(speaks in foreign language)
- Fact,
the Arabic word hawa'a means wind,
the Arabic word hawa means love.
Test, multiple choice.
Abdel Khalim said, you left me holding wind in my hands.
Or Abdel Khalim said,
you left me holding love in my hands.
Abdel Khalim was left empty or Abdel Khalim was left full.
Feruz said, oh wind take me to my country
or Feruz said, oh love take me to my country.
Feruz is looking for a vehicle or Feruz is looking for fuel.
Ul Kamthul said, where the wind stops her ships,
we stop ours.
Or Ul Kamthul said, where love stops her ships,
we stop ours.
Ul Kamthul is stuck or Ul Kamthul is home.
Did our mothers invent loneliness
or did it make them our mothers?
Were we fathered by silence
or just looking to explain away this gaping quiet?
Is it wasteful or wistful to pray for our brothers
and the language they never learned?
Whose daughters are we if we grow old before our mothers
or for their sakes.
They called our grandfathers the January children,
lined up by the colonizer
and assigned birth years by height.
There is no answer because we come from men
who do not know when they were born,
who married women shown to them in photographs
whose children left the country and tried for romance
and had daughters full of all the wrong language.
One, at the musicians club in Omdurman
a singer is stabbed to death for playing secular music.
The month before a violinist on his way home
is beaten by police, his instrument smashed to match wood.
All the bars in Khartoum are closed down,
all the alcohol and Khartoum poured into the Nile.
A new law forbids women from dancing in the presence of men,
another banned song lyrics that mention women's bodies.
Two, at a party in Omdurman,
light strung among the date palms.
My not yet mother, honey legs in a skirt opens her mouth
and the night air is the gap in her teeth.
She sings in the lilting English to a slow song
while bodies around her pair off and press close.
Before he is my father, my father smokes a cigarette
and shows all his teeth when he laughs.
Wants to ask the dark gold girl how her English got so good,
what the words mean and could he sing something sometime
into the gap in her teeth but first police arrive.
Rip lanterns from trees and fire a shot
through the final notes of the song
and tonight my parents do not meet.
But I imagine Khartoum as it was in the 80s.
My mother with ribbons in her hair,
dressed fanning about her nutmeg calves.
My father, who I hear was so lively and handsome
that only bad magic could have emptied that
and filled him with smoke.
The borrowed record player,
the generation that would leave
to make nostalgia of these nights
to hyphenate their children
and grow gnarled by diasporas every winter.
But tonight, Motown crackling in the hot twilight,
mosquitoes swaying in the velvet dusk,
my parents dance without ever touching.
And now my mother harbors her country's music in her lungs.
These songs, the only things she got in the divorce.
There is a TV show we used to watch when we lived in Egypt
where a group of Sudanese youth sing old Sudani love songs.
We don't get the channel here in the US.
Tonight, my mother finds every episode on YouTube
after a quiet dinner of leftovers at the kitchen counter
because it's just us two,
my brother is out being 21 and popular.
My mother and I sit together in the half light
and eat mango with our hands and listen to
(speaks in foreign language)
and I never hear love songs like this in English.
Songs that are as much about a country
as they are about a woman,
songs where a woman is country.
Before we grew bitter
and learned not to make a world out of a person,
learned not to make a world out of a country
because even your mother's country can betray you.
My mother's country broke her heart and I want to cry.
Picturing her eating mango alone in the dark,
singing to herself.
My brother and I, a world away
with our fast English and our hip hop and our late nights.
We are not from a world where love songs are like this.
We are not romantic, we are not considerate.
We forget to call.
We do not bother to phone the cable people
to ask for the channel with my mother's favorite show.
We do not bother to teach her
how to bookmark videos on YouTube,
how to download all the love songs into her iTunes,
how to buy mango already sliced,
packaged in neat plastic tubs.
But the story goes,
my father would never unwrap a piece of gum
without saving half from my mother.
The story goes, my mother saved all the halves in a jar.
That's not the point.
