lebanon

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.

For Fear that My Parents Will Never Understand My Poetry By Philipe Abiyouness

I no longer write poems about self-love because I figured it out.
Now, I write poems to tell my loved ones that I see beauty as far as the edge of their silhouettes.
That when trains are delayed I feed on their war stories and bathe in their jokes.
This is to say they have built me a fortress with legs and a thumping heart and hair that stands on end when morning bows before the hours.

I have known the imposters, took the time to kiss their cheeks and taste their words.
Their pithy left my tongue sour. They wear secondhand capes of culture, bought off those
that could no longer afford to keep it and dance to songs they did not write.

Culture is not a subscription.
Culture cannot be whittled down to knowledge reaped from a book.

Culture is cutting fruit in the palm of your hand
and sipping rosewater to ease the stomach.

Culture is sleeping four to a bedroom because nobody gets left behind.
Culture is generators visible like lighthouses
and filling the soap bottle with water when it is running low
and cutting the toothpaste tube in half.

Culture is not a lover to be fetishized and worshiped
rather a stubborn child screaming over all that you do
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that the earth is always moving and holding onto something
is mercy and reckoning boiled holy warm.

My mother reads me poems in Arabic and I watch her hands painting skies
and swatting gnats. Her eyes look up to see if I am understanding. I do not
understand the words, but the crack in her voice I understand. Her drawn out syllables and gaping mouth, I understand because my mother colored
my childhood with poetry every time she prayed the rosary by candlelight
and every time she made me wait in the laundromat for hours, so long
that I memorized all of the vending machine options and their corresponding numbers (Fritos A4). My mother wrote me a poem every time she locked the door and drove slow and fried fish on Friday.

My family is meter and measure and would hate this poem
because, “aren’t poems supposed to rhyme?” but still I send my brother
every basketball ballad I find, because are we not spun from the same hands, calloused and marshmallow?
(There is nothing tepid about upbringing)

Maybe one day they will lose the tops of their heads
to something radical and begging, like I am lost in their story,
forever attempting to write their fingerprints into cities
sprawling and forgiving.

He Sounded Just Like Me by Lisa Luxx

His voice was a park swing in the sunshine:
My fat toddler legs poked through the holes in the seat
I giggled free as I swung
Hair trailing like smoke behind me.
Eyes up to the sky
His voice was birds flying in formation to fresh climes
Wings spread, they did nothing but glide.

He sounded just like me.
But he said things that I could never say.
He spoke of bombs and war
And children who know nothing
But all the terror they’ve seen –

I spoke not of those things.

It was nightfall between cobbled streets.
At a pub in a village, between hills of green;
Northern England.
I was introduced to him because
We were both Syrian.

He said, “oh, we always find each other, don’t we?”
What did he mean?
I had been searching for him in places he did not hide.
The olive of my skin crouched under the white;
Sheepish to claim his heritage as mine.

There’s a baby in the corner of the pub, wrapped in blankets
While her mother smokes a spliff with the midwife
Out in the street.

A farmers daughter asks my voice where he’s from:
“Syria” is followed by silence.
Funny how the world goes quiet
When talking of places where noise won’t cease.

It’s this uneasy laugh in exchange for the kind of scream
That begs back to life a child crushed
By the house of her mother’s old dreams.

We squished and tugged at the word ‘safe’
As if it were play dough
And he were the father I only know by name.

“Safe, is West Aleppo
Where there are gunshots freckling the walls,”
The tun tun tun of machine guns mark out a dado rail
(Unlike the one in the hallway of my mum’s home
Where dust won’t settle long enough
Before she’s hoover-ing the stairs
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“It is safe,” he says
Because East Aleppo no longer has walls to mark.
The bombs pulled down homes
Built by the same hands
That shared ma’amoul between these stones,

And you wonder why they won’t leave?
This clay is made of pride and dignity
It shivered when brought to its knees.

He spoke to me of bullets
That skimmed the backs of his friends
As they talk casually
“What is another bullet at times like these?”

He spoke like me.
In the way that my words linger
In the gaps between themselves
Like we’re holding notes ~
Every breath contains songs our ancestors wrote.

