Beyond Memory: An Anthology of Contemporary Arab American Creative Nonfiction

By Pauline Kaldas and Khaled Mattawa

This anthology brings together the voices of both new and established Arab American writers in a compilation of creative nonfiction that reveals the stories of the Arab diaspora in styles that range from the traditional to the experimental. Writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, and Syria explore issues related to politics, family, culture, and racism. Coming from different belief systems and cultures and including first- and second-generation immigrants as well as those whose identities encompass more than a single culture, these writers tell stories that speak to the complexity of the Arab American experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
• Release date: Mar 6, 2020
• ISBN: 9781610756846

Book preview

literature.

1

Pain Management

ELMAZ ABINADER

I.

The wrist broke—the fracture circled my forearm like an etched gold bangle. It did not separate hand from arm, the bones did not jut out—the render was nearly symmetrical. The distal radius banged against a surface at the gym, and in time, sent me to the emergency room, my arm swaddled in ice bags and towels.

There was a procedure:

Insurance forms, weight, height, blood pressure, heart rate, temperature.

A nurse typed into a screen and asked, What is your pain level?

I bit my bottom lip, held my arm rigidly, careful not to let it drop.

Ten being unbearable, she advised.

I knew my pain, the throbbing and pressure. The wrist had doubled in size. Since this was the first time I’d ever broken a bone, rating the pain seemed abstract. I breathed deep. Not wanting to seem too intolerant or be mistaken for one of those people hoping for a good drug, I downplayed this new sensation, Eight point five.

She typed.

Questions about movement, flexibility, fingers, fists, and thumbs. The incident: I climbed onto the wooden side of a BOSU at the Y, holding fifteen pound weights in each hand, unaware that the surface was slick with oil. My feet gave way, I slid backwards, arms akimbo, dropping weights, forming wings that did not lift me, that instead slapped me against the apparatus and then the floor of the aerobics studio.

I jumped up and continued to teach my body-sculpting class. Blood filled the wrist, ballooning it enormous. Someone brought ice. Bracing the bag against my forearm, I continued to teach and ignored the pain, which should have been possible, I thought. But here, it insisted, progressed: six, seven point two, seven point six. At eight, I excused myself. I am going to the emergency room, I announced.

The nurse’s narrative would include the circumstances of the fall, the time from the incident to the arrival in ER, but would not register my deflection, my insistence on continuing—some shadowy bravery, or denial, or ego.

When the doctor arrived, he didn’t begin by looking at the wrist, but instead read the computer screen. What is your level of pain, ten being intolerable?, he first asked.

Numbers are trusty indicators. They measure: an inch is an inch because the ruler can prove this distance. We are relieved from judging, guessing, abstractions. In the case of pain, the numbers mark a place where a plan can begin to form. At the four level, the doctor might say we’ll get you something for that. When the pain is a seven, X-rays are ordered, slings assembled, casts fitted to the arm.

II.

Writers believe in narratives—connecting the reader to a character, a voice, developing experiences so vividly, we are there: in the city tenement, on the highway, at the farmhouse. We trust words, pick them precisely and combine them in ways that arouse the senses, deepen recognition, illuminate the moment. The experience of reading a story or a poem that moves into the body is nourishing and enlightening.

Rhetoricians trust narrative as one of the ways of making argument. Include a story that illustrates your point, you can attack head and heart. Fundraisers show us the tragedy of a family who lost everything in a flood, the photo albums, Sparky the pet dog, a favorite book, a grandmother’s painting. Health care advocates describe a child’s family struggling with her medical bills, allowing her sweet voice to be heard, her bravery to be illustrated. Under the surface of each of these devices is the suggestion this could be you.

Stories can bring us to tears or to fury or even to delight, all things being equal. These days, we capture their plots and characters in so many ways: dash cam recordings, news clips, phone videos. I keep thinking, these are such precise storytellers: the cop pulling the women from the car and handcuffing her, the team of officers crushing the man selling cigarettes, the footage of children and parents having a few minutes to visit each other across the border, a clip of Israelis tearing down a Palestinian school as the term starts.

