Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  I thought all women’s bodies were supposed to look like my mother’s. My body now is its larger twin; I have a smiling, dimpled ass and a W of my own. But in photographs of her in the sixties and seventies, my mother looks different: smaller, doe-like, her hair long and straight. It’s as though giving birth to my brother and me transformed her; it did. And she’s spent her entire life since then trying to be that woman she was before she became a mother, trying to slim her way back to being A Girl. I dieted with her in solidarity. Except I was eight years old when I started; I was still A Girl.

  No one stopped me. I didn’t read the diet books, just aped and mimicked what my mother did. I drank soup for lunch. For dinner, I ate a piece of chicken. In the morning, I ate nothing. And then there were secret comforts. Home from school in the afternoon, I stood in our wide, blue kitchen and ate a bag of cheese puffs. Each puff was my friend. Each filled me, leaving its orange dust, its ashes, on my fingers. My mother did this, too. I saw her at odd hours in the kitchen, snacking. She made sexual sounds when she ate. Moaned at her mouth tasting something, at her body filling up.

  In our family pool’s changing room, white women, expats, walked around naked, their bodies like men’s. That is what I believed, because their bodies were rigid, athletic, absent of the Ws and dimples my mother had. Their breasts were small and their nipples pink. I was confused by my body’s reaction to them; I couldn’t name arousal. At around this same time, I saw an ad in a magazine of Nastassja Kinski shampooing her hair. I masturbated to the ad, and to the seventies Playboys my brother and I found in storage drawers in the dark sitting room reserved for guests.

  In films and on television, I don’t remember seeing white women eating. Arab women ate on Arabic soaps, and danced, and laughed. At home and in the kitchens of families and friends, women milled around the table serving us and then sat and ate with us; at home, my mother mostly milled.

  The Cosby Show and Roseanne were on almost nightly, the Cosbys gathering and talking in their kitchen, usually standing up, the Conners sitting at their kitchen table even in the credits, a camera milling around them.

  My mother was a chubby Clair Huxtable, chic in eighties skirts and blouses, dark-skinned, her hair done. My mother was also Roseanne, fat and loud and hungry.

  •

  When we moved to America in 1991, I weighed 104 pounds. I was thirteen and eating six hundred calories a day. I weighed myself after school. Then, I stopped weighing myself. I began checking my size by wearing a green pair of shorts, the pair of shorts I’d moved to the U.S. in, every night before bed. I was able to fit into these shorts until I was about fifteen. At that point, the shorts would zip up but not button. Then, when I turned sixteen, they stopped fitting.

  I tried everything, but the shorts would not go up past my hips. I ate a slice of toast in the morning, an apple for lunch, and half a cup of pasta for dinner, dipping down to 450 calories, but the shorts still would not fit. I danced for an hour in my room every day. The shorts would not fit. I lay on my back and tried to zip them up that way. They would not fit.

  Nothing I did would make it so that I was the same body, the same person, the Girl I was before I moved to the U.S.

  My mother never explained to me that a fifteen-year-old is not a complete adult, that I still needed to grow. I didn’t understand why my body was changing, and so I thought it was punishing me, rebelling against me. At this same time, my father was monitoring my every move very closely. And I wanted to be in control of my own body somehow. So I starved.

  When starving stopped being fun, there were boys. Boys went in and out of me. But it was in college, my belly on the bed, my dry elbows propping me up, my mouth on the ridge of my friend L’s pussy, that I thought: Oh. Is this what I’ve been hungry for?

  •

  Two months after my son moved out on his own, I met a new boo. It was difficult for me to have a boo when I lived with my son, because I wanted to be discreet, I wanted to maintain boundaries, I wanted to protect my privacy and his. Once he moved away, I was on my own for the first time in my life, and I was happy about this and about my new lover. He loved my breasts. Sometimes, he came over just to nurse. He would ask that I continue to do my work, as I normally would, and then he’d curl his six-foot frame into my loveseat, place a pillow under his cheek, and nurse my breast. He sucked and closed his eyes. I worked. When he opened his eyes, I blew gently at them, to close them again, something I used to do with my son. I didn’t understand what this was: me nursing a man who was not my infant, who did not need me for sustenance. I nursed him, and every time he flicked his tongue against my chapped nipple, I felt useful and alive, wanted, and loved. It was all pretend.

