Chapter 1
“She hadn’t fallen asleep until the sky was grey with dawn.
And even then I was so rattled
I couldn’t leave her side, wondering if, like one of those hand-puppets that
play dead, she would bounce up again, light another cigarette and continue begging me, as she had
been doing before, not to tell, not to tell.”
BURDEN AND RESPONSIBITY; losing respect from mother
“Baba never found out about Mama’s illness; she only fell
ill when he was away on business. It was as if, when the world was empty of him,
she and I remained as stupid reminders, empty pages that had to be filled with
the memory of how they come to be married.”
“unable to leave her side”
“Then, as was usual on the mornings after she had been ill,
she took me on a drive to pull me out of my silence, to return me to myself
again”
“bought as many sesame sticks as I wanted”
GUILT
“Not caring if I lost her or became lost from her in the big
city”
“Their eyes were on Mama”
“I began to feel sorry and sad on how such mornings she was
always generous and embarrassed as if she had walked out naked. I wanted to run
to her, to hold her hand, latch on to her dress as she shopped and dealt with
the world, a world full of men and the greed of men.”
“I tell
myself off for being stubborn and for letting her buy me so many”
“to teach him all the things he had taught me about the
Roman Emperor, Lepcis Magna and Rome”
“I had kissed his hands like he taught me to”
“He had leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Take care of
your mother, you are the man of the house now”
“hoping he would call my name, wave his hand, snap his
fingers. I swear if he had I would have leaped into his arms.”
“I watched his solemn expression- an expression I admired
and feared”
“Green was the colour of the revolution, but you rarely saw
shutters painted in it”
“I felt
sick, anxious that I had done the wrong thing. Baba wasn’t on a business trip”
“Why had
I not acted?”
“He gazed at the square, no longer wearing the sunglasses, leaning with his hands on the
sill like a leader waiting for the clapping and chanting to stop. He
hung a small red
towel on the clothesline and disappeared inside”
“Stopping at the next traffic light, she whispered a prayer
to herself. A car stopped so close besides is I could have touched the driver’s
check.”
“Dressed up dark safari suits”
“I felt my heart jump”
They were the same Revolutionary Committee who had come a
week before and taken Ustath Rashid”
“Everyone knows you mustn’t overtake a Revolutionary
Committee car, and if you have to then you must do it discreetly, without
showing any pleasure in it”
“said the same prayer over and over. I felt the sweat gather
between my palms and the wax-paper wrapping of the sesame sticks.”
“Nothing better to do than give us an escort, the rotten
rats”
“My heart eased and my back grew taller”
“The innocent, Sheikh Mustafa, the imam of our local mosque,
had told me, have no cause to fear, only the guilty live in fear”
“I didn’t want the conversation to end”
“I was so close I could have touched the driver’s cheek and
I wasn’t frightened. Not at all. Not even a little, I` wasn’t”
“We are two halves of the same soul, two open pages of the
same book,”
“Words that felt like a gift I didn’t want”
Chapter 2
“I was woken up in the middle of the night by the sound of glass
shattering,”
“I ran to fetch her slippers, then threw them to her”
“Her medicine bottle half empty on the breakfast table”
“Her glass must have shattered. Mama was ill again”
BITTERNESS
“I felt my cheeks burn with anger: where is Baba? He should
be here because when he’s home everything is normal, she is never ill and I am
never woken up like this to find everything changed”
“I went back to bed but couldn’t sleep”
“she started her telling”
“The only thing that mattered were in the past. And what
mattered the most in the past was how she and Baba came to be married, that
“black day, as she called it”
“For although I feared those nights when we were alone and
she was ill, I never wanted her to stop talking. Her story was mine too, it
bound us, turned us into one,” “Two halves of the same soul, two open pages of
the same book” as she used to say
“You are my prince. One day you’ll be a man and take me away
on your white horse”
“I didn’t know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my
heart”
“You are my miracle”
“This is why I often lay in my darkened bedroom dreaming of
saving her”
“When Mama heard that her father had found her a groom, she
swallowed a ‘handful of magic pill’ “because they made a woman no good. For who
would want to remain married to a woman who couldn’t bear children? In a few
months, I thought, a year at the most, I’ll be free to resume my schooling. It
was a perfect plan, or so I thought.
“Part of the punishment was not to allow me even see a
photograph of my future husband.”
“I was so frightened”
“My father and brothers, the High Council”
“They didn’t know how it felt waiting in that room, where
the complete stranger who was now my husband was going to walk in alone and
without introduction, undress me and do filthy, revolting things.”
