Mizna: Summer 2016, Vol 17.1

Mizna

Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America

Volume 17.1 2016

St. Paul, Minnesota

Publisher Mizna, Inc. Executive and Artistic Director Lana Salah Barkawi Managing Editor Lisa Adwan Curator of Visual Art Heba Y. Amin Selection Committee Lisa Adwan Lana Salah Barkawi Sarah Najla Dillard Meher Khan Moheb Soliman Program Director Moheb Soliman Program Assistants Sonia Ali Sarah Najla Dillard Communications Assistant Meher Khan Board Members Abir Abukhadra Charlotte Karem Albrecht Ziad Amra Amy Kamel Nahid Khan Linda Mokdad Dipankar Mukherjee Rabi‘h Nahas P. Niny Salem

Mizna is a nonprofit arts organization that promotes contemporary expressions of Arab American culture. In addition to publishing this literary journal, Mizna produces the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival and offers classes, readings, performances, art exhibits, and community events showcasing local, national, and international Arab and Arab American artists.

Mizna is an Arabic word describing a desert cloud that holds the promise of rain and respite.

Mizna is published by Mizna, Inc., 2446 University Ave. W., Suite 115, St. Paul, MN 55114. Copyright 2016 Mizna, Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this journal may be reproduced without the consent of Mizna. To carry Mizna in your place of business, call 612-788-6920 or e-mail us at mizna@mizna.org. For more information, visit mizna.org.

This publication is made possible by the support of individual subscribers, generous donors, and by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

Special Thanks Barbara Lund Daniel Lurvey Emmanuel Ortiz Bao Phi

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Transliteration and Non-English Text.................................................... v Amir Hussain

“Unmanned”................................................. 1

Majid Naficy

“Escape to Lesbos”........................................ 2

Suheir Hammad

“Princes and Queens”.................................... 3

Dhuha Dheyaa Mina Attar Isa Mohammed Minatullah A. Alobaidi Zainab Mera

Letters from Iraqi Millenials Untitled.................................................. 4 “In a Broken Country”.................................. 5 Untitled................................................. 6 “Rebellion”................................................ 8 “Young and Not So Optimistic”.................... 10

Tammy Lakkis

“Border Control”........................................... 13

Gina Valdés

“Azafrán”................................................................. 14

Jennifer Zeynab Maccani

“Everything Blooms”.................................... 16

Ismail Khalidi

“The Wretched of the Earth, or Questions Posed the Day After Paris Takes Fire”......... 21

Susan Muaddi Darraj

“Words That Have Haunted Me”................. 26

Nicole Olweean

“Blood Is Where Certain Types of Love Are Stored”....................................................... 28 “Our Lebanon”.............................................. 29

Heba Y. Amin

Visual Art...................................................... 30 Interview: “Criticality and Dissent”.............. 39

Kamelya Youssef

“Beginnings”................................................. 44

Cover art by Heba Y. Amin. “Antiquity Thieves,” 2014. C-Print. Fayoum, Egypt. From the project Objects in Exile, described on p. 34.

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Eman Hassan

“Forests Lean Behind Us Now”................... 47 “Transport” ................................................... 48

Paul Zarou

“The Grocery”............................................... 49

Jazelle Jajeh

“How to Be Clean Again”.............................. 53

Shebana Coelho

“Mercury to Gaza”........................................ 56

Shadab Zeest Hashmi

“Sultana Morayma: the Last Queen of al-Andalus”................................................ 57

Nagat Ali and Heather H. Thomas

“Counterspirit”............................................. 59

Michael Jewell

“Celestial Navigation”................................... 62 “The Street of Looms”.................................. 63 “The Final Word”......................................... 64

Dina El Dessouky

“First Doll”.................................................... 65

Ali Hazzah

“Agaza”.......................................................... 68

Contributors ........................................................................................... 73 Donors .................................................................................................... 76 Submission Guidelines .......................................................................... 77 Subscriptions ......................................................................................... 78

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TRANSLITERATION AND NON-ENGLISH TEXT Transliteration The writings published in this journal often include transliterated Arabic words, and, for the most part, the transliterations are left as the author’s own. There are, of course, many dialects of Arabic and perhaps an even greater number of customs for transliteration, with no universally accepted standard transliteration scheme. Because of this, and inspired by the treatment of Arabic terms in Food for Our Grandmothers: Writings by Arab-American and Arab-Canadian Feminists, edited by Joe Kadi, this journal will seek to reflect the diversity of dialects that ring true for our individual authors rather than imposing one standard.

Italicization of Non-English Words While it is general practice to italicize words not found in standard English dictionaries, non-English words printed in this journal are not italicized. This decision is based mainly on the question of audience.

Many writers and readers within our community are familiar with Arabic, and to set Arabic words in italics would be to announce their foreignness or otherness in a way that does not reflect this familiarity.

Readers unfamiliar with Arabic or other languages that appear in the journal are also a welcome part of our audience. Even if the meaning of an unfamiliar word is not immediately apparent from its context, the invested reader can seek to learn it from other sources, or perhaps be comfortable with the discomfort of not knowing.

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Amir Hussain Unmanned The smoke melted into the air.

The boy’s clothes had been wrapped in it all morning.

Over the hill, into the clouds, his body flung, landed in a garden patch of soil and root vegetables.

“Do not look,” they say to his father, who is there holding his head on one knee.

“It came from nowhere,” they tell him.

“But it feels like it fell from the depths of hell.”

Blood pours into the vines, then into the concrete, then further into the soil, like a dark shadow.

His sister lies next to him, limbless, her face turned toward earth. Her eyes, white as sky.

Cranes pass over the clouds.

They soar over their cities, with machine eyes.

Yesterday draws near.

Wings move in the air like statues broken in pieces.

Where lies the human in this dust and rubble?

Where lies the human in a world that allows this to happen?

Consider now a family at home. The sun falls over their heads as they sleep.

Suddenly, shells break into bones.

A man rushes in. A woman falls to her knees.

Here lies their son and daughter, burned and blackened like two lambs. “Do not look,” they say to the father who is now standing on one leg reaching out to them, without hands, without fingers, without arms. M

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Majid Naficy Escape to Lesbos

September 20, 2015

In Ma‘arra, the poet Abul ‘Ala Was called a death-worthy infidel And a thousand years after his death His statue was beheaded.

I witnessed this destruction And knew it was not a safe place.

So I fled to Turkey And along with Syrian refugees Sailed from Izmir to Lesbos Where the poet Sappho Spoke of love.

Now I am in a camp of refugees With a number on my chest And a sandwich in my hand.

Oh, black clouds Passing borders fearlessly I am neither Odysseus who returns home Nor Aeneas who makes a homeland in exile.

I have escaped death And want to remain alive Like Abul ‘Ala Who survived through his poetry. M

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Suheir Hammad Princes and Queens we are homegirls at halftime heavy rain the singer in a do rag in a sky blue suit in a tangerine top raindrops sequin lens and sparkle screen his face postered girlhoods oooohhh the do rag been thrown perm rising up on him a poem in heels walking tight ass high notes downpour the guitar do the damn thing this is what life feels like up against a wall and all over the scale impossible women love each through hell through raspberry smashed gloss smacked smart mouths tender heads braided hard rocks we are not the same woman but the same kind we thank god we don’t love the same man but the same kind rare prince so pretty and mimi humming hennessey honey glazed we’re eating wings rolling bud we burn fierce wounded blaze injuries sunday night bowls in harlem a game and we dance to his song weather where our hearts are doves are thunder in deluge are crying violet oceans in bloom M

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Letters from Iraqi Millenials These essays were written by Iraqi students from Baghdad and Hillah who chose to attend college in the Kurdish Region of Iraq.

Responding to the prompt, “What is it like to be a young person in Iraq these days?” and collected by a former teacher of theirs, Andrew Slater, what follows are their responses—in their own words.

Dhuha Dheyaa What is it like to live in Iraq? Well, I don’t know. For me, it’s something I’m used to. Perhaps it is outrageous for others; but for me, it’s, well—I know it’s not normal, but it’s the only thing I’ve lived so far. For as long as I remember, politics has been a topic of discussion for Iraqis of all ages. The absence of security, money, and satisfaction has been a permanent feature of my life. ISIS, sectarian war, Arab-Kurdish conflict, and Turkey’s interference are all things lurking in the minds of most Iraqis. That all hasn’t stopped anyone from living. My name does not hold much importance and neither does my story. I am a young Arab girl living in the Kurdish Region of Iraq. I’m relatively poor—not living-in-tents poor, but the kind of poor where you are constantly stressed about every dinar.

For the past ten years I’ve been so accustomed to uncertainty that it has become quite difficult to plan ahead. This issue has two sides to it. One side is that I actually don’t worry about things. I don’t worry about not having money in the long run or the possibility of dying. The other side is that, unfortunately, I don’t have much strength or will to fight for things. Living here, especially with the ongoing changes and with Iraq losing its territory to ISIS or Turkish interference, has made the loss of things quite natural. If my own country can’t keep a piece of land, why should I lament the loss of anything—from a friend to a book? There seems to be a vast fire consuming everything, but even in the heart of all this scorching heat, we still try to find something beautiful to hold onto. People still go to work, get married, have children, buy houses, and most importantly, fall in love.

For me, love is the only rescue boat in this ocean of chaos. I’ve been in love for quite some time now, and every day it fills me with an unusual sense of hope. Love, for me, is really beautiful yet terrifying. It’s so beautiful to wake up conjuring the still image of the ones we love in our first waking moments, to anticipate that moment of meeting, and to feel that touch of their hands for the first time every day. But love is so grand, it’s horrible in its beauty as it consumes you and conquers all your soul. You are forced to give up your commitment to not planning, you are forced to fear loss and to think about it, even when you know that you are doomed to suffer from it. Love goes against everything that the Iraqi environment has forced you -4-

to adapt to. It fills you with hope of a better tomorrow, although you don’t know for sure that there will be a tomorrow. You fear dying, because you know what your death would do to that other person.

So, I, despite all the pain, death, blood, and tears that have covered the streets of Iraq, selfishly think only about love. I’m not sure if that makes me normal or abnormal considering the circumstances.

The economic crisis has troubled the lives of pretty much everyone, but for me, finding a way to marry the one I love is the dilemma that never escapes my mind. Being from different cultural backgrounds, so many things can stand in our way. In Iraq, marriage usually happens between the families of the bride and groom first, and later on between the people that are actually getting married.

It might seem like a small problem for others, but here in Iraq it is a big deal if the families don’t get along. It is an even bigger deal if one family is religious and the other is not. That one stupid piece of cloth that covers the keratin fibers that grow from the scalp can make a huge difference in this case.

Each day, a struggle erupts in my mind. A conflict between the lessons taught by Iraq and by love. Iraq tells me to give up, because, just like pretty much anything else, that person will go away and fall into oblivion. One day, I will forget the sight of those wide blue eyes.

Nothing is worth the struggle. Maybe death will be upon me soon; perhaps it is here already. But love gently whispers each day, perhaps I’ll live longer; maybe I just won’t lose him and all this struggle will be some fun story to share with our kids. Maybe, just maybe, there won’t be any struggle, and happiness and serenity won’t be just two words in the dictionary. I don’t know if we must say goodbye to all the beautiful things, or if there is somewhere out there where I won’t feel this agony.

Mina Attar In a Broken Country When will we ever see peace? This is the question that most Iraqis have been asking every year. A new year has started. It is 2016. People around the world were celebrating the new year at a time when many families here in Iraq are displaced, have lost close family members, and have lost their homes. Since the late ‘70s, when Saddam Hussein came to power, people have suffered, been through wars, witnessed pain and misery—and Iraq hasn’t seen peace since. Even after the 2003 war, the country has been through a lot of ups and downs—politically, economically, and in terms of security. And now, since 2014 and since the attack of ISIS on Mosul, the conditions keep getting worse. Iraq has never witnessed this number of internally displaced people, around 4,000,000.

I am a Kurdish girl living in the Kurdistan Region, but I was born and raised in Baghdad. I grew up under the terror and fear of the -5-

Baath party. I remember every morning when my mother prepared me for school, she used to tell me, “Never talk badly about Saddam Hussein in public, even though he is a bad man, because they will take your father away and you will never see him again.” Such strong words to say to a 7-year-old. It is the feeling of fear that almost every Iraqi has lived with for years and years till this day. Also, I remember the American planes used to bomb Iraq back in 1997–1998. It was for short periods of time, as small threats and warnings to Saddam Hussein. I remember very well the sound of the air-raid siren, then hearing the bombing and the gunfire. It was late at night when I heard that terrifying sound, and I looked out the window to see the sky turned red from anti-aircraft fire. Till this day, when I hear that sound of the siren in movies, I get scared and my body shakes. That is a typical experience for a child in this country.

Now I am 23 and I recently graduated from the American University in Iraq–Sulaimani. I was lucky enough to find a job in spite of the political and economic situation in the Kurdish Region and the rest of Iraq, and their poor relationship with each other. Now many people have lost their jobs and the new graduates cannot find work, and that pushes the youth to leave the country hoping for a better life. In addition, the salaries of the public sector workers are not being paid because, according to the Kurdistan regional government, they are broke. It is not easy to live under these conditions. Even though we are safe so far, economically and socially it has become unbearable. Also, many families now have lost their fathers, brothers, and other male family members serving in the Peshmerga forces fighting ISIS. Kurdistan hasn’t witnessed this much death since the ‘90s. When I leave the house, it is obvious on people’s faces. They are worn-out, tired, and depressed everywhere you go.

We live in a country that has no clear future. We live in a place where the old are tired and the youth are willing to do anything to leave. It is a conversation had daily with my friends to try to see a path for our future, to figure out how to survive under this pressure.

It is sad seeing all the people broken like this, each one in a different way. All you hear all day is that people have no money because no one is getting paid. Everyone wonders how they’ll manage to live and to send their children to school and to pay the rent. Even private businesses are closing and letting people go because they don’t have the ability to pay them. Living in this country is always about survival. It is a broken country, and prayers for a better future are all we’ve got.

