life, lyrically

Early Podcasting Attempts

2010-12-30T01:58:00.008-05:00

I've wanted to podcast for a very long time, and have come up with multiple ideas over the years...failing of course, to pursue any of them. For a while, I was going to read, in one thousand and one nights, the desperate chronicles of Scheherezade by the same name. I did not take into account the facts that, a)1001 nights is a hell of a commitment, and b)that the edition I had was an antiquated one that put even me to sleep, and that c)I had a dramatic inflection not at all suited to reading fiction, being both monotone and suicidal in its affect. Other ideas included doing an audio blog instead of just writing out these reflections, and I'm sure I came up with other ideas that I did nothing at all to pursue.

But I keep returning to the idea of audio fiction. I am a lover of the short story, in both audio and written formats, and habitually listed to Miette (www.miettecast.com) and the roster of actors who read for PRI's Selected Shorts (www.pri.org/selected-shorts.html).

I asked a couple of actor friends whether they would be interested in reading with me, and got their buy-in. I talked about it with non-actor friends, who were interested in reading with me, and gave their buy-in. All that remained was for me to curate the selection of short stories, and to begin with handling the logistics. I curated, and had a healthy list to start with, thinking that if I could keep a few weeks ahead, I would be fine and could continue adding selections from my reading life.

My friend Greg, one of the aforementioned actor friends, and a tumblr person (who you can find hugging panthers here), eventually settled for a few months in New York, and we decided to make our first attempt at an audio podcast. He came over to record our first short story. I set up GarageBand, with which I had only a passing, wary familiarity, and a microphone I had borrowed from a workmate until I could invest in my own (if this passion, unlike many passing others, stuck).

We riffled through a few of my anthologies, and, confronted with too many choices for him to pick from, I picked one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories, Cathedral. Greg began to read it, and didn't like it quite so much, the sentences being too short for his taste and therefore requiring much in the way of starting and stopping.

We tried a few others, but ran into trouble with trying to set down more than 30 minutes of audio fiction without rehearsing, and in Greg's case, without familiarity with the story. Eventually, boredom beat dedication, and we abandoned (at least for the night), the quest for adding our own brand of audio fiction to the vast world of the Internet.

Greg then had the idea that we could just podcast about the world at large, and that people, presumably all over America and the world, would find this both intriguing and worth following religiously. I was unsure of our mass market appeal, but being that it was late and there was not much else to do, agreed to record one episode. Here's how it went down.

I seem to find hilarious anything and everything Greg has to express. Needless to say, I don't think that this is quite as general interest as Greg was hoping for. Please stay tuned for such time as we can get the audio fiction podcast up and running! Any and all motivation is accepted, up to and including monetary contributions.
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Thoughts from the Battlefield: Chronicles of a Free Gotham Writing Class

2010-11-08T15:09:00.008-05:00

So I went to a free Gotham writing class today, and it happened to focus on memoir writing, which I didn’t know. And then I realized that all I do with this blog, ever, is write a disjointed form of memoir. So I thought I’d type up two of the assignments that we were given. The first assignment was to write our life stories in five sentences. Here’s mine, and I think it is probably the clearest indicator of the melancholy nature of much of my writing.

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Mariam Bazeed did not know how she would die, but suspected it might be alone. She’d left her family, and country, and friends years before, and moved across an ocean and a continent. Before that, she’d lived in Cairo, a city she had neither grown up in, nor one she’d gone on to know intimately. Before that, she’d grown up in Kuwait. Before that, she’d been born to aging parents, who died before she’d had the luxury, as most children do, of leaving them.

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A veritable ray of sunshine, aren’t I? What the hell is wrong with me? Anyway, the second assignment is not as self-pitying. In it, we are asked to look back upon a romantic moment from childhood. Here’s mine.

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We all trooped down to the gym, shoes scuffing against the cement in our excitement to be down there. Miss Kay was taking us down so we could learn the Lambada, and this was so beyond the ordinariness of our school days that I imagined you could hear my heart race from many paces away.

After showing us the steps, Miss Kay began to pair us off into the dancing duets we’d be assigned from that moment forward. I was ungainly and graceless, far from lithe. I worried that I would embarrass myself with a more capable partner.

I was paired with Moustafa, and blinked in surprise when Miss Kay said his name. He and Sheikha usually did everything together. I blushed. I’d been eyeing him for the entire school year. But he had eyes only for her, and never sought my own gaze.

We danced. And though I couldn’t tell for sure, it seemed as if divine providence had lent me a momentary grace.

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What I did not write in class was the ending to that story. Which is that, Moustafa, finding the bit when he has to dip me funnier than his seven-year-old sensibilities were at the time able to handle, lets out a big, wheezy laugh. He expels air through his nose at a velocity sufficient in power to dislodge a gooey bit of snot from inside his nose. It sails through the air between us, landing on my cheek, gummy side first, and sticks fast.

The End

My First Novel

2010-10-15T16:40:00.003-04:00

As a child, the schools I went to were not much interested in nurturing or cultivating our creative abilities. Rather, my school’s mission was to homogenize – to take the different influences of all of our different accents, to take the ramifications of our culture and the peculiarities of our upbringings, and smooth them away. A successful student sounded either British, or spoke English with such an amalgamated, worldly accent that she seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere all at once, so that one could never guess that she was of Middle Eastern birth, Middle Eastern upbringing, and that she had known only a Middle Eastern life. We were taught to speak as do the children of diplomats who had spent time in South Africa, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Belgium, and who sounded like none of these places, but who spoke an otherworldly English that smacked of that high-class nomadic life of the English-speaking, first-to-third-to-first world expatriate. A life steeped in all of the luxuries the host countries could provide, but which indulged in them only whimsically – ah, yes, that bronze Bedouin dagger would look so fetching next to our Moroccan tea set, let’s put it there! As if all of those objects had evolved to sit in just that corner or just that house, for just that family, and that family impervious to the history surrounding its members.

Our language learning was therefore never a creative pursuit. Certainly, we tried our hands at poetry, but only to learn the form so as to have the discernment necessary for the appreciation of Coleridge, Lord Tennyson, and the genius of Poe. We read the Brontë sisters, to show us that as young women, we could aspire to have a voice like English women did. We read Shakespeare as if before him neither comedy nor tragedy existed, for our kind was clearly deficient in producing work of such depth. We read the 1001 Arabian nights, and they took out all of the sex and all of the love and all of the beauty and all of the desperation, for Arabs could tell only tales of adventure. Even my math assignments, which were already bounded by the strict limits of that most logical of disciplines, had to be further regulated so that my work matched others’ in all but personal ability…and all of this at a time when my “x” could only have been a discreet value – the days of ranges and indeterminacy were still many years off, in a distant future I had not the abstract reasoning to imagine. I was made to chart my questions in a certain form, straight-jacketing my answers between rigid lines that gridded off my page, dividing cleanly and clearly question 2 from question 3, as if such regulation were necessary to keep the world of education from overwhelming me with its chaos.

It was in this milieu that I first began writing. My writing assignments required little imagination, for again that was not the strength my teachers were hoping to foster, and not the skill my parents were relinquishing their wages for. Instead, there were reports – I wrote about George Washington Carver and his peanut, and I salivated over descriptions of the peanut butter that had not yet begun to be imported for the expat population that craved it. I wrote about Marie Curie and the feeling fingers she sacrificed to science, and her subsequent death. I wrote about countless others, mentally grouping them all into the list of Great White Men I carried around in my head, though many of them were not white and many of them were not men. I plagiarized much of what I wrote, for as I said creativity was not much called for, and my conscience was as yet unformed and weak-willed. When there were no reports to write on famous people, there were argumentative papers to write, and so I put on a mask of rationality and discussed, dispassionately, whatever issue my teachers had told me to care about for the moment.

In sixth grade, I developed a crush on one of my teachers. His name was Mr. Rose, and he revealed to us one day that his first name was Michael, and we reveled in thus knowing him so intimately – we were unused to knowing our teachers’ “Christian” names, as they were referred to. He was Welsh, and young, and his ears and cheeks turned red whenever he was angry at one of the Untouchable Rich Kuwaitis who could give him lip and who he could do nothing to discourage, embarrass, or chastise. I have since tried to find Mr. Rose, using the reportedly limitless capacities of the Internet, but found in my search the Internet’s limits. He has disappeared.

But back then he was a very solid presence in my life, and not only because he was young and handsome and sported some very muscular calves that I found fascinating. He was the form teacher, and so taught me 80% of my time in school. His knowledge of science, history, literature, and mathematics seemed bottomless, as had all teachers’ up until that point, but in him that seemed a trait worth admiring. It helped of course that he lavished me with attention, and it was mostly because I was effortlessly a teacher’s pet. I studied little but had good grades, and spoke and wrote English better than any of my classmates…and so I was, without having calculated for any such betterment, promoted to the position of Teacher’s Favorite, and basked in the glow of his attention and approval.

Mr. Rose gave me my very first creative writing assignment. Many, including myself, were unclear about his expectations. What were we to write creatively about? Should the story be happy, sad, or bittersweet? Should it be about children or adults, should it take place in the desert we lived in during the school year, or in the (relative) oases of greenery that our native lands afforded us during our summer respites? Asked to think creatively and in narrative for the first time in our young lives, we freaked out. Our questions came at him, disordered, panicked, one on top of the other, for in our anxiety we had stopped waiting to be called upon before speaking.

Mr. Rose would not give us much solid ground upon which to walk. There were two rules to the assignment. One: that it had to be written in English. This was an attempt at a joke, to soothe our frayed sixth-grade nerves, for we wrote nothing – were not allowed to write anything – that was not in English. The other rule likewise gave us little direction as to what to write. Two: our stories could not end with the words, “…and then I woke up”. We were to write fiction, and we were not allowed to write it int he form of fantastical dream sequences, but instead had to ground it into a reality we could successfully create and maintain.

Though scared, I was excited for the assignment. I, like my classmates, was worried about the creative agency that it afforded me, for with the privilege of writing about what I wanted came the risk of writing about something that wouldn’t get me the A that I needed to appease my family, who put a great deal of importance on every assignment’s grade, without exception, and without leeway. But in spite of the worry, I found my young mind excited by this more than all of the other formulaic assignments I’d been set upon in the past. My father was a great storyteller, and a poet, and in my secret mind I fancied some of his talent had found its way into me. I wanted nothing more than to be able to weave the tales that he spun for my twin brother and me, if only with a fraction of his craft and his facility. I imaged in my father a contemporary male Scheherazade, whose life depended not upon the tales he could create and animate for his young audience, but whose enjoyment in so doing made him as avid in their production.

I was going to write a novel.

And so I set upon my task. I went home, and decided that as a true writer, I could not use pen and paper for my great work. I was to use a typewriter, like the professional writers in my mind did. I searched our over-stuffed apartment from top to bottom, looking for my father’s ancient typewriter, whose ringing keys I’d always found fascinating. My search was finally frustrated, and years later I leaned that my mother had gotten rid of the thing when my father had passed away. He had quit the world only after ushering in the more technologically advanced PC, and so it was to that that I next turned my attention.

I started my oeuvre by spending about an hour and a half finding the right font in which to set down my immortal thoughts. I ended up picking some intricate italic text, over-ornamented and difficult to read. That task completed, I thought for a moment about what my subject matter should be, an issue that I had given no thought to up until that point. It came to me immediately, jumping out of a then-consciousness that had been entranced with science fiction and the supernatural for some time. I would write about aliens.

I began creating my world immediately, my thoughts rushing through my head and my typing fingers incapable of keeping apace. My alien, like all aliens I’d come to appreciate, was on a mission to destroy the Earth, and my story interrupted him just as he was on his way on his single-person spaceship. I thought to make my story unique by writing from the first-person point of view of the alien, and it was my intention that the alien not be vilified throughout my tale, though he be tasked with destroying my kind mercilessly, and – because I hadn’t come up with one – without reason.

My alien race was hermaphroditic, was a deep shade of purple, and were telepathic creatures that could communicate wordlessly with their own kind, but with nobody else. They had not developed a facility with inferring other peoples’ gestures and motivations, having never been required to do that on their planet, and being therefore evolutionarily impaired cognitively with the task of recognizing anything other than telepathy as thinking behavior. They therefore thought that all creatures they had ever encountered were mindless, and that the civilizations they had visited had grown in much the same way that an ant colony grew – with little individual awareness, and therefore with little regard required on their end for the lives of these creatures.

I wrote and wrote, and began to be frustrated with how slowly one could create a world with only the stuff of words. I became frustrated with how difficult it was to write things into the space journey to make it interesting. And more than anything, I was afraid, for I could see as I unspooled my sentences onto the page, that I was nearing a blocked end. My alien would reach Earth, and would collide with the huge 3-dimensional writer’s block that was sitting in the path of his planetary mission. What to do, when a story you are working on has no facile ending? What to do, when the idea of writing any more is exhausting? At this point my story had run to five single-spaced, double-sided pages, and seemed to my young self to be already of Dickensian length. I knew that nothing would come into my mind easily or suddenly to destroy this writer’s block, and that to get rid of it would instead require the painstaking and patient work of chipping away, rather than blowing away effortlessly.

I wrote, and finished the story lamely and abruptly. As my alien gazed upon Earth through the porthole, she-he felt dizzy, and realized that, while working on a tedious mechanical repair, she-he had hit his right toe, where his-her brain resided. My alien’s brain hemorrhaged silently in his-her foot, and he-she died a lonely, unexciting death in space, while Earth glittered below, safe, and uninterrupted in its routine.

I printed it out, and gave it to my teacher, shame-faced. I had been giving him the story in installments, and he’d received and reviewed each part thus far with excitement and encouragement. The six single-spaced, double-sided pages I gave him in my flowery, over-ornamented text were to me a tangible artifact of my defeat, and I would not meet his eye as he told me how excited he was to be reading the final installment.

I got an A, for as I’ve mentioned, my teacher was not expected to reward creativity or adherence to high artistic standards. My grammar was good, my punctuation, but for an overabundance of commas, clarifying. He said nothing as he handed it back, and his silence was a pregnant one. My first novel was officially written. I did not write creatively again for the rest of my schooling.

Until one very early morning more than year ago, when I was having trouble falling asleep. There was a small girl in my head who was chirping away at a monologue I could not ignore, issuing as it did from between my ears. I sat up, and began writing what she was telling me, recognizing her to be composed of different parts of people I’ve known throughout my life, one of them myself.

It has been almost two years since I put down those few paragraphs. There are a few pages left blank between my last sentence of that story, and the start of another nonfiction ramble in my writing notebook. And the fear is back, for to finish the story is to make it official, to open it up for others’ judgment, to consider it done and no longer a work in progress that has potential for improvement. As the days pass I dismay that my second fictive adventure will be aborted as unceremoniously as my first, and that I will be left with the taste of defeat in my mouth, and that the little girl telling me the story will be, again, disappointed in having as weak an advocate as my cowardly self.

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i like grammar and punctuation

2010-10-05T11:24:00.001-04:00

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...though i have very much to learn about them still. listen to me talk about my favorite punctuation mark, the em dash, on my friend and workmate's blog.

http://gabistan.wordpress.com/2010/10/05/the-drama-that-is-the-em-dash/
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if there was a beyond, this is the letter i'd send.

2010-09-29T15:50:00.003-04:00

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how can i describe what it's like? i've tried writing about it, talking about it, but immediately begin to feel like an amalgam of two inexcusable states. either like an exhibitionist of the worst kind, one who exploits her pain and leaves its virtue in tatters...or a conversation-stopper, a hand of gloom descending upon the room, chaperoned by the uncomfortable silence assigned to keep watch.

how can i explain that still the most unexpected of triggers launch you into my memory, and that for a second, i am internally bent over, trying to catch my breath, though my body in the world of the real and the visible does not move. i feel a phantom wind knocked out of a phantom stomach.

how can i justify, this many years later, that i am still bowled over by the most innocuous of objects - a can of fava beans, the alphabet written out, jordan almonds, and by the whiffs of something that smell how you did when you were dying?

and amongst it all, performance anxiety. for pain should not be this maudlin, this self-indulgent. or at least, that's what this country tells me. even loss comes with an expiration date.
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Biography of a Face

2010-07-21T15:18:00.001-04:00

There is a barely perceptible exclamation point carved into my cheek. This is a natural mark, and when I was a child I pretended that it meant that I was special, to be thus marked without needing first to be wounded and scarred. I was further convinced of the fact by the (seemingly, to me) singular circumstances of my birth: that I was a twin given to an aging mother of 42 years, that I was born on the first day of Eid, such that the Muslim world entire celebrated my arrival. That I was a breach birth that did not involve a scalpel, and that my mother survived despite the stacked odds, the feet-first maneuvers, the jaundice, the gestational hypertension.

