by Randa Jarrar
12
THEFT
An ex-student sent me a message, saying that she was going to Ramallah the following month. She asked, Do you want me to bring you anything from the homeland?
The homeland, I said. Bring me the whole homeland.
I wish, she responded.
That wound, that sense of constant ache for home. That feeling that refugees have, that they were robbed of a resting place; it never stops.
Inventory. A key chain; lipsticks, usually the cheap drugstore kind; hair products such as serum at fifteen dollars an ounce; clothes, skirts and tops and dresses; shoes, with my old ones left on the display shelf; a phone line, I used D’s social security number to start it, ran a four-hundred-dollar bill before it was shut down; food, all sorts of meals from Whole Foods, and sundry items from self-serve bulk sections of grocery stores around the country—cashews, tea, dried fruit, crystallized ginger, all of which I labeled as a similar colored product that cost 800 percent less; toilet paper, from bars and libraries and once, The Cheesecake Factory; cocktail glasses, usually still with cocktails in them; ibuprofen; lighters, mostly not on purpose; a very large bag, which I took off a mannequin, slung around my shoulder, shopped the store for an hour while wearing, then walked out with, the plastic security tag making not a sound—I like to think the bag grew accustomed to me; several blocks of printing paper; pens and pencils from offices and people; a compact mirror from the Louvre gift shop.
I am a thief.
Unlike most people, I never stole as a child. I knew it was wrong, and I was afraid of the consequences. It was important for me to be, and to be seen as, a Good Girl. Positive attention shone my direction when I received straight As, when I spoke politely, and when I followed rules.
And then the Gulf War happened. The expulsion of Palestinians, an already-expelled group, from Kuwait happened. Our family moving to Connecticut happened.
•
It was in Connecticut that I stole my very first thing. I had a job on the main avenue. The job was at an independent body-care shop, where I shrink-wrapped lotions for elderly women. The avenue was a long, multi-block shopping street, lined, top to bottom, with pricey restaurants and high-end clothing stores. After work, I walked across the street to smoke a secret cigarette. I was fifteen years old. Boys at school called me Tits, and girls called me Rhoda. After my cigarette, I would walk into a gift shop. There were toys and buttons and pens and mugs and key chains with “American” names on them. None of the key chains had my name. Nothing in all of the world had my name. This meant I did not exist. Which then meant that I was invisible. Which lead me to believe I could take whatever I wanted. So I took a blank keychain, and I walked out. Nothing happened. No alarm sounded. I was thrilled and warm all over, until I realized I had no keys, no place of my own, and that the keychain was useless to me.
My mother sometimes picked me up from work. My mother did not work. She got married so she wouldn’t have to work. That is what she wanted, what she believed. My mother would stay in her car outside and wait for me. At the end of each shift, I would sweep the floors of the shop, blaring PJ Harvey and Prince and Björk over the din of the heavy rain outside. When the floors were clean, I’d lock up the inventory room and the doors to the shop, and I’d run from the shop to my mother’s car (the car we all used, because we could only afford one), dodging the rain, and as soon as I would get in her car, my mother would chastise me. She’d say, don’t you dare sweep for them again. Do you hear me? I never want to see you sweeping floors.
But it’s part of my job, I would say, and I don’t mind it at all. It’s kind of . . . (the word I was looking for was meditative, but at fifteen, I didn’t know it yet).
If I see you sweeping again, you quit that job, she’d say. Because to my mother, work was humiliation.
I got a paycheck every two weeks. I spent my money on whatever I wanted: usually books, clothes, cigarettes, and weed. But after a few months, I didn’t like working. My mother was right, I decided. Labor was such a scam.
And I stole.
In college, my parents put me on a cold-lunch plan. I stole dinner from the dining hall, pretending I was just there to study. I stole a billiard ball from the campus poolroom when a woman told me I wasn’t really Arab, just a descendent of white people who once lived in Arab countries. I stole flowers from wealthy neighborhood gardens when not a single person at my college, male or female, wanted to spend any sexy time with me.
Plus the time I suspected I was pregnant: I stole a pack of pregnancy tests from CVS.
•
Years later, I will tell my son this story. I will tell him that I discovered that he existed on a stolen pregnancy test. He will be getting ready to move out of our house. He will laugh and tell me he loves me. I wonder how I thought I could raise a child alone when I couldn’t afford a pregnancy test. And yet, my son says that he never knew we were poor.
I hate menstruation. And the fact that I have to pay money every four weeks so that I won’t bleed on my office chair infuriates me. So does the price of tampons.
My favorite heist: I was at a Target. I was menstruating. I placed two large packs of tampons in the basket part of my shopping cart. I paid for my cat food, the cleaning products. I did not pay for the tampons, which were still in the basket, under my purse. When I pushed my cart toward the door, I realized that I had to pee, but I didn’t know where to keep my cart with all my purchases in it. I saw a security guard and the idea thrilled me. No! I wouldn’t do that. I shouldn’t do that. I did that. I pushed my cart to him, asked him to watch my things while I used the bathroom, and he agreed. In the toilet stall, when I wiped after I peed, I noticed that my vulva was wet from excitement. I walked out of the bathroom and a pulse of pleasure radiated between my legs when I saw the security guard keeping watch over my stolen tampons, the ones I’d be pushing into my pussy every day for the next four days.
