I looked back up at the television screen to find the boyfriend crying, his voice trembling, his lips wet with spittle. “How could someone do something like this?” he sobbed, his words choppy. He was breathless; the interviewer clearly had no idea how to handle this breakdown. He said flatly, in a stern tone: “It’s a tragedy; there are maniacs out there. In the interest of public safety, we caution women against walking alone, particularly at night, when they’re most vulnerable to this sort of cruel attack.”
The boyfriend steadied himself and looked fixedly at the interviewer. A perplexed and horrified expression hung on his face. He was clearly disgusted by the way this man was using his pain to perpetuate a state of terror, pretending not to be complicit in a system where women are savagely attacked, shut down, spied on, kept under wraps.
But women, I thought, aren’t always attacked from behind by strangers. Omar had been an insider. Our relationship was an inside job. He was family—whatever that meant—a relative even if I’d never met him before. My father had trusted him to act as his proxy. And despite not having much faith in my father, I’d gone along with his choice. How bad could Omar be, I’d thought, if my father sent him to check on me? He was, after all, my father. I was born of his body, and if the logic of parenting was sound, any harm done to me would be transferred over to him.
And Omar and I, we had laughed together. We had hiked the hills and mountains, swam in the high lakes, sunbathed on distant dunes facing the silver waters of the ocean. At that thought, a distant memory emerged as vivid as daylight. We were on the beach. We were playing badminton. I remembered the sensation of my feet sinking into the sand. The sky was pale blue and entirely clear but for a few strands of wispy clouds hovering over the horizon as thin as hairs. The sun was nowhere in sight, but the world was aflame with its heat, its limpid light, and beneath that wide-open sky, the sea drew in breath after breath, exhaling against the shore with the ease of a sleeping giant. The beach was small and enclosed by tall barren cliffs. Those rocks, puckered and blistery, appeared in my mind like claws silently preparing to pinch me. I could still hear the hollow wiry sound of the shuttle going back and forth between us, the tension in the cheap plastic grid of the racket, the dull snapping sound it made every time I hit the birdie.
After that summer in Marbella, I retreated into a solitude from which I never fully emerged; I clung to it the way I’d once clung to Omar’s body despite knowing, on some deeply buried level of my consciousness, that he would hurt me, that he would extract what he needed from me, then dispose of me coldly, remorselessly, as soon as he was satisfied. But as devastating as the end of our relationship was, I still couldn’t help but feel that our connection was anything but clear-cut. It hadn’t been all good or all bad. It hadn’t revolved exclusively around violence. There had been times when I’d wanted to dig my teeth into his neck, to bury my body in his. There were times when I’d gone after him, times when I’d yearned for him. I’d loved him, and while that love ultimately had wrapped itself around my neck like a noose and asphyxiated me, for a time it had nurtured me, too.
I took a bite of the watermelon and thought of all of the times Omar had lifted a forkful of blackened squid-ink rice or gently fried slices of calamari to my mouth. We ate and drank with such pleasure. We’d existed in a world apart, in isolation. I hadn’t interacted with a single girl my own age that whole summer. What they were doing for pleasure I had no idea. I’d felt separate from other women my whole life; it was a feeling that had haunted me until I met Ellie.
The Bride Tribe walked past, their feet dragging across the concrete, their sunglasses shining with the light of the emboldened sun. It was high morning. They climbed onto a black bus with tinted windows in twos, arm in arm, steadying each other, until the last pair had been swallowed. I watched it drive off and imagined the whole lot of them passed out on the beach day after day, cooking their limbs under the Spanish sun.
The bartender changed the television channel. “Ay,” he said, sighing and nodding his head at the state of the world.
I thought I might cry. I wanted to. I was sure I needed to. But I was all dried up.
