4. First Loves
August 1990 – May 1991
War Drums
In the days and weeks that followed, things seemed to get worse and worse.
A diplomatic crisis erupted and American troops were deployed to Saudi Arabia. My father as ‘prominent local Arab’ appeared on the local news and was called by the paper; my Kuwaiti cousins got interviewed too. Some local church people came out to suggest that they could lend a hand … and Uncle Hamuda gently refused, explaining he was hardly poor and had put his money in banks outside Kuwait.
Eventually, the Georgia cousins headed back home; the Kuwaitis stayed on for a while, until it began to look like they might be here a long time. Uncle Hamuda applied to the Kuwaiti embassy for some sort of pay; nothing went out as what there was was reserved only for ‘real’ Kuwaitis. Zaynab started college (and Rob dropped by to bid her farewell). Her parents decided that they would be better off in a city than in a small town; they followed Omar and his brood to Georgia, found a short term lease on a house … and, eighteen years on, are still living in Georgia.
School started; I was in high school now. People talked about the possibility of war in the halls; teachers discussed it in class. In world history class, my teacher asked me to explain the situation to my classmates. I tried as best I could, stumbling only a few times as I tried to get across the basic cncepts. After class, Mr. Perez asked me to stay a moment; he said he was impressed, wondered if I’d ever considered joining the debate team (which he coached). I said, maybe, both my cousins had done well … he was startled and impressed as Jim and Rob had been state champions (or master debaters as they preferred), told me to think about it … and I felt smart that I’d actually impressed someone with my intellect.
Not every student was so impressed; someone I didn’t recognize called me ‘rag head’ in the hall the same day and a lot of people laughed (while I turned crimson).
Meanwhile, local National Guardsmen were called up, a couple of guys who’d graduated a few years before went to the Gulf … my cousin Jim, Rob’s brother, was in Navy ROTC at Virginia Tech with only a few months left before graduation; we all wondered whether he’d be sent out the following summer if a war dragged on. A second cousin went to sit in a tent in Saudi Arabia …
Yellow ribbons and American flags sprouted … people speculated what would happen in event of a war, how many thousand dead Americans and so on … I saw ‘no blood for oil’ spray painted on a wall …
And, for the first time, I began to be acutely conscious that I was an Arab and a Muslim and an American all at once. And, when people asked, I’d point out that we were Syrians and that Syria was now an ally of the USA and that Syrian soldiers served alongside American ones … though I knew that was something I ought to be ashamed of.
I wished intensely to be normal; most things were normal. My family generally got lots and lots of support from our friends and neighbors, even if, more than once, we all (well, maybe not Alia) had the experience of someone saying something like ‘well, between you and me, you know this war is really being manipulated by Israel’ or other Anti-Semitic conspiracy stuff (something that rather annoys me to this day as it happens often enough; some Anglo assumes that, since I’m an Arab, I must share their antipathy for Jews; as you’ll see, eventually that was proven quite wrong).
Homecoming Weekend
Even under cloud of coming war, life went on. And my life was that of a gawky high school freshman girl who’d rather be reading history books or adventure novels than in school, with only one really close friend.
After Lori and I had been friends for what seemed forever and mooned over countless boys who were about 0% likely to give either of us the time of day if they even knew our names, we got ready to start high school and pine away for even older guys who wouldn't care a whit about either of us.
Now that we were in High School, we knew that we were supposed to get boyfriends – or at least, pimply-faced boys to take us to the big homecoming dance. We speculated on who would ask us, each of us guessing that so-and-so would and how we’d respond. Of course, no one asked either of us, certainly not any of the ones we were fixated on. Naturally, those guys were star athletes and popular guys while we ignored the boys who were more like us as hopeless dorks. When I had suggested to her that we should join the debate team together, she dismissed the idea as the debaters were all losers … the guys worse even than the girls. And, if we wanted boyfriends or, at least, dates to a high school dance, that was the worst thing to do so we shouldn’t …
I remember, as a joke, saying to her, “You know, Lori, it’s too bad we can’t just take each other!”
“Yeah,” she laughed, “I bet we’d have more fun than with any of these loser boys!”
