Explaining 9/11 to a Muslim Child

Over at NYT's Motherlode parenting blog, regular Lisa Belkin turns the climacteric responsibility of explaining 9/11 to a Muslim child over to a Muslim mother bringing up her child as a Muslim. 

Belkin's well-intentioned side-step aside, the article itself is quite unsatisfactory. Moina Noor, the guest blogger, merely gives her child and her readers an unsatisfactory recitation, "bad guys attack, buildings collapse. Don’t worry, I assured him, we’ll get the bad guys so they won’t do it again." 

The child is eight, that he is only now curious about this phrase so rife in the public imagination, is indicative of the protective bubble that Noor considers necessary to Muslim parenting. That she describes it in such cartoonish terms gives him no respect. Or protection; it does not prepare the child for either playground taunts or religious school misinformation.

The hermeneutic guilt, media-assigned and Muslim-internalized and the resultant contrition, extraneous and so unnecessary,  is writ so large in the Muslim consciousness, and in Noor's, that she fails. She is so busy explaining her Muslim upbringing ("devout but weren’t necessarily interested in teaching their neighbors about Islam."), Defensively interpreting her Muslim faith, ("We are like you. Islam is peaceful."), Vigilantly establishing her motherhood ("how do I, as a parent, explain the slaughter of innocent people in the name of a religion that I am trying to pass on to my boy?"), that there is little time or space left to formulate any real argument. Yes, the article lacks value, but it is because American society has decided not to value its Muslim citizens to such a dimension that this woman is unable to speak directly to her projected readers or honestly with her child.

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I think he's ready for his man-card

At begging us to let him change the baby’s diaper:

C’mon guys, I can do it,  I want to be a man!!

 

On hearing why I didn’t want to go to the pool:

Really? You have your period? But you’re not at all grumpy or anything.

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Show us yer tits

Nope this is not about posting an FB profile picture of me that Li’l A took in which, what I took to be a long strand of hair was actually considerable cleavage. Nope.

 

It’s Baby A’s language. She needs someone better than her current giggly family to teach her that it’s just not okay to yell “TIT!”

 

Although to be fair, “tit” functions as a sort of suffix in her vocabulary right now.

Blantit = blanket (you can see how anyone could make this mistake.)

Naptit = napkin (it’s a bit of a listening comprehension fail here.)

Motit = monkey (and yes, it is pronounced “more tits.”)

Waltit = Walter, the protagonist of this book (how I knew she had a problem.)

 

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In which the family’s ethnic affiliations are laid bare

A few weeks ago, just as we were getting used to the summery warmth, just as we were getting used to waking in the mornings knowing that we wouldn’t need our winter jackets, the days where we lay newly awakened with half smiles, exulting that perhaps we could pack winter jackets away, we were visited. By ants. Big, jet-black ones—the kind we used to call “bully ants” in the home country.

And while I’m prone to getting a bit mommy tiger when they get too close to chubby (yet such delicate) baby extremities, I nevertheless wanted to be somewhat Mother Earth about finding a non-chemical way of warding them off. And after a week in which I did nothing, Big A showed up with ant traps. And then gave us a lecture on the proper usage of said traps.

“Do not kill any more ants,” he said. Hmm, I was thinking—may be these traps have shrill, high-frequency beeps to send the ants as far as possible from where we live with kids who wear as few clothes on as possible. No.

“You can’t kill the ants, because the way this works is that one ant is tempted by the bait and becomes covered in it. Then he has to go back to the ant colony so that the other ants can get poisoned too. That’s how the colony dies off.”

Li’l A and I are shocked:

This doesn’t feel wrong to you? It’s like giving them small-pox blankets.

Yeah, dad—it’s a genocide.

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QUARRELS

Eyebrows held like knitting needles
mouths braided with angusish
clouds bulbed like brains
drawn fleeced with thoughts
like water whipped by wind
rent like lightning
the ripped shelter of skies

so that in their rooms
children lie wakened
in fact, the children had been jumping in ther beds
in fact, the children slept throught the storm
in fact, the children had not yet been born

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THE MEETING

Upon their faces
marks of worry
of weather
a simpering parsimony of words

In her face
the confidence of sexual power
(or only a mirage of
sexual power—

for there is too much
coy questioning about it
do you like me
my clothes, my hair?)

And this
still within
the formality of marriage,
the rude intimacy of it.

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DROWNING

Drowning.
The logic of it,

its tranquility.
Sent to look

in the mirror
when

there’s no one there

To acknowledge

the water,
the water’s depth

to see it,
to die