First Comes Marriage Read online

  Published 2018 by Prometheus Books

  First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story. Copyright © 2018 by Huda Al-Marashi. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Cover illustration by Missy Chimovitz

  Cover design by Liz Mills

  Cover design © Prometheus Books

  Chapter 5: Beaten by Devotion adapted from Huda Al-Marashi, “Beaten by Devotion,” in Beyond Belief: The Secret Lives of Women in Extreme Religions, ed. Susan Tive and Cami Ostman (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2013).

  Chapter 11: Lunch Company adapted from Huda Al-Marashi, “Is This a Date?” in Hippocampus Magazine, May 1, 2014.

  Chapter 14: Say It Loud adapted from Huda Al-Marashi, “Otherwise Engaged,” in Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women, ed. Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi (Berkeley, CA: Soft Skull Press, 2012).

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018019607 (print) |

  ISBN 9781633884472 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633884465 (hardback)

  Printed in the United States of America

  And among His Signs is this, that He created for you mates from among yourselves, that ye may dwell in tranquility with them, and He has put love and mercy between your (hearts): verily in that are Signs for those who reflect.

  —Quran 30:21

  Author's Note

  BOOK I

  Chapter 1: Husband Potential

  Chapter 2: Muslim Love

  Chapter 3: A Girl Like That Won't Stay

  Chapter 4: A Small Island of Unity

  Chapter 5: Beaten by Devotion

  Chapter 6: A Divine Crystal Ball

  Chapter 7: This American Rite of Passage

  Chapter 8: See Me at the Prom

  Chapter 9: A Big Family Secret

  Chapter 10: Marching Toward Marriage

  Chapter 11: Lunch Company

  Chapter 12: A Sudden Thrill of Control

  Chapter 13: The Engagement of Our Children

  Chapter 14: Say It Loud

  Chapter 15: Sins for No Good Reason

  Chapter 16: Every Choke, Sob, and Sniffle

  Chapter 17: The Sting of Regret

  Chapter 18: Women in Islam

  Chapter 19: A Day for Me and the Girls

  Chapter 20: The Proof of Our Youth

  Chapter 21: Crises A, B, and C

  Chapter 22: A Bride Is with Us

  Chapter 23: Love Her, Boy, Love Her

  Chapter 24: Biology

  BOOK II

  Chapter 25: A Big, Fat Arab Stereotype

  Chapter 26: Trying to Make a Life

  Chapter 27: The Aspiring Doctor's Wife

  Chapter 28: An Edible Identification Card

  Chapter 29: I Love Huda.doc

  Chapter 30: A Matter of Life and Death and God Himself

  Chapter 31: Shia Heretic

  Chapter 32: The Love I Missed

  Chapter 33: A Family of Three

  Chapter 34: How to Fix Hadi and Me

  Chapter 35: Fictions of Love

  Chapter 36: As If by Magic

  Acknowledgments

  I pored over my old journals and emails in writing this memoir, but what follows on these pages is still its own kind of fiction. A memoirist must make countless trade-offs between what moments to include and exclude, and this very deliberate negotiation creates its own version of the truth. I think this is one of the many reasons why memoirs are so particularly prickly for the people we share our lives with—our stories on the page look so very different from the day in and day out we experience together.

  My husband has his own memories of our early years together, and I am grateful not only that he carries around a considerably less angst-ridden version of these events but also that he encouraged me to share mine. At his request, I have changed his name and the names of those related to him. I also gave all other characters, with the exception of those I've lost touch with, the option of using their real names. However, for the sake of clarity, I created composite characters to represent my friends from college.

  Last, I relied on the descriptor “American” in many places where it would have been more accurate to specify that I was referring to the dominant American culture or its Anglo-American and Western influences. While I recognize that it is problematic to set myself apart from the American experience in this way, I wanted to use language that most closely resembled how my family and I thought or spoke at the time, and immigrant communities in the United States commonly use the shorthand of “American” to describe their host society. By extension, I also appreciate that no definable characteristics apply to the labels “Arab,” “Muslim,” or “Iraqi,” but so as not to belabor the text with repeated reminders that these are generalizations, I chose, once again, to mirror what would have been most natural for me or one of my characters to have said or thought in each scene.

  I cannot remember a time when I didn't think of Hadi Ridha as a potential husband. The day my family first met the Ridhas, Mrs. Ridha took one look at me—six years old and my hair in braids—and my baby sister, Lina, and said, “Mashallah, mashallah. We don't need to look anymore. We found our pretty girls.”

  At the time, I didn't know that my father and Dr. Ridha had gone to the same medical school in Baghdad. I didn't know that they'd found each other at an American Academy of Neurology meeting in San Diego and that Dr. Ridha had invited us to his home for dinner. I didn't know that the Ridhas were also Iraqi and Shia, because those were descriptors I still didn't know to apply to myself.

  All I knew that day was that the Ridhas were different in the same way we were different. They spoke Arabic with “ch” sounds, replacing the “k” sounds; they ate rice with stews called marga; and they kept their five daily prayers, even though Mrs. Ridha, like Mama, did not cover her hair with the hijab. These were my signs that of the two types of boys in the world—those who were possible to marry and those who were impossible—the Ridha boys belonged to the former, the small population of boys from which I'd be allowed to choose a husband.

