Khaled Mattawa

So I go to Ashenda to get some fix Shandar there playing his lute & a dark haired angel combing a violin I cry Anatolia! Anatolia! I'm a nightingale shrieking dawn's first flick I'm the unknown soldier singing it's me again I say one more & I'm ready for the Western World Then I'm at a bar with Lucinda & we're drooling on the body on discipline and the reign of Robespierre Then it's consummation time & I say hey there's a ram butting at the door & a widow's crying for something I say Lucinda I've got a drum in my belly & she says I'm a goddamn shivering eel Then it's polka on a South Dakota lawn Shandar doodling Shahrazad stomping by the window soaking up the light Then we all smoke Camels & Lucinda says I wish I could live without having to disown & I say yeah tell me more about that

My mother forgets to feed her animals because it's only fair. She rushes to them when she hears hoarse roosters crowing and billy goats butting over a last straw. This month the moon becomes a princess. The stars fan her, Jupiter pours cups of wine, Mars sings melancholy mawals. Bearded men holding prayer beads and yellow booklets stare at her and point aching fingers at her waist. In our house we break a fast with dates from Huun and glasses of buttermilk. Then on to bowls of lamb soup flavored with mint, trays of stuffed grape leaves, spiced fava beans drenched in olive oil and lemon juice. And that is only the beginning. The spirits of Johnny Walker and gin hide in the trunks of white Peugeots. In the nightclubs of my city, waiters serve only non-alcoholic beer and belly dancers cover themselves. Father of sixteen children, our neighbor visits bringing two kilos of baklava. He washes them down with a dozen demitasses of sweet sage tea. Before dawn he runs to one of his two wives, both named Salma, and loves her hurriedly, his hands barely touching a breast.

After Al-Sayyah The radio blares “Dialogue of Souls,” and the woman who hated clouds watches the sky. Where is the sea now? she asks. Where is it from here? What is its name?— this rain on a morning ride to school, winter, my seventh year, my father driving through rain, his eyes fixed on a world of credit and debt. On the radio, devotion to the lifter of harm from those who despair, knower of secrets with the knowledge of certainty. Not even the anguish of those years, the heavy traffic, cold and wind could have touched me. I was certain the palm holding me would be struck again. Chance allows for that and for stars to throb in reachable depths. Filled with grief bordering happiness, I didn’t care if I was safe, whether the storm was over, only that it came, the slash of lightning, the groaning sky, and the storms we made, how rain stripped everything of urgency, how to the lifter of harm rise those who despair.

Cairo’s taxi drivers speak to me in English. I answer, and they say your Arabic is good. How long have you been with us? All my life I tell them, but I’m never believed. They speak to me in Farsi, speak to me in Greek, and I answer with mountains of gold and silver, ghost ships sailing the weed-choked seas. And when they speak to me in Spanish, I say Moriscos and Alhambra. I say Jews rescued by Ottoman boats. And when the speak to me in Portuguese, all my life I tell them, coffee, cocoa, Indians and poisoned spears. I say Afonsso king of Bikongo writing Manuel to free his enslaved sons. And Cairo’s taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is surprisingly good. Then they speak to me in Italian, and I tell them how I lay swaddled a month’s walk from here. I tell them camps in the desert, barbed wire, wives and daughters dying, camels frothing disease, the sand stretching an endless pool. And they say so good so good. How long have you been with us? All my life, but I’m never believed. Then they speak to me in French, and I answer Jamila, Leopold, Stanley, baskets of severed hands and feet. I say the horror, battles of Algiers. And they speak to me in English and I say Lucknow, Arbenz. I say indigo, Hiroshima, continents soaked in tea. I play the drum beat of stamps. I invoke Mrs. Cummings, U.S. consul in Athens, I say Ishi, Custer, Wounded Knee. And Cairo's taxi drivers tell me your Arabic is unbelievably good. Tell the truth now, tell the truth, how long have you been with us? I say my first name is little lion, my last name is broken branch. I sing "Happiness uncontainable" and "field greening in March" until I'm sad and tired of truth, and as usual I'm never believed. Then they lead me through congestion, gritty air, narrow streets crowded with Pepsi and Daewoo and the sunken faces of the poor. And when we arrive, Cairo's taxi drivers and I speak all the languages of the world, and we argue and argue about corruption, disillusionment, the missed chances, the wicked binds, the cataclysmic fares.

1. Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend has opted for secrecy, I don’t know. But I do know what to call the Africans, passport-less, yellow-eyed who will ride the boat before me for Naples, they hope. Here the sea curls its granite lip at them and flings a winter storm like a cough, or the seadog drops them at Hannibal’s shores, where they’ll stand stupefied like his elephants. What dimension of time will they cross at the Hours loop tight plastic ropes round their ankles and wrists? What siren song will the trucks shipping them back to Ouagadougou drone into their ears? I look at them loitering, waiting for the second act of their darkness to fall. I look at the sky shake her dicey fists. One can be thankful, I suppose, for not being one of them, and wrap the fabric of that thought around oneself to keep the cold wind at bay. But what world is this that makes our lives sufficient even as the horizon’s rope is about to snap, while the sea and sky ache to become an open-ended road? That’s what we’re all waiting for, a moment to peel itself like skin off fruit, and let us in on its sweetness as we wait, smoking, or fondling provisions, listening the engine’s invocational purr. In an hour that will dawn and dusk at once, one that will stretch into days strung like beads on the horizon’s throat, they will ride their tormented ship as the dog star begins to float on the water, so bright and still, you’d want to scoop it out in the palm of your hand. 2. A pair of Roman fists robbed of spear and shield; the tiles of the tapestries mixed in with popcorn that slipped from the buttery hands, aluminum wrappers smudged with processed cheese; countless cigarette butts surround the fallen columns and beams with a fringe of tarnished foam; pairs of panties still hot with forbidden passion… The ruins are not ruined. Without all this garbage packed, stratified, how else to name our age? 3. Earlier, I had walked the market of Sabratha, changed to its people, but like my old city brought me back to me. The petty merchants, all selling the same goods, shouted out jokes to each other. A Sudanese waiter carried a tray with a giant pot of green tea with mint. Among the older men, their heads capped with crimson shennas, I kept seeking my father’s face. An old lust wafted past me when the abaya-clad women, scented with knock-off Chanel, sashayed by. The sawdust floors of the shawarma and falafel eateries, the sandwich maker dabbing insides of loaves with spoons of searing harissa, my mouth watering to a childhood burn. Pyramids of local oranges, late season pomegranates, radish and turnip bulbs stacked like billiard balls, and the half carcasses of lambs as if made of wax and about to melt off their hooks, the trays of hearts, kidneys, brains and testicles arrayed in slick arabesques. The hand-woven rugs where the extinct mouflon thrives, mincers, hairdryers, and toasters, their cords tentacles drooping from rusty shelves. It was as if my eyes were painting, not seeing, what I saw, my memory slowly building the scene until it assembled whole. What face did my face put on in the midst of transfiguration? I know what the eyes of the men my age said, settled now in comfortable middle age, about the life I left behind. True, I did envy them the asceticism of their grace, where a given horizon becomes a birthright—to drive or walk past the same hills all your life, to eat from the same tree and drink from the well that gave you your name. 4. Though for centuries the locals broke the statues’ limbs and ground them to make primitive pottery, enough remains to echo all that has disappeared: you and the woman leave the towpath, and you brace her against the trunk of an oak. It’s not the moonlight, but refractions from suburban homes trapped under cloud-cover that make her bronze skin glow among glistening trees. First, God made love: the canopy like the inside of an emerald, her lips a rush of cochineal. Then a route of evanescence brought her from Carthage into these living arms, here. 5. “A nice time, “ he tells us, how he and four cousins crossed the desert heading home on top of three-years’ worth of meager pay (the tarp ballooning, a giant dough) roped to a truck. Wearing the goggles of the welder he'd hoped to become, he looked at the sky and wondered “what those flying, smoke on their tails, thought of us.” Later, deported in a cargo plane, he handed the Tuareg soldiers one of his fake passports, and they like “space aliens” (in shabby uniforms, sunglasses, tribal veils) poured into his face. As the propellers’ hammering calmed to a shuddering hum, he saw the stars, “hundreds of them like gnats” swarm Mt. Akakous’ peak. “My next road is the water,” he says serving us tonight, and we promise, if the coffee is good, to put him on the next boat to the moon shining over Syracuse. 