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With my nose in dusty old books, memories returned. I recalled dinner parties my parents held in our living room when I was seven. For a year these parties were a weekly occurrence, bringing together artists, writers, and intellectuals — doctors from the hospital where my father worked as well as university professors and journalists. In the late afternoon Mama would begin to prepare food as Baba lit candles dotted around our house. Our living room was all deep reds and browns and golds, the centerpiece a giant Persian carpet that boasted symmetrical patterns of flowers and branches. Guests would arrive just as the sun would begin to set. They’d sit on pillows around our mahogany coffee table, smoking cigarettes, sipping arrack, and munching on roasted mixed nuts from bowls placed around the room.

  On those nights I would be called to greet our guests and then quickly retire, either to my bedroom or to keep Doris company in the kitchen. A dizzying concoction of smells and sounds, fried sausages and pastries stuffed with cheese and spinach, alongside the fragrance of perfume, whiskey, and hookah, and the sounds of boisterous laughter and debate and the music of Pink Floyd, Samira Tawfik, and Abdel Halim all wafted in from the living room. I was occasionally invited to sit with the guests for some time. I would squeeze myself between the warm bodies of my mother and father on our brown leather couch, and pick out the roasted almonds from the bowls of mixed nuts until my father scolded me with a quiet stare for not leaving any for everyone else.

  I recall one night six of them were furiously debating under a cloud of smoke. At the time what they were saying meant nothing to me, they were simply words thrown around above my head, but through my readings in America my memory of those words began to form thoughts and ideas, and I started to understand the world of my mother and father. It was after the Berlin Wall had fallen, and Mohammad, one of my parents’ friends who worked with an international company, was laughing at another friend, Nadeem, the head of the lawyers’ syndicate.

  “Oh Nadeem-o!” Mohammad sang as he threw a handful of mixed nuts in his mouth. “Where are your Soviet friends now to come save you? You realize this is the beginning of the end, don’t you? Capitalism has triumphed.”

  Nadeem scoffed and made noises about Western imperialism and the evils of the free market. Sima, a journalist with thick curly hair and smoky eyes, nodded her head as she sucked on a hookah that Baba ensured was never without fresh coals. “Arabs should not settle for being a citizen of some imaginary country the colonizers have set up on make-believe borders,” she said. “After all, we are all one Arab people.”

  “And what do you propose we do with the non-Arabs in our region?” Nadeem asked. “Burn them at the stake? No, no, the solution is socialism.”

  “You are all looking outside for solutions,” interjected Hassan, an old friend of my father’s who had kinky black hair and wore a pince-nez on the bridge of his rounded nose. “The answer is within.”

  “And what are you suggesting exactly?” Sima asked, blowing so much smoke through her mouth that for a few moments her head disappeared behind the white cloud.

  Hassan took a sip of his dark red tea. A piece of wet mint stuck to the top of his beard, and he sucked it into his mouth. “We were Muslims before we were Arabs. Our true path is to follow the teachings of the Prophet, to live as he did and re-create the umma.”

  “Ya, Hassan, ya habibi.” Sima jumped in. “You work in the oil fields for a few years and you come home wanting to drag us back to the seventh century. Drink some arrack and relax.”

  Hassan laughed and raised his glass. “Enjoy it on my behalf, sister. I’m happy with my tea.”

  My father spoke up. “Fundamentally, the primary affiliation of the Arab is his family, his tribe, his community. Yes, we can speak of one shared Arab culture. But family is the core of who we are as a people. Without his family, an Arab is nothing.”

  Throughout this discussion I would gaze at my mother’s large glistening eyes as she took it all in, smiling, her glass never far from her lips, only moving so she could take a drag from her cigarette. Mama drank a lot on those nights, sometimes so much that she would remain seated until the guests all left, when Baba would have to help her up and walk her to bed. I look back at that time as one of the happiest periods in my life, and I would fall asleep blanketed in the sounds and smells of those parties that continued well into the night. But then a knock on our door one morning by two men from the government put a stop to those parties. The only thing that remained of them was my mother’s glass, which never again strayed too far from her lips.