“I walked up and down that room in my wedding dress
wondering what kind of a face my executioner had. Because that’s how I saw it:
they passed the judgement and he, the stranger armed with the marriage contract
signed by my father, was going to carry out the punishment
“there will be no point screaming” - helpless
“I was his right, his wife under God”
MALE DOMINANCE
“I was only fourteen but I knew what a man had to do with
his wife. Cousin Khadija, a chatterbox had fallen as silent as a wall after her
wedding night, had later, when she and I were alone, told me how her husband
had lost patience with her and with his fingers punctured her veil and bled
her”
“It was the duty of every man to prove his wife a virgin”
“Betrayal was a hand squeezing my throat”
“Blood is going to be spilled either way”
If “you didn’t turn out virtuous and true, your father was
prepared to take your life
Dad 23 years old; mum 14
“Nine months later I had you”
“The medicine changed her eyes and made her lose her
balance”
“Sometimes
even before seeing her I could tell she was ill”
“I would come into the house and notice a certain stillness,
something altered. I knew without knowing how I knew.”
“I would call out to her even though I didn’t need her.”
PROTECTIVE
“when I saw her eyes lost in her face and heard her voice,
that strange nervous giggle, I was certain Mama was ill again.”
“Sometimes I felt the panic then found her well, immersed in
a book by Nizar al-Qabbani, her favourite poet. That upset me more”
“In the morning, after I had fallen asleep exhausted from
listening to her craziness and from guarding her- afraid she would burn herself
or leave the gas on in the kitchen or, God forbid, leave the house altogether
and bring shame and talk down on us- she would come and sit beside me, comb my
hair with her fingers and apologize and sometimes even cry a little” –
remorseful ; affectionate
“shocked when I repeated to her the things she told me the
night before”
“You,” I would shout-
shout because I was unable not to”
“She would look away and say “You shouldn’t have heard that
Scheherazade – “A thousand and One Nights”
“Nothing angered her more than the story of Scheherazade”
“I had always thought Scheherazade a brave woman who had
gained her freedom through inventing tales and often in moments of great fear,
recalled her example” INSPIRED
“You should find another model”
“Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death”
› “All
sons, of course. I wonder how successful she would have been if they were three
harlots like her”
“What scared me the most during such nights was how
different Mama became. She said words in front of me that made my cheeks blush
and my heart shudder/ Saliva gathered in the corner of her lips. She didn’t
look beautiful anymore” LOSS OF RESPECT; FEAR
“Not because she had as much to live as he, but because if
he were to kill her his sons would live “motherless”
“I imagined how it would be to live without her. A warm
swirl spun in my belly, something warm and dependable gripped my heart and sent
a rush through me. I wasn’t sure if it was fear or excitement that I felt at
the thought of losing her.”
“lit a cigarette”
“On the mornings after she was always nice.”
She didn’t mind stopping under the pedestrian bridge “so I
could watch the bad boys hanging about the fast traffic and some, the truly
brave ones, by their ankles.”
“Normally when we passed under them, she would ask me to
shut my eyes.”
“But on such mornings she was happy to park beside them and
let me watch. Sometimes, she would even say “ I must admit, they are quite
brave. “Then , “Promise me you would never do that. Promise me you would always
protect yourself.”
“On some mornings, she took me ALL THE WAY to town just to
buy sesame sticks.
“if she had been very ill the night before, she would take
me to Signor Il Calzoni’s restaurant in the sea”
“hover in search of
conversation”
“He spoke how much he missed Italy and how much he loved
Libya”
“And occasionally he would chant, loud enough for all the
restaurant to hear, “Long live the Guide” towards a large mural” which ‘showed
the Colonel in his fill military uniform”
“And if the restaurant had a table of Revolutionary
Committee men, or Mokhabarat, people we called ANTENNAE, he chanted, “El-Fateh,
el-Fateh, el-Fateh,”
BURDEN
“The
things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible
to carry on living without spilling them”
“A boy your age should never speak such things”
Moosa “I know how much you love him”
“Wrapping my arms round myself, doubling over: this was the
only way I could keep it all inside”
Mama : “What do you want from me?
“I have given up everything for you. You’re not even
satisfied”
“On the way home I regretted all the talking and laughing,
regretted breaking my silence, allowing myself to be tricked like a cat teased
out from beneath a bed with a string.”
“I knew I had failed when, on our way back home, late in the
afternoon when the bread was no longer at its best, she would stop by the empty
bakery.”
“watch the baker Majdi reach beneath his deep counter and
think, that’s the devil”
“I knew it was her medicine, bad for her, and bad for me,
but doubtful of the world and my place in it, I said nothing.”
“Mama and I spent most of the time together- she alone, I
unable to leave her”
“I wondered how the world might change if even for a second
I was to look away, to relax the grip of my gaze. I was convinced that if my
attention was applied filly, disaster would be kept at bay and she would return
whole and uncorrupted”
“Although her unpredictability and her urgent stories
tormented me, my vigil and what I could only explain as her illness bound us
into an intimacy that has since occupied the innermost memory I have of love”
“There was anger, there was pity, even the dark warm embrace
of hate, but always love and always the joy that surrounds the beginning of
love.”
