In the Country of Men (Themes)

BEING A MAN/ MASCULINITY

·         “He had leaned down and whispered in my ear, “Take care of your mother, you are the man of the house now”

·         “I have never seen Baba cry before “ thought his father was tough         

·         “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 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.”

·         “Take care of your mother, you are the man of the house now”. I buried my hands in my armpits trying to stop trembling – tries to be brave

·         “I felt the desperate need to go to the reception room, to be the one reaching for her hand”

·          “Everything is going to be fine”

·         “You are my prince, one day you’ll be a man and take me away on your white horse

·         “Listen, you, you have no word, you are not a man because you have no word.”

·         “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

·         “I will then be a man, heavy with the world” – knows the burden of adulthood

·          “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?”

·         “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”

·          

BURDEN AND RESPONSIBILITY

·         “unable to leave her side”

·         “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”

·         “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” – Suleiman understood that letting others know about his mother’s illness would be shameful

·         “I would call out to her even though I didn’t need her.” PROTECTIVE

·         “The things she told me pressed down on my chest, so heavy that it seemed impossible to carry on living without spilling them”

·         “Wrapping my arms round myself, doubling over: this was the only way I could keep it all inside”

·         “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”

·         “I felt a string in my heart break as I looked back at Mama waving goodbye . Baba wasn’t home”

·         “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

·         “A strange exhaustion came over me”

·         “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”

·         The mum left him alone with the phone – irresponsible

·          

 HEROIC ACTION

·         “You are my prince. One day you’ll be a man and take me away on your white horse”

·         This is why I often lay in my darkened bedroom dreaming of saving her”

·         Made excuses that Mama won’t let him go to Lepcis when “she already told Baba you can” (sacrifice) - feels uneasy to leave his mother alone (Reason for initially not willing to go to Lepcis)

·         “He didn’t struggle (Kareem’s dad)

·         “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”

·         “I imagined him leaning with one arm against the door, sweating, bleeding beautifully “ exactly like the heroes I saw in films”

·         “You are my prince. My beautiful prince”

·         “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?

·         “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”

·         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”

·         “picturing how I could have saved her then”

·         “I imagined what I would have done to save her”

·         “happy endings” in cowboy film contrast reality

·         “Where were the heroes… the happy endings

·         “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”

·          

OPPRESSION

·         “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.

·         “My father and brothers, the High Council”

·         “there will be no point screaming” - helpless

·         “I was his right, his wife under God”

·         “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”

·         “Not because she had as much to live as he, but because if he were to kill her his sons would live “motherless”

·         “Scheherazade was a coward who accepted slavery over death”

·         “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.”

·         “How can any one of us prove that he or she is not, and never was , a traitor”

·         “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 man well into his old age, so that her locks would remain black as coal when his head was bald as the moon

·         “His tone changed when he addressed his wife, it was rough and unrestrained”

·         “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”

 FEAR

·         “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”

·          “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”

·         “Part of the punishment was not to allow me even see a photograph of my future husband.”

·         “I was so frightened”

·         “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

·         “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

·         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”

·         “It frightened me to see him like this because, although he was often serious, he rarely became angry.”

·         “I am worried, worried for us’

·         “You have chosen a dead-end road:

·         “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”

·         Mama “sounded like a small nervous fish alone in the deep”

 VIOLENCE

·         “As soon as the flowers came on Ustath Rashid was probably beaten,  I was certain he was ‘ taught a good lesson’, ‘his face spared’ … but his body a ‘patchwork of bruises’

·         “The man with the pockmarked face slapped Ustath Rashid, suddenly and ferociously”

·         “You have chosen a dead-end road:

·         ”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”

·         “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”

·         “ 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”

·         “I slammed the doors hut and locked myself in the room

·         S pushed his mum – little acts of violent

·         “you can’t hit each other over nothing”

·         The crowd’s reaction to Ustath Rashid’s execution was “madness”

·         “his back criss-crossed in dark glistening lines, some oozing blood”

·         “His eyes were closed, full off air or water ir blood, like split rotten tomatoes, and his lower lip was a fat and purple as  BABY AUBERGINE

·         “One by one we’ll get there’ – comforting mulberries reminded him that “they put their cigarettes “ on his temple

·         “I let the plates fall loudly”

·         “I often threw my shoe at the wall when it’s lace refused to be untangled

·          

CONTROL

·         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”

·         “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,”

·         “no one is ever beyond their reach”

·         “how quickly, how there’s no space to argue, to say no”

·         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”

·         “You have chosen a dead-end road:

·         “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”

·         “We are not against the revolution, we are against the extremes of the revolution”

·         ”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”

·         “you must be careful of the sun”

·         “it can kill you”

·         “in five years he’ll be fourteen, they’ll make a soldier out of him:

·         “They  are mighty” _ The revolutionary member

·         Even though the portrait was so big that “it was impossible to ignore”

·         “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

·         “The men she called ‘ High Council’- the men who met to decide her fate when she was onlyh fourteen”

·         “Now your father will think I haven’t brought you right.” – blame on women, not men

·         “She seemed captive, captive in her own home, continually failing to prepare herself for anything else.”

