Love Is an Ex-Country

by Randa Jarrar

  Oaxaca 3

  My son lied and said he could reach the bottom of the ocean. He was ten, and I had taken us to San Agustinillo, a beach town on the coast of Oaxaca. That same year, Aura Goldman drowned a few miles up from the beach where we swam. He said he could reach the bottom, so I swam out to him, but then neither of us could reach the bottom. The tide kept pulling us out. By the shore was a small chapel made of white stone, the virgin of Guadalupe inside it, painted half blue, mourning her son and bowing her head to the god who coerced her to have his child. That’s why I’ve always related to her. My son and I then were being pulled out by the tide, and I began pushing him forward, hoping he’d make it to shore. Finally, I saw a couple on the sand. I’d noticed them earlier—they’d been speaking Hebrew to each other. From the water, I shouted for help, and the couple ran, fast, and got help. They returned with two village men who swam out to my son and me on their boards and carried us to shore. I thanked the Israeli couple and held my kid on the sand.

  Istanbul 3

  Masha Allah! This is what thin women screeched when they saw me walk past, my size 22 body filling every thread of my blouse and leggings. They laughed when I ate a sandwich outside a restaurant. They only did this when I was alone—when the white women I was staying with walked through Istiklal Street with me, no one said a thing, did a thing. I was invisible then. The solo fat woman traveler in Istanbul is a terrorist. She shocks passersby, and because they can’t cry, they laugh.

  Marbella 7

  Stop re-ly-ing on that bawwww-dy! This is a judge’s musically pronounced catchphrase on RuPaul’s Drag Race, a reality TV show that pits drag queens against each other in weekly challenges. It is a mash-up of Project Runway and America’s Next Top Model, and Ru got to be Tyra, Heidi, and Tim Gunn all at once. Stop re-ly-ing on that bawwww-dy! is what he and his judges will tell contestants who show off their bodies, wearing almost nothing, instead of creating a new look that showcases their fashion aesthetic. If a queen relied on her body, and its own aesthetics, she was in danger of being kicked out, of sashaying away.

  The first time I was turned on by drag was when I was an eleven-year-old, visiting Spain with my family. On the beach, I thought the topless women were men, because I didn’t understand that women could go topless, too. At the hotel room, Madonna’s “Express Yourself” video came on every hour, and I ached at the sight of her in a suit and white socks.

  The year before, I’d watched the video for “Borderline” and twirled round and round in my room. I loved Madonna’s body: her fluorescent shoes, her tummy, her jangling arms jerking off a spray-paint bottle. I twirled round and round, my dress flying up and showing off my panties. I loved doing this. A neighbor boy watched me. Later, he asked me why I liked copying American pop stars. I told him I wasn’t. He said, Then how do you explain showing off your underwear shamelessly? Much, much later, a man in the audience of a talk I was giving with three other Arab women asked us, But isn’t feminism, this reclamation of our bodies—isn’t all that Western? My friend G responded, Sir, it’s not Western to want to be treated equally and to want full rights over our bodies.

  Istanbul 8

  Before I visited Istanbul, I thought cartoon images of the Orient, where skylines sparkled with domes and minarets, were Orientalist and inaccurate. That changed when our airport bus turned a sharp corner and I was confronted with just such a skyline, complete with seagulls and sunset and the glitter of the Bosphorus. My first night, I walked to the water and ate dinner at a seafood bar. In order to arrive there, I passed a cluster of silver anchors, fish heads, stray cats that were mostly orange tabbies, and a fish market. Unlike in Cairo, I was able to sit alone, a woman, and nobody bothered me. I ordered a beer. I drank the beer. I smoked cigarettes. Across the water I saw the Hagia Sophia and a few days later, I was inside. The mosque’s interior was cool and bright. On the walls were murals of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus. The chandeliers that hung down were geometrically placed in grids and the order was beautiful. The mosque also had a resident cat.