6. Suddenly, I find your descendant’s hands leafing through my chapters, scribbling a note in the margin of my thoughts: “How is it,” he asks, “that starlight announces the hour: how can a song divide desire in two?” “My flame,” I must have written or said, “coated her body like silk, one kiss spreading threads of lightening into her pores, until she became a sob, barely lifted by the wind, and I became mist, the shadow of a statue at the break of dawn.” To that he responds, “a Platonic echo;” and “What will come of such a plasticine love?” Marcus Aurelius, your descendent knows I’ll leave as I arrive, so empty he gets lost in me. 7. Two centuries ago, one of my ancestors sat on one of the communal latrines in mid-morning and listened to Apuleius’s defense. Across from him on that marble hexagon, sat two other men. On normal days they’d have talked about the olive harvest, the feast of Venus coming soon. But today they listen to the Madaurian’s high eloquence studded with jokes, cracking their own one-liners, shaking their heads in delight. Away from the hot midday sun and the throngs, you could say, they had the best seats in the house, and so they lingered and heard as much as they could then went about their business. So what if a man maries an older woman for her money, what impoverished young Roman in his right mind wouldn’t do that? And sure too, if some man comes to take your inheritance, even if he’s your best friend, even if he takes good care of your mother, you’d be a fool not to sue him to the Council, even if you’d have to accuse him falsely of black magic. That’s the beauty of it, or rather, whoever is going to win will have to make us trust beauty, that things being already right, can be more right, which is what “beautiful” really means. And what better way, to take in all this refinement than hearing it in a latrine where only beauty shields you from the awful stuff of life. 8. Marcus Aurelius, the men at the shore follow your path into eternity, though they already see their journey as a quarrel with circumstance, their lives abscesses feeding on the universe’s hide, tumors in detention camps, in basement kitchens. Their pockets filled with drachmas, they’ll lift diffident heads and drag feet lead-heavy with shame. One of them is now driving a taxi in Thessaloniki or Perugia. With enough of the language to understand direction, he engages his late night passengers. In the light of the dashboard they’ll entrust him with their secrets. With time, he’ll become a light unto himself, his car a winged chariot of human folly, and his responses to them saplings nourished in the dark soil of philosophy. It’s the gift of seasons that stray from the earth, when soul reigns incidental to flesh, forgiving to no end, a light that has long surpassed itself. 9. The birds that drew the line to the first distance remain nameless to me— creamy white breasts, gold dust around their eyes, black/brown (dark roast) wings. The deserts they crossed, the plains east or north of here fall like sand from my hands. Um Bsisi, I want to call them, citizens of a protracted destiny, native and stranger, prodigal and peasant— admit now, they you’re none of these, that you’re not any, or even all of them combined. 10. Southwest of here is Apuleius’s hometown, his inescapable destination having spent his inheritance on travel and studies. “Lacking the poverty of the rich,” he’s splurged, a month-long trip to the Olympic games; and openhanded, he gifted his mentors their daughters’ doweries. Few return to Madaura once gone, and when heading back shamefaced like him, they’d do as he did, taking the longest route hoping the journey would never end. Here in Sabratha, the widow hooked him, or he let her reel him, and that’s how that sordid business happily ended as it began. I look out toward Madaura, my back to the theater and the latrines, Madaura birthplace of Augustine, site of his first schooling—little Augustine holding a satchel of scrolls and a  loaf of bread for the teacher, awakened by his mother, his tiny feet cold in tiny sandals, his stomach warm with a barley porridge my grandmother used to make, forced to slurp it, sweetened with honey from the Atlas, a sprinkling of cinnamon and crushed almonds from the family farm. If the world is that sweet and warm, if it is that mothering, why then this perpetual scene of separation, this turning out into the cold toward something he knew he’d love? He lets go of the neighbors’ boy’s hand warming his own. He refuses the warm porridge forever, renounces his mother’s embrace. It only lasted a month, this partial answer, because even then everyone knew that the sweet fruit they grew housed the bitterest seeds, that piety is its own reward while belief only darkens and deepens like the sea before them, a place meant for those seeking life other than on this dry earth. That’s why prophets were welcomed here, calmly, because God was like rain and they like the saplings which know only the first verse to the sky’s rainless hymn. And that’s why Africa’s tallest minaret looms unfinished, visible from the next town over, and for fifty leagues from the sea if it were turned into a lighthouse for the ships that no longer come. The merchant who’d built it, money made from smuggling subsidized goods to Carthage and used Renaults from Rotterdam, ran out of money, could not afford the mosque that was to stand next to it, leaving its gray concrete bleaching in the sun. There’s enough history here to enable anyone to finish the thought. It’s useless then to track the fate of these travelers, some, without life jackets, had never learned how to swim. Why not let them live in text as they do in life?—they’ve lived without words for so long—why not release them from the pen’s anchor and let them drift to their completion? 11. In a few weeks you’ll see pedants here with binoculars trying to catch a glimpse of the Ramadan crescent, and if these migrants stick around here time will belong to the departure of other travelers, flocks of Um Bsisi follwing the sun’s arch, Japanese and Korean trawlers sailing to Gibraltar or Suez chasing the last herring or sardine. Where is she now in her time?