Standing Alone Read Free Page A

minority groups, next to immigrants from China. I went to sixth grade at Evansdale Elementary School, across University Avenue from my family’s simple three-bedroom apartment in the WVU faculty housing. Unknown to me, feminist scholarship was just starting to take root on campus, where Dr. Judith Stitzel, the mother of one of my classmates, was starting to teach women’s studies courses. By no coincidence, her son, David, took my arm and led me across one of the greatest divides that defines traditional Islam, and most of our world—the divide between males and females. He was my square dancing partner. Mrs. Gallagher, our sixth-grade teacher, had sent a note home with all of her students, asking our parents’ permission to let us learn to square-dance. My mother invoked what she had been taught in her Muslim family against boys and girls dancing, but I begged and begged for permission to squaredance. Finally, my mother relented.
    Some might say that was when my troubles began. But for eight years I lived by most of the hudud , or rules of my Muslim culture. I didn’t protest when I had to sit with the women in the kitchen while the men sat on the nice Montgomery Ward living room sofas. I could hear the roar of my father’s voice as the men engaged in political debate. As I grew up, I cared about the civil war in Lebanon and the Iranian hostage crisis. But I never felt I could enter the men’s space, and I didn’t—except to whisper messages from my mother to my father to stop talking so loudly.
    I knew enough, though, to recognize that women were restrained just because of the gender into which we were born. My junior high journal for Mrs. Wendy Alke’s English class is filled with snapshots that reveal that it was in my character to be a free spirit. I chronicled the biking accidents, the kickball games, and the other adventures that filled my free time. Not long after I moved to Morgantown, I shared a seat on my bike with a friend. “The handlebars started shaking. I was tense when all of a sudden the bike went down! We both fell, and I got most of the impact since I was up front! We had to walk the bike all the way back to the Med Center Apts., and on our way we saw a car and thought wow! If that had been two minutes later, we could have been run over!” Another time, I recounted how I broke my arm jumping off a wooden fence in my rush to play baseball with my brother and his friends. “I was going to play baseball. The log twisted, and I lurched forward. I got up and oh! yelped in pain. My arm had been broken, and I walked home with the help of my friend.” These would have been ordinary childhood stories except that in my life they were also symbolic of the freedoms my parents allowed me as a girl. In traditional Muslim cultures around the world, girls aren’t allowed to ride bikes in public; they aren’t allowed to play baseball with their brothers; and they most certainly aren’t allowed to walk home alone. I started earning money before I hit my teen years, babysitting neighborhood children named Bobby and Misty. I chronicled the night I earned $2.50. This was also remarkable because it set me on a path toward economic independence that so many women in more traditional Muslim culture aren’t allowed.
    It is clear from my childhood expressions that I looked to God for help in my life. As it sleeted outside one November day, I wrote that the Condors won their kickball game during lunch that day. “That means we are tied with them for 1st place and have to play them to see who is No. 1.” Invoking a Muslim phrase that means “God willing,” I wrote, “ Inshallah , we are.” When my brother fell ill one summer, I took the blame. Earlier Ihad gotten jealous that he was healthy while I was sick, and I yelled, “I wish you would die!” With my brother sick, “I started crying and crying and everyone else tried to