nonfiction

These Threads of Memories and Sounds by Micah Khater

The eulogies of a diaspora bear fruit in the homeland. I carry with my half-Arab, half-white body songs of Lebanon. So that when I step foot in Lehfed, after so many years away, I feel the elegiac rhythms in my path. I hear the call of lungs wet with life and earth in late April 1927 as I move through the streets of my grandmother’s birthplace, Brummana, nearly ninety years later.

I stand next to the yellow-stoned sepulcher that is meant to conceal the stench and shock of bodies long gone. The dusty road follows the mountain around, veering toward a small church, whose bells chime into the otherwise quiet air. As I walk toward the wooden benches and stark colors of painted saints who adorn the stone walls, I see roses crawling up the side. Their rhythmic dance in the sun-stroked wind sets me off course. I watch the pinks and yellows of their blossoms as their stems try to move out and beyond the soil, like young seeds floating in the wind. But their roots have betrayed them; they cannot move.

I turn away and walk through the doors whose wood seems to swell each time a hand presses on its smoothed ridges. As we stand in the hollow chapel, a cool breeze moves up and down the aisle, somehow reminding me that I have come over five thousand miles to eulogize the dead. My dead. It is in Lehfed, the mountain village town where my grandfather bought land long before me; where he, my grandmother, and uncle remain eternally laid behind the achingly beautiful walls of that sepulcher. As I stand in homily, I remark that this will be the second—or is it third—time that I have been near my grandmother’s body. Like the roses outside, her roots have been laid down long ago: pressed into the soil with tears and confusion from those left behind, begging her not to move. So now, we must come to her.

The eulogies of a diaspora bear fruit in the homeland. I carry with my half-Arab, half-white body songs of Lebanon. So that when I step foot in Lehfed, after so many years away, I feel the elegiac rhythms in my path. I hear the call of lungs wet with life and earth in late April 1927 as I move through the streets of my grandmother’s birthplace, Brummana, nearly ninety years later. Her parents had called her Hind, ensuring that when others spoke her name, they would not intonate French sounds like a colonial ventriloquist. She would have an Arabic name and she would bear the genealogy of her father, just like her mother had once done.

My grandmother, Hind Naim Aswad, curled her hair so that it fell away from her face. She painted her lips and shaped her eyebrows. And when she posed for one of her first photographs, she wore a blouse with buttons that glistened as she walked. Moving her shoulders square with the camera, Hind looked ahead only to be instructed to turn to the left. With her lips pressed together she let the corners of her mouth turn up just enough to make her eyes come alive. Frozen in time, the light catches Hind smiling.

After the birth of five children—two of whom had given up the ghost so early that they would later be remembered as twins that came and departed together—Hind felt her womb contract. The painful scars of childbirth made her legs ache and she found herself sitting more throughout the day, trying to rub away the blue tributaries that had risen to the surface with each pregnancy. Unable to loosen the choked blood, she called on a doctor to treat the wounds below the skin.

The physician insisted, so the story goes, that the only way to heal the veins was through another pregnancy. A sixth child, he said, might increase the flow and lessen the pain running along my grandmother’s days. Perhaps it was her ascriptions to motherhood—to her life’s labors—that made her willing to trust him. But inside, she must have equivocated because her womb had contracted and she ached with the memory of lowering another child into the ground. Even so, she felt the pain linger, growing into her bones like an unwelcome companion. So she heeded the doctor’s advice. In the month before her birthday, she found her bleeding had stopped and she knew that the season had changed.

Unbeknownst to her, Hind would celebrate her thirty-third birthday on the same day that her daughter-in-law arrived in the world. Separated by the salt of the Mediterranean and the crescent of the Atlantic, the two women would never meet. But they would share the day of birth, linking their souls in a way that echoed divine providence. And as her sixth child grew big inside of her, Hind felt the earth move as another generation entered the world.

I belong to my mother in a way that all children belong to the ones who gave them life. But I, too, belonged to something else. She—the child of white Americans—looked and inhabited the world in a way that my father and his mother, Hind, did not. Made up whole of these two parts, I found myself looking and not looking like my mother. Sounding and not sounding like her family. Being and not being American. These threads of memories and sounds snaked across my body, demarcating disparate geographies and genealogies.

When my mother took her first steps in the Old City of Jerusalem as a student, I wonder whether she saw women who looked like the daughter she had not yet had. I wonder if she stopped to feel the slopes of what Westerners considered an “older” world, knowing that her own children would be made up of both the “old” and the new. In this way, my geographies—given to me by both her and my father—fractured not just in space but also in time. Perhaps she knew that this place would come to mean home to her children, even if mostly in their nighttime longings.

Alif, Ba, Ta, Tha, Jeem, Ha…my white mother would read aloud the letters of the Arabic alphabet to her half-Arab children, teaching us how to speak with an evenness of our heritage. As the hard Cairo “g” rolled off her tongue, my father would answer with the soft “g” of Beirut and Brummana and suddenly they would move together through the streets of Egypt and the hills of Lebanon. I closed my eyes, hoping to go along with them to places I knew so well, even if only in my dreams.

“You look just like your grandmother Hind,” my parents would tell me when I complained about my milk-white skin and the thickness of my eyebrows. I loved those moments and would steal away a smile, thinking about Hind’s smooth features and full lips. Sometimes my father would look at me as if he was memorizing my face, just in case it changed and his mother no longer appeared across the contour of my brow or in the fullness of my cheeks. I would dream of my grandmother and wonder whether our physical similarity branched into our souls. Hind was the vision of my past and my future. Her breath had been captured in flashes and film, but she lived on in my bones.

To sing of a world both strange and familiar beckons the imagination. As a young girl, I drew up a facsimile of Lebanon in my mind, taken from memories and dreams, real and fictitious. And each time I returned, my static renditions of homeland evolved. Sprawling forth in many directions, Lebanon became more complex, but always remained symbolic. I clung to those images at different hours of the day—when I brushed my dark hair or pronounced my anglicized name. And at certain moments in my life, I grasped onto the dreams of days past with greater urgency—when images of Arab faces flashed next to the dust-filled smoke that interred thousands under rubble, rock, and American Pride. When those nightmares effaced my dreams, I tried to sort out what made me American and what made me Lebanese.

I dreamt of Hind and Lebanon because I could not fit all of myself into American. I spilled over, past the green pines of North Carolina and the sun-filled days of Colorado. I felt my mind vacillate whenever I spoke of identity, trying to figure out which box would suit me. Was I Caucasian or multiracial? Whenever I selected “White,” my racialization obscured my ethnicity. I did not want to be just American, as if that categorization in and of itself erased my grandmother and all of the memories that I had of her. I wanted to be as I was; as I am.

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Before September 11, 2001, half of me faded against the backdrop of my skin. Teachers and friends could not imagine a white Arab. So, they forgot about part of me: the little girl who claimed to be Lebanese but whose skin mirrored the light. I did not like being white, because that category suffocated me with meaning I did not mean and stories I did not tell. But others imposed that whiteness on me unendingly, forgetting my other half: they excised part of me, leaving it under refuse as if it had never existed at all.

By the time the towers came down and the smoke had cleared, I had undergone baptism by fire. Suddenly, erasure contorted into a perverse recognition. I became Arab, but remained American, moving through space with a dexterity and alacrity that belied the long braided ropes that tethered me to the ground. This new identity supplanted the old, but put me in a new category: one with no name. I was suspended in space, white and other at the same time—both a bearer to and victim of white supremacists’ violent heritage. I checked both boxes. I listened to teachers pronounce my name with new meaning and I felt others’ breath on my neck as they whispered in my ear, “Are you a terrorist?”

No, no. That was not me. They had taken my beautiful secret and made it ugly with their words and their spit. They had resurrected a ghoulish version of my other half and in so doing, ravaged my dreams of Hind.

Seated on two chairs, my grandparents stare back at me from a photo taped together and yellowing. It’s 1951. My uncle and aunt look away from the camera, coyly evading the gaze of an eternal audience. Everyone wears sandals, except my grandfather whose gendarme uniform requires a dress shoe with a slight heel. Hind’s cross hangs between the “v” of her collar, but the clasp of the necklace has fallen to the front. The misplaced clasp guides the eye toward her high-waisted belt where the fabric of her dress pulls, revealing that she is once again pregnant.

Most of the stories of my grandmother tell her life through marriage, pregnancy, and child-rearing. I dream because I cannot see photographs of her life beyond these moments. I descend into unknowable pasts because I am the embodiment of the unseeable futures of which she dreamt.

Yes, she dreamt. She dreamt as she stood for her wedding portrait on a rug whose perfect geometry mirrored the superficially clean lines of domesticity. An architect of futurity, she envisioned her children moving across the swells and breaks of the sea. Hers was a world unfolding and she challenged the mountains, even the ones that would become her resting place, to contain her dreams.

But her dreams were costly. They took her children like rip currents, only returning them after long periods of absence. If only she could move them away from the sounds of evaporating lives—disintegrating worlds—then the children might not fall under the bombs. This fractured reality crashed into her with unending hurt. She would have to throw her children far: far enough away so that they would not try to smuggle their way back in the night.

The war, as we call it, absorbs all of the light of memories from the 1970s—the height of my father’s adolescence. It is opaque and runs through our family like a hot knife, leaving wounds between us all. Even those of us who did not experience the war understand that its trauma lives on in our embryos and sperm. It is worn on the skin like feathers lay in glue, attached along our spine as a frequent reminder that displacement is the way that our father survived.

My father had been at Hind’s side for as long as she could remember. But how could she let this child, the embodiment of her labors of love, carry her bleeding in the streets after she was hit by shelling one afternoon? He ran with her as far as he could go, cradling the most precious love he had yet known. Feeling the pull between her own pain and her son’s fear, my grandmother must have felt consumed by a feeling that had no name, no calling, no place. It led her to say, knowing he might be gone forever: “I don’t want him to die here.”

She wore the violence of war around her neck, like a bad omen, reminding her of a dream that had begun to slip into a nightmare. She worried that maybe she had not prepared him for the loneliness that grips in an unknown land. She knew it was time. Yet, this ocean seemed so much more vast and hollow, like it would swallow her whole.

When she sent her last child to the land of dreams, she sent a piece of herself. The sweet memories, like a fragrant breeze, hurried alongside my father, bringing Lebanon with him. Whenever he told me this story, his words would sing of a land both strange and familiar. And when he reached the crescendo, I would feel that Hind had done more than simply send her child away. She had moved worlds.

I sit in the sun baked terrace, listening for sounds that might heal the grief worn from the time of my birth. My mother and father surround me, reminding me of the places I have been and those I have yet to go. My father’s hand grazes my back, telling me that the painful loss of the mother that sent him to safety has never left him. I see it when he looks at me. I see it when he moves in her image and I in his. My mother, the one who has given me breath, takes in her children’s world. Her world.

The place of resting is also one of haunting. I touch the stones that surround my grandmother’s body, which is to have something between my fingers that feels like the loss of time. This is my diasporic eulogy:

Here, I furtively graft dreams of Hind onto my skin. Her dark hair fades into the night sky as she dances across the dusty road, carrying me with her. She twists and turns under the moon with a spry tongue and beautiful hums.