  It was a remarkable discovery for the early 1980s. The only Arab community in our small, seaside Northern California town was a secular social group filled with a mix of Lebanese, Palestinians, Syrians, and a few Iraqis who had immigrated so long ago they spoke more English than Arabic. No one in my parents’ small band of friends was quite like the Ridhas, whose dialect was still so fresh on their tongues, who knew so many other Iraqi immigrant families in the United States, and who matched our family not only in religion and level of devotion but also in ages and interests. The fathers got along. The mothers got along. The Ridha boys played well with my brother, Ibrahim, and Lina and I played well with their daughter, Jamila.

  In spite of the four-hundred-mile distance between our Northern and Southern California homes, our families clung to each other. When the Ridhas came to our house, we took day trips to Carmel Beach, Big Sur, and San Francisco. We came back dirty and ti
red, and waited in line for a turn in one of the two bathrooms in our small ranch home. When my family stayed with the Ridhas, they drove us to Los Angeles County, to their newly founded Islamic center or masjid, and to events with the other Iraqi families gradually moving into the area.

  By the time my little sister, Lina, was four years old, she'd already intuited that the Ridha boys were the marriageable kind. After a picnic one sunny afternoon in Big Sur, she turned to Jamila Ridha, the oldest child among us, and said, “I'm full. Now can I have my wedding?”

  Lina had been gripped by wedding fever ever since she'd fallen asleep and missed her chance to be a flower girl in Jamila's aunt's wedding. Jamila had promised Lina she could have a pretend wedding just as soon as everyone was done eating. At home, we'd baked Lina a cake, using a box mix, while she put on her favorite summer dress, the one with the ruffles and the hula-dancer print, and then she stuck a comb with a short tulle veil in her mess of curly blond hair.

  Now Jamila brushed the potato-chip salt off her fingers, reached out for Lina's hand, and guided her off the bench of the picnic table. Together we walked down the poison-oak-lined trail to the creek where our brothers were building a dam. Jamila climbed to the top of a flat rock, cupped her mouth, and called out, “Guys, come here.”

  I listened to her voice bellow and admired the ease with which she commanded our brothers. Jamila was thirteen years old, four years older than me, and I believed in her authority. The boys, however, were unimpressed. The three of them continued slapping down the rocks they'd chosen for their creek dam with a clank and a splash.

  “Guys,” Jamila repeated. “We promised.”

  My older brother, Ibrahim, waded out of the water, looking peeved. He hated it when Jamila tried to organize us.

  Down from the rock, Jamila said, “Ibrahim, you'll do the ceremony.”

  Ibrahim shook his head. His eyes were green and his eyelashes so thick and bold that the girls at school teased that he wore mascara. “I'll do it for Lina,” he said. “Not because you asked me to.”

  “Well,” Jamila said, turning to her two brothers who were approaching in their swim trunks, “which one of you is going to be the groom?”

  Without a word, the Ridha boys stepped into their sandals, which were left at the side of a nearby rock, and moved in behind Ibrahim. The sun had deepened the tone of the brothers’ already dark skin. Amjad, the younger and shorter of the two, was wiry, pure flesh and bones, while Hadi was stockier with a small tummy and a waist that gave in on both sides to a slight crease.

  I crouched down so that Lina and I were the same height and said, “You don't need a boy to have a wedding. How about if you get married by yourself?”

  Lina dropped her chin so low it almost touched her chest, and pushed her lips into a frown. “But a bride has to have a husband,” she said with such certainty it was clear that Lina already understood there were rules to getting married.

  “Just play along,” Jamila said to Amjad, but he folded his arms and gave a firm no. She then turned to twelve-year-old Hadi. “You'll marry Lina, won't you? She's little. She doesn't understand what being married means. You don't want her to be disappointed, do you?”

  Hadi stood there with water dripping from his hair and listened to his sister's argument with his hands on his hips. He looked down and kicked the rock closest to his foot. He watched it scuttle across the ground.

  “Okay,” he said.

  Surely Hadi knew there would be teasing—that our parents would laugh heartily at the memory of the little bride and her new husband for years to come—and yet he was willing to put up with this for my sister's happiness.

  From the front of the campground firepit, where I stood as Lina's maid of honor, I watched Lina walk down the dusty aisle between a run of benches, clutching a bunch of artificial flowers with one hand, the other hand trying to suppress a giggle. Our mothers looked on from a bench off to the side, squealing in pure delight at Lina's irrepressible joy, the fluff of golden hair peeking out from behind her veil. Mrs. Ridha called out to her sons, “Pay attention, boys. One day you will dream to marry such pretty girls.”

  When Ibrahim opened his facetious wedding ceremony with, “Dearly beloved with the exception of Jamila,” my gaze fell on Hadi standing at Lina's side, playing along with a sincerity I'd never seen in a boy. I took a snapshot of Hadi in my mind—still in his swim trunks and as tanned as a piece of overdone toast. I decided if I did, indeed, marry Hadi one day, this would be the moment I'd say I first fell in love with him.

