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And the description of the state of war in a specific place. Politics is such an important part of our lives, whether we like it or not. In poetry, people mostly avoid politics. But The Iliad is a political work. I became an American poet by writing against the Vietnam War, I joined the movement by writing against the war, spontaneously.
I feel the first thing is to be true to oneself. Now you will say, what if you are a monster and are true to yourself? We are in a period when there is, funnily enough, more poetry being written in proportion to the population than during Vietnam. Poets have followed the general apathy of the Bush and Reagan years. Maybe that speaks about where poetry is in terms of its relationship to society. Some writers may feel themselves at a great distance.
They are discovering new forms, by complicating form and by avoiding anything that would smack of a message. And, like all great writing, it can defend itself beautifully. By looking at it, she understands the struggle to live, the finality of death. What I want to suggest is that fiction and poetry need not be specific to a political event to embrace the effects and depredations to life because of war, violence, injustice.
Iraq had great painters, musicians. It was the most dynamic Arab country for some thirty years, with an excellent medical system, the best in the Arab world. So the destruction of it…. Simultaneously, Saddam was an excessive character. You were for him or against him, no in between. In that sense, he was a total dictator. Still, something was happening there.
There was the same oppressive rule in Syria, but without the counterpart in culture Iraq had. When America attacked Iraq, each time they moved, they destroyed it. Though when you think about it, there is so much going on in the world, and Americans cannot care for everything. But this is something that America started and did. Hatred can lead to genocide. There is no real rationale to it. The US is not immune, but prosperity made America relax. America is interesting — everything is true about it, and its opposite is true. We have a democracy in many ways, really.
But people are horrified by universal health care, which Europe and Canada have as a matter of course. Yes, I went to Paris as a student in Sartre was the great thing, and I had not heard of him in Beirut. It was like a miracle. I had come from a culture where we lived on a more basic level.
My father was highly educated for those days, my mother was not. We had no books at home. My father was a Muslim from Damascus in the Ottoman Empire. Amazingly, the books existed on a shelf next to each other. So I have no problem with coexistence. I grew up with it. In Paris, everything was new, astonishing, until I was thirty. I was in a stage of discovery for thirteen years, until I started teaching, which gave me a distance from reality. I was immersed in reality until I was thirty.
In the present — that type of reality. Sartre said you could be moral without being religious. No, but his philosophy changed my life. Its second idea was about responsibility, and that is empowerment.
Coming from a Catholic school, I know firsthand that you are meant to follow the church, the priest — then you are a good person. You go to confession. They met during WWI, in Smyrna, in the street. She was so poor that, for her, it was a fairy tale. Then the war was lost, and my parents went to Beirut. From there it was downhill. I was educated because I went to a French school. My mother was extremely poor when she grew up.
She used to say there were only two jobs in Smyrna for women — to pick grapes for raisins or be a prostitute. She was sixteen when he met her. Then the Greeks in Turkey were in concentration camps. My father was dead by that time. I was twenty-four when I went. I had a French government scholarship for three years. I worked from the age of sixteen.
I was the only child. But I could take morning classes. I finished the whole program in two months instead of eight and received a baccalaureate, which allowed me to go into the third year of a French school that specialized in literature. I quit the first job and found one doing almost nothing, for a man who wanted to write a novel. He thought if I just sat there, he would write it. I read books in his library. He wanted literature to be free from the Jesuits, and he taught poetry.
Thanks to him, we got an enlightened education. When I told her, she went crazy. Brave in many ways, but also brave with no sense of the future. It was day-to-day bravery. It raises the question of developing character, your character, and how you respond to others, and fashioning characters in fiction. Some people have hardships that kill them. Others are made so bitter they have no hope. But hardships can also, in some cases, become experiences one can grow from. Often in your writing, there are questions of liberty and madness.