My news feed, my Facebook page are filled with vivid narratives that move me. A young Palestinian girl is dead, shot by soldiers, I shudder at the sight of her tiny body splattered with her blood, which makes her dress a constellation. Three thousand Rohingya are slaughtered, a surviving mother curls around her tiny infant’s body. A schoolboy is hung by a noose in New Hampshire, nearly killed. The welts in his neck silhouette the texture of a rope.

Ironically, the availability of the images, the stories told in pictures and video, the details that pour into each of our senses, has not provided a greater compassion or recognition. Oftentimes, a story arouses a counter narrative, a sneer, or a fleeting sympathy. What is happening? Why can’t the pictures of Native Americans protesting in the freezing cold result in despair so deep, we will do anything to save them?

Lots of reasons—political, cultural, and social. I know. But I am also concerned about viewers and readers understanding the level of pain. Maybe we’ve become inured to the images of grief, tragedy, murder, and injustice. Or relinquished our social consciousness around pain being universally unfair and unwanted.

III.

What is your level of pain, ten being unbearable? What if, in fact, we looked at each story in terms of physical and emotional impact, using numbers, instead of words, ten being intolerable?

Could we rate the pain in each story with a number? Could we trust victims to reliably apply a number that could lead to a plan?

What is your level of pain? Ten being unfathomable?

What is your level of outrage, ten being unspeakable?

What is your level of humiliation, ten being breathing the tar of the road to refuge?

What is your level of disenfranchisement, ten being loss of your country?

What is you level of anger, ten being firestorm?

What is your level of loss, ten being muted and wandering?

What is your level of disorientation, ten being unwanted foreigner?

IV.

Sixteen years ago, when the Twin Towers in New York City were bombed, federal and local governments seriously considered proposals on requiring Arabs and Arab Americans to have identification cards. My mother, who was hard of hearing, slightly bent over, and shaking from Parkinson’s, listened to these possibilities, her television blaring to the middle of the parking lot. She had been in the country sixty-five years. At eighty-eight years old, my mother had sent six children through school and higher education, run a business, lost babies and her mother, and survived heart problems and several fracturing falls. But the prospect of filing for an ID card broke her. In a pain haze, lying on the couch, she turned her face to me and said, I didn’t come to this country to lose my freedom.

Often a defender of the government, a respecter of authority, my mother rarely butted heads with the powers that be. Here she was, one year from her passing, feeling the loss of a lifetime. Mother, what is your pain level, ten being erased?

This was greater to her, at the moment, than the death of two children, or the passing of her sister and mother, of her loss of her home in Lebanon. Her face broke to pieces.

Mother, your level of pain when:

You left your country as a child?

You were separated from your mother?

When your father died before you got married?

When your children disappointed you?

When you were rejected by the society around you?

When your business failed?

Mother, what was your level of pain when you couldn’t dance, or sing, or listen to music, ten being inconsolable?

V.

Does it help to have what feels like an objective rating? Would we then know how to react?

What is your level of pain when your country is occupied?

What is your level of pain when the dictatorship murders entire towns?

What is your level of pain when you are suddenly a refugee?

What is your level of pain when it’s your son showing up in the video of a police shooting? Or dying on Rikers Island?

What is your level of pain when your dreams are legislated and then withdrawn?

What is your pain?

VI.

I am constantly reaching for the better language to surround the stories that illustrate our inability to feel compassion or our loss of the importance of human rights. They elude me, or maybe, I’ve used up the supply. The combinations of words do not go on into infinity like the arrangement of numbers.

If we follow the example of the fine doctor, ratings may connect the dots from pain to prescription. Give a prognosis, perform surgery, embrace it to stability, exercise it gently, then vigorously.

We can make up charts. If a person, or family, tribe, culture, society, or citizenship is having a pain rated at five, we have a discussion in the United Nations and pass a resolution. At eight, we put the opposing parties into negotiations, and at ten, we operate—remove the tumor, fix the break, replace the limb, assist the heart, rewire the brain, engorge the implant, radiate the area.