He spoke like me.
But he spoke words that I could never say.
He spoke of children who had been raised by war
“They think the rat-tat-tat-tat of gunfire is normal.”

Normal is the easiest thing to believe.
Normal is what you always see.
Normal teaches you how to be.

He was charming
(Almost more charming than me).
His eyes were a deep Syrian green
I fell pregnant
with an identity I’ve always been.

I am a seed of Syria that blew to the West
And grew like a crab apple tree
But my fruit is of Syria
I sound like Syria
I laugh with Syria
I cry for Syria
But how dare I cry at all?

He sounds like me
Until he speaks the language I don’t speak.

And then?
I watch him leave.

Origin Story by Jess Rizkallah

i was born to refugees,
i was named a miracle still, they wait
for something greater than
what i know how to be.

i’m alive, and therefore enough.

i have space for an extra organ
that never came home
and every year the sea levels rise.

or i have a twin that never followed me out of the womb,
is still stuck where a shrieking echo
comes down on a mountain village and the telepathy between us
is a gold thread so warm, it hums.

i’ll never know its language older than the polaroids
falling out of my mothers mouth older than the lute
in my father’s whistle

or mama gave birth to me & i came out a hyphen
i was born the big hand on a clock

or i was born an arm with a hand at both ends
taking both lands back at once, like they’re mine

or i was born an arm with a hand at both ends
holding a knife maybe i am a knife,
always spinning slicing
at roots and fruits i graft into the hollow
where the ancient humming organ
never made its home.
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maybe i am building this organ myself.
maybe this organ will be my country,
where i’m from. no
where i’m really from

where every language is light
pouring out of me. everything it touches
is greater than what i know how to be
& everyone i love
is safe here.

Sukoon Interviews Jess Rizkallah – by Rewa Zeinati

Rewa Zeinati: Congratulations on winning the 2016 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize! Tell us a little about your collection, and how you came up with the title.

Jess Rizkallah: Thank you so much. The collection is made up of poems I wrote during and after a lot of firsts in my life: first time living away from my family, first loves, first heartbreaks, first loss of someone close to me, and all of that interacting with the inherited stuff that manifested in very new ways for me when held under the stress of entering adulthood. The timing of the acceptance was perfect, too. Right at the end of a lot of things in my life, and right before I moved to a new city and started at a new school. I’m so happy it worked out that way. I’m not used to closure I don’t have to make up myself! I’m very thankful I get to look up to Fady and Hayan after working with them. They helped me come up with the title the magic my body becomes, after a line in one of the poems in the book. At first I was resistant to this title because that’s what it is to be a woman sometimes, feeling sheepish about owning the power of your experience in a world that doesn’t take you seriously when you’re speaking your body and complexities with your own mouth. I thought “is this too feminine of a title?” but then I thought “who cares if it is? if the title turns someone away, they weren’t going to listen to anything I’m saying anyway. it’s not for them anyway.”

RZ: You posted once on Facebook not too long ago that you didn’t want anyone to ask you what you’ll be doing after you graduate. So… what will you be doing after you graduate?

JR: Betrayal! Just kidding. I don’t know. I’ve been doing publishing and editorial work for eight years now, so hopefully something there. I really hope I’ll make a good teacher. I visited my family recently. While the water simmered on the stove, my Teta went outside and under the full pisces moon, picked rosemary for our tea. I remember thinking “why the fuck do I live so far away from my family?” The scarier the world gets, the more frequent that thought is.

RZ: You mention that your poetry has appeared, among other places, on your mother’s fridge. Tell us a little about your family’s response to your creative path/growth. This question comes from my personal Lebanese experience of the cliché that most every Lebanese parent dreams of seeing their child grow into a doctor, lawyer or engineer.