That Friday night was the night of the Big Game; I think we played Western Albemarle, but I’m really not sure. If it mattered, I guess I could go look it up. Lori was spending the night at my house so we had gone with my parents and my siblings; my older sister was in the high school band, my brother was off running around with other junior high boys, my younger sister was reading while my parents greeted neighbors and friends; you could tell easily who was from Riverport, who wasn’t by whether they greeted my parents.
A few, at least, of the people from other towns did do double takes on seeing my father; he had dark, wavy hair, dark eyes, Arab features, a thick mustache … and looked a little like that fellow in Iraq (many, many people have noted that over the years). Saddam, of course, wouldn’t have been caught dead in a high school booster club jacket or baseball cap … but … (my dad was asked in seriousness to ‘play’ Saddam Hussein in a mock trial at a local college and had the decency to refuse.)
Lori and I walked around and around … looking backwards, it was very much the picture of small town Americana and probably one of my most “American” of memories from that time. Honestly, I would say that that was about as ‘unforeign’ as I ever felt back then.
After the game, we all went back to our house together … Aisha was talking on the way back about her homecoming plan; a group of her friends – mostly band girls (and, if I remember correctly, several of them were from the larger conservative religious groups, Mennonites mostly, around) and a couple of harmless boys – were going to go to dinner and the dance together. My father had already given her permission, over, he said, his better judgment. I was jealous that she’d go and I said so …
“You’ll take Amina and Lori?” my mother asked Aisha immediately and, reluctantly, she agreed.
Lori and I were ecstatic; we’d get to go with upper classmen and we were going to our first high school dance! When we got back to our house, Lori and I were discussing nothing else … the only break we had was that she called her mother and told her the exciting news and got her mother to agree to pick us up after the dance.
We talked about what we’d wear and on and on … whom we’d dance with and all sorts of silly stuff like that. Finally, we weren’t going to be the nerdiest females in the whole ninth grade; that honor would have to pass to someone else …
After we’d headed upstairs to my room, we kept talking about everything. What would we do if so-and-so asked either of us to dance or what if everything went perfectly and one of us got invited by a boy to wander off … what then?
“Well,” I said, “I guess I would kiss him.”
“OK,” said Lori, “but, tell me the truth, have you ever really kissed anyone?”
“Just relatives,” I mumbled.
“Well, that doesn’t really count,” she said. “I mean have you ever kissed a real live boy?”
“No,” I blushed, embarrassed, “you know you’d know; I’d’ve told you if I’d kissed some guy over the summer … what about you?”
“Me neither,” she sighed. “What do you think it would be like?”
“Really nice? Maybe?” I suggested. “Well, if the boy was really cute … but, what if I made a mistake … and he decided that he hated me or made fun of me …”
“Yeah, I know,” Lori nodded. She paused for a long time, looked at me a little funny. “Y’know, I’ve got an idea … what if we tried out with each other, I mean not as a real kiss, but just as practice so we can make sure that we’re doing it right? And that way, neither of us will do anything wrong …”
“That,” I smiled, “sounds like a good idea, ‘cause if it turns out that I’m like a really bad kisser (or you are), it won’t really count and you won’t hate me or anything, right?”
“Yeah, of course not, you’re my bestfriend,” she smiled nervously and sat closer to me on my bed. Neither of us was really sure how to go about this.
“Maybe we should be standing up,” I suggested so we did and we were standing face to face. I felt really nervous and tried not to giggle.
“I think you’re supposed to close your eyes,” Lori said.
“Yeah,” I said and closed mine, tried to relax and felt Lori’s lips against mine as she bent slightly to kiss me. I remember that I was really surprised at how soft her lips were, but warm. After about a minute we stopped.
“That wasn’t so bad!” I laughed and she did too.
“You tasted nice,” she said.
“You did, too,” I said shyly. “Do you know what French-kissing is?”
“Uh huh,” she nodded. “It’s lke with your mouth open?”
“Yeah,” I nodded, “maybe we should try that …”
“That’s probably a good idea,” she said so we tried that and it was even better.
