by Zaina Arafat
Yet despite her striking appearance, she seems absent.
While watching the scene, I feel a tremendous sadness at her beauty. I feel despair for her misspent youth. In the video I am seven years old, Karim is five, and she is twenty-eight.
Until now, it’s never occurred to me that my mother was—my mother is—a child, forever stunted by her own traumas. I reconsider everything that was inflicted upon her. That she grew up under military occupation, that she was married by twenty and pregnant the following year, that her husband’s ambitions undermined her own and further displaced her, casting her into exile with a fragmented sense of home. All of her present power—her fearful rage, her enviable status, her unrelenting beauty—fades against this reality.
In this Sunday-morning scene, there is no sign of cruelty. My mother smiles shyly when she realizes that my father is filming her. She asks him to stop recording, and he does. The screen cuts to snowy static before giving way to blackness.
I sit staring at the screen, feeling ashamed. While my mother is the one who is beautiful, she doesn’t feel the need to be seen.
Anouk touches my arm and asks if I’m okay. “You seem elsewhere,” she says, and I am. I am lost in my mother’s possibility, in what could’ve been, caught between her frustrated potential and a desire to fulfill my own. I lament the disappointments that have come from surrendering her approval to pursue my own desires. I lament what she’s given up for me. Our mutual sacrifice creates wounds that may never heal. I will carry sadness for her pain, and also for mine. In receiving love from others, it will always be hers I crave most.
I look to Anouk, and I kiss her. She kisses me back. There is something to protect here, something else to long for. I then look to the screen and catch our reflection before turning it off, making room for the two of us.
Acknowledgments
For so long I have used the fantasy of writing these acknowledgments as a reward for finishing this book. Now that the time has come, I find myself daunted by the amount of gratitude I feel.
Thank you to my agent, Michelle Brower, who saw this book in exactly the way I hoped it would be seen, even beyond what was initially present on the page, and who championed it wholeheartedly. Thank you also to Danya Kukafka, Chelsey Heller, and everyone else at Aevitas Creative Management who has helped bring this book into the world.
Thank you to Jonathan Lee, whose incredibly perceptive, smart, and thorough edits elevated this novel beyond measure. To Carla Bruce-Eddings, for being such a fierce and genuine advocate. To Nicole Caputo, for designing the absolute perfect cover. To Yuka Igarashi, for editing an excerpt of what became this book for Granta. To Katie Boland, Wah-Ming Chang, and the entire Catapult team, thank you.
To the NWP at Iowa, thank you for the time and space and support to write, and for giving me a teaching fellowship so that I remained at least somewhat social and sane in the process. Thank you to my advisers and teachers, Robin Hemley, Patricia Foster, Honor Moore, and Geoff Dyer. Thank you also to Christopher Merrill, Natasa Durovicova, and Hugh Ferrer at the International Writing Program for their support, and to Daniel Khalastchi at the Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing. Thank you to my teachers at Columbia as well, Anya Schiffrin, Claudia Dreifus, Peter Godwin, and to Susie Lebryk-Chao.
Thank you to Kima Jones and Jack Jones Literary Arts for those precious two weeks surrounded by inspiring women and peaceful mountains. I am awed by what you’ve created and so grateful that it exists.
Thank you to my NWP classmates, my people: Jen Percy, Rachel Yoder, Ariel Lewiton, Inara Verzemnieks, Laurel Fantauzzo, Mieke Eerkens, Deborah Taffa, Matt Siegel, Kristen Radtke, Lucas Mann, Lina Maria Ferreira Cabena-Vanegas, Alea Adigweme, Sandy Allen, Olivia Dunn, Amy Bernhard, Catina Bacote, Blair Braverman, Quince Mountain, Helen Rubinstein, and Gemma de Choisy. To Gallywagon Leach, for, among other things, providing me a safe and loving home in Iowa. And to my NYC writing group: Meredith Talusan, Lilly Dancyger, Nina St. Pierre, and the rest of Ronny’s Children—thank you.
To the friends who have read drafts and who provided the support I needed to make it to the finish line, especially on dark days, thank you: Natalie Moon Brown (for your ongoing love, humor, and patience with my equine nature), Jen (for all the rotisserie chicken days), Tony Tulathimutte, David Busis, Ariel (who has been there through both weeps and laughs, and always keeps me from becoming boring), Kristen (I am forever obsessed with Scarsdale), Caitlin Roach Orduña (especially for the Megabus moments), Lisa Wells, Catherine Blauvelt, Callie Garnett, Amber Fares, Mallika Rao, Bilal Qureshi, Hope McClure Sypert, Farah Hussein, Sandra Reishus, Jake Rollow, and Alyse Burnside. To Eve-Alice Roustang-Stoller. To Libby Flores, for providing me with a stable home in which to finish this thing, as well as a new friendship. To Ani Lhamo. To Chantal, for lifelong friendship, love, and compassion in the face of all this, and for gently but humorously knocking reason into me whenever I needed it (“Why would she?!”). To Nate Nash. To Anne, also for lifelong friendship. I don’t know how to convey my love and appreciation for you, it’ll certainly take more than a bottle of Josh wine. I hope we can sing to Captain together forever.
To Gabrielle, for whom I will always hold a very special place in my heart. Though our story did not turn out the way I’d imagined and hoped, I am grateful for your faith in this book, and in me as a writer. I hope you know how much I believe in you, too.
Most of all, to my family. To my brother, Zaid, who called me every day over the last year, the hardest year of this marathon, just to check on me. To my father, Fawaz, a.k.a. Winnie. And of course, always, to my mother, Randa Masri.
© Carleen Coulter
ZAINA ARAFAT is a Palestinian American writer. Her stories and essays have appeared in publications including The New York Times, Granta, The Believer, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, BuzzFeed, VICE, and NPR. She holds an MA in international affairs from Columbia University and an MFA from the University of Iowa and is a recipient of the Arab Women/Migrants from the Middle East Fellowship at Jack Jones Literary Arts. She grew up between the United States and the Middle East and currently lives in Brooklyn.