  •

  I was an infant, and I was lying on my back. The room was dark, as though the pitch-black sky was indoors, thick around me. Maybe my diaper was being changed—my legs were lifted. Then, a pain, radiating between them. A burning. Like someone struck a match inside me. I screamed, but I’m not sure if I was comforted. And now, all these years later, my vagina hurts when I see someone in pain. A quick, radiating pulse zaps through my vulva, like a live wire. The darkness of the room is my memory, protecting me. The darkness is my mind, pulling the night in to save me.

  My father said to me, years later, “When you were a toddler, your mother once put a suppository in your vagina instead of your buttocks.” “Oh!” I said. “Oh, I remember that! I remember that pain.” “Yes,” my father said. “You cried and bled. We took you to the emergency room. It was terrible. The doctor there wrote a certified letter that your hymen was not broken, and that you had had this accident, in case a future husband wanted to know.” And this, somehow this last detail, is the one that shocked me the most.

  Therapists later would question this story. How do you know it was a suppository? they asked. How do you know it was your mother, not your father? Your mother, not anyone else?

  The fact is, I don’t know. The fact is, I love my mother. The truth is, I want to believe it was an accident. My anger isn’t just about the abuse that happened to me. It’s also about those events that occurred directly afterward—the hospital visit to make sure my hymen was OK.

  •

  I nursed my lover on the loveseat. He pulled nothing from me, and he was satisfied. I imagined showing him, or any of the many people I’ve fucked, the letter from the Kuwaiti doctor. I’m a virgin, I would say. Look. This was what was most important to my parents, to my health provider, to everyone around me. That I was still a virgin at twenty months old. No wonder the night sky came through to my nursery.

  7

  DOUBLE MAGIC

  “Everything, indeed, is at least double,” Proust wrote in The Captive, the fifth edition. of his classic text, In Search of Lost Time. Anne Carson has explored how the closeted lesbian character, Albertine, is a stand-in for Proust the writer’s lover, Albert. Albertine becomes Proust’s doll.

  I was in the toys section at a drugstore because I saw a doll I wanted to give my friend R’s daughter—he was a man I was in unreciprocated love with. I touched the plush doll, imagining that I was the daughter. And in that act, I became double. I was his daughter’s giver of gifts and I was the gift. I was his daughter and I was his lover.

  I bought myself the doll. I bought myself several dolls. Each came with a story. She was made of mime’s gloves. She was an ice cream shop attendant. She was a small, swinging satyr.

  When I was small, my father brought me a doll when he came home from one of his business trips. She looked a little like me: her fabric face framed with tight brown wool curls, large facial features, short. Sometimes, at night, I would beat her. I would slap her cheeks, pinch her arms, and pull her hair. I found her in a box the last time I moved. I kept her in the box. I am ashamed of what I did to her, my twin and my daughter. More recently, I took her out of the garage, put her on my desk, and gave her a friend.

  •

  Back in Fresno, I met my friends at a bar every Monday night after I
taught a class. The night I bought the dolls from the drugstore, I brought them to the bar with me, and I smoked the cigarettes I had just bought. I told my friends about the dolls. I said that I had a realization at the drugstore that I didn’t need to be a child to own dolls. That I had my own income now and could buy any doll I wanted. I told them how, as I stood in the aisle, I still thought I had to choose only one doll, even after I’d allowed myself to buy toys. It took a few minutes, I told them, but I bought all the dolls I wanted. They cheered. Later, when we paid our checks, they asked me if I would play with my toys when I got home. The possibility filled me up completely.