  And so what did it mean to be Arab now, under America’s harsh gaze? What is Arab or Muslim if not a fabrication, one invented and reinvented by politicians who engineered meaning behind these words to suit their history. The American pundits screaming at each other on television seemed only too happy to play along in constructing this fiction.

  I knew a lot about lies and fabrications. I saw the insidious intentions behind the white lies told in the shared histories of both my country and my family. I thought of an incident two decades earlier, when a group of rebels attempted to overthrow the president’s regime and install a socialist government. The revolt was quickly crushed and, to push his point home, the president massacred the rebels’ families in the center of town.

  Of course, if you want to read up on this incident you will not find it easy to do. It won’t appear in history books or school curricula. The event exists only in the minds of the surviving family members of the rebels, thought of but never spoken about. In class we were taught with texts that glorified small, ancient victories that happened hundreds of years ago. The chink in the armor of the regime was erased from history. To speak of the rebellion — no, even to think of it — was a great betrayal, not just of the president but of the nation.

  Teta ran our house much like the president ran the country. She had a tight-fisted control over memory, liberally erasing the past to control the present. It was no coincidence that Mama’s photographs were taken down from the walls of the house when she left, replaced with even more photos of Baba. The few times I asked about my mother, Teta would take a deep breath and turn her head in the other direction. I would be punished by hours of cold silence. Soon enough, to bring up Mama, even so much as mention her name, was equivalent to staging a coup. It was a betrayal of Teta and most of all of Baba.

  The solitude of America and the books it contained helped me uncover the secret to the hegemony of both the president and Teta. I explored my newfound freedom by finally thinking about my mother. I tried to uncover what had happened in those first eleven years of my life, bringing any memories I could muster to the surface to subvert Teta’s rule.

  I remembered Mama telling me that when they returned from America, Teta insisted that Mama and Baba live in separate houses until they married. Mama was given the guest room, and Baba was sent to live with the neighbors. Mama moved in, set up her art supplies in the corner of a room, and began to paint. She saw the world as if new, and Baba, who fell in love with the ways in which Mama saw the country, took her to the villages to meet with the farmers and the women who embroider traditional clothes. She painted them working in the fields, surrounded by orange trees and braying brown donkeys.

  At first, Mama’s arrival filled my grandmother with excitement. Teta set about molding her into the high-society woman she imagined her son should wed. In the mornings, after Teta checked my mother’s bedsheets for blood — to make sure Baba had not snuck in at night — she invited the neighborhood’s best women for subhiyeh. But my mother didn’t care about any of that.

  “We’ll set up a clinic in al-Sharqiyeh, and maybe a few in the villages,” she explained to Teta one afternoon, before turning to my father. “You’ll treat people, for free of course, and I will teach the children art.”

  “Let everyone be responsible for their own liberation, hayati,” Teta replied. She turned to my father. “There’s a new private hospital that has opened up on the way to the airport. I play cards with the general manager’s
wife. I’ll have a word with her.”

  And so she did, and so my father worked in the private hospital. “Just for a few years,” he explained to my mother. “Save for our own house, and then invest in the clinics.”

  My father worked night shifts, then he worked day shifts, and soon enough he worked both on the same day. And the money came pouring in and it was just my mother going to the villages and to al-Sharqiyeh. But this remained unacceptable to Teta. She was not going to see her future daughter-in-law painting with street children in the slums.

  “This isn’t America, habibti,” she would say. “You can’t walk around like you’re Mother Teresa. People talk here.”

  But if my mother understood this, she was not concerned. The dresses Teta bought for her hung unworn in my mother’s closet. And each time she slipped into those paint-stained jeans, my grandmother’s resolve only strengthened. The family’s standing was on the line, Teta warned my father. “Be careful. You only have one life, one reputation. Don’t make a mess of it.” And if Mama had no intention of becoming a good wife, then Teta would shame her into being one.

