A map of home, p.1
A Map of Home, page 1
A MAP
OF HOME
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Publisher’s Note:
Epigraph
Part I
ONE: Our Given Names
TWO: Comfort
THREE: The House Will Have Music
FOUR: A Map of Home
FIVE: Summer’s Fabric
SIX: Barefoot Bridge
SEVEN: Life is a Test
EIGHT: Tanks Like Green Elephants
Part II
NINE: The Travelers
TEN: In Transit
ELEVEN: This is War
TWELVE: The Pride of Religion
Part III
THIRTEEN: Finding the Center
FOURTEEN: You are a Fourteen-Year-Old Arab Chick Who Just Moved to Texas
FIFTEEN: Make it Yourself
SIXTEEN: The Shit No One Bothered to Tell us
SEVENTEEN: Big Pimpin’
EIGHTEEN: Dictations
NINETEEN: Demeter’s Daughter Finally Gets Some Shoes
TWENTY: Departure’s Arrival
Acknowledgments
Copyright
FOR MY PARENTS
PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of Fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Sometimes I imagine the map of the world
spread out and you stretched
diagonally across it.
—FRANZ KAFKA, in his letter to his father,
which he gave only to his mother
A MAP
OF HOME
I
In the so-called Age of Ignorance . . . our ancestors used to form their gods from dates and eat them when in need. Who is more ignorant then, dear sir: I, or those who ate their gods?
You might say: “It’s better for people to eat their gods than for the gods to eat them.”
But I’d respond: “Yes, but their gods were made of dates.”
—EMILE HABIBY,
The Secret Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist
ONE
OUR GIVEN NAMES
• • •
I DON’T REMEMBER HOW I CAME TO KNOW THIS STORY, AND I don’t know how I can possibly still remember it. On August 2, the day I was born, my baba stood at the nurses’ station of St. Elizabeth’s Medical Center of Boston with a pen between his fingers and filled out my birth certificate. He had raced down the stairs seconds after my birth, as soon as the doctor had assured him that I was all right. I had almost died, survived, almost died again, and now I was going to live. While filling out my certificate, Baba realized that he didn’t know my sex for sure but that didn’t matter; he’d always known I was a boy, had spoken to me as a boy while I was tucked safely in Mama’s uterus amid floating amniotic debris, and as he approached the box that contained the question, NAME OF CHILD, he wrote with a quivering hand and in his best English cursive, Nidal (strife; struggle). It was not my grandfather’s name, and Baba, whose name is Waheed and who was known during his childhood as Said, was the only son of the family, so the onus of renaming a son after my grandfather fell squarely upon his shoulders. It was an onus he brushed off his then-solid shoulders unceremoniously, like a piece of lint or a flake of dandruff; these are analogies my grandfather would the next day angrily pen in a letter sent from Jenin to Boston.
And why was my dear baba filling out my birth certificate so soon after my birth? Because before his birth, he’d had three brothers who had all evaporated like three faint shooting stars before anyone could write them a birth, let alone a death, certificate. His superstitions superseded his desire to hold me so soon after my emergence, and besides, he told himself now, we had the rest of our lives for that.
When he’d filled out the entire form, Baba regally relayed it to the black nurse, who he remembers was called Rhonda, and she stared at the name and sighed, “Damn.” Then Baba, in flip-flops, turned around and raced up the white tiled hallway, bypassed the elevator, ran up the three floors to the maternity ward, and burst into the birthing room. Mama was nursing me and I was eagerly sucking the colostrums, now and then losing her nipple.
“How is my queen?” said Baba, caressing my mother’s face.
