Who were you, Hanifa?

As far as I know, this is the only picture of my paternal grandparents. I’ve had this image in my home since 2006. I originally printed it out for an altar that honored dead relatives that was created at my wedding. More recently, it hung on my wall in my office, until last year when my office got a makeover from dark, electric blue to sunny pale yellow, and I have yet to re-hang any of my family photos. They are sitting in a pile on top of a crate of vinyl records from my youth (something I’ve been lugging around for years and never use).
A couple of days ago, right before Halloween, I got a text message from a friend asking me to join a gathering to honor our female ancestors. She asked us to bring photos and stories of those our grandmothers. I pulled this picture out and started looking at it. I knew almost nothing about the woman in the picture, save that she was my father’s mother and had died before I was born.
I called my mother to get more intel. “What was dad’s mother’s name?” I asked, after telling her about the event I would be attending.
“I can’t remember,” she said. She had not met my father before her death. My father had been dead for 11 years as well, and he was the last of his siblings to die. I asked her to look through old paperwork, looking for a birth certificate or immigration paperwork. Her search turned up nothing. The only concrete thing she could remember about her was that she had had 12 children, three of whom died before my father was born.
I went to the gathering with a photo of my maternal grandmother, Margaret, who I had known when I was a child, and this photo of my unknown paternal grandmother. I told some of the stories of Margaret’s bohemian adventures in Europe in the 20s and 30s, and my own memories of her. She and my grandfather had moved back to Vienna when I was about 7, and we had visited them twice. Then I began to sketch out the barest details of my other grandmother’s life that I knew from things my father had told me over the years, and that I had read in the autobiography he had written but never published.
“She had twelve children, and three of them died before my father was born,” I recounted. “When my father was less than a year old, his family immigrated from India to South Africa. They lived in Pietermaritzburg, a little town about 30 kilometers inland from Durban. Ten people shared two rooms with no electricity or indoor plumbing. That’s about all I know.” I passed the photo around to the other women in the room. It contrasted sharply with all of the photos the other women had brought of their own grandmothers who had grown up in the United States.
On my way home, I called my mother again. “I remembered her name!” she said excitedly. “It was Hanifa.” She had also found a letter of recommendation/verification from a South African official that my father had used to get citizenship in the United States that had given my grandfather’s name, Osman. It is unlikely we will uncover more information than that; while we have some contact with the relatives in South Africa, they don’t seem to be very interested in genealogy.
We’ve always been separated from my father’s relatives, though not by choice. I have many aunts, uncles, cousins, (and second cousins, great uncles, etc.) at the southern tip of Africa, but they are more strangers than family. My mother told me that my father had 51 nieces and nephews from his eight brothers and sisters. His oldest brother had 16 children. Most of these cousins are a great deal older than me, and many of them are probably already dead.
My father had been very close to his family, but had always been a bit different. He ended up quitting school after third grade, but he wanted to keep learning, and found a man with a large library who would loan him books. He used to sit under the street lights at night to read, as the kerosene lamps in his house didn’t put off much light. In his teens, he went to work at a newspaper in Durban, and his editor encouraged him to apply to schools in the United States. He ended up getting a degree in English literature from Ohio University, and then returned to South Africa. There were few opportunities for Indians under apartheid, and he came back to the states to get a graduate degree. While at USC, he met my mother, married her, and settled in Nevada to teach and raise a family.
During the summers, he would go to South Africa to visit for a month at a time, but never took his wife or children. My mother is white, and their marriage was illegal under apartheid. And so we missed out on the experience of extended family. My mother was an only child, and her parents had returned to Austria after we moved away from Los Angeles. She had a few cousins and aunts and uncles who we saw sporadically. I grew up in a textbook nuclear family.
When my parents finally took me to South Africa in 2003, I had a hard time relating to most of my relatives. My solitary, single life of adventuring was far from the lives of the devout Muslim women I met. When we visited one group of family members at their apartment across from the beach in Durban, I was excited to go swimming. The father asked a couple of his daughters to walk over to the beach with me and show me where to swim. When I asked them about swimming, they told me they hadn’t done it since they were children. Swimsuits on adult women are way too immodest.
I can’t imagine living in a world where religious culture tells me I can’t swim.
The day after the gathering, my eyes keep being drawn back to this photo of Hanifa and Osman. I’m especially curious about Hanifa, and what her life was like. Growing up as a poor Muslim woman in northern India could not have been an easy fate.
I wonder if she chose to marry Osman, or if it was an arranged marriage. In the photo, he looks quite a bit older than her. Did her parents marry her off to him while she was a teenager? Did she love him, or come to love him? Did she enjoy sex with him, or did she fight him off, as she knew that it could lead to another pregnancy, and another mouth to feed?
Did she have any dreams or desires? Or was life simply an endless round of cooking, cleaning, and laundry? Did she handle the money, or have to work outside of the home to make ends meet? Was there a vegetable garden in the yard to supplement their diet? Did she ever get a moment to herself? Did she struggle to stay awake while preparing pre-dawn breakfast during Ramadan?
My father often wrote about her love for him and how devoted she was to him. Did she have a life of her own, or were her children and husband her whole world? Was he her favorite, or did she love all her children equally? Was she resentful of her adult children who lived with her and brought grandchildren into her world, or was she performing a role her mother-in-law, aunt, or mother played for her? Had she traveled anywhere other than the long trip she took from the small town of Jodiya in Gujarat to Durban, South Africa? Did her world extend beyond the two rooms she shared with her family, and a few city blocks where she shopped for groceries?
I wonder, as well, what she would think of me. I suspect she would have a hard time understanding me and my choices. Would she find my 850 s.f. house where I live alone an extravagant waste? Would she shame me for not having children, or having sex with men I wasn’t married to? Would she be proud of me for publishing a book?
My immodest wardrobe would definitely be viewed as disrespectful, and she would probably side-eye my tattoos. Or perhaps she would be envious of my freedom and adventures, secretly wishing that she could have had the opportunities I have had.
Mostly, though, I think about how different my life is from hers, and how much has changed in only two generations. My world is much bigger and more open than she could probably imagine. Her son went from a life of poverty to middle class with his move to the United States. My father was still a devout Muslim, but didn’t raise his children in his faith. While I did get a lot of the cultural baggage of guilt and shame around sexuality, I didn’t receive the programming that many of the Muslim women in his family had: getting an education is supported and encouraged, but once you are married and having children, career gets put to the side in order to focus on motherhood. My mother was a stay-at-home mother when my brother and I were young, but she went on to have a very successful career, and my father was proud of her and didn’t expect her to choose between work and family.
Would I have been able to survive as a Muslim woman in rural India with no life path other than husband and children? Or would I have shrunk myself down to fit into that small, familiar box that women have been wedging themselves into for thousands of years, regardless of my own desires?
I wish I knew if Hanifa and I shared anything other than genetics. Did she have a good sense of humor? Did she love bright colors? Was she a crazy cat lady after her children left home? Was she a morning person? Was she left-handed? I will never know the answers to these questions.
Hanifa and her life will remain a mystery to me. Even the women family members who have had more traditional lives in South Africa still live very differently than she would have; they have indoor plumbing and electricity, for starters. I suspect that some of her relatives who remain in India are impoverished, but overall, Hanifa’s tribe has come up in the world, and includes successful doctors, engineers, and merchants. And one American girl whose life has moved forward in time and space and awareness to a world bigger and more complicated than she could comprehend.
