I looked at Mama’s face, that thing in my chest squeezing again, and it occurred to me that she had been around my age when she was forced out of her home in Palestine. She had come to Amman then too, before journeying on to Kuwait with my father. It seemed to me that fate was inherited, like eye color. I wondered if she had felt the same disorientation that now ruled my days. Had it been all she could think about—the incomprehensibility of forced, permanent displacement?
