Tag: 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.

A Hostile World By Jihan Shaarawi

Part 1: The Eternal Dupes

The Boy’s father sat on his small wicker chair staring at the newspaper that was brought from the capital. The Boy’s parents managed to send The Brother to the capital to join the public university. Every weekend, The Brother took a bus back to the village with tales of the soon-to-be revolution. That day, The Brother brought back news of The Monarch’s supposed diplomatic trip to England where he was spotted spending his days with European models at high-end bars.

“He is spending the people’s money on alcohol and whores! He should be hung in the streets!”

The Father was known in the village for his short temper and quick tongue. A year earlier, The Father told his employer that he was a “slave driving son of a bitch who should go back to England and fuck that sheep that he calls a wife.” The Father disappeared shortly after the incident and was returned, two months later, bloodied, boney, pale, and thrown amongst his neighbor’s apricot trees. After the incident, The Father only spoke his mind at home and sent his children to fight his battles.

When rumors began to spread in the village that the CIA had entered the country in support of the Liberation Officers, The Boy was sent to a nearby village where it was said that there lived a man who taught English to children. On his first day of English class, The Boy’s mother dressed him in his finest clothes, a cotton button down shirt with holes, dress pants that had to be rolled up at the ankles, and leather shoes that flapped when he walked. The Boy’s father licked his palm and used the saliva to contain The Boy’s frizzy curls.

“Listen to me! You speak to your teacher respectfully! Don’t stare at walls when he speaks! Don’t pick your nose! Remember not to mention why you’re really there. Say you want to learn English so you can work on one of the British farms. Don’t you dare mention the CIA!”

The Boy’s mother carefully tucked in his shirt.

“Baba? What’s CIA?”

His father struck him so quickly it almost escaped his mother’s eyes.

“He has the brains of a donkey. You bore me a donkey!”

“Enough! What will the Sheikh think if you bring him a bruised boy?”

The Boy’s mother splashed cold water on his face in an attempt to soothe the blow.

“Stop crying! You’re not a baby anymore!”

They paid The Neighbor 5 silver coins to take The Boy to the next village. The Boy sat on his neighbor’s cart (pulled by a small, weak, donkey) amidst the crates of apricots. Every now and then, when The Neighbor wasn’t looking, he took one and stuffed it in his pockets. It took forty-five minutes to arrive to the village and by then his pockets bulged at odd angles. This village looked identical to The Boy’s village except for the long line of young boys at one of the huts.

“That’s hut,” The Neighbor pointed towards the assembly of boys, “I’ll be back in the afternoon to take you home.”
Every weekday, The Boy travelled to the neighboring village for his English lessons. His malleable brain picked up the language quickly and he was soon teaching his younger sisters. The Father requested The Brother to bring back English newspapers from the capital. They all huddled around The Boy as he read each word carefully. He often made up the sound of a word if he hadn’t learned it yet.

Upon The Monarch’s return from England a huge demonstration was held in front of the palace. The Father decided that there couldn’t be a better time for a family vacation; so they packed some clothes and headed to the capital. They all stayed in the room that The Brother rented with another young man from their village. The Brother was studying engineering at the public university and was poised to be top of his class. He spent most of his days studying in a corner of the room. Every time The Boy passed by him, he glanced at the paper to see what his brother was studying. It was on the second day that The Boy realized that it wasn’t equations that The Brother was scribbling down; he was writing poetry. The Boy waited until The Brother fell asleep to steal the sheets of paper. The next morning he presented the papers to his father.

“I pay good money to have you study in the capital and you spend your days writing poetry? Your comrades are busy protesting and risking their lives and you’re sitting in this room writing rhymes! This is not the time! You know who writes poetry? Rich Europeans. Because their lives are perfect so they have to make up something to keep it interesting. Liberate your country first and then you write poetry.”

The Father lit a match and held it to the papers. In silence, the family watched the pages burn. When the flames had engulfed every word, the father led everyone to get ready for liberation. They needed to be at the square in time to see it all. When they reached the square, The Boy’s father lifted him onto his shoulders.. Crowds of people swarmed out of every side street and with each step it became harder to move. Scattered amongst the crowd were British soldiers on horses. They held rifles in plain sight—as a message to the masses. Students stood in the frontlines of different groups as they spilled in from the streets that snaked into the square. They left The Mother at home with the sisters; a protest was no place for the feminine. The Brother hadn’t spoken a word since his father burned all the pages of poetry. The Father insisted that burning the poetry would be a good opportunity to transition into manhood. He leaned on The Brother’s shoulder as he walked, using him as a cane. He screamed of the injustices done to him in captivity. The Boy had never seen his father so happy. The boys attempted to keep up with the slogans:
“Monarch Monarch of our hearts! May your kingdom fall apart!”
“Our bread is stale, our lives are cheap, go to hell you stupid sheep!”