Chapt 3
Made excuses that Mama won’t let
him go to Lepcis when “she already told Baba you can”
› feels
uneasy to leave his mother alone (Reason for initially not willing to go to
Lepcis)
Kareem follows his father “several times”
Kareem and Suleiman share a strong bond “ Because what
united Kareem and me rarely felt like friendship, but something like blood or
virtue”
(3 years older than
Suleiman); admired by Suleiman (“I wanted so much to be like him”)
Kareem and Suleiman’s house – same same but different,
“the mirror image of ours on the outside but on the inside
was completely altered by the different furniture and the colour of the walls :
like two brothers who had grown distant.
“They weren’t as well-off as we were”
“only a university professor”
“a business man who travelled the world “
“I felt a string in my heart break as I looked back at Mama
waving goodbye . Baba wasn’t home”
The students are very familiar with the history of Lepcis,
the history of the past
“Children are useless in a war”
“I watched Kareem nuzzle into his father’s side,”
“At times I used to wish that Baba was more like Ustath
Rashid”
“The times I felt
closest to him were when he (Baba) was unaware of my presence”
“he was often busy” “I would sometimes curl up beside him, but
his power of concentration ere amazing and he would hardly notice me”
“Although he travelled more than Ustath Rashid he never took
me with him.
“I begged him several times and once I felt so sick with
sadness that I screamed, kicked his shins and pummelled his thighs, and, when
Mama restrained me, I cried and called him ‘Ugly’
“I never again asked him to take me with him or cried in
front of him when he came to leave.”
“At other times I secretly wished that Moosa, Baba’s closest
friend, was my father instead”
“He often carried me on his shoulders to pick the high
fruit”
Cows from Scotland
Mama’s reaction’ dislike towards Um Masoud when she
complained about the cows
USTATH JAFER- respected and feared among the people
as he is ““able to put people behind the sun” as I have heard it said many
times”
While the mother says calmly “It’s alright” “It’s his
country too”
His father trues to protect Suleiman’s innocence and yell
“Go to your room” . “He shouldn’t see this”
leaflets criticizing the Guide and his revolutionary
Committees
“I say somebody, but there must have been hundreds, maybe
even thousands of men”
“Everyone feared these leaflets and made a point in tearing
them in full view of their neighbours.
“They are going to get us all in trouble”
“Mama spoke differently to Um Masoud, she seemed
sympathetic. She frowned and shook her jead and agreed with everything Um
Masoud said.
Bored, the boys tossed the leaflets into other people’s
garden. They did not understood the risk and degree of danger
“He didn’t struggle (Kareem’s dad)
“The man with the pockmarked face slapped Ustath Rashid,
suddenly and ferociously”
“That’s the fate of
all traitors”
“but Ustath Rashid was his friend” “he couldn’t keep silent:
when Um Masoud said Ustath Rashid was a traitor
Baba showed loyalty at start
Suleiman – caring “Who upset you, Baba” when he saw tears in
his father’s eye
“I have never seen Baba cry before
“ thought his father was tough
“It frightened me to see him like this because, although he
was often serious, he rarely became angry.”
Close friendship between Auntie Salma and Suleiman’s mother
“Their wives were like two lost sisters who had finally
found each other.”
“no two days would pass before one called or visited the
other”
From them who “talked endlessly”
“No need for you to be so close to that boy” and “She had
never called him ‘that boy’ before”
BETRAYAL
Suleiman’s mother tells Suleiman “try not to be so close to
him (Kareem)”
“This is a time for
walking beside the wall”
“I was affected by Mama’s words, I did feel myself nudged by
guilt whenever Kareem and I were alone.”
“A certain sadness had entered his eyes the day Ustath
Rashid was taken, but in wasn’t the”
Kareem didn’t have the “sadness of longing, it was the
sadness of betrayal, the silence sadness that comes from being let down”
GRIEF & LOSS
“He became quieter” “refused to join in any of the games we
played,”, “looking at us in a way that made me feel far away from him”
“ I wished the
Revolutionary Committee would return and this time take my father so that we
would be equal, united again by that mysterious bond if blood that up to that
day felt like an advantage”
“Sorry we didn’t stand arm-in-arm to block the way”
“after she had been ill, I was angry at her”
CHAPT 4
Baba “seemed preoccupied”
Brings the mother a perfume bottle each time he returns
“wasn’t full of stories”
“She had spent the whole morning in the kitchen.”
“she looked beautiful; she always looked beautiful when he
was home”
“I am worried, worried for us’
“She needs us now more than ever.”
“You have chosen a dead-end road:
“found Mama in his arms, make-up melting.”
“I need you”
Relationship with dad :
“”kissed me on the nose”
Holding ” the pot as high as I could”- “I could feel him
smiling proudly at me. It made my chest tickled.”
