I didn’t realize my father had gone viral until 2022, when a decades-old video had already reached over a million views—a shocking number that rose steadily as if out of spite. By then, when I first saw the video, around ten years had passed since he’d given his last speech. In the 2010s, he had made the private decision to end a thirty-year run as a globally famous and controversial religious leader; then, he had quietly disappeared from the public eye, his status and whereabouts mostly unknown to those who had bought his books or come to see him speak on world tours. He retreated to his life as a professor in Kansas, where he and my mother watched The Voice and he labored over a long-unsolved problem of algebraic geometry. But for years after he withdrew from his public fame, people from all around the world continued to write him emails to glorify or castigate him: brilliant, bold, foreigner, sinner.
In 2022, my cousin overseas posted a YouTube link to the family WhatsApp chat, and tiny hearts bubbled out of my phone screen as my uncles and aunts liked it from Abu Dhabi, Jeddah, and London. The video’s appearance surprised everyone in my family and especially my father, who regarded that time of his life as over and done. In the link preview his face was frozen mid-sentence in front of an auditorium’s mauve curtain, his tie straight and his shoulders straightened. In freeze-frames, he pushed his fingers to his temple in mock frustration. Here, he laughed. Here, he paused. Here, he motioned up and out with his arms as if to suggest the whole world beyond him, this room, and these people.
By the time I visited the site again a year and a half later in 2024, the views had reached almost three million and still climbing. Under the rectangle that framed his face-in-motion were tens of thousands of tiny thumbs-ups and thumbs-downs registering how many anonymous people had approved of what he was talking about—or hadn’t. What he was talking about was the purpose of life, which was, in fact, the video’s title. I didn’t have to watch “The Purpose of Life” to know what my father said within it, although I did watch it again and again.
I watched it with the sound on and the sound off, and in slow and fast motion. I watched it in bed, on my sectional couch, and on my porch in the Kansas house I bought after my father’s heart attack in 2016, which was a week after my son’s first birthday. I watched the video and laughed, and I watched it as I cried. I watched it because in the years between when my father first gave the speech and now, his essential question had become urgent and personal for me: Why create man when man creates violence? I was a girl when he first wrote this speech, his question abstract and remote to me then, but now I was a woman halfway through the course of life. My life was once a clean, open page. Now it was littered with past selves and scenes that glitched into the present while I unrooted a weed or carried my sons upstairs. Suffering, he had written in the video in fat, green letters that fell apart from one another and unraveled down the page.
I imagine he can’t bear it: the piece of this woman that can’t be grasped or owned. The piece of a woman that can’t be beaten out.
By 2024, I had known some measure of suffering. I had suffered a man who’d beaten me and threatened to kill me. I had survived that violence, although the memory of it sometimes surged within me and filled me with an inexplicable urge to flee: my body, my mind, my home, the good man I had married, the children we had together—the life I had built.
I wanted a piece of my father’s conviction for myself. I wanted a kernel of wisdom or faith that might soothe my urge to escape. So, I watched the video again and again. I watched it at home and in my office at the university where I work, always with the door closed before I pressed play. And, as I watched the video, I realized that I also watched it to claim him as mine—the one viewer among millions who understood best what it meant to know and love the man speaking on the screen. What did these anonymous commenters without faces or real names—CalmAchiever and Tootufftocry and user-ez7pq9eu8e—know of this man, my father, from whom they were seeking answers? I watched the muscles of his jaw work around the words I could have recited by heart if I had wanted to. I watched him tell a joke about a basketball game, and I watched him pause to take a sip from a clear glass of water. I watched him let loose a smile here and there: a sly smile or a bashful one.
