In another fantasy, someone might make it to America. “Your passport, we tear it up. Your picture, I put my picture, I take your name—my name is Paul and I’m an American.”
Then, when you speak with fellow Africans, Muhammed said, putting on a grand American accent and swaggering in his chair, you act the part you want to play. “ ‘I am an American, hey yo, good morning, man, good morning, yes! I’m from America, you know.’ ”
If you’re lucky, you can bluff your way onto a plane. “When they say in five minutes we are going to descend to Louisiana, or even New York, you go in the bathroom and you tear up the passport.” He made the sound of an airplane toilet flushing.
“When you get to immigration, you came from where? ‘I came from the sky, I’m a refugee.’ Refugee from where? ‘I’m a refugee.’ ”
Muhammad clapped the invisible dust lightly from his hands, and then again. That was it. That was where the plan stopped.
“And that works?” I said.
“Yes. Because humanity there, it’s good. But in Africa there is not humanity here.”
Muhammad himself was radiating with humanity, but in his homeland, there remained too many missing parts of too many lives. So he and others were willing to tear up their legal identities in the hopes of finding one more acceptable.
“There are Somalis who have American passports, English passports, Norwegian passports,” Muhammad said. They, too, had to pay the exit fee. “Thirty-three dollars!” he cried. For those Somalilanders, the fee might have been like the bitter herbs at a Passover Seder—a reminder of suffering. Where once it was an anxious journey, now it is a small tariff, paid in remembrance of more uncertain times. The rest of us foreigners paid it, too. It is the price you pay to leave because you can pay, and because you can leave.
MUHAMMAD HAD AT LEAST made it to someplace where those most basic freedoms, if not guaranteed, were respected. In Somaliland, “You can drive a car at one in the morning. No one will ask you why. Not one.”
This had been a theme in conversations with all Somalis: the ability to walk places, and to drive, especially late at night, without bullets or intervening laws or hassle. The ability to move.
I didn’t want to go drive around Berbera at one in the morning. Neither did Muhammad. Sometimes I was too tired to really want to walk around New York or Aleppo or Kabul or Hargeisa. But it was always important to know it was possible.
I felt a kinship—like we were from the same clan of those taking the long route. We moved because we could, and when we couldn’t, we talked about it. I recognized that urge to go, to dare the world to spin under your feet so that when it stops, ah! you’re somewhere else. And I was jealous, in a way, of Muhammad’s friends who succeeded in fleeing war-torn nations and death threats and hopeless economies—of the feeling of finality that comes in reaching a destination that justifies the journey absolutely, doubtlessly. Of the clarity of direction. While many have no choice but to take life-threatening journeys, I took life-threatening journeys just to avoid making choices.
Muhammad’s friends had trekked through the desert for a better life—I’d taken a boat for a better experience. And, three days later, my former employer had me booked on a business class flight over the North Pole. It would take just over sixteen hours to make it from Dubai to Los Angeles, where my brother lived. Then a half day on to Michigan, where Masha was waiting. In another life, I might have spent those exact same hours crossing my fingers against capsizing on the Tripoli-Lampedusa express.
Destination is a word that has been in the English language for a long time, its roots in Latin: “make firm, establish.” It doesn’t take a wanderer’s desperation to see that few journeys’ termini ever achieve that status. In our efforts to reach a destination, though, we are made to face something outside ourselves. For me, running toward gatherings may have been running away from solitude. Running toward the fears of danger might have been running away from the fears of peace. At the end, there was only the choice: Where would I run?
It took me twenty-three years to even begin to accept that someone who existed in a truly different way was not an existential threat. Muhammad’s difference was no danger to my way of life, it was only ever an opportunity to question it.
There was a flash of high noon sun on the sea a mile away. I felt crisped like a hot cookie.
“Tu rentres dedans, tu passes l’immigration—quand tu termines, tu reviens ici,” Muhammad said. Birds were chatting in the trees. He gave me the instructions again. “You go inside, finish with your passport and everything, when you finish, come and sit back here.”
The one-room terminal was bustling. The plane came sooner than I’d expected, and I never made it back to the baggage handlers’ tree. I like to think the offer still stands.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’VE HEARD PEOPLE SAY they flip to the acknowledgements first to hear the writer speak at his most genuine and unfiltered. Well . . . shit, then—you caught me.
