The postal worker stared at him intently and calmly replied, “what’s that, sir?”
“The VAMPIRES. The stamps with the VAMPIRES on them. Those stamps with the VAMPIRES on them sure raised some eyebrows! I wonder if you still have the stamps with the VAMPIRES?”
An audible voice from somewhere behind me in line thought out loud, “Is he kidding me right now? He’s kidding me right now. Are we really having a conversation about vampires? He’s having a conversation about vampires. Vampires? He’s kidding me right now.”
The 7000-plus people in line, I think it is fair to say, were less fascinated by the possibility of the continuation of the vampire-stamp line, and yet, as is the case in many quintessential New York situations, we were forced into someone else’s world -- another person’s questions and queries, in which we instantly became inextricably linked -- if not only for a few minutes on the subway or in line at the post office -- to some one else’s life. Though the vampire inquiry didn’t rank high on my personal profundity scale, the fact was, if I wanted to get my business done, I had to listen to this guy talk about his preference in stamps: colored, not black and white, oversized, and, thank God they got rid of those stamps you lick! Did you know that 10 years ago, that was all there was?
I did, actually.
I became engaged in the subject. I wondered with much interest how someone could care so much about stamps. I wondered if the man was lonely. I wondered if the man was conscious he was lonely when he talked about stamps to the teller who was kind enough to smile and answer his questions. I was forced to gain an understanding of the vampire-stamp lover that forced me to gain a deeper understanding of people, and the effect that life has on them.
Because of incidents like this, my perception of God has changed in New York. Needless to say, perhaps, this is hard to explain. In the tradition of the Arabs, I will tell a story to paint a picture. There is a famous fable of a man, standing on a hilltop in the Holy Land, who is considering all the world’s suffering and trauma -- the death of children, wars, aggression, injustice, oppression, hunger, pain and suffering. He raises his arms to the heavens and screams, “God! Why have you abandoned us?” God replies, “The real question is: why have you abandoned me?”
When we cause pain and misery for others, it is because we ceased to look at them with interest, we ceased to understand or to want to understand. Our river of empathy dried up and we became cold and selfish. We became arrogant in our beliefs and our conviction that our lives are the best lives, the most well lived lives. Many religious people fall into this trap, as well as many wealthy people, “artsy” people, educated people, and people in general. New York convinces me that God did not mean for us to act this way – there is way too much diversity, way too many ways to “skin a cat”, way too many lives that get lived different ways that work. The only way to be “better”, it seems, is to recognize how “un-better” any one individual really is, to see suffering and take it in and also to feel joy and wish it on others.
In New York, one can, if you look, detect a kind of collective will to test the limits of humanity, a life-ambition of sorts. As I look around me now, sitting in a café in the East Village, I see Blacks, Asians, Jews, Italians, and White people. But it’s more than that. I see tattoos, green shoes, business suits with pearl earrings, trendy hipster trucker hats, a bleached-blonde white man engrossed in what looks like an engaging conversation with a Dravidian looking Indian man, both of them smiling easily. A Japanese young man with long hair and a bright yellow T-Shirt talks to a white woman drinking iced coffee, as an Arab man sits on a bench in front of them, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the sky.
Far be it from me to view our society as some kind of idyllic garden with different colored tulips flailing playfully in the breeze, each flower more lovely and in full bloom than the next. But there comes a time when cynicism must be put aside in the interest of truth, and for a minute, I feel the impulse to put the protective cloak of irony aside and report what I see. In New York, everyone lives together, and the result, I would argue, teaches us an extremely profound lesson, a fundamental truth, an axiom from which many other opinions and policies should spring forth like a cool fountain--
God created an amazing diversity of people, and when you put them together and leave them alone just a little, the result is an overwhelming sensation of peace and tranquillity.
The result is beauty.
I must say that this realization comes as a major relief. It’s counterintuitive – this idea that crowding a bunch of different people together on a dense, concrete island would be a good thing. And yet it is – very good. Working in Washington with politicians, with neatly-packaged people and ideas that always stay on message, with the media that forces you to compress the complexity of life and existence into a frenzied 30-second sound byte, one starts not to think much of groupings of people in general. When we are bombarded daily with mob mentalities, whether they are here in America with the increased levels and intensity of xenophobia toward minority communities, especially Muslims and Arabs, but also others, that have become steadily more acceptable, or in the Muslim world in terms of group-think, the persistent and evil oppression of women, the near-total triumph of simple and narrow minded Imams, one starts to give up hope and wonder if a secluded life – not only physically, but in terms of risks one allows themselves to take and people one allows themselves to get to know – are really worth it.
I often hear friends say that they have “fallen in love” with New York, and I myself am experiencing a sensation of falling in love. But what is falling in love? It’s the abandonment of fear and the taking of risks. There’s a reason the word “falling” is used to describe the process. In New York, much like the decision to love God, one has to submit to survive. The pace is fast and events unpredictable, and the most stubborn proponent of an Ayn Rand-like understanding of radical individualism cannot seriously argue that this place is not totally interconnected and that there are simply some things that are out of our control. For the stress cases of the world, this is an incredible relief. The sensation reminds me of the busses in Egypt that are so overcrowded that people are hanging out of the door, swinging in the sweltering heat. But the bus driver, acclimated to the situation, sits calmly with upbeat music blasting, as many of the passengers sing along, or quietly fill their tiny square foot of space with silent prayers, movements of a sibha that might be sitting on their laps, bright eyes darting about, taking in the scene around them. Some even start de-stemming their mulukheyyia, or picking the rocks out of their wheat bread. And many of them are smiling. And alive. Curious. It can be exhilarating to locate the calm within the storm.
And so I realize more what the Qur’an means when it says that God created people in nations and tribes so that they can know one another, not despise one another. When 9-11 happened, I was in California, and read a lot of press about what New Yorkers were saying about the events through their anguish. One of the questions I read people asking stuck out in my mind – they asked, “why New York?” I didn’t get it at the time. Now I think I do. Why would someone attack this crazy amalgamation of lives that results in a strange and frenetic beauty? I wonder if Bin Laden and his goons really knew precisely what they were attacking. One hates to echo the hollow and shamelessly self-serving rhetoric of the Bush administration, but there is a sense of attacking freedom itself when one thinks deeply about what New York is, or has the potential to be. One thing seems very clear to me now: there is no way God wants it this way, and I’ve experienced a new level of pain and hurt that the name of God was evoked to carry out that attack.
God is very present in New York, whether it’s in the form of submission to the beautiful insanity, or in the bright and glaring diversity of God’s creations. I won’t here even use the pronoun “he” to refer to God, since the diversity that surrounds me renders that patriarchal use of language all the more absurd. Every day, by coming into more and more contact with bizarre vampire lovers in the post office, laughing transvestites in the subway, snazzy interracial couples walking hand in hand down the street, or simply the strange calm of the East river juxtaposed with towering skyscrapers as people go fishing while homeless people cool off by the water, I get more and more of a small glimpse, a shade of understanding of what God embodies.
Sarah Eltantawi is a writer and activist in New York, and Communications Director of the Progressive Muslim Union.