On the ride back to the village The Boy’s father could not contain his excitement. As each new passenger entered the bus, he retold his story of protest. Some listened in amazement; most ignored him.
“Be careful,” the mother whispered, “you never know who these people are. We can’t afford to lose you again.”
The Father couldn’t care less and for three hours he repeated his story. The father continued his political musing throughout the ride home, on the walk from the bus to the village, yelled them at all his neighbors, and finally through dinner, and the ritualistic post-dinner tea with milk.
“You know, I feel as though this time the British will go back to that hole they call The West!”
The Mother accompanied tea with her nightly card readings. The hearts symbolized love and marriage, clubs were money, diamonds were family and home, and spades symbolized career. The Boy sat in front of his mother waiting for his future to be revealed.

“Split the cards with your left hand”
The Father sat on his chair, slurping his tea.
“You know, they say that the CIA pays two hundred pounds a month for interpreters! Two hundred! Can you imagine?!”
The card formation was made up of 2 spades and 3 clubs. The Mother interrupted The Father’s rambling:
“There will be much change in your family life. This change will show you the path to your career.”
“He will become a politician for the government of tomorrow!”
The Boy gave all his attention to his mother. She stopped her reading and smiled, “my brave boy, my beautiful prince, darling love of my life, I could read you the rest but it doesn’t matter. We all know you will be great. Go to sleep.”

That night there was three short knocks on the door, barely audible. The Mother was a light sleeper and they woke her instantly. She shook her husband awake.

“Someone is knocking on the door.”

The Father jolted awake.

“What time is it?”

He fumbled through his small pile of possessions until he found his watch; 1:45 am. The knocking picked up energy.

“Do you think it’s the officers? Do you think one of the people on the bus said something? Why don’t you ever stay quiet? These children need you!”

“Shut up woman. If they were the officers they wouldn’t need to knock.”
The father slipped on a robe and opened the door. The outside darkness covered the face of the visitor. The father’s eyes adjusted to the darkness and he made out the figure of a young student, an acquaintance of The Brother. His shirt was covered in dried blood.

The Boy woke up two minutes before the knock on the door. He felt a chill from the open window and it woke him. When he heard his parent’s frantic voices he crawled on his belly to where they sat. His mother held her head in her hands as she slid slowly to the ground. The student, whom he recognized from the demonstration, attempted to sip the cup of tea but his unsteady hands wouldn’t allow it. His father was stoic. The Boy watched The Father rise out of the chair, walk towards the open door, and out to the fields. The Boy abandoned his hiding place and ran after him. No one in the room noticed his presence. The Boy used his arms to protect himself from the cold as he observed his father, on his knees beside the wall separating his field from the neighbors. Rotten apricots fallen from the neighboring trees surrounded him. His father picked them up one by one and threw them as far as he could. Threw them towards the British plantation; threw them towards the capital.

Theme 2: Conspiracy

“Bend down and spread your cheeks”

The Lieutenant flipped the switch of his flashlight and aimed the light into the exposed anuses of the prospective cadets. The building was large and discolored. The plot of land once housed the most loyal of The Monarch’s followers, but upon The Liberator’s command it was torn down and turned into The Military Academy. In the eight years since The Monarch was overthrown, The Academy doubled in applications. The Liberator filled the youth with the hope of nationalism.

After his brother’s death, The Boy soon decided that he would abandon his father’s dreams of CIA and become The Cadet. His father died shortly after The Brother’s death. The people in the village whispered that, because of his inability to deal with the older brother’s death, he slowly killed himself by slipping poison into his own tea every night.

“Died of a broken heart,” his mother always said, followed with a sigh.

When he announced his decision to become a Cadet he was met with the approval of all but his mother.

“Nationalism is a tricky disease, my son.”

The Mother’s words couldn’t sway him. He made the decision the day his father labored through his last breath.

“Stand straight and put your pants back on.”

The Cadet did as he was told without hesitation. The Lieutenant walked in front of the line of recruits.

“If you’ve made it this far that means you are now Cadets in the esteemed Academy. Our Liberator tore down the symbols of oppression that plagued our beautiful country and built strong, new, and reliable walls. You are the generation who will keep our Liberator’s vision alive through the decades. In your hands lies the hope of the future. Never again will we let our nation fall into the hands of an oppressor and never again will we remain silent.”
The Lieutenant stopped in front of The Cadet.