That I survived past those first few weeks in an incubator, a sickly infant who escaped the womb long before it was safe, and long before I was equipped. “Bent sab3a”, it was lamented, and the nurse, trying to prepare my mother for the inevitable, told her that we were dying. My mother, in later years and in retelling the story, would never have a kind word to say about that nurse, despite the good intentions that birthed those dire predictions. My mother was never able to separate the harbingers of bad news from the bad news they brought, a skill that those of us born in the Middle East have yet to perfect, for it requires a detachment we are incapable of sustaining, a concern for the factual we have not been taught to value.

My eyes are heavy-lidded, so that at times I catch myself looking bored when I am not, lethargic and uninterested in the happenings of the world around me. I cultivate this, for in America I have learned that a certain small sense of aloofness, coupled with perceived boredom, are good things. Turn more on of the aloofness, and people will translate it into confidence. Turn more on of the boredom, and wise is what you will appear to be. There are accessories that can maintain both illusions – crisp, ironed clothing in grayscale colors for the former, a book translated from another language for the latter. But in a pinch, my heavy-liddedness alone will do, and for it I have to thank my father, its genetic benefactor.

My skin is wheat-colored, as we Egyptians call those many shades of brown we perceive between the black man to our south, and the white man of our aspiration. All of the wheat of the world could not compete in the diversity of its hues with one school district in Cairo, yet we Egyptians still use that label, pretending conformity and homogeneity, our middle names.

My skin stretches between a high forehead, and short neck that I share with my twin brother. The high forehead was made higher by years of girlhood in which my mother, like every Egyptian mother of my generation, pulled my hair back into the regulation ponytail. And I and my school hopscotch friends would go home with tension headaches from the full day of tautness which we could not, were not allowed to, relieve.

My chin is nondescript, barely there.

My skin has been lighter in the past few years of my immigration. Those who say that the same sun rises everywhere do not know of its favoritism, how unevenly it bestows its attention upon the poles of the world. Though I engineer my summer costumes to maximize exposure, my skin darkens for barely a day before rebelling against me again, jaundiced and seemingly unashamed at its inauthenticity. My skin will not take to this Western sun. Everything here is dulled; my tan, my happiness, and for some solace, my sorrow too.

There is a wrinkle, right at the corner of my mouth. It is newly born, a smile line that used to be impermanent, fleeting, turned into an ever-present marker of the years. I need no longer smile nor frown for the crease to appear, for the years, even if there have been only 26 of them, have begun to etch permanence into my face.

My sisters will study this visage when I am home on my almost-annual pilgrimage, and will think of the husband who is yet to materialize, of the children I am not having, of my life lived incomplete. They will look to my smile lines and think of that quickly-approaching, almost-deserved label: spinster. I will look at them, at their worry lines, at the signs of their frustration at a life half-lived, though it be filled with husbands who demand feeding and attention, and children whose feet patter all day and all night. I will wonder if I have succeeded in escaping my fate, or if I’ve simply exchanged it for another, not at all kinder one, to be meted out in exile.

In moments of optimism about our own lives, we will secretly rejoice at the worry we see in the others’ faces, at escaping their woe. In moments of pessimism about our lives, the frown lines in the faces before us will transform themselves into laugh lines, traces of past happinesses we will think ourselves agnostics of, happinesses we will forget ever having had once before. In moments of clarity about our lives, we will see the same face, reflected in each other, with its high forehead, its nondescript chin, the only differences the wear and tear of the fleeting Western sun on one, and the chemical burn of Fair & Lovely on the other. We will recognize that the universality we perceive in these moments of clarity is a prison, and we will distract ourselves with our children, with our blogs few people read, with music, with gossip, with friends, with volunteering, and with anything that will stave off our own piercing penetration into truth.

Lives of Plenty: A Cautionary Tale

2010-04-09T15:33:00.000-04:00

The Morgan Library recently put together an exhibit of Jane Austen’s letters, and though I am typically a disinterested reader when it comes to my authors’ biographies (a failing, I know), I went. I am no Jane-ite, and though evidence abounds that her writings are of the enduring kind, I’ve not ereceted a shrine for her in the literary real estate of my passions. Further, I doubt that there exists within me a germinating “aha!” moment that promises to sway me in favor of such idolatry at some unforeseen point in my reading future. However, I did wonder about what her personal correspondences would sound like – as starchy and formal as the dialogue in her fiction? And then of course there was the thrill of reading correspondence not meant for public consumption – a pleasure not as illicit perhaps as it could be if performed in privacy with the mail of some contemporary living, breathing person, but thrilling nonetheless.

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I went, and found two things to be true; firstly, I found that the glimpses of the sour, judgemental Jane that I had detected in her fiction – specifically, the smallness that she gives some of her characters, coupled with a holier-than-thou-ness and meanness of spirit almost as visible throughout as the ink on the page – was all over her letters. The closer the relationship between her and her correspondent, the more biting her wit, the less sympathetic she seemed to be towards what ultimately were common human failings. But what else, I supposed, was a Victorian woman to do with her time, if she not bitch?

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Secondly, and what was more striking than the brittle personality under my scrutiny, what I found most interesting about her letters was how densely filled they were, and I do mean that in the most physical sense. There was barely any white space left on the page. Margins were utilized to write in, in long lines perpendicular to the rest of the text. In between the lines of the body of her letter, were other lines written in the space between, and up-side down, just so:

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She had also crosshatched her letter (see the image all the way at the top) in what resulted in a chaotic-looking, surprisingly readable, close-to-100-percent utilization of the single sheet of paper, which, folded just so, served also as bearer of address and stamp, so that no envelope was needed to post it.

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The wall texts explained this phenomenon quite simply – paper was expensive, and so letter-writers husbanded their space by necessity.

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I do not pretend that there is anything deliberately noble about these purely fiscal concerns – but I am tickled by the by-products of such circumstances. That expense limited how many trees were cut seems something of a blessing, and even more of one is the fact than an instrument of writing was so highly prized as a direct consequence.

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One of my first few blog posts speaks of this very same phenomenon, as it was an entirely different thing for me to receive an international phone call in the days of their expense and rarity, than it is today when my sister’s voice is but a headset and 35 cents away.

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Which all leads me to wonder about the coefficient of happiness in these times, when most things are cheaply bought, in quantities that supply most needs to excess, and what this surfeit means, what having plenty can ever mean. It seems to me that there are many who go hungry who are overstuffed, many whose appetites, though slaked, continue to grow, to want more, and more alarmingly, to need more. I wonder if we are increasingly morphing into addicts of one form or another, and if our dependencies, defined as they are societally as necessities, have trapped us into lives of unceasing, aching desire. The term “quarter-life crisis”, after all, is a recent one, coined for my generation and others like mine. And I wonder how we can think of our human trajectory as “progress”, when all we seem to be learning is existential despair at an ever-earlier age.

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My mother used to paint me what I saw then as simple, simple-minded, positively parochial childhood pleasures from her own past. In the summer, there were cases of mangoes, ripe, stringy, and just waiting to ambush her with an explosion of juices dripping down her chin, pleasurable punishment for her over-eager bite. There were cases of figs, skin leathery like forbidden flesh, and the inside so sweet and dense it was like eating molasses by the mouthful. In the winter, there were street cart-roasted sweet potatoes, their skins sticky on the inside with sugar caramelized to perfection for what would be the last generation of Egyptian children to grasp how wonderful their little lives would never again be. Their own children, though having many of the same pleasures, would exhibit the symptoms of discontent at an early age.

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By the time I was her age, my capacity for wonderment had already atrophied, so that I knew, even as I ran through the stalks, that my family's field of sugarcane was not as vast as it appeared to my six-year-old smallness, and that I should be careful, for too much of it would rot my teeth.

Egypt: A Fable

2010-02-19T13:34:00.001-05:00

...كان يا ماكان، في قديم الزمان، وسالف العصر والأوان

There once was a mighty Kingdom through which ran a Great River, bringing with it much munificence, so that the Kingdom was fertile and rich. This was a time before men, when animals alone roamed the land. Many who lived outside this region were mired in arid desert lands, which were forbidding, bleak, and niggardly. Accounts reached them of the Kingdom from sojourners' enraptured recollections, but they could not quite believe that a landscape could be so rich. It was known of the Kingdom's inhabitants that theirs were languages of superlatives, so that, it was said, they could not help but exaggerate. Still, interests were piqued, and many endeavored to see for themselves.

These pilgrims found it to be full of wonders, just as told. The Kingdom was filled with trees of every variety, and the trees had developed a reputation for beneficence, for giving of themselves to any and all who passed. A branch would stir as soon as the rustling of a passerby was heard, agile and flexible as an animal appendage, and at the end of it would be proffered fruit plucked from a higher limb. Ripe, juicy mangoes, persimmons, dates, glistening with promise and bursting through their skins; all of these and more were distributed to any and all who passed.

The berries of the land, being less conspicuous in size, begged the birds to sing their praises, and the birds obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the fruit until fullness. Travelers began to know that to find strawberries, one need but follow the robin, and for blackcurrants, the nightingale.

The edible roots and tubers of things, being less conspicuous still, begged the pawed and clawed for their assistance in uncovering them. The rodents obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the roots and tubers until fullness. So the potatoes came to be unearthed by the mole, the carrots by the rabbit, and the yams by the field mouse, who compensated for his small stature with unceasing industriousness.

The flowers, wanting also to be noticed and their nectar consumed, grew bold and cloaked themselves in the richest, most extravagant of hues, and it was their palette that gave the Kingdom its reputation for lush, verdant beauty. Wanting to be advertised no less than the bough and the tuber, the flowers begged the bee, the wasp, and the hummingbird to announce them wherever they went. The three obliged, in exchange for partaking themselves of the nectar until fullness, and their buzzing came to be a trail of sound that the weary could follow in search of nectar.

As with most stories involving kingdoms, there is in this one a King. His subjects were loyal to him, and while the Kingdom was young, he was known to be gentle and just. He was a lion, and while the Kingdom was in its infancy he spent much of his time eating, napping, copulating, and doing the things that large cats are wont to do. For the Kingdom, while young, needed no heavy hand in ruling it. It was a place of plenty, and it was the land's lavish bounty that kept discord to a minimum.

But as we all know, tongues all too often wag too much, and news of this land of riches spread far and wide to other, less fortunate landscapes. Creatures from all around bid hasty farewells to their homesteads, seeking lives of opulence. They came in droves, following the gurgling sparkle of the Great River, and made their dwellings on its tree-lined banks.

The trees and bushes noticed that their fruit was growing scarce, and that they themselves were suffering to make them swell to ripeness. Their roots were weak, their branches less sturdy, their leaves yellow. They began to produce less, and grew protective, no longer offering of what they had freely, so that animals had to wrest the fruit away by force. The roots and tubers were overtaxed as well, and began to hide themselves, burrowing deeper underground, spreading stronger, more intricate roots to fasten themselves to the womb of the dark, damp earth. The burrowers were forced to dig deeper for them, into rockier, less rewarding patches of land. The flowers were likewise feeling overburdened with others' hunger, and released a vapor into the air that made nectar-seekers colorblind, so that they could not find them. They allowed only the bee and the wasp and the hummingbird full sight, for they had long forgotten how to reproduce without the help of those three.

Violence came quickly to the land as its providers closed their fists. The inhabitants, desperate and driven mad by hunger after such fullness, resorted to feasting on each other, and developed a taste for the flesh and blood of their cousins. The King, driven to hunger himself and away from slumber, took action. What the land would not give him, he thought, he would take. He enslaved the most intelligent of the species he could find, requiring them to spend their days in agricultural and horticultural research. They developed methods by which to plant, to fertilize, and to harvest. So it was that the trees and bushes were impregnated unwillingly, and their fruit stolen for the mouths of others. And so it was that the tubers were uprooted from their native soils, and planted in rows, to be fed at calculated intervals what they needed in water and fertilizer. And so it was that the bee, having found a way to create liquid gold out of the simple nectar of flowers, was imprisoned in wood and mesh, forced to synthesize nectar all day, and to keep it cool with the beating of its wings at night.

The King did not stop at this, for his appetite grew as it was fed, and he became jealous all the more of his possessions from those around him. He forced the badgers into servitude, threatening them with a perpetuity of isolation, and bade them use the strength of their teeth to cut the trees down. They labored, day and night, until their teeth were filed down into useless nubbins, after which they were imprisoned for high treason. Generations of badgers and empty Kingdom coffers later, there was finally enough wood, and the King bade the elephants and the monkeys to work in concert to dam(n) the Great River. He no longer needed to threaten, for his populace had quickly learned what was at stake, and took orders quickly and quietly.

He called it, simply, the "High Dam", for though strong of limb and sharp of tooth, the King was not known for mental inventiveness.

And so the years passed, and lost was the Kingdom's happiness day by day. Equally receding was the sphere of civil life the King allowed to exist outside of his control. As a human would warn many thousands of years later, when his kind ruled the earth, absolute power had corrupted absolutely. The King's paranoia grew with the discontent of his subjects, and he created ways to control them further. He prescribed to them who and what they could worship, and in which ways. He told them who they could love, and in loving how many children beget.

He used spies, and magical orbs that could watch them, record and report their political transgressions. He divided them into sects, turned them against each other, fearing that one day they would recognize their enemy to be a common one. He busied them with the task of survival, thinking that the indigent would have little time to worry about self-governance.

But he, in many ways, was a short-sighted lion, and he and his magical instruments of espionage and sedition could not be everywhere all at once. The animals, over the generations and with their discontent fueling them, developed a common language, having before this unifying experience considered themselves different tribes. The birds trilled of freedom, the wolves growled of the tortures inflicted, and the woodpeckers tapped a Morse code advertising burgeoning movements of resistance. The King, deaf and dumb to this common language, had little idea of the uprising taking place around him.

Among this general uprising there were heroes, creatures who chirped and growled and pecked louder than the rest. They had code names by which their compatriots came to know them, for to call them by their true names would have fingered them to the King as traitors. And so it was whispered that Saad Eddin and Bahgat had reported the lion's violations, and that Nour had stood up and demanded a choice between more than one eternal ruler. Younger voices too began to speak loudly.

The Revolution began when the Great River, no longer content with the confines of its High Dam, broke free. For if the lion had let wisdom speak freely into the ears of his hunger and his thirst, he would have heard it said that the spirit, free by its very nature, could not help but rebel against the despot.

On Hammers, Nails, and Wheels that Squeak

2010-02-02T14:54:00.002-05:00

As a child, my father appeared to me to be entirely vice-free. He was a quiet, consistent, thoughtful man, whose occasional evenings with a pipe seemed well deserved. This, considering that his cleaning-filtering-tamping ritual took at least 30 minutes of patient, restrained preparation, such that he seemed less an addict than a connoisseur, a supplicant at some temple of pleasure that he revered, and did not take for granted.

His other pleasures were likewise reverent and ritualistic. He did not listen to his favorite, Fairouz, while in the car or in any way distracted from that singular experience. He listened, brow furrowed, in silence broken only by the sound of his own breathing, his attention so concentrated that he would forget to mute his very exhalations. For my father, the attentive parent, this was not a time for children. And for my father the workaholic, this was no time for multi-tasking. And for my father the writer, this was not a time for lyricism, appropriately outfitted though the mood may seem to have been for just that.