  My therapist, a woman of color, and the first therapist who has ever truly helped me, was very happy about this turn of events. She did play therapy, had a room full of archetypal doll characters—a girl child, villains, students, mothers, mermaids, firemen, etc.—and said that she wanted to talk to me about the doll I used to beat up. She asked me not to feel guilty, that it was in fact very common for children who grew up in households like mine, where violence was daily, to lash out and beat other children, and that I should be proud that I took things out on a doll. I used to apologize to her, I told my therapist. I would hug her and say I’m sorry. As I told my therapist this, I cried. My therapist is Latina and Indigenous, and we first started crying together when I spoke to her about Palestine. She told me that my apology was more than most kids do to the living, breathing children they hurt.

  •

  My friend H once told me a story about what he called “the Detroit doll.” This was a doll he had spotted in a window he passed every day after school on his way home. The doll, which was almost four feet tall, stood behind the glass.

  He later learned that the people in the house had lost their daughter. She had been killed that year. He didn’t know how. He only knew that they pretended the doll was her, and they put her in the window so she could view the world outside it. But it seemed to him that she was the thing to be viewed.

  •

  They dressed me up in white gloves, pink tulle, flowered prints. They brushed my curly hair straight. They gave me pretty shoes. I was to emerge a few minutes after company arrived. When I came out to the living room, everyone oohed and aahed. When I climbed down the steps, the oohs began earlier, and I was royalty. My mother and father expressed intense, contradictory feelings for me, protective, reproachful, domineering, and erotic. They dressed me up and tore me down. I was their doll.

  •

  Armando Reverón, an artist in the 1940s, made dolls. They were woman-sized and he used them as models for his paintings. Their skin was burlap sack, their features almost macabre. A review of his work in The New York Times later said that Reverón “expressed intense, contradictory feelings for them, protective, reproachful, domineering and erotic. Collectively they were a cross between a play group and a harem.” He liked to punish his dolls, too. They had highly detailed clay vaginas. He made them clothes, gave each doll a name.

  •

  For years I only watched Alice in Wonderland until Alice’s point of arrival in Wonderland. Later in life I thought this was because I may not have had access to the full film. As though the Wonderland section had been censored, the way most films I saw as a child were censored. Later in life I found the 1951 version, and I projected it onto the wall of the house I would soon be evicted from. And yet even then, thirty or more years after I’d first watched Alice in Wonderland, I stopped watching the film at the point when she reached Wonderland. It’s the section when she’s on her way, in transit to Wonderland, that I am most captivated by. Her growing and shrinking body, her large and tiny tears, her dress-covered limbs buoyed in water, water of her own body’s making. And most of all, the scenes where she is crawling through a brown and red tunnel, the walls all around her raw and ridged, a vaginal canal through which Alice is squeezed and squeezes, through which she transforms and comes to life.

  What happens to young women whose adolescent sexuality is controlled, whose bodies’ every movement is surveilled? Exit strategies and maps. We draw them up and go over the routes. We try the exits sometimes, at our own peril, too, because it’s worth it to know that exiting could work. This would be like someone pulling open an exit door on an in-flight plane just to make sure it worked.

  Alice wore a uniform. Women with exit strategies often do.

  •

  In the forties, right after the war, French designers were running very low on materials, and this gave birth to the Théâtre de la Mode—a traveling theater of fashion. Each couture piece was made miniature, and each doll was a third the size of a woman, and sometimes they even wore panties.

  •

  “When a woman gives [a doll] to a woman, it’s the life they cannot have, it is their child, sacred and profane . . . Sometimes if [Robin] got tight by evening, I would find her standing in the middle of the room in boy’s clothes, rocking from foot to foot, holding the doll she had given us—‘our child’—high above her head.” Djuna Barnes wrote this in Nightwood, which is based on her relationship with a visual artist named Thelma Wood, whom she lived with in Paris, and who’d given her a doll.

  Side note: Barnes admits that, once, when she was interviewing James Joyce, whom she admired very much, she totally spaced out.

  •

  In Ancient Egypt, statue makers went from creating elite and royal statues to making working-class statues. All these were gradually considered dolls, for play. Like Armando Reverón’s dolls afterward, they were made of wood, of clay.