“I felt such a relief now that Baba was home. Now everything
can be normal again, I thought. Now I can leave the house without worrying”
“I looked up at the sun. I thought, how strong is the sun,
how mighty, and felt frightened by it”
The possibility of it “ pressing down against us like a
giant balloon”
“sometimes it brought tears to my eyes” “Sometimes I wanted
to ask him how he saw, how he imagined us and the world, but I didn’t know how
to ask such questions then”
“imitating Baba’s walk”
“I see you. I see you”
“Although I knew Bahloul was mad, these words, these
meaningless words that he always repeated, increased my confusion. I wondered
ig he thought I was stealing my neighbours’ berries and was announcing himself
the witness”
“Was I stealing? I wasn’t sure”
“My heart shuddered. I tried to look, to seem, to feel
innocent because, as Sheikh Mustafa had told me, the innocent has no cause to
fear”
“ I wanted to speak to comfort her but I couldn’t”
“I didn’t know what was the matter with me, but was now more
concerned for her.”
S would show his mother his workshop and “give me the
answer, any question I could think of and as many as I could think of”
“She began to speak to herself,’ it’s all your fault. If
anything happens to him everyone will blame you, say you were napping while
your own son needed you. He’s only a child, Najwa, what were you thinking?”
“To the rest of the world she was Um Suleiman”
Chapt 5
“ I loved it when Moosa was here.
Martyrs’ square ( willing to sacrifice)
“We are not against the revolution, we are against the
extremes of the revolution”
Mama refers the hopes as “Clouds””they gather then flit
away”
“”Three years ago when those students dared to speak. They
hanged them by their necks. And now we are condemned to witness the whole thing
again. The foolish dreamers! And it’s foolish and irresponsible to encourage
them”
“It is our obligation to call injustice by its name” –
moosa- morality
“Go call it by its name in your country. Here it’s either
silence or exile, walk by the wall or leave. Go be a hero somewhere else.”
Nothing lasts forever”
“I knew she needed a quick answer, a quick good answer”
“I quickly made up a dream” A good dream
“I had always loved Moosa’s massages
“I am never invited to lunch parties any more”
“And if I invite my friends they won’t come”
“Cowards.” “No, just sensible”
Relatives avoid
“You can’t give people braver hearts”
Help me convince him to leave this wretched path”
“Noon, you fill my heart with fear and dread, showing me
more than I want to see” – recognized the familiar / relates to the poem,
“something I thought I had experienced”
“Moosa infected me with his love of language
“you must be careful of the sun”
“it can kill you”
CHAPT 6
“I imagined him leaning with one arm against the door,
sweating, bleeding beautifully “ exactly like the heroes I saw in films”
“Don’t leave this room “ Moosa proctecting
Mama “sounded like a small nervous fish alone in the deep”
“Shame on you following a woman and her son like that”
“vanished like a grain of salt in water”
“How can any one of us prove that he or she is not, and
never was , a traitor”
“Take care of your mother, you are the man of the house
now”. I buried my hands in my armpitsm trying to stop trembling – tries to be
brave
“I beg you” “Conceal my shame”
“This is not only forbidden by God and tradition, it is also
illegal”
“welcome, you have honoured us”
“I felt the desperate need to go to the reception room, to
be the one reaching for her hand”
“rats”
“They can put him under the sun, Better try to win them
over”
pg 66 scheherazade
“under Shahryar’s sword
“unable to look up into the sky or rest in the silence and
solitude of her own garden.
“She, I am certain now, was one of the bravest people that
had ever lived. It’s one thing not to fear death, another to sing under it’s
sword”
“You are well, that’s what matters, that’s all that matters”
”Concealer, conceal our faults”
Moosa wants to protect S, doesn’t discuss about the
revolutionary members when he is around
CHAPT7
“with room for one
more, ,reserved for Baba” – understood/ aware of the situation
“I recalled how he beat Ustath Rashid. I wondered what it
would like to slap a man, to kick him like that in the behind”
Soft insides of the bread “used it to wipe hands and mouths
clean”
“For a long time I believed that photograph: that on that
day Baba was in fact standing among trees washed in warm sunlight.” And so,
when I realized that the whole thing was a trick, I felt cheated”
“Sometimes when I came to the end of a piece Baba would clap
from another room, shouting, ‘Bravo.Encore,” and other times remained silent” –
not consistent
“Ifelt my cheeks burn with an anger that seemed to come from
nowhere.”
“wasted words”
“Mama was crying. I felt my anger doubling. I slapped the table.”
“What’s the matter, habibi, light of my eyes?”
“I longed for how things had been”
“”whether he was totally ignorant of his wife’s ‘illness’
“He kissed me on the head and gave me ten dinars” – proud of
his son, among his friends
Moosa – ambitious, dreamer -
“Well, he imported the Polish tyres and as with the chickens, he didn’t
order a few to try out first, he bought a whole shipload”
“You are no longer a baby”
“calling for her dead father to return and save her because
it was too soon, she said, all too much
and too soon” – marriage, motherhood
“Inspired to madness, inspired to craziness”
Yelled and cried
“Everything is going to be fine”
“You are my prince. My beautiful prince”
“I never liked being upset at Moosa”
Chapt 8
Dream : Baba “turned into a fish” fish = greed
“She never spent the night here when Baba was here when Baba
was home”
Feel insecure? “Separating us, sending each one sailing
alone through their indv night where morning seemed too distant and abstract to
be trusted.
