ODE TO SEINFELD

by Maliha Masood, Matrix Correspondent







My parents love watching Seinfeld. So obsessive is their devotion to the show that they even started coordinating their prayer schedule with the televised broadcasts so as not to miss an episode.

During the summer season, when maghrib or sunset prayers shift as late as 9:30 p.m, Ammi and Abboo would be quickly doing their ablutions, and then rolling out their prayer rugs, bowing and prostrating towards Mecca, chanting verses in Arabic before they sat down to see Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer in action. Every weeknight, from Monday to Friday, my folks are absorbed in the reruns that comes on from 10 to 11 p.m. It’s their after dinner treat and they usually have desert and green tea while chuckling over the same old jokes they’ve known and memorized over the years.

My mother would balance a plate of fruit on the armrest of her Lazyboy, peeling Washington state Granny Smith apples, a thin cotton shawl covering her gray hair, her arthritic feet propped up on a footstool. She’s fond of talking to the K-man in Urdu as if he could hear her and see her through the television screen to a small living room in Seattle, where Ammi’s often comparing him to the bumbling, clumsy servants we used to know in India and Pakistan. As soon as Kramer barges into Jerry’s apartment and starts raiding the fridge, my mom would say something like, “ayee, jinaab, tashrif layee,” a formalized way of saying to a king or noble man, do come in and make yourself present. She likes to make fun of Kramer in this way. And she calls Elaine “giddy battany”, a colloquial Urdu term for being short, which apparently also applies to me as Ammi routinely compares her eldest daughter to Elaine’s feisty take no prisoners confrontational side that I have somehow perfected.

As for my Dad, he vacillates back and forth between Jerry and George, enjoying Jerry’s glib comebacks, but reveling in George’s misery and sticky snafus, his general disdain and dissatisfaction with life. Abboo’s always been a sucker for the underdog, and according to him, I’m a dead ringer for George as well, his twin alter ego, given my track record. Last night, while I was over at their place, we all watched an episode together, an older one, in which Jerry gets dumped by the Southern Belle ex girlfriend of George, when she tells him “I can’t be with someone I don’t respect”. We all imitated in our best Southern drawl accents the part where she says, “I saw your act. It’s so much fluff.” And then the chortles took over. My father made the comment, “the poor fellow is flabbergasted that she’s looking down on him being just a lowly cashier.” I stole a look at my mom who said that the actress playing the Southern Belle looked vaguely Iranian.

Often times, you can tell the age of the show by the font on the word Seinfeld at the start of each episode, the straighter smoother letters signifying a show circa 1992, when Seinfeld was dangerously low in popularity and I recall Abboo talking about a new sitcom that was basically about nothing. But he kept watching it and gradually warming up to it and after the show went off the air and the stars had made their millions, my dad developed a cult like following to the four-some characters and their neurotic New York humor and roped my mother into becoming a fan as well, which might sound rather strange considering how my parents are devout Muslims, traditionalists who wouldn’t dream of missing any of their daily five prayers along with reruns of their favorite sitcom.

Is there an irony to this? I don’t see why, but plenty of others will, perhaps because they’re not used to the idea of us Muslims being halfway normal. The idea of loving Seinfeld is so American, so mainstream, so not newsworthy. People like my parents are not supposed to exist according to the popular media, books and literature. When you add to their Muslim factor, the aspect of immigration, the story gets all the more complicated.

All immigrant stories have in common history, language, economics, statistics, class conflicts and colorful grandmothers. But how many include a love affair with sitcoms? And what does that ultimately say about what it means to be an immigrant and an American? We need to enlarge concepts and definitions that cannot remain stuck in issues of integration and self-segregation, the assumption being that Muslim immigrants in large part are not well assimilated in the cultures of their adopted homelands, given the currency value of terms such as Londonistan.

There’s also the aspect of choice when it comes to assimilation. But what is not taken into account is that some people, like my parents, may not need to choose to assimilate. They did not need to because they were already assimilated into the West long before coming to the West, a little known truism that does not come up often in fiction and novels, perhaps because best sellers have to be constructed on shock value and horror stories rather than simple boy or girl next door accounts. My dad grew up in Karachi enamored with rock and roll and Hollywood. My mom went to a Catholic college in India and sang hymns.