I’d been dried up the year that I’d met Ellie, too, in Amherst, where I’d moved to write. As luck would have it, I, who could barely shed a tear then, was living with the easiest crier in the world, Sahar. She was born in America to Palestinian parents who returned to the occupied West Bank as an act of resistance, taking their three children, including Sahar, all of whom were American citizens by birth, to live with difficulty, without documentation, restricted from all mobility in the settler colonial regime of Israel. Sahar had come to Amherst to study; she’d tried to go back to the West Bank through Jordan several times to visit her parents and siblings but was continuously turned away by the Israel Defense Forces because, according to them, she’d been living there illegally in the first place. When they finally let her in, she refused to be separated from her family again and abandoned the small life she’d built for herself in America. What choice had she had?
When we’d lived together, she’d spent one-third of her time locked in the bathroom, sobbing uncontrollably. Her crying shattered me. I was poor, poorer than a street dog, and tired. Rent was cheap there and I’d wanted to bury myself in writing, but every time I sat down to face the page, Sahar would begin to weep and I would get up from my yellow wooden desk. There is nothing worse than hearing someone gagging on their own tears in the next room.
“Listen, Sahar,” I would say, sitting in the dim corridor in front of the bathroom door, “breathe, like this,” and I would draw in a loud, exaggerated breath. “I’m breathing with you. You’re not alone.”
Half an hour later she would open the door, her face red and swollen, and we would go our separate ways. We never talked about it. We didn’t need to.
As I drank the last of my beer, I thought to myself, I’ve heard that weeping my whole life. It’s the cry of the homeless. Not the kind that lives on the street; but the kind that lives in borrowed homes with documents and deeds and keys to houses that no longer exist because they’ve been confiscated, occupied, demolished; the kind that is warm enough and well-fed enough to yearn for what we’ve lost: land, loved ones, random objects. It’s the wail of those who live under occupation, who know we’re being watched, whose days are numbered and who are, nevertheless, free for the time being.
Free for the time being, I thought. What could be more confusing than to be free to get up and go to bed when we want, knowing that our days are numbered?
My thoughts circled back to Sahar. I remembered, smiling to myself, that she’d come home beaming one day. She’d been walking the aisles at the library and had met someone she’d connected with instantly, an Israeli woman who was a Palestinian ally. An hour later, Ellie was at our door, holding a six-pack of Miller Light, and she and Sahar sat at the kitchen table drinking and drawing maps of Israel and Palestine through the ages then comparing the imaginary geographies of their shared home with real maps they’d pulled off the library shelves, looking at each other with round horrified eyes each time they rediscovered how slim Palestine had become, how wide and tall Israel stood, how it appeared to be shaped like the blade of a serrated knife, a fact they both knew but that stung them every time they had to confront it anew. I’d never seen Sahar so happy.
I watched them from across the room, my dog at my heels. Ellie told me later that she’d been so sure that day that I disliked her. It’s true. I’d thought she seemed oblivious. She’d walked in and made herself comfortable right away. She’d even brought her own beer. All of this offended my sensibilities. I, who had been raised in the horrifying panic-stricken atmosphere of Tehran in the aftermath of the revolution and the Iran-Iraq war, was trained never to make myself at home in another person’s house unless they were a well-vetted family, a family from the same political camp, a family who wouldn’t turn against me or my kind, wouldn’t spit out my name even if they were being choked by the enemy. I wa
s taught to censor myself, to say as little as possible because whatever I said could be misinterpreted by any number of opposing people. I understood that I was always under siege and I behaved accordingly.
Perhaps I envied Ellie, her ability to take up space unapologetically, a misconception informed by historical facts: Israel was a willing partner in the dirty business America seemed always to be conducting in our backyard. I wanted to ask her: Have you come here to camp out for the evening? But I’d just stood there instead, silently smoking my cigarettes—Gauloises—a dirty habit left over from Marbella.
As I waited for Ellie now, the bartender brought me an ashtray. I was still smoking Gauloises, but my feelings toward Ellie had changed entirely. Until I had met Xavi, I had loved her more than anyone. And even after, we would often joke with Xavi that she was my wife, my wifey, we would say, and he, whose networks of intimacy ran along more binary lines than ours, would look at us with a gaze that suggested he was charmed and confused in equal measure. My phone buzzed. Here she was. Ellie had landed.
