MOVE IT OR LOSE IT

Getting Over the Hump

2012-01-01T22:46:00.008Z

What I've learned from perusing hijab blogs and tutorials is that I don't learn much from them, most of it is common sense, but the girls are cute and working out their hijab issues in their own ways, and I know they are like-minded folk in that their way of sharing their adventures and frustrations with life in general is to write about it on the inter-web. The last one I found plays the Willow Smith refrain "I whip my hair back and forth" as she demonstrates how to assemble the khaleeji (of the gulf states) style, which involves pinning giant flower poofs under the hijab to create mass volume. This is something of a controversy in the hijabosphere, owing to a hadith from the Prophet peace be upon him that "There will be in the last of my ummah, scantily dressed women, the hair on the top of their heads like a camel’s hump. Curse them, for verily they are cursed." [At-Tabarani and Sahih Muslim] At the least it has led to a mini-disclaimer in the hijab tutorials, whenever that step comes where the clip goes on- a nervous giggle or a knowing smile, and a "now this step is not necessary, but if you do it, this is how you do it."

Well, what to say? As my hair forms into a little hump all on its own without the help of a poof or a magic scrunchie, I'm not super concerned with this in relation to my own head, but I was definitely surprised by how many other girls changed their style to avoid the 'camel hump.' And power to them. If in the end its all about identifying what you think is wrong and then avoiding it, then yeah, this makes sense. If it's about avoiding deception, as some girls have mentioned, then yeah, let's not flaunt what our momma's didn't give us. But then what of heels and lipstick and all that crazy stuff we can do with our eyelashes? (My personal talent is to make myself look like a crackwhore.) And Spanx? Dare we ask.

Let's say we decide to ask. Next question: who do we ask?
An Imam, a scholar, other women, or random men to see what they actually find attractive... That last one seemed logical to the bloggers I came across, and in all cases they found that the men in their lives did not find the 'camel hump' attractive, a few find it alienesque.
Awesome, a decisive answer, problem solved. Okay so that means... hm ok wait, so, what does that mean? A falsely voluminous look is not attractive to men. So should we read that as meaning that it's okay because actually we're kidding ourselves we don't look any better, or that we still shouldn't do it and by following the rules, we're doing ourselves a favor aesthetically?

There are levels of naiveté but I think for the most part we know what we're doing and intention is everything. Hijab for a woman who is wearing it begrudgingly is obviously not as fun as the game I'm playing, (which I have named "OK. Let's Do This"), and for a defiant woman living in a country where it is imposed on her, it's the most logical medium of covert subversion. I do feel bad for those Persian girls in that one stock photo that is used online as a visual for any discussion of "improper hijab." At least for now they are the go-to image of 'scantily dressed women." I personally first found them when I was trying to figure out why Persian girls are so cute (still a mystery).

I think every woman who is making an effort to dress modestly and still look cute deserves a medal. It's not all fun and games. And even thought I already know most of your tricks, ladies, as a somewhat lonesome Buffalo hijabi, I have loads of fun following your adventures in modesty and it's comforting to know you're out there somewhere under the same sky struggling with your hijab pins having an ironic dance party to "Whip my Hair." Plus, I get to use words like "loads" because that's what the khaleeji girls say.

HERE'S AMENAKIN'S TAKE ON IT

The Chase

2011-11-25T06:41:00.003Z

I see these great vintage shops with beautiful and reasonably priced dresses and I used to wonder why it doesn't feel right to buy them or even to venture into the store.

But I figured it out. I think most of the joy in getting dressed is in the chase. The looking for it and finding it and deciding what to make out of it and after lots of seam-ripping and background noise of the original Law and Order, coming out with some sort of finished product with crooked contrast stitching and asymmetrical curves. I usually wear it the next day or soon after, and fifty percent of the time I realize after a few hours of wearing it that I got a little too excited the night before and while it was awesome in theory, that Liz Claiborne dress that I was so pumped to wear can't really be rocked properly with a hijab.
And then there is the strange satisfaction of watching the slow decay of the clothes, where the seams rip open because I didn't reinforce them or I tailored them so closely to a temporary body with no room for adjustments for winter weight.
Sometimes I face the strange situation of discovering something on the article of clothing that refers to the living body that was once in it, like a stain or mending or a nametag. One of my latest sweaters turned out to have what looks like a bloodstain, and in the shape of a bird or the type of dinosaur that flies. Sometimes I can't resist googling the name on the nametag and then get super creeped out if they live close to Buffalo, as was the case here. What'd you do, Pete? A woodshop accident? Did you go and get yourself stabbed? Is is coffee? Did your future wife spill it on you and that's how you met?
Those stay at the bottom of the projects pile. Except this one, where I decided to make a bird-shaped hole and fill it with something else.
So this is where we find ourselves. And unless I someday become a businesswoman or a shepherd's wife or a farmer's daughter, this is where I'll stay for a while.

Modest Hangups

2011-11-18T17:15:00.006Z

There were five girls, mostly in their twenties, that wore nikab during Hajj, and four of them wore it regularly in their respective homes in America. The other was a doctor who was just planning on going back to work after taking time off to stay at home with her two children. She explained to me how she went from wearing regular clothes to wearing an abaya to wearing all black with black hijabs. My mother always warns me against this and says it makes me look scary, and I tell her that it’s their fault if they get scared, and I say this knowing that no one is scared of me. I used to love being intimidating, but over the years my talents have dwindled and people tend to think I am a nice person and often approach me at the coffeeshop to chat about what I’m reading or what I’m wearing, or what they are reading or what they are doing that day or something they are irked about or something about the weather. Yesterday was the first snow and we all took pictures of it. I’m excited to wear my new winter hat which is mostly fur and which seconds as a hijab since it covers all of my hair and even if part of my bangs peek out they look like part of the animal the hat came from.

It’s looking like it will be an advantage to always have a head-cover and a neck-scarf all rolled into one, and appropriate for the Buffalo weather. The hardest part of looking cute in the winter is that the first thing people see when you enter a warm or heartwarming place is a cold, wet face, and you try to balance it out by being overly cute and fuzzy in boots and blankety jackets and long coats and shiny boots like Paddington bear. And I’m sure I will have the urge to rip the cold wet scarf off my head and shake out my hair like I used to, which also sort of looks like a coat. I had a dream last night that I was out and about just minding my business when I realized that I forgot to put a scarf on that morning, and to top it off my hair was all matted to my head and looking just awful and nothing like what you would want your hair to look like after having it all tied up and hidden like it holds an especially seductive power and needs to be reigned in. Maybe a punishment for my forgetfulness. When I asked the people around me in the dream why they didn’t mention it they said they thought I did it on purpose.
The girls that wear nikab told me how they hate those moments where it’s all women and someone asks if they can see what their face looks like and they unveil themselves, after a day of having cloth over their face they look just awful and unkempt, makeupless and nothing like what you would want to look like in an unveiling, because let’s face it, everyone expects you to be hiding some sort of toxic beauty under there.

And sometimes they are and sometimes they aren’t. A girl told me about her teacher, who was being harassed by a guy yelling at her that she must be hideous under that veil and that’s why she wore it, and she happened to be beautiful and lifted her veil and said, “call me ugly again.” It sounded to me like a story of defeat on the part of the woman, that she let that guy make her angry enough to unveil herself and share her secret, but it’s understandable. Even for those of us that aren’t flawlessly beautiful, it’s something of human nature to want to look beautiful in a culture where it is so highly prized, even if we know better.

The girls told me I should wear nikab because my eyes are “captivating,” and I explained that everyone’s eyes are captivating and also, that what I should be wearing is the opposite of a nikab because all it would do is serve to cover the ugly part of my face. They didn’t have a response to that and I didn’t push the point, but I did wear the nikab for a day and disappointingly, it really didn’t make me look all that great or like I was hiding a toxic beauty. I looked tired and old and scary, and kept forgetting to lift it when I took sips from my waterbottle. I don’t think they understood that I was doing it as a social experiment and they asked me if I was sure I was doing it for the right reasons, and I said no I was doing it just as a “thing.” And they asked me how it felt and I said it felt fine.

Winter in Buffalo is a great time for some heartwarming headgear. I'm going to aim for a different animal each week. And dinosaur heads? Dare I? I think I do. Crazier things have happened.

I performed the Hajj this year and instead of posted about it here, made a little offshoot recounting of the sacred journey at

2011-11-16T19:22:00.004Z

http://thetinypilgrim.tumblr.com

As soon as my mother and I got home from our summer in Kashmir I was going through an old drawer of special things so I could add to it, and I found an old 3-D viewfinder with slides of the Hajj. I can’t remember where I got it but it’s one of the most beautiful things in the drawer, along with my 3-D viewfinder of dinosaurs, and my illustrated book about birds. It wasn’t until a few weeks later that my father announced that he would be taking my mother for the Hajj and my brother suggested that I go with them and I agreed that I should go because I had a dream about it a few months before, and also several daydreams after I found that old viewfinder.

We left for Medina on October 24th, 2012 and completed the pilgrimage on November 7th, 2012.

GRIN AND BEAR IT

2011-10-14T07:41:00.002Z

When I was an intern in Tangier my boss bought me a poster from the Turkish pavilion of the Venice Biennial which said in big block letters, DON'T COMPLAIN. She picked it out especially for me.
I had to leave it in my house in the Kasbah of Tangier, but I will picture it above my bed in Buffalo.

What would it feel like to spend one day without complaint?
Why do I look for reasons to laugh when I am supposed to concentrate?

On the nightly ride to the masjid with my brother we are both reading different prayers silently to ourselves on prayer beads. I used to be impressed that he could count the beads and control the steering wheel at the same time but it's actually not hard to do and I realized that after I started doing it myself. There are probably a lot of things like this that will remain impossible to me because I like knowing that everyone I meet knows how to do a bunch of things I don't, even if I don't like them. It makes the world bigger.

There are a lot of things I want to say to my brother when we spend time together because there is so little of it, but the car ride is the perfect length for 786 repetitions of a small prayer of Dhikr, remembrance. You whisper the words and count them with your fingers so your extremities are involved and it becomes an action of the whole body. It helps to concentrate.

Genessee is a long and quiet street but sometimes when we stop at a red light the car next to us is blasting music. We can whisper the prayers louder and emphasize the "s" sounds and try to make them ring out over the rhythm and bass but it's hardly worth it. My brother rolls up the windows to keep out the sound and it stays just as loud I almost laugh out loud but he stays so serious that I try really hard to keep it to myself and keep saying my prayers under the thick layer of Rihanna.

The masjid can be equally as awesome, mostly seeing the young children engaging with the adults and with the prayer, knowing I was doing that when I was their age with no real idea of what was going on. My most vivid memory from the Parker St. mosque growing up was when a woman converted over the loud speaker, and I leaned over to my friends and whispered- "My mom said that when a person converts, it's like they start over like a newborn baby!" And I was thinking I couldn't even imagine what that would be like and wishing I could do that, and plotting maybe converting and then converting back, then deciding that it was best to wait and see how the rest of my life generally went.

I stifle a laugh during prayer when the little six and seven year old girls line up with us to pray, with their amira hijabs and tank tops and ruffled lace socks with monkey faces on them like the ones the elderly women in Tangier would wear. Sometimes they spontaneously break away from the line and begin to chase each other or run through the curtain partition to the men's side and then back again. The line is not supposed to be broken but we aren't allowed to move, so I stand there uncomfortably and get distracted by the movement and try not to laugh at the children struggling to keep their oversized hijabs on their heads when they bend in prostration. One girl kept bumping her head as if each time she was falling without knowing she was about to go down.

My own wardrobe is gradually finding its inner self somewhere between here and Narnia. My mother gave me a pep talk that made me realize that she actually does realize that we have the biggest noses we have ever seen and maybe she was actually acknowledging that mine is her fault. But it's a lost cause and we don't complain about it out loud but try and act casual and concentrate on trying to guess what is in that mysterious fourth of our field of vision blocked by little overlapping mountains like the ones in Doda leading up to the bigger ones. And now the hijab shapes my head and the mound of roped off hair becomes the biggest mountain. It's all a very clear path upwards.

The two hundred scarves I collected from Casa Barata will finally go to a worthwhile cause instead of just making everyone think I have a hickey I am trying to hide or trying desperately to look French. It's all in preparation for Hajj even though we are supposed to leave in 9 days and still don't have our visas. But one can only hope that things will fall into place and we will have the chance to get to Arafat and the chance to, as the Hajj is meant to, return home anew with a clean slate like a new-born baby.
Can you imagine?

(more) dress patterns

2011-09-22T20:49:00.003Z

A late bloomer, I took the plunge. My lion's mane had a good twenty-seven year run out on the streets and I can't say it brought me anything but trouble so I guess it's good riddance. But it's there, just hiding.

I am used to wearing costume-like attire and named them all: pirate-outfit, clown dress, Alice-in-Wonderland, sailor 1-3, tina turner, french maid, old maid, librarian 1-17, bee, gramma, grampa 1-3. Years ago I invested in a mannequin which my mother tried to dispose of in parts, one leg at a time.

The hijab names sound sort of like ice cream flavors or OPI shades of nailpolish. Palestinian servant girl, post-Hammam, Erica Badu, nun, rebellious nun, Chiquita Banana lady, Iranian tween, hijab hair, bloods, crips, turban, gramma, fabric braid, amelia earhart. towelhead, cancer patient, etc.

If anyone can, I think I can have fun with this. And in anticipation of any curious minds of distant relations, people are way nicer to me now. Maybe I used to be unapproachable and now an extra barrier from the world is somehow inviting people in. A barrier against my hair and also against my old costume-outfits. And all the nice boys talk to me to make me feel good about myself and boost my confidence. I am hyper-aware that anyone that knows me is sure it is a passing phase or a desperate attempt at an escape from moral bankruptcy, so it makes the most sense to add this to my list of personas and see how many people I can alienate.

The key to "in with the new" is out with the old, so there will soon be lots of dresses nailed to my wall. I did this my freshman year of college but with baby clothes and since it looked like a shrine of a dead baby I had to disassemble it in favor of Bjork posters.

Let's be open to purging old habits! Thinking up new ones! Sewing new pants to accommodate a new sense of comportment and then step into them one leg at a time.

With some sewing and mending and elongating I am confident that I can successfully hijabize my old costumes at least in time for Halloween to try them out, except that inshaAllah I will be across the world then and
far far away from where I am now.

HEAD-GEAR

2011-09-20T20:33:00.002Z

I never wrote my post Ramadan thoughts because then it would mean it was over. A blessed month is time for house cleaning. I rearranged my lists of things to do that I haven't done and reorganized my boots according to the probability of slipping and falling in preparation for November snow.
Buffalo is brilliantly autumnal and jobless and when the sun sets its like a hole-punch. Days are spent at a local coffee-shop that constantly reminds me that it is not the Hungarian Pastry shop. I have been watching reruns of Law & Order and they always place the scenes in actual shops in recognizable intersections in the city, so now I feel free to drop the names of my favorite places in my writing. I like to think it also proves that I am real.

Ideas about routes and streets and places have been blowing off steam around the corner and I'm starting to round them up from off the bathroom floor. I think they are all just sleeping but some of them look like they might be dead. They are blueish and don't move when I poke them with a stick.
These are ideas about places I've had and emphasizing that I feel displaced from them and probably replaced by another introverted foreigner who wanders the streets and befriends cafe waiters. They are an easy target because they always work in the same place and I always know where to find them, and I have never been one so I can't gauge how creepy it is. The recent place where I used to take up space is still there, maybe two sizes too small for me now.

I wear my old dresses as A-line shirts.
I hid all my stockings.
I look at all the books on my shelf and can't help but fantasize that all those spines that say SPACE were attached to books about blacks holes and meteorites and using the word fantasize makes me wish it didn't sound so much like "infanticide."
It's a form of worship to study the stars. From my rooftop I can watch them as I drink copious amounts of coffee to try and get work done at night to make up for my lethargy in the holy fasting days of the mid-month when it is recommended to fast. I do it if I stay awake until the morning meal but usually fall asleep an hour before after watching consecutive reruns of Law & Order and think about those places where they are solving their crimes and how they aren't just spaces used by criminals to commit brutal murders, those places actually exist and there are people crossing those streets right now, just like all the people and places in Tangier that I write about from here.

Under the stars we feel more clarity knowing our names are written up there somewhere
along with our loves and losses and lives in general.
Makes you feel more confident about your abilities in general.
Thinking about pluto and space, it's the appropriate place for that. Curiosity, asking why we are where we are in life and why the stars look like they are blinking like they are watching me too.
Pluto is tired and the stars are looking back at me, and God knows that if I can pull off the old wardrobe, I can pull off the new. And He knew that if I can pull off the nose, I can wear a hijab without causing a commotion. But can't promise I won't stop traffic. Because I already promised so many people that I would stop traffic.

Heartfelt

2011-08-20T22:36:00.004Z

In honor of stegosaurus month, I have decided to re-evaluate the kind of person I am and the kind of person I want to be. I think the best way for anyone to to do this is to ruminate for hours on what a horrible person you are, and then feel really bad about it for a long time. This is the only way to completely come to terms with your douchebagery. One misstep and you might go through life thinking that you are a good person. Don't be fooled. Thoughts like these can only be from the devil. And no, Mr. d, I won't capitalize your name even if it is your real name, although I will acknowledge your title because you are older than me and I am a very polite person.

The first step is to control one's anger. They say that if you can do this for forty days, it becomes a real part of you, the same way doing anything for forty days straight forms a habit.
This means you, Stego. Why are you always screaming?

The second is to ask for forgiveness, in which one's douchebagery comes in handy. Go on. Do it.

The third would be controlling desires. Not all of us have a second brain down there, Stegster. Stop rubbing it in my face.

So no, I won't marry you. And I won't move to Colorado. You punctured my heart with your tail spikes and I didn't see the wisdom in it then.
Now my heart has spikes and a second brain, and can defend itself better than if it was wrapped in barbed wire.

Wishes

2011-08-14T13:22:00.017Z

It's hard to know where home is.
We took the high road over the mountains through Kishtawar to get back to Srinagar. There was snow on the mountains and horses drinking water from small puddles. I took pictures of all of the sheep. They were either sleeping or running away from me and many of them looked genuinely offended that I caught them off guard.

Whenever we go through Kishtawar my parents have to visit the shrine or they have bad dreams. We stay in the same bungalow every time and sit and have salt tea and pastries. In the shrines there is a small closed room with what I assume are the coffins of the saints, and we give our salaams and pray for them. There are tiny colored rags on a large stick and around other places in the room that represent prayers of people that pass through, like a wig of wishes. I didn't wish for anything but there are a lot of things I could have wished for.

I wish I could learn about ships and dinosaurs and birds and planets. In Doda the sky looks like a planetarium. I wish I could spend time studying the stars, those tiny hole punches in the sky piercing through dark matter, maybe halfway between the earth and the spiritual realm. My brother says shooting stars are huge balls of fire aiming for the djinn hovering over the earth trying to overhear the angels talking about us and that's how fortune tellers know what is going to happen. Like a video game. I like this theory and so I believe in it.

I can see myself building a house here. With a swingset just like this.

all of the things

2011-08-13T22:59:00.015Z

When I blink it looks like taking pictures with an old camera where the shutter closes each time, or what it looked like when I had my pupils dilated. It must be the light from the month of Ramadan. I can't remember feeling it before because I wasn't paying attention. Purging distractions should be mandatory.

I'm going to a new mosque for Tarawe prayers this year, down near the airport. It used to be a church and was converted to Islam a few years ago. It randomly happened to already be facing the Kibla so the rugs didn't have to be placed diagonally. I have always been distracted by the designs on prayer rugs, which generally look like magic carpets. I collected some wild ones while I was in Brooklyn, most of them have a picture of the Kaaba in Mecca on them. Even with the ones with random designs I manage to find some sort of image that distracts me. The one I have at home has a screaming man. The one in the masjid has a waffle. My brother found an eagle. It's not recommended to close your eyes and if you do, you should open them every once in a while. So my eyelids flutter and I take a stream of photographs in my head of Mecca and waffles and eagles and a screaming man. At home I have three prayer rugs layered over a blanket. Women receive the same award for praying at home in the "masjid of their home" as men do for going to the mosque, and for staying there overnight for a spiritual retreat. Mine will be in my own room which I have deemed Dar-ul-Shifa, the house of healing, complete with a sewing machine, typewriters, tea light candles and a ship lamp. I had to inspect every corner and get rid of all of the pictures of faces so there are a lot of picture frames turned upside down as though I got into a fight with someone and don't want to have to look at a picture of the two of us together smiling next to a waterfall.

When we go down in sajda (prostration), if I keep my eyes open my hands with next to my head make the floor look like a butterly. So I keep them closed, then remember to open, then closed. So I have one picture of a butterfly. Twenty raqas of Taraweh prayer means forty butterflies. Identical ones with different shutter speeds. And for every extra prayer I pray I get to make four more.

There are only ten or twelve women that come to the night prayer and they bring colorful sheets to cover the rugs so our foreheads can touch something soft. They are mostly pink and have flowers in them. I found a small man in the flowers.
There is always at least one small girl wearing a tiny djelleba and headscarf, or wearing a t-shirt and capri pants and a tiny headscarf, and they go back and forth between praying and running around the empty space because ten women don't take up too much space. Long black djellebas and abayas overlap from the fan blowing on them and when we sit down the woman next to me sits on mine so I can't get up until she does, and since the Imam is on the other side of a partition, most of the women take their time before they get up.

Dhikr is remembrance of God and we repeat short prayers in phrases as a way of keeping our thoughts away from worldly things or trying to find the eagle in the carpet. Usually a Sheikh will tell you what to recite daily and you do this daily for the rest of your life. I like the idea of this and so I wanted to construct my own wird, the same way I was a special major in college. Pick and choose certain prayers and tailor to yourself. Except I soon realized that there is a reason people don't assemble their own prayer schedule, and so I'm adopting the one that the rest of my family does and hoping that if I do this I will be more like them and that I will do this for the rest of my life.
These are big words. Promises can be terrifying.

These are holy days and holy nights and sometimes I'm not even sure what to do with myself, so we read the Qur'an and recite our prayers while baking bread and embroiding dinosaurs, and always making the intention that I am doing it for God. Because I think God likes bread, and I think he loves dinosaurs.

As a sidenote, the month of Ramadan is also Stegosaurus month in Dar-ul-Shifa.

To Come, to go.

2011-08-10T15:28:00.003Z

Almost mid-Ramadan 2011, it is a time for reflection. Computers and sarcastic writing seems inappropriate for this blessed month. But to come, I will travel back in time and write about my incredible trip to Kashmir this summer to conduct an oral history project for a forthcoming Kashmir Public Library. We are blessed that someone has taken this initiative and I personally am blessed to be a part of it.
A time for prayer, devotion and repentance, I have already been feeling the baraka of this month. Lucky girl.
Ramadan Mubarak w nshoufk mn b'3ad.

Delhi

2011-08-10T15:25:00.002Z

It was the first time I had taken a rickshaw.

It was similar to what I would imagine riding a dinosaur would be like.
The stego kind.

CHASEWOOD BLOCK PARTY

2011-08-06T07:48:00.010Z

I received a comment on my post about the Chasewood block party that my words were extremely offensive to my neighbors, and I am writing this as an apology. A lot of what I write is meant to be a joke, and I know I tend to present the world in an ugly way, and the comment made me really think about how I sometimes go overboard in being cynical, overly critical and rude.
Writing about the block party was not meant to criticize the effort to have a block party, but the only reason I posted anything about it is because our family felt really bad and embarrassed that we had to interrupt the entire party with our stream of cars and everyone had to move the tables and chairs, especially since we had been notified in advance that there would be a block party. My mother wanted to say hello, especially to our newer neighbors who, since the block party, she has specifically told me have been particularly friendly. She is shy and didn't go, but we don't think anyone would have had a problem with her or her hijab, and they never have in the thirty four years that we have been living here.

And as an American, I have nothing against the posting of the American flag on the lamppost, and I'm sorry that my tone insinuated that I did. When I was on Fulbright, I did my best to represent America with pride.

Chasewood Lane is very close to my heart, and was an amazing place to grow up. I remember running down the street in a towel because I was invited to one of the houses in the double-digits to go swimming, and how the couple next door used to hang Easter eggs filled with candy on the tree in front of our house because their children were already grown. And how our neighbors helped us when the tree in our backyard was struck by lightning and set our pool on fire. I remember how countless families on the street bought girl scout cookies from me even though they probably had to buy them from tons of other girls. And I remember eating popsicles and collecting caterpillars a few houses down because we didn't have a willowtree, swinging on other people's swingsets, and playing in the treehouses down the block. And these are just my random memories of how other families have been hospitable, friendly and thoughtful, I know the other members of my family have their own.

So I am offering this apology, it has been a year since I wrote about the block party but I hope that anyone who was offended will have an opportunity to read this. I agree that I was being extremely facetious, and I hope it doesn't reflect on anyone's opinion of the rest of my family. Neither my parents nor any of my siblings would ever say anything disrespectful about anyone in our community. I will take down the post right away, and I hope that my neighbors can accept my apology, and that I can have the opportunity to thank them in person for actually making the effort to bring our neighborhood together for the first time I can remember since the Fox Hunt Farms phonebook, from which this map is taken, from 1984, the year I was born.

skirts

2011-06-25T21:55:00.005+01:00

You remember your little village, your little kitten, your little river.

We made dresses out of throwaway fabric modeled after Barbie clothes circa 1988.

The girls in the community have an old Indian USHA sewing machine from 1947. It uses a hand-wheel on the right side and when the needle moves forward it makes the sound of a train. The needle can't go backwards but it's easy to maneuver the fabric to reinforce the stitches. The machine has been in the family since it was new, since the partition. It feels like a tiny factory.

In a family of dressmakers, the little girls hem the edges of the skirt while they wear similar skirts. The little chaps make a puzzle for the kids to play with because they try to keep the needles away from the children.
The girls have a puzzle of their own by trying to make sense of the old foreign patterns. These sorts of things used to be casual but for today's woman are unusual. Most of them are eager to learn new things and think it's funny to try them on and stuff the ruffles in the chest with pieces of scrap fabric and leftover shoulder pads. The boys are not allowed to watch.

each hand holds hands with another hand
each neck fits into another neck
each hip fits into another hand
each neck is fit for a face
-- each piece has two faces.

When I got to use the machine I was like a small child getting overexcited by the sound of the train. I made a series of pockets to keep all of the pieces in.
We made two hundred and forty three pieces in real color.

One Hundred Billion of them

2011-06-25T19:56:00.004+01:00

243 postcards in real color for Georges Perec

I decided long ago that I need to marry a mathematician some day, but forgot it somewhere along the way.
Back in '97 I was doing some sort of strange project about biology and poetry which led to an obsession with Rachel Carson and to a conversation with my math teacher where she explained that MATH IS POETRY.

I immediately discovered that I agreed with her, even though she was short and strange. I try never to agree with short and strange people.
But it made sense if you focus on the rhythm of the words instead of the rhythm of Mrs. White's stomps across the Math extra help office which we could hear from across the floor because our high school was a social experiment of the '70s and had no walls.

A section of Life A User's Manual is a description of 243 postcards for Italo Calvino. Perec writes like a catalogue with lists and lipograms because he was an archivist too.

One hundred million million poems on index cards,
dirty from being handled by the postal service and read by the postal workers.

Cotton Djinn

2011-06-13T20:12:00.006+01:00

I went over to my cousin's house for dinner with my mother and she decided to stay over. I was wearing a red dupata and almost escaped Mom's emphatic cries for my protection in the dark from creatures of the night. I was already out the door when I heard her yelling yelling djinn! djinn! djinn! djinn! running towards me with her arms out trying to cover my head over the red I was wearing with the black scarf of my sister.

The last time we were in Kishtawar she taught me that the creatures that live beneath the ground are attracted by water and the cold and the color red. And probably by cold red water. When we walking home from one house to another in the dark we couldn't wear bright colors but since we only ever go to Kishtawar for weddings we usually had to cover ourselves in black cloaks or abayas like we were hiding from animals that could sense the heat in the warmth of the color. I wonder if it's because they are made of fire.

I was taught this and I believe it but I'm careless about it. By force of habit I ducked away from my mother's attempt at being superstitious and motherly, but regretted it immediately on the creepy drive home and walk up the lane. And chose the wrong night to watch The Exorcism of Emily Rose in bed alone. It's one of those movies where bad things always happen at a certain time and the angle of the shot shows the clock in the corner so you know something is going to happen at 3:00 am. And that books where they make a note of what time it was when the killer hit the girl over the head with a frying pan from behind.
My personal ominous time is 11:11. But it has been over two years now and so far it's nothing but fear that hits me over the head from behind.

Tomorrow Mom and I are shifting from one house to another, in a mint green house the same color as the one that burned down before I was born and is likely the reason that mint green is the best wall color ever.

We were shifting to a room we have stayed in before with a lot of djinn history, both in general and from personal experience because it's the room we always stay in when we come to Kashmir. I was taught that sometimes the creepy non-human race settle in empty houses before a new family moves in and then refuse to leave, and sometimes a house is built on a plot of land where djinn families with little djinn children are already living underground. They were minding their own business until provoked, not that I'm making excuses for that terrifying feeling that your blankets are pushing down on you and creepy shadowy figures standing beside your bed and vivid, terrifying dreams that keep you up all night and steal your breath.

I hung my white slip on the wardrobe handle in front of the rotating fan and every fifteen second it looks like Casper the friendly ghost floating around me. A friendly ghost protecting me.

I dreamt of a mint green house and did the math of how many walls I have painted that color, or small rooms in apartments I moved into because they were already that color. When I feel the sheets move and the walls shift I think of Mom yelling djinn! djinn! djinn! djinn!

I think I have enough walls to build an empty house to start a family in.

Methodology / Elephant Butt

2011-06-12T13:15:00.006+01:00

In the process of interviewing, there is short and long. I like long because it reminds me of how when we were kids and shared a room by brother and I used to collect chewed up gum and stretch it from one wall to the other wall and stick our artwork to it like a clothesline. It always managed to stay up at least long enough for someone else to see it.
So long
it is.

But the short is unavoidable. Always waiting in the shadows, stumpylike.
Today I interviewed three women in a row and couldn't get more than ten minutes out of any of them and a lot of the time they were just talking to each other about my questions instead of answering them. They didn't want to be in a room alone with me even though I am not a frightening person until you get to know me. They were waiting in line like three women in a row waiting for a dentist appointment because my cousin told them they had to do it like how people tell you that you have to go to the dentist and it makes your life shorter because you have to go every six months and it never feels like it's been six months.
I had to make a 'stumpy interviews' folder on my desktop. I keep it in a dark corner and refuse to give it a color until it shows some initiative.

I am partially to blame.
Six minutes in, I was asking woman-3 about important people in her life and she told me that she had lost both her father and her only sibling, a younger sister, and she meant everything to her. It's the sort of thing that is hard to respond to in any situation. let alone during an interview, let alone while my subject is simultaneously yelling across the room in a language I don't understand and handing out Kashmiri sweets. I let it linger for a few seconds and then awkwardly moved on like a little animated slug who is not very sure of himself and who has no friends. His mom probably made him wear corduroy pants.
The first woman answered all of my questions as if she was scolding me loudly and eventually changed places with a different woman who clearly did not want to be interviewed and most of our conversation was about how much she did not want to take part in my project and the trajectory of how it would fail.

It's hard to know what to shoot for. We pushed through sixty minutes today and every time I woke up from my inappropriate corner-slumber the guy was looking at me as he spoke into the microphone about his life and times as a painter of traditional Kashmiri paper mache. But he still smiled at me as we were leaving and let me take a picture of his paint colored yellow hand.

THINK OF THE CHILDREN

2011-06-04T10:00:00.005+01:00

Ironic that "the girl with the project" about preserving Kashmiri language is the girl in the room that doesn't speak or understand it. G--- and I play for the same team- the introverted outsider who would rather spend her money on traveling than on jewelry. (Except for the obvious clip-on exceptions). She had a deep and rumbly voice like hard water running over something grainy that is gradually disapearring. She kept referring to her Kashmiri skills or lackthereof as a "disaster." My mother often refers to me as a disaster, and so I immediately felt somewhat of a kindred spirit with this strange woman.
I was interviewed G--- at the women's college in a large carpeted room with awful acoustics so the recording will probably never be heard. It was obvious that she was respected or possibly feared by the others, but didn't relate well with other people on a general level. Throughout the interview she would go on tangents about her faulty pronunciation of Kashmiri and would pull someone into the conversation so she could make fun of herself out loud and get a laugh. She would ask whoever was closest how to say something or someone would correct something she said without her asking them to.
I asked her if there was something she had always wanted to do but never got a chance. She said of course, and listed faraway things she would do in faraway countries. I always follow up this question with a question about the children, as a way of assuaging regret with the hope that the kids can have what they didn't. But G--- already told me that she has no children, so the list of unfulfilled dreams was left just hanging there in the air.
I didn't want to have a painful situation recorded for posterity, so I paused it when she asked me to and she maneuvered my enormous headphones over her dupata so she could listen to it over again. She was smiling and laughed at herself and it was obvious that she felt good about it. She kept silently looking into my eyes with a somber expression and said we should hang out and chill some time. I have seen this look before- the one you get when someone thinks you are holding back out of shyness. But I hadn't done anything to provoke this, and I decided it was more of a "I can see myself in you" sort of look. I get those from older women a lot. And not only because I dress like an old woman, but maybe it's something about my hopefulness and willingness to let the wind take me in whatever direction it feels like. It doesn't so much carry me as blow me. There's a lot of tumbling involved.
We sat down for chai and she gave me that look again and said "If I could, I would spend all my money on a car and gas and drive from my continent to your continent! ... but no! You're only eighteen!"
It wasn't even a question. I have lied about my age before but eighteen was pushing it. It also occurred to me that maybe she was not married.
"Okay. When you learn how to drive, then we can plan."
I thought about whether I would want to do any of the things she had mentioned earlier. Shopping in London. Ride a camel in the desert. Spend all her money on traveling.
It seemed I have done most of the things she listed. I wonder if she would add 'get married' or 'have children' to that list. I would.
Before she said goodbye she wistfully gave me the look again, which I know understand as the 'you have a list of things, go do them!" And I agree. And I'm doing one of those things right now. And since I'm only 18, I don't mind spending another month stealing cherries and recording stories.

bird.

2011-05-31T08:01:00.001+01:00

I was picking cherries when I saw a pretty cool bird. He had a mohawk. I bet he's in a band and his name is three letters long. I bet he's addicted to meth.
His feathers are like plaid and are lighter than his face. When he eats worms it looks like he's seizing. His head is vibrating. He attracts the attention of local cats and also my attention.
The cherries aren't ripe but I like the way it tastes. There are roses in the vegetable garden growing against the fence and they poke through the diamond shaped holes like scented magenta polkadots like when tennis balls get stuck in the fence around the tennis court because you hit it too hard just for fun or you were trying to hit someone.
I have a job but I don't get paid so I steal their cherries and call it even. And then I eat them.
We live on a compound because we are a family unit.

I held a funeral for the local cat and told the birds it was safe to come home.

UFO

2011-05-26T02:32:00.003+01:00

I'm used to getting stared at when I travel to faraway places, and true to form, in Srinagar I sometimes feel like the alien in the market, mostly because the clothes we commissioned to our tailor have yet to be completed. While my western jean-wearing ways make me feel like a tween, my misunderstood sense of fashion has spilled over into my Kashmiri wardrobe. My grandma chic has evolved to simply grandma. I can only hope that my tendency to wear age-inappropriate clothes will not lead to a profound loss of dignity at an old age, trying to squeeze my way into something magenta.

We have had the same tailor ever since I was a little fat kid, despite his many flaws. I won't name names, but two sleeves of noticeably different lengths is not okay unless it was during my asymmetrical phase, when people would go out of the way to tell me they didn't like my outfit. Despite his lack of skills, his small business evolved into what is now known as Fancy Tailors. My family insists on remaining loyal, and my mother reminds me that "we're the ones who made him fancy!"

As an honorary foreigner, it only makes sense that I am treated as a foreign object stuck in a small place where I don't belong. My only defense for not learning Kashmiri is that Arabic is the highest language and I decided to learn that instead. So far it works.
The last person we interviewed claimed that I would never learn Kashmiri because I was wearing jeans. Maybe he's right. But it makes me appreciate Morocco even more and the gift it gave me, to be able to enter a foreign place and make it familiar. For now I will start with a small space, learn the streetnames and the schedules of public transportation. The beginnings of belonging to a city.

Homes

2011-05-19T07:01:00.002+01:00

The pollen is floating all over the air into the sky like summer snowflakes and then settle on the grass eventually. My mother caught one and said it felt like a cottonball. The roses are in bloom and planted beside the snowball trees that I think grow cherries.
I suppose I'm seeing Buffalo.
I had a seemingly unending crazy dream last night that I was there with all of my cousins from Kashmir. We owned a cat and a pig and I was in charge of feeding and cleaning up and I loved them both.
I was thinking how I had to leave for Casa Barata at 2pm to pick up some things I saw the week before but decided to sleep on. It took me a few hours to realize I wasn't in Tangier anymore and wondered why I would be confused about that. At one point in the dream I wrote and directed a play about elves. It was pretty good.
The craziest part was that I thought I was in Kashmir for the first time in six years about to start a recording project in a language I don't speak.
I am amazed at what I can come up with in my dreams.

THE SAME FLOWERS IN THE SAME PLACE

2011-04-27T17:33:00.003+01:00

Dear Perec,

Someone was drinking baileys in the bathroom.
There are probably cameras above the stalls. I don't think it was anyone from quilting class because they are all so jolly and wear puffy sweaters and white sneakers and look like Mrs. Claus.
The bathroom is beside the water fountain and against the wall are three uneven stacks of small plastic cups like the kind you might be asked to pee in at the doctor's office. The whole hallway is lined with metal railing in case someone falls down and needs something to grab on to. It is the same railing I hit my head against that time I slipped on ice down a handicapped accessible ramp and had to be taken to the emergency room. So I do not consider this a safety measure.

The room is the same room we sat in one morning in fifth grade when our teachers ganged up and as a team and forced us to interact with terrifying elderly folks so we could ask them about their lives. We were in pairs and I was partnered up with a girl I hate and the old woman we were talking to hated her too. She would recount thirty second memories about restaurants in Connecticut, where she was from, or in response to the questions we were given on our handout, about "how things were." She ended most of these memories with something like, "but you wouldn't know you girls are so young, things were different then." Something like what a grandma would say.

I used to have girl scout meetings in the same nursing home. I guess they like to have a youthful presence to make people feel bad about how old they are. This particular place was built like a maze and difficult to navigate. On one unfortunate day I was just about there, but then reoriented in a much more frightening direction by an elderly women chasing after me screaming "give me back my sweater! You took my sweater!"

I didn't know it then, but this was all a forshadowing of what was to come.
Not only would I dedicate my life to recording the memories of the elderly, but I would spend years dressing like a grandma and wearing old lady sweaters and costume jewelry.
As for the sweater I was accused of stealing, I am probably wearing it now. And if it's not hers, maybe a replica. The same flowers in the same place.

THE GROSSEST THING EVER, brought to you by me.

2011-04-27T03:39:00.006+01:00

Having spent two years as a struggling student in Toronto and two more in NYC, I have had more than an appropriate share of having to deal with mice. In Toronto I spent many nights listening to a colony of busy creatures building a small city beneath my floorboards and had to just assume they were fashioning me a beautiful blue gown for a ball where I would probably end up feeling really uncomfortable but it's the thought that counts.
In NYC, the little guy really didn't have much of an excuse after I one day reached into a bag of Milano cookies and felt the terrifying warmth of a warm rodent body. Years later in Harlem I was almost accustomed to seeing plastic bags skittering across the floor.

I would call my mother so I could have company while I tried to sweep them away, and as with any unwelcome creature, she taught me that "our home is their home," and encouraged me to try to figure out how to casually throw the mice out the window instead of causing them any harm.

We've never had a mouse in our house here in Buffalo, other than that one time Cat (the name of our cat) brought one home with such pride in his eyes, as cats do. I've been away for a while, but one of the first things my mother showed me when I got home from Tangier was two dollar bills that apparently the mice have been feasting on just outside the garage, which she just found. I am completely aware that this is the grossest thing I have ever scanned in my life, but even stranger than my having felt compelled to scan a small pile of half-chewed US currency is that my mother's reason for showing me the chewed up money is because she thinks it's sad that we didn't take the time to feed the mice what they needed to survive the winter, because our home is their home.

pretty stable

2011-04-24T19:24:00.008+01:00

I got to the circus near the train station and inside a big blue tent there was a trapeze artist without a net and rows of very small children, and I was terrified.
Mademoiselle Fatima seemed completely comfortable on the trapeze bar and not in a good way, but in the way they try to terrify you at the circus. Dhe seemed pretty sure of herself.

Then there was a horse and tiger segment and it was almost as painful as back in the day when I interned at Marineland to record the breathing patterns of Orca whales.
Killer whales are huge and the tank was about the size of the Juniors section of a Macys and at the shows they flipped around and swam around in circles and puffed water at the audience then went to sleep looking sad.
At the Moroccan circus the horses ran around in circles and "neiiighed" for five minutes and then went back to the stable while a seven to ten year-old girl in a white ball gown gently tamed doves to an instrumental version of a Celine Dion top 40 hit and to the crunch of popcorn and the crying of children remembering the fire-eater. And the clowns.

As we left my friends took photos and I tried to talk to one of the acrobats. He was by a set of pretty pink stables with tiny horses inside and he tried to explain to me that the they were fine and they were used to it, in the same way that Dr. Ramshaw justified to me that while we might contest the orcas being caged into such an unnatural SeaWorldish habitat, work is work. And since the animals grew up there, given their nature, they were fine being regularly fed and doing pretty okay.
I still don't agree with this, and I don't think he agrees with himself either, but it allowed him to do his research without feeling like a douche.

I was terrified at the circus along with many of the children, but serendipitously very soon after had the chance to spend the day, far away, with a friend and an amazing family with generations of running a traveling circus. For the second time I realized that for as much as they bring lifelong fear to some, it doesn't mean they are bad people. Everyone has to make their own way, and realistically I know nothing about the lives of the people or the whales or the horses and in the end, at least compared to me, they all seemed pretty stable.

We want everything old, but with a new Toilet.

2011-04-09T09:55:00.004+01:00

P'Hel hekeda. Walakin mukhtalifa. (Just like that. Except different.)

Buying underwear in Tangier is fun and mashi munaasaba. Somehow, it's always male shopkeepers and the kind of boys that whistle at girls that happen to be running the place and run it like the old Indian men at the bridal shops in New Dehli, dishevling all of the perfectly folded cloth for the slight chance that you might want to buy that super neon pink sequinned sari that they haven't beeb able to sell since 1989. After two minutes he has enough cloth coverage that he may as well lay down and go to bed.
I tried to be discreet but he kept picking out what he thought I would like with a band of onlookers watching the process. He seemed to think he knew me. Blue standard. White with cat and mouse cartoon characters. Orange.
I eventually decided on brown stockings that I saw on a mannequin, and as it turned out, it was the only pair and led to the shopkeeper somewhat violently pulling down the stockings of the mannequin so as to sell them to me. I couldn't help feeling inappropriate. She was fully nude from the waist down. Poor girl.

I'm making an effort to not say "pHal hekda" and mime instead of trying to remember vocabulary. It's been a hard road. Also trying not to speak muppet beeker-derija. Now that I keep hearing my voice recorded, it's too embarrassing. I can edit out of my final product with Audacity but I can't edit it out of my life. People are being more honest with me about my unreasonable behavior and I should probably listen.

The girls at Eric's Hamburger made me simultaneously feel like
1). I should interview more teenage girls and 2). be prepared for them to make fun of me.
Seventeen year old Sanaa kept telling me my Arabic was sweet and Haluwa but that I was talking so much she just couldn't keep up. I think one person asking another person if they are drunk is a useless gesture, so I didn't, and I probably didn't want to know anyway. They were sweet girls but obviously on some sort of mission for the night that I could hardly stomach after half of the Eric's "quality hot dog." I said mtsharafiin, it was nice to meet them, and they replied in unision, "mutsharafiin???" in a wait where are you going voice. It was cute, but I'm pretty sure their night was going to end like a scene out of "Marock" and I had business to attend to.

The night ended with a plate of midnight french fries at the playa, after convincing the waiter I was interviewing that 555 sounded like a really bad idea, even from across the street. We chatted about the international zone of Tangier and the he explained why people preferred Cafe Central to his previous employer, the Cafe Tingis next door. "They want everything to be original, just with a new bathroom."
It was true. Is that why I stopped going to Tingis? I know I prefer it.
Is that what Tangier is going for?
"pHal hekda, walakin, mukhtalafa."
or, "everything old, but with a new toilet."

CLOWN CARS, room for three.

2011-03-27T04:02:00.001Z

STABILITY: degree to which fabric resists pulling out of shape

Yousef Clown was in my taxi this morning. I was coming from the market and almost melted and it would have been impossible to not take a taxi. I found one and just as we were about to escape the chaos of the Souk Barra he ran up to the window and asked to go to some place I have never heard of but was somewhat on the same trek as mine. Yousef Clown didn't see me. The driver was reluctant to let him in and I wanted to loudly whisper or gesticulate in the rear view mirror or kick the back of his seat to communicate No! Please! KanKaystobarni!

But he could not hear my silent cries. In addition to the surprise 70 degree weather in what would be considered chilly-autumn- boots, I felt like I was melting with the thought that he had come in the taxi because he saw me there.

But I was resolved that it couldn't be. After sleeping on it, I feel like I was being too judgmental of clowns. I quietly imagined a television series in which clowns are a common race along with regular mortals, deprived of their basic rights. I would play the special clown that was both clown and magician - the best parts of a child's birthday party. And you would play the evil clown from "IT" except secretly good inside maybe I'm not sure yet I've only seen two episodes so far.

And I was right. He didn't follow me out of the cab even though I had to wait for change. I'm sure he didn't recognize me. Maybe that's why Allah convinced me to wear 4 lb. "chilly-autumn boots " in 70 degree weather knowing I can't resist wearing them with my purse of the exact same color. The other, I am realizing, has proven to be too conspicuous. Black and White stripes. Who would have thought? Maybe because I just capitalized that without thinking about it.
I need more purses.

These small interactions tend to play out like little stories. Minor chance it's my mind constantly reshaping events into tiny narratives. I was always awful at interpreting the "meaning" that the author of a story intended. There was something he/she/it was trying to say and I could never "get it." Then I decided it was fine, because there was no such thing as "getting it" as long as you got that you could never get it. And the author was absent anyway.
After years of such a fine education, I think about these small things and how they unfold, and I know that actually God is unfolding them, and I can only hope I'm getting it. I like to think the best of people, and I like to think the best of clowns.

IT'S MY FAULT

2011-03-26T21:27:00.004Z

I talk to myself the most.
It might be that every sheet of paper I borrow from Cafe de Paris burns another bridge. I had to get up three times today to ask for another wrqa. One of the things I say the most here is "ghallat dyalee" - it's my fault. Maybe I never learned how to be polite or maybe I'm just telling myself that to make excuses for things I know I shouldn't do.

I have chosen to ignore the difference between K (singular second person) and Koum (plural second person), and it gets me into linguistic fowda. Whenever I come back to Tangier I get gifts for cafes and other establishments that I frequent/haunt and almost every time the random waiter I give it to assumes it's for him and himself alone. And all the other waiters get offended and I get a funny feeling in my stomach when I do things like ask for pieces of paper. Apparently gifts are an efficient way to burn bridges.

I've been reading a book comprised of quotes from Imam Al-Ghazali. I read the first half of the book like a textbook, but the sort of textbook where you highlight everything because all of it is important and in the end the pages are 90% flourescent yellow with red ink in the margins and you get really embarrassed when someone asks to borrow it.

Page 3 and Lesson 1 : knowledge without action is insanity and action without knowledge is vanity.

INSANE CLOWN POSSE

2011-03-24T06:41:00.001Z

Yes, it has officially happened. I was offered a job as a clown. The offer induced laughter, then excitement, and eventually terror.

I was sitting in my usual spot - which somehow is the same spot that a waiter, who shall remain nameless, once asked me to always sit in so he could see my eyes through the mirror when he looked over the espresso machine. Which now that I think about it, usually just made me really anxious and overly concerned with what the top half of my face looked like.

I was chatting with Rachid, who tends to stop and say hello, gesturing at the seat across from me to ask if he can join me. I always say yes but usually add - "but I do have a lot of work to do, sooo..." To which he sits down anyway and makes a mouth-zipping gesture and promises to be quiet.

A group of four was sitting beside us and kept looking over as though they wanted to ask for something. I smiled, we got to talking, and I said something about how "kanhbb tanja bzzef bzzef walakin makaynshi khdma. WALU." (i love tanja soooo much but there's no work. NOOO WORK). I say this sentence at least ten times a day.

"Join us!" they cried jovially.
I asked "Shnoo khdma dyalkoum?" (where do you work?)
"Bahlawan."
Balawan?
"Balawan."
"Shnoo??" (in my usual squeaky 'shnoo' voice)

Rachid, who was annoyed for the entire conversation and definitely did not want to take part, finally rolled his eyes and revealed "Clowns. They are clowns," as though we had just lost a round of charades.
I squealed with delight like a small girl. "Bssaah!??" Gasp!

I fear clowns just as much as the next guy, but it was some sort of twisted reflex. And since no one was wearing their gear at the time, I felt pretty okay. So we all chatted and I learned some clownish vocabulary in derija (Fessi derija mind you). Perhaps their invitation was in jest (but they appeared to be serious), they asked again if I would want to join them as their "woman clown," and then asked me to at least come see them perform at a local Moroccan school the next day. Of course, OF COURSE, I said yes. Who can say no to a clown?

The next day we all piled into a shady white van. When we arrived, the children were all lined up, waiving their tickets to the show in the air, entering one by one. After everyone was in or being kicked out, and before I could assemble myself, the music started pumping and the kids were singing along with a terrifyingly dressed Moroccan clown who, although a man, had perfect control over the swaying of his hips. I eventually recognized that it was the shorter of the two boys that so normally sat with me at the cafe the day before. I sat through the show which mostly consisted of him yelling "khyba!" (bad) at the kids, and they accusing him of being "khyba!" back. (This sort of exchange is typical with kids here. They love it.) At one point he jumped onto the benches and started running around frantically. There is no way he didn't step on at least one kid. All in all, a good show. I wondered if a tasteful clown dress of only mint green and black would any less insane. I'm sure it could be considered couture some day. Besides, who are any of us to say what is and is not clownish.

We gathered equipment, got back in the van and ended up at someones house. Things started to feel uncomfortable right around when he proved himself to be a severely aggressive man. This was enough to make me feel uncomfortable but we were already in the van. We headed back to the cafe the woman and I made plans for the next day. At the qahwa we chatted about the show and the boy still had a smidge of white on his cheek- enough to identify him as a clown. Rachid was there and took me aside and warned me, very seriously, not to trust these people. "They want something from you." And he walked away looking like a worried father. I felt slightly suspicious of their hospitality but hey, it's Morocco. It's normal. The more you are able to trust people, you learn things you would ordinarily never get to know. This has always been my philosophy, and I am consistently being warned about it, but you can't change a hardened woman.

Things got quiet and I gradually began to notice that all of them kept making eye contact with each other silently and then the woman would ask me a question either involving making plans or where I lived. She made at least four attempts to figure out exactly which street I lived on, which I thought was strange because they aren't even from Tangier, and also just strange in general. I hoped that maybe she was just be an impolite woman, I told myself this as I pretended to have a phonecall and called a friend, just in case, to make sure I didnt get captured by this Insane Clown Posse that now looked like they were going to either boil me in a pot and eat me or chop me up and sell me for parts. Or just sell me whole.

My friends showed up, immediately agreed that this was not a good situation, and we left just after I promised the woman that we would go to the hammam the next day. My friends made me promise not to go because they both agreed that they were definitely planning something for me and it was not the hammam. BUT THEY WERE CLOWNS! I ask myself, is that a reason to trust them, or a reason to think they might capture me or sell me into white slavery. To their defense, they are from Fez. (And yes, that was another jab at Fez and how awful it is.)

Various members of the ICP traveling show called me from different numbers thirteen times the next day, and I didn't answer. They left for Fez the following day and I figure I'm rid of the temptation of seeing them again and face the possibility of capture.

But O, to be a clown! Even just for a day.
No one would be able to notice how big my nose is, hiding under that big red ball.
Enough reason to be a clown.

I'll sleep on it.
They return to Tanja in one week.

FISH & CHIPS

2011-03-21T16:45:00.003Z

I finally made it to Al Hoceima ... restaurant ... and consumed an unreasonable and unnecessary amount of food for a total of $3.00 after getting my hair did like a proper Moroccan woman. The boys from across the street at my baisar place were glaring at me in a strange way. I was on my way to see Atlas-Omar and he wasn't at his usual place, but managed to find me sitting in the lone table outside of restaurant humming to Tik Toc. There was only one chair, as though the proprietor was doing us lonely ones a favor, not having to look at the empty chair. Two hours earlier I was reading The Magic Mountain and in the restaurant near the sanatorium is a woman that is always alone with a book eating her meals and switched to the opposite chair to avoid the two men. I can't even count how many times I have done the same thing. And she was in a sanatorium. In America its not so strange, just sad, and in Morocco it gets me phone numbers, unwanted visitors and unwanted smoke inhalation. There needs to be more tiny tables, facing withe window, with just one chair. And a bookstand would be nice.

THE VOICE OF THE COCK

2011-03-21T16:22:00.002Z

The roosters are confused. They starting crowing for Fajr prayer but then they keep going until almost 3pm. It's frustrating but as Imam Al-Ghazali taught me in a present from my father, "Dear Beloved Son," 'the voice of the cock" is one of three exalted voices, I'm assuming because it wakes us up to pray.

My regular hairdresser mildly fondled me today. Not so much fondle as offered to scratch my back like a loving mother and I couldn't resist, as the fate of my hair was in his hands. I'm not sure if I can go back. I suppose I can live with stick straight hair for the rest of my stay.

The young girls in the neighborhood have started telling me I'm pretty when I walk by and petting my hair. It's half cute half creepy. Mostly cute though. I think its because my hair is as straight as hay and little do they realize I would kill for those crazy Moroccan curls.

The cats sound like birds and a woman outside my window is repeatedly yelling at her husband to buy cream cheese over the sound of the call to Asr prayer. The boys playing outside are kicking the football against the wall of the house and the rooster is still crowing.

These are the sights and sounds of the city today.

EASE

2011-03-17T02:07:00.003Z

EASE: a way of sewing a large piece of fabric into a smaller space without resulting in gathers or puckers.

What was that movie where the sign of a good woman is that she has a clean home?
What was I thinking about dreaming of? Dreams are overlapping with reality. I can't tell them apart.
One sign of a bad women is when her maid resents her. I tell myself that the reason she makes extra unnecessary noise when I sleep late is because I don't save plastic bags and that makes it difficult to collect trash like a normal person. Then I say that in my dreams I wrote something brilliant but was too tired to get out of bed to write it down. These are the nice things you tell yourself when everyone tells you that you seem "constantly angry" when you pride yourself on having won the "nicent girl in school" award three years in a row at Country Parkway Elementary. So I try to do nice things. And look out for old people to trip and fall so I can rescue them.

We have a classic home video of my brother, my father and me, circa 1987-ish where I wander around the patio making duck noises while my father asks my five-year old brother what he wants to be when he grown up.
He said:
"First, I'll learn to fly the ai'plain" (he couldn't pronounce his R's yet), "then I'll fly the helicopta."
Dad: "what about your studies?"
Brother: ",,,fly the helicopta......read my boooooks....then fly the ai'plane.

He was also well known to answer : "I wanna be a Maaaaan." Buffalo accent included.

Eidan (So...)

Goals for the YEAR:
-fly the airplane
-read my booooks
-be a good woman

Goals for the WEEK:
-burn no bridges
-make no enemies
-clean my room

Goals for TODAY:
-don't trip on a crack in the cobbled streets with my new heels.
-in honor of my father's birthday, read the book that he gave to me, "Dear Beloved Son."

zid nishan shweya

2011-03-04T12:35:00.003Z

Last year's cafe waiter is this year's taxi driver. I've already started collecting phone numbers. While the cafe waiter may occasionally treat me to a free coffee or a sugar cookie, the taxi driver can get me from point A to B, or, more likely point B to A, especially in the busy hours and in shoes that are too small for me. He can literally rescue me.

It's been getting more difficult to get to the beach and stay there. I should have seen it coming. I've been having nightmares about getting run over by cars that I should have seen coming. I suppose you can't stop what's coming and what's on its way.

Loop-de-loop

2011-02-18T00:56:00.007Z

LOOPING: connect the beginning to the end to allow for continuous repetition.

How to say "nausea" in Derija? I hate having to mime it out. It reminds me of those months when my sister was having morning sickness, and my two year old nephew would walk around hunched over imitating someone throwing up.

It's my first day in heels. So far I'm doing okay. I reroute when I know I'm approaching a "problem area" - the saggy arms of a muddy park where the heels sink in; full hips followed by confusing and surprising slopes; the cracks in the skin of the sidewalks that only I seem to trip on; of course, the endless hills of the city (the unmentionable areas). I know exactly which spots to avoid and I'll take my chances after enduring three months of Buffalo snow-weather, when dreaming of a sunny Tangier got me through the sludge. Now I'm dreaming of the sweaters that could have kept me warm in wind on the beaches of the Atlantic. Literally. Last night I dreamt of sweaters.

If I manage to not trip and fall, I am positive that I will either fall asleep or vomit in public because espresso puts me to sleep and because I have been drinking the local tap water. Can I really be expected to spend $2.00 a day on bottled water? $60 / month? With that much money I could buy a whole pair of jeans that won't fit me. Plus, the more contaminated things I consume, the more ready I will be for an eventual trip to Kashmir. Incidentally this approach already proves that I have already started to get comfortable with the infamous Kashmiri logic. Somehow all of its unexpected twists and turns always reminds me of those looping straws from Fantasy Island (an amusement park, not a strip club). I guess along those lines it also reminds me of a faulty roller coaster. In either case, I'm looking forward to making loops out of straight lines and disregarding the linearity of cause and effect until it makes no sense at all and I will say it like I believe it and then repeat it until I believe in it. It's what we were trained to do.

I built a room for you in my heart

2011-02-18T00:27:00.003Z

It has a garden and everything.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

2011-02-16T20:34:00.001Z

It's not so much that Tangier doesn't inspire me, because it always will. Even the idea of being "inspired" is somewhat alien. After two years in NYC I seem more concerned with people rather than places because I keep personifying the city.
There is a man who makes maps based on the haunts of William Burroughs in Tangier. He draws maps of the city based solely on where he used to go. It is what it is, but I'm excited for soundwalks. It is never entirely possible to document the spirit of a city, but a combination of sound and visuals and oral history can preserve different facets of the community and also support my self-indulgence in making and tracing maps except for when I actually need them.

A city is a character, not to be confused with having character, or what my mother means when she says in her Kashmiri accent, "he is just a character. Just a character."
So, a map of sound is sort of like following someone around and recording what they say. Or recording their breathing noises and other sounds a body makes. But that sounds gross so I'll say it the first way.

Dear Perec,

2011-02-11T10:55:00.002Z

The creepiest guy ever is staring at me from across the Socco. He doesn't look Moroccan. The shoeshine guy keeps walking past me and eyeing my boots with disgust. Its almost as if he doesn't even want to be the one to clean them.
And if he did he would see up my skirt. But I'm not much for leveraging.

Every five minutes the waiter at Cafe Central comes to my table and puts his hands around mine to warm him own, because "I'm skhoona and he is brd."
It makes me want to vomit but I won't do anything about it.

There's a pair of guys I see at every cafe I go to. They look like the guys from Casanegra. One tall, very dapper looking, and one short, not so handsome. He's probably the smarter one and will probably get injured or die by the end of the movie if this was a movie.

The guy across the square looks like he's about to bomb something. Not that I'm one to judge.

Three men have already offered to shine my boots for free. Maybe it's the Moroccan way of being extra nice to a woman with a shiner. It makes me look so hardcore. I must be punching myself in my sleep. How to say "Ummm, I fell" in derija?"

I would, if I could, give this boy five dirhams if I didn't think he was going to use it to buy glue and end up looking like a gremlin by the time he is twenty if he ever reaches twenty. I do really want gum though.

I ran into Abdelsalom in the Socco. He tried to explain what transpired the other night at Cafe Paris. Apparently they all agreed, I used to be heartwarming, and now I am a hardened woman. They all noticed.

Stop giving me looks when my heels hit the pavement yeah maybe I remind you of your 4th grade teacher but its not my fault we both love pumps circa 1990.

I can't warm your heart, but the hot flashes from being kosher and bitter can at least warm your hands.
Take what you can get because I'm giving it to you.

My nephew would see this and say, "why are you puuuple?"

2011-02-07T12:18:00.009Z

Is Tangier abusing me in the night?
The harassment has changed.
Today a midget called me a cheetah. A West African man called me a "meanie."

Living at the Andalusia has treated me okay except for waking up with random bruises. One above my left eyebrow that will definitely leave a scar and looks like I've been branded. The other is a huge purple bruise above my left hip in the shape of Africa.

Tangier is upset with me but he'll get over it. Breakups are painful.

A HARDENED WOMAN

2011-02-07T12:16:00.000Z

Are you a Friday Night Lights fan? Because i am.
The last episode was the return of Tim Riggins. Yes, he's back and causing as much havoc as ever. He's a new man with a hardened heart.

The return of the long-lost heroes and degenerates to their old town.
Its hard to try to be mature when everyone laughs under their breath before you even speak out loud. What's up your sleeve this time? So far, a fake pearl bracelet and a scar from an iron.
I found a solution, which maybe Tim couldnt find-

Tkklm b derija w safi. idda makayfhmnishi, dunia hania.
If you can't tell me in Deija, I don't need to hear it.
it probably means i don't have anything to say to you anyway.

Ok Tim,
we're in on this one together. You and me against the world. Lets tag team it.

compartment 1

2011-02-04T13:04:00.004Z

I missed my train by a few seconds. Mehdi was upset and I told him that Allah just didn't want me on that train. I was already remembering that I forgot to buy a notebook or a pen for the five hour train ride, when a man with a bag came into the station cafe and put little notebooks with pens attached on everyone's table, then came back around to see who wanted to buy one. Ten dirhams. And a three color pen! Allah clearly wants me to use this time to reflect on things and to use my red pen to edit out the bad stuff.

In the Casa Voyageurs Cafe, everyone is only paying attention to the news on TV, even those of us that only understand the pictures.

TRAIN 1, Compartment 1: the mission begins. One crying baby, her parents and a young couple. I smiled at the baby which turned out to be a deadly mistake. She was more of a cookie monster than a baby. They all immediately started talking about the crisis in Egypt- I understood the vocabulary but not the content. They were arguing politely and finally agreed to disagree. Eventually we all caught on that the younger guy didn't really speak derija, and the conversation switched to English. I tried to audio record and also accidentally filmed my hand ripping small pieces of bread from a loaf and smearing them with le vache ki rit. Gross. I didn't talk much because I didn't know enough about the situation to comment because I only understood the pictures.
The cookie monster was inappropriately caressing us all and the only thing that kept her quiet was scribbling in this notebook. She eventually resorted to singing everyone to sleep and I gave the "I-did-my-part-" look and wouldn't look up.

I'm realizing that even after a year and a half my writing style hasn't changed at all. Maybe Tanja hasn't either.

BFFs

2011-02-03T13:33:00.006Z

It's a new year and inshallah each new year will continue to bring a visit to our beloved Tanja. Everything is wet and clean from the rain. The ocean stays the same. I've stopped caring about scrapes and bruises because they help me remember things, so I appropriately only brought heels and slippery boots and I only packed summer clothes so I have an excuse to carry around a blanket in my oversized purse and spend hours in cafes inappropriately cuddling with it.

Themes for the coming months:
-bias: run against the grain
-basting: sew a temporary stitch to hold things in place
-butting: bring two edges together to touch but not overlap
-beeswax: keep the threads from breaking

-"back to basics": avoiding men who might want to marry you and simultaneously try to find someone to marry you;
while the romantic and cinematic side of you wants to return to the Muneria where everything is blue, in the spirit of new beginnings, go to the hotel across the street instead;
sit closer to the fire in the public oven to keep warm in the winter;
make a bun in your hair and hide a microphone in it;
Do your job.

I don't need to give up all of my old haunts or habits, but I feel older and less preoccupied with constantly having new adventures because it is no longer my job to do so. I'm here to listen and work.
and eat. and pray. and not-love Tangier all over again.
He's broken up with me too many times.
But can we at least still be friends?

EID MUBARAK

2010-11-22T18:39:00.000Z

Sitting in the back hall of the only mosque of suburban Buffalo, with all the women and kids and babies and candy, I re-lived the old days. Not the real old days, when we sat in Darul Uloom (one of many converted churches in Buffalo- in this case, a Mosque, and in other cases, concert venues) or Parker Masjid (used to be the first floor of a house on Parker St, an is now the basement, first floor AND third floor of the house on Parker St.), but the "newer-old days," of sitting in the back of Heim Masjid with all the other Muslims that live in Suburbia circa 1998. It used to be that random Kashmiri aunties would dramatically rise up from their front row seats to yell at the small children for screaming during khuthba (sermon), while on this Eid we had 8-12 year old children walking in turn through each isle with a sign that had clearly been framed on sale at Jo-Ann Fabrics reading "PLEASE BE SILENT! KHUTHBA IS ALSO PART OF PRAYER!."
I can't be sure why they didn't just put up a big sign on the wall or if it was one of those things where someone wearing a sandwich board is more effective than a stable, less mobile sign, but it was generally disturbing the crowd and keeping us all from hearing what was actually being said in this lecture. That being said, I can't say what was said this Eid, but I do know a sheep died in our names and I can only hope it will bring us some sense of peace this year.

Previous Employment

2010-09-28T18:44:00.012Z

Jack was a good friend. His thick brooklyn accent was always a welcome change to the British voices that always seemed to be mocking me in some way, gossiping about each other as they slipped in and out of the dreary apartment adopted by the British Library. They asked me about who had been in, who checked out what book and who hadn't paid their dues. I caught on to the social humiliation that comes along with not paying ones library dues and promptly crafted a very large sign listing names of those with delinquent fines and exactly how much they owed. Another sly move was for one member to pay the dues of another, initialing beside the name and putting a single line through it so it remained legible. I only bothered to remake the sign every few months because as much as I deplored public humiliation, I was a responsible librarian and determined not to let Margaret down. She was, after all the only member of the board that supported me taking up the position. She said I reminded her of herself. Always a good reason to hire someone. Fathers trust their daughters to men like them an the library was Margaret's only child, and she trusted me with it.

I knew I was going to be a good librarian. At least I had the wardrobe. The space only consisted of two rooms and was quiet and out of the way and I was pretty comfortable with alphabetical order. I never make my patrons feel like they have to justify their choice of reading material (it only encourages stealing / book-pants-ing. I never stole money or books, only book covers and postcards that fell out from between pages of them. None were from people I knew or addressed to people I knew, so I guiltlessly held on to them. None of them included anything more than short notes amounting to updates on the state of the weather.
Plus, I was a "great reader," or had learned to call myself one. There was nothing worse to the Brits than to have an unacceptable answer to the ultimate judgement, "do you read?" It felt like a trick question at first, and took a few months for me to learn that this would make or break you. "Of course, I'm a librarian" was not enough. I had to cite books- my favorites, classics and what I was currently muddling through. And I had to keep up on what everyone else was reading so I could report to the others.

Jack came by every other Monday and sat in his usual spot with a stack of books he picked out in the first five minutes he was there on the table beside him, to sort through for the remainder of the three hours I was open. He almost always accidentally checked out a book he had already read, mostly because a lot of the books had been donated by him. He took a trip back to Manhattan every year, to see his doctor he said. He never mentioned a family. When I announced that I was leaving Tangier to go back to school in the city he came to see me on a Wednesday before I left. He could hardly breathe as he was coming up the stairs and I could hear him panting before he made it to the top. It was labor. It sounded like labor. It sounded like lung cancer.

He had lent me a book of essays by Robert Fisk and we would talk about politics and the war. We talked about the exchange rate and New York. We talked about the election and he hated Hilary Clinton and called Obama "Osama." Most days he would come with Lucia, a blond Englishwoman in her seventies who dressed like she was in her twenties and had recently been dragged down rue de Fez by a motercycle after refusing to let go of her purse for a drive-by thief. Jack paid her dues for her because she was flat broke although she never looked like it. He never initialed the sheet so I never put her name on it. In the last months before I left he refused to pay and the two of them played a cat and mouse game, leaving messages with me and spying on each other. A month of this passed and I never saw Lucia again. I was pretty sure she wasn't much of a reader.

He said he came to say goodbye and at first only insinuated that he might never see me again. I gradually caught on and he gradually became less cryptic and eventually told me he was dying. He wasn't going to make it much longer. So when he said goodbye he was really saying goodbye. I said maybe I would see him again in Manhattan. He didn't answer me and changed the subject. He did this a lot and I assumed he hadn't heard the last thing I said. I think that is what happened here. I wasn't sure what was appropriate to do. A hug would have been awkward and there was nothing between a hug and just saying goodbye from my seat behind the desk and plus my legs were mounted across the grill of the space heater that I hid under my desk because it was the middle of December and the walls were made of cement. When he finally decided to leave I locked the door and cried just a little bit, just in case I never saw him again, I knew I would remember that he said goodbye and that I cried.

The next time I saw Jack was a year later. He was walking through the Petit Socco slowly, in a bright purple gondora that reached just above his ankles. I had never seen him wear anything that didn't resemble safari gear. He looked like an old senile man who wandered out of the house in his pajamas. He took a front seat at Cafe Tingis just like he ordinarily would, ordered a coffee and smoked a cigarette. I know he looked directly at me but there was no recognition. I thought of going over to say hello, but what if he was actually senile and didn't remember me? I wasn't about to cry in the Petit Socco and I'm no good at seeing people outside of their normal state against their free will. This I knew, Jack was alive. He was smoking, purple and pining for Lucia.

DIRECTIONS

2010-09-26T18:47:00.004Z

Now that I'm on the Netflix train, I am indulging in my obsession with horror movies. Not in a midnight showing at the Amherst kind of way, but I don't mind falling asleep to some cries of terror every now and again. Makes for interesting dreams.

I discovered that my first home in Tangier looks exactly like the sanitorium in Halloween. Hotel MHrsa. I am going to live there again some day and be who I was then. It's as easy as that. Didn't you know that?

It would have been a great room for seventeen people on a roadtrip, but for just me on a crisp night in the middle of December and a creepy mustached concierge who wouldn't help me with my bags and the not so subtle noises from the room next to the communal bathroom, it was somewhat inappropriate.
The bathroom was a hole in the floor in a closet with a lone lightbulb hanging from the ceiling making shadows of the spiders that looked like bigger, scarier spiders.

It might seem like a nostalgic longing for the time- a first arrival in a new city- but I think I do actually want to stay in that hotel again. It's like the horror films. I know how creepy it is but I also know it's relatively safe. And familiar at least in my memory and reconstructed imagination of it. Plus I want an excuse to say skeevies.

A man at Cafe Aroma recommended a book to me that reminded him of the book I was reading. I have given in to the fact that I will probably have a lot of conversations with strangers so long as I decide to do my work here. The last guy came over to my table to tell me how impressed he was that everything on me coordinated perfectly. "I'm fascinated. I mean, just the amount of time that must have taken you!"
I looked up the book. The author seems to generally argue that urban space is divided into places and non-places. He counted the metro and the supermarket as non-places. Transient spaces that engender no sense of belonging. I suppose a one night stand with a hotel would fall on this side of the line.
It is clear this man has never had a one night stand. If only he knew how much could happen in a super-market! And entire languages can be learned on the train. And I could assert the place-ness of hotel MHrsa with my hands tied, which hopefully they won't be. It feels like mine in its status as a historical landmark in my personal timeline. Maybe there's more to his ideas than that, but I'll pass regardless.

As I embark on a journey of thick description, I am looking forward to indulging in the small details of the local. I can write about the patterns of the cracks in the pavement without shame! Perec asks "how do you know your city?" and gives a set of directions for how to do it, specifically how to get it down on paper. I'm good at paper and following directions. I don't get lost on purpose because I don't need to. I'll keep a pencil to the ground to trace a line so you know how to find me. And at the very least it will make for a good set of instructions for an embroidered representation of the city shaped like a pelvis or a dress fitted around the pelvis.

Islamish

2010-09-25T21:30:00.008Z

My new ipod shuffle is so inconspicuous it's the sort of thing I could crush up and put in my gramma's oatmeal, undetected. Something so small it hardly changes the taste of things. A twinge of bitterness followed by a clump of brown sugar makes it better. Can't even taste it.
It's September 14, 2010. Nine years ago I was in high school and my yearbook advisor was yelling at me for not capturing the faces of our students as they watched the news a few days before. At the time I agreed with him, Why didn't I take pictures? In retrospect, I can see that although I do frame everything that happens to me in life as a story to be written, 9/11 was too confusing to be thinking as a journalist.
And ten years later. It is hard to feel that we aren't moving backwards. Assuming that moving forward entails universally acknowledging that Islam is a religion, not a political ideology or a cult. At the same time, the definitions don't really matter, it's just words. And to hear the same people that were the first to defend Islam after the attacks, years later asking if it is inherently dangerous "by definition," is mostly because in 2001, many Americans didn't know enough about Islam to question if any of the things they didn't know about it weren't true. In our newly enlightened age, most of America now knows so many things that give them an excuse to talk, any one of which might warrant suspicion, hatred or book burning.
I am not a political person, although as a theory major I have to at least admit to being a political body. I am Muslim. I do know this for sure. I can't say that "killer fundamentalists" as I like to call them, are either Muslim or non-Muslim, the same way that I would choose to ignore anyone who claims that homosexuals or prostitutes can't be Muslims. The phrase, "who are we to judge?" should resonate with Muslims most of all, considering that it is the basis of our daily lives. We are not the judge. More importantly, there IS a judge.
I don't like to debate. I'm not quick on my feet. More of a monologue kind of girl. My voice was made for it. I am told it is soothing, and good at putting people to sleep. And debate has too much to do with vocabulary. Why pit words against each other? Let them be a family.
I recently heard a man who had sadly majored in 'Creativity" at Buff State refer to himself as "an ideas person." The walls of his bedroom were papered with interpretive maps of his brain. I am a "words-person." The term "Islamism" is baffling to me. It is redundant and reminds me of "exorcism." It is listed in Wikipedia under a special series on "Criticism of Islam." But in the same way that I can call it inappropriate, I would say that language is fluid enough that this word can mean anything to anyone, and language is playful enough that made-up words and titles are entitled to make fun of me. I like to think they're having a good time.
If not for the coining of this term to mean awful things, I might have at some point referred to myself as an "Islamist." Now, in such a situation I will have to resort to "Islamish." It reminds me of the trail of goo behind a snail.
Being Islamish is to agree to play the game where we pretend that we can take the proper noun of a religion and add "ist" to create a whole new genre of terrifying people, then to take the root word and add a little disclaimer- I believe in Islam, which is a way of life, and so as the world changes, so will my lifestyle. Not to be mistaken for Muslimish, because that is something different entirely and more reminiscent of a fictional Kosher dessert.
I know. Even the -ish is redundant. Isn't it liberating? You can never really know which things fall under the Ish category. It's like saying I am a student of X. As a student, I am a critic, and I am still learning. I am a student of Middle Eastern Politics today and In ten years I will be a small business owner. Ish involves room for more. A space that can be filled or left alone. An empty seat at the back of the plane. An empty seat at the front of the bus.
"Islamism" used to mean Islam. As we increasingly became confronted with what is also known as political Islam (if I have to be a political body, why doesn't he?) it was readopted. We.
That's right I said it.
Irrespective of my fondness for the third person plural, wanting to be part of something that you're part of, the We here is problematic. Is my We the same as your We?
I hear everyone talking about this Islamist threat, separating the Islamists from the Islams, the (m)islams. I agree, We as Americans should accept those moderate muslims as ones-of-us. But I won't put too much weight in the pronouns. It all depends on which room we decide to wander into at the party. I don't mind being a she or an it or a part of they. I know when I'm being talked about because no one stops talking when I walk into the room.

COSTUME JEWELRY

2010-08-13T05:35:00.005Z

As an avid Madonna fan and with two older sisters, I became obsessed with fashion at an early age. This quickly led to a subconscious act of "costuming." I've had my ups and downs. In third grade I was addicted to a glamourous pair of velvet stirrups that in retrospect, yes, were absolutely fabulous. This was, however, soon after followed with borrowing my sister's heels and my mother's blazer and sauntering into class to find that I was wearing almost exactly the same outfit as my homeroom teacher. Not even the cool teacher- the other one.
Years later, yes, I probably own an identical pair of white pumps, but generally choose more carefully and opt for a rotation of sailor, farmer, shepherd's wife and "French."

This eventually led to the lure of disguise in general. The infamous veil. Wigs. Girdles. Sunglasses. People that buy the entire outfit including the shoes on the mannequin in the storefront window. Things acting in the place of what they aren't, or speaking for someone else. By naming ourselves that thing, what's the difference?
A name is a name.

An earring is an earring.
At 15 I got my nose pierced and convinced my mother it was an attempt to be more cultural. The school promptly kept up with the times and decided that nose rings, along with earrings, must be removed for gym class. My mother generally agreed with me that this requirement was unnecessary for my intellectual development and had given me a stack of notes for whenever Ms. K would invent a new sport that involved boys coming into contact with girls. The stack of notes came complete with her signature so that I wouldn't have to wake her up at 7am with a pen in hand. "Pssst! Mom! I think we're swimming today!" I composed concise and vaguely threatening excuses, including,- For religious reasons, my daughter cannot participate in (- insert imaginary sport name -) today. Then I would put in my nose ring and look for some heels.

I didn't feel bad about this flawless plan of ours because she would usually just have me sign things for her anyway. It wasn't forgery if there was verbal consent for one thing to pretend to be another by disguising itself as the thing it was supposed to be. Supposedly.

I got my ears pierced when I was eight. Before that I used stick ons. Most days one of them would fall off and I developed a habit of reaching up to both of my ears every couple of hours to make sure they were still both there. This habit, though compulsive, comes in handy ten years later in the world of clip-on earrings. Costume jewelry in general. My nose is still pierced but I'm saving it for a ridiculously oversized giant gold hoop ring with little bells on it in case I ever get married, keeping my word to remain cultural.

I only wear clip on earrings simply because they are more beautiful and go better with my wardrobe. They look just like the real thing. Transforming clip-ons to their true/false nature of being "real" earrings is my new plan B for becoming a useful member of society. Part B.a) Devise a way to wear earrings with hijab.

Plan A: Chief of Fashion Police.

Kayfa Halek?

2010-08-08T01:56:00.000Z

The Politics of Naming

2010-08-07T16:15:00.002+01:00

No, it's not a copy of my paper on street re-naming in Palestine, but...

TAP for the Tangier Archive Project is not so glamorous an acronym. But if you spend 4 hours a day watching DVDs of The Wire, it is. I can hear the reference and smile to myself and think about McNulty, but does anyone else? Allahuall3alm. The question every writer asks.

Do you guys hear that?

I hear that, but does anyone else?

The Tangier Archive Project: "I'd TAP that."

So let us not ask why, but
why not?
Leemada la?

When you try to catch up on world news...

2010-08-07T16:07:00.003+01:00

My S- Baji always specifically requests in the first few days of our many visits to Kashmir, that I not mention her name in any of my writing, so I won't. It is a shame because she is always the one to practice her English with me and because she is so adorable, we have the best conversations- or at least the most memorable. In 2005 over a full spread of at least twelve different dishes she prepared for our family as a welcome, she asked me- "Why is that poor Chelsea Clinton still not married yet? She should hurry up! Say hi to Bill."
To one of my favorite Bajis who is actually a Khala but manages to retain her warm growing warming glow, as does the television, which has recently become a very important part of my life.
S-Baji, your day has come. And interfaith, to boot!
Congrats Chelsea, the world has been waiting.

Hum kya chahte, azaadi!

2010-08-02T15:33:00.007+01:00

Shouting through speakerphones. Azaadi!

July 22, 2010, “More than a hundred thousand people marched peacefully to the UN office in Srinagar. They burned effigies, chanted ‘Azadi, azadi’ (‘freedom’) and appealed to India to leave Kashmir. The movement was not crushed. It was merely ignored. Nothing changed. Now a new generation of Kashmiri youth is on the march.”
European Parliamentary Delegation said that “Kashmir is the most beautiful prison of the world.”

In the worst violence to hit Indian-occupied Kashmir in over two years, the curfew continues, more people are dying every day, and demonstrators are still protesting.

geelani sahb agey bado hum tmhare sath hai.

ATI'GIRL

2010-07-29T11:39:00.004+01:00

I was listening to an old rerun of This American Life on the Uptown 2 about a man that was committed to a mental hospital because he pretended to be insane, thinking it would get him back to his normal life sooner than the prospect of jail-time. He explained, as I know all too well- if your main objective in any situation is to convince someone else that you are not crazy, you may as well take up foaming at the mouth.

I was reading Michel de Certeau's theories on strategies and tactics and found early on that his line of thinking could apply to most everyday situations. Not that this was an everyday situation. Just particularly applicable.

I like to use the word applicable because it makes everything sound official and like it makes sense.

There is always some authority, and there is always some subversion and accommodation. I could feel myself trying to prove my stability by helping other patients, playing nurse, dressing up and wearing makeup to look clean, getting Wayne water and asking, "Wayne, do you need some water?" I did my homework in the common room to prove how accomplished I am.

The other patients would talk about how I don't belong here, because unlike them, I am completely fine. So I stopped spending time in the common room, because it just seemed inappropriate.

I like to use the word appropriate because it shows that I know right from wrong.

PROJECTS

2010-07-22T04:53:00.008+01:00

There is always a folder on my desktop called "PROJECTS." It's more encouraging than anything realistic, like a folder titled "YOU ARE DOING THINGS."
In 2005 I took a mother-daughter bonding trip to Kashmir with the intention of 1) studying for the GRE and 2) doing "a project."

Project is my favorite word, because it can mean anything. I think of newbies all the time. Science experiments (spurred from Madeleine L'Engle), diaramas (based on nostalgic memories of looking out my parent's bedroom window and wondering, "what's out there...?"), recordings of people that make me wish I didn't have the memory of a goldfish, self-improvement efforts that in being projects at all make me feel good about myself to the point where I don't have to follow through.
My project in Kashmir in 2005 was to write a meaningful piece on the plight of Kashmiris, accompanied by photographs. I did not come prepared with a list of questions. I assumed I knew what I was supposed to want to know. I asked all the right questions to all the right people. After all I had nothing else to do but drink tea and read Salmon Rushdie. In the end, my aunt who teaches English and could articulate it with all the nuances I needed, in the midst of a riot at the boys college because I was apparently not properly dressed or warned (hair down- don't even think about it) informed me that I didn't really know what was wrong. People needed food and jobs. As for Azadi, people hardly talked about it anymore.

Not the case today. Some people say Kashmir is not a war-zone because we don't resort to violence, we adopt non-violent protest. Others, including the Indian media, only refer to the stone-throwing by young boys as the proof that Kashmir needs to be tightly secured. Based on what my own family has had to endure, I'm not sure I can ever say that Kashmir is not a warzone, and my background is not based on articles in the newspaper, its just based on what my family says. Which is biased based on experience, versus being biased based on the particular books or articles one reads.

All I can do is break it into pieces.

What is the difference between a terrorist and a freedom fighter? How can we approach the general lack of education about Kashmir and Godwilling it will not resort to the possibility of a parallel to why most Americans now know what Islam is? How do we know what to believe from anyone when there are so many conspiracy theories? I know these aren't the questions that kids my age schooled in international relations or foreign policy would ask, but since I decided to spend five years reading the literary theories of dead white men (and the occasional woman), these are my questions.
I tried to interview my mother the other day, a list of questions prepared, and as we sat through our noon-day yukney (lamb with milk curry and every possible amazing spice you can imagine) bliss. She kept contradicting herself or asking why I cared or asking how should she know?
I don't read all the articles. They all contradict each other. But I talk to my family. I suppose this goes hand in hand with my obsession with oral histories- wanting to record what real people are going through, not just considering the official signings and dealings of complex political situations. It's not that this isn't important, it's just not what I'm interested in. I remember reading about the Muduwannah reform in Morocco a few years ago, and there were countless documentaries on how the actual change in law was 1) protested by many 2) not implemented 3) many DIDN'T EVEN KNOW about the changes.

Simple things count on a day-to-day basis. I wondered, so I did what I do not-best and asked someone about it. These are small excerpts- [I "re-spelled" some of this person's words to make them more clear, mostly making it less slang and more understandable to those unfamiliar with English slang spelling. Most things I left as they were.]

"It's almost a month since all this started and our chief minister is holdng an all party meetng tmrw.....guess he was sleepn tll now. The only thng he did waz called in army...to impose curfew."

(Which is still going on).

"...ppl say indians say we kashmiris want to merge wid pakistan but its not true - most of the ppl in kashmir want a autonomous state...evn ppl posting on facebook r under surveilence now..."

I told my mother about my conversations with my family. She doesn't know what facebook is or how I even communicate with them through email, and especially, why I am asking questions about the current conditions. But as things get worse I think she is catching on. For now I am no official reporter, I can only report the situation on the ground as told to me by my family.

Meanwhile mom says, "This is hardship they have to go through. Kya karan? It's not up to us."

ALL WRAPPED UP LIKE A BURRITO

2010-07-18T15:38:00.011+01:00

The first thing I did when I got to Amman was call my mother to complain to her that this "jilbab phenomenon" everyone was raving about- yeah, guess what- TRY WEARING IT IN THE WIND! I elongated and punctuated the words "in-the-wiiind" for effect, as though to emphasize the very concept of yards of black cloth billowing in the wind, no uncommonplace to fans of clotheslines or Marilyn Monroe. Half the girls here are wearing niqab although they don't wear it at home, as a sign of respect and accommodation to situation. I respect that completely, but it is still odd to hear them complain about it. "Sometimes the niqab gets caught in my mouth as I'm breathing" etc. It's actually funny to watch the "wave" of face to back each time a man walks by while we are eating in a public place. It's sort of like asking a slightly overweight thirteen year old girl why she insists on subjecting her feet to a pair of goth heels from Wild Pair. Just got to. It's not a big deal.

They have adopted it, dealt with it, complain about it, and it usually blows off their face as we walk to school anyway. I realized within hours that it only upset me because I didn't want to hear women complaining about it, I wanted to hear all the tales of glory and joy that come following an open and visible spiritual transformation. If a girl is complaining about when she has to wear her hijab, why can I not equate it with someone else complaining that their heels are killing them, they can hardly sit down with their dress on, or even at the most simple level, in an effort to look cute on a chilly Spring night, they are just so cold.
It's hard for me to make a differentiation between these girls, the hijabed women of Islam, the nuns of Christianity, the women of Orthodox Judaism, and the fashionably confused of the younger generation.

When you wear a jilbab, you feel religious. My form of burqa was sunglasses because honestly, I have asthma and my nose is not attracting anyone anytime soon. There I was in the barely bearable summer heat of the city walking up hills at noon, with all that fluttering and exposing of curves, and it felt so hypocritical. I was embarrassed every time I passed by a man and was still honked and whistled at. I didn't pay as much attention to whether men were paying attention to me- (largely because the women here are so ridiculously beautiful. YES frustrated Muslim unmarried men: if you want beautiful children, here's your ticket).

It only took a few days get used to the niqabs all around me at school, because it's not that difficult to read people by their eyes alone. My point: Tyra, as the queen of smizing, you would be an amazing niqabi. I might need to pitch it to the show. LESSONS IN SMIZING: Tyra Banks conquers even more new territory.
However, I can guess what she would probably say, as a supermodel speaking for women all over the world (although I can't be sure). Probably something similar to what one of my dear sisters said before she became Muslim - "what's with all these poor women wrapped up like burritos? Giiiiiiiiiirl?"
"Women parading around looking like batman" is another one of my favorites.
Wait, I can be a superhero? Let's get the facts straight...

I have to admit, sometimes illusions of grandeur are tempting. I can tell when people are intimidated by me and I can tell when they are intimidated by my mother, who acts as though she can see straight through you and wears a jilbab and hijab. For me, along with fear of hell, being unsure it is actually required to get into heaven, but figuring its worth a shot. The hijab is mostly a constant reminder to "be good," which is a kick in the butt I honestly need from time to time. There there's always Vanity smurf, who I grew up with and always wondered about. Almost every time I looked in the mirror I wondered if I was admiring myself, when really most of the time I was seeing images of my mother and how similar we look and completely terrifying myself. For me to adopt hijab because I am scared of hell is fine with me. For me to adopt it because I want to make a stand is fine as well. To adopt it just because I can feel something tugging down at me saying 'this is it,' even though I have no logically and grammatically sound recorded testament as to why I would wear it, is fine with me too, if I think it will contribute to making me a better Muslim. Whatever reason we start to wear hijab, it is part of God's trajectory for us to get to where we are supposed to be.

I will admit, my intellectual attraction to the ideas of Saba Mahmood in Politics of Piety did had a huge effect on me, not that it was written as an invitation in disguise for young confused Muslim women to go out and wear the veil and see how it changes them from the outside-in. She posited a motivation for wearing the veil in the idea that religious practice can change one's religious comportment. I was surprised to read about this new idea (or any new idea regarding Muslim women) and though a lot about it, and if the placebo effect were relevant here (and maybe it is)- that might be part of my inspiration to at least try. I know a headscarf does not equal a law abiding Muslim, but at the point where I am at in my spirituality, it can't hurt?
This concept is much more well articulated by Janan Delgato in her article in response to a NYT article. Delgato writes, our need to "dismiss once and for all the ill-conceived notion of universality of desire; Not all women find fulfillment and happiness in the same life choices... A second step is not to insult each other’s intelligence. Muslim women have not been brainwashed into Islam, nor are we waiting for anyone’s help to awaken from our supposed 'false-consciousness.' Islam is our informed choice."
I have read these articles so many times, and it is generally always the same debate, except that lately there is legislation at stake around the world and protests for mosques to be built here in the US. Didn't we get over this?

What can we say? It's a tough situation. I totally agree that there is confusion in women's subservience to God and subservience to men, but I also believe there are many Muslim women who do not feel the need to speak out about the western perception of women's low status in Islam. They still believe in their religion, and they have come to adopt this lifestyle despite the result of being limited in life choices based on being part of a particular culture and probably focus more on human rights in general than women's rights in particular.

My point, if I have one, is that the choice to wear hijab is based on different life experiences for everyone. At this point I can take a breath and relax with a cold and lemony fizzy drink on our rusty lawnchair and say, I'm doing this for you, God. Let's both hope for the best. Let's make some honey. The halal way.

2010-07-15T12:35:00.002+01:00

I might call myself the black sheep, all shifty eyed and wandering from the flock, but we all wear black all the time anyway. Didn't whoever made that rule understand that women always look better in black anyway?

COGITO ERGO SUM

2010-07-14T14:08:00.002+01:00

improv:
you should always be ready for where it takes you

The girls met for fruit and fruit juice at apartment B and we had an interesting conversation about what it means to be Muslim. One thing that has really struck me about my present company, although we don't have the same taste in music or heel size, we have really meaningful conversations that actually make me retreat to my room and think twice about.

Q.1. What do you have to be to call yourself Muslim?
I have met my family so I know the sentiments of some, and I have formulated arguments against them. Two days ago while waiting to get the mandatory HIV test in order to extend the Jordanian visitors visa (?) I read a paragraph in a book on Shafi' Fiqh about it, which was both cryptically and comfortably vague. I think a lot of us (American Muslims, "regular" Muslims) are asked on a regular basis, and some of us can think of an answer on the spot but I've never been good at improv. I even had to pretend to go to the bathroom to flee from a free nyc improv workshop once after being tricked by a friend. I don't have an issue with being rehearsed. It means you have practiced. And religion is practice. And practice makes perfect.

Q.2. Why do I need to explain myself? I think (I am a Muslim) therefore I am (a Muslim.)
Ya Jam3a! Sm3a! That was the sound of me thinking. Wait, Musim women can think? Let's rethink this... All the while, at Books@Cafe rooftop trying to drown out the sound of the men behind me taking inventory of how much they drank last night to drown their sorrows.

Taking inventory. It's in The Purification of the Heart by Hamza Yusuf as far as I can remember and according to the conversation Tony has with Christopher in the Sopranos, it is also a key step in AA. I have never done it but can only imagine it to be terrifying. I remember trying to do it once when my brother was going to Hajj- figured I' get it out of the way- but it never panned out. My mother always says to say your sins out loud on the jainamaz when you are asking for forgiveness, to make sure you keep track. It's so strange how applicable religious duties can be to secular life. Keep lists. Keep inventory. Don't get into debt. Daily habits that we don't think twice about, but we have it all there, maktub, so why is it even strange to recognize them? My mother probably takes inventory daily. Or five times daily.

(Variation of Q.1) So what does it mean to be Muslim? The list of questions I have prepared are the ones I need to ask myself and others, which in the modern world of course requires a voice recorder. I went to Radio Shack yesterday to try and find one but since I have already lost three in the past three years I'm starting to feel like I might not be meant to have one. Also, there is a feeling amongst the girls here that most people don't really care what other people think, they just want to make sure you don't get lost. This may be because I have a tendency for wandering off.

PLEASE BE SURE TO HAVE A LIST OF QUESTIONS PREPARED

2010-07-11T14:21:00.004+01:00

I can only remember my first days in Fez because
a) they were ridiculous
b) I started writing from day one.

Amman Street fashion: I can't say I'm impressed with anything so far except for the widespread meticulous attention to personal hygiene. We were told at orientation to "try not to be weird." I don't think this rang any alarm bells in anyone except me, judging from the lack of darting, shifty eyes.

It's always fun to see other people's first impressions of a city that you love (/own). I don't think I was ever outright mean to anyone who looked like they didnt love Tangier enough, but I probably had little respect for them. Here in Amman I have a newfound appreciation for these pitiful wanderers, especially after taking up this new project of trying "not to be weird."

Upon embarking on an unfamiliar place, like a new house or the nursing home your son is about to commit you to, they say to have a list of questions prepared. I have local resources here, but no idea what to ask them. This is why I will never succeed in journalism. I never know where to start. Aren't you supposed to start from the beginning? Same reason I failed at philosophy. How could I read Derrida if I hadn't read Heidegger if I hadn't read Hegel etc. In the end I had to assume Derrida was the origin of what I believed about literary theory. Funny, because in the end, even that bastard didn't believe in origins.
In its own language, a lack of a beginning only served to renew my faith in God.

Given my penchant for origins, I figured I would start at wst-al-medina. or at least that's what I heard the taxi driver call it (city center?). There are tons of western-style cafes with beautiful Jordanian girls with tatoos on their forheads saying "don't even think about trying to find a husband in this country srsly you don't even have your nails done."

I now know that this must be one of my many random gaps in common knowledge, but hijabis smoke sheesha in Jordan. I might try it if I thought the combination of smoke and fruit made any sense whatsoever. How can so many people enjoy this ridiculously contradictory habit? Maybe this is how atheists feel about us God-fearing believers. Or like how I feel about people that listen to the Pixies.

There are ashtrays everywhere but it appears men go out of their way to smoke only where there are no ashtrays. Like the very small enclosed places where I buy my batteries. At holidaytime, do children fashion smokemen instead of snowmen? Now there's a good question...

Open Letter

2010-07-01T11:56:00.004+01:00

Okay Jordan, I get it, we're not the best of friends. I am not particularly charmed by your Western ways and not your "Oriental" ways either. Let's make a deal. Disorient. We can be like the Black Eyed Peas and get confused and then get ashamed and then censor ourselves on the radio.

There is a honey store named after me but with an extra F. I am always either a brand of honey in a non-politically threatening country or a pharmacy in the middle of Iraq.
"Al-ShiFFA" Honey.
Everytime I see it it's like just seeing a giant F!
F-YOU SHIFA!
SHIFFFA!
The last thing present in that name is a shadda. I can't even concentrate on a word let alone a letter. And Al-Amr of "concentrate" -
irkaz.
Irkaz?

kaz what?

O Arabic. I know you can humor me and pretend to laugh at my jokes the way you would for any other embarrassing ex-girlfriend.

There is a scar on my foot the shape of Africa. To the T. Jordan, you gave it to me.
Kashmir is a butterfly and most other places are birds made out of maps and fabric sewed on paper.
I should learn more about birds. I think they are my spirit animal. Wooly mammoth, get out the way!
I can guess what the T stands for.

ASH BDDK?

2010-06-25T13:50:00.001+01:00

Isn't that what we're all asking? I spent six JDs to get driven around Amman to find some landmarks for my new map. (Dinos aren't inspiring me as they should in the embroidery department lately). I saw three Starbucks. Cultural centers. Shopping malls. Traffic circles. Most things looked like government buildings. Up near Shari'ah Mango I found a beautiful little crack in a wall with a view of the city like little post-it notes layered over each other on my wall when I have eight thousand things to do. I don't know how many thousands of people are in Amman. I can't even identify the prominent physical features of the local residents. I still don't know which traffic circle I live closest to. And most importantly I need to find something to do between the hours of 3:30 - 6 am. (While the gym is technically a two bedroom apartment that I have the key to, it is "closed" then).

To be clear, Amman is more like stacks of the post-its that Dad gets free from the pharmaceutical companies. Those are all one color. Guess which color.

صار

2010-06-25T06:55:00.006+01:00

I am becoming the kind of woman that takes pride in her home.
This morning I cleaned the kitchen floor tiles with a sponge that may as well have been a toothbrush. The garbage leaked yellow and someone had dragged it across the floor. I got on my knees to clean that disgusting mess and when my hand grazed past the water cooler I felt a tingle. When I reached back behind the cooler I felt a jolt like sizzling streak up my arm and the loud humming noise of the cooler stopped and the machine turned off.

I think I stole the powers of the water cooler.
I am either going to die or I now have the power to heat, cool and dispense water at will. I am becoming one of the X-men.

It is enough to have Amman outside of my windows. I can calmly take care of my own things inside, unaware of the world out there and who those people are and what the signs say. Along with my heart, I think I left the knot in my stomach in Tangier. There is something about this city that is just interesting enough to keep me content and just boring enough that spending a day at the apartment cleaning, cooking NPRing, writing, reading, working, googling miscellaneous questions, instant cappuccino and serious arabic homework multitasking, doesn't feel inappropriate. In fact, I have as of late been feeling particularly munaasiba. There is no imaginary street kid tugging at my sleeve asking me for a euro and beckoning me towards the Kasbah.

It is safe to say that my relationship with cities can be self-destructive. Of course Tangier was the love of my life, and that held a certain kind of pressure. I am too caught up. I'm that girl that stops hanging out with all her friends because my boyfriend is just that awesome.

And it was too tempting to play a part. It was like they wrote it just for me like directors do for Penalope Cruz. I didn't know exactly what I was getting at, but I had some help from my friends. The help is what dragged me down in the end. Don't sleep with the help.

Everything feels brown and simple and I am enjoying the simplicity of it. I have only been here for a week but I can imagine never leaving and not feeling bad about it. If I stayed, it would be because this is the type of place God wants us to live. This is a desert.

I joined a gym. It might break me if I wasn't one of the X-men. Took a walk down to Souk-Al Medinah, a small shopping area a short walk from Hay Alkharabsheh and bought single pieces of fruit from a few of the vendors. I bought a titleless film for a dollar starring Miley Cyrus and when I got home repeatedly watched and laughed at her tribal dance performance of Can't be Tamed. Penelope Cruz does something similar in "Nine."

This time last week I was in Budapest. It's another weekend. The women don't usually go to the mosque in Jordan unless there is a women's area and they don't reappropriate it on Fridays to accommodate the men. I could get all dressed for it and look for one. I could wear myself inside out and keep a set of clothes with me in my purse just in case I'm out of place. Usually a safe bet.

HUNGARIAN FORINT (HUF)

2010-06-23T12:40:00.003+01:00

He huffed and he puffed and he blew your house down.

It took me an hour to convince the personnel at the Ferihegy airport that they weren't allowed to lock me in the airport overnight. A boy who looked like the alienesque guy from SNL gave me a voucher for a cab after watching me cry for ten minutes. Everyone outside the airport doors seemed genuinely concerned and the crying upset them.
I was escorted to the nearest hotel which turned out to be fully booked with a drunken wedding party. The second place had a room for me with a little black box hanging precariously in the corner, occasionally playing English music videos.
The alleycats looked like albinos.

The cats in Amman look relatively healthy and there aren't many. When I look out my bedroom window I can convince myself I'm in Tangier. The building across the street is encased in three tiers of curved wall like the one that says Tanger Danger across from the Cervantes. Except this one is a parking garage and I'm pretty sure they sell heroin out of the back windows of the one inTangier.
The sky behind it fades into white at the horizon so the hill looks like it was cut out of a magazine and glued on.

We prayed at three different masjids on a tour of Amman today. We drove through mountains. They could have been sand dunes. If I was in a better mood I might describe them as compiled mounds of diarrhea. Everything here is the same color.
My polaroid is lost in my lost luggage. I brought my last five packs of film that expired last year and travelled through as many airport security lines as I have, except they had to be huddled up in the corner of my carry-on trying to stay quiet like battered children hiding in the attic. I can see them wincing in the past tense.

The film is damaged enough that ninety percent of the pictures are sepia toned brown squares and ten percent are vague outlines pushing through a sepia toned cloud. I like these. I like them enough that I keep these packs of expired film with me and make sure they are hand-checked at security and wrap my polaroid in shawls and towels so I can pack them for faraway countries to return with eighteen brown squares representative of that country in sepia tone.

It's called the white city but really everything is brown. What I mean is, nine times out of ten I can take a picture of something and that thing will be brown. There is wisdom in the losing of it. I would have been driven to look for flashes of color or starkly contrasting objects. I wouldn't have noticed much else. Plus, what's the fun in a picture that doesn't know how to lie?
I have another camera back home and I'll save the film for October when the berries ripen in the backyard.

The Moroccan: Juz Wahid.

2010-03-07T01:47:00.004Z

In the spring of 2001 my mother's knee replacement surgery left her heavily doped up on Loritab and other colorful round pills she kept in an Ibuprofin bottle re-labeled MOTHER by my father on a piece of scotch tape in slanty illegible doctor handwriting. He writes over each letter a few times to make it more clear but actually it looks like the words are vibrating.
I was living with two Spanish boys on the other side of the world working Tuesdays and Thursdays as a librarian for the British Council of Tangier. The Brits let me work there even though I am American and most of them never bothered to learn my name even thought they sat in the chair across from me for the full three hours of my shift confiding in me with restless skeletons in the closet or samples of their writing. They called me "the Moroccan."

I would call to my mother late at night from the Cinematheque when it was still early in New York, to keep up on things. I wanted to know who was getting married and who had died and how they died and who had to perform the burial cerimony. Our Kashmiri community was growing again and was probably bigger than it was at its peak, around the time I was born. Most of the older kids moved away and we didn't really know the new additions that well and didn't know who any of the kids belonged to when they were running around our house at dinner parties breaking things and hiding people's shoes.

When the pain was more acute my mother would admit her relief at the gradual lack of her social obligations, or even having to adhere to social graces. At some point between '99 and '02 she started to refer to the Kashmiri dinner parties that had formed our social lives until we reached high school as "those weird gatherings." We stopped hosting them. It had been a tradition since the small beginnings of a community in in our small town, and back then we mostly talked about the war. The men would gather in one room and smoke and argue, and the women would drink tea in the next room and make tea for their husbands and talk about their husbands. Us kids would set up an assembly line in the basement and make friendship bracelets to sell at the yearly Islamic Convention for the KKK : "Kashmir Kids Klub." We were young.

Most families arrived in the neighborhood between '75 and '80 and all had stories about the blizzard, mostly getting trapped at the hospital or getting trapped at home without their husbands and with two little kids and they didn't speak English yet. She says it was terrifying then but now we can laugh about it, thinking of her there at home confused and frantic and probably cold and taking care of the kids. She likes to tell the story about a different woman who once put laundry detergent in the dishwasher and her kitchen overflowed with bubbles. My mother is one of the only women in the community that is not a practicing physician. We enjoyed having her at home when we were growing up and now my older brother insists on marrying a girl who will do the same for him and for his children, and I am regularly encouraged to practice hosting tea parties for my impending fate since I am not a doctor and clearly going nowhere.

I managed to stay close enough to my mother to warrant calling her every couple of days from Tangier. After the surgery the conversations became mostly one-sided, as though she was sitting alone at home all day and the only time she had a chance to speak to anyone but "cat" was when I called her. The only times I didn't call was when we took trips across the strait to Spain. I can't even imagine how much she would worry if she pictured me on that rocky boat floating from the lips of Morocco to the little lips of Spain, munching on a frozen cheese "sandweesh," watching the waves redirect the boat mid-smooch.

2010-01-04T08:51:00.002Z

M--- : "I woke up in a bush. it wasn't a huge deal. Someone got me out. Some french guy. He didnt try anything. He drove me home in exchange for a cigarette. It was nice, we talked. We talked about how to not let the city use you the way it wants to. It was like he was telling me about a woman he knew. Maybe he was. He was probably telling me about the woman he was with that night. I remembered seeing him in the drawing room. It was the kind of estate that still has something called a drawing room. The woman was wearing a green dress and I told her my earrings would look really nice with the dress so I gave them to her. They were the most beautiful shade of blue and I never got them back. She probably never wears them."

moonlighting

2009-11-30T11:08:00.003Z

It's a full moon tonight. It's the one/two nights of the year that I allow myself to be crazy. It's great.

I am more that happy with the latest addition to my collection of mint-green 9x9 ft bedrooms to live in. I never see my roommates and our relationships are strictly monetary.
Harlem will always be home. Every morning someone compliments the boots that most of my friends refuse to be seen with me in. The Palestinian deli guy gives me free sandwiches if i come in past 2am when all the lights are off, the M7 gets me to the pastry shop in 5 minutes and I have mastered the art of gypsy cab bargaining. (shout out to M-co)

A recent facebook comment from someone I remember as the girl who vomited in her hair once reminded me of a childhood ritual and prelude to blogging. Every night my father would have us write "The Page," which was essentially a sheet of loose leaf paper filled to the margins with anything we could think of, to prove that we were learning. I remember devoting about 4 x 4 inches to lists of ridiculous vocabulary words (I used to read the dictionary during recess), listing words that rhymed with each other, and learning what an essay was when my older brother out-did me and wrote one first. Mine was about cows, and how much I like them. But my favorite thing to write about was what I saw out my parents' bedroom window every night, because it had the best view of the moon. Every night I would continue the saga of the moon-people (which curiously resembled typical Bollywood movie plots) and try to imagine what they were doing. At an early age we were taught in Sunday School that all those cute little planetary balls floating around in space have creatures on them, so it seemed only natural that they had lives and dramas of their own.

Every night my father would file our Pages in the rest of the piles of files and paperwork that he brought home with him every night, and he would look over them before we went to sleep, which was usually much earlier than when he went to sleep. In exchange for the Page, we got Hershey bars. It seemed like a fair trade. My father kept a stack of them in his closet just below a giant green bowl where he emptied out his change every night and my brother and I would go through it every couple of weeks and roll about $10 worth of nickels and quarters. The only time we ever stole from the Hershey bar stack was when he asked us to go into the closet and look through his suit pockets to try and find his checkbook because he couldn't remember where he put it or which suit he wore that day. The only other thing that earned us this chocolaty delight was when we invited our friends over to help clean the basement. Dad made them write a Page too. Then they got two Hershey bars.

Twenty years later, I don't get Hershey bars for being a good learner, but I do get funded, which I guess is a better deal, although not as delicious. Meanwhile, I hardly ever get to talk to my father now that he has started moonlighting at the hospital when he should be retiring, to pay for all of those years that no one thought I deserved to be funded.

It's a full moon.
I love you Dad.

EVERYONE I KNOW IS FINE

2009-11-22T18:06:00.011Z

EVERYONE I KNOW IS FINE

١. Climate // CALAMITY

The accent led her to take these two words as the same word and she
developed metaphors around their being
the same thing and would talk about the wisdom in that thing of
their being the same thing.

Then using the words SHE and HER became something SENTIMENTAL and I had to stop using them.
I started using quotations because it makes it more "alive."

ب. GHEE:

"At the end put in more ghee: put some more ghee and it makes it better. Makes it tasty."
Mom sent me two bags of halva and encouraged me to have a tea party.

ج. Heaven and Fruit: usually you don't bother with the fruits you've never heard of anyway.

"We drink beer here because we won't have it there..." sung to the tune of a song I've never heard.
How do we know what's there?
Do women get virgins too?
Why would we want them?
Do we get to be the virgins? Is this really how it works?

4. WHITE: the medication makes you painfully sensitive to light.

The starchy white pages of the books we bought from the Islamic Bazaar, vibrating text
printed twice over but not in the same exact spot
makes for fat words talking about hell and insects and occasionally heaven and fruit.

5. In HELL: I was promised a way out.

"If you picture yourself in hell, you'll just snap out of it."

6. Capital letters are the start of something: sometimes when things aren’t moving
forward it gives you time to deal with the old things.

7. Periods are the ends of things: at a girl's first period she stops wearing shorts.

She attends her first and last baseball game with her brother's boyscout troop. She beats them all at bowling.

8. The TRICK: A pinch of baking powder!

Pretend you're a virgin every time they never don't want to believe you.

9. One HEEL: in the middle of the floor like a dead mouse.

When pretending to be a virgin wear black heels they always believe you.

10. One BOOT: with a cockroach in it waiting to give me a surprise party.

They won't send you flowers on your birthday but it was fun anyway.

11. TO BOOT: he reappears within days because I set him free.

12. TWO BOOTS: with little mice in them waiting for me to step on them.

That never really happened though.

13. MOVING THINGS: those people on the subway that don't hold on to anything.

Some day I will yell at all of them at the same time.

14. The First Moving Thing: moving and shaking makes something out of nothing.

And THAT,
is where babies come from.

حومة (sp?)

2009-09-07T04:16:00.006Z

In a desperate attempt to make make time self-destruct in the last two hours and twelve minutes of daylight, I decided to explore the hood. The best part of moving is the getting-to-know-you getting-to-know-all-about-you part, finding little spots and seeing the local kids and thinking about what their life is like now and if they will remember it this way when they're older the way I remember things about when I was little and where I grew up. Finding the little bars where normal people go and wondering if I will disrupt the rhythm of things if I went there to in a pathetic attempt at being nostalgic for something I never experienced

It's not the same as regret, because it's not something I knew I could have been doing.
Anyway, the rhythms of these places are too ingrained to be disrupted. That's why we like them. I know I could do whatever damage I want and it wouldn't matter, nothing ever changes, it's used to being disrupted, like Tangier, like Buffalo. These are my only two homes, so maybe everything is like that and I've just been giving them too much credit. But it's not just me. I know that much. I've read it in somebody else's book too.

MY TRAVELING PANTS

2009-08-29T23:44:00.010Z

The people of the town have a right to know

I am a local person.

I have no right to combining,
neither apparent combining nor real combining
neither apparent nor real combinations of salutations
and I salute you, members of the community.

At least three DVD vendors in Tangier think they are eventually going to marry me and it's not my fault. Each time I go back I get to learn new things about what I've been up to while I was gone. Sometimes the references make sense, or if the stories had titles they could apply to something I might do.

One of them gives me gifts. He leaves them at the cinema and then sits outside the hanout with the Marlboro men until I get there. I think he has been forced to make friends with a lot of the guys in the Socco because of this habit, and also smokes less because he can't smoke in the more public of the public, and by default this makes me a good person.

It had been a while since I'd got a gift but then, it had also been a while since I'd been in Tangier. He asked his messenger what I thought when I got it, and the messenger told him that I laughed. He held on to his fury.
"No. She was laughing on the outside but crying on the inside."

We're all in this together, the men on the corner and the crazy people and
I am also in on this. In December we agreed to disagree and I reverted to the comfort of being mute.
Wouldn't say something like, my mother looks just like Fairouz before the nose job. I can't even imagine saying that. But I know I said it like five or six times not that long ago.

The turnover rate is increasing but so is the rate of return,
and I can quietly go back
to being a local person
contained in one small pocket of the city.

BIR CHIFA //احسن يوم EVER

2009-08-21T14:18:00.008Z

I canceled on Hamid three times before i decided to stop being a douchebag and make my way to the cafe at 2:30, the time we both agreed would be most appropriate for me to meet him there, "because I can just keep working until 3:00 and you can just sit and have coffee and then neither of us will be waiting for each other like I waited for you before for a really long time all those other times," he said. It was also the mid-day slump when the taxi shifts were changing so anyone that knows what's good for them stays home in the midday heat, and the shifts at the cafe also change, so everyone is there all at once like a big family, first the night shift in regular clothes, then the day shift in regular clothes. Most of them wear fisherman vests, except Hamid, who wears muscle tanks.

The taxis to Bir Chifa are lined up on a very upright street next to the shop where I buy djellabas for my father and brother every time I go home to visit and they never wear them. I felt the need to make awkward small talk with Hamid along the way, since we were smushed together in the front seat, and soon realized it was, if not inappropriate, unnecessary to speak. We passed through parts of Tangier that I had never seen before, until we stopped at a small grey intersection where the buildings were also grey, and angular where the second floor juts out over the first floor.

Bir Chifa is one of the highest points of the city. We could see everything. Every patch of white and yellow and red and that shade of pink mostly only old people like to wear. Hamid spread his arms out nervously and said, "Bir Chifa," presenting it to me officially, and I realized he was nervous that I wouldn't like it and he wouldn't look directly at me. I hated realizing this, because it meant I would unnaturally emphasize my appreciation, even though it was sincere. I responded something like, "I love it bzzzzzeff." He nodded and kept avoiding eye contact and we kept walking. He mentioned to me in the taxi that his brother is still a tailor, and has a shop that we could go to. I declined at the time but it appeared we were going there anyway. Hamid was also a tailor when he was young and when I first met him I would ask if he could teach me how to make a djellaba. In retrospect and perhaps even at the time I could sense this was mildly inappropriate, for a twenty-two year old American girl to ask a twenty-two year old Moroccan boy if he could give her sewing lessons. It's probably one of the reasons we are still friends.
Anyway he never did it. We had one of our many falling outs before I had a chance to even get to Bir Chifa.

We stopped at a long green wall with a moped parked in front. I assumed it wasn't Hamid's because he sold his the last time I was in Tangier so he could buy a newer, faster one, and this one was more beat up than his last one. He shouted up to the second floor of the building and a few heads poked out, then ducked back in and a few minutes later his brother opened the door for us. The walls were like bubblegum and the floor was wonderfully covered in scraps from tailored women's clothing. Hamid demonstrated some of his skills on the makina while I loaded my camera- it seemed like the only way to convince him that I did really like it, and I wasn't mocking him when I said I wanted to live here. I had to be careful in crafting my sentences to be clear that I would be living either alone or with many women, also being careful not to use the phrase "house of women."
"Maybe we'll be neighbors some day!"
He smiled and nodded slowly, letting me know he was humoring me.
This was all, of course before I learned that the houses in Bir Chifa are actually more expensive than in other parts of town, closer to the city. Needless to say, this finding-a-house-in-Tangier-because-I-can't-find-a-husband thing still requires a lot more research and consideration on my part.

As we were leaving the shop, a plump woman in a blue headscarf peeked her head out in search for Hamid. A minute later we were sitting in his home, on his couch, watching TV with the woman, his step-mother. One of the first things Hamid had told me when I met him was that his mother had passed away, and that I looked just like her.
I luckily did not look like his step-mother. She looked slightly alarmed as though ready to pounce, but managed to smile as she stared at me sideways. We chatted about the Saudi Sheikh giving a lecture on TV. Hamid's brothers passed through the living room several times and were very polite. We sat this way for a couple of minutes until we got to the point where everyone in the room was looking around nervously like jittery birds, we said our salaams and headed for the qahwa.

Hamid not-so-innocently hyped up the qahwa by casually mentioning that Mohammed went there everyday after his morning shift, or before his night shift. "He pulls up a chair from the qahwa over there and brings it here to this spot, and sits here and drinks tea all night. Just like we're doing right now!" He pulled two plastic chairs over to the large expanse of dirt overlooking the city, and we made a table for ourselves in the middle of nowhere. To the left of us were four rows of parallel streets, a mini-howma, which I immediately identified as my howma. The first building in each row was simple grey concrete but I could tell there were some gems further in. I told Hamid my plan over and over, pointing to houses I thought would compliment my personality. He told me I probably couldn't afford a house in Bir Chifa. I had explained to him earlier how much debt I was in from college and now I regretted this. I really do want to be one of those rolly polly women sitting on the side of the road in a row. I wanted him to believe me.

We spent the afternoon at Mohammed's spot. Hamid told me stories about getting hit on by the European and American men that frequent the cafe and tips on how to avoid the especially creepy ones. I told him I was a lesbian and he didn't believe me, but did help me pick out potential girlfriends on the walk back to the taxi. Every couple of sentences he would throw in an endearing comment or funny story about Mohammed, and to my astonishment and delight, confirmed Absalom's previous claim that there were no hard feelings. He shrugged. "He married a Rifia."

He asked me what I thought of his neighborhood, over and over, and I insisted, every time, I heart Bir Chifa I heart Bir Chifa, but I know he didn't really believe me. So he'll just have to wait until I can prove it with a T-Shirt. Forthcoming.

ضريفة ومزيانة \\ NICE AND GOOD

2009-08-19T16:50:00.004+01:00

"Cheeeeefa. Cheeeeefa." It sounded like a muffled scream under a heavy layer of track 4 from the mix CD Frank made me for my birthday.
Then an awkward poke of the arm and a mimed plea for me to remove my headphones. O Absalom. How is it that you so often end up randomly walking behind me?

"Asalamalaikum Absalom. Lebass?"
It was around 11pm near the door of the Minzah and he probably just got off work. He kept his goofy smile on and immediately dove into a lecture on the social implications of constantly wearing soundcancelling headphones.
"When I say Salaam, you don't see me!" was the gist of it.
"Well I saw you just now."
"No you didn't I had to follow you."
The subject quickly changed to how I was making everyone think I didn't want to talk to them by being so unapproachable.
"You know, Chifa," he leaned in close as we made the turn onto Rue de la Liberte. "There are people like that here. Daeeman m3asaba. Always moody. But I know you're not like that. You're a nice girl, a good girl." I could feel him framing me in his peripheral vision, waiting for me to agree. "Now, Mohammed, you know, he's kind of like those other people...moody...mean..."

It was enough of a shift in topic that I could sense this would be one of his "let's talk about Mohammed so Chifa gets embarrassed" moments.
"You know, one day, he was spending time with you, here and there, having fun, good friends, and the next- all of a sudden he got married! Safi! No more Chifa."
He continued to bizarrely narrate the history of my rocky friendship with Mohammed as if we were in the first scenes of a sequel and he was catching up those members of the audience that were just tuning in. He even brought up the birthday cake.

"...and it was so strange because you were so nice to all the rest of us and kept coming to the cafe. You talk to everyone, even my ugly brother Ahmed ..."

"...and we all had so much fun when we went to that wedding in Bir Chifa..."

..."then you spent Ramadan with us at the cafe and Mohammed was so mean! Remember that?"

He narrated my life to me with empathy and was clearly trying to elicit some vulnerability on my part, so I performed.
"Yeah! That was mean! Why did he do that!?"
A huge part of me was curious about what had caused Mohammed's freak out years before. Even post-birthday cake, he had invited me to his wedding in Al-Hoceima, then subsequently uninvited me post-freakout. The boys gave me hints every once in a while, but nothing concrete.
He took my arm in his as we entered the old medina, facing a swarm of women with strollers and kids on bikes, wobbling back and forth.
"I'll tell you why. You know, Mohammed, he didn't just get married. He married a Rifia."

I knew this. A Rifia from Al-Hoceima. I even wrote a poem about it. The ة endings are irresistible.

"And she told him, the day you marry me, you have to stop speaking to all other women! So he did. That's it." He peered at me. "I told him it wasn't right, you were so nice, but he was scared of her. But now even he tells me how nice and good you were. You didn't do anything wrong." He paused and looked away as if to provide sufficient time for my inner monologue.

As we walked past the baisara guys calling my name, I thought about this possibility. It seemed strange that it hadn't occurred to me. Mostly because I knew I had done something wrong. About 100 things. Most of them involving inappropriate offerings of baked goods. The birthday cake! I never forgave myself. Was Absalom absolving me of years of guilt? Apparently I had just been overreacting this whole time, ignoring my good friend, who I missed, for no good reason.

We were nearing my final stop in the Souk Dhakhel, and I said as much, knowing I needed to be alone to mull over these new revelations.
"Wait wait I'll come with you."
"Nooo, I prefer to be alone, inshaAllah I'll see you tomorrow."
"Nooo, I'll come with you."
"Nooo."
"Nooo."
"...nooo."
"SuperHadda Beach Club!"
"Shnoo?"
"SuperHadda Beach Club! Let's go!"

I noticed a curious glimmer in his eyes. Absalom then went into a strange fit of raving about SuperHadda Beach Club. "Wow! It's so great! Music! Dancing! Wow! I invite you! C'mon! At SuperHadda Beach Club, all you do is say Whisky! and they give you whisky. You say Red Wine! and they give you red wine. Wow!" He was speaking in English now, and it was getting out of hand. Seriously ليس مناسب.
"I'm sorry, Absalom, I don't go to places like that."
Disbelief. Repetition. He explained again, the garden of earthly delights that was Superhadda Beach Club. Then he dropped the bomb.

"You know, Mohamed was saying you should go. He says how you are so nice and good and he wants you to go. He told me to take you."

The level of his desperation had reared its ugly head. This was the same Mohammed that insisted my Ramadan fasts didn't count because I wasn't wearing a djellaba and would daily beg me to consider wearing the hijab and yelled at me for buying him a birthday cake. It was clear what was going on. Absalom had hit a new low.

I left him at this juncture, and re-welcomed the strong possibility/fact that the birthday كعك was a mushkil, I was past the point of no return with Mohammed, and I would probably never live in Al-Hoceima. Word on the street travels faster by street-cat.

God chuckled to himself then got all serious: يا شفاء, you can continue to be ashamed of your سلوك
كان ومازال ليس مناسب
The joke's on you.

THE SHEKL OF THINGS

2009-08-03T21:32:00.010+01:00

3/4 way through the most eerie summer ever- where "ever" now officially means 1/4 century. It's becoming difficult to form words around experience.

My English is failing me and Tangier is gaining on me.

I keep falling asleep in bushes and hardly have time to respond to harassment- one of my favorite pastimes back in '07- let alone fleamarketing, public ovening, kittening, etc.

Between broken relationships and broken plurals, the shekl of things has molded into a sickly shade of green with envy for anything that speaks Arabic and people with cars passing through Souani.

Things we've always known still surprise us- we are not famous in Tangier but everyone knows us.
One false move could be the end of us. The more you are loved the easier it is to disappoint and the more you are watched the easier it is to see the flaws and the brighter your leggings the easier it is to spot you!

I don't want to jump to conclusions and say Tangier is jealous, but he is not used to seeing me out in public with other boys, so I can only assume ... my comrades are too white to pass for brothers, so I stick to classmate and hope it has the same non-threatening impersonal connotation as it does in English, and occasionally add "srsly i dont even know them" as a precaution but it just comes off as suspicious.

Floating in the refuse of my neglect of Beni Mekada, Bir Chifa and Tanja Maghogha, my neighborhood maps are still half drawn and I keep accidentally doing my Arabic homework on the back and handing them in.
walikin-
A beacon! (the good kind): redemption at Al-Hoceima.
I knew it was a fluke back in '08 when the city where I know my fate at least partially lies was repelling me like an overeager potential love interest. So I gave it another go, and thankfully. I knew he could grow to love me the way his older, more refined distant cousin could. Just took time. The trip consisted mostly of inappropriate naps and eerily decorated cafes and glimpses of the King on the tenth anniversary of his reign. The baisara isn't as good and the beaches are black but I'll be back. I can feel it like a tiny ant crawling up my forearm.
I have to make the myths before I debunk them and draw the maps before I embroider them.
It is my duty to the city.
Really, this is my true wajib.

I've been reading about our good friend "Ibn Battuta" in our good friend "Fus'ha" and find myself bombarded by dates of each of his travels which quickly led me to the conclusion that it's time to start dating again. Today it is 2009. It will be Ramadan in 2 1/2 weeks. I am leaving in 9 days, and I arrived here in 2006 which means 3 is the lucky number.

Of course, as is the course, relations are constantly breaking and the tiny kittens keep dying but I can feel the vacant lots filling with promising, useful things, remeniscent of tiny kittens- things like old men in wobbly chairs who never fall down.

deenii m3ak

2009-06-07T20:48:00.011+01:00

The factory minarets are a beautiful shade of powder blue. The boy sitting across from me looks Moroccan. We are eating the same bagel and watching the same episode of Lost. Past his profile through the window is a manufacturing plant of some sort. I always suspected I belonged in an industrial town. Something with a non-functioning railroad and lots of big, fat white cylinders with tiny stairs curving upwards on one side. Ideally, many of the construction projects will be left unfinished. Different levels of nostalgia and romanticizing would collide into one cinematic life, the whole way through.
Something is constructed over old, ruined things as heavy machinery bulldozes through them. The poky movements of the enormous yellow Caterpillar make me wish I had one and knew how to use it. My regular way of ruining things, while effective, would pale in comparison to a method involving heavy machinery. It would also be the closest I can ever get to being a dinosaur.

While I might consider my return to Tangier a triumphant one, you can never be sure if the city will welcome you back with open arms. Old street buddies get fired or disappear, secret beaches are buried under new roads, adopted street-cats turn up dead, the men who used to respect you make a last ditch effort to wed you and the men you fell for are still just not that into you. But aside from the details, the blueprint is the same and you can always find it, but maybe have to search the pockets and if the pockets are empty, you might have to fiddle with some buttons and if you’re still left with nothing, you’re probably just not her type. Move on!

I recently declared a silent war on prevailing notions of the Tangerine spirit, and have decided to challenge these false ideologies with my own, true ones. There is nothing more worthwhile than arguing against one subjective experience for another, more correct one. What have these years taught me, if not how to vocalize “the spirit of the city” with brevity and zeal; to retrace my steps and draw a map that would lead others down the same shwaari3 I once trod, and as long as everyone stands reaaally still, they would, soon after, “know what I mean.”

In an effort to balance out these last three years of idealism, I hope to disenchant the enchanted by debunking the myths and then immediately re-affirming them. If I am successful, I will then re-shape the image of the city in my own image; if I’m lucky, the whole summer will feel like one long refusal, comprised of many teeny-tiny refusals. In the spirit of negativity, everything I write and photograph will house within itself a negation of something I once said, or something someone else said before me.

WHEATISH

2009-04-24T02:12:00.011Z

MADRID TRIPTYCH

2009-01-19T00:12:00.010Z

When you spontaneously travel to Morocco for winter break, your bank may judgmentally put a stop on your credit card because they find it extravagant that a poor student would make such an unwise financial decision, or because that little list of charges from the Tangier Airport conjures up images of some curly topped olive skinned Simo who finally got a fucking break after all his years of scamming, although they shouldn’t think such things because you warned them about your trip weeks in advance. Perhaps some curly haired olive skinned Patel forgot to make the note in your account record.
He didn’t tell me he was curly haired or olive skinned but he did tell me his name was Patel. I trusted him immediately because he let his accent roam free and didn’t say his name was Jim.

Patel’s infatuation with the distractingly hot new intern working in the cubicle beside him left me with no choice but to spend the night rooming with a German couple, in “Bed 3” of Room 417 where there is only one key so although we were strangers we were forced to coordinate our actions and become friends for the day and night I was in Madrid. I gave them tips about where to go in Morocco if they ever decided to venture back after the horrible experience they had, and wanted to point out that they would have trouble no matter what because the girl was so fucking hot, but somehow felt shy about pointing this out- it must be the Maha in me. I've been suspecting for years that she is slowly taking over my identity. I must be 7 parts shifa to every 2 parts Maha. She's gaining on me.

I remained quiet and uncomfortable even after they both teamed up to try and help me remove my boot, which was clinging to me the way I used to grapple my mother’s leg like a frantic koala when she dropped me off to nursery school as I screamed "noooooogggghhhh!!!!" (Was it me or was it Maha?) I thought about my childhood screams and felt bad for the boot, so I left it and was that much closer to being ready for my flight. The boy asked if I wanted to leave on the television so that we couldn’t hear each other breathing and I said I guess I don’t care and it was as decidedly creepy way of saying goodnight.

I had two hours to visit the Museo Nacional del Prado on Friday. I will preface this by saying it was amazing and among my favorites. My mother would have loved it, all those walls saturated with images of hell. I was on a Goya mission and in some sections had to oscillate between a trot and a gallop because a simple jog was attracting too much attention. I kept wishing for those fat white sneakers with wheels that make me want to attack small children in the grocery store.

I attracted attention in any case unless it was one of those places where everyone stares at everyone which would be strange because you’ve got all these breathtaking triptychs to guide you through the vices of man and life of Jesus and up into heaven then back down into the fiery pits of hell. I decided upon reflection that the stares were because I was alone, and I didn’t notice anyone else alone, and maybe this is not common practice in European museums. It could also have been that I strongly resembled an animal that had recently been attacked by a larger animal.

I’m not sure why the Queen Mariana was one of my favorites, something about how she is making the same face I made when I was twelve and got into a fight with my mother and immediately after had to get my passport photo taken and I have been looking at that damn face since 2001 and can’t make a new one until 2011 and I can’t even begin to think what she must be feeling. I also really like her dress and intend to sew one just like it, minus about 98% of the frills. I’m not a no-frills woman. Always good to have some frills.

Otherwise, Las Meninas, The Garden of Earthly Delights, and Descent from the Cross all scared the shit out of me. And to wrap it up Patenier brought me back to Tangier because everything was so blue, with little fiery hellish clouds in the distance. You can almost see the devil narrowing his eyes and setting his sights from behind them.

A visit to the Prado is a great cultural replacement for those poorly bound books we used to buy from Islamic Convention Bazaars, with the starchy white pages describing the imminent, fiery fate of the disbelievers. Bring rollerskates and you can skim through hell and land comfortably in the lap of a plump Virgin Mary, or better yet, the bed of Goya's "Nude Maja." And you even have the option of "The Clothed Maja," if you're gonna be shy about it.

BACK ON THE TRAIN

2009-01-10T15:57:00.005Z

They sell you a ticket even if the train is pulling out, give you your change then slap the desk and yell "go catch it!"

I made a getaway to Meknes. It was night when I boarded the train so I didnt discover until the morning that the space between Sidi Kacem and Meknes is one of my favorites, in a dilapidated, farmish, evenly spaced trees kind of way. I could also use those adjectives to describe myself so it's really all very narcissistic. My compartment mates including two giggling girls and the boy who spent the entire four hours eating nuts and staring at my face and various other parts of my body.

I searched for air in the space between the door and the storage car behind us. A hoard of boys and one older man rushed past me pushing me aside and opening the storage car doors so the freezing air came rushing at me and I had a chance to say "sh3andiiiiik!?"
They ignored me, and in a few minutes all but one turned back. The mustached man whispered something in the boy's ear then also left. A minute later he returned and locked the doors leading to the storage car. The boy eventually came out of the bathroom and tried to re-enter our car, found the doors locked, and casually mimed for me to open them. I casually mimed back that the man had locked them. In a swift gesture he buried his head in his sweater and crouched into a ball and when he rose into my view again his face was wet and his eyes were red and I couldnt hear him over the howling of the train but I am pretty sure he was screaming, judging from the curve of the O of his mouth. I stared in horror and looked back and forth between him and the first class hallway and couldn't think of anything to do but pause my ipod out of respect. A uniformed ONCF employee returned to the spot and I did the miming locking the door again thing and he said he knew then asked if I would rather return to my seat and I said no I want to watch. I said something about fresh air ("ripe wind").

At the Hotel Majestic the blankets are warm and the light is dim and I fell asleep to Shahrukh Khan's wife not recognizing him without his mustache for the first 3/4 of the film. The morning brought fat rain drops falling on my head from dirty, high up places. I went flea-marketing in the mud where masses of heavy-booted children were being treated to gifts for Ashura and my general intolerance for greedy little hands left me mildly disgusted by all the pointing and wailing and "that one! that one too! wah!" Plus, the children in Meknes stare at me in a way that mini tangerines do not. At the Mausoleum of Moulay Idriss a giant pink coat with a head sticking out yelled to her father, "look look! it's a Palestinian!" The other ones just laugh.

I hesitatingly dined at Restaurant Marhaba on Mo V in search of Kebda (which in Meknes comes with proud little chunks of fat in the center) and instead find myself a changed woman after sampling the harira. Even the boy that kept changing his seat so he could watch me eat could not sour the perfection of the dish. The bread is fatter and the children are cuter (maybe because they are fatter) but otherwise Meknes reminded me of Tangier. The ride was worth it if only for this soup. I'm pretty sure it was peppered with some sort of drug. I guess I don't mind. I'll try anything once.

LESSONS IN FIQH

2009-01-09T14:47:00.002Z

There are many hadith related on this issue and have been discussed by the four schools. The Hanafis have judged all the narrations on this issue to be based on the method of "apparent combining" [Jam' al-Suri] not "real combining" [jam' al-Haqiqi]. This position is based on the fact that we are told to make every prayer on time, and there are hadith of Ibn Mas'ud which clarify that the Prophet Sall-Allahu alayhi wa sallam never combined the prayers together [by taking a prayer out of its time]

If the traveler entered a town with the firm intention of leaving "tomorrow or after tomorrow", and never intended to stay for 15 days, then he shortens his prayer, even if years pass by.

If the traveler enters his home town, then he must complete all 4 subsets, even if he did not intend to stay.

Whoever had a hometown but emigrated to another town, remains a traveler if he should travel through his original hometown. This is provided that it is not also his hometown. The basic rule is that one's original hometown is invalidated as a "hometown" by taking another place as ones home, but not by mere traveling or settling in another town.

The place of settling is invalidated by settling somewhere else (because the new place is its equal) or by traveling (because it is contradictory to settling) or by reaching one's hometown.

DAY OF FIRSTS / FIRSTNESS

2009-01-01T22:08:00.007Z

Ah, another year. I've been reading a lot of happy-new-years-gaza-here-are-some-more-bombs type sentiments. Zeineb and Shaima at the salon looked shweya m3asaba today so I tried to cheer them up with tall tales of my new years night. A few of those things might have been true. They feigned smiles and eventually I asked why there were so out of spirits and they told me the world was broken and Gaza is being destroyed with all its people and I stopped talking about my adventures on the playa. I eventually fell asleep as they were curling my hair. I'm starting to think of my trips to the coiffure as as fifty-dirham midday naps.
A day of firsts, I turned in just before all establishments on the playa, both classy and seedy, started charging a 200 dirham entrance fee. The cab stopped as though he was looking for me, and didnt make the usual comments I get on the way home from a late night, although he did try to charge me four times the cost of the ride and when I saw the "cuntur" (I usually only use such language in kesh) read "libre" I immediately Hashuma'd him as hard as I could like it was a sport, and he agreed to let me go for just twice the price.

This morning I finally made it back to the Fndq Shajarah to buy bedcovers and the mool offered me a beautiful off-white and white one for 250, and when I accepted he stalled for a couple of minutes while talking to a friend then re-entered the shop and explained something about a telephone and a high price and a question and then gave me fifty dirhams back. He was holding it in his hand, it belonged to him, I was smiling in approval, and he gave it back. M3amrni shouft shi haja pHal hakada.
The other firsts were less pronounced but still events I would consider firsts no matter what the date because these things happen in Tanja all the time. Nothing ever changes but b'safa 3ama, the details are changing enough that everything you do feels like the first time. Everything I do. I finally know how to not reflexively always speak Arabic in second person I don't know why I keep talking about you.

MOMMIES

2008-12-30T20:45:00.005Z

There is a new pregnant cat living behind the cinema. I thought I heard her wailing so I went out there with a piece of cheese and it turned out to be some other non-pregnant cat being a brat. I secretly let the mommy-to-be in the cinema last night, I hope she is warm and birthing in some corner where the carpet is already red.
The streets were full of protesting children today, mostly boys. I left the house in my uniform for the week, knit pajama-leggings, dirty boots and a coat, and decided I was not in the mood for creating a spectacle of the magnitude that was unavoidably in store, given the pajamas etc (they were green. best wall color ever. not best pajama color ever. they seem to constantly be asking something like “where are her pants?”)
It’s hard to read the news but it has to be done. Everything is getting worse. Why don’t I hear America? I am suddenly perplexed by the Obama pin that Safia so carefully affixed to the ribbon of a soccer trophy belonging to one of her sons and displayed above the television. I even learned how to say “hope, change, and progress” in Arabic. I know he’s not president yet, and I also know it’s naïve to imagine things will change when he is, but seriously, Is this progress? Or were are we only ever talking about ourselves instead of acknowledging how many people die because of the weapons we supply? And continue to supply. Kashmir has a government I wonder what will happen. It’s hard to not imagine that my children will never see the parts of the world that existed when I was growing up because they are being destroyed. The maps I force them to embroider into pillows will all be different. Maybe I will embroider them before the borders change and we can feel the changes under our faces when we are sleeping. It will be like a contest. Just to clarify I am not pregnant or married or close.
Omar was telling me how strange it was for him to see his country’s lower third un-shaded in a map on Spanish television, trying to make sense of where that desert went and when it would be back. I’ve been watching BBC but this is different and I know even when I change the channel it’s the same thing maybe less pictures, more correspondents, and interstices of Sarah Palin’s daughter’s baby and how much money is being put up for her picture.

Happy Holidays

2008-12-28T21:51:00.005Z

I feel like an astronaut.

Khadija cut me a break from streetfood with Friday lunch consisting of some unrecognizable animal they insisted should remain a secret and makes a sound Ive never heard as imitated.

