Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  Ellie asked Salim if he’d moved to Marbella after the Arab Spring had erupted in Egypt; he said he worked the season on the coast from May to September then returned to Cairo for the rest of the year.

  He’d grown animated again, gesticulating fiercely as he railed against the Egyptian government and the conduct of the Egyptians themselves. He was shaking his head vigorously; we understood from his reaction that he was well-aware that his flirtation with the topless women was a way of reclaiming some of the power he’d been disabused of as a brown man from the Middle East. And we, it seemed—Ellie and I—with our notebooks and reading glasses and our more reserved body language (arms by our sides, feet close together), our formal way of engaging a stranger, had been a wrench in Salim’s day. He was not free, he told us, to consume and be consumed without guilt while we were there watching him.

  I told him that I thought he had a point. “But that’s exactly the issue here, don’t you think? That you can channel your sexual energy toward them more freely than you can toward us?” It sounded as though I was envious of his attention, but I was more than willing to imply as much in order to advance the conversation.

  The circles under Salim’s eyes darkened. Clifford was still sitting with the women, letting them have their way with him. They’d taken his shirt off and wrapped it like a turban around his head. I heard one of them say, “You only have a few hairs left. Your scalp will burn, Clifford!”

  There was a great deal of whispering in his ear. He was nodding along, smiling, his eyes electric, his loins likely swollen.

  “Well, ladies,” he said, and got up to leave. They agreed to meet at such-and-such bar once the night had matured, and they blew kisses at him as he walked up the beach.

  “What do you think of what I said, Salim?” I asked, turning to look at him.

  “You know how we’ve been raised,” he said. “I can’t be free with you; I am not free”—and here he paused as if searching for the right word—“to misbehave.”

  “Right,” I said, considering his words. It seemed that Salim could not express his sexual desire freely with us, nor could he expect us to express our sexual desire freely with him—or anyone else, for that matter—at least not as freely as the white women, which was, I thought, a dangerous line of thought that left us all open to being treated like a heap of meat: the white women for being regarded as wanting sexual objects and us for being stripped of our sexual agency. It was all terribly imbalanced and insulting.

  His belief system was so flawed, it was insulting even to him; it implied that his misguided advances were an attempt to avoid shame, the shame he anticipated being subjected to were he to make an inappropriate remark to one of us. Paradoxically, it was his inability to negotiate shame that might cause him, or another man like him, to charge at women like us behind closed doors, to pounce on us with his sexual energy when there was no one there to judge. Did he not think we were human? People with agency, needs, desires, and wants of our own? People with a right to like or dislike? Were we always, in his view, on the receiving end? Is that where he thought we belonged?

  I felt terrible. I couldn’t help but think that on this occasion the women in the front row had protected us; they had, unbeknownst to them, acted as a buffer between us and Salim, us and the likes of Clifford. In an effort to avoid feeling shame, we had all subconsciously agreed to a set of transactional interactions that left us vulnerable to violence, to finding ourselves quite suddenly, and without knowledge of how it was we’d arrived there, in a situation that could spiral quickly out of control. By damming yourself up, by acting out of shame, you’re only ensuring that the eventual explosion will be all the more dangerous.

  I felt a sharp pain in my chest, a pain that left me restless, eager to spring to my feet, to walk into the water. My skin was burning; I hadn’t worn any sunscreen.

  Ellie was taking in the even beat of the crashing waves, the purring and gurgling noise of the sea as it tenderly combed its sand and stones. She leaned her head back, drew in a deep breath, and closed her eyes.

  “I’m so ready for that platter,” she said with a neutral tone designed to conceal her disappointment. Our collective mood had plummeted, and there wasn’t much Ellie or Salim or I could add that would restore our spirits.

  He left to go put in our order; no sooner had he gone than Ellie reached into her bag for the papers she had to grade. I was parched. My lips ached. I thought again of the briny bowl of the Dead Sea.

  I got up and walked to the water. I waded in. It was salty, warm, and burned and tickled my bronzed skin. A few seagulls dashed through the sky, and caught a gust of air, and glided inland again. I dipped my head underwater and let the sea wash over me. I thought of my mother. I wondered what it was she was escaping from in marrying my father. Her mother had refused to speak to her for a year for marrying a European man, a man who was not Iranian, who could not understand the family customs, manners, traditions. Had she been rejecting her identity? Had she married him as a means for leaving Iran during the revolution? For a moment, I had the strange sensation of swimming in a lake of blood. I heard my mother’s voice, heard it sink into that sea of blood. She was calling me to her. Your body, she kept saying, was my home. Why did you leave me? My heart is filled with fear at the thought of never seeing you again. I came up for air. The sky was pale. A single seagull dove into the water; its beady eyes had a razor-sharp focus. I watched it break the surface of the water and reemerge with its prey. I remembered how the birds had looked like missiles as they’d flown across the checkpoint at Ein Gedi, how the land of Israel and Palestine, in all of its variations, had drifted across my mind as I’d watched those birds dash across the desert.

  “The Judean Desert,” I mumbled to myself.