JR: Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the (upheld binary) difference between Lebanese sons and Lebanese daughters, and my being one of two daughters in a son-less nuclear family is impossible to divorce from my answer because I’ve found it tied to every expectation someone has had for me. Gender is always a shadow trailing behind my name: it’s a pretty traditional Lebanese thing to think that this is just a cute thing I’m doing to pass the time until a doctor or whatever wants to marry me. I’m lucky enough that I can recognize this and laugh in its face, instead of letting it hinder me. This is because my mother supports me and countered every sexist lesson the world tried to teach me. In turn the rest of my family has become supportive, too. (for which I’m grateful and full of love.) Busting your ass to prove yourself feels like an Arab kid rite of passage. To answer your question more directly: I do think my parents held a small hope that writing would just be a hobby, but I literally have no other skills, so writing was always going to be it whether anyone liked it or not. There were definitely a lot of “or not” periods growing up but overall and overwhelmingly, I always felt supported by the only people it really mattered to be supported by. I also feel really lucky that my family lets me share their stories inside my own. This was a hard answer to phrase, I don’t want to make anyone mad, but I feel it is important to be honest, and I know you must know what I mean.

RZ: Lebanon or USA?

JR: Both.

RZ: What are you reading right now and why?

JR: Right now I’m reading The Whale by Philip Hoare because whales are the most fascinating creatures on the planet, I’m convinced they’re aliens. They feel too cosmic to grace us with their presence on Earth, yet here they are and I want to get a closer look.

RZ: Who are your biggest literary and artistic influences?

JR: Sandra Cisneros, Kevin Devine, Lady Lamb, Lynda Barry, Frank O’Hara, Sylvia Plath, Melissa Lozada-Oliva, Safia Elhillo, Tiffany Mallery, Ada Limón, Mckendy Fils-Aimé, Franny Choi, so many friends, so many witchy creative femmes on the internet.

RZ: Crayons or ink?

JR: Ink
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RZ: How important are literary journals in your opinion and/or experience?

They’re so important. I want to know what everyone is saying and feeling at all times because otherwise I don’t know how I would get out of bed and face the world we’re all trying to fight for. I’ve made so many friends in the poetry community through the network of literary magazines we all read and contribute to.

RZ: Why Pizza Pi Press?

JR: I can’t sit still, I always need to be making things and I always need to be collaborating with other people. I wrote Pizza Pi Press on the back of a messy zine I made in college, kind of as a joke. Like “ha! it looks like this silly thing came out on a press!” but then I kept getting more ambitious and my friends wanted to join in and now it’s my favorite thing to be part of and I hope we continue to grow and remain a platform that amplifies those who feel silenced elsewhere. Also, I really love pizza.

RZ: What advice/insight would you be compelled to offer other young writers?

JR: Read as much as you write, maybe even more. Read people of color. Don’t be mean to yourself. Write even when people around you make you feel like you’re wasting your time. Keep a journal with you at all times and don’t beat yourself up if you’re not always writing pages and pages of work. Even just a thought a day is an entire world you’ve recorded and that’s so cool if you think about all the possibilities waiting to shoot off into a million synapses as you turn that thought over in your head before going back to the page. Think of your journal as an archive and every word an artifact of substantial magnitude. Don’t stress out about getting published – social media makes imposter syndrome feel more urgent than it used to be, but social media doesn’t show us all the nights where even our favorite writers feel stuck or defeated or sad or on their seventeenth straight episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Flaming Hot Cheeto Dust stuck to their face.

RZ: What are you working on right now?

JR: I just threw all of the contents of my closet and desk into the middle of the room and I’m not leaving my apartment until it is once again habitable and just as ready for this new season as I am. Thank you so much for making room for me at Sukoon.

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.

Iman Humaydan’s The Weight of Paradise, a story of memory, violence, and the elusiveness of homeland

“The homeland that killed us in its name”
Fiction Book Review
by Eman M.A. Elshaikh

Iman Humaydan’s latest novel The Weight of Paradise is a poignant evocation of the fight to defend and restore memory through the cyclical violence, exile, and suffering which seeks to annihilate it. Set mostly in Beirut in 1978 and 1994, the story lives “in the heart of the apocalypse” during the Lebanese Civil War and also emerges from its debris, struggling to piece itself together into an authentic whole. In this Beirut, even small distances are difficult to traverse, as the paths are encircled with violence or buried beneath its aftermath.