Others try to cloud my visions with smoke that creeps along the proverbial line of borders. With words sharp and raw, they cut across the ephemera of my grandmother. But she always returns. And when they put me in the part of the sky that has no name, I cry out and she answers.

When I passed through the veil, I saw the blue of the ocean and the red of the earth. I saw you and me. And Hind touched my face with a paintbrush, so that I might always remember that she had moved heaven and earth so that I might be. When others tried to drown me under the rubble and rust of broken dreams, I knew that they could not take that away from me. Like the rings of an oak tree, my face would tell stories of a land near and far and when my mouth froze, the contour of my brow and the fullness of my cheeks would echo a world that had passed before our eyes.

Fragments of Libya By Nour Naas

The air is hot and heavy when you walk out of the plane and you know that you are finally home because you should not be smelling cigarettes this deep inside the airport, but you do. The windows are big and the sun is pouring inside and it looks like no one ever sweeps the tile floors because what would even be the point? Everyone is carrying sand between their toes through and through. The employees are all wearing sandals, even the ones with guns, and you realize that you have never actually been to an airport like this. You realize that there is only one place that can feel like home, and it is right here, in this liminal space where we are always parting and uniting and making promises and breaking them again and again and again. The security officers and the men at the information desk are slumped against the walls, blowing smoke into the faces of men, women, and children. No one seems to mind it but us. It is our first time back in three years, and our first time back after the civil war, and we are directed into an office where three men are standing in either corner, staring us all up and down. I think it is because we have American passports, that we are brought in for questioning. Mama already told us not to say anything before we even landed. Our accents would give too much away, and we do not know what that would mean for us. So Mama talks, and Jalal and I just stand there and listen. The country has been rattling with violence since the war began, and there are signs of it before we are even outside of the compound. Plainclothes security officers have AKs slung across their shoulders, and there are bullet piercings on the off-white walls and the ceilings. The sense is different now, but it never stops feeling like home. When we head outside, I catch a boy about my age smiling at me, and I look away, but I must have smiled, too. Khali picked us up from the airport and drove us home to Hay al Andalus. On the way, we do not drive past one block without passing a revolutionary mural — murals reminiscent of Omar al Mukhtar, of Libyan resistance against Italian colonialism. In others, Gaddafi’s face is quashed under a boot; red, black, and green fill in quotes in calligraphic script by resistance leaders: we do not surrender, we win or we die. There is even a mural of Che Guevara near the Internet cafe we begin to frequent when the cable at home grows too unreliable for what we are used to.

Hnena and Jdeda are home and Mama is crying again, kissing their hands and their foreheads and caressing their heads, holding them like she is afraid she will never see them again once she leaves, and my heart is so full and it feels like I made it to the place that I have aimlessly been running toward for so long. By some stroke of luck, I am finally home. I have a place here and it is bizarre in the most beautiful way. This agonizing absence of homeland, followed by return, makes me want to feel and smell and hear everything and so I take off my shoes and let my feet sweep the hot sand. I kiss Hnena and Jdeda and I kiss my uncles and smell Khali’s cologne that he probably bought in Rome and I am tickled by their rough mustache against my cheek and I kiss my aunties and we hold each other for a long, long time, until they feel like they have compensated for all the years they were exiled from my life when I am in America. I run up the four flights of stairs with the black railings until I am finally opening the door to get out again and I see the city, a city that looks like everything and everyone was made from the earth. There are construction workers a few houses down, and I am with Sijoud when they wave in our direction and smile. We smile back and return our salutations. I do not feel like I have been away for all this time. It feels like these men working the house, like Hnena and Jdeda, like the boy from the matar, have been holding this story for me, just waiting for my return. I want to stay here forever. I beckon to Sijoud to go for a walk with me, and she seems as excited as I am. We go back downstairs and beg our mothers to let us go out until they finally do. We are only allowed to walk around the block once, then we have to go back inside. Aunty told Mama that a lot of girls have been getting kidnapped since the war ended. There are even gunshots and they come at random times of the day, so I am already grateful for this walk and no one is out now in the neighborhood but I get happy when I see somebody because I am home I am home I am home. And no one is sitting on the block, waiting for me to walk by to ask me where I’m from. Everyone already knows. My hair is curly and frizzy and the humidity is making it bigger like it is a flower that is blooming and that is when one of the men on the street calls me shafshoofa, but I do not mind. I do not even know what it means until my cousin laughs and fills me in.

I love everyone here like we are all family. This is exactly what it feels like. I am imagining my life with him and him and her and them and us and I want Mama to stay here. I want her to tell us that we are not coming back to America. She is talking about the possibility of this happening, and I am already talking about cutting up my passport, of throwing it into the sea. Mama tells me not to make jokes about that. The country is too unreliable, she says. We could be stuck here forever. But I do not miss America. Everything I miss, everything I have missed, I am finally here for. Sammy’s wedding is going to be at the end of August and this is the first family wedding I am going to be here to go to.

I am looking at Khaltu Sharifa and her body is moving like someone is shaking her in a fit of rage. She is not able to drink from her small glass of water without spilling the half of it first, and that is when Mama weeps. Mama told me stories about Khaltu, stories that I have a hard time picturing in my head because the only picture I have is the one that is in front of me now. Who was she before? There is a piano in her house and it feels strange to see this, but I am not sure why. Khaltu has dozens and dozens and dozens of books that decorate the walls of the house. My favorite thing, though, is the painting of Omar al Mukhtar right by the doorway to the living room. Khaltu’s husband left her and her kids. I do not know the whole story, but it makes me sad because Khaltu did not deserve to be left. I stare at her, trying not to stare too long, trying not to stare in the wrong sort of way. Khaltu tells me she loves me for the first time, and my heart goes in a circle. I do not know what or who I am or why or how she loves me, but I am flattered and I want to tell her that I love her, too, but for some reason I do not think that she will believe me. I am spending most of my time there talking to her caretaker, Zaytouneh. She is from Somalia and she speaks English, so we talk. And I ask her lots of questions and we only stop our conversation when it is time for salatul maghrib. Zaytouneh tells me that she is trying to get to Europe. She is trying, but what she really wants is to find her way to America. She says, Libya is not my final destination.
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We leave Khaltu’s house and the sun is so close that it is beating our backs. I look out in the distance because I see water and I think I see rocks too but I’m not sure. Mama laughed the kind of way that you do when you are sad. They are not rocks, it is trash that people dumped on the rocks, sitting for the water to pick it up tonight. A lot of things are different here but it is home. And I am learning how to love it in a different way because you just cannot love Libya in the same way that you did before the war happened, because people changed, the country changed, the landscape changed. I am falling asleep to the sounds of bullets but the gunshots and the fighting is happening so routinely these days that it is impossible for me to be afraid anymore. Hada al haya.
I am sitting on the beach in Khoms biting into the peaches that I washed in the ocean. I am standing tall on the rooftop breathing in the air of Hay al Andalus. I am buying that pink-beige mumtaz brand ice cream from the guy next door and my skin is all sweat and the heat is making it taste better than it probably actually is. I am sitting in al dar al arabiyyeh eating kusksi with usurti and nothing else matters. There is no war, no murder, no refugee camps, no kalashnikovs, no gangs, beyond this moment.

I am here.
We are home.

The House Between Two Rivers by Christina Yoseph

Recently, my girlfriend and I met up with our two closest friends from law school to catch up over drinks and pizza. She and I left school after completing our first year, so when the four of us get together, our conversations usually abide by a similar format: how is school going for them, how is life going for us, and what drama have each of us missed out on between hangouts?

Because we’re all nonwhite and of varying socioeconomic backgrounds, related topics likewise arise. On this particular Friday night, our friend Doug, who is given to discussing the ways in which his socioeconomic background has shaped the person he is today, went into greater detail on the subject. In describing the false comradery his peers sometimes attempt to forge with him simply by virtue of their shared Asian-ness, Doug said, “They’re rich but because their parents were working class back in the day, they think they know what it’s like—well, I’m still living it.”

When we all get together, we talk about white folks and their ignorance. Doing so seems natural because we’re all children of diaspora. Doug’s parents are from Vietnam. Our other friend Chase’s parents are from the Philippines. My girlfriend and I are each mixed-white: her mother is from the Philippines; my father is from Iraq. We bond over our brownness. We are alike, yes. But we are also not, and in more ways than I had taken care to analyze up until that point—because we had all gone to the same school, because we all dressed the same, and, in many ways, because we all looked similar on the outside.

Aside from the fact that almost no American-born person perceives me as Asian, Doug’s comment applied perfectly to me. I had heard, read, and engaged in countless dialogues with friends of color about colorism, but this was different. Yes, skin color was very much a factor in Doug’s economic background.

But there were so many other factors influencing his family’s status, their inability to move up in the ranks of a society that classifies Asian folks, in one fell swoop and in all their cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity, the “model minority.” His parents emigrated from Southeast Asia. His mother struggles with mental illness that she never received help with, and his father is a veteran dealing with the fallout of his service in the Vietnam War.

Whether he intended it to or not, Doug’s comment acted as a mirror for me. In recent years, I have begun to consider—and needlessly dissect—the economic struggles of my parents and my grandparents. I have gone so far as to mistakenly attribute, if only partially, my inability to fit in with some of my former friends, who’d descended from several generations of well-to-do white folks, to these struggles.

Moreover, this dissection has confusingly coincided with my inability to suppress painful yet critical realities that have informed my identity: my American-facing upbringing has been more white-coded than it has anything else. For example, although my parents guarded me ferociously against school bullies, they were each conspicuously hands-off when it came to the taunting I was subjected to by my white classmates post-9/11.

My father’s side of the family, in many ways, fits the ideal immigrant narrative nearly to a T: Christian, hardworking, and constantly vocalizing their gratitude for the country that gave them a chance at a better life. While they do not favor Republican politicians who push Islamophobic agendas (a phenomenon far more common in the Assyrian American community than I was once comfortable admitting), their relationship to politics in the United States is complicated. In Iraq, they were a religious minority, and although they live in America, they still feel connected to their community back home, and to their complex relationship with a religious majority the U.S. has branded the enemy.

In short, my family’s desire to seamlessly blend into the fabric of America has rendered them apolitical in certain ways—particularly because it has required that they differentiate themselves from a religion whose adherents we in the U.S. consider inherently dangerous.

I believe it is this unique condition upon which my family’s assimilation has been predicated that has prevented us from engaging in meaningful discussions about our individual experiences with xenophobia, though I am certain I am not the only one who has experienced it—especially considering my brother and I are the only ones on our dad’s side who are “mixed.” In fact, en route Greece in 2006, my parents, brother, and I were subjected to a lengthy TSA inspection. When I brought this up with my mother a few weeks ago, she couldn’t quite remember the incident.

My mother was raised by a family to whom adopting and abiding by American customs was imperative. Her father is a racist, and although she works harder than anyone I know to challenge the toxic beliefs she was taught, my grandfather was an abusive and controlling man, and many of his prejudices made their way into her ideas about the world.

I was, at first, offended by what I had initially interpreted as her refusal to acknowledge a memory which was so vivid and shitty to me for the nonsensical way in which it crystallized my state of otherness: the agents had searched my belongings in an effort to determine whether I was carrying anything dangerous aboard—to determine whether I, at age fifteen, travelling with my white mother, was dangerous.