“Lift your arms over your head.”
The Cadet did as he was told.
“You’re skinny. What does your father do?”
“He’s dead, sir.”
“What did he do before he died?”
“He was a farmer, sir.”
“Very good. Very good. Farmers are the souls of our nation. How did he die?”
“He died of a broken heart after the oppressors killed my brothers.”
“Yes. Tragic. Why are you here Cadet?
“To make sure the population of this wonderful nation is never oppressed again.”
“Perfect. I like your energy.”
The Cadet’s new routine woke him at 6:00 am. They ran for one hour, followed by two hours of standing in formation. Those who fainted or complained of the heat were forced to run for another hour. The Cadet never complained of the heat. The Lieutenant attributed it to his pure farmer blood. After formation, they were served breakfast. Usually beans but sometimes in winter they were given lentil soup. This was followed by General Command and Staff courses. They were served dinner at 7pm and given a free hour. At 8 pm all Cadets were expected to be in their bunks.
It was during the free hour between dinner and bunk time that The Cadet developed a new method of entertainment for his comrades. Using his mother’s technique of card reading, he would predict his fellow cadet’s futures. One evening The Cadet’s bunkmate, decided to test the truthfulness of The Cadet’s skills. The Cadet revealed a future full of love for his bunkmate.

“Alright, I’m slightly impressed. But if you really are as good as you say tell me what my girlfriend’s name is.”
The bunkmate was unaware that he had a tendency to whisper her name in his sleep.
The Cadet paused for moment, for dramatic effect and then spoke her name. This caused a stir in The Cadet’s unit and he soon became known as the master of cards. It was a few days later when one of The Lieutenant’s lower ranking officers came for him.

“Where is the cadet with the cards?!”

All fingers lead to The Cadet.
“Follow me, The Lieutenant wants to see you. ”
The Cadet raced through all the scenarios in his head. Since the ouster of The Monarch, gambling had been declared illegal. Perhaps, The Lieutenant thought he was encouraging the rise of gambling, thus calling for the disrespect and—ultimately—the rise against The Liberator! He knocked softly on the newly painted door.
“Come in!”

With a click of his heel and an exposed palm, he saluted The Lieutenant. The room was painted a dull grey-green and contained one brown desk, two wooden chairs for guests, one leather chair for The Lieutenant, and one portrait of the Liberator hanging high over The Lieutenant’s head. The Lieutenant fanned himself with a nationalist magazine, “The Capital Weekly”.

“Sit down.”

The Lieutenant waited until The Cadet was settled to continue talking.
“I hear stories that you’re quite the fortune teller.”
“We only do it for fun, sir. It’s nothing serious, sir.”
“No need to make excuses.”
The Lieutenant opened his desk drawer and revealed a deck of cards. He pushed them in front of The Cadet. In silence, The Cadet stared at the deck.
“Go on. Show me my future.”
The Cadet scanned The Lieutenant’s face for signs of sarcasm or anger. There were none.
“Ok. Please separate the deck into two piles using your left hand.”
The Lieutenant followed his orders.
“Pick out fifteen cards using your left hand.”
The Cadet laid out the cards in the formation his mother taught him. All the Aces were drawn.
“I see money. Lots of money. There’s money in every aspect of your life. You see, the club symbolizes money. It’s crossed here with the jack who could symbolize you or maybe a male relative. It’s also crossed here with the diamonds so there is money involved with your home and family.”
“Very good Cadet. Very good. Go back to work now. “
Two weeks later The Cadet was called back into the office. Before he could salute The Lieutenant interrupted him, “Come in. Close the door. Sit Down.”
Screening exams taught in educational programs often place too much importance on generic viagra purchase supine leg-length assessment in determining pelvic disorders. Sometimes it is also due to environmental or climatic reasons and even some other medical tadalafil uk problems and the remedies are also wide-ranging. In case, if he notices the dosages viagra canada overnight not working, consulting with your healthcare provider if they deal with such treatments. The spewhy not try these out bulk buy viagrat will adjust the treatment based on how your body responds to the initial treatment. The Cadet settled into one of the wooden chairs.
“What did you see in my cards last time you were here?”
“Money?”
“Do you know what happened to me?”
“No sir.”
“Last night someone broke into my house. They took everything. All my money. All my wife’s jewelry.”
“I’m- I’m sorry. I couldn’t tell if the money was coming in or out.”
The Lieutenant opened the drawer of his desk and pulled out the deck, “tell me what you see.”
It was from then on that The Lieutenant revealed his secrets to The Cadet. Confiding in his fortuneteller, he told him of all the plans. He told him of the foreign hands waiting to sabotage the nation. He told him of the former supporters of The Monarch who waited in small European towns for their chance to rise again.

Part 3: Forbidden Fruit

It was with The Lieutenant’s trust that The Cadet went on to become a Lieutenant himself, a First Lieutenant, Captain, a Lieutenant Colonel, and finally The Colonel of the ninth regiment. All this was achieved in the span of ten short years using minimal bribery and almost no torture. As the youngest of his rank, The Colonel compensated his age with seriousness and a large mustache.