•
I love heist films. I think about robbing banks regularly. I read about famous thieves with ardor and envy and ambition. My favorites are Parisienne drag queens who sashayed into a diamond store and put everyone there in a corner, like naughty dunces, and then just cracked the display glass and took everything and were never caught. Goddesses.
•
I am at a party with wealthy white people who think they are not wealthy. I ask them if they want to do an art heist. They tell me that Donald Judd’s pieces are worth millions. I say I have seen one cop the entire time I’ve been here, and that we could get away with it. I’m joking, of course, but am I? A handsome guy tells me there are three police officers here and they are not to be fucked with. He says they pull him over twice a week. He’s white, so he is still alive. Everyone wants nothing to do with the heist conversation.
•
D. B. Cooper was never my jam. It’s romantic, I guess, in a straight-white-guy kind of way. Instead of D. B. Cooper’s story, I have always been electrified by Leila Khaled’s. Khaled hijacked a plane in the seventies to bring attention to the Palestinian cause. No one was hurt. But sometimes I imagine that she jumped off the plane and took Palestine with her, and got away with it.
•
I read about kleptomaniacs. I discover that each of them steals because something irreplaceable was stolen from them. That something was taken from them, and they will never forget.
•
I think of my baby vagina bleeding, of how many times I’ve been evicted from homes. I think about wars. And I think of the original wound. I think about how I can never tell anyone what my hometown is, because I don’t have a hometown. I think about how I’m not from anywhere. I think about history.
And I distill my thoughts and focus on that wound. That first loss. I think about Palestine. I think about acres of land being stolen, trees uprooted. I think about the fact of my Palestinian-ness, my name and my grandmother’s name in the big computer at Tel Aviv airport, the record of my existence, because of which, ironically, I cannot return. I t
hink about people who left their homes, packing for two weeks, because they thought they would come back. I think about how many times I have done that, too.
•
The last time I stole was about a month ago. I walked out of a pharmacy holding two bottles of vitamins. I don’t always go through with it. Sometimes I place an item in my bag and think about walking away with it. And at the very last moment, I take it out of my dark bag and into the light, and place it on the register’s conveyor belt.
13
MONUMENT
From Texas, I drove on to Oklahoma City and checked into an old hotel. In my white-walled cavernous hotel room, I heard the news about Alton Sterling, a Black man shot point-blank in the head by police. I watched the video knowing that it would make me rageful.
White men with money sat across the hotel lobby from me in red velvet chairs and sofas, under a painting of white men sitting on sofas. The real white men talked about Donald Trump, and the longer I looked at them, the longer their bodies seemed to be surrounded with red blood.
My hotel was built in the 1800s by enslaved Black people. Now a white bartender was complaining to another bartender, a woman, who had to emotionally massage his pain: he said he’d been captured on film by a news crew and that they’d asked his permission to use his likeness and he’d said yes. But when he watched the news that night he’d been cut out of the segment.
He was very upset telling the other bartender about this.
I thought I was going to be on the news, he said, but they cut me out.
I got cut out of the news.
They cut me.
Out of the news.
Alton Sterling dying, being murdered, every minute on the news. Over and over again. Palestinian children in white burial cloth. Black and brown bodies wishing they weren’t on the news. Mothers wishing they didn’t live in an empire or under the thumb of one, an empire that depends on the myth of their resilience.
•
Before breakfast I walked outside the hotel with my dog, and the valet parker wanted to talk to us. He liked my dog. He reached over to pet her, and I noticed a tattoo on his wrist. I asked him if it was a tattoo in Arabic. He said yes and showed it to me. It said I love. I told him, “It says, ‘I love.’” He said, “It says, ‘my love.’” It said I love. But I nodded. He said an Iraqi friend wrote it for him. An Iraqi guy, he said. He used to work here. I asked him if he heard of the bombing in Baghdad a few days ago. He nodded, sadly. I said the Global North was fucked-up for living in comfort at the expense of the Global South. He said yes, and we acted like our lives were so hard. He shook his head. I wanted to embrace him.
I drove through Bricktown. There was a Flaming Lips Alley. I drove past bars shut down because it was morning, and the fanciest Sonic I have ever seen—a brick building, no drive-through.
I went north and wound my way to the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, to the site of the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995. It was no longer a bombed-out building at all. Years of living in the Middle East, of growing up around sites of trauma and war, made it difficult for me to process memorial sites.
The serenity, cleanliness, sterile slate gray tile, water, life replacing horror.
This site had all of that. It is across the street from a church. There is a small painting of a Jesus who appears biracial, Indigenous and white. He embraces the nineteen children who died in the bombing.
