Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  After the Quran was fully transcribed, the caliph ordered that all manuscripts containing any verses or excerpts from the Quran be burned, so that there would be only one official version.

  I always wondered how the versions learned by heart, the ones that differed from the official Quran, could be destroyed. How do you erase memory?

  •

  In my biblioclast fantasy, I order every single copy of my book from bookstores and warehouses around the country.

  Then the tricky part: the book is in several public and college libraries. This is when things get illegal.

  I check out every single copy of my book through interlibrary loans, and if that’s not possible, I fly out to the libraries and steal the copies. If I can’t steal the copies, I set fire to them in the library bathrooms and try to escape before the fire alarm goes off.

  Now the expensive part: the copies of my book in China, in Taiwan, in Italy, in Germany, in Palestine. I ask readers for help burning the books, but they can only do so much. So I purchase a multicity plane ticket:

  FAT–Berlin–Rome–Beijing–Taipei–AUS

  I don’t bother to fly to Tel Aviv. I call a friend of mine, a journalist, and she rounds up all the Hebrew copies and burns them in front of a settlement that had once burned down her family’s olive orchard, and she takes photos of the whole thing so we can show proof to my father that those copies are burned.

  I go on my multicity trip. In Berlin, I snort coke and go clubbing for forty-two hours straight, and at the end of it, I drunkenly collect all the German copies of my book in a sack and carry it onto a flight to Rome, where I drink lots of espresso and do the same thing all over again. I find every copy of my book in China, and in Taiwan, too. I take all these copies with me on a flight from Taipei to Austin.

  When I arrive in Austin, I get nostalgic, because I can’t afford to live there anymore. The airport is full of transplants, cowboy-boot-wearing women who don’t deserve to live there. I rent a car and drive twenty miles to Kyle, Texas; go to the post office where the rest of the books wait for me; and take them all to a field a few miles out of town by the five-mile dam where my son and I used to swim because it was free. I pile the books into a kind of pyre, a paper ziggurat. In my hand I carry long, dramatic matches. My best friend stands with me and asks me if I’m sure I want to do this, and I say I do, because despite everything I love my dad. Then I light a match and touch its bald, burning red head to the base of the pyre.

  The books go up in blue flames. The flames last for a while. The biblioclasm gives me a small bibliogasm. I take pictures with my iPhone and text them to my mother so she can show them to my father. After an hour of burning, I check my email on my iPhone. I have three junk emails from Netflix, PEN America, and Change.org.

  A few minutes later, my mother texts and says that my father wants to know if I also deleted all the files of the book on my computer.

  I sprint to my house in California from the field in Texas, and a few minutes later pull up all the files on my laptop. I delete them. Then I find the novel files I had sent myself as backups in 2001, 2003, 2004, 2005. I delete those, too. Every single trace of my first novel is deleted.

  •

  In 2003, after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, fires ravaged the Iraqi National Library and Archive, the Library of Religious Endowments, the library of the University of Baghdad’s college of fine arts, and one called House of Wisdom. The buildings were bombed or set aflame by looters. Iraq had lost its libraries in many wars before; in the thirteenth century, all of Iraq’s libraries were burned down, including the original House of Wisdom. It was said that the water of the Tigris River ran indigo with the ink of books that had been hurled into it.

  •

  My first book is completely erased.

  That’s when I imagine my father arriving at my rented bungalow to tell me he loves me again. We hug. After we hug, he tells me he noticed, while we were hugging, that I have back rolls, and that my skin is dry, and that, if I really loved him, I would lose weight.

  Shrink.

  Become smaller and smaller.

  And that’s when I have to admit to myself that my father might want me to disappear. He might want to erase me. To throw me and not my book onto the pyre.

  •

  In 1948, Israeli soldiers ransacked Palestinian homes and looted family libraries. Sixty thousand books and manuscripts were stolen. The eight thousand books that remain are now housed at the National Library of Israel. The other fifty-two thousand books were burned or recycled. My father was burned—no, born!—in 1950, and he grew up in the West Bank. Like all Palestinians, his biggest crime was his birth, and the sentence of this crime is disappearance. The main problem with Palestinians is that they continue to exist.

  In 2007, the Hamas-run Ministry of Education threatened to burn a collection of Palestinian folklore because it was pornographic. But Palestinians protested this decision, saying the folktales were sometimes crude, but they were also a cultural treasure. They’d been transmitted orally for centuries before being written down. They needed to be preserved. The ministry swiftly revoked the decision to set the books aflame.

  •

  Recently I met an elderly artist whose daughter didn’t talk to him for years. We sat together by a natural pool and he told me that he thinks my father wants me to respect him. It began to rain. He told me that sometimes we have to apologize to the people who wronged us.

  Another man, M, told me that having a father is better than not having a father. His own father died six years ago.

  Then a good friend of mine lost her father.

  And that is when I decided to contact my father—for real—to see if he still wants me to burn my books.

  He doesn’t.

