RAWI.org Featured Writers

Featured Fiction Writer: Susan Muaddi Darraj
Featured Poet: Dima Hila

Featured Fiction Writer: Susan Muaddi Darraj

Susan Muaddi Darraj is associate professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air, Maryland. She is the editor of Scheherazade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing. Her fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in several publications and anthologies. She is Senior Editor of The Baltimore Review.

The following is excerpted from "The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly," University of Notre Dame Press (forthcoming April 2007). See the publisher's website for book description and reviews: http://www3.undpress.nd.edu:80/exec/dispatch.php?s=title,P01156

The Scent of Oranges

By Susan Muaddi Darraj

Excerpt from The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly, University of Notre Dame Press, 198 pp., $20

     I don't understand why it's important, but I'll do this as you wish, Reema. I have an hour before the grape leaves finish cooking. Do you have to record? I wish you wouldn't. I'm not good at choosing my words - I have to think for hours to find the right one, but y'allah.

     When the alarm sounded, its shrill wail threw me back, far back in my mind to the classroom in the UNRWA school at the east end of the camp. I shared a desk with Huda, and we used to hold each other tightly under it when the air raid sirens rang and the planes soared above. If they dropped their loads, we were sent home early, running home to our frantic mothers. If they just passed quietly overhead, we went back to our schoolwork, figuring out what x and y were in the algebraic equations, or practicing our English conversational skills: "May I have some milk in my tea? Thank you kindly." Goddamn British.

     Sorry, habibti. Be sure to erase that part later. Promise? I know you said you need accurate stories for the project - the "thesis," yes I know - but I don't want that word on there.

     So that's how we spent our schooldays. Once in a while, a bomb landed on the home of someone we knew, a person in our class, and they would stop coming to our school. We would either attend the funeral, or hear from one of the old people in town or from one of the young men who worked in the city, that our classmate was at a special school for orphans.

     Let me interrupt again, Reema. Really, please be sure to go back and erase the curse word I said. Just say instead, "the meddling British" - not too easy on them, but not cursing either.

     Philadelphia was strange at first. Their English here was different, and they did not put milk in their tea. I hated it, even though I was grateful to your grandfather, God rest his soul, for getting us to America. The West Bank had been swallowed up, and my father decided we couldn't wait any longer to return to Palestine.

     On my first day in the new school - that's when the siren went off. In English class, the middle of the day. Mr. Emmitt was the teacher; he had black hair and thick glasses, and a gap between his front teeth, but I thought he was very handsome, even for a man without a mustache, but especially because all my teachers at the camp had been women. He seemed to smile especially at me - why are you groaning, Reema? - and my heart actually fluttered. I'm a woman, you know, God forbid your father should realize it. And I was a woman then, older than the other kids in the class. I'd missed so much school after the war that they sent me down to a lower grade.

     As the alarm exploded in our ears, Mr. Emmitt stopped what he was saying about comma splices and sighed. Everyone around me laughed for some reason, and one boy even cheered. I was wild - it was not Philadelphia anymore to me. It was the UNRWA school in the camp, and everyone was frightened, but calmly scuttling underneath their desks, chests heaving. Huda used to chew on the end of her braid, and I wished I could do that now, realizing how it must have comforted her. But my hair had all been chopped off weeks ago. God save us, we actually used to think that this technique - hiding under the desks - would protect us from the bombs. But, y'allah, what did we know?

     I became angry too, when the alarm sounded, because nobody seemed upset, not even Mr. Emmitt. And I was angry because I had been promised by Mama, on the airplane to Philadelphia, as I violently chewed gum the stewardess had given me to keep my ears from bursting, that we would be safe in our new home. And look what was happening, on my very first day! So I decided to save myself. I wouldn't be killed with a smile on my face like these fools. When you grow up in the camps and you see what I used to see - when you have a friend you tell your secrets to, and then a missile lands on her home, or the soldiers drag her into the shrubs as she walks home from school, then what? Then you learn to survive. Do you know this word, survive?

     Everyone lined up at the front of the room, but I crashed through the door, into the hallway, and ran. The alarm was louder in the hallway and my chest started quaking, and I couldn't breathe fully, couldn't fill my lungs. But I still ran. Other people stepped out into the hallway, keeping in their useless lines, but I barely saw them because I was looking, of course, for a place to hide.

     And then I saw it - an open door, and I ran in, and closed in. I pushed everything I could find in front of it, like a blockade; I used buckets, carts, cans, even a mop handle that I slid between the two bolts on the door. If soldiers planned to storm this place, I thought, sliding down to the ground and gathering my knees to my chest, they would have to take me after a battle.

