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Interview with Etel Adnan

By Rewa Zeinati

“MORE THAN EVER, OUR ARAB WORLD IN PARTICULAR, NEEDS POETRY AND THE ARTS, NEEDS EVERY FORM OF THE AFFIRMATION OF LIFE”- Etel Adnan

Rewa Zeinati: Etel Adnan, you are a multidimensional writer and artist; an author, a novelist, a poet, and a cultural critic. You have written documentaries and operas, short stories and plays and you are a visual artist in different media. You were born in Beirut, Lebanon in 1925. You studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, U.C. Berkeley, and at Harvard. In 1972, you returned to Beirut and worked as cultural editor for two daily newspapers—first for Al Safa, then for L’Orient le Jour. Your novel Sitt Marie-Rose, published in Paris in 1977, won the France-Pays Arabes award and has been translated into ten languages. At least eighteen works have been published in English. They include The Arab Apocalypse (Post-Apollo Press, 1989); Sea and Fog (Nightboat Books, 2012), winner of the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the California Book Award for Poetry. In 2011, you received Small Press Traffic’s Lifetime Achievement Award. And, in 2014, you were awarded one of France’s highest cultural honors: L’ordre de Chevalier des Arts et Lettres. What drives you on?

Etel Adnan: What drives me on? I really don’t know. Have never been asked such a question ever. I was a turbulent child and remained a restless person. When I enter a house I go immediately to the windows. And I remember when I was about 18 and I had a Russian friend in Beirut (there were many Russian refugees from WWI and their children) and I told her that we were living always projected into the future – a future with no idea or image attached to it – and she agreed with a great melancholy about her. My encounter with poetry came about the same time and age and I thought we were born for reading poetry. Nothing else mattered, of course there were the great French poets such as Rimbaud, Verlaine, Gerard de Nerval, Baudelaire; they really never left me.

What really drives me is the history of our area, the Arab World, and the Islamic World, and mainly because the trouble in them never stops. It’s contemporary History that writes my books.

There are two other major concerns of mine. One is love, the failure in love, due to so many things, and the fact that the first person we really loved haunts forever. There is also my love for Nature, my need for it. So all this can keep me going.

RZ: In solidarity with the Algerian War of Independence (1954-1962), you began to resist the political implications of writing in French and became a painter. In your own words, “painting became a new language and a solution to my dilemma: I didn’t need to write in French anymore; I was going to paint in Arabic.” Then, through your participation in the poets’ movement against the Vietnam War (1959-1975), you began to write poetry in English and became, “an American poet.” What does it mean for you to be self-labeled, or thought of, as an American poet?

EA:- I lived the Algerian war of independence while living in California. I was teaching philosophy, and following the news. It seemed to me then, and I think I was right, that the loss of Algeria was going to be a defeat like the loss of Palestine. Those were the Abdel Nasser years and the dream of Arab unity was a real goal. It remains that it has been a positive model for the Third World, an incredible achievement.

I felt great being an “American poet”, I had a home.

RZ: What makes good art/good writing?

EA: What makes good writing? Many, many things… you can’t tell, in a way. It’s also related to the times we live in. But The “Iliad” is still great writing! There is something that the reader recognizes, the soundness of a rhythm, something convincing, I don’t know. But there is no proof. You do what you can… but there will always be some people that will like it and some that won’t.

RZ: The sun is a central subject in your work. Is it your biggest inspiration? What inspires you?

EA: The sun was a powerful element of my childhood in Beirut. As I was an only child, the world surrounding me was of great importance. The sun particularly, as it is very present over there, and the city had low houses, three floors at most, and I was aware of shadows too… I remember trying to look straight at the sun very often, and my eyes [would] burn and blur, and also in the summer I don’t know how my mother found one of those colonial headgear, all painted white that I saw later in pictures of mostly British people in the colonies and I was then aware that the sun was a very dangerous being and I had to deal with it. So the sun is an omnipresent being in our countries, both beneficial and dangerous. No wonder our ancient gods were led by sun-gods, the pharaohs as well as the Babylonians had as a supreme god, a solar deity.

RZ: You have a way with writing that may appear, to the naïve mind, to be dizzyingly simplistic, yet, in fact, it is superbly full and brilliantly philosophical. I’m always struck by how your lines or sections end; you simply know when to stop writing and let the image or word resonate with the reader; always at the exact right moment, with the exact right word, not a moment too soon or too late. As simple as, “In the morning they all went to the small cages they call their offices. Some of them made telephone calls.” What is your secret?

EA: We are in a period of cut and dry poetry, of minimalism; it has become natural to avoid developement in our writings. It’s both new and very ancient. Look at the Greek pre-Socratics, their thinking is expressed as geometric equations, and it makes it very poetic.

RZ: Is there a difference between poetry and philosophy?

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EA: Is there a difference between poetry and philosophy? Yes and no. There used to be a difference in western philosophy. Western philosophy was involved in the search of some truth, of some system explaining reality. From the English philosophers on, the possibility of reaching absolute statements, statements about the absolute, was dimming. But it’s Nietzsche [who] demonstrated, or discovered himself that philosophical works are constructions, personal constructions that cannot pretend to be any definitive view of reality. That neared philosophy to thinking, brought it closer to intuition, to sudden “revelation”. Heidegger followed that line and ended up asserting that the greatest form of philosophy is to be found in the great poets such as, for Germans, in Hölderlin and Rilke. I very strongly believe, I find that the great Islamic Sufis are theologians/philosophers/poets, the greatest poets of that world.

RZ: Is one born a political poet? Or is all poetry political? (Or should it be?)

EA: Poetry doesn’t need to be political in its subject matter. It’s not the subject matter that’s important, it’s the way you treat it. Of course if you manage to convey the importance of something that gets you, your passion for it, how existential is for example the political/historical situation of your country, or of a country that matters to you, then that text could be poetic. You speak of a rose, or of the situation of Palestine, you can write something that will be a poem. How? It’s up to you, and to the reader… But in a way, everything is political, in the sense that everything says something about you that goes beyond the subject matter, and also that whatever we do affects the world, in minute ways generally, invisible ways, but it becomes part of the becoming of everything that is. In that sense, washing your hands is also a cosmic event.

RZ: Is there room for poetry and art in a region bursting with absolute turmoil; where fundamentalism, religious figures and politicians have taken over home and street?

EA: More than ever, our Arab world in particular, needs poetry and the arts, needs every form of the affirmation of life. The forces of death are very active, due to the abysmal mediocrity of our politicians, and also due to outside interference. So all we have to counterbalance that evil is to be alive, and to sustain life. Poetry, art, is what will remain of these dark period … I am always comforted by the existence of the great deal of creativity in our countries; they are suffering, but they’re going ahead, they’re surviving, and much more… we will not go under.

RZ: You mentioned once in an interview that, “It’s possible that in the past, unconsciously, people paid less attention to women’s work. Things are changing; there are more and more women curators, and more women gallery owners. It doesn’t mean that they will automatically pay more attention to women’s work, but it’s changing. We can’t complain.” Are things changing fast enough, though, for women writers and artists?

EA: Our region is changing in good directions in spite of all our defeats and destruction. There is a civil society that’s emerging from the ashes of our patriarchal societies. It’s a good sign, even if that society is regularly repressed.

RZ: What advice would you give emerging writers and/or artists?

EA: Giving advice is usually a pompous affair. If I have to give one, it is “don’t be afraid, go ahead, pay the price it [will] entail, and you will certainly feel free, and probably creative too.

RZ: “Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying.” Do you remember where you were or what was happening around you when you wrote this magnificent line?

EA: River, oh rivers… I don’t know where and when I wrote the line you quote, but it is utterly true… without the sea, the ocean, or a river in my vicinity I am a dying plant.

RZ: What are you working on right now?

EA: Working on what these days? I am painting, mostly. For a whole year, I have a poem already written, NIGHT, following SEASONS and SEA & FOG and I don’t know why I keep it waiting… must reread it carefully and let it go…

RZ: How important are literary magazines, if at all?

EA: Literary magazines are dwindling, for money reasons… and indifference for literature – young people prefer dance, music, where physical goes, but they are indispensable… they keep the pulse of the thinking of a society… it takes courage nowadays to run a magazine or a publishing house for poetry and literature in general.

Goodbye, Thea Stavroula

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

She died at 94. There are worse ages at which to leave this earth, but that doesn’t dispel the sadness. How many changes did she see in her life? How many wars? When she was a girl, the quickest way from Limassol to Paphos was by boat. People stayed in their villages, grew their own food. Now there are highways, and cars, and smart phones, and all sorts of other things she probably never dreamed of—though some things, like wars and their after-effects, don’t seem to change much.

She lived in Episkopi, a mixed village, populated by both Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots until the invasion that split the country. She raised three sons, losing a daughter at the age of four. My husband tells me she always wore the Hand of Fatima, at the time considered a distinctively Muslim symbol, next to the cross around her neck. That doesn’t surprise me. From the first time I met her, as I struggled to find enough Greek to thank her for her coffee, her smiling hospitality, it was clear that she had a large, embracing spirit. Whenever we visited there were always stray cats she was feeding, children in the garden, a bowl of sweets for passers by.

And everyone passed by. Her house was at the heart of the village, right across from the church, down the street from the archeological museum. Neighbors, relatives, outsiders—all were welcome. She taught the young archeologists staying at the museum how to embroider, unperturbed by the lack of a common language. There was no better place for coffee than perched on one of the chunks of ancient Roman columns scattered outside her gate, breathing in the stunning vista of the coastline spread out below, the sense of timelessness.

But time never stops.

The day Thea Stavroula died, a massive sandstorm struck, blanketing the island for days in a cloud of dust so thick it was impossible to take a deep breath. Temperatures soared as the sky pressed down, gritty and clotted. Even the sweat rivulets rolling down my skin felt muddy.

On the day of the funeral, we braved the brownish haze to drive from Nicosia to Episkopi. We parked outside of her small, familiar house, the usual coastal vista shrouded in dust, and crossed the street to the church. Family and neighbors were already gathering in the oppressively hot stone-paved yard, their black clothing a reminder of why we were there.

