I began A Border Passage out of a similar, but more intense and driven longing to free myself from, at that point, the strictures of academic language and the assumptions and conventions in which that language is steeped. By the time I was working on the last stages of my previous book, it had come to feel, that language, almost like a prison. I think now that that was where many of us found ourselves, in those years, at least many feminists, at the end of the ’80s and early ’90s.
I know also that among the reasons I began to work on the memoir, the moment I got the other book off my desk, was the sense I had that there were things here that I needed to address – that had remained unaddressed and even unrecognized in any work I’d done so far. I know now, too, on the evidence of my own notebooks from that time, that I had no clear idea as to what it was exactly I meant by this. And yet also that at the same time my intimations of what work I needed to do were actually very exact. For instance, to quote just a couple of sentences from my 1991 notebook – that is, right when I was beginning to think about writing it – they read (and they come after a paragraph about a morning spent digging in the yard clearing a space for a vegetable plot): “The broad patterns of nationalism and politics lie. All my life I’ve tried to make sense of my experience in terms of blueprints that don’t fit. This is where I must begin – dig up what’s under here.”
To me now that actually describes exactly what I did, in particular in my chapter on becoming an Arab, which, I think, does exactly that – sets aside the blueprints and sets out to unearth the unacknowledged history of the creation of nationalism and identity that I had been subjected to.
Also my chapter on the harem is extraordinary to me, now, looking back, in that in my previous book on women in Islam I’d left out the only dimension of that subject that I had myself experienced, growing up among Muslims. Apparently it had been invisible to me and in the process of writing A Border Passage that was one of the hardest chapters to write. To begin with, thinking back to my mother and about the world of women among whom I grew up I had thought – and for weeks on end I had thought – there’s nothing to write here, nothing worth writing about.
Anyway, I came across this passage about wanting to dig up what was really there when I was actually trying to track down something else – a dream I’d had at the beginning of writing the memoir. And as it happened my journals were all very conveniently in a suitcase in the wardrobe in my work room. I’d placed them there a few months earlier when, just thinking as one does about the precariousness of life and wondering what I should do with the notebooks. Should I destroy them now? What if I want to read them some day? And so on. And so I decided to put them in a bag and then think about what to do with them later.
Of course, packing them didn’t solve anything, but I have to say, it did feel very comforting because I felt I was doing something sensible – packing my bags, getting ready for departure. Anyway, there they were now, the notebooks, all packed together, ready to be looked through.
The dream that I’d been trying to track down had captured some quintessential quality about Pelham, which is where I’d lived, in the hills near Amherst, when I was writing that book. And in the dream I’d been driving home on an unfamiliar road, and just as I’d been thinking I was lost, I saw that the strange road that I was on with its marvelous views was in fact just an alternative road home. Then another memory of Pelham came – this, too, catching some essence of the place. This was of being unable to sleep and getting up finally, when it was scarcely yet dawn. And seeing, as I went to put the kettle on, a quite spectacular moon in the front window. The moon, I suppose, is always spectacular, but sometimes apparently more so than others. Anyway, I opened the front door then and went out as I was in my night dress on to the lawn. It was okay to do this there, at this hour anyway – trees screening one from the neighbors on either side and the house across the road distant enough and anyway asleep.
I don’t know if I would have written that book had I lived elsewhere. In memory, being in that house feels integral to it and to the process by which I came to write it. My notebooks from those days are filled with references to the ordinary things that make up our lives, but which, in that setting, were not simply background, but rather, were often spectacularly and even intrusively present, the way the moon was that dawn and that the nights routinely were there driving home, say – night, stars, woods, all ordinarily spectacular.
And even when not spectacular, ordinary things there had the capacity to catch and hold one’s attention. I write, for instance, in those notebooks, as if these were matters of riveting interest, about how exactly the leaves look at this moment, as I sit looking out the window, and the lawn and the paths beyond and the black dog loping across it, or about the sounds of the wind mysteriously moaning for no explicable reason, banging a door I didn’t know I had. “Was that a screen door?” – I wrote. And how exactly the snow looked, scuffed and windblown, the shadows of trees falling across it like hieroglyphs.
It was here that I finished the book on women and Islam, a book I’d conceived of more than a decade earlier and on another continent: in response to watching the news of the Iranian revolution then underway and to observing the then, to me, extraordinary sight of women – including socialist and Marxist women – voluntarily putting on headscarves and joining forces with an Islamic resistance, apparently sharing with them some notion of Islam as a route to justice, and donning headscarves as symbol of resistance and of commitment to justice. What history was this that I was witnessing and what, in fact, was the history of Islam in relation to women? And so I began, soon, that research project.
I had been living then in Al-Ain – an oasis in the inland desert of the Emirates, as spectacular in its way with its dunes and mountains as western Massachusetts. At that time in the Emirates there was talk, because of the Iranian evolution, of requiring the Islamic covering for all women, including non-local women like myself who were there working. And so this history that I found myself at that point passionately wanting to understand was also certainly a history whose implications in various ways, bore directly and personally on my own life and history.
