by Jerry Waxler
Ed Husain, author of “The Islamist,” grew up in a Muslim community in England. As a young boy in the 1980s his greatest pleasure was following his father and learning to pray. In high school in the 90s, he fell in with a group of boys who said that prayer was for old people, and that the urgent mission of every Muslim should be to destroy western culture. These ideas appealed to Husain, and overriding his father’s objections, he joined the demonstrations and soon began organizing them.
Husain’s choices offended me. Couldn’t he see his father’s wisdom was deeper than his own? Wasn’t it obvious he was attacking the very government that gave him the freedom to protest in the first place? While I was criticizing Husain, I felt a tug from another direction. In the back of my mind, I remembered my own choices when I was his age.
My father was a pharmacist. After years of hearing him speak reverentially about doctors, I decided the best way to please him would be to become a doctor myself. When I entered college in 1965, I was well on my way. But the Vietnam war was ramping up and so were the protests. When I was 20 years old, I stood outside the Commerce Building in Madison, Wisconsin, dodging tear gas canisters. A thousand kids with red faces and tears streaming down our cheeks, snapped our arms in a Nazi salute and screamed “Sieg Heil” at the club-wielding police. I had crossed a threshold into an angry state of mind where fixing the world took priority over a mere detail like my future livelihood.
Even though Husain’s journey and mine were light-years apart in ideology, we had many things in common. Both of us thought our hot-headed ideas were based on a pure ideology that demanded anger and action. Looking at our ideas as a matched set, I see how similar they were in their rejection of our parents’ values in favor of a pressured, bold path suitable for young men.
Another thing we shared was a conscience too deeply developed to ignore the inevitable results of our rhetoric. Husain lost his taste for divisive political action when he saw a student knifed to death in the name of religion. I lost my enthusiasm for demonstrations when I realized I could not riot my way to peace. And yet, it was too late to retreat to the innocence of childhood. We had to go forward, following the path we started. It took years of self-discovery before we were able to reclaim a sense of purpose.
After Ed Husain disengaged from his activist friends, he needed to learn the truth. He moved to the Middle East to learn Arabic and study the Koran in its original language. Eventually, he not only returned to the prayerful religion of his father but also gained a deep respect for the freedom and dignity afforded by western democracies.
My return to my father’s way of life took many turns. First I tried avoiding adulthood altogether by becoming a hippie. Then I became a piping engineer, helping design nuclear power plants. When that industry collapsed, I took a job in a foundry along with muscular men who poured molten brass into black sand molds. I drove a sports car, a red Camaro, and changed my own brakes and spark plugs. Tired of muscles and dirt, I became a computer programmer and technical writer. During the entire period, it never once occurred to me I was trying to figure out how to become a man. I just thought of myself as a person.
Toward the end of the foundry stage I decided that if I was ever going to find my way back to wholeness, I had to keep growing, so I began to read self-help books. For example, Stephen Covey’s “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” urged me to consider my thoughts and actions. Like a driver of a car who realizes he is steering a deadly vehicle, these authors showed me that living well required careful attention. I read a hundred books and learned something about how to be a better person from each one. I wanted to talk to someone about all this information so I entered therapy. After half a dozen years of talk therapy, I had gained so much respect for that process that I went back to school to learn to become a psychotherapist myself.
In graduate school, I deepened my understanding of people, for example, going deeper into the way children develop into adults. I learned general helping skills like the art of attentive listening. And I learned specialties like career counseling. In one of my specialized classes, I learned about a skill called assertiveness which means standing up for yourself and demanding your rights. The women’s movement has to a large extent been focused on teaching women how to become more assertive. I knew the course would help me counsel women, but I never found a corresponding course that would help me understand issues faced specifically by men.
I began reading memoirs, and many mysteries and puzzles about human nature came to life on their pages. For example, when I was growing up, the protagonists of novels were almost always men. Memoirs now gave me the chance, for the first time, to see the world through the eyes of female protagonists. I realized memoirs were providing insights into topics that I had only glimpsed in my counseling classes.
The big surprise was how much I was learning about boys. The more I read about other boys growing up, the more I began to see that growing up male has challenges that I had never before tried to put into words. After reading about Ed Husain’s experience trying to overthrow all of Western civilization, and reflecting on my own rebellion, I took another look at boys.
Mark Salzman, in his memoir “Lost in Place,” became obsessed with learning karate. Both he, and another author Mathew Polly in “American Shaolin,” even went to China to study martial arts. In “Tattoos on the Heart,” Father Greg Boyle worked with gang members in Los Angeles, mostly male. He was helping them find alternatives to shooting each other. I always knew the violent streak in boys lands them in jail far more often than girls, but now memoirs were allowing me to enter into those experiences and feel them more intimately. I now saw what should have been obvious all along. We have too much assertiveness. We become so fired up about our rights we demand, we defend, and we fight.
Of course not all boys assert themselves violently. In “Publish this Book,” Stephen Markley’s anger sent him running not to the barricades but to the voting booth. In the memoir “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson looked for his manhood by trying to conquer the Himalayan mountains. In his memoir “Open,” tennis champion Andre Agassi fought against his father’s demands by being a bad boy, breaking rules like dress codes, wearing colored shorts on the tennis court instead of whites. In so many cases, I saw how hard boys work to figure out how to grow up.