It’s four months after the fall—my wrist is healed. Monday I was cleared to go back to full performance of my duties as a fitness instructor.

Memory of pain: six. Level of pain: zero.

2

in which you do not ask the state of israel to commit suicide

GEORGE ABRAHAM

The officers, speaking harsh fragments of Hebrew, run your boots back and forth several times through the security scanner. After carefully inspecting the zipper, they decide to place your shoes in a metal tray and slide them to you. You are given a red badge to wear with your name printed in bold font. They keep your passport at the front desk. You are instructed not to ask questions.

You proceed to a waiting area, while the officers inspect your classmates, two-by-two, in five- to fifteen-minute intervals. Slowly, the waiting room begins to fill with familiar faces; your American classmates, marked with blue badges and blue passports in their hands.

A sign reading Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs: security cameras in use prompts your friend to joke about the room being bugged. It is important to mention that she is also wearing a red badge. Both the humor and exhaustion in her statement are familiar. Or maybe she reminds you of home.

Eventually, you are ushered out of the cramped waiting room and into a large lecture hall. A dark-skinned woman stands at the podium. You see her last name flash across the screen and are relieved by the familiar space it occupies in your mouth.

The woman introduces herself as an Iraqi Jew who is now a political law advisor to the Israeli state. She begins explaining her job and the difficult legal nuances of counterterrorism; how international law forbids targeting civilian infrastructure in combat. Hence, the terrorists tend to use international law to their advantage. Hence, war places unfair pressure on Israel to operate on the higher moral ground.

The distinction between this woman and a terrorist is a matter of semantics; she has a terrorist name, speaks the terrorist’s language, even grew up living among terrorists. And now, she is the one dropping the bombs on the terrorists, on behalf of a state that views her as the acceptable kind of terrorist.

The woman is only the first of several speakers, the rest of whom are white. The speeches begin to blur, as the politicians recite similar, rehearsed arguments, none of which are unfamiliar to you. Your haze breaks when the last speaker, a white-haired man, starts answering questions from the audience and says, 1948 happened. 1967 happened. And we won. This is war, I mean, history tells us things like this just happen.

The words escape him without the slightest hint of remorse. His stare, gray and rigid as stone; the kind of cold only a politician can know. You lock eyes with the Palestinian woman to whom he responded.

So what you’re saying is, my mother, who was born in Haifa, cannot return to her home, but any random American Jew can? The exhaustion in her voice is familiar to you.

Listen, the man sighs and removes his glasses. I don’t know your mother, but I assume she can find a home in another Arab country; that’s how war works. If we were to accommodate every refugee who claims this land, that would be a logistical improbability. That would, in essence, be asking the state of Israel to commit suicide. I hope this answers your question.

You want to say you are surprised by all of this, but in truth you are just numb. Or maybe the language escapes you.

An hour later, you are ushered out of the building by a woman who is introduced to you as an intern. You attempt to make small talk with her, only to receive half smiles and nods. The security guard up front hands back your passport in a small metal tray. She doesn’t speak your language, the guard explains.

What you have to understand about 1948 is they not only destroyed our village; they destroyed our lives. Yacoub’s voice crackling through the bus mic’s static almost resembles your grandfather’s. The way he’d pause and let "ya’ani bridge the countries in his sentences: Ya’ani, this was my home. My childhood. My paradise."

The bus shifts left to exit, Hebrew signs painting the side of the road, as you approach what remains of Lifta: mountainside speckled with stone remnants, structures half-standing, swallowed by the overgrowth.

Your moments in Lifta begin to blur: first, the descent, steep, as if the land itself is beckoning your return. Then, the runoff—you see a white man bathing in the desolate remains of a spring. Another Israeli man is reading a newspaper. He sits on a boulder as if he didn’t know a house once stood there.

This is the house where I grew up; that used to be the bakery downhill, Yacoub points onward as the rest of the class lags behind. In the distance, a building gapes like God smashed his fist down on its frame in a tantrum.