In Of Cities and Women , set in Barcelona, in the Ramblas, a woman walks down the street completely naked: She continued down the avenue probably heading for the red light district…. Was this a scene of absolute liberty or of insanity? Insanity, as a category, has mostly disappeared. But how do you run a society between these two notions, both boundaries, which in effect include disorders?
To implement law, what do you do when you have power? How do you use it? How to integrate contradictory rights? In your poetics, you are very free. In Of Cities , you employ the epistolary form. Because it gives one freedom. I wrote it because my friend Fawwaz wanted me to write a paper on feminism. Calling us or escaping us. The trend is toward uniformity.
Obviously women have been acculturated to use their femininity, men their masculinity. Aggression is part of life, but we also need a counter aggression. We need men who are against war as much as women — though there are more and more women for war. We need diversity and balance in the sexes. Goodness of the heart. That is the core of Christ and Christianity. Everything else is an invention of his followers. As a child, I had a strong sense of the presence of the sun. In the summer, the sun is very vivid in Beirut. I was fascinated by the shadow my own body made, when going for an afternoon swim.
In my twenties, I heard the French say that Arabs were the children of the sun, les enfants du soleil. It was said with disdain — Arabs were irresponsible, grown-up children. And I remember walking into the mountains of my village, never wearing a hat, being very aware it was hot, feeling surrounded by the sun like a thief by the police.
My relation to place is also a desire to know where I am. I grew up as an anguished child, partly because of not having brothers and sisters in a society where I was marginal. The French were ruling Lebanon, so we were also marginal in relation to a colonial power. And my parents were a mixed marriage — there were few. I think I compensated by trying to know always where I was.
The Arab Apocalypse takes a unique approach to writing on the page — you use signs, lines, curves, symbols. The signs are there as an excess of emotion. The signs are the unsaid. More can be said, but you are stopped by your emotion. Tel al-Zaatar is a neighborhood in Beirut, where twenty thousand people, not all Palestinian but mostly Palestinian, lived underground.
Maybe the fighters in the camp had some advance notice and left. But the women, children, and old people who remained were slaughtered. It was worse than Sabra and Shatila. It was as bad and worse. There was only one well, so women would go there for water. Maybe twenty, to make sure one got back. They were surrounded by snipers. The Arab Apocalypse is about Tel al-Zaatar — the hill of thyme — but its subject is beyond this siege, which was the beginning of the undoing of the Arabs. This war was the sign of disaster coming, that by mismanagement and mistakes, the Arabs would undo themselves. The form and content of The Arab Apocalypse are imaginatively fused: A sun which is SOFT.
The Arabs are under the ground. The Americans are on the moon. The sun has eaten its children. I myself was a morning blessed with bliss. I started this book when I lived in Beirut. I could hear the bombs from my balcony. I saw a manifestation of pure evil. In metaphysics there is no word for that. It relates to your saying that violence or evil has no one country. We have institutions, we try to control it. Or we decide to unleash it. But there is evil in every person to different degrees. Evil is part of being. Power creates a temptation to be abusive. Nations that feel immune, or superior, sure to win, are not wise.
Like the Bush administration, a folly of arrogance. In nature, there is danger, too. Because the sun is dangerous. It can kill you, burn you. But the sun is also life. The Arab Apocalypse is a superb example of a poem that pays attention to poetics and place, war, politics — literally, what happens in the city. There is the presence of war in almost everything I write. In we had refugees from Armenia. WWII brought foreign armies, not bloodshed.
In , the Israelis entered Beirut. There were other Israeli incursions, constant bombing of the south. Beirut was done and almost undone by war. But my vision of the world is pretty dark. I try not to forget the good of this world — not only good people, but the sunshine, the trees. There is also happiness in this world. In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country is written in paragraphs: People here to portray there is a person who loves me to death.