— her life dissolved in other people’s minutes, a sense of solitude her diligent companion even when she lets go of herself to kindness. He’ll be there when she returns from the party, he’ll lie beside her when she sleeps. He’ll say, “Time belongs to the species, but your life belongs to me.” She’ll laugh at his words, and remember what you, Marcus Aurelius, had said about losing only the moment at hand, how it circles in a ring of dead nerves, how we stand impoverished before what is to come. She’ll have her answer to your elocution; she’d always had an answer for you, one she refuses to share even with herself. 12. At last they set to sail. They slaughter a rooster, douse blood on the Dido figurehead adorning the prow. The seadog opens a canvas bag and pulls out a hookah. His Egyptian assistant fills the smoke chamber with seawater, twists the brass head into it, caking the slit with sand. He fills the clay bowl with apple-flavored tobacco, wraps it with foil, pokes it tenderly with a knife. He picks embers from the going fire, places a few on the aluminum crown, and inhales and blows until the bottom vessel fills with a pearly fog, the color of semen, I think, then hands the pipe hose to the seadog who inhales his fill and hands it over to the travelers in turn. The air smells sweet around us, the breeze blows it away and brings it back tinged with iodine. Their communion done, they embark except the one who stands, the dead rooster in his hand, as if wanting to entrust it to us, then digs a hurried hole to bury it in. The boat, barely visible, leaves a leaden lacey ribbon aiming directly for the burnt orange sun. As it reddens, for a moment, their standing silhouettes eclipse it. Then the sea restores its dominion, dark as the coffee cooling in our cups. Dangling from the vine arbor, the lights reflect a constellation on the table’s dark top. I trace my fingers among them, hoping conjecture would shine on the mind’s calculus. Between my unquiet eddies, Marcus Aurelius, and the coursing water, the travelers’ moment sails, its tentacles sewing a rupture I had nursed for too long.

Today the date palms were pruned, the branches taken before the fruit ripened, before sweetness littered the sidewalks. The man who sawed them worked alone, a crane lifting him to the yellowed fronds. Beside his truck, he stood tall, American, a pensive pioneer. The top of each palm looked like the back of a man's head after a close-crop haircut, the neck cooled to a stubbly remembrance of hair, or was like a cat after being spayed, startled by a strange newness, pacing familiar rooms, darting, confused, and you (had you wished to console) are greeted with a barren gaze. The rubble of bark and fronds reminded me of Iraq, not the ruined bridges, or the surrendering soldiers' hands begging food, but the 16 million date palms, one per capita, lining the seams of the Tigris and Euphrates, a reminder of my own Libya and its 10 million date palms and the years of easy wealth that brought them neglect except in Huun, a magical city where they stuffed dates with almonds and sent them as far as Tanta and Oum Dourman. From Huun this story: a boy stands by a palm imploring his uncle to toss him a fistful of dates. Flustered by the boy's monotonous cries the uncle loses his feet, and as he falls to his death, cries down "Here nephew, I'm coming down with the dates!" So that's what we got from Huun, almond stuffed wonders and proverbial last words. There was another reminder, a tale of the prophet Muhammad living for months on water and coarse wheat bread, his wives protesting the austere measures of his faith. Muhammad, who praised honey and had a professed love for cantaloupes, and who once declared "the best meat is that which lines the bones," found in dates the solution he required. To his Arab followers, and to his wives, the fruit was "three skies above luxury," and as indispensable as water and air. I once had this dream of Whitman: I found him under one of the palms on Sherman Way gazing admiring. Though he had seen palms by the Gulf of Mexico, he had never tasted a date. So we drove to a supermarket, and he who had been thoughtful, even dignified, until then, began to sign and moan at the taste of "Araby's sugared dust clouds." When we walked the aisles he insisted on pushing the cart. The frozen foods did not surprise him since his Granny buried potatoes in the cold dirt of her homestead. Still I had to explain tofu, plastic, tacos, and the foods labeled free. He ran his hands caressing the waxed floor; "Smooth as a girl's wrist," he exclaimed. The bright fluorescent lights reminded hirn of the opera, and Walt sang a gravelly tune. The children sitting in carts reached for him, their hands were Lorca's butterflies on his beard. At the cashier he filled pockets with candy, and was shocked by the headlines of our news. Honda, Toyota, Saturn, Oldsmobile— in the parking lot the names waltzed on his tongue. At the fast food stand he ate heartily, the burger's slipperiness amused him, and at his clumsiness we both had a laugh. Then the talk grew quiet, the table stretching like the expanse of time dividing us; I felt he no longer wanted company, having begun to understand our world. Despite his old resentment of Blacks, and now my neighbors, the foreign-born Hispanics and their engines roaring through