  I fly out to New York to see him, and when we meet, I apologize. I tell him I’m sorry that I hurt him. We hug. Seven years have passed. We are both on our best behavior. He isn’t critical of me; however, he doesn’t apologize in return. I ask if we can agree not to talk about the hurtful things we’ve said and done in the past. Yes, he says, let’s not mention the times you’ve shamed and disappointed me. He laughs, and I try to laugh, too.

  That afternoon we go for a walk and stop at the shop that carries his favorite Arabic newspaper. He buys it, and I hug him again while he holds the newspaper that is written in his mother tongue.

  My father is now a man with Parkinson’s, his body slightly curled downward, his socks pulled up too high, his mustache completely white. Seeing him this changed, this transformed, stings. And I finally understand that I need to let go of my old image of my father—the man who is a tyrant, bully, and biblioclast. Because that man no longer exists.

  18

  YES AGAIN, GODDESS

  This is the way I had originally ended that last chapter:

  My first book is completely erased.

  That’s when I imagine my father arriving at my rented bungalow to tell me he loves me again. We hug. After we hug, he tells me he noticed, while we were hugging, that I have back rolls, and that my skin is dry, and that, if I really loved him, I would lose weight.

  Shrink.

  Become smaller and smaller.

  And that’s when I have to admit to myself that my father might want me to disappear. He might want to erase me. To throw me and not my book onto the pyre.

  I go to my son’s room. He has a copy of my novel that I gave him when he was twelve years old. I find it on his desk. I take it out to the living room, where my father is standing, and I throw it at him. And this makes him dissolve from my life completely, sending him back to his own house. All that remains of him is a single facial hair, which floats, left, and then right, and back again, down to the wood floor, a hair that I will mop up eventually and flush down the drain, water finally putting out the origins of fire.

  I had written it that way because I hadn’t yet reached out to him, hadn’t yet found that small space inside me to forgive him.

  •


  M, my young ex-lover, had been the one who’d encouraged me to contact my father. He said that one of us was going to have to bend, and that since I was the younger one, it would have to be me. I resisted this for a short while. Then I put feelers out to my mother and my brother and sister, to see if they thought he’d be open to it.

  During this time, I also met an Egyptian man who was interested in kink.

  The shift from M to this other man is important because the other man is the one that held my hand over the threshold of becoming dominant in bed. M helped—by opening me up to role-play, kinky acts such as adult nursing, ball hitting, flogging, and more.

  I mention this here, while I write about my father, because I am aware that, for myself in particular, my father’s fear of my sexuality, his instructions to me to remain a virgin, his expectations of my femininity or what he perceived as a lack thereof—all of these were twinned, in practice, with his abuse of me. For sixteen years, he hit me. My first memory is of him taking me out of bed when I was eighteen months old, placing me on the floor behind the living room couch, and hitting me. Sexuality, pain, love, obedience, hurt: all are woven together in the loom that is my body, that is my skin and my heart.

  •

  In 2007, my father visited me in Michigan with my mother. My sister and brother also met us there, and we all stayed at my house, a place I was renting for an amount below market thanks to a friend of a friend, who had helped me find it. I was in Michigan for graduate school, and the house was a dream—three bedrooms, with an additional writing nook in my room. There was a washer and dryer in the basement. There was a basement. My son was ten when we moved, and it was the first house we ever lived in together that wasn’t my parents’.

  My sister, who was finishing her undergraduate studies at the time, understood what a big deal this was, and she cried when she came up to the second floor of the house and hugged me. She said she was so relieved that I had a home, a place I could write and raise my child. I was thrilled. We held hands and walked downtown and looked at comic books and drank hot chocolate together, and she and my son played with some toys on the living room floor.

  I had received the first payment for my first novel from the publisher, and I spent it on a perfect mattress and a wooden sleigh bed. They arrived the day before my parents did. My son and I put clean sheets on for my parents and napped in the bed. The next day, they showed up and nothing in the house was good enough for my dad. Every hotel and motel in the area was sold out thanks to a football game—a sport my family never watched or talked about. My parents were stuck in my house. At some point, my father told me I was fat and that I would probably be immobile by the age of fifty. I cried and left.

  My father grew up in a shack on the side of a mountain, in the West Bank, and fled at age seventeen. He lived in a hostel in Jordan and smoked cigarettes for a year. When the Egyptian president made education free to all exiled Palestinians, my father joined his brother in Alexandria, where he lived and studied engineering in the late sixties and through the seventies. He met famous poets and novelists and playwrights, wrote poetry, and wooed my knotty-haired mama, a soft-spoken pianist.

  In one of our family photos, we are at a café in Alexandria and my baba is presenting my diapered body to Tawfiq el-Hakim, the Arab world’s Molière, Chekhov, Proust, and Ibsen all rolled into one. Years later, when I enrolled in a Middle Eastern studies program, I discovered that el-Hakim was a huge misogynist whose female characters have no agency and no positive traits. I wanted to call my father and tell him this but was afraid he would hang up on me.

  My father always wanted me to be a writer. When I showed promise in dance and music, he shook his head and said, “Who wants to be a singer when you can be a novelist?” I did, but that didn’t matter. I was meant to write a novel about the history of my family and our struggles. That’s what my father always told me.

