Burn It Down Read online

  As penance, I would then go to parties within my own Pakistani Muslim community, determined to fit in, to break free of my sinful desires and find comfort in a circle that clearly knew right from wrong. But I didn’t belong. My laugh was too loud, my scarf didn’t properly cover my blouse, which was too short over my skirt, I caught the attention of too many boys—childhood friends—whose mothers were quick to warn them away. I felt adrift among those I had known my whole life. In their black-and-white world, I was a sorrowful shade of dishwater gray. And I began to realize that many of them pitied me for somehow being less of a Muslim. I was the girl no one would want to marry because I wasn’t enough of anything. Not Pakistani enough. Not Muslim enough. Not American enough. Not good enough.

  It was a period of free fall. I was untethered and lost. I didn’t belong anywhere and the injustice of that filled me with a blinding rage not just at Islamophobes anymore, but at everyone, including my own community.

  But acknowledging any rage against my Muslim American community was still, as always, convoluted and tricky. I stewed over their disparaging views of me and my life choices but vehemently defended them to others out of a fierce sense of loyalty. I may have hated some of my community members for their disapproval and their pity, but I was taught never to badmouth our own kind. Criticizing other Muslim Americans would open the door for outsiders to start lobbing insults. It was an invitation for Islamophobes to peg me as an oppressed Muslim woman to be rescued, never understanding that the oppression I felt came from both sides, suffocating and silencing. So I swallowed that anger until it took on another hue for me, a dull, burnt shade of red ochre. It was tinged with abandonment and confusion. It was the shade of judgment.

  I fell in love with my best friend. He was a Pakistani Muslim, just like me, but one who embraced both worlds unapologetically. He went to Friday prayers and fasted during Ramadan; he slept with white women and drank alcohol. And he didn’t hide it. In my sheltered world of right and wrong, halal and haram, Muslim and non-Muslim, he was a conundrum that somehow made perfect sense to me. For the first time, I let go of my inhibitions, and with his arms around me, I felt a new sense of acceptance and freedom.

  In the judgmental, restrictive world we grew up in, the acceptance of mind and body we gave each other was a gift few could offer. Even when it came to my still-conservative views on sex, there was no pressure. He understood and respected my inhibitions and we explored our sexuality together in other ways, an awakening that changed me. I felt I had found a home after years of not belonging anywhere.

  And then came the day we stood in my living room, voices raised, our faces mere inches from each other. “You want me to marry you and if it was just about you and me, I know we could be happy,” he said. “But it’s not. I can’t bring you home to my family. You’re not the kind of girl that my mother would accept. You just wouldn’t fit into my community.”

  And with those words, the murderous shade of maroon that always lurked beneath the surface, dormant around him, took over. In my rage, I saw the color of the blood I imagined flowing from his light brown eyes, once I scratched them out. It was the same shade my face turned as I used all my willpower to walk away from him.

  It was that relationship that broke me. It wasn’t the fact that, as a man, he didn’t deem me good enough to marry. It was that he seemed to confirm what I had known all along: my inability to conform to either society left me as a pariah in both.

  A few days after our relationship ended, I pulled out my prayer mat. I kneeled on it and began to cry. I cried until I had no more tears left, after I was done, I felt a lightness that I had been missing for years. I had spent years swallowing rage over the suffocating expectations of others. First at the outsiders who made me hate myself for being Muslim, then at my own community who made me feel like a stranger for questioning their rigid rules of decorum. And finally, at the man who made me feel accepted only to betray me when I needed more from him. The rage I had been taught as a child to subdue had been eating me alive. But that day, as I rose from my prayer mat, I decided to give it a voice. Unapologetic and loud.

  The next day and every day after, I went to work in my fashionably short dresses and skirts and came home to wrap myself in a long scarf and made my evening prayers in the solitude of my bedroom, away from the eyes of anyone else. My prayers became for me alone, a meditation to connect me spiritually with God, rather than a performance by which other Muslims could judge my piety.

  Among my non-Muslim friends and coworkers, I started speaking out as a Muslim woman. Comments that I had let slide in the past I now held up for discussion and debate. I wore my religious identity on my sleeve and defied anyone to try to find a disconnect between any aspects of my lifestyle and my beliefs. I no longer hid my anger behind any masks. Instead, I gave my rage free rein in the writings I shared with the world and the public appearances I made as a Muslim woman speaking about my identity. I was no longer afraid to call out the critics in all aspects of my life and hold a mirror to their judgments and fallacies. Months after I made the internal shift to unapologetically be myself, I met a Pakistani Canadian man who fell in love with the very qualities about me that I had long struggled with. We married after a whirlwind courtship and eventually had three children, with strong personalities of their own.

  It hasn’t been so easy to be vocal as a Muslim American woman over the past few years, though. The 2016 election brought a wave of Islamophobia and xenophobia that shook me to the core, and I often felt it would be easier to simply stay quiet. Baseemah was right all those years ago. I don’t look religious in the traditional sense and that gives me a layer of protection. Unlike the many wonderful hijabi women who became my close friends over the years, I have the ability to blend and hide when things get tough. I could always swallow my anger and wait for a better time.

  But as the mother of a teenage daughter, I realized very quickly that staying quiet was not an option. She’s never been taught to stifle her anger the way I was as a child, for fear of being a pariah in any community. She never needed colors to express her rage because she was given a voice with which to shout it to the world. She is proudly Muslim and American in a world that is increasingly becoming hostile to one half of that identity.

  So, I take my cue from my daughter and choose not to hide. Instead, I channel my rage to speak out publicly against both the Islamophobes, who see me as a threat, and the judgmental members of my own community, who seek to shame those they cannot control. I put up with the nasty emails and social media threats from trolls on both sides as well as the thinly veiled criticism I still hear from the conservative members of my extended family. Those experiences made me the color of Muslim I am today, the deep red of my righteous anger.

  But I think it may be different for my daughter. Recently, I asked her whether she had ever associated a color with being Muslim. “Pink,” she said, with a smile. “The color of love.”

  Homegrown Anger

  LISA FACTORA-BORCHERS

  Highway 62 runs through a small town called Alliance. It’s a skinny paved road that leads to my brother’s house. Along 62, there’s no shortage of MAGA signs, Confederate flags drooping from porches, intimidatingly large pickup trucks, and that popular bumper sticker with a graphic of six different guns lined up in a row and the words: “You have your family, I have mine.”

  Most people don’t have a residential home for anger. I do. It’s called Ohio. Ohio was always the place where I could see anger clearly, where contention was as clear as the farmlands, expanding deep into the horizon of water towers and beyond. In Ohio, there is space to be angry.

  As the daughter of immigrants who grew up listening to stories about the Philippine diaspora, I knew about migration. When I was eight years old, my family moved from New Jersey to Ohio, and once my siblings and I glimpsed the farms and rolling hills, we heckled Ohio as Hicktown, USA. I didn’t take the transition well. I cried longingly for the East Coast, but my mother constantly remind
ed us of the trade-offs: lower taxes, less pollution, and a slower pace of life, all of which were like foreign currency to me. I resented the golden cornfields and ambrosia sunsets because they came with long looks at church and in grocery stores. When cousins visited from Atlanta, Los Angeles, or New York, they teased us, asking if we spent our time cow tipping and wondering where all the other brown folks were.

  “Don’t you just admire the Amish?” my mother would say when we were out and saw them on the road. “They live lives of simplicity. Don’t you envy that?”

  I watched the clopping horses and rolling buggies as we passed them in our minivan and my mother smiled out the window. I flatly replied, “No.” But in my head, I thought of one commonality we had with the Amish: we didn’t belong on that road either.

  Anger started early. I guess it was born from the constant friction—perpetually standing out with raven hair and mahogany skin, parents with accents, and a culture of familial centricity that swung far from the Western notions of individuality.

  In grade school, I sputtered when I was angry, like a rusty faucet that couldn’t believe it had finally been turned on. There were always those white boys I couldn’t breathe around—the ones who pulled their eyelids toward their ears until they were razor thin and called me a chink when I passed them in the hallway. “Why don’t you go back to your own country?”

  And when my mom packed thermoses of Filipino lunches—jasmine white rice mixed with warm pork adobo or picadillo with olives—there were smug white girls with PB&J sandwiches who called my food dogshit and embarrassed me to the point that I asked my mom to stop packing me Filipino food. Assimilation was survival. I learned how to code-switch, straddle cultures, and create impenetrable borders: the lunch table was for American food only and the dinner table was where I could feast on steaming pillows of rice with nilaga, kaldereta, or Spam. At home, there was my dad uproariously laughing on long-distance phone calls to the Philippines with Sinatra records playing in the background. At school, I learned to feign misunderstanding, roll my eyes, or swallow my anger.

  On a particularly emotional night, after begging my mom to let me stay home from school, she gave me a pastel diary with a golden lock and key. Those early diaries, filled with loopy cursive, reveal the beginnings of a girl negotiating rage, desire, and borders. It was the only place I could share what I was experiencing. It became normal to yearn for what I could not have: an escape route that led me to safety, where coming of age didn’t mean coming of pain. I associated all the ignorance and cruelty with place—a literal state, not state of mind. I blamed Ohio.

  Growing up, intolerance took on so many forms—misogyny, anti-Asian sentiment, ignorance, white supremacy, settler colonialism, model minority myths, sexism, exoticizing, fetishizing, tokenism. I was invisible yet hyper-visible. In Ohio, I was an enigma to a lot of people and endured years of ignorant questions about brown Asian identity. “Aren’t all Asians the same?” “Are you a foreign exchange student?” “How do you speak English so well?” And all the while, even though I hated its presence, anger was always a companion. Wherever you walk, the sky is above you; wherever I went, anger was with me. My cheeks flushed, my heart pounded, the hairs on my arms rocketed to the sky, and I even grew lightheaded when I was outnumbered by white aggressors.

  In the religious household and schools I was raised in, I was taught that anger was dangerous because of its proximity to hostility, violence, malice, and hate. Anger in and of itself wasn’t wrong, per se, but wrath, a close cousin, was one of the seven deadly sins. It was difficult to coexist with anger.