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Inside, the church was dim and slightly cooler. I slipped some coins into the donation box and lit three candles: one for Stavroula, one for my parents, who died decades ago, and one for those still engaged in this battle called life. Then the chanting of the Orthodox service began, the musicality of the priest’s voice carrying me out of my thoughts as the candles flickered.

Soon enough the service was over—how quickly we mark passage from this earth!—and mourners gathered again in the churchyard, waiting for the coffin to be carried out. At the gate of the yard I noticed two tiny, ancient women clutching each other’s hands for support. One, I saw with a thrum of sadness, wore mismatched slippers on her feet. Later my sister-in-law told me that after the 1974 Turkish invasion, when refugees took shelter in Episkopi, Thea Stravroula had been the first to help these two women, giving them olives, that staple of village sustenance. Decades later, they had come to say goodbye.

We proceeded to the cemetery, where the open coffin required confrontation. I hardly recognized Stavroula in the body that lay face up to the sky. Age and illness had replaced her calm, robust demeanor with a startlingly gaunt profile; her eyes were no longer smiling, but closed.

This was my son’s first funeral. He watched carefully as they lowered the open coffin into the grave with ropes, poured oil on the body, scattered earth, and rinsed the shovel off with water over the coffin, mixing earth’s elements with her human remains. Then the coffin was closed and buckets of soil were tipped on top, attendants shoveling in more to finish the job. Dust clouds rose to join the dust that hung in the heat-struck, lowering sky. Her body went into the earth, earth was shoveled on top of her, and the sky rained earth on all of us: a dusty kind of tears.

At bedtime that night, my son asked me, “What is it like when someone passes away? What do they feel? What do they see? Where do they go? What do they become?” I had no clear answers to offer. Instead I kissed him and stroked his hair till his breathing settled.

But Stravroula didn’t settle. She lingered in the air around me, rich and full, her life too real to close a coffin lid on. I thought of an afternoon decades earlier, as we sat in the cool of her garden after hours at the beach—her laughter filling the air, the coffee she had brewed with careful hands waiting to be drunk, the future full in the unturned cup.

In my kitchen grows a plant started from a cutting taken from a tree in her yard, nestled in a simple clay pot. Like her, it is rooted in earth, arching toward the sun.

The Melancholy Oud

By Sahar Mustafa

As I come through the garage door, I hear the melancholy strings of the oud and I guess it’s coming from the soundtrack of an Arabian soap opera my mother’s watching on satellite. Quick, rhythmic clapping and another instrument I don’t recognize lends its sound, and its melody seamlessly weaves into the thrumming of the oud.
“Allah, allah!” my mother croons, and I realize she’s the one clapping. “Ente a’yooni…”

She’s singing a ballad from Oum Kalthum—her favorite Egyptian artist. Every time my mother plays her CD she tells me that the entire world was present at Oum Kalthum’s funeral in the 1970’s, that she even surpassed Gamal Abdul Nasser—Egypt’s most beloved president—in attendance by dignitaries from all over the Arab world. I guess she was like the Elvis of her times, or something. To me, her songs all sound the same. The one my mother’s singing now is about a woman confessing her forbidden love. I don’t think I’ve ever heard an Arabic song that wasn’t about forbidden love, or unrequited love, or love that finally kills you.

From the kitchen, I see the back of a man’s head I don’t recognize sitting on a loveseat in our family room. His hair is slightly receding in the back so that the finely combed strands are visible lines like black thread against his pale scalp.

Khalo Ziyad is sitting opposite him on the big couch. His eyes are closed as he strums the oud. Seated beside him, my mother blissfully sings with her hand resting on her brother’s shoulder. She motions me over without halting and pats the cushion for me to sit down. She winks at me and I’m impressed that none of them has missed a beat with my intrusion.

I feel like I’ve stumbled onto a secret clan, chanting something mystical. They look hypnotized by the music they’re creating that lets them shut out the rest of the world. I suppose it’s like the way I feel when I listen to Black Veil Brides; everything around me just fades into the walls and seeps into the floor and I’m just, like, floating on a raft.

The stranger has a weird-looking instrument in the shape of a trapezoid propped across his thighs and two metal cases over his fingers that he uses to pluck the strings. It’s like a harp resting in his lap.

Almost five minutes pass, which feel like ten or more as I’m waiting for them to complete the ballad. After my mother belts out the final verse, they laugh and clap. Suddenly, they remember me and the stranger pounces with excitement.

“Mashallah, mashallah! Who’s this?” the man asks me, setting his instrument on the loveseat before standing up with hand extended. “Where did this lovely lady come from?” It’s that funny way of asking like I’m five years old.

I extend my hand and he grips it tight while talking to my mother and uncle. “She’s a pretty one, mashallah! You better keep your eye on her,” he says. This is worse than the condescending tone—referring to me in the third person like I can’t hear. “She looks like just like you, Amina, thirty years ago, mish ah?”

His unkempt beard is speckled with white hairs, and he’s got deep grooves on his forehead like bike trails. His eyes are blue and I suddenly remember that he’s the one from Khalo Ziyad’s story. The rest of his face is dull except for those blue eyes glittering with tiny diamonds. He’s much shorter than Khalo and, like, only about an inch taller than me. His palm feels rough like he’s spent years scraping it against asphalt.

I try to politely pry my hand from his grip but he’s now going crazy over how much I resemble my mother, but declaring how much taller I am and definitely skinnier than her. She pretends not to hear the part about me being skinnier and keeps smiling.
He finally addresses me. “How are you, dear? I am Waleed.” It is Khalo’s best friend. I wonder if they can still see in each other’s faces—past the disfigurement and deep grooves of worry—how much of the children they used to be scaling the mountains and trekking across narrow valleys.

“Elhamdulillah,” I say and tug again to get my hand back.

“Did you know that I grew up with your uncle and mother? We were neighbors. I could see their kitchen from my bedroom.” He laughs thunderously and turns to Khalo. “I’d see your father—Allah rest his soul—drinking yogurt right from the bottle.”
This prompts another story about my grandfather, and my mother and Waleed laugh so hard there are tears in their eyes. Khalo Ziyad just smiles and nods.

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“What good times! Your uncle always led our expeditions, insisted he had a sharper eye for determining the horizon.” His head flits back and forth between Khalo Ziyad and me. “Did you tell her about the wadi?”

“Yes,” Khalo Ziyad says. I’m getting used to his monosyllabic responses. I wish I could get away with it when the idiots at school ask me questions, or when teachers demand I “elaborate, please” when I’ve already answered correctly.

“Are you hungry, habibti?” my mother asks. She never fails to ask me about food—with or without company present. Once again, I feel like a little kid.

“No, thanks. I ate at Panera,” I tell her.

“I didn’t know you played, Khalo,” I say, feeling ridiculous because I’ve only just met him so how would I know anything about him, really? His life is slowly unraveling like unwrapping a present in slow motion. Some parts are dull and expected, and other things are sort of cool surprises.

“Are you joking?” Waleed interjects. “The villagers made sure he was available to play at the wedding suhra before setting a date!” Waleed says. “Do you know what this is, dear?” He picks up his instrument and pulls me down to sit beside him. “We call this a qanoon,” he tells me. “It’s very del-ee-kate.”

I nod and then he slides the instrument, which is like an oversized board game, onto my lap. It has rows of strings attached to tuning pegs on one end. It’s actually pretty cool-looking, like an artifact from ancient Egyptian times. He places one of the metal clasps on my forefinger and urges me to pluck a string.

The sound is more twangy than the oud and softer. Waleed positions my finger on a particular string and he strums away on several at a time. We produce medium to high notes like a mother grieving over the loss of her child. It becomes too intense for me and I abruptly stop.

“That’s cool,” I say awkwardly and slide the qanoon back to Waleed.
My mother demands they play a song about Jerusalem and I can understand most of the words:

I passed through the streets
The streets of Old Jerusalem
In front of the shops
That remained of Palestine

My mother’s face is glistening with perspiration and she clutches a tissue paper and waves it in the air at certain intervals of the song. Waleed taps his shoe as he plays and his metal-protected fingers look like two miniature knights riding across a field.

I watch Khalo Ziyad as he strums his banjo-looking oud, and I’m impressed how effortlessly his fingers move over the strings. His face softens into a serene expression as though the tight fibers that make him smile or frown have gradually collapsed. His eyes are closed and the pulpy flesh temporarily disappears.

Towards the end of a verse, he opens his eyes in the middle of the song and catches me staring. He grins and winks like he’s just shared a secret he trusts I’ll always keep.

Newsworthy

By Lena K Tuffaha

I.

before you can see

we’ll need to adjust the lens

we find that natural light can be

unforgiving,

all those lines and jagged edges

glaring,

beads of sweat shimmering on the brow

scarlet of a fresh wound

unfurling across a body

might overwhelm

we’ll need to calibrate

 

before you react

before you assign any labels to what you see

(like injustice)

before you identify any emotions stirring in you

(like anger or shame)

we’ll need to fine-tune

It’s so complicated, this cycle

what appears so obvious

cannot be named

to maximize clarity

find a signature for the moment

we’ll need to select an image

layer the right sounds on top of it

we assemble a collage of now

so you can understand what’s at stake

so you can understand what you think you are seeing

the information that is

being sent from your eyeballs to your brain

is just raw data

and must be processed for you

 

This is called Context.

 

see for example the brown-skinned boy

slender limbs running across the street

a rock in his hand

focus on the rock

if you feel a bit unsettled by the chaos unfolding on his street

the smoke billowing from fires all around him

the tank pouring out armed soldiers

at the vanishing point where he aims

steady yourself with the thought

of the damage that the rock could conceivably do

and here it would be illuminating to note

that we have soldiers too

our boys sent across the globe

and don’t we love our boys?

and don’t we want them to come home safe?

see? A tank isn’t necessarily a bad thing            a semi-automatic

weapon aimed at a child maybe isn’t

what it appears to be

now hold these feelings in front of your eyes

as you look at that brown boy with the rock in his hand

 

This is called Nuance.

