playing cops and robbers

“The tenth guy was killed yesterday.”

“Who killed whom?”

“It’s internecine violence. It’s been going on for three years. Palestinians killing Palestinians. It all started when a bunch of kids from one prominent Khalili (Hebron) family beat up a crowd of kids from another prominent family. Just kids playing rough. Then, youths from the beaten family came over and beat up the offending kids. The youth of that family then met them man-to-man, and violence broke out among them. First, fists and feet, then someone pulled a gun. And that’s how it started. The latest in the revenge killings was yesterday.”

“But–” This was all bewildering to us. We were just in al-Khalil. “Where do they get the guns?”

The taxi driver laughed at our naivety. “Where do they get the guns? From Israel, that’s where.”

At the risk of further evincing our stupidity we asked, “But — how?”

“The black market. Where there’s demand, supply follows. You think Palestinians don’t have guns? The men of al-Khalil alone, I assure you, have more guns than the entire American military. So long as they keep using them on each other, even Israel doesn’t mind.”

the popeye treatment

We were in front of a wall-sized mural of Yasser Arafat. The canvas was Israel’s security fence.

Where was N? We said we’d meet at this border crossing half-an-hour ago.

“Do you want to cross to the other side?” I asked A. “N and her uncle might see us better from there if they drive by.”

We crossed the street. Now Yasser Arafat was looming over us, and a series of aluminum trash bins formed a pungent barricade in front of the more stately concrete one.

Three apple-cheeked round-faced straight-haired boys formed yet another barrier, this time in front of me. Each had a stack of CDs in hand. A was an ajnabiyah (foreigner), whereas I — I would understand their entreaties.

“Min shan Allah. Min shan Allah. For God’s sake.” They pushed the CDs at me.

Somehow, I ended up with three random CDs: one for Amr Diab, another for Um Kulthoom and the last — catch this — a Fattah Party mix (not to be mistaken for a Fattah party mix). What’s more, I ended up with a loyal following of pre-teen CD sellers.

Some of the boys who’d sold competed as vigorously over my attention as boys who hadn’t. I looked from face to face. Several of these kids were spitting images of each other. There were clearly brothers in the bunch.

“Instead of hustling each other like this, why don’t you guys work together? Now, some of you sold me CDs, right?” They nodded impatiently. “If you took turns, you wouldn’t wear out your buyers and you’d each go home with something.”

My reasoning didn’t buy new clothes or wash off dusty feet. Dissatisfied, a couple of the the boys picked up disintegrating spinach from the garbage heap and flung it into the air. It came fluttering down on A and me like green confetti. A was seriously unimpressed.

We crossed back to the other side. A sat on the foot of a supermarket. I stood in front of her, on the lookout for N and blocking the sun.

We heard a siren. An Israeli police car was wailing near the border. Two teenagers walked past.

“We did it! We broke the glass!” They clapped hands and, on fast feet, were gone.

Two of the apple-cheeked boys who had remorse written all over their faces crossed the street to us.

“You should probably go.” One said without making eye contact. “Someone threw rocks at their cars, and they might shoot. They sometimes shoot. You never know.”

From our place across the street, A and I listened as one vehicle wailed its distress and a hundred others stood mutely in their queues. Yasser Arafat, too, watched. He, too, was ominously silent.

revisiting the golden state

It’s not like it’s my first time seeing Arabs, and it’s not like I came half way across the world searching for them. I mean, I have only to look in the mirror to find one. And yet it’s a little unsettling how many Arabs there are here.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It’s not unsettling that there are Arabs. It’s unsettling that there are Arabs who look familiar, act familiar but to whom I am a complete stranger.

I taught Islamic Sunday School for several years and that’s like teaching a model United Nations, only with little human beings. If it weren’t for the occasional African American or Pakistani child, it could even be a mini Arab League.

I also attended the same mosque for as long as I can remember — a mosque known fondly (and sometimes begrudgingly) as “the Arab mosque in the area.” (Worry not. There are also Cambodian, African American and Desi mosques nearby. If you weren’t born lucky — i.e. Arab, Cambodian, African American or Desi — then, you could move away, start your own mosque or get an ethnicity-change.) In any case, my Arab-majority mosque saw me grow from a girl on a see-saw with a jumper and two braids into a hijabi adult who is still wondering what ever happened to that see-saw.

