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10. Hafeeza
- University of Arkansas Press
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T E N Hafeeza And those to whom Knowledge has come see That the (Revelation) sent down To thee from thy Lord— That is the Truth And that it guides To the Path of the Exalted (In Might), Worthy Of all praise. —QUR’AN, SABA (SHEBA), : I have never let my schooling interfere with my education. —MARK TWAIN [3.92.84.253] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 09:53 GMT) Trying to get a straight,earnest answer out of Hafeeza is like trying to get a cat to bark. It just isn’t happening. Even today, after knowing her for over a year in what most would call a friendly capacity, I still couldn’t say for sure, for example, whether she adores or detests me, and neither would surprise me much. The girl is about as easy to read as a politician but lacks any of the caution, pretense, or diplomacy. In the middle of our interview, she gets a text message—Hafeeza is obsessedwithtextmessages.Hervoicemailmessageannounces,“You’vereached Hafeeza.Please text-message me.If not,feel free to leave a message.”Every time I leave a message, I feel guilty for forcing her to hear a human voice when writingispreferred ,andIamprettysurethatthisisherintent.Thismessageisfrom Daran, whom she describes as “a magazine at the bus stop. It keeps you entertained for the time being, while you’re waiting for another bus.”As usual, I can’t quite tell whether she’s kidding or serious and eventually conclude, as usual,that she’s just a little bit of both.I can’t imagine that being so consistently ambivalent would be anything short of exhausting, but for Hafeeza it seems easy, natural, and even vitalizing. Hafeeza grew up in Woodinville, Washington, a small, predominantly white upper-middle-class suburb about thirty miles outside of Seattle. Her family moved there from New Haven,where she was born,when Hafeeza was seven years old.While she speaks fondly of her family, she is less than enthusiastic about her classmates. “Kids got drunk on the weekdays, smoked weed and snorted cocaine on the weekends, then returned to school to achieve the requisite A and do it all over again. Although I did not partake in the drugs or the alcohol—out of a direct, unacknowledged result of being raised Muslim—I loved being around the‘cool’ kids, watching the partiers from the wall, even if I wasn’t really one of them. And I wasn’t. I had nappy hair that I stupidly tried to straighten with a relaxer. Inevitably, my hair looked ever crazier in a highly successful attempt to rebel. I have dark, deep brown skin; I am tall [five-foot-nine] and was very athletic—so what I’m trying to say is that I was a tall lanky black girl with crazy hair;theantithesisof alldesirablefeaturesinaWASPhighschoolsuchasmine. “It didn’t help that I was raised Muslim, which provided me with this seemingly unpronounceable name Hafeeza. It’s phonetic.That’s it.Yet everybody wants to sayAfeesa orAveeza or—what my neighbor called me for eight years—Hafreesia. Her name was Mrs. Katurnuik (pronounced Kat-er-nik), and she thought my name was difficult to say. Whatever. Where was I? Yes, Hafeeza there was me: an insult to the white Western standards of beauty. And of course my brothers—I have two older brothers—were the forbidden dreamcome -true of every white girl,and either the envy or scorn of every white boy. So where does a black Black girl fit in? Yes, just as I said in the beginning . . . on the wall of the party watching the partiers drink,smoke,snort up,and rejuvenate . Ahh, high school. I was so happy to leave.” When I first met Hafeeza, she had just graduated from Spelman with a major inpoliticalscienceandwastrainingtoteachinthefallaspartof theAmericorps Teach forAmerica program,which places top college graduates in underserved publicschooldistrictsindesperateneedof teachers.Matthew,beinginthesame program, insisted that I meet her and that we would get along great. His main initial selling points were the following: () she’s funny, () she’s beautiful, and () she’s smart—in that order. So we met, and he was right. Still, we have not since become the close friends my husband was so sure we would, likely due in equal parts to our mutual laziness and to her genuine sense of contentment. Hafeeza appears to be content with the friends she already has, the person she already is,and the life she already lives.Despite appearances,however,she does acknowledge...