 

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now it gets trickier

you’ll need to remain vigilant

now that rock-throwing boy

wounds still fresh on his face

eyes half open to the sky

re-appears in the foreground swaddled in a flag            piled onto a stretcher

and beneath him a teeming sea of people

swells in what was the street                        they are lifting what’s left of him overhead

let us now turn up the volume for you

let’s pan out            resist the urge to look too long at

any one face

here a wide camera angle will do best

 

what are all these people saying?

 

focus on the totality of the sounds

why aren’t they softer? shouldn’t sorrow

be soft     modest     relatable?

 

focus on the Allahu akbar

who else says that?   what have you learned to feel about those words?

 

This is called Critical Thinking.

 

IV.

if you find yourself distracted

caught by the anguish on the mother’s

face in the crowd

focus instead on her veil

notice how many women in the crowd are veiled

how do you feel about that?

 

let the question fall slowly

between you and the mother

whose son’s limbs have been

collected for burial

if you find your stomach

tightening at the sight of her pain

if you find yourself measuring

the miniscule space her son’s

corpse takes up on the stretcher

if your eyes find others in the crowd

focus

focus again on the sound that floats up

the words you don’t speak

you do not know these people

 

why are they so angry?

 

tune into how their grief is loud

and disarrayed and confusing

and threatens to make you feel bad

stay with these feelings

now hold these feelings in front of your eyes

to filter the images you are seeing.

 

This is called Balance.

 

For more poems by Lena K Tuffaha read the full winter 2015 issue

The Tulip Tree

By Philip Metres

They wanted to tear down the tulip tree, our Jewish neighbors, last year. It throws a shadow over their vegetable patch, the only tree in our backyard. We said no. Now they’ve hired a hand to chainsaw an arm—the crux on our side of the fence—and my wife marches in tousled hair and morning sweats to stop the carnage, mid-limb. She recites her litany of no’s, turns home. Minutes later, the neighbors arrive. The worker fingers our unblinded window. I want to say, it’s not me, slide out of view behind a wall of cupboards, ominous breakfast table, steam of tea, our two young clueless daughters alone. It cialis usa online promotes generation of new tissues. In the sildenafil tablets 100mg appalachianmagazine.com end, Hanagan achieved 191 wins from 1102 rides, while Hughes finished two behind from 1045 rides. Kamagra cures the problem without looking at the cause of chronic impotence – the male’s incapability to attain or maintain an erection for long period of time in order to get a relief from the situation. viagra pill uk In viagra pfizer online a paper by Cakmak, Harun, et al., Journal of Ophthalmology, Sep 2013, the research suggests that there is a wrong notion that people have about the extravagant pricing of the same. I want no trouble. Must I fight for my wife’s desire for pink blooms when my neighbors’ cukes will stunt and blight in shadow? Always the same story: two people, a tree, not enough land or light or love. They want to let the sunlight bathe their garden—how can we refuse them? This is the only tree in our whole backyard—how can they insist? By rights they could cut every bit that begins on their side of the line. Like the baby brought to Solomon, it can’t be cut in two and survive. Someone must give. Dear neighbor, it’s not me. Bloom-shadowed, light deprived, they lower the chainsaw again.

these bombs called my back— a journal entry from my first night in filasteen when the invasion into gaza began this summer

By Aziza Quzeiz

“to be arab is to be simultaneously emphasized and ignored,
invisibilized but hypervisibilized in times of crisis”
–joanna kadi in food for our grandmothers

TAK, TAK, BOOM

the sound of a firework that probably wasn’t a firework woke me up and i cried for the next few hours because today was the first time ive ever felt connected to being arab, stopped denying it, and started to let myself feel the pain ive been holding back my entire life

SMA3I SHWEY

i grew up saying, “listen to me” instead of sorry. i was armed with mouthfuls of justifications because my existence as an arab woman was already an apology. sorry for taking up so much space. sorry we are so oppressive and fucked up. sorry we are power hungry and that a few of us represent the whole.

in other communities of color in the u.s. we are resented for internalizing “model minority complexes.” we are not real to the census or governmental institutions. we are told we fade into whiteness but receive none of its benefits. if an arab immigrant mother has to be rushed to the hospital in the u.s. she cannot receive translation services because she is “white,” so we are voiceless even when we speak. we are represented in literary discourse as light-skinned, upper-middle class, wanting-white. no one wants to listen, even for a little bit—shhhh—sma3i shwey, we are undocumented, we are Black, we are Brown, we are dark-skinned and poor too, we are not all muslim, we are queer and our sexualities are expansive and complicated, we are threats, we are problems, we are refugees and the bags they carry, we are borders, we are the sound of bombs dropping during rainstorms, the confusion in the streets, the act of discerning which sounds are real and which are imagined

AYEEEEEEEHAA

i dreamt of teta ululating to the sky, to the sound of this desperate explosion, something like thunder or a celebration of death, of our unpeopling. she howled with her head tilted back and in her calls i heard the earth split open to make space for our pain. i heard the gaps in generational memory between how hard we had it and how things Were Back Then. i realized that our realities are too painful to process so they require the extravagance of fiction, poetic ruminations about life before occupation and oppression. we need active imaginations in order to survive.

AAAAAAUIIIIIIII

how do we express this pain? if we do not discursively exist then are we granted spaces to feel? my baby cousins exchange graphic images of entangled bodies like they are cartoons. they change their profile pictures to martyrs we know. i think of the splinters we used to get in our feet from climbing into fruit trees at jiddo’s house, the jubilee in our captain majid heroic AUUUI’s, an ouch-but-yes, a mix between baba playing umm kulthum and his answer to her voice with “aakkh, aakh”s—those soft recordings of his diasporic pain, and the ecstasy in being chosen to pick the fruits, EHH, YES, AYYY. because if we feel pain, if we feel splinters in our toes than, EH, YES, AUI, AKH, AUUUUIEHHHA, at least it means we are living.

ARABNESS, 3RAB, 3AAAAA, YA RUB

it is something like a denial of pain leads us to project it onto others. this pain gets stored in our bodies and passed on to new generations who don’t know what they are carrying until the sound of an explosion or someone asking “where do you hide your weapons” floods it all back. where do i keep my weapons? i wanted to ask the israeli authorities the question back to themselves. they kept asking, “why are you carrying so few bags? arabs usually carry more bags. show us in your bags where you keep your weapons.” listen, a little bit, search in the place between my neck and my shoulders, the spot where i hide my sadness. find them in our wrinkled eyes, teta’s back, her split discs that are revolutionary weapons planted by generations of pain, my mother too tired to walk, measure the geographies of our spines and the way our displacement makes us so lonely, our bags are our bodies are our bombs are our backs carrying the weight of our revolutions and resistance inside of us, so volatile, so vengeful, so awake, still, somehow, alive.

homegirls, hashish, mishmish, and the moon[1]

I was rifling through the contents of my bag while receiving eidiahs and decided to dump out the treasures I was about to discard in the trash. I realized how much the contents reflect my restlessness, because I carry this bag with me everywhere I go:

Torn tunisian and jordanian dinars, euro coins and crumpled dollar bills, a ripped visa to the illegal state of israel, a tube of rose water a priest gave me in Beitla7im before calling me beautiful, hijab pins, a passport, a german chocolate wrapper, my vile of white misk that reminds me of my 3mto and how she puts it on her neck before putting on her hijab to go out, a list of Spanish phrases I might need, eyeliner, a condom in the innermost pocket.

I am everything a product and reaction to colonial modernity, everything before it and around it. Everything that flirted with it just to reject it. Everything that wants it but mocks it in the same breath.

The night Eid started I stayed up until Fajr having an hours long conversation with my brilliant cousin who is doing her masters in Arabic linguistic histories. She is trying to prove that we need new dictionaries for our slang and that all dialects are legitimate and rooted in thousand year old traditions. Our Gehs are just as legitimate as our Kehs as our Ehs as our cadences colored by colonial encounter, the subjugation of others, our experiences with regimes, structures of violence, sexual abuse, internalized cycles of rejection and pain, even as these linguistic patterns change because of the internet and text speech. I thought of learning darija in Tunis from an anarcho-feminist who told me to listen to the rhythms of Imazighen goddesses in the words, the way Tinafigh blended the ends of words together and echoed itself in Tunisian Arabic. He told me, before you learn a language you need to get the beat down. I went with him to watch Sufi performances in the mountains of Kef, dances that people memorized from over four centuries ago, songs that chronicled when the Arab invaders came. Under blue and green stage lights, Sufi dancers chanted, their white robes glowing while mac computers dj’ed a sweet funky bassline in the background. I was always annoyed with myself for being so jealous after watching these performances. What dances do I know? What clothing do I have? Where are my cultural genealogies and generational chronicles? What rhythms do I know to carry on the words and vibrations of my ancestors? I only know how to dance to southern r&b and I never really learned to “bellydance,” because the most “ancestral” music I know dates back to 1960 Syrian children’s songs.

I thought of my mother who didn’t want to wear a white dress to her wedding because it was too colonial and western. But when she asked her elders what they wore before white, no one had the words to tell her, no one knew what we did before, back then. The erasure of that memory was made less violent by the strange finality in accepting that maybe there was no “pure” pre-colonial past but one full of difficult fusion…one where the memory of white wedding dresses was so new (or old? or ours? or theirs?) that it became a part of us.

My cousin said, linguists forget about the new dialects and the new words that emerge from displacement. Her nieces speak a fusion of Syrian and Egyptian dialects not recorded yet, processing new words with new contexts with old roots with old stories. I thought of the other day when my sister was cleaning the kitchen with our aunt and asked her to hand her a Khu’ra. My aunt looked at her and laughed. “What did you say? Do you mean a Fouta? We haven’t used that word since Ottoman times.” We must have picked up the word from our mother, who was displaced from Syria in the 60’s, who heard it from her mother and carried it on in a strange vacuum of sounds untouched by time because of our distance and displacement. Other words, like kharata instead of tanoora, sha7a instead of leika, fetitt hummus instead of tis’iyeh, variance in my family’s regional dialects amplified by the oceans that pushed us apart from one another.

