Ten Things I Hate About Me (3 page)
Save the Forests.
More Bikes, Less Cars.
Why are there never enough red jelly beans?
Vote Chocolate into the Senate.
My personal favorite is:
Don’t go burning your retina on my account.
Needless to say, Shereen has no intention of settling down. She’s as passionate and active as ever, living to save the world through protests, sit-ins, vigils, and standoffs. I sometimes think she’d have a sit-in to protest against cats being fed generic-brand food instead of Whiskas. It’s no surprise, therefore, that she’s unimpressed with my dad’s desire for her to spend her weekends studying or learning a new recipe.
“I want to make a difference, Dad. And I don’t see how wearing the hij ab should stop me.”
Bilal throws his magazine aside and groans. “Shereen, can’t you just act normal for once? You seriously need to relax. You need a night at Cave. Some R&B, a little soul and funk, a Bacardi Breezer, and you’ll wake up to what life is all about.”
“BILAL!” my dad yells. “I will not have you discussing such things in this house. Alcohol? I thought you had stopped drinking. You know it’s
haram,
forbidden. And as for you, Shereen, stop speaking to me like I have a degree in English literature from Sydney University! How did I manage to breed such silly children,
ya Allah!
One thinks she’s going to save the world by protesting about anything and everything, and the other has the intelligence of a squashed falafel. And my Jamilah? All she does is watch this O.P. or
O.C.
garbage program, or whatever it is called, and dye her hair yellow.”
“Hey, don’t pick on me!” I cry.
Shereen rolls her eyes at us and storms out of the room. My dad sighs and sits down, erupting into an angry monologue.
“A man comes home to his family and expects peace. I’ve been driving my taxi for the past thirteen hours and I come home hoping to spend some quality time with my family. And this is what I get?
Ya Allah,
give me guidance and patience. Jamilah, make me a cup of coffee, will you, please? Make it strong. My back is sore from sitting all these hours.”
“I don’t know why you don’t give up the taxi, Dad,” I say. “You complain about a stiff back every night but you’re still out there doing long shifts. I wish you’d get an office job.”
“It’s too late for that now, Jamilah,” he says in a weary voice.
When my parents immigrated to Australia in 1974, my father couldn’t find a job, despite having a PhD in agriculture from the University of Beirut. His degree was highly specialized and the only work available would have required him to move us to the country. My parents weren’t too keen on being the only Arabs in a remote country town.
So my dad swallowed his pride and worked in various factories. In fact, he initially worked as a taste tester at a beer factory. That didn’t go down too well with my mother who, as a devout Muslim, never touched a drop of alcohol in her life. But my dad, who was a lax Muslim in those days, thought nothing of stockpiling the fridge with rejected cans left over from his shifts.
I make him a cup of coffee and go to my room. He’s obviously not in the best of moods. In fact, I’d have difficulty convincing him to let me go to the corner store. Tonight isn’t the right time to attempt to work a miracle.
YEARS OF HARD
work and dedication have enabled me to foster a talent for multitasking. I can pretend to be engrossed in my class work while simultaneously passing notes to Amy or reading a novel I’ve tucked away behind a textbook. Today I’m nurturing my talent further. I’m conducting Internet research in my Social Studies class while chatting to various people in the intermail chatroom. All of a sudden an envelope flashes at the bottom of my computer screen indicating I have a new message in my e-mail in-box.
The e-mail is from
[email protected].
I don’t know anybody with that e-mail address.
Amy leans over and looks at my screen.
“Cool e-mail address,” she says.
“I hope it’s not a virus or some weirdo.”
“Open it and see.”
I open it and she moves back and focuses on her screen. She has her own multitasking to attend to.
From: [email protected]
I’m in a school somewhere in Sydney at the moment.
I just noticed your e-mail address in the Sydney intermail chat room.
I was compelled to e-mail you. You see an e-mail address like yours and the cosmic forces in the universe push their power into your fingertips and you suddenly find yourself e-mailing a complete stranger.