     Baba had promised that we wouldn't have to run anymore. He came to our home, back in the camp one day, and his face was sad. Even when he told us he had managed to finally - after four years - to get us visas to the United States, we couldn't believe that we were leaving the camp. We were lucky, and we knew it. We could only get out because Baba's cousin, who had gone to America in 1948, made some papers for him. It had never been our home - Haifa would always be our real home - but still . I thought of Dina down the alley, whose father had died when they bombed the olive groves one day, and her brother who hobbled to a bus every day on his crutches - his right leg lost to a landmine - to work at a candy factory in the city. Dina used to come to my room and cry sometimes. Her brother was frustrated with his condition, knowing he couldn't get married, because girls needed husbands who could provide for them, and who could he provide for by wrapping little silver papers on chocolate for 10 hours a day? Well, he was frustrated. And I guess he tried once or twice to . you know what I am saying? - yes, I can see you know. So he tried with Dina. And she was scared to death. How could I leave her in that house, with nobody to help her hide? At least she could tell her mother she was sleeping at my house, but now that I was going to America, where soldiers didn't break into your house and landmines didn't steal your brother's legs.Where would she go? Even now, I wonder what happened to her.

     I shouldn't talk about Dina anymore. I don't want to.

     No, I will not. It's not my right to tell her story. I can only tell you mine.

     You? You can tell mine because I am giving it to you to keep safe, or to tell all the people, or to tell your sociology professor. Do as you like. It is yours now.

     Where was I?

     Yes. The closet. How was I to know it was a janitor's closet? To me, it was like the bunkers in the camp. There was water, and even some crackers and juice boxes on a shelf above the toilet scouring powder. Heaven!

     We had landed two weeks before this in the United States, but I already felt like a survivor. I was worried about your aunt and uncles, who were all in the middle school. I was in the high school building, and I wondered if they had found a place to hide as well. I went to the little sink and threw up, then huddled down on the floor again, my stomach twisting with fear.

     It was like the day at the orange grove in Haifa, the day it all happened. Maybe it wasn't when the problems started, but it was when I began to understand. Most of the Palestinians in Haifa were thrown out in 1948, but Baba managed to return after the war. Evenso, by the time I was born, nothing was certain. Our life was temporary, like we always knew they would come for us one day. If we didn't eat our food, Mama would always threaten us, "The soldiers will come for you." I remember your grandparents always seemed worried. My father always had a frown on his face, making his mouth look like a scar, and my mother started practicing in secret how to shoot a gun. I found her and my uncle Fouad one day; Fouad was her youngest brother, the one who died in 1982, behind the house when Baba was in the fields. Uncle Fouad's hatta waved in the breeze around his head. It was always pure white, because he washed his own clothes and took care of his appearance. I thought he looked like a prince when he sat on his horse, his reddish-brown stallion with the white streak between his eyes.

     On this day, Uncle Fouad was helping my mother point a shotgun at a box on top of the white stone fence on our land. "Aim properly," he was saying in his gentle voice. "If you watch it as you fire, you will hit it."

     I giggled then, from the sheer delight of seeing my handsome uncle, and hoping he would take me for a ride on his horse. But when I giggled, Mama shot the gun prematurely and the blast frightened me so much that I started crying, humiliated to be doing so in front of my Uncle, but scared anyway.

     Mama yelled at me for sneaking around, and warned me not to tell my father. I stood there, still sobbing, when Uncle Fouad offered to give me a ride around on the fields. I clapped excitedly, and let him hoist me up in the saddle.

     "Why is Mama playing with the gun?" I asked, feeling the wind in my hair.

     "To protect you from the Zionists," he responded calmly. He never lied to me, the way the other adults did, and I adored him. That's his picture there, in the small frame, the black and white photo. See how white his hatta is? He refused to leave the camp with us, and he broke your grandmother's heart when he died, because she used to take care of him like her own son.

     Weeks after I saw my mother with the gun, I heard her screaming for me and my brother and sisters. We ran back to the house, and my skirt and pockets were filled with oranges from the grove. Mama and Baba were frantically packing some clothes and money and loading them onto the old mules we owned. I saw Mama stuff her gold - her bracelets, necklaces, and rings, in the front of her thawb, near her bosom.

