The Power of Culture and Narrative: An Interview with Susan Muaddi Darraj by Lena Mahmoud

The writing community is a small one, and the Arab American writing community even smaller. I believe in being a good “literary citizen,” in helping to support and promote other writers.

In the following interview, Lena Mahmoud interviews Susan Muaddi Darraj, renowned Palestinian American fiction writer, about the impact of social media in cultural movements, the importance of contributing to an active literary community, and the rewards and challenges she has experienced writing her new children’s book series Farah Rocks.

LM: In 2019 you started the #TweetYourThobe to honor Rashida Tlaib’s swearing-in. Its popularity inspired the International Day of Tatreez and Palestinian Culture. Did you think that the #TweetYourThobe would have such a far reach? What are your hopes for the International Day of Tatreez and Palestinian Culture?

SMD: I wasn’t completely surprised that #TweetYourThobe went viral, because we had support building “underground” in a private Facebook group for a couple of weeks. (It was private because when I first floated the idea on Twitter to wear thobes on  the day of the swearing in, I got some intense hate mail). The idea grew and grew, with people inviting their friends. I knew that Palestinians and our friends would enjoy posting pictures of themselves in thobes and other forms of tatreez (embroidery) — and I was excited by everyone’s enthusiasm. I initially invited only 300, but by January 3rd, we had 8,000 members.

I think what did surprise me was the media reaction — it was overwhelmingly positive and enthusiastic. By mid-morning on January 3rd, my friends at the Institute for Middle East Understanding (IMEU) were funneling media inquiries my way. By noon that day, NPR and The New York Times called me within minutes of each other, and that was when I understood the impact #TweetYourThobe was making. And then CNN and others — and each major story spurred further interest in the topic. By January 4th, the second day (our campaign lasted 3 days), there were newspapers in Africa, Europe, and the Middle East covering it.

I was most affected by how meaningful the event was for Palestinian Americans. Finally, a chance to take charge of the narrative in the news headlines! It was refreshing. That’s why we are starting the International Day of Tatreez and Palestinian Culture — I’m partnering with the newly established Museum of the Palestinian People in Washington DC to do online and local, face-to-face celebrations of Palestinian culture every April 30th. We’re using the hashtags #TweetYourThobe, #TweetYourTatreez, and #TweetYourCulture.

LM: Your first two fiction books were literary short story collections, but your upcoming release, Farah Rocks, is the first book of a middle grade chapter book series. Was the transition from literary short fiction to middle grade fiction a difficult one? What inspired Farah Rocks? How many books do you have in mind for the series?

SMD: Well, I have a four-book contract with Capstone Books, and there’s a possibility of writing more if the book does well. I was inspired to write it by my daughter — she’s an avid reader and she asked me one day why there weren’t books with Arab or Palestinian girls in them. I realized I had wondered the same exact thing at her age. I loved books like Pippi Longstocking and Anne of Green Gables, later I got into Nancy Drew and even the Sweet Valley High books. But I never saw even minor characters who reflected my own life. That’s two generations of Arab American girls asking the same question, right? Where am I? How come nobody sees me? How come I don’t see myself in the books I love?

So I was like, “That’s enough of that.” I approached my agent with the idea. He doesn’t really represent children’s fiction, but he liked the idea and supported it. He told me to write the first two books in the series, and when I did — it took me about six months — he went out to publishers with them. And he negotiated a four-book deal, which is great, because it will be a substantial series.

Farah is a fifth grader who is very smart, brave, and funny. She has a fun little brother named Samir, a mother who is very patient, and a father who is hilarious and likes to make breakfast foods for dinner. They are a working-class family, and so they struggle with money. In the first book, Farah has to confront a new girl at school who turns out to be a terrible bully.

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Writing for this age group — 2nd to 5th graders — has been a challenge in some ways. I read books for this age group all the time, because I have three children of my own and they are all, thank goodness, voracious readers. But making the switch has been a humbling experience. I have a treasure of an editor in Eliza Leahy at Capstone — she has really taught me how to avoid being too nuanced, too subtle, how to keep the plot moving, and how to make sure the reader is always tapped into Farah’s feelings and thoughts.

LM: In addition to your books, you have been very active in the literary community, including hosting workshops for both RAWI and Barrelhouse. How do you think those two roles complement one another?

SMD:  The writing community is a small one, and the Arab American writing community even smaller. I believe in being a good “literary citizen,” in helping to support and promote other writers. I’ve been a literary journal editor — I edited the Baltimore Review for seven years — and I’ve been active with Barrelhouse Magazine for several years as well. I’ve also helped organize a successful creative writing conference in Washington DC every spring — Conversations & Connections (www.writersconnectconference.com) for the last thirteen years. In fact, it was just named one of America’s best writing conferences by The Writer magazine. I think the appeal of this conference is that we have a “no divas” rule — we invite only writers and presenters who have a generous attitude towards helping others learn the craft and the intricacies of the publishing world.