We kept practicing for a while, and, I remember, it felt really good. She asked me who I was thinking about and I lied and named one of the boys in our classes and she laughed and said she was too … so we kept making out and sat on my bed and tried some more but, eventually, realized we’d need to go to sleep …
We talked as we were lying in darkness about how we’d both be really good kissers and all the boys would want us both … and, eventually, fell quiet … and as I drifted off to sleep, I remember thinking, why would I want a boyfriend anyway if I had Lori to kiss?
Saturday
Lori’s mom came and got her in the morning and took her shopping for her first high school dance; she brought her back to our house late in the afternoon. When Lori got out of their car and walked from the driveway to the backdoor, I thought she looked absolutely beautiful; I know my heart fluttered a little looking at her. She was wearing a new dark red dress (or at least one that I’d never seen before) that left her shoulders bare and gave a hint of her ample-for-a-freshman cleavage. Her legs were shown off and she was wearing heels. She wore the necklace I’d bought for her in the summer and her long golden curls were neatly styled. Obviously, her mother had helped her look so nice …
As her mother walked up behind her, I was terribly self-conscious; I knew I looked nowhere near so nice; a long skirt and a nice sweater … nothing fancy or revealing, just plain-old, square-old Muslim me. I knew Aisha was dressed in the same dull manner but I wanted to be all glamorous too.
But both Lori and Mrs. Armstrong were all smiles. My mother came out and talked to hers. Cameras appeared and they took photos of each of us and, then, both of us standing together.
My father came racing out; he’d gone out and bought corsages for both of us (and for Aisha and a couple of her friends) and insisted on pinning them on us each in turn. In these photos, everyone is smiling and young …
My father pulled me aside before we left and warned me sternly:
“Remember, Amina,” he sent, waving a finger, “if the young man and the young woman are alone together, the Shaitan makes three!”
“Yes, dad,” I nodded. “No Shaitan, I got it.”
“So,” he continued, “don’t go off alone with any boy; if someone asks you too, take Lori with you …”
“OK!” I started to blush, embarrassed …
But he let us go and we – Lori and I – piled into the Arraf family van; Aisha was driving (since we’d both been ‘held back’, she was the first of her friends to get a driver’s license) and her friends all piled in … and Lori and I were both overwhelmed by all these older girls and felt ourselves to be very mature just to be included, even if these older girls were just as much dateless nerds as we considered ourselves to be.
Aisha’s friends were all dressed nicely, even if with little fashion sense; nice blouses, sweaters, skirts … though, as far as I was concerned, Lori was far better dressed than any of them. All of us, in those days, had spent hours with hairspray, mousse, and curling irons working to puff up and out our hair, trying to get as big as possible; everyone would look hopelessly dated and silly now.
We went to a decent, medium priced restaurant; I can’t even recall where now; there, we met up with more of Aisha’s friends (including several guys, at least one of whom – Dan – I was fairly certain was gay even then; I googled him as I was writing this and, no surprise, found his MySpace page listing him as ‘single, gay, and looking’; he sat across the table from Lori and I and he joked with us through dinner and was flirty in way that felt to me like a pretense even then) …
And, then, we headed towards the high school … where others were already wandering in to a gym filled with balloons and crepe paper while some unknown to me class officer was collecting money for tickets … paid up and entered … and I was at my first real live high school dance!
Which was far less exciting than television, movies, and adolescent fantasy had previously suggested it would be. A few dozen students dressed slightly better than normal stood around the edges of the gymnasium or sat here and there … fewer actually danced in the dim lights (and that dancing seemed more like inept shuffling than dancing even to square old me). Bad top forty music played: Vanilla Ice or MC Hammer or some other pop rap alternating with other, equally dismal music (this was the golden age of Milli Vanilli).
I suppose, in my mind, I had envisioned (if I’d considered it at all) such things as being like what I saw in films or, at least, what I had seen at Arabic weddings I’d attended (but whiter, less ethnic and cooler): people moving perfectly in time to the music, everyone grinning maniacally, and, when I arrive, the crowd parts for my entrance … dancing boys and girls compete for my attention …
I don’t know if Lori sensed my disappointment but she pulled my arm and half dragged me into the gym … and we stood for a while watching people nervously, hoping that someone would approach us and ask us to dance … and no one did …
Time passes, I feel a bit foolish; I can tell that Lori does too. Aisha’s friend, Dan, came over and talked to us about nothing; a record started playing, “Groove is the Heart” (Dee-Lite), if I recall.