The former Lieutenant, now The General Major, held his eighteenth annual “Liberator’s Officers Celebration of Freedom, the Nation, and Justice: in Honor of the Martyrs of the Liberator’s Liberation of the Nation from the Anti-liberation Tyrant” banquet. It was there that The Colonel managed to charm The Ministers of Interior, Exterior, and Culture into marrying his younger sisters. The Colonel’s family was thus promptly moved out of the village hut and into villas that once belonged to The Monarch’s aristocracy.

The eighteenth banquet marked the first year in which The Liberator could not attend. His wife claimed he was in “poor health”. The General Major laughed loudly, “Poor health! The man is an unstoppable machine! Not even the CIA could bring him down. Though, as we all know, they tried and failed.”
The guests sipped their imported alcohol and nodded knowingly. It was during this moment of great admiration for The Liberator (and his inability to die) that The Colonel entered, family in tow. The General Major beamed with joy.
“My boy! My cadet! My fortune-teller! Our honored and esteemed Colonel! Come! Come! Have a whiskey! Juice for the women of course.”

Ever the extrovert, The Minister of Interior left his wife’s side (without a hint of hesitation) in order to catch up with The Liberator’s cousin’s daughter. The Minister of Exterior, the more introverted of the group, rejected the whiskey and settled for water and a corner of the room with his wife silent by his side. The Minister of Culture was not present.

“My Dear! Where is your husband?! How I miss his gracious and cultured presence at my banquets!”

“I’m afraid there’s a soccer match today. He couldn’t miss it.”

The large room, covered in beige marble, surrounded by peeling wallpaper with a flowery pattern, was furnished entirely in Baroque style. Tassels hung from extravagant blue armchairs, a large dark wooden dining table stood in the center of the room with carved figures running down its leg, and a crystal chandelier with a lime green tint illuminated the grand hall of the mansion. The Colonel sat upright in one of the armchairs. He watched his sisters socialize with a world that was once exclusively his. His mother, whom he still lived with, was at the buffet table loading her plate with tiny sandwiches. He squirmed at the sight of her gluttony, at the thought of her cracked and overworked hands tainting the golden, fluffy, smooth surfaces of the miniature food. It was at that moment, as one sister scolded her husband’s wandering eye, another silently sipped her guava juice, the youngest flirted with the high-ranking Generals, and his mother filled her mouth to the brim with bread, when The Colonel began to feel that he needed a mate. He spent the last ten years living almost as a hermit, obsessed with rising in the ranks.
Twirling his mustache he surveyed the room. Most females in attendance were the wives and daughters of his colleagues, untouchables. The only remaining women were the embarrassing creatures he called his family. The whiskey warmed his insides and he began to doze off.

“Would you like more, sir?”

A young servant lowered her eyes as he snapped back to reality. She looked young. She couldn’t be older than twenty. The Colonel didn’t care much for age; all he could see were her eyes. They were blue. He had never seen a servant with blue eyes. He licked his mustache as he allowed himself to take in all of her body.

“Sir, another drink?”

The Colonel did something he hadn’t done in years: he smiled.

“Yes.”

The girl poured him a glass and with a quick smile she moved on to the next military man. The Colonel, reeling from the encounter, zigzagged to The General Major.
“Who is that servant girl?”
“She’s mine. I hired her after The Field Marshal’s wife found herself enraged with jealousy and kicked her out. Some peasant girl I believe.”
“I will marry her. Please arrange it.”

The General Major, in a fit of hysterical laughter, spilled the remains of his whiskey on The Younger Sister’s dress. The Younger Sister, who had been allowing The General Major to pour whiskey into her guava juice all night, giggled in ecstasy.

“My boy, she’s just a peasant girl. You’re too good for her.”

“You forget that I was once a peasant boy.”

“Different times my Colonel. Different times. But I suppose we could train her as we did you. The only problem would be her age.”

“Change the birth certificate?”

The General Major caressed the youngest sister’s arm and gazed with longing at her chest. He waved The Colonel off.
“Yes yes! Easily done! Come here tomorrow night and we’ll arrange it.”
The Colonel, in a drunken stupor of lust, searched for the servant girl amongst the guests. She reminded him of the girls he grew up with in his village. Their simplicity always attracted him. She was nowhere to be seen. The Colonel pushed through the crowd of Ministers and Generals until he reached the kitchen. At the counter stood the girl, her loose black outfit covered every inch of her body and a light black cloth hung loosely around her head allowing soft strands of her dark hair to fall out. At the sound of The Colonel’s entrance, she turned.