So all that is to say that I believe in supporting other writers as much as possible. I know that I have had other writers who mentored me when I got started — and I’m grateful to writer friends who blurb my books, who invite me for readings or to serve on panels, who spread the word about my work. Again, if you want to be part of this community of writers, you have to not only care about the written word, but you have to support those who write, edit, illustrate, publish.

LM: You were recently named a Ford Fellow, which comes with a $50,000 purse. Congratulations! How important do you believe awards and funding are for a successful writing career?

SMD: I was thrilled to be recognized by United States Artists, which awarded me the Ford Fellowship. That was quite meaningful because I was invited to the ceremony in Chicago, where I met so many wonderful writers (Lucas Mann, Fred Moten, Molly Brown) and artists working in other disciplines, like musician Terence Blanchard and vocalist Somi. It was a tremendous three days of sharing our work with each other and talking about the creative process.  So it’s not the award itself so much as the network it provides you, the company it places you in, that I value.

But of course, there’s no denying that awards can help your career in more tangible ways — having a book award sticker on your book cover certainly helps people pay attention.

Funding is also crucial, especially for those of us who work full-time and for whom writing is something we accomplish “on the side.” I have a full-time job and I’m raising three children, and I wake up early (sometimes at 4:30am) to write for a couple of hours before I start the rest of the day. Having funding is great because it allowed me last year and this year to take some time away and provide childcare while I was gone so that I could focus on my work.

LM: The writing advice that you provide during your workshops has been highly regarded. What is the most important bit of writing advice for other writers?

SMD:  Care about your characters. Know them. Understand their flaws. View them with a critical eye. Figure out what they love, what they want. What scares them? The whole book unfolds from their desires and their fears.

Hazem Fahmy’s Red//Jild//Prayer (Diode 2018) Reviewed By Helen Wing

It is red rage that guides the poet, who is ‘swinging [his] legs like a hammer’ as he observes the West’s ‘close-up on the dead Arab’ and questions why he is alive if the only images of himself he sees are of his death.

Hazem Fahmy’s passionate debut collection, Red//Jild//Prayer (Diode, 2018), maps a corporeal journey from rage to ecstasy, from fear to pride, ‘unabashed, unafraid’, from the profound alienation of the ‘silly, brown boy’ who defines himself ‘by that which makes me hate myself’ to the courageous emblazoned joy of intimacy and hope, of ‘Scream:/we are here,/ habiby./ Tomorrow can’t tame this love.’

Fahmy’s progress towards an ethnic and gender identity located in the sublime taps into a long tradition of homosexual poetry which seeks gender authenticity beyond the material:  think Cernuda, think Lorca.  Fahmy’s torment is layered and complex for he seeks to repossess the image of his body from the forces of ideological tyranny so that he can paradoxically sacralise his body as holy and indomitable through the power of love.

When the body is constantly shamed for being brown, for being Muslim, for being gay, the poet appeals to God and asks, ‘where else will these eyes go[?]’ Fahmy’s poetry portrays the identity struggle of a young man growing up amidst the Egyptian revolution and counter-revolution, global religious polarization, the devastation of exile, the confusing proliferation of non-transcendent, neo-baroque cultural images of the postmodern and the exploration of non-binary sexuality in a violent, unforgiving world.  Fahmy’s mastery ushers in brutal truths, a soothsaying of the excoriating violence inherent in the racism and ignorance of the West.         

The collection opens with a prayer ‘Red as in rage’ and we are alerted to the life and death battle of biblical proportions that may ensue as the following poem ‘the word’ subverts St. John’s Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the word / and it spat on me’.  Language, first the foreign tongue English but then the ability to speak, to inhere meaning, in any language, has been preternaturally stripped from the poet. ‘I opened my mouth only / to find that my throat, too / was stolen.’

It is red rage that guides the poet, who is ‘swinging [his] legs like a hammer’ as he observes the West’s ‘close-up on the dead Arab’ and questions why he is alive if the only images of himself he sees are of his death.  ‘Caesar’, a poem named after the prototypical dictator, rails against the easy belittling of the Egyptian tragedy. Fahmy parodies the contempt of the West for Egypt by domesticating its easy slogans of ignorance. Democracy, he cries ‘is not as simple as a break up song’, not ‘a bag of seeds you buy at Home Depot’.  He blames a postmodern commodity fetishism for the deliberate oblivion of the West for they ‘forget that we have been planting our own crops for over seven thousand years.’ He parodies himself in the oppressor’s dialect and delivers savage clarity in ‘Daily I watch America marvel / at how fast a brown body can burn.’  The curse of cultural improvisation in the hands of the poet becomes part of a necessary process whereby he restitutes a sense of self in the image-bound contemporary, using Jazz and colloquial idiom in a linguistic reduction ad absurdum which, for him, mirrors the perpetual rape of his consciousness as a young Arab man in an alien environment.  It is no accident that his love song to Egypt comes solely in Arabic as ‘my people are still a body’ and in the West, clearly and repeatedly, only a body. 