  Walking there or to the spice market, men openly stared, assessing my body. It felt as if they were feasting on it. I was uncomfortable with this, since it hadn’t happened at the seafood bar. But from that point on, whenever I traveled alone, men stared.

  The stray dogs of Istanbul were tagged. Each had a plastic yellow tag pierced into its left ear.

  In Istanbul I met L, an electronic music artist, twice. The first time was when he was dressed in linen trousers and a shirt, his head clean-shaven and his feet in sandals. We were on a ferry, and he told me about his work. We were traveling from the European side to the Asian side. We ate stuffed squash flowers and fragrant rice.

  A week later we met again, at the building where I was doing my residency. I had been writing about drag, and the women who ran the residency decided to tell everyone to arrive in drag. Everyone did, or at least arrived ready to be put in makeup, except L. L arrived in a gold dress, legs smooth, gold shoes, a black wig, and makeup. His nails were red and long. His chest was padded. I fed him ice cream while he sat in my lap. He came up to my bedroom with me and we stood in the dark, him expecting me to be dominant, me knowing I could have him and being too afraid to bridge the small physical distance between us. We spent the night with friends on the balcony, and I rubbed his beautiful legs and stroked the arch of his foot in the heels.

  23

  LOVE IS X COUNTRY

  In mid-July 2016, I was drinking tea at an Arab- and queer-owned coffee shop called The Bottom Line in Detroit. I drove here straight from St. Louis, through a thunderstorm. Later, K will take me to a jazz club and D will meet us there and tell us stories about her mother. We will stop at a gas station for cigarettes and the Arab guy will look at all three of us and say, Lebanese, Chaldean, Palestinian, pointing at K, D, and me. K won’t be impressed; she’ll say later that we should’ve gone to the Hot Arab Guy Gas Station two miles away. Detroit was full of white people. Where did they come from? They’ve bought houses and turned them into Airbnbs. The old train station has windows on it now. Glass, real windows.

  The neighbors on the left and the right of K’s house had American flags up. The neighbor on the left, walking her dog, stopped to tell me that she was voting for Trump but that she knew Muslims weren’t bad people. “Look at your family,” she said, pointing at K’s house, and I didn’t correct her, because I consider K family. “You guys are just like everyone else. Hardworking and kind.”

  I didn’t want to talk to her at all, so I said, “Please don’t act welcoming. This is my country.”

  •

  Hillary was officially nominated by the DNC. Everyone that spoke ahead of her in the days leading up to her nomination, especially the people of color—the Khans, Astrid Silva, etc.—were so much more interesting than her. Why, I kept thinking, why would our next president be someone who was married to an ex-president? The ways power in our country remained in a fixed place angered me.

  •

  The morning after the last day of the convention, I remembered again the day my father chased me around the house with a knife. The neighbors didn’t call the police that day. I had to call them myself.

  Why do you remember these old things? my mother has said whenever I’ve reminded her of them, annoyed. There were so many other, happier memories in this house.

  I can’t help but laugh. My mother, the empath.

  •

  Later, when Trump won, I imagined, in a terrifying fever dream, my parents’ neighbors watching as fascist police dragged my father’s Parkinson’s-addled body out of his house, our house. I imagined my son and me back in the basement, where we used to live when he was a baby. This time, he was an adult, and I had to make believe, for the sake of the police, that he was my servant to keep him alive.

  •

  I had almost crossed the entire country, and I felt nowhere near home.

  24

  ELECTION DAZE

  Ann Arbor, Michigan, is where
I was in 2008 when Obama won the election, and it was also where I was in 2016 when Trump won the election. While the town had put out fireworks and parties in 2008, this year, Ann Arbor was eerily quiet, the kind of quiet that every parent knows means something terrible and dangerous is happening. In 2008, I was living with a man who would become my husband. In 2016, I was divorced and dating four people.

