Against the Loveless World

by Susan Abulhawa

  My paternal grandmother, Sitti Wasfiyeh, Hajjeh Um Nabil, lived with us. Unlike Mama, she’d never really left her village in Palestine. Just as I do now in the Cube, my grandmother roamed Ein el-Sultan in her mind. She bored us with tales of her childhood and about people we didn’t know. She was sure we would return someday.

  “It’s the oldest city in the world, you cow,” she said to me. “Way long ago. Older than Jericho, even. If you were any good in school you’d know that.” I looked it up later with Jehad’s help, hoping to prove I was smart. “Sitti, I know Ein el-Sultan was established in 7000 BC.”

  “You don’t think I know that?” Sitti said. “Maybe you should work on losing some weight. No one is going to marry a cow.”

  Sitti Wasfiyeh had moments of kindness too. Braiding my hair in grade school. Teaching me to roll grape leaves, carve zucchini, and bake bread. But she could be mean for no reason at times, which nearly always coincided with calls to her daughters, aunts I had only heard of who lived in Jordan. To make matters worse, my brother could do no wrong in Sitti Wasfiyeh’s eyes, which made her insults all the more wounding. Mama would tell me not to be so sensitive: “She’s an ornery old woman, what can we do? She doesn’t mean any of it.”

  I gave it back to Sitti Wasfiyeh when I was fifteen and already believing I was bad. I was the leader of a gang that pulled pranks on teachers. I regularly stole candy from the corner store and one time let a boy kiss me on the lips. I back-talked adults and once even made Sitti Wasfiyeh cry.

  “You’re a mean old woman,” I yelled. “That’s why your daughters haven’t asked you to live with them. It’s not because they’re moving, or their houses are too small, or whatever other lies they feed you. It’s because you’re a nasty old woman nobody wants around, and if you don’t learn how to speak to us better, we’re going to throw you out too. All three of us are crammed into one bedroom so you can have your own room. You should be kissing my mother’s feet for what she has done for you. If it was up to me, I’d throw you out on the street. And you know very well your stupid daughters don’t send us a dime. The next time you accuse my mother of taking your money, I might personally throw you the hell out.” No one my age spoke to their elders in such a manner. I was bad.

  Mama whacked me with her rubber slipper. “Don’t you ever speak to your grandmother that way,” she screamed, the stings of her slipper on my skin punctuating each word. “If your father, may God rest his soul, were here, he’d put stripes all over your body with his belt.” I was glad my father wasn’t around then. He probably would have done exactly that.

  “How can you possibly defend her? She treats you even worse!” I cried.

  My mother dropped her slipper, breathless from the effort. She didn’t have much fight in her since Baba died. She took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and led me toward the veranda, but only after I apologized to Sitti Wasfiyeh, kissed her hand three times, and kept my mouth shut when she said, “You’re like a wild animal. Not raised right.”

  Mama gently put her hand on my shoulder. “Let’s sit outside and talk, habibti,” she said. That’s how it was with us. An argument or a whupping was over in seconds, and we were back to habibti and other love words.

  “You have to understand. We’re all she has in the world. Somewhere deep inside her, she knows what you say is true. That’s why she’s in there crying. But if she can pretend that I’m the reason her daughters don’t answer her calls, or why they don’t visit or ask her to live with them, then she never has to face the truth that her children have thrown her away. That’s a terrible fate.”

  I listened, realizing I was hearing something from the silent depths of my mother. We were a family with secrets, things that lurked in the corners of our lives, unseen, unspoken, but felt in the texture of arguments, the extra length of a pause, the focus of a stare. For example, I didn’t know until many years later that I was probably conceived before my parents married; my father asked for Mama’s hand to avoid scandal and shame. I don’t know if the rumor was true. But it might have been the reason we barely knew her family.

  I met them when my maternal grandmother died in Syria, and we traveled to their refugee camp in Yarmouk for the funeral. Everyone was nice to me, my brother, and Mama. But I could tell, from the warmth and love they exchanged with each other but not with Mama, that she had somehow always been on the margins of her family. She didn’t say, but I thought it was because of me or because her father, who died when they were all kids, had loved her most.