Isa Mohammed How is life in Iraq? That is a question many Westerners like to pose once you say you are Iraqi. Let me offer a few words on how life is in Iraq. Life in Iraq is as normal as life anywhere. An example? On December 18, I, like many fans of Star Wars around the world, went to the theater to watch the premiere. As the movie ended and the credits were rolling, I was thinking to myself, like every other Star Wars -6-

fan would think, “I can’t wait for the sequel.” The only difference is that I wasn’t worried that during the intervening period of time I would have nothing to do but wait, I was worried about the possibility of a car exploding near me and that I’d die before the sequel. This is the difference between life in Iraq and life elsewhere—the uncertainty. You never know what is coming; the element of surprise lives with you on a daily basis.

However, this is what makes Iraq special to me. I live in Baghdad, a city that I’m in love with. My relationship to Baghdad is almost like Romeo’s relationship with Juliet. I’m in love with her, but everything in her rejects me. Her beauty captures me every day. But I’m rejected by everyone in this old city. I hate politics, and everyone in Baghdad seems to be immersed in politics. I’m not very religious but I’m extremely spiritual; not many in Baghdad differentiate between the two. I’m honest about my contradictions; others aren’t. I feel that I fell in love with a woman that agrees with me, but everyone around her doesn’t. Maybe in another time Baghdad and I would be a perfect match, but I’m sure that now, we aren’t. But once you are in love, you have to accept to fight for what you love, even when all the odds are against you. I may think from time to time that I could abandon the idea of staying in Baghdad. That I need to go to a place where I can fit in, a place that I can call home because it looks like me. But you never get to choose your home; you are born into it, and you never give up on it. You can, but you shouldn’t.

This city seems desperate. It sucks the life away from you. This is evident in how our New Year’s decorations are pictures of people who died on the front lines against Daesh. Labeled as martyrs—a very loose term in Iraq. Anyone who dies is a martyr nowadays. It is evident in how the people see death today and forget about it in a day or two. How dogma governs, and how tribal laws are stronger than governmental laws. Even major governmental employees, a.k.a.

MPs, follow tribal laws instead of judicial laws. It is evident in how the garbage is slowly taking over the city and no governmental action is being taken to resolve it. How historical buildings are being abandoned to decay, or poorly reconstructed into an ugly red and blue facade. And the countless unnecessary checkpoints, causing major travel havoc.

Living in Baghdad is not easy, not at all; but I manage. Why? Because I’m a hopeless romantic fool. I see beauty in my city where no one else is looking. I love the shabby narrow alleyways, the chatter in the coffee houses, the scent of fresh morning bread, the music of tea spoons as they knock on the edges of tea cups, conversations with the taxi driver, and my favorite place in the city, Al-Mutanabbi Street. The street that captures the beauty of the Baghdadi intelligentsia, with their books, suits, and ideas, chatting early Friday morning. The open-air art galleries in the garden of the Ottoman Wali’s palace on the banks of the Tigris. I love Baghdad’s cruel dry summers, and crisp, windy winters. These insignificant places and events, happening every day in the face of all the horribleness of the -7-

lack of security and the worsening economic state, are what make me bear with my city. It is the beauty of the subtle things and the tiny ray of hope that bind me into believing it is not over yet. This is how life in Iraq is—relatively different and surprisingly the same.

Minatullah Amer Alobaidi Rebellion I was born in Baghdad on July 30, 1992, the younger child of the family. My mother once told me that when she found out she had given birth to a girl, her family said these exact words to her: “Too bad you did not have another boy. The poor girl is going to suffer so much in her life.” The traditional society I was born into had already condemned me as a baby to suffer in the future. But my mother considered me to be a blessing and a gift from God, so she named me exactly that, Minatullah. Later I would realize that unfortunately I am condemned to suffer for being born a female in Iraq.

The word suffer might sound too extreme for describing the life I have lived so far in Iraq. A more accurate word might be struggle. As a 24-year-old woman, I have spent the majority of my life so far struggling to avoid suffering. Why should I accept that my fate is to suffer just because religion and culture impose this belief? I still struggle, and I know I will continue to struggle as long as I act against the rules imposed by the country I live in. Struggling has become a normal thing for me in everyday life, because I have grown to be an independent woman with liberal thinking and a fearless character.

All of these qualities are not admirable in my society. In fact they are looked down upon because they are not exactly how this society would like its women to be. The majority of the people I deal with, whether they are colleagues, friends, or family, would not tolerate a woman who drinks or smokes, and definitely not a person who doesn’t believe in their traditions. In most situations I would have no choice but to lie or hide the truth simply to protect myself when I am asked questions like “Why don’t you wear a hijab?” “Why are you not married?” “Where is your family and how come you live by yourself?”

“Do your parents allow you to drink?” “Do your parents know that you smoke?” I have become the exact opposite of what society has expected of me, and that is why I struggle.

I was 12 years old when I started to think of what religion and Islam meant for me as a person. It was around that age when the United States invaded Iraq and the sectarian war between Sunnis and Shia began. It was then that I discovered that my mother was a Sunni and my father was a Shia and that I did not have ordinary parents. Although my mother is quite religious and a Sunni, she does not cover her hair and is very fond of the Shia rituals, while my father, being a Shia himself, does not believe in the Shia people. At that time, mixed Sunni and Shia married couples were not very popular, but they existed and were acceptable to some families. I did not grow -8-

up knowing the difference simply because my parents never spoke of it until the sectarian wars started. When I was in elementary school, everyone would ask each other, “Are you a Sunni or a Shia?” My parents advised me to never say either but to simply answer by saying, “There is no difference.”

In addition to witnessing the violence resulting from sectarian differences, I was not entirely convinced that Islam was being fair to me as a female. I remember that I was 13 years old when I asked my mother, “Why does God want only me and you to cover our hair but not my brother and father?” My mother answered, “Because we are women. If we attract men then it is our fault.” I said, “And why is it our fault if God already created us this way?” “God has his own wisdom” was my mother’s answer. Being born as a Muslim female in Iraq meant that I should cover my hair, accept that a male has more rights than I, and that my biggest accomplishment in life would be to marry and have children. To me that was simply unfair—and that is why I became agnostic. God or whatever controls the movement of the universe would not make me the way I am to suffer in life. My mother, being a believer in all religions, did not dissuade me. She simply said, “You are not going to have an easy life with this type of thinking.”

It all became clear to me from that point on. If I don’t believe in religion, then I won’t believe in tradition, and that was when I began to struggle with myself and the rest of the world. Girls my age would not accept me as their friend, boys my age would not like me, teachers would not tolerate me, and my family would not stand against society and people for me. I have often been called “strange,” “different,” “weird,” or “unusual.” My mother’s female friends once showed up to our house, and mother asked me to sit down with them. I was 18 years old, in my senior year of high school, and I had a short, boyish haircut, which was strange for them to see. They asked my mother why she had let me cut my hair, and my mother said, “She wanted to cut her hair even though I told her not to.” Her friends were surprised. They said, “And you just let her do whatever she wants? She would not appeal to men with this haircut.” My mother replied by saying, “Well, my daughter has always been different in her own way. If it makes her happy, then why not let her? Besides, I don’t want her to get married yet—she is still young.” Her friends have not liked me since.

I was mostly rejected by people and imprisoned by the culture and its rules. My decision not to conform was like seeing a bright light after living in darkness; there was no turning back on what I knew to be true. I promised myself I would not be the ordinary Iraqi girl who follows the rules of her parents and society only to end up marrying and following the rules of her husband. To me that kind of life would strip away my individuality, my thinking, my freedom, and I would be nothing more than a programmed machine. I set my goal then to learn English well, in order to read English books. I first began reading modern young adult books such as Twilight and The Hunger Games. I was later able to read classic novels like Pride and -9-

Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. To me these books were not just romance novels; they were revolutionary stories that shared the common themes of resistance and rebellion. The Arabic books that were available were always twisting reality and omitting the liberal and feminist themes. By reading books, I was able to not feel alone in my beliefs and ideas.

I spent my high school years locked in my room reading English books and barely studying to pass courses. I was reading to escape reality and to develop my thinking, an activity which was very addictive to me. By the time I was a senior in high school I knew English way better than my English teachers. It was then easy for me to get accepted to the American University of Iraq in Sulaimani without needing to take language preparation courses for English. Being in a liberal university encouraged me even more to sustain my liberal thinking. After four years I obtained a bachelor’s degree in international studies.

Nowadays there are more liberal movements organized by the young people in Iraq. These movements have been responsible for supporting women’s rights, the formation of private liberal parties, and publishing liberal books. However, these people are a minority who are thinking of leaving the country as soon as possible. I myself understand this feeling very well. Nobody likes being rejected, isolated, shamed, and forced to live in fear for choosing to live in a different way, despite causing no harm to others. In a country that considers itself democratic, we have no freedom of speech or thought and we definitely do not have laws that support women’s rights. It makes me sad to think of the girls that are being brought into this world with families that condemn them to suffer for being female.

I have been fortunate in my life to have been given the chance to be the woman I always wanted to be. I understand the consequences of the choices I have made since I was a young girl. They are the result of my rebellion against the nature of the community I was born into.

I believe I am an example of how a person can choose their own path even if society puts them in a bubble.

Zainab Mera Young and Not So Optimistic My name is Zainab. I’m a 21-year-old information technology student at the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani. I was born and raised in Hillah, in Babil province, and my family still lives there, but I moved to Sulaimani in the Kurdish Region of Iraq in 2012 to attend the university. Being a young adult these days is exhausting in general. It involves a lot of stress and pressure. It is the age at which you are trying so hard to create a painting that resembles your future as best you can. That is insanely difficult, and you probably have to paint it hundreds of times until you decide on the painting that has the path where you believe you’ll find your happiness. To make it -10-

easy to understand what it’s like to be a young Iraqi, we need math.

And here I am proving all my math teachers’ point of how math is useful in everything in life. Anyway, the equation is this: a young person + stress about how they want to shape their future + being Iraqi + extremely corrupt government + ISIS controlling and settled in the second largest city in the country = a glimpse of the life of Iraqi youth. There are several other factors that could be added to the equation, but to be honest my level of skill in math is not that impressive. I could add to that being a young woman as well, and that takes us to a whole new level of complexity and difficulty. I will explain further.

Hillah is the capital of Babil (Babylon) province in central Iraq.

It is located 100 kilometers south of Baghdad. It is much safer than Baghdad, but we have had our share of devastating bombings, kidnappings, and random assassinations. Hillah contains the ruins of ancient Babylon, and you can actually go have a look, but there isn’t much to see and you’d be frustrated because it’s neglected. The community, in general, is conservative and closed-minded. To me, it is pretty boring and somehow suffocating. Luckily, I grew up in a house that was my safe haven. Both of my parents are very open-minded and educated. They love to read, watch a lot of movies, and recently they added Facebook to the list. My mother watches a lot of CSI, and I think at this point she should add “full-time criminal investigator” to her resumé. They never put any pressure on me to conform to religion or to believe or do anything that does not seem right to me. They gave me space to grow up being an ambitious, independent person who always aims high. This made it extremely challenging for me to deal with the entire community once I stepped outside of my house.

When I turned 15, I decided that I would not conform to the community, but I would pretend to conform. I did not want to be someone who is exactly like everyone else and follows the norms of society blindly. I resented the idea of becoming a person who prefers to care more about following traditions and being accepted as part of the society than having my own individual thoughts and way of living.

But there was no other way than to pretend that I was like everyone else. This made everything easier while I plotted my escape from this society. I did not feel that I belonged, and so I had to leave it. Of course, I never wanted to leave my family. I wish I had superpowers to just teleport my entire house somewhere outside of the city or the whole country. But, you have to be brave enough to admit that along the way, you’ll have to let go of so many things and so many people.

So, two years before graduating high school, I saw an advertisement in a magazine about AUIS. A second later, I ran to my father, saying that this is where I wanted to go for college. His answer was “absolutely not.” He also said it was too early to talk about it, which gave me a hint of hope. I asked him again a year later and got the same answer, with an added statement: “It is too far from us. I can’t let my eldest girl go alone.” Sulaimani is a seven-hour drive and a one-hour flight from Hillah. In 2012, I graduated from high school -11-

and tried again with my parents. They agreed to come with me to see the university. Fortunately, they absolutely loved it. Sulaimani is a quiet, safe, beautiful little city. And compared to the community I came from, it is very open-minded and far less boring.

So far, I feel that coming to this university was in fact the right decision for me. I’m very comfortable here and I feel safe and respected as a woman. I made connections and learned from experiences I would never have been through if I had stayed home. However, this is not enough for me. This country has been going only downhill for several years. I tried to stay optimistic. I tried to keep the slightest spark of hope lit that things will get better, and that we’ll actually start building and developing Iraq. But, reality keeps putting out that spark. I know that as a young person, I should be part of the force that brings this country to life and picks it up onto its feet. But I also believe that when it comes to your future, you have the full right to choose to be selfish and do anything that guarantees you get what you aim for. I choose to be selfish and leave the country. I want my future to be free of bombings and ISIS or any other extremist group that chooses to settle here. I will be graduating in a year, and I’m doing everything in my power to find a way to leave Iraq and never come back. M

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Tammy Lakkis Border Control Driving across the Ambassador Bridge to Canada, my mom gets out our passports.

I hold them for her in the passenger seat and hope she doesn’t hear their accusations, the periwinkle pages whispering to one another between my fingers.

The Detroit River drifts between the two countries.

Above, we wade through limbo.

When we get to customs, we turn off the music.

The officer and the passports exchange a knowing look.

My mom’s mouth makes a line, her hand turning white on the wheel.

In that moment, we forget the zebra mussels in the river behind us holding against the tides as they’re pushed and pulled.

And there in the car, with the window rolled down and our minds silenced by the things we don’t talk about, we become flat like paper. M

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Gina Valdés Azafrán I see them on my way to work: a gathering of men huddling by the straw-dry San Diego River—men from Acatlán, Tamazula, Tepehuanes—who claim the unpaved sidewalk on Riverside Drive in Lakeside, their office, the 7-Eleven across the street, their diner serving up bitter coffee and a sugary bite— the day’s meal—unless a cowboy in an SUV stops to offer a day’s work, and the lucky one is hauled away with all he’s got: hard muscles, skilled hands, and a furious will to survive.

The day after 9/11, a stream of SUVs, trucks, and jalopies rolls down Riverside flapping stars and stripes, one to five a car.