  “You are not ironing along the lines, ya binti. What’s the point of ironing if you are not following the creases? Anyway what does this old woman know? Maybe wrinkled clothes are in fashion. I’ll just shut up. Do it as you like, habibti.”

  That was how it became. “I don’t mean to interfere, but … I wouldn’t think of cleaning it like that, but … I suppose if that’s how you want to be dressed … But maybe I’m the stupid one … I’m the donkey … Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand … Do it however you like, habibti … I’ll just shut up, it’s better.” And so on.

  On the morning of my parents’ wedding Teta burst into my mother’s room to find an empty bed. Frantic, she called up my father.

  “Your wife has run away,” she said, near tears. “The girls are coming in a few hours to begin preparations and she’s run away!”

  Baba assured her that Mama must have gone out to do some last-minute errands, or else needed a few hours to reflect. Teta, terrified of my mother never returning but desperate not to tell anyone about this embarrassment, paced the living room, drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and tutting to herself.

  My mother returned by midday, an hour before the celebrations were to begin. Teta heard her before she saw her, for there was loud drumming and singing coming from down the road. Peering out the window she saw my mother, riding on the back of a donkey, surrounded by a procession of Gypsies who roamed the empty plots of land by the airport road. The Gypsy women were trilling and dancing barefoot, while the men banged on animal-skin tablas and sang wedding folk songs. They pulled up in front of Teta’s house and stood there, dancing and singing. Teta watched them from behind the curtains, shamed and furious.

  After the wedding, my mother begged my father to use his savings for the new house he had promised her, so they would be out of Teta’s grip.

  “What do you mean buy another house?” Teta snapped when Baba raised the idea. “Don’t waste your money. Save it for your child and just build another floor here.”

  And before she had even finished her sentence, Teta was on the phone to a construction company to make plans. When the extra floor was complete, that was where Mama and Baba moved. This allowed Teta to keep a watchful eye on Mama, and every morning Teta let herself in, carrying a pot of food she had cooked the night before.

  “Your cooking is fine, habibti, but my son is very picky, you know. He prefers his food to have flavor.”

  The battle lines were finally drawn over my name. Mama wanted to call me Rasa. Teta, perhaps out of spite, insisted that I be called anything but.

  “I like it,” my mother said. And for once, my mother did not need to explain herself. Being pregnant with me, she had the upper hand.

  “I just told her I would keep you inside me until I got my way,” Mama explained, a triumphant smile on her face, as she stroked my back in bed one evening.

  I was born the day after Valentine’s Day. When she first saw me, Teta took one look and burst into tears.

  “Allahu Akbar! He looks just like his father.” Teta kissed the hospital-room floor. She clutched her chest and turned to my mother. “You see I was so scared, habibti. Not that he would turn out like your side, but, you know …”

  It didn’t stop at my name, and the fact that Teta had been defeated on such a crucial battlefield only increased her resolve.

  “You stopped breast-feeding him? He’s only two. I breast-fed my son until he was four, you know.”

  “Please let me do it my way.”

  “Fine, fine, I’ll shut my mouth. Maybe I’m the one who doesn’t understand,” and as Teta walked away she would mutter, just loud enough for my mother to hear, “Her breasts are too precious for her own son. That’s why he cries whenever she’s around.”

  When I was three Mama caught Teta struggling to stick almonds up my ass to relieve me of constipation. (As I recall it now, I wonder whether the almonds played a part in my desire for men.)

  “What the hell are you doing?” my mother said, snatching me from Teta’s arms.

  “Two days and nothing has come out,” Teta muttered, picking up another almond.

  “That’s not how you treat constipation,” Mama snapped, pulling my trousers back up. “And I told you to stop smoking next to him. His clothes are covered in ashes.”

  “What do I know, anyway? After all, I raised your husband and look who he ended up marrying.”

  By the time I was four the primary battle was over language. Teta only ever spoke to me in Arabic. Mama insisted on speaking English to me, because she said it was the language of power. So I spoke both, navigating the two languages like a combat zone.