  “I need a cigarette, habibti. Go inside. Open the third drawer. In the very back, there’s a pack rolled up in socks.”

  Mama was always between a pack-a-day habit and “trying to quit” periods. I was the only girl among my friends who wasn’t trying to sneak a smoke at that age. I had read in a comic book how Western companies were using tobacco to kill us slowly and take all our money and resources in the process. Refusing to smoke was an act of rebellion, and I liked to lecture others about the Western conspiracy, but I didn’t want to spoil the moment with Mama, so I dutifully fetched her Marlboro stash as the tea boiled in the kitchen.

  “May God bless you for all your days, my daughter,” she said when I returned with the hot pot, two cups, a cut of fresh mint, sugar, and her stale pack of Marlboros. Normally we could see kids playing in the narrow street below our balcony, but it was laundry day, and our clothes hanging to dry obstructed the view. As Mama had taught me, I had hung my brother’s jeans and shirts on the outer lines facing the street, then Mama’s dishdashas. My pants, dresses, and shirts were on the middle lines, hidden from the lustful eyes of adolescent passersby, and finally, on the inner lines close to the edge of the balcony, we hung our underwear. Instead of looking out at the goings-on in the street, all I could see were our panties fluttering in the wind under a blue sky.

  Pouring the tea, I said, “Mama, you have to stop her. She’s awful.” “Sometimes I want to take her to Amman to live with her daughters, but it’s not right.” She lit the cigarette and sucked, closed her eyes, and lifted her chin with satisfaction, releasing a cloud of smoke from her mouth. “Your father, may God rest his soul, made me promise to care for his mother, no matter what.” Promises to the dead were sacrosanct.

  My mother would stand up to Sitti Wasfiyeh when she wanted, but most of the time she just let things be. Unlike me, Mama was never one for drama, unless it involved someone hurting her children, which was why she once threatened her mother-in-law with a kitchen knife. I was maybe seven years old and had just come in to eat before going back out to play, but Mama insisted I stay in. “Besides,” she teased, “I think you might be getting too old to play with boys. They might think you’re sweet on them.”

  I didn’t hear what Sitti Wasfiyeh said, but my mother went to the kitchen and came back with a knife. “By God and His Prophet, I will cut your tongue if you ever utter such a thing again.”

  Later I asked her what Sitti Wasfiyeh had said. Mama shooed me away. “Mind your business and don’t meddle in grown-up affairs,” she said.

  I stayed indoors that day thinking loud arguments would explode when my father returned from work, but when he arrived, Mama sent me to the neighbor’s next door. Whatever was going on, it had to do with me. There was something that I, in particular, could not know. Of course, knowing what I do now, Sitti Wasfiyeh probably brought up the rumor of my birth and said something like “the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” or worse.

  According to Mama, Baba wasn’t much for housework. “I’m a man! What do you expect?” he’d say. But I know he wiped down our glass coffee table with Windex, which was fancier than using dish soap and indicated we were middle-class in the slums of Kuwait. “Yalla”—he’d motion for me to join him—“sing what you learned.”

  I’d begin the Fattooma song by Ghawwar el-Tousheh. On weekend mornings when Mama went to the neighbor’s house for coffee, he’d teach me a few more lines of the lyrics, and I’d sing while he wiped down the coffee table
. The Windex would form a rainbow across the glass, which amazed me. Baba said it was the magic of Windex. It only happened twice, but memory has somehow stretched it to the whole of my childhood, as if he and I sang and cleaned every day.

  I wasn’t allowed to sing the Fattooma song around Mama.

  “Why?” I asked Baba.

  “She really hates this song, and we’d both be in trouble if she knew you sing it.”

  I was torn between love for my father and loyalty to my mother. But I kept my mouth shut because that’s the kind of person I am. I also knew, without knowing that I knew, that Fattooma was probably his new girlfriend’s name, and that Mama knew it too.

