I Had Never Seen a Dead Man Before By Hedy Habra

Until my father-in-law died that summer in Tucson, Arizona

He seemed to sleep
in his suit and tie,
expressionless,
the color of death freezing
his shrunken features,
almost youthful in his eighties
as if an artist’s pencil
performed a final facelift,
inverting lines
for a last farewell.

I knelt on the velvet
rest in prayer.
thinking of the fig tree
we once planted together,
of how he always
saved the juiciest fig
for me: “Here,” he’d say
“this one’s from your tree…
see how well I care for it?”

∞ ∞

I felt a pang in my chest,
leapt years and years back
to a January morning: a young
cialis soft uk This is a little bit dangerous, not only because they are naturally defensive of their child, but also these parents are practiced at trying to make their child’s life easier. Most people have surrendered to the phone as a sort of appendage and carry cheapest cialis one with them all the time. One small change in viagra on line uk the way you respond to that feeling is your choice. Kamagra jelly Australia is the most preferred medicine to viagra ordination overcome the critical condition and live a healthy sexual life. child, taken away for the day,
only to return to a house
filled with absence,
where all had forgotten
how to smile.
I was never told what had
happened that day,
in Heliopolis. “Your father
is in the hospital,” they said.

I awaited your return,
week after week,
unable to understand
the silent procession,
charcoaled silhouettes
shading spaces
once forbidden to
our clumsy hands,
beveled doors
now wide-open,
black skirts hiding pink
damask silk, flowing
over gilded Louis XVI
chairs and Bergères
like a flock of Egyptian
ravens, threatening
my caged love-birds
placed at the balcony edge

The Ferry by M.R. Azar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This must be where they are kept, he thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short there are many considerations with anti-depressants. viagra on line recommended for you Male unproductiveness treatment and female unproductiveness treatment tadalafil purchase both are different things. This will tell you if the site view this raindogscine.com canada viagra buy is suspicious. Dry your hands before taking care of this viagra australia no prescription prescription. After scribbling several pages, Karim stumbled upon a revelation and, with it, a renewed vigor. The dim room brightened to his eyes and the low ceiling lifted.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He Sounded Just Like Me by Lisa Luxx

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

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

I spoke not of those things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then?
I watch him leave.

Sukoon Interviews Lilas Taha author of Bitter Almonds

Rewa Zeinati: Lilas Taha, congratulations on winning the 2017 International Book Awards for your book entitled Bitter Almonds, published by Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press. Tell us a little about the process of starting the idea for this book, up until the moment it was published and then nominated for an award.

Lilas Taha: Thank you for the opportunity to talk about my book and writing journey.

As a child of a Palestinian refugee father, I always wanted to tell the story of what happened to his generation—scream it out loud, if I could. Anger and frustration at the injustice of it all accompanied me through the years, much like most Palestinians who grew up watching their parent(s) try to move forward, while clinging to a land—a world—often described as perfect or magical, yet unreachable. Living in exile, my father carried his Palestine in his heart and managed to plant its seeds in mine and my brother’s. Hope flourished, and I arrived to adulthood determined to do the same for my children.

On my father’s last visit to me in the US, however, I saw something different in his eyes, a lack of luster, something was missing. After being displaced three times in his life, hope deserted him. That realization hit me very hard, and I struggled to engage him, to bring him back from the brink of despair. It pained me to see him that way; knowing he would not return to his beloved Palestine. So I started writing about his familiar world, involving him in discussions and challenging him to express more, talk more, remember more. Our daily sessions, when I read to him what I’ve written the night before, became our time together. We argued a lot, stepped into dangerous emotional zones often, and sometimes, we sailed into happy places. I wanted to create characters he could connect to and care about, and describe events as he and others in his generation experienced them, not as history books recorded them. That was my goal, and that’s how Bitter Almonds was born.

It took me a year to write the story and I was on my final edits when a lady, who had read my first book Shadows of Damascus, attended a writer’s event in Kuwait and mentioned my work to one of the editors present. At the time, Hamad Bin Khalifa University Press was under the umbrella of Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishers. The editor got in touch with me, and I sent her my manuscript for Bitter Almonds. A publication contract followed. The book was released world-wide, translated into the Norwegian language, and will come out in Arabic translation January, 2018.

Being nominated for, and winning, the 2017 International Book Awards in the Multicultural Fiction category provides wonderful exposure and is definitely the icing on the cake.

RZ: Your novel is thematically, among other things, about displacement and exile. How do these themes tie into your own life and experiences?

LT: I grew up in Kuwait among a mix of Arab nationalities. I spent most summer vacations in Syria with my mother’s family and my father’s relatives who settled there after their removal from Palestine in 1948. I was fortunate to absorb all cultures, but there was always a sense of being in transition, functioning in temporary mode: living in one place where my parents worked (Kuwait), visiting another where most members of my family lived (Syria), and yearning for a land I never experienced (Palestine).

With the Gulf War, I lost the patch of stability I was floating on. Through difficult circumstances, I ended up in a new land (US) speaking a different language. I pursued my studies, married a wonderful man—a Palestinian—and tried to build a secure future and a family. Eventually, my parents joined me, but by then, they had to resettle again (Jordan). And after the war in Syria erupted, some members of my mother’s family also became refugees. So displacement and exile were persistent companions in my life.

