A Letter to an Unforgotten Muslima

Dear Amina,

A tale could be told of our union when you were eighteen and I was twenty, full of drama and plot twists and all the intangible grey matter of the heart that clogs up the space between infatuation and love. Such a story—one that would require being spoken out loud, orally passed from ear to ear, era to era—would certainly include how we smashed to death terminological difference: Me with my scattered and reckless and arbitrary spirituality, and you with your disciplined and rational and historical devotion to Islam. I’d like to think that I seduced the Moroccan-American girl you were with my black-boy-from-the-inner-city-kicking-ass-and-taking-names-at-a-white-upper-class-college mojo. Especially when you pretended to lose your diamond engagement ring given to you by the parents of a quiet and passive and dutiful boy from North Africa who your own folks had selected to one day be your man—on the night I first put my mouth on yours.

In truth, you had selected me because I liked to raise hell about racism and injustice and the lie of fulfilled dreams so many pale and brown faces were living right under our noses. Long before we stole away from the Natalie Merchant concert on campus—our hot, damp palms clutched together—and marched across the quad of that ridiculous educational institution to my dorm room so I could be your first, I dreamed of you, Amina. In your dorm room. On your knees. Praying to Allah. Asking him for prudent guidance as you defied the Qur’an, bought the Merchant tickets, and whispered to me during the opening band, and amid the sea of white student bodies, I am ready. You kept the ticket stubs in your wallet during all those fearful years after you lost our baby, after you swallowed those sleeping pills, after I transferred from that school—during all those fearful years you worried not Allah but your family would smote us from the earth if they ever heard just a sliver of melody of the first movements of our tale.

And as lovers you chose me a second time, and no longer because I was two years older and “wiser,” but because I confessed one night into the wild flourish of your dark hair my parents’ drug addiction—the effects of which I carried like a pistol pointed at my moribund heart—and we were, finally, nigger and sand nigger unified at that educational institution which offered few examples of our kind of narrative. I had never lived among white people, but you had, and when I railed toward the deep end of my anger, which was laced with so much sadness, you prayed for me. You prayed for me on those evenings I tried to convince you of the joyous tastes of Goldschlagger and marijuana, both of which you vomited onto the linoleum of my dorm room floor as if you were a religious vampire unable to consume anything but halal, my body, and the word of God.

And yet you prayed for me when we watched Mississippi Masala—the movie forbade to you by your parents because it was about a young black man and Indian woman who fall in love—and clutched my arm and held your breath, for it was the first time you’d ever seen a sex scene, and one whose actors’ skin tones—brown against darker brown—matched ours as they fucked in cultural defiance and splendor. And yet you prayed for me on those late nights before your 8 a.m. Chemistry class when I came to your room drunk and high and you pulled the door open wearing pajamas of glorious, red silk that made you look like a monk for ailing angels or for a black boy in pain—garbs you let fall, without inhibition of regret, from your shoulders and hips, onto the floor, where hours before you may have knelt, faced Mecca, and recited Qur’anic passages before laying down to sleep with the knowledge that I was somewhere on campus carrying on with willing and curious and scientific white girls.

And yet you prayed for me even still when, after years of working two jobs in order to aid your family’s survival while sending me cash for light bills, for birthday gifts, and round-trip bus tickets from Columbus, Ohio to Tampa, Florida you finally, at twenty-seven, wrote the letter I’d always known would arrive: My parents have found me a nice man who I will marry, so you and I can never speak again.

Even then, as you tell me these days, you prayed for me, prayed for my well being, my prosperity, and for the love I ruined that you finally let go of in order to have three miraculous children, lives you created from your own delicate and armored womb of desire and long life. Yes, we should have married, but neither of us was ready for that level of defiance, but what I do know is this: even as I hear your voice over such an ineffective tool as this cell phone, the bass and cadence of your loyalty to the notion of our lost love—if no longer the memory of it—still has the power to seduce old wounds to heal—the way a god urges one to close her eyes, kneel, and whisper words she has faith can save a boy’s, and now a man’s, life.