Our Stories, Our Voices Read online

  A nice way of describing my personality is contrarian. If you tell me something isn’t for me or that I’m not allowed or that the door is closed, I will dig my heels in. I’ll break down the door or lose my voice yelling about how that is absolutely my space and also fuck you. So it’s no surprise that I waded into Tolkien, got the message that I Was Not Welcome, and then took over the house despite the huge YOU’RE NOT WELCOME sign in the window. The bones and foundation were good, I said to myself. The decoration was shit. I’d have to tear down the wallpaper and all the portraits in the main hall, and then put up my own stuff to make it mine. I also wanted to call up the ghost of Tolkien and let him know, in case he didn’t, that making your elves all look the same and then dividing them up based on arbitrary categories was not actually diversity. Assuming he cared. I’d bet he didn’t.

  I began writing my first fantasy project when I was twelve. I kept it in a red spiral notebook, now thankfully lost. I remember it way too clearly, though: it was set in the elvish refuge Lothlórien, and featured a brown-skinned elvish princess. The opening scene was her standing in front of a crystalline pool, crying as she realized the elf she loved didn’t love her back. He’d insinuated himself into her good graces in the name of securing her crystal jewel. The crystal jewel was probably a fake ring of power. What’s important here is not that I thought I was writing original fiction (oh, to be so young again), but that the elvish princess was brown.

  It seemed both natural and necessary that the characters I wrote were brown, even if the worlds I was stealing from were not. I’d grown up surrounded by people who looked like me, who told me that my stories were necessary and valued, and who worked actively against the very loud media narrative that I was strange or didn’t belong. Eleven-year-old me didn’t recognize that simple act for what it was: a necessary and powerful resistance to a literary tradition deeply invested in keeping people like me out.

  The world of my imagination was my respite in a world that was becoming overtly hostile. The same year I wrote my Tolkien fan fiction the two towers at the World Trade Center collapsed after a pair of planes were deliberately crashed into them and a third plane was crashed into the Pentagon (less than twenty minutes from where I lived). Islamophobia wasn’t invented with the terrorist attacks in 2001, but it felt to me as if the safe and easy world I’d known dissolved away in a single instant. The mirror my parents held up for me was gone, and what I had in its place was the increasingly ham-fisted allegories in the media for East/West geopolitical relations and the small worlds I created in my mind.

  * * *

  The week after 9/11 the Islamic school I attended and the mosque attached to it were closed. Someone stuck and burned a cross on the lawn. A few months later a story circulated about a Muslim woman at a stoplight who was pulled from her car by her hijab and beaten. After a while it became really clear—if you were Muslim or looked Muslim you were a target, and there were rarely people who were willing to step in and put a stop to it.

  In 2003 I sat with my mother and sisters in my living room and watched the televised broadcast of the first bombing of Baghdad in what would come to be called the Iraq War. As much as Bush claimed this was part of the War on Terror and not an international expression of how everyone felt about Muslims, it definitely felt like the latter.

  Despite not being the direct victim of hate crimes, it was hard not to notice the looks when I went out with my family, especially after I started wearing hijab. Walking through life felt like being a clenched fist all of a sudden. I was always waiting for the ax to drop, for someone to step too close or cross from firm into hostile. It was exhausting to walk out of my house every day and wait for the bus afraid, walk home afraid, go to the grocery store afraid.

  And then, of course, I switched schools. We moved in 2005, and so I said good-bye to my middle school friends and the safe environment of an Islamic school. Gone were the familiar faces, and the familiar dress, and the familiar languages. Granted, the school I transferred to wasn’t an all-white space, but it wasn’t the same and it presented a new set of challenges and fears. Up until then, I’d never thought of myself as a shy person. But I was terrified of this new environment, and the loud overbearing girl I’d been disappeared.

  The more shy I became, the more I retreated into reading and writing. Here were worlds I could control, problems I could solve, characters I knew and understood. There was something familiar and reassuring in crafting new worlds with problems both extraordinary and similar to mine. Made suddenly bold in my writing, I tried my hands at a novel.

  I never finished it.

  * * *

  I was nineteen when I finished writing my first book. It was the first year I’d participated in NaNoWriMo and won, and I don’t think there was anyone prouder except for my mother. Now that I’d managed to write one book, I knew I could write another and another and another. Writing a novel was no longer an elusive and magical skill, given to only a few. I had it! I’d done it through sheer perseverance during my first year of college, through all its ups and downs.

  Thinking back on that first novel (I no longer have it, thank you, short life span of the PC), I have to laugh a little. A friend gave me some well-meaning, but ultimately incorrect, advice: the average young adult novel was anywhere between one hundred and one hundred and twenty thousand words. My first novel was one hundred and fifty thousand words long, really three books smashed into one. It was neither high fantasy nor science fiction, so the length was entirely unjustified.

  More importantly: it was bad.