The mosque saw me change and I, in turn, saw it through its countless renovations: the creation of  a women’s prayer hall out of a kitchen; the conversion of a community pool into a sand then wood-chip playground; and the (possibly fire-hazardous) sealing of various doors after attempted robberies.

I was a vine that grew along the walls of that mosque, and growing alongside me were countless other leaves, many of them just barely unfurling.

That’s why, when I went to my predominantly Arab mosque — and I went often — there were always children clamboring about: young curly-haired boys who, embarrassed, ran away from their Sunday School teacher who had magically stepped out of her classroom (and her designated day of the week); little pigtailed girls who hugged my knees and made me feel like a well-loved tree; a playful infant who made it hard for me to keep a straight face at a ‘azaa (condolences service); a bold pre-pubescent boy who, thanks to a badly tailored shirt and/or a thickened waistline, asked me if I’m pregnant (Who needs marriage anyway?); and the same bold pre-pubescent boy who, on observing me with my bearded brother, asked for the name of my fiance. (I know children ask a lot of questions, but do they have to ask awkward ones? Why don’t they stick to the ‘whywhywhy?’)

In short, I befriended a lot of Arab kids.

Maybe this is because Jumpstart trained me to treat preschoolers like human beings, not stuffed animals. Maybe it’s because, as Mama says, ‘a’lik izgheer (your mind is little) and therefore I get along with like-minded little minds. Maybe it’s because I enjoy the children’s company more than I do that of the mosque’s bigger kids (i.e. parents) who play aggressively, are often poor sports and who separate into teams faster than oil and water.

Whatever the reasons, the conclusion is one. I like kids. (No, I’m not a pedophile. If I were, I’d tell you.)

Well, today I got to see an overwhelming number of kids — almost enough to compensate for one hundred years of solitude. Since it was the second day of Eid, my friend and I took her fourteen year-old cousin to an indoor theme park where, I tell you, we found more children than ants on an anthill.

The outrageous proportion of children to parents, the flagrant violations of due process (and, by that, I mean standing in line), and the faces — all were so familiar. I swear there was a boy-version of a little Libyan girl I know, and I saw one of the Sheikh’s children bouncing on a trampoline.

Of course, not one of the thousand children running about the place knew me. And of course, it was strange being there, considering I was neither a child, a sibling nor a parent. As we say in Arabic, I had no mawqi’ min al i’rab. In the sentence’s grammar, I was neither subject nor predicate.

As night stealthily crept in like the Grinch, stealing away the children’s energy, families began filing out of the crowded theme park, and my friend aptly remarked, “Isn’t it wonderful that, at that age, you get tired, and I mean dead-tired, not from studying or working, but from playing?” And I thought, darn right. The years I spent in the golden-state, kicking myself up off the ground after school on a wobbly see-saw, with no one opposite me but the wind — those were indeed the golden years.

Yes, I’m far from the poppy-flower Golden State of my childhood, but since there are countless happy, boisterous, precocious Arab children here, I really can’t be that far away. I guess, wherever I am, children have a way of bringing me back to a golden state of mind.

darndest things

Although my grandparents lived in Saudi Arabia for over thirty years, they and their six children were like an island at sea. They felt mostly alienated from their surroundings, distant from their neighbors and, in the words of Edward Said, simply out of place.

Maybe it was the fact that, despite his long stay in Saudi, my grandfather Sido was denied Saudi citizenship and did not see raises in his salary because (a) he was originally from Gaza and (b) he had too many children.

Or maybe it was the fact that his eight-member family lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a struggling area, where many of the infants ambled about bare-bottomed and defacated in the street.

Or maybe it was that my blond and green-eyed Sido was widely considered a “foreigner.” (I never understood if this meant Westerner-foreigner or unwanted-poor-Arab-immigrant-foreigner). Once, as he cycled to work, Sido witnessed a car accident and a Saudi national immediately bore (false) witness against him. “Policeman, it was this foreigner’s fault. I saw it. It was all his fault.” The policeman, who’d witnessed the incident himself and saw that Sido was not at all responsible, thanked the man for his (unsolicited) testimony and sent him packing.

