In Which We Are Intelligent in Silence

Somewhere In The Margins

by HAFSA ARAIN

I

It was not as though I was never told I would accomplish anything, though I was often told to be modest about the things I did well. Don’t sound too smart: a bit of advice that no one said but everyone meant to imply. You are such a know-it-all: a common refrain said about me in high school. My cousins called me a “dictionary”in a loving but also hurtful way. I think it meant that I used larger words than I was supposed to. I think it also meant that I made other people feel stupid.

I have learned that women are supposed to be intelligent in silence. We can know things, but we should never say we know the things we know. Particularly if what we know would hurt someone else, or would advance ourselves at the expense of aman.

Before my younger brother was born, my sister and I were taught the ideals of womanhood. My mother, grandmother, and aunts were all our role models in this: they stayed silent even when they had things to say to their husbands and fathers. They would say those things to each other over the phone, when their husbands were at work. My mother used to stand in the front of the stove stirring the evening’s dinner while chatting animatedly to her sisters in Pakistan. We would pretend we had not heard them having these conversations, but we knew from then that the only people who can keep your secrets are those who know what is at stake if you let those secrets out.

After my brother was born, my mother coddled him and kept him safe. It is possible he saw what it was like for us, but I think even our treatment was kept from him. Like my mother taught us, my sister and I shared our quietness with each other. Only we could understand truly what it was like to be a girl, be an immigrant, and be in this family.

II

The books I read when I was a young adult were full of young white people who were “special” in some way. There was Lois Lowry’s Anastasia Krupnik, who was described as thin with angles instead of curves, or Perks’ Charlie, who was gifted despite being horribly depressed. Both of those characters possessed unnatural intelligence for teenagers; both were voracious readers. It was because of Anastasia that I read Gone With The Wind, and because of Charlie that I read The Great Gatsby. I assumed that special people read books all the time, and so I read books all the time.

Special meant that people didn’t notice you until they did notice you; special meant that you had a certain je ne sais quoi that your peers never realized about you. And because I was a person who was rarely given attention in middle school, I longed for nothing more than to be one of these gifted individuals.

I think I knew then in some deeper part of my brain that I was actually not special at all, that perhaps there was no such thing as being special. It was not until I was in college that I realized the entire concept was actually for young white children. And because we were Pakistani, we never heard about our own exceptionality from our parents.

The biggest thing I learned from these books is that special people are quiet. They do not often say what they are thinking; they write the thought in a journal instead. And so I kept many journals. Some were girly with flowers on the front, but my favorites were the ones that looked indistinguishable from my school supplies. They were filled with my deepest thoughts and desires: the ones that I could not even share with my sister.

III

Now that I am a graduate student, I have realized my silence is a trap. It is not a trap for me, for I use it with extreme care. It is almost a manipulation. Instead of silence being a symbol of my servitude, it has become a symbol of my mystery. Instead of saying something out loud in class, I reserve the thought for myself. I write it into my notebook, somewhere in the margins where it is easy for me to find again. I will return to the thought later, I tell myself, and I will write about it in a research paper and not speak of it. And though I may want to convince myself otherwise, I have realized I am silent in the ways that my mother was silent.

I take the Myers-Briggs personality test every year. Though I say I do not believe in the test at all, I revel in the fact that I am an INTJ. It means that I am not Elizabeth Bennet as many women wish to be, but Darcy instead. It means that I share a personality type with Michelle Obama, C.S. Lewis, and five U.S. Presidents. It means in some twisted way that I have confirmed what I wanted to be true so many years ago: that I am one of those people who used to be invisible and is now worthy of something. It means that my silence was worth it, and that by staying silent I accomplished something.

IV

In graduate school, I often wonder if the people who are the loudest are the people who have the least to say. I sometimes scan the room in my larger classes and look at the faces deep in thought. It is very clear that we all want to be here, that some of us may have even been “called” to be here. We are all training to be religious leaders.