But then, I realized that this experience for my mother hadn’t been sandwiched by other disorienting moments of xenophobia. This moment wasn’t even about her. And because my mother and I have always been so close, it was easy for both of us to ignore the ways in which xenophobia affected me, because I was of her. She could pretend that ugly things like white American suspicion of American-born, part-nonwhite folks like myself didn’t apply to me, because I came from her, and she and I were cut from the same cloth, and being viewed with contempt or suspicion simply for being had never been her experience, so how could it ever have been, or ever possibly be, mine?

Being so close with my mother while simultaneously nurturing this unspoken part of my lived experience because it is uncomfortable, because it is what separates us, has created a painful disconnect in our relationship. I think it has been more comfortable for my mother because it does not disrupt the course of the conservative American way of living she was raised to believe is proper.

However, she and I have been talking about these experiences, about our differences, and about the lack of understanding that has permeated not only our relationship, but her upbringing, and she is exceptional in her willingness to open her mind and to embark on a mountainous journey of learning and unlearning, all on her own, despite the chorus of naysayers by whom she is surrounded.

Last year, when I told her about how my Trump-supporting coworker said she “understood” that Americans don’t want people from my dad’s country coming to the United States because “they’re the ones doing most of the bombings,” my mother suggested I complain to HR and management or quit after seeing how unhappy I was with the hostile work environment.

My father’s reaction, on the other hand, was silence. Certainly a thoughtful one, but silence nonetheless. While I had raged about my coworker’s comment—and about other such comments made throughout the office in the aftermath of the election—my father’s reaction to my experience was subdued and made me feel a bit like I was howling my frustrations into a void. However, the sensation was not new to me, because I had long been aware of the vast differences between our experiences with otherness.

Internally, my family has abided by its culturally conservative traditions, inherent to which, on both sides, are religion; my father’s side of the family is Assyrian, and my mother’s, Greek Orthodox Christian. Though I am in my late twenties, bringing a male partner as a guest to a family function on my father’s side is still out of the question (marriage would need to seriously be on the table).

My being in a queer relationship, then, is, to put it mildly, out of the question on both sides. Although the United States lags far behind dozens of countries when it comes to the acceptance of queerness, both of my parents’ ethno-religious backgrounds are still significantly less forgiving.

For a time, I opted to dis-identify with my Assyrian heritage. This is due to the fact that—to put it lightly—I don’t get along with my dad. My issues with my father are deeply personal and I will not explain them here. My unhealthy relationship with my father has long served as a source of insecurity for me when it comes to my Assyrian heritage: because he is cut from the same cloth as his family, and from their community of friends, I am not close with them either.

The nonexistence of my relationship with my father and his family has often made me feel stateless. This feeling has been compounded by the fact that there is often pressure on the children of diaspora to offer family members unconditional acceptance, love, and understanding under the basic premise that “sticking together” is crucial to our survival.

What gets left out of this equation, however, are important relational nuances, such as abuse, and the ways in which it is coded (for example, along the lines of gender and sexuality). And while some might choose to forgive family members who impose abuses of that nature upon them, I am absolutely against the concept of pressuring others to do the same for the sake of preserving one’s heritage. In short, I do not believe that one has to compromise their own psychic survival in order to maintain their cultural and ethnic ties. That being said, while I am not by any means close with my Assyrian family, I have valued learning about our history.

Before my grandparents brought my father and his siblings to the U.S., they were wealthy. When they did arrive here, the adjustment, which involved a lengthy financial struggle, a severe climate change (from Baghdad to San Francisco), and a loss of community, led to my grandmother’s developing mental health issues that to this day have, unfortunately, gone untreated. Eventually, however, they recovered financially and became economically stable, with my grandfather making a living for their family as a wine and spirits salesperson.

The female sexual organs The pelvic area (below the belly button) houses a woman’s reproductive system during love making. viagra ordination Inform your healthcare provider in case, you have an incomplete injury at the lower end of the area mentioned earlier then the area of the spinal cord, are more likely for achieving a psychogenic erection than if you have an incomplete injury at the lower end of the area mentioned earlier then the area of the spinal cord, head or on sexual organ. viagra online consultation Reduced online levitra tablet thought about this signs of aging such as coordination and balance. Some foreign sources of order cialis without prescription that operate outside America are not required to pass the cost savings on their functional expenses to their clients by means of decreased and reduced price runs. I cannot say with certainty whether anything else factors into my father’s family’s ability to achieve the “American dream” as much as the tax bracket they belonged to in Iraq. In revisiting my misplaced belief that my parents’ meager beginnings—of which I was only a part until I reached puberty—were critical to my experience as a nonwhite person, I am reminded of a bit of wisdom bell hooks insisted upon when my partner and I went with some friends to see her speak at my alma mater: the institutionalized violence done to people of color is predicated upon, above all else, capitalism.

At first, I had trouble wrapping my mind around this concept; admittedly, I was skeptical, as questions about racial profiling by the cops and Homeland Security percolated through my head. It took learning about the foundations of our country and understanding that they have not been eradicated, but rather, that they have merely mutated to disguise themselves as examples of “progress” for me to grasp the what hooks was saying.

The successful employment of money-making schemes—like our country’s private prison system and unilateral wars that begin and end with our invasion of countries in the Global South—requires know-how on the parts of our country’s wealthiest members (such as the heads of arms dealing companies, for example) when it comes to choosing scapegoats. Members of our country’s white majority who do not stand to profit off of these systems are nonetheless determined to see that genocide is done to these scapegoats, either through incarceration, deportation, or murder. They subscribe to the patriotic rallying cry, Keep our country safe! (read: white).

The point is, my failure to understand the reality of hooks’ claim—instead willfully conflating my brownness with that of my friends’, whatever our economic backgrounds—equated to my trying to force a square peg into a round hole. When my brown friends made comments about my seeming white, my liking white things, or my not being a real brown person, I felt an infuriating mixture of confusion and anger which only ever distilled down to resentment, because I couldn’t understand where their resentment was coming from. They all knew that I was white, yes, but they also knew that I was Assyrian.

More than half of them had initially asked, Syrian? before I’d explained that no, this was different. I thought, You don’t even know what I am and you’re telling me what I’m not? Many of them didn’t speak a lick of their own native tongues—and true, I barely speak my own, but I fought my insecurity over my lack of fluency with regularity, reminding myself that it was the result of my parents not sharing a common language, that I was shy growing up, and that learning a language as an adult is hard enough as it is, let alone one that is practically dead. It drove me even crazier when folks who were similarly light-skinned or ambiguous—or even white-passing!—made these sorts of comments. What the fuck? I would think. You and I are not different. But in reality, we were. We are.

Before my family and I moved to our Pleasantville-like neighborhood, we were living in a smaller, lower-income town. Nonetheless, my brother and I wanted for nothing, and as far as I knew, my childhood was the stuff dreams were made of. All the adults on our street were friends; so were the children. We had block parties regularly, and there was a true sense of community. I was a child living in an idyllic, multicultural neighborhood. And because of this, the differences in skin color between my childhood friends and I didn’t matter.

But once I changed schools, they did. Because I was new, and because I was a question mark—not only not white but unfamiliar for my not-whiteness—my new brown classmates and I didn’t seem to have much in common. I was, however, excited to find out that we liked a lot of the same music. Like me, they had grown up watching shows like 106 & Park. Every once in a while, one of us would get excited because the other was singing a song that the other liked. Otherwise, we really just didn’t have much in common.

Admittedly, most of the music I’ve become meaningfully attached to throughout my life has been introduced to me by someone that was important to me at some point. While I do hold dear some of the songs and artists people from my past have shared with me— because I see music as a reflection of one’s personal growth, which necessarily includes their community—my music tastes have evolved significantly. For example, because I grew up listening to hip hop and R&B exclusively with my closest childhood friend, the combination of (mostly) losing touch with her over time and having no friends who listened to such music resulted in my listening to it far less as I aged.

I eventually made a friend in junior high whose music interests skewed “alternative,” and it was through her that I was inducted into the overwhelmingly white punk rock community. At the time, I was barely a teenager, and I didn’t perceive the music I listened to through the lens of skin color. I liked my new friend, and she was the only one I had, and I liked the music she liked. It was new to me. And no one I was hanging out with in Pleasantville liked the music that I grew up listening to. Looking back, this switcheroo in my taste in music made sense—though some of the albums I grew up listening to remained fixtures on my playlist.

My tastes simply changed as a result of my environment. I was suddenly surrounded by mostly white kids whose parents had evidently filled their heads with shitty ideas about folks who didn’t look precisely like them. The music I listened to and the cable television shows I watched as a teenager, for example, are the results of my upper-middle class upbringing which, despite by no means being reserved for white folks, I see now are white-coded. But being a member of a minority that was foreign even to the other brown children rendered me even stranger to the white children.

However, I wasn’t properly assimilated into my own family, on either side, either. I was truly an island. But I didn’t want to be. Enter my “white girl music,” introduced to me by my white friends. Nonetheless, I felt it spoke only to me, to my complex brown girl feelings, and to my experience of feeling isolated in my brownness while coming of age in a white world. TV was my best friend, providing me with all the refuge I needed as I learned to make sense of my family’s abrupt and drastic ascendance into the upper-middle class.

Even when some of my brown friends from my hometown and I reunited in high school, they were no longer interested in my friendship: I had officially and sufficiently whitened up. Even though I was perfectly happy with my new friends, it stung, and I couldn’t understand what had changed in two short years; although we had ceased to correspond via phone and email nearly as regularly as time went one, we had once been so close. I’d expected them to be as excited to see me as I was to see them. Throughout high school, I witnessed them maintain their friendships with each other and expand their peer group, never making an effort to include me. The sting became a dull ache that was increasingly anchored in a nagging curiosity: What happened? But eventually, it all made sense.

My being called a white girl is in part a reference to my having light-skin, my being white-passing, and my being mixed-white. But it is also largely, I believe, a reference to the socioeconomic class from which my family and I hail, and the ways in which I carry myself.
I am not, never have been, and will likely never have to be familiar with so many of the institutional barriers that have been erected before some people of color at every turn when it comes to attempting advancement in our capitalistic society. The discrimination I have faced in relation to my nonwhiteness has not come in the shape of institutional and therefore capitalistic barriers, but rather, for the most part, in the form of completely manageable micro-aggressions.

I erred in living first, by believing that these micro-aggressions put me on the same plane of experience as my light-skinned peers simply by virtue of the fact that our skin tones were similar, and second, by becoming resentful when I felt judged by them because I felt entitled to spaces that were theirs despite my undeniable class privilege.

I am well-aware that racism and xenophobia do not come with one-size-fits-all approaches: dominant classes have come up with coded language and systems, for example, that apply to specific cultural, ethnic, and racial groups. In other words, I am not saying that the xenophobia I experience—whose undercurrent is that Middle Eastern and North African folks, particularly if they are Muslim, are dangerous simply by virtue of their national origins—is the same as that an East Asian person might experience.

In this way, of course, it is possible that not all of the folks who have deemed me white could have understood my experience of being othered, just as I could not have understood theirs. However, I did not want to share my experience with them, because, again, I felt as though they were judging me, positioning me as a member of the dominant class.