Not to my death or hers, but to the death of the person I loved…. I wonder who invented the ugly word punishment. It was probably God, who established the word and the deed. My heart had been broken. No, not at all. It adds fiction to the fiction I became…. There is a sense of exile in everyone. We are exiled from each other, to a point. Writing is a dialogue with that deep feeling. Some feel they came from somewhere. They have a strong illusion of belonging. Other people, or groups, have a special restlessness and understanding, a nomadic spirit.
Everything has its advantages. We are the result of history, more than we know — we think we are free from it. You function in relation to the entire moral code that is based on responsibility and, therefore, freedom of choice. In Sitt Marie Rose , your protagonist maintains her freedom by not trading places with her Palestinian lover. The Phalangists offered to trade her—that would have been treason to her.
Sitt Marie Rose was an extraordinary woman. You represent women and their place in the world — not just in the Arab world — and also in terms of their feminism. I am a feminist, first because I was a rebellious child. I was not a conscious rebel, but an instinctive one. I took a particular pleasure in it. I became more politically involved when I attended Berkeley.
Society is conservative, you always have to behave. I was a natural rebel. I was intrigued by a statement of yours, that you fear Western civilization. Conquering is always at the expense of somebody else. Western civilization behaves as if it offers redemption — the Israelis were the last example of that. They came as Westerners, Europeans, but Western civilization, like all civilizations, had invaded others. But most of the other civilizations tried to integrate the indigenous people — the Romans had emperors who were Arabs, Alexander wanted to join East and West.
The Chinese had many ethnic groups. The West is the most racist of civilizations. It eradicates the conquered people. For example, Belgium was responsible for twelve million Congolese deaths. Western civilization speaks about itself as a model, but it has a very dark side. I had no interest in politics until living in Paris in My position then was that Palestine had to be liberated, in any way — we had to win that war.
This was the case until the Oslo Accords, ten years ago, when I decided I was not against peace. Oslo was a turning point — it made me a pacifist. I still believe the Palestinians have a cause, but I believe it is natural that we live together and build anew. Writing also changes me. Something happens, and I must discover it.
Writing forces one to go to the bitter end of what one thinks. In a darkened room of the Qatari National Museum, three screens play silent films of Bedouin life. The images are washed out and damaged from thirty years of continuous play. On one screen, my grandfather stands with a group of men squinting into the camera, raptors flapping. The men are falconers, and their birds cling blindly to their forearms. The corners of the images have collected a grainy residue; sometimes the picture skips. On another screen, an elderly woman, face veiled in black, two long braids swaying down her back, waddles across the frame behind a small herd of goats.
This room is an anomaly in a museum dedicated to pearls and oil and dioramas. Amid the sample oil drills, limestone cross sections, and restored pearling dhows, it is strange to see the disintegrating footage of the Al-Murrah proudly bearing their swords and rifles, posing as though for a still photograph while the camera pans up and down their straight-shouldered frames.
No one visits this room. No one seems to visit the museum at all. The films play on repeat, wearing out their images. The museum was an ambitious project conceived and completed by Sheikh Khalifa bin Hamad Al-Thani in It was built to represent , years of human history and fifteen centuries of Muslim values in the Persian Gulf. The structure of this history-palace is a refurbished complex of royal residences. So he did two things to ensure that Qatar would not lose its cultural heritage. He built an ambitious museum of the state and sea, and he strengthened his military by drafting the symbolic old guard of Arab honor, the Al-Murrah Bedouin: It is weighty, this name.
I come to it the old-fashioned way, by my father, a modernist. He left the Empty Quarter to go to college in Montana. The Saudi government paid for him to learn business, while he secretly made plans to become a long-haul trucker. He was one of the first of our clan to go to America, and he was the first to marry a white woman. The first to marry outside the family, even, though there would be others.
It continues to be scandalous. We are a fierce and honorable people, we Al-Murrah, at odds with the world and the desert and the people of the towns. I know this to be true, because I read a whole book about it. Nomads of the Nomads: Though by the time I found the book, browsing the picked-over offerings in the library at the American University in Cairo, many of us, including my siblings and our extended family, were living in Qatar. By the time I read the book, in fact, many of our men were in jail in Qatar. Or, like my father, in exile.
