a fixed residence, AND i know that even with a US passport, we too can easily be disappeared
secondly, i attempt to be in right relationship with them. i am polite when i respond, i even try to inject some humour into the exchanges.
i try to be surprised by joy: it isn't happening. i am not going to get blamed for this too!
there are ways in which in the US if you are considered suspicious of something, often people's first reaction is to ask, "but what were you doing/wearing/saying/being, etc. to make them suspicious?", as though by our very being we are beings who arouse suspicion. "you know, if you didn't have that beard or where those clothes, it might not have happened."
privilege and entitlement can often be in the little things, things seemingly so small that people don't notice them as privilege and entitlement. for example,
some people can fly wearing whatever they choose.
some people can have whatever kind of hair they want and fly in peace.
some people can even joke with the customs agents, safe in the knowledge that nothing will happen to them.
those are colossal things for me. i can't fly (and i fly often) without wondering:
does my beard look too wild?
are my eyes to blood-shot from being dried out by aeroplane air?
are we going to get reported because we prayed in our seats? will the books in farsi send them over the edge?
are prayer rugs really just weapons of mass destruction, since supposedly our "religion" exhorts us to violence?
if there is indeed a category of human being, those who by their very physical being arouse suspicion, i'd just like to know how it is that some us manage to have been placed on that list without our ever knowing.
TRAVELLING WHILE MUSLIM
("slovo": for Russian theorist, Mikhail Bakhtin, the Russian word "slovo", translated in English as "word" becomes the screen on which multiple, morphing and highly-competitive socially-constructed views are projected.
for some reason, they ask me always if i have a job and what it is that i do (i am currently trying to learn whether they are legally entitled to ask that of me as a US citizen, but in any event, the answer doesn't make much difference since they will do what they want to anyway since they have the uniforms and the weapons.
my answer to the job question, smilingly and in a "non-threatening" tone of voice:
"i am the Provost of a graduate school where i am also Professor of Islamic Studies and Cultural Studies; our school provides immersion education in multi-religious contexts for our students. That's why i spend time in Turkey and India each year" you'd think that in the current world that might merit a simple "thank you", maybe even a "Wow, congratulations on trying to open the doors to greater mutual understanding." but i don't think that they actually even hear it because they never inquire more deeply into it. they just sort of glaze over because
what you see is not what you get
because you don't "get" (understand) what you see
what you 'get' has nothing whatsoever to do with what you see
in has to do with what it is that you decide you are perceiving)
ESSAY QUESTIONS FOR A FICTIVE MOODLE EXAM
If you are a brown Muslim, DOES spending lots of time outside of the US make you vulnerable to more suspicion?
is it too much mixity too much of the time?
should you not just live in the place of your passport?
MORE ABOUT BEARDS
for years, i have been writing little pieces about the demonising of beards, etc., looking at beards and "hijab" as signifiers of not only Muslim identities, but of particular kinds of Muslim identities. in some places, if you have a long beard, that is considered a sign of belonging to some conservative tendency, while wearing hijab is sometimes interpreted as a sign of "male" dominance over "women" and therefore of indicative of women who are religiously conservative. this is so overly-simplified and over-determined and deeply interwoven with other issues that i hope to explore in further disjunctive notes, insha'allah.
in the midst of all of this, i belong to a Muslim Sufi world in which we have tender veneration for the beard of the Prophet. in Turkey, hairs from the beard of the Rasul are often brought for veneration in circles of dhikr or during local masajid (mosques) during Ramazan or during the celebrations of the Birth of the Prophet and at other times as well. i'm not here to debate distinctions between veneration and "association" (shirk) or bida ("innovation"), haram ("that which is forbidden"), nor am i going to produce a "chain" of citations about the practice. i just want to talk about a powerful experience that i had with the sakal-i sherif, the beard of the Prophet, may peace and blessings be upon him and upon his most beautiful Family
if you read the piece i wrote on here about the Friday prayers or about my morning at Eyup Sultan, you know that i just love the beauty of my spiritual path and am sick of being perceived as belonging to a 'nation' of psychopathic criminals, haters and spoilers of everyone else's picnic.
So, i was at this Sufi dhikr (ceremony of Divine Remembrance) and some hairs from the beard of the Prophet were place in the middle of the room after we finished praying maghrib (one of the two evening prayers). as we chanted and made the dhikr, i had this experience of beholding in the eye of my heart the Prophet dressed as a Mevlevi shaykh (Mevlevis are the spiritual descendants of Rumi; called Mevlevis because Rumi was and is known as Mevlana: our teacher). he was whirling slowly, in the way that the shaykh does at the end of the Sema:Whirling Ceremony. my heart was on fire and i couldn't stop crying. my whole body was trembling and these word sprung up in my heart: (i later set them to music and we sing this hymn still today):
In the bliss of blessing
The Lovers of Love
You do turn majestically
Above our hearts
Drawing us into the sweet embrace of the Fire
There to become diamonds
Brilliant like your face.
Tears of mercy flowing
From your lovers’ eyes
Fall upon your holy beard
O Diamond-Heart Guide
We are lost forever
In Oceans of Hu,
Singing la ilaha
Ill’allah!