I'm not looking for anything serious,
just someone to watch my plants when I'm gone.
You can sing now if you want to,
they're worried no one will marry me.
I have an accent in every language.
I want to be left alone
but that's not how you make grandchildren.
I can't go home with you,
home is a place in time.
That's not how you get me to dance.
I'm not from here, I'm not from anywhere.
I mean to say that I don't know that song,
I mean to say that my body is a pill, small
and love is the wrong man's tongue to tell me so.
My body dissolves,
my body finds men who are water and calls them home.
My body is everything that happened to me.
Love is a thing my body borrows to forget.
Love is a pill,
my body is water.
My body is a tongue and love dissolves.
Love calls the wrong man home,
love makes my body a stain
and goes looking for water on the wrong man's tongue.
Love is a house.
My body is a bath drawn in flood water.
My body trickles in through the floorboards.
Love is the carpet that I've ruined.
Love is decoration.
Love is an alternative to water.
Love is just something to do until the war starts.
My body is a border drawn up by some man long ago.
Love is everything that happened in between.
Love is the floorboards.
My body is decoration.
Love ruined all the carpets.
My body is the carpet.
My body is the stain.
love makes it all dissolve.
Love is an alternative to home.
Love is flood water.
My body burned to the ground.
My body called the wrong man home.
Love started the fire,
My body is everything that happened after.
The wrong man is an alternative to love,
The wrong man is a map,
home is where he puts the lines.
My body is a border drawn by accident,
by the wrong man's tongue.
Love makes scars on my body and calls them borders.
The wrong man mistakes my body for a body of water.
Love let the wrong man decide
what my body mistakes for home.
Love started the fire.
My body is a house on fire.
My body drew a bath in flood water,
the wrong man is flood water.
Love and the wrong man are an alternative to hating my body.
My body is a body of water
poured over everything that happened to me.
My body makes every scar an island.
The wrong man makes my body small, a pill.
Love makes the water and my body dissolves.
But when love flickers in the corners,
it opens in me what I pretend is a need to confess
what is actually just a need to blame everything
for my cowardice,
this preference for men
whose daughters will not have my eyes.
Anyone who threatens to matter,
who's not my preferred shade of disposable,
whose shoulders are enough to tell me
that I will succumb to the softness
that I spent a lifetime coaching out of this body.
This is the one that I will crowd out the door
and say that I am protecting him from my love,
from everything that it is not.
I will say, a woman betrayed by her own body
will never keep any of your secrets.
I will say, most men are afraid of me you know
or I will say, in my culture
we do not take our men's names as our own.
You have nothing from me.
I have my own name, one letter away from my mothers.
I know now how this body works,
how it will never let a name go
once it is taken it into the mouth and fed it to the breath.
I still know by heart
the phone numbers of the ones who have lied the most,
it was they who I loved best.
I let them name me in their language
until I forgot every word of my own.
Now every mouth full of me is gone,
caught between the teeth of liars
who hiss when they laugh and will load a whisper
with the kind of spells that can convince a girl
that she is nobody's daughter.
Or I will say, my mother and I
are women who look like nobody's wives, the strong girls.
Inheritors of every bitterness of a country
racked by war until it broke itself in half.
We are the tapered point of a horizon law line of women
who've learned to cook dinner every night
whether or not the men come home,
who spit their daughters out an ocean away
to save them from this land
that will drink up all its children
just to show the stains off to the world.
Lover, the whole world knows the color of my people's blood.
Lover, I am a girl without a country,
carrier of an ancient loss.
Lover, I cannot keep house.
I haven't enough language to name a child with lover.
In loving you,
I betray all the left behind women in my blood.
I've left my home behind once already,
I cannot survive another loss or I will blame my father.
I will say, my father is a backwards glance,
my father is a whispered breath.
My father is forgotten and I have his face,
a skull pierced by the eyes of a man who left
makes me the girl who leaves.
These are the heirlooms that I've got.
My father is a stranger,
every man is a stranger.
