I am

"The Imagining Ourselves project has been one of the most empowering experiences of my life. Diagnosed with MS in 1994, I cannot stand on my own two feet. Holding someone’s hand makes all the difference. I remember when this project was a simple Call for Submissions. I watched it transpire. I am amazed at what it has become—a global conglomerate of women holding hands. It’s beautiful and I am blessed to be a part of it."

I am

I remember it well—the black hole that was my life. I was too young to know that I needed to climb out of it. I was too naïve to know that I could. It swallowed me whole in a moment, in a sentence. The diagnosis was clinically definite. My doctor said it like it was nothing. I had never heard of it, so how bad could it be? My mother was beside me crying… what was she crying about? I remember it all so well.

The words pierced me as I read what it could do to me, how it could rob me of the ability to think, to speak, to walk, to move. I didn’t understand. How could one thing take so much away? This couldn’t be happening! My life was just beginning… and now it was ending. I had to know, so I kept reading… but it hurt and the words, they pierced me.

My eyes welled with tears as I turned the page. There, alone in my room, they poured out of me. I could not stop them. I was supposed to get married. I was going to have children—two boys and two girls. I was going to be a good mother. My husband would love me so much. I would be the perfect wife. Who would want me now? I turned another page, but I could barely see through the tears.

I let them all go… the dreams, the hopes. I was foolish to think they were mine, foolish to think I deserved them. Surely, this was my penalty. I just wish it didn’t hurt so much to let them all go.

Is this it? The brochure said the heat would make everything worse, but I was fine last summer. It’s getting so hot now, and the colours are all bleeding together. I could see everything a few minutes ago. It doesn’t make sense. I can’t get up either. What's going on? What am I going to do? Is this it?

They're staring at me. Can they see it? I don’t want them to. I’ll stare back. What are they looking at? Why are they staring at me?

I want to die. My doctor wants me to start using a cane. I’m 21 years old. I don’t want a cane. I want to die.

I haven’t been out in days. It’s too hard. I get dirty looks for taking the handicapped spot. They're right—I shouldn't be here. I can’t climb the stairs. The slopes of the ramps mock me. Someone's changing in the accessible stall and the automatic door is disabled. Maybe I’ll get that cane. I don’t want to, but this is ridiculous. I haven’t been out in days.

I should smile a little more. I don't have to be so rude. They only stare because they don’t understand what’s happened to me. Perhaps they haven’t heard of it either. Perhaps I’ll smile a little more.

It’s addictive. People are smiling back. They see the cane. They ask about it. They tell me I’m beautiful. They say I’m inspiring. They say they’ll pray for me and they hope I get better. They tell me to keep smiling. I think I will. It’s so much fun… and so addictive!

I’m speechless. Did he just say what I think he said? Did I hear him right? “I’m sorry to see you that way.” Did he just say that to me? But he’s homeless... why would he care about me? I don’t know what to say. I am utterly speechless.

These four walls, they alone have seen my tears. They closed in on me once. The darkness was never black enough to conceal my pain. It glowed from within me, burning me, constantly reminding me of what I was and what I could never be. I thought I would die here—here, within these four walls.

I lifted the curtains today. I want the sun to shine in on me. I want to see its light, to feel its love. I am so happy! Strangers seem to care. They want to help and they’re not afraid of me. They look past my disease and see me! I am in awe. I was so mistaken about everything and it all looks so different now, now that I have lifted the curtains.

He’s a good man and he loves me… but I had to turn him down. I just have to do this without him. I have to find my place in this world. It’s waiting for me. It needs me. I will find it and I will fill it with my love, my hope, my sincerity… the sincerity of a homeless man. I will bring it to life and lift the curtains that darken it. He’s a good man, but I...

Before the Hockey Game

"It is important to talk about violence without taking for the hood of victim. To be strong, without the denial of our rights which are weak. Majority from experiments which we (women and men) run into, are grey areas which - |, why they are such difficult, to describe, and why they are such difficult, to find support and cicatrization."

Before the Hockey Game

There was the hockey game. We had to leave for the hockey game, or we were going to be late. I cannot remember how you were on top of me, only that we were vertical then horizontal, as though played like marionettes. I recall a glimmer of fear—that falling would hurt, my head would slam backwards into the floor, perfect hair would come undone. But in my mind we fell with control, precision. I've patched it up so that the history becomes soft as the sleeping sounds my lover makes when I wake from this nightmare and stare at his body there in the morning light.

In my memory I am wearing a rust-orange dress, with my hair all up in a bun. I had told you that I didn't want to that morning; I guess it was something like the fact of having pulled on my pantyhose. How long that takes, you know, to make sure your thumbnail doesn't snag the nylon. But I wouldn’t have worn that dress for the hockey game. The times you forced yourself on me and the reasons for no and the clothes that I wore and the expressions on my face have all run together.

It was okay lying on your living room floor, because it was covered with a plush brown wall-to-wall seventies carpeting. I was comfortable, more or less. It was okay to lie there and negotiate.

I was lying on the carpet but I wouldn't really call it negotiation; there was too much fear involved. I don't know where it came from, but it was thick. It was like the fear of dying, the idea of losing you was.And your interrogation was an ultimatum. It was either with you or without you; it was either yes or a resounding no.

So it was understood that I would act as the machine. I was making no sacrifices because, as you put it, all couples go through this kind of negotiation. This is how couples are. This is what they do. I would understand this.

You cannot imagine my ceaseless rationalizations. You cannot imagine how I have tried to place my woman's body back in the physical reality that is past, how I've empowered the resignation to mean, fine you can take me, but you haven't taken me. Maybe there was power in that divorce—the body from the mind. Maybe there was domination in my resignation. Maybe letting you have my body was a smirk. Maybe it was a beautiful dancer, bowing out.

But none of that came just then to the seventeen-year-old, to the inexperienced, to the fear acting as machine. Indeed, you did have my mind. The idea of losing you placed so much fear in me, so real and arresting, that I went to grab onto something and I felt there was nothing to take. -

That was the grayest moment. That is the moment when the jury leaves the courtroom with concerned wrinkles on their foreheads and we wonder at the muddiness of truth and reality, experience, choice.

It was easy as pie, and then it was over. You know what I did afterwards you? I broke just like a little girl. But when you asked me why I was crying, I betrayed myself.

“I’m not mad at you,” I said, serious, sincere and sweet as ever, “I’m mad at myself, for not listening to my heart.”

How badly I wanted to let you off the hook. How scary it would have been to hold you accountable. Isn't it funny, the kind of power, poverty, desperation my love had?

“I raped you,” you have written me, years later, “I’m sorry.”

Dreamings

(reflections on HIV/AIDS in Uganda)

I
am In the dream of dream. Somewhere into the rough melody of breathing, there is a woman. In the dream of dream, somewhere, a woman cries. Cotton wool of it busuti|| is with folds in knees through the clock of standing on knees by a place at a bed. It holds tea in one hand, and in the dusk of day it drinks it. Lighting kerosene is lighted by motion of hand to the cup to breathing of lips.

II
In a dream of a dream. Somewhere.

III
Three men lean against the bar, focused on the cool froth of their afternoon drinks. A Kenyan beer, Tusker. Their suits are freshly pressed and their talk is pungent like the smell of overripe mangoes. They speak like ageing roosters about the news of the past weeks, and between the gossiping they mourn. Grace’s daughter is sick and she has gone home to the village in Ankole. The rains are heavy and the men hope that the bus will reach the village by nightfall. The road must have been churned to mud by now.

IV
An old woman murmurs short prayers as she watches her daughters pounding groundnuts. It is nearing five o’clock and she is wearing a dress of ochre and green that seems at peace with the red clay of the hillsides. Her son Joseph will be marrying on Sunday and the community will be expecting a grand feast. The millet has been ground and is ready to cook but ten kilos of matoke still need to be cut and prepared by the day. Her oldest daughter turns to look at her abruptly and she remembers her husband who passed only last year. She grows weary remembering the hours of cooking, washing, digging she did to support her family- yet her husband still sought satisfaction outside of the house. Her prayers resume as the pounding begins again.

V
In a dream of a dream. Somewhere between heartbeat and the coarse melody of breathing, there is a woman. In a dream of a dream, somewhere, there is a woman telling stories. The days grow long in each syllable she offers. Sometimes she speaks in bullets that recall the days of armies that swarmed the country like locusts, destroying what they could. Other times she speaks in Nile waters that brought wazungu so far from their homes. They say she can speak in injections and pills that bring the fever down, and bring life back for another day. Today she is speaking in reams of colourful cotton. Bodies are being cleansed for burial and she will clothe them in the hues of mountain flowers.

VI
In a dream of a dream, somewhere. There is a woman.

Verité

sometimes act of taking time, to create a poem--and, to read one--- contradiction of the world, which, possibly, would prefer, that we were turned away our attention from a language. With all of potential for connection us with more deep silence, greater history, internal landscape, no surprise writes it and read, possibly, would seem like threatenings gestures. I want, that limning invited anybody slowly downward, to value beauty, and promisingly, to find sense of surprise in reserve.