He wrote poetry, and did so in many notebooks similar to the one I keep for these ramblings…but the hardback nature of our notebooks is where any similarities between them begin and end. While mine show the pattern of my thoughts – erratic where I am running after a tenuous idea or phrasing, scratched out and with arrows pointing to my many changes of heart and mind – his drafts read like manuscript copy. His writing is neat and measured, his penmanship impeccable. His draft is sure of itself, evidence that he put pen to paper only when all of the elements of rhyme and rhythm, meaning and aesthetics had aligned perfectly in his mind, when he was sure that they needed no revision.

My father forgot himself though, around Flight Simulator. He reacted to it as a Persian does to catnip – in a manner inconsistent with his otherwise austere, distant, elegant, world-weary air.

I write all of this now from a terminal in the Cairo Airport, where the men making up the majority of the passengers are eerily silent. I would not be surprised if these were men my age, for my generation has readily bought into those instruments of temporary isolation known as iPods and laptops and e-readers*, and we brandish them wheresoever we go, to protect ourselves from the company of our fellow 20-something-year-olds.

But these are men of my father’s generation, or slightly younger. They do not read in airports, nor do they listen to tinny music audible to themselves alone. These are men who are talkers, who make friends in every queue, every congregation, every time they travel somewhere, anywhere. These are men who are patriarchs, who are used to leading conversations, mostly about themselves, at the heads of dinner tables. These are men who nightly go to hookah cafes, and have been going since before there was an English word for what those were, before fruity tobacco flavors were acceptable candidates for smoking by anyone other than the weakest, most moneyed of men.

I am noticing them now for their silence. Even those who are on their cell phones are speaking in uncharacteristically quiet tones, hushed and reverential, far from Egyptian. I hadn’t realized the depth of the quiet until the lull between one podcast episode ending and another beginning, having chosen in this instance the safety of temporary isolation. I wonder if I’ve just missed some sobering announcement – perhaps that our flight to Kuwait has been delayed yet again, on top of the two restless, unscheduled hours already spent wasting at the airport. I take my ear phones out, banishing the New Yorker for another time when the low decibel level is less concerning, less out of place.

Ears perked, I listen for announcements for a few minutes, but the loudspeakers have news only of other flights and other destinations to tell me and my fellow congregates at Gate 5. My puzzlement grows, as I look around once more to the silent men around me.

I then realize that their eyes are all trained outside, trying to make out behind the glare reflecting off of the floor-to-ceiling windows the plane, into whose belly we are about to embark. They are bewitched by this miracle of human invention, as is every Arab man I have ever had occasion to see around anything and everything aeronautical.

I think of my older brother, who was so enamored of the possibility of a life spent sky-bound, that upon failing to meet pilot criteria, he promptly forgot the five painstaking years spent in engineering school, and considered instead a lifetime of scented towel and cookie distribution as a flight attendant. I think of my friend M______, whose tastes did not otherwise conform to what is considered in Egypt to be the masculine normative, but who was still under the spell of any thing both metallic and winged. M______, who would eventually become a makeup artist, M______, who did not know the makes of the more common car, M______, for whom even soccer held no appeal. M______, who seemed the least likely candidate to tap successfully for mechanized knowledge of any kind, nevertheless knew when the retirement flight of the concord had been, and mourned the end of that era with true, heartfelt grief.

And it is all of this that has finally brought me to think of my father, than man of noiseless, discreet, respectable passions. For the only moment I can remember seeing him be anything but collected was when he was in aerodynamic, role-playing bliss.

It is Microsoft Flight Simulator that held this fascination for him. That software was somehow capable of turning my father into something of a stranger. Inattentive, quick to anger when interrupted or distracted from his task – to fly a poorly pixelated airplane over an equally rough-drawn landscape (this being 1996, when graphics were mostly representational), and safely down onto an unimpressively rendered strip of grey tarmac.

I tried playing it myself a few times, of course. When my father bought our first computer, he and I and my twin brother approached it as an adventure, but also as a family task. Whether it was figuring out how to access a directory in MS.DOS mode, or mastering a level of whatever new games we’d installed – we went at it as a threesome.

But MFS could never capture more than my most fleeting interest. There was certainly an issue of over-complexity. I was too young to understand the dials, to treat the journey as anything requiring preciseness or finesse. Who, after all, knows what that is at such a young stage? And even knowing, the unrestraint of youth worked against me constantly. Then of course there was the issue of how minimalistic it was, how anticlimactic. Whether one crashed or landed, there was grayness to look at, and nothing but self-satisfaction as a reward – there were no fireworks, no victory video clips, nothing. Even if one were to plummet dramatically out of the sky and spiral down into certain doom, the screen cracked only half-heartedly, and there was not even the smallest puff of dust stirred up by the demise of plane, pilot, and passengers.

And so it is that all of the men surrounding me in the terminal are looking at the airplane as an object of desire, an object of relinquished childhood dreams and bygone passions. For Egyptian boys, “pilot” is the quintessential response to that oft-repeated question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” That is, until they turn into young men, and the concerns of the real world, that most wretched of places, descend upon them.

Being in Cairo for even the shortest amount of time messes with my head, for the people I know within it have one thing in common; they are all successful providers who have long abandoned their Plan A. Most, it must be mentioned, slide like newly-minted keys into the slots that their fathers have created for them; the contracting company, the private dental clinic, the all-you-need-to-do-is-not-fuck-up position at a family friend’s telecom services firm. Most have abandoned their childhood wants, and have woken up to the improbability of actor, ballerina, writer, pilot, have abandoned their attempts, and have decided as marker of maturity not to mourn the loss.

But most Egyptian men I know have the latest version of MFS on their computers, and are struck silent in airports. At night, after those they are providing so staidly for have gone to sleep, they creep away and settle onto their computer chairs. They sit, in their off-white undershirts and their drawstring pajama bottoms in front of screens that can merely simulate 3-dimentionality for them, and allow themselves the short, controlled bursts of that alternate reality that my father meted out to himself so judiciously. And I wonder often, whether it is they whom life and its quotidian expectations have defeated, or if it is I who will discover the ruination of false promises, of optimism beyond reason, and too late at that to settle into Plan-B-Providerhood. One American proverb promises that the squeaky wheel gets all the grease, and another warns that the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. Which one of those two will life make me out to be?

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*This last is an embellishment, for though we listen to music, we, the Egyptian nation, do not read.

My Nieces and I: A Third-Person Narrative of Nine Years

2009-11-20T16:42:00.003-05:00

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When she first comes over for college, she is perceived by them to be penniless, though she is not. They cannot imagine how a 17-year-old can afford to live, sleep, dine, and buy plane tickets to take her across the ocean and back once every year...and all on minimum wage. So there are no requests back then, though she of course always asks. She enjoys, when serendipity allows, the occasional unplanned purchase of that one thing that catches her eye, that thing she recognizes instantly as being perfect for so-and-so. But she is (or tries to be), at heart, a pragmatist. So she asks.

Her question appeals to their reason; "I'm going to get you something anyway, so wouldn't you rather it be something you want?" They give the standard, polite reply; "Just come. We want you. We need nothing else." That does not pacify her, for she is determined. But they are youthful, and are more stubborn than she has learnt to be patient...for she too, back then, was youthful, or thought herself to be. So although she asks, and asks again, she is told and told again to just come, that her presence is gift enough, that she, somehow, is sufficient.

But she is not grown so much older that she has forgotten the single-minded materialism of youth, and knows that there are consumerist desires to be discovered within them, bubbling just underneath the surface. She knows what it is to be feverish for objects, things that have the potential to elevate you amongst friends and competitors, both groups more often than not occupying the same camp. She knows what it is to find distraction in these objects, to travel to faraway places, to leave the here and now through the benefit of a book, a video game, a doll. And so she asks.

But they have been convinced, or shamed into believing, that to ask is improper, and so they tell her that she is all they could ever want. She is pleased at the sentiment, and half-believes it, but shops anyway.

She has been unsuccessful in getting any input from them, and so is forced to guess. She comes to them bearing gifts, her best guesses, some educated and some not so much educated. For the one showing an artistic inclination, a set of coloring pencils that cannot be bought in Egypt, at least on a six-year-old's budget. For the one who has yet to discover her talents, a storybook, this being thought by Mariam to be a lowest-common-denominator type of purchase. Clothes, for both of them, for they like clothes. Not too many non-educational toys, for she is far more like her mother than she can readily admit to at this age. She is right about some things, wrong about others. The colored pencils are a hit. The assumption that reading can be enjoyed by all, not so much.

They are thrilled to see her, their joy real, not solely occasioned by the necessary show of affection between family. She is their favorite aunt, for reasons she cannot qualify, but that she accepts without too much argument. She, the only gift they asked for, is irritable over the next few days, and not such great company. She is jet-lagged, she tells herself. But the truth is that she is now unused to this place, her home. She sleeps in the mornings and stays awake at nights, and continues to do so for a few days. But the nights begin to be oppressive to her, with their lack of company and lack of things to do, and overabundance of time in which to think. So she begins to sleep at night and stay awake in the mornings, like the majority of her countrypeople. Her mood improves, or at least she becomes better able to control the snappiness that is second nature to her in this place, her home.

This episode of irritableness over, she is their favorite aunt again, and she notices with pleasure that they do not ask her for what she has b(r)ought. Her suitcase, sitting still packed in the corner, is never an object of their attention, surreptitious or otherwise. And she believes them, that they are happy to have her. She is pleased that they are polite children, that they have heeded society and silenced the internal greed that is natural to all of their kind. She calls them around, opens the suitcase, distributes her triumphs and her failures. For the gifts that do not seem to please (though the children try, they are not yet good actors), she will pay a slow penance during her few days with them. She will notice herself buying local trinkets to make up for the failings of the foreign, spending slightly more time than she is generally inclined playing cards, being gentler with her admonitions when they are occasioned. She will hug them more, and kiss them more, and show them that despite her error, despite not knowing them well enough to have gifted with flying colors, they are loved. She knows, somehow, that she would not feel herself to have transgressed at all if they knew more of her than those few weeks. But her plane ticket back is already booked, and in spite of herself, she is counting.

The years pass, and they grow out of one type of youth into another. They are no longer children, but adolescents. They have musical tastes that are all their own, and one of them uses more American slang that she should know. They are more emotive than ever, in a way that is undiscerning, and as a consequence, dilute. Their "I Love You's", if Facebook updates are to be taken as evidence, are indiscriminate. But she knows that she is still their favorite aunt, if only because her mother had only had so many daughters, and because people do not change.
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She hasn't been home in two years by now. She is no longer in college, but works in a place called Corporate America, where the vacation time is strictly allotted, and does not make undue allowances for people who are oceans apart. She asks them what they want, and nine years later there is still that polite front, un-eroded by the passage of time. "Just come. We want you. We need nothing else."

But later, there is an email. They email regularly, something she hadn't done at their age, for she was born in 1984.

There is a short list of things to get, and the subject line of the email reads, "stuff we need". It is not a long list, nor a difficult list to procure, nor an expensive list, and so she does not immediately understand her dismay. But the list is jolting, saddening, and suddenly awakens her to the years and their passage.

Her sister, who had once been concerned with exfoliating creams, hair products, and other things related to the preservation and enhancement of beauty, has ordered a bottle of vitamins. One-a-Day, Women's. And this makes sense, because they have all grown older, even if Mariam had, an ocean of both water and denial away, chosen to forget that fact.

Her nieces order too much Americana to make her feel comfortable. How does a ten-year-old child, across an ocean, know what a burrito with beans is, and that it can be bought in Chapotle (sic)? The same niece who has requested this wants a shirt, her one provision in that regard being that it not conform to her mother's tastes. A Facebook update, later, listing things she would like to try: "Burrito, Fruit snack, Pop Tart, Corn Dog, Strawberries whipped with cream, Cheese with Ranch Dressing, Apple Crisps". She wonders if it is her niece's intention that she stumble upon this update, whether this is a masked, diplomatic way of asking for more America.

She fears that there is more that they want that is not included in this short list. The one with a taste for what she imagines a burrito might taste like does not listen to Arabic music. She had confessed this in an online conversation a few weeks before, and listed all of the bands that she liked to listen to sing in a foreign, less familiar tongue. She did this without hesitation, and Mariam reminded herself that her own sadness was an overreaction, that she too had once felt this way. "That will change," Mariam had typed to her niece. "You will understand when you are older". Her niece, Mariam thinks, had not believed her, and for that Mariam had blamed the myopia of youth, and ended the conversation hoping that she was not self-indulgent in her assignment of blame.

That short list, again - she fears that there is more on it than they have included, desires and wants written in the invisible ink of cultural, religious, and social uniformity. She worries about this, both for what it is, and for the hypocrite her fears are showing her to be. The next time they speak on the phone, she knows that she will find it difficult not to echo her mother, from years ago, when Mariam herself was drifting into mental landscapes unknown. "Remember: We are Arab. We are Muslim."

A Sundial in the Shade

2009-11-02T14:14:00.003-05:00

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As a child, I "abhorred coloring". I do not know that from memory, nor do I pretend to recognize ever having (at such an early age, anyway) hatred strong or all-encompassing enough to warrant the usage of that term by a kindergarten teacher...but there it is. Apparently, I abhorred coloring enough to deserve three separate mentions in the four report cards I received for my first school year. Which serves to show at least that throughout my life, I have been nothing if not opinionated.

If I had to guess why I hated coloring, I would say that my motor skills back then must not have been developed enough to do it to a standard I found in any way satisfactory. I would have been, after all, just learning how to properly grip a pencil for maximum control. Perhaps I could not stay within the lines consistently enough, or achieve the same level of saturation throughout. I was certainly concerned with quality, enough so that I still, to this day, remember the slowly-dawning but joyous epiphany of discovering that coloring in the same direction could make all the difference.

But it is perhaps because of this perfectionist leaning that I had that I went on to hate art class altogether, for try as I might I could not draw or sketch anything with any degree of fidelity towards either my imagination or whatever reality I was attempting to re-create. All of my other temporary hobbies were likewise plagued with this insistence on quality...I would take something up only long enough to determine whether I was any good at it. If the answer was a "yes", a check mark was (neatly) made in the margins of my mental list, and I pursued the activity moderately. If the answer was "no", I abandoned the pursuit, never looking back or feeling any regret. So dancing fell by the wayside, and sporting suffered an equally early demise. Ignoring the efforts of my father to nourish and empower my inner strategist, chess lasted all of a few weeks before I abandoned its campaigns forever to my more patient, and infinitely more strategic twin brother.

It is not that I had no respect for practice. As a former stutterer, a former bad speller, bad grammarian, bad English speaker, bad first grade mathematician, I knew that one could improve. I had overcome enough of my deficiencies in certain areas to know that. However, all of those triumphs were undertaken and celebrated in the name of my parents. It was not for me that I read above my grade level, not for me that I learned multiplication tables before they were introduced to my class, nor was it for me that I my efforts ultimately improved my penmanship. That is not to say that I needed a smiling picture of my parents on my study desk for motivation, nor to keep my goals in sight. It is to say that they had successfully and without guilt - as Arab parents are wont to do - subsumed my own interests into their own, so that to me they became indistinguishable, one from the other.

In spite of all of these personal triumphs, I was an essentialist still when it came to certain talents and sensibilities, things that I felt practice could improve upon only on the precondition that there be some implicit core of giftedness. A core that by necessity was intrinsic and inseparable from the person. That certain individuals walked with extra-ordinary fluidity and grace seemed blindingly apparent to me, even about children my age. That someone could sketch a hand or a tree leaf without instruction and have it resemble the real seemed to me to indicate that their worldview was somehow different from my own. That their visual field spoke to them candidly and in volumes, while mine whispered barely a word to me, and was guarded and pithy in its remarks. I realized early on that there was a glass ceiling I would contend with for the rest of my life when it came to visual art, and very quickly got sick of bumping my head against it in my attempts to stretch the limits of my potential. I hunkered down instead, into myself and into the things for which I knew I had larger possibilities.