There is something called phylogenetic trees that trace how dialects and words become sisters to one another. We begin to develop different strands of similar languages that then morph into parallel but different spatiotemporal directions. Like our subjectivities, language evolves into vastly fragmented, complex strands of meaning and belonging.

I think about the splits in our community and family tree, how we are scattered into different worlds with naïve hopes of returning to our homeland, our roots, once “this” is all over (the regime violence, the revolution, the refugeehood.) I think about how I am named after a tree I have never seen. I am named after a dream I have never lived. I live my life in hopes of returning to a homeland that has never known me.

And when I speak in this tongue that is somehow a part of this mess, my Arabic hiccups and wavers into whispers, manifests into hesitancy and a fear of messing up the intricacies of our fela7ified grammar. I am laughed at for my awkward Americanisms that don’t make sense in translation—my siblings and I speak in 3rabeezy, slinging around our mish-mash of Arabish, soupy slurs of ma3lish inno can you 3atini al jacket taba3i aw nah?

buy cialis pills Erectile dysfunction (ED) is a kind of sexual impotence in men. Long Looks capsules also provide natural nutrition to your body and aid in its absorption which results in tadalafil 10mg a safe and effective increase in height. Unfortunately though, http://www.midwayfire.com/board-of-commissioners/ buy viagra nothing much could be provided to its patients from the medical point of help. Women who are suffering from uterine polyps, cheap viagra for women fibroids, scar tissue or other liaisons. I am so blessed to come from a family of migrating revolutionaries, to come from a people who sacrificed everything for their words. Who were criminalized and terrorized and violently displaced because they chose to write and speak their realities.

But no matter where we go, we cannot rid of these accents. And I can’t rid of my restlessness, my inability to focus on one thing without thinking about what my parallel-self, my “over-there” subjectivity is thinking or doing or writing.

I recently facilitated a healing group for Muslim women who were yearning to talk about the splits in our identities, how we feel so fragmented and fused and forgotten.

I wrote down the common themes on a tiny receipt I found in the bottom of my bag:

where is home – where do i feel home – why does home not feel safe – why do i not feel safe in my own body – why doesnt my body feel like home to me – why does my family / community seem to create expectations i do not fit in to-  why am i living in doubles/ triples / a million fractured pieces – when will i be whole – when can i learn to love my splits – when will i bridge this world with that – where can i go to be loved – where can i go to be heard – will you hear me – will you hold me – can we love each other wholly –

(I think of Qwo-Lo Driskill, in Double Weaving Two Spirit Critiques: “How does our storyteller construct her survival from the threat of losing family love, especially in a context where familial ties hold so much material and emotional security?”)

Can we speak our truths and know that we will still be loved, across these multiple worlds?

I find home in my homegirls, in a few drags of hashish, preferably under the moon and with music playing. I find home in bowls of mish mish and ma’mounia, mashed into a delicious brew. I feel home embrace me somewhere at the tip of my tongue. My mind needs to be in motion to make sense of these things, my mouth laps up quiet soups of clunky morphemes and finds pleasure in the phonetic fusions. I find home in my hybridity. I feel comforted by Gloria Anzaldua when she said, “I am a turtle, wherever I go, I carry home on my back.” But me, I am an Arab woman, wherever I go, I carry home in my bag.

Letter to Um Yusuf

“Legbara, your daughter still need plenty healing yet,” said Osain with her mouth. “Body get better, but spirit still bust-up, I think.”

“Is okay, Papa Osain, thank you,” Ti-Jeanne told him, a little surprised at her own audacity. “I think you start the healing good already. I could do the rest myself.”

–from Brown Girl in the Ring by Nalo Hopkinson

 

Leila told me that they took you while you were sleeping. She said you blamed god and yourself and that you didn’t understand what you had done. I always took you for granted, as the auntie immutably fixed in the living room, chopping bamya in the shadows. Your right eye would wander and every time I looked up I would find it resting on me. I remember your voice sounded like eggplant roasting in cumin and bharat under high flames—scratchy, layered, deep. When they told me you had been raped in regime prisons, you had just passed away and I could not dislodge the letter from me to you from the back of my throat. I could not even send your daughter a condolence text because our pain was too similar.

I know you are long mornings made of warm bread and Quranic verses, centuries of erosion. You are not a metaphor for our motherland or for the earth or the state but you are inside them all, working to untangle their crusty layers of toxic waste. I will find you in breathless la howa wa la qowa illah bilahs, I will find you when I am stripped to my bed rock trying to remember. I will hear you speak to me when I vomit for hours thinking I am pregnant and you will remind me there is a cocktail of toxicity trying to find its way out of your body and mine. Sometimes I feel the violence of the empire coursing in our veins. I never know about the survivors in our family until they have passed.

I know your real body is made of stars and the rest of you is diffused into different realms of possibility, somewhere between jinn worlds, angel light, our fucked up human shit made from mud and clay. I know your body will remember this pain, your palms will become permanently inscribed into rocks and I will find your imprint everywhere. I felt your pain and it is terrifying, underwater avalanche meets planetary explosion. Your shoulders were never meant to be boulders and none of this was ever your fault, but now that you are here you will find pieces of yourself you thought you lost and when you do,

it will be a beautiful,

seismic,

cosmic,

reunion

and for that

and for you

i am so thankful.

[1] title is a failed fusion between nizar qabbani bread hashish and moon and sonia sanchez’ homegirls and handgrenades

Regret and other pleasures

By jennifer jazz

Dreamer - mixed media - 152x92 cm By Nouf Semari
Dreamer – mixed media – 152×92 cm By Nouf Semari

 

“So you want to learn Arabic.” Muna said while we sipped from paper cups. “Well, you know, it’s a classical language,” I said putting my foot, instead of more tea, in my mouth, because it would’ve been easier to just learn some of the laid back dialect she spoke when her phone rang. I was working again. My lessons were squeezed into lunch breaks. She wanted me to begin with writing the alphabet. My hands were too unsteady. Not that the notebook and pen on the table between us mattered once we started spilling our souls. She was no spring chicken. In Cairo, she had almost gotten married.

“This is him. He was a liar.” She said showing me his photo. She rented a room in Brooklyn from an old woman from her hometown who spied on her comings and goings. She traveled to random public places across the five boroughs, meeting students who had read her tutoring ad, most of them doing a few lessons and quitting or never showing up at all. I don’t know who sighed more as we’d occupy the table for two we’d gravitate towards, at a Starbucks with the seedy lighting of a pub.

“Why don’t you dye your gray hair?” She asked as if Prince Charming were only a few rinses away. As if I would make room on my twin mattress and single pillow for anyone but a dying millionaire with my name on his will. I’d give her the face palm. She’d swat my hand and insist, then before a full hour had passed, I’d grab my tote and pass her two twenties from my purse.

“I can’t charge you to just talk. I feel bad. Next time you must learn something” she’d say.

She had been working for a translation company that offered to sponsor her, but the friend filling in for her while her immigration papers were being processed was refusing to vacate her desk she told me when she showed up in a haunted kind of mood on one particular occasion.

“Human resources won’t intervene. I’m 36. I have no career, no husband. Nothing.” She said. So I called Mohammed who used to row the meat slicer at a market near my office. During a phase when I needed a voice to occupy the excess space of a house larger than I was used to, I’d vacuum and load clothes into my dryer with his voice in the receiver pressed to my ear. Quite the storyteller, he’d reminisce about growing up in Egypt under Sadat as well as the stunning Libyan widow he had tried to win over with expensive gifts until her family suddenly decided she should marry her deceased husband’s brother instead. The stress of courtship had left him resentful, but I had recently received email pics of him and his new bride cutting their wedding cake, and as soon as I asked him for advice on Muna, he brought up his middle-aged bachelor buddy Ahmed.

“I can tell by how Ahmed looks at me,” Muna said with a dopey smile. “It’s love.” By this time she had a stable full-time job and had given a housewarming party at her new apartment in Queens where she served kunefah that Zeinab, a jaded neighbor with a rug she rolled out and performed her prayers on while the rest of us talked in another room, said was overbaked.

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Muna wasn’t only larger than life physically. Her exotic green eyes and glittery pinky ring hypnotized everyone around her into feeling better. Unfortunately, she couldn’t entirely cheer up Ahmed. He had overstayed a visa decades ago. Couldn’t fly to Egypt to meet her family because he would never get back into the United States if he left. The “M” word gave him cold feet. Her ultimatums triggered a series of suspenseful breakups. I was at her kitchen table, she was buzzing in another friend when a panic came over her as she told me her relationship with Ahmed was between us and asked me not to mention him.

I didn’t have fast enough reflexes to keep up with their action packed romance. I was selling electronic resources to librarians for a company where I had to close sales to make a living wage. Had to keep dialing and emailing or get on planes and fly to the states where buyers were based because sometimes this was really the best way to get them to write checks. There was also my mother’s older sister, Aunt M. 77 years old, recently wheelchair bound but all by herself. Life’s unpredictability would have had a field day with her if I didn’t cook, deliver and serve her meals. I would have found little relief in anything but sitting next to my son bathed in the rainbow of our TV if Muna’s number didn’t regularly light up my phone.

“You need help. Where does your aunt live? I can bring her food and clean for her sometimes inshallah.” She’d offer, though I knew she didn’t mean it.

“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the lord my soul to keep and if I die before I wake…” I’d say at bedtime when I was a kid. I was supposed to just ask God to bless my parents, siblings and relatives but would include stray animals, victims of crimes I’d seen on the news, etcetera because I was the same way.

It started with a call to prayer that bent skyward like the most unusual flower prying itself loose from vines. Being African-American and raised Catholic had always been awkward. But it was at a point where everything old echoed. I didn’t need the Goth architecture, handbags and matching shoes. Just a quiet frame I could share with others who believed in doing things the way you’re supposed to that I found in the storefronts and renovated office spaces of New York where Muslims pray. I was given a heavy gold embossed Quran in one. In another, a Senegalese woman with tribally stained toe nails showed me how to ritually cleanse, as I ran wet fingers over my face, an innocent portrait of me in my first communion veil appearing in the sink water that gathered.