The first line is the camera’s aperture.
If you find beauty it will rise
from the half-moon petals
strewn on the nightstand
or the shirt tossed
over the radiator.
The shirt
reminds you of spring in a country
with galvanized tubs
and spider web clotheslines
turning in the breeze*
the wrong subtitled film.
What I speak has nothing
to do with love. There is no
galaxy. A star is not plural.
The couple smokes
at the foot of the bed.
Outside, a car runs out of gas
but coasts another mile
on ghostly fumes. The heart
keeps traveling past fenceposts,
pushing luck after goodbye.

The Rainbow Generation

It was the first question, my mother asked me, when I told it, that I’d|| the met man in Dubayi which I wanted to marry.

“How black is he?”

I felt like I’d been hit in the solar plexus – that area of your stomach that, when hit, feels like the wind has been punched right out of you. I felt myself mentally stumble, pole axed by the irrelevancy of the question.

But instead of saying “What the hell do you mean ‘How black is he?’ What does it matter what colour he is?”

Instead of saying, “What matters is that he loves me, that I love him, that he’s a good man and we’ll be happy.”

Instead of saying any of these good things in answer to my mother’s question, “How black is he?” I said, “No darker than Simon (my brother). Not dark at all, a fair olive skin in fact” – to which I received a huge, relieved sigh – far more telling of her relief than anything she could have said.

Why did I back down? Why did I justify myself/justify Amjad instead of indignantly telling my mother that the colour of Amjad’s skin didn’t matter? Why did I cave in and say that Amjad wasn’t dark skinned at all? Why didn’t I say the powerful words, “So what if he is black?”

In part because I realized that if I’d said, “Who cares how black he is, what matters is that we’ll be happy” my mother would have said that the colour question was an important part of the ‘would be happy’ question.

She would be right if you look at the world as it was – the world as it was when she married.

So what defines our generation of women?

We love and hate based not on race or nationality but on issues. This is a huge change compared to my mother’s generation and I think that it’s something that defines our generation – a generation that sees itself increasingly as one which is comprised of international citizens, proud of their ancestry but feeling it is only a very small part of how we define ourselves.

I got married to my Palestinian husband in a South Indian dress with an exotic flower behind my ear – very Hawaiian! I completely confused our guests about ‘What I was trying to say’. In the world I’d like to create, that I think is coming, our guests wouldn’t be confused but rather amused or unfazed because they would all doing the same! So, we’d have a black guest who’d wear a sari and a Muslim headscarf or an Asian man who’d wear a dishdasha but who spoke Norwegian. What a wonderful world that would be!

The Bride's Tears

Amina||, beautiful and elegant, going to marry Lamine||. It at first caught one's eyes with it good taste in clothes and in course of time, Lamine|| arrived to discover and love its unprejudice. More than it, it has a body of dream, that it knows how to cherish. Lamine’s|| a body never complains, when it sets to the hands of Amina||. Certainly, they do not sleep together but a few caress and good massage from time to time never hurt somebody.

Lamine sent his best friend, his uncles and his aunts to Amina’s parent’s home to officially request their daughter’s hand. Neither Lamine nor Amina were present at the meeting. Their relatives spoke in their place. Amina visited with neighbors as the two families agreed upon the sum to be paid and the date of the marriage.

After Lamine’s representatives left, Amina returned home. It was one of her uncles who was granted responsibility for giving her hand.

The marriage is set for the beginning of next month. There is only one month to do all the preparations. Lamine and Amina each get their friends together for a meeting. Neither Amina nor Lamine attend. They have no choice but to trust their friends. The friends get to know each other. The girls, representatives of Amina – Lamine is represented by men – brought a list of everything they need.

The girls and the men each meet separately. Three days before the wedding, Amina is forbidden to go out. Her friends are there to spend the day with her. The traditional ceremony begins tonight.

Since morning, the female relatives and friends of her mother have been moving about the house. A little while before sunset, other women come as a group. The house is full of noises and laughter. It is just a little taste of what the next day will bring.

Two aunts have come to grab Amina. Hands tied well at her biceps, they bring her into her room. There is scarcely room to put their feet but, in the middle there is no one, just a mat and two cups. In each of the cups there is henna – dried leaves, ground and used as a paste to color the hair, hands, or feet. The two mixtures are different: one pasty, the other more powdery. Amina was obliged to undress down to her slip in front of sixty pairs of eyes all focused on her. An old aunt applied henna on her head, and then all over her body while muttering verses from the Koran.

--Why aren’t you crying?
--Why should I cry, who died?
--Keep quiet, said an angry aunt.
--I have never seen a bride like this, eyes as dry as fire.
--It just goes to show, you have much still to see cousin.

Once the aunt had finished, she took the second cup, and then three aunts came forward. This second step is meant to be a scrub but, the way these women do it, you’d think they were trying to peel her. Amina understands now why young brides cry. The henna is well perfumed, it has a nice odor. She has henna everywhere on her body, in her ears, eyes, and mouth. Wishing to rub her eyes, the aunts immediately block her hands on her thighs, believing that she is trying to struggle and remove everything.

--Let go of me, I have henna in my eyes.

The old aunt tightens her clothes, then covers her with a new clean sheet.

--Do not wash before tomorrow morning, we know you. Let the henna penetrate into your skin.

Starting now you will stay in your room with your friends and your cousins and you will keep the sheet on you, whatever you do.

--Remember, Amina, you cannot let people see your face. You cannot watch your marriage ceremony through the window. You cannot dance. You cannot watch your guests having fun. You cannot live your wedding. You do not have the right to be happy on your wedding day. Cry Amina, cry, empty yourself of all the sobs in your body, believe that you are unhappy, that you are sad and everyone will be proud of you. Cry and your name will serve as a shining example.

It is almost seven o’clock in the evening. A cousin has come to take Amina to her bath. She is carrying her on her back, covered by a sheet. A young bride does not walk during the wedding.

The bathroom is improvised. The real one is not big enough to hold all of the women. In the rear courtyard, the women formed a circle of at least twenty people. Once Amina was in the center, those who were in front made a wall with woven mats. Amina is completely undressed by the aunt who had applied the henna. She is seated on a stool. Next to her there is a large gourd filled with water, floating henna leaves, dates, white kola nuts. There is also a pail of clean water and a container of soap. She is washed by her aunt like a baby. She is well soaped, then rinsed. The aunt handed her the soap so that she could do her “intimate” washing but the women protested, it’s for the aunt to do, so she did it. After the “intimate” washing in front of twenty people, the grandmother recited verses from the Koran over the water in the gourd. The aunt poured the water over her head and then all over her body while reciting suras and offering advice.

-- Now you will kneel before your parents and ask their forgiveness. After that, all of your sins will be erased and you will have only those committed at your husband’s house. I hope you will have the fewest possible. Go, my daughter, and listen well to the advice your parents give to you, above all keep them always in your head, for you will need them.

Before leaving the room, her friends advise her to cry, to at least pretend, just while asking forgiveness from her parents. Tradition asks that the young bride cry from this moment up until her arrival at her husband’s home out of the sadness of leaving her family. Of course, the desire to respect this tradition brings some young brides to put on an act.

-- Be strong, you are not losing your parents. It is the destiny of each woman to one day leave her family to go and live with a man.
Upon arriving at the husband’s home, the old women removed the bride’s covering.

-- You are home now, you can remove this covering and moreover stop crying, or you risk scaring your husband with your red eyes.

Imagine their surprise, and moreover their anger, upon discovering that the young woman had dry cheeks and completely white eyes

At Lamine’s house, an old woman makes the bed, mumbling something between her teeth and her receding gums. She puts a white cloth on the bed. It is sewn to the four corners of the bed so that it won’t slip and so that the newlyweds do not end up on the sheet. This cloth will be recovered tomorrow morning by the old woman who made the bed, and it will serve as proof. If it is stained with blood, it will mean that Amina has escaped shame.

If the cloth is stained with blood, the mother will give a party. She will send roasted guinea fowl to her son-in-law, she will be congratulated, and the women will dance.

If the cloth comes back as white as it was before, the mother will spend the day crying. Friends and relatives will help her. Women will come to take the news of the bride or rather some of the cloth so they will be able to gossip, and they will parade into Amina’s room to insult her and to remind her that she has shamed her mother and dishonored her family. There will be no guinea fowl, no party, no jewelry, and no fifty-thousand francs and the husband will be free to either keep his wife or renounce her. Lamine’s family will come to make a scandal.

In the end, the women were left unsatisfied: the day after the wedding, the old woman came to wake Amina. Lamine did not hand over the cloth; he kept their wedding night a secret.

Positively Romantic

I married, when I am 20, complete grandiose hopes for the future. It is brought to family of Chistian, I was ready to undertake my marriage journey, as faithful and submissive wife and enthusiastic mother.

But just three years later, I found out that my husband had been cheating on me. I decided to call it quits and demanded a divorce. We were living in Kisumu at the time and since it had the highest prevalence of HIV infection in Kenya, I was aware of HIV/AIDS. But never for one minute, did I think I was going to be infected because, like many people, I believed that only promiscuous people caught the disease.