The site was an outdoor memorial, with an artificial and shallow reflective pool where the building once stood. Visitors were encouraged to sit near the field of empty chairs, which were a physical representation of the chairs of the dead. Near this, there was a small section of the original building left. Salvaged granite. It was beautiful. The top of it was devastated, cracked, burned, and bombed. It reached up toward a tree, which was labeled “survivor tree” by the memorial, and up to the sky.
The bombing was the deadliest act of “domestic” terrorism at the time. One hundred and sixty-eight people died; hundreds were injured. The white perpetrators were sentenced to death (Timothy McVeigh) and prison (Terry Nichols). McVeigh was executed three months before 9/11. He remains the only terrorist who received an official execution sentence by U.S. courts.
•
In the shower that morning, I started my period. When I looked down at my feet on the ceramic bathtub, I saw a small blood clot between them, dark brown, a long Y: the shape of the Nile.
•
From Oklahoma City, I drove to St. Louis. As I wound through Missouri, I heard on the radio that there was a city nearby, in the Midwest, whose electricity ran on the skin of women. The city power plant was almost shut down, but strippers in the district kept it on with their donations. When the lights were on at night you could gaze out at the place and understand how women’s bodies literally made the city shimmer.
•
In Springfield, every billboard screamed, “This is a country fair.” One said, “Visit the Uranus fudge factory.” There was a series of Dixie Stampede billboards, and a series of Fantastic Caverns billboards that feature weird Okie people, in strange and obvious costume getups. Basically, people performing whiteness. Then miles of grass. The only representation of a person of color I saw for two hundred miles was a giant Cherokee statue outside a travel center back in Eastern Oklahoma. It felt as if I was in a temporary place, the way a carnival sets up and then leaves. That’s what I was getting from this part of America. Outwardly not committed, temporary. There were no homes. I drove past huge trailer-home lots. Nothing was here to stay.
•
Signs along the way:
Leaving Kiowa-Comanche-Apache Reservation
Leaving Sac and Fox Nation
No sign welcoming drivers to the nations and reservations, which I loved. You are not welcome here. We’ll let you know when you’re wanted, which is never.
As I drove I remembered the story inside Leslie Marmon Silko’s 1977 classic, Ceremony, about a Native man who returns from World War II, and the ways his trauma was healed by Native history and folklore. In one section of the book, a group of Indigenous American witches hold a contest hundreds of years ago about who can cast the best spell or create the best ceremony. And the one that does is the one that calls the white people over, the one that predicts colonizers. It’s always been such a hair-raising and terrifying idea, one that places power back in the hands of the oppressed, as if to say to the colonizer, “We sent for you.”
I was pulled over by a Missouri police officer for speeding. There was a larger SUV going the same exact speed as I was, but I was the one who got pulled over and my hair was extra frizzy and big this day. The cop approached my car very gingerly—he was slim, pale, and short, and he wore a wide-brim hat. As soon as he saw my face, his body language changed. If I seemed like a light-skinned woman of color from behind, I seemed like a white woman from the front. My dog climbed up on the window frame, and the cop asked if she was friendly. I said she was very friendly. He asked for my license and registration. I reached into my bag. I brought out my wallet. I leaned over and gave him my license. At no point did he seem threatened or pull a gun on me or kill me. I even asked if he could give me a warning. I was going 86 in a 70. I understood my privilege and actually requested a warning. He said I was receiving a citation because 86 was too high for a warning, but his inflection was apologetic. He gave me my ticket, which said I was going 85. I went along my way, alive. In one piece.
•
From my notes the next morning:
Philando Castile was shot dead yesterday in a routine traffic stop. He’d been stopped forty-six times up until that point. He paid off every single citation. The police officer shot him anyway. I walk around Soulard and go to the farmers’ market. An elderly man wants me to sit with him to talk about my dog, so I do. On the way into St. Louis there were signs: PASS WITH CARE. My fat Arab body continues to pass for white.
14
INSIDE THE YELLOW LINE
Just after New Year’s of 2
005, my younger brother, R, then a senior at the University of Maryland, came home to D.C. after visiting our parents in Kuwait. The security people at Dulles Airport detained and questioned him for hours, then told him he was a deportable alien. He had two weeks to surrender to authorities. Once he did, he was sent to a jail in Virginia.
A few days after his imprisonment, I got an email from his lawyer that said he needed contact lens solution. I rushed out and bought it, sent it off with his prisoner ID number on the envelope, went home, and spent the rest of the day in bed.
Unlike my brother, I was born in the U.S. and never had to work for my little blue passport. My Egyptian/Palestinian family did; they all took tests and held little flags and swore to do or not do things—all but my brother, who was too flaky at eighteen to fill out the proper forms or take buses to the right offices. He was left behind in our family’s Becoming American journey. In 2001, he was living with students who sold pot. When they got busted, he went to jail for five days and did a few dozen hours of community service. And he was being deported four years later because that had been “a crime of moral turpitude.”
My brother called me collect, and I got up the courage to ask him what the jail in Virginia looked like.
“They let us congregate for religious reasons inside a small strip. They seal it off with yellow tape. You can pray or talk inside the yellow line.”
A few days later, my father called me in a panic.
“Your brother is turning into a fundamentalist,” he said.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”