In this setting, my reticence has reached a new high. Sometimes I will fully form a paragraph in my head about my thoughts on Islam, women, and religious scholarship. At times, I have even started to open my mouth, my lips separating and my brow furrowed with a question that will not be asked. Sometimes, another person in the room cuts me off from sharing my thoughts. This person is usually a man. Many times, though, I close my mouth again and tell myself to stop resembling a fish.

When the class is over, I go back to my apartment and begin to realize how much I have lost by not saying anything at all. I think about all the times when I was young, and how often I was told to stay quiet. I wanted so desperately to believe that I could overcome it, that I could be outspoken. I have begun to realize my own limitations – that perhaps what is keeping me from the being the person I want to be is the very same quality that would make me exceptional at being that person.

V

I am quiet in more ways than one. I am quiet, because I also keep parts of myself hidden from everyone else. I keep my flaws very, very secret. It is as though I would prefer others to think of me as having no flaws at all. It is possible that we are all this way.

I sometimes tell my sister my true thoughts, for she is the only person who would never judge me for having them. After I hang up the phone I realize how narcissistic I am and how unbelievably judgmental I can be. In truth, my own conceit separates me very little from my peers. I am no more or less judgmental than they are, though I rarely share this part of myself with them.

All of those things remain in my head where they belong. I silence them, as I am accustomed to doing. I am not allowed to have flaws; I am not allowed to show fault. If I do, it will all be unraveled in an instant. Everyone will know I am a fake; I am nothing more than a sinner. It will show that I do not belong here at all.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Claremont. She last wrote in these pages about reading Harry Potter. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Opus 54" - Dustin O'Halloran (mp3)

"Prelude 2" - Dustin O'Halloran (mp3)

In Which We Read Them In The Hallway

Away From The World

by HAFSA ARAIN

When we were eleven we measured our adulthood through vice. Rumors would spread that a girl once smoked a cigarette, or that a boy got to first base with a girl from another school. When I was eleven, I was kept away from that world. This was partly because of my Pakistani parents, and partly because I was always reading. I was not wholly dissatisfied with middle school society; I had simply realized from a very young age that adventures were limitless on paper.

My school librarian introduced me to many books. She made sure I read Louisa May Alcott, Mark Twain, and S.E. Hinton. When she told me she had met an author named Rowling in Naperville, she insisted I read her work, Harry Potter. “I just ordered them for the school,” I remember her saying with a barely held excitement. My interest in being the first girl in school to read a new book was quickly squashed when I discovered they were fantasy novels. Witches, broomsticks, and dragons rarely interested me – I preferred a story I could relate to. My librarian was adamant, saying that I would find myself in Harry’s story. She said that everybody could.

As soon as I first starting reading Harry Potter, I couldn’t stop. I read on the school bus, and I read walking to class during passing period. In the middle of the night, I read when everyone else was fast asleep; my grandmother’s snores were audible on the other side of my bedroom. When I started reading at the dinner table, my father put his foot down. He disliked fiction, and he disliked fantasy stories most of all. “There is nothing of value in stories like that,” he used to say in his lectures. When he said those things, I would imagine myself in Harry’s world. I would imagine being away from my parents, my siblings, and my classmates in a boarding school. It was full of people like me, full of people who read books. Not just books – but fiction.

I wanted to be like Hermione more than I have ever wanted to be like anyone. She was the smartest in her class; she was so powerful in her knowledge. She was an outsider to Hogwarts at first, and yet she knew everything about it. In many ways, she was a young immigrant, like me. She left her parents behind, and immersed herself in a new way of life. In Chamber of Secrets, she goes with her family to Diagon Alley. They were foreigners; she had to answer all their questions. I thought of the times that I had to do the same. Like Hermione, I was somewhere between two worlds.

My grandmother left to visit Pakistan in the winter of seventh grade, and I used to lie on her bed to read Prisoner of Azkaban over and over again. I read about Harry discovering his godfather, Harry fighting the dementors. I cried when Harry had to discover that he would return to the Dursleys. I cried when I closed the book and realized I had to return to my world. It was the first time I had cried over a book. The tears that splashed on the paper left tiny wrinkles. Outside my window, I saw a chilly fog over the backyard. (Were there dementors there? I remember thinking.) A few months prior, my grandmother had woken up to hear me sniffling while reading in the middle of the night. “Don’t cry,” she had said in Punjabi, “It will be okay.”

