February 20, 2008

Passing Thoughts

Posted by kameelah rasheed at 5:00PM

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Stories cull writers from the world. Stories reveal themselves to us. The public narrative, the private narrative -- they colonise us. They commission us. They insist on being told. Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of storytelling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.--Arundhati Roy

I know aunts and great-grandparents who through the alchemy of Southern racism, intermarriage, self-hatred and survival managed to live their life passing either as white or just not that Black. I never thought of myself as passing because I had no desire to and and such an attempt would be futile as the deep darkness of my father's skin trumped the coveted lightness of my mother's skin much to an unnamed grandmother's silent disapproval. Swooned over as a baby because I happened to be much lighter than my father's side of the family, I was warned about sitting in the sun to long and getting "too black."

And I got blacker because I liked the sun and it was not until age 12 that I understood what being "too black" meant. Like my father I had tiny eyes and when I smiled my chubby cheeks enveloped my eyes only leaving tiny slits earning me the obviously problematic named "China eyes." I was taught that I should be excited about this because it took me one more step away from blackness.

I used to rock cornrows until I begged my parents to let me get my hair pressed. Kids were making fun of me because I was the only kid without straight hair and mind you this was at the same time I was being called a white kid because liked school. I explicitly remember my grandmother paying to have my hair pressed every three weeks. When I came home, she'd smile, play with my hair and told me how pretty I was. In a too late caveat, she noted that I had "good hair," but straight hair was always the best option even if the pressing process was tedious, smelly and time-consuming.

While I always understood the nuances of race and blackness within the tiny and dysfunctional community of confused Black folks I grew up with, the nuances of race and blackness were a different monster as I began mixing with non-Black Muslim communities. This became another monster because I felt that not only was I being asked to mute some elements of my Blackness, I was also being asked to adopt another identity that, while being foreign to me, was considered coveted and authentic to others.

Having grown up around mostly Black Muslims and a few African immigrants, I'd never experienced feeling less Muslim because I am Black or not "authentically Muslim" because I was not Arab or even South-Asian. I always heard my parents speak of "immigrant" Muslims and I wondered why we didn't go to Masjids with them, or they didn't come to our inner city Oakland Masjid, but the question never lingered long enough for me to reflect. It was not until college and living abroad that these issues of race in American Muslim communities became more salient.

If you take a look at Abdur Rahman's blog "A Singular Voice," he has a five part series on Black-American Muslims in which he discusses Black Americans and their experiences in "immigrant" communities. Part 5 explicitly addresses immigrant racism and documents episodes of self-hate and identity negotiation among some black Muslims who in the search for being accepted as authentically Muslim engage in "Islamic passing." Islamic passing as Abdur Rahman explains is a process whereby a Black American Muslim mutes elements of their Black identity and history sometimes to adopt a "more authentic" Arab identity and history or to simply "blend in."

If I were to do a retrospective of my episodes of "Islamic passing" I'd have to look at when I first began wearing hijab. When I first began wearing hijab at 15 I wore it like a Badu wrap or just tied behind my head because that's how my mom rocked it and it was the way how the other Black American Muslims at my Masjid rocked it. During my second year of college I decided to began wearing my hijab under my neck. The decision was rooted in my attempt to be more modest (something long enough to cover my neck and chest), but it was also rooted in my desire to be recognized and seen as "authentically" Muslim. And coincidentally an extra piece of fabric did mean that more non-Black Muslims were more willing to give the "As Salaamu Alaikum." This felt good; I will be honest about that. I spent a lot of my life being rejected from communities I expected to be "my" community, whether it was Black folks, girly girls or Muslims.

While I saw increasing acceptance from non-Black Muslims, I did feel inklings of estrangement from the Black American Muslim community I grew up in as they saw me as assimilated into a more Arabized Islamic identity and forfeiting the richness of the Black Muslim experience which to some degree was signified by the syncretic harmony between Islam and West African headdress. Whatever the case, I persisted in my ways knowing that not everyone could be pleased including my father who on multiple occasions criticized me for my choice.

This choice almost immediately flung me into the forever foreigner stages whereby everyone I encountered while living in Washington D.C. to living in Cape Town, South Africa saw me not as Black but as "something else" because of course there are no Black Muslims, only African Muslims and because of course only real Muslims wore full hijab. As I learned, quite interestingly, the hijab had the power to erase elements of indigenous Blackness in favor of a more "authentic" international Blackness associated with African countries like the Sudan, Somalia, Ethiopia or Ghana that passed the litmus test for Islamic authenticity. The hijab provided a foreign identity that momentarily allowed me to escape the assumptions that because my people picked cotton and were forced onto reservations that I was somehow less Muslim. Momentarily, I could be "just Muslim" without the pejorative baggage of being a Black American Muslim who somehow knew less about Islam, somehow was just a posturing Muslim, but not Muslim at heart.

At 20, I began to reflect more deeply on this passing and identity negotiation a bit more deeply realizing that any community religious or otherwise that required that I surrender elements of my identity were not a healthy community. I began to resent myself for articulating my Islamic identity in a way to please others rather than to please Allah. I began to feel betrayed by communities of Muslims who whether consciously or unconsciously were teaching Black American Muslims that Islam was equated with a particular Arab or South Asian identity could be bought at a store or mustered up with a certain infliction in speech or the positioning of the the tongue when saying "Islam." Most problematic was the assertion that Islam was a custom, a trope -- a commodifable object subject to contextual trendiness rather than a spiritual positioning that could be embodied rather you rocked a kanga or Girbaud jeans.

Now at 22, I am mostly surrounded by non-Black Muslims. While I still wear by hijab "like an immigrant" as my father has said, my hijab is more associated with a recognition that I can wear my hijab however I please and still assert a Black identity. Even with my new found confidence and comfort with explicitly identifying myself as a Black American Muslim, in non-Black Muslim circles, still lingering in the ghettos of my mind is a question of whether I'd be accepted if I rocked a Badu wrap instead of a hijab tucked under my chin and proposed bean pies and fish sandwiches for the event food rather than Kebab or briyani and curry chicken. I still question to what degree I am still looked at as "the black girl" of the group. I still wonder if they "get it."