“watching Egyptian romance films where lovers and love are
never satisfied”
“Their melodrama seems to mock love:
“Strengthen
her doubts about love and confirm her instinct to go without it, accepting-
always accepting – a life forced upon her”
“my check warmed by her pillow, wondering how can /heaven be
anything ither than this” – motherly love, warmth and affection – valued
“I always suspected there was a different reason why, when
Baba was home, Mama didn’t sleep in her room”
“I lay that night unable to sleep, wondering- an d feeling
fear, guilt and anger at my wondering- if I shouldn’t have done something to
stop it; if unbeknown to me Mama needed my help” – righteous, wanna do the
right thing
“And what a failure I prove to be” – harsh critical reflection
“camouflage”
The picture of Baba, “his smile changed” , insinuating the
change in respect?
“You are my prince, one day you’ll be a man and take me away
on your white horse
“A sweet sensation of guilt and excitement ran through me”
“Children
aren’t suppose to know these things”
“you encouraged him, looked up to him to guide you, inflated
his chest with your adoration
“You are Egyptian. The most they could do is deport you”
“I would give my life for him”
“You are children playing with fire”
“Walk by the wall” “look the other way,this is their time,
not ours”
“work hard and get us out of here.
“in five years he’ll be fourteen, they’ll make a soldier out
of him:
“now look where his recklessness has led us”
“Bu Suleiman is an honourable man who wants a better Libya for you and for Suleiman”
“They are mighty” _ The revolutionary member
“But no,
I must be a good wife, loyal and unquestioning, support my man regardless. I’ll
support nothing that puts my son in danger.
“I won’t follow. I
will get my son out of this place if it takes the last of me”
“Inflating his chest”
“reading and rereading to him the newspaper articles that
you know would kindle the fire in his heart, urging him on, pushing- always
pushing- and if the printed words weren’t hot enough you would add in your own
bits, because you need a hero, you need someone to pluck you out of your own
failures”
“to prove to your good father that in the end you were right
to go against his will, that unlike everyone else you don’t need a university
degree because you were destined for greatness”
“Moosa’s idea for the “headquarters on Martyrs’ Square. How
discreet! It’s hardly out of the way, hardly underground:
“Forward planning:
Likes attention?Dreams too big? Selfish ambition?
“Whenever he’s upset”
(doubling habit”
“He loves his books more than anything else. One day they’ll
come to burn them and us with them” – dedicated; passionate
CHAPT 9
“I was confused. Why wasn’t he furious?:
“I saw the driver’s face and realized I didn’t know him/; -
many people rebelling
Sunglasses hidden agenda
Even though the portrait was so big that “it was impossible
to ignore”
Dedication: “To my eternal friend and comrade” “With my
undying loyalty, Rashid
Found the need to hide the book – sorta know about it being
risky
“You let a boy beat you”
“I am not a child”
“Yes you are” “with an irritation that made the betrayal
harsher”
“feeling
a dark unstoppable force gain momentum”
“Everyone knows your father is a tr-“
“It was a good, clean throw”
“Listen, you, you have no word, you are not a man because
you gave no word.”
“imagined their eyes gleaming with pride.”
“But you were wrong about yourself”
“Kareem entrusted you with his
secret love for Leila”
Calling himself a “traitor” “heard the tremor in my voice”
as he tries to
“the book Ustath Rashid had gifted Baba with his ‘undying
love’
“I heard that the Guide had a switch in his sitting room, beside
his television set, so whenever he saw something he didn’t like he flicked the
flower on. POWER
“I had seen such interrogations before broadcast on
television. They are meant to show the nation the ‘faces of the traitors’
“Usthat Rashid said, ‘no’ when Baba’s name was mentioned. I
knew this was the opposite of betrayal”
“A strange exhaustion came over me”
“I was surprised by how easy it was to get rid of him, how
willing he was to obey me. It made me feel guilty”
“I suddenly felt affection towards him” (Bahloul when he was
earnest and ran to the other door
“ I grabbed a handful of stones and hurled them at him
“Every time I missed my anger hardened”
“I had never frightened anyone so much before”
“Perhaps then he will understand that there was nothing to
fear, that I am the boy and he the man, I thought.
