NATIVE BELIEVER

Fiction

Unraveling in America

NATIVE BELIEVER
By Ali Eteraz
272 pp. Akashic

Reviewed by Dennis C. Rizzo

Any society tends to be xenophobic. Outsiders are scanned and tested and permitted entry only upon assuaging the fear (or guilt) of the group. In Native Believer, Ali Eteraz gives us a character who has been successfully assimilated; so he is led to believe. Set in the first person, our unnamed protagonist starts off as a medium-level ad executive at a medium-level advertising firm in Philadelphia. Eteraz chooses average-to-mundane for all of the settings, including Philadelphia. It’s not New York, not ‘top of the barrel’, but life is good.

M (as he refers to himself at one point) embraces the new boss at work, then is fired because the boss finds a Koran in M’s apartment. This duplicity startles both M and his Southern-born wife because they have been studiously non-religious. M was not even aware his mother had placed a Koran on the very top shelf of his bookcase, to be discovered by the new executive during a welcoming party. The firing brings M’s ethnicity into play in what he thought was an ethnic-blind workplace. M’s comfortable American world begins to unravel.

I stepped out into the cold, my eyes fixed on the river. The ice was a dirty gray blanket with an occasional piece of knotted wood sticking out above the surface, like fingers pointed at me, accusing me of being a Muslim, the Fascist of today. And the disembodied nature of the incrimination meant that I could lodge no protest.

Eteraz sets a cheerful stage for us and then shatters it. M proceeds through a period of what we might call “muslimication” (small ‘m’). As with Luke Skywalker, M begins to realize that, deep inside, he always felt ‘different.’ His wife begins a period of road trips for work, leaving him in an unemployed funk and ready to explore his beliefs. He does this through several characters drawn, I suspect, from Eteraz’s own experiences.

The essence of the story comes out in a speech by Ali Ansari, M’s new friend in the Muslim community in Philadelphia – M’s Muslim Yoda, it seems.

It’s sad how we ended up here. Sad. Those towers went down and suddenly everyone started pinning their gripes on a thing called a Muslim. .... And the rest f the world fell in line with this new game. If you’re Indian, pissed off about Pakistan complaining about your occupation of Kashmir? Hey, just call them Muslims and get them declared a terrorist state. If you’re Israeli and you don’t want to release an inch of the West Bank to the Palestinians? Hey, just call them Muslims and you don’t have to move your tanks. If you’re Russian, struggling with a bunch of Chechens telling you to stop raping their women? Hey, just call them Muslim and blow them to bits. ... If you’re European and you’ve got millions of illiterate Turks and Moroccans and Algerians and Libyans who you didn’t allow to become citizens for decades? Hey, just call them Muslim and declare them fascist or lazy or criminal or all of the above. And if you’re American and you want to fly around the world and bomb the boogers out of countries that object to you taking their oil and resources? Hey, just call them Muslim and go to town.

Eteraz is not an ‘Islamist’ or a radical. He brings M into this arena to begin the process of educating him (and us) about the how and why of Muslims in post-9/11 America. M begins to explore his own culture for the first time. He listens, he thinks, and he finds truth on both sides.

In one particularly poignant scene,  M views a former colleague’s political ‘statement’. The projection of quotes from the Koran onto the wall of the Constitution Center in Philadelphia. Electronic graffiti espousing Islamic creed. Nothing happens to the perpetrators. M begins to wonder what the Muslim community would say or do if he projected the words of the Declaration of Independence onto the mosque in Mecca. His answer prods him back to his roots in America. It causes him to question the sincerity of his new friends, while at the same time to finally accept his own ethnicity within the melting pot of America.

M gives voice to the issues of Muslim-Americans.

I had been identified as an agent of Islamic expansion, the fear of which was woven into every Westerner, who had known a thousand years of Islamic assault, from Spain to Russia, from late Rome to early America. This fear transformed and cohered into a different form after the shadows struck New York. No longer was it a fear of an empire of faith lorded over by a sultan, armed to the hilt, strapped with swords, but robotic sleeper cells waiting to be activated by some dark man in a dark cave. .... The trouble with this narrative is that it didn’t apply to me. There had been a misunderstanding. I harbored nothing toward Islam, or toward any other idea in the world that might assert itself as a competitor to America. ... But that’s the thing about misunderstandings. Unless you have the power to take control of the one who has misunderstood, you have to participate in the misapprehension. You have to enter the prison that someone else has constructed for you....

In reviewing books I am often drawn to wonder why a publisher selected this or that author for publication. In too many cases, the question is unanswerable. In the case of Native Believer, it is crystal clear. Ali Eteraz is a master storyteller. Native Believer brings out the angst of a population caught between world events and assimilation into a fear-ridden culture. It is to Eteraz’s credit that he is unapologetic, and nods in admiration to those immigrants who have come before. Believer or non-believer, you won’t look at the local mosque the same after reading this excellent work.