Bloomington, Indiana, 2005

Dr. Tariq Nasir was thirty-six years old and had been an associate professor of comparative literature at Indiana University for four years when he began to notice that the body of the community was rejecting him. This was not a medical event — he was not experiencing an allergic reaction or an autoimmune disorder, though the metaphor was precise and, in retrospect, prophetic. The community of Bloomington was a body, and Dr. Tariq Nasir was an antigen that had entered its bloodstream, and the body's immune system — not organized or intentional, but distributed and automatic, the way immune responses are distributed across tissues and cells without a central command — was producing antibodies in the form of small, polite, reasonable actions that, collectively, were expelling him.

Bloomington was a college town. It was the kind of college town that appeared in magazine articles about the best places to raise a family — tree-lined streets, independent bookstores, a farmers market on Saturdays, a community theater that produced Shakespeare in the summer, a population that was sixty-eight percent white and twenty-two percent international and ten percent everything else, with the international population concentrated at the university, where Tariq had been employed since 2001. He had arrived from Detroit, where he had grown up in a family of Lebanese immigrants — his father was a dentist, his mother was a nurse, and they had come to the United States in 1978 on a family reunification visa, and they had spent their first three months in a motel in Dearborn, Michigan, waiting for their apartment to be ready, and Tariq had spent those three months learning, from his mother's quiet anxiety and his father's careful politeness, what it meant to be a person whose name was slightly difficult for Americans to pronounce and whose religion was something his classmates asked about in the third grade with an innocence that did not prevent it from feeling, to Tariq at age seven, like an interrogation.

Tariq had become a professor of comparative literature because he believed, with the certainty that only a person who had felt the weight of being different at age seven and had spent twenty-nine years trying to lighten that weight through achievement, believed that literature was the universal language — that the stories and poems and plays that he taught to his students transcended the particularities of religion and ethnicity and nationality and spoke to something fundamental about the human condition. He had built his career on this belief. He had published two books on the intersections of Western and Middle Eastern literary traditions. He had presented at conferences in Paris and Beirut and Tokyo. He had been praised for his ability to bridge cultures and make the foreign familiar and the familiar foreign.

He had not anticipated that being the bridge would make him visible in a way that was not flattering. The visibility had begun subtly, in the small adjustments that the community made around his presence, the way a body adjusts its chemistry to neutralize an invading organism. It had started, Tariq realized later, in the weeks after September 11th, 2001, though at the time he had not connected the changes to the attacks. He had simply noticed that people were different — not dramatically, not in any way that could be described as hostile, but in the subtle way that water changes temperature when a warm object is placed in it, gradually, almost imperceptibly, until the change is complete and the object and the water are at the same temperature and the object has been transformed by the water and the water has been transformed by the object and neither can remember what it was like before they met.

The first adjustment was verbal. People began to overpronounce his name. Tariq was already pronounced with difficulty by most Americans — the T is pronounced like a D in Lebanese Arabic, and the q is a sound that does not exist in English, produced at the back of the throat where English speakers do not normally produce sounds, and most Americans said Tareek or Tahreek or, on occasions of particular difficulty, Tariq, stretching the vowels until the name was unrecognizable. After September 11th, the mispronunciation became deliberate. People would look at him with an expression that was not hostile but curious — the way you look at something that you want to be polite about but that you also want to examine closely — and they would say, slowly and carefully, Tuh-reek, as if the name were a word in a language they were trying to learn and were not sure they were learning correctly.

Tariq corrected them. He always corrected them. He would say, gently, it is pronounced Tah-reek, with a hard T and a q that comes from the back of the throat, and they would nod and say thank you and try again, and the second attempt would be slightly better, and by the third attempt, they had the name approximately right, and Tariq would smile and say that was perfect and the smile would reach his eyes and the person would smile back and the interaction would end on a note of mutual respect and neither party would recognize that something had shifted in the space between them, that the name — the name that his mother had given him at birth, the name that had been on his birth certificate and his passport and his social security card and his driver's license — had become, in the interaction, a test that he was taking and they were administering and he was passing but not quite, and the not quite would accumulate, interaction by interaction, into a state of permanent nearness without full belonging, the way a key that is one millimeter too short opens a lock approximately but never completely, and the door remains slightly ajar and the draft comes through and the warmth escapes and neither the key nor the lock is at fault — they are simply not designed for each other, and the mismatch is not malicious but it is real, and the draft is cold.

