Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  He asked me, “What is the name of your father? And what is the name of your father’s father?”

  My father and I at that point hadn’t spoken in four years. We would not speak for another three.

  I gave the redhead the names he’d asked. He noted something on a piece of paper and asked me where my father was from. My father was born in 1950, when the West Bank was part of Jordan, so I told the redhead that my father was a Jordanian American.

  “So, he is from Jordania?” the redhead said, pronouncing the word Jordan wrong. I had no idea how someone could mispronounce a place they shared a border with, but Israel often strikes me as a place that doesn’t want to believe where it actually is on the map.

  I said that technically, yes, he was. “Where was he born?” he said, and, cornered, I told the redhead that my father had been born in Jenin. He noted something else on a piece of paper, gave it to a man who seemed like a superior, and asked me to go to another room in an opposite corner. When I said that I was a writer and an American citizen, born in Chicago, he shrugged and instructed me, again, to go to the room in the opposite corner.

  I went to the room, and I waited.

  My father had said in an email that, by writing about sex in my novel so shamelessly, I had disregarded the legacy of my Palestinian family, which, he claimed, had defeated Napoleon.

  I always thought he was being dramatic about Napoleon, but eventually I looked it up. In a book titled Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus 1700–1900, I found the Jarrar family, and I found Napoleon. The emperor’s attempt to conquer Palestine had been stopped short in 1799, and an ancestor of mine named Shaykh Yousef Jarrar, the mayor of Jenin, had written a poem “in which he exhorted his fellow leaders . . . to unite under one banner against the French forces.” I’d never heard of this poet-warrior ancestor before, but I had given my son the middle name Yousef, as if by instinct.

  A woman wearing seven rings on her fingers, and a lot of blue eye makeup caked around her eyes, emerged from a small interrogation room and asked me to join her. She told me to close the door behind me. The room was the size of a walk-in closet, and I knew it had been built to intimidate travelers. The woman said she liked my necklace, and we spoke about jewelry for a few minutes. I admired one of her rings in particular, and she smiled and said it was from Egypt. She then swiped my passport and asked me about my parents’ names, again. This time, I told her I was not in communication with my father, and that I was an American citizen, and a writer. She did not seem to care about this information one way or the other, and she spoke my grandmother’s name. I hadn’t heard my grandmother’s name in years. She had died in the early eighties. I told the officer this, and she nodded, and she gave me the names of many of my ancestors. I wanted to ask her for her grandmother’s name, but I gave her the name of my friend in Jerusalem and my Israeli publisher in Or Yehuda instead.

  “Your publisher?” she said, confused, and I said, yes, my book had been translated into Hebrew and published in Israel. I could see her computer screen. She plugged in my publisher’s name and my friend’s, in Hebrew, and their addresses came up. The program she was using looked clunky and old, but it held information on every citizen in Israel. At this point, things began to feel Kafkaesque.

  She said that there was a Palestinian ID attached to my name. I told her I had no such ID. She said that I had entered the West Bank with the ID in 1993, and that they had record of the entry. She said that this would be a problem. When I tried to plead my case, she asked me to put my right finger on a glowing red scanner. Then my left finger. She took my photograph and asked me to go back to the first waiting room. When I asked her what I should expect, she said she wasn’t sure.

  Half an hour later, a group of teenage guards took me to baggage claim. I asked them if I could speak to someone from the American embassy, or the consulate, and they nodded, smirking. A few minutes later, I asked them what we were doing there, and they said we needed to find my bag. I said that my carry-on bag was my only bag, and they seemed shocked. I travel a lot, I told them, which they seemed to find suspicious. They asked me why, and I said I was a writer. They frowned at me. We waited for more guards. It must have been their shift change. The baggage claim was deserted. In the corner, a few guards were giving each other massages. The guards I was waiting with gave each other high fives and chatted about teenage stuff. I kept asking what we were waiting for, and they ignored me.