CHAT 11
“Something in me was ashamed if what I had done to Bahloul”
“ Her tone, the way she sat stiff and unmoving, immediately
unsettled me. This was a mood that overtook her at tomes, one I was familiar
with and which turned her inn search of conflict”
“What heroic chords that word caused to resonate in my ears”
“reminded me of the solemn standing ovation the slaves had given to their
masters”
Made “Baba poised in admiration”
“As soon as
the flowers came on Ustath Rashid was probably beaten, Iwascertain he was ‘ taught a good lesson’,
‘his face spared’ … but his body a ‘patchwork of bruises’
“Several times I had woken up in the night to make sure all
cigarette butts on the ashtray beside her were out, looking under the bed in
case one had fallen there. This is one of the reasons why I couldn’t leave her
side when she was ill”
“She often, during those empty days when Baba was away,
walked aimlessly around the house”
“That singing that had always evoked a girl unaware of
herself, walking home from school;, brushing her finders against the wall: a
moment before the Italian Coffee house, a moment sheltered in the clarity of
innocence, before the quick force which, without argument, without even the
chance to say, ‘No,’ thrust her over the border and into womanhood, then
irrevocably into motherhood”
“I wanted so much to make her happy, as happy as she seemed
when Baba was home. Except it wasn’t happiness that came over her then but
something like confidence:
She moved faster and sounded more self-assured. Could I ever come to inspire
that in her, I wondered from beneath the bed sheet”
Opened the window when the gas was left - knows what to do;
takes care of himself
“I slammed the doors hut and locked myself in the room
They all had agreed, I though, to ignore me’
ADNAN “ with his own life and literature of illness, seem to
need no one
“Like my heroine, Scheherazade, he, too, was living under
the sword”
“You should find another model. Scheherazade accepted
slavery over death”
“they had each other, one person clapping wouldn’t do”
“I knew he was lying” – about Sharief being good friends
with his father
“Unlike Mama and Moosa, he answered my question, He didn’t treat me like a child
Men are
never afraid. And you are a man, aren’t you
“did he leave in disgust when he saw how close I and the man
who had taken his father were becoming, I wondered.
S pushed his mum – little acts of violent
CHAPT 12
Baba’s fiery mint – caught but S doesn’t know
Aware/ familiar that Echo means tapped / privacy
“I felt bad that I had lied to him”
S immediately answers his family name to the stranger in the
phone
The mum left him alone with the phone – irresponsible
“if she ever needs drinking company, to call on me” “I too
get my medicine from that scoundrel, Majdi – illegal
“red towel on the clothesline in front of the window”
“The red towel, that’s the code”
“Nasser is a very nice person” – childish
CHAPT 13
“One day Baba will take me with him on a business trip, I
was certain.”
“I will then be a man, heavy with the world” – knows the
burden of adulthood
“I hardly ever did something alone with Baba.” “He was away
so often, and when home he was usually distracted by a book or newspaper”.
“The only activity Baba and I did alone was the walk together
to the mosque on Friday”
“After the prayer Baba enjoyed introducing me to his friends”
“When he was home, Baba seemed distant. Away he seemed
closer somehow, more alive in my thoughts
“The men she called ‘ High Council’- the men who met to
decide her fate when she was onlyh fourteen”
Khaled- “the one who gave me up, betrayed me.”
THE FEAST OF ANTS- telling the history of our country
“Now your father will think I haven’t brought you right.” –
blame on women, not men
‘”I couldn’t
lift her, couldn’t carry her. Because I was only nine”
“picturing how I could have saved her then”
“I couldn’t wait to be a man. And not to do all the things normally
associated with manhood and its licence, but to change the past, to rescue that
girl from her black day”
“How much of him is there in me?
Can you become a man without becoming your father?”
CHAPT 14
“These people have no mercy”
“The acceptable age difference had to be at least three
years.”
“With such a gap no one could object or say she would grow
barren and old before he did. Because you had to think ahead. A woman had to be
young and strong enough to bear children and serve the mam well into his old age,
so that her locks would remain black as coal when his head was bald as the moon
“When I was caught and flogged with a bamboo stuck on the
front and back of my hands, I lied and told them it was his idea. It didn’t
feel wrong at the time, but when he eventually was brought into the room and
saw me I felt terrible. I had betrayed him,
“the Revolutionary
Committee man, Sharief, “ “loyal to his cause” “confidence and youth “seemed
beyond age and need, a man calling for the world to keep up with him”
CHAPT 15
“my inauguration into the dark art if submission”
“ I swear to God” “I have always liked you. Her eyes wide
open, eager to convince
“Her confidence was repulsive”
“He was a senior member if the Mokhabarat”
“Most of us secretly admired his power in comparison with
our parents”
“His tone changed when he addressed his wife, it was rough
and unrestrained”
“Since we found out about Rashid, we have nothing to do with
him or his family
“I wanted to impress them with my aim”
“you can’t hit each other over nothing”
The ambulance door he “shut it with great care”
“By rushing to my rescue Sharief had spilt the sea. Created
an undertow that would pull me even further from Kareem”
“We drift through allegiances , those we are born into and
those we are claimed by , always estranging ourselves
“accepting Osama’s anger, agreeing that I wasn’t innocent,
that Adnan was the ultimate victim “
“She seemed captive, captive in her own home, continually
failing to prepare herself for anything else.”
