A Servant to Many Gods Part 1

“Maryam!” My mother yells in her Belizean Creole.
“Yes mommy?”
“Cuhn ya.” I saunter toward her cautiously and look up. Her height gives her a godly aura; her stern face weakens any fluttering rebellion inside me. Her thin arms are akimbo on her waist, brushing against strands of her matted hair. The kitchen light shines on her chocolate-colored skin and her forehead wrinkles. “If yuh no start comb yuh hair, I wahn dread it!”

Earlier in the day, I leave the house with my hair in a neat pony tail and a fat, black, braid hangs down my back; but when I return home, my bushy hair is wild and similar to Albert Einstein’s. I am trying to show my mother that we are alike regardless of my lighter skin and straighter hair. My banana colored skin and Barbie-doll-hair slickness cannot separate us, because I finally figured out how to kink my straight her—drenching it in water and letting it air dry—so that it is more like hers. Thus, my mother’s warning about putting permanent dreadlocks in my hair, if I don’t keep it neat and straight, rings in one ear and floats out the other because having straight hair makes me different—makes me suffer.

My soft, slick, black strands are fine in a smooth ponytail or under my black headscarf that I wear for Friday prayer at the Mosque. To be like my mother is a wish I share with every little girl, and even though I try to kink my hair, I actually really like my straight strands and want them to remain that way when she says she will take them away. So if I don’t want my hair to be dreadlocked, then it won’t I think. But I forget that my mother knows how to braid, twist, and grease my hair so that it will permanently lock, forming uncombable dreadlocks, since she has done this to her own hair.
~
I am 11 years old and I live in Los Angeles with my mother and siblings—there are five us, but Amira is most important of all as she has a great deal to do with this story. I am the oldest girl—a mommy’s girl, then Amira the loud-mouth, is three years younger than me and she is not a mommy’s girl.

My mother’s been talking about moving back to her home in Belize. She is tired of how we move around to get away from my abusive father. He harasses my mother with phone calls; threatens her with memories of swift blows and bruises. We move so much that it’s hard to keep up with my friends and enemies.

My hair is the main subject at school and at home. The children at school tease me because my straight, “good” hair is different from their “bad” kinky hair and they aren’t my friends. They bare their teeth in smiles, but joke about my light skin and hair; my “non-Blackness.” My light skin confuses them and they don’t know if I am mixed, Latina, or a foreigner. I change schools a lot and so this confusion happens wherever I go. Though I am used to the teasing by the children, I think something is wrong with me because my mother reminds me of my cursed lightness. “Yuh look just like yuh pa!” I look at Amira whose coffee colored skin is similar to my mothers. Amira’s hair is similar to my mother’s dreadlocks too.

None of my other siblings look like my father (the light skin or straight hair). I witness how Amira’s tight-curled hair breaks combs and how her hair naturally flares out like a peacock when she combs it. Amira is the only one who decides that she wants dreadlocks; her hair obeys the locking process, kinking and knotting naturally. But my hair won’t lock when I try to twist it, it just lays flat, hanging past my face and shoulders as my mother scolds me for looking lighter, looking like my father.

I try to look less like my father and more like my mother. My hair twists into tight curls when I wet it, and if I let it dry out, then my hair does not lie flat but rises like a tangled bush. Black and matted strands of hair grace my mother and Amira’s brown faces, and I want to be like them so that I fit in. I release my mane in school, hoping to impress the children, but mainly to impress my mother when I get home. I drench my hair in the girl’s room and after my damp hair dries, it puffs into a wad of black cotton candy. Finally, it kinks up and I proudly stroll home. My mother fumes with anger as my hair mimics a lion’s mane.

“Cuhn ya. Sit down,” My mother says while sitting on the couch. I walk up to her, turn around, and sit with my back to her hands, she is holding a comb. “Rememba a mi tell yuh I mi wahn put dreads eena yuh hair?”
My response is silence and I ease my head back, between her legs. She pulls on my long strands and combs her fingers through my hair. I know that she is interweaving my slick strands of hair into tiny braids; braids that will take time to loose out; braids that are too small so that I won’t want to loose them out. What I don’t know is that these braids will kink and knot into dreadlocks if I don’t comb them out after a week, or two.

My scalp pulls as the braided strands hang around my face; my mother looks at me and says, “No loose dem out.” My stomach feels funny and I stare at the loose, black, vines that wrap and hang around my neck and shoulders. Now, I know what will happen. I want to tell my mother no, I don't want dreadlocks. But I can't. I know that my hair is too straight to naturally kink up and form beautiful dreadlocks like hers, so that’s why she braids my hair, but I still have a feeling, a resistant feeling now that it actually happens. I want to fit in, but I am betraying myself because I can’t speak up. But a part of me feels like I am finally fitting in.

However, I still feel like my mother forces my hair to kink—she forces me to change too quickly—I want kinky hair, but not permanently. She forces me to have dreadlocks and doesn’t tell me why. I don’t ask why either. Maybe she kinks it because I come home with a wild mane, I don’t know.

