Deus vive

Pondering God in the Ironbound

Jul 5, 2023

Good afternoon. The days are drifting towards the hot, muggy spire of summer, I’m hunting down stone fruit that will succumb to the softest press, and thinking about God. (Who isn’t, you ask. Fair enough.)

Today, I took my toddler and baby (who’s about a month from starting to toddle, and then I will have two toddlers and zero baby) to Independence Park in Newark. The densely populated Ironbound section where I live, designated a heat island by climate change researchers, has two parks serving a population of roughly 50,000 people. (The National Recreation and Park Association’s guidelines are for seven acres of park space for every 1,000 people. The Ironbound has about half an acre for every 1,000 people.) This is a common injustice in orphaned American cities like Newark (does America have anything but orphaned cities, you ask? Fair enough.) But the silver lining is that every time we go to Independence Park, whether it is 11 in the morning or 6 in the evening, it is teeming with people of all ages, from Portuguese retirees sharing companionable silences to high school students playing football. Unlike the eerie, vacant parks of suburban America, Independence Park takes a crowd.

Today, my son ran through the sprinklers while I tried to have a conversation with a Brazilian woman who arrived here 6 months ago. To my pride and shock, I was able to conduct an entire conversation with her in Portuguese, telling her the ages of my children, asking her about the granddaughter she was accompanying to the park, and how long she was staying here. She told me to touch up my roots; my premature whites were showing. I told her I had no tempo, with two crianças. Then, a man and a woman showed up, and something about their attire, a certain mannered tidiness that most people in the Ironbound eschew for flamboyance, told me that they were preachers, also a common group in attendance at the park. I excused myself by telling them I didn’t speak Spanish or Portuguese. My companion told them that she was also evangelical like them, and then commenced a conversation in Portuguese between them, far beyond my pay grade, that continued to gain in fervor. At some point I heard transgender and lesbianismo, and the chanting gathered hateful froth—are queers our new universals? By the time my son came back from the sprinklers, they were loudly praying and making sounds—how odd and embarrassing the spectacle of worship looks to the outsider—and even my son was staring at them, possibly because he actually understands the language, or then because even he, at three years old, knew that something otherworldly was happening at the next bench.

(At Independence Park; my lady had a point about the greys)

Once the preachers had left, the woman turned to me and asked if I went to the igreja. I told her no, I was a Muslim. When that didn’t compute, I told her I didn’t do igrejas, I was more the mesquita vibe. Her eyes widened a bit. The Ironbound is not ummah country. She said, “Otro deus?” (Another God?) I thought of explaining that no, no, same God really, slight fracture of timelines, but again, pay grade. So I said yes. She asked, “Deus vive?” which I took to mean, “Is yours a live God?” and I nodded because certainly, what good is a dead God to me. But then she recoiled a bit, and I wonder if she had meant to ask if I worship some other human in the guise of God? Ah, well. She said a friendly ciao ciao and walked away.

Last month, my father visited from Pakistan. While my mother comes frequently enough to the US for it to be familiar territory to her, my father approaches the customs of this country with a delightfully anthropological interest. As we were driving through wildfire smog on Route 21 to visit a Turkish bakery in Paterson, he asked me which group in the US had the most respect, whether it was the clergy or humanitarians or who else, and I tried to concentrate on traffic while explaining to him, and myself, that no one in the US has any respect. Respect, as a concept, has no place in the American landscape that I know.

I am thinking of this in tandem with a Catholic dinner guest some weeks ago who mentioned that he was intrigued by Islam. I bit my tongue to stop myself from screaming, “What’s wrong with you?” Instead, I asked him why. He said that what attracted him to it was a certain seriousness that he doesn’t feel in Catholicism anymore, at least the way it is practiced in the American Northeast. A God you can make fun of isn’t a God anymore. This rings true to me. As someone whose vocabulary and metaphor are mired in God, I’ve been laughed at in the US for invoking God in regular conversation. “May God take care of you” or “May God repay you” strikes people as religious behaviour; for me, it is simply how I experience language. So then, if society always has to have an object that it treats with the utmost sanctity, and if that is not God in America anymore, what is it?

The answer is obvious. It’s money. I’m not proclaiming a value judgement; I’ve seen all my life what serious religion looks like, and it’s ugly. Nostalgia as a whole is a dangerous project; read my brilliant friend Nina Li Coomes’s recent newsletter on the subject. At the same time, replacing God with money also seems suboptimal at best. The novelist Brandon Taylor, who writes a formidably smart newsletter that you should subscribe to, calls this the atheist money theology, basically a system in which you take all the sanctity and respect—aah, there’s the word—that you earlier gave to a God and shower it on capital instead.

But what of Europe? After all, that’s where they pronounced God dead, and a long time ago at that. Deus vive? Nâo. Deus morreu.

From a chat with a dear friend:

In Europe, God was replaced by nation, a pride in boundaries and borders, an ownership of language and food and history. My theory is that this is also why immigrants have a harder time assimilating there. For better or for worse, Europe is holding onto something. Nation, by definition, is not universal. Money, like the queers, is, and so if you come to America and agree to be rolled into the capitalist system, you can keep your ethnic attire and your nauseating claims at identity and everything else. No one cares, because there is little to care about. Somewhat relatedly, read this brilliant iteration of Alicia Kennedy’s food-centered newsletter, which is easily the smartest thing that makes it to my inbox every week. Making a case for why All-American food is simply corporate food, Alicia writes, “…in the U.S., there’s a false idea…that U.S. cuisine is big enough to hold all the foods of the world. This melds into notions around how the market and technology are inevitable and infinite, and thus can save us from any crises. It’s not gastronativism, but gastroexpansionism: If U.S. cuisine can encompass everything, there is nothing to protect, whether that’s biodiversity or cultural significance.”

Anyway, on other topics:

This Saturday, 8th July, I am part of a wonderful ensemble of artists getting together for food and poetry in Brooklyn. Tickets and more details here.
Next Wednesday, I am interviewing Mohsin Hamid for the paperback release of The Last White Man, again in Brooklyn. Come through.
Alongside all the wonderful newsletters mentioned above, I am reading Tezer Özlü’s Cold Nights of Childhood (absolute banger), smelling the light in these beautiful pictures on the Delhi Houses Instagram, and listening to this God-filled qawwali on repeat.

Happy summer.