     We started to walk, and I thought we would never stop. Seven of us trudged on, and sometimes I helped Mama carry Rabe - your uncle was just a baby then - and keep Ihab, Rana, and Samia in line and cheerful as we marched. Sometimes, I would wake up and realize that Baba was carrying me. For the first few days, we still had some of our oranges with us, and we would peel them and eat them, and then lick the juice from our fingers. The smell of the oranges got on my dress and on my skin and I smelled it the whole time we walked. We didn't ask what was going on. I thought if I kept eating my oranges, they would stop coming for us, but when I said this out loud, your grandparents' frowns shut me up.

     Do you know that I sat in that janitor's closet, and even though I knew that the pine cleaner odor surrounded me, I still smelled fresh oranges? It's impossible, logically, but I tell you that it filled my nostrils, that scent, and the back of my tongue prickled. In the camp we ended up in, I used to smell it. Even now - how many years later? - I can still smell it, and I remember it all - Dina huddling on my mattress, Huda chewing on her hair, Uncle Fouad riding the horse with the white streak between its eyes, Mama stuffing gold in her bosom, and me, hiding under a UNRWA desk, hiding in a closet, hoping something would shield me from what was to be, from the soldiers, the bombs, the devil. Everyone. Who knows how long I was in that closet? Maybe two hours? And then I heard voices on the speakers - the principal Mr. Green, who looked like he has no rear end (erase that too, ok?), telling me to come out, wherever I was. That same morning, my first day of school in America, and he said to me, "How are you, young man?" Can you imagine? I guess he didn't know that Huda was a girl's name, but I was humiliated. Mama had chopped all our hair when we left the camp to come to America, the way your grandfather used to shear the sheep in Haifa, because we all had hair down to our hips and it was expensive to wash and care for her, and Mama never had time anymore. I remember how we cried, even Mama cried, and Baba threw his hands up in the air, asking, "Are you all Samsons? Lost your strength now? We lost everything, and this is what you cry for?" That first day in school, I was also wearing trouser pants and a long T-shirt that said "Philadelphia Phillies" on the front - donated by a kind neighbor - so maybe I really did look like a boy.

     Mr. Emmitt's voice came on the loudspeaker too, darling Mr. Emmitt, who asked me to please come out and it would be alright. My UNRWA English served me well enough to understand that much, but I would not leave. I remember the stories of soldiers holding a gun to people's heads and making them speak to get their relatives out of a house. I was not stupid. I snacked on the crackers I found, and they settled my stomach a bit. Much later, I heard another voice - that of my mother - telling me in Arabic, "Habibti, come out. It really is ok." I trusted only her voice.

     And of course, I ran out, kicking the buckets and mops and brooms out of my way, flying down the hallway when another teacher spotted me - they had all been looking for me - and took me to the big office where my mother was. The first thing I asked was if Ihab, Rana, and Samia were ok, and she said they were fine. Mr. Green and Mr. Emmitt then explained to me what a fire drill was, and I felt miserable. So humiliated.

     They let me return home, rather than finish the day. It was better anyway, because everyone in school now knew who I was - the new girl with the short haircut, who was older than everyone else and barely spoke English. The skinny boy who really was a girl. The kid who hid in the janitor's closet because the fire drill scared her. The girl whose mother had to come to school and talk to her on the speaker in a funny language that sounded like spitting.

     How's that, Reema? Enough material for your stories? When I went back? Well, it was not fun. Some of the classmates looked at me strangely, and many laughed. One girl told everyone I was dirty because I was wearing the same Phillies shirt, but in the camp, we wore the same clothes two or three days in a row unless we got dirty or sweated in them. But I never made that mistake in this country again. Your father always asks me why I buy so many clothes. "Just leave me alone on this issue," I tell him. You know how men can be.

     But the first day back, a Korean girl smiled at me, and she sat with me during lunch. I don't even know her name now, but she was very petite and very pretty and she used to twirl her hair with her fingers all the time. She moved to a different school the next year, but for the rest of that first year, she was my friend and she knew some English. It was nice. I was grateful. We sat together and read the same books and I even visited her in her home once, with your grandmother. Our mothers couldn't even say a word to each other, but they just smiled at each other and made these gestures and exaggerated faces, listening to our giggles. Three languages existed in that room, and my friend and I were the only ones who knew more than one. Our English wasn't great, but it's like a bridge. As long as it gets you safely to the other side, what else matters?