“More Whiskey?”

“No. You. I want you.’

“I’m sorry?”

“You’re coming home with me tonight.”

“Is The General Major exchanging me for another girl?”

“You’re my wife now.”

The Colonel lunged towards the counter in an attempt to wrap his arms around the helpless child. She screamed and ran towards the hall; he pursued. The sight of the hall stopped the lovers in their tracks. All the guests stood in silence, staring at the grand entrance. The Field Marshal was reading from a paper.
“ -It is with deepest regrets that we announce the death of our Liberator, our savior, and our nation’s father,”
The sisters screamed in despair and fainted into their husband’s arms, the youngest into The General Major’s. The Ministers and Generals began to silently pray into their whiskey glasses. The Colonel reached towards the servant girl as she tried to use this opportunity to escape. He pressed her head into his chest, she tried to pull away, but he pressed her head tighter against his chest.

Part 4: Disaffection

Report For the Beloved People of the Nation on National Salvation and the Incident of the Fundamentalist Attacks on the Beloved Nation:

We, the cabinet of the military council, hereby issue this report to clarify and create an honest and transparent account on what transpired on the 14th day of April.
Since the death of our beloved Liberator the nation has found itself infested by the disease of fundamentalism. These fundamentalists spoke in the name of religion when, in fact, they merely used religion to topple the pillar of the state. As we all know, the nature of their hate and violence began shortly after the death of The Liberator when they decried The Successor’s ascension to power. They used the Western ideal of ‘Democracy’ to accuse our dear Successor of being an unworthy father of our nation. They gathered in squares and chanted. This, being an innocent act, was allowed to flourish due to the kindness of The Successor’s heart. He, being aware that they were simply mourning the death of our most distinguished and revered Liberator. The events that took place are almost too tragic to write. However, it must be mentioned that these poor fundamentalists brought it upon themselves.
Who are these fundamentalists and how can you spot them?

They are usually in groups and disguise themselves as students or hardworking men and women. They claim to be thinkers and artists, yet are never seen at any of the national theatre events nor do they participate in the annual “Portrait of the Nation” award.

Why must we be wary of them?

Using the same rhetoric as the English who colonized our nation, these fundamentalists use ‘liberal’ ideals that go against this so-called “religion” they follow. If they were truly pious people they would understand that the Successor has been blessed by God’s will. How can these pious people not recognize salvation?
What happened?

The fundamentalists finally revealed their true nature and attempted to attack the state. Using concealed weapons and makeshift tear gas; they spontaneously attacked our brave young policemen. The state had no other option but to act quickly! Gunmen climbed on the roofs of civilian houses and were prepared to shoot anyone on the ground. So we were obligated to send the tanks in. They also had three bombs hidden in residential buildings! Thankfully the state was there to defuse them. Many have accused the state of using excessive force. However, I’m certain the judiciary will understand this need on the state’s part to maintain justice and liberty. Tragically fifty-three fundamentalists perished in the events that unfolded. Many were trampled in the stampede that their own colleagues created. Some were even used as human shields by their more cowardly counterparts! These deaths were not a result of the state’s violence, as some would suggest, but negligence on the part of the fundamentalists. The remaining threats were apprehended and sent to an undisclosed location. There, our young Lieutenants in training will interrogate them and, if God wills it, we shall have a safe and healthy state.

Thank you and May God and The Successor bless you,

The former Colonel of the ninth regiment, Interim Field Marshal.

Part 5: Charade of Doom

After the Incident report was signed, the former Field Marshal was asked to retire and The Colonel took over. They say this new Field Marshal is a man of integrity, not afraid to make decisions and take charge. When asked what should be done with protestors, the then Colonel’s answer was “make them disappear.” This gained the respect and admiration of all his colleagues and it was unanimous that he must be the new Field Marshal.

The Field Marshal leaned on his dark wooden desk. A portrait of The Successor hung above his head. It was only a year into his time as Field Marshal that the generals and ministers filed into his office one day. They locked the door behind them and all vowed secrecy. They filled him in on the plan, they told him the reasons, the necessity of it. In one short hour they planned the execution of The Successor, promising the Field Marshal that if he went along with their plan he would be named the new Leader of the nation.

The plan was executed quickly and flawlessly. The Field Marshal received the news from a young lieutenant.
“The Successor has been shot at the national parade. Fundamentalists have been apprehended.”
The Field Marshal stood, and with no hesitation, began walking down the hall. The young lieutenant (a nephew from the youngest sister) walked at his heel.

“Boy, you’re sweating on my boots. Go home to your mother and tell her to buy a pretty dress.”

