Savage Tongues

by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  Ellie asked if I would sit next to her; she wanted to do a tarot reading for me. She needed to practice her hand, and my uncertain fate made for perfect material. “Your struggle is focused,” she said. “It lends itself well to this kind of thing.”

  I lit my cigarette and asked Ellie if I could use her mug, which was empty, as an ashtray.

  “Sure,” she said, somewhat reluctantly.

  She’d quit smoking years before I’d met her though she occasionally shared a cigarette with me. We’d pass it back and forth between us, taking two drags at a time. I offered her the one I’d just lit.

  “Not on an empty stomach,” she said, pushing my hand away. We decided that after she was done with the tarot reading we would go out to eat and buy cleaning products, and that we’d reward ourselves afterward by going down to the beach to watch the moon rise in the opal sky above the sea. I’d gone on and on about the sky in the Costa del Sol; about how, at times, it appeared so thin as to be translucent only to shift abruptly into an opaque gunmetal, thick with fog. When the fog dissipated, I’d told her, the sky would turn an intense blue again, darkening and lightening in shades, eventually turning lilac, then a regal purple, and, at twilight, navy blue, before going black altogether; the moon, silver and mercurial, would hang dead at its center, a bright flame that would burn until dawn. I was already dreaming of staring at that moon, of seeing it reflected on the surface of the water, which took on the texture of hard plastic at night, thick, solid, impenetrable. And as I thought about that round, sleepless moon, Lorca’s lines returned to take their place on the stage of my mind, the curves and eddies of his words lit up by that metallic light: The moon holds out her arms, her metal breasts are bare. It was my favorite thing—to daydream about words.

  I ate the remaining dates in between drags, spat my pits in the mug, then piled in the rest, which Ellie had stacked into a tower. They looked like the exoskeletons of cockroaches.

  Ellie wiped her hands on the towel, tucked a few loose strands of curls behind her ears, and shuffled the deck. The cards were beautiful, as glossy as silk. I’d seen them before, in Sam’s apartment in Lefferts Gardens, which he shared with his girlfriend. It was the Next World Tarot deck. All of the cards featured the artist’s friends and acquaintances, one of whom happened to be Sam’s girlfriend. The deck represented minorities, differently abled bodies, women in hijabs, gay and trans couples. It was a deck that sung its tune proudly and professed a kind of transgressive, revolutionary love.

  When Ellie was done shuffling the cards, she placed the deck on the coffee table and told me to divide the deck three times thoughtfully, holding in my mind’s eye a clear vision of my predicament. “Then,” she said, “take deep breaths, connecting your mind to your heart and your heart to your hands, and restack the deck.”

  I did as I was told. I envisioned Omar as I’d seen him just a few hours earlier on the beach and tried to locate him in the larger complex of my past. I’d been trying for so long to understand my own cravings. To understand the shape of whatever longing I’d foolishly believed he could fulfill, a longing he’d clearly detected and was eager to string around my neck like a noose. I felt my belly grow warmer with every breath. I cut the stack in two. It was the heat of rage, of an old repressed fury, a feeling I couldn’t sustain for long; it made me want to hurt myself. It was an unwieldy, dangerous energy, an energy that I recognized as a consequence of having been branded with Omar’s appetite, his lack of control. In other words, what I was feeling, I told myself as I cut the deck a third time, was his rage. By sleeping with me, by manipulating and controlling the contours of my life as an adolescent, Omar had unloaded his anger onto me. His frustration with his own life. His shame. His toxic secret of grooming young girls. And I was left to hold the hot coals of his dark longings for the rest of my life.

  “Relax your face,” Ellie said.

  She put her hand on my back. My muscles relaxed with her touch. For a brief moment, the room filled with the silence of a wake.

  Eventually, Ellie whispered in a hypnotic tone: “Each of us is spurred on by a private mystery, a secret that escapes our notice despite being deeply familiar to us.” Then she instructed me to open my eyes and select one card from the deck, which she’d spread out across the table in such a way so as to make the edge of every card visible.