Balboa and Saticoy, and the Koreans' karoake— the baseline's muffled thuds, voices doused in Canadian Mist, and the off-key pleadings to the lover who never comes—, America remained to him luminous-industrial-fuming- sublime, and as he wished, beyond others' adjectives, beyond what anyone could have conceived. Mumbling a farewell, Whitman stood to leave. And with this my dream ended, Whitman wishing to depart and I holding on to his wrists. All day I wanted to hold his wide wrists. If you drive west of Alexandria your path will run through Alamain, Barani, and Matrouh. Then Egypt will end with a town on a steep hill called Sallum. If you go through the two checkpoints, Libya will unfold its dry pastures for you. On the Sallum hill there is a hotel where people stay to await relatives crossing the border or to hear word if it is safe to return. Across the road a tired bluegreen tea house sits like a bruise permanently on the verge of fading from the prairies' skin. You will also see the money changers— all teenage boys. With their right hands they will wave thick wads of money at your windshield, and with their left they will jostle to give you the best rate. The last time I stayed in Sallum few cars came from either direction, and among the boys fights flared with curses and stones hurled at brows. When the boys' rabble grew loud a man lazily stepped out of the tea house to call them bastards and sons of whores. This went on for hours until the sun settled in the middle of the sky, the boys taking shelter under a torn canvas shed, and the man to the tea house's dusty cool. Then just when all movement and noise seemed to surrender to the September wind and heat, four of the boys broke for a run racing—money still clutched in their hands— to a young date palm in the distance. Pressing shoulders and backs against it, they shook the palm until the season's first fruit began to rain. The other boys joined them, and soon the tea house emptied of the men slouching inside. Those were my brothers who cowered beneath the date palm to gather handfuls of fruit, rubbing each date clean on their sleeves, chewing softly to savor the taste as though it were a good omen, and rising to resume their lives, on their faces the smiles of those who once were blessed.

Long after the sun falls into the sea and twilight slips off the horizon like a velvet sheet and the air gets soaked in blackness; long after clouds hover above like boulders and stars crawl up and stud the sky; long after bodies tangle, dance, and falter and fatigue blows in and bends them and sleep unloads its dreams and kneads them and sleepers dive into the rivers inside them, a girl unlatches a window, walks shoeless into a forest, her dark hair a flag rippling in darkness. She walks into woods, her feet light-stepping through puddles, over hard packed dirt, through grassy hills, over sticks and pebbles over sand soaked in day, stones sun-sizzled over lakes and frigid streams through dim cobbled streets darkened squares and dusty pastures. She runs from nothing, runs to nothing, beyond pain, beyond graveyards and clearings. In the dark the eyes of startled creatures gleam like a herd of candles. They scatter and give night its meaning. What echo of a bell lulled her what spirit, what scent of a word whose storm wrote her what banks fell to drown her which blood star which thread of water which trickle of light whose heart being launched whose floating soul seduced her what promise did it make her whose memory burned her whose prayer did she run to answer whose help, what sorrow clot what pain dammed inside her what wall must she rebuild now whose treasure beckons her who spread ivy like a veil to blind her? Daybreak lies chained to a blue wall from which the stars drop and lose all meaning. She runs past villages that lost their names roads that lost their destinations seas that lost their compasses and sailors rivers that lost their marshlands and travelers houses that lost their sleepers and criers trees that lost their songs and shadows gardens that lost their violets and benches valleys that lost their worms and farmers mountains that lost their prophets and marauders temples that lost their sinners and spires lightning that lost its silver and wires chimeras that lost their bridges minotaurs that lost their fountains. Crescent moons hover above her, ancient white feathers, birdless, wingless lost to their own meaning. Music rises out of her vision. It stands, a wall covered with silver mosses. A clarinet sounds a wounded mare, violins women who lost their children. Flutes blow their hot dry breezes. Drums chuckle the earth’s ceaseless laughter. Pianos are mumbling sorcerers calling spirits and powers. Cellos chew on the sounds of thunder. Dulcimers skip about on crutches. Dance floors flash their knives daring their dancers. Words mill about the streets like orphans. Then a lute begins groaning and dawn loses its meaning. Night girl, night girl your book is full now. You have drawn all the pictures. You have seen many weepers. Stars held your sky in place and moons floated on your lakes and washed them. When a bird sings when dewed branches tilt sunlight into eyes when curtains are soaked with light when mirrors drown in shadows, take your day to the shore, my child. Put out the words that fired your waking, scatter them on the sand like seeds, then with your feet gently tap them, and let the bright waves receive your meaning.