“Reconstructing, reconstruction,” laments Sabah, a central character who ties together and ruptures the narrative at different points. “Every day on radio and television they talk like this, too. Maybe they want to build and construct so that people will forget.”

Indeed, the novel feels like a rejection of forgetting, as the characters in their own ways are obsessed with retrieval. The novel interrogates memory and its antagonists masterfully. It probes the process of destruction and reconstruction and the ways in which they are irretrievably bound up in death, violence, and historical revisionism. In doing so, it is an unflinching portrayal of the violence that lives alongside the characters, who “had become skilled at managing their lives in its shadow.”

Humaydan intertwines the story of Maya, a recently widowed writer and mother who returns to Beirut from Paris in 1994 following her husband’s passing, with the stories Maya finds forgotten in a suitcase in an abandoned building. In the suitcase, Maya finds Noura, Kemal, and Sabah, and she instantly becomes obsessed with unpacking their history through their photographs, letters, and diaries.

She seeks out the eccentric but heart-breaking Sabah, an older woman living alone in the old Beirut neighbourhood of Khandaq al-Ghamiq, waiting for her disappeared husband to return and tending to her small garden, even through bombs and gunfire. Living virtually as a recluse, she initially meets Maya with hesitation, but ultimately tells Maya about Noura and Kemal’s lives as well as her own.

Shilajith was found after scientists noticed wounded animals frequenting caves which cialis no prescription cheap contained large deposits of the substance. The connection with the inner guidance system viagra cost people can understand their own feelings and set their priorities while searching their true soul mate. Generally, there are two basic side effects from generic viagra pill Tongkat Ali. You will be shocked to death if you try viagra purchase to use it again. Sabah’s stories and recollections provide Maya with the connective tissue that brings Noura and Kemal’s story together. She learns about Noura’s self-imposed exile from Damascus after a tragedy in her family and how this exile becomes permanent once Noura starts writing the truth about what happened. She learns about the violence that follows such truths and will stop at nothing to silence them. She learns about Kemal, Noura’s lover in Istanbul, and the fragile life they try to build together. But these stories and their tellers are often treacherous, and Maya, like Noura, fights to save truth from oblivion.

Humaydan’s main achievement with this novel, which is full of despair and yet buoyed with a promise of love and hope, is in allowing the reader to “enter history through countless endless gates,” and in doing so, reread history. It imbues the narrative with a subtle promiscuity that disrupts even the reader’s own recollection. In doing so, it forces us to confront the silences and lacunas in our stories and how they can both ruin us and save us. It is also a meditation on the dangers of invented memory and the need to bear witness always. This force is present even in the sweet love story between Noura and Kemal. In her diary, Noura writes, “with him, my doubts about history books started to gain power and take on new meaning.”

Humaydan writes in a poignant and confessional voice, which shines most brightly in the pages of Noura’s diary and the letters from Kemal, where they write about loss, violence, and lost homelands. They trace their wounds together and look for origins and resting places. In their histories, one finds Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, and Turks and the lands that shift and subsume them under violent nations, lamenting “the homeland that killed us in its name” and yet finding fragments of homeland scattered everywhere.

Though these deliberations on homeland and its erasure are thoughtful, there is also a questionable sense that the violence and oppression of the Middle East are somehow primordial or inevitable. The various scenes, in Damascus, Beirut, and Istanbul, are seemingly always engulfed by death and violence. In these places, both the repressive state and its resistors, both communists and capitalists alike are irrationally cruel. A looming tyrannical government occludes all individuals, who are anonymous, interchangeable, and sublimated within classes or sects. It threatens to destroy indiscriminately and without reason. Government actors, like the ubiquitous and senseless “mukhabarat” are equally anonymous and robotic, incapable of poetry and truth. Though the novel is committed to history, these places seem to exist outside of it.

Perhaps this indictment of these societies as irretrievably violent is in fact an indictment of men, who in the novel are either absent or violent. Even the boys in the novel attain masculinity through violencing women, who in turn “retaliate against oppression by oppressing themselves.” In this novel, men push women out of their homelands, punishing them for their desires and their consciousness. “Oppression pushes women to emigrate, to flee,” Noura writes, “it’s the kind of oppression that often comes in the form of a man.” Indeed, Kemal, who was dressed as a girl in early childhood in order to avoid a curse against the family’s men, seems to be the only exception.