‘A Queen bleeds in Ramadan (after Orlando)’ depicts the poet Kamagra Oral Jelly contains the same ingredients as the Kamagra tablets. best buy viagra Fatigue viagra 100mg price decreases and endurance increases. For djpaulkom.tv generic cialis without prescription example a healthy person would require 100mg pill and a senior could get erection with single dose of the tablets. A person should avoid all these commander viagra try my link things to prevent pregnancy. caught in the profoundly personal and semantic trap of double oppression, where he is both prey and predator in a massacre that is both imputed to his kind and yet which kills his kind. The paucity of discourse redoubles his anguish as it crudely simplifies both racial and gender hate. Again as he interrogates easy hegemonic assumptions his pain is not just physical but spiritual. ‘Oh God, / we look to you and are told you hate us’.  The poet’s search for identity is a search for the sublime, which, paradoxically, can only manifest through the physical.  In ‘On Adding Sand’, he uses the geography of the page – America on the left, Egypt on the right – to sketch the depth of cultural difference. He deftly weaves a pseudo-coherence between the racist slur described in the poem and a plea for the sanctity of sand: ‘It is typical of us mortals / to mock this Earth. To spit / on its Holy.’ For Fahmy the taste of sand woke poetry in him, and from the desert his body rises as a physical temple as he asserts his refusal to be brought low by the glib mockery of the West.  Later, in ‘Muse/me’, the poet articulates a place to breathe between Self and Other, a self-image, as he says, ‘I tell myself / there is no bad cinematography / in the real world. Only bad editing/ Like stitching two images with no rhythm. Like a call to prayer / and an explosion.’

Jild, skin, is sandwiched between Red, the rage at one’s identity appropriation by an alien racist culture, and Prayer, a song to redemption through love.  The skin, the body, is the vessel the poet needs to relocate in his search for a sublime, knowing intimacy.  This body, as delicate and flammable as film reel, has to be rescued from the ravages of fragmentation to choreograph a sense of belonging, love and voice. For the poet his voice is physically torn from the third eye, ‘my forehead cuts open / with a coarse / gurgling / sound’.  His vocal binding, like his skin, is material and constantly under threat from the lexical violence of political sloganeering and the yearning for communication and community. In ‘Jild’, the history of fear, for and of the body, is the central focus for the poet as he struggles to place his gay identity and his Arab identity not just in the US but also within the violence of his Egyptian contemporary and his faith. ‘I’ve lost interest in Independence Day(s) / I’ve grown tired of blood piercing the night / sky.’ Again here Fahmy samples the confectionery of the postmodern predilection for nullified, meaning-drained images to excoriate the culture(s) from which he feels disbarred.  The lexicon of fear: ‘a bogart’, an ‘Ode to Essos’, an image negative, foot-printed evidence of absence, all these terms sketch his pain and his search for a poetic voice in a world that rejects the sublime. Thus the sarcasm of his, ‘What an epic feeling it is / to be unmade by a white man, / and his deceitful pen.’  The pivotal contradiction of the skin, the conceit of the binding of identity in skin and his binding in the book, maps his need to repossess and reinvest identity.  This effort is fuelled by the twin urges of rage and compassion seared into his chilling image, ‘The next time a white man wears / my skin, I’ll cut it off, drain the blood, and drape it over / the first shivering brown child I come across.’

Eventually in Prayer ‘a night of terror / becomes a morning / of joy as Fahmy discovers the intimacy of love, ‘a symphony of skin.’  That skin, once dead and damned, becomes sublime and eternal in love, ‘like the wine that awaits you in heaven’ as the poet takes ownership of his belonging in love and in gay identity. ‘Dawn a red dress / in my closet, / always there / for me.’   The movement from ‘I’ to ‘we’ for belonging, and from ‘you’ to ‘they’, a distancing signaling the poet no longer feels as personal attack the all-encompassing censure, punctuates his new found joy, ‘Louder than bombs, / we cry out […] to see a flag wrapped around a breathing body, for a change.’  At last the parading of contempt and pain has become a life-affirming parade of joy. 

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.

