Mizna: Summer 2015, Vol 16.1

Mizna Prose, Poetry, and Art Exploring Arab America

Volume 16, Issue 1 2015

St. Paul, Minnesota

Publisher Mizna, Inc. Executive and Artistic Director Lana Salah Barkawi Managing and Poetry Editor Jen March Prose Editor Lisa Adwan Guest Curator of Visual Art Maymanah Farhat Selection Committee Anna Andersen Lana Salah Barkawi Sarah Najla Dillard Jen March Moheb Soliman Program Manager Moheb Soliman Program Assistants Anna Andersen Sarah Najla Dillard

Mizna is an organization devoted to promoting Arab American culture by providing a forum for its expression.

We value diversity in our community and are committed to giving voice to Arab Americans through film, literature, and art.

Mizna is an Arabic word meaning “cloud of the desert.” This cloud shades and protects the desert traveler, easing the journey.

Mizna is published by Mizna, Inc., 2446 University Ave. W., Suite 115, St. Paul, MN 55114. Copyright 2015 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 our generous donors, and by the Knight Foundation.

Board Members Charlotte Karem Albrecht Ziad Amra Amy Kamel Nahid Khan Michele Khouli Dipankar Mukherjee Rabi‘h Nahas P. Niny Salem Interns Claire Kouatli Emily Ahmed TahaBurt Special Thanks Mark Conway Bill Dobbs Jenna Hamed Ann Mayhew Athir Shayota -ii-

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Transliteration and Non-English Text.................................................... v Hasan Dudar

“Today I’m Writing You from Palestine”.... 1

Hala Alyan

“Jerusalem”.............................................. 4 “Forecasting”.............................................. 5

Amjad Hajyassin

“Girl in the Living Room”............................. 6

Mike Rollin

“Today When I Say the Wars........................ 12 “Today When I Say the Wars........................ 14

Lauren Camp

“Peripheral Vision”....................................... 15

Donya Tag-El-Din

“Living Art”................................................... 16

Christina Najla LaRose

“Speak, Silk”.................................................. 17

Jennifer Zeynab Maccani

“Mujaddara and Myrrh”............................... 20

Rasha Abdulhadi

“We Live in Shell Houses”............................ 24

Hazem Fahmy

“Opera”......................................................... 25

Samia Halaby

Visual Art...................................................... 26 “Abstract Pictures”........................................ 35

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

“Wasta”......................................................... 38 “Translation” ................................................. 39

Angele Ellis

“The Mind, Mind Has Mountains”............... 40

Kathryn Kysar

“At Sunset: Iraq, 2004”................................. 45

Ron Riekki

“The Qur’an at Auburn, a Lesson”.................. 46

Cover art by Samia Halaby. “Green Earth,” 2014. Acrylic on linen canvas, 153 cm x 203 cm. Reproduced here courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.

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Majda Talal Gama

“There Is a Green That Is Missing”.............. 47

Reem Abu-Baker

“The Gods of Beauty”.................................... 48 “Habibti”....................................................... 49

Anwar F. Accawi

“The Rocket”................................................. 50

Layla Azmi Goushey

“The Fortune Teller”..................................... 55

Joyce Thomas Aruri

“Tribute to Naseer H. Aruri”......................... 57

Contributors ............................................................................................ 59 Donors ..................................................................................................... 61 Submission Guidelines ........................................................................... 62 Subscriptions ........................................................................................... 63

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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 an accepted method 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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Hasan Dudar Today I’m Writing You from Palestine To my father: Every year or so I tell myself that I’ll come to this place, and that I’ll bring you along with me. You always refuse.

I insist, and you say, “Why should I go? What will going there bring me?”

“It’s your home,” I say. “Don’t you want to see your home?”

You say, “This is my home. Toledo is home.”

“Home is there,” I insist, and usually at that point, the conversation ends.

Today I’m writing you from that place you refuse to visit.

Palestine. Mom, Khaduj, and I came by way of Jordan and are here for one day only. Still, it’s enough time to capture the beauty and strange moodiness of this land. As we drove through the yellow hills leading us out of the arid Jordan Valley and into the greenery of Jerusalem, I felt both joy and sadness pass through me, the same way a good coffee first runs bitter and then sweet across the tongue.

I was sad for many reasons and happy for one: that I’ve finally seen this city.

I must admit, though, I felt the sadness before the joy. This sadness began with something very simple, and foolish even. That is, that I feel I’m a tourist. Everything here reminds of it. My first time setting eyes on the city was in the passenger seat of an overly air-conditioned Mercedes Benz, driven by our tour guide. He’s a nice Palestinian man from Jericho, not to mention the youngest grandfather I’ve ever met—he must be forty-five, at the most. He comes from the oldest inhabited city yet dresses as though he’s from Los Angeles. Shiny brown loafers, dark designer jeans, a thin white shirt, sunglasses, and a deep tan. He picked us up at the border and sang for us the entire way from the Jordan River to the Mount of Olives. There’s not a song he doesn’t know. Mention an Arab country, and he will sing to you what’s playing on its radio at that very moment. We told him our name is from Egypt, and he sang us a song about Egypt. Then Mom told him she’s Lebanese, and he sang her a song about Lebanon.

How beautiful it is to drive along the Jordan River and to be sung to. On a map, the land appears as just a narrow strip of beige and green. But when climbing the Jordan Valley, you see every wrinkle. I imagined stretching out all these hills and was reminded of 2006. Do you remember when the professor visited us for dinner after the war in Lebanon? She said she met with a priest and he told her not to mourn. “Lebanon is like a balloon,” he told her. “Hit it on one side and it will rise from another.” I didn’t understand that until -1-

now. The hills here produce a sense of infinite space. It’s like New York and its towers that stretch a small island to the sky.

The Mount of Olives, the highest of those hills, is packed with pilgrims and tourists. I’m one of them. I had always felt that my first time seeing this place I would feel that I’ve come home. Instead, I feel that I’m a guest. There is a happiness that I’m excluded from feeling. I come, and only part of me is able to feel joy. I’ve heard stories before, of people having the chance to visit Palestine when things calmed down during the Lebanese civil war, some time after the Israeli invasion. Many people went, but one man told me he refused. He said he’d rather go on his own terms or never see it at all. I feel much the same now. I’ve come here on terms that aren’t mine. I came as a tourist, to see things, to take their pictures.

That same grotesque role of the tourist has brought me joy as well. When we reached the top of the Mount of Olives, I was overcome by the fact that that collection of homes and stones folded between several hills is Jerusalem. It was there. I could see it. We could have turned back then and I’d have left happy. But then our tour guide began forcing us to take those silly tourist photos where it appears we are cupping the Dome of the Rock in our palms. I did so reluctantly, and returned to looking out over the city. A melancholy set in. From atop the mountain, and even down in the narrow alleys, the Old City is quiet, quiet with the sort of silence that precedes death.

All around are kind reminders of death. Past death, present death, future death. Here, all death lives side by side. In the ancient hillside tombs, in the slow, reluctant strolls of old men, and in our refusal to record our history so as to avoid sealing our demise in those obituary books. Don’t be mistaken; there is life here, too. But I sense that it comes with great caution, a life within limits. This is always most evident in a town by what’s missing rather than by what’s there. The absence of noise, of smell, and of merchants hissing at you to buy their knickknacks. If it weren’t for the lazy tourists and the hum of motors, Jerusalem would be a dull town, a museum, whose residents walk around on tiptoe.

You asked, “What will going bring me?” and I find myself asking that same question. I have no answer other than it’s brought me regret. I had naively thought going would somehow remind Palestinians and the occupier that those generations in exile are still there and still remember the land and its people. But it’s impossible to know what my presence means to them, if it means anything at all.

Rather it’s brought me to regret thinking that Palestine is there, that it’s an actual place. Your question, that statement, hasn’t made sense until now. For all my life, until this moment, the only Palestine I knew was your Palestine, a Palestine neither one of us had seen. This is the Palestine of my grandfather’s home, which was a small house at the end of a street in Akka. I know of this room through you, and you know of it through your father. It’s an inheritance of memory. A place that grew smaller and smaller with each story, as though time

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were something measured in inches and feet, and the farther we grew from it in days and months and years, the smaller it got in our memory. Someday, I’ll pass it on to my child, too. Hopefully by then it won’t be too small to dwell in.

I know you would want me to be happy and to not feel any sadness on this visit, but I must say, it’s strange to stand in a place that you were not allowed to return to but only visit, in a memory not yours. You left in May and were born in July. For seven months you saw it from the womb. You breathed its air, you ate its oranges, you heard its songs, you dwelled in one of its daughters. You were then born in Lebanon, but your papers say you were born in Akka, in Palestine. That leaves you with the question of what it means to be born. Is a birthplace that place where you exit one body and enter the world on your own? Or is it a place of belonging? Or maybe it’s neither of those things and is rather the condition and the history you are born into that matters. Meaning that for you, you belong to nowhere but the idea of longing. On some level, for those in exile, it’s ceased to matter anymore whether Palestine and Akka are real places. They’ve become metaphors, and you were born into that metaphor, in a place you were not, in a place your feet have never touched. You tell people the truth, and they tell you you’ve recited a poem: I was born in Lebanon on the seventh of July, but at the same time I was born in Akka, too.

That was the Palestine I knew, one that was occupied and in turn occupied its people. As I stand here, overlooking the city, the place where impatience brought me, I’ve learned one thing: we never had to return because we never left. M

-3-

Hala Alyan Jerusalem My photographs of the souk are sunlit: prayer beads,

kaffiyehs, ceramics, carpet.

Finger pricked on the crown of thorns fashioned out of cedar wood.

I am rumpled from six sunsets of Marlboros and an Arabic still clumsy in my throat.

Shukran from the Palestinian shopkeeper eating dried figs when I translate to the American women for him: no the kitten is his not injured she likes to sleep in the tire

Blond eyebrows knit

and when they leave, the shopkeeper shrugs and says—bemused, wondering—

The Americans, their hearts bleed for cats.

-4-

Forecasting For J

Come winter—silver ponds, telescopes, the firecrackers of midnight.

A heart that fishtails itself broken, ethereal ventricles and the aorta slick with blood. Urgent, pesky. The body is transparent in its wanting, amulets diagrammed easily on the inside of a palm—a cedar pronged into branches of need, the rivers sewn and precise in their ending—always, it’s rudderless, a lithograph for departure.

I am the yes, yes, mushrooming from a plucked thorax, the rack of good, salty lamb I will never cook you, the plot of sundews in another wife’s lawn. Admire the architecture of my moving chest, the delirium of my wrists, how you come like an ocean receded and then returned, lit by rain and acid. The father who made me risky so men would beg for it. For the forest that one becomes searching for origin, carrying the seedpods and nighthawks, the thyme and Xanax of mama’s cupboard, the card deck I split in half for spite. It is true— in the bistro the coffee dregs skittered into elk, canoes, aerial limbs speaking the amen of a late marriage.