The second adjustment was social. Tariq noticed that he was no longer invited to certain gatherings. The faculty luncheons — the informal Wednesday noon meals that the English department had maintained for twenty years — continued to happen, but the invitations changed. They were no longer sent to the department-wide mailing list, which included Tariq. They were sent through the informal network — phone calls and hallway conversations and notes passed between classes — a network that Tariq was not connected to because he was not, in the subtle architecture of departmental social relations, a node that the inviters considered central. He was peripheral. Not excluded — exclusion would have been simpler and more honest and easier to name and easier to fight. He was peripheral, which meant that he was included in the official communications and excluded from the informal ones, and the gap between the official and the informal was where the rejection lived, because the official invitations were for meetings and presentations and administrative business, and the informal invitations were for luncheons and drinks and conversations that, in a department the size of fifteen, were where the real relationships were built and the real information was exchanged and the real decisions were anticipated before they were made.

Tariq did not complain. He continued to attend the official meetings and to present at the official seminars and to participate in the official business of the department. He taught his classes and published his books and advised his graduate students and served on the tenure committee and the curriculum committee and the diversity committee, and on the diversity committee he was, paradoxically, the most valuable member, because every discussion about diversity began with his presence — not his words, but his body, the fact that he was sitting in the room and wearing a suit and speaking English with an accent that was Lebanese rather than English or Indian or Chinese — was evidence that the university was diverse, and his presence was the evidence, and his presence was also the barrier, because the presence of one Muslim man from a Lebanese family in Michigan did not, in the calculus of the committee, constitute the kind of diversity that required structural change, and his presence was used to demonstrate diversity while the structural conditions that prevented other people of color from thriving in the department were left unexamined.

The third adjustment was environmental. Tariq began to notice that people crossed the street when they saw him approaching. This was not universal — it happened perhaps thirty percent of the time, and only on certain streets, and only at certain times of day, and only with certain people, and Tariq could not have described the pattern if he had tried, because the behavior was not deliberate. People did not cross the street because they had decided to cross the street. They crossed because they were walking and they saw him and their bodies made a micro-decision — a decision that was not conscious, a decision that was produced by a network of associations and anxieties and cultural messages that had accumulated over four years, since September 11th, and the body made the decision and the feet moved and the street was crossed and the person did not know that they had crossed the street until they had crossed it and were standing on the other side and looking back at Tariq, who was standing where he had always been standing, on the same sidewalk, in the same place, at the same corner, and the only thing that had changed was the person's relationship to the space he occupied, and the relationship had changed from neutral to slightly wary, and the wariness was not hatred — it was something smaller and more diffuse and more insidious than hatred, because hatred is honest and identifiable and actionable, and wariness is not. Wariness is the body's immune response — the automatic, distributed, unthinking reaction to something that is recognized, at a level deeper than thought, as foreign, and the response is not malice. It is maintenance. The body is maintaining itself against the foreign, and the foreign is not dangerous — Tariq was not dangerous. He was a professor of comparative literature who taught undergraduates about Rilke and Rumi and wrote books about the connections between Persian poetry and English modernism — but the body does not know this. The body reacts to the signal, not the substance, and the signal was the name that was difficult to pronounce and the accent that was Lebanese and the beard that he had started wearing in 2003 and not shaved because the ritual of shaving felt, on some level he did not fully understand, like a surrender, and the beard was a signal that the body registered as foreign and the body's response was to cross the street and maintain distance and preserve the boundary between self and other without acknowledging that the boundary existed or that the other was other or that the response was a rejection.

The fourth adjustment was institutional. The university administration, which had praised Tariq's diversity contributions in the 2003 annual report and had included a photograph of him at the multicultural fair in the donor newsletter, began to redirect his committee assignments. He was removed from the tenure committee, which had been a privilege and a responsibility that he had carried for three years, and replaced with a white faculty member who had been on the committee for one year and needed two more to complete the standard rotation. The official reason was rotation — all committee members served for three years and then rotated off. But Tariq knew that he had been appointed to the committee in 2000, before September 11th, and that the rotation schedule had been flexible in other cases — faculty members had served four and five years on committees when the institution had needed their expertise — and his removal in 2004, at the three-year mark, was not an application of policy but a decision that had a timing that was convenient for the administration and inconvenient for him, and the inconvenience was the point, because the administration had decided, at a level that was not official and not documented and not even conscious, that his presence on certain committees was no longer optimal, and the optimal configuration was one in which the person who had been hired to provide diversity was not present in the spaces where diversity perspectives were actually decisional rather than symbolic.