  Finally, they took me to a room in the corner of the baggage-claim area. It was becoming clear to me that at Ben Gurion, unjust things happened in corners. The guards asked me to open my bags. I did as I was told. I noted that the room was filthy. The Israelis were concerned with showing a clean and gleaming exterior—the floors of the airport outside shone—but for suspected threats and people like myself, behind closed doors, tucked away in dirty corners, they hadn’t bothered. A very butch young woman asked me to follow her. She led me to yet another room, where the walls were faded and filthy, and the floor was covered in dirty carpet, littered with small bits of paper and hair clips. It reeked of intimidation, and of humiliation.

  I don’t believe in hokey things such as souls or spirits, but I could sense a deeply disturbing feeling in the room. There, though I was not strip-searched, the young guard poked and searched every millimeter of my clothes and underclothes. I tried to keep myself distracted, so I wouldn’t weep. I tried to keep my spirits up. I did not want to allow these teenagers to rob me of my dignity.

  When I came out of the room, a boy with pimples, who looked like he was my son’s age, was going through my clothes. Above him hung a tourist poster for the Dead Sea. The poster read: The Dead Sea; Where Time Seems to Stand Still. I had been in Ben Gurion for over two hours and knew the feeling. It was as if I existed outside of time, suspended in a strange molasses of interrogation.

  When he was done checking all my clothes, he asked me if I needed any help repacking the bag. I said that I didn’t, and that I had a system for packing. “You have a system?” he shouted. I told him this was an American idiom. Still, he watched me closely as I packed.

  I was worn down and angry. The teenagers escorted me back to the waiting room, the Arab Room, where there was now a new guard. A few people were gone, and a few new people had arrived, but it was still an Arab Room.

  The woman with all the rings walked in with my passport in her hand and said that she was sorry, but that I was not allowed to enter Israel. She said she had spoken to her supervisor, and that he had decided that I was not to enter. When I asked her if I could speak to him personally, she said she would ask, and she walked away with my passport. I never saw her again, nor did I see the supervisor.

  I called my sister and told her the news. She was devastated. A friend of mine had been waiting in his car outside the airport to drive me to her, and I called him, too. When I told him now that I was being shipped back to the U.S., he said, furious, that he would call his friends at the U.S. consulate. When I called him back, he said that there was nothing they could do, and that I was banned by law from entering Israel because I was considered Palestinian.

  I told a guard that I was a diabetic, and hungry, and an hour later someone wordlessly brought me a sandwich. I began to feel like a prisoner, grateful for a dry bit of bread and cheese. Halfway through the sandwich, I asked the other people in the room if they were hungry. A middle-aged woman in hijab said she was, and I gave her the rest of the sandwich. A large guard appeared over me, hovering, and asked me in Arabic where I was from. I answered reflexively in English, “I am from here. And from California.” He asked me, in Arabic, where I was going after the airport. I said, in English, that I was going to Jerusalem. He walked away and accused me of pretending not to know Arabic. He said the word Arabic hatefully. I followed him and said, in Arabic, “OK, I do speak Arabic. Where do I want to go after this? I want to go to a bar with my friends.” He laughed at me and said I could go to a bar when I got back to America.
<
br />   After a while, I was the last person in the room. It had high stone walls that spanned every floor of the airport, and when I tried to look all the way up, I could not see the ceiling. I felt as if I were trapped in a strange, deep well.

  An elderly man who was not Jewish but who had attempted to make aliyah was put in the room with me. When they told him he was being deported back to the U.S., he said he would not leave. The guard said to him, “I could do this the nice way, or I could do this the not-nice way.” It was ludicrous in more ways than one, to hear a nineteen-year-old speak to an old man that way.

  An hour later, the bearded young man who had originally questioned me at the immigration hall became my guard. When I tried to go to the bathroom, he said I was not allowed. This made me nervous. I had been allowed to go before. I told him so. “Well, it’s different now,” he said.

  “Different how?” I asked. “Am I under detention?”