A year after splitting with my husband, I found love again. After a while, the relationship took a serious turn and we began to discuss the possibility of having children together. That was in 1994, when we decided to check our HIV status by getting tested. To my utter shock and horror, I tested positive while my boyfriend tested negative. I did not expect this because I was faithful throughout my marriage. I was healthy and had not fallen sick or shown any signs of being infected.

Not surprisingly, I lost all hope in life. I thought I was going to die and so I stopped living. I stopped making plans for my future and no longer had any interest in my job. I even declined a scholarship I had won to study abroad as I didn't see the point. My one constant worry was for my two-year-old son. I didn't know what would happen to him once I died.

Fortunately, my boyfriend remained supportive. He didn't desert me, but gave me the emotional support I so desperately needed at the time. From that experience, I learned that it is very important whom you choose to disclose your HIV status to the first time. That person can either build or destroy you, so it's crucial that they have a positive perspective towards life. Being a lawyer, my boyfriend constantly coached me on my human rights and urged me to move on with my life. We eventually parted and he went his own way, he is now married and has a family. But we remain good friends to this day and I will be forever grateful for his support. He gave me the strength to realize that it was not the end of the world and that my life should go on.

For the next four years after I was tested, we kept my HIV status private. I did not want to tell anyone because of the stigma associated with the virus. In 1998, my older sister, Terry, died of AIDS-related complications and my entire family supported her throughout her illness. Still, I continued to keep my status a secret.

Then while working with Safari Park Hotel, I decided to change my career to suit my needs as a woman living with HIV. HIV has a way of changing one's perspective completely. So I began to network with organizations dealing with HIV/AIDS - in order to learn more about it. For me, knowledge is power.

In order to share my status with others, I first had to learn how to deal with my stigma against myself. People will view and treat you how you view and treat yourself. If you don't appreciate or respect yourself, then others won't. It is very important, therefore, that people living with HIV first take responsibility for their own lives so they can then be responsible for the lives of others.

I was glad to discover that some organizations had risen above the social stigma associated with HIV/AIDS and hired people who were infected. A job turned up at the Holiday Inn, and part of the interviewing process included a medical pre-employment test. When the doctor gave me my results, I told him I was already aware and did not want it hidden from my records. Holiday Inn hired me to be their conference manager in spite of my HIV status.

It took a while longer but I eventually told my family that I was HIV-positive. They were very supportive though surprised that I had known for so long without telling them. They were even more surprised when they found out that my boyfriend knew and was still with me. It gave my brothers a different perspective on how to treat women, especially those infected with HIV. My friends, too, were surprised, learning that I had lived with the virus for so long without telling them and that we had kept hanging out and partying without any of them having a clue.

My life became as normal as I could make it. I continued hanging out with my friends, but I was cautious and knew my limit.

Because I so wanted to work in the HIV field, I took courses in public health from South Africa and in capacity building in sexual reproductive health from the Centre for African Family Studies. In 2000, I won a scholarship to London to study for a post-graduate degree in sociology. And it was here that I met JP, my current partner. Because I was heavily involved with an organization working with HIV, I was quite open about my status. JP knew I was HIV positive when he approached me, and he informed me that he was as well. We have been together now for four years, and I love the special companionship and support that this relationship affords me.

One is Not the Loneliest Number

“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.”
Virginia Woolf

There are several life skills my mother taught me before I set off into the world: how to properly separate my laundry; how to balance my checkbook; how to prepare red meat in an assortment of quick-and-easy ways. Other skills I picked up as a sink-or-swim necessity: how to negotiate rent; how to negotiate salary increases; how to negotiate failed relationships, hopeless heartache, the metaphysical realization that we die; and how to negotiate reasonable rates with the psychotherapist.

There are certain skills, however, that are often left out of public discourse, usually owing to our general squeamishness about anxiety-arousing issues such as mental illness, poverty, sexual dysfunction, and — what I would like to expound upon in this essay — being single. Or more specifically, being a single diner.

To walk into a restaurant by yourself on a Friday night, request a table for one, savor a full course meal complete with wine, and linger over your espresso while surrounded by tables of raucous friends or (even worse) affectionate lovers spooning gelato into each other’s mouths — to dine alone in supreme grace and dignity is a life skill akin to high art. Your mother never taught you this. Probably because she never spelled it out for you that at certain points of your life, you will be alone. If you are not or have not already been alone, you will be one day. And if you already are, welcome. The purpose of this essay is to reclaim the state of dining alone and to overthrow cultural assumptions that cow us into spending another desolate evening eating microwaved burritos while watching The Jeffersons on TV.

I admit, there are few things I enjoy more than sharing a meal with friends, either at home or at a restaurant; the conversation and laughter flow, we reminisce about old times, the palates are soothed and happy. Dining with a lover is usually a notch higher on the Richter scale of pleasant evenings, adding the element of being pampered and serviced by the wait staff, leaving us to concentrate on l’affaire d’amour in between bites of mu shu pork. But there are times in my life when I find myself far away from friends and even further away from having a lover. At these moments, I stubbornly refuse to give up the one epicurean pleasure I can truly satisfy by myself: eating. Why not go to a restaurant by myself? I don’t remember the first time I did, but I have many times since, and my experiences lead me to believe that the lone diner strikes an assortment of anxious emotions within people’s hearts. Whether it is fear (“Will I be her one day?”) or pity (“That poor girl!”) or relief (“Thank God I’m engaged to Bobby!”), most people would rather the single young woman dine alone in the privacy of her home, and not in public. However, I refuse to compromise my life to soothe the anxieties of others. In order to subvert the subtle discrimination against solo diners, we must first learn to identify it.

To begin, there are certain recurring reactions that happen whenever I dine alone, designed, I’m sure, to discourage the act. Most of these reactions fall under what I term single-phobia, or the irrational fear of independent people doing social activities by themselves. A dining experience in which I am harassed by singlephobia usually unfolds in the following manner:

Host: Table for…?

Me: One, please.

Host: (Arching a skeptical eyebrow) Okaaay . . . this way, please.

(The host then leads me past bright empty booths at the front of the restaurant to a shaky miniscule table in a dark corner next to the kitchen.)

Me: Couldn’t I have one of those front tables? I’d rather not sit in the dark.

Host: I’m sorry, but those tables are reserved for parties of two or more.

(What he really means to say is that the front tables are reserved for people with friends and social lives, and that people dine at restaurants to have a good time in the company of others. To maintain the festive atmosphere, they relegate me to the dark corner.)

Me: Fine.

(I am seated. The waiter takes my order nearly twenty minutes later. He only returns twice more, to bring food and to bring my check. He easily ignores my frantic hand gestures for more water, my polite yet assertive yelps of “Excuse me!” and focuses on any other place in the room when hustling past my table in and out of the kitchen. I know what he’s thinking, having been in the restaurant business myself: single diner equals small tip.)

Why does single-phobia permeate our culture? Perhaps we can blame the usual suspects: magazines, MTV, Top 40 boy-bands crooning their everlasting love to pubescent girls, urban bar culture (straight and gay), romantic comedies with trite endings, advertisements with ludicrous claims. But whatever the reasons, the object of the game is to not be alone. People spend lots of cash to be in a couple. Couples spend lots of cash being in couples. Call it a capitalist theory of modern love or just call me bitter, but whatever the explanation, this cultural phenomenon of anti-aloneness prevails wherever I attempt to enjoy a meal in a restaurant by myself.

For example, once when I was in New York City, I spent one homeless week in the Lucky Wagon, a pit passing for a hotel on the Chinatown–Little Italy border. At that point, I had only a hulking backpack of possessions, a pseudoglamorous magazine job paying subsistence wages, and a crazed determinism to keep me from ending up in the East River. My five-by-ten whitewashed room had no TV set to quell the voices in my head demanding of me, “How did you end up at this all-time low?” I tried to soothe my worries with dinner on Mulberry Street, the vivacious tourist trap of Italian eateries, where I chose a noisy, crowded little trattoria because it served my favorite dish, penne all’arrabiata — “angry pasta” for an angry girl.

The waiter sat me at a corner table, of course, me being the only single diner in a room full of birthday parties and groups of Japanese tourists. He was a handsome, young Italian American, his name may have been Anthony, and he laughed and joked with me for a bit. Then, broadcasting over the entire room in a booming voice, he asked me, “What are you doing eating alone?” Flushed from embarrassment and the wine, I shrugged my shoulders. “It’s Saturday night and you’re alone? What’s the matter, your boyfriend doesn’t take you out???” I started to explain that I didn’t have a boyfriend to take me out, that I didn’t even have any friends in New York, that I really was alone, but I realized he wouldn’t believe me. That’s when I began to understand how deeply entrenched in American culture the fear of the single diner is. It didn’t even cross Anthony’s mind that I was an independent, free being, eating dinner by myself.