You might think this a limiting perspective for a child to have, and you would be right. That I challenged myself with first grade mathematics, and penmanship and the articulation of my rolling letter r, and felt those to be worthier pursuits than something more creative is a loss of many minutes of my childhood spent simply wishing that I was doing something else. And yet my priorities had been prescribed, my philosophy regarding perfectionism and talent unchallenged by the Arab lifestyle I led, consisting primarily of study, and academic, results-focused vigor.

I find myself sliding back into essentialist expectations now that I am (oh cliche of cliches) trying to write fiction. Perhaps I have been ruined by the testimonies of published writers who talk of the process as if it were to them as unavoidable and insistent a need as that to breathe, that they speak of it as if possessed by an other spirit that produces and produces and produces. I find myself wondering whether there is something missing in me, that nugget of talent so essential to the core of the artist, that makes me deficient in feeling like only myself when I sit down to write. Where is the other Mariam that, like Borges's Borges, is supposed to usurp me from myself and wrest my pen away from my own grasping hands and into hers...and I powerless to stop her?

There was a time when I lived in Kuwait where the entrance way to our apartment led into a view of our large dining table, which served my family when we hosted denizens of our friends for Ramadan dinners, and more frequently as the place my brother and I laid out our homework to do in the evenings. I was, as with most things school related, meticulous about the presentation of my work as much as about the content, and so spent many neck-breaking hours leaned over my work at that table, working on satisfying my own preconditions. I handed in many reports that I insisted were to be written on blank, unlined paper, and had perfected a method by which to write in straight lines. After dividing the paper up into equal vertical segments, pencil lines drawn faintly across would serve as my guide. Erased afterwards, these pencil lines left no mark.

My older brother, who was living with us at the time, happened to glance at my work just as I had finished writing and erasing my guidelines. What I had left was a report on George Washington Carver and the many uses he'd discovered of the unpretentiously pedestrian peanut, all written on blank, unlined paper in lines perfectly straight, belying both my age and its reputation for carelessness.

Pathetic as this might be to admit, I do not think I've ever seen my older brother as proud of me as at that moment. Perhaps he, being an engineer at the time, had an unduly high regard for what he assumed was a good eye on my part, capable of writing straight and spacing equally? I remember he took it as a point of pride that he could estimate distances fairly accurately, and so it was perhaps this mirroring of his talent that he appreciated? At any rate, he called my mother over, showing her my feat. I struggled for a moment, unsure of whether to tell them how it was that I came to write without a slant. Transparency won over vanity, and I showed them how I made my guidelines.

My brother's eyes dimmed, his interest vanished almost instantaneously. Had I been a magician, this would have been the moment I told him my tricks of the trade, erasing wonderment and mystery in favor of the mundane machinations that, to the uninitiated, manifest themselves as magic.

My mother had the opposite reaction. After initially seeming uninterested in the quirk that my brother took as aptitude, she praised me for my attention to detail, for taking the time and making the effort. My mother who, not having been taught to read music, taught herself difficult pieces by ear, picking out the notes and somehow producing on the piano Fareed Al Atrash pieces on an instrument generally incapable of catering to the micro-tonal maqam scale. My mother who, though interested in French literature and displaying an aptitude for the humanities, gave up her own interests and pursued her father's suggestion that she "try" medicine. My mother who circumstance had widowed twice, who had raised as a widow five children, once as a twenty-something year old and once again as a fifty-something year old. My mother who was as a result unimpressed with talent, it having served her very little in life.

My brother had the leisure of appreciating talent, and of believing that he lived in a world where it might mean more than perseverance. I wonder which of their worlds it is that I live in?

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A Hudson River Parks Story

2009-09-24T10:20:00.011-04:00

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There are evenings when my daily confinement in an office building, and my subsequent nightly confinement to a Brooklyn apartment appear to me to be too sad a fact of life, and especially mine. In Cairo, my default is to call friends, and will more often than not end up looking at the lights of the city and its many mosques from the height and untouched darkness of the Mokattam Hills.

When we get there at sundown, the shadows obscure the garbage littering the drop to Cairo, and the darkness overtakes everything. For a few hours we sit in each other's company, drinking sweet tea, listening to opportunistic lutists who hustle the area's patrons. They know of the romanticism that will envelop us and make us want live music from artists dimly seen, whose talents will appear as disproportionate as the light emanating from the tiny bulbs so far below us. It is off of this predictable sentimentality that they make their living. For those hours we live in a clean, clear, and timeless Cairo, somehow and against all reason improved by the twinge of loneliness inspired by any truly black night.

But all of this is a retelling of a Cairo in which I no longer live, and whose nostalgic memories are larger than life could ever hope to be. But perhaps that is my cynicism speaking.

Now that I live in a place called New York, I count my blessings of working in the West Village, and walk to a pier around 10th Street, on West Street. The pleasures to be had there are simple. The view: a none-too-impressive view of the Hoboken skyline; a speck that is, upon squinting, ill-rewarded inspection, the Statue of Liberty. I go mostly for the air. The smell: that confusingly sea-like brininess that hold no memory for me, but brings pleasure nonetheless. For impersonal company, lest one feel alone in the world: there are usually runners around, a few of the homeless, and gay men on migratory rounds from Chelsea, looking sun-kissed no matter the season.

I walked over there today, catching up with a friend over the phone on my way. As I walked to the rounded end of the pier, I looked to my left in the direction where Lady Liberty stood to be gawked at. I saw, on the water between her and I, a kayaker, braving water that looked choppy from the September wind, and that was made further choppy by the motorized boat moving alongside him, transporting something or another from one shore to the other.

Today there was music, and as I got to the end, I saw couples dancing underneath a tent-pole studded with lighting, and the speakers from which the music issued. This was not a usual sight, and I sat down to watch. My friend complained that she could not hear me very well over the music, and I surprised myself by suggesting we speak later, rather than moving away. We hung up, and I settled in to watch complete and (for the most part) completely untalented strangers dance.

A tin can underneath the tent-pole announced the donation imperative, stating simply: "tango".

The idea I had of tango came completely from the movies. I expected brisk, exacting movements, a controlled passion, a tossing of the head that would look strange in any other context, dips and tricks and some violence. But this was nothing like that. These were amateurs. Hobbyists. People who tango on Wednesday nights, and put a couple of dollars into a tin can at the end of their evening.

As I stayed longer, the sky darkened, and more and more people arrived. The majority of these were not couples, but arrived, for the most part, alone. Alone and on foot, on collapsible bikes, on skateboards, in cars from New Jersey across the water. Alone and in shorts, tank tops, flowy evening dresses, sparkly scarves, flip flops, rubber shoes with the Nike swoosh iridescent and lime green on their sides.

I thought to leave after the first hour. I was not warm enough to be comfortable, and the mosquitoes had taken a liking to my face. I, for some reason, had gotten my notebook out and was writing things (mostly this) down, not knowing what, if anything, my point was in doing so. My commute was still fully ahead of me, and it was already 9 pm. But the same thing that has in the past kept me out in the Mokattam Hills until indecent hours, kept me there until impractical hours. In the same way that the bumpy car ride down the mountain would take me back to a Cairo far from beautiful without some distance and some darkness, I knew that a subway ride would break the spell the night had woven around me, and that my words would be too much mitigated by the person I am under florescent lights, and that they would sound flat as I wrote them. I stayed for a little longer with my uncharacteristic self, and wrote at leisure about what was happening as it happened.

I was there for a total of about three hours, my attention divided between many persons of note for one reason or another. There were the badly dressed ones (cargo pants, heeled leather shoes, flowery prints), the overdressed ones, and the sartorialists who'd gotten everything just right. There were the very old, the very young, and the in-betweens whose day jobs I wondered about. There were the notable exceptions: under-represented races and ethnicities, non-NYC residents who'd come all the way in from _____. But there was one woman in particular who caught my attention, and held it.

I watched her for a while, for she was a striking figure in more ways than one. She was old, and very thin, and had too much makeup on, in garish colors. She was in a tank top that exposed the side of a breast shrunken and sagging from the dual influences of age, and her emaciation. Everything she had on was some shade of pastel; a light blue tank top, pink slip-on shoes, grey, frizzy hair.

I'd noticed her earlier not because of this unflattering description, but for what I'd thought was spunkiness. She'd danced earlier with one man who'd biked over with his partner, and appeared surprised to see the dancers, but wanted to join them. He'd taken her up, leaving his boyfriend guarding the basketed bikes, and lead her strongly and at a pace clearly beyond her own level of comfort. She'd stopped him mid-step, crowed to "LEAD GENTLY!", and they tangoed.

He left soon after, this dance session after all being impromptu on his part. She danced on the edge of the circle made by the coupled dancers in her group. Her eyes were closed, her arms outstretched around a partner she imagined with every step. She needed nobody, her body seemed to say, and was in and of herself, content.

These dancers had a language peculiar to themselves, nonverbal and completely related to the music. They laughed in unison when their songs ended with an overly typical flourish, as if to say, we can enjoy this with both irony and joy in equal measure. They coupled and uncoupled with little awkwardness, these strangers of varying heights and hefts. Talented and un-, some graceful, some too deliberate, some in red ankle socks and heels, some balding, some beautiful. She kept separate from them all, and seemed, in her concentration, to be oblivious to the world around her.

Later, she came over to a woman resting next to me, and finally spoke within my hearing. "Nobody will dance with me!" she squawked. "The people who're good don't want to dance with anybody who isn't, and everyone else isn't good enough to dance with. I wanna learn, but nobody wants to dance with me!"

Her list of complaints was long and varied, and with it she destroyed every one of my conceptions of her, leaving me finally stripped of all that I'd wanted to see, feeling bereft having only what was.

Eventually, the organizer noticed her sitting off to the side, with her knees pulled up to her chest and her hands hugging them closer to her. He went over to her, unwound her from her compactness, and took her up, looking both bored and overly smug at his own generosity. I watched her for a few more minutes, as I finished writing, and wondered whether there would ever be a time when I stopped noticing lonely people.

تمت

2009-09-18T16:04:00.011-04:00

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My friend A__ S____ asked me a few days ago to come by and take a look at his collection of books, as he was downsizing on his personal possessions. I went over, experiencing what Christmas must feel like to some; I was filled to the brim with wonderment and gratitude, and was not disappointed.

A__ S_____ had undertaken a reading of the western canon of literature (according to Yale's Harold Bloom), and while he'd not gotten far in the reading department, he'd completed some of the purchasing involved, and so had many treasures to offer me. Aside from the decidedly euro-centric selection suggested by Harold Bloom, A__ S____ also had a few books in Arabic, which I took as well. Some of these were bestsellers, though that means little in a place like Egypt, where The Yacoubian Building was one and sold all of 3,000 copies to Egypt's populace of 83+ million...and this after being made into a movie with an all-star cast.

I packed my little windfall up as best I could, and headed home. It was late when I got there, and so I prepared for bed, and got into it in the hopes of quickly falling into sleep in order to function the next morning.

My excitement got the better of me. I made a deal with myself to skim through the books for a maximum of 15 minutes, and then go to sleep with a temporarily sated appetite. I picked up one of the books in Arabic, realizing with dismay how long it had been since I'd done anything but doodle in my native language. I read the back cover and the author bio, studied the packaging and the cover art. I found myself smiling wryly at the irony of Mama Suzanne's smiling endorsement of a book charting the history of Egyptian liberalism. I leafed through it, skimming, noticing that my self-appointed 15 minutes were almost up. I flipped to the final page of text, and there my thoughts of encroaching daylight and the associated workday died, overtaken by the image of the three letters that ended the book: تمت.

I stared for a couple of seconds, then threw off the covers and approached the pile that made up the remainder of my recent acquisitions. I brought all of the Arabic language books back into bed with me, and found their final pages: تمت , تمت , تمت , تمت. Every volume ended that way, with an announcement of its ending; the end, finito, this your signal to close this volume now and consider it read.

I will own up to the fact that this was something of an over-reaction to a publishing convention that probably meant very little. Very little, that is, if it were to be considered outside of a mind perhaps too affected by dystopia-obsessed novels the likes of 1984, A Brave New World, etc. I remembered then also that those same three curvaceous, unobtrusive letters appear at the end of all of the Arabic black and white film credits I'd ever sat through...a tradition we probably picked up from Hollywood, as we did its aesthetics, its ostentation, and its movie scripts (this last with particular fealty).

But it seemed to me strange still, to see this announcement at the end of a book. Did one really need to be told, in language external to and separate from the narrative arc of storytelling, that one should expect no more? Could the reader not be trusted, in the case of non-fiction, to know when a writer was done summing up her argument?

I eventually did go to sleep, and thought about this not too much in the next few days. On one of my look-at-random-things-on-the-Internet breaks at work, I came across the following website: imhalal.com. Someone had apparently developed a Muslim search engine, which would rate search term returns on a three-point scale of haramness. I found the idea of this amusing, and tested out some terms. Here are my initial findings:

pamela anderson: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 1 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

sex: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 2 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

homosexual: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 3 out of 3! I would like to advise you to change your search terms and try again.

the devil: Oops! Your search inquiry has a Haram level of 2 out of 3. This means that the results fetched by ImHalal.com could be haram!

[lesson of the day - homosexuals are more haram than the devil himself.]

Notice that with a 3-star haram rating, no search results are actually provided to the user, only the stern injunction to change the search term, and to try again. Also, in case you were wondering: "sperm" is a three-star offense, but "ovum" passes muster.

Anyhow, I shared this with friends, amused at the glitchiness and the bad logic of whatever algorithms these people had thought up with which to censor/censure life. I invited those I'd tagged in my note to share discoveries of their own, and moved as a result from amused to disturbed as this search engine uncovered - rather, confirmed - the dangerous biases rampant amongst the Muslim community.

That "homosexual" elicited a "Hell, no!" from this search engine was of very little surprise to me. But that my twin brother's disturbing "how to kill someone" was only a two-star offense was shocking, if only relative to how other search terms were rated. "Breast cancer", as my friend discovered, came with a warning, but "testicular cancer" was halal. "Rape" was a three-star word, with no results returned...and so was "rape victim".

I have no doubt that some of these ratings are resultant from bad coding rather than deliberateness no the part of the developers. That being said, I think they'd likely endorse their stance on homosexuality, as well as on many of these other apparent biases. What concerns me now is not that this engine does its work badly, but that it does it at all.

On a religious level, I fail to see how having this kind of tool makes any sense. Few people old enough to operate a computer don't know what a "sex" input is likely to return them. This engine, therefore, is not made for deliberate, willful voyeurs of all that is soiled and sordid according to Islam. Those people will most likely use Google Image Search.

Should we suppose that this is an engine meant to protect willful sinners from the whisperins of iblees, then one must ask the following question: have we become so far removed from the idea of resisting temptation as a part of practicing faith? Has our religion become so much about surrender that we leave our own judgement to computer programmers, lest our curiosity get the better of our will? And if that were the purpose of this search engine - where are the brownie points in that? Do Muslims nowadays ever choose what they perceive as virtue, rather than set up a rigid societal/legal structure that enforces "morality" by stifling all other forms of expression or being? We sleep away Ramadan days until sunset, and consider ourselves to have fasted. We drape women in black by force of law, and call them chaste, modest, God-fearing.

So who is it that is targeted here? What is the purpose of this engine, and for whose protection was it created? Is it for little Zeina, who comes home from school having heard an unfamiliar word, and upon seeking enlightenment, is told that the knowledge she desires is contraband of the three-star variety? She hears it again in her Muslim community, this time attached to "Lot" and "pillar of salt" and "fire and brimstone", and that becomes the sum of her experience?

On a secular level, this has tones of Kurt Vonnegut's Harrison Bergeron for me. It is a way of handicapping our minds, by having something do the deciding for us, and by instructing us where no instruction is needed, and where it should be unwelcome. But apparently, somebody has decided that there is need for this, this gatekeeper.

Repeat after me, Muslim world: tempt me not challenge me not put on my blinkers prescribe the world to me and I will swallow it whole.