But years had passed since then and I was a fledgling convert only occasionally fasting the Ramadan Muna called out of the blue. We made plans to meet at a masjid over a Turkish restaurant in Midtown East. She was a heaving mass of warmth and good memories. It was right after work. We lined up with other women with our palms lifted in midair, then crossed them against our chests. We leaned forward with our hands on our knees like runners catching their breath. I was seated on the floor mat, staring just past my lap — we were done when, “Nothing has changed.” Muna began as if she couldn’t keep it inside another second. “He won’t pick up the phone and speak to my parents. It’s time to follow through. He earns very little. I would have to pay for almost everything if we got married, but…” She paused and for that moment, her eyes lost their usual glow.

My son’s father had been a musician who had studied painting, had the vocabulary of an art critic and expected me to afford him all the comforts of a wife without any strings attached. Shoveling snow, hauling heavy bags of groceries and clothes back and forth from the laundromat all by myself, my fundamentalist interpretation of feminism prevented me from realizing I was single. Born in 1960, I had come of age during the most liberal era in America. Casual arrangements with men were normal for women of my generation. I would have been acting if I had pretended to find Muna’s relationship with Ahmed unheard of. She was thinking out loud. I was eavesdropping when the curtain that separated the men’s and women’s sections parted, and the imam entered with milk and a tray of food. A woman in a kaftan embroidered with a scribbly pattern helped herself first. Then, the imam left, and a tide of heavy voices briefly washed across the smooth gray matting where we began eating our first meal since dawn. Tearing a fig from my teeth, I recalled being lost in a mosque on 116th Street and mistakenly crossing the men’s section without any of them even noticing I was there.

“How is Ousmane?” Muna asked.

“It doesn’t matter.” I said, stunned to hear his name. He was a man I never got to know, had only brought up once.

“Why not? Why not?” she teased pounding her fist on my leg.

“I need to feel like I’m taking a risk when I fall in love.” I said. “He’s too safe.” She gave me the same clueless stare I probably gave her when she talked about Ahmed. A woman in a veil so long it hid her feet, sat between us. The three of us forming a semi-circle. It was late and I had a commute ahead of me. My bag was a history lesson. Plunging my hand in to make room for some dates wrapped in a napkin that I planned to eat during my bus ride home, I touched a vial of blood pressure pills, faded supermarket receipts, loose cough drops, even the spiral notebook I had used before I realized that all I wanted was another woman to share a heart to heart with from time to time, not Arabic lessons.

 

Arsenal

By Elmaz Abinader

We don’t need thunder, might, or the conversion of galaxies to withstand —
if anything we are armed with fists, conscience, rocks, history, and backs like hemp

Warfare drives us into an insistent fog, cold and frequent, a churning in the belly–
drives us to link, chain a curtain, thatch a roof; braid vines into electrical cords

Our skirts are shredded into tourniquets; clog arteries resolute on lava, tidal wave–
Rocks crack like pumpkin seeds between our teeth, even in empty mouths.

It’s nothing for women who cradle little ones between curtains of incursion–
we have birthed more than one dead son, brother, hostage, girl, flower, stone.
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Forts have been built of silk and cement, each hand laying brick upon brick.
The years pass, the beds sag aloneness; graves are hollowed right below the breastbone

We are our own weapons: waiting hardens the calves, teaches us how to move–
phrases are formed and we mouth ancient stories but nothing

as remarkable as this preservation of life when death lurks. The sergeant asking
questions through the crack in the door our bodies are pressed upon

These days are not remembered, no names are evoked; our shadows slide
down the wall unnoticed
We are seismic in our keening, this song, a story, told in whispers, starving ourselves of breath.

Ali

By Zeina Hashem Beck

He wasn’t a beggar,
just someone who asked
for a smoke and talked to himself.
His right hand traced sentences
into broken circles
near his tilted head,
his eyes had seen
beyond language, couldn’t find
their way back. His cigarette,

 

always hanging at a certain
angle between his lips,
almost parallel to his nose,
was his only anchor to the real world.

 

The people at West House
would sometimes give him a free haircut.
No one knew where he slept.
I think we believed he didn’t,
that he just ceased to exist
beyond the corner.

 

We never saw him seated,
just a familiar pedestrian
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side of the street every day,
as if the distance
between Abu Naji and Universal were
the whole Mediterranean sea.
He walked and walked yet stayed
in place. Or maybe he didn’t.

 

One day he pointed to a car,
said it was a Russian tank, named
the year it was manufactured.
Sometimes he gave random lectures
about communism.
We said hello or we didn’t,
he replied or he didn’t.

 

There were rumors
he was a professor gone mad,
that his whole family was killed
before him during the war,
but no one really knew anything
for sure about him, except that he was
as much a part of Bliss Street
as the students, the sidewalk, the fast food,
that he was one of the possible
definitions of the city.

 

Darśana

By Pd Mallamo

Discriminate between what gives you peace and what disturbs you. Whatever is better, follow that.

– Papaji, Sri H.W.L Poonja

1

Geneva

Fabian rode the bus from his home in Pottsville PA to Providence RI, three hundred and twenty two miles. The bus stopped forty-six times; the trip took thirty-seven hours. He drank a full gallon of black coffee he’d brewed the day before and poured into a pump-jug hidden in his backpack. He made fourteen trips to the abominable toilet at the back of the bus. Except for a three-hour nap, he spent his time working through the first two books of James Elroy’s underworld trilogy while looping Neon Indian’s “Polish Girl” over and over until it became trance music, an enhancement to Ellroy like sex in a hearse. His Pentecostal father, disappointed and distrustful that he had chosen Brown over Calvin or Hope, drove him to the bus station and advised him to be careful with the coloreds, even at Brown, sure there’s some good ones and a few who genuinely love the Lord. Maybe when you’re finished with college you’ll reconsider the Army. These days the Army is loaded with Christians, you’d be right at home, they’re doing the Lord’s work in the godless Middle East. Don’t be out late; half the wicked things in this world happen at two a.m. Beware the evil eye. Discern the antichrist. The woman in the seat next, a window seat, was black, beautiful and from Baltimore by way of Botswana, or so she said, and sporadically, when she wasn’t staring soundlessly and in perfect stillness out that window, began brief soliloquies with the phrase “I remember …” These inevitably became confessions, as if he were a priest or, better yet, a priest she would never see again. At one point she told him she had willingly lost her virginity to a nineteen-year old cousin when she was twelve, allowing that twelve was at the outer limits of consent but that’s how she chose to remember it. This was a week after the heat riots in Houston. At another, that she’d had a boyfriend every single day of her hilariously dysfunctional and now-defunct marriage because one man was never enough, ‘specially if he got no money; at still another, that she used meth and even though meth is considered a white man’s drug she likes it very much but knows it will kill her. Confronting the baleful twilight of a soon-to-be heat-dead universe without the comforting illusion of a loving god she has nonetheless switched to prednisone which is even Whiter and perfectly respectable and makes her feel like an angel but will eventually leach her bone like meth and destroy her liver and kidneys, though maybe not as fast. I won’t lose my teeth, she said, and I won’t look like I got hit by a truck. I’m not exactly a candidate for Celebrity Rehab. Her name was Geneva and she didn’t know who had named her or who her parents were, she’d bounced among foster homes until she was eighteen and then she bounced to the street where she’d taken her lumps, believe me! She was straight out of Ellroy, and little fissures raced through his heart each time she revealed a side of life so bad it was scarcely believable, color of pain, stench of fear, relentless anger, death everywhere. When she spoke she always touched his arm. He switched off Neon Indian, shut the book and twisted in his seat to regard her full on, this stranger he was not supposed to meet. He focused on the center of her eyes when she spoke, peering deep inside to see fire and destruction, evil and light, where erotic capital had soon enough become survival sex and only god knew what else. In her presence he felt his leaving home in the muscles of his bottom and thighs, interludes of fear, giddy joy, anticipation, premonition, dread, dark confusion – then, finally, deliverance and Amen, the entire limbic cycle compressed into hours instead of months, amplified by caffeine and bus motion, by the strange being sitting next to him, by the memory of the abrupt bewildering almost ex-nihilo call from Providence. Smelled briefly from somewhere in the back an aroma like pot-roast his mother made on Sundays; later, a voice, also from the rear, that sounded like his father, but half-drunk, unlike his father who was drunk only on the Lord. He comprehended that his brothers and sisters, all younger, were now permanently deprived of a secular advocate and would have to fend for themselves, resist the programming or dive right in, he’s gone to make his small way in the big world, fantastically lucky because first he’d been turned down cold by Brown as expected, a single-page form letter signed by the copy machine and mailed to nobodies; then, inexplicably, another letter admitting him provisionally but only if there were room and the gods did not continue to ignore him; turned down cold again two weeks later with another single-page form letter sent first to the wrong address; then informed by phone forty-eight hours prior that a place had unexpectedly opened, come immediately if you can tear yourself away from Pottsville, there is a scholarship because even though your high school grades suck your SAT is stellar and you maxed the math. Someone high at Brown had reached down down down and pulled him up up up as if his or her hand were the very hand of God, pulled him in one clean lift above religion, Republicans, patriotism, coal mines, KwikStops, little gray houses, four-hundred pound women, listing Pontiacs, television, girls who couldn’t read, bullies and dolts and drunken veteran’s parades. On cream-colored tile by a urinal flush-handle in a Wilkes-Barre men’s room at a Gas ‘n Go where the bus had stopped to offload three passengers a urinator had scrawled “This may be your day.” The final stop was still three miles from the campus. Geneva took his face in both hands and said with breath that smelled like Trident, I ain’t no white man’s dog, then wished him luck and blessed him, a soft wet kiss on his lips. She said Fabian was a lucky name unless you happened to be a Pope. Never forget me, she said, I will live in your mind even when I’m dead, that’s god for you. Exhausted but too embarrassed to call Brown for a pick-up from the bus station he lugged two suitcases and a duffle bag nearly the entire way until a family from Massachusetts with a van and another Brown freshman gave him a lift.