·         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 days and now want to marry her to a complete stranger”

·         “Muammar el-Qaddafi” “the symbol of hope and freedom”

·         The guide’s voice on the radio “Revolutionary forces are capable of and have the right to use terror to eliminate anyone who stands against the revolution”

·         ‘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”

·         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’

·         “Qaddafi decreed that anyone had the right to claim a vacant property as their own”

·          

·          

POWER

·         “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”

·         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”

·         Soft insides of the bread “used it to wipe hands and mouths clean”

·         Dream : Baba “turned into a fish” fish = greed

·         “welcome, you have honoured us”

·         “rats”

·         “They can put him under the sun, Better try to win them over”

·         “feeling a dark unstoppable force gain momentum”

·         “imagined their eyes gleaming with pride.”

·          “Perhaps then he will understand that there was nothing to fear, that I am the boy and he the

·         “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”

·         POWER- given full attention

·         “because they used to mock him, couldn’t understand his sensitivity”

·         “it was my father’s political involvement that had scared them away

·         “how isolated we were”

·         “and now a mighty hand has come to his rescue

·         “She seemed to relish the silence that had to be assumed while Mama made the tea”

·         “reminded of that secret rush of power I had felt chasing him around the garden, throwing stones at his back”

·         Corruption “ that they would see it that ‘friends in high places’ would doctor my file, cross out the words ‘stray dog’

·          

LOYALTY/friendship

·         “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

·         Kareem

·         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”

·         “ 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 of blood that up to that day felt like an advantage”

·         “Sorry we didn’t stand arm-in-arm to block the way”

·         “He loves his books more than anything else. One day they’ll come to burn them and us with them” – dedicated; passionate

·         “To my eternal friend and comrade” “With my undying loyalty, Rashid

·         “the book Ustath Rashid had gifted Baba with his ‘undying loyAlty’

·         “Usthat Rashid said, ‘no’ when Baba’s name was mentioned. I knew this was the opposite of betrayal”

·         “they had each other, one person clapping wouldn’t do”

·          “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”

·         “At a time like this we should stay together”

·         “My heart had never ached with more longing, longing for my true friend twelve hours away now in Benghazi

·         “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”

·         Seing his letter “made me long for my childhood friend”

BETRAYAL

·         “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

·         “No need for you to be so close to that boy” and “She had never called him ‘that boy’ before”

·         Suleiman’s mother tells Suleiman “try not to be so close to him (Kareem)”

·          “This is a time for walking beside the wall”

·         Kareem didn’t have the “sadness of longing, it was the sadness of betrayal, the silent sadness that comes from being let down”

·         “You let a boy beat you”

·         “I am not a child”

·         “Yes you are” “with an irritation that made the betrayal harsher”

·         “Kareem entrusted you with his secret love for Leila”    

·         Calling himself a “traitor” “heard the tremor in my voice” as he tries to

·         “I had seen such interrogations before broadcast on television. They are meant to show the nation the ‘faces of the traitors’

·         “did he leave in disgust when he saw how close I and the man who had taken his father were becoming, I wondered.

·         Khaled- “the one who gave me up, betrayed me.”

·         “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,

·         “Since we found out about Rashid, we have nothing to do with him or his family

·         “your father was very cooperative, melted like butter”

·         “I can’t bear looking at him” “The betrayal in his eyes”

·         “Only yesterday you were ready to die for him, now you wish he had died for you”

·          

GUILT

·         “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”

·         she would come and sit beside me, comb my hair with her fingers and apologize and sometimes even cry a little” – remorseful ; affectionate

·         “She would look away and say “You shouldn’t have heard that

·         “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”

·         “I was affected by Mama’s words, I did feel myself nudged by guilt whenever Kareem and I were alone.”

·         “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?”