My partner told me about a song called “Don’t Call Me White,” which is basically what I was screaming in my head whenever I felt that way. I was screaming, Do you know how people fucking see me? But truth be told, I really don’t know how people see me. A lot of the time when I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t know how I see me. It’s a strange sensation, because for a time, I felt secure in my nonwhiteness, in my “mixed”-ness, in my me-ness.

But my lack of understanding as to exactly why I wasn’t the same as my peers—why our brownness didn’t magically render our experiences unequivocally identical—and my failure to examine the resentment it cultivated, separated me from my own experience with nonwhiteness. I had rushed out of my vaguely country, inland bubble and straight into drawing a false equivalency between myself and my peers solely based on our skin color—and the result was a lack of clarity. Eventually, I begun to feel that I had only ever been imposing on the identities I had once claimed as my own.

I was angry at not ever having had anyone to share my shitty experiences with—not even within my own family. And now, brown people were making me feel like I was white. I guess if I’d realized sooner that they were perhaps taking note of more than my skin color, I would have let my guard down—and engaged in a much-needed release of this resentment—much sooner than I did. What I learned eventually was an invaluable lesson: in order to see yourself, you have to see—perhaps not first, but simultaneously—more than just yourself.

Earlier this year, I wrote a personal essay while I was still in the thick of my resentment over feeling excluded from communities of color. Reading back on it, my bitterness jumps right off the page. But I don’t cringe as much as I’d expect to while reading it, because navigating white America—particularly without any frame of reference for how to claim agency over one’s diasporic and queer identities—is tricky as fuck.

I am grateful for the loved ones I do have, like my mother, my friends, and my partner. I am always learning from them, and they, from me. They trust me enough to mine my own experiences and to independently evolve my ways of thinking. They care for me enough to extend their patience to me when I am growing, even when I take my sweet time doing so—though they may not have had the same luxury.

Whether Doug intended his comment to resonate with me or not, it undoubtedly sent me into a tailspin of self-reflection. And although I don’t know if I will tell him so, I do know his words have changed the way I interact with others, even if this change is barely perceptible. His remark catalyzed somewhat of an epiphany for me, and I can only wonder how my externalized lack of perspective has grated others, and for how long.

One thing is for sure: if my friends and loved ones can be soft with me, then I can be soft with me, and with them too.

The Ferry by M.R. Azar

Karim sat in a dark corner at the edge of the port, his legs dangling rhythmically over the silent water. His time on the Island was coming to an end and soon the ferry would carry him back to the mainland.

“I’ve never seen the sea so calm,” he thought.

He tried again to remember why he had come to this place but became distracted by his muddy boots. They cast shadows that floated like ghosts over the rippling tide. He leaned forward and saw a strange face staring back at him through the mist that slept on the water’s surface. It beckoned to him and his heart burst as though he was falling for a moment. The sea now seemed to hold for him a different meaning than it once did. The clear azure world that had once inspired wonder and a thirst for life had given way to a world of shadows and death.

The Island has been a refuge for wealthy mainlanders for centuries. It is a place for them to sink their feet into the warm sand and feel the cool breeze sway against their skin. A place to gaze at the boundless blue sea and colossal mountains that jut out from the earth, shimmering with lights from the ancient villages. A place to stare in wonder at the moon, suspended against the blackest night sky as it projects a rippling silvery bridge that is swallowed back into the sea before dawn.

The mainlanders still came but others had begun to follow–always after dark. The mainlanders did not know, nor care to know, where the newcomers came from. Some said they materialized from nothingness. Others rumored that they crossed an unseen bridge over the horizon when the moon was at its brightest. Few observed that the exodus started when the storms became more devastating and more frequent, when the droughts and wildfires consumed vast swaths of land, when the seas became sewers, and when the armed men arrived. Either way, misery brought them here and misery consumed them.

The daily ferry was the Island’s lifeline to the outside world and the only means of transportation for passengers, vehicles, and supplies. It was also where the affluent mainlanders, destitute newcomers, and hordes of humanitarian volunteers, Karim among them, converged.

Near the ledge where Karim was sitting, colossal spotlights illuminated the night and guided the horde of exiles over the short bridge into the ship’s bow. The ground rumbled beneath him. This was a dismal place. Hundreds of distinct brown faces melted into one another, forming a single faceless mass that trudged forth somberly but deliberately like a funeral procession. A shared yearning bound them: that this journey, which had started and would end differently for each of them, would finally just come to an end.

The horn blared, signaling the ferry’s imminent departure. Karim grabbed his duffle bag and made for the ferry. The line was flowing with urgency as the passengers hurried to board before the ferry vanished into the dark horizon, taking the promise of a worthwhile life with it.

“Where do I get my room key from?” Karim asked the ticket collector.

The man replied with a heavy accent: “Follow the signs to the concierge and they will give you your room number and keys. It’s in the compartment after where they are kept.”

Karim noted the strange description and proceeded to follow the man’s instructions. He walked through the cargo hold, gawking at its unfinished facade, chipping walls, and steaming pipes. He marched up a long flight of stairs that led to the first passenger compartment. He entered the chamber and his eyes were struck by the orange-brown hues that erupted from the outdated wallpaper and carpeting. This chamber was completely barren and dilapidated. Through the flickering lights, he made out the crude camps that lined the corridor. Each colony staked its territory using piles of tattered bags, ripped suitcases, and other artifacts of a grim life.

This must be where they are kept, he thought.

As he weaved a twisted path around the pitiful travelers, a shudder came upon him like a sudden, cold rain. Guilt. It had become a frequent companion, and when it visited, Karim embraced it like an old friend. He revered it and found in the pain it brought a sort of retribution that might balance the universe and bring some justice to a wholly unjust world. Guilt, he thought, was penance for the comfort of his warm bed while his brothers and sisters rotted in dirty hallways and cold stairwells.

Why did he come to the Island? What good had come of it? These people were coming long before he arrived and would continue coming long after he departed. Their struggle was indifferent to his existence.

He would soon be back in suburban Virginia, back to his upper middle-class life, back to staring at a blank laptop screen between sterile white walls that closed in a little more each day, back to his tall red-brick row house on a quiet street lined with white cherry-blossoms and red maple trees, back to his elegant girlfriend, Amal, whose soft shapely legs he constantly fantasized about. Soon, the memory of his time here would fade and be forgotten like a childhood memory.

From this self-reflection sprang a terrible self-loathing. In himself, he began to see the privileged volunteers that he despised because, unlike him, they did not come from across the horizon and, to them, the newcomers were no more than stray dogs to be saved. They descended on the Island with extravagant clothing, raging parties, and penetrating vanity. By the end, it was their own souls that needed saving. Ah! This was a wickedness born unto him, an original sin, one that he could not wash off or repent for. Only a holy savior could offer salvation, but he was not a religious man and so no atonement was to be had for him.

Karim finally reached the end of the hall where two large double doors led into the passenger compartment that was off limits to them. He took a step inside and it was as though he had stumbled through one of those Magical Doors. A burst of light exploded before his eyes and the walls bellowed with a Hellenic blue-white. A large central staircase with a marble face and railing carved with floral festoons led up to the bedrooms. Cafes bustled with fat patrons dressed in summer linens and harsh clinking glass. He had reached the mainlander compartment.

A young woman in an elegant costume and deliberate pose greeted him. “Some Champagne, sir?” she said, drawing out the pronunciation of Champagne longer than it needed to be.

He did not want Champagne. He wanted escape from this awful spectacle. He scarcely could react before feeling a noose tighten around his throat and a boulder crush his chest. He whispered through his teeth, “No, thanks,” and hurried up the stairs to his room.

The keys fumbled in Karim’s trembling hands before he unlocked the door and entered. The room had a low ceiling and a king bed next to an antique oak desk with some writing material. The bathroom sat in the rear. He threw his bag on the floor and sank like lead into the bed to calm his nerves. He woke up to the siren sound of the ferry launching from the port.

“Why did I come here?” he thought again.

Karim always had trouble controlling his thoughts and feared into which murky alleys an unfettered mind might lead him. His mind was on a long chain that night, and it battered against the silence that consumed the room. He could endure no more. He leaped up and reached for the writing material to jot down his thoughts, hoping to banish the ghosts that had followed him from the Island with a pencil.

Keeping a journal made him feel better. He could project onto its pages those feelings which he could not share with Amal. She knew him to be a warm and affectionate person. She had explored his soul like a garden and often found herself lost in it.

But obscured behind the winding grape vines that sheltered her skin from the sun, behind the blossoming gardenias whose fragrance showered her body, behind the gentle chirping of the birdlings that made her heart radiate, raged a storm that Karim hardly could quell. His soul was wounded, and the wound was festering, gnawing at his insides, and rotting his soul. The walls that a lifetime of detachment had erected inside of him seemed to be crumbling. But the writing made him feel better.

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“Yes, that’s what I’ll do!” he said to himself and plunged like a deer through the arches back down into the dilapidated chamber where they were. He would find his atonement by joining his kin and suffering with them.

Karim made his way onto the deck where the moon hung high behind the clouds and the winds rattled. He thought the fresh air might reinvigorate him and indeed it felt to him as if jumping into the cool ocean on a hot day.

He encountered two young brothers, Ali and Moussa, who were kicking a deflated soccer ball back and forth in clothes that had seen better days and shoes that showed their toes. A stray kick sent the ball rolling towards Karim and he performed tricks by spinning the ball on his finger like his basketball coach had taught him. This pleased the brothers very much and they ran to him, trying to imitate his moves, and he taught them how to do it.

Moussa, the older of the two, mastered it on the second try, but Ali struggled with his tiny fingers. The older brother was very patient with Ali and gently guided his finger beneath the ball to teach him. Moussa always looked after Ali. His dad made him promise and Moussa took the responsibility very seriously. They laughed together, and, for a moment, the kids forgot where they were and where they had come from.

But they could not escape their past for long and started with the story of how they arrived on the ferry. They were unaccompanied minors who had made their way from their village under the care of a human smuggler. Their month-long journey saw them riding an overflowing Volkswagen bus, northbound towards freedom. They were ransomed, robbed, and threatened, but gravest of all, fought off the sex traffickers that prowled behind every corner. Moussa protected his younger brother along the way like the bravest knight.

Ali described the cramped bus with its frame rattling uncontrollably as it raced through the tranquil desert. The passenger compartment nearly came apart from the chassis over every hill that it was not designed to pass at these speeds. Only the occasional glow of cell phone screens and cigarette cherries illuminated the endless blackness. The driver did not need any lights–he made a living crossing this desert.

The passengers sat consumed in silence, scarcely holding on to their sanity as they agonized over what might be lurking in the darkness. Ali and Moussa, and everyone else on the bus, had seen the videos. They knew what atrocities awaited those who were caught. Then, blinding lights pierced the darkness through the rear window, interrupting the uneasy quiet. It was a patrol car according to the driver who recognized the headlights. Their luck was boundless tonight, the armed men only asked them to turn back.

The caravan attempted the crossing again the very next night. And there it was at long last, a welcome sign and the final stretch before freedom from the treacherous place they came from. They had finally made it.

Ali turned to Karim in whose familiar face he saw his father’s eyes. He asked him through tears that washed the dirt off his face: “Did you come from the bad place too?”