Bob Marley dips up and down on the television screen, he has dreadlocks too. His twisted dreadlocks bounce, as he rocks his body back and forth. Bob Marley is a Rastafarian, a Rastaman as he says, and by planting the locks in my hair, my mother wants me to be like Bob, like her. She wants me to be in a world of people that call on Jah and the spirit of Rastafari; a world of people that love to be natural. Their kinky matted hair grows into floor sweeping dreadlocks, and they are free of combs, free of brushes, and free to have unkept and wild hair. Their hair is a reflection of their free spirits and minds; they don’t comb, straighten, or brush their hair because they desire to have their hair as natural as possible.

But when I look at Bob, I see an unknown world; a world for my mother, not for me. I am a Muslim, not a Rastafarian. I am unsure of this new world and what it entails, and so I am afraid. But I hold my tongue because I love my mother.
~
I didn't want dreadlocks, but could you say no to your mother? Especially when you were 11 years old? No, you couldn’t. I swallowed my no and thought hat I had finally started fitting in. I kept quite and was a good girl for mommy. I continued be a good girl for the next 12 years, and kept those heavy locks. You’ll understand why I kept them later, but first let me take you back before I had dreadlocks or language. Back when all I had was memory and my mother had a broken life.
~
As a baby, my head is full of soft and smooth hair—Black people say I have good hair. My skin is too light and my hair too straight though, to be Black enough, and Black people argue with my mother that I am mixed with Black and White. But both my mother and father are Black.

My mother's Belizean skin is mahogany-brown, while my African American father has lighter skin, with almost a yellowish-brown tint to it. My mother and father are united in love and faith. They worship Allah and go to the Mosque every Friday. Their faces turn to the east and their foreheads kiss the ground. But then they stop praying together because my father has too many wives and my mother nurses too many bruises; swollen lips caked with dry blood are my father’s gifts to her, his first wife.
“I had a dream that a girl with green eyes was chasing me around the house,” my mother says to my father while laying on her side in their water bed. She sometimes slips into an American accent, so my father can understand her.
“Okay, and?” My father snaps back.
“And, you know how my dreams always come true,”
“Oh God, Fahima Please.”
“Well, do you know any green eyed girls?” My mother asks with irritation, sitting up.
“You spyin’ on me now bitch? I should fuck you up.” My mother tries to shuffle out of the way but my father’s fists are the last thing she sees before blacking out.
They stop talking and move like ghosts in our home, haunting the rooms with their silence.

One day, my mother put my siblings and me in the back seat of a friend’s car and we drive away to a new home. In our new neighborhood my mother tries to create a new identity to mask our existence from my father. Even though my mother leaves my father, she still decides to continue be a Muslim.

Originally she is just a Methodist Christian, until she meets my father. He converts her with his words, lips, and body. And she is given an Islamic name, Fahima, which means understanding. But even after my father uses Islam, saying that Islam gives the man the right to beat his wife, she decides to keep her Muslim name, identity, and faith and tells her children that we are too. Our Arabic and Qur’anic names tell us who we are—molds us into who we need to be.

My first name, Maryam, means that I am similar to the Holy Virgin Mary. My last name, Abdul-Qawiyy connects directly to Allah. Abdul means ‘friend’ or ‘servant of’and Qawiyy means ‘The Most Strong.’ Qawiyy is one of Allah’s names because who can be stronger than the Creator of All the Worlds? And so, as Maryam Abdul-Qawiyy I kneel in prayer and commune with the most strong, just like my mother. My siblings and I are all Abdul-Qawiyys. Therefore, not only are we Muslim, but our last names signifies that we have strength beyond measure. Abdul-Qawiyy reminds me that Allah prepares me in the womb; prepares me for the world; prepares me with strength.

But my mother changes her identity, physically at least, and, as her children, we do too. We have too, she says. She begins growing dreadlocks after she leaves my father. I am too young to understand why we move away, but I can see her relief and freedom developing. She twists clumps of her hair into thick matted—uncombable—strands that hang around her face. She doesn't wear her headscarf as often and then, slowly, decides that most, if not all of her children should have dread locks as well.

Before my mother even asks, Amira exclaims loudly that she ‘wants dreads!’ And then, it was my turn. My mother clumps Amira’s hair together and it forms beautiful matted strands and she looks even more like my mother.

I don't know if my mother thinks disguising us with dreadlocks will save us from our father’s sneaky prowling or if it is a religious decision. But dreadlocks, and all that it entails, is slowly filtering through my mother to me; therefore, some confusion set in because I am still a Muslim girl. But, it seems okay to have dreadlocks, even if I am Muslim because my mother has dreadlocks and is still Muslim, and I know my mother is right about everything. But I still have some apprehension toward having dreadlocks because I know it is a symbol for the Rastafarian religion. But my mother is Rasta and Muslim at the same time, so I can do both too; just like Amira.