  “Where are you going?” my mother would ask.

  “To school,” I’d say.

  “Say it in Arabic,” Teta would bark.

  “To al-school,” I would reply.

  As I grew older, I became frustrated with my mother’s heavily accented English, which jarred with the accents I heard on television. “Snake” became “essnake,” “orange juice” became “oranjuice,” “mirror” became “mirrow.”

  “There is no e at the beginning of snake,” I recall telling her once. I tried to get her to say it without the e. She humored me, repeating “snake” over and over, but she could not rid herself of that e.

  At the time, I despaired. Why couldn’t she say it like the television mothers do? Why must that vulgar accent remain? It was disgusting, that treacherous e at the beginning of the word. My mother, who had spent more than half her life in America, was still somehow unable to be truly American. She was a half-formed thing, a freak and an outsider, neither American nor Arab, stuck somewhere in between. I wanted nothing more than for our family to be normal, and even in her pronunciations my mother was adamant in keeping us different. But now that I was in America, where the s hissed with ease from the mouths of everyone I met, the perfection of it so sterile, I longed for that unwelcome e in all its vulgarity.

  By this point, memories of Mama were hazy in my mind. They were like old photographs that had yellowed and faded over time. And yet, slowly, forgotten memories floated to my consciousness as I began to search for them. That first year in America I would go to bed in the evening, my mind racing with ideas of Arabs and Islam, feeling an alienation that struck to my very core, and in my dreams I would reach for memories of the one true outsider in our family, and hear the distant voice of my mother begging my father: “This is not what we agreed. Talk to her. Please.”

  “What do you want me to do? She’s my mother —”

  “I’m your wife!”

  “She’s only trying to help,” I would hear my father say, before he returned to work, or turned the television on, or prepared the coals for his hookah.

  Whether I was recalling events that really happened or simply making up history as I went along, all I could do was weave the memories together into a story, to bu
ild a nation of Mama inside me.

  For months I searched for my mother in phone books and on the Internet. Although I was not certain she was in America, the resurgence of my mother, if only in my memories, made me believe that she was closer to me somehow, if not in geography then perhaps in spirit. Despite my searches, there was nothing conclusive to draw upon. Did she not want to be found? And even if I did find her, I would arrive as this confused mess of a boy, with stupid questions about Arabs and Islam. Would her own freakishness console me or only drive me even further outside the norm?

  In that first year in America I did have a brief respite from my isolation. After spring break I met two pre-med students at the library. The girls were from Tennessee, and almost every day for a month I spent many hours in their dorm room as they played Southern gospel music at a deafening volume. I clapped and sang along with them, not knowing the words but open to learning, an eager smile on my face. Quite simply, I was happy to be invited to a party for the first time. One day I casually remarked that they looked like Venus and Serena Williams. They gave me a long lecture about American racism, about slavery and Martin Luther King and the struggle of civil rights in America. Then they stopped inviting me to their dorm room. I was left with a feeling that race in America was a story passed on through generations. I also began to understand that now I was inevitably a new chapter in this story, although as of yet I did not have a Martin Luther King to help me field off the stereotypes and lies about my race and religion that were being formulated before my eyes.

  I thought of Islam. Although our family did not have time for religion, Baba discovered God in his cancer. Before he became too sick to go anywhere, he took me along to Friday prayers. I went with Baba and we prayed. We took our cue from the row of men in front of us, the new ritual fascinating in its oddness. When they knelt, we knelt; when they crossed their arms, so did we.

  But then the strange feelings appeared. I watched the broad backs of the men as they knelt in front of me, their backsides inches from my face. As thoughts of the men infiltrated my brain, I fought with myself. God can’t catch me thinking these thoughts in his house, I remembered thinking. I had closed my eyes and focused on being in the present moment, to be one with God. But the temptation to open my eyes, to catch one more glimpse of the men’s bodies, snatched my focus away soon enough.