تمت

From Wikipedia: An obituary is an attempt to give an account of the texture and significance of the life of someone who has recently died.

2009-06-23T15:02:00.007-04:00

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When my mother died a few years ago, she left behind clearly stated instructions as to what she wanted done. The woman who was to wash her and clothe her in her white funerary shroud was to be the mother of a man who we hired as a driver for her, on the occasions when he was needed. Al akraboon-a awla bil ma3roof, my mother likely thought. She gave no apparent thought, however, to the fact that the woman in question would have to get from Shobra El Kheima to Maadi in order to do that, and considering the other Islamic maxim that ikram el mayyet dafno, personal loyalty and burial haste would have to go head to head in pursuing these circumstantially contradictory wishes. In this case, personal loyalty trumped haste, and Umm Muhammad was indeed the woman to assist my sister and I in giving my mother her final preparation.

My mother’s other wishes were both few and pragmatic. She wanted to be buried next to her mother. She wanted no fuss made over her passing, and that included funerary arrangements. In fact, she did not want a funeral at all, and wanted a simple obituary written. She wanted very little space taken up in the paper, and seemed to want to leave this world with as little proof of her passage as possible. Here today, gone tomorrow, no exposition on the departure, nor any unnecessarily ostentatious displays of grief.

In the midst of “it” all, these last instructions were to pose complications and controversy for my siblings and I. Arab culture is not known for stoically bearing death, and we were a textbook example. Unable to interrupt this emotional demonstrativeness, we had to decide what to do while not in the rightest of minds. Muslims bury their dead quickly, and so the ticking of the clock was both rapid and deafening for all involved.

Let me interrupt my narrative here to explain why my mother’s wishes were controversial, and hope that the honesty of the explanation will forgive its crassness: That there would be an obituary was assumed. That it would be short was unheard of, except for families who had not the means for the per-letter fees. This did not include my own.

That there would be no funeral procession was also unheard of. Everyone got one, except for those who died unclaimed, having no family or none that cared. This did not include my mother.

Our camps were split. A couple of my siblings and I wished to respect her requests, and bury her in the pauperish style she’d requested. Others of my siblings felt that to let our mother go without pomp and circumstance would be a betrayal of her statures in our lives – that to give her what was culturally mandated, and to give her lots of it, was the one parting gift still possible to us (excluding prayer, of course). Thus do the dead leave us with remorse, and our desperate scrambling to do well by them thereafter.

The siblings on the side of the big funeral and the big obituary had my uncles on their side, who through gender and age superiority, trumped our own opposing desires. The big obituary ran, and the funeral arrangements were made.

My mother was buried next to her mother, and her obituary in the paper was one of the largest for that day. In it, that Dr. S_____ H______ K_____, daughter of F_____ A_____, sister of A____ K_____, M______ K_____, M_____ K_____, and M______ K_____, widow of M______ E________ and A____ B_____, mother to H______ E________, Y____ B_____, D___ E________, S_____ E________, and Mariam Bazeed had passed into the mercy of her Lord, and that the funeral would be held in so-and-so place at so-and-so time. Wa nas2alokom as-salah.

Our house was made open to those who wished to pay their respects. Regrettably, length of stay is equated in these situations with level of respect/love for the deceased, and so many came day after day after day, and sat hour after hour after hour, growing jittery with the black Turkish coffee that was continually served and continually drunk.

Conversation was strained, halting, more often than not providing further depression and next to no distraction from the newly created void that was the reason for gathering. One of these, when all who was present was family, concerned the rightness of what we’d done, whether to trump the wishes of the dead with the forcefulness and potency of the living in keeping with tradition was indeed the thing to do.

I asked why it all mattered. It seemed to me to be erring on the side of caution – even better, loyalty – to do as my mother had requested. “Who reads obituaries anyway?” I reasoned. Big or small, an obituary was a formality. I was sure that all who had come heard the news through the extended grapevine that transports both gossip and calamity so effectively through ever widening rings of family, friends, and acquaintances.

I was surprised at the chorus of voices that disagreed with me so strenuously. What did I mean, who read the obituaries? Why – everyone. I looked around, noticing that this “everyone” included only people in the room who were over fifty. Tante M___, my uncle’s wife, told me that she and her mother both read it every day. How else could one know that a friend or a distant relative had passed, if that someone was not close? Given that people are often buried the same day they pass, and that funerals occur rapidly thereafter, there was no time to be out of the obituary loop, and one needed all the notice one could get. So one read the obituaries, and one read them every single day.

I returned to silence then, having realized how superficially I knew this side of my culture. To pay one’s respects was a serious duty, and apparently if one was old enough to anticipate the need for that being frequent, one read the obituary.

I have since wondered at this phenomenon – the details and the technicalities of it all. I had so many questions, and no gentle way to ask them of those assembled who would know.

For example – there was the timing/scheduling issue. When do you begin reading the obituary? Is it a wake-up call kind of thing? Someone dies, you find out too late, and amend your behavior to avoid future oversights? Or is it preemptive for most people? Someone is diagnosed with a deadly disease, and you start their clock by picking up the newspaper thereafter for a quick scan? Or has it nothing to do with externalities, but is instead behavior triggered by an internal countdown, a deep-seated sense of time running slowly out for you yourself, and therefore most likely for your contemporaries. Is it the first adult tooth that detaches itself from your gums, signaling the beginning of an unstoppable downwards-facing spiral? The first liver spot, the first cataract? Or is it something even earlier: the first stiffening of the bones, the first wrinkles your naked eye can see, the first time you ache for no reason at all.

There is a possibility that I am over-reacting to much of this, as is my wont. There is a possibility that I am generalizing, as is also my wont. Finally, there is a possibility that I am dissecting behavior that does not warrant dissection, behavior that constitutes just one more thing people do.

And yet, consider this. Consider the qualitative difference that this behavior can impose on a life. The day you begin reading the obituary is the day you reckon, with any true understanding, with the mortality that surrounds us always, but that goes unnoticed or ignored in much of our lives. It is true that we all understand, at a young age, our inevitable demise….but this is a cerebral, hypothetical mortality, a “some day” mortality with little power to truly move us, let alone change our behavior. The smoker continues to smoke, and we do not say “I love you” any more frequently than we had been. We continue to sweat the small and the moderately-sized stuff, and we live as if we know that we will not die tomorrow, as if we can afford routine and boredom.

With the obituary, we invite death into mundane life, into the ravages of routine and habit, where it becomes just one more thing we do. W do this knowing that one day we will spill our tea, leap up from our chairs in a disbelief quickly replaced with memory and crushing, crushing loss, as we read the obituary. And despite all of this, the smoker continues to smoke, and Arabs do not say "I love you" any more often than anyone else, if at all. If reading lists and lists of the newly dead will not change us, what can?
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Nady El Fahaheel

2009-05-19T16:40:00.013-04:00

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I had the distinct, though rare pleasure of my friend M’s company for brunch recently while I was visiting in Chicago. Something like the following conversation ensued, which in turn had me remembering the episode described below.

M____: “I went out to put quarters in the meter and told my sister to look out for a girl with really short hair, in case you came in before I got back.”

Me: “Yeah, it’s a lot longer than the last time you saw me.”

M____: “I really like it this length.”

Me: “I like how people react to me more now that it is this length. But I feel more like myself when it’s short – I like being mistaken for a man.” (this last said jokingly)

M____: “Ha! Well, I suppose that says something about you.” (also, jokingly)

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I’d grown up dissatisfied not with my gender itself, but with the life that came along with it. An example: my older brother, an adept whistler, was allowed to fill our home with beautiful, complex music from noon until night, while any such behavior on my part elicited immediate admonition from whichever parent was closest at hand – girls did not whistle. Of course my desire tripled as soon as I was prevented, and I pursed and blew constantly as if all of my present and future happiness depended upon it (which I realize now, without exaggeration, that it did – breaking gender norms early was important, and made possible my life thereafter). I whistled nonstop, until I could mimic any and all tunes I knew or heard regardless of complexity or key.

This was not the only symptom of my early rebelliousness against the niche that Arab culture had carved out for me and my sex organs – I was a tomboy through and through. I’d enjoyed, for a brief stint at the beginning of my life, the dresses and skirts and pretty patterned things that my mother bought for me, but in subsequent years, retired them out of my wardrobe in favor of unisex clothing which interfered less with my chosen lifestyle of eight-year-old-boy. The only Barbie I owned was stripped of her decorative clothing, and featured in my play-acting only as the kidnapped victim my GI Joes had to rescue from the mad scientist (forgive me, women everywhere, for my sexist Hollywood-influenced playacting).

My one surviving domestically-themed memory from those years is of an experiment with custard. My mother, without fail, brought in to my father’s bedroom elaborate breakfast trays every single morning, which he consumed during his hour-long morning ritual of shaving dressing mousse-ing blow-drying (for he was a meticulous man). Included in these would be a dessert selection, for what is breakfast without something to sweeten the tooth for a day’s beginning? At least, that’s how the thinking went in my family before the entire world turned against the unfairly and much-demonized carb(ohydrate).

On a certain day, unremarkable to me, some internal alarm clock began beeping in my father’s head, and he decided that it was time for me to do something that women did. I was thence given the task of custard. I was to prepare my father’s dessert cups for the week.

I was little over eight years old, and so it is no surprise to me that the results were disastrous. Indeed, what seemed surprising was that nobody else had anticipated the failure of my culinary skills, even if the custard was boxed in just-add-milk powder form. Boxed custard, you will find, when entrusted to an eight-year old very quickly morphs into a nightmarishly inconsistent texture, lumpy, hard, unevenly flavored.

My father ate every single cup of it I made for breakfast-dessert, lunch-dessert, and dinner-dessert, saying nothing that wasn’t either encouragement or silence. Was he dutifully eating the fruits of his own ill-advised labors? In a sense, was my unwittingly patriarchal parent consuming the custard of his own bad judgment in attempting to engender gender too early? Or was he swallowing it down in silent encouragement, to show me that I’d successfully performed the first dry run of my destiny as an Egyptian female, one who makes things for others’ palates and tastes? I don’t know the answer to that, but smile to remember my father’s magnanimity, his silent, uncomplaining, and likely joyless consumption.

At any rate, I must have been given reprieve after that, for I remember being able to go happily back to my life as a tomboy who only ate in the kitchen: one who made nothing in it. I had no girl-friends, and enjoyed the company of boys, as well as the scabbed knees, the play-playground-fights, and the rough and tumble that came along with their company. My twin brother was a constant companion, and my older sisters were older enough that they were more like guardians than peers. Our two best friends, who lived only in the next building over, were both boys with whom we rode bikes, played Doom, and bickered both verbally and physically over Atari, Sega, and Sean Michaels WWF wrestling cards. I remember standing with my music teacher (a favorite, since in her class I got to sing to my contentment) and telling her how I wished for boy-ness. She said that being a girl could also be fun. I looked at her, shaking my head internally, bemused with her British naiveté at life – she had obviously learned very little in the many years separating us. It is not that I wanted to be a boy, but that I wanted to be free like one. And that was not possible in the Arab world.

I never knew my parents to be conflicted about how I should act (clearly, like a woman-to-be) or why (because), but for one rare episode:

The sporting club was where the Egyptians went on their weekends, being an island of staid respectability, and just as importantly, affordability in Kuwaiti social life. My father was a distinguished man, who took very particular care of his appearance. This care never came across as being symptomatic of a vain disposition, or of a desire for public approval – rather, he appeared to dress to impress only his very own impeccable and highly exacting standards.

This meant that even in the sporting club which we and other expat families favored, he would appear as if dressed for work, minus perhaps - and only on the hottest of days - his suit jacket, and even then only when he was expecting little company but for ours, his twin children. He was old-school, the kind to put a tie on for a trip to the store for milk. We were a study in contrasts.

The adults chitchatted politely about this and that – “this”, and usually “that”, all being events or gossip taking place back in Egypt, that had little to do with their everyday expatriated lives. While they did this, the children took advantage of what limited entertainment the sporting club offered. Those were days when the big wide world still remained closed and unfamiliar to us, and our attention spans had yet to be been corrupted by its diverse wiles. Therefore, the swimming pool, swing sets, game room, and tennis court (for running and other random playful acts, for none of us could play actual tennis) all seemed to be more than enough distraction.

We spent the day at the sporting club from early morning until the sun had long set, and the mosquitoes had gathered in enough numbers to be unbearable. The lunch meal was the only time the children and parents spent time in each others’ collective company. I had just finished a game of something or another that had me dusty, sweaty, and stained. I walked over to my father, whom I adored, and beamed at him. It was lunchtime. He was in the air-conditioned cafeteria, looking as collected and coiffed as ever, and was tamping some tobacco into his pipe. I slid my chair closer to him, for I liked the smell and his proximity. To me, it seemed a feat of magic that only my father was capable of, to light a fire and make it smell like cherries. When my mother lit the stove, it smelt like nothing.

My father was sitting with his friends W____ and N_____, a married couple, and was laughing huskily and quietly in his reserved way. He was commentating on my appearance, on how unladylike I could be. I grinned mightily, these being complimentary utterances to my ears even though I knew they were not intended as such. I sat down with my order of pounded breaded chicken and French fries, listening to my father recount a playground episode of mine that had not stuck in my own fleeting, childish memory, but that he remembered distinctly and with great detail.

“She asked me if she could go over and play soccer with the boys. I suggested instead that it might be nicer for her to do something else – skip rope, go on the swings. But you know Mariam. She kept insisting and I told her to go ahead. She is young, there is no harm in it. I told her she could play as long as she was goalie and not out in the field. I watched her for a little bit then went for a walk around the track.”

Here his voice swelled with something like pride.

“I came back, and found her not only to have completely abandoned her goalposts, but to be actively directing every single boy on her team and the other’s, including her twin brother. They all listened to her, I don’t know why. I started to call her over, but stopped myself and just watched”. Here he chuckled again, and grew quite, looking at me.

I imagined I could see possibility in his eyes…but older-me thinks that maybe that is only what I wanted to see. Any sense of the possible would have inevitably ebbed as his fancy was brought back down to earth, back down to his own expectations of the unmistakable girl smiling back at him. At the time, I am sure she recognized the ebb for what it was. She finished the remainder of her fries both quickly and quietly, and then it was time to go home.

Once Upon a Time, On a Flight to Jordan...

2009-04-21T10:18:00.006-04:00

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The Arab womb being what it is (i.e. willing and expected to perform at high inexhaustible capacity), meant that the child-to-adult ratio was unbelievably high. This further ensured that the twelve red-eye hours to come would be fitful, and would be filled with very much noise and little sleep. The flight had Jordan as its final destination, and so uncovered female hair was a rare sight amongst the passengers, as were non-Arabs, Jordan being light in tourist traffic.

Human beings were coupled like our 767 had become a modern-day version of Noah’s ark – all of the animals wedding-ringed, all slightly irritable, all too-willing to go forth and further multiply to ensure uncomfortable flights for the childless among us for many more generations to come.

The woman at the boarding gate questioned me twice with eyebrows raised as to whether I was boarding alone, having noticed this trend of coupled-ness and/or childfullness. I was clearly old enough to be fertile, yet had neither a hairy man nor a hairy child to show for it. I looked around the New York airport, slightly shocked that I had yet to set foot in the Middle East, but was already sticking out like a sore thumb amongst my fellow Arabs – a throbbing-bruised-single-25-year-old-Arab-female-traveling-alone thumb, the dodo reincarnate.

The couples were seated with notable uniformity, as if directed by an unseen hand. Women occupied middle or window seats, with their mates sitting resolutely on the aisles. I wondered for a split second whether the women were being afforded the better view in a gentlemanly show of indulgence. I then realized that the trend was likely an organic and inevitable consequence of ensuring male comfort and freedom of movement, rather than the female visual amusement. It is not for men to negotiate knees and under-the-seat baggage on their way to the bathroom – they must roam free, like the cougar, with only the regulation seat belt (unbuckled) between them and their will. It is also not for men to allow their wives’ shoulders to be brushed by other passing cougars…so their wives are relegated to the nice view far from the aisle and its dangerous impropriety.