2

Cooper

Fabian met his advisor Monday afternoon at two p.m. in Archibald Hall. He knocked a door upon which the words A Cooper were printed modestly in gold leaf and when he heard a noise inside walked through. He closed the door carefully and turned around to see a very old man leaned way back in a swivel chair looking him up and down through half-lidded eyes.

Judas Priest, the old man said after a long moment. When did you drag in?

Last night, sir.

You the Pottsville boy?

Yessir

Bus?

Yessir

God almighty. He shook his head. Fabian is it? – nice name unless you’re the Pope.

So I’ve heard, sir.

Pottsville P-A. Wooo-E! You musta blowed the ROOF off that test! A Cooper dropped his chair forward and rummaged through papers on his desk until he found a green file.

As I thought, he said. Maxed the math. Well well well. Play ball?

Center field.

And?

.263.

Cooper plopped the file on the desk, turned around, leaned again back in his seat. You want the good news or the bad news?

I’ll take them both, sir.

Which one first?

The good news I guess.

By the way, I AM the Brown Department of Journalism.

Yes sir

Brown doesn’t have a Department of Journalism.

OK

Make sense?

Not quite, sir.

In reality I am the Brown University reality consultant – the Consultant on Reality, as it were. Journalists deal in reality. You follow?

Yes sir.

People come to me to make sure it makes sense.

What makes sense, sir?

Whatever. Two point five billion dollar endowment people tend to pull all sorts of things out their ass. It’s a self-reinforcing system with no actual referent to the real world. This is why they need a reality consultant. Follow?

Kind of, sir.

To Brown’s credit, they understand this – unlike Harvard with an endowment ten times bigger.

Yes sir –

So the problem’s ten times worse.

Yes sir.

The claptrap that comes out of that place…

Very interesting, sir.

You a Pollack, son?

Yes I am.

Rhetorical question.

Oh, I –

Your name’s Jarosinsky for god’s sake

Of course, sir.

The most beautiful women in this world are Pollack.

Yes sir

Did you know that?

No sir

Chiseled features. Statuesque. I saw Zsa Zsa Gabor once with her clothes off. Of course she’s Hungarian, but what the hell –

Yes sir

I’ll tell you about it sometime.

I’ll look forward to that.

You don’t know Zsa Zsa Gabor from Lyndon Baines Johnson.

I’m sorry, sir.

Is your mother beautiful?

A bit overweight, I’m afraid –

Of course she is. She’s a Pollack.

Actually, she’s Hungarian.

The old man slapped his knees and hooted at the ceiling. Well played, young man! Well played!

Thank you, sir.

Anyway, here’s the good news: You’ve done the hard part.

Which part was that?

They jump you through hoops?

They sure did!

A goddamn dog circus?

A dog circus it was, sir!

Sixteen letters, twelve phone calls and they still can’t make up their goddamn mind.

Exactly, sir

And if your daddy had two hundred fifty million dollars like Mitt Romney?

No dog circus?

One goddamn letter, one goddamn phone call, they meet you en masse at the airport – but you’re just a Pollack from Pottsville –

True, sir

Smarter than Mitt Romney’s sons put all together –

Thank you, sir

Want the bad news?

I’ll take it, sir.

No underwater basket weaving for you, I’m afraid.

Sir – ?

He pulls a volume from a bookshelf above his desk, ostentatiously closes his eyes and flips pages. He chooses a passage at random, then opens his eyes and reads aloud: But this emphasis would be lavished in vain, if it served, in your opinion, only to abstract a general type from phenomena whose particularity in our work would remain the essential thing for you, and whose original arrangement could be broken up only artificially.

He tosses the book back on the shelf. Is this comprehensible?

Not to me, sir.

We’re off to a good start.

Thank you, sir.

He holds up his hands: I’m not saying no wine, women, song –

No sir –

Without wine and women not to mention song old Brown is just not Brown. You may as well be back in Pottsville –

Understood, sir.

I’m just saying a Pollack from Pottsville has got to make this goddamn place PAY! What’s the major?

Don’t have one yet.

We’ll work on that.

OK

Will you listen to me?

Yes sir.

Will you trust me?

Fabian hesitated and the old man laughed again.

Son, he said, here’s the bad news. Here’s the reality from the Brown University Consultant on Reality: You have to come out of here knowing something very few people know. And – he jabbed his finger for emphasis – people have got to pay GOOD money for this something. You follow?

Trying, sir.

Otherwise go back to Pottsville.

Yes sir

That junior college on the hill –

Oh Lord –

One shot.

Yes sir

Hard work!

Absolutely!

Now, you don’t want to be a goddamn dentist or something – ?

No sir

Lawyer, MBA – ?

Heaven forbid, sir.

This is the golden door, boy. For you it opens ONE time.

Sir, I swear on a stack of bibles I will study my Pollack ass off!

A Cooper slammed both hands on the desk. That’s the goddamn spirit!

Thank you sir!

You’ve made me a happy man, son!

I’m very glad, sir!

Your people religious?

Highly, sir.

Strychnine? Rattlesnakes?

Not quite, sir.

Rapture?

Any day.

We can set that little fable aside for now can’t we – ?

Yes sir

We can establish veracity in the present tense here at old Brown – ?

Of course!

Allow Saint Philomena be who she actually was, etcetera – ?

I’m not sure I –

Define “apotropaic”

Fabian thinks a moment. I think you’ve got me there, sir.

Who was E. Howard Hunt?

I know I’ve heard that na –

What’s tardive dyskinesia?

… I ….

He pointed to photographs on the wall opposite. Do you recognize these people?

That’s Earnest Hemingway. Speaking with Fidel Castro.

Who’s this? He pointed a shaky finger to a sitting man with dirty boots and an open shirt, laughing like he didn’t have a care in the world.

Don’t know, sir

A Cooper pulled another book off the shelf, Che by Jon Lee Anderson. I knew all three, he said, handing him the book. Fidel was sane, the others were artists. Sense the dichotomy? So of course Fidel’s still alive, Hem and Che long gone. Goddamn it, I’ll be dead soon, too. Wife passed five years and I miss her every day. Get as much from me as you can, I won’t last forever. First assignment: read the goddamn book. He reached out, tapped the cover. Second edition.

If I may ask, sir, why him?

Because you’re from Pottsville. Got a dictionary?

I’ll get one, sir.

A Cooper pulled forty dollars out of his wallet. Brown Bookstore, he said. Get a good one. Make sure you get the Cooper discount.

His joy was whole and perfect when Fabian chose Arabic. He said Beirut women were the most beautiful women on earth. They met for lunch every week for three years. Look deeper, he said, always deeper. The summer before senior term Fabian went to Damascus with a professor of Mideast languages for a conference on Islamic verse during the sway of Suleyman the Magnificent. Cooper died on an August morning sitting at that same desk in Archibald beneath the photographs of Fidel, Hem and Che Guevara. He left Fabian his cat and two boxes of books with explicit reading instructions penned in precarious handwriting. He also left him thirty-five thousand dollars. Fabian considered giving half to his family but knew most of it would go to the church. He bought a red almost-new Ducati, clothes, shoes and boots, a MacBook Air and the best electric shaver money could buy. When he graduated in May he joined the army as an Arabic linguist. He called his father, who shouted for joy. He sent his mother A Cooper’s cat. He stood mournfully at A Cooper’s grave wishing mightily he’d heard the story of naked Zsa Zsa Gabor. Then, after three month of basic training, he blasted his red Ducati across the continent to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California for a year of Pashto.

And, suddenly, Afghanistan.

            3

Aamir

عامر

One hot two a.m. at the end of summer he is inserted with a Ranger squad four miles outside an eight-hut hamlet midway between Qila Abdulla and the Afghan border. They tramp silently to a rocky overlook and wait for drones – and, if the night is a bad night, the Taliban or, worse, Pakistani commandos. A tap on the head means flip down your IR goggles and all-at-once he sees a Ranger’s arm extended skyward where three simultaneous exhaust trails from high orbit lance into the hamlet from different angles blip/blip/blip/STARBURST/STARBURST/STARBURST……………………………………

BOOOOM/BOOOOM/BOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh………… detonations so deafening, fires so intense he knows the entire settlement is smashed and burning. Double-time to the site, sifting quickly through flaming debris and clothing attached to body parts for anything of intelligence value, papers, rings, watches, talismans, hard drives, phone bits, photographs, medicines. These are stuffed quickly into zipper bags along with DNA samples from dead men and unmistakable dead women and dead children he emotionally blocks as he works, dogs, he thinks (and knows he will later unthink) little dogs, when you kill the master you kill his dogs, these are the rules of war. A ranger jerks him by the arm and they run through flames to a man drenched in blood without feet frantically crawling into darkness at the perimeter, small intestines dragging out ten feet behind. The ranger flips him over with his boot and shines a light in his face/over his clothes and Fabian leans/looks/declares: Arab, take him! From the darkness a child crying and another ranger sprinting to the sound, emerging moments later with a small girl in his arms. Then the Blackhawks descend, the footless man and girl heaved in with the medics and all hell breaks loose AK’s/RPG’s east and north. Fabian runs and leaps for the hatch, hears the captain bawling GO GO GO/rounds splattering like raindrops against the hardened hull/screams/smell of blood. He digs for the seat restraint as the pilot hits full throttle, g-force hauling him so hard his legs buckle. He covers his head with his hands and shuts his eyes tight in the shuddering black cabin.

            *

NATO Hospital, Kandahar

When Fabian walks into the ward the man is craning his neck to see Walker, Texas Ranger on a television set across the aisle in the nurse’s station. When he sees Fabian, he first addresses him in Arabic:

Just a minute, he’s almost got the filthy criminal!

Fabian backs up to the door and shuts it.

What the fuck? I can’t watch Texas Ranger shoot the feet off the bad guy?

