my obsession

in december 1992, i was seven months' pregnant and obsessed with a man - the one i believed was the father of my child. he, in his own way, was teaching me a lesson about attachment to other human beings. in other words, he was interested in absolutely everything (and everyone) else but me.

since i was obsessed, i spent all my time thinking of ways to get him to realize that we were meant to be together. we were living in london, a wide, spread-out city, where one's friends are farflung. trains take ages to arrive and it's difficult to do anything on the spur of the moment. it's very easy to feel isolated. add to that that it really wasn't my turf. i was most at home on the grafitti-ed pavements of lower east side and tribeca in new york city. london was a dark, dreary place in winter.

so i wandered those long, winding underground tunnels, in a raggedy old barbour riding jacket and took myself and the baby sasha inside to shrinks, tarot card readers, psychics. i was addicted to astrology pages. i used to stop in the corner shop every time a new issue of patrick walker's columns came out. i even called one of those 5-pounds-a-minute hotlines. what should have made me laugh was that every single one of those people told me i needed to get my life together and move on. but i kept searching for the one who would tell me what i wanted to hear.

on a trip home, i went to the witches' market in mexico city and bought a magic spell, a talisman, that i had to bury in the back garden along with some silly things, to win the man over.

i'd never been so taken by anyone before. i shopped and cooked dinner for him every night, did his laundry, packed and unpacked his suitcases, cleaned his house and single-handedly moved his entire apartment into a new one. without movers. i went alone to my prenatal classes and to buy what little baby gear i could afford. i read a story once in which an accomplished woman said she was so in love with a man that if he'd asked her to lie down and be a doormat, she would have done so.

i was like that.

i liked to believe that he was in love with me as well, just not able to deal with his feelings. now, looking back at his actions over the years, maybe i was right, his obsession just simmered longer and more angrily. i wasn't angry, just broken. i somehow believed that my life hinged on his. that everything would be perfect if we could just fix that parallex error - his mistaken perception.

since he didn't care what i did at christmas, i found myself wandering around new york city with an exboyfriend who had become a close friend. we spent our time eating all the stuff i missed in london. fresh green arugula, rich olive oil, sun dried tomatoes; just-baked bagels and smoked fish, pizza with the mozzarella still bubbling from the oven. in those days, london was not about food or sensuality and my friend, who was half-jewish and half-italian, was ALL about it. i am still grateful to him. i think his girlfriend at the time couldn't figure out what i was doing.

one afternoon, visiting our old haunts, we walked down prince street and ran into a man on the sidewalk. peter introduced him, he was the brother of a common friend. he took one look at me and said, "why aren't you writing?"

i was shocked. i said, "sorry?"

he said, "you're a writer, aren't you?"

i said, "i guess..."

he said, "i look at you and i see books and books full of empty pages. you NEED to write. you've always needed to write."

of course, since my priority was the man, the most useful information i gleaned from this was that he was a psychic and i promptly made an appointment for a session that i couldn't possibly afford.

not surprisingly, he told me the same thing the others had - though rather more roughly as was his style. "you need to get away from him. he's just using you for what he needs and he doesn't care about you."

however, i was still pregnant. i had to go through a few more months of feeling like i was eating broken glass before i emerged, along with a thin pale baby girl, stronger and ready for a new start.

oh and i started writing again.

i was reading my horoscope yesterday, it comes out monthly and it was the first of the month. since i find myself again in an unstable situation, i rushed to read it.

the woman said, "think back to where you were in december 1992, as you are likely to be living though some of that eclipse again."

and all of a sudden, everything made sense.

while i've been obsessed with another man - though not him, actually, the person i imagined he was, maybe the person he once was - he's been obsessed with himself, taking brief breaks to cannabalize and torture me. it's surprising how, when a person who's felt weak comes into a position of power, he takes such pleasure in trying to squelch others.

what's even funnier, he believes he's a writer now. he talks about how "great it is to be in the zone." and how he's writing "without a pen."

i guess it should make me laugh.

yet again, i need to stop obsessing about a person who really doesn't care about me and listen to the psychics and all the messages of the universe. i need to go back to what i've known since i was seven.

my love affair with words and their magic. that's satisfaction of telling rich, sensual stories.

no more empty pages.

keeping the blade sheathed

love, lust and sexuality are so unclear for muslim women.

in our best portrayal, we are serenely beautiful and sexless as a vase. we are unconditionally loving as a madonna. a muslim woman is most honorably portrayed as a mother. echoes of catholicism…

i've always wondered why it seems like we hobble our women.

my disclaimer - of course, there are exceptions and i am one. in my mind, so many things are cultural, not a fault of the faith but of the humans who practice it.