  He would not answer me. I told him that I was an American citizen and that I demanded to know whether or not I was under detention. He closed his eyes, then opened them, and said, reluctantly, “Yes.”

  I lost it. I demanded to see someone from the embassy or the consulate. He ignored me. I said that he needed to take me to the bathroom. He said no. I lifted up my dress and pretended to squat, and I shouted, “Fine, then I will go to the bathroom right here!”

  He became angry and shouted to another guard to take me to the bathroom. When she said she couldn’t, he took me himself. He insisted on the gender-neutral handicapped toilet, and he waited outside the stall. When I was done, he checked the stall after me, to make sure that I had not concocted a bomb out of my pubic hair. I laughed at him, and he angrily took me back to the detention room.

  I waited two more hours. Whenever a guard came into the room, I would ask him what was going on with my passport, and what I could expect. The guard would look down at me and sneer, “You have to wait. You have to wait.” When I told him I had been waiting for hours, he only repeated, “You have to wait.” My wait felt interminable. In his speech to the UN, Mahmoud Abbas quoted the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish’s poem “State of Siege.” He read, “Standing here. Sitting here. Always here. / Eternally here, / we have one aim and one aim only: to continue to be.” And he added, “And we shall be.” The state of sitting, of standing, of waiting, is the principal state of the Palestinian; it is the state of the refugee, of the oppressed, of the outsider, of the writer.

  Eventually, two female guards came to tell me what time I would board the flight back to the U.S. When they did, I burst into tears. I had been holding out hope, right to the last. After they left, I was stuck with the male guard again, the one who had picked up the phone in the immigration booth.

  I asked him if I could board a flight elsewhere—to Amman, or Cairo, even Paris. I wanted to go somewhere, at least, even if I couldn’t see my sister.

  “No,” he said. “You have to go back from where you came.”

  I said that this was unacceptable, and that I wanted the choice to go elsewhere.

  This time, he shouted it. “No. You must go back from where you came.”

  “Are you from The Lord of the Rings?” I said.

  He narrowed his eyes at me and snapped, “Come with me.” He made me stand in a hallway for twenty minutes, as punishment. I made fun of his long eyelashes. I asked him if he was related to Snuffleupagus. He ignored me.

  An hour or so passed, and a guard came and eventually escorted me to flight 797, back to the U.S. We bypassed security, avoiding a scene, and when we got to the airplane the guard gave my passport to the flight attendant, an American.

  “Do not give her back her passport until you arrive in America,” he said.

  She squinted at him, confused. “What do you mean?”

  “This woman was denied entry and must return to the United States. Do not give her this passport until you have left Israel and arrived in America.”

  She looked at me and nodded, frowning.

  I went to my seat, which was in the middle of the middle row, the worst place to sit on a twelve-hour flight.

  The flight attendant walked over and handed me my passport. “Um, here you go,” she said, and I laughed and thanked her.

  Holding my passport again on that almost-empty plane, I understood, in a way, how lucky I had been. The passport hadn’t been confiscated. I was not imprisoned. And yet, this was how Israel treated someone with a voice and American citizenship. There are today, held without charge in the Israeli military detention system, hundreds of Palestinian children. There are reports of a systematic pattern of ill treatment toward them. Silenced and oppressed, these prisoners have little recourse. In the news recently I saw that two thousand of these prisoners have resorted to the last form of protest left to them: they have collectively gone on hunger strike.

  I flipped through the passport and, surprised, found that the officials had left a stamp on it. The stamp was massive and read, in English and Hebrew, Ben Gurion Airport ENTRY DENIED. I stared at it for a few minutes. Then, I saw it: the picture of the ship I had seen eight hours earlier, that I had thought was a sign of good luck.