I began to wonder if I was a witch. I wrote in my diary at age 13, “Maybe in American Hogwarts, the letters don’t get sent until someone turns 14. I might still get mine.” I dreamed of having my own chance to prove myself, of having my own moment of greatness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but there were many other children with the same thought. Harry’s life was not only full of adventure, it was just so certain. We wanted just an ounce of Harry’s purpose, just a fleeting feeling that we were doing the right thing. His life was sure, and our lives felt like they would never measure up.

On our beige Packard Bell I found websites dedicated to the Wizarding World. I found interviews with J.K. Rowling, character profiles, and theories on plot. Back then, social media was still in its earliest stages: comments on news articles were rare, and message boards and chat rooms were the norm. I joined the ones labeled “Harry Potter”, and found a digital space full of people like me. We wrote our feelings about the books, explained our admiration for Jo Rowling, lamented the loss of favorite characters, and threw out our predictions. As the series was slowly being released over years, fans would predict its ending in the most imaginative ways. “Dumbledore is really Ron from the future,” one post said. “Harry and Voldemort are really one person,” said another. I wrote my own theories down in my journal: “Harry has a long-lost sibling,” and “Snape and Lily were best friends.”

I had given up on the notion of being a witch in high school. I decided to focus on school and being a good student. Everyone knew about Harry now, but I was convinced the other students did not know these books like I knew them. Still, when I answered questions in class with my hand raised in the air, waving madly, other students would snigger, “Hermione Granger!” To them, it was not a compliment.

I was still sharing a room with my grandmother when Order of the Phoenix was released. After I got my copy of the book, I sat in the hall with a flashlight to read it at night so as not to disturb her. When she woke up for dawn prayers, she stumbled upon me on her way to the bathroom. “Still reading that book?” she asked in Punjabi.

Deathly Hallows was released when I was about to be a college junior. I read it for the first time in my apartment in Chicago, miles away from home and from my grandmother’s bed. When Hermione erased her parent’s memories, I had to shut the book to let the thought of her action sink in. I thought of my own parents, of how many things I had kept from them over the years – all of those vices I had committed in order to grow up. I kept those things from them to protect them. I had to keep them away from America’s turbulent understanding of what it means to be brown, to be foreign, to be an immigrant.

Lately I have chosen to re-read authors like Zadie Smith and James Baldwin instead of Rowling. Though whenever I go back to the Harry Potter books, I find a warm comfort. I enjoy picking them up and starting from a random chapter or page. I do it with extra care now, for even though they are hardcovers, their binding is separating. My copy of Sorcerer’s Stone is held together with painter’s tape, the bright blue of it clashing with the typography on the cream paper.

I needed Harry’s world more than I can even remember. Sometimes, I still need it. But I cannot escape so easily now. I find that my responsibilities are too heavy, and that reality has settled permanently into my fibers.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living outside of Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Home to Me" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)

"Show Me the Way" - Stefanie Heinzmann (mp3)

In Which We Responded With Broken Sentences

image by Erik Madigan Heck

On My Own

by HAFSA ARAIN

In Pakistan, they don’t let girls make mistakes. We are kept from any type of wrongdoing – for if we do wrong, then we shall never be married. It is almost a sin to be an unmarried female adult. In many ways, my insistence on being alone has been a reaction to that injustice. I am alone in order to prove my independence to the world. I had those thoughts on many occasions: signing apartment leases or job offers, completing college admission packets and receiving fellowships. Girls like me didn’t use to do these things! I thought with a sort of desperation. I am a trailblazer! I had those thoughts when I moved out of my parents' home at 18, when I traveled the world at 19, at 21, at 22, at 23. I am a trailblazer.

Somewhere along the line, it came to be that this was not enough. Being alone was not enough. Even for just one gloriously short time in your life, you need someone who has loved you and who you have loved. They try to tell you this in movies, and you scoff at it. And then it hits you: they say this in movies, because it is true.

