Learning Religion
Two comments on this piece:
- Writing about difficult topics is daunting and can be self-indulgent, or just sickly dwelling. So the only tasteful approach to these dark and sad areas is humor. HOWEVER, this piece is about my grandmother. I can't be my humorous self when I'm writing about my grandmother. She was not a funny woman. I don't remember her laughing at all. So I need to honor her style as a person
- I'm aware of mistakes and awkward writing in this piece. But I don't have time to edit it. It's the perfect start to my new website. So I want to publish it now
My grandmother, Haya, tore her family apart and rebuilt it around education - piece by piece, child by child.
It started with my oldest uncle. Their town had no high school. Instead of accepting this, she moved the entire family to another city. Then she sent him to Canada - unheard of at the time. He became Saudi Arabia's first psychiatrist. Ever.
My mother was next. In an era when girls were attacked just for going to school, people used to hurl rocks at them on their way to school. Other girls ran. Other girls quit. One by one, they all dropped out until my mother walked alone. My grandmother didn't tell her to quit - she gave her rocks to throw back (literally). My mother became the only woman of her generation in the village to finish school, and the only one to work.
Everyone thought my grandmother was crazy. She did this with every child. She sent my uncle to Riyadh. My aunt lived with extended family in another city. Her youngest to live with us. The irony? Haya was herself illiterate.
Being illiterate tormented her, but her pride wouldn't let her admit it. She kept her radio on always, desperate for knowledge. She'd memorize the grocery lists, then walk through the market pretending to check items off a paper she carried. Her pride was a prison - she couldn't bear to let anyone see how much she didn't know. Then she found me. As a child, I had selective mutism. I could only speak in specific conditions. Reciting was one of them. For her, I was perfect - a secret teacher who physically couldn't tell her secret. When no adult was around, she would bring me her books (this was our favorite). I read to her, and in those moments, her pride could rest. At twelve or so, I outgrew my mutism. She lost her safe window to learning and retreated back behind her walls.
Years passed. Dementia came. By her deathbed in 2015, she had outlived three children. Outlived all her siblings she barely knew. Survived poverty. But she spoke none of this. On her deathbed, she said: "Why didn't anyone take me to school?" I can only imagine the depth of the regret and the loneliness of that desire for this to be the first and last time she asked this question.
Her story haunts me, all of the elements in it: sacrifices, regret, debilitating ego, death.
As I pick up my work on my religion (or manual let's say), this story keeps coming back to me. My new religion is very unclear, but learning will be at the center of it.
In 2013, I faced my own crossroads with learning when I moved to New York. Broken English made me sound like a child, which stung daily. But going home meant giving up a decade of future books, people, and cities I hadn't met yet. And I'm so glad I stuck it out. I can't imagine spending the last 10 years in Saudi with my pride intact but my mind untouched.
I still occasionally feel the ache of my broken English or my uneven education (if people treated me as fixed and didn't understand my delta in life). But for the most part, I'm growing to appreciate my state in the world. My learning arrived in the wrong order, which turns out to be the right order - a sequence so scrambled it renders me immune to prepackaged or common wisdom. I don't align with any school of thought because I simply don't know what those are yet.
Sometimes I catch myself wondering what the hell am I doing: cooking a religion in my kitchen, performing hajj, building my own curriculum, and filling notebooks with half-formed thoughts. There's something pure in this solitary exploration - no audience to perform for, no framework to satisfy, just a haphazard and very sincere pursuit of something with whatever tools I have.
The main character in one of my favorite novels (Stoner) understands that I think: "Sometimes, immersed in his books, there would come to him the awareness of all that he did not know, of all that he had not read; and the serenity for which he labored was shattered as he realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know."
My capacity to grow, to learn, to think - that's the only religious feeling I experience now. My grandmother died with one question about learning. I live with a thousand. I genuinely pray that if my questions stop, so do I. I have no desire to live if I lose the capacity to wonder.