Don’t be mistaken, I’m not some kind of gourmand misanthrope advocating antisocial behavior. I recognize the basic human need to feel love and affection. But I also believe that a young woman would do well for herself to recognize her relationship to the world and the conditions in the world that cause her to experience what our modernist friends the Existentialists called angst, or the feeling of despair and anguish. Night after night of frozen burritos and TV sitcom reruns is this citydwelling gal’s version of despair and anguish. But then an epiphany: the realization that in any life of substance during which risks and leaps of faith are taken, there are inevitably moments when there is only me, and that is a good thing, and I will celebrate by taking myself out as my favorite guest to a lovely dinner.

With all self-affirmations out of the way, I’d like to proceed with tips and techniques for interested parties on how to dine alone gracefully and enjoyably.

• First of all, the meal you are eating determines whether or not you may bring reading material to entertain yourself. I’m of the opinion that any brunch or lunch is a good time to bring the paper, a good book, a magazine, et cetera. If you forget to bring something, under no circumstances should you begin to shuffle through your Day Runner organizer, pretending to write notes in the mini-calendar section; it is a telltale sign that you are extremely uncomfortable dining alone and are desperate to look busy. Instead, calmly finish your meal and preoccupy yourself by staring blankly at people and eavesdropping blatantly on conversations. It’s entertaining, and you’ll seem intriguing, I guarantee.

• If you are eating at a more stylish restaurant, you might consider more sophisticated modes of self-entertainment, like drinking copiously. In restaurants with outdoor seating, I like to smoke. Be careful, though, not to drink or smoke too much before your meal is served, as you may make yourself ill, and that can get messy.

• One game I like to play every now and then when I’m dining at a finer eating establishment is “Food Critic.” Dress to the nines for your meal. At several key points during the meal (after swirling the first taste of wine around in your glass and after the first bite of each dish), pull out a notebook and pen and jot down notes. Make several calls on your cell phone to your answering machine at home, pretending you are making after-dinner plans, and drop the names of chic bars and media personalities whenever possible. If I do a good job, I can usually weasel a free dessert and free alcohol. It’s fun!

Before I conclude, I’d like to point out one very important thing to remember at all times: you are not really alone. Sure, the setting is for one and there is only a fake floral arrangement in a vase to greet you across the table. But who says you can’t converse with the floral arrangement? People talk to their plants and pets all the time — why is it so strange to speak with inanimate objects? A short conversation I had with my dinner last night went something like this:

Me: Hello, Mr. Pizza! I must eat you now!

A rather flat conversation, I admit, but thoroughly spontaneous and enjoyable nonetheless. Or if you like, solo dinners are good opportunities to resurrect imaginary childhood friends and catch up on old times with them. During my solo meals, I like to replay past arguments I’ve lost to friends or ex-lovers, perfecting the flawless retort I wish I had thought of at the time. However, I have to be careful not to argue out loud, as I tend to get carried away and alarm people at nearby tables. My point is, when dining alone, never underestimate the pleasure of your own company, and enjoy it with pride. And when all else fails, there are always the voices in your head. . . .

Lighting a Candle

I arrived to the small town in Michigan in cold the winter, to visit comrades, meeting. Like a season, I was in the stage in my life, when much things closed.

For years before, my days and nights were consumed with work to end military rule in my country Nigeria. That had ended suddenly in 1999 and I found myself struggling to re-learn neglected roles and possibly to develop a new one – me as a partner in a wonderful relationship.

For some reason, returning to a cycle of clubbing and partying as I sought to meet and be met by a potential boyfriend didn’t appeal to me. So I delved deep into my life’s experiences for something that I could do to call my soul mate to me. I had been raised to believe that one’s intentions in themselves were powerful and made all the difference, so the clearer a person was in setting an intention, the more likely she would be in achieving her aims. Also, a key part of my fellowship program emphasized the need to use ritual to mark points in our lives. Bringing the two ideas together, I decided to do a ritual to express my readiness to meet my Mr. Right.

So it was that one winter’s night in Kalamazoo, Michigan, I lit a candle, closed my eyes and set as clear an intention as I knew how to give, expressing my desire to welcome someone wonderful into my life. The very act was empowering and liberating, because it felt like I sent out a radio signal that would be received by Mr. Right and I no longer needed to go searching. Instead of hours spent worrying if a certain guy was interested or not, my hours were now spent turning a searchlight into the dark tunnels of my soul. I gained a serenity that allowed me to hear myself think, to sink deeply into my heart’s deepest yearnings. Beneath all the conditioning, what mattered to me?

A year passed, and then in the next, a friend became more. In so many ways, my special friend was all wrong – he was of a different race, a different faith, and a different nationality. The old me would probably not have recognized him but the new me knew that in all the ways that mattered, he was everything I had ever hoped for. I can’t know if my candle ritual helped any in bringing my special person to me but I’ve always felt that somehow it helped me get clear about what I needed, which made arriving at my destination possible.

Being True to the Most Important Partnership in A Our Life – Ourselves

As women, we are air-conditioned, to look outside itself for answers, for connection. We are air-conditioned, to think of other at first. We are air-conditioned, to do alternatives which do not serve the our highest well, it is not honoured beauty to our to individual essence. We are air-conditioned, to make decisions from sense there not sufficiently, from a lie social faiths, supported for generations and from sense, that we can not have everything, what we wish truly.

We bring all of this to the relationships we choose in our lives. In the marriages that we say yes to and to the divorces we later face. To the marriages we say yes to and to the loneliness we later feel. To the long term relationships and marriages that serve to contain our brightest light instead of helping us shine brighter. To relationships that become more important than the most important one we have – the one we have with ourselves.

And it is time that we realize that to have the partnerships, the marriages we desire in life, we can’t start with the other, we must start with ourselves. The simple and often ignored fact is that a relationship should enhance our life, otherwise, we are better off without it. Enhancing does not mean better financial means, more security, reduction of past pain or more or less of anything else – that is our job and our job alone. A relationship that enhances our lives enables us to be an even better person because of the support, love, compassion and understanding it brings. It is full of absolute admiration of our soul and our partner’s gratitude that they can share in our soul’s journey.

If we truly want a relationship that supports our growth, honors our essence and breeds unconditional love then we have to create the space for it in our lives. We must believe it’s possible, we must take responsibility for healing ourselves and we must be willing to be truthful with ourselves.

Unfortunately, many women do not end up in a relationship that honors her soul – not because it’s not possible, but because we settle for less or because we don’t ask the right questions of ourselves or our partners – or if we ask the right questions, we don’t answer truthfully. We must understand that if our partner can’t see our soul, then they will never enhance our lives to the levels that we deserve.

Settling is a word that we should all remove from our vocabulary. Somewhere the words settling, compromise and collaboration got mixed up. A relationship always takes collaboration – two people working together to solution where both are satisfied. However, a relationship should not involve settling for less than we want in a partnership or in our life overall. A relationship should not require compromise of our happiness for anything or anyone. It should not require being less than who we are or giving up things we desire. Somewhere women got the notion that sacrifice was required, that relationships must have sacrifice. The truth is that contrary to popular mindset, they don’t and they shouldn’t. There is no glory in sacrifice, no matter what the martyrs say.

Truth is a word we should all bring into our lives – everyday. Truth is hard and being the creative souls we are, we are well equipped to avoid it. However, the only way to the joy we seek is through truth. We have to be willing to face deep, authentic and real truth. Not what we think is right. Not what others tell us is right. But our own truth. Truth that leads to true joy, even if it stings to get there. To find truth, we must strip away fallacies we build to shelter us from things we don’t want to look at or that we create to give ourselves a sense of security. If we are willing to be 100% truthful, what we desire is possible.

There are many myths to dispel and many questions to ask to find the truth in ourselves and in our relationships to create a partnership that honors our essence. For now, I would like to invite you on a short journey into two questions that can get us to the heart of the matter very quickly. All that is required of you is a willingness to set aside your perceptions and beliefs for a few minutes and a commitment to complete truth (remember only you can hear you). With these two things in hand, we can take the journey into these questions – two questions that most of us will be quick to answer “yes” to but two questions that many, if truthful, would have to answer “no” to.

The questions are these:

Do I fully, without question, love myself and believe in the core of my soul that I deserve nothing but that same type of love back?

Am I committed above all else to my happiness, at all times?

These two questions are the anchor to everything. If you don’t believe that you deserve love or if you aren’t 100% committed to your own happiness, you will settle, you will bend, you will create illusion so that you don’t have to be alone. And you will do so without even knowing it. It is those of us who are not willing to answer with absolute honesty that create the biggest illusions in our lives.

It is easy to ask these questions and simply say “yes”, almost in reflex. Who wouldn’t want to say yes – you’d have to be crazy, right? Wrong. You see, the answer is not the point of the questions. The point is to give yourself permission and time to sit in the question and feel, see and hear the answers inside you. Inside the places you normally don’t let yourself look. The places where absolute truth lives. The power of question is in the question itself, not the ability to answer it. So, if you answered “yes” to these questions in less than 10 seconds, your real answer is probably “no”. Real answers don’t come that quickly.

So let’s take a closer look at this idea of loving yourself completely. There are many people that would say they love themselves completely but then act in conflict to that, especially in what they tolerate and create in their relationships. Why? Not being truthful.