“I love this song!” Lori said.
“Me too!” replied Dan.
And he grabbed our wrists and half dragged, half-led the two of us to dance with him.
Now, I had often danced growing up; you can’t be an Arab woman and not. But almost always to Arabic music and with Arab friends and family around … and I started dancing enthusiastically along with the music, doing all the steps I’d learnt from Zainab and Rania and so on … arms in the air, hips moving … a mix, I suppose, of biladi and debke steps … my eyes closed as I enjoyed the music …
And opened them to see both Dan and Lori (and several others) watching me rather oddly. What they must have seen was a scrawny, geeky girl suddenly gyrating in a hyper-sexualized bellydance of the sort rarely, if ever, seen in the gymnasium of John Singleton Mosby High School …
My eyes widened and for a moment I felt embarrassment but … they started imitating me … and I was thrilled … and danced and danced …
And, eventually, I was feeling parched so Lori and I went looking for a soda or juice. As we walked up to the punchbowl in the cafeteria, Vicki White. an older girl I’d never spoken to was filling her cup. I recognized her as one of the more ‘popular’ juniors; I knew she was dating a football star, was a cheerleader, etc., etc.. You know, the basic Ms Popularity … She saw us, made eye contact with me and spoke.
“What was that spazzing you were doing?” she asked me, scorn in her voice.
“Um,” I mumbled, “it was Arabic dance.”
“Arabic?” Vicki repeated. “What are you, some kind of Iraqian terrorist or something?”
I looked at my feet, felt myself about six inches tall and melting into the floor. I couldn’t speak.
“Actually,” I heard Lori saying as she stepped closer to the older girl, “Amina is Syrian. And the word is Iraqi, not Iraqian. But, even if she were Iraqi, she’d never be a total bitch to someone she didn’t know!”
I looked up; Vicki was almost shaking with irritation. She slammed down her cup and stormed out of the lunchroom. Lori laughed.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I told her.
“Yes, I did,” she said as she put her arm over my shoulders. “Nobody insults my best friend in front of me!”
I thanked her; we danced a little more, even if we looked like spastic Iraqian terrorists. And, then, the dance ended and we sat outside on the school steps, looking up at a thousand stars in the cool night air until Lori’s mother came for us.
On the way home, we both babbled about how great everything was … and I gushed about how brave Lori was … and when we got to their apartment, we went up to her room to keep on babbling.
“You were wonderful,” I told her for the hundredth, “showing Vicki up like that!”
“No, you were!” she said.
“Too bad,” I said, “that we didn’t either of us end up kissing any boys!”
“Yeah,” Lori said and looked right at me. “Maybe we should try to practice some more?’
“Yeah,” I said and I just melted into her, my hero and my friend.
The two of us made out far longer with far more passion than the night before, hardly even pausing to pretend we were thinking of boys, until we were both so groggy that we fell asleep with our limbs all entangled.
Autumn
Days moved quickly. My father rushed down to Georgia a few times and back again but I barely noticed. Life seemed to be quickening and I knew I was getting older. For too long, I thought, I had been a little girl, with a little girl’s mind and a little girl’s body, but, at last, that was done.
One October morning I woke up and my gut hurt in a way I couldn’t understand; I thought maybe I had the flu or maybe an ulcer or I was getting some kind of cancer. I’d never hurt there before, certainly not like this …
And when I went to the bathroom just after, I saw that there was blood in my underwear … and blood in the toilet …
And I was so excited; I was a week short of fifteen and I’d been expecting something like this for years and years, at least since the day in fifth grade that all the boys were sent out of the room and we had to watch a stupid filmstrip … and, when nothing had happened and nothing had happened and nothing had happened for long months turning into years, I’d begun to have a growing anxiety in the back of my mind …
What if I were somehow different? What if I never got my period, what if I never grew breasts or curves? What if I stayed a physical child forever?
