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MANAR OF HAMA  MOHJA KAHF The food here is terrible. The meat smells disgusting. There is no real bread, or coffee, or olives, or cheese. They have a nasty yellow kind of cheese and even the milk—Khalid says make cheese yourself if there is no cheese, but even the milk is tasteless. Even the eggs are pale-yolked. I don’t know what they eat in America. I have lost five kilos already in the months since we left Syria. Khalid keeps saying you will get used to it, Manar, things will get better. But I don’t see how. Back home I was a smart, capable woman who could make her way around in the world. I am Manar Abdalqader Sharbakly of Hama. Whether I was in my hometown of Hama or in Khalid’s city, Damascus, it didn’t matter. The ground knew my feet. Here I get lost if Khalid isn’t with me on every little errand; the streets all look the same in this horrible little town. Back home I was top of my class. Here I am queen of the dunces. I have not been able to learn more than ten words of their miserable chaotic language. I think these people invented English as a sort of mind-torture for foreigners and newcomers. My children can babble away in English by now and they look at their mother who cannot speak two words to the school secretary and I know they are embarrassed. They are already in another world, one I don’t understand. They do things that make the hair go white as if these were normal things to do. Boys talking to girls, girls talking to boys in school and sitting next to them. Even Khalid is shocked sometimes. I said what do you expect, putting them in American schools that mix up girls and boys. What do Americans care about modesty, they are the world leaders in immorality, this everyone 111 1KALDAS_pages:1KALDAS pages i-72.qxd 8/3/09 2:35 PM Page 111 knows. But we have no choice—there is a private Catholic school for girls only but we can’t afford it. I have no one to talk to. There is one other Arab family in town, the engineer who invited Khalid to work in his company. This is how we got permission to enter the country. His wife is Palestinian but she was born in America and has forgotten her roots. She wears pants and knows only a choppy little Arabic and speaks to me out of her nostrils. Treats me as if I were an ignoramus. I look backward to her because I wear the kind of dress that, in our social circle back home and among people who have taste, is the dignified thing for a woman to wear. There, she and her pants would be seen for what they are: tasteless, ill-bred, and unbecoming. When we left Syria months ago, my family had just been killed in the Hama massacre. Massacre, massacre, massacre, the Hama massacre, there I said it. It is real. It happened. Even if I am surrounded by people who have never heard of it. Hama: blank stares. Asad: blank stares. Syria: blank stares. A government that would gun down twenty thousand of its own citizens: blank stares and nervous shifting of eyes. They have no idea that anyone in the world outside Sonora Falls, Illinois, exists. Except maybe the next town over, where the rival school team lives against whom they compete in that savage sport Americans play instead of soccer. The one where the object is for the players to ram each other like mad beasts. I do not want my son to start liking that game. The most imaginative intellect in town is capable perhaps—on a good day when his mind is working remarkably—now I am laughing at myself, Manar girl, look at where you’ve ended up! it’s a wonder I haven’t lost my sanity—yes, an intelligent specimen on a clear day is capable of imagining Chicago. This is where we landed in America, the airport of Chicago. That is the farthest afield their minds will take them. I, Manar Abdalqader Sharbakly of Hama, am a ghost from a nonexistent place. The week before I left this nonexistent place, we in Damascus waited, tense and starving for scraps of news from Hama—word from my parents, from friends, neighbors...

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