  I should recall more about my father. I was old enough to have accumulated memories by the time he died. For a while I invented memories of things I wished he’d done—brush my hair, teach me to fix cars, visit school on Parent Day, tell my stupid teachers to kiss his ass, swim together in the ocean, read to me, carry me on his shoulders, take my side against Mama on report card day, and put Sitti Wasfiyeh in her place when she said I was stupid as a donkey or when she made me wash my mouth out with soap for cursing. I imagined him being as fed up with Mama’s Singer sewing machine as I was, insisting that she stop sewing our clothes and take us shopping in the Salmiya souq.

  But all that is left of my father is a man who sings the Fattooma song and wipes the coffee table with Windex until he dies and fades into the looming absence of a face in the framed photo hanging on a wall in a long-abandoned Kuwait apartment in a country that abandoned us.

  Mama was pregnant with me when Israel made her a refugee for the second time. After fleeing Haifa in 1948, she had made a home with my father in Sitti Wasfiyeh’s ancestral village, Ein el-Sultan. Fleeing once more in June 1967 with only whatever they could carry, they walked more than eight kilometers to cross the River Jordan at the Allenby Bridge. When they got there, the bridge was overwhelmed with bodies and eventually collapsed just as Mama was about to cross. Some people fell and had to be rescued. Some didn’t make it out. But people kept walking on the collapsed bridge, holding on to its cables and broken pieces as they waded through the water. Mama told me: “I just prayed to God as your father and I crossed, and I made a deal with the river. I said I’d name you after it if it didn’t swallow any of us.”

  But calling me Jordan would have been too strange. That’s how I got the name Nahr. River.

  My father made the dangerous journey back into Palestine after he got us to safety in Jordan. Palestinians learned the first time in 1948 that leaving to save your life meant you would lose everything and could never go back. That’s why Baba stayed alone in our empty house for months under curfew while Israel consolidated power over the whole of Palestine. To be alone in the eerie quiet of the emptied home, where he and his siblings had grown up amid the daily bustle of a large family, must have been painful. Still, he stayed and got a hawiyya; he could thenceforth remain in Palestine as a “foreign resident” in his own home. He said it was better than being a refugee.

  Baba joined us as soon as he could. But his long absence had fractured our family, and by the time I was born, my parents had already made their way to Kuwait, where my father was fucking the first of many girlfriends. Her name was Yaqoot and that’s the name he recorded on my birth certificate—not Nahr—without consulting my mother. He was probably with Yaqoot the night Mama went into labor, probably a little drunk when he reached the hospital and still basking in the glow of a romantic evening when he impulsively named me after his new lover, perhaps underestimating Mama’s intuition and rage.

  Yaqoot is an unusual name for Palestinians. One finds it more among Iraqis, which is why I figure my father’s lover was a daughter of Babylon. It means “ruby,” and everyone agrees it’s a rich and resonant Arabic name. But when Mama saw the birth certificate, she screamed and cried and hit my father. She smashed all the plates in our house, hurling a few at him as he ducked left and right. He let her vent, apologized, swore Mama was the only woman he loved, and promised he wouldn’t do it again. They probably made love afterward, had a good run together for a while, then the whole scenario was repeated with another woman.

  When she was pregnant the second time, Mama threatened to kill my father if he named the baby after one of his “whores,” but she didn’t have to worry when she birthed a boy. My father named him Wasfy, after his mother, Sitti Wasfiyeh, which was just as bad as far as Mama was concerned. Needless to say, Mama never used the names recorded on our birth certificates. She kept her promise to the river and called me Nahr. My brother Wasfy was Jehad, a name Mama chose, which became yet another point of contention between her and Sitti Wasfiyeh.

  Only my family and some administrators at my school knew my real name was Yaqoot, which had an element of fate to it, because when the Americans ousted Saddam, Kuwaiti police asked about someone named Nahr, but my identification card said Yaqoot.

  My brother wasn’t as lucky. People called him by either name, or both, Wasfy Jehad. When the Kuwaiti police went on the hunt for Palestinians to exact revenge because Yasser Arafat had sided with Saddam, they knew who they were looking for.

  Jehad was only three years old when Baba died of a heart attack in the arms of another woman. Mama lied and said Baba was home when it happened. She made up an elaborate tale that shifted each time she told it. “He was wearing the red flannel pajamas I bought for him,” she would say one moment. The next, he’d be in the green pajamas or just his underwear. In that version she had to dress him quickly before the ambulance came. Mama was a terrible liar, but the truth was too humiliating, even though everyone knew, and Mama knew they knew. The lie wasn’t just to protect her and us from shame. I think she wanted to protect Baba too. Despite everything, Mama loved my father very much. And he loved her, in his own way.