  In the photo, his body was still svelte and solid. My father had, alongside his outward obsession with writers, a secret obsession with his body. He spent my childhood on diets and exercise regimens. When I was a child, he went off to “fat farms” and came back pounds slimmer. I thought all men were like this until I left home. Even after I succeeded at writing and publishing, my father was obsessed with my size.

  •

  During their visit to my new house in Michigan, I took my father and mother to a public library whose architecture I was sure my father would admire. We sat at a table and flipped through journals, and he asked me if I saw myself as beautiful. When I said I did, he told me I was wrong. I got up and left in tears. A week later, I saw a man my father’s age sitting in the same seat by the new-fiction collection. I had to resist the urge to ask him if he thought I was pretty.

  After my family left the house, peace came over me again.

  But later that month, I found one of my dad’s white undershirts in the basement, where I did my laundry. I was so angry with him that I felt a seething hatred, and I threw the shirt on the basement floor. I stomped on it, spat on it, picked it up and ripped it at the sleeves. I threw it back down and spat on it and stood on it. I wanted to be the one beating him up in a basement. I wanted to win, to be strong, to overpower all his judgments and violence and pain.

  A little over ten years later, I was back in my parents’ home, standing in their basement and doing a load of my parents’ laundry. I was standing right by the water heater, right by the spot where my father had beaten me twenty-four years earlier. He was upstairs now, his left leg slightly shaking, his bones bruised from his disease, his hands curled in his lap. I laundered his undershirts and socks and my mother’s things happily, wanting to help. For some reason, there was a baseball bat just a couple of feet from the washing machine. I wanted to feel something, anger, bitterness, revenge, self-pity—anything at all. But all I could feel was sadness, both for the man my father used to be and for the powerless girl I once was. It was perhaps the seven years that I spent away from him that helped me reach this destination in myself. The fact that by the end of the seven years, every cell in each of our bodies had turned and changed, so that not a single part of him had ever beaten me, and not a single part of myself had ever been beaten.

  19

  BAD MUSLIM

  I’d been in bed with a married man when I realized that my own marriage was over.

  I was leaning over his body when an odd feeling of nostalgia took hold of me. It was a bit too soon to be nostalgic, but I couldn’t help it, my sense of nostalgia: it was genetic. For a moment, I thought of how my husband and I used to spend hours at this, when we first met, of how my husband hadn’t had sex with me in over a year. And I thought, looking down at the married man, this is what people talk about when they say that as soon as you start thinking about the beginning of a relationship, you’ve reached the end.

  I had spent the afternoon with the married man by a lake. The lake glittered, and the married man told me, as we sat by a fire at the edge of the lake, that he had heard the lake was so deep that it could flood the entire state. He made a motion with his hands to show how deep into the earth the lake was; late that night, he made that same gesture as his fingers went in and out of me.

  There were casinos near the lake, and before his hands went in and out of me, he said he wanted to gamble. I walked through a small wood and to the hotel near my cabin, and I saw him at the bar of the hotel casino; he was already very drunk. I told him I wasn’t sure I would gamble, but that I would watch him. He wanted to know why I didn’t want to gamble, and I told him it was the last thing forbidden in Islam that I hadn’t broken, the only thing I had left to call myself a Muslim by. I ate pork, didn’t pray, never fasted Ramadan, and had sex. But gambling, I said, I had never gambled.

  This must have turned the married man on, because he became determined that I should gamble. He put his hands on my shoulders and said, “We are going to gamble.”

  I had lied to him about never gambling. I had gambled with my best friend in Louisian
a; five of us had driven out there from Texas in 2005 and for her bachelorette party we gambled all night, and then slept in a double motel room, drunk.

  I had lied to him because I knew it would turn him on, the notion of taking my gambler cherry, stripping me of being a Muslim. And it worked. He gave the blackjack dealer two hundred dollars and split the chips into two piles, pushing one of the piles to me. I had never played blackjack—that part was true—but he taught me patiently. He told me when to hit and when to stay. The dealer, a middle-aged brunette named Jill, assumed we were a couple. I told her we were in town for our twelfth anniversary. The married man glanced at me; he played along.

  When we ran out of chips, he put another hundred on the table, split the chips again.

  The casino played the Rolling Stones, and I said, I fucking hate this song. I want to get what I want.

  The truth was, though I had gambled before, I had never cheated on a husband. I had been living without regular sex for years, and yet, I had never cheated. Zina was the Arabic word in the Quran for adultery. It was a beautiful word, the z so final, the a at the end feminine, bewitching. So though I didn’t pop my gambler cherry that night, I popped my infidelity cherry; my zina cherry.

  When I got blackjack, the married man leaned in and kissed me. He loved that I was being a bad Muslim.

  •

  When I was a child, I flared up with fevers and strep at least once or twice a year. My mother would come to my bed and put cold compresses on my forehead and then pat me with the back of her hand, her wrists encircled with bracelets her father had given her when she had graduated from college—the first woman in her family to do so. She would pet my forehead and read, in a whisper, verses from the Quran. My favorite was the verse about envy and evil, with its images of witches blowing on knots. She read the verse over and over, soothing my fever and my skin, nursing me back to health.