  Laid out like that, the deck looked like a staircase rising in gentle gradations to a purer, more transcendent space. I felt time folding and unfolding itself like a dream. I studied the cards. I moved my hand over the length of the deck and tried to feel the vibration coming from each card. It was strange, the way some of them stood out to me and others faded into the background, signaling that they had nothing to offer. For a moment, with my hand gliding over the cards, I heard the sound of my own laughter, an unrestrained laugh that had come out in fits and bursts that summer. I saw Omar chasing me around a food shack on the beach at sunset. The sand was firm and wet underfoot. The sun was an orange ball of fire, a perfect radiant globe hovering over the black band of the horizon. The sea, in that fading light, appeared moss green, a dark half-moon with a gelatinous surface. The water had been rough that day. The lifeguards had raised red flags on the poles that dotted the coast, signaling to swimmers that they should take caution.

  When Omar finally caught me, short of breath, I was standing by a flagpole. He wrapped his arms around me from behind and said the most pathetic thing in the world. “Age,” he whispered in my ear, “is irrelevant when it comes to love.”

  I said nothing. Or perhaps I said something about the seagulls circling like vultures overhead. I remembered that I was cold, that the wind was picking up, that my feet were clammy from being wet.

  I examined the deck one last time. My hand was on fire. I pulled a card and turned it around. It was the Five of Wands.

  Ellie concentrated on the card. She was studying it and examining the position of my body in relation to it. She moved a penetrating gaze over my face and hands.

  As she contemplated the message, which I had presumably called forth from the deck, I scanned the sky through the window, lost in thought. I was stuck in the same mental loop I’d been stuck in for years, a loop that felt oppressive to me but that I didn’t seem capable of exiting. I was lost in the mental maze that I’d constructed over the years, built with the most primitive thoughts. I was fundamentally in agreement with Omar. I believed and had experienced firsthand love’s capacity to transgress and challenge social norms, love’s radical inappropriateness, and I felt thankful for it. I’d been deeply accepting of relationships in which one partner is significantly older than the other, irrespective of sex or gender, so long as both parties were consenting adults. I wasn’t the kind to raise an eyebrow or wince at other people’s relationships.

  Besides, I took issue with the laws governing and dictating the terms of adulthood. These laws were unstable, mutable; it is impossible to separate our understanding of sexual politics from our notions of cultural progress, of time itself. Who is an adult? Who determines which people are of mature age and which aren’t? It all seemed so deeply arbitrary to me, so confounding; the fact that others so willingly swallowed the rules of decorum without demonstrating even an inkling of doubt or resistance only increased my confusion. Surely, the laws governing adulthood had resulted from a debate or in response to some tragic incident. But who were the people who’d had a seat at that table when they were written, and where were those people now? Were there women at the table, lesbians, bisexuals, gay and transgender citizens, children and teenagers who had been abused, or adults who had been abused as children? Why were these laws, which so carefully police our bodies and the exchange of fluids among them, being shaped predominantly by middle-aged white men who were, in all likelihood, either straight or at least pretended as much? Why weren’t these laws continually subject to the scrutiny of time? I considered, as I had considered countless times before, that I had been raised in countries that had laws and social rules tha
t practically repelled one another and that, at their extremes, went so far as to demonize one another for being too restrictive or too lenient or both, a combination that seemed impossible but somehow wasn’t. The moral codes I had internalized were deeply contradictory.

  I saw a seagull approach the terrace and land on the railing with a steely grip and a grace that left me dumbfounded. Its eyes looked red in the sun, as if sparks of fire were about to leap out of them. I elbowed Ellie to look at the bird, and she turned silently, gently, so as neither to scare the bird off or lose her own train of thought, her intuition of what the card held in store for me. As soon as she turned back to the card, the seagull took off toward a set of razor-thin clouds. Soon it was out of view.