“No, uhm, I’m just a helper”, his voice crackled. These words brought with them a surge of self-contempt that made Karim’s stomach turn. The cold wind was no longer pleasant to his skin and the children’s voices turned to screeching chalk. He wished them luck on their journey, hurried back inside, and never saw them again.

Inside, he came upon a young man sitting on the floor carefully polishing a pair of Nike basketball shoes as though they were a new BMW. Karim kneeled next to him, complimented his “kicks”, and asked him if he played basketball.

“Yes, I am captain of my team back home”, the young man replied with a quiver in his voice. “I hope I play again soon.”

“I play basketball too. Maybe we can play together when we get to the mainland.”

The man with the Nikes explained that he could not play on the mainland because he had no clothes to wear. He told Karim about a cold night a few days prior when the angry winds struck relentlessly against the boat that carried him to the Island. The boat looked sturdy, but only looked so. It swayed from side to side as the terrible waves crashed against the frame, drenching the passengers and filling the hull with water. They seemed to stand still against the wind despite the full throttle of the engine. They were carrying too much weight but what ballast was there except for their bodies and the few valuables they carried?

After eight hours into what was meant to be a four-hour journey, they were still too far away from land. The engine had stalled several times, stranding them in the middle of this watery graveyard. They were cold and wet in an overloaded coffin and the sounds of children crying and women wailing were muted only by the howling wind.

They made it to within 100 meters of the shore before the boat ran out of gas and the engine shut down for the last time. The boat had been accumulating icy water for eight hours. Without the thrust of an engine, they could only pray for the waves and the wind to propel them towards the rocky shore. Though they were so close now, the dangers persisted. How many others had the cruel black sea swallowed under the same circumstances?

They had no choice but to toss all their bags and suitcases overboard. Everything. Most of them carried only their most precious belongings. Everything else had been lost or stolen somewhere along their long arduous journeys. Those who had packed their cash, passports, or jewelry in their bags were out of luck. Everything was to be tossed overboard immediately –their time was running out.

The barefooted man refused to toss the one small bag that he carried. He couldn’t. Fellow passengers lost patience and snatched his bag to lob it over. He managed to grab one thing before it sunk into the abyss– his Nikes, the same Nikes that he now clutched against his chest as he retold this chilling tale. This was the last remaining artifact of his old life and Karim started to understand the care he gave to it.

After finishing the story, the man turned to Karim and embraced him. To this person, an impossible journey had finally come to an end and he wanted to share his relief and his joy with a friend who had endured the same. The familiarity of Karim’s look, his voice, and his language would do at this moment. He found comfort in their shared struggle and in the raw human connection that it created. Then he pulled away and asked Karim: “Did most of your things survive your journey?”

The words wouldn’t escape Karim’s mouth. A terrible shame again bubbled up from his heart and he knew he would no longer find peace in this world.

He hurried onto a secluded corner of the deck away from the accusatory eyes that he imagined were pursuing him everywhere on this ferry. He saw in each of those eyes the reflection of the devil that haunted his every thought, mocking him for the injustices that he could not make right.

He found himself in a state of singular loneliness as though, to his eyes only, all the colors had dissolved from the world. Despite the howling winds and the roaring engines, he could only hear the metallic whisper of his conscience.

The final chain of his sanity crumbled and the ghosts led his mind into that darkest alley from where he knew there was no escape. He looked down into the water and saw that face once again beckoning to him. This time, Karim’s fingers gently released their grip of the railing and he plunged into the cold bitter darkness below. Here, Karim could suffer alongside his brothers and sisters forever and his guilt washed away into the sea.

Randa Jarrar’s Him, Me and Muhammad Ali – A Review By Eman el Shaikh

Randa Jarrar’s Him, Me, and Muhammad Ali is brimming with nostalgia. Not the inert kind, that encloses and preserves memory in amber-colored warmth, but the disruptive kind, that threads everything with an aspiration for the distant and interrogates memory persistently. The thirteen short stories in this collection are threaded with a potent, cutting nostalgia: nostalgia for the wholes that now lie fragmented, for other spaces and times, for faltering imaginings, for possible worlds that never existed. This nostalgia is promiscuous, recruiting history only to watch it dissolve in an array of contingencies and tensions.

This collection of stories palpitates and trembles around these tensions. Pleasure and grief weave together to create an intricate sensory synthesis. Faith and doubt play together dialectically, peeking out, whispering to one another, and being tucked away when they cause too much mischief. This balancing of tensions does not result in a permanent anxiety. Rather, Jarrar masterfully draws upon them and inflects her writing with humor, surprise, and elegant subversions.

These tensions persist, exploding the life-worlds Jarrar brings forth and yet binding them together. And it is in this and through this that Jarrar’s meditation on Arab identity arises. She shatters Arab and Arab-identity identity and lets the fragments speak and refract kaleidoscopic life-worlds that Jarrar makes palpable. Her characters are too abundant to be collapsed into single subjectivities, and so they overflow, replete with tentative imaginings of belonging, dreams of flight, grand visions to capture the moon, small hopes to survive another day, and triumphant subversions of inherited trajectories.
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Though Jarrar’s use of magical realism is striking, her imagination lives most visibly and profoundly in the writing of the ordinary lives of Arabs and Arab Americans, which through her beautiful, poignant, and witty writing are wrought as a very different kind of magic. There is magic in unexpected and partial love affairs, in strategic mistranslations and omissions, the switching (and inventing) of fortunes, and the persistence of the pursuit of pleasure. And pleasure is the most magical aspect of these stories. Across nation, class, gender, and age, one can trace a commitment to—indeed, an ardent belief in—pleasure, which often sits alongside and converses with many “familiar oppressions” in order to give birth to this set of marvellous stories.

My Father’s Daughter by Kathy Shalhoub

My father once told me that women were all the same; they made promises they didn’t keep.

I was a freshman sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed holding the receiver to my ear.

“They’re full of bullshit,” he said. I couldn’t remember his face but his voice sounded so much older than his fifty-seven. It sounded like someone else’s and very far away.

“I really will come see you this summer,” I said again after his declaration. I was ready at last.

“Whatever. Happy Birthday. I love you,” he said.

I didn’t reply because I didn’t want to lie.

I am four years old and I’m a Princess. Dad is the King. In a house of six people I see only him. My brother and sister are invisible. My mother is at work and Teta, my grandmother, busy in the kitchen. We sit on the marble steps that connect upstairs with downstairs. He soothes my knee where I have fallen. A dark blue bruise is brewing beneath the skin. The tiles are cold. He picks me up and carries me up the stairs.

“Is my Princess okay?”

I am safe and warm in the throne of his arms so I smile and nod.

“You know, your Grandfather was a Count,” he says. His English is accented. “You have blue blood. Royal blood,” he says, his chest swelling and his eyes looking deep into mine. Teta passes by and rolls her eyes.

I lift my chin an inch higher. The blue knee makes sense now. Some months later, I am in the garden carrying a box of tools for my brother. It is too heavy and my hands are sweaty. It starts to slip and I can’t hold it. I drop it on my ring finger and the finger splits open. I bleed crimson.

I am five years old. I am bouncing on my dad’s leg and laughing. The TV is on and a blonde Miss Universe struts around the stage with her diamond crown. The perfume of tobacco on his fingers is warm and delicious.

“You will be Miss Universe one day,” he says, gripping his pipe between tea-stained teeth. Maybe, but I have yet to see a Miss Lebanon on the show.

But when he lifts me up and sits me in his lap I feel like Miss Universe. I am loved. That summer we are on the beach, me in my one-piece stripy bathing suit and blue floaters sucking at my arms, him in his Speedos. He is so tall and handsome. His hair is dirty blonde. The tips curl perfectly around his ears. Golden body hair sparkles on his bronze skin. He gives me change and lets me go buy a Merry-cream. I feel like a grown up.

I hurry back to share my ice-cream with him but he’s not on the slippery white benches that surround the pool. His blue towel is still damp with sweat. I look up and scan the tall hairy bodies all around. I see the back of a man in Speedos standing near the wall overlooking the crashing waves. The oil on his bronze skin glistens in the sun.

He is talking to Miss Universe in a tiny turquoise bikini. The chocolate and vanilla swirls melt onto my hand and drip down to the hot cement.

I am six years old and it’s been a long, sticky summer. The electricity is out again. This is normal in Lebanon. It is late afternoon and my sister and I have exhausted our list of games. Mom is still at work. Dad is awake and better today.

“Get changed,” he says. “Let’s go outside and take pictures.”

My sister doesn’t want to participate. I run to change out of my nightie and into my new ballet outfit. Outside in the dimming sun, hibiscus flower in my hair, I am the most beautiful girl that ever existed.

“My prima ballerina,” he says.

I preen.

That school year I begin ballet classes – a gift from Aunt Hoda. At home after class, I dance in front of the mirror, sing to myself, do a plier, a pirouette. My father wobbles in the doorway.
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“You want to be ballerina?” His voice sounds strange.

“Yes!” I screech, and jump at him to pick me up. He squats down instead.

“Then you gonna be a poor starving artist all your life,” he says.

Dad likes taking photos but he is an engineer. We are poor anyway.

I am seven years old and we are in the red-tiled kitchen. My father is very angry with my brother for not eating his tomatoes. The number of tomatoes does not equal the amount of anger. My brother puts a slice of tomato in his mouth and gags immediately. It’s a texture thing. My father thinks he’s being difficult. He undoes his belt, and in one move whips the leather from his pants and across my brother’s back.

My brother flinches but says nothing. I run out of the kitchen and into the living room. My father comes to find me. I shrink into the corner of the couch. He sits next to me and drops an arm across my shoulders.

“Don’t be scared.” He knows I am because I’m crying. “I would never hurt you.”

I know he wouldn’t but I am sad for my brother, and relieved it’s not me.

A bottle of Smirnoff and a row of beer bottles later, my father staggers into the kitchen in his underwear and grey robe. It feels like he’s been away for a long time but there’s war and I know no one can travel these days. I hurry in after him wanting us to spend time together. I want to hug him but hang back in the doorway. He struggles to open the refrigerator, sways in its mist, still gripping the handle while he scans the inside.

He stoops and plucks the bottle of French’s mustard from the door, wobbles, spins a little then falls on his bum, legs spread out. Laughter bubbles over his lips.

I do not go closer. I do not look into his face. I do not hug him. I focus on the bottle of mustard he still holds. It is very yellow. The King begins to fade and his Princess does too.

I am 10 years old. The man standing next to me outside is my father. I am crying because there’s a dead kitten on the concrete underneath his car. Or maybe I’m crying because Teta died so recently. He pats my shoulder like a baby pats a dog. Stiff. Awkward. Pat, pat, pat. We both seem disconnected, an old toy put together with improvised pieces.

“It’s okay, I’ll take care of it,” he says. “Daddy will always be here for you.”

He hasn’t been anywhere else, but I still miss him. I have never called him Daddy either. I take his words and carefully wrap them up. I put them inside my heart where they still burn.

A few months later, Aunt Hoda is dropping me off at home after a day at her place. A Red Cross ambulance is parked outside our house, the siren is off but the orange lights are spinning. Something happened to Teta? No, Teta died months ago. I sprint inside. A man is lying facedown on the floor next to my parents’ bed.

Mom tells me he’s going to hospital to get better. After that I sometimes see his name embroidered into towels I help mom hang outside. Then one day the towels stay home. I don’t say goodbye and I don’t say I love you because I don’t see him again. He is back in his country, getting better.