Tariq accepted the reassignment. He did not fight it. He continued to teach and publish and advise and serve on the committees to which he had been assigned — the diversity committee, the curriculum committee, the faculty senate — and he continued to believe, with a belief that was slightly diminished but not extinguished, that literature was the universal language and that the work he was doing was important and that the community of Bloomington, for all its small rejections, was still, fundamentally, a community that valued education and intellectual engagement and the exchange of ideas, and that the rejections were not fundamental but surface, the way a body's immune response is not a rejection of the person who is infected but a rejection of the organism that is making the person ill, and he was not ill, and the community was not ill, and the rejection was not malicious, and the rejection was real, and the two truths — that the rejection was not malicious and that the rejection was real — existed simultaneously, and the coexistence was the condition that Tariq Nasir lived in from 2004 to 2007, the three years between the first systematic adjustments and his eventual departure, not fired not resigned but leaving, because the accumulation of adjustments had reached a point where the cost of remaining was higher than the cost of leaving, and the cost was not dramatic — there was no incident, no crisis, no confrontation, no moment of rupture. The cost was the cumulative effect of a thousand small adjustments, the slow rejection of a body that did not know it was rejecting, the gradual distancing of a community that did not know it was distancing, the transformation of a neighbor into a slightly foreign presence into a person who was polite but not included, included but not central, present but not belonging, present but not belonging, present but not belonging, the phrase repeating not for emphasis but because the condition was repetitive, day after day, interaction after interaction, adjustment after adjustment, the immune response that was not a crisis but a慢性 process,慢性 meaning chronic in Chinese and persistent in English and unrelenting in its effect, the process that did not erupt but eroded, that did not attack but avoided, that did not exclude but peripheralized, that did not declare war but maintained distance, and the erosion was real and the peripheralization was real and the distance was real and the only thing that was not real was the intention — there was no one who had decided to reject Tariq Nasir, and that was the point, the system had rejected him without a decision, the body had expelled the antigen without a command, the community had distanced itself without a meeting or a vote or a statement, and the rejection had been accomplished by the accumulation of reasonable, polite, well-intentioned actions by people who did not see themselves as rejecting anyone and who, if asked, would have said that they liked Tariq and respected his work and appreciated his presence on the diversity committee and had no idea why he was leaving and would have been surprised and saddened if they had known, and the surprise and the sadness would have been genuine, and the genuine surprise and the genuine sadness would have been compatible with the genuine rejection, and the compatibility was the condition that Tariq Nasir understood and the people of Bloomington did not understand and the space between understanding and not understanding was the space in which the rejection had occurred, invisible to the people who had performed it and visible only in its effects, the effects that accumulated like sediment, layer by layer, until the landscape had changed and Tariq was standing in a landscape that was the same physically but different socially, and the difference was the rejection, and the rejection was the community itself, the body that had rejected itself, and the self that had been rejected was Tariq, and the Tariq who had arrived in 2001 was not the Tariq who left in 2007, because the community had transformed him through the process of rejection, just as the immune response transforms the organism it is protecting, and the transformation was not destruction — Tariq had not been broken or defeated or silenced. He had been changed. He had become more aware of the difference between the official and the informal, between the inclusive and the welcoming, between the body that says it accepts and the body that acts to accept, and the difference between those things was the space in which he had lived for six years, and the space was small — not a chasm but a millimeter, the same millimeter that made the key fit approximately but not completely, and the millimeter was where the draft came through and the warmth escaped and the rejection lived, not as an event but as a condition, not as a decision but as a process, not as malice but as maintenance, and the maintenance had been successful, and Tariq had left, and the community had not known it was maintaining itself against him and had not known that the maintenance was a rejection and had not known that the rejection was real, and the not knowing was the condition of the rejection, because if the community had known, it would have stopped, and the process that was automatic and distributed and unthinking would have become conscious and intentional and intentional rejections are easier to fight than unthinking ones, because you can name a malice and you can confront a decision and you can organize against a policy, but you cannot organize against a draft that comes through a gap that nobody has decided to leave and nobody has decided to close and the gap is simply there, the size of a millimeter, and the cold comes through, and the warmth escapes, and the body does not know it is cold and the antigen does not know it is rejected and the draft is the only evidence and the draft is invisible and the evidence is not actionable and the condition persists.