I have been alone always. I have never been attached to someone; I have never been part of a couple. A boy in high school once asked me out, and I refused, citing my religion as an impetus for singlehood. Boys in high school never asked me out, for they never noticed me. And beyond this being a point of pain for me, it was a type of twisted success. I attempted to be as invisible a teenager as I could be – standing out was asking for trouble. Being single was part of blending into the grey, blank walls. I stood by my locker when he asked me. He was nervous and jittery. I responded with broken sentences. Getting asked almost felt like a series of increasing pressures. I would not have known what to wear, what to say, how to act around him. Saying no was a relief. But for some reason, I cried on the way home on the bus.

by Erik Madigan Heck

In college, I asked a boy out once, though I was never fully sure why I did it. I knew he wouldn’t like me as I liked him. He was nice to me, so we went out for tea one time. But he had no intention of carrying on. It was as though I asked him out as a dare to myself, something with which I could test my own courage. It was an experiment in how American I could be: how much I could resemble the other girls in my classes. They had all had pasts; they had all had baggage. (“I just have all this baggage,” they would say, “you know, from past relationships.” Or, “I just find it so hard to trust someone again after what he did while I was studying abroad.”)

It was easier for them, I used to think. Their parents didn’t mind that they dated people, with some parents even encouraging it. My parents were afraid of dating, they were afraid of the whole concept of “the opposite sex." My parents were not American – they were and are the opposite of American. They were afraid of us being American, because if we were American then they wouldn’t understand us anymore. If we were American, then we were lost to them.

I disregarded the pain of having lost love (a common story among women my age), because I have never been in the position to fall in love in the first place. I had crushes on boys, a solidly unpleasant state when the feelings are unrequited. Though however unnatural the crush feels in the moment, it is probably the most natural feeling in the world.

I chose not to think of the question: who would I have to be for them to like me back? The image of the American woman is so different from the image I project. I am not white; I am not thin. I do not drink alcohol, and I cannot pull off a pencil skirt. I have never been able to relate to any women I have seen on television, in magazines, or even read about in books. Absolutely none of those women were Muslim women, and very, very few were South Asian. Women like me were never part of anyone’s consciousness – it is almost as though no one had ever even considered us.

by Erik Madigan Heck

That, and the fact that I am a woman’s woman. For as long as I can remember, women have found me to be a wonderful and completely non-threatening friend. In junior high, a girl named Sarah told me I had been a “girl crush” of hers for a long time. Everyone wanted to be my friend: for me to read them my lousy poetry in high school, to nod along with my radical thoughts in college, to hear me gripe about my life in my early twenties. Being a side character in someone else’s story became my comfort zone. When we hung out, I was the friend with whom they could always share the cab ride home. Women almost counted on me never having a boyfriend, never wearing a sexier outfit than them when going out, never being flirtatious with their beaux.

So many women, and thusly, men, have reduced me to being completely non-sexual; I am good for homo-social relationships only. I find it so hard to blame them for that assumption. Muslim women are seldom seen as anything other than oppressed. My friendships have become strained on the issue of my singleness: women will sympathetically extoll my virtues in an effort to prove me wrong. “You’ll see,” they’ll say, “There’s someone out there for everyone.” To me, that only sounds naïve.

I have to face the truth: I might never be with someone. I might never have a boyfriend, and I might never get married. I have never met a man who wanted to be with me. I am alone. I have to learn to be okay with being alone – no, with being single. Loneliness is okay once in a while, but being single is never okay. Because being single is not a value you have, but the net worth you own. And my net worth is only myself. No one has ever seen me as sexy: only as a capable, good-humored and worthwhile friend. In the end, I will add it onto my list of failures: I did not get into that Ivy League school I applied to, I did not write that book I meant to write, and I did not find someone to love me back. Not even for just a little while.

Hafsa Arain is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living outside of Chicago. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about her childhood.

Images by Erik Madigan Heck.

by Erik Madigan Heck"Dancing On My Own" - Robyn (mp3)

"True Love Will Find You In The End" - Spiritualized (mp3)