Two Muslims (Part One)

Well, New York continues to surprise.

Or maybe not. Coming to the city as a new (or perhaps altered) person, I’m not sure what was here before that I couldn’t see, versus what was never here at all.

“She’s a pretty amazing person,” said Jeanne about her colleague, who conducts evaluations for people requesting asylum in the US.

Then she told me the story of a fifteen-year old girl from—where? Let’s call it Pakistan, though it could be any one of countries where fundamentalist Islam is raging.

The girl wrote the name of a schoolmate in her notebook. The family discovered it.

So?

The schoolmate was a boy.

Well, you and I would probably say “so,” and maybe even wonder whether the family had any business looking inside the girl’s notebook. Not being a parent, I don’t know if that’s standard operating procedure….

You can probably guess.

Family wasn’t pleased. So they gave the girl two options:

1.     marry a fifty-some guy whom the family would chose

2.     ritual killing by a family member

The girl chose:

       3.   get the hell outta town

Well, she did. Don’t know the story of how, but she landed in the United States. And is now in hiding because she fears her family may be sending / arranging a hit man to kill her.

That’s where Jeanne’s colleague comes in. Working for a group called Physicians for Human Rights, she does evaluations for people seeking asylum in the United States.

Which has, by the way, the largest number of petitioners for asylum of any industrialized country. About 40,000 people, if yesterday’s-read-today’s-not-findable number is correct in my memory.

And she trains young physicians and med students to do the evaluations as well.

The evaluations themselves are interesting. They’re not supposed to be therapeutic—though paradoxically, they can be. Instead, they’re meant to make the person requesting asylum relive and retell the worst of the (usually) torture that they have endured—to do it fast and dirty, as it were.

Why?

Because the person requesting asylum is gonna face a judge who is going to rule on the question—has this person truly suffered persecution or terror? Is he or she in danger, should the US deport? How convincing is the evidence? Yes, you call appeal the decision. Better, though, if you don’t have to.

The person doing the evaluation, then, becomes a psychic surgeon—applying the saws and drills to the mind and memory, extracting the most painful abuse and torture to display to the judge.

Curiously, some people find the process helpful.

Right, so Jeanne’s colleague had a problem. A fifteen-year old in hiding somewhere, without cash or food or clothes. And Super Storm Sandy bearing into the city. What to do?

Rent a car and deliver the goods, make sure the kid was safe.

Well, I did my share of snorting and some of Franny’s share as well. It seemed to call for it. Look, I don’t give a shit about culture and respecting religions and pluralism and anything else. This family? Rather, these guys—since they have completely subjugated the women?

They’re unspeakable. “Heinous,” perhaps, is the adjective that springs to mind. “Abominable,” certainly, is another alternative.

I can make a case—sort of—for why Islam developed the rules and traditions it did when it was a desert religion. A religion formed where water was precious, hospitality was a necessity not a nicety, when a harsh environment forged a harsh societal code.

Right, but now?

I’d say something that I think any woman would say. There is nothing more important than the family—the husband she has loved, the children she has born and has raised. And for a guy who is willing to kill his daughter for the “crime” of writing a boy’s name in a notebook? A guy who has sent her fleeing in terror halfway around the world, and who is hiding who-knows-where as a massive hurricane / Nor’easter / snowstorm bears down on the region? A guy who does that for his family’s “honor?”

Off with his balls!

(Stay tuned for part 2.)

Multiple Worlds

It’s one thing to be motherless, another to be familyless—and that’s how it was beginning to feel. And though the Fernández family does very well—excellently—in some areas, even exceeding my own, they can’t compete in others. Who else but Johnny has been observing my muddled attempts to open containers, waiting for my imploring eyes to lift to his. He’ll take the container, slide his fingernail under a slot hidden somewhere, and open it in seconds. Pass it back to me.

He once taught me how to fold a shirt—a shirt we were giving to a little Puerto Rican kid living up in Spanish Harlem. I’ve forgotten the process now, of course, but not the thought—is a little kid gonna care? Is he gonna see all John’s careful, neat, ordered work? Nah—it’s Christmas morning, he’s ripping into his presents, wrapping paper flying everywhere, the tape stuck to his fingers or nose!