  I returned to my thoughts. Once I was in the maze, I had to complete the circuit. This, too, was an old habit, a kind of compulsive mental attitude I’d developed as an adolescent, likely due to the fact that I’d had to leap from language to language, from Farsi to Spanish and English and back, like a toad between ponds; I was always in the process of examining my understanding of a culture through one diametrically opposed to it: I viewed the East from the perspective of the West and vice versa. I was trapped between these supposedly antagonistic forces. These absolute hemispheres, the lines that had been drawn across maps, that severed my body, my being, sawed it in half. It was too much. My life required of me an almost inhumane level of cognitive flexibility, an openness that left me unprotected; I had to let every bit of cultural subtext in, then sort through it later once I’d had time to measure any new information against the knowledge I’d acquired previously in another land. It required a herculean effort made more exhausting by the fact that each of these lands policed my body, my female body, differently. In Spain, I reviewed mentally, the age of consent is sixteen when only years earlier it had been fourteen. And then there’s Iran, I thought, where a woman is considered an adult at the age of nine. And what about the United States where I’d spent the majority of my adult life? I had come to understand there that adulthood is the age at which one finishes high school. Out of the nest at eighteen, I thought—a luxury, really, when there isn’t enough space or capital in most of the rest of the world to accommodate such desires. Taking all that into account, how was I supposed to conclude anything? I was caught in that triangle—Spain, the United States, Iran—in the most arbitrary triangle of all, that space where culture’s prejudices and its laws coincide to draw boundaries around the lives of its citizens.

  I was on the cusp of realizing something that had evaded me for years. What had given me pause when Omar had indirectly professed his love to me on the beach, I realized, was that I hadn’t believed him. I hadn’t believed that he loved me. Rather, I had knowingly tricked myself into believing it. He had insinuated his love through a statement of fact, and I knew enough to know that love, true love, consumes a person, makes them uncertain, causes their voice to tremble, and there was, I realized—because it was as though I could hear his voice at my ear again now just as I’d heard it that evening—no sign of trepidation in his voice, no quivering, no emotion. But I’d wanted to believe that he loved me—or worse, I’d needed to believe it, and that need was stronger than my analytical powers; it had intercepted my ability to listen and respond to my own body, which had gone, under the weight of those words, stiff with grief and confusion, as rigid as the flagpole I was leaning against. I had overridden my body, cut myself off from its innate wisdom, and in that moment, I had lost contact with myself. I had lost all communication with my intuition. A corpse—uninhabited, cast off, a waste of space.

  I felt tears gathering in my eyes. I felt something toxic and solid caught in my throat. I put out my cigarette and looked down to avoid Ellie’s gaze. She didn’t notice, or if she did, she sensed that I didn’t want her to comment on my pain, to let on that she could see me holding back a flood of tears.

  She began to speak, her eyes still fixed on the wands. She traced their lines with her finger, and said, “This card signals conflict and change. The conflict you experienced is deep and continuous with an ongoing conflict that existed and still exists outside of you, a cultural conflict between East and West, earth and water, masculine and feminine, the psychic and the material—you were caught at their fault lines.”

  She sounded like she was reading from a text that had been transcribed in the gossamer of the universe. She was a conduit, reciting the message that I’d called forth by allowing my hand to hover over the cards, my body to direct my choices. I was shocked by the continuity between my thoughts and her words.

  “In order to resolve this conflict,” she said, finally looking at me and searching my eyes for a response, “you’ll have to draw on all of your psychic and emotional resources. The resolution may be subtle, the path toward its achievement equally so, composed of nearly imperceptible shifts in consciousness that ultimately will integrate all of the many differing opinions that you carry within you.” She added that true integration didn’t mean eliminating contradiction but rather aligning the inconsistencies inherent in my intellectual and physical life with the high ideals of the heavens, not the heaven we’ve constructed from our limited position on earth, from our religious perspectives, but a heaven beyond the paradise we’ve been taught to imagine, a space that is abundant, wide open, that allows opposing realities to exist side by side without judgment—a complex space where we are invited to let go of our constant need to know or understand everything, where we are no longer measured by our supposed purity.