Death of a Patriarch by Marianna Marlowe

In the hot dry wind they congregated, all of them who had come to mourn a patriarch, a husband, a father, a father-in-law, a compatriot, a friend. Dressed in black they gathered, those of them who had come to receive his body and position it in the grave, or to throw a handful of dirt onto the corpse, or to recite from the Quran, or to weep and keen, or to remember and regret, or to wait until after the family has left to shovel in the remaining soil and maneuver the heavy concrete top over the hole. They stood on the barren ground, the lonely area in Livermore surrounded by hills and meadows, rimmed all around by grasses that swayed submissively in the oppressive current. In the distance, the freeway droned and whined. The wind, instead of refreshing them like a cooling breeze, seemed to carry with it a sense of death and despair, of fatalism and endings, of global warming and climate change. The sense of desolation she felt standing there at her father-in-law’s funeral, baking in the heat, irritated by the grit of the blowing dust, holding a black parasol over her mother-in-law’s coiffured white head, was only reinforced by the rectangles of artificial grass placed haphazardly over the graves, graves that she knew hid the remains of real people, beloved mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, sisters and brothers, aunts and uncles and cousins and friends. 

Like crows in the bleak landscape, they clustered around the grave. Her mother-in-law’s elegant parasol, purchased decades ago in Paris, looked weirdly incongruous in its modish sophistication. They stood in the windswept clearing, among other flat graves, some sporting small slabs of granite perched at their heads with names etched shallowly in metallic silver or gold. At that moment she felt an acute nostalgia for the Victorian graveyards she grew up reading about in books, the ones beside quaint stone churches, covered in moss and grass and ivy, individual names and personal epitaphs carved carefully on heavy headstones, graveyards that, as the resting places for the dead, felt peaceful–snug and familiar. They had visited her British ancestors’ graveyard earlier that year on a family vacation—the differences she couldn’t help but note now intensified her uneasiness in this arid setting. She compared the lush greens with the bleached yellows, and the marble headstones aged into picturesqueness with the slick, modern hardness of the square slabs of granite; she saw how her memory of the decades-old trees, oak and elm and chestnut, which lent charming shadow to the garden of graves, clashed with her present vision of a lone pair of struggling saplings bending in the hot wind and failing to give shade to even one plot; she noticed the difference between the plants flourishing in the damp English earth, climbing up fence and wall and gravestone alike, and the plastic pots of fake flowers tilting precariously on the uneven surface of these gravesites by a motorway.  Here in the glare of the sun with no clouds, no trees, no shade to bring relief, she felt exposed, like a skeleton left to the elements in an indifferent, hostile desert. At this burial ground it seemed like she was trapped in a Salvador Dalí painting, for here the rituals for the dead felt to her artificial and contrived; the cycle of life and death, of ashes to ashes and dust to dust, was denied, replaced by the disinfection of hygiene and civilization, by the flat hard ground, by the cement sides of the narrow cavity, by the small bulldozer waiting nearby to finish the job of covering the body, filling the hole, placing the concrete lid onto the grave with lonely finality.

Minutes earlier, the plain white van had pulled up, a vehicle stark in its practicality, with no sense of tradition, of gravitas, of solemnity. The cardboard coffin had been taken out of the back of the van by mosque men who, at the appropriate moment, opened it to remove the linen-shrouded body. They handed it, as planned beforehand, to her husband and his brother, to the sons of her father-in-law, who took it, careful with respect and love, with outstretched arms, and together laid it gently, face toward Mecca in the East, at the bottom of the grave in which they were standing. She had watched as they both, dressed impeccably in dark suits, timeless and formal in leather shoes and belts, ties and cufflinks, had lowered themselves, as per Muslim custom, into the trench that had been designated their father’s final resting place. At first she had felt the discomfort of unfamiliarity, of foreignness, of strangeness as her husband climbed down into a dirt hole, as the father of her children descended into the ground. But then, as she watched him reach out for his father’s body, sharing its heft and weight with his brother, and saw the gentleness with which they held him, she felt only the beauty of children being the last to handle a parent’s body, to lay it down to rest, to say good-bye with their tenderness and their touch. 

That morning she had kept her own young children from their grandfather’s funeral at the mosque, over an hour away in the East Bay, that the family, not having a community mosque nearby in Palo Alto, had contacted for the service. She had wanted to shelter them, to protect them, to keep sad or disturbing images from taking hold forever in their memories. She had left them with her mother, and had attended the service with her mother-in-law and sister-in-law, standing and kneeling and praying in the sound-proofed room behind the section reserved for the men and the imam. She wanted to stand by her husband, as a companion in mourning, as a support in grief, but instead found herself playing that role for his mother. She looked through the thick glass partition separating the men from the women, and watched the cardboard coffin being passed from man to man to land at the front as the imam spoke a eulogy, as the congregation rose and sat, worshipped and prayed together. She followed the movements of her mother-in-law, mimicking her as she stood and knelt and held out her hands, palms up, to her god. The atmosphere in the women’s section, unlike the men’s, was casual and relaxed. Toddlers played with their toys. Little boys and girls ran about at will. Babies slept or fussed. Mothers admonished or called to their children. Part of her enjoyed the warmth and intimacy that came with this informality. Another part of her resented the quiet seriousness that was taken for granted for the men, a solemnity that contrasted with the constant distraction deemed natural for the women. 