Driving back home—flagless—I catch sight of the men from different towns in Mexico— all-American boys now— chasing away an Arab man to the other side of the river, shouting, Bad man, bad man, go, go! sparks of fear shooting out of dark eyes.

Undulant flags dwindle to one— confederate flag still flies above nearby house— and a gathering of jornaleros from other towns in Mexico now claims Riverside, hustling a day’s work, dreaming of turn of fortunes: full-time work for a small plot back in their villages.

On the other side of the river surges El Cajon, where I run errands. My first stop: a nameless market for warm tortillas, the high stack gone by noon, the owner brothers on their way to a village in Guanajuato.

The new owner is a burly Shiite who sings praises to Sistani, who one day beams when I recite Hafez and another day angrily recounts an Al Jazeera report of a brutal attack at a hospital in Iraq. They’re Spanish!

Spanish! (meaning Hispanic) he fumes as we clutch our tortillas.

The following week, the Shiite announces he’s returning to Iraq to see his other wife. Two Mexican men paying for tortillas and pan dulce lean toward him, Why you have two wives?

Why? Why? He rakes in our dollars for his ticket home.

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Now a Kurd is selling tortillas, urging me, Come to Iraq, to the north, safe and beautiful as San Diego.

A Chaldean takes over, tells me Saddam called the Chaldeans the flowers of Iraq. Moving closer, he says, Mexicans are the flowers of America.

I drag my old Nissan to my favorite car wash, find it Iraqi-owned, men from Michoacán and Zacatecas replaced by Kurds, five surrounding me, polishing my car with silent concentration.

The new immigrants: at last count, fifteen thousand strong in the country’s second largest Little Iraq.

Cruising down Main Street, I see a gathering of men with intense eyes in animated conversation in front of Hajji Baba restaurant.

Women with long dresses and beige or black headscarves walk toward a market where, at the entrance, statues of a camel and St. Jude welcome them.

Looking for good saffron, I follow them in and the lively chatting subsides.

The Chaldean owner pulls out a small tin can from a glass case on the counter, places it in my palm like a gold coin, tells me, Very good kind. From Spain.

I hold the fiery herb that’ll turn my cheeks to pomegranates, this precious spice—azafrán— that conjures up hanging gardens, trilling fountains.

Almond blossoms, gazelle eyes, musulmanes, judios y cristianos—the flowering of al-Andalus.

The Iraqi merchant looks intently at the saffron and at me, says, Spanish.

Very good kind. M

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Jennifer Zeynab Maccani Everything Blooms The cat has a tick in its neck. Even from this distance, Basim can see that. His glasses are the one thing he hasn’t lost yet. At times, he’s forgotten where he left his keys, misplaced his heart medication, lost his Sam’s Club membership card. He can’t afford to lose his glasses— without them, he can’t even see the numbers on the register.

“Here, kitty, kitty.” Basim clucks, crouches. The cat doesn’t seem afraid of anything. It hurries over to him, letting out a mewl that bounces and wobbles with each step. Basim strokes its white fur and glances past the end of his driveway, toward the red-faced bank barn, the pastured cows staring with slits for eyes from across the way. Up and down the country road—no one.

“Why did I open a music shop in a town this small? Huh, kitty?”

The cat rolls over on its back, exposing the matted fur on its belly. The sun’s warmed the pavement, and the cat stretches itself out, lolling its body from side to side. Basim eyes the tick, nestled in the white fur.

“I’ll be right back.” Basim gets up and goes inside. The bell on the music shop door chimes. Sundays are always slow, no customers.

Sundays are for listening to music and thinking.

Basim fetches a pair of tweezers from the bathroom and dips them in rubbing alcohol. When he comes back out, the cat’s still lounging on its back, running its tongue over the pads of one paw. It narrows its eyes at him as he emerges, the bell clanging behind him.

Basim holds up the tweezers. “Something for that pest,” he says.

He kneels and runs his palm over the cat’s spine. The cat arches into his hand, stretching its legs and curling its tail. It seems friendly enough.

“Hold still, now.” He presses the tweezers to the cat’s neck. It doesn’t twist away. Basim tugs the wriggling tick from the animal’s fur and tosses it to the pavement. He crushes it with his shoe.

“There, now,” he says. The cat gets lazily to its feet and stares at him. “Go home, now.” It doesn’t move. Basim stands and brushes himself off. He pretends to ignore the cat, turning to take in his shop sign: Basim’s. How proud he was when he first opened, how proud he is now.

When Basim opens the shop door, the cat follows him.

“Suit yourself,” he says. He pushes the door open, and the bell chimes, trembles. Basim makes his way back behind the register and presses play on the CD he was listening to. The shop speakers thrum to life, releasing a plaintive woman’s voice. The cat slinks between the rows of CDs, jumps on top of the counter. It settles next to Basim, curling up for a nap.

“Do you like Umm Kulthum?” Basim strokes the cat’s bone-white back, the same color as Basim’s hair and stubbled mustache. “She re-16-

minds me of home,” he says, leaning his elbows on the counter. “Things were more simple then. My mother used to make kunafeh when things were slow and the weather wasn’t too damp. You know kunafeh? It’s a cheese pastry. You soak it in sugar syrup with a few drops of rose water.” The cat buries its head in its paws, blocking out the world.

The bell chimes again, and the cat raises its head. A boy walks in, his T-shirt tight with sweat against his shoulders. Basim searches his memory—has he seen the boy on his bike before? He can’t seem to remember anything these days. Basim lowers his head as the boy browses the rows of CDs, past the singles, the top twenties arranged by year, past classical and hip hop. He stops in front of the foreign music section, still as a ghost, hovering. Basim looks away, turns down the Umm Kulthum album two notches. The boy scans the names of tracks.

Basim’s CD skips—he’s had it over a decade, a souvenir from his last trip to his native Syria, before the cataracts and the beginnings of his failing memory made him stop traveling.

“You found my cat.”

Basim looks up and jumps, the hair on his arms twitching. The boy is standing directly in front of the counter. When did he get there? The boy’s a haunting.

“Your cat?” Basim adjusts his glasses and frowns down at the boy. “Oh—she came this morning. Had some trouble with a tick.”

“It’s a he,” the boy says. “Name’s Max.” “Max, then,” Basim says. “You should take him home before he wanders off again.”

“This was my dad’s favorite song,” the boy says. “Didn’t see the album on the shelf.”

Basim frowns at the boy again, over the rim of his glasses. “It’s not for sale.” Annoyance rises like an itch, and Basim wishes the boy would choose something else and leave him to himself. Sundays are his only day to relax, the only day he can play what he wants in the shop. The music helps him remember the old times, the good times.

He remembers his mother and his grandmother, the laundry lines crisscrossed over the streets of Homs, digging through baskets of dried lentils in the souq on early mornings. Sometimes Basim feels his memories are trapped between the notes of Umm Kulthum like sticky grains of rice in a colander. He worries that someday that will be the only place they remain, once they’ve all drained out of the holes in his aging mind.

The boy fidgets. He reaches for the cat, who rolls away from him. “Did you know my dad?” he asks. “We moved into the red house down the road, past the steer farm. Last year. He got me a bike, said I could ride it, now we moved out of the city.” He pauses. “Dad saw your signs in the window, the big foreign music section. Said you were the only other Syrian in the whole county.”

“He said what?” Something warm and agitated comes to life inside Basim, squirming like the many-legged tick. The months of keeping to himself, the feeling that no one understands. The war has de-17-

stroyed most of Homs, he knows, though he never lets himself watch the newscasts when they air. He doesn’t want to see it as it is now, metal wall-supports sprouting like hair from fields of gray rubble, the sickening slant of cracked rooftops, a child’s plastic slippers mangled in the street. Basim wants to remember the city where he was born when it was still green, when the women laughed out stories, when the men clapped and danced at the tables outside the cafes.

“My dad’s from Homs,” the boy says. Sweat tracks from his earlobe to the collar of his T-shirt, uncovering a deep tan under a layer of dry Pennsylvania dust. “Was, I mean.”

“Was?” “He died six months ago.” The boy reaches up again to pet the cat. The animal lets him, doesn’t move or even open its eyes.

Basim almost says, In the war? Instead he says, “What happened?”

“Heart attack.” The boy doesn’t even look up, says it as though it’s the name of a track on his favorite album, a line from a comic book. “Mom thought the fresh air would do him good, get him to exercise more. But then he was gone.”

Basim says, “I’m sorry.” He imagines the cat slinking out the door behind the boy, being alone in the shop again. He feels a pang like loneliness, though he doesn’t think he’s felt lonely in years. He thinks to himself that death changes a kid. He says, “I’ll give you the CD on one condition.”

The boy looks up, his hand still buried in the scruff of fur at the back of the cat’s neck. “What’s that?”

“You’ll come here tomorrow and listen to it with me.”

The boy smiles. Basim thinks of his bicycle in Homs, the way he used to lean it up against the wall of his parents’ apartment building, making sure the handlebars were in the shade so they didn’t get hot while he was inside. Inside him is a summer warmer and wider than any Pennsylvania has ever seen.

The boy extends his hand. “Nagib,” he says, “but you can call me Nate.”

Basim shakes his hand. He ejects the CD, places it carefully in its jewel case. He hands it to the boy. “Nate,” he says. “Tomorrow.”

The bell chimes. The white cat follows Nate out the door. *** When Nate returns, he brings his cat. Basim is happy to see them in spite of himself, in spite of the fact that he misplaced his cordless phone just that morning. Basim gets a stool from behind the counter, and Nate settles on top of it on the other side, the cat between them.

Basim puts on Umm Kulthum. She charges up with her voice like a cloud horse, rising on the wind. She repeats words, yearns like a caged bird.

“How much do you understand?” Basim asks.

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“Some.” The boy seems quieter than the day before, less forthcoming. Basim lets him be. He closes his eyes, pictures his childhood to the music. A five-minute ride to his aunt’s, ten minutes to the spot his grandmother once told him used to house a communal oven when the city was filled with horses and caravans. The trellis of roses in their neighbor’s garden. Basim remembers being unable to fathom how old his grandmother was, being overwhelmed by the idea of generations stretching into generations, centuries of change.

“How long you lived here?”

Basim opens his eyes and smiles, tugging at his white mustache.

“Oh,” he says, “many years. First twenty, then thirty, then forty years.

I’ve lived longer in Lancaster County than in Homs.”

“Dad used to say it doesn’t leave you.”

“A very deep thought from such a small boy,” Basim says.

Nate is staring at him with those dark eyes, then flicks them away to the cat at the last second. “Max loved him,” he says. He massages the back of the cat’s neck, gently pulling on loose rolls of flesh.

The cat yawns and purrs.

“Sometimes it’s good to talk about it,” Basim says.

Nate looks down and away, toward the rows of CDs. “Dad used to tell me about when he was my age, where he grew up.” He reaches into his pocket. “You seen what’s happened?” he asks. “There’s nothing left. Nothing.”

Basim squints while Nate taps and swipes at his phone. Images come up, video. Nate hands the phone to Basim. He holds it up to his face. He’s flying above the wreckage of some ancient city—no, these are apartment buildings, concrete walls, flat ceilings with satellite dishes clinging to them like thousands of ears.

“What is this?” Basim whispers.

Nate scratches the cat behind the ears. “Homs.”

A piece of Basim is carved out. It slips out under his ribs, red, inconsolable. That familiar pull of what is loved but slowly forgotten, the unbearable certainty that something beautiful has been snuffed out forever, like a piece of music erased, corrupted. Basim closes his eyes and imagines the walls painted again, bright as anything, turning slabs of brick and plaster to gold, rebar to ruby. Basim opens his eyes. The city bleeds his mother’s blood, his grandmother’s.

“Didn’t know if you’d already seen it,” Nate says.

“No.” Basim blinks, compares his memory to reality. For a moment, he’d felt lucid and whole, as though the past were more real than the present, as though a part of him had just laid his bicycle against his mother’s apartment wall. He shudders. That wriggling pain again, the sheer impossibility of hope, hard as granite. “How easy it is for things to break apart,” he says, and his old voice cracks.

Nate scoots his stool to one side, reaches his arm around the cat.

The video stops. He takes the phone back and stuffs it in his pocket.

Basim lets his head hang, his hands flat on the counter, listening to his breath. He shuts his eyes again. For the first time, he wishes he’d

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lost his glasses, wishes he could will himself to toss them down and smash the lenses so he only had to hear, rather than see.

Nate reaches over and sets one of his hands on the counter next to Basim’s, just touching his knuckles. They look at each other.

“Dad said the same thing,” Nate says. The cat stretches, rippling the muscles on its shoulder blades. “Said at least he remembered it the way it used to be. The taste of the rice, lentils. Olives. Kunafeh.”

Basim nods. “Kunafeh.” Clammy warmth spreads from Nate’s chubby fingers into Basim’s age-spotted hand. All around them, the rose of Umm Kulthum’s voice climbs the wall as though it were a trellis, and everything blooms. M

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Ismail Khalidi The Wretched of the Earth, or Questions Posed the Day After Paris Takes Fire Where This Fire Begins Where do we start the clock?

With a squad of black-clad assassins bellowing fire from the depths of their alienation at street level in Paris?

Or with a missile that makes a wedding into a funeral, severs time from above?

How about with a magazine full of racist cartoons?

Or with the limp fingers of their creators?

What about with two jets hitting two towers?

But these are not equal things.

Because who here cares about Kabul?

Who cares About Baghdad?

About Beirut?

About Tripoli?

About Gaza?

About Sana’a?

About East Jerusalem?

Who here cares about Aleppo?

About the once-dazzling cities of Syria and Iraq and Yemen?

Cities that I loved even though we never met properly and never will.

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Who here will mourn those places and their disappeared?

Who cares about brutalized brown bodies in Baltimore?

In Ferguson?

In a dungeon in Chicago?

Tortured by some uniformed grandson of black Irish or Pole bleached white and mean with time and opportunity, turned inheritor of Torquemada’s methodologies, made carrier of the virus of reconquista imported to the Americas and surviving in mutant strains.

Where do we start?

In Algeria?

With the ravaging of the land at the hands of the imported Parisiens and Marseillais?

In the banlieues of today?

Filled with the progeny of those who survived civilizing missions of Napoleon upon Napoleon, Republic upon Republic, wave upon wave of settler and soldier, priest and headmaster?

With those who survived the liberation of France at the front of the fight?

Those who know firsthand that brown feet and fists paid the price to rid those lands of fascists, who know too well how such a feat turns into an eternity in the projects at the edge of the city of light, harassed and neglected, left to rot and fester

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under the hateful eyes and tongues and batons of the righteous Franks, swung from right to left, left to right, and into the welcoming arms of the cross-eyed preacher who preys on madness birthed from violence and hypocrisy, a madness that becomes combustible?

Where does our anger begin?

With 10 million Congolese twisted and hacked to death by Leopold?

With misguided partitions?

With borders traced around us

by Brits and Belgians and Beltway bureaucrats?

How about with the bombing of Beirut the day before?

Or with the guided munitions sure to fall before long, all in the name of Paris?

In the name of Paris will those who flee the fires raging to the south and east be crucified and sent away to float again on the desolate seas, out of sight forever?

The new fascists would love that and tweet about it too.

The liberals would agree, but only in private, and then post their despair.

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Where do we start this story?

This morning I learn that a cousin, young and beautiful, is among the executed at a cafe.

I want to start with her.

With her freckles and her smile.

With her brother flying to Paris as I write.

With her parents waiting outside the closed door of the morgue.

I don’t remember her voice.

Only her smile.

Because we are a scattered tribe.

Because Paris is far.

Because Syria is far and on fire and my cousins everywhere are among the dead.

And a man in Bourj el Barajneh hugged a suicide bomber to death, saved those around him, though not his own daughter.

I want to end with him.

I want to begin again in a world without black-clad boys screaming random death from behind Russian rifles.

A world without shiny planes that erase us from behind the white clouds.

I want to go to Paris to know what her laugh sounded like.

To hug her.

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And I want to end with him.

In Beirut.

To learn to hold the explosive human close and stamp out his fire.

Where do we start this story?

Where do we start the clock?

How do we know where this fire begins and where it ends? M

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Susan Muaddi Darraj Words That Have Haunted Me I was a college sophomore when I signed up for a course in Middle Eastern history at Rutgers University. The professor was a nice enough man, but one who was not willing to talk much outside of his lectures, and who stared blankly at you when you tried to extend a conversation started in class. The class met three times a week, in the humanities building, in a room shaped like a trapezoid so that he was at the head and we were all spread out around him.

He taught us the basics: the rise of Islam in the Arabian peninsula, the emergence of the Ottoman Empire, the impact of World War II. And then we got to Palestine.

This was most exciting to me—I was in this class partially to meet an elective requirement, get my three credits, and move on like everyone else, but I also had a more personal reason for enrolling: I wanted to learn about my own history, beyond the stories my parents told me, beyond the West Bank village where we vacationed in the summer, beyond the yellowed photographs my mother kept in an album.

But the professor, standing behind his lectern, said, clearly, reading right from his notes, “There was no Palestine, and there were no Palestinians.”

I raised my hand to disagree. And my 19-year-old self said, “But I’m Palestinian—my parents came from Palestine.”

“No, no,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling, as if he were about to tell a little kid that Santa Claus didn’t really exist. “Your parents are actually Jordanian—the Palestinians didn’t have an identity until the Israel question arose.”

I protested further, but he needed to move on. The lecture had to be delivered. And of course, he wasn’t really willing to talk much after class. Attempting to engage him in future classes was useless—I realized quickly that I annoyed him.

But his words haunted me for a long time. I felt erased, not just by him, but by the whole of academia—he spoke in such an assured and confident tone: “There were no Palestinians.” As a first-generation college student, who already felt out of place on a college campus in many ways, his words added to my feelings of inadequacy.

It was most devastating because it had always been difficult, as a Palestinian American, growing up in the United States, to talk about my ethnicity. Most people didn’t really know what Palestine was, and it’s not like I could show it to them on a map. The people who did have a glimmer of what Palestinian meant usually also had some negative association with the term: terrorism, bombs, oppressed women. Those were the people who typically looked twice at me and said, “I would have never guessed you were Palestinian,” as if I were somehow the exception.

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There have been other troubling words. During a conversation about our parents, a good friend of mine once casually asked, “Aren’t Arab fathers very controlling of their daughters, and just . . . you know . . . dominating?”

Once, someone asked me, “Did you convert?” when learning that my family is Christian and then shrugged and said, “Oh, right,” when I reminded them Jesus Christ was born in Palestine.

There have been comments expressing shock that my mother worked. That my father was a really nice guy. The earnest advice to “please be careful” when learning I was about to travel to the Middle East. The references to “over there.”

These words, small as they are, haunt me.

They are the outgrowth of the deeply entrenched myth in the Western mindset that Palestine was a desert, uninhabited, uncultivated, just waiting for someone to come along and make it bloom.

That the Arabs who were there were a backward people, who didn’t value life, who adhered to old, barbaric codes of living.

There have been other words, from historic figures, that have haunted me. Golda Meir’s famous comment that “There were no Palestinians . . . They simply didn’t exist” confirmed the fable that Palestinian was a made-up identity, conjured up for political purposes.

Then there is her often-quoted “There will be peace when the Arabs love their children more than they hate us.”

Last fall, my book, A Curious Land, was finally published. It’s a collection of linked stories, set in Palestine and in the United States, between 1916 and 1999. When I initially set out to write it, eight years ago, I tried to simply tell some good stories. The first story was about an old man, who I named Abu Sufayan, who tries to stop a crime from occurring in his village. I set the story in the 1930s, and this forced me to rely on more than just family stories and my own memories of Palestine. I had to dig down into the research and read about pre– World War I Palestine, about how people lived, about their farming techniques, and their marriage customs. I took the history and I embroidered it onto the page. As I created the characters and wrote the individual stories, as I stitched them together, I realized that I was speaking back to the words that had haunted me for so long.

I was testifying to the existence of the Palestinian people, in Palestine, over the course of a century.

In contrast to what Golda Meir said decades ago, there will be peace only when we all learn to listen to one another’s stories and to acknowledge one another’s victories, defeats, and struggles. Words can haunt you, or they can—as fiction does—put you in a place where you can willingly understand and live someone else’s life, even for a short time. M

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Nicole Olweean Blood Is Where Certain Types of Love Are Stored We do not learn, and that what we call learning is only a process of recollection.

—Plato I dream that my sito is chasing me down flights of stairs and I have to kill her with bricks. What did the Lebanese man say to the Syrian?

Khebez, as in: eat, as in: there are children in America trying to remember the sounds of this language, who see a shaker at the market that says Mediterranean salt, and want to fall asleep with it at night— What I mean is I used to stand in awe of mountains, and now, I stay awake listening to the fullness of breath in flesh caverns. The moonlight on my skin a reflection of a reflection. My sito can’t bring back the word reverence in Arabic or in English, but she can tell you how the bees filled my father’s clothes and I am left wondering what gets to be remembered—as in: if we have to kill each other, we might as well eat first, as in: my grandmother, bleeding, me waking in the taste of salt.

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Our Lebanon I came to myself in the dead of night, a desert refusing water.

And the horse they swore had been broken pummeled the side of its enclosure.

Here, horse, come to the fence.

Tell me of the day we left you.

I will tell of the day I recognized kinship in a bowl of olives.

Give me everything you swallowed in the field.

If you won’t, still our shadows follow us, long and leaning toward each other. Watch them: With the sun in front, we could be the same creature. M

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VISUAL ART

Heba Y. Amin Heba Y. Amin is an Egyptian visual artist, lecturer, and visiting assistant professor at the American University in Cairo. She received her MFA at the University of Minnesota and is a DAAD grant recipient, a Rhizome Commissions grant winner, and is short-listed for the Artraker Award. She is the curator of visual art for Mizna, curator for the residency program DEFAULT with Ramdom Association, and co-founder of the Black Athena Collective. She is one of the artists behind the subversive action on the set of the series Homeland that received global media attention.

Amin’s projects are embedded in research addressing the convergence of politics, technology, urbanism, and media. Her work has been shown worldwide with recent exhibitions at Dak’Art 2016 Biennale, the Marrakech Biennale 2016 Parallel Projects, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Camera Austria, Berlin Berlinale 9th Forum Expanded, the IV Moscow International Biennale for Young Art, the National Gallery of Mongolia, and the Gotlands Museum in Sweden.

She has spoken extensively at conferences and events, including Transmediale, re:publica, Laboratory of the Future in Warsaw, and Media Art Histories Conference. She lives between Berlin and Cairo.

Amin is represented by Galeri Zilberman in Istanbul.

Facing page: The Earth Is an Imperfect Ellipsoid, 2016. Black and white archival photographic prints, 20.5 cm x 20.5 cm.

Clockwise from top: “35° 54’ 41.6” N, 5° 23’ 3.95” W.” Ceuta, Spain.

“20° 52’ 35.45” N, 17° 3’ 32.08” W.” Nouadhibou, Mauritania.

“Unknown Coordinates 1.” La Aguera, Ras Nouadhibou, Mauritania.

The Earth Is an Imperfect Ellipsoid is a land surveillance project that utilizes Kitab al-Masalik wal-Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms), an eleventh-century geography text based on accounts of merchants, geologists, and adventurers describing major trade routes in the Islamic empire, and converges it with the narratives of contemporary migration. The project looks at current political constructs in Africa through land surveying and measuring techniques that have been employed along paths of migration for centuries.

It attempts to place the contemporary migration story within the histories of technological advancements and urban development.

Through extensive road travel, cartographic research, and landscape surveillance, the project visualizes these contemporary geographies and supplements them with constructed histories of the past. It unfolds as a photographic poem that portrays the perspectives of the landscape that bore witness to centuries of migratory traces. The project is comprised of photographs, text, and a projection.

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“Accumulations, assemblages (III),” 2016. House frame, yarn, tagounite, and cape spartel; archival color pigment print, 20 cm x 56 cm.

The Black Athena Collective is a research and artistic laboratory for experimentation that engages political discourse and territorial logics connected to the African continent. It looks specifically at the architectures of migrancy and the various frameworks of space and territorial demarcations in relation to errant bodies. The collective draws from challenges posed by Martin Bernal’s thesis which questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography. Through multidisciplinary perspectives including geography, sociology, and history, the Black Athena Collective raises the question of migration as a crucial principle for imagining new conventions of territory. Central to the Collective’s investigations are the reconstitution of political spaces and the various architectures and forms of reterritorialization. The Black Athena Collective was founded in 2015 by artists Heba Y. Amin and Dawit L. Petros.

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“Iron Eaters,� 2014. C-Print, 80 cm x 360 cm (3 images). Nouadhibou, Mauritania. From the project Objects in Exile.

This image and the one on the cover are part of the broader project Objects in Exile, these works look at the illicit movement of objects in the context of economic crisis and political violence. They address loopholes and contradictions in the constructs of trade and economy through dislocation, deconstruction, and the reframing of contested objects. By alluding to instances of precarious labor, the project attempts to question the materiality of objects and the traces of value that are associated with it. Objects in Exile explores the transformations of past meanings, the removal of referents, and the depersonalization of cultural identities.

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“As Birds Flying,” 2016. Video stills.

In late 2013, Egyptian authorities detained a stork migrating from Israel and accused it of espionage due to an electronic device attached to its leg. Filmed with a drone, Amin’s film “As Birds Flying” confronts the absurdity of the media narrative in Egypt that has turned a bird into a symbol of state paranoia.

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Photographs courtesy of the Arabian Street Artists: Heba Y. Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl, a.k.a. Stone. “Homeland Is Racist,” “1001 Calamities,” “1001 Jokes,” “There Is No Homeland.”

Excerpt from “‘Arabian Street Artists Bomb Homeland’: Why We Hacked an Award-Winning Series”

In June 2015, we received word that Homeland’s set production company was looking for “Arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to the set of a Syrian refugee camp for the show’s new season. Given the series’s reputation, we were not easily convinced, until we considered what a moment of intervention could relay about political discontent with the series. It was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself.

Our instructions were few, but included “writing ‘Mohamed is the greatest’ is okay of course.” We armed ourselves with slogans, with proverbs allowing for critical interpretation, and, if the chance presented itself, blatant criticism of the show. And so, it came to be.

The set designers were too frantic to pay attention to us as they built a hyper-realistic set that addressed everything from plastic laundry pins to the frayed edges of outdoor plastic curtains. The content of what was written on the walls, however, was of no concern. In their eyes, Arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the Middle East, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and, this season, to refugees. The show has thus created a chain of causality with Arabs at its beginning and as its outcome— their own victims and executioners at the same time. As was briefly written on the walls of a make-believe Syrian refugee camp on the outskirts of Berlin, the situation is not to be trusted.

—The Arabian Street Artists Full statement at hebaamin.com -38-

Criticality and Dissent Lana Barkawi Interviews Heba Amin

We are living in an interesting cultural moment when it seems the mainstream Western media is rediscovering that politics and art have an important relationship. I’m thinking of the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition, the Guerrilla Girls, Black Lives Matter, and the action you took part in on the set of the television series, Homeland. In response, questions like “what impact can art have on politics” have been arising, as if this is a new idea. What’s your reaction to this?

Today, many artists are dealing with a crisis of conscience. They are grappling with the idea of using art as a platform to voice social injustices. “Social art” has become increasingly prevalent in the context of a world experiencing more and more censorship in media.

The debate that is happening now is about whether or not artists have the agency to actually promote change, and whether or not that responsibility should be put on the shoulders of the artist in the first place. Can art in fact make a difference and should we be placing that expectation on art? We find ourselves asking these questions within funding structures and an art economy that are also controversial, and at times an extension of the very issues we are addressing in our work. Who is funding and buying our work?

As a collective of artists, the Gulf Labor Artist Coalition addresses this very point by utilizing their platforms and networks to instigate dialogue and negotiation toward a situation artists (especially from the Arab world) feel complicit in; their aim is to ensure mi-39-

grant worker rights associated with museum construction in Saadiyat Island, Abu Dhabi. They, like many artists today, are starting to see it as their duty to address social issues that are not being sufficiently challenged, if at all. The aforementioned groups are all using a wide range of creative tactics to address particular social issues.

There is no doubt that in some cases creative tactics for social change are really quite effective, but they don’t always work and can sometimes backfire (think Ai Weiwei’s reenactment of 3-year-old Aylan Kurdi’s body washed ashore). In many of these cases it is futile to argue whether or not art can impact politics, but rather we should talk about how art can reach the public, open dialogue, provide different perspectives, and challenge the way people see. Perhaps, to this effect, we can begin to empower people to instigate a movement toward political change.

When we [Amin, Caram Kapp, and Don Karl, a.k.a. Stone, who have come to call themselves, ironically, “the Arabian Street Artists”] “performed” our “Homeland hack,” it was not in the context of an art performance at all. In fact, it was quite instinctual and uncalculated.

We were provided with a unique set of circumstances that prompted us to react. Perhaps, with the three of us being involved in the arts in various ways, we were swayed by a certain kind of thinking. It wasn’t until after our hack went viral that it started being framed within the context of art. This is completely fine by me, as it allows our criticism to enter into a realm of debate and discussion; it speaks to the social platform that art has become and allows our hack to live beyond the act itself. I can only see this as being a positive thing toward political change.

What is striking to you about this moment of art activism?

This moment of art activism is different than any other moment because our media constructs have shifted. Social media platforms play a huge role in art activism today not only because of the potential for widespread outreach, but also because of frameworks of participation. The development of platforms that promote citizen journalism have empowered individuals and transformed the way people publicly express themselves. The real power of such tools became evident to me during the Egyptian revolution, when people across the globe participated in an uprising like never before. Today, media activism and tactical media rely heavily on the non-geographies of technology. On the flip side, however, the very platforms being used for democratic expression are the same ones that are incriminating bloggers, activists, and artists who express dissent under authoritarian regimes. Who is held accountable when people are incarcerated for expressing themselves openly? It is important to question the corporate ownership of the freedom of speech.

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Can you tell us what it’s been like to be working and teaching in Egypt over last few years, when the situation for activists, journalists, and artists has been so dangerous?

The situation in Egypt is very difficult these days. There is an atmosphere of fear and paranoia that is causing paralysis. Under a zero-tolerance policy toward any form of dissent, Egyptians are experiencing an extreme form of censorship that is sending many people to jail. You can imagine what this does to artists who are reflecting the world around them and how that might impact the kind of work that they are making. In the last few years many arts and cultural institutions have been shut down, some of them voluntarily, because under these conditions, sustainability is nearly impossible. The artistic outburst that coincided with the start of the uprising in 2011, however, relayed the desperate need for creative expression. That is not going to be shut down so easily.

As a professor at the American University, I try to have these discussions with my students. We are afforded a safe and secure place to contemplate these very scary issues, a kind of exploration that could not happen at a public university. Imagine what it must be like for an art student to graduate today and make art in such an environment. My students have expressed their fear quite openly and the fact that they, understandably, cannot afford to take such risks.

Can you imagine a future society that is void of critical and creative thinkers? I can’t think of anything more terrifying.

In this election year in the United States, we are living through heightened anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Arab rhetoric and the ensuing upsurge in profiling and violence against innocent people in these communities. The situation in Europe has not been so different. A reality for artists in our community is feeling the burden to respond. I recently heard Naomi Shihab Nye tell a story of a literary magazine that, after having rejected her work for years, actually commissioned a poem from her but stipulated that it be about Donald Trump. She took this in stride, and of course, she wrote a wonderful poem. What do you make of such expectations placed on Arab artists?

The minute we start to put expectations on artists is when we start to lose the possibilities of something else. Unfortunately, in the real world, artists usually do have expectations placed on them in some form or another, be it funding structures or societal constructs. But when it comes to the kind of stories artists tell, we don’t do ourselves a service if we are speaking to the lowest common denominator. We need to be expressing issues that we find to be pressing instead of fitting into somebody else’s misinformed view. I understand fully how this can be a challenge for immigrants and minorities making art—I experienced this myself living in the United States and Europe where I was always forced into an identity that somebody else had defined.

The trick is to find strategies and tactics to subvert those constructs.

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Given the right situation, this could be a much more powerful approach in conflating the regional divide.

There has been a great deal of global attention on Arab artists over the last decade or so. How is this affecting the situation for artists and their practices?

It is not surprising that there is global attention on Arab artists considering the political stage of the last decade; artistic expression emerging from a population experiencing extreme political and social upheaval would be attention grabbing. This has undoubtedly shifted artistic practice in the region, where many artists from the Middle East are not only reflecting their experiences but are strategically using art to broaden the conversation, provoke debate, and, in some cases, perhaps even attempt to shift realities. With the 24-hour news cycle pushing a particular kind of narrative, artists can provide a much-needed alternative.

In many ways this global attention has positively impacted artists in the region, as many have received international recognition.

At the same time, there is a debate about “authenticity” and whether or not foreign funding institutions and media are shaping the way art is being made. However, a relatively recent shift has occurred in reclaiming local narratives and focusing on contemporary art development irrespective of foreign constructs. Reem Fadda’s curatorial concept for the 2016 Marrakech Biennale “Not New Now” addresses Pan Afro-Arab and Afro-Asian unity and looks at “the legacies of decolonization, in addition to its failures, as one of the origins that has inspired contemporary art to embrace incendiarism, criticality, and radicalism.” Large-scale exhibitions like this with predominantly Middle Eastern and African artists allow us to revisit our past on our own terms. Artists from the region are re-addressing recent histories that have been excluded from the books. Sultan El Qassemi, for example, founded the Barjeel Art Foundation to share his significant collection of Middle Eastern modernist works, an era in art history that is only recently being addressed and documented. If it weren’t for projects like this, important periods in cultural production will be forgotten and eventually disappear. Art students in the Middle East, for the most part, are not exposed to contemporary artists from the region and are therefore not developing within the context of their own contemporary art production. As these projects become more publicly documented and integrated into Middle Eastern art discourse, young artists will undoubtedly start to be inspired and influenced by local artistic development instead of looking abroad or back into ancient history. That is the hope anyway.

One of the images we see in these pages is from a new collective you’ve co-founded, the Black Athena Collective. What’s the background of this project and what drew you to it?

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The Black Athena Collective is a project I co-founded with artist Dawit L. Petros. We joined forces after we completed another project that we found to be incredibly problematic. We both realized that we needed another space where we could explore, experiment, and find ways to grapple with troubling issues. Our project starts with spatial constructs and political discourses connected to the African continent. The Black Athena Collective’s name is taken from Martin Bernal’s thesis, which questions methodological assumptions embedded within Western historiography. His seminal text suggests that ancient Greece—and Europe in general—was highly influenced by the African continent. We want to explore alternative ways of addressing narratives from South to North and try to uncover this blanket of dominance on narrative, especially as it relates to the architectures of migration. Our format is still open, as we have just recently launched the project; we hope to involve other people, we hope to ask questions, we hope to critique structures in place, we hope to write and visualize and discuss and lead workshops, and let’s see where it takes us.

You have worked with Mizna over the years in so many meaningful ways—as a featured visual artist, an invited filmmaker, and also a behind-the-scenes web whiz. Now you’re taking on the visual arts curation for this journal after Moukhtar Kocache and Aissa Deebi.

What’s your vision for the journal’s visual sensibility?

Over the years, Mizna has maintained itself as a place for Arabs by Arabs in a country that has, since 9/11, villified the community in many ways. It provides a significant platform that gives voice to concerns and experiences that affect the Arab community worldwide.

There is a very important discussion happening in the art world today about our region. Artists are critiquing and questioning structures, regimes, social injustices, and ideologies in a way that is probably not happening elsewhere. This is incredibly important as we enter into the difficult phase of confronting drastic transformations caused by recent wars, uprisings, and waves of mass migration. Using art as a form of political engagement, artists are narrating contested space and addressing the ramifications of contemporary conditions to cultivate critical analyses of the diverse constructs of the region. My vision for the journal’s visual sensibility is to feature the work of artists who are really challenging previous narratives and proposing a shift in thinking. It is our time to reclaim our own histories, and there are many very capable artists from the Arab and Arab American world whose work explores this in thoughtful and intelligent ways. M

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Kamelya Youssef Beginnings 1. “do you want some coffee?” she asks, her hand open, her palm facing me, her other hand on her knee, white cloth framing her soft face. “yes, tata. baddi ahwe.” yes, i want coffee. she catches herself. “are you old enough, child?” on this day she remembers which granddaughter i am and she knows my name but she does not know i am 24 years old, enough to think i need coffee and finally understand the news in arabic. she picks up a coffee cup, tiny enough for a few thimbles of lebanese coffee. “pour her a cup, hadiya.” she points her palm at her maid, a middleaged ethiopian woman, who has pictures of her four children tucked into her bosom and a tattoo on her chin. hadiya takes the empty cup and returns it to me full, speckles of dark brown coffee on the rim, the cup painted with broad vertical strokes of green up the sides and small red flowers between the vines. “yisallim edayki ya binti,” god bring peace to your hands, she wills in thanks. my grandmother calls hadiya “binti,” meaning “my daughter.” hadiya has been with my grandmother for sixteen years and since most other families have left the village, there are no longer any other migrant maids from ethiopia. (there is violence in arrival. what does violence feel like in the staying?) my grandmother gestures toward the remote and nods her head up, signaling me to turn up the volume. on the television, people are piled into cairo’s tahrir square. my grandmother’s tattooed hands rest on her lap, cup sitting between two palms. turning away from the screen, she looks up in prayer and whispers a few words for these men and for god. i see a heart tattooed on her right hand.

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“do you want some coffee?” she asks. i see a stitch tattooed on the other. she catches herself. “are you old enough, child?” “yes, tata,” i assure her. the cup in my hand is nearly empty. “come read my cup when you’re done, then.” she takes her last sip and places the cup upside down on the table. i also place my cup upside down, and a grainy brown drop falls to the floor. the coffee grounds tell us stories and we practice listening. after a few minutes, i walk over to her chair and kiss her forehead. “basri, basri,” she commands. “najmi,” she says—read the stars. hadiya sits next to me and starts sipping at her own cup. she sees me pick up my grandmother’s coffee cup and she catches my eye before the stars do. “najmi.” the inside of her cup is still white with golden coffee rivers lightly dusted along the side. the stars are faint—i cannot hear them. the revolution blares on the television. the government drives tanks into the city square. my grandmother looks at the television and looks at me. i see the tattoos on her hands and the blue veins beneath her thin golden skin, the oxygen machine next to her, her silver wisps haloing her white scarf. hadiya had poured her a cup of diluted coffee, golden instead of brown. she has been doing this for years.

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2. “do you want some coffee?” my grandmother asks. she catches herself. “are you old enough, binti?”

3. suddenly on stage a child sings an aria and there is no opera and there is no audience and there are no handkerchiefs and we are watching the birds of our grandmothers fly and we are watching what we thought were our motherlands rise and fall and scream and whimper and they say this is life this is the gospel of it and we sing the child sings and we remain on this island stranded our wings tucked behind our lungs we etoile et toi mish ana mish mish mish sitti mish wish can i survive here can i go to the pomegranate tree that gave my grandmother shade and sweet and something red or will it be bulldozed shelled worse forgotten what does the cup say what does the cup sing what does memory feel like a breeze across your back does it come back M

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Eman Hassan Forests Lean Behind Us Now

Late Fall 1990

In Massachusetts we watch the dark lasered with showers of green across the TV screen in my Great Aunt Marie’s gazebo; Kuwaiti skies all backlit with neon smoke of artillery thinking of other family still there under the assault, of our father, the day his ghuttra gyrated out the window while my sister hit the gas pedal as he leaned out the car, video cam strapped to his shoulder, the drawing back shot of soldiers taking aim and firing, sear of bullets whizzing over the blasts of my father’s profanities, over the screech of tires, stench of burnt rubber, his laughing maniacally in the background of shaky footage as the triangle of white cloth flew off his head and smacked a gunman, ghosting his face, deflecting punctuated rounds and my sister’s hands are shaking now as she strikes a match during the retelling, takes deep drags off her Marlboro Red, cloud of white smoke escaping her almost a shroud of depleted uranium.

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Transport

Dubai, 2011

Traffic on the road is terrible, but here this is normal.

This can be anywhere in the Middle East, the heat a stampede through the solar plexus.

I see those men as I get in a cab, sink into cool air . . . how those men stare—and I let them. I can see —not through, but at: look on to.

And it startles their Asian faces enough to momentarily forget how they sit, squashed, bent over in small seats, shackled by space, shoulders numb against sides of the metal truck . . .

You know, the kind used for livestock.

Trafficking on the road is terrible, but here this is normal.

This can be . . . anywhere in the Middle East.

Eyes peek out of parallel slats as if peering from an oven. M

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Paul Zarou The Grocery It was a brick, still layered with the pitted crust of mortar and chipped on one corner. It wasn’t just the force with which the brick was thrown, but that it had hit dead center, collapsing the Haddad’s grocery’s large picture window. The shattering glass startled Michael awake sometime after 2 a.m. He had been in the middle of a dream, which allowed him the momentary solace, if for only a couple of fleeting waking seconds, to imagine that he was still back in his old bedroom in Brooklyn. Michael’s torso tensed as he jerked upright.

An anxious sour knot formed in the pit of his stomach at the disquieting recognition that the crash of glass that woke him was their large storefront window—the window directly beneath his bedroom. From the street below Michael heard muffled hoots and shouts, followed by the sound of skidding tires laying rubber against the asphalt, as a car sped away from the front of their store.

A week after the 1967 Six-Day War, with the country and home that his parents had left years before now occupied, and during an oppressive New York mid-June heat wave, Michael’s father had taken ownership of the grocery. He moved his family from their home in Brooklyn, where in the surrounding few blocks their native Arabic was spoken and where everyone was in some way related to each other, if not by blood, by the roots of heritage and community. In his upstairs apartment bedroom, Michael was just starting to get comfortable in his new surroundings, just beginning to learn how to sleep again.

Michael’s father, his thick black hair disheveled, jumped out of bed into his pants and flew down the stairs. Michael trailed after him, but as he took his first step out of their apartment door, his mother, who had hesitated at first, grabbed a tight hold of Michael’s arm for balance as they carefully negotiated the narrow staircase. Her firm grip seemed to tug on Michael, slowing him, holding him back, not wanting to let him go.

