To begin to believe, like a coy bride, in the American dream. To whisper to oneself what Fitzgerald wrote—that America was the last time man beheld “something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
To find yourself in the other America. To be in La Paz. To fight for breath, humbled by altitude. To look at Cerro Rico, the mountain that filled the coffers of the Spanish Empire. To find out a man dies in the mines daily. To hear that so many men die there is a widows’ association. To wonder how the world allows it.
To go into the desert. To see the salt flats. To drink bad coffee. To search for the stars. To shiver in the cold. To make one’s way into the Atacama. To receive extra scrutiny at the Chilean border, despite the new, blue passport. To soak in the wealthy vacationers at San Pedro de Atacama. To marvel at how proximity to wealth cleanses. To roam Valparaíso. To visit the old house of Neruda. To read of his heroisms. To remember his flaws. To know Father read him devotedly as a university student in Pakistan. To decide to forgive Neruda.
To share a bus ride with a dusty traveler speaking frantic Hebrew into her phone. To look up the news. To put down the phone. To pick up the phone. To put down the phone. To wait for it to stop. To be fixated, horrified, addicted, repulsed. To be unable to look away.
To return to the America you call home. To walk in a daze in FiDi. To open up the New York Times. To x out of the New York Times. To open up the New York Times. To get answers to many questions. To get daily lessons in propaganda. To understand how we let it happen. To see the roads that led to Shatila, Auschwitz, Darfur, Srebrenica, East Pakistan. To realize you never wanted these answers.
To wake up each morning. To grind coffee. To pour the water in the reservoir. To measure out the coffee. To spill grounds on the marble. To get a rag. To clean the mess. To press Brew. To hear the machine grunt. To pick up the phone. To see a video of journalists sheltering inside Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis. To hear them sing, “We will stay here, until the pain ceases.” To sit down. To watch it again. To ignore the children as they tug at your pajamas. To watch it again. To memorize each man’s face.
To be one of the 300,000 in D.C. To flood a rest stop in Delaware with keffiyehs. To roar with the crowd. To cry with them. To wonder if it will change anything. To see it as a drop in the ocean. To know that wisdom lies in being able to see the ocean itself. To fail to see the ocean.
To read a headline on Palestinian ingenuity in turning a wild plant into food. To wonder at the rot. To be disturbed by one’s naivete. To wish for the Palestinians the characteristics of ordinary people. To not wish resilience for them. To want the men to be like the men you know—insecure, fragile, stubborn. To want the women to be like the women you know—bitchy, angry, petty. To want for them the daily, shitty burdens.
To become exhausted by the image. To hate the litany of photos and videos streaming in. To question their efficacy. To know they chip away at the spirit. To see the indelible image of a woman holding the corpse of her nephew. To see it’s been named Photo of the Year. To feel bile rise like magma in the throat.
To teach the children, “From the river to the sea!” To delight in their repetitions. To feel disgusted by the charade. To tell them to go play Dinosaur. To receive a houseguest. To put on the coffee. To heat up machboos. To hear your friend rage. To feel disdain. To disallow such incredulity, to consider it the domain of children. To go about one’s day. To change diapers. To walk to the park. To bring back books from the library. To be grateful for mundane labors. To know it as the easiest way out of despair.
To land in Pakistan in February. To observe the change in light. To note the men, to note how you will never get over them. To feel sweat on the small of your back. To see the early timidities of spring. To complain to Father about the political climate in America. To hear him tell you a central rule of aviation. Against strong winds, one must fly at a diagonal. The point is still to get to where one needs to. The direct approach is never the best one.
To teach a workshop on land and place. To note that city folks cannot imagine land. To realize that their land is always peopled. To push them on terrain, trees, flowers. To hear them say people, parties, sewage. To wonder what connection to land will mean in the future. To drive back after the workshop. To note the Margalla Hills, freshly green after rain. To remember that they will be around when no one else will.
To wonder, like you did, Etel, on the necessity of God. To be unable to come up with a better solution. To look up lists of famous theists. To hold out for the future. To wonder who will be here to see it. To imagine God looking on, alone in the vastness, after His plans finally work out. To remember Abu Ghraib. To want to spit. To want to kneel.
To be back in America. To get sick in transit. To take albuterol puffs. To look out the window. To decide to fast. To look forward to the predawn meal. To enjoy the quiet footsteps and half-lit kitchen. To spoon out yogurt. To toss on hemp seeds. To mix in the honey. To spoon electrolytes into water. To grind up more coffee. To eat a fleshy date. To soft boil two eggs. To pour out the coffee. To swirl in some milk. To make the morning prayer. To toss in bed after. To read of famine. To see that the Israelis don’t allow animal feed into Gaza, because people have been eating it.
Around 2 PM, to feel hunger pangs. At 4 PM, to feel dizzy. At 5 PM, to find clarity. At 7:22 PM, to end the fast with a date and pomegranate juice. To wonder at God’s little theater.
To listen to the final sermon of Ramzan. To sit with the three-year-old in the women’s section. To hear the imam speak of parents found cradling their children under the rubble in Gaza. To finally weep. To look around and struggle to find a dry eye. To know they are your sisters. To leave silently after the prayer. To be unable to name the feeling. To wonder at God’s little theater.
To know that a few years on, it will be different. To know that we will be called upon for performances of pain. To know the performances will be feted. To already imagine the bestseller about genocide—by then, they will call it that. To know there will be Israeli memoirs of guilt. To wonder how to prevent it. To consider the new language that must come of the ashes.
To attend Eid prayer among cherry blossoms. To make çılbır. To go through four pots of coffee. To have a Gazan friend bring flowers. To see the Eid attire in the park. To find the Nigerian cloth cuts impeccable. To romanticize the openness and generosity of the ummah. To cut yourself off. To reject the nobility of any people.
To wonder on the question of diagonals.
To watch A Passage to India. To be reminded of Greene’s The Quiet American. To love these things, still. To put yourselves in the feet of the English. To imagine the thrill of a whole race learning your language. To wonder if you’d make a good memsahib. To hate empire, but perhaps not its aftershocks.
To wonder on the question of diagonals.
To feel disgust at language, this paltry fool. To wish to employ it still. For proof of its efficacy, to list out examples of its perversion—WMDs, liberty, equality, humanitarianism, women’s rights, fundamentalist Islam. To feel cheapened by the list. To know, still, that language is the only place we meet. To write a short story with a character named Furat. To find out it’s the same word as Euphrates. To think of Iraq. To remember Babylon, and the tower that fell there.