The day before, her husband and brother-in-law had left together for the morgue to be coached by an imam through the ritual cleansing of the paternal body. She herself had seen it, but only afterward, when it had been washed and prepared for burial in a simple white shroud, placed in its cardboard box, looking, like a wax doll, shrunken and diminished. Her mother-in-law, overcome with sadness and stress as they gazed at the body, this foreign, unrecognizable figure, faltered where she stood, almost falling to the ground. She rushed to hold her up, to support her, People with such kind of sexual problems get incapability to hold or achieve erection when they are in bed with their partner. tadalafil professional ‘s main task is to increase the flow of blood into the penis. When this happens the cellular respiration will decrease and free get viagra you will be more prone to premature aging and disease. One of the products is the levitra 40 mg InLife alternative smoking device that has been designed to help smokers give up smoking logically and simply. Intercourse gives us sense of belongingness as well as sense female viagra canada of acknowledgement. to squeeze her shoulders tightly as if to say I am here, you are not alone, you will be ok, this too shall pass. At that moment she wondered why she, the daughter-in-law, the non-blood relation, the non-Muslim, the non-Syrian, was performing this duty, and not her husband or his brother, not the widow’s own beloved sons. She could only think that they, too weighed down with their own grief, could not support their mother in hers.

The evening before she had realized that the widow should not be left alone that night, that first night of the death, when her father-in-law had drawn his last breath and been taken away hours later by the coroners in black plastic, the sound of the long zipper closing over the body making the death real, tangible, final. When she shared her concern with her brother-in-law, he reassured her that of course he would stay with his mother, he would not leave her alone. But when the time came for goodnights, she saw her brother-in-law depart with his wife and daughters for his own home a few minutes away and understood that she was the only one left to comfort her mother-in-law, to make sure that she did not sleep alone in the dark master bedroom, on the suddenly empty marital bed, in the room that she had shared for decades with her husband, the room where her husband had died just hours before. Her own husband had already announced his plan to go upstairs to bed, upstairs to where his children lay sleeping, protected from the sight and sounds of their grandfather’s death and their grandmother’s grief by her, their mother. She understood her husband’s need to go upstairs and sleep with his children, away from the bedroom where he had stayed faithfully for hours before and after his father died. 

“Would you like me to stay with you tonight?” she asked her mother-in-law tentatively; they were alone together for the first time after her brother-in-law closed the front door behind him and her husband climbed the stairs to join his sons in their sleep. 

“Oh, would you?” her mother-in-law responded. “I would be most grateful to you!” Her mother-in-law, speaking English as a second language and educated as a doctor in England, still retained a formal syntax even after forty years in California. 

So she found herself lying in the bed of her parents-in-law, trying to fall asleep where her father-in-law used to sleep, feeling the hollow in the mattress carved out over the years by the weight of his large, heavy body. Thankfully, she kept reminding herself as she gazed tensely into the darkness, acutely aware of her mother-in-law’s breathing, her father-in-law didn’t actually die in that bed, in the same exact place where she now lay. She had found one way, however, to mitigate the awkwardness, to alleviate the tension of sleeping in the same bed as her mother-in-law, the mother-in-law who had, in the early years of her marriage to her son, been reserved and cold, who had failed to welcome her into the family, who had not wanted her son to marry her, who had judged her for years, who had constantly compared her to a Syrian, Muslim, Arabic-speaking ideal. She had gone upstairs herself and brought her younger son down to sleep in the middle of the master bed, in between her and her mother-in-law, his grandmother. It soothed her to have him there with her, her son, her child, her baby, young and warm, his breathing steady and his breath sweet.