we keep our women uneducated. we marry them off young, cover their faces so they can barely see on the street. we teach them that their job is to support a man, not support themselves. we don't equip them for speed and strength. we limit their sensual world, we keep them confined to the home or behind curtains, we cut off their clitorises and cover their hair.

i once stood up and marched my daughters out of an eid khutbah (sermon) because the man speaking (not an imam, thank God for small mercies) said there are more women than men in hell. women are seduced by the material world, they can't control themselves, so they lead men astray, he explained. as an example, he told us that his daughter wanted to celebrate new year’s eve – what a sacrilege!

i muttered something about his deserving to go himself to test out his theories.

but i wondered if i was missing the subtext.

more recently, as i was involved in the building of a muslim community center, i listened to a muslim woman talk about why she wanted a physical wall built between the parallel men's and women's sections of the prayerspace.

she didn't like sitting so close to a man. she said could feel the heat of his presence, the scent of his clothes, his breath if he sat beside her. it was distracting.

perhaps, muslim women are more finely-tuned. perhaps our sensuality is so knife-blade sharp and sensitive, that even beneath our layers of fabric and behind our walls, we tremble with sensation. perhaps, unlike an ordinary person, the simplest physical interaction - the brush of shoulders or breath on our ears - is enough to shoot sparks through our spines.

there was a "modern love" essay in the nytimes in 2007 called “close enough to touch was too far apart.”
a young muslim woman went on a date with a young muslim man. as they sat in the cinema together, his hand creeped towards hers, and they, for a brief second, held hands.

we all know that morning after feeling. when one regrets the breach of one's honor or dignity with a slight nausea and a hollow in the stomach. feeling thus, she broke off with the young man.

in thinking back, i wonder if we muslim women aren't so perceptive that the warmth of the hand, the heat of the blood surging through its veins, the heightened sensitivity of the fingertips was too breathtakingly intimate in itself. it's too easy to dismiss her as prissy and over cautious. perhaps instead of being oversensitive, she was hypersensitive. her ordinary reaction was an overreaction.

i think of lush novels like “the almond” by nedjma. or my sheltered pakistani cousins who were addicted to jacqueline susann and v.c. andrews, books with torrid shiny covers.

even as a small child, i was frustratingly sensual. on a spring day, i liked to lie face down on the lawn and inhale the scent of the damp earth, occasionally chewing stems of grass. i loved the heat and the slight salt of sweat on the edge of my lips. i liked my body and the sensation of my skin. i can't imagine keeping my hair covered because i love the feel of sun in it, its softness and lushness. shiny bald during chemo, i loved running my fingers across my scalp. i loved the feeling of water pouring down on it.

i was fascinated by watching my body transform as I swelled rosy with pregnancy and equally fascinated watching the flesh fall away when I had cancer. i marveled at my strange sexless shape, pale blue like a francis bacon painting. preadolescent, my cousins and i sneaked into my uncles’ stash of playboy magazines and even then, i was enthralled by the shapeshifting beauty of the human form.

my poor mother tried constantly to keep a check on my intoxication with sensual pleasure. she found me in the backseat of the volkswagen enjoying the feel of the warm plastic against my skin. she warned me that touching the wrong parts of my body could make me very sick. that desire could be so overwhelming that if i didn’t learn to keep myself under control, i would come to a sad end. and i would most certainly go to hell. today, when i lie down on the pilates equipment that uses that old black volkswagen upholstery as a cover, i am still transported to a sense of contradiction. isn’t the body sacred too? i learned to respect its temple as i recovered from meningitis, liver disease and then cancer.

years ago, i went on a date, i think it was my second or third so we were not yet close enough to touch. we walked through central park and briefly sat on a bench. a ladybug landed perfectly on my friend’s hand. I laughed and he put his hand near mine, so the bug could dance from his fingertips to mine. as we touched, ever so gingerly, it felt like electricity bolted through my entire body. I lost my voice. my mouth went dry.

i sometimes wonder if my fellow muslimahs are as receptive. if the reason for the harsh seclusion is that we pulse with sensorial awareness. in the same way that native americans have a low tolerance for alcohol, we are innate hedonists.

are the limitations on us a way to guard the strength of our sensitivity? is the edge kept razor sharp and ready by staying sheathed?

is it that, if unleashed and acknowledged, our desire would rock the world?

wouldn't letting us loose would be better? releasing us to own our experience, to meld the material with the spiritual. would't the blade be of more value in use? as women, we are the closest to the divine in bringing forth life as well as living.

in my mind, our ability to fully live the body is what can take us to the soul.