  I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer. They dropped out of my eyes, though I no longer felt the need to cry. I was astonished by the correspondence between Ellie’s rhetoric and my private thoughts; the deck of cards appeared, in light of the exchange, to have an infinite dimensionality to them, to contain worlds that willingly lent themselves to a variety of interpretations. I did exist on a fault line and that fault line was not something I could resolve. My not-quite-white skin, the fact that I was the abandoned child of a British sailor and an Iranian mother.

  I barely knew my father. I’d seen him only sporadically throughout my childhood, and when I did, his presence was so disorienting to me, it disturbed me more than his absence had. Most of the time I forgot he even existed in the first place. I’d been raised in Tehran, speaking Farsi. It was my mother’s language, the language she’d nursed me with, the language she’d used to soothe me when I’d cried as an infant. And yet my features and the color of my skin bore a resemblance to both my parents; my face was ethnically ambiguous, a face onto which all manner of fantasies and political narratives could be projected.

  I was a hybrid child. I was Omar’s hybrid teenage lover. And Omar was a hybrid, too, by virtue of having migrated to Spain, a Lebanese man from the upper echelons of Beirut society, a man who spoke French and Arabic and Spanish and English with seductive ease, a man who’d internalized the colonial logic under which he’d been raised, who’d been conditioned to desire a girl like me, half West, half East. I was a physical manifestation of his psyche. To him, I finally understood, I was a fantasy. My body contradicted the very notion of the invented self. Who has that privilege? I wondered broodily. Not I; much like Omar, I’d been branded by someone else’s power long before I’d had the chance to find my own sense of self. The magnetic field directing our internal compasses, I realized, was blocked forever by the force of colonialism. The card I was holding seemed to insinuate this split nature of mine, the fact that my subjectivity was implicated on both sides of the divide.

  “Ready?” Ellie asked. She told me to draw a final card.

  I lifted my right hand and let it hover over the spread again. Perhaps, I considered, as I moved my hand back and forth across the fanned stack, Omar had believed that I wouldn’t be able to transition into womanhood without his direction, just as the West believed the East incapable of transitioning into modernity without its “benevolent” imperialism, its narrative of conquest as salvation. There were, I admitted to mys
elf, feeling an attraction to a card toward the end of the spread, ways in which my relationship with Omar had rescued me: he had shocked me back into life, taught me that it can be full of adventure and pleasure, laughter and good food, and the joys of wilderness. Our relationship had healed and destroyed me in one swift blow. What had been balm for my younger self had cast a dark shadow over my future self, the self I had become, the self who was sitting on a dirty floor in an old, abandoned apartment about to pluck a card from a deck in order to understand her fate. Aware that my younger self had taken a loan out on my life.

  I flipped the card over. It was the card of Temperance. The card featured a young woman with brown skin kneeling next to a river and pouring water from one cup into a lower vessel. “This card,” Ellie said, “is about rising from a lower plane to a higher one. The woman in this card is protected by natural law. She is able to resist abuse because she feels deeply that she has a right to her humanity.”

  She paused thoughtfully, then reached for the interpretive book. She looked for the page that offered information about the card of Temperance. It read: she tempers the whimsical flight of the fool, she mixes hot water with cold, she has one foot in the water and one foot on dry land.

  “She is reversing the flow of the water, which means, I believe, that subconscious elements may be rising to the surface for you. Think of her as your ancestor. Do you remember that line from Benjamin?” Ellie asked.

  Benjamin was far from my mind even though I’d spent years thinking about his work, communing with his sentences.

  “We exert,” Ellie said, “a weak messianic power over our ancestors.” What this means, she went on to say, is that time flows in more than one direction; it moves simultaneously forward and back, sideways, even in elliptical, spiraling loops; we can heal the wounds of our ancestors by making space in the flow of time for our bodies, which have been persecuted since time immemorial, subject to erasure, extermination, restricted mobility. We carry their scars, their genes, their languages or the ghosts of their languages; but we, too, have an effect on them. We, the living, can influence the dead by changing the arc of history; by restoring justice, we also reinstate their sense of dignity.