But: I hope this doesn’t sound too different from the first 340 pages, because I wanted you to catch me there, too, and because these thank yous are all too simple to filter: these kindnesses kept this book alive by the hairs of its fingertips, and meant so much more than even that.
First: I owe all of this to my agent Jane von Mehren, who had the faith/courage/recklessness to say This might just be a thing—and who made it so. And to Alane Mason, without whose incisive, sanity-saving hand edits there would be no thing at all, and without whom you and I would probably not have met, like this, even on the page.
To my grandmother, who showed me that being a writer was actually a thing, too, and to my grandfather, who lived a life that said, Your town can want to kill you, but that doesn’t make the world mean. And to the trans-century love between them that said: you can build a big, solid snowball around the connection between two flakes.
People have also said (and I know—for straw men, they sure do a lot of talking) that we do so much of what we do to prove ourselves to the ones we knew in high school. My high school was a nice one; I wasn’t strung up by my suspenders or called Two Eyes for not wearing glasses. But still, there was always a kind of rejection—the rejection of young love, which doesn’t crush a spirit, and which leaves only an impulse: I’ll show you! Or: One day . . .
So—because it might be that all this was a way of asking you to prom—this goes out to my high school crush(es), too.
And: to the scholars who walked me through historical and conceptual and terminological intricacies throughout the writing process. And to my enlightening Arabic teachers Youssef Nouhi and Taoufik Ben Amor—because, if those classes hadn’t been great, this’d be a book about the mid-Atlantic states.
To Rita, who read East of Eden with me. To Rebecca, who clarity-checked problem passages and kept me from going in infinite circles. To Kunaal, Billy, Maximo, and Yegor, for looking ahead. To Jonathan Green, for all the advice I needed (in the accent I wanted). To Masha. To Neal and Jake, among the other spot readers for the book, and travel partners whose perspectives—and field notes, and years of frantic texting—helped keep my memory 3-D, and alive.
And: to Justin Moyer, whose brilliant use of colons hit me once like a revelation (and like permission).
For everyone whose names were mentioned (or changed), whether we have remained in touch or not, whether I have asked you what color your couch cushions were again or not: getting to know you was what made this worth it.
And, because mood and smells and the colors outside the window all have a way of trickling into any open document, thank you to the towns where the bulk of this book was written and pulled apart and put back together: Abu Dhabi, Ann Arbor, Anchorage, New York, Geneva, Shanghai, Los Angeles, New Haven, El Bruc.
They say there’s an incredible feeling to do something all on your own. But: all of this is a cocktail of borrowed benevolence, and the recipe is more complicated than I understand. If I could trace this gratitude as far as it would need to go to b
e fully honest, on the next page I’d probably be thanking Kevin Bacon and half the port district of Kiev.
They say write is a relative of German reissen, “to crack/rip/wrench”—and though I have little trouble cracking myself open, I think I have only ever had the nerve to do so because of the glue I knew was close by. For my friends (who are always the first faces of a hoped-for audience): thank you for being glue.
(My cousin Yotam is handing me a beer now—I understand that this Selfless Act is not the most important part of making this thing, but it still feels crucial.)
Writing is always a kind of lowering, too, into a well wide enough just for one—and while good company gave me the charge for solo missions down deep, it was those familiar faces peering over the lip of the well that really pulled me back up.
To Ashley Patrick and Kyle Radler, and to everyone at Norton who have helped make this a reality: thank you. I think of your offices on the park the way I think about my first apartment, or about driving school if I’d ever gone—the site of a big change worth making. Thank you for guiding me through it.
To Richard Todd and Suzannah Lessard and the faculty and students at Goucher, who read many things in many stages—and especially to Jacob Levenson, without whom I would have melted, and with whom I cut the manuscript in half with a kind of confidence I did not have in myself alone. It feels very rare to find someone whose suggestions resonate as if they were your own decisions, all grown up. With Jacob, and with Alane, I feel I was handed the belle’s dance card.
Thank you to Signor Pietro del Pizzo, the legendary tailor of Haverford, Pennsylvania, for fixing my six-pound jacket.
Thank you for reading.
A NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
(AND PRONUNCIATION, AND BULLSHIT)
“THERE IS NO UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED FORM for transliterating Arabic,” as the Chicago Manual of Style puts it. There are many standards, like dialects along a spectrum of academicness—some importing useful symbols, some using only the letters you’d find in English—but there’s no one way, and there are puzzles in every choice.