  I can’t remember what my prose was like (probably also bad), but when I was nineteen I didn’t understand how to write a story. Stories have arcs, rising action, falling action, climaxes, and denouement. A good book can control its pacing, can keep the reader invested even when it slows a little. It took me a long time to understand that books were not supposed to imitate life. They reflect the real world in important ways, but the phrase “truth is stranger than fiction” exists for a reason. In fiction, coincidence is rare, and most things are causal. Everything should serve a purpose because the best narratives are built consciously and with great deliberation.4

  I didn’t know any of these things. I only knew what I felt compelled to write. The overlarge story of a girl who fit in neither at school nor at home. Who feared being turned away by strangers as much as she feared being turned away by people who loved her. Who was eventually hunted down and spent a greater part of her adolescence looking over her shoulder. She gave up on normalcy, on being able to not run, on peace. I remember many things about this character—who I named Behzad—most of them fond. But the two things I remember the most are her feelings of being pursued relentlessly and her ability to come back to life once killed.

  I was a macabre teen—I think many would likely argue I’m an equally macabre adult. In the first scene where her immortality is revealed, she is shot point-blank between the eyes. When she wakes up her face is covered in the blood and gore of her former body. It’s hard, for me at least, to not draw the parallels between this scene and my teenage self’s question of why? Why did we have to keep going on? Why, when we were hated and pursued and put on lists, did we have to get up every morning and go out and face the day? Behzad was a girl filled with bitterness and anger, and a large part of it was turned inward at her inability to simply die and be done with it. Her genetics forced her to get up every single day.

  The narratives we build around and about ourselves and our communities are rarely rooted in truth. By that I don’t mean that there is an inner truth from which one can build, but that as in most things in life, there is no narrative. Fantasy, and fiction in general, is compelling because it rationalizes the bizarre and the strange. Earth, life, the self bangs along, out of sync, doing as it likes and oftentimes without discernible order or logic. We tell stories to make sense of that—the weird, the ugly, the sudden and terrifying. We want to say, great character arc, self, but the truth is just as many peo
ple stall out in their nascent stages as people who veer wildly off course in ways we’d never believe if put down in a novel.

  Seventeen-year-old Somaiya was certainly not forced to get up every day and face a world that seemed to hate her, but it often felt that way. What was I supposed to do? How was I supposed to navigate my life, when faced with so much hate? Behzad’s answer to that question was fight, live, survive.

  * * *

  When Morocco secured its independence in 1956, it faced a “problem”—it was a new country with new borders (historically, the Maghreb stretched from the west coast of modern-day Morocco over most of North Africa), with a population of diverse ethnic groups (collectively called Amazigh) who were (and are) fiercely loyal to and proud of their heritages. In a violent effort to show an outward-facing unified identity, the government imposed a regime of Arabization. Most Moroccans already spoke Arabic, but under the new laws, indigenous languages weren’t taught in schools, weren’t used on signage, and indigenous names could not be put on birth certificates.5

  I am not Arab. But I grew up in a community where the identities that were readily accepted or took precedence were Muslim, Black, the daughter of an immigrant. The messiness and complexity of identity (mine and others) were flattened and neatened so that other, more pressing conversations and solidarity movements could take place. It was more important that I spoke Arabic (as did all the students at my Islamic school), more important that my mother immigrated here before I was born, more important that I carried around the strange, bittersweet nostalgia for a motherland I’d never seen.

  I knew that I was Amazigh. My grandmother and eldest aunt both wore Amazigh facial tattoos specific to our Schlouh ethnic group, and many of my cousins spoke Teschelhit. And yet, somehow, through most of my life I carried the Arab and Amazigh identity inside me, side by side. It never felt as if they were in tension with each other, or that they struggled over and against each other. Perhaps because I didn’t speak Teschelhit, and perhaps because the myth of an Arab Moroccan culture is exactly that, the part of me that could speak Arabic and the part that saw my grandmother’s facial tattoos spoke to and fed each other.

  It was a strange thing, then, to begin to come into the knowledge of the violence of taking on the Arab label while also being confronted with other frustrating myths. I am Black and Amazigh and Muslim, and yet to hear it from other people, I am none of those things. I don’t code Black enough for some, and for others I’m Muslim so I must be Arab. Because I must be Arab, I am then a colonizer, with no claim to my mother’s homeland and no right to her cultural legacy. I am an interloper, a liar, a deceiver, a thief. And, of course, to others I am worse things. You just have to turn on the news to see.

  Like I said, identities are messy. They always overflow the boundaries we set up. The ways we nurture them and the ways people assail or erect false limits shape the people we become. It becomes easy to hide, or to run, or to scream, or to fight, depending on whether you’ve been dammed up or told to reroute for safety. I fall somewhere in between. I know who and what I am, and people who are wrong about those things don’t matter. I am still an intersection of identities, sometimes in tension and sometimes in harmony. That is immovable and unchangeable, whether someone chooses to believe me or not.