“She’s lovely,” Mama said, thinking he meant me, “and eight whole pounds, the buffalo! No wonder my back was so . . .” Baba’s brow furrowed, and Mama couldn’t finish her complaint, because, eager to correct his mistake, Baba was already out the door and running down the white-tiled hallway, past new mothers and their red-faced babies, past hideous robes in uncalled-for patterns, bypassing the elevator, and sliding down the banister of the staircase, landing smack on his balls at the end of it. But he raced on, doubtlessly feared by the hospital’s patients and nurses who saw an enormous mustache with limping legs, which, upon its arrival at its destination, was screaming for Rhonda, where is Rhonda, help me, Rhonda, an outcry that provided the staff with three weeks’ worth of endless laughter and snickering.
Why had Baba assumed, no, hoped, that I was a boy? Because before his birth, his mother had had six daughters whose births all went uncelebrated. He’d watched his sisters grow up and go away, each one more miserable than the last, and didn’t want to have to be a spectator to such misery ever again: to witness his own girl’s growing and going.
Rhonda, who’d expected Baba to come back and try the naming thing again, emerged with the birth certificate already in hand, and Baba, who is not usually known for laziness, grabbed a pen and added at the end of my name a heavy, reflexive, feminizing, possessive, cursive, cursing “I.”
Moments later, Mama, who had just been informed of my nom de guerre, and who was still torn up in the nether regions, got out of bed, flung me into a glass crib, and walked us to the elevator, the entire time ignoring my baba, who was screaming, “Nidali is a beautiful name, so unique, come on Ruz, don’t be so rash, you mustn’t be walking, your, your . . . pussy”—this in a whispered hush, and in Arabic, kussik—“needs to rest!”
“Kussy? Kussy ya ibn ilsharmoota?”—My pussy, you son of a whore? “Don’t concern yourself with my pussy, you hear? No more of this pussy for you, you . . . ass!”
“Ruz, enough, have you gone mad cussing in public that way?”
“You think these people understand a word we’re saying? You!” she shouted in Arabic, and pointed at a white woman nursing her child in the hallway, “your kid looks like a monkey’s ass.” The woman smiled at her in English. Mama looked at Baba again. “Aaah, there are surely hundreds of Arabs in Boston!”
“Actually, my love, this is where Arabs first arrived, in the 1800s, and called themselves Syrians.”
Mama stared at him incredulously. Her brown IV-ed hand rested on her enormous hip, colostrum leaked into her nightshirt, and her large eyes, which were fixed at Baba as though poised to shoot death rays, were still lined with kohl.
“Impossible! You’re giving me a lesson in history, you ass, and you named our daughter Nidali?”
“Yes, and another curious thing: the immigration officers would change the Arabs’ names, so the Milhems would become the Williams, the Dawuds the Daywoods, the Jarrars the Gerards, and so on.” Baba was trying to calm Mama down by distracting her.
“It’s good that you are mentioning name changes, my dear; I’m changing the girl’s name right this instant! First you give her a stock boy’s name, as though she’ll be raised in a refugee camp, as though she’s ready to be a struggler or a diaper-warrior, then you add a letter and think it’s goddamn unique.” A nurse who had been following Mama presently gave up, and Mama continued. “No, brother, over my dead body and never again will you get pussy, I’m not forecasting this girl’s future and calling her ‘my struggle’! She’ll be my treasure, my life, my tune, so don’t tell me my pussy needs to rest!”
The elevator announced its arrival with a hushed DING, as though begging my parents to give up.
“Your tune?” Baba said, boarding the elevator with Mama. “Don’t tell me, don’t tell me: you wanted to call her Mazurka? Or Sonatina? Or Ballade? Or, or . . . Waltz?” Baba was giggling, amusing himself while angering Mama to unnamable extremes, a skill he was just beginning to master.
“There’s nothing wrong with Sonatina!” Mama said, and the elevator made another DING, and she walked out.
Baba stood in the elevator still, pondering the idea of Sonatina Ammar, and finally he released a giant, expanding, white-tile-hallway-shaking laugh.