The Field Marshal’s villa was larger than anything he could have imagined as a boy. The halls were surrounded with doors, all leading to dark rooms that smelled of dust and cleaning product. They only used half the rooms in the house. He passed the kitchen where his wife slaved away making meals, though he brought her dozens of servants. He climbed up the wooden stairs. He passed his daughter’s room, where once he found a boy with a hand under his daughter’s blouse. That boy was later sentenced to six months in prison for indecent exposure. He passed his son’s room where once he found a boy with his hand down his son’s pants. That boy was later sentenced to six years in jail for debauchery. He finally reached the room at the far end of the second floor hallway, his mother’s room.
His mother had gone deaf and blind in her old age. They say her blindness was caused by the venom of a snake that the CIA planted in her garden. They say she went deaf because the CIA planted a bug in her ear in order to spy on her son. They say The Field Marshal, ever the hero of the nation, stabbed her ears.
The Field Marshal opened the door to her room. It creaked. She sat in her usual spot in the middle of the king sized bed. His mother, who never adjusted to a life of luxury, threw out the furniture she didn’t need. All that remained was the bed, the side table and a closet. Every time The Field Marshal walked into the room he remembered her imperfection, his embarrassment at her peasant manners, her inability to change. Immobility and excessive card reading caused her to develop a hump. Yet, even her hump lacked perfection, it was slightly off center. Her hands ran over a deck of cards as she split them with her left hand. He moved slowly so he wouldn’t startle her. He sat near her; the mattress sank and creaked under his weight.

“Who’s there? Don’t hurt me! Don’t you know who my son is?”

The Field Marshal edged towards her and ran his fingers over hers, their signal that it was him and not a
fundamentalist. She smiled and felt his hands.

“My boy! My beautiful, powerful, wonderful boy! Let me read your fortune!”

“We had him murdered. Do you know what this means?”

“My delightful little Cadet! How I love you!”

“This means that I will be the new father of the nation. I can finally be what your husband could never dream to be.”
She ran her hands over the cards frantically.

“I feel hearts in these cards. You will find love! Love everywhere! It crosses over with diamonds! This love will give you wealth! Oh my brilliant Colonel! You will take over our amazing nation!”

The Field Marshal looked at the cards, there were no hearts to be seen. He stroked his mother’s hair.

“I can’t wait until you die. The last piece of my youth will die with you.”

“Oh my boy! My darling Cadet! My brave soldier! My adored Colonel! My revered Field Marshal! Our nation’s beloved Dictator!”

His mother wept for her love and devotion to her son and thus for her love and devotion to the nation. The Field Marshal picked up a bowl of soup left on the side table and fed his weeping mother.
They say the CIA filled the mother’s soup with miniscule amounts of arsenic until she finally died, taking his memories of innocent youth with her.

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.

 

 

 

Left

By Lena Zaghmouri

What struck me most about Mom’s family was how their pictures looked so different from what Mom told me they were actually like. They looked so put together and all-American, untouched by any troubles. Just two white married parents and one cute kid that always stood in front of them in pictures with a big smile and her arms open, embracing the world and the photo that would capture that emotion forever.
In reality, though, Mom’s parents were divorced, and Mom said Grandma’s main concern was finding her next boyfriend or husband, Grandpa’s the new family he inherited from marrying his second wife, which was soon after he divorced Grandma.
Grandma looked sweet and virginal with blond hair and light brown eyes, but she had countless affairs since Mom could remember.

Grandpa looked kind with dark blue eyes, thin brown hair, a soft manly smile, but Mom told me he would become irritable and beat her for the smallest mistake when he was angry with Grandma. Mom had a collection of bruises on her arms and back that she showed me to prove it. He would let plenty of things slide if things were going well with her Grandma, but that was rare. He was easier to be around once her parents divorced during Mom’s early teens, but then he never wanted to be around her anymore either. Mom was part of his past life, the one he claimed was driven by anger. He needed to minimize contact with that as much as possible.
But Mom having a child out of wedlock with a Palestinian reawakened Grandpa’s latent anger. He called her a shameful slut and washed his hands of her and was unwilling to meet me, his olive-skinned granddaughter with a weird name like Isra, one he probably couldn’t even pronounce right.

♦♦
Grandma came to visit on rare occasions; the first time I remember was when I was five. She was upset that Mom had a child out of wedlock, but she was more forgiving. She was between marriages, and Mom had just kicked Baba out for good. Mom would complain about what a deadbeat Baba was to Grandma sometimes.
“Honestly, Carol, I’ve always told you if you just lost fifteen or twenty pounds, you could get yourself a decent man,” Grandma told Mom.
She visited once or twice a year, usually during the holidays; she would bring me a new Barbie or something as a Christmas gift. Grandma ignored me and vented her frustrations with the world and the men in her life to Mom.
But now, three years later, Mom had cancer, and Grandma went back and forth on whether or not she would take me after Mom passed away. Sometimes she said it would be nice to have someone to live with, someone to help out and spend time with her, but then Grandma would say the last thing she wanted to do was take in an eight-year-old at her age, especially one with a father like mine.
Mom didn’t trust her, though. “She’ll want you when she’s alone, and as soon as she gets a man, Grandma’ll find a way to get rid of you.”