Before that she had seen her father-in-law just two hours after he died, in his bedroom, on an emergency cot, the sound of the Quran being sung playing throughout. A sound she has learned to find soothing and has always found hauntingly beautiful. It comforted her to know that he died surrounded by that sound, those words, that music. His body then was still big and sturdy and robust. His skin olive and his face ruddy. His hands wide, his limbs full. He lay on his last bed, the wheeled hospital cot that had been brought in for his final days and placed next to his side of the master bed he had slept in for over four decades. He was naked save for a set of diapers that evoked, she was grateful to see, the dignity of a loincloth. She walked in, after sending her children straight upstairs to sleep, to join her husband at his vigil beside his father. Her husband sat on a chair pulled up to the cot, or stood looking down at the body, wiping away his tears and murmuring prayers as he massaged his father’s feet, rubbed his legs, squeezed his hands and arms, smoothed his hair off his forehead, kissed his brow, spoke his love to him. They stood vigil thus, the elder son, saying his good-byes through caress and prayer and she, the daughter-in-law, witnessing him with the body of his father, listening to the melodic recitation of the Quran, holding the back of her husband, the grief-stricken son. 

Only hours earlier, she had been sitting in a local French bistro celebrating her own father’s eighty-third birthday. She sat with her brother and sister, her mother and father, her older son and younger son. Her husband had driven south to his parents’ house several hours prior, called home to be with his father, the father who had been dying for a few weeks, but who today, tonight, might really go. With somewhat of a “just in case” mentality, with sadness tinged with resignation, her husband got into his car alone to make the long drive from their town to his parents’, a drive that took him over the Golden Gate Bridge, past Alcatraz, through San Francisco, by missions and reservoirs. She stayed behind, all of them uncertain as to the timing, the course of events, the future, and wanting to celebrate her father’s continued life on his birthday. She was sitting on the banquette, sandwiched between her children, a son on each side, talking over poached salmon and wild rice, when her cell phone vibrated on the table beside her. She snatched it up right away, on high alert for news from her husband about his father, and listened intently, holding the phone tight to her ear against the noisy hum of the restaurant. 

It had happened.  The patriarch, the husband, the father, the father-in-law, the grandfather, was dead.

No one’s Innocent by Frank Dullaghan

 Jack’s a prisoner in his box.
The doll’s house has lost all sense
of calm, its furniture haphazardly arranged,
its dolls prone on table tops, on stoves.
One is waterboarding in the bath.
 
The unicorn has had its name snapped off.
The fire engine’s ladder’s stuck.  Black plastic
firearms are stacked against the wall.
A Lego airport is missing most its bricks.
No replacements can be found. Its planes
 
are of different sizes. The one that opens
is packed with animals. A yellow giraffe
which has had its back legs chewed to twists
remains silent. Doll’s limbs rattle
the Cinderella box.  Teddy has managed
 
to hold on to one black eye. Now you can order levitra on line in total confidence from a well reputed and knowledgeable doctor. So it s low price viagra http://respitecaresa.org/412-2/bgsa-is-here/ better to keep the vital functions in the body to continue while taking rest. Use kamagra jelly if you suffer from erectile cialis generic overnight dysfunction in a secured & effective way. Sexual health account to a state of physical, emotional, mental, emotional and social well-being in relation with sexuality. buying cialis from canada The crayons
are in bits. A Cindy doll has had her hair
cut short. You could call this place a playroom,
you could call it Gaza, a prison cell.
Who pays attention? Call it Hell.
 

The Day I Found Home by Nofel

“Our eyes will see what had been written on our foreheads.” The Arabs declaim this as an expression of fate: your fate is predetermined; there’s no escape. I leaned toward the mirror—all but my eyes covered with a turquoise face-mask—and I wondered if God had written this day on my forehead, if He did so in Arabic or English, and whether this phrase was mentioned in the Quran.

I thought of when I was a child, an adrift and dejected child, and whether I ever imagined a day such as this one. All my life, I had thought, I’d be searching until I found a place to call home, and now here I was: a twenty-year-old who had been in Canada for a little less than five years, and was attending my citizenship ceremony; my ceremony of finally belonging, of finding home.

I went out of the washroom, after a short episode of rumination, and looked at my twenty-year-old friend, who was staring out of the window. She was wearing a grey sleeping dress and no underwear. I wondered why she wasn’t, since it wasn’t hot at all, and whether or not she would’ve felt as comfortable had I not been a queer man. I also thought of all the times I got called a “faggot” or was threatened with violence for holding a man’s hand, and how much work is still left to do in order to ameliorate the status of queer and trans Canadians.

         “A colonizer of a Croatian descent helping a Libyan become a colonizer,” I said to her, giggling.

         “Yup!” she smiled.

