I want to thank members of my family who provided guidance and insight into the conditions in Kuwait during the Iraqi occupation and subsequent US invasion, which they lived through. They prefer not to be named. I am grateful to Dr. Salman Abu Sitta and Ibrahim Nasrallah for providing me with or pointing me to text-books and other materials I needed in my research where it came to specific historic audits, local topography, and political chronologies. Thank you to Dr. Richard Falk, Rachel Holmes, Adab Ibrahim, Eric Larsen, Linda Hanna, Ghada Dajani, and Raja Shehadeh for reading and offering encouragement on early drafts. Thank you to Dr. George Zahr for his consult on questions relating to organic and inorganic chemistry.
In addition to Norstedts and Diana Verlag, I want to thank all of my other international publishers, especially Aschehoug (Norway) and Feltrinelli (Italy), who have been so good to me over the years.
Mame Lambeth, my dearest and oldest friend, read all my books multiple times at different stages. I turned to her because she was brilliant and creative, but mostly because she loved me, and I trusted her more than anyone else in the world. She read a rough draft of this novel before she passed away on June 12, 2018, the night after her seventy-fifth birthday. I spent the next several months revising this manuscript with the profound grief of losing the person who had been my only anchor in life spanning the past thirty-two years. In both of my previous novels, I inserted tributes to her that only she would recognize. Her daughter Erin Caldwell, my former high school classmate, recognizes them too. Mame taught me many things, among which was how to live my truth even (and especially) when it was at odds with social conventions. She showed me how to love and appreciate solitude, how to connect with the natural world and forge emotional relationships with animals. She didn’t like many people and let very few into her life. It was my privilege to be loved by her. She never let me down, never disappointed me, though I’m sure I let her down and disappointed her plenty. This novel is dedicated to her memory, and as with my previous novels, there are bits written for her. I am glad that I was able to tell her how much I loved her and what her enduring and unwavering friendship meant to me over the years since we first met, when I was a lost and troubled sixteen-year-old high school student. But I am still left feeling that I did not do or say enough. She gave me far more than I gave her. Dedicating this novel to her memory is only fitting, however insufficient or late it might be. My life is dimmer without her. I still have not adjusted to the reality that our daily online Scrabble games are no more; or that I cannot pick up the phone to call her whenever I want, to ask about her garden, her dogs, her shoulder problems, her kids and grandkids; or to tell her about my days, to gossip, complain, rejoice, and generally indulge in the most profound friendship I’ve ever known.
Then, just as the galleys were printed, I learned that my birth mother, Aminah Abulhawa, was critically ill. We spoke for the first time in ten years. She was in a hospital bed unable to breathe well, but we saw each other on FaceTime, and her eyes smiled behind the oxygen mask when I told her I was coming to Kuwait to see her. By the time my plane landed a couple of days later, she was already in the ICU, heavily sedated, unaware of my presence or of her body’s struggle to hold on.
I had always wondered what that moment would feel like. But it was like nothing I had ever imagined. It was an immensely sad, lonely land, littered with shards of ancient hurt, ancient anger, the corpses of so many unsaid words and unanswered questions, and memories without stories—meeting my mother for the first time in 1975. I was five years old. She was beautiful, with long shiny black hair, silky olive skin, and groovy bellbottom jeans. A hot wind across my face coming off the airplane in Kuwait. Black marks on my white shorts from the luggage conveyer belt. Aminah said “I told you not to sit there.” A photo of a mother and daughter cuddled, smiling in bed. I looked happy. She did too. I was her first born, and her only child then. The others (five more girls) would come much later. No one in the family knew the abyss that bound us. They think they do, and they have their own narratives—bad daughter, wicked sister, a mother’s tough choices, and so it goes. The truth is that I would have liked to know her as a woman. She didn’t have it easy, thwarted by terrible men, first my father then my stepfather. I have always had compassion for that. But she and I could not cross that abyss. It was too big, too deep, too dark, though we both tried, teetering on its edges at different times.
Six months prior, she sent me a friend request on Facebook, which I accepted. Then she sent me a message: “Hi.” Nothing more. I didn’t know what to do with it, and though I came back to that message many times, I never responded. I thought I had more time.
Her lungs couldn’t take one more cigarette and just stopped. Her other organs followed one by one. I watched in the hospital as edema slowly dissolved her wrinkles and restored her face to the smoothness of her youth. We looked so much alike. Everyone said so. Some people who hadn’t seen me in a while thought I was her. One of her grandchildren, a nephew I had just met, thought his “teta” was out of the hospital when he first saw me. I liked that, thought it was poetic.
I know enough about vital signs and blood markers to realize she would be gone in a day or two. I said a final farewell by her bed and went to the airport to leave her memory—and days of condolences and the stream of well-wishers that arrive after Muslim burials—to the daughters she raised, whose love for her was not complicated. I left them to grieve together, without the distraction of the estranged older daughter in America and the curiosity that always provokes.
Alone with my grief and regrets, I stared at the Facebook message Aminah sent to me—“Hi”—the only written note I ever received from the woman who gave me life. I realized for the first time that she had been a powerful driving force in so many of my decisions and achievements—driven by a desire to hurt her, to make her see me, make her proud. She is present in all three of my novels, in the complicated mother daughter relationships of my first two, then simplified in this novel.
I am a daughter of many women, and I want to salute two of them here: Mame and Aminah. May they rest in peace and power and love.
To the individuals whose love sustains me—my daughter, Natalie Abulhawa, and my dear friends here and around the world: thank you and I love you. A shout-out to my furry babies now and departed: Luca, Lily, Lavar, and Shami; Gipsy and Midnight; Tommy and Emerson; Char, Toby, and Max.
Finally, I want to thank you, dear reader. I am not a writer without you and a novel cannot fully become, or find its place in the world, without your thoughts and interpretations of it.
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This electronic edition published in 2020 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published in 2020 in the USA by Atria Books, Simon & Schuster, Inc.
First published in Great Britain 2020
Copyright © Susan Abulhawa, 2020
Susan Abulhawa has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work
Quotes excerpted from The Fire Next Time, c. 1962, 1963 by James Baldwin. Copyright renewed. Used by arrangement with the James Baldwin Estate
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ISBN: HB: 978-1-5266-1879-5; TPB: 978-1-5266-1880-1; EBOOK: 978-1-5266-1878-8
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Against the Loveless World Page 33