Airline regulations didn’t apply, this being an Arab flight. Children and adults alike wanted-needed-couldn’t-wait to visit the bathroom just as soon as the seat belt lights went on, even our bowels thwarting all authority and hope for order.

Flight attendants were cajoled into this seat switch, and then another, and then oh bleaze bleaze won’t you put zis bag in za storage bin at za front, sbecial storage bleaze it’z crowding my legz bleaze.

“Wein rohty?”, the man on my left and across the aisle demanded of his wife, who mumbled an explanation (since clearly her options of destination were limitless thousands of feet off the ground in a closed airplane) before sliding past his unmoved and unmoving knees – for it is not for men to scootch-make-way-shift-to-faciliate-female-movement.

The man on my right had taken pills that promptly lodged in his throat the minute our attendant took up her tray of sleep masks and headphones to distribute.

Puma Socks: “I need water.”
Female Flight Attendant: “My hands are full right now, sir.”
Puma Socks: “I asked the other one but he didn’t bring me.” (For it is not for men – even flight attendants – to serve)

She set her tray down, interrupted her routine, and brought him a glass of water, taking the time to add ice. The obtrusive pill, which had interfered not at all with the processes of breathing, demanding, and complaining, was washed down with ice water, for it is not for men to wait.

I am in the middle row of seats, one of those rare female dodos sitting in an aisle seat. I am alone and my hair is uncovered, so people speak to me in English.

The man on my right has a man on his right, and they start a halting, accented conversation in English. One sneezes – nose and mouth uncovered, for it is not for men to hinder their breathing passages, nor is it for them to keep their germs from flying forth and multiplying.

Puma Socks: “Aatchoo! Al Hamdo-lillah!”
Bearded Man: “Ah akhi, enta ordoni? Yarhamokom-Allah!”

Pegged thus, they continue in Arabic.

Bearded Man: “Men wein?”
Puma Socks: “Irbid!”
Bearded Man: “Blah blah Irbid is awesome, ahsan nas blah blah.”

Later…

Puma Socks: “Are you married?”
Bearded Man: “No, but I hope to be soon. It is hard to marry, hard to find a compatible one.”
Puma Socks: “Yes, yes, but you can marry one and teach her?”
Bearded Man: “Esh? I didn’t hear you?”
Puma Socks: “Ya3ni you can marry one and teach her to mold to your attitudes.” (For it is not for men to mold)
Bearded Man: “Yes, yes. I intend to take a village girl.”
Puma Socks: “Yes, yes. One of those would be best.”
Bearded Man: “Yes, yes. Probably tawjihi age.
Puma Socks: “Yes, yes. Not too young for you?”
Bearded Man: “No, no. Eighteen!”
Puma Socks: “Ah! Yes, yes. Thaz good.”
Bearded Man: How about you? Married, children?”
Puma Socks: “No, no. But someday soon, I hope. I left Irbid to work and ma hasal naseeb. Anyway, I am still young, there is time.”
Bearded Man: “How old are you?”
Puma Socks: “54 in June.”

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Female Flight Attendant: “Excuse me, sir, chicken or pasta?”
Puma Socks: “Chicken comes with rice?”
Female Flight Attendant: “I don’t know, sir, the meals are covered.”
Puma Socks: “You don’t know? How about the basta? You don’t know whazz in there also?”
Female Flight Attendant: “…”
Puma Socks: “Chicken.” (For it is not for men to say blease)
Female Flight Attendant: “Here you go, sir.”
Puma Socks: “…” (For it is not for men to say thank you)

Female Flight Attendant: “How about you, sir? Chicken or pasta?”
Bearded Man: “What you say? I was listening to my headphones?”
Female Flight Attendant: “Would you like chicken or pasta?”
Bearded Man: “Chicken. And Coke. And Eye-ess.” (For it is not for men to wait to be asked)

Female Flight Attendant: “How about you ma’am?”
Me: “Chicken, please. Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.” (For it is for me to overcompensate)

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Direction(s), or the Lack Thereof

2009-04-04T14:25:00.010-04:00

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It was approaching midnight and I was on the subway platform pretending to be engrossed in a particularly uninspiring collection of short stories by Augusten Burroughs. I had invested quite a bit of time idly scanning his belabored sentences and half-following his story line, and so issued the occasional forced guffaw so as to trick myself into believing I was engaged in an enjoyable activity. This type of psychotic behavior (for isn’t the deliberate planning to lie to oneself symptomatic of just that?) also served a secondary purpose. In my years in New York, I had found that evidence of being engrossed happily in a book was a superb method by which to halt directions-seeking tourists and self-promoting New Yorkers in their industrious paths to disturbing one, and intruding like an obtrusive herd of elephants into one’s otherwise disengaged life. Surprisingly, book-engrossed me was at least three times as successful at detracting attention than was demonstratively scowling get-the-fuck-away-from-me me. So I read on, and I chuckled forcefully on.

My game must have been off that day. From the corner of my eye, I could see someone at the periphery of my visual field approaching. I lowered my heard further, turned slightly away, but this did very little in deterring the advance. The footsteps never slowed, and as they approached to within conversational distance of me, I was forced to look up and engage in the pretense of being a social animal.

I found myself to be surprisingly unannoyed by the intrusion, despite my earlier preparations to ward off just that. The gentleman who approached me had a very agreeable air about him. Okay, so perhaps “gentleman” is a generous description. He was far from distinguished enough to warrant the intended usage of the term. His shoes were black, scuffed up leather still showing the ghostly wavy outlines left behind by this past winter’s weather salting. These were worn under visibly pilling navy blue trousers with sewed-in creases at the front – a true relic of days and fashions past. He wore a nondescript shirt, also navy blue with some type of unremarkable striping or checkering in grey. He kept a greying decently-groomed mustache, and his skin was brown and creased in a few endearing spots. Had he looked less tired, they would have looked more like creases caused by excess merriment in life rather than skin crackled and worn by age. His features and clothing choices suggested that he was Middle Eastern.

This last observation flipped switched of both ease and tension within me almost simultaneously. Ease because the perceived similarity of origin immediately created a sense of familiarity on my part towards him – this irrespective of whether he guessed that I too was Arab…which he didn’t. The tension stemmed from previous encounters such as this that ended with an uncomfortable and uninvited intrusion into the details of my life. Amicable beginnings of, “Ah begad? Men fein fe Masr?” quickly degenerating into demands of, “Do you live alone? What is your family name? Where do you live work play breathe are you married?”

So I opted for English. He did not speak it very well, and apparently unsuspecting of my ethnicity attempted no direct communication in Arabic. He stumblingly asked for directions, getting desperate as a train approached which he wasn’t sure whether to take. I explained more physically than verbally that he should wait for the same train I was getting on, and signaled to him when it eventually arrived. He looked relieved, and we sat across from each other in the same car. I got back to my insipid Augusten Burroughs.

Being that by now it was quite late, there were only a few other passengers. I noticed when half-heartedly continuing to read that one of them, another older gentleman, appeared lost. He kept craning his head up to look at the mapped subway route from his seat. He would study this for a while, illumination consistently failing to light up his features. At a couple of the stops (for there were many in my journey back home) he hopped off the train, looking confused and undecided, only to scramble back on as the doors were closing.

He began asking people in the car, one of them my recent companion – I’ll call him Omar. Omar shrugged, even though the station asked for was a major one. Omar looked at me, and looked back the man. I realized I was staring and dropped my eyes to the text I wasn’t reading.

Over the course of the next 20 minutes, the man’s behavior continued, getting more and more jittery as time passed by. He walked up and down the car, making his selection of people to ask seemingly at random, none of whom could or would help. I'll admit here that the man appeared disheveled, was toothless with uncombed hair, and that perhaps that was why he was fhaving trouble finding the samaritan spirit in his fellow New Yorkers. Omar kept swiveling his head in my direction each time the man was rebuffed.

I began silently pleading with the man to ask me. I kept glancing up at him, willing him to make eye contact and recognize the information brimming and bubbling inside me, wanting him to occasion its share.

I was majorly conflicted, experiencing actual anxiety at a situation that was really ludicrous at its core. Despite clearly needing the help, I felt that to approach him without his direct request was too forward, too invasive, intrusive, Arab. I wrestled with this ridiculous stance:

He would appreciate it.

It was none of my business.

The hour of the night meant the he would wait long to get back on the right train if he guessed wrong. It was already so very late.

He would ask me if he wanted my help.

He was an old toothless man – an easy target.

It was none of my business.

Omar kept on looking from him to me, as if spectatoring a tennis match.

The man eventually got off again – one station before he was supposed to. I tried speaking to tell him to get back on the train, but my voice caught as my internal monologue started back up. I spoke to him in my head, as if by sheer force of will I could get him to scamper back onto the train.

Suddenly, inevitably, it was too late. The doors slid closed with finality, and I slumped back into my seat, sweat coating my brow. The old man stood motionless on the platform as the train moved away. He still hadn’t moved by the time we were overtaken by the darkness of the tunnel, and he became no longer visible.

The next stop was mine, and Omar followed me with his gaze as I got off at my destination, each of us lost on our way home.

On Beauty*

2009-03-20T10:24:00.007-04:00

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*Let me first acknowledge that my title is inspired/stolen from Zadie Smith’s book of the same name. I tried a few others, but nothing seemed to fit quite as well. So, plagiarism thus acknowledged, I begin.

Growing up in the Middle East is growing up with large portions of honesty, and around a majority of people who tell it like it is. Certainly, it is also growing up with mogamlat (false compliments) left and right, but these are so easily recognizable that they are not even intended as lies, white or otherwise. They are a convention, similar to Egyptian shopkeepers urging one to take their merchandise for no money at all. No shopper in his or her right mind then makes off with the goods, surely? There would be a jail sentence, or more likely a street-beating, in that.

It is this brand of social nicety that all mogamlas fall under, a barely disguised and easily recognizable lie that is of little consequence, and little effect; nobody familiar with the culture could mistake a mogamla for anything more heartfelt. Obviously ya Tante Esmek-Eh you have not slimmed down. We all know you’re wearing the old post-pregnancy clothes you’d once been iron-willed enough to retire to the back of the dolab, collecting dread and dust therein, waiting for just this day. But we say them anyway, perhaps to fill the silences, or to introduce a daily dose of niceness given and received (perfunctory though it may be) into our days.

It is with this easy and learned discernment that I grew up in the Middle East. I knew very well the code that we spoke, although I’ve not really ever been one to engage in the giving of compliments I do not mean – I have always tended to choose silence instead.

Regardless of whether I partook in the dishing out, I have always been a mistress at detection. It is because of this that I knew I was ugly.

A little disclaimer here: for those of you who are strained and uncomfortable at the moment, and thinking of emailing me in true-friend interventionist form to say that I am beautiful – I do not believe myself to be ugly anymore. I speak now of the past. So calm yourselves; listen. What I hope for the below to do is to rid you (or at the very least make you question) this knee-jerk reaction.

I had an early childhood full of admiration from the adults in my life. I was generally well-behaved, high-achieving in school, and I was a cute, well-presented kid. My mother dressed me in cute little skirts, and put me in hair barrettes. My sisters were ever-vigilant about keeping all the tangles out of my hair, and the shine firmly in. I remember specifically being encouraged to act coy as a circus act for the adults in my life, who were so very consistently tickled by it.

This all changed almost overnight. Suddenly, I was awkward, physically imposing for my age (read: fat). My hair, so silky and smooth for the beginning portion of my life, was suddenly too kinky and curly and unruly to do anything about except give up and let it go where it wanted, and do what it wanted. It would hang, frizzy and uncontrollable in an ever-present and ineffectual ponytail – that unfortunate epitome of plainness employed by mothers all over the Middle East for hair that will not straighten. My eyebrows widened vertically, and seemed insistent on having no two hairs grow in the same direction. The occasional pimple would find the most prized and prominent piece of real estate on my face, and settle there for weeks, red, angry, filling to eventual bursting with liquid that seemed to have no business being produced by the human body. They called this stage of my life puberty.

After this there was very little demand for coy-me. I was treated differently; suddenly I was no longer expected to be cute-on-demand, as if with the early onset of adulthood I’d lost that capability, irrevocably and forever. I was a little more than eight years old.

With this transformation came my exposure to that particular brand of Arab honesty. My weight was a topic of public discussion at every family gathering, as was the upkeep of my hair, and other subjects regarding my physical presentation. This was not something that horrified or embarrassed me, nor was it discussed by others as if it should be a source of negative feeling – it was simply expected, in the same way that commentary on my grades or religious observances were expected. I grew up with an insensitivity about these issues, and could discuss them dispassionately and without rancor or sullenness. I was bad at being pretty in the same way that I was bad at geometry – it was an area that I was expected to want to improve at in the same way that I would be expected to want to ace any geometry exam administered at school. I was matter-of-factly overweight, not shamefully or humiliatingly so. It was an issue of practical consideration, not an issue of esteem or self-valuation – my marriage prospects were at risk, my health was at risk, and those were reasons to care (probably in that order).

I came to the US, and my looks (or lack thereof) immediately turned into dangerous territory. Innocuous comments I made that included any mention of my weight were met with uncomfortable silences, nervous laughter, or often with a strange and unbearable combination of the two. My commentary was judged to be indicative of low self-esteem, as if to acknowledge a physical reality based on averages was to be unnecessarily cruel to myself. As if to be blind about how I was perceived and interacted with by the world was the only avenue left through which I could feel good about myself.

This type of attitude meant that I quickly developed a significant level of anxiety about my physical appearance. Clearly, this was something shameful if I could not talk about it. This was something to be embarrassed about if one could not even verbally acknowledge it with friends. I packaged myself in baggy clothing, dressed down everywhere so that nobody would ever think that I was trying and failing at looking good – it seemed better to appear disdainful of even the attempt. I publicly scoffed at people who were superficial enough to care about their appearance, as I strained to fabricate a carelessness with it that belied the truth of how much I obsessed, and how carefully and deliberately I hid myself from the world.

This has all changed now, and I don’t know why. The point here is not to discuss my transformation from moth into butterfly, and in fact I think no transformation ever took place. My attitude towards my physical appearance simply evolved and I regained my matter-of-fact judgment of my physical presentation to the world that I’d learned in the Middle East, and that I had lost momentarily in America. I have not slimmed down, and have no miracle diet/pill/lifestyle-transformation to tout as the solution to temporary-if-you-want-it-to-be obesity.

The point is to ask why we find it necessary to pretend that beauty does not matter. My personal experience was that to pretend that that was the case, to never acknowledge where an individual moved away from conventional standards of beauty, made it harder to feel and act normal. I was much happier with my life when I knew that physical appearance was a sector of public performance in which I did not score very highly, and treat it simply as that – something that I could work on if I found it important enough, but not a fundamental detractor in any way.

Does my “analysis” above ignore certain realities? It ignores a myth, certainly –that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that not every person is enamored of some type of standard (some more conventional than others) - that beauty is ultimately too subjective to talk about. While I am sure that there are people in the world whose tastes do not conform to any convention, they are an exception to a rule that most are better served by minding. There are averages, and most people tend to agree on levels of attractiveness above and below those averages. That is how movie stars and models are made.

So, those of you that are lip-glossed, manicured, well dressed and pressed, and spent some of your day today making yourself look good – you likely acknowledge a truth you will not speak. One must try, as one is judged. Those of you who spend just as much time looking particularly unconventional – you do the same, but you adhere to different standards of beauty, but a standard nevertheless. How honest we are about this capacity of others to judge us is all that changes from culture to culture. The Middle East seems to have a healthier attitude in this regard, and I find myself to be much happier having regained my politically incorrect view.

Here's to hairspray, concealer, and (hopefully one day) a diet pill that won't give you cancer.