My father told me once that women were all the same, they made promises they didn’t keep. I don’t know if he was talking about my mother or me but in either case, he was right.

I was an engineering freshman sitting cross-legged on my dorm bed holding the receiver to my ear. I couldn’t remember his face but his voice sounded so much older than his fifty-seven. I promised him I would visit that summer. Winter got there first.

Sukoon interviews Arab-American poet and scholar Mohja Kahf

Immigration, Feminism, Revolution

“What is language for if it cannot function for us when we desperately need it?” – Mohja Kahf

Rewa Zeinati: Mohja Kahf, you are a professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Arkansas. In addition to Hagar Poems, published last year by the University of Arkansas Press, you are the author of E-mails from Scheherazad, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, and Western Representations of the Muslim Woman: From Termagant to Odalisque. You were born in Damascus, Syria, to parents who immigrated to the United States in 1971 when you were almost four years old, and you spent your childhood in the Midwest. Where is home to you? And does one ever stop asking this question?

Mohja Kahf: Never. I’ve moved I count seven major times in my life, one of them a life-changing immigration about which I was too young to have an opinion. Finally I thought I had settled where I am now. I’ve been here longer than I’ve lived anywhere else. But when the Syrian Revolution started, for a minute I thought I would have a chance to reverse that immigration, to go “home again,” and I knew I was ready to take that chance. To leave everything again. But of course there is no “home again—” and for Syrians, that is now true in a particularly painful way. But the Syria-hope the Syria-chance shook me up from my illusory settledness and now I know I also am not home yet. I need still to find what I want and seek it and make it home as best I can.

RZ: Your poems explore themes of Arab identity, Muslim identity, and feminist politics. How important is religion to one’s sense of identity?

MK: Well, it varies depending on the person, of course. How important is it to mine has evolved over time. For the last sixteen years in the U.S., however, I’ve found that even though I’ve been ready to talk from another speaking position, something besides religious affiliation, the world keeps wanting to hear me speak as a “Muslim feminist” or “Muslim American.” There is work needing to be done there and I happen to be equipped with the tools for it and so I keep getting pulled back to shoulder some of that work, although I have other work going on to which I also devote energy and wish to see realized. So for example, will I ever be able to publish just a manuscript of love poems? Without bagging it as “Muslim woman love poems?” Hey, I have the manuscript—somebody find me a publisher please.

RZ: The poems you are sharing with us in the current edition of Sukoon are stylistically quite different from your previous poems. What compelled the change?

MK: Two things. I went to a poetry reading where a poet had “list poems,” and the experience sort of challenged me to write list poems. And secondly, Syria and silence. Meaning, I was at the end of my ability to speak about Syria. An impasse. No sentences were getting through. I was at the end of my belief in the efficacy of language, almost. I felt the end in sight of the vocation of writing, almost. What is language for if it cannot function for us when we desperately need it? need all three components: text, sender, recipient – need someone at the other end to hear what someone sends out into the world, to hear responsively. In Syria, by the regime for decades, language and narrative and expressive function has been so utterly abused and distorted. And then, regarding Syria in the world, the expressive function of language and writing, also so abused and distorted. So this “list poem encounter” seemed to come just then as a possible path out of my impasse. Cut through all that. Forget syntax. Forget grammar which has been manipulated to obscure truths. Let go and sink down to the level of words. Broken words. One word at a time, one phrase at most, like what would be the only units one could manage to get out if one were being strangled or bled out and lay gasping. Just one word, then another. Get it out. Articulate through inarticulateness. If you can do nothing else. Those are gasp poems. Gasp. Syria. Blood. Betrayal. Gasp. I’m too broken to do more than a one-word line. Take it. Gasp. Make sense of it. Carry it on to the next. Gasp. Run. Gasp.

RZ: Your latest book, Hagar Poems , is a collection written over the course of 20 years. Many of the pieces were written in the ‘90s, but some were written not too long before the date of publication. Tell us about your experience writing this book, and why it took so long to complete. When is a manuscript ever complete?

MK: You’re kind and attentive to have read it and paid attention to such detail as the dates. It’s not complete; it’s never complete. For starters, there are specifically two more good Hajar poems I wish I had not culled out of it. I had forgotten those two set aside and wish I’d put them back in time. There was a third put-aside poem that I managed to get back into the manuscript before publication. Then there are other poems I had pulled out that maybe were not as strong. I pruned and culled for years, decades, because I wanted it to get published; earlier versions of the manuscript were rejected for publication over the years. All the while, up to a certain point in time, I was also adding more Hajar poems (and then pruning and culling from those too).

I first encountered Hajar when my first baby got sick and had a febrile seizure—first time I had seen one, terrifying. Here’s this baby, this life, and you are responsible for keeping it alive, and it’s 3am and where did everyone go? I felt abandoned, tricked, like, this is the fine print of the family program that you signed, get married have a baby, but nobody mentioned you how poor you’re going to be and how alone even if married, with the nature of patriarchy and with immigration and today’s mobility and the global economic system and the lack of universal healthcare all stripping you of those people who might have been around to help in another kind of world. When I woke up from that, I thought, damn, we have glossed over Hajar’s story. There is no way it is as sugar-coated as we learn it in the tradition. We had to silence a whole lot of it to just fast-forward from her in the desert alone with her child and desperate to, bingo, whatever platitudes the traditional view gets out of it wrapped up in a bow. Let me unwrap this bow. I want to cut it to shreds. The bits of text about Hajar in the various scriptures are elliptical and cryptic enough to allow for imaginative spaces; you can cut in and interpolate in ways the traditional readings of the texts do not.

And once you start with Hajar, the same project is waiting to be done with so many other figures. Some other figures pulled me over the years and I spent some time on Maryam, on Asiya, on Balqis. But hey everyone, be my guest, there is an endless amount of reconfiguring that could happen with Hajar and her sisters, and with countless other matter of old, if it happens to grab you anew.

And as for the appropriateness of doing that (I guess it’s to the conservative readership I say this bit), well, if it is not there in order to grab us anew, what is it there for?

When you cialis uk http://deeprootsmag.org/2016/11/14/seeking-a-meaningful-acquaintance-with-schubert/ pill prescribed by a doctor make sure you follow the amount of dosage and instruction on how to take the medicine. All of the above can be achieved buy cheap viagra by using healing mineral water. Generic variant comes cheaper than the cheap levitra browse that now brand name pill and still get cured in the same manner. In fact men are very much at peace even when they come to know they are suffering from ED. sildenafil india price is a very effective but an equally strong medicine and prolonged use can have some serious side effects. RZ: Tell us about your experience writing the sex column Ask Mohja, for the website Muslim Wake up! How did the idea come about?

MK: Well, those were a heady few minutes, hah. The column wasn’t called “Ask Mohja;” it was actually called “Sex and the Ummah,” and I was one of two columnists who were supposed to alternate, but it ended up being mostly me, and then some guest columnists I pulled in to try to still have alternating voices. I am delighted to say that it was the place where one of Randa Jarrar’s fabulous short stories was first published, as a guest column. It somehow got tagged in people’s minds as a “sex advice column,” but it was never that – it was a sexually themed fiction column, is all, mostly fiction pieces, although one time I did pull in a “sex advice” guest column by a gynecologist, a Palestinian American feminist. I had sent in “Little Mosque Poems” to the MuslimWakeUp!.com website editors to start with, in a spirit of feminist Muslim self-critique. An then they and I started conversing, and one of our conversations was about how there’s this Muslim belief that Islam is a sex-positive religion, and then there’s this modern stereotype of Islam as sexually repressive, and the truths are so much richer and more varying than those two positions, so what about exploring the gap between these ideas by delving into sexual experiences from a “Muslim angle” whatever that may mean.

Then there was Abu Ghraib, the exposure of sexual abuse there by U.S. soldiers, and that deflated my joy in doing the column.

What deflated it also was my sense that white readerships wanted to exploit the idea for the wrong reasons, Orientalist reasons. I started getting offers from agents who were interested for all the wrong, imperialist cultural politics, reasons. Well, I had received a death threat from an Islamic extremist reader, and so of course that attracted all the would-be makers of a new neo-con Muslim woman voice or something. And that was not a direction I wanted to go, ever. Man, I coulda been a star if I’d gone that direction, I coulda been rich! Haha.

The whole endeavor of the website was one of progressive Muslims self-critique and of Muslims critiquing conservative Muslim discourse, and that is a project I support. But a few of the writers started going in the direction where “progressive” meant “be a tool of imperialist cultural politics,” not progressive at all, not in solidarity with the struggles of oppressed people intersectionally. Just a tiny number, but they got a lot of press. It dampened my enthusiasm for being there with them under that “progressive” label.

RZ: What advice would you give emerging writers? Especially women writers of color?

MK: Give yourself time to take care of your Self. Give your Self space for creativity. Don’t fill your life with people who won’t nourish you. Remove soul-crushers from your daily life. Also, the people with whom you exchange energies most, their world view will try enter yours, so be careful what you let enter, where you work, where you live. In this white supremacist structure of our times, it is easy as a woman of color to be pushed to be what the structure needs, but is it what You need? What do You need and want? Seek that. This is all advice that I am constantly having to give my Self.

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

Tremendously important. Without them we would just have those bigger journals that can get bigger money. We would have fewer and narrower channels where expression must be funneled. With them, we have multitudinous avenues for a multiplicity of voices and audiences. Without a reader goading it on, wanting it, a poem can wither and die. And with a reader who wants only certain kinds of poems, only certain kinds of poems will be written and see publication. The small literary journals find readers who are hungry for just that unexpected poetry but didn’t know what it was until they encountered it.

RZ: What are you working on right on?

MK: A volume of poetry about Syria, about the Syrian Revolution. For whoever will listen. For us, Syrians, if no one else.

Look, I’m sorry if the Syrian Revolution reads to the world’s progressives and leftist only as a conspiracy for rightist and imperialist agendas. It seems like I have to apologize for the existence of Syrians who do actually suffer the enormous human rights abuses of the Assad regime, to apologize for this to a world that does not want to hear this because it doesn’t fit current progressive agendas. The fact that Syrians are also getting abused by the Islamist extremists who are manipulating the grassroots protest movement for their own ends and in turn getting manipulated by regional and world powers only makes it more urgent that the original Syrian grassroots civilian uprising be recognized and respected. Just because the Syrian uprising doesn’t fit what progressives thought about the regime, doesn’t mean the human rights abuse doesn’t exist. Deal with that. Change your eye to adjust to the fact of our existence as Syrians. I say that, while doing internal critique of those Syrians who are selling out the Syrian Revolution to rightist agendas. My poetry on the Syrian Revolution is my own attempt to deal with the multiple silencing of Syrians, by the regime for five decades, by the right and left globally, by each other. Things grew to such a pass that a Syrian cannot find a space to speak amid so many different kinds of silencing. For a while I was so disheartened in so many ways internal and external that I stopped writing Syria altogether. It seemed so futile wherever one turned, like pounding on a thick beveled glass wall that was soundproof. What was the point of any writing at all? Fuck that; I’m back. Publish me.