Mama must not have fought longer after Baba’s laugh, or who knows: maybe she went to the nurses’ station and talked to Rhonda, and maybe Rhonda told her that the birth certificate was already sent out—that Mama would have to go to the office of the City of Boston clerk and see the registrar of vital statistics, where they keep the birth and death certificates—and maybe Mama, who is the most superstitious of all humans (even more than Baba, and to that she’ll attest) shuddered at the thought of taking me, a newborn, through the heat and the Boston traffic to a place where, she must’ve imagined, people went to fill out death certificates, and she must’ve further imagined that going on such a trip, to such a place, would surely bring about my death—because I still have my name.
MAMA LIKED TO say you could never judge how people might have turned out. For her—aforementioned superstitionist par excellence—if things hadn’t happened exactly the way they’d happened, one out of three
As Mama said this, I’d be fantasizing about growing up in Southside Boston with cool people, a giant, three-foot-long latchkey hanging around my neck. Only four years old, I’d come home from day care and pour myself a bowl of cereal. It could have been like the Bill Withers song, “just . . . the . . . two of us”: poor and Arab. People would have assumed that Mama, who has kinky black hair, brown skin, dark green eyes, and wears a lot of gold, was a Latina, and that I, a cracker-looking girl, was her daughter from a union with a gringo, and that would have been that.
But Mama is an Egyptian, her mother was a Greek, my father is a Palestinian, and my parents didn’t stay in America, on account of my yia yia (my Greek grandma and the reason that I look sort of like a cracker) dying of a brain tumor at the old age of fifty-six. They didn’t stay in Boston: they returned on an EgyptAir plane with me in Baba’s lap, Mama curled up inside herself, and Yia Yia’s ghost jammed in between them. They returned cheerless, in seventies polyester pants and straightened hair, to bury my yia yia at the Greek Cooperative Cemetery in Alexandria.
In Egypt, I played with a set of Russian dolls my dead yia yia once gave my mama. I pretended to be the smallest Russian doll, the empty-bellied one that goes in her mama, the mama that gets cradled in her mama and so on. I knew that the biggest doll, the biggest mama on the outside, was a Greek but that I was not a Greek. I noticed that all the dolls were split in half except me, even though I was split in half: I was Egyptian and Palestinian. I was Greek and American. My little blue passport, the one that looked nothing like Mama’s medium green one or Baba’s big brown one, said I was American. I didn’t have to stand in a different line at airports yet, but soon I would. And Mama would stand in a different line, and Baba would stand in yet another line. It would make me feel all alone and different. It would make me believe that the world wanted to split up my family, so I’d pull to them even more.
After burying my grandma, we left Egypt and went to Kuwait, where Baba’s new job awaited him. Kuwait, in the seventies, was a haven for Arab intellectuals and for people who wanted to live in apartments that did not resemble shelters.
In their first year of marriage, my parents had already moved twice. Baba said that moving was part of being Palestinian. “Our people carry the homeland in their souls,” he would tell me at night as he tucked me in. This was my bedtime story when I was three, four. “You can go wherever you want, but you’ll always have it in your heart.” I’d think to myself: “That’s such a heavy thing to carry.” I’d visited this homeland once, noticed that there was a lot of grass, several rocks and mountains, and thousands of olive trees and donkeys. It helped to know this when I was little, forced me to have compassion for Baba who, obviously, had an extremely heavy soul to drag around inside such a skinny body.
WHENEVER I IMAGINED Baba running out just after my birth and sliding through hallways like a movie star, I knew he must have embellished. Baba liked to do that: tell stories that were impossible but true all at once, especially if those stories made him look like a rock star. This is because he used to be a writer and was now an architect. Our little apartment was filled with blueprints and plastic models of houses instead of notebooks and poetry and ashtrays: a reality that filled him with great sadness.
So Baba, a survivor, put that sadness into these stories.