But, at last, the day had finally come … and I could begin to think of myself as a woman. Legally, I knew, under Muslim law I could now be married … and, at some point, a slight fear ran through me that what if, contrary to everything I knew about my family, my parents decided I needed to be married off and sent for a suitable boy? Would I refuse?
And I knew, too, that I was now old enough to fast Ramadan, to start covering even when I wasn’t praying and to start becoming a woman in dress as well as in theory. Back then, covering seemed just one mor of the weird backwards ways of my Arabic family … so I didn’t quite yet.
But, oddly, I noticed that I did start changing in other ways. The breasts I prayed for didn’t show up but … I started caring more about clothes and hair and make-up, probably for the first time in my life actually caring …
But I was a weirdo …
My last class of the day was Freshman Honors English. I loved that class … Lori was in it, of course, but so were the other kids in our grade that I actually liked and the teacher was great and we had fun and we wrote poems and had discussions … and then there was Ms. Peterson …
Just remembering her makes my heart skip …
Julia Peterson, our student teacher, twenty-two or three, always dressed in black and always wearing laced up boots … rather ‘Goth’ and sophisticated and cool … pale skin, almost milky, bright red hair, pale blue eyes … from Alexandria and about to graduate from Madison. I hung on her every word. She was the coolest person I had ever met until then and, when I saw her, I thought, I want to be like her … I even deliberately got in trouble so I would have to stay after class as ‘detention’ as she would have to sit while Mrs Warner was off doing whatver English teachers do at the end of the day … and I’d just talk to her about whatever … she told me about bands she’d seen and music she liked; I copied all that … she talked about going to Goth clubs in DC and poetry and on and on …
Yes, I had a crush … I had a few dreams about her; we went to club together, she combed my hair … she kissed me … and I woke up sweating and tingling …
I started dressing more like her; no more clueless nerd girl. Now, I abandoned tennis shoes for Doc Martens I bought at the mall … started wearing more and more black, no more jeans, but long skirts …
I dyed a bright blue streak into my hair and came to school and everyone looked at me like I was crazy … but Ms Peterson told me it looked nice …. I started wearing eyeliner and silver jewelry from back home …
I turned in a composition I’d written on the fly, a morbid poem … and Ms Peterson insisted it be published in the school’s literary magazaine …
Maybe I should have been worried, crushing on my teacher, maybe Lori should have been, I don’t know. Eventually, though, that autumn passed into winter like a dream. Lori and I were as close friends as we’d ever been but were now, suddenly, closer. I think we passed more notes, called each other more often and so on; we were practically inseparable in school and, when we were alone, we kept ‘practicing’ kissing each other … a lot.
Fridays, if we were going to her house together, almost as soon as we were inside the door, we’d be making out … and almost all the time that we were together alone passed that way. And, while we were practicing kissing, we began touching each other -- because this was just 'practice' too ... At least that's what we said to each other so we could justify fondling and nuzzling each other's breasts, groping each other, and finger banging.
I remember admiring her, her breasts, her soft curves, her long curly hair, her bright blue eyes … and thinking of them when we were apart. I know that even then I knew that we were only pretending that it was all about getting ready for some future boyfriend but, when I was fifteen, I couldn't handle the thought that I might be a lesbian or bisexual, couldn’t handle that only women were in my dreams.
But, however it was, a lot of Saturday mornings (and some Sundays) I'd wake up in Lori's arms after a night of kissing and holding each other. And we'd sometimes lay there naked, touching each other, and talk about some heartthrob or other unattainable male in the vaguest of ways; I was pretending – if I weren’t thinking of her, I was thinking of Ms Peterson – and I suspected she was too...
January
School ended for the Christmas break. New Year’s Eve 1990, I spent with Lori like we’d spent most every New Year’s, watching the countdown on TV and eating chips. Just before midnight, she reminded me of that When Harry Met Sally movie, so, at the stroke of midnight, we kissed lightly, said “Happy New Year!” and then kissed long and hard after that. Just practice, y’know?
