When Wings Expand

Sunday, May 4 | 08

I am Nur, daughter of Firdaus and Yusuf, granddaughter of Halima. I am twelve. I live where I was born, in Toronto, Canada, with my Turkish-Muslim mother. My father Yusuf grew up as an American Quaker, and became Muslim when he was sixteen. My little brother is Mehmed, and he is eight. My mother’s mother, Halima, lives in Istanbul and was married to Abdallah, a Moroccan naturalist who died in a car accident in Turkey before I was born. There are more people in my family, of course; I’ll write about them later.

A few weeks ago Mama gave me this journal. She bought it for me last year when she went to Quebec City with Baba, just after she found out she had cancer. She said she knew how hard her sickness has been for me. She scared me a little bit when she said that. She said my writing and drawing could be a medicine for me, but I didn’t know I needed any medicine so I left it sitting in my drawer until now.

I used to write a lot, but that was before Mama got sick, before the cells in her body decided they would go crazy and do whatever they wanted.

I’ve never had a journal as beautiful as this one is. I wanted to find the right word for the color of its leather cover, and not just write blue … it is a spectacular blue, not at all ordinary so I found azure in the thesaurus. Azure blue it is, and it reminds me of the blue stone necklace my friend Hana’s dad brought her from Afghanistan. I love staring at the color, trying to climb inside it, where I feel safe and protected. The pages have a tiny little bit of texture. I wonder if this is hand-made paper? Anyway, I like how the book lies flat when it is open so I don’t have to fight with it and it is easy to write in it.

This journal really matters to me, so I shall name it. Naming things always makes them more important. From now on its name shall be Buraq.

Ya Buraq, you are sooo cool, can I use your name for my journal? You are the animal the Angel Jibril brought from the heavens and which flew the Prophet Muhammad all the way from Makkah to Jerusalem in one night.

Sunday, May 11 | 08

Dear Buraq, today we were supposed to be going sailing on Yasemin’s family’s sailboat, Baba, Mehmed, me, and even Mama. The plan was to go out on Lake Ontario. A few days ago Mama was feeling better and she was looking forward to having the wind in her face. But she woke up in the middle of Friday night with a searing headache and by Saturday morning she wasn’t able even to lift up her head. Baba was constantly repeating la hawla wa la quwatta illa b’illahul azeem—there is no power or might save Allah’s—and that made me even more scared. The doctor came over right after fajr, the early-morning prayer, and said she was having a delayed reaction to her last chemotherapy treatment. Well, why wouldn’t she react, getting all pumped up with poison? It is so scary to think about what they have to do to get rid of cancer. Anyway, the doctor came and gave her two injections and the headache went away, alhamdulillah. But she still feels weak and dizzy.

Still, she was so sweet to us. Mama was in bed, and Baba was holding her shoulders and stroking her long wavy black hair. She told us she felt sad about being the reason we were missing the trip. Good old Mehmed! He said, That’s OK! Nur gets seasick all the time, and anyway look how gray the day is! It’s better we stay home and Mrs. Prouty can make us cookies! Was this Mehmed talking? If it wasn’t for his shiny black hair I would have been sure it was some other child, able to talk like that. Honestly, I never knew he had it in him!

Monday, May 12 | 08

It’s a good thing I started doing my homework early on Sunday, because it took me all day! I was supposed to write about what it would be like to …. I came up with these ideas:

Live on a fishing boat

Live on an Iroquois reservation

Get a gift of $1000

Paddle a canoe to the Toronto Islands

I wanted to add:

Have breast cancer

Lose your mother

Be like everyone else

But I didn’t have the courage to write about those.

Especially not the last one, because I am so afraid of being ungrateful. I know we are not like everyone else because we are Turks and we are Muslims. And I know in my heart of hearts that I wouldn’t change either of those things for anything. So I say, too bad, Nur, you don’t get to be like everyone else, and guess what? It just doesn’t matter! And don’t forget, you have plenty of friends who aren’t like everyone else either! What about Yasemin and her five Turkish brothers? What about Janine from Palestine, and Hana from Afghanistan, what about all the people who go to the Andalusia Mosque, let alone all the other masjids in Toronto?