There is no denying the beauty of the intricate lives woven together by Humaydan in this touching novel. However, in The Weight of Paradise, some of these threads are too thin. The reader is riveted by the textured inner worlds of Noura and Kemal but is left craving more of characters like Sabah and Maya. Sabah’s fascinating story still craves excavation, as her inner life remains opaque. The reader gets glimpses of her effervescence and her desire to fly and senses the decay of that spirit over time. Through the moving stories of her two lives, her desire for freedom, and her will to be a witness, the reader does not truly get a sense of her pain, but merely its imminence. Maya’s voice is poetic yet truncated, and though the backdrop of her life is sketched, the reader gets only a hazy sense of its detail. Through the suitcase, Maya inherits a reservoir of memory and seems to exist primarily to dip into it. Because of this, the novel ends before its force can be fully explored and resolved. In other words, the problem with The Weight of Paradise is that it was too brief.

The Weight of Paradise is a powerful call to question our histories, and in doing so, it is a call to question the violence that lives at the heart of it and possibly at the heart of our natures. “But this is us: we feed the poor, we laugh at a passing joke, we love, we mourn, we dance, but we also kill our neighbours in civil wars. Since we are like that, how can we describe ourselves?

Two poems by jess rizkallah

i haven’t forgotten

mar charbel is the scary one
resting a bloody hand on your
child’s shoulder when you
forget to keep a promise

clears his throat before you can
step out on your word

stays dressed in black

once ate his own smile but
never swallowed

i like him most.

he still hums
to the pulse
in my wrist.

i kept him with his contemporaries
all beads on a string, my own congregation.

the plastic confining him chipped at the corner, a reminder
of his ability to dart between pulse & phosphene
while i slept. the string loose, then broken

he stays compact,
like a syllable
even while religion fades
into muscle memory.

call this faith, finally. and the body, a prayer
to feel guilty about whispering into the night.

moonstones charging,
warm by the window.

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i’ve ever believed in even if
i don’t believe it anymore.

part of me always
chipped at the corner

give me the flute & sing
after fairuz & gibran

origin is an apple jam jarred to make wine,
put in the ground but always comes up vinegar
when picked at the skin of where the earth
spit you out before you were you
but after the flute started playing.

hands are the etymology of prayer
i turn mine slowly in the morning sunlight
through my window. i watch the rings hug
my fingers. my knuckles hairs grow back
slower now, but i still have this inheritance
from a man who sang to his fig trees
and raised his voice at a woman sprung
from the shadow of a tree full of switches

and all i can ever do is brew coffee for the
mild mannered and write stories
that don’t belong to me

i come from love that didn’t always know the right way.

a cracked seed aware of its cyanide. bruised fruit.
preserves or vinegar, depending on the light.

his body pushes up tomatoes
wherever her hands waver this too,
a type of apology i listen for
until that flute in me stops.

Interview with Philip Metres

Poems of exile and war, and poems in translation

Interview with award-winning American poet, translator, scholar, and activist Philip Metres

By Rewa Zeinati

Rewa Zeinati: What does it mean to be an Arab American writer/poet? Or would it be more accurate to be ‘labeled’, simply, a writer/poet?

Philip Metres: Ever since I was young, I was marked as Lebanese or Arab because of my looks, and because everyone in my father’s family or in our Arab Christian Church immediately welcomed me as one of their own. I’ve been told, ever since I was young, that some of my ancestors came from Bsharri, the same village as Kahlil Gibran, and that he visited them in Brooklyn. (We have the letter to prove it! The family also believes that he wrote The Prophet while staying with them at 290 Hicks Street, but I have seen no actual evidence of that beyond a mythic wish.) But what it means for me to be Arab American continues to evolve. It’s never meant just one static thing. Often that’s what happens to immigrants—the Old Country becomes an ossified image of a lost home, even when that home is constantly changing in their absence. For me, being Arab American means I don’t forget that my people come from the Middle East, and that I carry their memories inside my memories, both remembered in the mind and carried in the bone. That I keep in touch with what is happening there, and that I constantly remind people that humanity has no national border. I’m always pleased when I hear Arab or Muslim names in the American public sphere—as artists, journalists, academics, writers, etc. It makes me feel like the United States is changing.

