My #hijab and other such considerations: a longread
I’ve had to think about my hijab a lot, recently.
Which is besides the point, if you truly think about it. When I put on my clothes at the start of the day, I’m not meant to think about it constantly for the rest of the day, because why the heck would I. The aim of my daily donning of accoutrements has always been comfort, ample legroom (for when I’m overtaking pedestrian slowpokes on my way to work), and aurah (the Islamic rule on what parts of my body most of the world – is allowed to see). My thinking of fashion is so rudimentary that one of my earlier criterion for dressing was, ‘What can I wear that will let me kick people when the need arises?’
And then I realised that I can kick people no matter how I dress. So, you know.
Pada yang datang dan pergi
I.
You were singing a song while playing guitar. It was a perfect teenage moment — complete with the world slowing down, everything else falling into a haze of blurred purple, your nasally strained voice the only thing I could hear. I had always known you because you were always popular, and that was my fault as well — always going for the obvious choice. Until that one perfect moment, you had been in my periphery. After that one perfect moment, you were all I could see.
It took years of focused affection and the silent pining young girls do so well before I could get over you. And even that came in a dream. I dreamed that you had a girlfriend, and I was fine with it. When I opened my eyes in the morning, I realised that I really was.
Dear Amina Serra
Dearest Amina (dearer to me than most of the Aminas combined),
This is your Dhaz Teyze Syazwina. We have never met, but I love you very much. You won’t understand for a couple of decades, perhaps, but when you love someone the way I love your mother, you will inevitably love whoever little person they bring forth into the world. You’re all the way in summery Istanbul, hopefully sleeping and cooing through most of your first Ramazan, and I am here in warm and humid Malaysia, but I think of you plenty and hope you’re having a swell time.
No hacias otra cosa que escribir
I could write about the moons I’ve missed – all the nights I’ve spent in four walls, the view outside my window just shy of a dazzling night sky. It faces a field where young boys march and kick footballs and tackle each other to the ground with gangly enthusiasm.
I could write about sunrises I don’t wake up for. When I peel myself from bed, on fewer mornings than I wish were so, I’m always chasing the sun, willing dawn to wait five more minutes, while I wash my face, rinse my arms, run water over my feet. Give me three — no, four more minutes. Let me face God before I go back to sleep. When I land myself in bed again, I shut my eyes tight against the morning light. I’m not done yet.
learn to look at an empty sky
I.
When I was somewhere between child and teenager, back before we had the word ‘tween’, she stared at me for a very long time and said,
“It’s a pity about your nose. You would be fine otherwise.”
For nearly 20 years, I subsisted by looking at myself in only bits and pieces in the mirror. I could never look at myself whole. There was always something to avoid.
Prayer
It occurs to me that I have been walking through each day, waiting for God to prove me wrong.
For God to say, ‘No, not yet.’
Clicktivism – an interview from 2012
Last year, Sami Kishawi approached me for an interview for a piece he was writing for ISNA’s Islamic Horizons. Sami is a Palestinian-American grad student, writer, political activist, photographer, and founder of Sixteen Minutes to Palestine.He is also one of the first people I followed on Twitter. We have never met in person, but I consider him a brother and a friend.
In May 2012, he interviewed me for a piece he was writing on ‘clicktivism’, a.k.a. online activism. This was hot on the tails of BERSIH 3.0 and Kony 2012, and looking at it tonight — due to some laptop housekeeping — Â it appears that I had a lot to say on the matter.
I’ve decided to publish this in full as a kind of note on how online political activism, in Malaysia and globally, has evolved over the past year. This has been minimally edited so that it depicts with accuracy his questions and my response at the time.
Old Jottings from My Notebook I
Note:
There was a period after my return from Melbourne in which I felt empty, lost, and generally not altogether present in my everyday. This entry and the ones to come are from a brown, plain-covered notebook a dear friend gave me, in which I was as honest as I could be.Â
In 2013, I feel it important to revisit these old thoughts of mine, to remember how I was and how I am and how I would like to be. And to let you know that however you’re feeling, you are likely not alone.
May I be so converted and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not
My mother grew up the 6th out of 10 children, in a wooden house not big enough for all of them but which they made do with. My late grandfather was a volunteer policeman and had been friends with P. Ramlee, when they met during one of my Tok Ayah’s football matches in Singapore. My grandmother used to sell local kueh every morning, her younger children making the rounds in the village before going to school. My mother and her siblings grew up very close to each other, and their bonds were passed down to us; we first cousins were raised more as each other’s siblings and in batches, since there seemed to be new additions to our extended family each year.
My batch consisted of Y, P and me, each of us separated by two months in age. Our mothers accentuated this fact by always having us take a picture together, and we have several of these to chart our growth as we grew older. But the real markers of time aren’t photos – P recently married a beautiful, sweet girl and is now expecting his eldest child in a few months, and Y has just expressed her wish to be married to the man of her choice soon.
If there is any sign that I have long left my teenage years behind me, it’s not my nostalgia whenever I hear an NSync song, but rather, it is this.