I can speak from experience here. In the past, I thought I loved myself. I had a high self-opinion and I rather liked myself. I was successful in my job and had many friends, so of course, I thought I completely loved myself. That was until I ended a 15-year relationship, which was made up of all kinds of things that indicated in fact, I really didn’t understand what loving myself was. I settled, put up with, looked the other way, made excuses. I put up with things then that I never would today. Not because I am stubborn now or because I think that I am better than anyone else, but simply because I finally made the journey into myself, into truth to discover what true self love was and to come to own that I had not really been living from that place.

When I went inside, I learned what it means to love oneself, to honor oneself in the highest regard. I learned to be my own best friend. Once you hold yourself in that place, you demand nothing less. I expect the same level of love and respect I have for myself from the person I call significant other, partner, spouse, etc. If that person cannot exist on, give on, or be on that level, then I choose to be alone rather than with someone that can’t give the level of love and respect I deserve. There is no settling. Half is not enough. Half time is not enough. I love myself everyday and I expect the same from those I am in relationship with.

The second question deals with happiness and our absolute commitment to our own. The two questions go hand in hand for how can we find happiness if we don’t love ourselves and vice versa. Can’t. Period.

When going into the question “Am I committed above all else to my happiness, at all times?”, the important thing to focus on is ‘at all times’. Let me explain. If you answer this question with a “yes”, congratulations! I don’t know anyone that would first off answer the question with a “no”. The real test - and this is where digging deep into our souls comes in - is being 100% committed. Every day, every minute, in every situation, are you committed to your happiness? Sadly, for many, upon examining decisions in life, upon examining relationships in life, most people couldn’t answer “yes” because most haven’t made the conscious commitment to own their happiness 100% of the time.

The good news is that this is a very practical question, one that you can use every day to measure the decisions you make. If you are 100% committed to your happiness you will always choose that which reinforces love and respect for yourself and in turn others. Because happiness here is not about material satisfaction or short-term gratification, happiness here is about true, sustainable, authentic joy. Don’t be confused.

An example. You are in a relationship and your partner has done something that you dislike more than once, you get mad, you fight, you make up and then all is well until it happens again… and again… and again. You ask yourself “Do I love myself completely?” Your answer “yes”. You have done your work and you really do love yourself.

Now, let’s use the practical question “Am I committed to my happiness 100%” and apply it to the situation at hand. Does the situation make you happy? “No”. Do you keep putting up with it? “Yes”. May it give you short-term gratification? “Yes”. Does it bring you true joy? “No”. Does that seem congruent with someone that says she loves herself? “No”. The happiness question doesn’t let you hide. You have to face the truth of unhappiness and then decide what to do about it. If you ignore it and settle, you are not 100% committed to your happiness. If you do something to change the situation, whatever that looks like (setting a boundary, saying what you need, ending the relationship, taking a break, etc.), you can ensure that you are acting to support your commitment to happiness.

And to be clear, let me dispel any thoughts that being committed to your happiness 100% is selfish. That is a load of bull. And it’s what has gotten women into trouble for centuries - always giving, giving, compromising, compromising – putting others first. The notion that we must put others first is a big line of guilt and a setup for failure. I am not saying that we shouldn’t give to others – giving to others is a critical part of having a fulfilling and happy life. And I strongly believe that if you want to give to others you have to give to yourself first. You must make sure you are whole and full first so that you have something to give to others. There is no guilt in that.

Happiness and love are two things that we crave most in this world. And they are two things that we force out of our lives all of the time, everyday. It is part of the irony of the human existence. However, I do believe that simply by being aware that love and happiness is a choice we can make in our lives, we take the first step in creating it into our reality. You deserve happiness and love – don’t ever let any one, even yourself, tell you differently. Honor the essence of you. Namaste.

On resurrections, Indian families with the children of grown man age practice an ancient ritual. They wake before dawn and uneasily wait favourable arrival paper on Sunday. As soon as it is delivered, they report a short suppliant before they will clean papers for the desirable Matrimonial section.

While arranging marriages is an obsession as old as the Kamasutra, it has taken on a few modern avatars: matrimonial newspaper ads and websites being the parental arsenal of choice for securing eternal happiness for their unwed children.

One lazy Sunday as my friends and I were lounging over chai and cigarettes, we decided that we needed to find a suitable girl for the eligible bachelor in our midst. As I was combing through the matrimonial section full of ‘fair, slim, professionally qualified, homely girls and innocent-divorcees’ I spied an ad for Muslim brides and found one that sounded eerily like me. When I read it to my father over the phone amid fits of laughter, there was silence at his end. He had indeed listed my profile on the Matrimonial pages.

This was not the first time that my parents had brought up the issue of marriage. The pressure to get married started when I was very young. Twelve months old to be exact. When my father, who was away at the time of my birth, learnt that he had a daughter he wasted no time in promising my tiny hand in marriage to his friends’ son.

When I grew older, my parents would haul me off to dinner parties and weddings where I would be introduced to a different assortment of eligible bachelors. Later they began preparing my resume and passing it on to anyone and everyone who was connected to a potential partner. I discovered the existence of my resume, drafted by none other than my father, only because I started getting strange calls from my relations, and sometimes random strangers, asking me about my qualifications, complexion, and cooking skills.

After graduation, while my parents began looking for a suitor in earnest, I went on to pursue a masters in Bombay and began to work there as well. My decision to leave home was fraught with tension and guilt. There was a lot emotional blackmail, tears and threats, but in the end we struck a bargain; I could do as I pleased as long as I met the men they lined up.

I met a dizzying array of men. One quizzed me on my religious knowledge, another spoke in painful detail about his academic accomplishments; another magnanimously proclaimed ”I will allow my wife to work”; an America returnee who couldn’t stop talking about his BMW and ”Game room”. When I in turn asked them about Amitav Ghosh, David Lynch or Green Day I only drew blank stares.

I also had to deal with a volley of questions from the prospective in-laws. I was looked up and down, all my proportions sized up, and then interrogated on my language skills (English, Hindi, Urdu), culinary dexterity (Maggi instant noodles) and deference to elders (non-existent).

After one too many of such meetings, when my parents showed me yet another picture of a prospective candidate, I told them that this was the last time I was going to do this. No exceptions. However, when I read his resume, my interest was piqued. He had a degree from IIT (India’s top engineering school) and a PhD from an Ivy League University.

When we met his family they welcomed us with such warmth, I soon forgot why I was there. They had a bookshelf full of my favorite authors (always a good sign) and soon we were talking about everything from politics to the latest Bollywood blockbuster. Later when they asked me what I was looking for in a husband, I actually was puzzled why they were asking me that! I mumbled something I deemed suitable and soon phone numbers were exchanged and he was to call me.

Our first phone conversation lasted two hours. That progressed to emails and more phone calls. We talked about our work, about films, books, living abroad, college, elections, news, anything and everything. We never once mentioned the ‘M’ word.

So was there a moment when I realized that he was the One? Not really, but to his credit, not only did he know who Amitav Ghosh was, he even knew someone related to him!

We met each other soon after and decided to get married. When I told my friends however, most of them were mystified. They couldn’t understand why I wanted to get married this way. Some felt this was some ”betrayal of the sisterhood”. Others wanted to know if I had caved in to parental pressure. Maybe, but I had been on the arranged marriage circuit a while, and this was the first time I had actually contemplated getting married. My first thought was, “Why did they find him? Why couldn’t I?” But they did and I would have been a fool to say no just to prove a point.

So does arranged marriage work? It’s been nearly two years since we have been married and we are, dare I say it, happy. We share doing the dishes and the laundry, I don’t make perfectly round rotis and sometimes a meal is just Maggi, but the most important thing is that we see each other as equals. So in the end arranged marriage did work out for me.

My parents saw each other for fifteen minutes before they got married, my husband and I talked for nearly six months before we did. My parents faced more parental and family pressures than I did. I had the freedom to say no, my parents did not have the luxury of choice.

Nowadays, arranged marriages are no longer just decided by the parents, both young men and women play an active role in the process of looking for their life partner. In these ”semi-arranged” or ”arranged-love marriages”, the only thing you have to be sure of is that you do want to get married. So all I can say, is keep an open mind, you never know if you’ll get lucky. I know I did.

A Wind Untamed

very morning, it dealt with crowds which stormed an arriving bus. It was difficultly to find job in its profession in it little city, so that it had to replace regional the capital.

The return commute was also tough; the winning strategy was to sneak on to the bus shielded by someone else’s broad back. If for some reason that did not work, she could always stick out her hand holding the briefcase and let the crowd suck her in to the bus’s warm womb. The only tricky part was not letting go of the case. Right now commuting seemed like a bad dream. She had a week’s vacation ahead of her, and she didn’t care that it was unpaid. The knocking of train wheels, usually grating, sounded to her like a hymn to a new life. She was traveling not to relax, not to shop, not to worship at cultural shrines. Her trip was an attempt to change her fate. An attempt to stop retailing her brains for pocket change. An attempt to leave behind a city whose dark windy streets were filled with unhappy people who did not know how to smile, a place where one could plan no further than tomorrow, where life was full of uncertainty and fear. In that city her peers never dreamed of having children because they could not imagine how they would be able to provide for them. So they didn’t want them. What did they want? Quick sex enjoyed strictly within the limits of easy friendship, free of any obligations.