You dream of August, a dozen fluted stems unfurled into candelabra.

Everywhere, berries drop like purple snow; unfallen storms husk the air. I dream the same dream, only the rain has come and gone, laundering the trees to alabaster bark. My lungs are grass. They find a wind and call for you. M

-5-

Amjad Hajyassin Girl in the Living Room She lit a half-smoked cigarette and sat on my white desk chair. She started spinning slowly, her toes dragging against the old hardwood floor. The smoke from the cigarette clouded the room, and I sat up to open a window.

The oscillating fan was turned on, and the smoke snaked its way toward the window. I watched her as she spun around. She was wearing one of my old college sweaters even though it was stifling in my room.

“It’s a little hot, don’t you think?” I said, lighting up my own cigarette.

“I get cold in the mornings,” she responded. I didn’t know how to answer, so I just shrugged my shoulders. She crushed the cigarette in an ashtray. “I’m going to jump in the shower and get ready for work.”

“Okay.”

I made a pot of coffee while Mariam was in the shower. I could hear her singing. “Sa’altak Habibi” by Fairouz. Random song. But I smiled. My mother used to sing Fairouz songs to me, when I was younger. I let the coffee brew.

It was nearly one in the afternoon, so I made wudu at the kitchen sink, dripping water all over the floor. I set out the prayer rug, facing it toward the east. Toward the Kaa‘ba. The athan app on my phone went off, and I began the afternoon prayer. Mariam walked around me, taking great care not to pass in front of me, when she exited the shower. By the time I was done praying, she was putting on her work shirt.

Mariam had spent the night at my place. She told her parents she was sleeping over at her cousin’s apartment in Manhattan. Her parents didn’t mind, since Mariam spent a lot of time at her cousin’s place. They didn’t think anything of it. Once Mariam left her house, she came over. She had her own key to my apartment. By the time I got home from work, she had dinner ready. She made baked ziti and set the table with two glasses of red wine. It was a nice gesture. We ate, drank the bottle of wine, then made love. We passed out on my bed, twisting our legs and arms together.

We’ve been seeing each other for almost two years. I wanted to marry her and I told her so a year into our relationship, but she said she wasn’t ready to get married. She wanted to focus on her career. I respected that decision and never brought it up again. I think she appreciated that. Her family was aware of my existence. They knew me through my family. I might have had a two-minute conversation with -6-

her father, in the past. But they didn’t think I was involved or had the intention to become involved with their daughter. They wanted her to marry a doctor or lawyer. Not a part-time adjunct professor of English literature at a community college. They didn’t care that I was a published author.

Okay, granted, I self-published, but I made a decent career selling that novel. It was well received by a number of bloggers. They still didn’t care. “What would people think if you married a writer?” they told her. She said she didn’t care.

My parents said roughly the same thing. “Who’s going to marry a writer?” I would shrug my shoulders. With that kind of attitude, no one would.

My parents had big plans for me. Especially after I was accepted to Columbia University. They wanted me to major in pre-law. Then after graduation, I would attend law school. And for the most part, I was okay with that. I didn’t mind the major; it was interesting. But, I took a writing class in my sophomore year and fell in love. I switched my major to English and, once I graduated, I attended Columbia’s School of the Arts for creative writing. They weren’t exactly happy about that decision. My father was so against it, he didn’t go to any of my graduation ceremonies. After I switched my major, he said he wasn’t going to pay for my tuition. That was hard. The lack of support from my family was a terrible realization, and I thought I had made the wrong decision. But, I started waiting tables and took out some loans and was able to pay my way through school.

Once I finished my master’s degree, I was hired as an adjunct professor teaching introductory classes on creative writing, and then I moved out of my parents’ home. My father and I weren’t talking much. At all really. He was a stubborn Palestinian man who wanted things his way. There was no talking to him. My mother and I kept our relationship. Our relationship was always stronger than the relationship between my father and me. Palestinian men are notorious mama’s boys and I was no different. She didn’t want me to move out of the house, at least not until I was married. But she understood that I could no longer live in the same house with my father. I left and moved into a small apartment in Brooklyn.

“What time do you get off work?” I asked Mariam. We were in the living room now. It was an ordinary living room. A leather couch that stretched along the wall. A TV hung on the opposite wall. There was a bookshelf, half empty near the window. We were sitting on the couch and she was putting her heels on. The TV was on, but I wasn’t paying attention. Mariam had the most adorable ankles.

“It’s a short shift. I’m covering for someone, so I’ll be off at 5-ish,” she said, straightening her black pencil skirt. She took a pack of cigarettes from her purse and lit one. “I’m really glad we can smoke in your apartment.”

-7-

“Yeah, me too.” I took the coffee mugs and plate to the kitchen and tossed them into the sink. “Call me when you get off work. Maybe we’ll go out for dinner or something.”

“I would, but someone’s coming to utlob Halima. Or at least try to.” She laughed nervously and crushed the cigarette into the ashtray. She stood up and brushed the ashes from her skirt, leaving tiny white-grayish lines that she tried to rub off. “I’ll call you if it ends early. Okay?”

“Sure,” I said. She left, waving goodbye as she stepped out of the apartment. I turned the TV off and poured another cup of coffee, in a new mug.

Mariam was a bit of a conundrum. She was beautiful. Like, drop-dead gorgeous. The first time I saw her was at a wedding. She was wearing a red dress that hugged her hips like every man that ever loved her.

She walked into the hall and every head turned her way, even the groom’s. She didn’t bat an eye though. She hugged her friends. Gave a couple random khaltis kisses on their cheeks. Then sauntered over to her table, her parents right behind her. I don’t even remember whose wedding it was. The moment she walked in, she was all I cared about. I was outside, toward the end of the night, and caught her eye as she was leaving. I didn’t stare. That would have been rude. Plus, I didn’t want her parents to see me leering. I don’t believe in love at first sight, but it was close.

A few months after the wedding, I was grading some papers in a dingy café near my apartment. I didn’t notice her until she sat down at my table, with her cup of coffee.

“Hope your wife isn’t coming.” The way she said it, I knew that she knew I wasn’t married. But I told her I wasn’t married, anyway.

She sipped her coffee and raised her eyebrows. It was a funny thing to do; I laughed.

“What?”

“How old are you?” she asked.

“30.”

“And you’re unmarried?”

“Yup,” I said. “How old are you?”

“Pushing 25.”

“And you’re unmarried?”

“Yeah, I’m expired,” she said. This was a running joke in the first-generation Arab American community. A woman older than 23 was considered “expired,” or there was something wrong with her, if she was unmarried. Didn’t matter if she was focusing on school or her career. Marriage was the ultimate goal of every Arab girl.

“Yeah, I’m sorry to hear that. You might as well just start collecting cats.”

“Shut up,” she laughed, then stood up. “Well, it was nice talking to you, but I gotta run.” She left, and my eyes were glued on her as she walked out of the café.

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My younger brother, Amier, called me soon after Mariam left my apartment. Amier was a few years younger than I and he was the pride and joy of the family. He graduated high school early, went to a great university, and just graduated from medical school. To add insult to injury, the kid was married and now he was calling me. “‘Sup, bro,” he said. I could hear his annoying wife in the background. Jameela. She was fake. She was the type of person that tells you something was haram but couldn’t really explain why. Amier was the same way.

“What’s up, Amier?” I said, trying to ignore Jameela’s yelling.

“Not much.” There was silence for a moment. “So, we have a surprise, Jameela and I, and you need to go to Baba’s house.” More silence.

“Today? I’m a little busy right now, grading papers.” I was lying.

I was just sitting in my living room, in the same spot, since Mariam left.

“It’s really important. I wouldn’t ask you if it wasn’t.” He was pleading. “Please. I want you there. I already told Mama you’re gonna be there.”

I got to my mother’s house a little early. Amier and Jameela weren’t there yet. I pressed the bell to the house and my mother answered.

She was wearing a long greenish thobe. I hugged her and gave her a kiss on the forehead.

“Where’s your husband?” I asked.

“You mean your father?” she snapped back.

“Sure.”

“He’s in back, smoking.”

“Didn’t the doctors tell him to stop?”

“Oh, now you care?” Her sarcasm only matured as she got older.

“He doesn’t listen to the doctors. If he dies, it is his fault.”

I sat on the couch in the living room. The house was clean. She was watching an Arabic sitcom. I could hear the soft bearlike voice of my father in the kitchen. He sounded tired. He sounded sick. He sounded like my father always sounded: defeated.

He came into the living room and I stood up. “Asalaamu Alaykum,” he said, in his soft deep voice. He threw himself on the couch. I just muttered a response and rolled my eyes.

My father was still upset that I hadn’t followed the career path he wanted me to. Because of that, his relationship with people was always lukewarm, if not downright ice cold. I was his eldest son, but he treated me like a stranger. If it weren’t for my mother, I would never see him. He was half asleep on the couch when Amier and Jameela walked in.

“Asalaamu Alaykum,” they said in unison. My father jumped up from his half-assed sleep and ran to my brother. His excitement at Amier’s presence hurt a little, but I was used to it.

I stood up and hugged Jameela in that weird side-hug kind of way. I gave Amier a big hug. I hadn’t seen him in awhile, and he and -9-

I never really had anything against each other. My mother ran in from the kitchen like a sprinter and kissed Jameela all over the face, telling her how beautiful she was. My mother was a politician. She was diplomatic. She was a charmer. She could have sold someone seawater at the beach.

We sat down on the couches in the nice living room. Ever since my brother had gotten married, whenever he came over, we sat in the nice living room, like he was a guest. I never understood that.

Literally the day before his wedding, my mother snapped at him for sitting on the pristine couches that nearly no one ever touched. But now, here we were, sitting on the perfectly cleaned couches in the perfectly arranged living room. It was like one of those showcased living rooms they have at furniture stores. In fact, it was just that. My mother bought the entire living room they had at the store. Including the lamps.

My mother rushed back in with a tray of tea and cookies. Everyone took a cup of tea and a cookie. She set the tray down on the table.

Everyone was quiet. My father was wide awake, but for some reason, snoring. I just stared at him, half in pity, half in disgust.

I was impatient. There was too much quiet. “So, what’s the big news?” I blurted out.

Jameela eyed Amier and smiled. “I’m pregnant,” she said.

My mother squealed, jumped up, and hugged Jameela. They were crying as they embraced each other. I smiled and gave Amier a hug. I was genuinely happy and excited for them, though I thought it was a little early to have babies. I omitted that, though.

“Mabrook, little brother,” I said.

There were more kisses and more hugs. Everyone was excited.