My Grandfather's Clock

2009-02-17T14:56:00.010-05:00

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I made the mistake, this past weekend, of going to bed consistently late and waking up mid-afternoon. While I have an almost unshakeable belief that that is the absolute best way to start any day, this unfortunate though inevitable side-effect resulted: it is about 2 am as I write this, I have work tomorrow, and after spending 45 minutes wide-eyed in a pitch-black room, I have to concede that sleep is yet far off and, at the moment, quite unachievable. I reached for my blog-notebook, purchased for the exclusive and conceited purpose of writing down blog-thoughts immediately before they disappeared from the sieve that doubles as my memory bank. I began filling it as I waited for sleep to descend.

In times such as this, my mind often buzzes inexhaustibly of the past. My thoughts tonight have zigged and zagged thus:

First I thought back to some childhood report cards I’d recently unearthed from a long-undisturbed pile of papers. I found that they go as far back as my first year in Kindergarten, and though skipping a few years, go all the way to middle school. My mother had kept all of these, and it was with great interest that I had gone back and leafed through them to read of my forgotten academic past.

There were a few surprises. I abhorred coloring, though I like it now. Sadly I rarely indulge in coloring books, society having firmly established it in my mind that this is not a suitable adult pastime. I was friendly and affectionate with adults (or so said the “social development” portion of my report card) but reticent with my peers, making few friends until the end of my first year. This did not match my assumption that I had been a socially precocious child, for all of the memories I’d retained from childhood included some form of social interaction. While I am sure I spent some time alone, no memory survives of those periods.

From this my thoughts went to music, which I had been highly graded in. I’ve always loved singing, and have enjoyed myself tremendously over the many years since I first realized that I could carry a tune, and that it sounded pleasant when I so did. I’ve not had many public performances, but have always felt blessed in some way to be capable of creating something of beauty using only my body as an instrument and my breath as a medium. I’ve long been pleased with the immediacy of it, the singular agency in singing that is unmatched by other forms of instrumental performance, the lack of any level of abstraction.

My thoughts from there progressed thus: My school for some years of my life had a daily assembly. This involved all of the different grades and classrooms within those grades trooping down to our largest hall, where our silver-haired principle would make relevant “housekeeping” types of announcements, discuss ethics and morality, and greet us or say goodbye to us before and after every long school break. It was nice to have these meetings of our entire community, and there was rarely any grumbling, no rudeness or backtalk from students, and therefore little policing from the adults.

At the completion of every assembly announcement, the music master (mistress, in my last year there) would lead the entire school in two or three songs – whatever we had time for after business had been taken care of. These were rarely themed, and had very little to do with our school specifically – in fact, we had a school, “anthem” which we effectively ignored and never learned in all my years there.

Instead, we sang all these very western songs, some of them very Christian indeed. A lyric from one of them comes to mind…“Lord of all, to Thee we raise, this our joyful song of praise”. My teachers doctored some of the lyrics to make them slightly more potable – the original version, for example, has “hymn” instead of “song” in the lyrics.

It is surprising to me now that the very Muslim adults in our lives minded not at all that we were singing hymns in our British schools, learning trappings not of our own cultures but of people's who were different from us, lighter in skin, paler of eye, rounder and pinker of face and a continent away – people who doubtless at some deep level felt their influence to be in some way civilizing to us Muhammedans, us Arabs, us brown-skinned folks whose parents and grandparents knew what it felt like to be colonized. I was in this way expatriated twice; I was an Egyptian living in Kuwait growing up in quaint old England.

But perhaps I am being too harsh, adding too much heavy meaning to what was thoughtless and neutrally-intentioned action. Perhaps those were simpler times, when songs were songs were songs, and people assumed (correctly?) that no agendas of any sort hid behind them. Perhaps all our fair-skinned teachers were aiming to do was make beautiful music with us in a language we all shared. Perhaps it was a way, in the midst of being deliberately and constantly made to feel like an outsider, to share with us a piece of what was home for them, to bridge some gap between their world and ours as expats together.

I still have those song books somewhere - smuggled underneath my school-uniform shirt out of assembly after I found out that I was changing schools. I still remember the words and the tunes to most of the songs I sang happily and often in assembly. I also have fond memories of concerts given by me to my parents while they bathed me. I taught them what I sang at school, bridging a further gap imposed by my school-life and their work-life, our time apart. My mom had a pure soprano sound, and I hope never to forget her Egyptian-accented voice repeating after me.

In case you were wondering, this was my favorite song, and I still find myself humming it at random times. I liked it for the constancy it described, the loyalty that it taught me to strive for.

A few fun/funny covers of "My Grandfather's Clock":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayT3eN4OFag&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7ICC2D_8K8&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Aa_0OnEwXM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUfLtPbQW8Q '

On the Assuredness of Past Generations

2009-02-11T13:45:00.022-05:00

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Back when I must have been about eight or nine years old, I signed up for my school’s ice-skating club. What that meant was that each Thursday morning, the first day of the weekend in the peninsular Arab world, a small bus would pull up outside my building. I would run out, dressed in my coolest gear, excited by the many novelties of the situation that lay ahead of me.

Firstly, I didn’t get out much, which was normal for expats in those lands, and most especially Egyptians. My life was tightly circumscribed on all other days, and so it was with a liberal dose of pure delight mixed in with everyday childish excitement that I would leave home. I looked forward to my Thursdays all week, thinking as I did back then that to ice-skate was to do something delightfully exotic, daring. My twin brother hadn’t signed up, and we were used to extra curricular activities being done in the presence and involvement of the other. Not that we ever minded each other’s company, but still – there was something thrilling about my singularity in this. During those few Thursday mornings, I was free in a way that I almost never was otherwise.

Secondly, there was the ice to think about. Sensually, the experience was delicious. I would walk in from the scorching Kuwaiti sun and would be immediately greeted with a cold wall of air as soon as the automatic doors hissed open. This wall would break upon me, chilling the sweat running down my body that was a permanent symptom of Kuwaiti weather, drying it almost immediately. I marveled at how that briskness could make me feel.

This was usually followed by a half hour of mounting anticipation as I struggled with rented skate shoes that are ostensibly made to be worn by all, but fit none who try. I would inevitably have to ask for help from the shoe attendant, as would the other kids in the gaggle that was our ice-skating club.

What would then follow was about an hour or so of instructionless, and therefore little-improving amateur skating, in the exercise of which many injuries would be sustained, friendships tested, and trust shattered as we failed to hold each other up, skated too fast or too slow, and generally acted in our uncertainty as a non-cohesive team in a non-team sport.

But I have strayed. This story has very little to do with skating, for nothing of import ever happened on the ice.

My father gave me pocket money outside of my regular allowance for these special Thursdays. After skating, there was a food court, and it was there that we would end our Thursdays most satisfactorily. Kuwaiti currency, being strong as it was and still is, enabled me to go up to a vendor with only a few coins, and walk away with gustatory riches beyond my ability to consume in one sitting. My schoolmates and I would alleviate the pain of our bruises, the discomfort of our borrowed shoes, and the wetness soaking us from our many falls in cheeseburgers, popcorn, imported candy, and all other brands of sinfulness and excess.

On one such Thursday morning, on the way to the rink, my friend H___ made me a proposition. I was to give her 100 fils, the largest denomination of coin in Kuwaiti money. She would in return give me 250 fils, the smallest denomination of paper bill in Kuwaiti money. I gave this very little thought, given that such an exchange was so very clearly in my interest. I handed over the coin, and pushed into my pocket the paper bill she gave me.

For whatever reason, I came home that evening with the paper bill still in my pocket, unspent. Perhaps I had been in possession of other money and had spent that instead, for I had never up until that point been one to leave home and return having spent nothing. At any rate, this meant that I had the bill in hand to show to my father.

I did this in excitement, sure that he would be proud of my sound decision-making and fiscal capability. Clearly, I’d come out ahead, and had agreed to a savvy bargain. I recounted to my father how H___ had requested the trade, and my agreeableness to it, with the subsequent exchange of goods on the bus. He looked first puzzled, then worried.

What followed were days and days of my father studying the 250 fils. He would take the bill and sit on his side of the bed. He would turn on his powerful bedside light, and bring his magnifying glass in from the study. He would pore over the bill, sighing regularly, as he discarded one hypothesis for H___'s strange behavior and then another. The bill was not conterfeit, as far as he could tell. It was not torn unspendably so. It was a perfect specimen of that denomination of bill, and it called out to be spent accordingly.

He questioned me repeatedly, asking me to tell him the story again, asking me what H___’s expression had been like when she made this offer. He got particularly frustrated during one such interrogatory session, and said that he was going to call her parents to find out what was going on. I begged him not to - it would get her in serious trouble. I knew that for expat parents such as ours, the fact that she would make such a careless trade would not go unpunished, nor lightly punished. Our parents had left everything they knew behind and had started over, and here we were squandering their cash - the reason behind their self-imposed loneliness and isolation from a world for which they longed constantly.

My father never figured out what was wrong with the bill, nor with H___. He eventually forgot the mystery and continued to make money at his staid, respectable profession. The exchange rate was always in our favor, as was the strength of Kuwaiti currency. With the funds generated he bought Cairo-based real estate and plots of land, things that expanded his ownership of miniscule portions of a country he could no longer get away with calling home. With more of these funds he furnished these empty apartments and living spaces with lavish furniture we sat and slept on only for the short month we spent in Cairo every year. Otherwise, it gathered dust in silent testament to his and my mother's fiscal achievements, and was meant to challeng locals' questions as to what they'd ever gained by leaving, to provide proof that it was all somehow worthwhile. The rest of their funds went towards providing my brother and I with a childhood lacking in want, and with a good education.

I, on the other hand, was unburdened with the weight of the future, and was therefore irreverant. I spent my 250 fils that very next Thursday on a cheeseburger, popcorn, and imported candy.
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Kitchen Ruminations

2009-01-16T17:38:00.012-05:00

I rarely have epiphanies of any sort in the kitchen. Any culinary territory is shaky ground, an area of great confusion and failed endeavors, dashed expectations and foiled creative impulses. That being said, I very recently had my first big kitchen think – well, big anyhow, relative to my more usual kitchen ruminations concerning whether I’d added enough cumin to suit my cumin-y tastes. The date was November 29th, and the year was 2008.

A friend from work was coming over, and after a scheduled trip to the Brooklyn museum, I was meant to wow her with my culinary prowess. In a fever of anticipation (since I rarely cook, despite loving kitchen experimentation), I had gone to WholeFoods and purchased organic (i.e. overpriced) items, forgetting all about budgets, and spending more on the materials for one meal than I do in a week of grocery shopping. I came home laden with shrimp, chestnuts, nuts of all other denominations, as well as visions of praise and glory awaiting the completion of my toil.

My epiphany came as I was 75% along the path to ruination, as I contemplated throwing out ingredients that could likely fetch at least a kidney in some impoverished nations. The rice was inedible (cinnamon and turmeric overdose), the nuts charred (one must keep in mind that they continue cooking in their own oils for a couple of seconds after the heat source is gone), and the chestnut soup smelled like gum (from an overly liberal addition of mastic). I decided that the rice was unsalvageable, as I knew of no established technique of cinnamon extraction, and was throwing out all three cups of it I’d made. My cell phone started trilling its fakely-delicate electronic notes.

The message was from my sister, who lives in my native Egypt an ocean and a 12-hour flight away. I was happy to hear from her, and said as much in response to her pleasantries. “Bent halal, lessa ba2ool feinek ya D---? I just ruined the rice dish you make so well. How are you?”

My mention of the rice fiasco was innocuous; I had not meant for her to be involved in the process, but was adding a pedestrian detail of everyday significance. This is something I do very deliberately, convinced that the triviality of such details makes the distance between us appear smaller, more surmountable. My phone began chirping again though, minutes after my response to her. In the Count’s phrasing (yes, the count of sesame street): one text message, two text message, three text message, four! Five text message, six text message, seven text message, more!

My sister had taken the time (on a non-QWERTY phone, mind you) to write out a full recipe, usually yielding delicious results when carried out by her genius hands. The recipe itself was useless, and bound to produce substandard results. Like most recipes provided by Arabs, it lacked a single unit of measure. I knew the rice needed cinnamon, and hadn’t failed to notice in the many previous occasions of my consumption of it that toasted almonds were crunching pleasingly between my teeth. In short, my sister’s careful and industrious texting had done little more than confirm that I’d bought the correct overpriced ingredients, but told me little of how to best use them in pursuit of deliciousness.

I was nevertheless touched at her thoughtfulness, and for taking the time to laboriously write out a full recipe on a phone that did not lend itself to messages longer or more eloquent than, “He sez yea!!! LMAO”. I prepared myself to begin another batch of rice, musing the whole time about how much easier it has become to communicate across an ocean and a 12-hour flight distance.

Memory Lane: I’m about six or so, and my immediate family is split between two continents. My twin brother and I live with our parents. My two older sisters – mothers to my brother and I in everything but name and fact – are in college, and an infrequent plane ride away. I spent most of my childhood missing them desperately when they were away, and being anxious about the inevitability of their impending absence when we were together.

There were moments of relief though. The phone would begin ringing, and my ears would perk up, timing the duration of the ring. International phone calls in those days and in those lands rang about twice as long as local calls, announcing prior to that first “hello” that this, this phone call was special. In my excitement, the seconds would stretch out, and I would stand transfixed by the first ring. Once over, the ring would signal the beginning of a race; the world would speed back up, and I’d sprint to the living room (multiples phones were considered a disturbance in my family). The stampede thus begun, I would hear the patter of my brother and mom’s running feet as they attempted to claim that first breathless “hello” for themselves. We would often crash into each other at our destination, arms flailing and hands grasping. We would scramble for a second, until a high-decibeled exclamation from my mother would quickly restore the balance of power, and establish her as the authority in our midst.

I never listened all that closely back then to the content of my mother’s phone conversations with my sisters. The subject matter always appeared dull when compared to the laundry list of childhood adventures I was compiling in my head. This listing behavior was not born out of anticipation alone, but was a thing of necessity. I would have a minute to a minute and a half to speak before my mom would wrench the phone from my unwilling hand to give my brother his turn, or before the line would go dead. The phone calls were expensive, and considered a frivolous indulgence. So I would make a list, prioritize my agenda items, and yell as many of them as I could over the phone after attempting – in vain – to describe the depths of my longing for their company.

Listening to my mother a couple of years later on just such a phone call, I realized that she too made a laundry list, and that she too got to only one or two items on an ever-expanding list. Hers were urgent items for immediate consideration or action. Have you found a land broker or not. Did we win the court case. Do you have your visa. Is she out of the hospital. The application deadline is tomorrow – send it in. We arrive on the 13th.

My mother therefore exercised far more self-control than I in my youth was capable of. She did not say I miss you, nor use my feeling words at all. She had precious few seconds in which to deliver instructions, make requests, and confirm everyone’s health, if not their happiness. She spoke telegraphically, yelling into the mouthpiece to cover the distance between two continents, and suppressing her happiness at hearing from two absent daughters. She allowed herself only a nostalgic smile once the line was dead, replacing the receiver back into its cradle.

When we called my sisters we could tell they greeted our calls in the same way. Their voices would then be breathy, their speech rushed, and their happiness and excitement evident in every syllable crowded in desperation into gunfire-rapid sentences. We had to somehow outrun, with the speed of our delivery, Time’s unstoppable march.

I snap back to my modern-day kitchen, where I am blanching and toasting my second batch of almonds. I began my stroll down memory lane with wonderment and satisfaction at the ease with which my sister was able to reach across continents to deliver something as unremarkable as a recipe. I am less and less pleased as I catalogue the differences between my recollection of the phone calls of my past and our most recent communication.

My heart rate is steady, and my feet do not patter. My voice, were I to use it, would be modulated, perhaps even a little indifferent. I am not in the least breathless, and my contact with my sister – still a continent away – will not be the most remarkable part of my day. Our conversations, though frequent in comparison to 1990, will be frivolous, relaxed, non-telegraphic, and of little to no importance or consequence.

A Room of Our Own

2009-01-16T13:05:00.005-05:00

Part I: Birth.