Mama liked to expose him when he told such stories; she was his paparazzo, his story-cop. This was because she was the true rock star: a musician who no longer played music. Baba couldn’t afford a piano yet, he claimed, though Mama always accused him of hating classical music and wanting her to be miserable. Our house was filled with Baba’s blueprints and plastic models of houses and with my schoolwork and toys and dolls and a hundred half pairs of socks instead of a piano: a reality that filled her with great sadness, so she took it out on us. This was the core of our conflict as a family.
I knew from the beginning that home meant fighting, arguing, and embellishing, and that’s why I loved school. School was where my parents were not. Teachers were there; they taught us facts based on reality. They weren’t supposed to love us, and they didn’t. They were English and cold and didn’t resemble us at all. I liked this, that they did not hold a mirror up to me. Like some kids felt about play, school was my true escape.
AT SEVEN YEARS old, I attended The New English School in Jabriyya, Kuwait, a gray and blue brick and concrete monstrosity made up of three large buildings. The first building was the secondary school, the second was the secondary school’s science and art wing, and the third was our building: the primary school. We had our own playground and in the enclosed courtyard, behind glass, sat several taxidermied animals. This was scary for us since we were only seven years old and we didn’t know why we were forced to stare into a fox’s eerily real green eyes while eating a za’tar lunch sandwich. Even more disturbing was the peacock in the center of the scene. The peacock’s feathers were long and gorgeous, but on its face was a look of horror. I was convinced of it. I tried to ask my best friend Linda if she thought so too, but she refused to look at the animals because she was the only girl in class whose parents were cool enough to have a dog. When we went back to our classroom and sat in our little chairs, my friend Tamer raised his hand.
“Yes?” Mrs. Caruthers answered wearily.
“Mrs. Caruthers, are the animals outside alive?”
“Right, I see. No, they’re not. Anything else?”
“But . . . how do they look so real?”
“They’re bloody stuffed, all right? They’re killed off and then stuffed by some evil bastard called a taxidermist. Are we done?”
“Taxi drivers are not bastards. Some of them give me chewing gum.”
I laughed at Tamer’s defense of taxi drivers, but no one else did.
“Right. Smashing. Everyone open your books up to page 11. I want to hear you read, Nidali, since you’re so vocal today.”
I read a story about a girl who likes to ski on cold white snow, and every few sentences I’d wipe sweat off my brow. I was sweating because I was scared and because it was 104 degrees outside, but I kept reading about the girl who likes to ski. My pronunciation was awful and Mrs. Caruthers was obviously and irritably in need of a drink.
“Some of us simply must practice at home. Some of us are pronouncing our words as though they are pieces of stew stuck in our teeth. Some of us . . .”
“What’s stew?” Tamer blurted out. Tamer had soft straight brown hair in a mop cut, a huge brown scar on his left cheek, and two enormous, gleaming black eyes. I kissed his scar once. His cheek smelled like round bread.
“All right, not stew: bloody kofta, is that better? Your pronunciation is the absolute worst, Mr. Tamer. Read the story on page 13, please.”
Just then, the national emergency system sounded the alarm that made our ears ache for hours afterwards. The siren was emitted from a central city station at 11 A.M. on the first day of every month, and everyone at my school, which was in the southeast, could hear it as though the alarm were only a few feet away, and so could every other school and section of the country. Its melody was monotonous, a low beep that sounded like a “doy” followed by a higher beep, then a higher one, and then the highest, pause, then the highest again, lower, lower, and lowest beep with a five-second break in between sets: doy-Doy-DOY-DOY: DOY-DOY-Doy-doy. It went on for three minutes. During those minutes, Mrs. Caruthers went silent and reached in her desk drawer for her “water” flask. The class erupted, grateful to have these three minutes to gossip in our own language. When the alarm sounded its last beep we became mute, like a loud soccer game on TV that’s been suddenly switched off, and we resumed our reading.
The silence made it seem as though the alarm never happened, as though there wasn’t a ten-year war being waged over our little heads, between Iraq, the country just north of us, and Iran, the country whose hills we could see across the Gulf’s water on a clear, dustless day.