  I remembered how, when I first met my ex’s stepmother in Texas, we had bonded over her collection of costume jewelry. A lot of the pieces were from her first husband, whom she had divorced before meeting my then-father-in-law. I noticed that many of the pieces he’d given her had imagery of boats and ships. When I pointed that out to her, she had raised her wine glass and said, “You’re right! He was shippin’ me out.” And that’s what had happened to me. I had been shipped out.

  Two massive, bald-headed men sat on either side of me. If I believed the conspiracies, I would have thought those guys were Mossad. But it was obvious before long, from the way they blasted terrible club music on their earphones and, later, passed out, that they were just some doofuses on their way to America. In an attempt to be polite and not touch the men around me, I folded my arms, but this became terribly uncomfortable after a while. A few hours into our flight, I decided that I was tired of being polite and so I put both my arms down. Minutes later, the man on my right began to jab my elbow. I ignored him and feigned sleep. He jabbed and jabbed.

  Finally, I turned to him, my arm firmly on the armrest, and said, “I get it.”

  He looked at me, embarrassed.

  “I really get it. But I am keeping this armrest. I am not moving. I will keep my arm here for the rest of the flight,” I said. And I did.

  17

  BIBLIOCLAST

  My father. He wanted me to be a writer, but when I became one, he didn’t like what I wrote.

  I didn’t speak to him for almost seven years after I published my first novel, which he hated and called pornography: it features lots of teenage sex and masturbation, as well as an unsavory portrayal of a narcissistic and selfish father. He insisted it was the sex scenes that offended him—and not the depiction of the father character, who had been very, very loosely based on him. My father said he would only speak to me again if I publicly burned every single copy of my book. I love imagining myself doing this, my transformation from rejected pornographer to redeemed daughter and biblioclast.

  •

  Most texts are burned because they are deemed, by one religious group or another, as being heretical.

  Torah scrolls were burned by ancient Romans. The Talmud was burned in medieval France. The Quran was burned in the United States. In 2010 a pastor named Terry Jones threatened to burn two hundred Qurans on the ninth anniversary of 9/11. He didn’t do it, but dozens of Qurans were set on fire on September 11 by other people (all men; biblioclasts are overwhelmingly male).

  My novel was a heretical text, too—in our household, my father was God, and his word was Truth, and anyone who talked back to him, or even just interrupted him during breakfast, was a heretic whose book needed to be burned.

  •

  I’ve started indulging in this fantasy of myself as a biblioclast. Here i
s what I imagine:

  I round up all the copies of the book in my house. I have two paperbacks in my office, six hardcovers in an old chest, and two advance reader copies on a shelf in the dining room. If it is summer in my imagination, I burn them in my backyard in the barbecue pit; if it is winter, I burn them in my fireplace.

  Next I begin to contact readers who might have copies. I ask them to mail all the copies to a post office box in Kyle, Texas—the town in which I began writing the novel, when I lived in a trailer for three hundred dollars a month (including all utilities). The readers, baffled, comply, because I explicitly state to them how important it is for my father that I do this. Friends who have heard my complaints about my father—that he was so strict I wasn’t allowed to socialize; that he struck me; that he often made me feel as if my large body was unworthy of love—don’t understand why I would burn all my books for him. I tell them that my father did his best to love me; that he praised my writing; that he took me on a trip to New York City when I was thirteen; that he used to sing with me and laugh at my jokes. I tell my friends that now, as I near the age of forty, and work in a place where I am a minority, my empathy for him has deepened, that I can finally imagine what it must have been like for him, a Palestinian, to immigrate to the U.S. and work at a job where he was the only Arab, perhaps the only person of color. I tell them that I miss my father, and it becomes a bit easier for them to understand.

  •

  The Quran was orally passed on in the years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, and it was not written down until two decades later (between 650 and 656). In Arabic the slightest mispronunciation can change the meaning of a word entirely. (When my father was a boy and heard the muezzin’s call to prayer, “Hayya ala salaa,” he thought the word hayya, which means come, was the same as the word hayya, which means snake, and so he would imagine a snake on a prayer rug, which confused him greatly.)