So what I did write about was getting a gift of $1000. It was really fun! Here’s a tiny piece of my homework:

$1000! Yikes! That is so much money! What will I do with it? I didn’t realize before what a responsibility money is—just deciding what to do with it is hard work. My first thoughts were all about new clothes and bracelets and necklaces. Then I looked around my room and saw the great maple bed Uncle Furqan built for me, the wicker chair Mama brought me from Quebec, my stained-glass lamp, my luscious cream-colored settee with its dusty pink throw—what more do I need? This much money seems too special to spend like that. Then I thought about taking my family on a vacation, and remembered with a start that Mama is too sick to go anywhere right now. And then it hit me—her medicine! I want to use the money to help buy her medicines! But first I’m going to spend whatever it takes to get her a beautiful new quilt, and some new plants for the windowsill near her bed. I want the quilt to be something that soothes her and makes her happy just to see it. Since she has to spend so much time in bed these days, let it be with beautiful things around her. She loves colors and fabric and geometry. I pray she likes it.

I got so excited writing this. I quite forgot that it was all a fantasy! Then I remembered that Grandma gave me some money recently. It was $350, not $1000, but I can use it to buy a quilt for Mama! Last year when we went to the county fair there was a booth with home-made quilts. I took one of their flyers, because I had never ever seen anything so beautiful—the colors, the shapes. It made me want to be a quilt maker when I grow up.

I can’t wait! I’ll get someone to take me to see them and choose the best one I can find for Mama.

Wednesday, May 14 | 08

Every Wednesday afternoon I have a class with Yasemin at the Andalusia Mosque. We are doing an intense study of the Qur’an with Auntie Khadija. She has been teaching us tajweed, the proper pronunciation of Arabic, for the last three years. Now that we have nearly mastered the tajweed we are reciting the whole Qur’an, memorizing it as we go, and learning the meaning of each page. I’ve always been really happy doing tajweed, but this is a lot harder. First of all, the memorizing is hard, and then sometimes the meanings are even harder. But every once in a while I come across something that just leaves me with a delight I can barely understand. Like,

Allah is the Light of the heavens and the earth—The likeness of His light in hearts guided by those verses is as a niche in which is a tremendous lighted lamp, the lamp mounted in a crystal sheath of brightest glass, the sheath of glass as if an iridescent star—it fueled from a tree utterly abundant with blessings, an olive tree in the day’s sun neither solely from the east nor from the west, whose oil is well-nigh luminous though yet untouched by fire

~ Qur’an; Al-Nur, 34-38 ~

Honestly, Buraq, when I found these verses, my world just stopped. The picture they give is so clear! It felt like everything just opened out and out and out, and I was standing all alone on the very edge of the universe. And all of a sudden I remembered the lines from William Blake that we had to memorize and write about in English class. And I knew that it wasn’t just nice lines of poetry … it is what is REAL, only most of the time I can’t remember it.

To see a world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour.

~ William Blake, Auguries of Innocence ~

When I was memorizing the verses from the Qur’an I kept feeling like something was coming to me, something REAL, something that would nourish me and heal me, and never leave me.

So this is what makes Mama and Baba and Grandma so careful to never leave the Qur’an. I pray that I will never leave it, that it will never leave me.

Friday, May 16 | 08

My Auntie Ayshe, Mama’s sister, has come from Turkey to stay with us. Sometimes it seems like she is crying. But when she sees me, she will always smile and hug me. It helps me a lot to have those hugs, because something is really strange around here now, and I know it. Nobody’s been telling me much, but I can see how worried and sad everybody is. I want somebody to sit down and tell me what is going on, but they are all so busy, and guess what, Buraq? I realize that actually I don’t