Arezu, where have you brought me? she wrote.
So she had seen the picture, the photo of the sad bride with her soiled veil. Welcome to the Costa del Sol, I replied; I’m outside, at the bar behind the bus stop. I told her to get some money at the ATM, enough for the pair of us. I told her my card wasn’t working. I told her that my heart was fat with joy that she was here.
Mine, too, she wrote back.
While we’d become inseparable, we barely spoke to Sahar now. Our contact had diminished significantly over the years. We missed her terribly and spoke of her often. She’d abandoned her poetry. She resented the time she’d spent in America, torturous months during which all of the fear and trauma she couldn’t allow herself to experience in the West Bank came rushing forward. She could never have expressed that kind of vulnerability in the West Bank. Exposing oneself like that when you live under occupation only makes you more defenseless; but of course, in a painful twist, leaving that state opens you up to incredible pain. In the end, the only way for Sahar to resist her own annihilation had been to continue living under occupation. She’d returned to Palestine, to Bil’in. Ellie and I had visited her once, almost eight years ago now. She’d since stopped returning our phone calls, our emails, our Facebook messages. She’d become a ghost. Eight years can feel like a lifetime. So much had happened. She’d married and divorced. She’s queer and she’d married a gay man, an act that allowed them to carry on with their same-sex partners under subterfuge. She’d existed in this way alongside other queer Palestinians in the face of Israel’s pinkwashing; their supposed openness to gay life was still another form of colonial discourse, another way of marking Palestine as backward, barbaric.
Ellie had gone through her fair share of relationships in those eight years as well: a Colombian American woman, a Norwegian man, then an Egyptian one. She moved around a lot. She went to Cairo for a while to perfect her Arabic and work on a few translations. Then the Arab Spring had erupted. She’d stayed as long as she could, but eventually she’d had to return to the States, to Amherst.
When she came back to Amherst, I was living in Brooklyn, with a chef who was fine enough at first, but who started coming home later and later at night, drunk, coked out, his mouth smelling like another woman’s vagina. He would often be going to bed just as I was getting up to write. We barely saw each other, and almost never had sex. We shared a bedroom and the cost of the rent, and continued that way for a long time because neither one of us could afford to move. And I had no interest in actually getting to know anyone anyway, no interest in letting anyone in, in asking or answering questions.
Now here Ellie and I were, I thought, putting out my cigarette, a decade later. I got up and moved through the crowd. There she was, laughing, laughing hysterically, coming toward me, pushing her glasses up her nose, her eyes wide, her mouth cracked open, her red curls bouncing as she lunged toward me. She threw her arms around me.
“Where are we?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said.
But I knew exactly where we were. We were at the airport one hour outside of Marbella, that city of salt and sun, dust and death. I could point to it on a map with my eyes closed.
3
ELLIE AND I WOKE UP on the bus and found we’d gone astray. I was in a gloomy mood. The few times I’d opened my eyes to look out the window, at the foothills of the Sierra Blanca on one side of the autopista and the coastal dunes of the sea on the other, I’d had the nagging sensation that we were moving in the wrong direction. But I couldn’t fully trust my judgment; I couldn’t grasp my own mind. I’d slept badly in the weeks prior. I would sleep for an hour or two only to be startled awake, gripped by horror, my mind seized by a procession of images: the moonlit streets Omar and I had walked down, the rooms where I’d obediently spread my legs, the empty Chinese restaurants where we’d eaten under the red light of paper lanterns. Beneath my panic ran terrible rivers of latent lust that completely undid me. I’d lay awake thinking of the scent of basil and tobacco that wafted off Omar’s skin. I thought of how I’d adored that smell, how I’d pressed my face against his armpits, his groin. I saw myself split in two, divided, my character composed of two antagonistic halves: one ruthless and perverse, predisposed toward a total abolition of rules, hungry for Omar’s deviance; and the other consumed by feelings of terror and disgust at the very thought of our relationship.