As you near the hill’s bottom, Yacoub points to the opposing hillside: that hill—ya’ani—is where my father and his fathers were buried. The waste . . . ya’ani . . . sewage from Jerusalem runs down the hillside and erased his grave marker. You ask yourself, how many times has the state of Israel asked Palestinians to marvel at their own land’s suicide?

You reach the bottom. In the distance, there is a playground with a newly renovated park, speckles of white children running around. The government started building a, a . . . ya’ani, a new Israeli quarter at the base of our village. This is our land, but they want to pave over it. We are fighting them, ya’ani, in the courts . . . but the construction has already begun.

You ask again: how many times has the state of Israel forced Palestinians to abandon their own; to have their very conception of home paved over and forgotten?

It is important to mention that, on your way to the bus, Yacoub points out a hybrid tree species that produces both almonds and berries. It is the result of decades of competition between an invasive species, and a fruit gene indigenous to the region; two lineages, intertwined into a finite body, refusing erasure. Science says that there are two likely outcomes to such speciation: either one species will conquer the other, or another entirely new species will emerge over generations. Yacoub calls it a genetic anomaly. A miracle of God.

Six months later, you are back on your American college campus. The gaze of a hundred eyes fixed on you and the equations displayed in light behind you; both are a language of their own. A vial filled with Lifta’s soil hangs on a strand around your neck. You feel it against your chest as you speak to the audience in their own language of proof and theorem.

You reference an equation from a paper in your hand, and as you glance down, notice TECHNION UNIVERSITY OF ISRAEL dominating the top of the page.

Their argument was a logical fallacy, so in a sense, the paper authors cheated. They’re Israeli, so I suppose it makes sense.

You don’t know why the words slip out of your mouth. And, for a second, time ceases to exist, and you are not a mere college student defending his thesis, but instead a Palestinian college student defending his thesis to a wall of petrified, white faces. Maybe it being Israeli independence day weighed heavy on you. Or maybe every day is Israeli independence day, and your ancestors slipped out of your throat. Maybe it was the soil, hanging from your neck like a key might. It is often the case that Palestinians who fled during the Nakba still have the keys to their homes, even if their homes are no longer standing. In either case, there is always a mourning; there is always the lack of home placing a weight around your neck, a bullet in each word that escapes you.

A well-intentioned white professor pulls you aside after your presentation and lectures you on professionalism. You want to tell him your history; how Technion’s existence is at the expense of your ancestor’s land and lives; how this same university makes an open-air laboratory of Gaza and calls the people there the necessary expense.

How, despite all of this, you are expected to sit docile, as your own academic institution funds the crumble and rupture of a land you called home. As if this same academic institution didn’t turn their back when the Birthright campaign and other friends of Israel threatened to put the Arab students on a watchlist. As if this same institution didn’t try to swallow you into the night’s mouth, tempting a moonlit suicide attempt from you, or that copy of you who craved most an escape that night. Were you to die, would they write you into a boy on a godless ledge, and speak not of the demons you fled, or the gravity forming a hollow country in your heart? Or would they say you were just abandoning your body; would they say, this is war, I mean, depression. Things like this just happen? Would they remember, first, the history and not the body it haunted?

But you are not the self you survived, nor are you the version of yourself who takes in words of the white professor, who you remind yourself, is well-intentioned. You are, instead, the copy of yourself you found at the entrance to the Aida refugee camp, six months prior, taking a selfie in front of a life-size statue of a key. While you are off being the literal Palestinian diasporic stereotype, your white classmates give candies to children walking in the streets, and ask to take selfies with them. The children hold up 2 fingers next to their saviors in the photographs. #PeaceInTheMiddleEast. 128 likes on Instagram.

Inside the camp, a youth program director tells you about the role of art in the lives of the Palestinian refugee communities. We began to notice our children were born into such desperate conditions that they dreamt of no other reality than becoming martyrs, the director says, "It was our goal to teach our children that they could live for Palestine; that they didn’t have to die for their