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Mama once said the city was a map of all the people who’d lived and died in it, and Baba said every map was really a story.
“Every place you go becomes a part of you.” “But none more so than home.”
Mama’s voice is so red it’s almost white.
The colors of voices and smells tangle in front of me like they’re projected on a screen: the peaks and curves of Huda’s pink-and-purple laugh, the brick-red ping of a kitchen timer, the green bite of baking yeast.
told Rawiya to be careful of words: “Stories are powerful,” he said, “but gather too many of the words of others in your heart, and they will drown out your own. Remember that.”
How many Polaroids are there of places that no longer exist?
think about how much faith people had to have back then to trust the stars would be there when they needed them to, to trust the sky wouldn’t fail them.
Shrapnel is a red word. To me, it sounds like metal and anger and being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It sounds like the red and yellow things inside of people, the fear and rage that rot a person out until they rot out somebody else.
The tall lady’s voice is thick as water, ruby purple as pomegranate seeds.
“stories ease the pain of living, not dying. People always think dying is going to hurt. But it does not. It’s living that hurts us.”
Abu Sayeed’s voice is all black consonants and sour vowels drawn out like oil on concrete. I don’t recognize it.
“But must innocent lives be lost,” Rawiya said, “over such thirsts for land and gold? And we are explorers, not spies.” “As any poet knows,” Khaldun said, “the story often matters less than the telling.”
What need do we have of borders drawn in blood across God’s creation? Christians and Muslims have tilled the soil of this valley side by side for centuries. We are a generous people,
But then, for the first time, an entire sentence comes through, whole and clear and perfect as a ripe peach.
is there still space in the world for extraordinary things?
I am swallowed by sapphires, my shoulder blades sliced by frosted knives. I am crushed by every shade of blue I have ever seen: Ultramarine. Lapis. Navy. Night.
Everyone, no matter what language they speak, has a name for the stars.
The blue-violet voices wind around me, protecting me from my fear. I am covered with a thick rind of safety, like an orange.
person can be two things at the same time,” Itto says. “The land where your parents were born will always be in you. Words survive. Borders are nothing to words and blood.”
Our stories. They call us Berber, from ‘barbarian.’ But Amazigh means ‘free man.’ Did you know this? No one can take our freedom from us. No one can take our land or our names from our hearts.”
“nobody can love the stars and hurt people. They just can’t.”
“This isn’t just a map of where we were going. It’s a map of where we came from.”
“We mapped the world, survived a war, and banished the tyranny of the roc from ash-Sham and the shores of the Maghreb for generations to come.”
“But what is the lesson?” Rawiya asked. “What is there to learn from all this—this brokenness, this chaos? We saw the wounded, magnificent world, its mountains, its rivers, its deserts. Is there any making sense of it?”
“Must there be a lesson?” al-Idrisi said. “Perhaps the story simply goes on and on.
Time rises and falls like an ever-breathing lung. The road comes and goes and suffering with it. But the generations of men, some kind and some cruel, go on and on beneath the stars.”
desire to know why the world is the way it is. Scientific inquiry offers one set of explanations, and writing, by examining the emotional reality of the human condition, offers another.