It’s a thing with John—he can’t abide something less than tidily done.

Well, they lead crazy lives, these two. And there are more of them than me / us. So it was time to come up to a city still recovering from a disaster.

Which announced itself at the airport. Waiting for the luggage, I watched a news reporter follow a social worker around the darkened halls of one of the projects. Knocking on doors, checking on people. 60,000 people are still without power.

The gypsy cab driver, checking his GPS for directions to West End Avenue and 93.

Hunh?

A New York City cabbie can’t get to an easy mark on a grid? I begin to explain.

“Listen, just go up to whatever-that-bridge-is-that-comes-into-125^th, you know, up there in Harlem…”

“Listen, Buddy, you think I don’t know my city?”

We have a breezy confrontational exchange—quite pleasant after Caribbean gusto and cordiality, which variably turns into action.

Some of the bridges are still closed.

Oh, and the subway is jam-packed, and quite slow.

But the world of Upper West Side Manhattan is unaffected. Yes, trees are down in Central Park, and the North Woods is closed. Widow-makers, I think, and then remember that Jack told me that curiously, the branches that are resting in forks of trees—until they fall on the victim walking under them—tend to come down on perfectly still days. One of those things he had to say in lieu of “I love you….”

The supermarket, as usual, never ceases to astound. The logistics—how do they get all this stuff into the city? And what stuff it is. Pomegranates? Syrian figs? Thirty-five kinds of olives? Who buys this stuff?

And curiously, little bits of Puerto Rico are incorporated here. I’m in line at the deli, wanting my lox and bagel. The lady in front of me is ordering pinchos and then it’s my turn. Another guy takes my order.

“¿Son de cerdo o de carne de res?” asks the pincho lady.

Pork or beef?

Pure Puerto Rican Spanish, as is the pincho.

So I switch to Spanish, as does the clerk, and we’re all 2600 miles south. 

Or maybe farther. Since I enter John and Jeanne’s apartment and discover disorder, for the first time in my life. Then I see—I’m backstage, behind the scenes, and the stagehand is Ángela, the cleaning lady from Queens, via El Salvador.

Well, I’m curious about life, or rather lives, and we chat. She’s not a lady who much likes, or practices, taciturnity (what! No red squiggle? Did I get away with it, or has the computer given up on me?).

Mostly in English, some in Spanish. In fact, she’s set this stage for almost a decade now, and met and knew Franny. We talk about life—how it takes her two hours, now, to get home to Queens by subway. So she’s spending the night with her mother, up in a project in Harlem. How lucky they were that the hurricane hit Jersey, not the city. How fast the power had been restored, all things considered. How good it was to have work.

Well, last week it was the hurricane. John stood and watched through the window as the transformers blew across the river in New Jersey. “Looked like the 4^th of July,” he reports. (Note to John—tempting as they are, windows tend not to be the best places to stand afront {no, computer, I did mean that “afront”} in hurricanes.)

And yesterday it was the Nor’easter. Well, there’s snow in the Park, and this morning I was much more in Wisconsin that Manhattan. Snow on the ground, the trees losing their leaves, a dark, cold sky. Squirrels leaping branches above the urbanite dogs below.

Leave the park, and it’s city, all right, with chrysanthemums still blooming over patches of snow.

And oh, another thing different.

Marc.

Always before, this city had overwhelmed me, mocked me, doubted that anything would come of or from me. It had scorned me, or rather sniffed at me.

Wrong.

It hadn’t. I had come limping with self-doubt / self-defeat leading to the point of despair and suicide. The city had welcomed me. I had slunk back from its embrace.

My Spanish is better than Ángela’s English, and we’re saying farewell. I escort her to the door of the home that’s not mine but is; a home that is, in a way, more Ángela’ s than John or Jeanne’s.

“Mucho gusto” I say to my new friend, whom I may not see again….

Or do I say it—finally—to a city welcoming me?