Once, I let a stranger introduce himself with his hands,
I've been trying to remember my own name ever since.
Through the saxophone's mournful syrup,
shiver of guitar and a smoke eyed voice
studded with the names of all our dead boys
and all our burned cities.
And now the lyrics do not translate.
Arabic is all verbs for what stays still in other languages.
(speaks in foreign language), to mourning.
With the translation to awake cannot honor,
cannot contain its rhyme with (speaks in foreign language)
To swim, to make the night a body of water.
I am here now and I cannot mourning.
I am 25 and always sick,
small from my age and always translating.
I cannot sleep through the night.
No language has given me the rhyme
between ocean and wound that I know to be true.
Sometimes when the doctors draw my blood
I feel the word at the edge of my tongue.
Helim sings (speaks in foreign language)
I am drowning, I am drowning.
The single word for all the water in his throat
does not translate.
Halim sings, teach me to kill the tear in its duct.
Halim sings, I have no experience in love nor have I a boat
and I know he cannot rest, cannot swim through the night.
I am looking for a voice with a wound in it.
A man who could only have died by a form of drowning.
Let the song take its time,
let the ocean close back up.
Republic of the Sudan, Ministry of Interior,
Passport and Immigration General Directorate,
alien from Sudanese origin pass card.
At the government office a veiled woman
made the card on Microsoft paint,
told me my Arabic was not bad for a foreigner
you can barely hear the accent.
I board the plane
with grandma's voice crackling through the phone,
today we cued for fuel and food,
come home again soon.
My blue passport made me American.
Place of birth Maryland, USA.
And in the months since my last visit
I feel the American slurs settled back to coat my Rs.
And in New York, I am ambiguous brown girl.
Sudanese, but your English is so good,
you can barely hear the accent.
Mama still speaks to me in Arabic here
but we eat with fork and knife.
We play some of the old songs but mostly Motan
to remind mama of those swaying 80s nights in the garden
before it turned to dust,
before the old country crumbled and mama came here
to give me the blue passports for freedom.
And last time I was home, a soldier stopped the car,
asked for ID.
Held the stiff navy blue marked Maryland, USA.
Asked where I was from,
laughed when I said here.
Alternate ending.
The dead boy is poured back into his body.
I tried to leave home, but the ocean bears its teeth.
And where I'm from is where I'm from
and not where I was put.
It's morning and my grandmother pins hot colors
to the clothes line.
It's evening, I'm still on a date
and the words say something to me in Arabic
fall backwards down his throats.
And what is a country but the drawing of a line.
Today I draw thick black lines around my eyes
and they are a country
and thick red lines around my lips
and they are a country.
And the knife that chops the onions
draws a smooth line through my finger
and that is a country.
And the tightening denim
presses a soft purple line into my belly
and when I smile like my mother,
a line flashes in between my two front teeth.
And for every country I lose,
I make another and I make another.
And I believe that sometimes we do not die.
I will not believe that to be housed in a body that is black
is to be always dressed in black for the funeral.
We live forever.
Sometimes our mouths open and a song falls out,
thick with a saxophone syrup.
And all are dead in the ground make this land ours
and all our missing fathers make us everything's child.
Today I did not dress for a funeral,
today I wear the yellow dress and laugh with all my teeth.
Today my lost ones are not lost to me,
they live in the wind that gathers my skirt.
Today, this is my country.
Today, I say their names and all the holes left behind
shaped like black girls and black boys
are lit up by hundreds of far away stars.
Today I woke up and was not dead
and tomorrow might be different
but tomorrow does not yet exist.
So I hold my mother's hand
and kiss the brown valley between each knuckle.
My brother opens his mouth to laugh
and the light pours in through the gap in his teeth.
I press my body to a man that I find beautiful
and sway to a song that knows us.
I live forever with my feet in my grandmother's lap.
I live forever by the water with the sun spilled over me,
remember me this way.
And when they come from me,
play the song I love into the space I leave behind.
Thank you.
(audience applauds)