Love Is an Ex-Country Read online

  Praise for Randa Jarrar

  Him, Me, Muhammad Ali

  Winner of the 2017 American Book Award

  Winner of the 2017 PEN Oakland/

  Josephine Miles Literary Award

  Winner of the 2017 Story Prize Spotlight Award

  An Electric Literature Best Short Story Collection of 2016

  “Sharp and irreverent . . . When Jarrar’s sense of humor tangles with her character’s feelings of estrangement, the results are often charming and funny.” —Los Angeles Times

  “Funny and darkly imaginative . . . The stories are confessional and riveting by means of the deeply intimate and vulnerable spaces Jarrar’s characters allow us to access . . . Jarrar’s fiction has exciting range, and she investigates narrative as well as social taboo . . . Like the tightrope walker in the opening story, Jarrar pulls off incredible feats again and again.” —Portland Mercury

  “These stories showcase the strength and talent of a writer of immeasurable gift and grace, who confronts the poignant and often brutal realities her characters face with sass and verve.” —The Los Angeles Review of Books

  “Weird, hilarious, melodramatic, gorgeous, and sincerely resonant.” —Electric Literature

  “Jarrar presents an astonishing variety, each story as inventive as it is insightful. It’s a book for this oppressive electoral season, where presidential politics are ugly and destructive, and demagoguery is endeavoring to trample a core American truth: Our country’s strength derives from open borders. Jarrar is here with a correction.” —The Millions

  “As a queer, Muslim, Palestinian-American and proud fat femme, Jarrar lives the complexities of intersectionality. Fortunately for her readers, she infuses those complexities into her characters . . . She shows their connections and differences by leaving no topic unexplored—class, language, and sexuality are all at the core of the book. Her style is straightforward and direct while being multifaceted and thought-provoking.” —Bitch

  “Jarrar follows up her novel, A Map of Home, with a collection of stories depicting the lives of Arab women, ranging from hypnotic fables to gritty realism . . . Often witty and cutting, these stories transport readers and introduce them to a memorable group of women.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A subtle interrogation of class spanning multiple generations and an exploration of desire enlivened by a dash of magical realism.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “[A] brave, bright, tell-it-like-it-is collection . . . Impressively varied in style and content, Jarrar’s collection is recommended for a wide range of readers.” —Library Journal

  “Him, Me, Muhammad Ali is a searing collection of short stories about loving, lusting, losing, and surviving. Randa Jarrar is one of the finest writers of her generation. Her voice is assured, fiercely independent, laced with humor and irony—and always, always, honest.”

  —Laila Lalami, author of Conditional Citizens

  “Randa Jarrar’s prose is bold and luscious and makes the darkly comic seem light. The voices in Him, Me, Muhammad Ali are powerful individually and overwhelming as a chorus. This wonderful work isn’t just a collection; it’s a world.” —Mat Johnson, author of Loving Day

  “These vibrant, funny, earthy, and above all, yearning (for love, for family, for home) stories are a revelation. Jarrar combines the invention of Calvino, the sprung style of Paley, the poetic imagery of Babel . . . But that mash-up isn’t mere stylistic exuberance; it’s a restless, relentless and deeply affecting effort to forge identity out of fragments, to make a whole out of halves. These are the stories we need right now.”

  —Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes

  “The stories of Randa Jarrar are fearless, funny, and sad, soaring and earthly, fable-like and visceral, full of families, lovers, friends, strangers, and lonely children. These stories laugh with and think through and rise against, which is just to say they brilliantly demonstrate Jarrar’s huge talent, compassion, and range. Him, Me, Muhammed Ali astonishes from start to finish.” —Sam Lipsyte, author of Hark

  A Map of Home

  “[An] extraordinary debut . . . Jarrar’s lack of sentimentality, and her wry sense of humor, make A Map of Home a treasure.” —People (four stars)

  “A Map of Home will leave you laughing out loud.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Randa Jarrar takes all the sappy, beloved cliches about ‘where you hang your hat’ and blows them to smithereens in her energizing, caustically comic debut novel.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “In Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, Nidali, a refugee from Saddam’s bombs, finds a Texan adolescence dizzying to navigate with her Egyptian-Grecian-Palestinian background. Jarrar’s prose is as delightfully dry and intense as her main character . . . Sarcastic essays, Arabic lyrics juxtaposed with American rap, and other anecdotes present cross-cultural observations that are both humorous and wistful.”