Even my father stopped his awake-nap to congratulate my brother and his wife. My mother was still crying.

The conversation continued to different things. Amier’s work and school. Jameela’s morning sickness, which I could have done without. My father’s health, which I could have done without as well.

My mother’s rose garden that was her pride and joy.

Jameela turned to me. “I heard Mariam was going to get engaged.” I looked at Amier. He had told Jameela that I was seeing Mariam. No one else knew except him. I had told my parents that we stopped seeing each other.

“Oh, I didn’t hear that.”

“I figured she would tell you, since you guys are close.”

“I haven’t really spoken to her in awhile,” I lied.

“Oh . . . that’s tragic.” She was being sarcastic now. I never hated her more than at that moment.

“Mariam is a very pretty girl. But very kaweeyah,” my mother interrupted.

“Yeah, she really is. I’m glad she’s getting married. Someone needs to calm that girl down. Always going out late at night. Allah knows what she does.”

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I stood up and looked at my watch. “I think it’s time for me to go.

I have a lot of papers to grade.”

My mother stood up. “Habibi, stay. We’re gonna have dinner.”

“No, no. I really should get going.”

I left the house and sat in my car for a minute. I looked at my phone.

No new messages. I called Mariam. No answer.

I left a voice mail. “Hey, Mariam. Call me when you get this, please.”

She never called. M

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Mike Rollin Today When I Say the Wars I no longer see the Americans.

The avenue was Mutanabbi Street or it was nothing at all.

The crests of the buildings, the pedestrians and traffic, Baghdad, or nowhere at all.

The ground still there to walk on. To hold me up.

I stand with bare feet on May grass.

Rouse me great Earth!

I stand with bare feet and the tireless winds fill my lungs, the fertile arcs of sun and stars score the endless black beyond.

And there is Muntadhar al-Zaidi throwing his shoes at George Bush.

One shoe.

Then the other.

This is a goodbye kiss from the Iraqi people, dog.

The black shoes buzz, apocalyptic wasps.

I didn’t see anything around me except Bush. I was blind to anything else.

Your black loafers a goodbye kiss, and the Ducati Model 271 you are rumored to have worn selling out across the Middle East.

A black leather kiss, and school children in Damascus wearing backpacks with your face on them.

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A rough kiss, and pictures of Bush ducking etched onto walls across Baghdad, worn on T-shirts in Egypt, and illustrating children’s games in Turkey.

I felt the blood of the innocent people bleeding from beneath his feet and Bush was smiling in that way.

The president the flags microphones cameras

the smile gone

black

as your straight-flying shoes.

Muntadhar al-Zaidi, let me return your rough kiss.

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Today When I Say the Wars I mean a knock at your door. A woman who says she is a doctor asks you about deaths in your family in the period since the American invasion. A public health study. You wonder why she is at your house.

When was the invasion? She looks flushed, tired, so you invite her in.

She sits on the sofa as you pour some tea. She compliments your tea. The woman looks too young to be a doctor. Perhaps it is her blue tennis shoes, or the way her hijab rounds her face. How many people live with you? Any births since the war started? You look around the living room. Worn rugs on the floor, family photos on the wall crooked, a little dated. Can you tell me the date, cause, and circumstance of your deaths? The woman finishes her tea, thanks you for your hospitality. She pauses at the door. It seems there is something more she wants to say. You wonder if you have forgotten something. Circumstances. She stands in the doorway, unmoving, until finally you must close the door and she becomes part of the house, a sort of pillar that you must squeeze past every time you leave or return. The papers on her clipboard yellow and curl, flake off into the dirt. The smell of her sweat, once sharp, fades. M

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Lauren Camp Peripheral Vision A bird enters Dad’s condo through an open screen.

It flies toward his TV, and Dad sees a darter on the silt of the river: kingfisher, wagtail.

A string of pigeon feathers follows. Outside, it is morning. He is almost alone; he tries to refocus, sees a sky the color of dimes overlapping the asphalt. No, a man selling fresh fish and fat hanks of a cow. The bird whorls.

Wet air crawls from the shore, and when he reaches out, the water is warm.

Next week will be 62 years, 3,224 sabbaths.

Under the table is his wall and the chair.

America has yeasty clouds, Dad notices again. The furniture is brown. Parts of him are blank. He flew through the clear door of leaving. Nice boy. He left the nest in short pants, ghost-eyed and autumn, and traveled in dusk, the plea of the desert revolving away, but always a trace in his throat. M

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Donya Tag-El-Din Living Art Baba sits slightly hunched, head tilted to the left, Gnarled hands, nails oil-blackened.

Pistachio shells littering the ground around his tired feet.

Bunions red and aching in the dim light of late night television.

On the wall behind him a portrait of an African woman With gold bangles and a knowing smile.

There’s a glow on her cheeks the color of warmth And strings of Technicolor beads dangling gracefully round her neck.

Another 8’ x 4’ painting, oil on canvas. A lion savages a frantic horse.

Claws deep in flesh, mounting the creature the cat sinks its teeth into muscular tissue.

This one is hung above the tired settee littered with Dirty clothes and rolled up socks. Work boots tucked underneath.

Hulking paintings, anxious brush strokes, from another time, Another man. Brimming with unsettling youth.

If you stare at them, hanging there silently, you can hear them Tell a story. In a dying horse’s eyeball I see Frustration and anticipation mixed with hope and someone’s daydreams.

Where did he go?

Into a cold north, a factory, a discarded dream.

Baba presses a pistachio to his lips, grasps it With his tongue and spits out the shells in one smooth motion.

“There’s no money in art. You can’t build a life on imagination, And you can’t eat oils or paper.” M

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Christina Najla LaRose Speak, Silk We sit and talk and the silence speaks of the giants who have died in the past and have returned to those scenes unsatisfied.

—William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book I I. In Syria, women wake early and kneel to the earth, scrape tough grain, cleave out clay, carry a piece to the master’s house, fling it against the door, wait— not for his nightshirt-clad cursing— but for the clay to stick: sign of a good mousam, silk harvest.

Outside the master’s house mulberry trees attacked by locusts silkworms ravaged by disease cocoons coiled on cane mats swollen like smashed globes, wait for boiling to soften the sericin, brushing filament, finding thread to begin the unspooling.

A woman sits, cocoon in hand, loosens the coil, releases roiled pressure, unravels the thread.

As she prepares to start reeling women outside stand beside the master’s house watching clay slide to parched ground.

II. Follow the thread: in 1913, the world a chessboard, countries the pieces, alliances, allegiances.

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In two years, ships blockading the port will mean mouthfuls of grain locked inside crates soldiers scavenging fields Kamil finding lemon peels in garbage heaps and palming dirt into his mouth.

Go to the market and in the huddled, shouting crowd count four faces.

In weeks you will find one of them amidst the stomach bulged bodies on the street.

III. Four years ago, in Dara’a, some schoolboys spray-painted a message: The people want the fall of the regime.

They were jailed by security forces.

Soon after, forty people were found in a mass grave— some with gunshot wounds, some without— limbs.

This is only the beginning.

It is impossible to know how many we have lost on city streets, impossible to know how many burials pierce the serrated thread from Aleppo to Damascus.

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IV. Poor women know what to do when things come unraveled: we sit in a quiet room, thread in our fingertips.

We know how to gather fragments.

We know how to close distance. M

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Jennifer Zeynab Maccani Mujaddara and Myrrh Mama’s doctor told us she won’t live to see the spring. They sent me to play Go Fish with the nurse, but I kept looking back to make sure Mama was still there. What if she disappears tomorrow? Or tonight at the dinner table? In the next five minutes?

Mama’s name is Mariam. I think it’s prettier than my name.

Mama told me Rahel was my great-grandmother, but I don’t know any other kids named Rahel. Mama says maybe there are some the next town over. Maybe Khalid’s mama will name his little sister Rahel when she comes. But I don’t know. Khalid’s mama is the only one except for mine that sends him to school with cold lentils and rice instead of peanut butter and jelly. The other kids ask us what it is and I don’t say anything, because if I say “mujaddara” they’ll laugh at me.

The doctor told Mama to pray. When we got home she laughed because she never prays. Sometimes I do, like my baba does. We kneel next to the bed and put our hands together and we tell God what’s bothering us. I ask him to keep Mama laughing. Maybe if she keeps laughing she won’t disappear.

My sitto, my grandmother, used to get mad at Mama for not going to mass. Mama told me once that when Sitto came to Boston from Syria, when Mama was a little girl, they only had mass in Latin.

I’m glad they have it in English now, except Sitto can’t understand very much, because her Arabic is better than her English. I don’t know where they have mass in Arabic, but I don’t think they have it here in Boston. Sitto always used to come with Baba and me to Mass. Mama’s never gone, not even now. Mama said when Sitto first came here and she wore her lace veil to mass, everyone in the neighborhood thought she was a Muslim.

Once, a girl at school asked me what I call God. I said, “We call him ‘Allah.’ It means ‘God’ in Arabic.” She laughed at me and told me I was Muslim. That night I asked Sitto, “Who is Allah?” Sitto didn’t laugh. She said, “Al-ilahi al-wahid. Al-muhyi.” The one God. The giver of life. And he was.

But now Mama traces the kitchen table with her finger every night after dinner when I’m supposed to be in bed. The table used to belong to Sitto, in the yellow house on Mount Auburn Street. Mama and Baba don’t talk anymore when they sit at the table. They just stare at it like it might say something, like they’re listening. Maybe they think Sitto will come out of the wood and whisper to them from heaven.

After dinner, when Baba goes to wash up, I tug on Mama’s sleeve. “When you go,” I say, “how will I know who I am?”

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“What do you mean, hayati?” she asks, holding the bowls and plates in a tottering blue and white tower, a one-legged crane.

“When you’re gone, things will change. Will I change, too?”

Mama sets the plates down on the table again and kneels beside my chair. “You’ll be just who you always were, even if I’m not here to remind you.”

My eyes get itchy. I rub them and insist, “But what will I do when I’m sad? Who will tell the stories about Sitto and the desert?”

“Baba can tell you the same stories,” Mama says, and she strokes my unruly charcoal hair.

“But it won’t be the same without you.”

For the first time Mama looks at me like she looks at the table, and it’s like opening the door to a library where there are lots of old books in a language I can’t read. “Hayati,” Mama says again, just like Sitto used to say, “I’ll be in the stories. I’ll be in the spices. I’ll be in the wind.”

Every night after that she sends Baba to wash up and sits me down at the kitchen table. Every night Mama looks a little more tired, a little more pale. She tells the stories anyway.

The first night Mama tells me how to make harisa, the sweet semolina cake I love, drenched in syrup and topped with a blanched almond. I’d had no idea it had so much sugar or that the semolina had to be the finest you could get. “Have Baba take you to the market in Watertown where we used to go,” she says. “Ask the man for the fine-ground samid. Tell him you’re making it for a wedding. It will taste just like it does now.”

The next night it’s mujaddara, the lunch staple I’m too ashamed to pronounce. “Remember, Rahel,” Mama says to me when she’s told me how to stew the brown lentils and rice and caramelize the onions, “a hungry man would sell his soul for a plate of mujaddara. Eat it during Lent after Baba takes you to confession, and know that being grateful also brings you close to God.” On the third night it’s hard to eat. Mama had a tube in her chest at the hospital today after school. All morning Khalid asked me to help him with our reading assignment, and I was too nauseous to say anything. I don’t want to go back to the hospital anymore, but Baba says we have to go. I say to Baba maybe that’s the reason Mama’s disappearing. He raps me on the back of the head and tells me not to say that ever again. He tells me a cancer is growing inside of Mama, in a place I can’t pronounce that begins with p.

That night when Mama puts the dishes away and tells me how to make kibbeh, I think of the cancer. Maybe it’s like that, where someone has scooped out the good things inside of her and replaced them with bad things. Were they pushed inside her body when I wasn’t looking, like she tells me to push the ground lamb and bulghur into the kibbeh shell? Is there any way to get the bad things out again?

The nights go on and on until they blur together into one long bible of recipes and comforts and stories. Mama tells me how to -21-

make maqluba, tabbouleh, and kafta. She teaches me how to set three chickpeas atop a bowl of hummus and sprinkle it with smoked paprika or tangy sumac. She shows me how to grind walnuts for muhammara and crack stale Syrian bread atop fattoush. I learn to fold a dollop of lamb inside a trifold of dough to make sfiha and how much better ice cream tastes when it’s sprinkled with chopped green pistachios. My mouth waters when I realize I can buy pitted dates from the market with my pocket money and make ma’amoul for Baba. I know now why Mama’s hands always smell of garlic, and why we always run out of cumin in the cupboard.

By the twelfth week, there’s only one thing I don’t know.

Mama is very weak now and doesn’t cook anymore. Baba cooks, but he burns the lamb and lets the rice harden on the bottom of our pots. I ask him to get me a step stool and then I make the recipes Mama taught me, holding out my hand for the ingredients I can’t reach. Baba eyes me each time he sets a jar of grape leaves or a vial of spices in my hand. “Where did you learn to cook like that?” he asks.

“Mama told me,” I say. “She told me she’d be in the spices.”

On the last night of the twelfth week, while Baba washes the sticky lentils off the blue and white dishes, I go and sit next to Mama’s bed. She’s asleep, so I kneel beside the comforter and put my hands together. This time I don’t ask God to keep her laughing. Instead I ask him to give me a good memory so I can remember her recipes, even if I can’t remember my reading assignments.

While I’m not looking, Mama reaches down and wraps her fingers around my hands. They feel like rice paper. I look up at her and she smiles.

“Mama,” I ask her, “you never told me why we use the rose water.

It’s in the baklava, but I smell it in church, too. Does God like it?”

“Hayati,” she says, “I’ll tell you, but Baba knows the story better.

When they took Christ’s body from the cross, they wrapped it in cloth and dressed it with spices. The priest sprinkles us with rose water on Good Friday so that we can be like Him, so that we can be reborn.”

“Will we?” I press my fingers into hers, and my stubby nails leave crosses in her skin.

“Of course, hayati,” she says. “Of course we will.”

The next morning, Mama is gone. I wear a stiff black dress to the funeral. Someone puts blush on Mama’s cheeks for the service, but I wish they hadn’t. She’s beautiful without it.

When we get home and the house is emptied of all our cousins and aunts and uncles and neighbors, and Khalid and his parents have gone home and left us a dish of kafta wrapped in foil in the fridge, I sit down with Baba at the kitchen table. He puts his head in his hands and starts to cry with a sputter, as though the sight of the wood is too much for him to bear.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do without her,” he says into the folds of his palms.

I want to put my chubby hand on his shoulder, but I don’t.

Instead I get my step stool and go to the stove. I get out filo from the -22-

freezer. Butter and sugar and pistachios multiply on the counter like songbirds on a wire. I start to form the layers, brushing on the butter.

Then I bring down the rose water.

When the baklava is done, Baba looks at me with astonishment.

“Did your Mama show you how to make this?” he asks.

I nod.

“Hayati,” he says, and he rubs his eyes. “Why baklava, why today?”

I push his plate toward him across Sitto’s steady wood. He leans over the warm diamond drenched in honey and breathes rose water.

When he meets my eyes, I say, “So we can meet again someday.” M

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Rasha Abdulhadi We Live in Shell Houses The women here are flowers who beat themselves open into blossoming with so much still left unfolded.

They braid into their hair the ribbons of all that never was made, tuck behind their ears the curls of gray highway of songs planted, never ripened, never sung.

I sent you an arrowhead to tell you there are lives here we do not even have dreams about anymore— before our gardens and our shows before our private wars: an extinct inheritance inaccessible even to its descendants.

I sent you an exploded envelope of shells from Chicago all the way to Johannesburg to say that there might be something sensual about the transient, about finally giving up exasperated and satisfied— to say that I could not possibly want all the shells that wash up, vanish and break without appreciation or use.

I see now how these pieces which have served as currency between peoples are the cast-off houses from another creature that we name only in the dark.

For hours I squatted that day, making a crab’s way along the sandy lakeshore in the last spring sunshine, choosing from a reef of washed up shells— a tide cast off by tiny inhabitants who shed one small shell, and still small, enter a new home, still unprotected and only for a short time.

I remember this now, because I saw you tonight: how

I sent you a tiny buddha carved of jade, no bigger than a thumbprint, how you sent me woody chips I only recently bit into, tasting cinnamon, turmeric.

Something secret and perfect. M

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Hazem Fahmy Opera When my mind is dying and the last of its neurons know that the end is nigh, tell my lover to put it in a glass jar emptied of strawberry jam and bury it underneath a miscellaneous stage in the Cairo Opera House.

Let its last moments be ones of serenading celebration.

Let the likes of Sobhy Bedir be the final voices it hears.

Make it leave this world on the chords of middle-aged relics of a time it was sorely deprived of and maybe then it’ll remember the Nile as a stunning 19-year-old with hair that curls with the black of a thousand and one nights till her waist rather than a withered old hag of a soul with nothing to give.

Maybe if the jar is comfortable enough, my mind will fall asleep and think it madness to resist being carried by a multilingual ballad to the night sky.

When it’s high up there for the world to look tiny enough maybe, just for once, it’ll look upon the ancient skyline below and not lust for New York or Johannesburg.

Maybe it’ll ask the Angel of Death to wait for just a few more minutes as it extends a hand to the city and maybe, just for once, Cairo will take my hand and dance with me. M

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VISUAL ART

Samia Halaby

Born in Jerusalem in 1936, Samia Halaby is a leading abstract painter and an influential scholar of Palestinian art. Recognized as a pioneer of contemporary abstraction in the Arab world, although based in the United States since 1951, she has exhibited throughout the region and abroad. Halaby is widely collected by international institutions, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, Abu Dhabi), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.), the Art Institute of Chicago, L’Institut du Monde Arabe (Paris), the British Museum (London), and Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art (Al Rayyan, Qatar). Halaby was the first full-time female associate professor at the Yale School of Art. There has recently been a renewed interest in her oeuvre, and historians of new media are currently re-evaluating Halaby’s experiments with computer-based painting in the 1980s, which she created programs for and performed live at Lincoln Center and at the Brooklyn Museum, in New York, and categorized as kinetic art.

Halaby’s writings on art have appeared in Leonardo, Arab Studies Quarterly, and Jerusalem Quarterly, and most recently in the edited volume Jerusalem Interrupted: Modernity and Colonial Transformation, 1917–Present (Northampton: Olive Branch Press, 2015). Halaby’s independently published survey, Liberation Art of Palestine: Palestinian Paintings and Sculpture in the Second Half of the 20th Century (2002), is considered a seminal text of Palestinian art history. In 2014, Booth-Clibborn Editions published the artist’s second monograph, Samia Halaby: Five Decades of Painting and Innovation.

Selected solo shows include Ayyam Gallery, London (2015, 2013); Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (2011); and Ayyam Gallery, Beirut (2010). She has participated in recent group shows at the National Academy Museum, New York (2015), Broadway 1602 Gallery, New York (2014), and the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (2014). Halaby’s first retrospective was held at Ayyam Gallery, Dubai (Al Quoz) in 2014, and traveled to the Beirut Exhibition Center in 2015.

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“Cliffs,” 2014. Acrylic on linen canvas, 180 cm x 180 cm.

All images reproduced here courtesy of Ayyam Gallery.

“Women,” 2014. Acrylic on linen canvas, 122 cm x 167.5 cm.

Following page: “Turning Landing,” 2014. Acrylic on linen canvas, 153 cm x 203 cm.

“Takheel I,” 2013. Acrylic on linen canvas, 122 cm x 167.5 cm.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Abstract Pictures

We move in spaces with gravity and light, measuring our surroundings by walking and seeing, having been ourselves molded like clay by this same space. Light and color fill our visual field, while words fill our thoughts and interpret our experiences. This is how we evolved and how we are now in this twenty-first century. All the time, everywhere, our heads are full of words. We select words to name what is happening, to describe what has happened, and to talk about the future.

We learn words early, and they cost only the effort of saying them. Cheap, immediately available, easy to learn, they are excellent items of exchange. They are present in all parts of our thinking, our actions, our production, and all disciplines of human thought.

But much of what we experience cannot be described and shared with only words. The language of scientific symbols and graphing as well as the language of pictures accompany our human descriptions. Often they all work together as the most effective communication.

Pictures lack the specificity of words and scientific symbols yet have the power to describe space and relative color that words cannot. Pictures most often contain parts that can be named with words. A realistic image, even a photograph full of easily named objects, will possess attributes that the proverbial “one thousand words” cannot describe. But in comparison to words, pictures are expensive, heavy, and difficult to exchange. Recent technologies have mitigated the stodginess of pictures through print and digital media. We can now instantly share photographs through the web, even while photography is only a small part of the range of pictures mankind produces.

We are hard put to experience our surrounding free of words.

But in spite of this, records of our experiences have historically begun with pictures, not words. Words, first as pictographs, then as syllables, and eventually as letters, grew in the fertile soil of pictures, as did scientific data and graphing. Pictures are nearer to actual experience than are words, even while our visual experiences are easily preempted by words. Children draw before they spell.

Our visual experiences provide information that we store in memory. The richness of this storehouse cannot be expressed in words any more than can the general aesthetic feeling of a beautiful Facing page Top: “Water Lilies,” 2013. Acrylic on linen canvas, 145 cm x 145 cm.

Bottom: “Convergence,” 2013. Acrylic on linen canvas, 45 cm x 45 cm.

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sunset or the sensation of being hungry or in love. For example, as we experience trees, thousands of them, at different times and places, at varying distances and levels of energy and aging, we store a universe of visual information about trees that is not easily expressible in words or graphs or photography or film. It is a storehouse based on a length of time, unlike a particular view at a particular time captured in a photograph or a painting.

When we see an abstract visual image that taps into this storehouse, we feel a connection developing, a whisper of future communication, and relief that this storehouse in our minds has taken concrete form. Because, as an abstract painter, I search for areas of my knowledge where words do not exist, sometimes attributes, the source of which I am not conscious, appear in a painting. Others may recognize visual material in my paintings that they themselves have experienced and can see with greater clarity, and they can show them to me persuasively. Once I was working on a painting all in reds with a few bits of shocking yellow and green. A friend walked in and was deeply moved, saying that it was Palestinian embroidery. I had unconsciously used the method Palestinian village embroiderers use to accent the mostly red embroidery called takheel, thus the title of the painting Takheel I. But the final test of the pudding is in the eating, and if no one recognizes my abstract paintings, then my paintings have failed. This recognition does not have to be in words. It is enough that people know what they like.

Visual abstraction is present in daily life, but most people seem unaware of it. Two gardeners may consider the attributes of similar rose bushes, exchanging what is essentially an aesthetic discourse.

I once heard two Arab women dialogue about the attributes of color, shape, rhythm, and material of woven geometric rugs and wall hangings, selecting what is superior and what is inferior, all the while unconscious that they were evaluating what is essentially visual abstraction. All four individuals would proclaim they know nothing about abstract painting. Yet they discourse on the aesthetics of visual abstraction and almost always agree as to what is most beautiful.

Abstraction grew in pictures in earliest times, but pictures that are strictly abstract developed first in medieval geometric abstraction in Arabic art, and later under the influence of the Soviet revolution in the twentieth century. In both cases, time as a dimension in pictures was central. I consider them both my aesthetic ancestors and hope to build on their accomplishments.

The first critics to describe twentieth-century abstraction, not understanding its essence nor the essence of the revolution that gave it birth, called abstraction in paintings purely a product of the brain, cerebral, and not related to nature or reality. Separating abstraction from reality thus made it easy to define as spiritual

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and disconnected from reality. Arabic abstraction, as expressed, for example, in the geometry of the Dome of The Rock or the Great Mosque of Damascus, is so foreign to aestheticians and art historians that its profound relationship to nature is completely disregarded and it is described as decorative.

In essence, academic discourse to date on abstraction calls it either cerebral or decorative, completely missing the most important and beautiful of its attributes, its ability to imitate nature’s general principles rather than nature’s appearance. And it does so by externalizing our own visual experiences of the world over the passage of time. This understanding and analysis allows me to say that what I paint is an abstraction that describes the world, one that reflects it and makes an illusion of it in a way that is not lens-based and therefore not photographic, one that incorporates time as one of its formal dimensions. —Samia Halaby

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Lena Khalaf Tuffaha Wasta Everyone who knows someone gets to have what they want done.

Consider the case of the aspiring muezzin, who must have been someone’s cousin or nephew, whose career unfolded at the expense of our neighborhood, and frankly, our faith.

Imagine being awakened every day before the light strand is discernible from the dark, to be jolted out of your dreams of democracy by the morose and grumbling bray of his call his phlegmatic staccato gutting the prayer call of anything prayerful and sending it rapid-fire across the last silences of night over the scratch and pop of a low-quality loudspeaker.

Imagine the tragic march to the sink for morning ablutions while his loud quarrel with language continues, swells in our rooms, and throbs in our heads now full of thoughts not resembling praise, asking only for the mercy of silence.

And so the prayer designed to usher in the day to break the long dark of night to sing the light back into the world crashes through our windows like fists full of stones.

There’s a simple definition for wasta.

It’s the thief that steals the song in your prayer.

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Translation She asks: Why do you say Mama when you call me?

Six o’clock and I am tired.

And making dinner right now.

An Arab with a 5-year-old demanding neat-and-tidy American answers.

I phone it in: That’s just how Arabic works.

Translation is a complicated dance.

Mama is the word that holds you in even when you are walking around in the world with your own name, so that calling you to me I discard the self and respond to the name you gave me, becoming the person you made me.

Mama is a time-traveling word, a song to you and to my own mother, so that whenever I reach out to you she is there too.

And calling you I am once again the daughter, tethered to her just as I am locked in this lifelong embrace with you.

I call myself and my own mother and you all three of us, in one breath, writing this poem. M

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Angele Ellis The Mind, Mind Has Mountains I wake in the middle of a dark wood, on a cot covered with a green army blanket with a mossy surface, identical to the blanket Daddy brought back from the war. He used it for picnics, stopping for lunch by the tree-lined roadside before we reached Auntie Jouhaina’s house. We kids found her old-country food sour and strange, so Daddy, out of politeness to his favorite aunt, refused to let Auntie Jouhaina serve us more than a snack—something sweet, like the velvety halvah I almost imagine melting on my tongue.

Every morning, there is blood on my pillowcase. I press a blind finger to the metallic drool running from my mouth. I consider the possibilities. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, ulcer, gingivitis. Once I asked the guard if I could see a doctor. She laughed. I will never see a doctor.

My cell is a former laboratory closet, fitted with a steel door with two slots—one at face level for commands, one at the bottom for food. It stands—like this entire scientific compound converted into a camp—above the ruins of gingerbread-trimmed Alpine cottages where the wealthy and the fortunate took the cure for the white plague, as they called tuberculosis before it was supposed to have been eradicated, like racism. In those winters, a hundred years ago, patients sat on the original Adirondack chairs, wrapped in tent-sized blankets, breathing icy air into their bleeding lungs. The great Dr. Trudeau insisted on cheerfulness as a tonic for infection, like mountain breezes and a bland diet. He put the coffins on outbound trains in the dead of night.

We look more alike—and more antiquated—than those doomed patients. Our uniform is a shapeless black top and pants, and sagging black socks with an indentation between the first and second toes to accommodate black flip-flops that are either too large or too small.

The only difference accorded to gender is that women wear hijabs and the men, turbans, whether we are Muslims or Christians, secular humanists or atheists.

We are allowed to take this headgear off at night, but it must be in place after morning call—a mocking recording of some countrywestern singer twanging “Allahu Akbar.” We have no combs, just blunt plastic clips to keep our straggling hair in place. The men wear beards, also uncut. Our dirty uniforms are collected with our bedding, which means a day spent naked on a bare mattress. Then a stiff “clean” uniform is returned.

At first, I thought that the calls, the costuming, were for the benefit of the guards, convincing them they are protecting the State from the foreign, the dangerous—although most of us are US citizens, some of us native-born for generations. Now I think it is -40-

for the benefit of the cameras. Cameras everywhere, even when you can’t see them. The government must use the footage for training, for public entertainment. The executions are staged so carefully I’m certain they’re being broadcast.

We are let out into the yard twice a week. The drill is the same.

Fighter planes fly overhead in V formation, a flock of mechanical geese. We keep silent until the warden—beefy and bespectacled, like Theodore Roosevelt—and the more telegenic guards lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance, directing us from a platform whose backdrop is an enormous American flag. A canned chorus of children accompanies the live voices. (Where are the children? I wonder. I have never seen a child in this camp.)

The Pledge has changed since I recited it in school, right hand splayed over my heart: I pledge allegiance to the flag Of the Great Republic of America And to the President, for whom it stands One Homeland under Jesus Christ, indivisible With security and justice for all born again After the distorted Pledge dies away, a prisoner is brought forward. How they are selected, I don’t know. I can’t hear anything when I’m inside my cell except the bleating “prayer” through the intercom, and commands barked through the door slot.

We kneel as the victim stands, supported by two guards. (It is obvious that he or she is sedated; no one ever struggles.) The warden intones that so-and-so—he mumbles the name—has been charged and convicted of treason and terrorism against the Great Republic of America, and is sentenced to be executed by the humane method of lethal injection.

The victim is hauled onto a segmented gurney and strapped in tight. Then the top half of the gurney is lifted so that the victim faces the crowd. A sternly beautiful blond woman wearing a lab coat and stethoscope enters from stage right, trailed by a handsome blond man who manages a medical trolley from which the poisoned bags dangle. Dr. Death Barbie injects an arm bared just above the elbow, the tender inner joint already primed with a red, white, and blue port.

The execution seems to last forever. Sometimes the victim is silent. Sometimes, voice slurring, she pleads innocence, begs for mercy. Sometimes he shudders and moans. The phalanx of guards is impassive. We kneel, silent despite burning eyes or tears.

And then we are prodded into our cells, where a meal is waiting: pail of water, packet of stale crackers, and slices of government cheese, white with a greenish tinge. I didn’t eat at all the first week— or two—how can I keep track of time when I have nothing but broken fingernails to scratch the ghosts of days onto plaster walls?

Now I sip acid water from a plastic cup, and take small bites after breaking each rancid cheese slice in two and setting it atop a -41-

cracker. I dip my fingers into the cup when I am finished, and wipe my mouth on my tunic sleeve as if it were a napkin.

There are no showers for us, only wafers of soap—hotel soap, their “Hilton” or “Sheraton” wrappers another mockery. The miniature bar slivers and disappears before another is doled out. I ration my drinking water to wash; my stained pillowcase serves as washcloth and towel. I dry it on the edge of my cot.

At least I have a separate container for my waste. Sometimes I imagine that the guards use our weak excrement to garden, growing vegetables they will feed only to us. Despite the filth in which I live, my mouth waters at the memory of my grandfather’s tomatoes, bigger than softballs, and his thin-skinned old-country cucumbers— kiyaar—as cool and juicy as draughts of lemonade. *** In my dreams, most nights, is the first man I saw executed. We are at a conference at the Washington Hilton. This is what I am feeling in the dream before the worst happens—irritation at the length of the speeches, and mild repugnance at the hotel lunch—chicken breast with mixed vegetables and roasted potatoes, followed by vanilla ice cream with butterscotch sauce.

He is at the podium. He—I cannot speak his name—was a respectable leader of a national organization. He had a blog, published books, and appeared regularly on television.

He is talking about the increasing threats to our civil liberties— wiretapping, blacklisting, interrogations, deportations, even incidents of torture. I make notes among my doodles on a pad with the organization’s logo.

Then the soldiers burst in. Before anyone can react, one of them grabs the leader from behind, while another pulls out a pistol, fires it into his chest. He dies with a look of surprise, blood spreading across his white shirt, soaking his red power tie.

As the crowd erupts in screams, I awake, shivering as I remember what happened next. The soldiers trained machine guns on us, as the soldier holding the dead man shouted: “The President has declared martial law. You are all under arrest. Any terrorist who tries to escape will be shot!” He dropped the corpse onto its back on the carpet, letting us see the scuffed bottoms of its polished shoes. In Arab culture, this would have been a deliberate insult, but we didn’t know what anything meant from that moment.

We were herded down a staircase into the hotel’s underground garage, pushed onto Greyhound buses with the doors and side windows blacked out, after being stripped—as in a robbery—of wallets, purses, briefcases, jewelry, phones, and watches. Then we were ordered to throw our belts, shoelaces, ties, and scarves, including the headscarves some women wore, into piles. The guns never wavered.

We didn’t leave the bus until we reached the camp. The toilet soon became foul, but the soldiers continued to allow us to use it, -42-

even after a stream of waste flowed under the door and down the aisle. Twice, the bus stopped to change drivers, but we couldn’t see anything. Once we were given food, bags of burgers and fries that the soldiers lobbed at us. The fries in the bag I grabbed were hot, which brought tears to my eyes.

After so many speeches, we were mute, locked into separate mental cells into which death could intrude at any moment. My best friend was at that conference. I saw her shoved onto a bus a few minutes before I was. I’ve never seen her again. A strange man sat beside me during that interminable ride. We kept a rigid distance between us, afraid of any gesture that the soldiers might interpret as complicity or rebellion.

It was pitch dark when we reached the Trudeau Institute. Using flashlights, the soldiers sorted us into groups by gender. There were no whispers, no furtive touches. Although I couldn’t see where we were, I felt familiar branches reach out to me, inhaled the sharp pine smell of mountain air. I could almost taste it, like Auntie Jouhaina’s halvah.

Brilliant, I thought with a stifled gasp. Inside a national park, heavily forested. One road in and one road out. Fort Drum a short chopper ride away—two hours by truck, if they’re speeding.

Brilliant.

When I try to think now—when I clear my mind of Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar, crowing like Auntie Jouhaina’s malicious parrot—I think of her, whose bones lie under the soil of these mountains. As a young immigrant, Auntie Jouhaina (Country of Origin: Syria; Race: Colored, her Ellis Island papers said) saved what would become our family. She made enough money in one year of peddling notions to bring my grandfather over—leading him through a maze of war and famine with her golden spool, a thread that stretched from Mount Lebanon to America. A connection now lost, broken.

When I first knew her, Auntie Jouhaina resembled a matryoshka doll—hair dyed raven black, circles of candy-apple rouge on her cheeks, dress covered with violent flowers. She was a benevolent witch whose stories, like traditional fairy tales, were not meant for children. “My name is very old name,” Auntie Jouhaina said. “It mean, seer.”

After marrying a Frenchman who preferred whiskey to working, Auntie Jouhaina took a number of jobs. For a while, she was matron of the Saranac Lake Jail. She relished the tale of how, one August night, a wealthy blond was brought in for drunk driving. The woman slept for hours on the cot in the cell, mink coat draped over her silk shift. Summer nights are cool in the Adirondacks.

When the wealthy woman woke, she was spitting mad. “Look at me—my fur, my jewels!” she screeched, shaking the bars with fingers that dripped diamonds—in Auntie’s telling, as big as icicles. “And look at you—why, you’re nothing!”

“Maybe,” Auntie Jouhaina retorted. “But I’m out here, and you in there.”

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*** It does look different from out here. I can’t lift my head to watch the warplanes; I hear the false Pledge as a distant echo. As I face the crowd, I see at last, among those faces, my best friend—tears flowing down cheekbones now as prominent as a fashion model’s.

And then I’m back in college, in a hospital room in nearby Tupper Lake, and Auntie Jouhaina is dying—thin as a needle, her flowers and rouges faded away. I feel nervous—I want to make her smile—and so I remind her of her story of the rich woman in the jail.

Auntie Jouhaina stares at me. She is so small inside this sterile space. She whispers, “I never tell you what really happen. That rich woman get me fired. The sheriff say to me, ‘No dirty immigrant can speak to an American lady like that and think they get away with it.’

“Khallas—finished.” M

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Kathryn Kysar At Sunset: Iraq, 2004 Black heeled soldiers with empty rifles click hard worn boots on stone, boy faces beneath tattered beige visors, their long legs stiff on the road.

The war creeps behind you, changes shape and form, an evasive shadow at dusk, moving like dark curtains, a black crow sneaking at the edge of the garden.

The sun sets, disappearing below the horizon, changed and unchanged, reborn and burning. M

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Ron Riekki The Qur’an at Auburn, a Lesson The Imams have entered the classroom—two Imams, ten students, the others have all left, pulled the fire alarm to avoid this. Here’s the disappointment of the South, the fastballs of mistranslations—the Norton, let me just say, is the stuff of mythology. If you could make non-fiction any more fiction, you would step into the end of letters, the gaps between words holding more truth.

The silence made out of plantation architecture, crapwhite. The frustration comes from the dedication to beer and football and the iteration of old fox antipoems. I know, I know, I know, this should be expected, but I had such great hopes that homeschooled kids might be open, be capable of climbing tall hills to see the bundled up, the mantled one, the enwrapped one, instead of the traducer, the slanderer, the backbiter.

Outside the window a kid in a cowboy hat goes across the school lawn in his truck, the brake lights on, tearing grass. I turn to an Imam. He tells a parable of mirrors. M

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Majda Talal Gama There Is a Green That Is Missing From the dense mid-Atlantic July. Here, foliage forms cozy bowers, yet, on a dime, they are slick giants of malachite puppeteered by lashing winds.

My green is Eastern, a diwan of rubais; it blooms in deserts, after spring rains, unseen. Even my coffee is a weed-colored broth, brewed from two kinds of green: cardamom and raw coffee bean. The flag of my father: crossed swords on a verdant field. In my heart, the kiswah is green; I have been weaving from faith my entire life. Mosques of the Hejaz are capped Sunni green.

My favorite dish as a child? Mulukhiya, a cup of viscous Egyptian greens.

I have walked beneath date palms and arches of gardenia bush: the fragrance of peppery green leaves over waxy blooms; anointed by hot dust rattling off the fronds.

I pray on this carpet of green, it is not near, the trees here bear no fruit that I desire. I am a different shade of green. M

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Reem Abu-Baker The Gods of Beauty

On Being Beautiful When Not Caucasian We set fire the little hairs on our arms; little hairs singe up, smoke up, twist up, evaporate, pollute: smokestack softness against open-mouthed midwestern skies.

We burn them down like we hear white-fence Americans burn down forests.

We have dirty doll people living in our arm hair forests; they dance, uncovered, to the gods of fertility and shade.

The shade will shrivel in our burning suns.

We will dress for dancing.

We will go dancing and be better than these bodies; eclipses, waxing moons, floating homes to howls we will be, across deserts.

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Habibti He carried me in his wallet when I was baby fat and seductive I was whoring tampons I didn’t know how to wrap a scarf I just pinned and pinned and penetrated cotton twisted it up ‘til I was bald I had hair of course in his wallet this has always been a great characteristic of mine something to show from the wallet just forget the baby fat focus on the hair hide the fact that I do not know how to wrap a scarf am questionable virgin with those white packages for women grown women not babies whose pictures are still in their fathers’ wallets slightly worn I imagine from sliding under the leather from salty hands from man my daughter see my daughter is getting older you should you should meet her quick M

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Anwar F. Accawi The Rocket In 1957, when I was 14, two things happened that changed me and the world around me forever: I had my first bad case of priapism, and Laika, that poor Russian mutt, shut in her orbiting tin coffin—a Soviet satellite named Sputnik—barked at a stunned world whose inhabitants had flung her into outer space and left her there to freeze to death. These two things, Sputnik and my pecker, became the hub of my life and the focus of my energies. When my mind was not occupied with the one, my hand was with the other.

My cousin Albert (who liked to brag to us younger kids about his being old enough to make a woman pregnant), Ghassan, my sly cross-eyed friend, and I were caught up in the ensuing wave of interest in the mysteries and possibilities of space. Rockets and space exploration were all we talked about when we were not talking about hunting or girls.

One late August afternoon, too hot for a dog to be out in the sun, the three of us were sitting around, cooling our heels in the shade of the widow Farha’s almond tree by the stone quarry. It was then that Albert suddenly came up with this crazy notion that the three of us could start our own space program. He said that we, too, could build a rocket just as good as that of the communist bastards and shoot it up into orbit. Ghassan (the skeptic who always thought that nothing was doable) laughed so hard that his left eye rolled back into his head and disappeared. Ghassan’s mocking laughter was just what Albert (the incorrigible optimist who believed anything was possible) needed to make him adamant.

He said, “What are you laughing at, you little cockeyed khiryi?

You don’t think I can do it, do you? Why can’t we build a rocket that will reach the heavens? Do you think that those who have done it are smarter than we? What do they have that we don’t? Tell me. Huh?” “Well, for one thing, Mr. Rocket Man,” snickered Ghassan, “we don’t have the frigging money. Sending a rocket up into space takes a lot of money, I will have you know, and we don’t have three liras among ourselves.”

“Who said anything about money? I don’t need money,” Albert shot back. “I can do it without spending a piaster. Not one lousy piaster.”

“And how in the world, if I may ask, are you planning to do it without money?” said I (whose concern was always not so much the what but the how). “Ghassan has a point. I know he thinks that nothing can ever be done, but this time he’s right. We just don’t have what it takes.”

“Oh, yeah? We don’t have what it takes. We don’t have what it takes,” Albert mocked. “Haven’t you forgotten something, boys?

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Haven’t you forgotten that my father works for an oil company in Beirut, and he’s got all kinds of stuff in the shed behind our house?

Everything we could possibly need is in that shed. You pricks know that, don’t you?”

He was right, of course. I had forgotten that Albert’s father was a pack rat, and over the years he had dragged into his shed enough stuff to rebuild the Damour Bridge if it ever came down.

Every objection we made after that, Albert would shoot it down with the same deadly precision he had killing birds and lizards with his slingshot. When he was finished with us, we were sold. In less than half an hour, he managed to make firing a rocket from our little village into outer space sound as easy as one-two-three.

“Okay, okay. What do we do now?” I said. “Where do we start?

We don’t know anything about building rockets. We don’t have any books or magazines to help us, and no one in this stupid village of ours knows how to make a missile, let alone fire one. How are we supposed to do it? How?” “Jesus, you people,” said Albert disgustedly. “I can’t believe you’re so ignorant. What is a rocket, anyway? Tell me now. What is a rocket? It’s nothing but a big firecracker like those we shoot on Santa Barbara’s Day in September, just before school starts. That’s all it is. You stuff a lot of gunpowder into a pipe, point it in the right direction, and light the fuse. When the powder starts to burn it will push the rocket up, and, if we use a lot of powder and pack it in hard, there is no telling how far up it will go. Now that would be something, wouldn’t it? Imagine our rocket like a silver bullet, tearing the heavens all the way into space and orbiting right up there above Sputnik.

We’ll be famous, boys. We’ll be frigging famous. They’ll be talking about us forever. How’d you like that now? Tell me. How’d you like that?”

The idea that we were going to be famous made me dizzy. I could see it in the headlines of Al-Nahar, Lebanon’s leading paper: “MAGDALUNA BOYS PUT HOMEMADE ROCKET INTO OUTER SPACE.” “And who knows,” I thought to myself, “they might even mention my name on the radio. That would be something. And the girls in the village would be all over me. I could take my pick. I could have anyone I wanted, even Jamili, the mayor’s granddaughter.” I was definitely all for this rocket thing. I was for it like I had never been for anything else in my life.

“When do we start?” I asked. “Can we start right away? Let’s go over to your dad’s and see what we can find, okay? Let’s do it now, okay?”

“Hey, hey, hey. Hold your horses, son. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves now, okay? This is not the kind of thing you rush into. We’ve got to have a plan. First, let’s give our rocket a name, okay? Rockets always have names. What shall we call ours? Any suggestions?”

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Ghassan, who wasn’t laughing anymore, and his eye had come back, could not hide the excitement in his voice. He was so worked up that he started stammering, “Well, well, let’s cah . . . cah . . . call it Al-Kashaff, the Scout. Yeah. Le . . . le . . . let’s do that. That’s what I think we should cah . . . cah . . . call it. It’s a good name. That’s what I thuh . . . thuh . . . think.”

Albert and I liked the name immediately. That was it. Ghassan had gotten it on the first try. Son of a gun! I couldn’t believe it. Our rocket was going to be Al-Kashaff. Nobody said anything, but we all felt that half of the project was already finished. Giving our rocket a name made it very real. Naming things does that.

The first thing to do was to raid Abu Albert’s tool shed and help ourselves to everything we needed. So, the very next day we sneaked into the shed, while Albert’s mom and dad were having their siesta, and we looked around. We found all kinds of stuff lying about—stacks of 3- and 4-inch galvanized pipe, kegs full of black gunpowder, fuses by the bundle, and lots of sheet metal and clamps. Quietly, we carried out everything we needed and took it to Albert’s grandpa’s back yard. We chose to build Al-Kashaff there because Albert’s grandma, Katrina, was as deaf as a snake, and his grandpa, Ayyoub, was as blind as a bat.

Then we set about putting our space vehicle together.

My job was to put the stand, or more accurately, the launching pad, together, and Ghassan, being cross-eyed and all, was told to design the precision fins that were supposed to act as rudders. He was also to find a suitable site and get the rocket ready for the launching.

Of course, the project was top secret and it remained so until that mid-afternoon in late fall.

It took us three days to prepare the 4-inch galvanized pipe, stick the fins on its tail end, and build the launching pad, which was a wooden platform with four legs on the bottom and parallel metal bars, sticking right up out of the platform to hold the fins in place and guide the rocket as it went up.

When Al-Kashaff, a little over a meter long, was finally ready, Albert stuffed it with black gunpowder and tamped it hard with a broomstick. While he did that, I double-checked the launching pad and put the finishing touches on it. Ghassan stood next to me, one eye on Albert and one eye on me, the corners of his mouth wet with anticipation. He whistled contentedly as he looked on.

Al-Kashaff was finally ready. Zero hour had come. We carried the rocket wrapped up in a piece of tarp to Shahla’s Hill, the spot that Ghassan had picked at the top of a rocky mound overlooking the village. When we got there, Ghassan and I set up the launching pad and secured it by leaning big rocks against its legs. Launching pad in place, Albert carefully slid the rocket down among the iron guideposts. When it was resting squarely on the pad, Albert handed Ghassan a box of matches and backed off in a hurry. I followed him to a safe spot about twenty meters away. We crouched behind a huge boulder, half the size of Magdaluna’s one-room schoolhouse.

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Ghassan stuck a burning match to the long fuse and, as soon as it started fizzing and hissing, he dashed to where Albert and I were safely dug in behind the rock.

There were a couple of anxious moments when the fuse seemed to fizzle out, but as soon as Ghassan got up to relight it, it would start smoking again. The burning fuse made a mean sound that made my scalp tingle.

After a minute or two of hissing and sputtering, Al-Kashaff started to dance on the pad like someone who’d just stepped into a bed of red-hot coals. Then, as it began to rise into a cloud of thick, black smoke, it started to shake violently from side to side. But it kept trying to go up, up, and up. Nobody was breathing. My head was buzzing with “Hail Mary. Hail Mary, make it fly. One more hand span and Al-Kashaff will be airborne. Just one more hand span, dear God, and it will clear the iron rods. Please, please, please, let it fly.

Oh, God, please make it fly.”

Suddenly, the rocket jumped straight up and hovered above the launching pad for a moment, its tail end slowly swaying this way and that. Then, it turned on its side, just above the tips of the rods, and blew up—a blinding flash, followed by a boom like nothing I had ever heard before. We were stunned, like dynamited fish, as much by fear as by the report of the explosion. I had never imagined that we could produce such a big noise. It was like the sonic booms that the Israeli fighter jets made over our heads every now and then, only this boom was twenty meters away.

For a while, we couldn’t move. We just sat there with our hands over our ears, dazed by the ringing in our heads.

When we finally came to, we left our shelter and went to the launching site to see what had happened. Al-Kashaff was gone. Not a trace of it was left anywhere for us to see. But there were some twisted fragments of the launching pad, scattered here and there around a smoking, two-foot deep hole that looked like the crater of a small volcano. I felt light-headed. I tasted gunpowder on my tongue. And the ringing in my ears was so loud it could be heard in Jmailieh, the village on the next hill.

Magdalunians ran out of their houses, disheveled and confused, shouting to each other, wondering what was going on. What in the world was that noise? Were the Israelis bombing us? Did a plane crash? Then somebody said, “It must be those damned Accawi boys and their cross-eyed friend. They’re always getting into stuff.” Some of the village kids ran up to the hilltop, stood around us in a circle, and looked up at us adoringly. They looked like a bunch of heathens standing around their idol. Ghassan was so pleased with the attention that he grinned from ear to ear, which made his left eye roll back into his head and disappear again.

The villagers had something to talk about for many, many weeks after Al-Kashaff blew up. And they would recount in detail what they were doing at the time, and how they felt when they heard the explosion. But the rocket thing was eventually forgotten. And once -53-

again life returned to normal in Magdaluna. As the days turned into months and years, Albert, Ghassan, and I went our separate ways.

Ghassan went on to be not a rocket scientist but a night watchman at a local power plant. Albert did not become an engineer at NASA. He got a job “sexing” for a poultry company in north Lebanon, and I became exactly what I have always wanted to be, an English teacher.

Magdaluna, made briefly famous by the three rocketeers, no longer exists. Sometime during the civil war that started in 1975, rebel fighters came down from the eastern hills, blew it up, and then razed what remained of it to the ground with backhoes and bulldozers. For many years, Magdaluna was nothing but a barren, chalky hill overlooking the Abul Yabis River. Then slowly, as law and order were reestablished many years later, a few old timers who had fled to safety in other countries returned, and some of their children and grandchildren, like spawning salmon, came to the village and began to rebuild. They cut new roads, erected spacious villas, and laid out flower gardens, but the village today looks nothing like it did back when I was a boy. Very few landmarks remain. There is the old carob tree and the cactus patch below where grandma’s old house used to be, and the baidar, the threshing floor where I used to ride the donkey-pulled maoraj during wheat-harvest season. And there is that big, gaping hole that our rocket made in Shahlah’s rocky hill when it blew up that summer in 1957. It is still there, but very few of us who are still alive and kicking know how it got there. M

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Layla Azmi Goushey The Fortune Teller My father sits on the edge of the sofa.

Ya Araf, what is my fortune?

His face is expectant.

His hands caress themselves in a washing motion.

Umm-Jibril swirls the dregs in my father’s coffee cup.

Three times.

She turns the cup over onto the saucer.

My Muslim father fidgets.

He wants to know if his business will flourish.

He is remembering his childhood.

His father wrapped in white cloth And buried in Jerusalem.

He is remembering fleeing Palestine His mother a widow And no one to buy him shoes.

My mother’s bracelets jangle.

Purchased from the gold merchant in Beirut, Four pendants dangle on her golden chain Allah and the Cross, Taurus and Leo from the zodiac.

He gave everything to her Yet would not let her drive.

He told her to sit with the women But then left the men and joined her.

My mother’s nervous laugh erupts And she hands Umm-Jibril her cup.

I am a young girl. Five years old.

I watch the fortune teller peer into the cups.

I watch her short, freckled arms, Gold earrings shaped like tiny drooping leaves Wrinkled neck, thick ankles, her flowered dress.

My mother adds sugar to a new cup of coffee.

She eats her knafa.

The cheesy pastry floats in rosewater syrup.

She takes another, and chuckles apologetically.

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Two Taureans and a Leo Dangle from her chain.

To my mother, the fortune teller says, “At the end of your life you will drown in sweetness.”

Umm-Jibril smiles.

I raise my eyes to hers, And she takes a breath to speak.

Lips parted, she stops.

And I see that she understands time.

How the past, present, and future are a trinity And there is only now.

The seer knows that as I sit in my father’s lap Leaning against the soft muscles of his stomach His fleshy thighs, I am also at his gravesite with my sons As his casket is lowered into the earth.

He is boxed in steel.

My mother laughs under her breath She and my siblings will bury him as a Christian.

His Texas car inspector’s name tag on his suit.

The fortune teller eyes the dangling pendants.

To my father she says, “At the end of your life you will forgive.” M

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Joyce Thomas Aruri Tribute to Naseer H. Aruri (January 7, 1934–February 10, 2015)

More than half a century ago, I went to a dance sponsored by my church and met the person who would change, fill, and magnify the remainder of my life. Naseer always said it was “love at first sight,” and I want to add that it was also love at last sight. Naseer and I shared exactly 54 years of marriage. I kissed him goodbye on February 12, 2015, the 54th anniversary of our wedding day.

Our marriage was one of unconditional love, mutual respect, and unwavering support, though our backgrounds and personalities should have made us completely incompatible. Our life together was rich in contradictions. Naseer was quiet and intellectual; I am extroverted and business-minded.

Naseer had no knowledge of or interest in sports; I’m an avid fan. He used to say, “All over America wives are telling their husbands, ‘Come sit with me and forget football.’ I’m the only man telling his wife, ‘Leave the football game and come sit with me.’”

Even more significant than our contrasting personalities, our religious traditions were different. But Naseer’s qualities, as all who knew him will attest, transcended these differences. He was the living definition of a gentle man. Members of my extended family often spoke of the way he uplifted and inspired them. My late brother Peter once said, “Naseer is the best thing that ever happened to our family.”

Sweet-tempered, modest, and kind, he was a person of fierce principles, but no viciousness. He possessed a nobility of spirit and purpose, and a devotion to the cause of human rights that could neither be bought nor diverted.

On June 4, 1967, Naseer was awarded his PhD at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst. His father had traveled from Palestine to the United States for the first time in order to see his son awarded -57-

his doctorate. It was a proud culmination of hopes, hard work, and sacrifice made all the more precious by the presence of Naseer’s father. Our joy spilled over. We had much to celebrate. Our newest son was two months old, and our daughter took her first steps at the graduation party that my mother and father had proudly prepared for him. But our happiness was turned inside out the next morning when our five-year-old son Faris put on the television and announced, “Mommy, Mommy, there’s a war in Palestine!”

With that sentence our lives changed forever.

The Six Day War shook Naseer to his core. From that point on, he dedicated himself to his people. He wrote, organized, and spoke with all the passion of his great heart and the power of his superb intellect to illuminate the Arab world to the West and to plead for justice for the Palestinians. Naseer always put the cause of Palestine before his own interests. He was never one to take credit for any advances that the movement achieved, instead preferring to pull up his shirt sleeves and move on to the next task at hand.

His numerous publications were never about stamping his name on a book or an article, but rather designed to educate the American public about the injustice forced upon the Palestinians, and how successive US governments were as culpable as Israel in perpetuating this injustice. His numerous speaking engagements were never about him standing behind a podium, but instead always focused on getting the message out and hoping others would do the same.

Though he grappled almost daily with issues of international significance, he remained always an involved and loving father to our four children, Faris Naseer, Karen Leila, Jamal Thomas, and Jay Hatem, and later an attentive grandfather to our thirteen grandchildren. The man who helped them understand the Palestinian perspective when they had to do social studies projects for school was the same man whose eloquent voice drew the world’s attention to the cause of human rights. He was a superlative role model for them and a devoted, tender husband to me.

My husband—the humble humanist, the incorruptible activist, the cherished man of both my dreams and my reality—has gone from us. He has left us a priceless legacy that we will try to honor and a great void that we will never fill.

Thank you, Naseer, for the gift of yourself and for the light of your love and goodness that will continue to shine in our hearts, in our lives, and in the still-dark corners of the world. M

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CONTRIBUTORS

Rasha Abdulhadi grew up between Damascus and rural south Georgia. She is an organizer and cultural worker, farmer and beekeeper, fire-breather and stilt-walker, educator and community technologist. She currently lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, and is working on tatreez and science fiction.

Reem Abu-Baker holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Colorado–Denver. She is the assistant editor for the Colorado Encyclopedia, program coordinator for the Colorado Book Awards, and an editor at Y’all’d’ve. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Word Riot, Flash Frontier, and Thin Air Magazine.

Anwar F. Accawi is an ELI instructor emeritus and has been an ESL teacher for thirty-two years. He has taught in the United States and in Lebanon, at the American University of Beirut, before going to the University of Tennessee in 1979. Accawi is a published writer whose work has appeared in books, literary anthologies, reviews, and college textbooks in the United States and abroad.

Hala Alyan’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, and Columbia Poetry Review. Her first full-length poetry collection, Atrium (Three Rooms Press, New York) was awarded the 2013 Arab American Book Award in poetry.

A second collection, Four Cities, is forthcoming in 2015 by Black Lawrence Press.

Lauren Camp is the author of two books of poetry. Her third book, One Hundred Hungers (Tupelo Press, 2016), won the Dorset Prize. The book details her father’s childhood in Baghdad and her interaction with the rituals and language of his culture. Lauren is a 2015–2018 Black Earth Institute Fellow. laurencamp.com.

Hasan Dudar is an editor and journalist of Palestinian and Lebanese descent, based in Toledo, Ohio. His articles have appeared in Al Jazeera America, Businessweek, the Associated Press, and the Arab Daily News. He graduated from the University of California– Berkeley with a master’s in journalism.

Angele Ellis is an award-winning writer whose poetry, fiction, and reviews have appeared in over forty journals and eight anthologies. She is the author of Arab on Radar (Six Gallery Press), whose poems earned her an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and Spared, a Main Street Rag Editors’ Choice chapbook.

Hazem Fahmy was born in Houston, Texas, and was raised in his parents’ native Cairo, Egypt. He left at 15 for the African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa, and after graduating, commenced his undergraduate studies at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

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Majda Talal Gama is a Saudi American poet based in the DC area. Her poems have appeared in the Northern Virginia Review and are forthcoming from Gargoyle; War, Literature & the Arts; and the District Lines anthology.

Layla Azmi Goushey is an assistant professor of English at St. Louis Community College in St. Louis, Missouri. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Missouri–St. Louis, and is pursuing a PhD in adult education.

Amjad Hajyassin is a New York–born Palestinian writer. His stories are about being Arab and American. He began writing after his mother passed away in 2010. Starting out as an amateur memoirist, Amjad began to delve into fiction and prose poetry. He can be found on-line at AmjadKhamis.Wordpress.com.

Kathryn Kysar is the author of two poetry books, Dark Lake and Pretend the World, and the editor of Riding Shotgun: Women Write About Their Mothers. Her latest project was a collaborative CD of poetry from Pretend the World. She teaches at AnokaRamsey Community College and the Loft Literary Center.

Christina Najla LaRose’s writing has appeared in Hawwa, Humanity & Society, Third Coast, Live Science, Staccato Fiction, Flashquake, and Mizna. She holds an MFA in creative writing and is currently a PhD candidate in English literature and women’s studies at the University of Michigan.

Jennifer Zeynab Maccani is a Syrian American freelance writer and biomedical research scientist living in the greater Hershey, Pennsylvania, area. Her work has appeared in Sukoon and the Canton Writes 2014 anthology.

Ron Riekki’s books include U.P., The Way North: Collected Upper Peninsula New Works (2014 Michigan Notable Book), and Here: Women Writing on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. His “Carol” was in The Best Ten-Minute Plays 2012. The First Real Halloween won best sci-fi/fantasy screenplay for the 2014 International Family Film Festival. His “The Family Jewel” was selected for The Best Small Fictions 2015.

Mike Rollin received an MFA from the University of Minnesota and has worked as an interpreter, community organizer, and writing instructor. His poems have appeared in POOL, Water~Stone Review, Redivider, Northwest Review, Commons Magazine, and on the air at KAXE radio. He lives in Minneapolis.

Donya Tag-El-Din is currently working toward her PhD in English literature and language at York University in Toronto, Ontario. Her poetry has been featured in various zines, journals, and anthologies, including Spirits, Mizna, and Whiskey Sour City.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha writes poetry and literary translation.

She has lived in and traveled across the Arab world. Her work has appeared in Magnolia, Floating Bridge Review, Taos Journal of International Poetry and Art, Al-Ahram Weekly, and the Seattle Times. Her poem “Immigrant” was nominated for a 2015 Pushcart Prize.

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DONORS As a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization, Mizna depends largely on donor contributions for our operating costs. If you enjoy this publication and would like to support Mizna, please consider making a tax-deductible donation at mizna.org.

Mizna Donor ($5–$49) Kitty Aal Eve Lotter Abou Chacra Kate Aksadi Bilal Alkatout Mirah Ammal Brooke Anthony Kareem Azzazi Robert Barnett Leila Ben-Nasr Beth Cleary Brian Cronwall Manan Desai Steve Dietz Liz Doyle and Greg Nammacher I. Ruth Hansen Sahar Hassan Kelly Heitz Abdeen Jabara Mary K. Kamel Larry Long Josina Manu Aaron Nesser Jennifer Pennington Sarah Peters Angela Polk Flo Razowsky Suzanne Ruby Zarmina Sayedi Sam Selvaggio Theresa Swaney Leila Tayeb Cindy Tong Refat & Miriam Zayed Many generous anonymous donors

Lisa & Jehad Adwan Devon Akmon Rami Azzazi Sami AlBanna Mohammed Bamyeh Sharon Rodning Bash Reema Rose Bazzy Jack Becker & Nancy Reynolds Eve Borenstein & Candace Falk Rich Broderick Ouahib Chalbi Nellie & Fritz Dorigo Angele Ellis Salah Fattah Dina Gad Gary Gardner & Helen Kivnick Gretchen Gibbs Layla Azmi Goushey Kathy Haddad Lorie & Karim Haddad Lena Halabi Salwa & Akram Issaq Camellia Kalra Andrew Knighton Barry Kryshka Adnan Mansour Jawdy Obeid & Zarmina Sayedi Steven Rosenberg James Rustad Janet Schmitt Jamie Schwesnedl Mary Shehadeh Scott Smith & Lana Barkawi Julia Bulbulian Wells Many generous anonymous donors

Mizna Associate ($50–$249)

Mizna Patron ($250–$999)

Catharine Abbott Abir & Hashem Abukhadra Fadia & Yusuf Abul-Hajj

Jeanette Wiedemeier Bower & Matt Bower Rebecca Haddad & Ziad Amra

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Mazen & Nicole Halabi Barbara Jabr Amy Kamel Nabil Matar Dawud Mulla & Nahid Khan Katie Murphy & Charlotte Karem Albrecht Rabi‘h Nahas William Nour & Guy Piotrowski Maher Safi Brett & Katherine Smith Mizna Benefactor ($1000+) Yehia & Nawal Barkawi Michele & Wael Khouli Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Carolyn Foundation Center for Arab American Philanthropy Cultural STAR Program Elmer L. & Eleanor J. Andersen Foundation 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 of Arab American Communities Partners & In-Kind Donors Arab American National Museum Intermedia Arts The Loft Literary Center Radius of Arab American Writers

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Mizna continuously seeks original writing for upcoming publications.

If you would like your work to be considered for our Intersectionalitythemed winter 2015 issue, please send in your submissions by August 30, 2015.

Contributors do not have to be of Arab descent provided their work is of relevance to the Arab American community.

Send your submission and a short biography (maximum 50 words) via e-mail as attachments to mizna@mizna.org, and include the word “submission� in the subject line. The attachments should be standard word-processing program files. Please include your name, mailing address, e-mail address, phone number, titles of your submissions, and genres of your submissions in your message. Your name should not appear on the attachments of your submissions.

Prose should be double-spaced and limited to 2500 words. Kindly 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.

We do accept simultaneous submissions, 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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