Jeff H., a promising financial analyst from sunny Oklahoma, wanted to have kids. He wanted them to grow up bilingual. He assumed his Russian was fairly good because he had worked for three years in St. Petersburg. In his first letter he wrote about his love for the city and his desire to marry a Russian woman.

“He looks like Chip and Dale rolled into one,” she thought when examining his picture. Apart from this odd love for Russia, Jeff seemed to her a typical American, pragmatic and businesslike. This impression clashed with his stated hobby. “I love adventure,” he wrote. “I love new people, new countries. I love discovering new things since I easily get bored.”

“It seems that I am to become his new adventure. . . .” They agreed to meet at the entrance to the Nevsky Prospekt metro station.

The hands of the clock were steadily crawling towards five. The hurrying crowds flowed indifferently around a man who stood by the metro wearing a gray coat, which seemed too light for the St. Petersburg winter. The man kept checking his watch. He left when the evening light drained down into the Neva River and the pink brush of sunset touched the green wintry sky. Several days later, he found her email in his in-box.

“Thank you for having come. When I was traveling to Saint Petersburg, I thought that only a few steps separated me from a happy future. Forgive me, but I did not dare approach you. I saw your eyes, and it seemed to me they were looking for someone extraordinary. There is nothing exceptional about me! The picture that I sent you looks better than I do in real life; it happens sometimes. In the picture, I look like a tender, shy Russian girl in whose eyes froze a dream of a tranquil life with a comfortable home, lovely children, and a solid husband who can take care of his family. I’m sure you are tired of the triumphant smiles of American ladies, who are too strong to need anybody. I could become your wife. But for that I would have to bury my true self. It seemed to me that you were seeking someone timid and dependent. I might have appeared timid and dependent in my letters to you, yet I am strong. I was afraid that I couldn’t fulfill the western idea of the patient, agreeable Russian woman. I was afraid that you wouldn’t like me. I don’t want to deceive you from the beginning. Yes, I am tired of this boring, gray life and I want comfort, warmth, a family. But marriage without love is impossible for me. My ethics prohibit me from giving up my freedom in exchange for your sponsorship. When I saw you, you seemed so lonely, as if you had lost hope forever. Sweet sadness poisoned my joy then. It was like a dream that did not come true. It was like the wind that could not be tamed.”

For the rest of the day, she wandered aimlessly up and down Nevsky Prospekt, trying not to think about the man in a gray coat waiting for her in vain at the entrance to the metro. The air rang with freedom and abandon.

“Some fashionable writer once said that Saint Petersburg can only be loved. There’s nothing to do here but love, he said. So I’ll love. I will love all its different guises: the wet and windy city of the winter, the dusty and humid city of the summer. At least this love will be reciprocated.”

The white flames of a January day are put out by the black ink of the night. The late moon hangs in the pale sky like a round of moldy cheese. Its light pours through the window and fills the room. The silence, held captive by four walls, seems sinister and mysterious.

The woman sleeps. She dreams of a city washed by the spring rain, of asphalt turned blue with puddles, of constellations of streets awakened by the chattering birds. The sun’s rays are dancing on the fierce green leaves and on the dazzling gold cupolas of Saint Isaac’s. She smiles in her sleep.

“It’s time to learn to live in the now. Time to trust that tomorrow will come without fail, and then everything will begin anew.”

Expecting (from The Modern Jewish Girl’s Guide to Guilt)

The mice have eaten the arms and necks off all my cashmere sweaters and I am just over it. I know they are using the cushy yarns to build nests for their babied, but can’t they do that somewhere else and with someone else’s cashmere sweaters? Tonight as I brushed my teeth at the kitchen sink, I heard scratching and looked up to see two tiny mice running along the molding over the sofa. When I came up to bed, I found one arm of my black sweater, chewed off as perfectly as a piece cut from a dress pattern, lying on the floor next to the nightstand. I can’t take it. We’ve got to get a cat, or maybe two cats.

Or maybe I should call Terminix? I hate the thought of the little beasts gnawing on poison and then crawling somewhere to die, bloated with thirst. But at eight weeks pregnant and counting, I’ve got my own nest to feather, and mice droppings all over the kitchen counter just won’t do.

How Darwinian.

On the way up to this mice infested paradise, S. and I got into an argument. We were walking into Saul’s, the local Jewish deli, and S. said he didn’t feel comfortable because there aren’t ever any other black people at Saul’s and the pictures on the walls remind him of Zionism and all the horrible things being done to Palestinians in its name. Because I’ve got a little Jewish in my African-American, or a little African-American in my Jewish, depending on the day, I know what he means. But I feel very at home in Saul’s, and I feel this crazy, irrational, out-of-control desire to protect Jews and Judaism from people’s negative perceptions, whether they have some basis or not.

I launched into a tirade about how the Israeli government is as far from many of the Israeli people as the Bush government is from many Americans. I pointed out the long, liberal tradition of American Jews. I made analogies to the knee-jerk assumptions people make about being African-Americans. S. tried to get a word in and have a conversation rather than a debate, but I had already hoisted my ivy-league machine-gun mind onto my shoulder and begun the assault. After a few rounds, my voice was tight and accusatory. S. withdrew from the conversation completely.

Taking a breath, I had a flash of the baby and how arguments like this might frighten him, if they didn’t already. I thought about something S. and I have talked a lot about: ceasing argument in our relationship forever and prioritizing peace between us over whatever issue our intellects have gotten hooked on. I never want ideology or “being right” to take precedence over loving one another and being a family. There’s just too much to lose, S. for starters. My baby’s mental health is another important something that comes to mind. He’ll never be able to handle being a second black, white, and Jewish Buddhist if his parents can’t keep it together.

I think that underneath the defensiveness is guilt. I feel guilty about what is happening in occupied territories. I feel guilty that so many Jews have been able to assimilate and become successful while so many from other marginalized populations have not. I feel guilty that I can sit in a restaurant and feel comfortable while at the same time, someone I love feels awkward and unwelcome.

But I think feeling guilty is just a way out of taking responsibility. As long as I feel guilty I can pretend that I am actually doing something about what is going on – I am feeling guilty – when in fact I am doing next to nothing to directly impact the peace process, or to change the culture of Saul’s. The guilt-induced tearing at my psyche also makes me feel as if I, too, am suffering alongside the ones being wounded. I, too, am a victim of the whole rotten mess. Which is true, but also puts the responsibility for fixing the whole mess where, exactly?

Before we went to bed last night, we talked about names. I’ve been calling the baby Milarepa after a Buddhist ascetic who tames both human beings and animals by singing to them.

I wish we had a cat to tame these mice.

Maybe we should name the cat Milarepa.


June 5th, 2004

Went to my friend Trajal’s dance performance downtown tonight, a piece inspired by Bret Easton Ellis’s book Less Than Zero, all about the deep insecurity that fashion often masks. As someone who has never met a Prada skirt she didn’t like, I found it very insightful. Afterward, a bunch of us went to dinner and I asked people to come up with names. The response to Milarepa was lukewarm, but people liked Tenzin, which I’ve been throwing around for the last few weeks.

“Tenzin Walker,” our playwright friend Brooke said. “That’s strong.” Trajal took to it right away, and started to include Tenzin in all our future plans. “Well, when Tenzin is born, we’ll have to have a party,” and “I can’t wait to go to Paris with Tenzin.”

Paris with Tenzin!

Yesterday on the phone, I asked Trajal if he liked his name, or if having to constantly spell it for people drove him crazy. He said he didn’t always, but that for most of his life he has loved his name and can’t imagine being called anything else. I can’t imagine it either. Trajal is so sui generic, so unique, that I can’t help crediting his name with inspiring at least some of the freedom he’s claimed for himself. I don’t think he could have been the complete iconoclast that he is if his name was John.

Or maybe he could, and I am just looking for justification to name the baby something that isn’t in the Bible. Last week I had lunch with my editor, who has worked on tons of Buddhist books, and she said that the American kids with Tibetan names all want to be names Diane and Michelle. That have me pause but then I thought, don’t all American kids want to be names Diane or Michelle?

Anyway, tonight I felt like the belle of the ball. Even though it was Trajal’s night, being pregnant makes every night my night. Not long ago I heard Chritiane Northrup speaking about yin wisdom, and how the egg waiting for the sperm is full of it. The egg just calls out the sperm and then waits, knowing the whole school is just going to come calling. I feel like that. For the first time in my life, being is effortless. My job is to sit and glow. All I have to do is wait and the whole world, the whole big life experience, is going to come and land right at my feet.

Tenzin Walker!


September 23, 2004

Last night I told everyone I was thinking about naming the baby Tenzin. My stepmother looked up from her plate and said, “Tenzin? What kind of a name is that?” Then my father said that no matter what I named him, he was going to exercise his right as a grandfather to call him whatever he wanted, which was Chaim. I told them that Tenzin is the Dalai Lama’s name and that I couldn’t think of anyone more inspiring to be named after. And then my stepmother said, “Isn’t there anyone in the family you could name him after?” And my father said, “Yeah Rebec, what about Samuel? David? Moishe?”