  People can forgive you different food and customs; they can fall in love with your baklawa; and they can respect you for your long school uniform skirts and opaque tights, and for saying your daily prayers as fast as you can in a corner of your cabin during science camp. But saying you couldn't have a boyfriend or that you'd likely marry someone whom you had never gone on a date with, made you an alien. It made all the girls in your sixth-grade class circle around you during recess and ask why you couldn't just go with John; it wasn't as if he'd be your boyfriend or you had to kiss him or anything. It made the same girls corner you in the restroom at the spring social and ask why you couldn't just dance with Chris; you were making him so sad, and it was really so selfish and mean to keep saying no. It made the guy in the mall who just asked for your number tell you to go back to Kuwait where you came from.

  Not being allowed to date was the issue that plucked me out of the realm of exotic and interesting and planted me firmly into a sad documentary about people from other cultures, the kind that makes its audience walk away grateful to be themselves. In my peers’ insistent questions, their shakes of the head, I could almost see them reflecting on how lucky they were to be holding the keys to their own love lives, when there were girls like me whose mom and dad were going to drive them to the door of their future relationship and take a seat inside.

  My peers’ relief bothered me far more than the prohibition against dating itself. Deep down, I wanted to marry the Iraqi, Shia boy who would make my parents proud, someone who prayed and fasted, someone who knew as much Arabic as I did if not more, and someone who'd give our children Arabic names and take them to the masjid. I wasn't the trope of an immigrant's kid, prepared to reject her family's traditions in order to fit into mainstream culture. On the contrary, the contents of my mind deeply ashamed me. I could sing along to nearly every theme song on television, but my Arabic vocabulary was limited to words said around the house, my five daily prayers, and some of the shorter Quranic verses that I could recite but did not understand. I did not have a single memory of Iraq, not my mother's childhood home with the flat roof satah where she slept outside on balmy nights, not the creamy gaymar and freshly baked samoun she used to eat for breakfast, not the gilded shrines she made pilgrimages to every Ashura with their massive Persian carpets and crystal chandeliers.

  I had been only two years old in 1979 when my family made their last trip to Iraq. An intense interrogation in the airport made Mama decide it wasn't worth going back anymore and that it was time to get the rest of her family out. There was no way I was going to sever what little ties I had to my culture and religion by marrying someone outside of it.

  My entire extended family consisted of couples who had barely known each other when they wed, couples who had been introduced via photographs or paired together from within the same clan. Mama and Baba were themselves distant relatives, something I never told any of my friends for fear they'd recoil with disgust and forever brand me the child of an incestuous union. Baba was from a branch of the Marashis that left Iraq in the 1920s and settled in the tropical island of Zanzibar. He was studying abroad in Canada when his sister sent him Mama's picture, a wallet size he blew up to poster proportions and proudly toted back to Iraq to gift to my grandfather as a stand-in for the daughter he was taking with him. Whenever he came across the original wallet-size photograph, he'd show it to me and my siblings and tell us, “Look here. See how your mummy was so pretty,” his Arab–East
African accent thick, dragging out the o's and pushing hard on the t's.

  Mama was, indeed, the quintessential pretty brunette—the kind who usually plays sidekick to a bombshell blond, the kind you wouldn't expect to find married to a short man, twenty years her senior, with thinning gray hair, a salt-and-pepper mustache, and the beginnings of a potbelly. People often mistook Mama for Baba's daughter, and Lina, Ibrahim, and me for his grandchildren, but Mama only wanted me to see the wisdom in her union and the folly in American dating.

  “The problem with the women in this country is they expect too much,” Mama would often say to me while getting ready for work. “They want love, they want passion, and they want it to last forever. Your father is a good man; he encouraged me to go back to school. Not every man would put up with his wife working and studying. If you want to start believing in this country's what-about-me garbage, there's no end to it.”

  When Mama arrived in the United States in 1972, she was eighteen years old. She didn't drive, speak English, or have a high school diploma. Baba urged her to go back to school right after my brother was born, and from then on, she'd always worked and studied, earning first her GED, then two different associate's degrees, then a bachelor's in nursing. Eventually she'd earn a master's and doctorate of nurse practice. She often said she would have gone to medical school had there been one in town.

  For years, Mama worked the 3:00 to 11:00 p.m. shift on a pediatrics floor. We got home from school after she left for work, and most nights, we were in bed before she got back. Days often passed without us seeing her, and so when Mama was home, she expected us to be available for parenting. One afternoon, while getting ready for her shift, she told me of a coworker, “That little twit-twit Sandy has only been married for two months, and she already wants a divorce. She slept with her husband, kissed him, and now she says she doesn't even know him. How much more does she want to know?”

  Standing in front of her dresser mirror, Mama swiped a padded applicator across a square of eye shadow and added, “People here tell me, ‘You married a stranger.’ What stranger? Someone your parents know and your family knows is a stranger? They think if they date someone and they kiss him and sleep with him, they know who they're marrying. What does that tell you about a person except for what they look like naked?”