Often he would unleash a smile that was a vision of perfect youth, his lips arched to expose uniform white teeth, his face brilliant and beaming: forever thirty-something. But, I knew that smile wasn’t genuine, a truth that belongs to me and not them, because he is my father. Behind the videotaped smile, I know he was anxious—panicked even—by his public role and what it might mean for my mother, my sisters, and me. I also know that smile wasn’t real, because I’d watched him smile an impromptu, honest smile for decades: at my mother sitting across from him in their living room, always directly in his line of sight; at punchlines in funny movies, his favorite type to watch; across large lecture halls at his hundreds of students as he sermonized about mathematics, his trained subject; at my two younger sisters; at me. I am always, forever, watching him.
In the videos—there are many versions of his talks online—he always tells the story of his conversion from atheism to belief. He recounts his Catholic upbringing in New England, where nuns beat him for his left-handedness because the left hand is Satan’s hand. He may or may not include a particular climactic moment: a recurring dream he had as a young man, in which he saw himself in a blank white room bathed in light emanating from some high-up window, and then lowered his head to the ground. In the story of his life, the dream became reality, fiction turned fact. He did, in fact, lower his head onto a red-and-gold rug on a mosque floor in San Francisco full of both prayer and panic while the day outside was mild and blue. Light beamed from a single window above and rippled around him. Beside him, other men placed their heads on the ground in unison, all of them joined by the ritual of recitation in a language he couldn’t speak and never will.
I have seen him give this speech dozens of times, maybe more, over a lifetime in which I watched him become progressively more famous—first nationally and then internationally—and then increasingly criticized. He was an American, a Muslim convert, a professor of math, and a self-taught religious scholar. He was promoting a liberal, critical interpretation of religion, which was unpopular with traditionalists. He had begun writing his first book when I was a toddler. At that time, he had imagined his first manuscript as a letter-of-sorts to my sisters and me—a record of his thoughts on faith for us. But by the time I was in grade school, he had published a second book and had become well-known in American Muslim circles. By the time I was in high school, he was known throughout the world. At first, he was determined; then, he was anxious as his fame grew and he began to receive death threats; then he was indignant, and then, finally, expended of fire and fury, he was drained. Suddenly, I was in my final year of college, and he became just a man again, pushing a lawnmower up a punishing hill while the Midwestern summer sun beat down on his unshielded brow. He became a man who crouched to drink from his backyard hose, a habit from childhood, the knees of his pants stained with grass and his shirt sweat-drenched. He became a man who walked down a neighborhood sidewalk on a humid, honey-suckled night beside his daughter, trying to convince her to finally leave the man who who had threatened to kill her. The daughter—crying, arrogant, broken, unrelenting—was me.
*
In the viral video, my dad starts the story with his mother, whom he will call a saint, a woman of faith, a hospital nurse, and the long-suffering victim of his father. He always begins the story with his mother, although it is, for him, primarily a story about faith. When he gives this speech, he describes with varying levels of detail a scene that opens his second book. In the scene, my father is eight years old, the same age as my own son the day I noticed that the video reached nearly three million views. The story begins as my father is woken from sleep by the sound of violence: a loud voice and a quieter one, a thump, and then, finally, a louder thump. The loudest thump sounds, he says, like furniture being slammed against a wall. This is the part of the story where he denounces faith, because isn’t it unfathomable to believe in any god when you walk downstairs and find your mother, red hair gathered on top of her head, bent backward against the kitchen counter as far back as a spine will allow, trying to gain distance as the man who is your father beats her?
My father prays to the God of his upbringing and begs the Holy Father to disappear my grandfather. It is a boy’s wish: disappearance rather than death, no blood or body, but, instead, a black hole that, once manifested, might swallow up all that is awful and leave behind only stillness. That is his prayer night after night: Father, please, take our father away. But my grandfather doesn’t disappear, and my father runs down the stairs at the sound of a loud thump before he catches himself in the kitchen entrance.