  —Oxford American

  “Jarrar . . . has created a tale of crossing borders (geographic, sexual, cultural, and otherwise) that challenges readers to remap the boundaries of ‘normal’ adolescence.” —Bitch

  “Ah, eccentric families. In Jarrar’s first novel, the lovable Ammars are talkative, argumentative, and so alive they practically burst off the page . . . Jarrar is sophisticated and deft, and her impressive debut is especially intriguing considering her clever use of recent Middle East history.”

  —Booklist

  “Jarrar is a funny, incisive writer, and she’s positively heroic in her refusal to employ easy sentimentality or cheap pathos . . . A coming-of-age story that’s both singular and universal—an outstanding debut.” —Kirkus Reviews

  “Jarrar’s sparkling debut about an audacious Muslim girl growing up in Kuwait, Egypt and Texas is intimate, perceptive and very, very funny . . . Her exhilarating voice and flawless timing make this a standout.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  ALSO BY RANDA JARRAR

  A Map of Home

  Him, Me, Muhammad Ali

  For my friends

  CONTENTS

  1. The Loudest Whistle

  2. Magic

  3. Bushed

  4. Truth or Consequences, 2016

  5. West Texas, 2016

  6. Love Is Bodysome

  7. Double Magic

  8. A Street Called Chestnut

  9. Underground

  10. What Love Is

  11. Yes, Goddess

  12. Theft

  13. Monument

  14. Inside the Yellow Line

  15. Boaters

  16. Imagining Myself in Palestine

  17. Biblioclast

  18. Yes Again, Goddess

  19. Bad Muslim

  20. Love Is neither Slave nor Pharaoh

  21. Taking the Knife

  22. Cities vs. Women: A Body’s Scorecard

  23. Love Is X Country

  24. Election Daze

  25. Home

  Acknowledgments

  1

  THE LOUDEST WHISTLE

  In the summer of 2016, my son now an adult and a sabbatical ahead of me, I decided to drive across the country alone.

  I had read about the Egyptian dancer and actress Tahia Carioca doing a cross-country American trip once in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile; he interviewed Carioca and she told him she’d been married at least a dozen times. When he asked her what she thought of America she had said, “Liked the people, hate their government’s policies.” She was born in Egypt in 1919. I was conceived in Egypt almost sixty years later, and here I was, an American woman who had never crossed her own country by car.

  But the deeper I dug into Tahia Carioca’s trip, the less I found about it. She had i
ndeed married more than a dozen times: I found the names of fourteen of her husbands. One of them was an American lieutenant she had met while she was dancing at the Cairo Officers’ Club during the Second World War. “I whistled the loudest,” he boasted to Associated Press reporters after they married. She was twenty-five or twenty-six, a young woman who had already been dancing for ten years. She loved to dance, she always said, but hated the stereotypes about dancers. Of these, she told an American newspaper in 1946, was the idea that dancers lead a life of exotic leisure. “In the movies,” she said, “the dancers drink big goblets of wine, eat at rich banquets, and flirt with everybody. Actually, I . . . lead a rather simple life to keep my weight down and my muscles lithe.” I found photos of her fifty years after this interview; in them, she is fuller, big bellied, with fat arms and a gorgeous round face. By then she was finally leading the rich life she had so fully earned.