After we decided the appropriate display areas for Obama paraphernalia we went to Lubna`s salon where the air was saturated with steam and the overwhelming suffocating scent of femenine conceptions of beauty. A wedding party waited quietly but secretly impatiently to slide their hijabs off and have their hair done then promptly readjust their newfound curls into little buns so they fit under the tiny triangles of cloth that somehow never slip to reveal the roots. Mine always do.

Safia and I created seats out of various things around the room and drank cawa and tallked to the baby sitting on the lap of the woman next to me with the sour face even when we cooed at her baby.
Once energized by the cookies Safia bought for me which we shared, the baby started petting my tufts of hair like one might a mangey animal. I felt remotely comforted.

I waited a few hours for beauty to take hold of me before the steam eventually put me to sleep in my chair and the baby played with the candy wrappers and I earned the right to go home without shaming myself.

Qodqm lzanqa, the cinematheque is even more beautiful than before, saturated with goods for sale and delinquent teenagers. I hide in the back by necessity, not choice, and still feel a certain sense of "dyality" even though I don`t use the rooms w m3andi sweret walu. does that count as arabic ebonics? i hope so. That`s how I meant it.

It's a holiday for all of the Godfearing believers. Then Kashmir, then Gaza. My mother thinks the phones are bugged. "America is a caring guy he used to go rescue people but now he changed his policy so Allah changed his policy too." She is Kashmiri and has learned to make sense of anything.

Half a Bowl of Baysar

2008-12-22T12:33:00.006Z

I woke up screaming this morning. There was something on top of me, pressing its weight on me and holding my shoulders back against the bed.

There was no one there really, I mean, not really. And I've had dreams like that before. I always assumed it was a djinn attack until I heard a story on NPR about a Catholic woman that had similar experiences and later discovered it was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning. So now I think it might be half-hallucination, half-djinn attack. Since this was a creepy-ish alley in the Souk Dhaakl of Tanja, I think it's pretty safe to call it a djinn-attack.

I used Nancy Ajram and Kanye to keep me awake after that, and fled the pension as soon as it was light enough to get letcheen at Tingis, then had my hair done to make me feel better. I look like a cross between Medusa and Miss Piggy and will probably fall asleep halfway through the Cinematheque film tonight, but at least I feel better. All it took was a little baisara. Nus zlafa.

RIP BISOUX

2008-12-21T20:13:00.003Z

"Hal hada awwwwal marra f' tanja?" (Is this your first time in Tangier?) Abdslam had the devilish grin that means he is about to tell a joke that spans from Place de France all the way to the Socco. Actually, his hadra is basically all just one long joke.

"La, ana Tanjawiya," I played along.

"W 3lesh ghatskn f l'hotel? 'tina mashi tourist! Jee m3aya f' souani." Basically he was insisting that since I am actually Moroccan, it was ridiculous for me to be staying at a hotel, and wanted to bring me to his samsar to find me an apartment in Souani for a month. O Souani! How I missed your white walls and laundry shadows!

A few others had told me the same thing over the course of the day and I had to explain that my romantic sensibilities convinced me that staying at the Muneria again would be inspiring, in the Anne of Green Gables sense of the word.
Everything was blue just as I'd left it. I got Room 3 where 70% of the view is palm frond. The room is cold but the air is warm and the blankets are warm. The Tangerinn closed early or maybe I arrived late I can't remember. When the maid- the same one who two years ago took my clothes out of my closet without asking to wash them because they were visibly disgusting- came to bang on my door because it was 1:15 and I hadn't checked out. Rabia looked at her watch and made a face then agreed to not charge me extra for taking five minutes to look presentable when I hit the streets.

Staying at the Muneria made me feel like a stranger and I was briefly upset in the moments before I fell asleep on my glasses, but as soon as I was outside again I knew it wasnt Tanja that was rejecting me, I had just miscalculated the difference between shifa circa 2006 minus the shifa 2008 version-faster, more compatible.

The streets and men on it updated me on all the gossip-
H&M&M&M is now just M&M after a thievery accusation. Actually almost all of my dailies (basically the men who taught me Arabic) were fired or fled. Muhammed squealed with delight when he saw me, pointed to my face, ballooned his cheeks, and gave me a thumbs up. I expected more people to do it than the four that already have, not always with the thumbs up at the end. So I got fat. Small changes. At least I can entice squeals of delight. It's all a girl can ask for, really.

My cat Bisoux is dead. She was run over by a car. No I don't want to talk about it.

The plan for the coming days is to install some pockets into my nonsensically pocketless coat to ensure I can still use body language that lets everyone know that I am unapproachable. And isn't it ironic that after three months at the pocket-factory-training-center I still need my tailor to do it? I don't really, I just like employing and imploring him.

My hadra is slowly rising from the dead, I get to do a lot of then and now comparisons, "i used to"s and "smeHli"s because apparently I left without saying goodbye to about half of Tangier and the anger felt towards me when I left was much stronger than I even imagined, and even what I imagined was pretty bad. At least I have this month to make up for it.

muneer-ia

2008-12-14T08:48:00.001Z

When I spent my first night at the Hotel Muneria I didn’t know that it was where William Burroughs wrote Naked Lunch and I didn’t know anything else about Tangier either. I didn’t know that I would leave the city shaped in the mold of the image I would have read if I had read anything about Tangier before I got there. Idealizing the nostalgia and inescapable feeling of being a history-making subject, longing for the empty corner at an old man’s café where I would be inspired and interested in every detail of the action and non-action taking place, creating space for itself in an abandoned corner of the city where we could all be left alone.
I could also achieve this in the streets, in the way Manhattan is now imposing it on me, but then it seemed like a talent like I was performing something unnatural. But it was practically the only thing that could have happened to me there, and it was practical. Now I feel like I can draw the constellation by connecting the little holes the silverfish burrow in the old blue comforter over my head, to trap in the heat. It’s not exactly that vision is 20/20 in hindsight, but the pictures are developed. Hate waiting for the pictures to develop.
The Muneria is situated on a hill, you can see the Mediterranean and a slightly drooping palm tree dividing the view into a neat set of thirds. All that blue, everywhere, going to Marrakesh felt like wearing pink tinted sunglasses. I wore them once for real, driving through the Middle Atlas, fat grey things that made me look like Um Kultoum. It only made everything look more orange and fertile. I need to remember to be her for Halloween some year.
I chose the Muneria over Ibn Battuta because it was twenty-dirhams cheaper per night. I was coming from the Hotel Mhrsa across the city beach, which uses ancient room keys that made me half expect that Room 8 would actually lead me to Narnia. In fact it led me to a huge square room with no visable insects, 3 king sized beds pushed together, and 2 single beds at the foot of the larger beds. I imagined it could comfortably house a large Somalian family, and later learned it was probably housing Africa escapees, as Tangier is in many ways a large blue house of people trying to get to Spain. But Hotel Mhrsa has mint green walls and deep brown wooden doors and no hot shower but the walls won me over. Situated across from a vacant, steep hill of grass which I believe has been converted into a parking lot, the vision of two twin girls at the end of the long hallway telling me to come play with them was enough to send me to the Muneria, a comforting name, the feminized version of my brother’s name.
The first night I spent in the Muneria it was raining, and the windows flew open and the rain was slanting towards me, I was eating chocolate truffles and watching bollywood on my computer with a space-heater on my bed and sometimes pressed it up against me even though they tell you not to do that. The concrete building sealed in any ounce of cold that leaked through the screenless window and now that it was open it was hopeless. There was no bolt on the window so I leaned my 87 lb. suitcase against it to keep it shut, and thought about sex to keep me warm.
If this image sounds familiar it’s because it’s the same way I wrote about the Muneria while I was there. Even my metaphors and similes are coming out the same. I am remembering the way I wrote about it and the things I photographed in it I don’t even have to try and remember something more, it was all completely legible.
It may have been December 13th, 2006 that I spent my first night in that icy room. Maybe I was aware of this, maybe that’s why I started writing about it. I can’t always tell what is historical, part of the story in general, how it unfolded and refolded and how I even framed it folded. With certain creases in certain places, to keep track of bad decisions- always a practical move. And it was, on the whole, a practical move. Good things came of it. Blue, historically situated things.
The person I’m referring to when I talk about that night at the Hotel is also situated in something. It would after all be narcissistic to only talk about myself.
I can still say that I didn’t know what was going to happen to me in Tangier and that it could have happened some other way and I could have done something different from what everyone does in Tangier, I could have read it in a book and not even had to make the move, but I think sometimes saying I discovered something is just saying I remember it, and the choices were different then and the vocabulary was different, although even here the metaphors stay the same. Writing it in the second person could be equally as historical and trapped in a certain way of describing and hanging on my wall with the rest of the polaroids I collected from each situation where I needed to see what the picture would look like, so I could picture myself in it.

VACATIONING / VISITORS

2008-12-03T07:07:00.002Z

There is a ghost in my room.
I know it now.
In my dream Sunday night I was here, both physically and in the dream.
In the dream I was a much more ambitious artist than in RL and my walls were saturated with framed photographs, whereas I’ve actually only managed to fill six frames. So in the dream everything was falling off the walls like a tornado was whipping through, and in the morning I woke up to the sound of a fallen frame (none of the other stuff was real so none of that was there). I saw it slouched behind the back left corner of the couch and left it there because I was too lazy to bend over and extend my arm. This kept up for days.
I soon started to like the look of the gap in the frame pattern, and the passed-out drunken Polaroid behind the couch and decided to leave it there.
So today I get home and it’s back on the wall. Sure I have roommates, but not the type that would reassemble a photo collage on my west wall. Not the type to even spot a stranded polaroid behind the blue couch that came with the room because I would never buy a blue couch of my own volition.
So what kind of ghost is this exactly?
I would start by saying she likes to take mouse-form. This way, I can equally distribute my fear of the ghost and fear of the mouse over both entities, 50/50.
Second, it’s probably a girl ghost. Because she hasn’t bothered me in my bed at all. This is just me being logical (kashmiri logical)
The third thing I can say is that she is invisible, because I can’t see her yet.

I’m getting back to basics. This is the reality of the thing. These are the things I can feel and I don’t have to see them because I know them. And inshaAllah in two weeks I will be back to all there is to see and will be seeing them and won’t even think to decide if they are really being there.
Tangier is like that. Once you get past the stories and the windows and the gloomy December port, what you see is what you get. And once you make your bed you lie in it because you only get one bed. And one blanket. And the windows at Hotel Muneria don’t stay shut so you should bring an extra. And if it is raining you should bring a poncho and sleep in it. And if it is December it will be raining. And then you end up wishing for a boy ghost to keep you warm in your bed. Not the William Burroughs kind, if you can help it. They boarded up the Naked-Lunch-room 9 anyway. Room seven has a radiator but no heat and a view of the sea and other blue things. Blue almost entirely fills the frame and even the room is painted blue, and both of your blankets. Blue fills up all six of the frames and even the ghost is see-through.
So first you see, and then you see-through, then ask for room 7 and set up your spaceheater in the bathroom.

Ana huma, huma hunaaka.

2008-11-08T19:52:00.004Z

I'm not the type to ask but I asked. "OMG Wheeerrree did you get your bag?"
It was a one-strap Kashmiri embroidered tote, identical to the ones I collect each time I go back, and apparently hailing from the Austin City Limits Music festival circa 2006 where it sells for 10 times what it costs in Lal Chok. The woman was dressed entirely in black leather.
"You know it's funny because I wasn't even going to wear it today it totally clashes with my outfit."
"Yeah I know, it does. It's pretty though. It looks Spanish." I'm not sure why I said any of those things.
"Yeah, probably."

At the terminal I struggled to load facebook and stream The Office and eat a bagel at the same time. If I don't publish my mood to all my old friends from high school how can I be sure I'm really feeling it?

"[random russian gibberish from man nearby]"
-What?
He looked remotely desperate and I thought maybe he was asking for my bagel.
"Russian?"
-Oh, no, I'm not Russian.
"Aremenian?" -No
"Turkish?" -No
"Greek?" -No, I get that a lot though. I mean, when I'm in Greece. I mean, when I was in Greece that one time.
"You really really look Greek."
-Then why did you guess all those other things?
He started yelling to his wife to make sure she remembered to order his coffee.

The world is getting bigger and more self-aware.
These relationships will slowly help me develop a nationality that encompasses both where I'm going and where I've been. I just want to be truthful.
Then the problem of finding a word for it.
I might have to move a century back to find the point of origin. There. That.
Them!
Say it enough times.

There is something particular about the waiting area in the Buffalo Airport, since it can be assumed that for the most part, only some emergency or devastating news or familial obligation can bring people to Buffalo from some other place on a night like this. And somehow it drains enough out of you that even moments away from boarding the plane back home, most of us still look like we want to die. At least we have eachother's drained, deflated faces to look at and think about how messy her hair is and how strange her nose is and how you want that bagel she's got and why didn't you think of that before you passed through security?

OUR SHELVES AND HEARTS:

2008-10-15T03:13:00.008Z

Three men in Astoria.
I must have looked Muslim that day.
"Assssalaaamalaikum Sister."
“'slamlaikuuuum.”
I butchered it with the old Urdu pronunciation I just can’t shake and secretly don’t want to.

Small businesses generally remind me of camping stores. The shelves here were divided into squares holding Islamic gear- DVDs, headscarves, hadith quotation collections, full hadith collections so you can pick and choose like herbal remedies- the same books weighing down our shelves and hearts back home.

Some titles:
Hell and Heaven
Hell & Judgment
Hell and Shaytan
Hell and Punishment
Hell and You
Hell and Your Burning Spirit Corpse
Hell & Your unanswered cries of pain

I’m waiting for some newer, sexier titles, as is the way with academia.
Like, make me take your class.

Hell and the Politics of Agony and Eternal Regret.
Hell & Rhythmanalysis of Your unanswered cries of pain and eternal suffering.
Heaven & Your Eternal Absence in it.

So anyway, a little girl was squatting beside a shelf of “Adam’s World” DVDs and asked “do you want a movie?” She appeared to have sprouted from one of the white bearded Arab men conversing with the African(-American?) cashier.
“Nooo, not today.” I was looking for the Arabic-English Dictionary.
“Do you speak Arabic?”
Even in speaking with a child, I was suspicious of her motives. Did she own the store? Would she judge me? Yessss.
“Maybe…no. No, I don’t. DO YOU?”
She gave me an “are you kidding me” face reminiscent of when I answer questions by pointing to my nose.
“What’s your name?” I asked and prepared my palate to pronounce it correctly.
I failed. It was so outlandish I can’t even remember it. At least eight vowels. All in a row like little starving children at a kitchen bench.
“I’m Shifa’ ” Naaailed it.
Now the cashier addressed me and the girl was promptly pulled away like an attentive Backstage Drama Club was at work.
“Ooooh I wish I was good like youuu.” He kept saying it.
I looked around. It seemed he was speaking to me.
“This is a dictionary.” It was green. Could’ve been a Qur’an, admittedly.
“Where are you from? I from Senegal. Born in Senegal, raised in France, lost in America.”
I laughed heartily, sincerely, and tried to start paying for my dicti
onary“You know, they charge $45 for this at the NYU bookstore, you’re getting gypped!”
I thought about a possible substitute word for “gyp.” Nothing came.
“You know though, I came to this country and just fell apart. Everythin’, everythin’. Before, I was so good. I was soooooo good. Doin’ everythin’ right. But I got like I thought I was better than everyone else. Now I see I’m just a man, like everyone. Now I have that humble- I can be humble because I’m lost.”
He enunciated his T’s in a pretty way.
“Yeah, it’s hard.” My Buffalo accent sounded disgusting after his monologue. I think sometimes I emphasize it just to gross myself out.
“And you know, sometimes my friends they ask me why I like the white women not the Black women I tell them I don’t knoooow, I just like the white women and they say what if there’s a white woman and a black woman and the black woman is prettier, watchu gonna pick I say okaaaaaaay the black woman. Hehe.”
“So really you just like beautiful women.”
I’m not sure if he understood my accent.
“…I wish I was good like you.”
I looked down at my paid-for dictionary. My dictionary.

What ever happened to the boys? The sons of that guy in Bryant Park I met last summer when Samia couldn’t find me at the movie. I heard him speaking Arabic on the phone and got all excited and said something about it and he asked me why I was studying Arabic all the way over there in Morocco. “Why not in New York- there are more Arabs here than Lebanon!”
“Lebanon is small,” I replied.
“I have two sons. Both of them can teach you Arabic- for free.”
I thought about his proposition. “At the same time?”
It was a joke. I wouldn’t say he eyed me wearily, but he definitely eyed me.
In any case, I don’t think he replied.

IT'S PRETTY OBVIOUS

2008-10-07T00:38:00.010Z

He pressed his giant hand on my stomach as if attempting to abort the unborn baby of an ex-lover. I wasn’t looking up. I saw through the window that the D was packed and when no one moved in the first couple of seconds I went “aawww” like a balloon deflating at the sight of an empty orange rectangle of shifa-relax! with his walls squeezed in by the left arm of an Arab guy and on the right by the purse of a Spanish woman. Ok, I couldn’t realistically do anything but follow where this man’s hand was pushing my belly. I think he was yelling something about what a douchebag I was, but fortunately I was spared this segment of his performance. Ok, I am a douchebag, please don’t impregnate me with whatever is charging through your fingers as they grapple with what I was recently endowed with by lack of pilates. Ok?
Relatedly, I was earlier in the day scolded in Arabic class for saying wakha because it confuses the other children. I’m pretty sure my lunchtime sermons about hell earned me the same scoldings in second grade.
So everything is moving backwards.
Maybe all the way back to Tangier? Maybe back to East Amherst? So close!
It’s okay because
1. the leaves were falling in Bryant Park today like “it’s fall!”
2. I found my niche in the middle of Manhattan (“Quiet Area”)
3. Brooklyn Bridge x 27 = ( 8, 412? )
4. Sarah Jessica Parker X me = GOD LIKES MY SKIRT.

Event:

2008-09-29T03:00:00.002Z

As a new-fake New Yorker, I inevitably have been "keeping up" with the elections, and felt almost as obligated to watch the presidential debates as most people in war-torn countries overseas do- I wonder if they watch a dubbed version at H&M&M&M? It would have been nice to be there to add many non-truths about America and Americans along the way. Best Hobby.

I missed the live-event and wondered if I could find a way to recap. Upon googling, i found that not only could I watch the entire thing in easy to chew pieces, titled "chapters," but also glance an inch to the right to find the text, each word lighting up in red the way it does when babies sing along to elmo, just in case I don't know how to read.
My favorite character is "Event."

"Event: laughs."
"Event: unsure of itself."
Event: puts on pajamas.
Event brushes teeth.
Event poops.
Event sleeps.

Ramadan Blues

2008-09-23T02:28:00.002Z

The thing about Ramadan in NY is that almost every mosque represents a different part of the world. I found a watermelon themed jainamaz from the Bengali man with the incense rack that always makes me embarrassed, mostly unsure if the bearded vendors notice that they sell fragrances titled "lick me all over" and "touch me here" right under the "patti labelle" shelf. I guess she's wholesome enough for all of us.
The Syrian and Egyptian hanouts share my loyalties when it comes to "canned fooul" and expired halal cheese.
I once frequented the Burkina Faso-ian market but I've converted over to Kosher meat from Trader Joe's because I can't be bothered to skin my own chickens (and to think I ever imagined I could marry a Moroccan). It was fun speaking French though. They were all so nice to me. They invited me to their country.
I'm invited.
As is the way, the only place I could find to belong was the place no one belongs. The "University" Islam scene is somewhat of an enigma. Complete with flourescent lights to spotlight the sins we commit pre-lunch break, the Islamic center is housed in the basement cafeteria of a church on 6th Avenue. The community is something of a collision between the Pakistani Student's Association and the Palestinian Student's Association, and somehow I can't pass for either. (Something about my nose not being pointy enough. Both nations of the pointy nose...) I fled to Columbia where I correctly predicted that most of the kids at Iftar dinner weren't even Muslim, and was met by a special presentation of the Nakshabandi Turkish Sufis. The Taraweh was more of a workout than a spiritual reflection but I think I just need to get the hang of all that up-and-down. Even I hated pilates on the first day. This is like pilates + God. In any case I will go back next week and see if I can be inspired.
Which as I recall, seemed to happen through various means, several times daily, in Tangier.
I'm not moping, I'm just saying.

SIMON SAID, PT. 2

2008-09-09T04:57:00.009Z

DAD TAKES OUT HIS FRUSTRATION OVER HIS TRANSPARENT WIFE ON SIMON, SENDING HIM TO A VOCATIONAL SCHOOL WHERE HE APPRENTICES UNDER "A REAL MAN."
SIMON DOESNT MIND BECAUSE IT'S NICE CONVERSATION AND A CALM ATMOSPHERE.
SIMON'S SHADOW TAGS ALONG FOR THE RIDE.

TO SIMON'S DELIGHT, THE COMMUNAL SHOWER HAS NO CURTAIN, AND HE IS FINALLY ABLE TO SEE WHAT HE WAS MISSING.

THE SCHOOL FINALLY NOTICES THERE ARE TWO SIMONS. THE DEAN CONFRONTS THEM BOTH WITH A SINGLE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE REAL SIMON. SIMON'S SHADOW BETRAYS HIMSELF BY TEARING THE PHOTOGRAPH IN RAGE, WHILE THE REAL SIMON REMAINS SILENT.

COINCIDENTALLY, A PRETTY BAD "ACCIDENT" IN THE KITCHEN IRREPARABLY DAMAGES SIMON'S "HAMMERING HAND," CAUSING HIM TO RUN AWAY FROM SCHOOL LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT.

WITHOUT SIMON TO DRAG HIM DOWN, SIMON'S SHADOW EASILY BECOMES THE COOL KID.

NO ONE KNOWS WHAT BECAME OF HIM AFTER THAT FATEFUL DAY OF NOBLY GIVING UP HIS IDENTITY TO HIS MUCH MORE CAPABLE AND SOCIALLY ACCEPTABLE SHADOW, ALTHOUGH THE INTRODUCTION OF A NEW SPECIES OF FISH-BIRD TO THE STREETS OF TANGIER MAKES US WONDER...

SIMON'S SHADOW CONTINUES TO BATTLE HIS VISIBILITY ISSUES IN A FIGHT AGAINST TIME.

SIMON SAID, PT. I

2008-09-06T03:58:00.012Z

SIMON SAID LIVES IN A PRETTY NORMAL HOME FOR THE MOST PART, WITH A VIOLENT FATHER AND A MOTHER WHO IS HARDLY THERE.

WHEN LONELY SIMON MAKES HIS SHADOW HIS "TOP FRIEND" ON MYSPACE, DAD GETS WORRIED.

DAD TAKES IT OUT ON MOM, WHILE SIMON HIDES WITH HIS SHADOW BEHIND THE COUCH. WHILE BACK THERE, HE NOTICED A LAMPSHADE THAT WOULD MAKE A SWEET DRESS.

SIMON TAKES TO THE MACHINE WHILE IN CHARACTER AS "SIMONA" -
NO ONE FINDS OUT.

CONFUSED AND ALONE, SIMON(A) EVENTUALLY GETS INTO DRUGS. HE MAKES A CASUAL RUN FOR IT AS HIS "FRIENDS" ARE HAULED IN FOR DEALING.

HE MADE A CLEAN BREAK FROM THAT SITUATION, BUT HAVING FORGOT TO WASH OFF HIS MAKEUP, HIS FATHER GETS ANGRY ANYWAY.