I felt like Judas.

Before we arrived at the question of what to name the first biological grandchild of our clan, we focused our collective energy on whether or not my sister should take a role on a reality show. My brother and I were vehemently opposed and got so outrageously vocal about the whole thing, with my father chiming in from the sidelines with a “legal perspective” and my stepmother picking at her miso cod and trying not to get involved, that my sister finally had no choice but to accuse us of ruining her life. She stormed out of the room as I yelled, “We are only telling you this because we love you,” to which everyone nodded approvingly and my father said, “That’s right, Rebec,” following which my sister slammed her bedroom door.

It was my first dinner with the fam since being home, the fam being the Jewish half of my family, and home being their apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. My father got a huge kick out of watching me eat two California rolls, one filet mignon Yakitori, a giant salad, an order of Agadashi tofu, two bowls of miso soup, and an entire order of steamed vegetable dumplings. He kept beaming and saying things like, “So, you’re eating for two, my Rebecca? Eat plenty for my grandson in there, the little schutsky,” and asking if I wanted the rest of his chicken lo mein.


September 25, 3004

We went to Ronnie and Tom’s to break the fast for Yom Kippur. Jason, Ronnie’s black, white, and Jewish son with whom I used to watch Love Boat and Fantasy Island sprawled on his mom’s bed, was there with his new girlfriend. She’s Cuban, but has never been to Cuba. Of course this possibility didn’t occur to me until after I had talked about how beautiful the island was and how the people are so incredible. The blank look on her face tipped me off. Then I started obsessing about how her family must have lost everything in the Revolution and they probably hated Fidel or at least have serious legitimate gripes and here I come, a spoiled American, talking about it like just another place I visited and added to my places-where-I-have-gone-and-now-have-an-opinion-about list. Disgusting.

The whole name thing came up again. Ronnie said, “Tenzin? No, I don’t like that so much.” Then my stepmother said, “What are the kids at school going to call him?” and my brother said, “Ten.” My father threw his hands up and said, “I like Chaim,” and I said, “Dad, we talked about this,” which we had, earlier in the day. I told him that I would not have anyone, including his grandfather, subjecting my child to even the merest hint of identity confusion. I said, “What if Grandma insisted on calling me Susan?” He paused and said, “You’re right, I would have told her that your name was Rebecca. But how is he going to get a job with a name like Tenzin? You know,” he said seriously, “there is a group of women with names like Shanequa speaking publicly about how their names have kept them from succeeding in the work place. They’re all changing their names to Mary.”

I told him that Tenzin was a perfectly respectable name, and part of a tradition at least 2,500 years old.

Then I asked him how many jobs he thought Chaim would get, and we both burst into laughter.



October 5, 2004

Talked for a long time last night with S. Seemingly out of nowhere I suggested we name the baby Jonah, or maybe David. S. kind of went through the roof. Um, hello? We’re Buddhist and, more than that, we made a decision. Please don’t tell me your ambivalence is stirred up again.

But it’s not ambivalence, it’s guilt. I feel like I am letting the clan down. Even more than that, I worry that if the baby has a name that doesn’t resonate with my family’s biblical template, they may not bond with him. In this crazy world, my baby is going to need grandparents. Isn’t it my responsibility as a mother to make sure the seeds for these important relationships are planted?

I also want him to relate to his Jewish roots, to know what it means to be a part of this crazy tribe of people who mix love and arguing like chocolate syrup and milk, who use Yiddish proverbs as terms of endearment, and who manage to find fabulous YSL sandals in the mountains of lame shoes at the Barney’s Warehouse Sale. I want him to know that his grandfather believed in justice in the old-fashioned, Jewish lefty way, and that even though he’s a Buddhist, he’s related to one the most revered rebbes in Judaism.

Maybe guilt is the mechanism that holds us all together and keeps us from completely spinning out into non-Jewhood. I heard somewhere that human beings, in terms of the way we organize ourselves, most resemble pack animals. As in wolves, dogs, wildebeest. We want everyone in our pack to smell the same. If they don’t, we’re not sure they’re really one of us, and if they’re not one of us, how can we trust them?

Biblical name=Smelling the same
Smelling the same=Trust
Trust=Survival

Biblical name=Survival.

Sigh.




November 29, 2004

I am starting to think that giving a baby a Tibetan name isn’t a betrayal of family so much as it is a sign of maturation.

S. and I were flipping through a magazine, talking about how many people are stunted in their development, hovering in an adolescent state well into their fifties and sixties, even until death. He defined adolescent as being overly concerned with the acceptance of peers, and fearful of rejection or confrontation with the adult world.

Which made me thing of George Costanza on Seinfeld, the Jewish guy masquerading as Italian who still lives with his parents, and of the stereotypical Jewish man still unhealthily meshed with his mother. I think I can safely say that guilt is the mechanism by which he remains ensnared. Who can stand the emotional blowback that comes with breaking away?

If guilt keeps up from moving forward and acting on our beliefs and aspirations, it certainly follows that not acting on our beliefs and aspirations can keep us in a state of arrested development. If we aren’t diligent in our efforts to mature, at some point cutting the cord of familial expectation, we become infantilized by it.

That seems pretty clear.

Now every time I feel guilty about the baby’s name, I think about George Costanza. Even though he’s not Jewish, the image still works.



December 23, 2004

Um, can I ask one small but very relevant question? Why the hell doesn’t anyone tell you how much it’s going to hurt? Oy f-ing vey. Here I thought I was going to have this natural birth, with my beloved midwife and her fabulous assistant. I thought if the pain got too bad I would hop into the birthing pool, and because I love to swim and take baths, it would somehow relax me and ease the pain.

The only thing that could ease the pain was an epidural, and if I do this again, which at the moment I cannot imagine, I will demand one after the first contraction, if not before.

The whole thing was a miracle, but more on that later. At the moment I must document my newfound respect for every human being who has given birth, and I completely retract my judgment of every woman who has had or will have a scheduled C-section. I mean really, maybe I just have a low threshold for pain, but I don’t think so. It is outrageous. I remember screaming, somewhere in between the toilet, the birthing pool, the bed, and the shower, that I couldn’t believe every person on this earth got here this way. It just doesn’t seem possible.

But it is and now, 30 hours after it all began, I have this little baby boy who is the most vulnerable, unbelievably precious thing I have ever seen.

I honestly don’t know if I can bear it. The joy. The pain. The responsibility.

His name is Tenzin Walker.

as i write these words, i am feeling tired, which is not new, as i have been feeling tired every day for two
and a half years, since an enormous earthquake, tornado, thunderstorm, and atom bomb hit my life all at
the same time. yes, my son was born and that was that.

i spent thirty-one years before that day preparing
for its arrival, for “the return of the king.” of course, i had not the faintest clue that’s what i was doing. so
many years spent focusing, bettering, falling, kicking, striving, arriving, not arriving, hoping, dreaming,
preening, screaming, laughing, flirting, hurting, crying, lying, creating, waiting, running, running, winning,
spinning, growing, knowing, not knowing, sowing . . . and then, he appeared. like the first woman on
earth to give birth. that was me. that’s what i am.
so now, there is light coming in through the crack in the door. no less, no more.
now, i am still the same. and i will never be the same. . . .
now, if the angel of death comes down and asks for his soul (the king’s), he gets mine instead,
no question about it.
now, i am going to sleep.
love, noa

------------
Lyrics

There is light coming in
through the crack in the door
now
there is hope
where i’d never expect it before
now
there are so many things
but there’s nothing at all
now
you are learning to stand
i am learning to fall.
now
as the air in the night
becomes cooler and sweet
now
i get up seven times
just to cover his feet
now
there is pain
but i’ve packed it away for next year
now
there is newness and grace and for now,
there’s no fear.
then
i can hardly remember what then used to be
then
there was someone i knew
looked exactly like me
i was running and running
with so much to boast
and i had no idea
what matters the most
later
when all of this has turned to songs
and faded pics
later
when colored wooden blocks
turn into heavy bricks
later
when you will greet me only
with the shyest smile
who knows what later brings?
and so meanwhile . . .
now
there is light coming in
through the crack in the door
now
there is hope
where i’d never expect it before
now
there are so many things
but there’s nothing at all
now
you are learning to stand
i am learning to fall.

Old maid

You keep asking me
why I still haven’t married.
This time, I didn’t find it funny.

I looked around me for some answers:
Perhaps they’re written in my poems.
Perhaps they’re sketched in my paintings.
Perhaps they’re framed in my films.
I tried hard to remember
if this is what I chose:
the camera instead of the casserole,
the canvas instead of the cradle,
the metaphor instead of a mate.

You’re still asking me
why I still don’t have a partner.
Never in my whole life
did I consider being single
as a curse.
I won’t look around for a while
even if you ask one more time.
The answer might still be long in coming.