·          “Something in me was ashamed if what I had done to Bahloul”

·         “I thought of saying ‘Poor Kareem’ but I didn’t

·         “for abandoning my parents,

·          

ANGER/BITTERNESS

·         “Not caring if I lost her or became lost from her in the big city”

·         “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”

·         “You,” I  would shout- shout because I was unable not to”

·         “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.”

·         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.”

·         “after she had been ill, I was angry at her”

·         “Ifelt my cheeks burn with an anger that seemed to come from nowhere.”

·         “Mama was crying. I felt my anger doubling. I slapped the table.”

·          “Every time I missed my anger hardened”

·         “I slammed the doors hut and locked myself in the room

·          

INNOCENCE/ A CHILD’S PERSPECTIVE

·         “Her medicine bottle half empty on the breakfast table”

·         “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.”

·         “Children are useless in a war”

·         “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’

·         “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”

·         “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

·         “I was confused. Why wasn’t he furious?:

·         “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”

·         “Perhaps then he will understand that there was nothing to fear, that I am the boy and he the man, I thought.

·         S immediately answers his family name to the stranger in the phone

·         “Nasser is a very nice person” – childish

·         ‘”I couldn’t lift her, couldn’t carry her. Because I was only nine”

·          

 LOSS OF INNOCENCE/ GROWING UP

·         “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.”

No longer believes parents are perfect, losses respect for mother

·         “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”

·          “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” – Suleiman understood that letting others know about his mother’s illness would be shameful

·         “My heart eased and my back grew taller”

·         “I would come into the house and notice a certain stillness, something altered. I knew without knowing how I knew.”

·         “when I saw her eyes lost in her face and heard her voice, that strange nervous giggle, I was certain Mama was ill again.”

·         “shocked when I repeated to her the things she told me the night before”

·         “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

·         “A boy your age should never speak such things”

·         “I never again asked him to take me with him or cried in front of him when he came to leave.”

·         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”

·         “with room for  one more, ,reserved for Baba” – understood/ aware of the situation

·         “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”

·         The picture of Baba, “his smile changed” , insinuating the change in respect?

·         “Children aren’t suppose to know these things”

·         “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

·         Aware/ familiar that Echo means tapped / privacy

·         Suleiman sees the interrogation of a man accused of being a traitor on television

·         He understands that “his body is a patchwork of bruises”

·         “You are no longer a baby”

·         Opened the window when the gas was left - knows what to do; takes care of himself

·         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”

·         “Apart from making me lose trust in the assumption that good things happen to good people, the televised 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”

·         “You always lie. I am not a child and you always lie”

·          

MORALITY/ RELIGION

·         “I felt sick, anxious that I had done the wrong thing. Baba wasn’t on a business trip”

·         “Why had I not acted?”

·         “The innocent, Sheikh Mustafa, the imam of our local mosque, had told me, have no cause to fear, only the guilty live in fear”

·         “Although I knew Bahloul was mad, these words, these meaningless words that he always repeated, increased my confusion. I wondered if 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”

·         “It is our obligation to call injustice by its name”

·         “I beg you” “Conceal my shame”

·         “This is not only forbidden by God and tradition, it is also illegal”

·         “Walk by the wall” “look the other way,this is their time, not ours”

·          “Something in me was ashamed if what I had done to Bahloul”

·         “I felt bad that I had lied to him”

·         “if she ever needs drinking company, to call on me” “I too get my medicine from that scoundrel, Majdi – illegal

·         The ambulance door he “shut it with great care”

·         “accepting Osama’s anger, agreeing that I wasn’t innocent, that Adnan was the ultimate victim “

·         “I thought of saying sorry, but I collected my flippers and walked away”

LOVE

·         “I had kissed his hands like he taught me to”

·          “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”

·         “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”

·         “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

·         “I didn’t know you were going to be so beautiful, fill my heart”

·         “You are my miracle”

·         “Promise me you would never do that. Promise me you would always protect yourself.”

·         Moosa “I know how much you love him”

·         “Mama and I spent most of the time together- she alone, I unable to leave her”

·         “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.”

·         Kareem and Suleiman share a strong bond “ Because what united Kareem and me rarely felt like friendship, but something like blood or virtue”

·         Suleiman – caring “Who upset you, Baba” when he saw tears in his father’s eye

·         “Don’t leave this room “ Moosa proctecting

·         “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

·         “What’s the matter, habibi, light of my eyes?”

·         “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

·         “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”

·         “darkly content with the world I was given, thankful to be hers”

·         “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”

·         “When I reach her she kisses my hands, my forehead, m y cheeks, combs my hair with her fingers, straightens my collar”