Classes started back and things got tenser at home … my Dad was watching CNN continuously if he wasn’t at work, arguing with the television, constantly on the phone talking in Arabic … and my mom was nearly as tense …
Last minute peace deals and so on all fell through and …
Then came the war.
Up all night glued to television. My father’s face is wet with tears. He’s on the phone to Omar in Atlanta …
Minnie comes obver; she couldn’t get through on the phone. I hear her and my mother talking in hushed voices, they don’t want my father to verhear or any of us children. What if thousands of Americans are killed? What happens to us? My mother says no one in Riverport would ever bother us. Minnie tells her don’t be so sure …
My mind races … I remember Anne Frank … she looked like me …
And it goes on and on for a month. My parents likely wouldn’t notice or care what I did … I get a second set of piercings in my ears … and it’s months before my mother mentions that. I come home from school late and I know I stink fo tobacco and cheap perume … nothing.
In school, the teachers are so nice to me. Mr. Perez asks me to stay back after class. Have I reconsidered debate team? No, I tell him. Has anyone bothered me because of …?
The war? I ask. Yes.
I tell him, no … and he says that’s good, but if anyone does, plese tell him … he knows what it’s like to have an odd name and be a little different …
I leave in a hurry.
Ms Peterson is gone now but Mrs Warner asks me the same, suggests maybe I should write about being an Arab at Mosby High …
And I leave in a hurry.
They don’t, I think, get it. I don’t want to talk about being different, I don’t want to talk about being an Arab, I don’t want to discuss being an Arab in wartime … I want to talk about becoming a woman and being good looking and how not to be a nerd … tell me how black makes me seem deeper and more poetic … but please …
Aisha gets it even worse; she’s in US history and her teacher keeps putting her on the spot, asking assinine questions like ‘why do you support Saddam?’
I want to dig a deep hole and hide. Someone calls me Towelhead behind my back as I walk through the hall … I hear Lori telling whoever it was to stick it but I don’t turn and just keep walking …
February
Lori is my guardian angel then and so many times … I can’t imagine life without her and our games are getting steadily more possessive. But …
One Friday night came; it was the first week of February, if I recall … I was, I know, already thinking about Valentine’s day coming up and wanting to do something for Lori for it … and knowing that I was thinking that tells me that I knew what I was about; at fifteen, I wasn’t wholly innocent even if I were virtually virginal; it’s amazing how much one can glean from books and films and television …
We were playing our usual late night games and were both just about totally nude. These had been progressing slowly over the past few months; at first, we just kissed and kissed, then one time, Lori had kissed down my neck and pulled off my shirt and kissed my nearly non-existent breasts while blood had rushed through me … and I’d done the same. And we kept pushing the boundaries farther, touching and kissing and holding each other.
That night, I recall, she had straddled me and stripped me while we kissed … and, when I was naked, Lori had slid a few fingers inside me and, as she was getting pretty good at it by then, had me really turned on; I was a woman in love and was lying nude entwined with my lover in her bedroom, having sex, even if I couldn’t have stated any of that clearly then.
"I want to try something new,” I whispered to Lori and got her to lie flat on her back.
I started kissing her breasts, then down her soft belly, and, then, at last, went down on her. Obviously, I was utterly inexperienced but she really seemed to like it ... after about ten minutes of my kissing, sucking, licking her, she was shaking and shuddering, pulling my hair and moaning ... it was the first time I'd seen a woman orgasm and, I think, was probably her first time, too. I thought she was more beautiful than ever … and I was touching myself like crazy and came about as close as I could come then to crazy. I nearly thought her thighs would crush me at one point but I’d never been happier – and, when we were both through, we lay for a long, long time just holding each other...
I didn't know quite what to say and said the most obvious line anyone had ever thought to say, "I love you. Lori"
She didn't say anything but just started sobbing. She cried herself to sleep and shoved me away when I tried to comfort her …
The next morning, we acted normal and, when my mom came to pick me up,
Lori said she'd call me later on. She didn't. Ever.
Monday
Monday, I missed my morning classes because of a dental appointment; I had no cavities but still needed my teeth cleaned. The dental hygeinist asked me how I’d colored my hair, said it looked good … So I was late coming in to school and, when I did, my whole world came crashing down.