In any case, in the midst of Saudi’s sand dunes, there lied an emotional gulf between some refugees and Saudi locals.

Once, when they had settled into a house, my grandmother Tata had complained that the place was zay wijhuh (like his face), referring to the owner.

Now, in Palestinian dialect, if you say something is like someone’s face (ex. the food is like your face), that’s no good news for your face or for the the object of that simile. Implied is that your face ain’t that good lookin’. Tata’s mistake (arguably, apart from the insult itself) was saying it within earshot of her four year-old daughter.

Some days later, the owner came by. He found the blond, blue-eyed girl sitting near the threshold. “How did you find the house, ya shatra (you good girl)?”

“Zay wijhak (like your face),” came the straight unapologetic reply.

To Tata’s embarrassment, the owner repeated to her, in her own words, her assessment of the new home. My grandparents were duly reminded that they had among them embedded journalists who, despite their smallness, had big ears and big mouths. Kids do say the darndest things.

swinging to the moon

Grassy hills with a perfect slope for tumbling. Trees with roots wrapped around their bases. A softball field with powdery red sand. Basketball hoops standing back-to-back. Not one, but two playgrounds.

Welcome to heaven — er, the park.

At a picnic yesterday, my sister and I welcomed back a ‘ammu (uncle) who’d just returned from Libya. He told us that you could not find a single park like this in the entire country. So much potential. Little infrastructure.

My sister and I thought about that as we broke off from the predominantly parent-and-young-child party to take a stroll.

I asked my sister, “How do you build infrastructure? I mean, why isn’t there infrastructure? All it takes is a little money and you should be able to make this all happen.”  After all, Libya is, by no stretch of the means, poor.

“Corruption.” My sister replied. The money’s there, but not there. “Still, if people took initiative, they could do whatever they wanted. If one person in every city built a park for her community, using personal or public funds, it would be done.”

As my eyes revisited the green stretch of land that ends where stately houses begin, I imagined a careworn dusty Libya. I thought about how, as the daughter of immigrants, I may very well have been born and raised elsewhere in the world had things turned out differently. I might never, then, have enjoyed this breeze, this view, this grassy seat on a hill.

Later that day, when the sun king had fled and a yellow crescent presided in its place, my sister and I hit the swings. Most of the children had gone, so the playground was vacant. The night gave us a delicious sense of privacy in a public place, and we set off, gliding into a velvet sky.

Then two little boys arrived. Polite little boys, I might add. I moved to let them sit next to each other on the swings, and my sister and I took turns pushing each other, as if we were as little as they. As I prepared to make my “launch” to the moon, the little boys did the countdown.

“If you could plant any flag on the moon, what would it be?” I asked them, in a series of off-the-top-of-my-head questions. “America!” came the answer, faster than I’d expected.

“If you could paint the moon any color, what would it be?” was the next query.

“Black.” One of them said. “Red,” said the other.

Hah. I thought. A grim world that would be that had a black moon lost in a black sky, or a red orb looking down on a planet where red sadly evokes the color of blood. (Why did I not think of red as the color of carnations instead? Perhaps I’ve seen one too many horror movies. Or was it too many episodes of the evening news?)

As I felt myself rise nearer the moon (albeit only inches nearer), I saw skating parks on those craters. Snowboarding on the white slopes. Houses, cars, parks. An unlikely vision.

I realized how alarming it would be to look up at the night sky and see civilization — and corruption — painting itself across the face of that crescent. After all, I hardly look to the moon to see a reflection of my world.

The moon, I realized, is like the park — one of this life’s adornments. Free for everyone or, more accurately, anyone who stands within the U.S.’s borders. Unlike the park, however, the moon is universally accessible. It is operational without the least human maintenance. And it is visually if not actually out of this world.

If Libya’s would-be-parks are as bald as the moon, I shall still think there is goodness in the world so long as we can all look up after a long, tiresome day, and be comforted by a crescent neither black nor red.