The Orphanage

By Daniel Drennan

In Beirut, in the area of Achrafiyeh, in the neighborhood of Sioufi stands the orphanage, the Crèche, known as Azariyeh for the woods that are no longer there, and for the children who are no longer there; these no-longer woods of Azariyeh harbor fairy tale-era connotations of dishonor, and sin, and illegitimacy; ’uwlaad bi-Azariyeh, les enfants d’Azariyeh; the bastard children of Azariyeh. And if you visit the Crèche you will find rooms unchanged since forever, empty now, quiet now, still now; you will ring, and you will enter, and there is the staircase up, and there is the hallway, and there are votives and statues and icons. And there as you pause is the room full of blue cribs, and white cribs, cribs made of wood, unchanged, practically unmoved for decades, here, a crib I lay in long ago, lonely toys and stuffed animals now filling the space formerly occupied by me, by other children, hundreds of children, hundreds and hundreds of us; there is another room just the same. There is a room with white metal cribs, slightly bigger, lined up back and forth; there is another room with toilets that line three of its walls, toilets so small as to verge on absurdity; there is another room just the same. There is a room with desks and chairs and a bigger desk for a teacher; there is another room just the same. There is a room for play, for running, for games; and another room, just the same. And there is a room with a small table and a small desk and on this desk sits a set of steel drawers that contain the blank paper forms on which were written the names, on which were noted the information, on which were spelled out in details belying their fabrication out of gossamer nothingness whole lives, spun stories of lives’ beginnings, opening narratives stillborn in their creation, for all of the children who once filled the cribs, the beds, the rooms in this place, this orphanage, now barren, now deserted: papers marked with fictitious names, papers that pretend to show disparate events of varied locations yet all in the same handwriting—the dead giveaway, the false start. And here is the Italian version, and here is the English version, and here is the French; and here are the birth certificates, and here are the baptismal decrees, and here are the ecclesiastical edicts, and here are the approved name-bestowing documents, and here are the testimonies of foundling status, and here are the official adoption papers, one, two, three, four, five, six pieces of paper come from drawers arranged one over the other in efficient precision: and thus an adoption. On the other side of the same room stands a row of file cabinets, and within are arranged the procedured by-products, the dossiers of children now departed, their folders crammed with letters in airmail envelopes and pediatrician’s notes and vaccination dates and wishes and blessings; files stuffed with missives and thank-you offerings and pictures showing countenances rid of smiles, posed out of context among estranging groups and beaming faces; these Children of Lebanon now far flung and distant, these pictures sent by proud parents and fabricated families full of hope and promise and new beginnings filling up steel file cabinets arranging the myriad lives of those given Egress, a Conveyance, an Exodus. And these gray metal cabinets elsewhere hold other stories, other dossiers, children who came back, sent back, perhaps too sick, or perhaps not wanted after all, returned, and here written in red, “deceased soon thereafter”, and here, “child succumbed to illness”—an insufferable double rejection, an abjectly suicided reaction. And here, more yet still—the children refused treatment at nearby hospitals during the war, doctors seeing “no point”. And there is yet another room, and in its corner stands an inconspicuous steel desk with four small drawers half-full of worn index cards of faded pink and blue and green, and in ink the cards are noted with the names of children given over to the Crèche during a few scant years a few scarce decades ago, and here is the information about the original parents, and here are their names, and phone numbers, and addresses, and there, at the bottom of each card, is a blank area to note the reasons, stated plain, for the child’s arrival. And if you are not careful you will start reading them, these cards, one by one, mesmerized; at first shying away, yet coming back and forcing yourself to look, to read, in the same way you forced yourself to walk down New York avenues to look at poster faces and read about the lives lost in those Towers now long gone; and you will look and you will read, and like those smiling faces that plastered the walls of Lexington Avenue you will again find a unifying element that brings an otherwise disconnected, disparate group of people together—a devastating event, a tragic happenstance, an infinitely sad vagary of destiny, a culmination of willed derivations pinpointed in one monstrous manifestation referred to as “adoption”—and you will look, and you will read, and you will hold your breath as you read: Child abandoned by parents, child has spina bifida. Child abandoned by the mother at the hospital in Zahorta. Past sexual practices, including masturbation, do http://secretworldchronicle.com/category/podcast/season-nine-avalanche/page/2/ commander cialis not knowingly lead to impotence condition. The viagra canada mastercard cost varies depending on the number of times couples can become intimate and with on another and have sex. Some of these disorders include: diabetes, hypertension, renal system disease in addition cheap prices for viagra to heart attacks. However on the assumption that phosphodiesterase type cialis tab 5 negative catalysts aren’t efficient enough , then some oral medicines, intracavernosal shots, or penis pumps can be administered. Child orphaned on the father’s side, the mother has already placed the eldest in the orphanage’s care. Child abandoned by the mother at the Orthodox Hospital which contacted us. Illegitimate child raised by a woman who has departed for America, and who has left said child, now 11 years old, with her godmother, who hereby abandons her. Child abandoned at the hospital Nôtre Dame du Liban in Jounieh. Child found in Furn Esh-Shebbak in front of the door of Mrs. X. Child orphaned on the mother’s side, the father has four other children; cannot care for the fifth. Child orphaned on the father’s side. Child born two months after marriage of parents who hereby abandon him. Mongoloid child abandoned due to his infirmity….Child abandoned, child abandoned, child abandoned, child abandoned. And you will stop, and you will feel a certain unease as you barely dare read more, you will sense a creeping disquiet as you deny each card its due, as you feel each card’s presence in space marking just another of five hundred odd and sundry ways of abandoning a child. And for some useless reason you will try to maintain the order of these filings, for some strange reason you will try to keep a sense of reverence holding these cards, these lives, in your hands; and for some reason you will carefully replace them, and you will quietly close the drawers, hands shaking. And for some reason you will stand there utterly dumbstruck, your voicelessness loudly proclaiming how these nonchalant cardboards are, in their weight, crushing; in their banal bureaucracy, eviscerating; how in their fragile and forgotten state, these lives, annotated on silent pieces of discolored paper, approach something bordering brain-numbing apoplexy. And there is but this vast emptiness. And no ghosts dare haunt these halls.

Man of the Orchard by Zahra Hankir

I first met jeddo (grandpa) in August 1987. I was just three years old, but I have this distinct memory of him hurriedly running down the driveway of his humble orchard-home in Zahrani, barefoot, in the pouring rain, to embrace my mother. He hadn’t seen her since just before the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon in 1982; they’d barely communicated in the interim. Tears were streaming down his face as he held her.

Osman “Abu Nasser” Antar was born to Zahra and Mahmoud in Sidon in 1929. He was the fifth of eight other siblings — one sister, and seven brothers. His father was a trader and a landowner who worked between Palestine and South Lebanon; he managed his finances poorly.

When jeddo was barely 11, my great-grandfather unexpectedly passed away, leaving the family of ten with very little to survive on. My grandpa was consequently forced to leave school to provide for himself, his younger siblings, and his mother.

When I think of jeddo, it’s almost always of him sitting on the ground, in front of a pile of ripe oranges that he’d picked from the bustan (orchard) he tended to, with a kuffiyeh wrapped around his head, dressed in his khaki work clothes.

He’d often have Fairouz, Umm Kulthoum or Mohammad Abdul Wahab playing from a little radio in the background as he carefully arranged the oranges into crates to be taken to the market.

Sometimes, when he was in a particularly good mood, he’d have classical Arabic ballads blasting from my uncle’s parked car as he worked, or he’d hum their tunes whilst feeding the chickens in the coop.

Jeddo was, to my mind, a man of the land. To him, the land of the orchard was life, and he was rarely away from it.

Jeddo started picking fruit and crops as a young boy. When it was blossoming season, he’d wake up at the crack of dawn to head to the orchards with his brothers, where they’d stay for days until they finished their jobs, before returning to the city. For hours on end, they’d toil away at the land, guarding the crops and irrigating and picking the oranges and lemons.

When jeddo’s father passed away, working at the orchards to the south of Sidon would become his primary source of income, and ultimately, his profession. He quickly took on a reputation of being one of the finest men of the orchards in his area. He upheld that reputation for more than six decades, working the land with a sense of pride and ownership that left almost everyone he came into contact with in awe.

Jeddo would eventually join the city’s trade union, hosting meetings for the tens of men of Sidon who, like himself, worked in the orchards. Once a week, grandpa would line up the chairs in the garden of the orchard he tended to and along the private road that led to it. The workers would congregate to discuss the affairs of the union.

Grandpa would eventually become treasurer of the union, a role which would see him travel between Sidon and Damascus and which would earn him a mention in a historical book on the southern port city. Those meetings at his boss’s bustan and the crowd they attracted became so notorious, that political figures from Maarouf Saad to Nazih Bizri would compete for jeddo’s support; the meetings often involved political discussions that would translate into votes.

My mother’s childhood home in the south of Lebanon was simple. In the middle of a beautiful, modest-sized orchard, it seemed cut off from the rest of the world. The walls were worn and cracked, and the beds, which I’d share with my aunts, were stiff. In the summers, it was unbearably hot, and in the winter, unbearably cold.

But in between trips to Lebanon from the U.K., I thought of that small home as a vast palace full of treasures, and of my grandfather, as the king of that palace.

Every Sunday after we moved back to Lebanon in the mid-nineties, we’d congregate at the bustan in Zahrani for extended family lunches. They almost always consisted of kousa mehshi (stuffed zucchini) — my grandparents’ favourite — or dishes that my brothers and I would request, such as grandma’s homemade pizza or wara’ 3enab (stuffed vine leaves). Grapes dangling from the vine leaves that jeddo had grown himself were picked for dessert.

Before and after my rebellious years at college (sorry mama), I cherished those Sundays. Specifically the moments following lunch, when my grandparents would move to the living room to watch the news on a tiny black-and-white TV set. Teta (grandma) would lie down, weary after cooking a feast for at least 10 people, and jeddo would sit upright in his chair, with his rosary beads in one hand.

On his other palm, he’d almost always rest his head before dozing off, drifting in and out of sleep. Sometimes he’d briefly wake up to smack a mosquito on his arm or leg. It always made us laugh, how he’d fall back to sleep instantaneously.

Like clockwork, Jeddo would then head back to the bustan, where he’d work until the sun went down. Before we’d leave to Sidon, he would load up the trunk of the car with oranges, lemons, bananas and assorted vegetables that he’d grown and picked himself. The scent of orange blossoms at the bustan was so dense, it stayed with us for hours after leaving.

Growing up, we’d heard multiple legendary stories about jeddo. Some of them, he told us with a chuckle. Others, we heard from teta or mama or our uncles. We learned to suspend rational judgment on the veracity of the stories.

A donkey once kicked jeddo in the face, breaking his nose instantaneously, he told us. Despite the pain it caused him, he almost immediately repositioned his nose, straightening the broken bone, he said. It’s a story he’d share repeatedly over the years, explaining to my brothers that they should be abadayat (good and strong men).

Jeddo’s surname, Antar (the name of a legendary Arab poet and warrior), sometimes seemed poetic, like he’d strived, throughout his long life, to live up to it.

In another one of those stories, jeddo had apparently killed a poisonous snake with a shotgun — despite being paralysed with fear — at the age of 13.

The snake’s skin was so tough, the bullet wouldn’t go through it with the first shot. He was said to have killed the snake with the second and last bullet: by shooting it straight into its mouth.