  •

  My first crush on a girl may have been on Thumbelina. In her, I saw a sister, a diminutive lover, my mother, and then, myself. She was trapped on a lily pad with a frog who was unkind to her. She had been sold off by her community. She was tiny, insignificant.

  I knew about Thumbelina because we had a book about her and a book on tape to go along with it. The tape would beep when I needed to flip the page. The voice of the woman who read the story was commanding, elderly, and informed.

  I was probably five or six years old when I listened to the Thumbelina tape, thumbing my way through the book at each beep. Thirteen years later, I would have a child. And within me already were all the tiny eggs I would ever have; deep within me part of my child already existed. And because my mother had lost her mother just before I was born, my own motherhood was already a part of my identity. I mothered my mother. And I mothered my brother, who was born thirty months after I was, and who I patted and cared for at night when my parents went out, or in hotel rooms while we were traveling and while my parents were at dinner.

  The origin story of Thumbelina, or Tiny, as Hans Christian Andersen tells it, is that an older woman wanted a child but couldn’t have one. She went to a sorcerer and was given a seed to make her own child with; when she planted it, the seed blossomed into a tulip. And now the gayest moment of Thumbelina: the old woman kissed the petals of the tulip—two petals, to be exact—and out came Thumbelina. She was half the size of a thumb. A tiny, perfect, anthropomorphized clitoris. As a child, I was drawn to the miniature nature of this perfect being, and to her tiny accoutrements: her bed was a walnut shell, her blanket, a petal. She took up almost no space at all. She was nothing like me and she was everything like me. If I mothered my own mother, who actually came first? I wanted to be like Thumbelina: born of no man. It was like Surat al-Samad, the verse of the Quran I repeated in class and before bed: God did not beget and was not begotten. As an adult woman, I feminize the Quran so that this part reads, She did not give birth and nor was She given birth to. Thumbelina, like the divine, is perfect, whole, and mighty. Her physical size is irrelevant. She is indivisible, above all others, and for the entire length of her story, she attempts to escape lascivious masculinity as embodied by both the frog and his mother. She is never penetrated and is finally able to get away from her captors, releasing into a world of other fairies. She will never give birth to any other. In the fairy tale, she finds a prince her size who also
emerges from a flower. The rest of their people join them, emerging from other flowers. It’s a marriage of clitorises in a magical kingdom of clitorises, the final touch being a pair of tiny wings bequeathed to Thumbelina, giving her complete freedom. In that buzzing, the story ends, her entire self transformed into an orgasming, climaxing queen.

  •

  The foil of Thumbelina was, is, Tinker Bell. The first time I saw Tinker Bell glide across our television, I fell in love. Her tiny green dress and long legs, with pointed feet, shoes with large white pompoms, and the fairy dust trailing her signaled an otherness and an inaccessibility, as did her white skin. Her red lips. Her indigo blue eyes and black brows and lashes. Her jealousy. Her possessiveness.

  Her moment with that mirror, realizing that her hips were large. This moment did not exist in the book version, only in Hollywood’s. But it made me wonder if I was too much. Shorts and other pieces of clothing would fit me imperfectly. I wasn’t fat yet, but I wasn’t skinny. And seeing that even Tinker Bell, who could fly and was tiny, was worried about the size of hips, made me love her more. For a moment, I thought we were alike. I could relate to her.

  All of this, and her unavailability, made me desire her deeply. I wanted to be her, and I wanted her to be mine.

  Thumbelina and Tinker Bell are both, in my imagination, queer, visual representations of clitorises. They buzz, they yearn, they are tiny and hidden, and sometimes tiny and visible. They are wet. They flicker. They want. They make you want back.

  •

  For years after the 2006 Israeli war on Lebanon, whenever I wanted to conjure an image of a badass woman, I visualized a photograph taken just after ceasefire, of a store owner in flip-flops dusting off a white-wedding-gowned mannequin in the rubble outside her shop in Beirut.