  Carioca’s dance style was unique: the L.A. Times once called her a “belly-rina,” but she despised the term belly dancer, and said she was an Eastern dancer. She was right; the term belly dance is Occidental, and in Arabic this kind of dance is called raqs sharqi, or Eastern dance. Belly dance, as it is known and practiced in the West, has its roots in, and a long history of, white appropriation of Eastern dance. As early as the 1890s in the U.S., white “sideshow sheikhs” managed dance troupes of white women, who performed belly dance at world’s fairs (fun trivia: Mark Twain made a short film of a belly dancer at the 1893 fair).

  Carioca honored her practice and tradition’s roots in Egypt and believed they were beautiful and sacred, and when she danced, many commented that she moved in sharp yet languid movements and took up very little space, moving and contorting herself while grounded onstage.

  •

  Her 1946 marriage ceremony made news all over the U.S.: she and Colonel Gilbert Levy wed ten years before the Lovings married, and twenty years before Loving v. Virginia, when the Supreme Court struck down the last laws of segregation banning interracial marriage. Carioca was very light-skinned and almost passed for white; in a black-and-white photo of her holding Kim Novak’s hand and standing near Ginger Rogers, I delight at the thickness and darkness of her Masry hair, notice how much larger and more unique her facial features are compared to the blondes. She is a North African woman charming Hollywood with her smile and her eyes, two of the things she once said were the true secret weapons of a dancer.

  I finally found mention of the road trip in a New York Daily News article from June 1, 1946: it said that Carioca and Levy would be traveling to New York by motor after spending a honeymoon in Los Angeles, and that afterward, they would split their time between Cairo and L.A.

  Twenty years earlier, in 1926, many of America’s “highways,” still only gravel roads, were completed—it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that proper highways were constructed. These early iterations offered the scenic route cross-country, meaning that the trip could take two weeks and often longer. When, in 1946, Carioca made the trip with her new white American husband, how much privilege did her skin color, her wealth, and her white husband afford her in the middle states?

  •

  Inspired by Carioca’s boldness, I decided to go on a cross-country trip of my own. Unlike Carioca, I was not famous or wealthy or a professional dancer. But like her, I was fond of dancing, light-skinned and privileged, libidinous, divorced more than once, and ready to motor. In Fresno, California, I made a list of destinations.

  But before I left for my trip, I flew to Washington State to say goodbye to my favorite lover fuckboi at the time, M. When I arrived, he gave me the worst news you want to hear from a fuckboi you’re trying to fuck on a fuckation for the last time: he was falling for a new woman, and he also (“unrelated,” he said) had chlamydia. So I pretended not to be sad and took a ferry to Vashon Island and stayed there, in a cabin, for a week. The cabin had a large claw-foot tub where I could cry, sink, and soak my entire body.

  My friend T, who lived in Seattle, came to the island to check up on me. T has written books of poetry and worked in tech and is Egyptian. He was one of my Others. You recognize these people: siblings you have never met. The siblings you would choose if you could choose siblings. Friends without benefits, as T would say. We are both fat and beautiful.

  •

  T said Seattle’s dating scene was oppressive. When I asked how, he said everyone wanted to hike, or ride bikes, or camp, or canoe. He wanted to know why he couldn’t just watch a movie with someone and fuck. I told him Netflix-and-chill was a thing. He said it was not a thing in Seattle. T was older than me and the women he met were all “fighting against wrinkles and death.” T said it was easier being a Christian in Cairo than it was being a couch potato in Seattle.

  T and I terrified everyone at a brunch place on the island. We were the only people of color and he kept saying the word suicide. He was talking about his depression, but the woman in fabric sandals and a crocheted tank top seated near us was shifting uncomfortably across from her salad. When we left, we saw two young Black men sitting in chairs outside a storefront and we greeted each other instantly, helping erase the memory of the uptight woman at brunch.

  Afterward we walked to a marijuana clinic I’d driven past the day before and were told that we needed a prescription. I got angry and I asked T in Arabic if we should tip the woman or bribe her to give us weed. I was joking but he looked at me seriously and said, Maybe we should. I said no and we walked back to my rental car.