  So, when I finally could, I left.

  I moved to the Pacific Northwest, then Boston, then New York—and experienced different forms of intolerance in all the famed big, fancy cities we are told are the hotbeds of free thought. It was different, but the same. There was much more representation and food options, and blending into crowds was easier, but there was a nagging similarity wherever I lived or traveled. In each place, I learned how whiteness and supremacy morphed, customized by region, population, and politics. Even during months-long stays in other countries like Nicaragua and even my ancestral home, I learned that my identity as a Filipino American meant different things in different places. In the Philippines, identity is much more stratified. Punishments and rewards are based on body size, citizenship, language fluency, formal education, religious affiliation, and class. I was always searching to wholly belong to one place, but that isn’t what I found. Instead, I found parts of myself everywhere I went, and learned I could adapt to a number of places.

  By 2016, after living in so many different locations and moving in and out of Ohio five times, my life partner, Nick, and I chose to leave New York City to live in Columbus with our two children, for financial reasons and for family support. After living in Cincinnati (just a bit too contentiously Southern for comfort) and Cleveland (too much lake-effect gray and snow), Columbus—rumored to be a progressive haven with a decent food scene and queer-friendly politics—appeared to be a much-needed middle ground. I grunted over the moving boxes but hoped that since we were living in a blue county, we’d be with other folks who would celebrate the first woman president. The “grab ’em by the pussy” tape was playing on a loop and Ohio was polling for Hillary. I reminded myself that no presidential candidate in recent times had won the presidency without winning Ohio. As long as the Buckeyes went blue, the country would go blue.

  A month before the election, during a long weekend, I drove from Columbus to Washington, DC, savoring the luxury of a quiet car without children and drinking in the changing landscape. Ohio flashed by like a silent movie and America was the story. The urban faded into pastoral scenery. As I inched along southeast Ohio, the intuitive alarm that often sounds before I enter hostile territory began to go off in my head. There were enormous banners, MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN strewn from husk to husk along the sides of cornfields and TRUMP/PENCE 2016 staked into the ground. It was no surprise that southeast Ohio was Trump country, but the visual blast felt different from what I had seen before. When I left Columbus, I was certain Hillary would win, but what I saw on that drive convinced me otherwise. Ohioans were rising up for Trump and their anger was palpable. It was clear to me that Trump had Ohio, and if Trump had Ohio, he had the presidency. When I shared this realization with my coastal friends and activists, they tilted their heads in disbelief. They repeated the same thing over my insistence: “There’s just no way, Lisa. There’s no way he’s going to win.”

  But as we know, for white men, there’s always a way.

  After the 2016 election, Ohio grew into a new political and personal battleground unlike what I had experienced before. But this time it wasn’t just me. It seemed most people I knew were fumbling with personal and familial relationships because of political differences that created gashes or reopened old wounds. The political climate welcomes all kinds of anger now, and the most pronounced difficulty I’ve witnessed people experience is the inability to withstand anger’s longevity, which is a prerequisite to reap its benefits. Most folks are only familiar with anger as explosive, uncomfortable, and destructive, which is only a fraction of anger’s identity. There’s more. There’s a lot more to anger than that.

  Living in the constancy of anger was, at first, difficult, because I bought into the idea that anger was, in and of itself, an unnatural state—the opposite of who I wanted to be: a consciously centered worker and writer for liberation. I also feared that the profundity of my anger would annihilate my chance to experience genuine joy. As it turns out, though, anger wasn’t the problem; it was the suppression of it and not understanding it well enough to know how to express it. Prolonged anger can distill into a fuel for creativity, resistance and, ultimately, deliver moments of that elusive joy and a sense of belonging. But before it could transform into those things, I had to wear it and grow it to understand it as more than just a part of my narrative but also who I am as a person.

  When anger is known on
ly as an obstruction, the automatic reaction is repellant and removal. We end up repeatedly questioning who or what should be abandoned—do you sever old friendships because of how they voted? Do you visit family less because Fox News permeates their house? Do you leave home and move as far away from Ohio as you can?—instead of asking what is worth keeping.

  Anger often leaves novices flailing. It’s the inability to withstand the fire that causes the rush to judgment and frenzied journeys to the coasts of like-minded safety. For me, living in Ohio means living in opposition, and anger has constructed an advanced arsenal of weapons that allows me to move in the world, stay in relationships, and prioritize my well-being. Ohio forced me to coalesce anger with a sustainable lifestyle. Safeguarding my headspace and emotional bandwidth became a practice. I ask for more information before agreeing to participate in anything—organizations, school meetings, worship spaces, literary events, community dinners, and creative projects. I’ve become selective about which disagreements are worth pursuing (“Am I arguing with this person to deepen the relationship or deepen my point?”) After almost forty years of fury, you learn that anger means organizing, not just mass movements but also the seemingly mundane details of daily life. But, even with all the prep work, there’s no guarantee of emotional, psychological, or physical safety, and that awareness means taking nothing for granted.