So what are the Ten Things?
This class is aggravating my didaskaleinophobia (fear of going to school). The one good thing about computers is that you can spend useful hours on Google looking up things that actually matter. Last week I learned that a teacher here who blushes every time a student speaks to her has ephebiphobia. That is a phobia meaning “fear of teenagers.” She’s clearly in the wrong profession.
E-mail me back quick, I’m bored.
My name’s John, by the way.
I’m intrigued. I make sure that Mr. Turner isn’t hovering beside my desk and proceed to e-mail John back.
From: [email protected]
My name’s Jamilah. I suffer from genuphobia (a fear of knees).
I’m also in class in a school somewhere in Sydney.
I am on the verge of suffering from narcolepsy.
What is narcolepsy, you may ask. Well, let me inform you, courtesy of my RESEARCH SKILLS, courtesy of my teacher, courtesy of his nonexistent and naive brain.
Narcolepsy is a chronic neurological disorder caused by the brain’s inability to regulate sleep-wake cycles normally. At various times throughout the day, people with narcolepsy experience fleeting urges to sleep. If the urge becomes overwhelming, individu als will fall asleep for periods lasting from a few seconds to several minutes. In rare cases, some people may remain asleep for an hour or longer.
My friend Liz is sitting next to me and has already contracted narcolepsy. Her head is bobbing up and down and her mouth is open. There is no dribble yet. I will let you know if any escapes. Is there a phobia of dribble? I’m sure you will advise me if there is.
The urge to sleep is becoming overwhelming because all I can think about is curling up on my sofa with a stack of movies and a block of chocolate. This class is killing me. The urge is getting stronger. And…str…on…g…e…r…
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
PS I don’t know you well enough yet to tell you what the Ten Things are.
From: [email protected]
Got to go. Add me to your address book and e-mail me sometime.
TONIGHT I HAVE
madrasa,
Arabic school. In addition to driving a taxi, my dad is on the committee that runs the after-school classes, which are held once a week in a rented classroom in a public school in Wentworthville, which is about a twenty-minute drive from our house. My dad’s on a personal mission to ensure I get no special treatment. So I have to attend class every Tuesday night. I’ve been going since I was a kid; I conjugate verbs, do comprehension, write essays.
The best part about madrasa is that I’m part of a band. Each of us plays an Arabic musical instrument and we practice every two weeks. I play the
darabuka,
which is a drum. It’s shaped like a goblet, and the trunk is made of wood or pottery, with the head made of skin. The trunk is usually decorated elaborately with inlaid designs in tortoiseshell and mother-of-pearl. My darabuka is black with mother-of-pearl designs. It’s very funky. When you play the darabuka you strike the center and
edges of the head with both your hands, letting out a tremendous mix of heart-thumping beats.
After a long day at school, madrasa can get pretty tedious, but I generally have a good time. Being in the band is awesome. Also, all the other kids in my class are wholly unconnected to my school, so madrasa is like a sanctuary for me. There I’m Jamilah. I play the darabuka, eat my Lebanese food, and listen to Arabic pop music. I’m not a walking headline or stereotype. I’m just me.
We’re running late to class this evening. My dad finished his shift a little later than usual and took ages getting ready. He usually dresses the same: stonewashed jeans hitched high up over his waist, shirts with colorful prints, and open-toe slip-ons. I’m not talking about trendy Ralph Lauren leather slippers. I’m talking big, floppy tan-colored slippers with the masseur soles. Then there’s the aftershave. He wears musk and drowns himself in it. He smells overwhelming to me. Bilal and I have tried to buy him nice aftershave from David Jones but he doesn’t really like it; he claims that it makes him feel like a teenager. I fail to see the connection between adulthood and musk. I pointed that out to Dad and he nearly grounded me for backtalking.
“Couldn’t you go a little easy on the musk, Dad?” I joke, the scent of it flooding my nostrils in the confined space of our car.