Michael’s mother would never have spoken out loud about her reluctant embrace of what her husband considered his stake in their future. But Michael knew. He knew it the way an only child intuitively knows his mother’s emotional undercurrent. Michael often understood his mother’s position on things not by what she might say, which often was very little on most topics, but by the subtle shades of quiet she’d slip into. He’d instinctively measure the depth and weight of her introspection and knew when he should be concerned. And with his father’s initial announcement of the store’s purchase, Michael readily felt her unspoken reluctance by her immediate retreat. But Michael couldn’t discern whether it was just

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general caution she felt, or regret over having sunk all their savings into the new business. Perhaps it had been an uninvited warning she had received from her aunt who had read some prognostication from the intricate swirls and residue on the bottom of her drained Arabic coffee cup, which Michael believed his mother wouldn’t heed anyway. But as time progressed whatever it was seemed to dissolve, and she moved forward with a renewed acceptance, leaving behind any reticence. After all, how could she ever consider disagreeing with a husband whose goal it was to better their lives? Michael had forgotten her initial reaction, until that night. As they neared the bottom of the stairs, Michael turned to look up at her. He was met with his mother’s best effort at reassuring him, while her small hand nervously clutched around his arm, speaking to the contrary. She remained steadfast not to betray how she really felt. But at 15, her son knew better.

The Schaefer Beer light, which was hung in the window by two thin wires, was still swinging, unbroken by the impact. The shattered window, with the jagged edges of glass glistening under the swaying of the fluorescent light, only reinforced Michael’s own sense of exposure. He stood frozen, staring at the black gaping hole in the window, until he was awakened again when his father called out, “Come help.”

While Michael busied himself sweeping up shards of glass from behind the counter, he spotted a large piece that had wedged itself under the old worn butcher block that now held the cash register.

Michael knelt down awkwardly, and as he stretched his unsteady hand out to reach for it, he caught the sharp edge, slicing his index finger open. Blood oozed to the surface in a thick line that defined the length of the gash. As he stood up and moved his hand to examine the damage, a bright red drop spilled out, hit the floor, and was swallowed up by the porous wood. He stuck his finger in his mouth. The warm blood tasted sweet as he gently wrapped his tongue around the cut. And as he took that moment to nurse his finger, his nerves let go, rushing out of him. He suddenly felt tired, faint. This feeling lasted as long as it took for his mother to splash alcohol over the cut and examine it closely for any slivers of glass.

The 1967 Plymouth police cruiser eased up to the curb across the street as if it were stopping by for a routine dinner break. Out of the patrol car stepped Sergeant Neal McClusky, accompanied by a young rookie officer, Phillip Bosco, who lagged several steps behind him. As McClusky walked in, Bosco stayed outside, surveyed the broken window, and then with the beam of his flashlight leading the way, walked the perimeter of the building. When Bosco returned, he continued to hang back. He kept his distance and seemed to study the family as intently as he had the damage.

In his mid-thirties, Sergeant McClusky was fit and had tight pasty skin that appeared translucent over his sharp features, features that reflected well his earnest professional demeanor. “Do you have any idea who’d do something like this?” McClusky asked.

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“No,” Michael’s father said.

Shaking his head, McClusky said, “It’s unusual. Not something that happens here. It’s a good neighborhood.”

“What does that mean?”

McClusky, caught a little off-guard by his pointed response, stammered a bit and then added, “Ah . . . it’s probably just some kids, horsing around.”

Michael’s father didn’t care for the idea that the vandalism to his store was just “horsing around,” but he shook his head.

“We’ll keep an eye out,” McClusky assured him.

Michael’s father turned to look at the broken window and then back at the two policemen, and as if suddenly remembering something that he should not have forgotten, asked, “Can I get you coffee?

From upstairs? Or a sandwich?” gesturing toward the deli case.

They politely, somewhat awkwardly, declined both offers.

“It’s no trouble,” he continued.

Bosco stepped up to the counter and asked, “Can I get a pack of Winstons?” At the same time he dug into his uniform pocket to fish out the 39 cents.

Michael’s father handed him the cigarettes and waved him off, almost dismissively, “No, it’s okay.”

“You sure?” Bosco asked, with exaggerated earnestness. His display of sincerity sprang from an effort to assuage an immediate pang of regret. Maybe he shouldn’t have asked for the cigarettes? He had become acquainted with the businesses that would readily hand over a pack of cigarettes, a sandwich, or coffee and would always refuse payment. But he lived in this neighborhood. It was his home. And these were the new owners. Despite being there in uniform, on official business, walking in that night reminded him of the countless times he had been there before, picking up groceries for his mother.

Somehow it didn’t feel right or comfortable to accept the gesture, or at least as comfortable as it had with the others.

“Yes, please, take the cigarettes,” Michael’s father insisted, nodding to reassure Bosco that it was okay.

Bosco, still uncertain, kept his hand held out in the air, cupping the change, for a bit longer. He then slowly stuck his hand back into his pocket, feeling the change slip through his fingers and settle at the bottom of his uniform pocket, next to his extra handcuff key, and said, “Thanks.”

McClusky was jotting down a few more notes on a small pad, and without looking up, he asked, “Mr. Haddad, would you spell your first name for me?”

“Aziz, A-Z-I-Z,” Michael’s father answered.

“Got it,” he said. He flipped his pad closed, assured Michael’s father again that they’d keep an eye out. Michael watched as the two officers seemed to move to their car with more haste than they had arrived with. Michael and his father found a couple of sheets of plywood in the basement and boarded up the window.

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Michael sat down hard on his bed, feeling a weariness that defied his young body. He surveyed his small room through the haze of yellow light cast by the old gooseneck lamp on his nightstand. The thought crossed his mind that maybe he should get up and brush his teeth, but he decided that since he hadn’t eaten anything during the time they were downstairs cleaning up, the few drops of blood from his finger didn’t count, and since he had brushed before he went to bed the first time that night, he didn’t need to. Sleep wasn’t a consideration, so he reached under his bed and slid out a small cardboard box he still hadn’t finished unpacking. He sifted through the various books and keepsakes until he found his worn copy of Casino Royale.

Michael wished to escape into the world of clear-cut bad guys and a cool good guy who always wins, and of course the beautiful women. But despite his infatuation with James Bond, the words written on the page were out of focus. After rereading the same page three times, he gave up, turned off the light, and just lay there staring at the murky shadows splashed on his gray ceiling, until he tired past the throbbing in his finger and the gnaw in his stomach, and drifted in and out of a fitful sleep.

Michael’s father face was outlined by the dim amber glow of his burning cigarette as he sat alone in his car half a block away for hours into the night watching over his store. But despite his father’s vigilance, Michael still received his share of splinters from the plywood they used, in the late morning hours, to secure the other broken windows.

Michael’s anxiety seemed to temper a little each time they had to clean up glass. He wasn’t sure why this was. Does each subsequent violation make it easier? He guessed that maybe he had grown used to the routine or, at least for the moment, picking up some broken glass was the worst of it. After the third time in less than two months, whoever was breaking their windows grew bored and stopped. But for Michael what remained was an underlying foreboding, which would fade with time but never completely leave. He had accepted that their lives had changed. But what Michael could not foresee was to what extent their lives would become entangled in their new livelihood and its surrounding neighborhood. Michael wanted to believe as his father did, that it was all for the better, but whenever he’d think about that night, he could still feel his mother’s anxious grip squeezing his arm. M

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Jazelle Jajeh How to Be Clean Again I was pure once For a day I was round and crying and my cousins squirmed on wooden benches Harsh seats that gave them no other option Than to pay attention Everyone was there I was there too But I couldn’t tell you what my mother smelled like that day What my ears felt like that day Filled with water and psalm incantations The word Allah repeated enough times to fill the altar They were trying to fix me No one can say why I was broken No one can say if it worked If I am restored Restarted Reestablished as a person ready for the world They hoped I would stay this way This whole This pure Until the next time I came back to that space In a white dress And flowers Ready to give my life in exchange for a ring I have no way of remembering my baptism Maybe that’s why I take such long showers When I know I shouldn’t When I can hear the bills and the drought soaking up the drain I continue my sacrifice of the earth Consuming it And letting nature devour me in return Maybe that’s why I walk outside when it rains Trying to absorb every piece of renewal Watching the world try to clean itself Try to scrub us away Attempting to start over And I get it Maybe that’s why

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I am always drawn to the ocean As a cure As a new beginning I cannot help but wonder Why we always need to feel clean What is so impure about this skin So rotten in us That it needs to be washed away Why is it that Submerging underneath waves Looking up at translucent possibilities Is a new chance A ritual Of nonhuman creation A baptism Free of oil and lace Like no lock of baby hair sliced off and saved While it is still soft Still untouched Before it grows out coarse and strong Hardened by every hand that reaches for it You cannot see porcelain through the holy water here It is caked in salt Impure Bitter in your mouth Like rough soap Like cracked black pepper Like sliced-up promises Like times you thought everything was pure Everything was starting again Wading into filth-streaked rivers Dry throats Seeing water as a luxury When it composes most of each body Every time we breathe Water Every time we think Water Every moment we pause to consider our finger placement On piano keys On collar bones

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Pressing imprints into date cookies Our placement of trees Of our folded knees Water Every sweat-streaked shirt Tear-soaked mouth We are cleansed from the inside out This is a system A procedure we are born with It cannot be hijacked Kidnapped Stolen We all know what it is We all know how to be clean again We all know The purest form of everything Is starting over M

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Shebana Coelho Mercury to Gaza There is a mote of mercury at the very tip of my nose

someone once told me

and if I let it it will lead me to the end of a story that began when a boy let me into a house that had already fallen into rubble into an Eid that had become lament into dust that was once

cement and couch and cradle

where a child reached for a lemon

held by her mother

in a hand stained red I am not the truth

my love I am the shadow of it the shadow of flesh of steppe the landscapes that speak to me love me to the end of the arroyo and the start of the sea the cactus calls me by name and says yes it is the one I was sent to seek this spine that I pluck from the flesh of the center

this spine will straighten into story will lay down its sharp

so the boy may clamber onto it point to sea and wish for the boat to arrive

so he may start the voyage he has never taken over the sea under the cover of night to a place where Eid is not mourned

and a child wishing for a lemon receives it and the moon rises in a sky that remembers it is sky and can stand

without falling into dust M

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Shadab Zeest Hashmi Sultana Morayma: the Last Queen of al-Andalus At the end of the story, in its final pages, is a queen. Not the pious despot Isabella of Castille, who is about to command the Inquisition; or the embittered, vengeful Sultana Aixa la Horra, who is inciting war within the house of Nasrid; but the queen who is obscured from view on this history’s chessboard, whose life and death will come to be a veritable symbol of the paradox that is al-Andalus, the queen who prevails as the enduring shadow of a legend. Her name is Morayma.

Eight hundred years have passed in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain— years turning like great mills, a resplendence of work reflected in books and buildings, cities and institutions, technology and aesthetics, bridging antiquity with modernity, east with west, fissured periodically but sewn back together again and again by Iberian Muslims, Jews, and Christians. al-Andalus, which, under Muslim rule, has brought about a transformation simply through intertranslation, which has dared to find direction in deviation from the known and accepted, where the Abrahamic people have found enough peace to transcend literalism and worship willingly in each other’s sacred places, to inscribe the other’s scripture on their own walls, is collapsing.

It is 1482, the year Morayma weds the Nasrid prince Abu Abdullah, who is known in history mostly by nicknames: Boabdil, or Rey el Chico (“little king”), or El Zygobi (“the unfortunate one”). The house of Nasrid is at war. All that signifies Al-Andalus—the books, maps, machines, manuals, poetry, medical and musical instruments, recipes, calligraphy—is about to be destroyed forever; a near-millennium of civilization utterly wiped out by the crushing machinery of the Inquisition, a tyranny of epic proportions poised to swallow an epic legacy of tolerance. It is the year that Morayma’s fate becomes knotted with the fate of the last Andalusi bastion, Granada.

Morayma is 15 years old on her wedding day, wearing a borrowed gown. Her father, the vizier, a spice-merchant-turned-general, is frugal, wise, and well respected, but no less doomed than every other character in this story. Courtiers and chroniclers observe the bride in the magnificence of the Alhamra palace, where she stands surrounded by honeycomb colonnades, saffron curtains in Granada silk embroidered with the Nasrid motto Wa la ghalib illa Allah (And there is no conqueror but God), filigreed walls, acres of scented gardens, leaping fountains. Amid all this richness, she appears in her Muslim modesty, covered with a shawl, showing only her “large eyes and sweet face.”

The wedding festivities in the breathtaking Alhamra would be Morayma’s only time in the palace as a royal. Instigated by his mother, Aixa, Boabdil fights against his father, Mulay Hacen, for succes-

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sion, a conflict that results in the imprisonment of Morayma in a carmen (a small house with an orchard) in the city of Albayzin, at the foothill of Sebeka, directly below the Alhamra. In this city, which takes its name from al bayyazin, or “the falconers,” Morayma is a caged bird. Her husband is sent to battle, and what is left with her in his long absences is a caged bird’s view of the palace on the hill.

She bears Boabdil two sons. Both are taken away in infancy by the Catholic monarchs Isabella and Ferdinand, who agree to return the boys when the war is resolved; this is said to be the first of many false promises to come.

Morayma’s father dies in battle, and her husband is defeated.

Her sons are raised Catholic in captivity, cut off from Arabic, which is not only the language of their forebears but has been the lingua franca of al-Andalus for centuries. Morayma dreams in Arabic. She is the closing chapter of a civilization known for enlightenment, elucidation, articulation, communication, but she herself is pure silence. Unlike her husband, made famous for a sigh (as he looks back at Granada for the last time), and her mother-in-law, for her rebuke (“you do well to weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man”), Morayma bears the burden of history’s silence.

She symbolizes the trauma of loss, but I insist on seeing her also as a dreaming time capsule, locked out of verbiage. So she dreams in all the banned languages: Arabic, Andalusi script, and weave and rhyme. She dreams in tilework, waterwork, and geometry, in logic and faith, musical notation and recipe, fact, theory, and praise.

