Diana Abu-Jaber, author of The Language of Baklava

Diana Abu-Jaber is the author of Crescent, which was awarded the 2004 PEN Center USA Award for Literary Fiction and the Before Columbus Foundation's American Book Award and was named one of the twenty best novels of 2003 by The Christian Science Monitor, and Arabian Jazz, which won the 1994 Oregon Book Award and was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award. She teaches at Portland State University and divides her time between Portland and Miami.

From Diana's Weblog:

August 31, 2007:
The Beauty of Not-Knowing

Mother Teresa referred to Jesus as "the Absent One," and wrote intense, piercing letters about her sense of doubt, her despairing inability to perceive the divine presence. While pundits like Christopher Hitchens have seen this inability as evidence damning religion itself, I believe our country has hardened to such an extent that we've become increasingly intolerant not only of racial or cultural diversity, but of diversity of thought and feeling.

The patriotic fervor that descended on this country following the attacks of September 11th had a kind of irresistible energy. What could feel truer than proclaiming love of one's country? The problem is that these passions incinerated everything else in their path. There seemed to be no room for questioning anything, especially the government--even in its most nightmarishly questionable moments: the bombing of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the manipulation of our national elections.

As a child in a multicultural family, I grew up in an atmosphere of uncertainty. We lived in America, but my father, a Jordanian immigrant, asserted that we were "really" Jordanian. My various identities tugged at me: I felt multiple allegiances--to heritage and home--but I was never really uncomfortable with this multiplicity until others insisted I had to choose. It sometimes felt as if it wasn't permissible to live among different identities, to have a flux and fluidity within one's personality.

When I was in high school, a well-meaning social studies instructor announced that we would be doing an exercise on "race relations." She asked the people in class who thought of themselves as "white" to move to the left side of the room. Students who considered themselves "people of color" were asked to move to the right side of the room.

People scrambled to their sides almost instantly.

I have green eyes, brown hair, fair skin. There's nothing about my appearance that says person of color. But my father and most of the relatives I grew up with would certainly have fallen into that category. I had no idea which side of the room I belonged on--both sides struck me as fake. The exercise began to seem like something more than a statement on appearances: it seemed like a test of loyalty. Whose side you on, anyway?

I sat there, alone in the center of the room, with children on either side of me, laughing at my confusion. And the longer I sat there, the more I felt that the divisions themselves were phony. We'd all been conditioned to choose; it was too frightening to sit alone with uncertainty.

I've come to believe that there is in fact, a grace in uncertainty. As the poet Ranier Maria Rilke said, "Try to love the questions themselves…do not now look for the answers." The openness to discovery, the curiosity of the quest, seems the only "truth" available to our limited perceptions. I wish my high school teacher had felt this way. She'd eventually shaken her head at me and said, "Diana Abu-Jaber, go to the right side of the room." I obeyed, but I knew that, as certain she seemed, she was wrong. Either way.

Mother Teresa's own uncertainty was apparently the source of great pain for her. Yet she was able to achieve extraordinary things for the sick and the dying--almost as if all the things she wasn't sure of helped bring into sharper focus the things she did know. It can be frightening-even horrifying--not to live in pure certainty. But it seems that, eventually, the more we can love our questions, the better we can come to love ourselves.