FATHER ONCE AGAIN TAKES IT OUT ON MOM, WHO IS CONTINUING TO DISAPPEAR FROM HIS LIFE, AS SIMON'S SHADOW IS BECOMING MORE AND MORE REAL.

SIMON WRITES, DIRECTS, AND STARS IN A MOVING ONE-MAN-SHOW ABOUT SELF-REPRESENTATION IN WHICH HE TAP DANCES ON FLOWERS.
FATHER WALKS IN AS HE IS PERFORMING ON STAGE AND LEAVES BEFORE THE SHOW IS OVER, BUT NOT BEFORE SIMON SPOTTED THE LOOK OF DISGUST ON HIS FATHER'S FACE AFTER SEEING HIS SON PRANCE AROUND IN NEXT-TO-NOTHING.

IT REMINDS SIMON'S FATHER OF WHEN HE WAS A BOY. ALL HE WANTED IN THE WORLD WAS TO BECOME A BEEKEEPER LIKE CRAZY UNCLE "IB." BUT HIS FATHER BEAT IT OUT OF HIM, THE SAME WAY HE WOULD BEAT THIS OUT OF SIMON.
WHEN SIMON RETURNS FROM HIS ONE-MAN CAST PARTY, FATHER FORCES HIM TO KILL BEES AS PUNISHMENT AND SECRETLY WEEPS AFTER, SEEING THEM ALL BLOODY AND STUCK TO THE WALL LIKE THAT.
SIMON WISHES HE COULD USE SOME SORT OF KILLING-SPRAY, ALSO HATING TO SEE THEM ALL BLOODY AND STUCK TO THE WALL LIKE THAT.
MOTHER SENSES THIS AND ALTHOUGH NOW COMPLETELY TRANSLUCENT EXCEPT FOR THE HANDS, SPRAYS THE INSECTS WHILE DAD'S NOT LOOKING.

SIMON REALIZED HIS MOTHER DOES LOVE HIM EVEN THOUGH SHE'S NEVER ALL THERE, AND SPEEDILY WORKS THROUGH ALL THOSE MOM-ISSUES.

THINGS ARE LOOKING UP...

FAR ROCKAWAY

2008-09-04T02:18:00.002Z

"I'm a smoker as you can see. I have to apologize. I really shouldn't be smoking."

The middle aged woman with the awkwardly arranged gray bun in her hair started to fidget with pieces of her kitchen.

"Here c'mon we'll try it right here." She left the room to find cloth and thread so I could test out the machine.

"As you can see, it's brand new!" she yelled from the next room, unnecessary in such a small apartment.

"You can just unplug the vacuum cleaner to get that thing going!"

In searching for the vacuum cleaner plug, I surveyed the kitchen, a hodgepodge of colorful dishes and imported goods from India. There were some posters indicative of her religious persuasion, having converted from Judaism to Sikhism, which I already knew because she told me in the car as part of the explanation for why she moved from the upper west side to Far Rockaway.
I can't remember how it fit into her story or why she felt she needed me to approve of her life choices.

"Not a big deal," I said. "Some of us live here, some of us live there." It sounded vaguely like something she might say. Safe choice of words.

"...but it was all we could afford at the time and you know even with this crazy economy I'm still paying less for this apartment than I was over in Manhattan."

Looking around the apartment, it wasn't hard to understand why, although she had made it cozy with oversized cats for insulation and paisley bedsheets nailed to the walls like tapestries.

"Here we go. I use this just to clean things up sometimes, no big deal if there are a few stitches in it."

She handed me a white, blood-stained handkerchief.
I waited for her to explain that it was actually ketchup but she didn’t, and I was too impatient to leave to insist on a less cryptic scrap of cloth.

The machine itself did seem brand new, without so much as a fingerprint on it. It was more of less like the one I share with my mother in Buffalo, so I knew how to thread it. I slid the non-bloody side of the cloth under the presser foot as the woman explained to me that her mother could “sew like a horse.”
I told her my mother could sew like a seamstress.
She replied, “Well, yeah, my mother was a seamstress.” I backed down.

“But I just don’t have the knack for it. Or maybe the time, or space, or…” I listened and added appropriate comments and questions where they fit. She asked me to repeat everything I said. I would switch to a tone someone might use to read a children's book, to encourage her to reply to my questions with something relevant to the topic. Sometimes it worked.

Her head was almost resting on my shoulder. My right shoe searched for the plastic pedal and was greeted by the sound an elephant makes when it bleeds.

“What the…” The woman eyed the machine with a furrowed brow. “Try it again try it again.”

I re-threaded both top and bottom and tried maneuvering the bloody cloth once more, but no-budge.

The next ten minutes consisted of her saying “now, what the…” in different tones and at various speeds. She would probably also be really good at reading children’s books.

Eventually she gave in. Speaking slowly, “you know, I re-mem-ber having this problem once before. I think it’s why I gave up on my sewing!” She let out a hearty laugh. I even more slowly suggested that I leave. She suggested we continue looking at the machine saying “now what the…” and so we did. It was her house I had to follow the rules.

“The thing is (I tried to use all of my favorite phrases to keep me entertained), the teeth aren’t rising up to the cloth. See how it’s buried? It’s supposed to rise up to meet the foot and nudge the cloth forward. Instead the needle is just sewing in the same spot over and over. Nothing is moving forward.”
I quietly enjoyed the metaphor and wondered which of us it was relevant to as she switched her repetitions to “awww Iiiii seee.” I hummed in agreement after each time until I felt it was encouraging her to keep saying it.

Once our song was done she insisted we best be getting to the station.
“Well, at least you don’t have to walk!”
“Yeah, thanks for driving me.”
“You know, it actually all worked out for the best I think because I never would have known what was wrong!”
“Yeah.” I tried not to think about the two hour subway ride ahead of me as we both climbed through the passenger door of her sea-green Buick.
“Can you believe this only cost me $300?”
“Wow.” Actually I couldn’t. It was an okay looking car. My favorite color. Same color as my ipod. Which also cost $300.
“Same price as a sewing machine,” I offered, and wondered if it was inappropriate.
“I know! And it drives, to boot.”
“To where?”
“…to boot.”

We passed an African-American couple on the street, and here she found an opportunity to share her expertise about Far Rockaway. “You know, the Blacks are actually very friendly here. The Spanish, no, but the Blacks, oh yes. Very ‘yes ma’am no ma’am.’ I can’t say anything about the Jews though!” Then muttered something. She laughed because I was supposed to know what she meant.

At Mott St. she thanked me again as I tripped out of the old Buick. “May you have… the best life. The best of life.” She was moving her head back and forth and enunciating her words like it was a poem.
I smiled. “Oh, thanks. Good luck with the machine.”
She sort of winced as I mentioned it- the thorny issue tainting our otherwise pleasant relationship- and winced again as a crowd of teenagers dubbed me “sugarbuuuutt!” at the door to the station.

IT'S THAT TIME OF YEAR AGAIN

2008-08-25T01:49:00.005+01:00

WHAT TANGIER TAUGHT ME ABOUT RAMADAN, sources included in parentheses:

1. Don’t strategically forget it’s Ramadan. (General Words of Wisdom)
2. If you do not own a djelleba, you are technically not Muslim (most boys from Al Hociema)
3. Put long skirt on over your regular outfit before you reach the door to the mosque (shifa)
4. You don’t have to fast if you are chronically sleepy, but you do have to constantly accuse others of not fasting, to make up for it (multiple sighted sources)
5. When you see a procession of young boys running with bowls through the street, you know it’s time (Grand Socco)
6. Try to remember the difference between gin and water. (General Words of Wisdom)
7. Bringing fruit to a Moroccan family who has invited you for iftur is ridiculous and they will mock you (shifa)
8. Don’t break your fast with kif. always eat a smidgen of a date first (Grand Socco)
9. Always remember to hang mildly translucent bedsheets over your wine rack. Sometimes you can cut eyeholes in these for a spooky effect (Casa Pepe)
10. Despite popular belief, glue sniffing is allowed during daylight hours (Rue Imam Laiti Glue Sniffer)
11. Despite popular belief, punching other people in the face is also allowed during daylight hours. But sex is not. Even just regularly. Unless maybe it's a really dark room. Or the Hotel Flandria (not shifa).

Stay Tuned For “WHAT THE NYC ARAB CORNER-STORE CASHIERS WHO I PLAN TO BEFRIEND FOR MORAL SUPPORT TAUGHT ME ABOUT RAMADAN.”

ONE WOMAN SHOW

2008-08-22T20:34:00.004+01:00

Now that my two years of moroccan-husband-searching are finally up (out of necessity, not success), I finally discovered the cruel secret they were keeping from me, betrayed in the end by Shayla, my friendly Arabic Podcast host. An early September "Festival of Brides" in Imilchil, south of Casa, involving mass-husband choosing by the girls that had come of age in the year preceding. When I googled it I found a photo of a group of men all peering over each other, presumably at the women, like boys at a high school snow-ball. Only some of them were toothless. I keep wishing I was there.

Shayla's incessant talk of Moroccan culture is not helping the situation either. Her subtly firm grasp of English idiomatic parlance does not convince me that she is also doomed to a life away from $.50 bowls of baysar and loosies for a dirham. I suspect she records from a flourescently lit internet cafe in Casablanca. Oh Shayla. If only you weren't my teacher.

Sometimes I talk nervously to myself out loud in coffeeshops in Arabic to warm up my vocal chords before I delve into learning and creeping out my neighbors on the sinky couch cushions totally non-condusive to serious academic work. I recently realized the first thing that comes out of my mouth without thinking is "N3am, walikin m3andish asdiqa' hanaya." It's sort of sad and makes me wonder why I miss Tangier, but then I convince myself I learned it from Maha. Hiya f3eallan wahida.

Old Times

2008-08-06T03:44:00.004+01:00

I’ve been trying to keep up my Tangier lifestyle while spending my days dragging 30 lb groceries through the streets of Brooklyn because I can’t figure out the subway and when I do it's broken.

I visited Atlantic Ave. first chance I got, hoping to be swaddled by a warm blanket of Arab sights and sounds. There were more hipsters than hijabis and hardly anything halal despite the Arabic signage. I managed to peek my head into a Yemeni restaurant full of only men, and was comforted by the awkward and misplaced-ness of my presence under the fluorescent lights. I will go there later with a notebook and it will be just like old times.

I found a few butchers that will come in handy for next month’s Ramadan, one Pakistani, one Lebanese, and one Egyptian. I decided to make it a competition of signage, and since the Pakistani had his price list titled “HALAL MEAT” all in that ghoulish font typically used only on Halloween (with the blood dripping down the letters), he definitely wins.

I tried to befriend the Lebanese Goods cashier in my old way, explaining that the name on my “SHIFA HONEY HEALING HONEY IT WILL AMAZE YOU” honey bottle, was in fact my name! He ignored me. I guess it only works in Arabic. I’m starting to feel that way about my personality in general.

At the end of the street is a perpendicular highway and beyond that highway is the river. I could see boats on it and as the sun set the whole street was orange. It made me want to buy school supplies. Instead I hung my head low and began the hour-long walk back home, when out of nowhere the Adan (call to prayer) started to blast from the loud speakers of Al-Farooq Mosque and out onto the streets of Cobble Hill for everyone to hear. I didn’t even think that was legal. But there it was. And all the shops closed, and re-opened fifteen minutes later. And I was late for prayer.

THIS THING IS JUST A MEMORY BOX

2008-07-19T06:37:00.006+01:00

The kids on the street set up a lemonade stand.
It vaguely reminded me of Safia and the fresh squeezed orange juice, mostly just the spirit of it, so I went over. As I approached, the sight of cell phones and bottled juice set up on a foldout table forced me to pretend I had walked to the end of the driveway to get the mail.
Things just aren’t the way they used to be.
There’s even a black kid on the street now. We haven’t had one of those in years.
Twenty years now we’ve been the most non-white family on the block. Ironically the only time my neighbors see me is when I take the day to tan in the backyard.

I can’t tell what I’m writing about anymore. All I have here is my family, (almost the exact opposite of Tangier) which I was banned from writing about years ago when my Baji made me promise never to mention her by name when I become a famous journalist.
I am starting to become fascinated by the daily living practice of everything around me, I think it’s more of a bad habit than creative inspiration, seeing everything like a specimen. In any case I’ve been busy with a project of preservation.
The project we started at the Cinematheque right before I left was Memory Box / Boite a Enregistrer les Souvenirs / Snduq Al-Dikrayat, to preserve the memories and family stories of our neighborhood. The whole family album.
It spawned out of wanting to record every word my mother said. So I got home. She was still talking. The family albums were still there. My sister had begun to censor them, removing and possibly destroying the ones that included my other sister, when she was young and adorable, where you can see her true hair color, and the same of my mother before she went to Hajj. These are the gems.
As someone who has an almost manic obsession with recording everything through pictures and sound, I have been trying to build on our family album for years. It’s like cutting my legs off.
So I have launched a preservation project to digitize all family memories before they are screened by the “black cloud.” In a way I understand what she is doing but in a plumper, more supple way, a way that takes up most of the chair, I think the whole thing is ridiculous and as much as I miss Tangier, I’m glad I am home to save these things.
Even my mother, when she opened one of the 1999 Kashmir albums exclaimed, “This thing is just -like a -memory -box!” with all the usual hesitations and accent.

And I miss the elastic way of practicing Islam that seemed to come from all directions back west, generally behind a façade that presented itself in a caricature almost like a joke, like talking and winking at the same time.

This is the only picture I have with no people in it. Maybe I will start coloring the faces of people in black like my mother does when animate objects sneak onto the patterns of the fabric of our furniture. In her defense, sometimes it does take a month or two to recognize that squiggly shapes spell out a body. Head and hair and everything.

MAPS II

2008-07-18T21:11:00.002+01:00

MAPS

2008-07-03T01:51:00.005+01:00

LAST WORDS

2008-06-25T15:24:00.006+01:00

When Morocco wants you out, she kicks you out. With the heel of the boot.
Somehow I got tricked into spending my five hour layover entirely within airport walls, instead of wandering the streets for some last minute kicks.

She finally gave me most of my voice back, but kept my luggage in exchange.

But it feels appropriate. This is how I pictured my last moments in the Maghreb.
This is basically the way I arrived, eating the lettuce out of a frozen sandwich from the airport.

CHRISTMAS CARD FROM THE MED.

2008-06-09T13:50:00.005+01:00

The wheat shimmers in the bread. Long pieces of it.
Consider the view from behind my glasses compared with the view outside the lens. Juxtaposed, two confused versions of the same thing.

I started announcing my departure- my favorite response is when someone hangs their head and sighs.
The manager at Cafe Paris is going to give me his sister-in-america's address so I can go visit.

Mohamed’s baby was born and is named Hamza. I wonder about the family name. If it can be linked to drug-lords from Al Hoceima, like everyone says is probably the case.

Absalom got married. I wasn’t invited.
He came into the cinema with his new bride. I asked why he didn't tell me earlier, and he looked at me and responded in a mix of Arabic and English, something along the lines of “I was completely enamored with my new wife that I forgot to invite you.” Of all the things he could have said, this was probably the least disappointing response. Still, I would have loved a chance to redeem myself from the Bir Shifa incident.

In the spirit of having my fill of the Mediterranean before I am banished to the Atlantic, I went to Greece.
Everyone thought I was Greek.
Everyone looked like my mother.
One of these women was at the seminar I was flown in for. She was wearing a hot pink shoulderless t-shirt under a black spandex dress. She suggested instead of “dialogue” or “unity” as the theme for next year’s call for proposals, we use “bread.”
“Because everyone love bread,” she said.
That also reminded me of something my mother might do.

All over were posters of a man who was an exact 50/50 cross between my mother and father. My Greek brother? His name spelled looked like mountains colliding into parts of a wheelbarrow.

We drove to the Temple of Poseidon for sunset. The sea was moving in jerky slow motion like the leathery skin under the fin of a dolphin. The open mouth of the temple made everything around it more possible. Aesthetically, vaguely closer to perfection than any other given thing, sitting up on a hill with arms crossed above a full belly like it was pleased with itself.
We watched the sunset there then ate fish, the same fish we have over here and I wondered how the cultures of the coast affects their personalities. They tasted like they maybe had less of a backbone than moroccan fish. More willingness to cooperate.

My last night I spent at Hotel Zorbas and was greeted by a Spanish couple in my bedroom in the thick of the night. I had fallen asleep to a Spanish music station looping Jennifer Lopez, George Michael and Britney Spears, which in the interim had transformed into hardcore porn (or softcore at a climax). The girl was very polite in asking if she could turn off the television, or if I was still watching.
I snuck out like a thief in the night at 4am to catch my free ride to the airport from a different hotel, hiking through the streets of Athens, hoping it was as crime-free as the website insisted. It’s amazing what a girl will do for a free taxi. Legitimately, it would have cost one fourth of my monthly Moroccan salary to order my own. But getting away reminded me how lucky I am to have access to fresh bread and chicken and fish and figs for $1 a kilo this week. And how I have exactly two weeks left to enjoy these things.

Days: Numbered

2008-05-24T19:04:00.011Z

Two stray cats are copulating on the sidewalk of Rue de la Liberte, I laughed out of embarrassment and they both looked at me for a minute then kept at it. No one watched them or tried to move them, only moved around them.

The death of the discman has brought me to a strange place, post IPOD death and IPOD II disappearance, this most recent blow has relegated me to punishment of silence, and the discovery that I understand 70% of conversations going on around me. Luckily,
the best way to learn Arabic is to listen to old people. Half the conversation is comprised of noises and they often repeat themselves, or repeat what the other person said, to confirm they heard right.

Eating a cold pancake out of a plastic bag, watching the fountain and the gardener of the traffic circle: the old man to my left is desperately trying to suck something out of his teeth, or maybe that is how he tastes food. The blind man arrives a few minutes later with someone resembling him, maybe only because they both have white hair. They cozy up between a man sleeping peacefully in his booth, and a heartwarmingly plump Spanish woman with a coffee and a cigarette and her head resting on the hand with the cigarette, like she is sitting at her kitchen table waiting for the mail.

I’m back to my daily routine now that my days are officially numbered, cakes for breakfast, H&M&M&M for lunch (even though Mohamed keeps telling me I got fat and inflating his cheeks to demonstrate), and the continued mission to try every fish in the market. Except the ones that are sold only half-dead, squirming around in the bag as you carry them home to their impending fate / doom, then erode their spirits into the walls of the qasbah.

Feels Like Patanka

2008-05-14T11:31:00.004Z

Through the window at Café de Paris I get to see everyone on their way to work, scarves and belts and pot bellies still in place where they were strategically placed earlier that morning.
Most of us are still waking up, sneaking in yawns, and others are already knee deep in dealings by 8am.
Café Paris celebrates shady passport exchange, what seem like divorce proceedings, and -God help me- small children and their obnoxious noise pollution, as of late.

I have begun to mentally prepare for my departure, designing small handmade invitations for my Mughal-e-Azam going away bash. I will invite all of them, and only Absalom will come.

I’m not usually up this early. Tight times are forcing me to “take-jobs” that have nothing to do with me or mine including menial photography assignments- the latest having to do with the Tangier Renaissance- forces me to think about what that could actually mean.

Will these upscale elitist spaces eventually overtake the low-life gems that continue to differentiate Tangier from Marrakech despite the waterfront, despite the geraniums?
Are the Dar Noors and Serenity Spas of the city really the next wave of urban development for sleepy Tangier?

Sometimes the whole city is like one big yawn. The noise is transparently placed in efforts to wake us up. I can see through it and conveniently, also sleep through it.

From the café window I get to see all of my Souk Barra friends out of uniform and a lot of times I don’t recognize them, only that I know that I know them.

The waiters at Café de Paris wouldn’t let me take pictures this morning- some mumbling about the patron and pleading eyes convinced me to drop the subject and sheepishly tuck my camera back into its hiding place.

A man with a box tied to his neck with a bird sitting on it is in the window, I want to ask what he is selling but I’m losing my vocabulary and can’t pronounce verbs ending in ein. I usually say something like, what’s that you've got there? or Can I buy that from you?

I have become all around very strategic. Being a strategic person involves trusting yourself. Your ability to affect people. General faith in cause and effect.

In general, I don’t trust the words that end with an open mouth. F’gaa, qaraa, shifa’e.

I have two months to get through the 3 kilo textbook that has been making eyes at me from across the room all year. You know you want me come get me, he says. But I resist each time. When will this flirtation evolve into something real? Why can’t you commit? Was it something I did, something I said?

While pleading with my Arabic I lost track of the conversation in real-time. Apparently I had stained my banana-coat in some mysterious place between my waist and collarbone and right shoulder. I thanked the man for pointing it out and chased it like a dog for a minute before deciding it was a strand of my hair that he mistook for a streak of dirt.
I received a free treat from the Qawee on my way out, also like a dog.

What to do when no on takes you seriously? Opt out of the banana coat, perhaps? But Faddal makes brush strokes in the air each time he sees me in it, calls it my artist coat.

I know it’s not the coat-
it seems I’ve all around made myself too familiar.
Too available.

Is that the name of the game? I plead once more with my Arabic, it takes him a few seconds to mentally translate, then he slithers away as if to say, you’ll never learn.
In dialect. In idiom.
Something about my being fit for a pocket.
At least I understood the part about the pocket.

HOCEIMA

2008-05-09T10:33:00.005Z

After finally exploring the gloomy remnants of cafes and low-budget sea-side resorts at Robinson Plage (empty pools, etc) I was especially eager to make the trek to Hoceima. A long time coming, I admittedly let myself build it up in anticipation, the long imagined home of Mohamed and Mohamed (and Mohamed and Mohamed).

The six hour approach managed to include a stack of misadventures including the creepily determined, possibly high, car-chasing hash-dealers they warn you about in guidebooks. They put on an impressive performance, luckily shy of running us off the road. The eventual disappearance of each obstacle was only an introduction to a new one on the one lane mountain road to Hoceima. At points we ventured off-course only to be met by potholes and gloom. The first glimpse of the Rif cuddling up to the sea coaxed some gasps, mostly on my part, a pretty constant gasper on the whole. But as we approached the city in our tiny white fiat, still pure and genuinely curious, there came an overwhelming sinking feeling, felt by all parties.
We spent two hours in Al Hoceima, inspecting the gloomy premises, before we decided to flee- or more appropriately- to escape-
no Talla Youssef, a taste of Cala Iris, a taste of the public beach.

Upon my return Uthman interrogated me on what I’d seen and why didn’t I tell him. Come with me next week, he pleaded. I casually removed his hand from my knee and explained that I would never return to Hoceima.

Homes

2008-05-08T17:10:00.005Z

Mohamed the projectionist invited us to his home on the outskirts, past the factories and past the Tanger Maghogha, farms and dogs then jump the fence. We were greeting by chickens and things, and started the baisara cooking before our tour of the orchard. It was all very serious, following behind his meandering through the trees pointing and declaring the fruit of each like a mother presents her children. I secretly hope they have secret names.

We feasted on baisara and the local variety of erghyf while the dog watched on and later also feasted. The lazy ride home was a belly-full, the car filled with flowers we picked, moving with them all from taxi to taxi, encouraging creative cat calls involving flowers on the walk through Beni Mekada.