♦♦

Mom told more positive stories about her family when she put together the photo album for me, her hands newly thin and lined with pale blue veins. She didn’t have energy to put it together before, and once in a while she said there was no point in it because what did all those pictures mean? Most of the people in them I had never met and probably never would.
Still, we sat in the full size bed we slept on at Baba’s place while she put it together. Mom explained who and what was in each picture before she pressed it down on the sticky surface. “Well, hopefully, Isra, your grandma will visit when you live only with Baba,” she said. “Maybe this will make her turn around.”

♦♦

Mom went into the hospice the next day, and Baba picked me up after school every day so we could go there and see Mom. Sometimes Baba would be in the room alone with her, but usually they kept me there to alleviate the tension between them. We had been living at Baba’s, but I was sure my parents weren’t together, and they wouldn’t have even spoken to each other if Mom wasn’t dying.

Every time Mom said she was tired and needed to rest in the hospice, I was sure that she was going to die then, and I would cry inconsolably, even though Mom assured me she wasn’t leaving yet. Baba would take me out of the room and try to comfort me for a little bit, but he would soon become angry and tell me to be strong. Plenty of people had gone through much worse back home in Palestine, so my pain now didn’t matter.

♦♦

Grandma came soon after Mom went into the hospice. She would take me to see Mom for the week or so that she was still awake and not drugged beyond comprehension.
And suddenly I wasn’t invisible to Grandma anymore.
Grandma now picked me to vent her frustrations about the man she was in the process of divorcing and Grandpa as well. “I talked to Carol’s father, and you know what he told me? He can’t get the time off work! Can you believe that?” She sighed and clenched her teeth together. “‘This is your child,’ I said to him. ‘Can you just pull your dick out of your wife’s pussy for two seconds and remember you have a daughter?’ You know those kids his wife has aren’t his. She had them with the guy before. I don’t see what’s so great about her. She’s as plain as wood.”

♦♦

Grandma took me out for ice cream once Mom slipped from consciousness, and she said she couldn’t stand to see her daughter suffering to death and that her granddaughter didn’t need to see it either, so Baba let her.
Though I loved ice cream, I wasn’t excited about getting some that day. Most of it melted on the back of my hand and dripped on the table, and Grandma had to take me to the bathroom to clean up. I could tell she was irritated I saw her roll her eyes in the mirror, and she told me that I had to eat like a civilized girl.
Kamagra Oral Jelly and its Side Effects are extracted, to let you know completely what option you should take before trying out sildenafil viagra generico. levitra basically is a brand name of the generic drug tadalafil. These extensively studied adaptogens http://frankkrauseautomotive.com/testimonial/great-dealer/ generic cialis may similarly work by mimicking stress itself, according to Swedish researchers Alexander Panossian and George Wikman. Some men cheapest cialis prices are incapable of holding on for more time due to stress and mental depressions. For example- Kamagra is an effective medicine pills viagra canada which enable ability to fight against erectile issues. We went to the hotel she was staying in—she would spend the night at Mom’s apartment whenever she came before, but she hated Baba and his apartment—and she put cartoons on for me while she criticized all the men she had had in her life, reserving the worst for Grandpa. “I swear once I married that guy he became such a drag,” she said. “We were so young, and all he wanted to do was stay in and drink beer. Even convincing him to go out to the movies was like asking him to drink cyanide.” Grandma cringed at the thought of him. She moved on to her three other husbands: the second was too mean; the third had affairs; the fourth, the one she was in the middle of divorcing, was a drag like Grandpa, but it was more understandable because he was almost a senior citizen.
I didn’t say anything. My lack of response must have been made her sad; Mom always had some kind of commentary for Grandma, even if it was negative like telling her she should grow up or learn what monogamy was all about. “I’m not even sixty years old, and my daughter is dying. You’re not supposed to bury your child; it’s the other way around. Of course, it’s no picnic to lose your mother at your age.” She wiped a couple of tears that came from her overfilled brown eyes. “You know things are going to be different, right?”
Everyone used that phrase—“things are going to be different”—though they already were different. I hated spending time with Baba, having him prepare my food or ask him questions. He never knew the answers, and he would get irritated by them. “Don’t ask dumb questions,” he always said to me.
Baba was scary, too. Most nights I could hear him crying out in his sleep. When Mom was there she told that it was just because Baba had been through some terrible things since he was even younger than me, and he remembered them in his dreams, but I was sure that he was possessed. It was worse without having Mom there to tell me to go back to sleep.
I had to live without my mother.
At school everyone had a mother that I knew of. A few lived with their grandmothers or someone else, but they at least visited their mothers sometimes. And their grandmothers liked them a lot more than Grandma liked me. They didn’t talk about men all the time, and they didn’t tell their daughters that if they lost weight, they could find a decent man.
But I had a feeling that Grandma was feeling sorrier for herself. She was losing her daughter, the one she could turn to between men. She also started to put on a little bit of weight, especially in the middle. She probably would never be able to find another husband, at least not a decent one.