The long march of human history, as the year 2008 approaches the end of its first quarter, seems to show a geographic preference for which barbarities it has chosen to repress: heretical pyres a thing of the primitive past in the West, while citizens of the group of countries collectively labeled “the Middle East” bare their teeth in an agony of righteousness as they stone the apostate, rid the unhymenated (sic) of their unmarried shame in ignominious death, and silence multitudes more than they would let speak. It is to this world that I ask you to come with me now, circa 1984.

My mother had unsuspectingly gone to bed assuming a good night’s sleep, when I decided I had waited long enough, and wrestled my way out of enfolding membranes and cushioning fluids to greet the world. A neighbor I would come to know as my twin brother came tumbling out not long after. I was premature, grossly underweight, jaundiced, and, to top off my misfortunes, had been born into a 1984 that closely resembled George Orwell’s novel of the same name. Most history books will not present the innocuous year 1984 in such a light; it is recorded as any other year, with its unremarkable share of misery, joy, and sorrow. The unfortunate truth is that it was indeed unremarkable – Big Brother, brown-skinned in my region of the world, was watching then, had been watching before I was born, and continues to watch long after.

Part II: Everything after.

As a child growing up in the Middle East, I was lied to constantly. Perhaps the biggest lie I was told was that there was no such thing as a white lie, for I realized later on in life that what the adults around me thought of as my moral instruction was but a series of “white” lies, each one strengthened and held in its place by the next. Being that the frame of years which I call “My Childhood” seemed (at the time) to last forever, I cannot begin to enumerate the number of lies I was told by those most trusted and closest instructors of my destiny, nor can I measure the damage done, whether slight or deep, by each manipulation of fact or omission. Some spring to mind, familiar still as they are tossed at me even now, in tireless hopes of convincing a mind thankfully made immune: the earth is not round, a professor of religion would say, ignoring scientific fact in favor of a misunderstood verse in an old, but sacred, manuscript. My parents, both proud practitioners of what they called the “noblest profession” of medicine, telling me that man’s skeleton lacks the rib from which woman came, forgetting the many hours spent in a Cairo institute of (what was called) learning, counting countless bones and ligaments: Just this many make the ribs, just this many make up the foot, fibias, tibias, and other __ibias endlessly memorized by rote. All of this forgotten in favor of literalizing the allegorical to give it contemporary importance. Interestingly enough, my parents did not receive their instruction in medicine at the same university, nor were they taught by the same faculty. They were lied to by distinctly different institutions, by different practitioners of medicine, and went on to propagate these falsehoods in behavior endemic of both the educated and uneducated classes of the Middle East. Worse, they discounted the evidence that their eyes and their inquisitive, surgically-gloved fingers were able to provide, quashing their cognitive dissonance at believing skillful orators at the expense of their own individual authenticity.

I was told that murderers and tyrants were national heroes. I was told to echo those ostensible truths in public, for fear of sanctions resulting from a concern with that most dangerous of propagandas, historical accuracy: this in 1996 – I was twelve. Twelve, and worried about what may slip out of me if I were not a constant and invariable self-censor. I was told that past military failures in truth had been victories, and that the world’s history books and scholars had it all wrong. I was told that to be ruled viciously and violently by one of our own was far better than being ruled viciously and violently by strangers, that tyrannical rule was somehow subjectively altered by the nationality of the tyrant, by whether he – always he – was “blood”. I was told, by the fear and uncertainty with which the adults regarded their own freedom, that I was not free. For many years the word itself was a white lie, its purpose to divert the attention and to make our world an endurable place.

I was told these lies and more. The difference between what I have chosen to mention here and what shall remain untold is that the former includes only those lies that I was spoon-fed in the Orwellian world of the Middle East. These lies were what made up my textbooks, from whose curriculum I could not escape even in the stabled private schools of my youth. These lies were propagated by politicians, educators, community and religious leaders, and others who could not be defied. These lies were strategically defended, such that public actions aimed at weakening their hold were just as publicly punished – ayatollahs, presidents, and police officers bringing truth-seekers to heel with a fatwa, a carelessness with constitutional rights, and warrant-less arrests, jail beatings, and other forms of physical and sexual brutalities sanctioned by those blind to the law, and deaf to its protectorates.

I have not exaggerated in detailing these lies. Human rights organizations’ reports will corroborate the varied and imaginative punishments dealt to detractors from this society of liars. I speak now of Salman Rushdie, of Kareem Amer, of Ayman Nour, of sexually explorative adults fated to be on the Queen boat on the unluckiest of all nights, and of others of their ilk who choose not to conform.

It was in reading Virginia Woolf that I came to think about the predicament in which those unfortunate countries of the Middle East find themselves. But what could an English writer, with all of the colonialist sensibilities and assumptions of her time, have to say about the members of those unfortunate and varied tribes labeled (leadenly) as “natives”?

Nothing, for her concerns was for the English-speaking “fair” sex. In an essay recognized in her time to be seminal, and in ours relegated to being merely intuitive and commonsensical, she suggests that without a room of her own, Woman (sic) cannot be but a shadow of what her potential would otherwise promise. This, specifically, as a writer, an artist, a potential genius of Shakespearian proportions.

But what is writing but one method amongst a multitude in human expression? Are not our textbooks lyrically lusterless chapters in a memoir of humanity, replacing the mermaids and warlocks of fiction with big bang theory and an exhaustive listing of fibias, tibias, and other __ibias?

How then, without a room of our own, can we in the Middle East rise above the baseness of our anger, our frustration, our deluded-ness as calculated and orchestrated by others, into a humanism concerned with truth above all? How are we to overcome the poison of the lies told to us, when no public sphere of expression is safe? How narrow the rooms of our minds can become, as we crowd them with all of the words that are unsafe in our bugged phones, in our informer-infested streets, in our traceable blogs and IP addresses. The rooms in our minds, being equally concerned with contentedness, bread, fruit, water, shelter, and the delusion of hope, shut down all other thoughts that give us unrest. We echo the lies we are told, and begin to believe them for the sake of that biggest of our white lies: happiness.

And so our world continues to be flat. Man continues to have a missing rib. Tyrants continue to be saviors, hailed publicly as such. Apostates continue to die bleeding, heads pocked in from the impact of hard stone. The unhymenated continue to tremble at the wrath of their murderers whom the law protects. And this after the proud march of all of that recorded and unrecorded history, in the year 2008. The world turns a blind eye in a misguided attempt at cultural relativity and pluralism, interventionist policies sacrificed to let monstrosity live on in the guise of multiplicity. Freedom is trampled underfoot, martyred on the altar of these and other such “enlightenment” sensibilities.

And yet, what happens to the dreams we dream before we put on our armor of white lies? Deferred thus, where do our dreams go?

I am inclined to believe that our dreams – deferred, trampled underfoot, ignored, vilified, put on hold, forgotten, forbidden, exhausted, censored, fatwa-ed against, domestically violated by all, and in other ways cruelly treated – rise up out of the dust of our days, forgiving and forgetting of our harshness. They await patiently our courage and perseverance against the unlikeliest of all odds, that they may cocoon themselves in our resolve, and be reborn as hard-won reality. The long march of human history, as the year 2008 approaches the end of its first quarter, has shown this to be true.

lyr-ic / [lir-ik]: characterized by or expressing spontaneous, direct feeling

2009-01-16T12:52:00.026-05:00

My obsession with Umm Kulthoum began relatively recently. Upon leaving Egypt for the States, I became uninterested in non-Arabic language music. This change in taste was surreptitious – it began with what I thought back then was a maturation of taste. I discarded my Spice Girls CDs, and moved on to the shake-your-booty style of Arabic pop. Those CDs were in turn discarded during my summer months back home. I’d buy up classics, realizing that everything I’d rolled my eyes at in childhood had plagued me with nostalgia once it was circumstantially out of earshot. Abd El Halim began crooning in my NY-based ear. Farid Al Atrache invaded my dorm room with his nasal attempt at an Egyptian dialect. Warda made an appearance or two, and still others gave up their time for the one-person audience that was me, alone in my dorm-room when I missed Egypt.

Umm Kulthoum was not one of those performers paving the way on that long and winding road to maturation. A mildly painful, greatly embarrassing moment in childhood had kept me well away. I thought of her as nothing but an ugly woman with a gravelly man voice who’d induced an incident of projectile vomiting during my formative years.

This must have been somewhere around the time I was eight years old. I was in the car with my mother, who, far from being modernized in her own musical tastes, had nevertheless in my experience never before sunk quite so low as to subject me to that then-reviled voice. My parents both listened to Arabic classics, certainly…but more easily potable ones; Fairouz, Shadia, Abd El Halim. People with lowest-common-denominator type appeal, who sang to music that was not too repetitive, that did not last too long, that did not overwhelm you with stimuli of winds and strings and percussives. They were (not to denigrate them) the mac and cheese of classical Arabic music.

Umm Kulthoum and her troupe knew nothing of such blandness, and its uncomplicated appeal to my childhood ears. She was the foie gras of Arabic music, and proud of it – but surely sensible adults knew that foie gras was a meal best consumed post-childhood? Not always, as it turned out. My mother, in a violent attack on my senses never before or since inflicted upon me, jammed a tape into the car player, and sat back with an expression of benign concentration. The first few centimeters of tape starting playing with their attendant clicks and hisses, and I continued studying the scenery outside my passenger window, enjoying the rare treat of being allowed to sit in the front seat. I was an unwitting victim, but not for long: suddenly...MUSIC.

Tabla. Then the lute. Violins – way too many of them. A nay – as if there wasn’t enough going on – persistent, reedy, husky, insistent. Repetition upon repetition, a barrage upon my senses that kept being added to with call-and-response instrumentation, complexity manufactured through increasing the diversity and number of the instruments being played. Five minutes, eight minutes, ten – still music, still instruments, still the whirling dervishing musical hell into which I’d been hurled.

My insistence that the music was making me feel sick was taken by my mother to be merely childish angst directed at music from the days of yore. All adults knew that the new generation had not enough respect for said days of yore, and I was ignored accordingly. I continued to be ignored until I rolled the window down, and let loose an orange streak of half-digested chunks onto the side of my mom’s blue Volvo. Needless to say, once the evidence of my dissatisfaction was safely wiped off the car, the Umm Kulthoum tape disappeared into a glove compartment, never to be played again in my digestively demonstrative presence.

So it was strange to find myself, years later, hearing clips here and there of Umm Kulthoum's music and not quite minding it. Not minding changed to liking it ever so slightly when the mood and the context were appropriate – hookah bars, friendly but silent and contemplative gatherings of people, late-night television when one couldn’t sleep, and the occasional night when someone who’d never been in love wanted to hear what it would sound like.

By sophomore year I had Enta 3omri and Seeret El 7obb memorized. In the years to come, Amal 7ayati followed, and Al Atlal. I sampled patriotism through music with Misro Tatahaddath 3an Nafseha and trawled through the Internet trying to figure out the title given to her adaptation of the Ruba3iyyat of Omar Khayyam. I ordered biographies of her, and read fiction based on her life. I listened to radio interviews and marveled at how different and less majestic she sounded when she wasn’t singing, but also how relatable. I watched a bad documentary of her, the only one I could find on Netflix. I watched every single episode (sometimes more than once) of the soap opera based on her life, where she is idealized like all Egyptian greats are by their nostalgic never-speak-ill-of-the-dead-opined brothers.

I’ve since wondered at the source of my fascination. Partly, it is that she was certainly a controversial, very political figure in many ways. Rumors abound about the hostilities between her and her contemporaries during her ascension as Egypt’s (and the Arab world's by extension) uncontested heroine in the musical area – did she or did she not have anything to do with Asmahan’s early demise? How is it that she became mired in the country’s politics to such an extent, denounced by the newspapers upon the Nasserists seizing power, and again after our great defeat with Israel, when all she ever did was sing? What of her long-term affair with one of the princesses of the royal Egyptian family, and the reputation of lesbianism that followed her throughout her career? Was her vocal range as impressive as has been thought? Did the scarf she always carried in her left hand really conceal cocaine, needed to carry her through her many-hour vocal performances?

The answers to some of these questions are out there, and the answers to others are likely to forever remain a matter of opinion and conjecture. They certainly all add to her intrigue, but it was not any of this that intrigued me personally.

What did however, was this change in my affect towards her. It is not that I gradually came to like her voice. I still thought she sounded, in the recordings that I was falling in love with, like a man with a gravelly voice, and couldn’t in all honestly call listening to her to be pleasant for any reasons that made sense. Though her voice was high and pure and well-rounded in her early career, the music she is most adored for in Egypt comes at a much later time, towards the end of her life, and in it she does not have the purity, she does not have that intense clarity that mark her 1930s recordings. She was therefore a mystery amongst her contemporaries – how is it that she appealed then and appeals still now to a large audience who never had and still have no similar interests in anybody else? Asmahan, Mounira El-Mahdiyya, etc. – they all had sweet voices - high voices, smooth voices, voices that sounded like mercury flowing and femininity incarnate. So, what about Umm Kulthoum made her impervious to the deterioration of the vocal chords that comes with age, the deepening of her sound, the loss of her higher register?

I watched the aforementioned bad documentary of Umm Kulthoum in hopes of solving this mystery for myself once and for all. Here were going to be interviews with contemporaries of hers, as well as with musical theorists who were bound to tell me, exactly, why people fell in love with her, and why she was such a giant in the annals of Arabic music. I watched, and was disappointed.

Yes, everyone in the documentary went into paroxysm of pure delight when speaking of her talent, and of her effect on audiences worldwide. People’s reactions to her were well documented, from the men springing to their feet and abandoning their restrained upper-middle-class sensibilities to scream their admiration, that she may hear them upon the stage and over the orchestra…to the trio of women who were filmed literally bouncing on their seats in a particularly memorable segment.

Finally, one woman began to say something about what made Umm Kulthoum unique amongst her contemporaries, and why she is seen as having a talent unrivalled by anyone documented in our musical history. My ears perked up for the answer to the mystery forthcoming, and it was...good diction.

What the fuck? Good diction? Seriously now? This opinion was repeated as the documentary went on. Apparently, all these experts could come up with was that Umm Kulthoum was much admired in that she could pronounce Arabic well when sung. I started compiling a list of people I knew who had this specific talent, and realized that it represented almost all the speakers of Arabic I knew – those that didn’t lisp, those that could roll their r’s, etc.

Needless to say, this was not what I was looking for – this was a poor man’s answer, and left the mystery unsolved. I went back to my videos and recordings, despairing of ever understanding my own motives. It was then that I stumbled upon what must be the explanation.

To watch Umm Kulthoum on stage is to watch a woman give her all, with the completest abandon. She sings without restraint, in a country and culture that coined the word for its females. Her voice, even after its change, is expressive in a way that is indeed unrivaled by every single one of her competitors at the time, and since. What she loses to the ravages of age and ill-health, she makes up for in gusto, such that you can’t help but be invested in her performance, in wanting nothing more than to hear the end of her song, and the fate of her love. You listen to Umm Kulthoum to know what love could sound like.

That is why, on the same bad documentary, the musical theorists and historians were coming up with made-up reasons to legitimize a nation’s love for her (good diction, my ass), while the everyday Fatma’s and Mohammad’s interviewed on the street hit the nail right on the head. They all simply said that she sang what they were feeling, and that she dramatized in song and on stage what was happening in their hearts. She was helped by her poets and her composers, but none knew how to sing a love song quite like Thouma.

To end, a short clip of her improvising during a concert in Morocco.

If that does not solve the mystery, then I know of nothing that could.

Long clip of the same.

I have given much thought as to how to begin this blog, and whether to begin at all. Do you begin with a piece of expository writing, about your motivations, what you hope to say, what you hope to add to the Internet jungle that is unique and all yours and worthy of people’s time? Or do you just begin, as if in mid-sentence? I decided that this might be a good selection to start with – how appropriate to begin with a legend whose success can be traced back to her passion, irrespective of talent? How refreshing to be able to say that to do something with abandon is to do it well? To establish myself firmly and forever on the sentimentality bandwagon, let me therefore suggest, in beginning, that to live life lyrically is to live it best.