Before I'd gotten to school, Lori had told some other girls that I was a pervert, a lesbian. When I'd walk through the halls, I thought I heard people saying 'lesbo', ‘dyke’; I could feel the stares burning me...
I went to Lori's locker to wait for her, but she ignored me as best she could. As soon as I got home, I called her. No one picked up so I let it ring and ring, ten, twenty, thirty times. At last, she answered, "Hello?"
"Come on Lori," I told her, "it's me, Ami"
"I don't want to talk to you anymore."
"Why not?"
"Cause you're sick!"
“What?”
“What you did to me!”
"But you liked it!"
"Just don't bother me anymore!"
And that was that; she hung up and wouldn’t pick up when I called (or the five hundred times I called after that). She ignored me at school no matter what I did; I left her notes and letters; love letters and apologies and pleas and promises I’d never do ‘it’ again and everything I could think of. Soon, she had other friends and I was sure I overheard her telling them, when I went by, that I was a sicko dyke...
Minnie
I went home from school with my head hung in shame, that Monday and every day after that. I was miserable and wanted to die. I’d go up to my room, listen to the same mournful cassettes over and over (mostly second generation ones of Marcel Khalife, Fairuz, The Cure, The Cult, and so on …
I was ashamed, I was disgraced, I felt like I wanted to die. I hated myself and was disgusted by the idea that there was really something wrong with me …
I was also heartbroken and mournful; the only really close friend I’d had, that I thought I could share everything with had deserted me … I scrawled:
“If only I'd thought of the right words,I could have held on to your heart. If only I'd thought of the right words,I wouldn't be breaking apartall my pictures of you.Looking so long at these pictures of youbut I never hold on to your heart. Looking so long for the words to be truebut always just breaking apartmy pictures of youThere was nothing in the worldthat I ever wanted moreThan to feel you deep in my heart.There was nothing in the worldthat I ever wanted morethan to never feel the breaking apartll my pictures of you.”
I wrote horrid poems, filled with self pity and anger and desire for death … I scrawled on my notebook: “I’m waking up I can not see that there is not much left of me. Nothing is real but pain now. Hold my breath as I wish for death. Oh, please God, wake me!”
My immediate family didn’t notice much; we were Muslims, Arabs, living in the USA … and these were the days when the worst images were coming from Iraq, of round the clock air raids and slaughters in bomb shelters, ‘turkey shoots’ and highways of death. I drew pictures of grim scenes … piles of dead bodies, ruined landscpes …
My parents watched CNN incessantly and had trouble sleeping; they were irritable and depressed, angry and outraged and no way to express it in the outside world. If they even noticed that I was walking around looking like death, they likely assumed I was also feeling the pain of two hundred thousand dead Arabs.
I could barely eat; if I looked at myself in the mirror, I was disgusted by the grotesque blob staring back at me. No wonder people hated me, I thought. I quit buying lunch at school, saving my money for cigarettes from the Seven Eleven (which I smoked only in great privacy). I lost weight – and there hadn’t been much of me to begin with.
I wandered into my great aunt’s house one day, collapsed on her couch; I didn’t want to go home. Minnie had always let me (and my sisters and brother and our other cousins) come and go as we pleased … and, now, if anything pleased me, it was not being at home.
She looked at me and knew I was in distress and asked me in her smooth, seventy odd year old way, what was wrong … and I told her in one long, gushing breath:
“Everything, everything, everyone hates me, she hates me, and I didn’t do anything, all I did was be her friend and tell her I loved her and do what she wanted and she kicked me away and made me like dirt and I just want to die and everything is horrible and I don’t want to live and …”
and, and, and …
and Minnie just listened and nodded and when I ran down, said to me softly:
“Amina, a broken heart is a terrible thing and it feels like the world is ending and nothing could ever be worse, but it will get better.”
“You don’t understand!” I blurted.
And she shook her head and said, “Child, I’ve been married three times. I buried two husbands. And, believe me, there isn’t a day I don’t think of both of them. And it hurts every time. But I go on. And the other one? I loved him … and he loved me, but sometimes love isn’t enough … and, even when it is, it doesn’t always work the way we want it. You might love someone and they don’t love you back. And nothing you do will make them love you. So, you’ve got to go on.”