         Later, in line to be admitted into the courtroom for the ceremony, I took a few selfies to ensure that I looked as gorgeous as I could. I was wearing my black prom suit and, what I consider to be, my fancy shoes from three years before; a black tie and a white shirt with black dots, which I purchased two days ahead of the ceremony. In the courtroom, I was so enraptured that I ran out of thoughts, a rare occurrence for my brain. I only gazed at the Canadian flag while smiling at my friend, who took photos of me—ecstasy beaming through her eyes. I did notice, though, the racial diversity among the staff: A Brown hijabi lady welcoming the citizens-to-be, another Brown woman stating the rules of the courtroom and introducing the judge, who, I remarked, is of an Asian descent. So enthusiastic to become a citizen was I that I didn’t even contemplate the political significance of the presence of a non-White judge, and whether he was still confronted with perpetual alienation due to his non-White ethnicity. Does he get asked where he’s really from as he grabs coffee before conducting citizenship ceremonies? Does he even drink coffee? For the best results, make it a sildenafil cialis Continued point to elicit that pain and then giving it a try. This dysfunction is quite common among women and to help those women cialis buy have been manufactured and launched in the drug market in the form of conventional allopathic medicines and chemical based cosmetics. Readiness to 50mg generic viagra travel from on-shore to off-shore sites can be essential for specified positions available. buy viagra cialis There were consumers who could just not get over with the test. I pondered upon none of that until weeks later. In fact, I was even no longer bothered to pledge allegiance to the monarch, for I had comprehended the meaning of the oath in the few months prior to the ceremony: Canada is personified through the queen and, in pledging allegiance to the queen, I’m pledging allegiance to my country.

When the judge spoke, I didn’t pay much attention to his words. All of my strength and focus went toward holding in my tears. I didn’t desire to stream another St. Lawrence. I felt my feet rooted to the ground as I stood for the oath and, later, the anthem, reminding myself that it’s a stolen land with which I fell in love. I repeated the words to the oath in English and French as loudly as I could, and sang the anthem from the bottom of my heart without shedding a tear. I don’t usually mind crying in public; I’ve cried at coffee-shops, buses, and sidewalks. That day, however, I knew that my lachrymose eyes would go on for hours, if I let them be. (I’ve been sobbing ever since, whenever I remember the ceremony or that I now have a home).

Afterwards, I meandered down the sunlit streets of Vancouver alongside my friend, uttering, probably more than I should’ve, as if in an attempt to pronounce to the whole world and, more importantly, myself my new status as a Canadian citizen: “It’s my first time crossing the road as a Canadian citizen.” “My first time looking back at you as a Canadian citizen.” “My first time drinking water as a Canadian.” I reiterated sentences along these lines for hours, even after we took the ferry back home to Victoria, even after I lost myself to the reflection of lights on the immovable waters of the Pacific.

I was born and raised in a country that hated me, and that, despite my intense desire not to hate it, it forced me to hate it, too. At a young age, I realized that hate, just like love, is overwhelming. I immigrated to Canada from Libya with my single mother and two brothers in 2013. The story of how my family ended up here, I feel, is for my mother to tell and I’ve no right to divulge it. I still wonder what my life would’ve been like had I stayed in Libya, envisioning myself like debris of a hideous building or the ghostly remnants of a corpse. It comes to my mind, too, how much more arduous it would’ve been to tread through life as an openly queer man in a country with no respect for human rights in general, let alone sexual minorities.

Canada is not a utopia—we live in anything but a post-racial or gay friendly society—but it’s in no way comparable to the country I was born in and never loved. I’m fully mindful of my privileges as a colonizer and a citizen, and I’ve got so much faith in this country. Canada has hurt and disillusioned me quite a lot, but it had also embraced me long ago and I embraced it back. In spite of, and because of, everything, Canada remains the home I’d been looking for since I was a child.

Egyptian Proverb Pt. 2 By A. Mustafa

she finds me awashed, lost /  in the shallow of the prairie 
boasts slick wet promises / seduces even, my marrow
strokes my spine / a signal story:
 
    of fires amidst the desert of Dakhla
    white moths flocked to the flames
    each wave drawn into the bright
    pinions turned to ash of impulse        
    these one-night butterflies called Leila
 
to fly into the flames/ to know the saccharine lick
for even the moment / though brief of beauty
there existed enough light / to yield hot surrender.
 
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lies told honestly in three propositions by Sahar Khraibani


1.
 
I wrote a poem on the subway
 
We drove across the Sonoran desert at 10 pm
And it felt like
Two in the morning
The I-10 at night is pitch black
But you can see the stars
Like you’ve never seen them before
In your little hometown
Polluted by lights
And a thick layer of smog
From nitrogen
And all the cigarettes
Everyone smoked
 
On the F train
Passing West 4th St
Sitting next to a man I don’t know
His skin is darker than mine
I don’t want to be scared
But I am
K told me about the reservations
And how casinos are important
For native people
It felt odd
To not know any of these things
And then to know them

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2.
 