  Once, in the heat of a fight over money (it was usually about money), Sitti Wasfiyeh blamed Mama for the death of my father, her only son. “If you had been a better wife, he wouldn’t have had to go to other women,” Sitti Wasfiyeh had said casually as she ate the food Mama had prepared.

  “If you had raised a man who knew how to keep his dick in his pants and spent his money on his family instead of on whores, we wouldn’t be having this argument,” Mama fired back. That night, I heard her on the balcony apologizing to my dead father for what she had said. “I forgive you, my love. I miss you,” she spoke softly to the ether.

  Palestinians who had been chased out of their homes in Jerusalem, Haifa, Yafa, Akka, Jenin, Bethlehem, Gaza, Nablus, Nazareth, Majdal, and every major Palestinian city found a place in Kuwait. The oil boom offered opportunity to build a new life there. Although Kuwait never allowed us more than temporary residency—making it clear we were always guests—Palestinians prospered and had a major hand in building Kuwait as the world knows it now. We participated and contributed in nearly every sector of life, but we remained an underclass.

  I knew that, but it didn’t matter. I loved Kuwait. It was my home, and I was a loyal subject of the royals. I lined up every day of school with the other students to sing the national anthem. I sang with passion and allegiance to Kuwait’s successive ruling emirs. I grieved when Emir Sabah Salem el-Sabah died in 1977. And every February 25, we partied like mad to celebrate Kuwait’s Independence Day as if it were our own.

  I loved everything about Kuwaitis—their delicate Khaleeji thobes, their matchboos with browned chicken and hot sauce, their diwaniyas, pearl diving traditions, and tribal ways. I even taught myself to speak their dialect and could dance Khaleeji “better than their best.” That’s what someone told me. In eighth grade, I was even selected to be part of the official troupe that danced on a televised celebration for the royals during Independence Day. But unlike the rest of the group, I wasn’t included the following year because people complained, insisting that such an honor should be reserved for Kuwaiti kids.

  “They don’t like seeing Palestinians excel at anything,” Mama said to make me feel better, but sh
e only managed to annoy me. I didn’t appreciate her speaking ill about Kuwaitis; but for her, everything came down to being Palestinian, and the whole world was out to get us. It wasn’t until I had survived time, war, and prison that I understood why.

  “You see how the whole country is eating zeit-o-za’atar, trying to be like us?” She laughed big. I could see the fillings in her teeth. Now, alone in the Cube, I laugh at the memory, and it’s as if the silver fillings I remember are my own. I tell Mama how much I loved it when she guffawed like that. The guards are accustomed to the conversations I have with the walls. I know I’m alone here. I’m not delusional. But the way memory animates the past is more real than the present. I see and feel and hear Jehad, Sitti Wasfiyeh, Mama, Baba. Most of all, I am with Bilal here.

  There were no cell phones or computers when I was a kid, and television offered just two channels—one in Arabic, the other in English with subtitles. Programming started in the evening and lasted until midnight. Both channels opened and closed with readings from the Quran, which we kids waited through impatiently before we could watch cartoons (Tom and Jerry or Road Runner), followed by soap operas. Once a week, each channel showed a movie, heavily censored to remove any hint of physical intimacy, which meant I never saw images of lovers even holding hands. It was obvious where the cuts were made. One moment actors would be looking deeply into each other’s eyes, leaning in for a kiss; next thing they’d be standing farther apart than when they started. The film would spasm, which encouraged us to fill in the cut with a kiss or more. But I wasn’t even good at that. I could only imagine what I already knew, which was simply a peck on the lips, until Suad Marzouq informed us, a group of stunned fourteen-year-olds, that adults kissed with their tongues. We thought she was lying, but we practiced on each other anyway. By the time I was sixteen, I thought I knew everything there was to know about love. My friends and I had managed to get our hands on one or two dirty magazines. Once we even snagged a VHS porn video.