I’ve always felt a kinship with people of color, and particularly with recent arrivals to the U.S. Our experiences are all different, but I feel the Old Countries in the way they hold themselves, the way they move in the world. Being Arab American for me also means that I’m part of a great migration, that my ancestors were intrepid travelers. People, in the end, are not just a nationality. Nations are a temporary political fiction—albeit a highly-militarized and deeply ideological one. So many of us come from many directions, like the four winds. According to my genetic test, some Italian appears to be swimming in my Middle Eastern genes. I wonder who this Italian was. And also, there is some North African in me, some Maghrebi. And some sub-Saharan African. And I haven’t even mentioned my mother’s Irish and German roots. So I am a person of many migrations and journeys, all these ancestors traveling toward and within my breathing, my heart beating, my voice speaking, my hands writing.

RZ: Tell us a little about your experience translating Russian poetry into English. How did it all begin? How did (does) it influence your own writing?

PM: I’m still trying to answer this question for myself. The Russians would call it my fate. This past fall, I spent my sabbatical writing a 90,000 word memoir recalling the year I spent living in Russia during the period of economic transition (1992-1993), trying to retrace my steps into that decision. I’d gotten a Watson fellowship for a year-long independent study project called “Contemporary Russian Poetry and Its Relationship to Historical Change,” which enabled me to live in Russia, translate Russian poetry, and meet and interview contemporary Russian poets.

One secret reason I went to Russia was that poets were powerful there, that poetry mattered to people there. To say poetry mattered to me is to understate the case by half. Reading and writing poetry had altered my life, had become my life, my secret life, the one that was mine that no one could see. Reading Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” simply confirmed what I already knew—that we were broken, and that headless sculptures admonished us to change our lives. Poetry had given me a way to clarify and transform my inner chaos, and the turbulence around me, into something almost beautiful. It mattered so much to me, and so little in this country, I’d wondered if I’d been born in the wrong nation. I’d been learning how the Tsar acted as Alexander Pushkin’s personal censor, after Pushkin got involved with the Decembrists; how Stalin sent Osip Mandelstam to his death in Siberia for writing a poem that made fun of him, and how Osip’s wife Nadezhda committed his entire oeuvre to memory, to ensure that his words would not be forgotten; how Anna Akhmatova’s heroic witness in poetry outlasted even Stalin; and how Russian poets in the Sixties—Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Andrei Voznesensky, and Bella Akhmadulina—declaimed their poems to stadium crowds; how Joseph Brodsky was subject to a “show trial” because he was a real poet and the State could not stand that fact. Poets in Russia seemed to be prophets and rock stars, revolutionaries and dissidents. I wanted to find out why. The truth was more complex than I could have imagined.

But it’s true that translating and meeting those poets completely transformed my idea of poetry and its relationship to the political sphere—I became less interested in poetry as a political weapon and more interested in its alternate way of being, both part of but also beyond politics, or rather, beneath all politics. The primal ground of being. Translating poets like Gandlevsky and Rubinstein and Tarkovsky became an education in poetry’s possibilities. I know the poets I’ve translated better than any other poets because I’ve lived inside those sonic language architectures longer than in any other poem.

My new book, Pictures at an Exhibition: A Petersburg Album, was occasioned by my return to Russia ten years after I’d lived there. I was flooded by memories as I walked around St. Petersburg, and I needed a way to write about returning to a place where I lived but never felt quite at home. There’s something in me drawn to that feeling of being unhoused, exiled, wayfaring, lost. I can’t explain it.

RZ: You’ve mentioned once that you hope that your 2015 poetry collection, Sand Opera, “can help be the start to a new conversation about the state of poetry, American life, and the role of Arab American literature in our ongoing cultural and political debate about U.S. foreign and domestic policy regarding the Arab world.” Tell us a little more about that.