My dad is weaving in and out of traffic. “It is the most beautiful scent in the world!” he says in Arabic. He suddenly
switches to English as a car cuts us off. “You son of za sister of za brother of a donkey!” he yells. “Get out of za way!”
I cringe and sink down in my seat. “Dad, relax, will you?”
“Yes, yes, I will relax,” he says dismissively.
“Can I ask you something, Dad?”
“Yes.”
The heat in my body bubbles like soup on a stove. “There’s a party this Saturday…”
He glances at me, one eyebrow raised. “Party? What kind of party? A study party? A poetry-reading party?”
“A normal party.”
“Define normal.”
“
Dad!
It’s a normal get-together of teenagers where we listen to music, occasionally dance, huddle in groups, and check out each other’s outfits.”
“You forgot alcohol, drugs, and sex.”
“It’s not like that. That stuff will have nothing to do with me. Practically everybody in my class is going. I’ll be home early!”
“I would feel more comfortable letting you sleep in a lion’s den.” He pauses and thinks for a moment. “Oh, and the lion hasn’t been fed for a week.”
“Dad,” I groan. “I’m sick of being left out all the time. I don’t have a social life.”
“You’re sixteen years old. Do you expect me to allow you to go? Do you think I left my brains in the trunk of this taxi? I know exactly what goes on in these places.”
“Don’t you trust me?”
“Trust, trust, you kids nowadays are fixated on this word. Trust will never be an issue between you and me. I take it for granted that I can trust my daughter.”
“Then what’s the problem? You know I don’t drink and I’ll never touch drugs!”
“A place where there is alcohol, drugs, relations between boys and girls is not an environment for my daughter.”
“I’m not going to do anything wrong, though.”
“It doesn’t matter how much perfume you have on, if you stand immersed in a rotten smell, it will rub off on you.”
“Oh, come on, Dad! You can’t be serious!”
“I am. Not to mention that drugs can be put in drinks so that girls are easily violated. And you want me to send my youngest daughter out as prey? What has got into you, Jamilah?”
“I’m just so sick of being different…Why does Bilal get to do what he wants?”
“He doesn’t. You know I disapprove of his lifestyle. But what can I do? I can’t control him like I used to. He’s a young man now. I can only scream so much.”
“But if Shereen got up to what he did, it would be different. And she’s older. So age has nothing to do with it.”
“Girls have more to lose than boys.”
“That’s a double standard!”
“Nobody said society was fair.”
“But I deserve fairness! My friends are allowed to go out and nobody has a sunset curfew like I do! I’m a freak!”
My dad sighs heavily. “It is absolutely out of the question.”
We’ve arrived at madrasa and my dad parks the car. I jump out, slamming the door behind me.
“You’re so unreasonable!” I cry, and storm off to class.
My Arabic studies and music teacher at madrasa is Miss Sajda. She’s in her early forties but I think she’s in denial. She wears thick black eyeliner like Cleopatra, lots of gold bangles, and leopard-print tops. Her hair is dyed light brown with strawberry blonde highlights, and she teases her bangs so high that sometimes I want to yell out a warning for her to duck when she walks through the classroom door. She’s pretty funky and down-to-earth. She’s fiercely proud of her Lebanese heritage. At the same time, she’s fiercely Australian.
Miss Sajda is a very close friend of my Aunt Sowsan (my dad’s twin sister), so I occasionally see her outside of madrasa. Aunt Sowsan relishes any opportunity to fatten up our family with her superb cooking. Miss Sajda is usually included in the invitation because she’s a divorcee and therefore, in Aunt Sowsan’s opinion, is deserving of extreme sympathy and kindness.
The members of our band are Mustafa Moqbil, Samira Abdel-Rahman, and Hasan Celik. While we’re waiting for Miss Sajda to arrive, Mustafa announces to the class that he has a new rap number to perform.