And she took my hand and held it. And I wasn’t quite so sad.
(And I didn’t think until a long time afterwards why she was the only one around who made the connection that I was heartbroken from a failed romance – and didn’t seem bothered by the object of my affection’s gender. When I did, I did wonder … Aunt Minnie was an odd bird for her time and place; she was ridiculously progressive and liberal and always had been … and she had had a best friend for years and years, another older, childless widow. And the two of them went to Hawaii and Florida and Montreal together; Minnie had pictures up of the two of them in all those places … and Ellen was a little butch … and when I wondered about that, or why she had books on her shelf that I read later on – Rubyfruit Jungle, Wells of Loneliness, Orlando – whether my Great Aunt wasn’t totally straight, it was way too late to ask about …)
Ramadan
That year, Ramadan started in the middle of March. For the first time, my parents allowed me to fast … and I was excited to have a reason not to eat or drink. Even when it came time to eat, I was still reluctant to eat.
It was a time of brutal images; the Uprisings and their suppression were underway in Iraq, bringing mixed feelings as well as recollections to us. People with names or ancestry like ours were being strung up, tortured and killed in the South of Iraq; an Omar or Aisha in the family tree was as a death sentence to the Shia groups. Yet, the repressors were from the same party (even if a different, less sectarian branch) than that which had repressed the Muslims in Syria. Images of the Kurds fleeing were horrible; we gave money to groups to help them and tried to get others to care (in a very short time, many of those Kurds would start arriving in our area).
My parents thought that I wasn’t eating well and walking around depressed for the same reasons they were; that the torment of watching all this, of hearing endless gloating by the Americans at a ‘bloodless’ war that had brought the death of hundreds of thousands, had gotten me down.
It did, but my own internal misery was far worse. I would sit and think that I wished I could explain my heartbreak to … well, Lori. And, she treated me, if I were lucky, as non-existent. I couldn’t help but think of myself as evil, foul, a sinner, and a corrupter … I hadn’t realized how utterly my life had centered on Lori and, when she was gone, I had nothing.
And I ate little, stayed up at night … stumbled through school. The first of the year, I’d weighed 108 pounds; by May, I had shed sixteen of those. I could see my ribs clearly, my hips were jutting points …
I thought about running away, about suicide, all of the depressed teen stuff; I’d lock myself in my room and listen to depressing music or write bad poetry, spent my lunch period sitting alone chain-smoking near the art students ...
The only light in my tunnel came when my parents decided to move to Georgia; my dad had been having long conversations with Uncle Omar and they’d decided to go in business together. Later, he told me that he was also concerned that we were too far from other Muslims, from family (even if we had a thousand cousins in them thar hills), that we were getting too American; he’d told his brother about Aisha and I going to school dances and Omar had been shocked; “Next thing you know,” Omar had told him, “they’ll be marrying Christian men.”
And they had other ideas …
End of April, it must have been, my Dad says over dinner to Aisha and I,
“Would you like to go home?”
We both look at him blankly.
“What do you mean?”
“Sham, Damascus … I talked to Omar and Hamza and they want Raghad and Rania to go home for the summer. Would you like to go?”
“YES!” I almost shout.
Aisha’s more thoughtful, but nods …
“What happens if we don’t?”
“You’ll have to help us pack.”
“Pack?”
And it all comes out … we’re moving … and Aisha and I will leave one house and return to another … I am ecstatic.
4 comments:
Firstly, I was a joy reading this. Thank you for allowing us to experiences things from your perspective. Secondly, as a Kurdish Iraqi, I thank you even more, for paying so much prominence to us in your story and highlighting what was happening in Iraq during that time.
Thirdly, I can not wait to read your next piece.
Thanks! There's much more to come!
Thank you Amina for sharing these words.
I should be working but I am glued to your pages.
Peace and Blessings
Happee
What happened to Lori? Was it just confusion, being scared or some kind of internal homophobia? Did she eventually come to terms with what happened like you did?
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