Our histories are merging
As mine is forming
 
I never write poems on the train
I’d been always preoccupied
With my destination
And what station’s next
And the passed out man
And the sad woman crying
 
We have some favorite spots in the city
This is how it becomes a home
When you stop needing directions
To a destination unknown
 
I woke up this morning
Sulking sulking
Sulking
“Stress paralysis is real”
I tell S
 
A guy in Koreatown is really pissed on the phone
Because a dumplings spot he used to frequent 10 years ago is gone

3.
 
We have no sense of history
Yet are so embedded in it
It follows us everywhere
 
Drove down Embassy Row
In Washington DC
One man standing under the rain with an umbrella
“I am the Sudan revolution”
 
The I
Stands in between 
History
And the reclaiming of it
 
“The great force of history
Comes from the fact fact we carry
It within us, are unconsciously
Controlled by it… history is literally
Present in all that we do”
Wrote James Baldwin
 
 
I have no sense of history
In the passenger seat
In the car
Driving across the Sonoran Desert
Across Embassy Row in Washington DC
I can’t reclaim it.
 

Maskoon by Sara Elkamel

We clung to our dreams like ants to sugar.
In them we walked, we meandered uncertain,
we strained to remember

colors of the sea. Then in dream after dream
the homes of our mothers
and fathers crumbled.

They gave them away.
Like clowns, we writhed
and we screamed. Now we can never go back.

When we rise, we assemble the bones
we’ve collected. We toss orange after orange into the water,
watch them float.

We are a queenless colony, feeding on itself.
We recall the crowns
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one side sewn exactly, pink lines inclined like lashes,
the other gouged out by our feet.

When we were in the desert,

it was difficult to find the end of things.
We dreamed we danced and bled,
and climbed skies for the goats we loved.

Here, someone
asks: is it like this every night?
But the night does not answer.

Dust

by Lana Habash

Stone streets of an old city,
carts lined with rings of fresh bread,
seeded sesame, the scent
of coffee mixed with zalabieh,
where songs of prayer mark time–
here, the hand of God is pressed
in stone. Touch your hand there
palm to palm,
and time will pass
through your fingers,
more enduring than belief. Uniformed men
set against the sky, the dawn
ignores them. A young boy stands,
circled by men, guns
slung over shoulders
like shopping bags. The boy
leans back, delivers the blow,
runs. He knows where and how.
And like the Sea the merchants part,
then rushing back,
one current now, an old man slows
the push of his cart, a woman
slows too and smiles.

***

Stories We Tell

How Haja stood at the door,
hands raised to her son
Don’t come in
with those.

How he took
the grenades
from each pocket
as if they were lemons,
with a smile that said,
There’s no need for all that.
Or how the khuwana
stopped our men,
bent over the road,
the last pieces of home
on their backs,
how the men
lifted their heads
to ask Did you sell it
furnished?

Or how the checkpoint soldier
questioned the farmer
What do you
feed your chickens?

day after day,
then turned him back
for the wrong answer.
How finally the farmer
said with a shrug,
I give them money.
They decide for themselves.

Or the young boys loaded
on an army truck,
set free
by pleading hands,
women
who cry My son!
and tear their hair.
How the women took
the puzzled faces
to their own,
saying, Go to your own home now,
child.

How on the morning
of tawjihi,
the schoolboy
arrived early,
stopped at the designated
knot on the string,
threw down his books,
took off his shirt,
to demand
that the beating
be quick.

Or how the teacher,
now the line
that won’t
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laughed
as she picked up the stone,

The land
knows
who loves it.

***

Stories We Don’t

Women who carry life
give birth to the dead
at the waiting points
on the open road.

An olive tree on its side,
gnarled fingers reach to the sky,

land is not place.

Of course there was the house
lost,
child loaded
onto a garbage truck,
eyes toward home,
eyes always toward home,
and of course there were those
not so lucky as that,
who died on the long walk,

and of course for the living
the attic came next,
the cold floor,
the seven bodies.
Yes, there were tents, walls, stone,
perhaps a house,
and the names our children bear:
Jaffa
Haifa
Beisan
Jenin,

what a people must swallow:
the hollows of a culture not ours,
the land wet with blood
of others like us
thrown into
the singular
strangeness
of exile,
the thirty years it took
to see their shadows
on every Washington and Main,
this land of ghosts,
the outlines of a brother here,
a sister there,
their eyes, accusing
their eyes, the future.

Maybe regret is passed on
to daughters.
We carry it with us,
pieces of home
on our backs,
one camp to another,
waiting.

And yes,
we remember, still see
her, sister, bearing life,
as she begged for maya
on the dusty road, see her stumble
on the stones,
push herself
up,
bearing life,
stumble again,
till finally
she lay still,
the dust
from the road
mixed with her hair
and dry lips
bearing life–

dust
means something different
to us.