Behind You Is the Sea

by Susan Muaddi Darraj

You have to be loyal to your exile as much as you are loyal to your homeland. —Ibrahim Nasrallah

He spent a long time teaching me how to read and write, how to connect the letters together because Arabic is not printed. The letters mostly slide into each other. Except for some letters—some letters, like ra, alif, and others—are complex because they don’t want to be connected. They’d rather cut a word in half than reach out and link to the next letter. My name is like that—the first letter is ra, and it’s separate from every other letter in my name. Sometimes, when Baba would make me write it over and over, I imagined that the ra was standing on an island, cast away from the other letters, watching as they sailed away together.

But today, I’m not ready. Mr. Donaldson gives us a Robert Louis Stevenson poem, “To Any Reader.” I’m into it from the beginning. That’s never the problem. I read really well—English and Arabic—so my comprehension is like nothing you’ve seen. But this poem . . . the ending is what gets me: “It is but a child of air / That lingers in the garden there.” I don’t write a word. I just think of all the sadness that’s suddenly in my heart. How can one line, “a child of air,” do that to you? It’s not what the poet meant, for sure. But I’m taking it that way. Because that’s what is at stake here. I don’t want to be haunted by a child of air. My mother is already made of air. My father is basically gone. Torrey? Torrey loves me. But I know better than to depend on anyone like that.

The day he dies, Baba looks skinny and surprised. When he sucks in the last breath, his mouth opens in an O, like America has shocked him at last, and freezes there. It’s like he finally understood he was never meant to win here. We’d known it was coming. You can tell. You don’t even need anyone to tell you that all you have left are just a few minutes to be together, intact, as a family. So we stood around him, me, Mama, and Maysoon. The nurse with the long gray hair asked if we should call someone else, but there is no one. She stayed in the next room, to give us privacy while we waited, but she came in whenever she heard him gasp or to put more morphine in his IV. “He can hear you,” she reminded us every time before slipping away again. Americans like to talk about everything, I know. They like to share their feelings, like purging old clothing or dumping clutter. But when you’re like us, you purge nothing. You recycle or repurpose every damn thing. Nothing is clutter. And as I stand here, watching my father die before he ever really lived, all I can think about is how I’m going to use these feelings I’m having now. I need someone to love, the way I love Baba.

All we know about high class is the basic formula: more money means better quality.

We’re chasing “class” and desperate for it.

But he’s been saying, for three years now, that Michelle is fun but she’s not the kind of girl you settle with. And I hated that mentality, the old Arab way of sizing up a girl based on nothing and judging her future.

Michelle thinks my dad is an old-fashioned misogynist and my dad thinks Michelle is a slut. He has seen her exactly twice in three years, but he waited until the second time to issue his official disapproval. “She is bretty, yes, but she will not be a good mother of your children.” I think now about his words, and how I’d hated him, and everyone, for that sentiment.

Baba interrupts my thoughts, tells me in Arabic, “Having a nice life with a good woman is the best thing you can hope for in this world. She will make all your days good ones.”

I like calling him Ray.” It burned him up! Raed meant “pioneer,” he who blazes a path—that was his son, so smart and capable and clever.

What else was wrong? Nadya had asked him wearily just this morning, as they got dressed. A wedding that cost a year’s salary, he’d retorted. A DJ who played American music that sounded like a video game. Most of all, a celebration less than forty days after they’d buried his mother. The mass for her soul hadn’t even been said, and here was her grandson, dancing a strange dance with his skinny wife, flapping their arms like terrified birds. His new daughter-in-law who had a white cat she loved so much that it was a guest at the wedding. It sat up on the head table on a white satin pillow, presiding over the party like a princess.

The stupid school was trying it again—working against her, not with her. But this time, they weren’t moving Eddie to another class, or taking away his class aide. This time, the threat was to hold him back another year. Fighting a public school system was like standing at the edge of the ocean, she thought; you’re determined to hold your ground, but it will drag you in until you’re up to your knees in salty water. The icy waves will crash against you, tempting you to flee and go somewhere safer, warmer. They will make it hard for you to stay. For years, she’d been handling paperwork—teacher evaluations, medical diagnoses, the forms that were numbers and letters, 504, IEP. It was all draining her, and that morning, with the new threat, she’d had to face facts.

Destiny put everyone on a stage, to play a role, and sometimes the spotlight slipped off you to give you a break. At other times, it burned into you directly, relentlessly, as you stumbled through a soliloquy of exhaustion.

“You’re our rock,” everyone told her, but that reputation didn’t feel like a compliment anymore. It felt like neglect.

America was all about work and saving for the future, not for indulging petty whims, he argued, seeming angry, as if she’d suggested something wrong or wasteful. All he had to do, he reasoned, was not smile too widely or too often.

wonder how Baba described America all those years ago when he sweet-talked Mama into leaving her village and getting on a plane to Baltimore. “Life will be so good, Allah kareem,” he’d probably said. Maybe he’d even fed her the whole sidewalks-are-made-of-gold line. I’m just guessing. I have zero memory of Baba because I was a surprise baby, born fourteen years after Reema, and he died (probably of the shock) a couple years later. What I know for damn sure is Mama wishes she’d never left Palestine. She thinks America is one big trick that God played on her.

That’s how you survive when you need white people to help you—you just keep all the shit inside and collect your paycheck and thank God you can see the dentist once a year.

“Behind you is the sea. Before you, the enemy.” I glance at him then continue. “You have left now only the hope of your courage and your constancy.”

famous speech by Tariq ibn Ziyad. He burned his men’s ships at the harbor so they couldn’t sail home; he’d known they were scared, so he made fighting their only option.

Arabs are ridiculous; even if they live a dream life, they want to star in some tragedy. If there is no tragedy, they imagine one.

apartment, studying for midterms. It had been quite a lesson—hurt could be neutralized with focus, with determination. Eyes on the prize, she reminded herself that night. One day, they will know what they have done to you. * * *

Dealing with the Israeli authorities was like dealing with an angry, suspicious girlfriend. “Why do you want to bury him here?” asked the Israeli embassy. He explained, and they continued to pester him. “But why? Isn’t he an American citizen? Why here?” “His whole family is buried there.” “Not his brother Suleiman. He died in 2014. He is not buried here. And his wife is not buried here.” That nugget of information sufficiently creeped Marcus out. It was intended to, he suspected, like when they asked a suspect a question when they already had the answer. He patiently played along with the game, and they finally acquiesced, probably figuring that letting a dead Palestinian come home was better than a live one. The Palestinian Authority was easier: when he assured them he’d pay the fees they exacted, they said, “Ahlan wa sahlan,” and signed off.

Marcus realized then that, while some people talked about growing up poor, his parents had been a whole different level of poor. Barefoot poor. Starving poor. Babies dying from diarrhea poor, like Mama’s little sister, Amal, who had died before she was a year old. Sleep on rooftops in the summer poor. Go to mass at two different times so your siblings can share the good shoes poor. Boil weeds to make tea poor.

Mama, in her last days, had told him to buy her a plot, if he could afford it, on the east side of the cemetery so the sun would rise on her grave. And he’d done it for her. Being buried in America was itself not an issue for her. No, Mama had embraced American life, finding delight in small things, in everyday places. The Dollar Tree, where she could buy everything from gardening gloves to bags of beans. She bonded with their Puerto Rican, Irish, and Black neighbors over exchanging coupons. She splurged on her Elizabeth Taylor Passion perfumes from CVS, and her Wet-n-Wild 99-cent lipsticks. You can live well, in this country, if you don’t set your hopes too high.

The Arabs were a people that knew life could be horrifically unjust and unfair—and yet they cherished it.