  Palestine? Israel? A land without a people for a people without a land? What a strange and false saying! I listed the names of the territories as I’d listed them during that bus ride to the Dead Sea, as Ellie and Sahar had listed them as they’d drawn maps of Israel and Palestine under the dim light of the kitchen in our home in Amherst so many years ago.

  “The Upper Galilee, Haifa, the Negev,” I said, splashing water on my face.

  My voice caught in my throat. I thought about the Jordan River emptying out into the Dead Sea. Then I remembered that there were, in fact, three Dead Seas: the half that belongs to Jordan, and the remaining half divided again—one portion of its deadness to the West Bank and the remainder to Israel. The landscape is always forced to bear our wounds. We purge it of certain people while we populate it with others; we draw artificial lines to protect ourselves from our supposed predators; we spend our lives policing those boundaries, going to war for them.

  When we’d arrived in Ein Gedi, a soldier wearing a bulletproof vest, his hand casually coiled around his gun barrel, had walked down the aisle of the bus examining our passports and belongings. He was the paradigm of manhood, the perfect representation of the health and vigor of the state. We were close to the water. We could see the white sand of the sea sparkling like diamonds through the windows. A curtain of mist hovered above the water, and the Jordanian mountains looked pink through the vaporous air.

  The soldier returned our passports to us without saying a word. As American citizens, we benefited from unrestricted mobility while Palestinians, who were born and raised on this land, were trapped without citizenship in a few arid square miles. “Maybe,” Ellie said, tracing the soldier’s gun with her eyes, “this is why they called it the Sea of Death.”

  The sky was yellow; it was bright. The Sea of Death, I thought, a sea separated from its source water in the Jordan River—dams had been built, irrigation projects initiated—a sea in a desert, exposed to constant heat that sucked up the water and churned it into vapor. The heat was so intense, it had compromised our senses. We’d spent hours languishing by the sea, floating on the water, talking about the ways in which the gaps in the story of the land had wrenched the gaps within us open still more, about how so oft
en the gaps between external narratives of race and gender and nationhood and our private sense of self are unaccounted for.

  That, I considered, turning on my back and floating on the water, staring at the diminishing sun, drowning out the frenetic chatter on the beach, the chatter of the women in the front row who grew rowdier by the second, is what I was trying to do. I was trying to account for the gap between the narratives that I, as a survivor of rape, was asked to perform and the reality of my experience, which was forever in the process of morphing, full of contradictory feelings that I had learned were best kept to myself.

  Except with Ellie. Ellie, who understood the pain of knowing that our bodies had experienced pleasure even in the midst of undeniable violence. As if our bodies did not belong to us, as if they were divorced from our psyches, our consciousness. How else could we feel physical pleasure while being psychically annihilated? We had desired our own deaths. Ellie could barely stand being in Israel, and she had dealt with her feelings by running headlong into a toxic relationship with an abusive man. She had felt the power of the unacknowledged violence in Israel and Palestine, the violence that was invisible in Israel as it raged on against the Palestinians who were continually invaded and dispossessed of their homes. She had wanted a physical manifestation of the violence; she had wanted to engage in an activity that would cause her pain that she could account for, a pain with a concrete source. Sleeping with her boyfriend and all of his friends had been, she’d said to me, the equivalent of cutting oneself in response to a traumatic event that is not being acknowledged by the community in meaningful ways. Those runaway years had led to years of insomnia. She complained of feeling trapped and alone in a culture that had experienced extreme torture, that was now engaging in the destruction of an innocent people as a way of purging themselves of their inherited pain. Even after she found the strength to leave her boyfriend, she hadn’t returned home. She’d fallen in love with a Palestinian woman and moved in with her. Which is to say she’d been to the other side, where children waited with folded arms and legs under the burning sun. Where the water ran dry. Where the olive trees shrank. Where bodies withered. Where infrastructure—roads, electricity, water—were built for Israeli settlers while being denied to the Palestinians. There were the shelled-out buildings, the black water tanks on the roofs, the burning piles of garbage, the bullet holes in the walls of houses. All of the things that continued to unfold on the other side of the separation wall.

  Months later, when she finally saw her parents again, they called her a traitor. “Once a traitor, always a traitor,” they said. She had been shunned. They had sent her back to America. They’d been afraid of the judgment of the Orthodox community to which they belonged. And yet, after years of living in Israel against her will, Ellie had been transformed by it; she no longer belonged squarely in America either. She was lost and alone; she was left without guidance, without anyone to speak with in Hebrew.

  We had both experienced the bitter pain of exile, of being banished by the people we loved, from the nurturing nest of our native language. Where does a story begin? I wondered. What are a story’s origins? Because the more I considered the arc of my life, the more I had to contend with the glaring truth that my story with Omar had begun long before I’d met him. I had been primed—through my culture, my family dynamics, my own unbending character—to fall prey to him, to believe that I’d been the one to seek him out. I needed to believe that in order to persist, in order to live. I needed to believe that I’d had some agency in the matter however minor that agency had been in comparison to his. After all, I didn’t feel I could heal without acknowledging that I had participated in my oppression by giving him permission to be my oppressor. I needed to account for the fact that I had taken steps toward him myself even if I’d misjudged what it was that I was stepping toward. I’d underestimated his capacity to outinjure me.