In my father’s story, the mother faces the doorway into which her son appears, pajamaed and beautiful with blond hair made unruly by sleep. He wears an expression of sheer panic. She has turned her head away from her husband to avoid his whiskey breath, and so she sees her gentlest son at the room’s edge take a step toward her. The father will not pause bearing down on his wife and keeps his focus intent on her face. The father wants something unreachable from within the mother, although he has already married her and shared her children. She will never leave him and will die never having left him. Still, he wants the part of the mother that speaks to and for herself alone, the self that belongs only to the self. I imagine he can’t bear it: the piece of this woman that can’t be grasped or owned. The piece of a woman that can’t be beaten out.
*
In my early twenties, the man I loved sometimes beat me awake. I may have snored or refused to relegate my unruly body to one side of the bed. Asleep, I may have called some other man’s name. Or maybe I’d performed the most grievous sin: dreamed of a life without this cruel man. Awake, I had trained my body not to flinch or flee, but in sleep, it let itself loose, and I flailed my limbs around his queen-sized bed until I woke up tangled and feverish in the jersey sheets. Or I jolted myself awake to find my legs positioned as if about to run out of the bed. In the blue bruise of dark, the furniture became shapeless and shadowed against the walls where it stood guard.
On this morning, the man said I had snored, and he accused me of sabotaging his sleep. I was, according to this man, always snoring. It wasn’t unfathomable, since both of my parents were noisy sleepers. Their syncopated snoring sounded like something primordial from down the hall where I slept as a child. It was as if some beast within each of them was suffocated and brought back to life on a loop every night. I imagined that some equivalent unnamable terror within me might be my inheritance. To the man, it was as if a recklessness had taken root inside of me, unchecked and unmannered, and he had to tame it. Some small part of me believed in that recklessness, because internally I had begun to admit that I wasn’t sure if I loved him, not truly, and that he certainly didn’t love me. I talked back to him in my head, and sometimes out loud. No, you’re the one who will never leave this town. Or, No, I’m not crazy.
And it did sometimes feel like a beast lived within me and watched disapprovingly as the man beat me, ready to escape and unleash. I was afraid that a subconscious part of me would out myself, especially when I closed my eyes. I might have sleeptalked or made another unintended sound: a snore, or maybe a scream. Yet no one ever claimed to hear me snore: not my sister with whom I shared a childhood room nor, years later, my eventual husband, whom I would ask again and again, Are you sure I don’t snore? No, he would say, you don’t make a sound.
I opened my eyes to find the man’s face directly above mine with his eyes narrowed so that they appeared almost closed. My vision was still blurred with sleep, and if I refused to blink, it was possible to believe that maybe he, too, was asleep or that this was just a dream. But his hands were around my throat and his grip tightened. I swallowed air as I choked and said that I was sorry. I cried. Or, having been woken like this before, I had had it. I can’t remember exactly, because this scene would replay in different variations. Sometimes, I balled my fist tightly and threw a punch at the man. I aimed for his face until I could free myself from his grasp, spring up, and curse him. This was a lesson my father had taught me—how to hit back—although I know he hoped I would avoid the need for it. You’re a fool, I said to the man, a motherfucker, and a murderous man. You need help, I said. At least once he agreed. He took a shower and, still damp and wrapped in a towel, told me that he feared there may be something wrong with him, too. I knew sleep never came easily for him, because he told me as he begged for my prescription cough syrup when he wasn’t sick.
Sometimes I surrendered to the inevitability of violence, and I simply collected my body into the shape that offered the most protection. I existed disembodied somewhere above the scene, and from there, I watched dispassionately—look, a woman hinged upon herself, a woman spiraled inward, a woman halved—and I waited for the moment to pass.
