American Education
by Leila C. Nadir
Cary Adams, Breakthrough, digital photograph, 2023. Courtesy of the artist.
American Education
Leila C. Nadir | OCT 2023 | Issue 28
Every Sunday afternoon after classes and prayers at the mosque, I helped my cousin Madinah with her school homework. We’d sit on her bed in her basement bedroom, textbooks, notebooks, papers spread around us, while our parents drank tea upstairs. Our heads bent over assignments, I’d try to keep focus and ignore the Bollywood superstars staring down at us from every wall. Posters of Bollywood guys in unbuttoned shirts with hairy glistening chests. Posters of Bollywood actors in tight pants with mussed-up black hair. I was about to say here that Madinah’s bedroom was a Bollywood shrine, but that wouldn’t be accurate. Every Sunday, I had to save Madinah’s teetering grades from within a Bollywood orgy.
I was an above-average student, not too hard-working but careful to never let my grades fall below Bs because of that do-or-die life-rule preached by every teacher, including my own teacher-mother: Good Grades will get you into a Good College, which leads to a Good Job which leads to a Good Salary which leads to that added perk of Good Health Insurance, and if you fall off this track, good luck to you, who knows what might happen. I knew Madinah had missed some schooling while a refugee in Pakistan—for years I’d been helping her with homework even though she was two years ahead of me in school—I was mindful that my tutoring could be the difference that gave her a shot at Good Grades and a Good Future. So she wouldn’t fall into that frightful abyss no one could bear to imagine.
Pencil in my hand, I opened Madinah’s US History textbook. I was fourteen now, in ninth grade, on my high school’s college track; Madinah was sixteen, in eleventh grade, and she brushed her long black hair in the mirror, pretending she was about to listen. I saw a new poster on the wall, an actor I recognized from some Bollywood flicks—he was astride a horse, looking like he’d just galloped out of a sexual storm, hair wind-blown, shirt ripped open. Like the cover of a romance novel. How did Madinah get away with this? Her father was as strict as mine. Maybe stricter. He didn’t notice the eyes of Mr. Indian-Horsy-Hotness aimed straight at his daughter’s twin bed?
Madinah dropped the brush and flopped onto the bed, her long shirt a wave of bored fabric. I flipped a textbook page and I tapped a passage with the pencil. “The answers are buried in the sentences, Madinah, find the keywords, it’s easy.”
And it was easy. For me. I could scan a column of text in seconds. Meaningful words popped out at me. It was an unconscious feeling I’m aware of only now—how books were reliable, no back-and-forths, no erasures. Sure, meanings shifted, interpretations evolved, but the black etches of letters on white pages did not move. I stared into them the way I read my backyard’s bare angled branches against cloudy skies in winter—a support system with patterns I could hold onto. One time, I read a book on English grammar just for fun, cover to cover. Subjects, verbs, clauses, adjectival phrases—my hair tingled like spirits had entered the room—sentences broken apart and reassembled, meanings the same, but not totally, not really. Something amiss, nuances, subtleties of meaning, but always there were references, proof, structures to rely on, stability I didn’t have at home.
I pointed to a paragraph. “The answer’s here, see?”
Madinah sly-smiled and rolled her eyes, lying back on her bed, arms under her head, below horse-riding hottie’s sexy conquering glare. “You do the worksheet for me.”
“Madinah”—I was shocked—“I can’t do that. Homework is important!” Her Future!
She grabbed my ankle under my loose pirhan tumban pants. “How do you get your legs like that? Do I need a special razor?”
After two years of my tutoring, Madinah wasn’t interested in my academic lessons anymore. No more American History or American Politics or Algebra or Chemistry or other high-society topics. Which is a lofty way to say: Madinah wanted me to educate her about American romance and beauty customs. As the only Muslim girl at my high school, with a father who wouldn’t let me socialize with Americans, or do much of anything else after school hours, I wasn’t used to being treated like an authority on anything girl-related. But I was born in the US, and I had an American mother, so I jumped at this chance to share my anthropological observations with a girl in need of guidance. We could work on her grades later.
Next Sunday at the mosque, classes over and the muezzin singing the azaan, I zipped my Qur’an into my backpack and was headed to the prayer hall when Madinah grabbed my arm.
”Come with me, we don’t have to pray.”
I looked around. “What? No! My father will kill me if I skip.” During the azaan, he’d glance back from the men’s row, my brother Mohammed at his side, to make sure my sisters and I were lined up with the women in the back, elbow to elbow.