Luckily, English is surprisingly well-stocked with the phonemes for the 28 letters of the Arabic abjad (so called because it begins a-b-j-d). Choices here have been made, while staying true to proper spelling, with an underlying goal: that a non–Arabic-speaking friend could read straight off the page and have the best shot at being understood.
Even though there are two kinds of t, s, and d—one just like English, and one called “emphatic” because it should affect surrounding vowels as if the speaker has just gained a hundred pounds in his face alone—these are spelled out here with the same Latin letter. (The unemphatic letters are far more common.)
There are two Arabic letters for the English digraph th—voiced (“this”) and voiceless (“fifth”)—and an emphatic third, too. These are all th here.
There are two kinds of h: the kind you know, and a squeezed kind that puts more air through less space. Both are simply h here—and people will probably understand if you misspeak on the softer side. There is a kh, the sound cats’ claws make or the sound Russians make when they laugh, and a gh, like a quick gargle. (Sh also comes from a single letter. There is no p.)
Occasionally, there are unavoidable troubles for the simple approach. The name for literary Arabic, transliterated Fusha, is spoken “FuS-Ha.” The u is pronounced like the “oo” in “foot” (and not like the “u” in “flute”), because the s is that emphatic kind that fattens up the neighboring vowels.
Mistaking k for q is more common: this is the difference between your neighborhood voiceless velar plosive and a voiceless uvular plosive. That is to say: the difference between the unspecial kaf, and the qaf, the consonant made by clicking the place deep in your throat where smoke rings come from. That is to say: the difference in where your tongue hits your throat makes the difference between kalbi! and qalbi!—“my dog!” and “my heart!”
Occasionally, transliterations shift to match pronunciation: janbiya becomes jambiya (mostly), because that’s how it (mostly) comes out. The stimulant leaf qat (sometimes spelled khat in English, but always spelled q-a-t in Arabic) becomes gat, then chat to match the-way-you’d-say-it in Yemen, then Somaliland.
The most technical distinction retained in this book’s transliterations is between two letters that, without using special markings, are both written as an apostrophe: one forward and one backward. The ’ stands in for the Arabic hamza, a glottal stop that sounds exactly like the hyphen in the word “uh-oh.” The ‘ is the ubiquitous ayn, a vowel during which you choke briefly, and then set yourself free. (Because it makes noise, and isn’t over in an instant, it is written in the book—almost always—as ‘a.)
Proper nouns are written, however, in the simplest twenty-six-letters-only way in which they are already known in English: Sanaa, Baath Party, Shia. (Keeping all its letters intact, the Yemeni capital, often written Sana’a, could by more precise rules come out as Sana‘aa’—or even San‘aaa’.)
Mada’in (ma-da-in) Saleh, as a small exception, has kept its apostrophe because it’s already hard enough to find without asking the Saudis for directions to Madane Saleh—but maybe also because, as with Jonathan Raban in the 1970s, Saudi denied me visas to visit (because there were no visas to visit), and so remains just that much more foreign to me, known only by its little markings.
With no intention of erasing a word’s history, the general choice to pluck apostrophes from place names may commit the cardinal sin Junot Díaz warned against: “I’d rather have us start out as fractured so we don’t commit the bullshit and erasures that trying to live under the banner of sameness entails.” My hope is that we can marinate in the differences—the foreign sounds we absorb without thinking, and the markings of all that uvular action—and then come to rest in a place where we remember that most of our history is never on the surface anyway. Otherwise, relentlessly maintaining apostrophes is a bit like asking a professional skydiver to wear a parachute to a dinner party.
Aspiring to an understanding a bit deeper than a glottal stop, and in accordance with the Eleventh Commandment—that saying “Fronce” instead of “France” does not make you cool—there is only one prerequisite: recognizing that any Arabic word in English context will always be different than an Arabic word in Arabic. Eventually, after a successful import, words lose their italics and become permanent residents or full citizens of the English language. Hawai’i becomes Hawaii.
And possibly because the iPhone suggests “Ba’ath,” and the New York Times writes “Baath,” and because both are technically fair—I think I might also be taking the side of humanity over the machine—if only because algorithm (from al-Khwarizmi) is a word that went through just that kind of human process.
The Full Catastrophe.
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