Many of my American friends are at a loss to understand my parents’ fixation with Seinfeld. They presume my folks are not familiar with American idioms and slang that the characters pepper in their speech, and that their silly offbeat, often raunchy comedy is at odds with our Pakistani Muslim immigrant values that shouldn’t be appreciating such gibberish. I guess it’s time to level the playing field and expose a different side of who we are, one that tallies with our individuality, and not just what others want us to be.

These days, I cannot help but wonder that you cannot be a Muslim in this country if you don’t fit the caricatures. And if you dare invent a new model, such as Muslims who love Seinfeld, then you may as well risk being an imposter. It does help that in manners of appearance, you could not possibly mistake my mother for being none other than an immigrant, a traditional, soft-spoken elderly Muslim woman in her headscarf and accented English. But to believe the same lady is throwing punchy verbal jabs at Kramer every night after her prayers, is to perhaps suspend your imagination.

Many times, the Seinfeld episodes have become parables for our own personal triumphs and crisis in life. When I was unhappy with my job or had trouble juggling independence with marriage, my dad immediately compared the situation to George, the way he keeps having some problem or another to deal with. He then translates in Urdu, “kuch na kuch garbar hay”. Always some kind of commotion. I chalked it up as a learning lesson from good old Georgie. It is this identification with the characters and their emotional ups and downs that explains our connection to Seinfeld, amazingly transcending issues of race, culture, religion, nationality.

Contrary to popular opinion, Muslims and non-Muslims have a lot more common ground than differences and it is this focus on a shared humanity that makes my parents resonate with Seinfeld. No doubt, Abboo and Ammi are hardly living the lives of smart single Manhatannites, who take themselves a tad too seriously to the point of borderline narcissism and unhealthy obsessive compulsive disorders. At their age, my parents are just trying to get through the days, still working ten-hour retail shifts in their seventies and having to cope with the nuisances of getting old. I’m lucky they’re still near me and everyday, if I want to, we can talk and laugh together. That’s what keeps us going and it does not matter whether we’ve seen that particular Seinfeld episode once or ten times, because it’s the frivolous indulgence of that half hour on TV that counts.

Most people who park themselves on a couch in front of their flat panel screens would agree about the pleasures of a silly sitcom after a long hard working day. It’s pure escapism much like the Bollywood movies my family grew up watching that have now become the rage among trendy Americans. But I know for a fact that my Indian born parents would take Seinfeld over Bollywood any day. They really get the characters, who are sometimes more real to them than our flesh and blood relatives.

Of course, none of this stuff would make it into immigration statistics or that checkbox on government forms where we have to signify racial identity by marking Asian or Pacific Islander, because there is of yet no checkbox for Pakistani/Indian Muslims who love silly American shows. To know this is to know my parents as individuals, to see their identity outside of Islam, outside of what makes them alien and different. In the course of their seven decades, their eyes have witnessed many things and if memory has a storage room of names, then consider the ones that my parents have accumulated. Karachi. Saddar. Tariq Road. Bori Bazaar. Seattle. Mount Rainier. Wallingford. Kirkland. 520. Jerry. Elaine. Kramer. George. Newman. J. Peterman. Soup Nazi.

On that note, my Dad recently told me to stay away from a Lebanese grocery store where I like to get my falafels and hummus, the reason being my constant skirmishes with the owner who according to Abboo is the Middle Eastern version of Soup Nazi. So there you have it. There’s an answer to all of life’s trials and tribulations thanks to Seinfeld.

Make no mistake. Behind my mom’s veil and my dad’s brown face are the beating hearts of Muslims wedded to their faith. Immigrants, technically yes. But immigrants who love quirky American humor and reruns of their favorite sitcom.

Maliha Masood is an award-winning writer and the author of Zaatar Days, Henna Nights. A former policy analyst at the International Crisis Group in Islamabad, she is the founder and president of The Diwaan Project, a Seattle-based cultural institute geared toward public education on global affairs. Maliha teaches a course on women and Islam at the University of Washington and is currently at work on her first novel set in contemporary Pakistan.

PIMP THIS |