     I have to finish dinner now. Ok? Good. Just shape the words I said the way you want - fix them and make them sound good. You are the writer, habibti, not me

Featured Poet: Dima Hilal

Dima Hilal is a poet and writer, born in Beirut and raised in California, where she studied at the University of California at Berkeley. Her work has appeared in various publications, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Mizna and Orion Magazine. Her writing has been anthologized in The Poetry of Arab Women: A Contemporary Anthology (Interlink Books, 2001) and Scheherezade's Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing (Praeger, 2004), among others. She has been featured at the Beyond Baroque Cultural Center, World Stage, Levantine Cultural Center, Autry Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and at the Alexandria Library in Egypt. Her libretto was a finalist in the Words and Music Project, commissioned by the Oakland East Bay Symphony. She has taught poetry workshops and given lectures on issues of identity, culture and community in contemporary Arab poetry. Hilal currently resides in Dana Point, California, where she is working on a collection of poetry. For more information, visit http://www.dimahilal.com.

Cradlesong
Sister
Unusual Name
Ar-Rahman Road

Cradlesong

I don't adore babies
their sprawling selves
and gurgling mouths
you won't see me
kneel before them
like an altar
murmur sweet nothings
as if in prayer

but for you
sweet boy
I could nearly burst
with the joy of you

I could spend hours examining
your pudgy cheeks
and overflowing thighs
your delicate lashes
the curl of your left ear
could get lost cataloguing
the variations of your murmurs
from restless mews to finicky cries
could hum the theme song
to every god-awful kid's show
and swing you a trillion times
just to elicit another giggle

for you sweet boy
I could bury my nose
in each layer of your clothes
spread them out
like priceless artifacts
for display at the nearest museum
I could curate
your bibs in chronological order
record your first word
(quite possibly auntie)
for posterity
memorize the exact location
of your first step
the where and why
behind a scraped knee
could count the bubbles
in your evening bath
the thread count in your hooded towel

for you sweet boy
I could stare at the sky above
and name every star
until you fall asleep
whisper these words each dawn
to welcome you to another day

Sister
            for Dahlia and Serene

You're debke and tamarind
Orange blossom and zaatar
You're the muse
And the poet both
The thousandth book
In the library of Alexandria

You're the secret
Passed between friends
The unexpected laugh
Bouncing down sidewalks
And rolling into alleyways

You're the sweeping city of Beirut
Sparkling skyline
And diamond dreams
The valley of Baalbek
Figs ripening in midday sun
Wash fluttering in the wind

You're the safe harbor
The escape
From countless trials
And tribulations
From the ceaseless trepidation
Of mortars and F-16s
You're the well
At the end of the water line
The bread doled out
From the corner bakery

You're rosary beads
Weaving between creased hands
The click of every prayer
The whispered promise
            Tomorrow will be
            Tomorrow will be

Unusual Name
Acknowledgment: Unusual Name will be forthcoming in Arab American and Arab Anglophone Literature

Sound of raindrops
Their first splatter
The unexpected pitter
Patter that sends you
Searching clear skies
For a cloud in sight
dima ~ summer rain
A blessing for my ancestors
Desert tribes longing
For pregnant cerulean skies
To crack open
Releasing rain, its delivery
Life sustaining, its arrival
A miracle

And hilal
he    a hint of breath
Through parted lips
The taste, the smell of mint leaves
lal, the la la la la
Women's ululation
The wedding celebration, the zaffeh
Welcoming the aroussa,
The blushing bride

Unusual name
Follow the cicadas' cries outside
Again search the skies
For evidence of our existence
hilal ~ crescent moon
Suspended in mid-air
Disappearing and reappearing
The sihr, magic, of centuries past

At age five
I would crane my neck
To catch sight of our name
Skimming the stars
Anxious to find it rising
Over distant hills
Whoever saw it
Would call out its presence
And we would beam our
Own curved crescent smiles
At each other
At our family fortune

Unusual name
Familiar as the flash
Of summer rain
The scent of grass and dirt
Unearthed
Familiar as the rise and fall
Of your very breath
Of the ocean tide pushed
And pulled by the pearlescent moon
The crescent child

Ar-Rahman Road

On my street,
         mercy resides

Spiders get carried out of houses
in styrofoam cups
gently airlifted to safety

Children swap legos for tonka trucks for barbies
never chided for not sharing
broken toys buried in the backyard
          (along with hard feelings)

Housewives make pies
twenty at a time
cherry, strawberry, peach, pumpkin
deliver them to neighbors' doorsteps
disperse them in the park
freshly baked presents
next to sleeping bags and cardboard boxes

On my block church bells ring
early on Sunday morning
and every prayer is for another

The Lord's prayer mingles
with the sound of the adhan
floating from the nearby mosque

On my street
we want for nothing,
       but salaam

Long for nothing,
      just rahman

RAWI.org Featured Writers

Featured Writers

Original Arab American writing:

Featured Artist:

Advertisement: