It isn’t such a hard thing when people ask me what I did for Father’s Day. There are people I celebrate but my own father is dead and this is sometimes an eel of a thing in any conversation about grilling or buying cologne. Everyone who sees it seems to want to turn away. They can’t. I watch them see it and I want to turn away. I can’t. Eventually I say something about him. I mention that I am writing or have written about him. Or I say that one of these days I’m going to have the courage to complete my request for his military service record. Or I deliver the Wimbledon Centre court worthy serve “he died of AIDS when I was 13.” I prepare myself for the return, emoting or questioning. Sometimes this directness is an ace. The subject turns to the weather and I am suddenly alone in the old third Sunday of June conversation. In the end we all just go back to scrolling and double tapping the dudes who are easiest to post on Instagram.
This year I was on my own for the day. The only person questioning my doing was me. I called my aunt to wish her happy birthday which happened this year to fall on the same day of the week it did the day she was born and on that call I made the conscious decision not to bring up the fact that she was born on Father’s Day. Because I didn’t know if she needed one but just in case, my aunt gets to have a break from thinking about Father’s Day, too. I took my son to the spray park. We called his dad in Thailand and wished him a great day. I called and texted a few dads and went to see a few in person at a church service and twisted that feeling of spiritual loneliness over in my gut several times. My dad is never there. In any church. My father’s shahadah finger still waves when I close my eyes. I cleaned my house, moved some furniture, took out trash. I looked at my phone thinking about the image of my father that I have made my wallpaper thinking about writing something about him…yeah more Instagram. Funny reels, beautiful photos, a spiral of stories and there it was – Zain Khalid has won the Young Lions Fiction Award for his novel Brother Alive.
I have been reading this book for months. Once I attended a virtual reading and asked the author if Gen X Muslims had been giving him his flowers for the way he wrote one of the characters, Imam Salim, with so much compassion and grace. Or something like that. I can’t remember now. I think I remember that the answer was no or not really and I hope I messaged something like “here go your flowers, sir!” I don’t remember now. I just remember that I hadn’t finished the book yet and that the word irredeemable had been sloshing around in my chest ever since I read it in this book and ached for this wonder of a man Zain Khalid had written, Imam Salim, to have what I thought was a truth and reconciliation of some sort with Youssef, one of the other central characters and one of three sons Imam Salim adopted in 1990. For me, Brother Alive is striking all the chords about sexuality, global intellectualism, and fatherhood as a social ideal it may be designed to strike. It is also striking things I’m not so sure I know how to prepare my heart for as I complete the novel. So I had put it down for a while. And yesterday I picked it back up. I thought maybe I would wait to finish the book and then blog about it. I will probably do that, too. But in the meantime, I wanted to share a few thoughts about why I picked it back up, why I’m rooting for Imam Salim (aside from the fact that at one point in my life I wanted to grow up to be just like Salim’s friend Adolphina so duh), and why Zain Khalid got flowers from me, a GenX woman who, like Salim’s forgotten several night stand Hani, took to calling myself a “used to be” Muslim.
I am the edge. Imam Salim is a man I could easily have known. Maybe he came to the masjid and gave a talk to us younger kids in the ummah about going to college. Or maybe he sat on a panel of people at Rutgers during one of those furiously long days when my parents made me go to a conference with them where people talked about all things Islam and wore beautiful ornate badges always in some shade of deep forest green. Maybe he was the brother who said it was ok for us to have a fashion show. Yay. Maybe he was the one who said it was haraam. I didn’t care. I was never wanted in any Muslimah’s fashion show. Maybe he was the imam who let me and some of the other kids at one youth program put on a talent show. There were some fantastic playwrights in that group. But my role in Ibn’s news parody was much more well received than the one I played in Sala’s drama about child sexual abuse. No more plays for me. We were taught to cover. And when I got older, I was insufferable about how these things should be done. Ridiculously critical during times when I was trying to hard to prove how good I could be. How settled.