When I was young, I stumbled and struggled on my path toward adulthood. Now decades later, comparing my life with the lives of boys in memoirs, I see a pattern that helps me make sense of my journey. My decisions early in life seem to a large extent to be based on trying to please my father. I’ll call that Stage One. In my late teens, I became impatient with Dad’s way. His guidance seemed to be slowing me down and I felt a sense of urgency to pass him in the fast lane. That was Stage Two, but as Stage Two progressed, I didn’t know where to stop. I rejected my father’s path so effectively I began to fall apart. Finally, I became frightened by my own rebellion and realized I didn’t know what I was doing. Around 25 years-old, I entered Stage Three, when I stopped rebelling and started pursuing a career. That was what I used to call “adult life” and thought there was nothing after it. Decades later, just when I thought I had run my course, I discovered there was a Stage Four. After my youthful anger had passed, I rediscovered my youthful idealism.
I originally wanted to be a doctor to please my father. He loved healers and I wanted to become one. Decades later, I am revisiting that desire to help others, replacing the original intention of healing physical disease with my lifelong desire for mental and emotional self-improvement. I want to help people learn about themselves and find their best path. And I’m not alone in my return to the idealism that lay at the foundation of my youthful rebellion.
When Ed Husain was young, he wanted to tell the world about his religion. It was a righteous instinct that required intense action. Later, when he discovered the roots of his faith, he realized there was a deeper obligation at the heart of his passion. His more mature intuition was that people needed to learn these things for themselves. He ran for elected office in the British government and tried to steer other Muslims towards the gentler, more inclusive roots of their religion. Based on his experience of being misled, he reached out to help others avoid similar mistakes. Then he wrote about his memoir to raise the alarm about the dangers of the fundamentalist movement that was insinuating itself into the minds of young men.
Other memoir writers followed similar trajectories of enlightenment and generosity. Mark Salzman wrote another memoir, “True Notebooks” about going into a prison and teaching boys to write. Greg Mortenson decided to stop fighting mountains and start building schools for poor children. Andre Agassi was not content with being a world famous tennis player. A high school dropout himself, he started a school for disadvantaged kids.
For most of my life I resisted the notion that men have different ways of looking at the world. I thought we were just people. Yet all along, I was behaving like other men, heaving myself against war, against career, against everything. But without the wisdom to reflect on my compulsions, I could never relieve the pressure. Now that I compare my journey with those portrayed by other men, I believe I could have achieved my deeper goals faster and with more wisdom by acknowledging that I happened to be a male.
I didn’t know all this back then, but I know it now thanks to reading and writing memoirs. Memoirs have given me the ability to step back and look at the forces that were being played out. For example, I see myself at 22 years-old raging at the world to stop fighting. The world sent in their own platoon of young men and they were better armed. Looking back, I see this head-on collision only fulfilled our need to rage but failed to achieve our goals. Now, as I look at the state of the world, I wonder how many young men are out there fighting to tear down some enemy’s world, or furious at some group or policy, and I wish I could help those boys see a different way. I imagine a world in which, instead of devoting their energy to tearing things down, they poured their idealistic passion into building solutions.
Perhaps writing stories will help. It certainly helped me. By writing my memoir, I now see the journey through those stages. Perhaps it could help fathers, who, by writing their story, could become more sensitive to the journeys of their sons. And it might help the boys, themselves. Erin Gruwell, the teacher in “Freedom Writers Diary,” and Mark Salzman in “True Notebooks” showed troubled kids how to write about their lives, and as they heard the words on each other’s pages, their own sense of social responsibility emerged as if by magic.
Memoirs are spreading the word that we are protagonists in our own drama, that we are all intertwined, that our actions matter. Perhaps memoir reading and writing could help boys find their authentic selves faster, and convince them to spend less time pushing and heaving against the world. World peace without the riots. I know one 20 year old boy who has finally grown old enough to understand this truth. Now I need to explain it to a few others.
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Is it assertiveness or aggression? Neither it’s Thumos or Thymos!
What makes boys so willing to fight for what they think is “right?” I puzzled over this quality that drove me crazy when I was growing up. I don’t think “assertiveness” is the right word. Assertiveness indicates something more methodical and carefully planned. The impulse I’m trying to describe is more pressured, and instinctual and pervasive than that. It takes over a boy’s whole sense of direction. And I don’t think the word “aggression” fits either. The willingness to hurt others might be part of it. But this larger “boy’s instinct” is not just about a fight for a street corner. It’s more philosophical than that, as if boys have an instinct to understand their righteous place in the world.
I recently found a candidate for the right word in a book by psychiatrist Jonathan Shay. In Shay’s professional life, he treats Post Traumatic Stress Disorder in combat veterans. In his private life, he studies Greek classics. In Shay’s book, “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming” he points to the Greek quality called thumos (also spelled thymos). The Greeks harnessed this quality of righteous anger to train good warriors. Once I knew the word, I saw the quality everywhere. Consider the murderous fight between Tybalt and Mercutio in Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet.” They were incensed by an insult from the “enemy” family.” Erin Gruwell, in “Freedom Writers Diary,” invited her students to compare Shakespeare’s deadly fight with their own Los Angeles gangs. Shay’s discussion of this Greek concept did not include advice for how to steer boys toward a more creative, socially productive outlet. For that, I will need more research. I think I will find the answer in memoirs, which are the repository of human truths of all kinds.
To learn more about the process of going from boy to man, I signed up for a Men’s group weekend offered by The Mankind Project, If it sheds light on memoir writing or self-discovery, I will write more about it here.
Notes
Amazon page for “The Islamist”
Link to an article I wrote about “The Islamist” and another memoir, Azar Nafisi’s “Reading Lolita in Tehran
Index to articles about memoirs on Memory Writers Network