  Two days after Trump won, I drove from Detroit to Toronto to do an event at a bookstore. Before leaving town, I stopped at a food co-op to pick up some nuts and water. In the aisles were white people in performance fleece and hiking boots, losing their shit entirely. “He’s going to roll back everything the Democrats did,” one said, panicking. Near the soup aisle, a woman cried, and another woman held her, as they both talked about gay marriage bans. It was happening. The angry layer was finally surfacing in America. I had waited for it in 2001 when we invaded Afghanistan, and waited for it in 2003 when we were invading and bombing Iraq for no reason. I used to sit in cafés in Austin, Texas, before my son got out of school, and watch everyone around me living their lives as usual, and I’d wonder why they weren’t crying when we were actively killing people, including ourselves, in two meaningless wars.

  Now everyone was angry. Everyone was mourning.

  The bridge to Canada was easier to cross than the George Washington in New York. I paid a quick toll and showed my passport and was on my way to Toronto. When I arrived, I parked in front of my friend M’s apartment. M, a Palestinian Canadian lesbian, hosted me while I was in town. Her door had two funny homemade leftover Halloween decals: one said Halal and the other said Haram. She set up a hookah for me and ordered sushi and we ate and talked about Trump, and M, a lawyer, said, “Well, now leftist white people can save us. Isn’t that what they’ve always wanted?” We laughed and drank tea and talked about our mothers.

  In the morning, I met up with my friend F, a Muslim queer woman I’d befriended years before. She’d asked me what I wanted to do, and all I wanted to do was go to a spa and be naked, so that’s what we did. We submerged our bodies in the salt water and cried and talked about ways to survive under Trump. She was a Canadian but still worried. She said we would need provisions for internment camps since Trump would want to instate a Muslim ban. For the camps, we said we would start hoarding water, fabrics, spices, and books. That night, I read in a bookstore run by a brown woman; the audience was full of immigrants and queers and immigrant queers. We held each other in that space and afterward went out for Cuban food, which I’d noticed was being cooked by white teenagers. F and M laughed and told me that there were very few Latinx in Canada. After the meal, we asked our waitress to take a photo of us, but while she did, a white guy at the restaurant counter took a photo of us, too. A woman in hijab told me she had noticed him doing it. So I approached him and asked to see his phone. Terrified of me, he handed it over, and I went through his photos. There were four pictures of us. I deleted them, then deleted them from the deleted folder. I told him to wake up and realize that we weren’t an exotic exhibit for him to record, that he needed to ask permission before doing anything like this. I wanted to smash his phone but handed it back to him, and he remained unapologetic and performed a confused look until we all left the restaurant.

  I didn’t want to go back to America in the morning. I drove anyway, and when I arrived at the border, the patrol officer was an Arab American man named Jallad. That was odd, because it was the last name of my childhood friend, but also because it translated to “he who holds the whip.” It was too on the nose. He was strict, and he asked me to pop my trunk. He wanted to know what I wrote about. He wanted to know why I had Lebanese stamps in my passport. He did not say, “Welcome home!” When he was through, he waved me into the country, and I drove to the Detroit airport, the entire way thinking about how I belonged to a country that employed a person of my own ethnic background to police me. We were policing ourselves. And Trump wasn’t even president yet.

  Months later, at his inauguration, he will use words no president has ever used. I will take them and make a poem out of them.

  Mere hours after I shared the poem, my father texted me. He was proud of the poem. This was the first time he’d been proud of something I published. It took me twenty-three years of writing to make my father proud. And all I needed to do was rework a narcissist’s words.

  25

  HOME

  2016: I made it clear across the nation and was now in Connecticut, visiting my parents for two weeks before heading back. My parents, who thought they’d be safe and sound if they moved to a place like Connecticut. My parents, who do not pass for white.

  When I arrived my mother opened our home’s wooden door and stood there for almost half a minute trying to figure out who I was. She said later she was confused because my face resembled my face as a baby, but with makeup on. When she finally understood that it was me, she laughed and sobbed. It was the first nice surprise I’d ever given my parents at that house. All my surprises there had been awful—me sneaking out of the house, me being pregnant and eighteen, me, two years later, announcing I was moving to Texas with my baby.

