Obviously I gave up, in the end, the struggle of trying to figure out what belonged where, and where exactly the boundaries were. Nor is it yet clear to me how exactly I will write up this current work. In what sort of book should it be? A memoir in some way? Sequel to A Border Passage? A book in which I am openly present and show myself to be caught up in the flux and turbulence of our times, along with my subjects, the ‘Muslims of America’?
Even the meaning of this word now, of this identity – Muslim – is obviously undergoing change. I could easily imagine writing a chapter in this book too, reflecting on this re-forging of our identities that is once more in process today, under the pressures of politics and history. Our re-definition, this time, as Muslim, as inescapably Muslim – a term that today refers primarily not to belief, but rather, in the eyes of the CIA, the INS and of ordinary people, to something that is ineradicably there now, apparently – in our genes, our names, our place of origin.
Is it possible, I ask myself as I try to figure out how I should write, to write in personal voice and in a style that openly shows one’s very implicatedness in the history and subjects we are writing about? And yet also produce a text that is as cogent, as complex, as fair to its subject as an academic text might be?
Is it possible too, in such a text, to open up questions, complexities, possibilities of meaning as richly as one might in an academic text? My guess for the moment is that, in this situation and on this topic at least, it should be possible. But I’m still struggling with whether a conventionally academic book would somehow be more useful or effective.
It’s easy enough, of course, to remove oneself, to remove all outward traces of the personal: but the rest, the entire cargo and mark of our consciousness is of course always there, like some indelible watermark. Among these I would count, for example, the kinds of things I revealed a moment ago, when I mentioned that I had twice now responded to the unexpected appearance of the veil by embarking on a research project to understand its appearance. This is just one example of the implicit cargo that is always there in our writing and speech, like it or not.
Obviously we bring to whatever work we do that hidden cargo of preconceptions, assumptions, frames of narration – explicitly or not. Obviously, too, this sort of cargo informs and is as present in the work, say, of Bernard Lewis or any other writer and academic quite as fully and pervasively as in more overtly personal texts, and obviously, too, Lewis and other academics of his stamp often offer their texts as instances of ‘objective’ impersonal scholarship, presenting them in a style and format whose object is precisely to conceal the presence of the personal and of that entire hidden cargo. While feminist scholarship at least intends and attempts, on the contrary, to make embedded assumptions as self-conscious and explicit as possible and to make that underlay visible and bring it in under the lens of scrutiny.
I find that I miss, now, in all sorts of ways, my old habits of writing in notebooks. I’ve placed one of my very favorite kinds of notebooks right there, close at hand on my desk, to try and tempt myself back. It probably was the destruction of boundaries that occurred for me after 9/11 that was most responsible for my stopping. But other things, too, are different now. And these, too, perhaps contributed to the change.
I’m still as attentive as ever, I find, to how exactly the leaves – or whatever – look in the scene outside my window. But my view now is more circumscribed. The only leaves I can see are those of the azalea bush right by the window, and those of the two distant and delicate trees outlined against the patch of sky visible from my desk. I know intimately now how they look in each season, and in the different moments of the day.
Other things are different too, including where I am myself in my own life. This, perhaps, as much as anything, is shaping my changing perspectives on writing and as to where it is exactly that boundaries and borders fall. I used to be quite clear as to what belonged where – what was personal, what was academic. And I apparently knew, too, with unhesitating clarity what to write where. Looking back now, I see myself as having been exceedingly docile and obedient in these matters. Agreeing to and falling in with these conventions and categories as to what kind of thought belonged where.
Now, I’m more likely to catch myself reflecting that surely there was some very good reason as to why exactly one had to put those sorts of thoughts here, and those thoughts over there. No doubt, there was some excellent reason why it had to be this way. But, now, what exactly was it?
And so this sense I seem to have now that such borders are not, after all, quite as fixed and clear as I once took them to be, is perhaps simply my own version of that wonderful line by, I believe the English poet, Jenny Joseph: “When I’m old, I shall wear purple.” When I’m old – or should I say . . . wherever it is that that particular movable boundary falls – my hope, I think, is that I will continue to stray across borders.
