The Pleasure of Being Other // Hajer Mirwali

Can you hear the mullaya reciting, the static echo of her microphone, women weeping, the dry scratch of tissues being pulled? I send my friend an audio recording. My mom has invited over 40 women to our house to commemorate the death of the prophet’s grandson. We’ve rearranged our living room and kitchen furniture to accommodate them and draped the walls in large sheets of black polyester. My sisters and I dress in black. The women arrive in their black abayas and hijabs. I don’t hate these things, I text my friend. It’s a controversial Shia tradition in Islam but the ritual is familiar to me. All these women gathering for the same purpose. All these women in one space. A few weeks later I go to Rawi Hage’s launch for his book, Beirut Hellfire Society, at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. The DJ plays Mashrou’ Leila while we wait for the event to start. First there’s a musical performance by Waleed Abdulhamid. He covers a Fairuz song. Rawi hasn’t come on stage yet and the night is already so Lebanese. After his reading, I stand in line to have my copy of his book signed. When I tell Rawi I’m also Arab, he stands up and shakes my hand like he knows me. It’s so nice to have young Arab writers out here, he says. He signs my book in Arabic: To Hajer, Atyab al-tamniyat. This is my experience outside of the MFA classroom. And inside? One student does a seminar on essays by Raymond Carver, Norman Levine, and Carol Shields. The essays explore the form of the short story, but the student’s seminar focuses on the lack of a racialized perspective. We spend her seminar time talking about representation and how to decolonize our writing rather than form. I write in my journal: Do we exclude ourselves from the conversation on craft by making it about race? And after that, very quickly, a long paragraph that gets messier as the lines go on and begins with: I have this feeling like I want to break out of my body and perhaps disappear completely. I was tired of being a problem. That student could have been me because it has been me. I’ve been so frustrated by course readings on craft in which every reference is to a white male writer that I stop reading. Is my refusal to read such an essay worth losing the opportunity to contribute to the class discussion? I have also seen what happens when essays by racialized writers are presented. They either write about how they are not allowed to write about craft, or they dismiss craft altogether and focus on identity politics. I’m not saying thoughtful essays on craft by BIPOC writers don’t exist, I’m saying they aren’t read in MFA classrooms—at least not the ones I’ve attended. When we’re excluded, our absence is a problem, and when we’re included only as a talking point about racial and political issues in writing, our presence is a problem. In both cases, we’re implored to talk about race, and our identities become hurdles we must jump over to keep up with our classmates. The same identity that I have space to love and celebrate outside the classroom is always made into a problem inside. With no Arab or Muslim teachers and no readings by Arab or Muslim writers that don’t centre on war or occupation or Islamophobia, I have had no chance to enjoy my identity. I value deconstructing those things that “Other” me, the politics of my identity, but there is no room left for pleasure. I don’t mean I want to enjoy being marginalized, but I want to be allowed to enjoy what pushes me to the margins. I want to read writers whose identities align with mine in a context that doesn’t ask me to continuously question and solve who I am. Outside the MFA classroom, I have experienced the pleasure of being a Muslim Arab woman, but inside I have always needed to defend my identity. The word for pleasure in Arabic is mut’a. It requires a thick sound from the back of the throat. Compared to pleasure’s slipperiness, mut’a commands. It’s heavy and abrupt. Pleasure fills the mouth with its expansive consonants. Mut’a escapes in two quick breaths. I like holding both words and thinking about how the sounds of each one changes the meaning of what I’m discussing. To be in a fluid state of pleasure and to assume the authority of mut’a. As a writer and MFA student, my identity should be allowed to recede into the background if I want and I should have the space to experience its fullness. 

Hajer Mirwali is a Palestinian and Iraqi writer living in Toronto. She is an MFA candidate at the University of Guelph and reads for The Ex-Puritan and Brick. Her poetry has appeared in Brick and she was a winner of Room Magazine's 2017 Short Forms Contest.