*
Even as a boy, my father was square-jawed and broad-shouldered, traits he and his brothers inherited from his father. He was unlike his brothers because he was quiet and didn’t like to fight, although he was built for it with a fist that formed a sizable, heavy weight when he coiled his fingers into his palm. From a young age, he knew that his fist was made for violence. But he would not throw it. He would live his life with his balled fist carried at his side in an orb of kinetic energy that pulsed with the possibility of violence unrealized. He was the second-to-last in a family of five boys who dog-piled, who bit, and who threw their weight around until something broke, even and especially within themselves. He didn’t judge them for their violence; rather, he found himself unwilling to do what they did: throw their fists at his father and brace for the return. My dad would rather endure his father’s attacks and make himself inanimate in the face of that rage. He was determined to hide himself within himself, and there remain fortified and protected. He knew that this made him seem strange to his family, who would see him as unable to speak the language in which they were most fluent—that of violence and injury. The youngest brother, Matt, was the only one stranger than my father, because while Matt was quiet, too, Matt inhabited a slight body not made to execute an impact. My father was fiercely protective of Matt and used his own size to shield his little brother. It was Matt whom my father left behind asleep upstairs to find their mother bent backward in the kitchen.
I felt that if my father died…I would be doomed to watch my life as if from behind a great pane of glass, caught somewhere between living and dead.
In his story, the father’s teeth are bared and his hands form a vise-grip around his wife’s shoulders. As a game, the father sometimes practices this grip on his boys, bragging about the enormity of his fists. See how strong the grasp is? How impossible it is to escape? Or, now in the scene, he raises his fist toward his wife’s face. It’s not a threat; it is vow. The son knows the damage his father’s fist can do, and he knows the sound a body makes when beaten: his four brothers’ bodies, his own, and his mother’s, although hers is the quietest because she always refuses to shout or move.
Without unbending her back, the mother arranges her mouth into a placid line. It is the practiced expression of a nurse. Now, faced with her little boy, she is gentle but firm, a tenor meant to evoke calm in chaos. “It’s all right, son,” she says. Son, she calls him, or my son. She calls him this until the day she dies, even when he has become my father. “Please, son,” she says, “go to bed.” My father’s story leaves my grandmother there, frozen in time with her back strained against the kitchen counter’s sharp edge. This is how he comes to believe there is no God, and that beyond life there is only darkness within darkness. Or, perhaps, the sensation of endlessly falling, which is how his life feels anyway.
But then, in the video, my father’s story moves toward its final point: spiritual revelation, awakening, and surrender. He transforms in front of the audience, and he’s no longer a small boy in a kitchen at night. Now he’s a strong, capable man wearing a tan suit and a patterned brown-and-gold tie telling the story of how violence led him to renounce faith; how he began to study faith to disprove it on the basis of violence; and how in studying faith, he found it again. When I watch, I know that my mother picked out the tie a couple of nights before. I can see how she would have selected it from the tie carousel in the closet beside their bed, laid it flat in his suitcase on top of the pressed suit, and placed beside it a small bag that included his blue hair gel and a roll of mint floss. She knew he was a man of habit, that was his coping mechanism, and that even on the road he would not deviate from his routine. He would shower, shave, and apply the blue gel that kept his hair perfectly in place. He would walk seven miles. He would skip breakfast and eat a small meal of fruit and cereal. If he was going to be gone for a long time, they would exchange love notes that I sometimes found but never read. This was before my mother became unable to find herself in the story of my father’s life and his telling of it. In the years that he gained fame, she was a stay-at-home mother and wife. She often found herself alone and lonely stranded in Kansas, an immigrant far from her own family overseas in Saudi Arabia, until in later years she began to return to them—in short and then longer stints.
In front of the audience, my father pauses to touch his chin and moves to the subjects of the JFK and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, the race riots, and the Vietnam War, all of which he once took, he says, as further proof that no merciful God hovered above the Earth. How, he had wanted to know, could there be a God who created man, and who allowed man to create violence. But then, he says, the words of the Quran, by which he felt personally called, brought him back to faith. Those words brought him to the understanding he delivered to the audience: that suffering might serve as a vehicle for spiritual growth. The words of the Quran brought him to the brightly lit mosque within which he performed his first prayer on a red and gold rug under the light of a window. They brought him to my mother, a Muslim herself, and then to me, their first child. They brought him there, to the scene in the video, where he stands in an Iowa auditorium before an audience to which the cameraman sometimes pans. They watch him from folding chairs, lean out of their seats for a better view, and they laugh freely at his jokes. The camera lens refocuses on my father who smiles back at them like a movie star or some small, lesser god.