Those long sleepless nights had left me in a somnambulant state. As I drifted between consciousness and sleep, the road Ellie and I were traveling on seemed to levitate; the thistle and grass growing at the foot of the firs and the pines sticking out of the white rock of the foothills shrunk beneath us. I felt a deep-seated sense of unreality surge forth, a light-headedness born of shame and exhilaration. I wondered for a moment if it was suicidal of me to return. I took in the glistening patch of azure through the rectangular window of the bus. A falcon darted across the sky. I followed its flight for as long as I could until my eyes started watering from the intense light, until the rugged cliffs beneath its wings appeared shrunken and wrinkled. I saw myself walking hand in hand with Omar across the arid landscape. My head was bent low, my gait slack and resigned. My hair was long, as straight as a dagger. I was tanned and thin.
He was muscular, tall, robust. I watched as a rising tide of rock and sand and bramble swallowed us up, as we disappeared into the landscape. The air seemed full of the ashes of the dead. I leaned my head back and closed my eyes. Omar, I thought to myself, had flattened my life. He’d turned it into a cautionary tale, and this Spanish landscape, with its jagged rocks and pale coasts, had been his accomplice. And no wonder. My Muslim ancestors had been purged from medieval Spain centuries earlier, as had Omar’s, as had Ellie’s Jewish ones. They’d all been eradicated in waves. As I looked out at the changing landscape, now more lush and sculpted, it seemed to me that the spirits of our ancestors were still moving through this space, microscopic fragments backlit by the harsh sun. How strange, I thought, how strange and devastating to think that Omar and I both had been emptied of our personhoods, our futures foreclosed before we’d ever been able to love or harm each other.
My eyes stung. I leaned my head back and closed them again. My thoughts were anxiously circling my mind. I wondered if Omar had felt more comfortable consigning me to my own extinction because he knew full well that we’d been subjected to a violence so severe and perseverant by the gears of history that the sheer magnitude of its force would conceal whatever brutality he might exercise against me. His compulsion to assault my body, however unforgivable, was minute compared to the disfigurement that had been engineered by the West against us both, and these losses, layered one on top of another, formed an entangled whole. How was I meant to take on the task of mourning a private violence that had historical valences of such magnitude? After all, you need autonomy in order to grieve. You need to feel worthy of the life you’ve been given. You need to be in charge of your own story,
to feel ownership over your emotions, even the most despicable ones. But our lives had been modulated by the West. What did it matter if Omar asserted his power over me when my life was not worthy of being grieved? When my body had been designated a target for violence?
I felt dizzy, nauseated. My head began to spin. I felt as though space were folding over itself. I remembered posing these very questions to Ellie over one of our long phone calls. Take care, someone had said to me, a colleague or an acquaintance, perhaps a reader who had attended one of my events while I’d been on the book tour; the words had stuck in my mind—take care—a shot and its echo. The two words, side by side, had sounded to me like a warning. What does it mean for us to take care when the odds are stacked against us? I’d asked Ellie in that last phone call of ours. How are we meant to believe that we’re deserving of care when we’re repeatedly told that we’re a problem?
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “I don’t know.” Silence settled between us. We listened to each other breathing on opposite ends of the line. Then, finally, she’d added: “You won’t be mourning alone.” She believed in the power of communal grieving, in sharing our sharpest reservoirs of personal pain as a means of recovering our political agency. “The task,” she’d said, breathing into the phone, “will leave you undone and that undoing will transform you.” Perhaps, we’d agreed, mourning isn’t really possible when you’re alone. If the transmission of violence requires the collision of bodies so too does grieving require community; they are two sides of the same coin. I looked over at Ellie. I was so grateful she had come to Marbella with me. Our bodies, I considered, exist in relation to each other; there’s no such thing as “I” without “you.” Ellie stirred awake and turned toward me. She had felt my gaze on her in her sleep.
Savage Tongues Page 4