Morayama’s death comes as a further poetic comment; she is invited back by fate for repose in Andalusi soil, a sort of permanence denied to others as the clan goes into exile to Morocco. She is only 26 years old at death. Her grief-stricken husband carries her body from the mountains of Alpujarras to the family graveyard in Mondujar. As he goes through the burial rites, he does his utmost to honor his beloved queen. The city of Granada’s official records show that Boabdil offers regular prayers at Morayma’s tomb and furnishes the mosque with substantial funds to continue recitation of the Qur’an as a blessing for her soul. Promises are made and broken yet again.

The new rulers of Granada confiscate the sum of money left for the upkeep of the mosque and tomb, demolish the mosque, and build with its funds a church on the site. There she dreams, under the ruins. Endlessly dreams.

What the lovely “Moor” Morayma loses through neglect by historians, she gains in mystique. Her silent presence seals her place as the lingering ghost of a spectacular millennium. Al-Andalus will be recalled in poems and songs for centuries to come, as nostalgia and as a story of hope and heartbreak. In no other way does this tragedy punctuate itself better than in the figure of Sultana Morayma. M

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Nagat Ali and Heather H. Thomas

translation by Gretchen McCullough

Counterspirit 1.

Her voice is like a pearl that lights the darkness, my counterpart from another world, as if we had met before in a dream or a more innocent time.

As if my broken-spirit mirror could ponder what stains my heart, the same pair of deep eyes moving, bewildered, in every direction.

2.

Up-down the stairwells my eyes carry me, the scarred darkness leading nowhere until she arrives.

Her eyes don’t hide the warrior, the deft battles, woundedness, escapes and nightshade games I too have played to trick the body out of its seeing.

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Around a smokeless fire each spark’s a spell, the words piling up, heaps on the floor like old lovers’ clothes tossed into bloodlines.

3.

We don’t need a language.

The soul sends signs so I don’t need to tell her about my sweetheart alone in Seattle making do with my picture hung on his decrepit wall.

Now I am certain he resembles my father who abandoned me in the middle of the road.

I have nothing else In this wasteland of a city except you, kind counterspirit.

4.

We go to the mosque with the green glass tomb, an emerald ocean inside filigreed walls

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silver-cool we press our hands against.

I think of the elusive light at the end of the dock, us sailing backward into the Book of the Dead, sisters across calligraphic waves and pillars of the upright pronoun, our eyes the same black mirrors I’d released to come here. M

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Michael Jewell Celestial Navigation Five times a day I turn, saluting the black cube which pulls gravity into its heart. Because there is no truth but truth, five times daily I knock at a door of polished ivory and know that on its threshold stands an angel, waiting to take my hand or my life.

The voice of the stone speaks to me, the music of a diatom.

The shadow of the mountain shines more brightly than the sky, and at every turning a message comes unbidden, as if to sailors plotting a course by the stars. It tells me I hold the key to the world.

I have rediscovered the word through which thinking becomes translucent.

As I approach my destination I trace a vein of quartz through exposed granite.

I climb the stairs to your room, trusting in your forgiveness, and likewise wind-stunted red cedars cling to the cliffs, making beauty from disfigurement.

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The Street of Looms The streets narrow and lead only further into the city, reaching other side streets and smoke-filled shops where tea is served in brass cups, and here lies the danger, because you are drawn so deeply into the shadows that you cannot retrace your steps. You come to the Street of Looms, commended to the blind weavers, and they watch you with second sight, as if they could easily disprove clear statements of fact with rugs of complex design.

You ask the way from them, but they stop their work to question your willingness to listen.

Could you follow their art beyond an urge to lose yourself even more completely in desperation, to risk becoming like them?

Would you trust them enough to carry their baskets of wool and sweep their courtyards for years before they teach you, and will you keep their secrets once they are revealed?

For these are the vows of silence they require, to risk going blind from seeing the pattern too closely.

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The Final Word Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War ­—a mass public-performance piece Union Square, New York City September 22, 2001 Not expecting the world to change to accommodate its victims, but neither accepting my own predatory nature as the final word, I traced the spoor of boot treads mixed with clumps of fur and patches of clotted blood across the snow, and wondered which member of this year’s dwindling herd went lashed to the hood of a car three days before Thanksgiving.

Which hungry deer was taken at the edge of our field, having abandoned caution in favor of better foraging? When I walked the border for fallen or vandalized posted signs I listened for shots which rolled up the valley, though hunting season had officially ended, and emerging from the conifers I looked for a line of cloven tracks in fresh powder because I needed to know not only that the fittest survived, but the graceful and serene as well. M

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Dina El Dessouky First Doll

for Suheir Hammad

I didn’t know what to give my daughter for her first birthday didn’t want to bind her in

silky pink ribbons and polyester threads

didn’t want to smother her with

tiny, perky breasts squeeze her between impossibly narrow thighs smother her beneath a veil of platinum blond nylon

didn’t want to bury her under PVC BPA PCB mountains of poisonous acronyms so I sifted through the rubble of my past and future lives and gave birth to her greatest granddaughter Birthing a doll was backbreaking each crude, painstaking stitch born of an unskilled labor of love little more than child’s play

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Birthing a doll ran me ragged as I hunched over her raggedy body blood shot my eyes as I strained to create another woman like so many worldwide from only thrown-out scraps and their own creativity stitching together new lives vibrant, playful out of nothing I crafted her one auspicious eve like a witch channeling

women everywhere just like me and not like me at all

July 21, 2014 I crafted her as my heart and ears bled with the news of women, children, and men too shells strewn across the Gazan shoreline I thought of under under under

all the heads aching hands sewing

mortar and fire a looming birthday constraints of

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threadbare socks and lace from old panties crumpled plastic mesh and torn-up polka-dot pajamas women giving life when death was too greedy For my daughter’s first birthday I made her

left her face naked a blank slate upon which to imagine her

a rag doll a survivor

future heritage lineage daughters children M

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Ali Hazzah Agaza We sat down late one afternoon at a small lacquered table in the back of the umbrous restaurant section of the pub, away from the aging bashawat gathered by the bar. I hadn’t previously met Misha’s wife, and his sister kept her distance, and the friend was a shadow of the bubbly, outgoing teenage girl I remembered.

Misha ordered a Sakara Gold, but the rest of them had Turkish coffee, except for his wife, who pleasantly requested mint tea from the young waiter.

“Mish ma‘oul! Unbelievable! After all these years! Was the flight okay? How is your hotel? Isn’t it amazing how little Zamalek has changed?”

I chanced a glance at Misha’s sister, but she looked away. Was I an embarrassment? After all, there were those meetings behind the new pool at the Gezira Club. The huge banyan tree in the Jardin d’Enfants. The quick clamber. The brush of her legs as she pulled herself up. Now safely hidden, lost in the foliage of an ancient tree. My head spinning. Her young half-English body in a Jantzen bathing suit in the warm Cairene afternoon, when we met with an urgency, time after time. That first time, I thought I would fall off.

None of this was mentioned, of course, as she composed herself.

It was as if she was concentrating on not remembering anything.

“Hoda said it must have been hard on you all leaving.”

“What of it?” said Misha’s sister.

“You boys probably need to catch up,” said Misha’s wife, smiling. “We’re going to shop at Khan Kalili.” She touched him as she got up, and I stood up too and awkwardly shook hands with the three women amid the clumsy clatter of wooden chairs being pushed back.

“It was nice meeting you,” said Misha’s wife.

“Forsa saeeda,” I said, and they left.

“Let’s have some real drinks,” I said to Misha. “I keep a private bottle here, like most of the regulars.”

“A regular already?” he said.

And so Misha and I moved to the small bar, and my bottle of airport Scotch was brought out.

We talked about his life in England and had drinks, and even a couple of Stellas, too, for old times’ sake, or perhaps for the sake of our parents, who used to sit in a large circle with their friends every Friday during lunch in front of the Lido.

Soon Misha’s face became flushed. He became serious.

“My memory is gone,” he said. “I’m starting to forget a lot of things. And I can’t read Arabic anymore. I don’t remember much of what happened when we lived here. And I don’t know why I’ve returned.”

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“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “None of us do.”

“Do you think there are a lot of people who do what I seem to be doing? I mean, who come back looking for something but not knowing really what?”

“Of course,” I said. “It’s very common here, and in many other places too just like this. You can spot them, us, a mile away. I’m fairly certain we don’t look like regular tourists to the locals.”

“What do we look like?” he said.

I thought about that for a moment.

“Honestly, to someone on the street in Cairo nowadays we probably don’t look like we’re here to see the pyramids.”

Misha laughed. “No, we probably look more like zombies.” He glanced at me. “Or maybe sleepwalkers who’ve come searching for that inscription etched with a pen knife on the trunk of a tree somewhere.”

The aging bashawat noisily started leaving the pub. They all seemed to be conducting important business via their cell phones, but perhaps this was mere show. The bartender scanned their table for tips as he watched them go, and the place became intensely quiet, except for a couple of young waiters murmuring to one another, and the cashier, who sat by the entrance to the kitchen.

“So, you ever fuck my sister?”

“I wish.”

“Even that time in London in the ‘70s?”

“Not even then.”

“So why the look?”

“What look?”

“Ya, ragl, don’t lie to me.”

“I thought your memory was trashed.”

“In London, what happened?”

“Well, she was going out with that Olympic Airways pilot.”

“Yeah, so?”

“I mean, she was already going steady.”

“That didn’t stop you, did it?”

“From what?”

“Going to her place that evening. After taking her to dinner. And paying the garage mechanic to repair her car. Don’t lie to me. I know what you did. I know all about it. She told me.”

“Yeah, and so?”

“Never mind. I’m not pissed. I mean, I am pissed, but I don’t care anymore. Tell me something . . .”

“What?”

“Would you still fuck her now?”

“Misha, please. Let’s drop it with the sister thing.”

“Fine. So what do you think is going to happen to us?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nobody wants us anymore.”

“A bit late for that, isn’t it?”

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We paid for the drinks and started back to his hotel. We navigated the narrow streets and the traffic that now clogged Shaggarat el Dor, and the motorcycles that buzzed about in the dark, their headlights off, and the rows of cars double-parked bumper to bumper, their windshield wipers bent back and pointing to the sky as if in prayer, as we stepped on and off the unusually high sidewalks like two ancient goats.

It occurred to me that Misha and I had never strolled on the streets of Zamalek together before.

“How come we never did this as kids?” I said.

“My mother never let me or my sister walk anywhere without supervision.”

“That chauffeur who drove you to the club?”

“Yes—him, or taxis. Everywhere.”

“What was his name?”

“Osman.”

“Yes, that’s it.”

“Is your mother still alive?”

“Yes. You know, she doesn’t always recognize me nowadays.”

We passed by the Petit Lycée on Ahmed Heshmat, where I often got into trouble as a boy.

“Did you remember Mademoiselle Jaja from kindergarten?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you go to her wedding?”

“I was there. I think. Yes, I’m pretty sure I was there. I was the trainbearer. With your sister.”

“That’s right! She was very beautiful that day. I remember that quite well. Didn’t you wear a silk shirt?”

We kept walking on Maraashli Street. Despite the strangeness of the hour, some workmen were demolishing what little remained of a curio store adjoining an elegant old villa whose once-beautiful garden had been left untended. But we could still glimpse the faded lettering above the ruined door to the shop: Ce petit coin de rien.

Neither of us said anything as we walked to Ahmed Mazhar Street, and I did not know if Misha remembered that this antique shop was one of those forlorn, desperate places where all the families that were being kicked out by Nasser tried to sell their exquisite handmade Aubusson furniture for piasters on the pound before fleeing the country.

Soon enough, we arrived at Firdaus. My street. Paradise Street.

“The French sisters lived here,” I said. “Second floor. Remember them?”

“Yes,” said Misha. “Such beauties. All three, especially the eldest one. We all lived so close to one another. I wonder what ever happened to Monique.”

His blue eyes brightened, and for a flickering moment he no longer was an unremarkable old man with a bald head and hurt oozing out of his pores but instead that handsome teenager who once had

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all the hearts of the most sought-after girls at the Gezira Club in the palm of his hand.

“It has been lovely seeing you, Keemo.”

“You too, Misha.”

“Till next time then.”

“Yes.” I watched him disappear into the hotel.

Taxis slowed down and beeped at me. I shook my head, as a young soldier with a no-doubt bulletless machine gun sat cloistered in a kiosk at the gate of the Indian ambassador’s residence, observing me as he ate a foul and ta’miyaa sandwich while listening to a transistor radio.

When I last saw Misha, I was 12 and my mother and I were passing by this exact spot on a Friday morning on our way to the Gezira Sporting Club. It was nothing in those days for an Englishwoman to walk in Zamalek unescorted by a husband or adult male relative by her side and without having to cover her head or arms to avoid being pestered by salacious young men with no manners or sense of personal shame. Nubian boabs protected the streets with their collective sleepy gaze as they dozed on benches by the doors of the apartment buildings that had replaced many of the private villas along the Nile.

I noticed a familiar car coming down Mazhar Street, a regal Buick with its dashing ventiports gleaming in the sun. Misha’s father was driving, and I wondered if their chauffeur had taken the day off.

Misha’s mother was in the passenger seat, and his sister was in the back with him all sullen, and the trunk of the car was half-open and filled with luggage and tied down with rope.

Misha’s father pulled over and stopped next to us. I had never seen him look like this before. I had only seen him relax, playing chess in the club on Fridays amid family and friends, and sometimes he would play a game of chess with me and let me win, even though he was a good player and would never have been beaten by a kid like me who was still learning shatarang.

“I haven’t seen you both in ages!” said my mother.

“I’m sorry I haven’t called. We’ve been—” “I understand completely. Don’t worry about it.”

Misha’s father said nothing, but he kept glancing at the rearview mirror like some nervous character being followed in a procedural.

“We’re going on holiday!” said Misha, grinning at me. “It’s our first agaza in ages!”

Misha’s father said to his wife, “We really should go,” and I remember thinking that it was odd that he seemed so sad and unsure of himself going off on holiday.

“Where’s Osman?”

“That bastard turned out to be mukhabarat. Spoke perfect English the day I sacked him, after we found him rifling through a briefcase that André had left in the car. He’d been spying on us all along, apparently.”

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“I see.”

“We have to go!” screamed Misha’s father.

“Well, goodbye then,” said Misha’s mother, calmly, as if all this was normal.