RZ: You are an electrical engineer by training and you mention that creative writing is your passion. Why didn’t you pursue this passion earlier on?

LT: Ever since I was a child, I’ve written short stories and personal reflections, but always in Arabic, and I never really entertained the idea of publication. I kept it as a hobby as I earned my engineering degrees and raised a family. Writing took me to my comfort zone, a respite from the stresses of life, and it stayed as a personal escape tool.

When the sad events started unraveling in Syria in 2011, the uncertainty and worry about my relatives frustrated me to the point that I started writing a story to reflect my emotional upheaval, but I used the English language for the first time. With persistent support from my husband and friends, I joined a writer’s guild and read parts of the story to the mix of writers. Their feedback was surprisingly positive, which encouraged me to keep writing in English and, a year later, I had a published novel. Bitter Almonds came next accompanied by my desire to join writers who shine a light on the Palestinian struggle and other issues pertaining to the Middle East for readers in the west.

I can’t see myself not writing. In an irrational way, I think of myself a girl hugging her security blanket. I hope to be able to stay on this writing track, perhaps publishing original works in Arabic, too.

RZ: What was/is the most terrifying part about your writing journey? Its beginning, or now? Or both?

LT: I don’t think it is the beginning. When I started this journey, I really had no clue what the writing and publishing worlds are like. Don’t they say ignorance is a bliss? I can relate to that. I just pushed forward, learning as I go, and the more information I gathered, the more aware I became of how rocky this path is. After all the hard work I pour into a book—my baby—I let go of it for readers to judge and criticize. There are no training wheels to gradually lift from its bike, no kindergarten to slowly remove it from my care. Once my book is released, the baby suddenly becomes an adult.

Therefore, I’m in constant learning mode. I want to produce a better product, a higher quality book, a more expressive novel. I don’t believe there’s an end of a road for a writer. There’s no ultimate goal to reach. That in itself brings me to the terrified state.

RZ: Your book is dedicated to the loving memory of your father. Tell us a little more about that.

LT: I’ve explained how I started writing Bitter Almonds to engage my father. Sadly, he passed away about three weeks before I signed the publishing contract, so he never really knew I got the story out. But I believe he is smiling at me from his special place up above, perhaps with a new twinkle in his eye.

RZ: You’ve moved around a lot while growing up. What or where is ‘home’ to you?

LT: Although I have many places where I feel at home, in my mind and heart, the absolute definition of home has always been Palestine, a place I had only heard and read about growing up, but didn’t have the chance to see until fairly recently as an adult. Palestine holds a powerful grip on my emotions and imagination.

My Arabic dialect is colored by my mother’s Syrian accent, and sometimes I surprise people when I passionately talk Palestinian, even have my sincerity brushed aside because of it. That infuriates me. The feeling of being Palestinian has been talked about in so many ways, and written in plenty of poetry, wonderful books and articles. Yet, I think it’s an indescribable state of existence. All we can do is hold on to it, try to creatively express it, and pass it on to the next generation.

Just as my mother instilled in me her fabulous culture and values, of which I am very proud, my father did the same, and the both of them together created a special environment independent of the geographical location where we actually lived. My husband and I tried to do the same for our children living in the US.

Spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually speaking, Palestine was always, still is, and will forever be my true home.

These filters are mainly viagra 50mg canada intended for broader documentation such as space planning and design changes, but in theory they could also be applied directly. Further they take a lot of time for accepting submission. buy viagra pill It has the best cialis viagra effects for erectile dysfunction in men. What is the secret online cialis to a happy and healthy life. RZ: Would you describe Bitter Almonds as more of a political story or more of a love story? Or maybe love is political anyway?

LT: I would describe it as a human story at the center of a political pie with a slice of love, a dose of culture, a pinch of history, and a dash of hope. I don’t believe that romantic love solely transcends borders and politics, for I see love of country and homeland is just as enchanting.

RZ: Are any of the characters in your novel based on, or inspired by, people you’ve met or know personally?

LT: The simple and straight forward answer is no. There isn’t a specific character based on someone I know or met. But I used my experiences with the people in my life to see my characters with clarity and shape them to the way they turned out. My father’s personality was very complex, and I borrowed some of his traits to create both Omar and Marwan in Bitter Almonds, so in a way, their combined personalities were inspired by some of my father’s attributes.

Additionally, I’ve always admired the sincerity of my teachers, and the ingenuity and strength of the women in my family, starting with my mother’s ability to always see the big picture. I drew on all of that to develop the different female characters in the book.

RZ: You were born in Kuwait to a Syrian mother and a Palestinian father, and you left for the United States after the Gulf War. Tell us a little about your experience living in the US, in terms of identity, exile, “otherness” and/or belonging.

LT: Although I was exposed to the western world as a child through trips to Europe that my parents took us on, I experienced cultural shock just like every immigrant who arrived to the New World. At first, everything was difficult. I missed moving within a big homogeneous community. The little things I took for granted became very important and even essential. I longed for the smells, sounds, and tastes of the Middle East. I remember I had a panic attack the first time I talked one-on-one with my professor when I was studying for my master’s degree.