  So we return once again to eleven-year-old me writing her brown elvish princess. Writing myself into fantasy was just as much about imposing a narrative structure on my identity and on people’s reception to it as it was about engaging my writer’s identity with my racial and religious one. I sought out fantasy—to read and to write—because it felt and still feels aspirational to me. At its best, it’s about fashioning a mythic space that gives us the room to imagine what sorts of greatness we can achieve. That greatness is often metaphoric (though I wouldn’t say no to being a witch-queen), but it’s a cultural and personal imaginary space where we can achieve greatness against all odds. For a girl living in a reality where her very existence is threatened, this mythology, this possibility, is crucial and necessary. And making space for myself, carving that space out, Tolkien’s ghost be damned, is just as much about the narrative necessity to create those myths as it is about how much fun I have.

  * * *

  I rewatched The Return of the King recently, and then immediately after read Tolkien’s tragedy The Children of Húrin. I was surprised to find that I disliked ROTK this time. The Two Towers has always been my favorite of the trilogy; in terms of character work and narrative drive and the pacing (despite the seeming never-endingness of Helm’s Deep). I’ve loved this world since the fifth grade, and loved the Elves most of all, and so when I came away from this latest rewatch feeling sad and almost discouraged I was confused.

  This time something of Tolkien’s project with Arda revealed itself to me, and it was a project that I fundamentally disliked. The waning of the Elves and the dominion of Men and the static comfort of the Shire were all things I understood and still understand in their way. But I realized this time that The Lord of the Rings trilogy is about the closing of an age in Arda and the inability of Middle-earth to ever replicate it. Aragorn will remind people of the kings of old, but he is the last reminder. There will be no more great kings of Gondor; there will be no great alliances between Men and Elves. The age of heroes is past, and the age of something quieter and less grand and pale in comparison has begun.

  It’s nostalgia to the nth degree, but with a nihilistic bend. And in the context of the aftermath of the First World War, it makes sense. As a tool of imperialism, it’s a compelling narrative, one that drives a person to seek that glory again and again. But if you’re on the losing side of imperialism, it kind of blows. Your glory days didn’t pass in some great victory. You did not triumph over evil. You lost, and your loved ones are gone, your holy places are toppled or ransacked, your tombs and cemeteries looted, and on and on.

  This is not a myth I am interested in. I am deeply suspicious of nostalgia, even as I recognize what a powerful tool it is for the downtrodden. But the myth of never again reaching our former glories, of never again being great, is anathema to my whole person. Empires die; that’s the way of things. But we’re not dead. We didn’t pass into history books with great places bombed out by however many wars. We are decolonized or decolonizing, and greatness may look different now. We are in diaspora, or we cannot trace our way home, or we do not recognize that place as home. But there are other ways to build greatness, other ways to shine brilliantly, to be glorious and luminary. Those things have not gone into the past. We will have to remake what they mean, we will have to define a future that does not rely fully on what we were and will instead have to imagine what we can become. And there is power in that myth making, in recognizing that we live and that there is something precious in that living, that we can pass that down to someone else, that we can lay down a new path for a different future, that we can write it out from under the shadow of whatever glorious structure or moment we hold dear to our hearts that has passed into the annals of history.

  * * *

  1. I realize this sounds incredibly fancy. That’s because it was. It had a fabric jacket!

  2. Not being immediately excellent at this, I quit.

  3. Horns are, in the Western literary tradition, usually coded as white. They’re used to signal and herald the arrival of kings and heroes. Drums, on the other hand, were used by Muslims during war. The North African Almohads famously used drums and poetry to intimidate their enemies on the battlefield, something Tolkien was likely familiar with, if not in that specific capacity, then generally.

  4. This is why your tenth-grade English teacher is asking you why the curtains are pink. Often pink curtains are just pink curtains—but the author put them there for a reason. Because the room needed pink curtains or because the pink curtains are Symbols. With a capital S.

  5. This is changing, however slowly, thanks to groups of activists in Morocco and across North Africa who are fighting and lobbying for the right to indigenous
cultural expression (among many other things).

  CHANGING CONSTELLATIONS

  Nina LaCour

  The town I grew up in was beautiful, but I didn’t want to be there. Nestled within the San Francisco Bay Area, it was a valley surrounded by hills—green or golden depending on the season—with no train station or freeway exit. In order to get in or out you had to go through somewhere else. I felt trapped there, suspended.

  I remember the early-morning suburban sky. The glow of the 7-Eleven behind the bus stop where I waited each morning with my best friend, Amanda. On the good mornings, when we woke early and felt like walking, we’d meet inside the store to get hot chocolates before setting out—first through the strip mall with its still-quiet stores, and then on a trail behind the new condominiums and houses. Eventually it would spill us out onto the far side of campus, whether we were ready or not. I was never ready. On that trail with my friend, I was at home in a town that rarely felt like home to me.

  Amanda and I were among the few apartment kids in town. Everyone else had money. Everyone drove expensive cars to school. I remember being called as a junior to the college counselor’s office, where I explained that I was only applying to state colleges because I would be paying my way through school. The counselor was so puzzled by the idea that she set down her pen, squinted her eyes at me, and asked if I was an emancipated minor.