Tariq Nasir left Bloomington in the summer of 2007 and accepted a position at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he was one of four Muslim faculty members in the humanities division and where the streets were not crossed when he approached and the luncheons included him on the informal list and the name was pronounced correctly on the first attempt and the body of the community did not reject him because the body was larger and more diverse and the immune system was more tolerant and the tolerance was not complete — nothing is complete — but it was more complete than in Bloomington, and the difference was not that Bloomington was intolerant and Ann Arbor was tolerant but that tolerance is a spectrum and Bloomington was closer to one end and Ann Arbor was closer to the other and the distance between the ends was the six years that Tariq had spent in Bloomington, and the distance was the millimeter that separated the key from the lock and the draft from the warmth and the rejection from the acceptance and the antigen from the body and the professor from the community and the neighbor from the stranger and the person who belongs from the person who is present but not belonging, present but not belonging, present but not belonging, the phrase repeating because the condition was repetitive and the repetition was the process and the process was the rejection and the rejection was the immune response of a body that did not know it was rejecting and did not know that the rejection was real and did not know that the real was not malicious but was real and the not knowing was the condition and the condition was the millimeter and the millimeter was the draft and the draft was the cold and the cold was the warmth escaping and the warmth was what Tariq had brought with him from Detroit and from Dearborn and from the motel where his parents had waited for their apartment and from his mother's quiet anxiety and his father's careful politeness and from the name that his mother had given him and the religion that he had practiced and the accent that he had carried and the beard that he had grown and the books that he had written and the classes that he had taught and the students that he had advised and the committees that he had served on and all of that had been the warmth and all of that had escaped through the millimeter gap and the body had not known it was escaping and the body had not known that it had a gap and the gap had not been designed and the gap had simply been there, the way gaps are there in all bodies, all communities, all systems, the way gaps are the default condition of any system that contains multiple organisms that are trying to maintain their boundaries and the maintenance is not malice but the maintenance is real and the real is not malicious but is real and the real is the draft and the draft is the cold and the cold is the warmth escaping and the warmth is the person and the person leaves and the body does not know it has lost anything and does not know that it has expelled something and does not know that the expulsion was a rejection and the rejection was real and the real was not malicious and the not knowing continues and the gap remains and the draft continues and the cold continues and the warmth is gone and the body is at the same temperature it was before and has not changed and has changed because the loss is a change and the change is not recognized as a change and the unrecognized change is the condition and the condition is the millimeter and the millimeter is the distance between present and belonging and the distance is the space that Tariq Nasir occupied for six years in Bloomington, Indiana, in the years after September 11th, when the body of the community rejected the antigen that was a professor of comparative literature who taught about Rilke and Rumi and wrote about the connections between Persian poetry and English modernism and carried a name that was difficult to pronounce and an accent that was Lebanese and a beard that was not shaved and books and classes and students and committees and warmth and presence and belonging that was approximate but not complete and the approximate belonging was the condition and the condition was the millimeter and the millimeter was the gap and the gap was the draft and the draft was the cold and the cold was the warmth escaping and the warmth was Tariq and Tariq left and the body did not know and the knowing was the gap and the gap was the millimeter and the millimeter was the distance and the distance was the rejection and the rejection was the immune response and the response was not malicious and was real and was the draft and was the cold and was the warmth leaving and the leaving was the end and the end was the beginning of a different body in Ann Arbor where the temperature was different and the draft was smaller and the millimeter was smaller and the rejection was smaller but not absent — nothing is absent — only smaller, because the immune system never stops functioning and the body never stops maintaining and the maintenance is not malice and the malice is not there and the real is there and the real is the millimeter and the millimeter is the gap and the gap is the draft and the draft is the cold and the cold is the warmth and the warmth is the person and the person is Tariq and Tariq is present but not belonging and the not belonging is the millimeter and the millimeter is the distance and the distance is the rejection and the rejection is the immune response and the response is not malicious and is real and is the condition and the condition is the gap and the gap is the millimeter and the millimeter is the space between present and belonging and the space is where Tariq lived and the living was the rejection and the rejection was not malicious and was real and was the draft and was the cold and was the warmth escaping and the escaping was the leaving and the leaving was the end and the end was not malicious and was real and was the millimeter and the millimeter was the gap and the gap was the space and the space was the rejection and the rejection was the immune response and the response was the condition and the condition was the person and the person was Tariq and Tariq was present and not belonging and the not belonging was the millimeter and the millimeter was the distance and the distance was the draft and the draft was the cold and the cold was the warmth and the warmth was the person and the person is the millimeter and the millimeter is the gap and the gap is the space and the space is the rejection and the rejection is the immune response and the response is the condition and the condition is the person.

The body had rejected him. And the body had not known it was rejecting. And the rejection had been real. And the rejection had not been malicious. And the not knowing had been the condition. And the condition had been the millimeter. And the millimeter had been the gap. And the gap had been the draft. And the draft had been the cold. And the cold had been the warmth escaping. And the warmth had been Tariq.

And the body had not known.