The footless man adjusts himself in the bed, sips water through a straw, and says Here’s the problem, buddy: I can’t find my feet! Where did you put my feet?

I think you are a man called Aamir, disciple of al-Awlaki. Or you are a disciple of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab –

The footless man laughs. That idiot. Your attempt at humor, maybe? But what have you done with my feet? My guts you have found – but what about the feet?

We will give you new feet.

Like the feet God gave me? Or by the hand of the devil, the same that makes your drones?

Feet that work.

Not even Chuck Norris would do this to another man. No, not even to the criminal! With these false promises you hope to woo me?

You are a murderer and a fanatic. What could I hope to gain?

Such hypocrisy! Cities of infants and grandmothers cooked with your atom bombs, but only I am the murderer.

*

An orderly wheels him outside to a porch shaded with camouflage netting. With a pushbutton-remote he moves both mattress and man to sitting position, then leaves. Fabian offers him a pack of Marlboros. He leans forward, takes them gently without a word or look, opens the pack to tap one out, closes his eyes while Fabian lights it. He inhales deeply and falls back into his bed..

The devil’s cigarettes, says Fabian.

Give the devil his due, the man laughs. Blackhawks roar overhead and he strains to see them.

All this – with the cigarette in his hand he motions around himself and to the sky – is Southeast Asia without the jungle. Why are you so stupid? Your human projects are an affront to God. This is why they fail.

We didn’t come here. You came to New York.

New York, he spits, that sewer. We did you a favor. Now look what you have done. Will you destroy the world for a filthy place?

We are anxious to learn the whereabouts of any captured American or Allied service member.

Of course you are.

If you will provide names and locations we –

If you will provide my feet.

Your feet are gone.

So are those men. This law is plainly written. You speak well the language of The Word yet you are ignorant of it. Where is your excuse?

*

I suppose it is time to move on with my life, he said. Isn’t that the Anglo-Saxon way?

Fabian has brought him another pack of Marlboros. Aamir holds his cigarette up to Fabian’s face.

At least with these I can talk, which is a relief for me also. It is up to you to judge the value of what I say.

Everything you say is valuable, Aamir. I am sorry about your feet. Actually, you should be dead.

Are the rest dead?

Yes.

All?

No.

Who is alive?

A child.

By God! He will grow to fight you!

She is already in California.

Aamir falls back into his bed-chair and flicks the cigarette away.

*

About the waterboarding, he said – let’s get it over with. Maybe I will remember something to tell you.

Shall we do it here, on this bed?

If not, you will have to carry me. Plus the bed moves up and down. Very convenient.

If you cooperate we will send you back to Thadiq.

Is this before or after you make the devil-feet?

Whichever you prefer.

I don’t want your devil feet. I would rather crawl. I was crawling when you caught me. That is good enough.

You don’t want to go home?

Of course not.

You want to stay here?

Oh no!

Where, then?

California! In Los Angeles you will find blond women with blue eyes and massive breasts. Bring one to me. Then maybe I will tell you everything!

*

I had a teacher, a wise man. He told me to work as hard as I could, then let it go, like a balloon to the sky. If it is the will of god, the rains will come and my orchard will grow.

An American said this?

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Yes.

Well, by god, that is good advice!

Here’s the rest of it: He did not believe in god.

Aamir took a long drag on his cigarette and looked above himself. He sighed and took another long drag.

This is my world, said Fabian.

So it is. But I, too, have been to many places – Europe, Africa, once to Brazil and Venezuela – yes, the life of sweet fruits. A friend graduated from the University of Wyoming School of Social Work and lived with the hills-billies in Hardeman County, Tennessee. Yes, I have seen many things and heard of more but the Word of God is always within me. When I read a newspaper or book, or watch something on the television, or meet someone new, The Word is there. It is my focus and reality. How can you live? How can you think? How can you create these vast machines without consulting the true Creator first? If there is no center it will all crumble to nothing, yes, even your machines.

*

I am finished with the feet. All flesh is consumed. My feet just got there first. Insha’Allah

He is watching another episode of Walker, Texas Ranger. Fabian pulls up a chair and tosses him a pack of Marlboros.

Shall I now roll over and bark? He taps one out and Fabian lights it. He motions to the screen where the Texas Ranger endures a savage beating.

Walker is hurting for certain-ing, he says. Those cruel Anglo-Saxons! I see them on South Park.

Hurtin’ for certain. That’s how it’s said.

Hurt-ing for certain-ing?

Drop the first “g” – Hurtin’ for certain.

By God, even your language is corrupt. Who can understand this? Where is this written? There are no rules!

It is the people’s rule. It is the people’s language.

What people?

The people who watch Walker, Texas Ranger.

What kind of people are these?

Simple people.

Less simple people do not watch Walker, Texas Ranger?

As a general rule, no.

Do they say “hurting for certain-ing?”

They do not.

And why is that?

Their language is less precise – a language of deception.

And the show?

The plots are predictable and the outcomes sure.

Less simple people cannot agree with this? Do they not find this comforting?

Is life like that, Aamir? Here you are eight weeks later with no feet in an American hospital talking to a man in the intelligence service you think wants to waterboard you.

If you waterboard me I will be hurting for certain-ing, just like your countryman, the patriot Chuck Norris.

Fabian motions to the television. Maybe they should waterboard Chuck Norris.

Aamir slaps his knees and throws back his head. If God should allow this, he wheezes through gusts of mirth, I should like immediately to die! For how can life get any better? Only if they showed this on Cops.

*

One cannot live without God. Did your father not teach you this?

He tried.

You did not listen?

I did not agree.

Then it was the false god

That is certainly possible.

Not all gods are the false god. This is the error in your thinking.

This, too, is a possibility.

For obedience the True God gives us many wives. Therein lies great joy.

In my country it’s called something else.

Does your father wish for many wives?

Fabian laughed. After my mother, I doubt it.

There are many lovely flowers. No two are the same. But in America there is only one wife. In frustration the husband watches filth on the computer or divorces his wife and makes lawyers rich. This is not the way of God. How then do you think you provide answers for the people of this world? Pimps and the ho’s on television. Drugs in your children and old women. People so fat their faces look like the pig face, millions of them. This is madness. You have got everything backward, everything wrong. You have nothing to teach anybody.

*

At least let me have a good-looking Ukrainian nurse like that shitbag Gaddafi.

Wish I could.

Then tell me a story from your American life, a story of justice. But tell me in my own language so I understand better.

Fabian thinks for a moment. Texas Ranger justice?

Of course, the real thing!

I will tell you a story about my great-grandmother.

A woman?

Yes, the best story of all – but I must tell it in English, the language of justice.

I will hear it. Wait, wait! He fishes around for cigarettes. Let me light another Marlboro. Marlboros are the cigarettes of justice.

My great-grandmother had six children – five boys and one daughter. That daughter was my grandmother, my mother’s mother.

  1. What happened?

The five sons all grew up and became coal miners. My grandmother was the only girl and she was the baby.

  1. What happened?

Her name was Hattie. When she was fifteen she ran away and got married.

Fifteen was too young?

Her mother thought so. And, she didn’t like the young man.

What did he do, the young man?

He was a farmer’s son. He worked on the farm. That is also where they lived. He was a drunk. When Hattie’s mother saw her, she always had bruises and black eyes.

This man he would beat her?

Yes

Why?

He did not need a reason.

He was a piece of shit?

Obviously

What year was this?

1936

  1. What happened?

One day Hattie’s mother heard that her daughter was hurt. She took a bus to a little town thirty miles away called Moline, near the husband’s farm.

  1. What happened?

Hattie’s face was swollen and she had three broken fingers. He hit her with a pipe.

This piece of filth!

Great-grandmother found a doctor, then went to see the man’s father. He wouldn’t do anything.

Because he, too, was a drunk?

You learn quick.

  1. What happened?

Hattie refused to leave because she was pregnant – with my mother, actually. Six weeks later great-grandmother went back to Moline. Alone, at night.

Alone?

Yes.

How did she go there, this woman, thirty miles at night alone?

She borrowed her brother’s car, a Studebaker. Today my mother has it. I played in it when I was young.

Nobody saw her?

Apparently not.

  1. What happened?

Right down the road from the farmer’s house was a hay barn. You know what I mean?

Yes, food for the horse.

Well, she set it on fire.

By God!

Everybody ran out to see this fire, including my Hattie. When they did, her mother circled back to the farmhouse.

The farmers did not go because they were drunk. This I can tell. OK. What happened?

Great-grandmother had a little revolver.

What kind was it?

Smith & Wesson Hammerless .32. Nicknamed the “Lemon Squeezer” because it looks like a kitchen appliance. My mother has it now, too. It is a family heirloom. Do you know this word?

No

Something passed down generation by generation.

Yes yes, we have knives. In America you have guns?

And cars.

So she took that hair-moon in there? Ok. What happened?

She shot them both.

By God! The Woman did this?

Yes

They were killed?

Indeed

  1. What happened?

She went back home. Dark of night.

And did they find her? Did they catch her?

No. And since Hattie was at the fire and other people saw her there, the police couldn’t blame her.

Did people hear the shots?

Certainly.

Why did they not come running?

People shoot skunks all the time, even today. Do you know the word “skunk”?

A stinking animal?

That’s right.

Thereby this mother saved her daughter?

She did.

And how did you come to this knowledge? It is in your family of course.

Secret knowledge passed down.

Your mother told you.

That’s right.

Do the American police know?

They do not.

To this very day?

Correct

Have you told anyone else?

You are the first.

By God, you do me great honor!

Why shouldn’t I?

Because we are adversaries. But you are very interesting. And your great-relative was perhaps an Arab.

*

Your life in America – it is what I heard?

What did you hear?

Baseball and the apple pie?

Not exactly.

No pie or no baseball?

My father worked for a poultry processor. My mother worked at a dry cleaner. The big event was paying off the house. They’re still in it, that house.

What do they do in there?

Watch television. Take pills.

But you left that place – ?