Jeddo was notoriously handsome, even as an elderly man. As a teenager, he was acutely aware of this, constantly using his looks and charm to flirt with girls.

But grandpa was also a poor man, who spent most of his days working for very little. In his downtime, he’d loiter the streets with his older brother and best friend, Saleh, who worked in the orchards with him. Realising they couldn’t capture the attention of girls in their shabby work clothes, they once decided to save up some money to buy a nice shirt, to impress them. They’d take turns wearing it.

One of those ladies was Souad Yemen, my grandma. Jeddo first caught a glimpse of her in town, while he was still in his khaki work clothes. She was taking a stroll with grandpa’s aunts — the wives of her uncles — and her great beauty struck him, he’d tell us. Instead of saying hello right away, though, he ran home, showered, put on the smart shirt and trousers, and hurried back to town to join them. This was a lady jeddo wanted to impress.

A proud woman, teta ignored him all evening.

Teta was extremely rigid with jeddo at first. She did not like men who flirted so ostentatiously with her, and she would never, ever flirt back. My grandma was, my mother says, “brought up like a princess,” having been extremely spoiled by her father. But jeddo wouldn’t give up on her. He befriended her father, despite the fact that he was scared of him, and eventually secured a job at his bustan.

Teta would warm up to jeddo eventually. One summer’s afternoon, when the akadinia (loquats) were in season, she invited her friends over for lunch.

Jeddo, at the time, was working in the bustan — picking the loquats — when teta’s friend brought a tray over to him, with a message from Souad: she wanted some of the fruit. He arranged them for her in an intricate pyramid, before sending the tray back. They married shortly afterwards.

Such a long and costly project after an already arduous and expensive merger or acquisition could be davidfraymusic.com cialis tablet disastrous for many companies. Ed is not only caused by physical complexities of some treatments but there are several factors which invite it such as:Surgery: Surgical treatments of prostate and bladder cancer browse over here now on line levitra can damage nerves and tissues required for an erection. One of the most important messages a parent get viagra from india can give children is that they have the power to manifest anything you want. These things work well to arouse excitement cheap order viagra and prepare your bodies for a great and pleasurable night ahead. Teta’s mother, dismayed by the match, said her daughter would spend the rest of her life washing grandpa’s work clothes.

Years earlier — when my grandmother was still a teenager and my grandfather a lad — teta and her girlfriends would frequently meet up to catch up and gossip. During one of those meet-ups, grandma’s friend said in passing that if a girl recited a certain prayer, she’d see her future husband in her dreams.

Shortly after their discussion, teta did indeed dream of jeddo, whom she had hardly noticed at the time. In the dream, he was leading a donkey with saddles on both of its sides. One of the two saddles was heavier than the other, and jeddo spent the entire journey trying to balance the two. A fitting premonition, if there ever was one.

Jeddo and teta had a wonderfully complex relationship that continually teetered on the edge of complete collapse. Despite living humbly, they struggled financially during the first fifteen years or so of their marriage. Having already left school against my great-grandma’s wishes, teta provoked the ire of her mother when she married jeddo.

But in between the stresses that weighed them down — they had two very ill daughters — they also shared some private, playful moments, away from their six children. They had a secret little cupboard at their orchard home that they’d constantly replenish with treats, including the finest nuts, snacks and drinks.

When my mother, Mariam, was born, she contracted typhoid fever. Frantic, grandpa took his ill child to the only doctor in the city, quickly burning through the little money he had. He needed 5 liras, the doctor told him, to purchase medicine urgently needed to treat my mother.

At first, jeddo sought an advance from his employer, but the man refused. He’d loaned his brother money to buy a cow, and requested repayment, but he said he was unable to hand over the funds.

Off jeddo went to a café in the old city, where he ordered tea, and sat in stubborn, sombre silence for hours. The owner of the café approached grandpa, asking him what was wrong, and jeddo — proud man that he was — couldn’t bring himself to speak the entire truth.

“I’ve forgotten my money in another pair of trousers at home,” he told the shop owner. “I need 5 liras to buy medicine for my sick daughter.”

The shopkeeper, who knew of jeddo’s plight, handed over his day’s earnings, which added up to 17 liras — all the money he had in his apron. When grandpa refused to accept the money, claiming it was far more than he needed, the man insisted he take it all.

My mother maintains, till today, that it’s the combination of the shop keeper’s kindness and jeddo’s determination that saved her life.

As the problems mounted, teta and jeddo decided it would be best to go their separate ways. Though the divorce wouldn’t last for long, it was something of a small disaster for the family, the effects of which would linger for years.

Grandpa, stubborn as he was, would claim he was saamed (steadfast) when people would say he should take teta back, as they were clearly still in love with one another.

Teta would eventually return from Damascus, where she stayed with her family during the divorce, and jeddo couldn’t help but soften up.

The divorce lasted less than a year, but it’s a period of time that jeddo would look back on with great regret and remorse, until the day he died.

During the Israeli invasion of 1982, the IDF would infiltrate the South, eventually reaching Zahrani, where my grandpa and his family lived. Stories circulated that the army was patrolling the surrounding areas, so jeddo had instructed the family on how to behave should the inevitable happen, to ensure their safety: He would act cordially, and the children and teta would remain quiet, indoors.

An Israeli army contingent did indeed reach the bustan, as they neared Sidon. Upon encountering jeddo, who was terrified but composed, they asked for water. The senior officer, who knew Arabic, got to talking to my grandpa about his family, and jeddo told them that he had a daughter who was married and who lived with her husband in Ireland.

Jeddo continued conversing, attempting to conceal his fear, unsure what else he could do. He said he hadn’t been in touch with my mother for months, and that she’d surely be worried about the family’s safety. The Israeli officer asked for a contact number, and promised he would soon call my parents to convey to them that jeddo and the family were indeed safe.

Weeks later, my father, then a doctor at a hospital in the U.K., was told, while he was at work, that he had received an international phone call. A man claiming to be an Israeli officer told my dad that his wife’s family was safe. Shocked, my father reasoned that it was a prank call, and hung up on the man.

It wasn’t until 1987, when my mother first saw jeddo on a trip back to Lebanon after the invasion, that she and my father came to realise it was indeed a true, and somewhat remarkable story.

Among jeddo’s most endearing qualities was his sense of humour. When I was about 15 or 16, and still a tomboy, he told me I should “wear high heels every now and then,” because I’d started looking “more like my four brothers” than a young lady.

In his final years of life, he’d occasionally ask someone to bring him a pocket mirror. He’d then peer into it seriously, before saying, “TOZZZ” (fart), and handing it back over with a chuckle. He’d do the same when he’d see photos of himself as a younger, handsome man.

But jeddo’s most captivating quality was his sensitivity. I’d seen him cry multiple times. While he did indeed live up to his surname, he found no shame in exposing his weaknesses.

Every time I’d leave Lebanon after visiting, when I’d say goodbye to him, he would break down into tears, saying he was frightened it would be the last time he would see me.

Each time, he would ask me to take care of my mama once he’d pass, because he could see mama in me, and mama was special.

After my teta passed away in 2010, jeddo would constantly speak of her, how they met, and the love they’d shared, tearing up each time. Occasionally, he would say, endearingly and with a chuckle, that being with her was a lot like the “taming of the shrew.”

When jeddo was bedridden, toward the end, he had a picture of teta taped up next to where he rested his head, on the wall. We’d often catch him looking at it with a sense of guilt and longing.

Osman Abu Nasser Antar passed away at the age of 87, on February 4, the same date as teta’s birthday.

In Her Dream I Spoke Arabic: In a college composition class a few years ago, many worlds came together.

By Jesse Millner

A student from Palestine writes “theological” instead of “theoretical.” I help her understand the difference. She has no thesis. She arrived in America three years ago having learned to write essays that reference poems and the Koran. She loves her family, misses raising tomatoes outside of the village she grew up in. Her main point is the compassion with which she writes about the world, how the very first creature she wrote about was a rabbit, which she drew a picture of in the top right corner of the page in her notebook. Rabbit, she says, in Arabic, contains the first letter of that alphabet. So it’s logical to associate learning alphabets with drawing rabbits. She comes to see me in my office with her work and I tell her how good it is, how her voice is strong and beautiful, how she paints the world with strokes of kindness, how she’s almost making me believe in God again.

Is that the main point of teaching, of writing? To learn about others, to hear their voices, to see the wonder with which they still view our world? A student from Lebanon writes about living in an apartment building where, after the 1988 civil war, they had to use black garbage bags to replace whole sections of the outer walls of the building. During one attack after air raid sirens went off, her grandmother had to be left under a table in their apartment because she couldn’t walk and she was too heavy to carry to the shelter.

Sitting next to the woman from Lebanon is a former American soldier who had served in Iraq. His first essay is about beauty, and he says beauty for him is being allowed to leave his running shoes on the floor in the middle of his apartment, and to throw his clothes on his bed when he gets home. He writes, “For me, chaos is beauty.”

For me, my students are beauty. My writing classes are filled with a chorus of young voices straining against the walls of the five-paragraph essay. They are amazed that they are allowed to write in first person. They are astounded that they can write about issues that are important to them: My Palestinian student’s fifteen-year-old cousin was beaten by Israeli soldiers because he ran from them. His leg was broken. One soldier picked a fresh lemon from her grandfather’s orchard, cut it in half, and then rubbed the bitter fruit into her cousin’s eyes.

On her way to school each day, she had to pass three IDF checkpoints. She writes that the soldiers were young and afraid, that they asked her about her major in college, what she liked to do in her free time. She feels sorry for them. She wishes, as the young men do themselves, that they could go home.

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Her name is Enas. My spellchecker underlines her name in bold red, and I think of the blood spilled in Palestine. Enas writes about the smell of her grandmother’s bread. Enas writes about the beautiful red cheeks of her ripe tomatoes. Enas writes about teaching second grade when she was in college because an Israeli curfew prevented the regular teachers from traveling.

Yesterday after class Enas showed me pictures of her friends and family in Palestine. They lived on a mountain covered with olive trees. Some of the photographs show children playing in snow. Enas tells me she has forty-five cousins. I’m drawn to a particular photograph that shows Enas with her family just before she moved to America. Enas, her aunt, and her mom are all wearing white hijabs. She flips the album and on the next page Enas is wearing a sombrero in Disneyland. I tell her I’m delighted by the juxtaposition. She types “juxtaposition” into her hand-held translating device and I watch the word I know flow into Arabic.

I ask my class to write down their dreams. I tell them not to have coffee or tea when they woke up. I said it was ok to go to the bathroom. Enas writes about a dream where I came to class drinking a beer. Since I’m a recovering alcoholic and haven’t had a drink in twenty-eight years, I was a little bit taken aback. Then she talks about how, in her dream, outside the classroom door she could see images of Palestine: a rope swing that her grandfather had hung from an olive tree branch for her when she was little, a car carrying a bride to her new husband’s home. She could also smell burning wood from an oven where her grandmother baked fresh bread. At the end of the piece she listened to me speaking Arabic. And when she read aloud my words in that other tongue, when I listened to myself speak through her, I heard myself in a different way.

It didn’t matter that I only said, “Enas, pay attention instead of looking out that door.” The words were magic and they still linger like foreign ghosts on my tongue.