Madinah smoothed her headscarf over her hair and winked. “If we have our periods, we don’t have to pray.”
My face probably contorted. “What—?”
“The Qur’an says.” She laughed. “You didn’t know?”
I didn’t know. Did Madinah just twist restrictions on women’s bodies—gender segregation, menstruation taboos—to get what she wanted? All those rules my father dictated about how Afghan girls should act and how I always failed, and here was Madinah, straight from the home country, headscarf on her hair every Sunday, breaking rules I didn’t even know existed?
Cool.
Madinah pulled me to the balcony. While Good Muslims prayed below us in the prayer hall, we tipped back in two beige fold-out metal chairs, backs against a chalkboard scratched with Arabic. Her black hair was so long it dangled from the bottom of her chaadar, never fully covered. I’d been trying to grow my own hair out for a while, but every time the length reached past my armpits, my mother started saying again how stringy and thin my hair was—please-please-please let her cut it, why did I insist on having such lifeless hair—until I got so insecure I let her chop it. Each time, a trimming of whatever hairstyle I wanted, what I thought I might want, I didn’t know what I wanted, it kept growing and growing, she kept snipping it off.
Madinah pulled up her tumban. “Look at this.” She pointed her toes and showed me her calves, and oh my, I was not ready for what I saw. Just one week before, during my Intro to Shaving in her Bollywood bedroom, her legs had been so dry, so hairy-hairy. Now my student had mastered and surpassed my lessons. Her legs—so sexy—brown—smooth—and such excellent skin tone. I hadn’t expected such quick learning.
“Nice legs, Madinah jan.” I pulled the end of my scarf over my mouth and laughed.
Madinah flexed her legs, pointing her toes higher, like a ballerina. A foot landed in my lap. “Feel them.”
I tried to think of something encouraging to say. “Wow, so smooth. Very impressive.” But my words were forced, my reflexes off. Because I had that outer-space feeling I got a lot. Like I was from another planet. Like every girl was better at girl-ing than me. Like I was miming required motions. Like other girls were in it, living it, just being it. I’d thought Madinah was like me, on the sidelines, watching, marveling, figuring it out. But she’d leaped beyond me.
“Moisturizer,” she said, raising her eyebrows three-four times. She looked down at my legs with concern. “I can give you some.”
I reached my fingers under the ankle of my pants for a reality check. Never had they felt so rough and stubbly, so unimpressive. For sure, I was blowing my legs’ potential. Why couldn’t I get it right, just shave more, moisturize, allot a few extra minutes in and after showers, that was all it took, some motivation, and I’d have beautiful legs and—
The collective swish of fabric echoed up to the balcony. Good Muslims downstairs moving together, silently prostrating-standing-worshiping, and I was up here feeling legs and supposedly menstruating. I felt guilty, counterfeit, unsure of what version of what thing I was faking, if it was my fault for not fitting, how sinful I was—not for not praying, I didn’t care about praying, but sinful for, maybe, making a mockery of Good Muslims, people I’d known for years, and Muslims around the world, bent down in heartfelt submission, pleading to Allah, praying for justice, praying for the ends of wars they were caught in, praying to return home, praying for reunion with families.
Madinah’s legs in the air, chair tipping—I worried she’d topple, overturn my chair on her way to the floor, and the crash of metal would echo off the ceilings, bringing the Mosque Moms, who skipped prayers to prep for the Pizza Hut Pizza Sale, running to the balcony, headscarves swinging, to find me and Madinah, on our butts, tumban rolled to our knees, shaved legs bare.
“Madinah, be careful.”
Hand on mouth to muffle a giggle, she twirled her legs in the House of Allah.
Leila C. Nadir is an Afghan-American writer and artist working on a memoir that examines the global geopolitics that invade our living rooms and the intimate violences that reverberate across the planet. She has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Hedgebrook, Bread Loaf, de Groot Foundation, Tin House, Aspen Summer Words, and Maine Arts Commission. Her writing has appeared (or will soon) in Michigan Quarterly Review, Black Warrior Review, Khôra, Shenandoah, North American Review, Asian American Literary Review, Aster(ix), and ASAP/J.
Cary Adams is an interspecies kin-maker, folk-punk musician, environmental artist, and creative-critical researcher investigating a modern memory disorder that he and his collaborator Leila Nadir call “industrial amnesia.” His work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New Museum and has been supported by awards, fellowships, and residencies from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace Fund, and the Maine Arts Commission.