It was hard to find a job in her profession in her little town

Every morning, she mixed with the crowds that stormed the arriving bus. It was hard to find a job in her profession in her little town, so she had to commute to the regional capital.

The return commute was also tough; the winning strategy was to sneak on to the bus shielded by someone else’s broad back. If for some reason that did not work, she could always stick out her hand holding the briefcase and let the crowd suck her in to the bus’s warm womb. The only tricky part was not letting go of the case. Right now commuting seemed like a bad dream. She had a week’s vacation ahead of her, and she didn’t care that it was unpaid. The knocking of train wheels, usually grating, sounded to her like a hymn to a new life. She was traveling not to relax, not to shop, not to worship at cultural shrines. Her trip was an attempt to change her fate. An attempt to stop retailing her brains for pocket change. An attempt to leave behind a city whose dark windy streets were filled with unhappy people who did not know how to smile, a place where one could plan no further than tomorrow, where life was full of uncertainty and fear. In that city her peers never dreamed of having children because they could not imagine how they would be able to provide for them. So they didn’t want them. What did they want? Quick sex enjoyed strictly within the limits of easy friendship, free of any obligations.

Jeff H., a promising financial analyst from sunny Oklahoma, wanted to have kids. He wanted them to grow up bilingual. He assumed his Russian was fairly good because he had worked for three years in St. Petersburg. In his first letter he wrote about his love for the city and his desire to marry a Russian woman.

“He looks like Chip and Dale rolled into one,” she thought when examining his picture. Apart from this odd love for Russia, Jeff seemed to her a typical American, pragmatic and businesslike. This impression clashed with his stated hobby. “I love adventure,” he wrote. “I love new people, new countries. I love discovering new things since I easily get bored.”

“It seems that I am to become his new adventure. . . .” They agreed to meet at the entrance to the Nevsky Prospekt metro station.

The hands of the clock were steadily crawling towards five. The hurrying crowds flowed indifferently around a man who stood by the metro wearing a gray coat, which seemed too light for the St. Petersburg winter. The man kept checking his watch. He left when the evening light drained down into the Neva River and the pink brush of sunset touched the green wintry sky. Several days later, he found her email in his in-box.

“Thank you for having come. When I was traveling to Saint Petersburg, I thought that only a few steps separated me from a happy future. Forgive me, but I did not dare approach you. I saw your eyes, and it seemed to me they were looking for someone extraordinary. There is nothing exceptional about me! The picture that I sent you looks better than I do in real life; it happens sometimes. In the picture, I look like a tender, shy Russian girl in whose eyes froze a dream of a tranquil life with a comfortable home, lovely children, and a solid husband who can take care of his family. I’m sure you are tired of the triumphant smiles of American ladies, who are too strong to need anybody. I could become your wife. But for that I would have to bury my true self. It seemed to me that you were seeking someone timid and dependent. I might have appeared timid and dependent in my letters to you, yet I am strong. I was afraid that I couldn’t fulfill the western idea of the patient, agreeable Russian woman. I was afraid that you wouldn’t like me. I don’t want to deceive you from the beginning. Yes, I am tired of this boring, gray life and I want comfort, warmth, a family. But marriage without love is impossible for me. My ethics prohibit me from giving up my freedom in exchange for your sponsorship. When I saw you, you seemed so lonely, as if you had lost hope forever. Sweet sadness poisoned my joy then. It was like a dream that did not come true. It was like the wind that could not be tamed.”

For the rest of the day, she wandered aimlessly up and down Nevsky Prospekt, trying not to think about the man in a gray coat waiting for her in vain at the entrance to the metro. The air rang with freedom and abandon.

“Some fashionable writer once said that Saint Petersburg can only be loved. There’s nothing to do here but love, he said. So I’ll love. I will love all its different guises: the wet and windy city of the winter, the dusty and humid city of the summer. At least this love will be reciprocated.”

The white flames of a January day are put out by the black ink of the night. The late moon hangs in the pale sky like a round of moldy cheese. Its light pours through the window and fills the room. The silence, held captive by four walls, seems sinister and mysterious.

The woman sleeps. She dreams of a city washed by the spring rain, of asphalt turned blue with puddles, of constellations of streets awakened by the chattering birds. The sun’s rays are dancing on the fierce green leaves and on the dazzling gold cupolas of Saint Isaac’s. She smiles in her sleep.

“It’s time to learn to live in the now. Time to trust that tomorrow will come without fail, and then everything will begin anew.”

In September 2003, I met Amina Lawal, an illiterate villager from northern Nigeria who was made famous in 2001 when an Islamic Shari’a court sentenced her to death by stoning for having a baby out of wedlock. At the time of our meeting, she was appealing the sentence and in a matter of weeks would be sitting before an appeals court to receive the judges’ ruling.

I first met Amina at the house of her lawyer, Hauwa Ibrahim. The following day, she and her lawyer came to my fiancé’s house for the interview. Amina brought her baby, who was then one year old.

Talking with Amina was difficult. We spoke different Nigerian languages, and she didn’t speak English. She had gone to Koranic School, where she had memorized parts of the Koran and learned how to pray, but she hadn’t had a secular education. Questions had to be simple; subordinate clauses confused her.

However, from our first meeting, I was struck by the air of peace and calm that surrounded Amina. She seemed gentle, self-effacing, and docile. During the interview, she spoke briefly and sometimes would not speak at all, preferring to let her lawyer, who had become like a second mother to her, speak for her. Below is the interview, followed by my reflections on the experience.

Could you talk about your background, childhood, parents, and family?
[Amina’s lawyer answers for her.] Amina is from a village called Kurami, in Katsina state. Her father, a farmer, died when she was young, and she grew up with her mother and stepfather. She has no formal education but went to Koranic School. She got married when she was thirteen or fourteen years old. She has three kids with her husband and was divorced a couple of days ago. Her oldest child is twelve years old.

What are your expectations for your life?
I leave my life to God.

What were your dreams when you were growing up?
We had no dreams. We were not brought up to think that we could dream.

Since the Shari’a case, how has your life changed?
My situation is not one that is accepted. People look at me when I go out. Even before the incident, I liked to stay at home and rarely went out. Now, with this, I go out even less.

What are your expectations now?
There are different types of expectations in life. Given my situation, I keep wondering, will I be killed?

What key things have you learned because of your recent experiences?
There is no space for me anywhere. At my age, I am not meant to be in my father’s house but in my husband’s house. When I stay with my parents, after a few days, they become fed up with me. It is not their fault, as their house is small. [Her lawyer uses her hands to show how small.]

What are your plans for after the case?
I just want to get married.

To whom?
God will provide.

Where will you live with him?
Wherever God sends him from.

Has any man shown interest in you recently?
Yes. There was a man who showed interest. My mother said he had to meet with my senior mother [the term by which her lawyer is known]. She [the lawyer] interviewed him and quickly found that the man thought I was receiving money from people outside. He was interested in the money.

Are you interested in going to school?
No. I prefer to get married.

How has your view of justice, religion, and others in your village changed?
I just want to leave others to God. Whoever thinks he is dispensing justice, I leave to God.

What would she say to other young women or girls in her community about what she has learned about how to live your life?
Who would I talk to? If I talked to the girls in my village, they would turn around and insult me.

------------------------------

Reflections
We had no dreams.
We were not brought up to think we could have dreams.

Amina said, when I asked her what were her dreams growing up? It seemed the logical question to ask, as she, her lawyer, and I, sat together in my fiancé’s house. As I wondered, are we not so far off from where we had intended?

She was clear about one thing: if her appeal were successful, she wanted to get married.

Without conducting a survey, I think it’s safe to say that getting married is the most popular dream among young women in my generation in Nigeria. It’s difficult to have it be otherwise. Parents and friends of your parents pray for you to be married, in your presence, so as to reduce the chances of your not being clear about their priorities for you.

In another life, I offer leadership programs for young women in Nigeria. One of the women in the inaugural class, Zainab, is perhaps remarkable because she rejected her family’s arranged marriage. Zainab wants to be a doctor. Failing to convince her to get married instead, her parents concluded the wedding arrangements with her betrothed in Saudi Arabia and forced her to Niger, the country north of Nigeria, to begin her long journey across the Sahara to cross the red sea, to a husband. Zainab escaped and returned to Nigeria, where she found KIND, and is working on her university entrance exams, still intent on becoming a doctor.

Zainab’s aunt just had a baby a week ago. She delivered the baby by herself. It isn’t clear if this is the practice among her people or if the baby came too quickly and at a time when her family couldn’t get her to the hospital. In any case, the baby girl was born feet first. It was a difficult delivery. The baby died. I am looking to a time when Zainab will hold health seminars for women in her community so they can take care of themselves and their babies.

In the work I am doing I realize that many women are still waiting for permission to be present, to make different choices, and to still be accepted by their community. When Amina said we were not told we could have dreams, she was speaking for herself, a poor, illiterate village woman. And she was speaking for so many other women who are educated, seemingly accomplished but still expressing another’s thoughts through their voice, seeing another’s vision through their eyes.

Ultimately, imagining ourselves must be imagining ourselves authorized.