- Fact.
The Arabic word (speaks in Arabic) means wind.
The Arabic word (speaks in Arabic) means love.
Test: Multiple choice.
Abdulhalim said, "You left me holding wind in my hands."
Or Abdulhalim said,
"You left me holding love in my hands."
Abdulhalim was left empty or abdelhalim was left full.
Fairouz said,
"Oh wind take me to my country."
Or Fairouz said,
"Oh love, take me to my country."
Fairouz is looking for a vehicle
or Fairouz is looking for fuel.
Uhmkalthoum said, "Where the wind stops her ships,
we stop ours."
Or Uhmkalthoum said, "Where love stops her ships,
we stop ours."
Uhmkalthoum is stuck or Uhmkalthoum 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 wasteful to pray for our brothers
in a language they never learned?
Whose daughters are we if we grow old before our mothers?
Or for the their sakes,
they called our grandfathers the January children.
Lined up by the colonizer
and assigned birth years by height.
There is no answer.
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.
And 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 in 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
and at a party in Omdurman,
light strung among the date palms
My not yet mother, honey legs in her skirt,
opens her mouth and the night air is the gap in her teeth.
She sings and 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,
dress 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 live 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 drifting near the lanterns,
my parents dance without ever touching,
But the story goes,
my father would never unwrap a piece of gum
without saving half from my mother.
The story goes my mother saves 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.
So I understand why you did not call me back,
I peel and peel and cannot undress,
I wear my grandfather and my left eye turns to milk,
my grandmother and the curl unravels from my hair,
I smell a flower and adore an acidic perfume,
I wear my mother and remember a garden
with Magnolia flowers,
a scarf packs up my heavy hair.
I wear my brother and a bullet is assigned to me at birth,
I wear blood in my mouth,
where a man's name or a language should be.
So in the divorce I separate to two piles,
books, English, love songs, Arabic.
My angers, my schooling,
my long repeating name,
English, English, Arabic.
I am someone's daughter,
but I'm American born
It shows in my short memory,
my A historic glamor,
my clumsy tongue When I forget the word for in Arabic.
I sleep unbroken dark hours on airplanes home
and dream I've missed my connecting flight,
I dream a new and fluent mouth
full of gauzy swaths of Arabic,
I dream my alternate selves,
each with a face borrowed from photographs
of the girl who became my grandmother,
brows and body rounded and cursive like Arabic,
but awake to the usual borderlands
I crowd shining slivers of English to my mouth,
Iris, Crocus, Inlet, heroin,
How dare I love a word without knowing it in Arabic,
and what even is translation,
is immigration without irony.
Sofia, means pure.
All my life that's been true, even in my clouded Arabic.
And now the lyrics do not translate,
Arabic is all verbs for what stays still
in other languages.
(speaking in Arabic)
to mourning, what the translation to awake cannot honor,
cannot contain its rhyme with (speaking in Arabic),
to swim, to make the night a body of water.
I'm here now and I am not buoyant,
I'm 27 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.
Halim sings (speaking in Arabic).
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.
Ars Poetica.
And this opens with a quote.
Autobiography practiced in the enemy's language
has the texture of fiction.
Aussia Jabbar Fantasia.
In Ohio I tell a classroom of white students
a story I mean to be beautiful
about my grandfather retreating in his old age
to his first tongue
in which there are no separate words
for like and love.
Once at a restaurant,
meaning I think to say,
I would like some tomato soup,
repeats to a flustered waitress,
I love tomato soup,
I love tomato soup.
And the white students
and the white professors like my story.
They think I mean it to be comic,
the room balloons with their delight.
They're laughing at my grandfather
and it is my fault for carving tenderness from my old life
without context, parading to strangers my weak translations.
Now they think I am joking
and laugh at my every dripping word
And isn't this why I learned this language?
To graduate from my thick and pungent newness?
My accent and my nameless shoes?
To float my hands like a conductor,
redirect the laughter to a body not my own
for a moment of quiet inside my trader's head.
Alternate ending.
The dead boy is poured back into his body
I try 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,
its morning, and my grandmother pins hot colors
to the clothesline,
its evening, I'm on a date,
and the words, "Say something to me in Arabic"
fall backwards down his throat.
This poem is called, "Men Follow Me."
On Instagram.
On Twitter.
Home from the subway station,
through my front door,
over the years,
wait for me to turn 18,
with their eyes, with their cars,
with their children in the backseat,
in the empty parking lot.
The echo of footsteps giving them hundreds of bodies,
with their tongues out,
with their teeth shining like flies.
After I pay my fare and exit their taxi,
into the bathroom, into the elevator,
maybe even when I die and step away from my multi-hood body
I will look back to see them still,
one hand hot against their groin,
the other reaching from my hair
I was hurt, I wasn't
I saw it on the internet,
licked yogurt from this spoon
while the girls described their blood,
hot, seizing the cotton of a sheet,
I am speaking from the cut place,
from my other mouths.
Do not believe me for I was never cut
or I was hurt but never sewn,
or I wasn't, I wanted it,
I didn't, I screamed
I didn't, I bit down
I bled, I didn't
I clicked through pictures of the girls.
Moon faced, thick cheeked,
still fastened to the roundness of childhood.