Even though Mustafa, Samira, and Hasan all play traditional Arabic instruments in our band, they’re also wannabe rappers. They insist on starting most of their sentences with “yo” and ending their statements with “man.” They also think they live in the “‘hood” and attend madrasa wearing Adidas from top to bottom, jeans ten sizes too big for them, and bandannas. Mustafa also occasionally comes to madrasa with a Band-Aid on his cheek in reverence to the American rapper Nelly. Miss Sajda has never asked him to remove it. As far as she’s concerned, he has every right to look as ridiculous as he likes provided he can conjugate his verbs.
Mustafa, Samira, and Hasan have a rap group called Yo, Oz Iz In Da ’Hood. They invited me to join them but I declined.
The rap band consists of Mustafa (vocals), Samira (who makes spitting noises into the microphone or blackboard eraser, depending on the props available), and Hasan (who stands next to Samira, doing the whole rap thing with his fingers and offering the occasional “yo” to beef up the chorus).
“We came up with this last week,” Samira says. She grabs a pencil case and starts making spitting noises into it in an attempt to create some rhythm and beat. Hasan begins walking up and down in the foreground. He has that “I’m too cool not to bounce when I walk” thing going on; his head is low, his knees are bent, his back is curved, and his fingers are in strict rapper mode, slicing and jabbing the air for no apparent reason. Mustafa coughs, looks at us with a serious, contemplative expression on his face, and then launches into the lyrics:
“Yo, whassup?
Guildford’s in da house
MCM is my name”
“Yo” (interjection by Hasan)
“
Cops always out to lay the blame
They try to take away our pride
‘Cos they confused by their lies
They see us with our spikes
And they try to trample on our rights”
“Yo” (another interjection by Hasan)
“
Maybe if we were white
They wouldn’t put up such a fight
Yo whassup with that?”
“You tell em gangsta” (Hasan again)
“
I tell ya, whassup with that?”
The class erupts into cheers and we all burst out laughing. The three of them take a bow, clearly enjoying the attention. Miss Sajda walks in and looks at us with amusement.
“I see that you’re all being well entertained,” she says, smiling at us. “Too bad you have a pop quiz on the history of Muslim immigration.”
We all groan.
“Muslims have been in Australia from as early as…?” She stands over my desk and I look up at her.
“Um…since the time you could buy a kebab from a van at a gas station?” The class laughs and Miss Sajda raises her eyebrows.
“Not exactly the answer I was looking for. Anyone want to bless me with an intelligent response?”
“The sixteenth century,” Liyaana Donya answers. “Makassan fishermen from the east Indonesian archipelago visited the north coast of Western Australia…”
“How fascinating,” Samira whispers to me in a bored tone.
“Jamilah, can you tell us how many English words derive their root from Arabic? Jamilah? Woo hoo! Earth to Jamilah!”
Her voice startles me out of a daydream in which I’m at George’s party enjoying Peter’s attentions. “Um…I’m not sure…”
“Over nine hundred,” she says. “Can you give us an example?”
“Not really, sorry.”
“Hmm…I am deciphering that somebody has had a bad day. But that’s OK. Everybody’s entitled to resent my class at least once a month.” She winks at me and I smile back gratefully. “Now let’s look at the word
decipher,”
she continues. “The word
cipher
means zero in Arabic, which was used as a prominent symbol in early secret codes…”
She doesn’t address me for the rest of the class. Later she approaches me, pulling up a seat beside me.
“You’re not yourself today,” she says.
I shrug my shoulders. “Just some personal stuff.”
“Anything I can help with?”
“Nobody can help. My dad is a really stubborn person.”
“What happened?”
I want to confide in her but I clam up. I don’t expect her to understand. I don’t want her pity and I don’t want to be lectured. So I tell her that I’d rather not talk about it.
“Well, feel free to talk to me at any time. I’m willing to listen to anything you have to say.”
I thank her, even though I have no intention of taking her up on her offer.