PM: The difficulty with poetry is that poetry readers typically resist politically-challenging work, and people interested in politics tend not to read poetry. (In a particularly dark moment, I lamented to a friend that I wrote a book of poems too political for poets and too poetic for political activists.) At the same time, every couple weeks, I get another email from someone who’s just read Sand Opera and wanted to thank me. So I’m very grateful for the fact that it exists.

One thing I’m doing now is I’ve begun a Lenten observance. Every day I’ve been posting a poem from Sand Opera at www.behindthelinespoetry.blogspot.com alongside Scriptural readings and dialogue pieces by other poets, writers, artists, and activists. This dialogic, choral project has been a way for me to return to poems that I’ve always felt were only partly mine. Since so many of the poems were themselves documentary in nature, composed of found language, the voices of so many touched by war, it’s almost as if the poems wrote me as much as I wrote the poems. One of the gifts of the Lenten observance has been that it occasioned my getting in touch with some Iraqi friends that I hadn’t spoken to in years, to ask for their contribution. And they have graciously agreed to participate.

But it hasn’t been without poignancy. One Iraqi scholar who has worked in the States for many years asked me about the project, and I mentioned some other Iraqi writers and artists who were participating, as a way to entice his participation. He said, well, that’s good, but Iraqis and Arabs already know the situation. I assured him that there would be a number of Americans who also would be part of it. But to hear him say that, his voice cracking with the weight of sorrow he’s carried for so many years, was heartbreaking. I heard in his voice the weight of a weary exile, unable to lay down his burden. Still trying to convince Americans of the humanity of his people, of himself.

Though I’ve felt self-conscious asking other writers to dialogue with my work, I’m touched by the robust response—as if people were almost waiting to be asked, wanting to add their voice.

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RZ: “Art should remain subservient to politics.” What are your thoughts about this statement?

PM: It’s preposterous, but only slightly more preposterous than the American version of this statement, that art must remain free of all politics. Art is not art if it is subservient. Yet clearly art for its own sake is also a dead end.

RZ: In your opinion, what makes a good poem?

PM: Difficult question, because there’s no arguing taste. But for me, if you cornered me, I’d say that it’s a poem that retains some obdurate mystery, something unexplainable that makes me want to return to it, and is never quite exhausted by my re-reading.

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

PM: I found it funny and sad that a fellow poet told me that he felt as if he should write more political poetry; as if it were somehow an obligation, a necessary evil to be part of the family of poets. That’s the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie, for whom politics is something is necessary but dirties one’s hands. That distance is also a fiction of privilege.

A truly memorable political poem is alive because its politics so inhere in the fabric of the poem that it is inseparable from the fact of its being a poem. It’s damned hard to write real poetry of any sort, and doubly hard when it attempts to be political. There is a well-known Arab American poet who writes passionate verse for a righteous cause, and when his book came out, I hoped that it would be brilliant. Although I agreed with him politically, I found only one line in his entire book that I felt was truly alive. One line.

RZ: Is there room for poetry and art in a region that burns with absolute turmoil; where fundamentalism, religious figures and politicians have taken over home and street (i.e. the Arab region)?

PM: Of course there is room for poetry. Now more than ever.

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

PM: They are the ongoing conversation that writers and writing are having with each other. Reading them is to sit at the table of that conversation.

RZ: What advice would you give emerging writers/poets?

PM: The same boring thing everyone else says, probably. Read contemporary poetry and writing, but also the classics (that which is ancient is most new). Read more than you think you need to, because one isn’t original without knowing what has been done before. Don’t be afraid to “cover” (or imitate or argue with) other poems and poets. Write every day if you can. Write as if your ancestors were listening. Write as if the unborn are leaning in to learn the future. Write only because you must, and then write with the joy of this impossible gift of sentience.

RZ: What are you working on right now?

Every day, I’m doing this Lenten observance, which has returned me to scripture, to Sand Opera, and to the work of friends. But in terms of book projects, I’ve got a few that are simmering, that I hope will come to something: “The Flaming Hair of Fate” (the Russia memoir), “Shrapnel Maps” (poems on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict), a book of translations, and a book of interviews with Russian poets.

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. 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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.