By Carolyn See,
who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, August 31, 2007

DO ME TWICE

My Life After Islam

By Sonsyrea Tate

Strebor. 271 pp. Paperback, $15

If Sonsyrea Tate wrote this memoir to provoke, she certainly succeeded. Her African American mother, who chose to stay home -- in accordance with the tenets of her faith -- and raise 10 children, is sure to entertain some uncharitable thoughts about her condescending daughter. Her father might feel the same way. Her useless, no-good, philandering, attempted-murdering ex-husband should be hopping mad, too, whether he's still behind bars or not. But mostly, the elders of Tate's branch of Islam ("My family followed Elijah Muhammad's son into Orthodox Islam when he took over,"she explains) must right now be searching some theological rule book under "F" for fatwa. Though who knows? They might be turning pages to find "F" for fearless. Tate, while appreciative of some of the things she learned from her strict Islamic upbringing, has left that faith behind and developed some highly individual spiritual beliefs of her own.

But "Do Me Twice" is less a theological argument than an account of what it was like to go through adolescence in an iffy section of Washington in a particular time and place, as a member of a practicing Muslim family. While her first book, "Little X," chronicled the rigors of an Islamic childhood, "Do Me Twice" begins as 18-year-old Sonsyrea engages in a classic fight with her equally youthful boyfriend -- literally, the boy next door. She doesn't like her Valentine's Day present; it's a single, cheesy, plastic rose. They quarrel, and a third voice is heard: "If you're ashamed of my son, then he needs to find somebody else to be with. . . . My son is a good man, and he's gon' take real good care of you one day." His mom says this while driving them around like the children they are.

But their quarrel is about a lot more than that rose. Sonsyrea's mother stays home with those 10 kids, refusing to get a job, on the grounds that Allah will provide. Her father is living what turns out to be a double life: Half the time he's a pillar of the mosque, the other half he's a jazz musician and drug dealer. Ron, Sonsyrea's boyfriend, whom his mother defends so stoutly, "had been in and out of juvenile detention centers and jail since he was fourteen. The last time he was in, charged with attempted robbery and attempted murder, he converted to Islam and changed his name to Dawud. Of course, I didn't know the extent of his lawlessness, nor did I know about the twenty-years-to-life sentence hovering over him when I embraced him." What Sonsyrea is lobbying for, far more than a decent Valentine's Day present, is to get married, so that she won't burn in Hell when she has sex with Ron.

On the other hand, since she's in college and has another whole set of motivations, when she discovers she's pregnant, she goes ahead and has an abortion. She doesn't agonize about it; she simply wants to finish her education. She doesn't want to get trapped in the life of the projects. But her expectations are so touching, contradictory and naive! Ron does marry her. They set up housekeeping (with a fair amount of stolen and shoplifted goods); they spend evenings together playing Monopoly. Except that Ron, who fathered another child at the age of 15, spends more and more nights out with his girlfriends and never gets a job. He insists on sex even -- or especially -- when Sonsyrea doesn't want it, and the next thing she knows, he's back in jail and his relatives keep calling her day and night, insisting that she bail him out because she's the only one with a credit card. Besides, she's his wife; she has to stand by her man.

The miracle of this is that she keeps going to school. No matter what, she retains that sense of direction, that ambition, falling like a plumb line through the chaos of her life. She's always felt that she's come from a "good" family, a family that prays five times a day and tries to follow the demanding strictures of the Koran. But she sees her mother becoming more and more desperate as the electric bill goes unpaid and her father ratchets up his drug-dealing business. One day she hears her sister, Sakinah, playing a hand-tapping game with her girlfriends:

Your muva's in the kitchen cooking rice,

Fatha's round the corner shootin' dice,

Brotha's in jail raisin hell,

Sistah's in the basement selling [her body] for sale.

Ron is still in jail, and Sonsyrea's fed up with the way marital, religious and racial loyalties have distorted her life. "There ought to be a law against men calling women collect to curse them out," she writes. "There ought to be a law against women being silly enough to accept those calls time after time." Her uncles -- and by extension, other black men, "got into all kinds of trouble and tried to justify it saying they were just trying to take back some of what the white man had taken from Blacks for so many years."

Think of the confusions. Think of the clashing expectations between white, black and Arabic cultures. Think of Sonsyrea's mother unrolling a dozen prayer rugs five times a day. Think of that poor plastic rose. That poor guy in jail. Then think of Sonsyrea's almost inexplicable courage in extricating herself from that harsh world of so many contradictions. If the people close to the author may be provoked, strangers should thank her for opening a window into this all too perplexing world.

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