  Except we walked past the rental car and past the two young men again. They were sharing a joint back and forth. I noticed and T noticed, too. We had to turn around because we had walked past the car. We passed the young men again. They greeted us again. We got in the car and as soon as I started it, T said, We can’t ask those guys for weed.

  And I said, Of course we can’t.

  We can’t get those guys in trouble, he said.

  I agreed with T. I told him that yes, it’s racist to ask the only two Black people we have seen today on the island for weed.

  T said we should go to Seattle and score legal weed. This involved taking a ferry, which is beautiful and romantic, even in a friends-without-benefits kind of way, and I agreed, and we drove past the two guys as they continued to pass the joint between each other.

  T wanted to know why I planned to drive cross-country. Since it was 2016, I told him that I wanted to commune with the land I lived on, to see America during that deeply troubled and troubling election year.

  To look at the place that might elect a person like Trump.

  I told him I loved the feeling of forward motion, that driving felt like home. And then I told him about Tahia Carioca.

  She did the trip twice! I repeated to T. She didn’t even live here. She had a tendency to do things multiple times, I said.

  T understood, and said yes, she was married more than a dozen times.

  Every time she wanted to fuck someone, she had to marry them, I said. There was no privacy.

  T agreed. Then he asked me to watch the road.

  There were no squirrels on the island, but there were deer. In the five days I stayed there, I had to avoid three deer crossing the road. A deer crossed now, gorgeous and graceful.

  “Tahia?” I yelled after the deer.

  “Tahia!” T said, “You are beautiful in this new form.”

  2

  MAGIC

  I guess most people newly freed from responsibilities take naps. But not me. What I did was, I drove fourteen hours to Arizona, which I realized was a huge mistake as soon as I arrived in Flagstaff. My dog and I slept in a motel room that inexplicably had four beds of varying sizes. We were Goldilocks. My dog, who has thick cataracts and is blind, sniffed at the walls. The next morning I tried to drive us to Sedona, but I realized halfway there that the terrain and view were replicas of Kings Canyon, which was forty minutes from my house in Fresno. But by then it was too late. I was behind a row of cars whose drivers were elderly, their feet flutterin
g constantly against their brakes. When we pulled into the resort area, I found a way to turn around and began making my way to New Mexico.

  An hour in, I stopped at the gas station; my dog hates the car so I took her with me to the restroom after I pumped gas. We squeezed into the restroom, which was busy with a matriarch and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, all Native women, all instantly kind to me and my dog. The stalls were full except one, and when I got out, the women were gone. Instead, a white woman in a uniform was washing her hands. I stood by her and washed my hands, too.

  This place is a shithole, she said.

  I think it’s rather nice, I said.

  The bathrooms across the street are like a four-star hotel, but I can’t go there, she said, because I’m a truck driver, and we don’t get to decide where we stop.

  She was wearing a pair of wraparound metallic blue trucker shades.

  Some people just shit in their trucks and throw the bag out the window, she said.

  They do? I said, amused.

  Yes, well the people they got driving now, they’re not from here. They’re not American. They’re Syrians. Might as well hire monkeys to drive trucks now.

  I’m glad they got out of Syria, I said, now that I understood that this woman had waited for all the Brown people to leave the bathroom, and that as soon as she saw me, a light-skinned woman who she assumed was white, she was able to be comfortable and vocal in her racism.

  Are ya? she said, vaguely disgusted.

  Yes, I said. They’ve been through hell. I’m Palestinian, I said, and for the first time, I realized I was taller than her.

  She walked away and said, Well, I hope you’re OK with spending your tax dollars on them.

  I am, I said. My tax dollars pay for my son’s school, for the roads I drive on, and for bombs that kill Arabs, by the way.

  She didn’t say anything. I could have left, but I went after her. She had hidden in the convenience store’s aisles. When I saw her, I said, I’m not a monkey. You’re a racist. You have no idea what it’s like to be a refugee.