*
Under the YouTube video of my dad’s speech was a comments section flooded with thousands of remarks. Most viewers praised my father, and many argued with each other about religion. I’ve never been as grateful as I am now for YouTubes existence, wrote fatemasamir7604. Since 2019 or 2010 i watched this video the beginning of every Ramadan. Its an annual tradition, wrote kibwel.parker6042. Christian Evangelists “witnessed to” the mostly Muslim commenters by inviting them to salvation, and the Muslim commenters argued that they were, in fact, worshipping the same God and therefore didn’t require saving. Atheists wrote that my father deluded himself. Religion is its own worst enemy, wrote user-jh4fm4fe3k. Some commented on his appearance, his voice, and his demeanor. His face and voice look and sound like Christian Bale, wrote ariff_arshad. Feels like Batman explain Al-Quran. Some commenters wrote directly to my dad, confused as to why he wouldn’t respond to their questions or write back to their requests.
There was a controversy within the comments as to whether my father was dead or alive. Some mourned his death, and they prayed that God would have mercy on his soul or that he would be rewarded in heaven for his good deeds. Some wanted to meet him in the afterlife. They eulogized him with a fervor that made me uneasy, because to me he was different from the man they saw at a podium, bestowing what I knew was an uncomfortable smile upon a crowd of strangers.
To me, he was the man who walked up the tree-lined hill to our house every afternoon, who sat on the living room floor and worked out a mathematical proof on a yellow legal pad, or who cut fresh spinach noodles—my favorite—on the white countertop in his kitchen. I walked beside him, sat beside him, and waited on top of the kitchen countertop for the dough scraps that he would cut and which I ate raw. I was eight, ten, twenty years old. I swung my legs against the cabinets and talked about whatever came into my mind, because my father and I were forever talking. Even as a child I knew with certainty that I would never experience happiness as pure or uncomplicated again.
The YouTube commenters gave conflicting accounts of his death. He’s dead already 3 years, wrote aa.r2588 in 2023. I can’t recall when but I saw a post on youtube which stated that Dr. Jeffrey Lang passed away some time last year, wrote shariqhasan6220 in 2024. May he rest in peace, said envi-jm9mi. There was an entire Reddit thread of mourners. Others claimed that no, in fact, he was not dead. They claimed to have seen him, heard from others who know him personally, or found accounts of his life on the Internet. He isn’t dead! Where did you get that from? wrote mrhamzah18, and yukhzia replied, hes lying. Opoo96-dy8we writes, No, thank God, the doctor is fine, and yasminee52 wrote, Allah give him more blessed years with his family.
i love you so much, wrote azizsobirin8227.
*
In 2016, when my father had a heart attack, my mother called me three times in a row. I had taught my classes at the Indiana college where I was a professor and picked up my son from daycare. He had just turned one and for his birthday we had FaceTimed my mom and dad, who cooed and waved at him through the screen. Now, as I lowered my son’s sleeping body into the high white crib for his nap, my phone’s jingle cut again and again through the quiet. I knew the sound meant an emergency.
Within hours, my husband had driven us across Indiana and into Illinois where dusk purpled the horizon, and then into Missouri as the night turned truly black. Throughout it all, I cried, unable to say anything beyond, “my dad.” We made it to my parents’ house very late at night, and in my childhood bedroom, we tried to sleep for a few hours before 7:00 AM when the hospital would let us in. My dad had been rushed from our college-town emergency room to a hospital complex about an hour away, and we made the drive up as early as we could.
At the hospital, doctors were preparing my dad for a triple bypass, which they felt he was likely to survive. I was initially suspicious of the surgeon. He was a man my age, maybe younger, who sucked a red lollipop during rounds, but he gave my dad a 99 percent chance of survival.
As a mathematician, my father was reassured by that statistic. He reminded me of it, 99 percent, before they wheeled him into surgery. I knew these were good odds, because he had trained me to be discerning about statistics and numbers, and every mathematician knows better than to promise a hundred. Although I knew that, I did not like the 1 percent that refused to fit itself neatly into a round number and denied me any guarantee. I cried through the entire surgery, seated next to my mother in cushioned chairs that faced a large glass window. The window overlooked a new hospital wing under construction where the long neck of a crane poised over a building’s steel skeleton. It was eight days before the first day of winter. We were in limbo between seasons. Such mildness is a rarity in Kansas, because the state is notoriously temperamental and swings wildly between heat and cold. I didn’t care what the weather did that day or any day, because I felt that if my father died, I would always be stuck in almost-winter, almost-fall, and I would be doomed to watch my life as if from behind a great pane of glass, caught somewhere between living and dead.
It was also my mother’s birthday, a fact I had forgotten but remembered. I cried as I wished her a happy birthday. She turned away from the window to face me, and in her expression I found neither fear nor sympathy. Instead, she looked at me as if I were a child who had misbehaved or, more generously, who had misunderstood something important. “Why are you crying?” she said to me. “No one is going to die today.”
My father looked beyond our carefully placed blinds and our curtained windows and saw something I didn’t see: the undercurrent of violence that pulses through every night.
After the surgery, we waited to see my father, who was sedated. He was taller and had a bigger frame than the other patients, and the hospital bed looked like it might bend or break beneath him. We should get some rest, the surgeon told us. The surgery had gone perfectly. That night, we checked into a house that I had rented a few minutes away. The house was at the top of a hill below which sat the hospital, pumping out steam and light. I had an urgent need to be with my father, and so after I put my son to sleep, I walked down the hill toward the red glow of the hospital’s emergency room entrance.
In my dad’s ICU room, he was awake and propped up by several pillows in the metal hospital bed. A tube was taped under his gowned chest and ran into his mouth, breathing on his behalf and preventing him from speaking. I placed my hands, cold from the air outside, on my father’s cheeks. He always preferred winter to summer, cold to heat. Winter reminded him of the East Coast, which was, he said, a place with real seasons. He longed for the fall of his childhood, where the trees blushed pink, then red, and then lazily let their leaves loose. “You like the cold,” I said, and he nodded.
*
What happens next is that my father’s heart stops. The nurses were just going to extubate him, which is a procedure in which they remove the tube from the patient’s throat and allow him to breathe on his own—and to speak. “We’ll talk soon, Dad,” I say before they usher me behind a curtain for the process, which they say will be quick and easy. Over the curtain, I can see the monitor that tracks the electric waves of my father’s heartbeat, sine and cosine, and I keep my eyes trained on its peaks and valleys. Then, I watch as the line goes dead, a perfect x-axis. It’s something I would have said to my dad—x-axis—if the line hadn’t signaled his own heart giving up its work.
A recording comes over the intercom repeatedly saying the words, “Code blue.” A wave of nurses floods my father’s room, all of them speaking at once and someone shouting about the shocking amount of blood. Finally, someone realizes I’m still in the room, and a nurse escorts me out of the ICU, which is put into lockdown as overhead fluorescents blink to signal the emergency unfolding. In the waiting room of the ICU I’m alone, and, unable to stand, I fall to the ground. My mind is capable of one word, one that’s all too familiar to me at this point in my life, but this time it’s amplified to an unprecedented and deafening level: panic panic panic. I think to myself I want to call my father but realize I may have had my last phone call with him the day before when my mom handed him her cell in their local hospital room before an ambulance transported him here. Hi, sweetie pie, he said.
My father survives. The doctors tell us it’s a miracle. My dad’s newly mended heart popped a stitch, and the surgeon—a genius, it turns out—by chance stayed a little late before heading home for the night. He reopened my father’s chest and located the bleed quickly, pinpointing that which had come undone in the red tangle of heart and veins. The surgeon himself comes out to the waiting room where I am on the floor, surrounded by my husband, my son, my sisters, my mother, and my father’s best friend, all of whom have gathered to say their goodbyes. The surgeon looks at me directly, registering that I am the one least capable of handling any bad news, and he says to me, firmly, “Your father is going to be okay.”
But first, before my family arrives, while I am still alone in the waiting room, a woman approaches me. She is younger than my mother but older than me, and her hair is a grayish blond not unlike my father’s. She doesn’t ask me what has happened, but she pulls me up off the ground where I’m seated and into an embrace. I don’t like to be touched, but in that moment, I don’t care about what happens to my body. “Can I pray for you?” she says. Normally I would say no. I’m uncomfortable with public prayer, especially when it feels pressed upon me. The words and verses of Christian prayer are particularly foreign to me as a life-long Muslim, and I don’t fully understand its rhetoric: the father, the son, the holy spirit, the crown of thorns, the body and the blood. But at this moment, there is nothing I want more than this woman’s prayer. She holds me tightly so that all I feel is warmth, and then she begins: “Dear Heavenly Father…”
*
In the YouTube video, my father is forever in limbo, which is a kind of purgatory. He’s alive and dead, young and old. He is eight years old in his mother’s kitchen watching his father beat her. He is thirty-something with appled cheeks and clear blue eyes, telling a joke about my mother, whom he loves. And, in the comment section, those who know him personally insist he is alive. “Yes, he is my math professor,” writes aidanbowen687. “Mr. Jeffrey Lang is 70 years old by now, maybe he was retired from public, who knows,” writes anybrody. In the video, he is forever beginning with his wish to save his mother and disappear his father, and then he’s moving on toward a story about faith.
For me, though, I cannot move past the image of my grandmother. Go to bed, son, she says. Her words are measured, and her voice is soft. She will not be made to raise it, and she won’t scream or fight. She will order the features on her face and place her mouth in a flat line like the surface of an undisturbed pool of water. Sleep, son, she says, because she knows that by morning my grandfather’s rage will have been spent. She believes, I think, that she will be alive. She can only bear this rage and become its target knowing that her children are safe in their beds upstairs, their collective breathing moving through the house and into its vents, which although she cannot hear, she can feel.
I can’t move past how she turned her head away from the man in front of her for the span of a lifetime. I don’t judge her for it, having turned my own head away from a man who beat me in a queen-sized bed until, by some miracle, I was unable to turn away any longer. In the face of violence, I found myself at first silent, at first still, as the man placed his hands around my sleeping throat. And then suddenly, something unlocked, and I was unable to quiet the electric energy building within my body and my fist. It was the beast of my inheritance. It was my father’s voice within me. “You will have to fight,” he said to me beginning when I was a child, although his own fist was gathered into a ball he refused to throw. Suffering, he had written across the page, partly a warning and partly a bare truth.
Our childhood home was quiet at night, sitting on a cul-de-sac encircled by a meeting of trees whose heads bowed toward the center as if in prayer. My sisters and I looped and looped the cul-de-sac on our bikes, and my father chased after us. Fireflies blipped and burned out, and the cicadas joined in an incantation that crescendoed into an ancient whirr. There was no real threat, but as dusk fell, my father looked beyond our carefully placed blinds and our curtained windows and saw something I didn’t see: the undercurrent of violence that pulses through every night—steady as a heartbeat—hides behind closed doors, and remains cloaked and shadowed.
I see it myself now, because once you’ve seen it, you can never unsee it again. I was six, I was twelve, I was twenty-one years old. I was seated in front of my father learning a lesson that he was insistent I learn. He curled my fingers into my palm. He put his own hand around mine and squeezed it into a solid form. Here, he told me, teaching me to do that which he could not: This is how you ball a fist. This is how you throw a punch. This is how you land it.
__________________________________
“The Father, the Son” by Jameelah Lang appears in the latest issue of New England Review.