  My dad stood in the hallway, his face beet red, giggling at my surprise. I hugged him, and he kept repeating, “I miss you. I love you so much.”

  Sometimes, in my escape from being a mother, I became a daughter, fully. The feeling resembled that of moving house. Instead of inhabiting a home where I was in charge of another person, I inhabited a home where I was the one cared for. At least, that’s the wish, the desire. As my parents aged, I recognized that these homes would begin to fit into one another. I would have to mother them while being their daughter. But maybe there was time. Maybe I could still be a child, for a short while longer.

  •

  And so I got stoned a few days later and we all went for a walk, my parents, my sister, my brother, his wife, and their dog. I love being stoned around my mom because she is naturally high—she notices small things like butterflies, flowers, birds, earrings, clouds, plants, smells, cupcakes. She is the most fun person to be stoned around. We looked at vintage things and then crossed the street and I fell, miscalculating the space between the street and the curb and my foot. I fell forward and landed on my knees, and my hands broke the fall but my head bounced against the sidewalk a little. I was wearing a giant fake flower hairpin, and it absorbed my fall—femme power!—but while I was down there, I saw my dad’s shoes and my mom’s shoes and my brother’s shoes as they rushed over to help me. I was completely fine, and I reassured them that I was all good, but they doted on me. My dad decided to walk to the drugstore across the street to get me some things to clean up my bleeding knee. When he got back, he told me to put my foot up on a park bench, and he slowly took out the alcohol pads and wiped my wound. His hands shook while he tried to open the Band-Aid wrapper. I wanted to take it from him and just do everything myself, but in that moment, I understood that he wanted to care for me, and that I had to let him. So I waited as he slowly opened the Band-Aid wrapper and negotiated the small plastic tabs on the adhesive side. That part took a minute or two. Then he finally stuck the Band-Aid on my knee. And there I was, my foot on that park bench, my wound cleaned and dressed, forty years old and thirty-nine years old and thirty-eight years old and thirty-seven years old and thirty-six years old and thirty-five years old and twenty-nine years old and twenty-six years old and sixteen years old and twelve years old and nine years old and five years old and four years old and three years old and a baby, all healed. Completely loved.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Earlier versions of some of these chapters were published in different forms:

  “Bad Muslim,” in BuzzFeed: Reader

  “Biblioclast,” in The Sun

  “Boaters,” in The Rumpus

  “Imagining Myself in Palestine,” in Guernica

  “Inside the Yellow Line,” in The Progressive

  “Loosely Based,” in Utne Reader

  “Love Is X-Country,” in N
asty Women

  “Neither Slave Nor Pharaoh,” in Bitch magazine

  “The Gift,” in Lives: The New York Times Magazine

  “What Love Is” and “Taking the Knife,” in GAY Mag

  I am indebted to these editors for their sensitive comments and suggestions: Roxane Gay, Lisa Factora-Borchers, Tomi Obaro, Samhita Mukhopadhyay, Kate Harding, and Carol Ann Fitzgerald. Many thanks to Alexandra Christie and Jin Auh for their belief in this book, and to my brilliant editor at Catapult, Megha Majumdar, for her smart, kind, precise, and excellent notes and edits. Thanks also to the Lannan Foundation and the Montalvo Arts Center for the space, both literal and creative, that they offered during the making of this book. And to all the friends who keep me company during my ongoing journey: I am so lucky to have such a generous chosen family.

  Thank you.

  RANDA JARRAR is the author of the novel A Map of Home and the collection of stories Him, Me, Muhammad Ali. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Salon, Bitch, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She is a recipient of a Creative Capital Award and an American Book Award, as well as awards and fellowships from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, Hedgebrook, PEN, and others. A professor of creative writing and a performer, Jarrar lives in Los Angeles.

  This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of experiences over time. Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

  Copyright © 2021 by Randa Jarrar

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-948226-58-5

  Jacket design by Adalis Martinez