♦♦

Though it was almost my bedtime, Grandma had no plans to take me back to Baba’s or call him to ask if I could spend the night with her. “Who cares what he thinks?” she told me when I asked if I was allowed to stay. “He isn’t worth a shit anyway.” She took me to the store and bought me some pajamas and a night light, though I stopped using one over a year before. “What about a toy or something?”
“No, I don’t want to play.”
“You sure are a mellow child.”
After I took a bath and changed into the new pajamas, Grandma talked more about how the man she was currently divorcing was trying to hide his assets and get out of paying her as much alimony. “It’s not like I’ll be getting much. We were only married for a year and a half,” she said. “Couldn’t stand him any longer than that.”

♦♦

Baba pounded on the Grandma’s hotel door so hard I thought he must have bruised his knuckles, shouting at Grandma to open the door or he’d call the police.
Grandma didn’t hold out for long, but she wouldn’t let me go without letting Baba know that she thought he was a worthless Arab.
“You don’t deserve a say in the matter!” Grandma said. “You haven’t been there for most of her life, and all you’ll do is lock her in the house until she gets married!”
Baba told her at least I wouldn’t learn to be a whore like she was and charged past her and pulled me by the hand. “My daughter comes home with me!” he yelled as he brushed her aside to leave.
He left me in the pajamas Grandma got me, and he talked to me for over an hour, which he never did before. “She is a sharmoota, a slut. Do not act as she does, Isra. You do not want to live as her.” He told me that he couldn’t believe that a woman could act that way. His mother, my sitti, he said, would have never spoken to a son-in-law the way she had. Well, he wasn’t really a son-in-law. He never married Mom, but it should be the same thing to these Americans because they didn’t believe in marriage the way Palestinians did, so Grandma should think of him as her son-in-law. And Sitti definitely wouldn’t have carried on that way, marrying all kinds of men for money or whatever the hell she believed she would get.

♦♦

Baba woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to put my shoes on. Mom had died, and we were going to see her one last time before she went to the crematory. I was still tired, but my heart was thundering in my chest, so it was easy for me to stay awake.
Grandma was at the hospice before we were, her face red and streaked with tears. Mom lied on the bed, no oxygen tube connected to her, pale and gaunt, her hair a darker brown than what it was before, her lips still red. I cried, and my chest felt so light that I wondered if the center of my body was still there. For over a week now, Mom had been unconscious, and the only way I could tell she was still alive was that she sometimes made a soft grunt when she was in pain. Then a nurse came in and gave her some more drugs to keep her quiet and comfortable.
Baba picked me up and carried me out of the room. People hadn’t picked me up for years on a regular basis, and by then, I was only five or six inches shorter than him, but I guess he still thought I was four. He said we should go back home and let them take Mom away.

♦♦

Grandma held the memorial service at a small banquet hall. I spent most of the time sitting at one of the middle tables next to my father, chewing on one of the black cloth napkins, my dripping saliva warming the back of my hand. I watched my mother’s relatives, trying to see if I could remember them from the photos, and if I could recall their names or if Mom had ever spoken of them. But I couldn’t place most of them, and they were just as distant from me in real life as they were in the pictures. They seemed uncomfortable around me and my father and gave us short, awkward condolences. They spoke amongst themselves, telling their stories about Mom, what she was like as a child and a teenager.

That day they all had had a close relationship with her when she was alive.

I slipped out and sat under a tree in the picnic area, crushing some of the dried leaves, mildly enjoying the slight pricks in my palm. Grandma found me out there and kneeled down as far as she could to speak to me. She was reconciling with her husband. “I might as well,” she said, tearing up. She always wiped her tears daintily. “Who else will have me at my age? And I can’t live off alimony. I should just pack it in and face reality.” She wished me luck with my father, though she doubted he would be a good one. “I hope he doesn’t send you back to his country, but what can you do?”

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.

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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.

Goodbye, Thea Stavroula

By Lisa Suhair Majaj

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

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

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

But time never stops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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