“I’ll tell Abe your news,” said my mother, referring to my father, Ibrahim, by the nickname she’d given him after their first date. “I don’t suppose you’ll be writing.”

“Best of luck.”

“All the best to you, too,” said my mother.

We watched the car drive off down Ahmed Mazhar, which in those days was still a two-way street.

“When are we going on holiday?” I asked, but she didn’t answer.

Some time later, I found out that Misha and his family had gone to Greece, where they stayed for a few years. Misha’s father could not find work at first and quickly went through the little money he had managed to smuggle out of the country. After a while, he was able to get a job in a bakery in Athens through an Armenian relative. He had owned a small shoe factory in Alexandria. But Nasser took it away from him, as he took a lot of things that did not belong to him from a lot of people, and most of those people were never again the same.

Misha’s father never said anything bad about the abandoned country he still loved but that no longer loved him in return, and for several years, I would occasionally catch a glimpse of his now-sequestered Buick on Mazhar Street, still being driven by Osman the chauffeur, with an army man, wearing dark glasses, grimly ensconced in the back seat. Neither ever seemed to be aware of the teenager with the pale blue eyes riding in the car with them and smiling at me as the ghostly limousine vanished into the mayhem of Cairo’s traffic. M

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CONTRIBUTORS

Nagat Ali was born and raised in Cairo and is a doctoral candidate in literature at Cairo University. Her poetry collections include A Superstitious Creature Adores Garrulousness, Cracked Wall, and Like the Blade of a Knife. Winner of the Tangier Prize for Poetry, Ali was selected to participate in the Arab literary festival Beirut 39.

Minatullah Amer Alobaidi, originally from Baghdad, is an alumnus of the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani. She graduated in 2015 with a bachelor’s degree in international studies and a minor in business management after receiving a full scholarship from the US State Department. Alobaidi is currently working for Heartland Alliance International, an NGO in Sulaimani.

Mina Attar recently graduated from the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani and now works as a student services coordinator at the university. She has a bachelor’s degree in international studies with a minor in business management. She was born and raised in Baghdad but is Kurdish, originally from Sulaimani. She moved back to her home city a couple of months before the 2003 war.

Shebana Coelho is a writer and director, originally from India, now living in New Mexico. Coelho’s work has appeared in Sukoon, Word Riot, Malpais Review, and Al Jazeera America. She received a CEC ArtsLink award to collaborate with Ashtar Theatre (Ramallah) for the project Land Out Loud. shebanacoelho.com.

Susan Muaddi Darraj is the author of A Curious Land: Stories from Home, which won the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction.

Her first book, The Inheritance of Exile, was a finalist in the John Gardener Fiction Prize and was named ForeWord Press’s Book of the Year (Short Fiction). She is a lecturer in the Johns Hopkins Master of Arts in Writing Program. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

Dina El Dessouky was born in Hamburg to parents from Cairo and immigrated to the United States at age 3. El Dessouky teaches writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she completed her doctorate in literature. Her work also appears in Spiral Orb and Min Fami: Arab Feminist Reflections on Identity, Space, and Resistance (Inanna Publications, 2014).

Dhuha Dheyaa is a student at the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani. She is currently majoring in business administration and minoring in international studies. Originally from Baghdad, she moved to Erbil two years ago. At AUIS she has joined several volunteer organizations and is currently an intern for the IRIS department, the university’s research institute.

Suheir Hammad, Mizna’s first Edward Said Award recipient, is a poet, playwright, and aspiring DJ. Her poetry has been translated into several non-romance languages and presented in universi-73-

ties, community centers, prisons, on screens big and small, and at the Loft Literary Center. She is working on two new collections of poems. Hammad remembers listening to Dr. Nimri Aziz on WBAI in the car, before she ever published a poem.

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is the author of Kohl & Chalk and Baker of Tarifa. She has won the San Diego Book Award for poetry and the Nazim Hikmet Poetry Prize and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize multiple times. Her work has been published in Prairie Schooner, Poetry International, the Cortland Review, Vallum, Atlanta Review, and Journal of Postcolonial Writings.

Eman Hassan is a biracial poet who was raised between the United States and Kuwait. Her poems have appeared or will appear in Aldus Journal of Translation, Blackbird, Illuminations, and Painted Bride Quarterly, and her work is forthcoming in the anthology Hysteria. She is one of the founding members of the American University of Kuwait.

Ali Hazzah is a former IT executive, as well as the co-founder of one of Egypt’s early rock bands. Hazzah grew up in Zamalek, Cairo. To date, he has written eclectically minimalist fiction on a highly sporadic basis. He is an admirer of the literature of vanished worlds and the work of Albert Cossery.

Amir Hussain’s poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Faultline, Mizna, Fugue, Water~Stone Review, Poets for Living Waters, and Sixteen Minutes to Palestine. A recipient of the Loft Literary Center’s Minnesota Emerging Writer’s Grant in 2014–2015, his poems explore the crossroads of natural and social environments.

Jazelle Jajeh is 19, a Palestinian born in San Francisco to a painter and a businessman. She studies English, Middle Eastern studies, and education.

Michael Jewell is a poet, painter, and novelist living in Calais, Vermont. He has had two chapbooks published by Wood Thrush Books, an independent press specializing in nature writing, and he has exhibited art regionally. michaeldavidjewell.com.

Ismail Khalidi’s plays include Truth Serum Blues (Pangea World Theater, 2005), Foot, Tennis in Nablus (Alliance, 2010), and Sabra Falling. Khalidi is co-editor of Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora (TCG, 2015). He received his MFA in dramatic writing from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.

Tammy Lakkis is a writer and an artist living in Detroit. She is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she studied English and creative writing.

Jennifer Zeynab Maccani is a Syrian American writer and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). Her short stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Stream, Clackamas Literary Review, and the Normal School. She received an honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s December 2015 Fiction Open.

Zainab Mera is a senior at the American University of Iraq– Sulaimani, majoring in information technology. She was born and

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raised in central Iraq, in the city of Hillah. She has a passion for writing and currently works at the university’s writing center, helping students to enhance their writing skills and learn how to enjoy writing.

Gretchen McCullough is a writer and translator whose bilingual book of short stories in English and Arabic, Three Stories From Cairo, was published in 2011 by AFAQ Publishing House, Cairo. Currently she is a senior instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition at the American University in Cairo.

Isa Mohammed is a 24-year-old university student born in Baghdad. He moved to the Kurdistan region to attend the American University of Iraq–Sulaimani. He is also a freelance journalist and a published poet.

Majid Naficy fled Iran in 1983, a year and a half after the execution of his wife, Ezzat, in Tehran. Since 1984, Naficy has been living in West Los Angeles. He has published two collections of poetry in English, Muddy Shoes (Beyond Baroque Books, 1999) and Father and Son (Red Hen Press, 2003).

Nicole Olweean is currently a second-year candidate in the University of California Riverside’s MFA program. Her work has appeared in Menacing Hedge, Bird’s Thumb, and Fishladder.

Andrew Slater is currently the director of a genocide documentation team in Duhok, Iraq, for Yazda, a Yazidi-American NGO. He was previously an English literature and composition professor at the American University in Iraq–Sulaimani and has an MFA in writing from Columbia University.

Heather H. Thomas is the author of six poetry collections, including Blue Ruby. Her work is translated into Arabic and five other languages. Her poems have won prizes from the Salem College Center for Women Writers and the Academy of American Poets. She lives and teaches in Reading, Pennsylvania.

Gina Valdés’s poetry and prose have been published in five languages, in journals and anthologies in the United States, Mexico, and Europe. She has recent or forthcoming work in Pilgrimage, California Review, San Pedro River Review, Huizache, and CALYX. Kamelya Omayma Youssef is a poet, educator, editor, and organizer based in Detroit.

Paul Zarou is a writer and business professional in the hightech industry, selling products that serve the post-production market. Zarou is also affiliated with the Humanitas Prize as a judge and captain. The organization gives out awards recognizing television and motion picture writers whose work explores the human condition.

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Sagirah Shahid Kenji Shoemaker Amy Sparks Theresa Swaney Leila Tayeb Jelena Todic Cindy B. Tong Julia Bulbulian Wells Sean Williams Joseph Zaine Refat & Miriam Zayed

Matthew Kane Rashid & Mona Khalidi Nahid Khan & Dawud Elmaz Abinader Mulla Eve Lotter Abou Chacra Helen Kivnick & Gary Amr Al-Hindi Gardner Zaid Al’Hakim and Andrew Knighton Thoraya Al-Essahki Jason Makansi Arwa Alsamarae Jen March & Kurt Amal & Salih Altoma Froehlich Anna Andersen Nabil Matar Melissa Anderson Kathy McKay Brooke Anthony Dr. Hilary Morris & Dr. Robert Barnett Mizna Associate Nesreen Akhtarkhavari Michelle Baroody ($50–$249) Rabi‘h Nahas Leila Ben-Nasr Dominique Najjar Donald & Sharon Esam Aal & Paula Aal Meena Natarajan & Berglund Catharine Abbott Dipankar Mukherjee Cathy Camper Abir & Hashem Bruce & Barbara Margaret Amad Carlsen Abukhadra Nordstrom-Loeb Steve Dietz Fadia & Yusuf Abul-Hajj Jawdy Obeid & Zarmina Sarah Najla Dillard Lisa Adwan Sayedi Naomi English Devon Akmon Ady Olson Jennie Goloboy Kate & Katherine Aksadi Nancy Reynolds & John Layla Azmi Goushey Nora Ali Becker Lorie & Karim Haddad Bilal Alkatout Frank Rhame Brahim Hadj-Moussa Evelyn AlSultany Mike Rollin Laura Hallen Sarah Barkawi & Eli James Rustad Amanda Hankerson & Harland Khaldoun Samman Mohannad Ghawanmeh Zeina Barkawi Janet Schmitt I. Ruth Hansen Sharon Rodning Bash Kerry Sheehy Pauline Homsi Vinson Reema Bazzy Lucia Wilkes Smith Iris Hoover Jennifer Beckham & Paul Brett & Katherine Smith Michael Jonak Ching Clay Steinman & Inge De Deidre Kellogg Ketroser Salwa Ben Zahra Becker Taous Khazem Stephen & Hala Buck Elizabeth Tisel Pedro Lander Rissie Burt Tara Woolpy Diyah Larasati Tom Cassidy Patricia Mitchell Ouahib Chalbi Rachel Norman Paul Cimmerer Mizna Patron Juliana Pegues Brian Cronwall ($250–$999) Jennifer Pennington Nellie & Fritz Dorigo Jay Peterson Salah Fattah Joyce Thomas Aruri Flo Razowsky Gretchen Gibbs Elena Athwal & Mazher Elizabeth Reiser Kathryn Haddad Al-Zo‘by Steven Rosenberg Mazen & Nicole Halabi Mohammed Bamyeh Leona Ross Abdeen Jabara Reem El-Radi Christine Sasseville Camellia Kalra Rebecca Haddad & Ziad Sylvia Schwarz Amy Kamel Amra -76-

Saed Wadi & Randa Ismail Rita N. A. Mansour William Nour & Guy Piotrowski Jeanette Wiedemeier & Matt Bower

Mizna Benefactor ($1000+) Yehia & Nawal Barkawi Michele & Wael Khouli Cultural STAR Program General Mills Middle East Employee Network Joyce Foundation Knight Foundation Left Tilt Fund McKnight Foundation Metropolitan Regional Arts Council Minnesota State Arts Board National Network for Arab American Communities University of Minnesota African Studies Initiative Asian Languages & Literatures Immigration History Research Center Mizna Partners Film Society of Minneapolis/St. Paul The Loft Literary Center Northern Lights.mn Radius of Arab American Writers Walker Art Center Wisdom Ways Center of Spirituality

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES UPCOMING THEMED ISSUES

Environment & Climate, Winter 2016. Deadline: July 29 Surviving the Rhetoric, Summer 2017. Deadline: February 28 Environment & Climate This theme is meant to explore the state of the climate and ourselves.

How do climate change and the environment intersect with occupations, wars, migrations, and ordinary life? How are people and communities adjusting or taking action? And how are we participating in and experiencing contemporary discourses and spaces oriented around our relationship to nature? Guest editor: Gary Paul Nabhan.

Surviving the Rhetoric: Arabs & Muslims as Villains, Again The presidential election in 2016 in the United States has reignited the narrative about Arabs and Muslims as expedient villains. This is nothing new, but perhaps there is a fervor and momentum this time around that is especially dangerous. How are we being affected, responding and not responding, surviving? We’re looking for work that wrestles with the topic in thoughtful, personal, whimsical, humorous, critical, or other ways, skipping the speeches and lessons.

General Submissions Information Mizna continuously seeks original writing for upcoming publications.

Contributors do not have to be of Arab descent provided their work is of relevance to the Arab American community. Submissions are accepted throughout the year on an ongoing basis. If you would like your work to be considered for our winter issue, please submit by July 29, 2016; for our next summer issue, please submit by February 28, 2017.

Send your submission and a short biography (maximum 50 words) via e-mail as an attachment to mizna@mizna.org, and include the word “submission” in the subject line. The attachment(s) should be standard word-processing program files. Please include your name, mailing address, e-mail address, and phone number in your message.

Prose should be double-spaced and limited to 2500 words. Please limit poetry submissions to four poems per submission. Verses exceeding our page width will be treated with a runover indent. Proofs can be made available for author approval before publication.

Simultaneous submissions are allowable, but we ask that you contact us as soon as your work has been accepted elsewhere.

Writers whose work is published in Mizna will receive complimentary copies of the issue in which their work appears, a one-year subscription to the journal, and a modest honorarium.

Due to the volume of submissions received, those not conforming to the above guidelines, as well as material previously published in any other English-language forum, will not be considered.

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SUBSCRIPTIONS

Annual Subscriptions United States/Canada: $20/year or $35/two years International: $35/year or $65/two years Institutional: $60/year or $100/two years Individual Issues United States/Canada: International:

$10 (add $1.50 each for postage) $10 (add $5.00 each for postage)

For a complete list of back issues and to subscribe, please visit mizna.org.

Or, send check or money order to: Mizna 2446 University Ave. W. Suite 115 St. Paul, MN 55114

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