POWER- given full attention
“because
they used to mock him, couldn’t understand his sensitivity”
“darkly
content with the world I was give, thankful to be hers”
“because the suffering endured by women surpasses all kinds
of human suffering/
Mama was locked in her room for 30 days while they looked
for a groom for her
“You forbid to school, lock her away for thirty day s and now
want to marry her to a complete stranger”
“it was
my father’s political involvement that had scared them away
“how isolated we were”
“I cried because I understood that I was now the property of
another man”
“And that was how I knew it was over. A word had been given
and a word had been received, men’s words that could never be taken back or
exchanged”
“I remembered his beatings and felt my back grow taller”
“I remembered how my back too had grown taller after the
white car stopped following us”
“I imagined what I would have done to save her”
CHAPT 17
“your father was very cooperative, melted like butter”
“and now a mighty hand has come to his rescue
“unable to make sense of what Sharief meant:
“Once I sat for six hours watching a close chess match
between a Libyan and a Korean at the International chess Championship” “When
the Korean won I almost cried with disappointment”
“Muammar
el-Qaddafi” “the symbol of hope and freedom”
Mama’s face was completely blank
Her face gave absolutely nothing away”
“wide-eyed, beautiful, but lifeless”
The crowd’s reaction to Ustath Rashid’s execution was
“madness”
“I thought of saying ‘Poor Kareem’ but I didn’t
Join their discussion about the execution
Traumatised “shut or
open, my eyes continued to see the slim figure of Ustath Rashid swinging in the
mid-air”
“shooed him back to his own bed when he woke up frightened
and wen t to lie beside her
“She seemed to relish the silence that had to be assumed
while Mama made the tea”
Covered up Baba’s blood with ‘lost a tooth
“At a time like this we should stay together”
Mirror covered
“happy endings” in cowboy film contrast reality
“Where were the heroes… the happy endings
“Apart from
making me lose trust in the assumption that good things happen to good people,
the televided execution of Usthat h Rashid” gave “no illusions that /I or Baba or
Mama were immune from being burned by the madness that overtook the National
Basketball Stadium”
Hiding of mirrors
19
“You always lie. I am not a child and you always lie”
“his back criss-crossed
in dark glistening lines, some oozing blood”
“His eyes were closed, full off air or water ir blood, lke
split rotten tomatoes, and his lower lip was a fat and purple as BABY AUBERGINE
“I felt we, Mama and I , would be safer this way”
“I wanted to tell her , “Don’t worry, everything will be all
right”
“I almost never get nightmares”
“I thought of running to kiss it a thousand and one times”
20
“He made me cover the mirrors. He doesn’t want to see
himself”
“let him see himself for what he really is”
“I can’t
bear looking at him” “The betrayal in his eyes”
“Only yesterday you were ready to dies for him, now you wish
he had died for you”
“The only reason you are still alive is because it’s not
your country
“One by one we’ll get there’ – comforting mulberries
reminded him that “they put their cigarettes “ on his temple
21
“Baba looked at me. I began to feel nervous, nervous in the
way you feel when alone in a lift with a stranger
The guide’s voice on the radio “Revolutionary forces are
capable of and have the right to use terror to eliminate anutone who stands
against the revolution”
“reminded of that secret rush of power I had felt chasing him around the garden,
throwing stones at his back”
“Although he had saved up and bought the boat, he hadn’t started
fishing yet. Bahloul couldn’t swim
“I wanted to save him:”
“I thought of saying sorry, but I collected my flippers and
walked away”
“My heart had never ached with more longing, longing for my
true friend twelve hours away now in Benghazi
22
“I let the plates fall loudly”
“I often threw my shoe at the wall when it’s lace refused to
be untangled
“Their new life, where Baba never went away and Mama was
never ill, distanced me from them,”
23
final embrace with father
bag full of sesame sticks “I was installed alone in a
foreign country to thrive away from the madness
“met by Judge Yaseen’s disappointed gaze
“But Libya grew distant in the background, began to mean
little.