One day I applied to Brown University. It was a class assignment, apply to a college, here’s a list. I chose one at random. Someone at Brown actually decided to let me in. It took a while but they did it. If not for that person I’d still be in Pennsylvania pulling chicken guts at the processor. I’d never have learned Arabic. We wouldn’t have met.

God helped you. He answered your prayers. Now you have fresh life in a new world!

I don’t pray.

We all pray. Even if we don’t pray. Here is the proof: You got into Brown University and learned my language.

How many have you killed, Aamir?

By God I have killed no one – or I too would be dead.

How is that?

I will not send a soul to heaven unless I can guide him to the gates of paradise. I promise you.

Why haven’t you done this, then?

Don’t you know? I am just like you my almost-friend! I speak the language of the enemy. We are both too valuable to die!

*

Fabian’s commander, a black bird colonel named Cornelius Monk who graduated West Point and has general written all over him, makes an unannounced visit to the intel shack. He does not seem to notice a poster on the wall hung by a long-gone linguist featuring Richard Nixon shaking hands with an obviously-high Elvis Presley in the White House above the caption “Two Great Americans.” You’ve had that piece of shit three weeks, he says. You got him because you two go way back (he makes quote marks with his fingers) but so far it’s been all relationship (he makes quote marks with his fingers). Your terms, right? Knock yourself out. Well here’s our status: Current? Zip. Corroborating? Zip. Directionals? Zip. Timeline? Zip. You’re all I’ve got Jarosinski, since Rumsfeld kicked out the queers – but real soon soldier, and I mean real soon, I render Abdul here off to Egypt. They hand out Marlboros, too. Then they shove them up his ass. When did you get to be so stupid? This happen on my watch? I’ll tell you this – Monk points a finger at him – he sings in Egypt we got a problem you and me. I’ll haul your ass up for dereliction. Or worse.

He sings in Egypt, says Fabian, you’ll see Christ Jesus fly over the desert at sunrise. Then we’ll really have a problem.

*

He tosses a pack of Marlboros on the bed. Enjoy them, he says. They may be your last.

Aamir slowly unwraps the pack and taps one out. When Fabian leans over with the lighter Aamir catches his eyes and holds them until he inhales first smoke.

I have a confession, he says. For you and for God. I will whisper.

Fabian leans again.

I am afraid. And therefore I am ashamed.

He smokes for a moment. Soon they will give you shit. They will say, Make him talk or we will send him away. He will be tortured and thrown alive from the helicopter over the Red Sea. This is reality.

Take the deal.

Either way I’m a dead man, even in Thadiq, one side or the other. Of course you know this. The only question is how do I die – like a man beloved of God and the Prophet, or like a dog – your dog. I will tell you. I will die like a man. They will burn me and cut me, then bind me with steel and drop me from great height into the sea. Insha’Allah

He pulls thoughtfully on the Marlboro and again seeks Fabian’s eyes but Fabian’s eyes are far away. Fabian leans in close and whispers, I knew a man who would do exactly the same.

As do I. Walker, Texas Ranger!

*

Suns in their multitudes seethe and cry upon the boundless plane of the night. Within this very firmament Aamir With No Feet has lately tumbled, somersaulting in clear air through flocks of gulls and Boeing drones and fiery Mohammadan angels shouting praise and courage. Though he unquestionably soiled himself and was abused for that, too, he found his voice and screamed the name of God over and over until the instant he struck the sea.

*

Onward and downward, says the colonel. How do you say “grunt” in Pashto? I hope you kissed him goodbye. We all need pleasant dreams. You will too, Jarosinski. Boots on the ground, troop! Welcome to the real Army. You know what I said to the last interrogator? – So be a bum and a dope addict for a while. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Just remember who butters your toast.

4

Fabian Jarosinski

He spends six months in El-Aaiún advising rich old men with coffee eyes and breath of cloves on the thrifty procurement of mail-order brides from Kazakhstan, sometimes three and four at a time, who are happily quarantined for the first three months against the possibility of herpes and HIV. The old men, paprika magnates, not only pay him well but treat him like a son, which is to say they love him. Don’t feel guilty, the girls whisper; you are not actually “procuring” because anything is better than Kazakhstan. These old men are harmless, they have let foxes into their henhouse, we will steal their desert jewels and flee to Madrid, come with us! Then another six months in Beirut where he begins a master’s program in Arab literature & language at American University. There he sees a countryman with green circles tattooed around his eyes, chain-smoking and talking to himself. On his backpack is a message scrawled on the bars of a childish representation of Old Glory rendered upon a dirty scrap of cardboard: SAY “HI” TO COMMANDER NAGASAKI SPREADING ACTIONS OF PEACE ACROSS THE WHOLE WORLD NOW JOIN HANDS!!!! In Cairo he meets a psychiatrist come from Boston for a conference on addictions who said he almost went crazy working with the obese – diabetes, sleep apnea, hypertension. Crackheads meth-freaks my freakin’ ass, they die because they won’t stop eating, it’s just that simple, I have four degrees from three good schools, I should know. Next week I’m doing a presentation at Johns Hopkins: “Pizza, A New American Religion.” Fabian estimates the psychiatrist weighs three-hundred pounds. A full year in North Africa learning Arabic dialects Hassanyya, Touareg, Juba, Nubi, Dhofari, Najdi. Outside a Riyadh mosque one day a woman with her white-blond hair covered along with part of her face so one saw only dark eyes surreptitiously took his hand and slipped him a note. She was a Polish journalist on her way to Western Sahara for a Der Spiegel piece on Mariem Hassan, so back he goes to El-Aaiún where they present themselves as a married couple and sleep together. At some level this is incest, she says, but at least it stays in the family. When something good happens is the universe functioning or malfunctioning, I can’t tell – but the gall of deity throwing us upon this senseless earth crawling with charlatans in His name then damning us when we can’t figure it out, that’s why we’re all atheists in Europe. Are you atheist? Will I ever see you again? When she returned to Poland he hired on with a food entrepreneur from Baltimore blessed with ardent Alewite relatives who convinced him that Damascus was ripe for a string a Taco Bells, then threw in all their money. After only one presentation to a preposterous Syrian version of an American chamber of commerce he is beaten half to death by outraged Islamists who also threatened to bomb any and all Taco Bells he might be so unwise to construct. Fabian later learned that both the man’s Alewite and American relations, who had likewise invested and lost everything, beat him yet again – an unforeseen risk of fast food capitalism in the Arab world. Another month with the Polish journalist who came to Jordan for a Paris Match story on Iraqi refugees, who, in some places, now outnumbered Jordanians. She revealed her intention to draw parallels with persecuted Mormons in nineteenth century America who also migrated and engendered resentment and bigotry when they outnumbered Missourians in parts of Missouri.

Do you think your readers will understand this, he asked, a Mormon-Iraqi parallel? It wouldn’t even fly in my country.

Sure, she said, the older generation reads books, they don’t give a shit what Lindsay Lohan is up to, they’ve been interested in Mormons for at least a hundred years, do you know any?

I’m Pentecostal, he said, somewhat lapsed.

I’m Roman Catholic, she said, the same. What do you get when you put those together?

A Mormon? he laughed.

She’s The Sherriff starring Suzanne Somers is on the hotel television, dubbed into both Hassanyya and Berber. My god, she says, your country is taking over the entire world one television set at a time. Meanwhile the reefs are dying because everybody in America has a constitutional right to air conditioning. You are burning coal to generate electricity to run machines that cool your houses, so the earth gets even hotter and the oceans acidify, does that make sense? Soon you reach a point of no return and then what will you do, jump in the ocean to stay cool? It will eat your skin and you will die like the reefs and fishes, which is what you deserve stupid capitalist pigs. He lunges and catches her ankle and she laughs so hard she pees herself, then blushes upwards over alabaster shoulders and long alabaster neck, which lovely rose, he observes, compliments those black eyes. Watch out, she says, or I will call the mutaween and tell them you want to build Taco Bells in El-Aaiún. Next morning in the bazaar they find Sudanese selling Taco Bell out of a freezer in the back of a spice store. The Polish woman shakes her head as if to say If you can’t beat them… and kisses his ear. Will I ever see you again? she asks.

One day, in the middle of the Sahara, Monk calls literally from out the blue to ask if he has overcome his crippling obsession with Stone Age religions because if so there is a place for him at NSA where Monk is a section chief. I made general, he says, and the next year they packed my token black ass off to the Pentagon. NSA made an offer I couldn’t refuse. I’m doing the same for you, Jarosinski, don’t ask how I got your phone number.

Thanks, says Fabian, but how sick and desperate would I have to be to even consider something like this?

Sick and desperate, well that’s interesting. Aamir took that dive for your sins if that’s what you’re getting at – and yes, by god, even California if he’d given us something to work with, but all he served up was horseshit and you ate every bit. Here’s a chance at redemption, think about it, that’s all I’m asking.

What about your redemption, Monk, how’s that going?

Hard to believe, kid, but I’m working on it, I really am.

Two days later still in the desert another call, this one from Red Cross in Tunisia telling him his parents had died in a car-truck accident the evening before in West Virginia where they’d gone to see his mother’s sister, Aunt TerriLois, who weighed nearly a quarter-ton and was in the final stages of congestive heart failure and had actually heard the accident report on her police scanner while working through a colossal bowl of Hostess Zingers. A semi driver hauling feminine products for WalMart had fallen asleep at 9 PM and crossed the divider. TerriLois herself died next evening reaching for her cigarettes, toppling from bed with a thunderous crash and puncturing a lung with a rib shattered by an oxygen bottle on the floor. After he’d settled his two youngest sisters with an uncle in Pottsville for the rest of middle school he rode the bus to DC and lunched with Monk in a jam-packed NSA cafeteria. Then he flew to Warsaw.

The Polish girl was more beautiful than he expected or hoped or, he knew absolutely, would ever in ten lifetimes deserve. She met him at the gate with her family, almost fifty people. Half of them are Catholic, she says, the other half still Communist, I don’t know which side’s worse. Only god knows.

I thought you were atheist.

No one’s an atheist, not even the Communists. They just think they are.

And you?

Some things you have to take on faith, Fabian. Even me. Especially me.