My parents competed for their children’s love, measuring affection through our religious, ethnic and consumer choices. Since we grew up in the States, my American mother had the home advantage over my Afghan, Muslim father. What kid wouldn’t choose her all-American fun over my Baba’s foreign moral policing? When her favorite Golden Oldies or Top 40 songs crackled through the car radio, she turned the volume dial until the bass distorted, and she, my brother, my two sisters and I sang-shouted together at the top of our lungs, our blue Volkswagen van barreling down the road, full of seat-belted kids. She filled the house with the aroma of chocolate chip cookies baking in the oven, pulled out her credit card for trendy outfits and ice cream sundaes at the mall, and snuck me into the hair salon when my father forbade me to cut my long, limp hair. “Just put it in a ponytail,” she said, handing me an elastic scrunchie, when the new perm curled my hair to my ears. “He’ll never notice.” Baba made rules, and Mom taught me to break them. She was the normal one, I thought, just like every other American in the U.S.A. She had twirled a baton at football games with her high school marching band, kicked her legs into the air in a mini-skirt and tasseled boots. And she wanted me to be normal too, with moussed teased hairsprayed frizzy hair, just like everyone else.
Baba was different. And not only was he hell-bent on accentuating his difference—he called it “Afghan Muslim Pride”—he wanted for his children to be different too, just like him. When my aunts sent new shalwar kameez from Afghanistan—for some reason, they always chose the most conspicuous hues, bright red, shiny yellow—he suggested I celebrate these gifts by wearing them to the mosque, to Afghan friends’ homes, which was fine, but he didn’t stop there. Why didn’t I wear them everywhere, to the grocery store, to the post office, and—the thought terrorized me—how about to school to show the other kids I was a proud Afghan girl? Marion in the 80′s was a town with limited global imagination: my classmates made sense of my brown coloring by surmising the Nadirs had come from Italy, the darkest, most faraway place these rural white kids could fathom. I didn’t correct them. When I resisted Baba’s idea of interrupting my high school’s parade of stonewashed jeans and white sneakers with an Afghan fashion show of radiant pink, he turned away, wounded, as if I had personally insulted him.
While Mom gladly would have let me and my siblings plant our butts down in front of the TV all day, or chug cans of soda to quench our thirst, Baba found these behaviors morally dubious. The icy Coca-Cola fizzing in our glasses at dinnertime, he announced one day, was actually “chemical water” and no longer allowed in his house. Family Ties and The Cosby Show, family-safe programs by most standards, were deemed proponents of a licentious American culture when the child characters grew up and began to date, and he jumped from the couch to shut the TV’s power. Our time was better spent practicing Persian writing skills, he decided, and he instituted after-dinner lessons: I was expected to draft letters to my aunts and cousins in Kabul, whom I had never met, or translate newspaper articles or paragraphs from novels, which he painstakingly corrected with red pen. More homework upon regular school homework, plus thirty minutes of Qur’an reading every morning, with tutorials on Arabic vowels and prayers five times each day. Baba exerted concentrated effort to impress an Afghan, Muslim identity upon his children, to counteract the American culture we naturally absorbed everyday, the culture my third-generation Slovak-American mother reinforced just by being there.
—Leila Nadir
Bio
Leila Nadir earned her PhD from Columbia University and works as a creative writer, post-disciplinary artist and critic. In addition to writing a memoir about growing up in an Afghan immigrant community in western New York during the Cold War, Nadir is a new media environmental artist who has exhibited internationally. Her recent artwork includes commissions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, Turbulence.org and the University of North Texas as well as exhibitions / performances at the M.I.T. Media Lab, Smackmellon Gallery, European Media Art Festival, Exit Art Gallery and Neuberger Museum of Art. She teaches at the University of Rochester.
Artist Info
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