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,
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