  I turned and dove under the water. I kept my eyes open. There wasn’t a fish in sight. The water was nebulous, gray in bits, green in patches. It was composed of a range of hues melting and blending together just like in the sky. I could still hold my breath underwater for the better part of a minute. I came up for air. I kept my back to Ellie, the women in the front row, Salim, the whole lot of them. I looked out at the horizon. The water stretched out as far as the eye could see. I thought of my father as a young man at sea. What a lonely life my father had led. What a troubled life. I felt my body grow soft under the weight of that thought.

  What was I doing there? I suddenly wondered. What had I been doing here? The sand hollowed out beneath my feet. I heard Ellie calling after me. I turned to look for her. She was standing ankle deep in the water, her hands on her hips.

  “Food’s here,” she said.

  I felt the water rush off my limbs as I emerged from the sea.

  Salim was bringing us two glasses, another bottle of wine, a bottle of water, some napkins.

  I felt as though I were floating—up, up—as if all of the heaviness within me had sunk down like an anchor. I was drunk. I was hungry and thirsty and craving a cigarette. I saw the masseuses come out from behind the wall. I wanted to rush toward them. I wanted someone to rub my feet, to massage my legs, to push their hands into the nape of my neck. But the women in the front row beat me to it. They ran across the beach to them and grabbed them by the hands. The masseuses were laughing, laughing wholeheartedly. The women dragged them to their beds, forced them to lie down. They took their shoes off and started to massage their feet, their scalps, their hands. I laughed, too. We all laughed. It was the most delightful thing I’d seen them do. I sat down next to Ellie and we ate our hearts out.

  “Look at this squid,” Ellie exclaimed.

  The masseuses were laughing. They were rolling on their backs, bringing their hands to their faces in disbelief. They lingered for a short while, enjoying the view alongside us. There we were, each of us misunderstood in her own way, watching the sun go down together.

  “And the octopus,” I said, lifting one up by its maroon tentacle and dangling it in the air.

  Ellie grunted with pleasure. “Orgasmic!” she said.

  And it was. It was the best thing I had ever tasted. In the distance, the seagulls cawed. They were eyeing our plates, their squeals overlapping, calling, “Go, go, go!” I watched the sun dip beneath the horizon. A shimmering copper blaze emerged from the sea. From that heaving pit of darkness, a golden tunnel of light shot up toward the heavens; I stared at it for so long that I forgot myself.

  10

  WHEN WE GOT BACK FROM THE BEACH, the apartment was pitch black. Its mute walls towered over us in the darkness. The lines and angles of the floors, the curve of the sofa, the seams in the tiles, it all appeared ominous to Ellie and me. We had arrived full and drunk and pleased with our day, pleased with what the day had revealed to us, only to find ourselves in an apartment prepared to pounce. I wondered if the apartment was rejecting us, punishing us for having taken a cloth to its dust, having rubbed its surfaces raw with vinegar. Ellie leaned against my arm. We were standing in the foyer, trying switch after switch.

  “It hadn’t occurred to me until now,” she said, pulling like a child at the hem of my dress, “that it was strange for the electricity to have been on when no one’s been here for twenty years.”

  I made my way cautiously across the living room, Ellie in tow, and opened the shutters. The silver glow of the moon spilled in; it leaked through the curtains and reflected off the polished floors, giving us enough light to see by. I felt a hand at my back. It was Ellie’s, but for a moment, I feared it was Omar pushing me into the halo of moonlight so he could regard me from behind, examine my adult body for the curves of my youth. My legs went stiff, my arms numb. My heart beat furiously. It sounded to my ears like a galloping horse treading a cracked thirsty earth; I heard a thud-thud, thud-thud thud-thud across that barren land.

  “Arezu,” Ellie whispered, placing her hand tenderly between my shoulders. “Arezu, maybe we should
get out of here.” We had four days left in our trip.

  She had a point. Standing in the feeble moonlight that had pooled at my feet, I felt stripped of understanding, stupid—a silly, wayward girl with no control over the hours of her life. What had I been thinking? That overcoming who I’d been was as simple as returning to this apartment? That word—overcome—I turned it over in my mouth and thought, What a laughable word. I said it to myself with derision—overcome. What did I think, that I could lift myself out of my own wretchedness, the murky, war-torn, blood-soaked landscapes that had made and unmade me? I wanted to laugh, to laugh like I’d laughed all day, to laugh at how stupid it all was. How false it all felt. How utterly ridiculous my life had been. I looked at the spilled moonlight that was spreading across the floors, following me from room to room like quicksilver. This apartment, I concluded, is diseased, irremediably savage, attached to its darkness, to its psychological games. How had I ever survived a summer alone in this place? I heard the sound of my own strained breathing as Omar closed his hand around my neck. While I’d been lost in the fantasy of love, of pleasure, he had almost killed me.