Consider the softness of my jaw,
my face without angles, without edges.
I covered, I coward, I didn't
I cried, I came to.
I click and learned their names and can't them?
I learned the names of the stones,
the theory, it wasn't me.
I think of all the ways we match,
it could have been, it couldn't.
Consider the cut place,
thick liquid of citizenship spilling
from my many mouths,
uncut, my many uncut mouths.
My each and every name, my casing, a border,
my mouth, my body, my failing tongue, a border,
my grandfather, milk pooling in his hopeful eye,
Say it, I lost a language and grew another border.
Spoiled milk, my curdling citizenship,
my liquid spilling citizenship,
my missing names, a border,
poured everywhere and drying in the yellow morning,
My body is touched and I claw the air from my borders,
I misplaced my homeland,
mispronounced my mother tongue,
again louder, harder, border
Imagine my mirror mouth,
it's boundless dark,
all my alternate selves better,
broader, bolder, border,
louder, thinner, say it.
Though purity is I know an invention,
She bleeds, blacker, brimming, border.
My grandfather's girl, matching milk
Sofia pure, citizens and born backward
Imagine me softer, border.
I cover my shoulders in a photograph
so the hissing will quiet.
I cloister my vices
I maintain my weight, I never cut my hair,
I'm asked to change my dress
I am asked to line my eyes never in order,
only the slight apology people will talk,
I am asked to take down the photo,
I am asked to anonymize my lover
stop showing my teeth,
cover my knees, shave my legs,
stop wearing red, stop wearing makeup,
stop wearing lipsticks,
stop being photographed at night,
people will talk,
what will they think?
What will they do with my name?
I was 24 and almost died and nobody knew.
I was sick in my heart and my blood I fainted,
the train started moving,
I started to empty from my body while it fell.
Everything suspended and viscus I felt very slowly.
I had time to name it,
before a stranger caught my weight
and later I kept quiet, told no one.
I knew what they would think,
I knew what could be said,
I knew what stories form
when bodies float into the tracks before trains,
I fell and was caught
and the next day brushed my hair
and dressed loosely and chased Lee
and went on hollowing all mouths of my name.
Bitnas, noun, daughter of people,
girl with a name,
unbroken yolk is reputation
Daily maintenance of name,
girlhood governed by tongues,
reputation a system of value.
Virgin, sane, oiled and brushed.
Fluent, chaste and shy.
Uncut and undyed hair, covered,
reputation as condition for name,
reputation as condition for daughter hood,
reputation shaped earn, name.
I was 14, 16, 20 and nobody knew,
I was hurt in my redacted,
in my blood, I fainted,
the man started moving,
I started to empty for from my body while it fell,
everything suspended and viscus
I fell very slowly
I could not name it and keep my name,
a stranger redacted and later I kept quiet told no one.
I knew what they would think
I knew what could be said
I knew what stories form
when bodies redacted, redacted, redacted, redacted
I redacted and was not caught.
And the next day brushed my hair
and dressed loosely and chased Lee
and went on hollowing all mouths of my name.
Sumha, noun, reputation, shared root with Sumia,
noun, hearing, as in,
I heard redacted's daughter was seen,
redacted while wearing redacted,
such a shame with that complexion,
that hair she could have been redacted.
I heard redacted daughter smoke cigarettes
and opens her mouth to laugh,
Such a shame,
She must not have a father,
I heard, redacted's daughter
is no longer redacted's daughter
and cannot close her legs
I heard redacted lost her people,
lost her surname when she lost her redacted.
I heard redacted was never a daughter,
has no people has no reputation has no name.
What small freedoms could I exchange for my name,
for my name for the sounds people make when they daughter me
for my cage for my sumha,
for what people hear in the absence of my cloistered body
for the sentencing after,
I heard for the sentences locked away before my name,
my name prize itself opened my name,
my name prized above my body, above my mouth
My name, shrouds my body magnifies its every act
My cage, my name, my cage,
my reputation my unbroken yoke
my unstained sheet my cage my stage my blood my sheet
but what if I will not die?
What will govern me then?
How to govern me then?
What bounty then on my name?
What stone what a rope,
what man will be my officer?
And what is a country with 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 chop 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 the line flashes
between my two front teeth and for every country I lose,
I make another and I make another,
So I pledge allegiance to my homies,
to my mother's small and cool palms
to the gap between my brother's two front teeth
and to my grandmother's good brown hands,
good strong brown hands gathering my bare feet in her lap,
I pledge allegiance to the group text,
I pledge allegiance to laughter
and to all the boys that have a crush on,
I pledge allegiance to my Spearman plant,
to my split ends,
to my grandfather's brain and gray left eye.
I come from two failed countries and I give them back.
I pledge allegiance to no land,
no border cut by force to drop blood.
I pledge allegiance to no government,
no collection of white men carving up
the map with their pens.
I choose the table at the waffle house,
with all my loved ones crowded into the booth.
I choose the shining dark of our faces
through a thin sheet of smoke,
glowing dark of our faces slick under layers of sweat.
I choose the world we make with our living,
refusing to be unmade by what surrounds us.
I choose us gathered at the Lakeside,
the light glutting off the water
and our laughing teeth,
and along the living dark of our hair.
And this is my only country.
Thank you.
(audience cheering)