As time went on, I eased into American life, graduated, married, and moved to another state to start a family. My husband and I made the effort to keep our children within a sphere that combined mainstream America and the Arab American community around us. Furthermore, living in the big mix of ethnicities and backgrounds of the US helped me to assimilate while proudly maintaining my cultural heritage.

The sense of being an outsider diminished, but it didn’t completely disappear. I’m thankful for that. I know where I belong, but of all the places I lived in, I’m not sure where I don’t belong.

RZ: What advise would you give budding writers who might be afraid of pursuing this path?

LT: Don’t write as if someone is looking over your shoulder. Write what you want, more so if it is difficult and thorny. Write what is begging to be released, and be patient, for a writer’s vehicle moves slowly. Don’t let your ego stand in the way of improvement, and always, always, seek honest feedback.

RZ: Which writers were you influenced by while growing up? Which writers are you drawn to now?

LT: Growing up, I read most books by the known Arab geniuses, namely Naguib Mahfouz, Ghassan Kanafani, Taha Hussein, Gibran Khalil Gibran, Anis Mansour and many more. I also read a good number of the translated literary classics for western writers like Earnest Hemingway, Agatha Christie, Jane Austin, the Brontë sisters, and Leo Tolstoy to name a few. As I gained more command of the English language, I re-read those classics in English, which provided me with additional levels of enjoyment and different angles of understanding for the same books.

Currently, I’m drawn to Arab writers such as Susan Abulhawa and Saud Alsanousi. Other writers I like are Khaled Hosseini, and Jodi Picoult.

RZ: What are you working on right now?

LT: I’m working on two novels in parallel. Something I haven’t attempted before. One is a sequel to my third novel, which will hopefully come out next year. The plot is current in time and it deals with American Palestinians connecting with their roots and themes relating to resistance.

The other novel I’m working on explores a rarely touched topic of Palestinian life, and is entirely set in the Middle East.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sukoon interviews Arab-American poet and scholar Mohja Kahf

Immigration, Feminism, Revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


RZ: What are you working on right on?

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

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

Two poems by Mohja Kahf

Flora Fauna Syria
By Mohja Kahf

plum trees
Syria
cherry trees
Syria
janeric trees
Syria
like me, like you
Syrian LGBTQ
police brutality
Razan Ghazzawi
free press
student protest
city protest
water hoses
electrocuting billyclubs
live fire
laurel trees
laurel soap she handmade
mama, what he brought me
crates of grapes
and underneath the grapes,
my love packed the apple crates
starvation sieges
Yarmouk, Khaled
Ferguson, Michael
Daraya, Ghiyath
water bottles
Standing Rock
drought
water-sharing
food-sharing
truckbed of eggplants
sarin
transparency
tanks
Tianenmen Square
Tahrir Square
Daraa al-Balad
Clock Tower Square
Bayda village
I am a free woman, daughter of a free woman
local bodies
local council
power-sharing
solar panels
power-hoarding
president-for-life
Adra Women’s Prison
conscience
unconscious
electrocution
torture tire
Razan Zeitouneh
cats of Douma
olive tree
orchard
mountain
holy sea
rape farms
field clinics
field morgues
torched crops
scorched lungs
kheerota
azadi
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I am a human being
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walnut trees
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and underneath the crate of grapes
my love packed the apple crates

Aleppo the Necklace Broke All the Words Fell Apart
By Mohja Kahf

oud
my spine
Aleppo
Aleppo
pine nuts
pistachio
provisions
pizmonim
they have taken the one I love
cluster
melody
embroidery
woolens
pillow
swollen
Aleppo
sworn to me
evil eye
turquoise
tiny blue buttons
earlobe soft flesh
thin gold hoop
blood river
maqam
adhan
seeron ahkchig
a dream in quarter tones
lowered lashes
bone juts wound pus
gouged gagged
terrified
Aleppo love
answer me
alarm
tocsin
siren
music
words
use-
less
amulet
madstone
lodestone
amaun, amaun
Halab Halab
Halabi

Suffer the Little Children

By Marguerite Bouvard

It took me too many days to muster the courage
to pick up the newspaper with the front-page photo
of Abu Anas Ishara’s three-year-old daughter
half naked, her sweet face held in a scream
of extreme pain and confusion
from yet another chemical shell
that landed on her house
enveloping her parents and her newly born
sister in dust and foul smelling
smoke. Her scream remains
without answer, with no arms
to hold her, no medical care in Marea. Her skin
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chambers of a heart, it will be bathed
in tears, it will be answered by
a mother’s loving voice.

Marea is an agricultural village in Syria

PALMYRA

By Marguerite G. Bouvard

the cradle of ancient civilizations
where monuments inspired by
Greco-Romans and Persians
hold up the sky, and time

stands still, when my hands can’t
reach out or encircle the children
who were unable to flee
or to rebuild the walls of bombed out

houses, are unable to light
candles of hope when night and day
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