“My accent had quickly become Caireen”
“but truly felt nothing”
“none of the fervour that once caused me to cry, after six
hours of watching a chess match in which a Libyan lost to a Korean at the
International Chess Championship
“Nationalism is as this as a thread, perharps that’s why
many feel it must be anxiously guarded”
‘Evader’
because I had not returned for military service
‘Stray
Dogs’ who refused to return
The government’s next move was to refuse my parents a visa
to leave the country, holding them hostage, as they were, until the evading
Stray Dog returmed
What could we possibly give her (our country) that hasn’t
already been taken”
“I yearned for them… Kareem”
“Once, but only once, when I was still a boy, I cried and
screamed, throwing things as I had done before to stop Baba going on one of his
endless business trip
I am fully aware of how even this choice was influenced by
her, what she ca;;ed her ‘illness; and ;medicine; , , the clourless liquid
supplied under the counter by the baker, still illegal in Libya”
“I suffer an absence, an ever-present absence, like an orphan
not entirely certain of what he has missed or gained through his unchosen loss”
“Egypt has not replaced Libya. Instead, there is this void,
this emptiness”
“How readily and thinly we procure these fictional selves/”
“if only we waited to see what might have become of us”
24
After Baba denounced his political convictions, or had them
denounced him , the relatives showed their approval by visiting my parents
again”
“It was the best thing you ever did, sending me away”
“she began to regret sending me away”
“I hated how her confidence plummeted with time, how she
reflected in the past and hinched in front of it in regret. I wanted her certainty
back, even that ruthless, steely certainty that made her send me away,
against her husband’s reservations and her only son’s plea’
Deposit liquid assets into the National Bank”
“the national currency had been redesigned, they were told”
“only to be told afterwards that individual bank withdrawals
would be limited to
one thousand dinars annually
My parents were badly affected by this
The following year, private savings accounts” “were eliminated”
“my
parents watched their money vanish ‘like salt in water’
“This meant that even if they were allowed to, during the
first years of my stay in Cairo, my parents couldn’t afford to visit; and, more
crucially, the cost of my education and living couldn’t be met and therefore
had to be endured in total by Judge Yaseen who was amiable about the whole
thing”
“You and I are one man. Suleiman is like my own”
“Father was left with no choice but to seek employment” “He
got a job as a ‘machine operator in one of the nationalized factories”
“Both he and Mother seemed to treat this as a novelty in the
beginning and I was encouraged by their high spirits
“I
could hear her laughing”
”the smile
clear in his voice”
“Mother was furious”
“How could he have done such thing?”
“Has your father forgotten what kind of country we live in?
“I fully aware that the telephone line was tapped”
“Had he managed to delude himself that he could still change
things” “Had he come to prefer death over slavery, unlike my Scheherazade,
refusing to live under the sword”
Corruption “ that they would see it that ‘friends in high
places’ would doctor my file, cross out the words ‘stray dog’
“I began to consider this, consider it seriously.
Particularly because Mother began to sound depressed, recalling the missed
opportunities: the education and careers she might have had. Loneliness seemed
to remind her if all the things she had missed”
“the countless messages she left I erased without listening
to their content”
“The stamp told me that it was from Libya. Is seemed a cruel
intrusion into the life I was making in Cairo””a desire very similar to wanting
to be free of the past”
Seing his letter “made me long for my childhood friend” ”she
has not left your house for weeks”
“what’s
missing from her life is only to see you” “I am making sure she needs
for nothing
“Qaddafi decreed that anyone had the right to claim a vacant
property as their own”
In this country we don’t understand the illnesses of the
heart.”
“She needs you”
“She needs you”
Kareem signs the letter with “Your friend and brother?”
“I detested how she and her past, how her ‘illness; injected
the world with so much urgency that not even my childhood friend and I had time
to reminisce
“if he still remembered my betrayal”
“even this letter that had come through against her will. I
refused to respond to”
After the Father was “pardoned behind bars”, Mother returned
to her sober self, busy again with her duties
DAD: “I just wanted to hear your voice’ and so I talked for long stretched of time to
satisfy this desire”
“I noticed a peculiar aloofness enter my voice” “ She tried,
always, to break the distance, to bring me back, to have me speak with love”
“he died painlessly” “to comfort me”
“unable to conceal the amazement felt by the Libyans living
abroad when they hear that a compatriot has managed to pass through the gate,
been miraculously exempt from the endless restrictions and decrees, feeling
both a sense of triumph, in knowing there still exists a thread connecting
their country to the rest of the world, and jealousy, at not being permitted to
return”
“Nasser must have been forgive, “Once labelled a
‘Conspirator’ and ‘traitor’, he had become a leading member of the diplomatic
community”
Forgiven even though, “from these distances only blame and
regret seem possible
“I am sorry, I said, and immediately felt the need to repeat
my apology”
“I felt
deep gratitude and searing envy. He was there in all the ways I couldn’t be”
:”everyone was getting on with their lives, busy forgetting,
willing to forgive”
“Yes. I would like that, I would like it very much, Kareem”
“He kicked ferociously as Ustath Rashid’s leg did above the
National Basketball Stadium:
“for abandoning my parents,
“But you have had many chances since to return, and he would
be right
“I consider the option of not looking for her”
“You’re a man, I tell myself. And she’s coming to see you,
to see what has become of her darling boy”
“The mother who tried to never have me, the mother who never
chose it, the mother who resisted in all the ways she knew how:
“Mama! Mama”
“When I reach her she kisses my hands, my forehead, m y
cheeks, combs my hair with her fingers, straightens my collar”
god bless whoever made this
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