We acquired our reputation in the desert. The most deserted desert in the world, a vast sea rippled with ridges and waves and islands of sand. Desert people do desert things, like herd goats and ride camelback and plunder the occasional village for essentials, while finding ways to work around the sweltering heat and aridity and the delirious hallucinations that ensue.
We would play this role for decades. For our fine work, we were rewarded with Land Rovers and houses and passports. In any case, at the age of twelve, my father went to town for the first time to buy his first pair of shoes, and at the age of twenty, he was sent with a cousin to study in America on scholarship.
He returned, but not to Saudi Arabia. It may have helped that we were coreligionists, as well: Various Al-Murrah tribesmen became military colonels or police captains. For two glorious decades, all was well between the Al-Thani royals and their Al-Murrah loyalists. In June of , Sheikh Khalifa flew to England on his private jet for a shopping spree. While cruising the streets of London, Sheikh Khalifa was dethroned by his son Hamad. Inspired — or, perhaps, humiliated — by the United Arab Emirates, which was expanding in every direction, from architecture to tourism to political clout, Hamad wanted more for Qatar than concrete castles, pearl diving, and isolationism.
He saw Doha as the next Dubai: He saw a new world of glass skyscrapers, sleek minarets, and lots and lots of high-end shopping malls. His father was not part of the plan. And nor, it must be said, were the Al-Murrah. It is difficult to say what would have become of my family in the Doha of the Future, had we embraced it. Although what remained of Bedouin ways would likely have been further eroded by the gale winds of progress unleashed by the new sheikh, in retrospect things could not have gone much worse.
Some argued that the younger sheikh had behaved ungratefully, a traitor to the ancient codes of paternal respect and decorum. Perhaps others were offended by the bloodlessness. And far be it from the Al-Murrah to allow their legacy to go down without a fight. A dozen army officials imagined a glorious and bloody overthrow that would change the fortunes and legacy of the Al-Murrah and bring glory back to the people.
Passing whispers in the mosque, covert meetings in the Majlis, secret handshakes, and military bravado — maybe too much bravado. Before it really began, the counter-coup was over. It was never clear how many Al-Murrah men were involved. Several of them are still in jail twelve years later; some of them, close members of my family, sit on death row to this day.
There have been allegations of torture. In any case, it was not long before the authorities had acquired a list of names that comprised much of the male Bedouin population. Over the next year hundreds of men were rounded up, while thousands more were exiled or blacklisted. By the time I came back from the States in , the only Al-Murrah left free in Qatar seemed to be elderly men and women, although most had had their citizenship revoked or suspended some years before.
Dressing as a woman was a stroke of genius for the old timer. But it was also emasculating, and he is still spoken of within the family as a joke, not as the daring practical thinker he proved himself to be. The nomads of the nomads have been tamed. And he has been kind if not magnanimous in the later years of his victory; today most of us are once again Qatari citizens. Grouped together in government projects just west of the wretched Doha International Zoo, the Al-Murrah spend their days looking toward the Saudi border, dreaming of the past.
Sometimes on a Friday afternoon after prayer, my great uncle takes the younger children across the highway to break zoo regulations and feed the sad menagerie. Like most kids these days, they ignore the old man, pausing barely a second to look the ostrich in the eye while feeding it sugar cookies. The unsuspecting heirs to our great loss trot off to chuck potato chips at the chimpanzees until sunset, leaving Great Uncle to the contemplation of the molting ostrich in her chicken-wire cage, mulling the greatest change of all: I expressed some doubts to my mother.
You want glory and riches. Being half American and half Qatari my sister and I are very lucky to have had so many paths to choose from. If you ask my littlest sister El-Bendari what she wants to do when she grows up, she will tell you without hesitation: El-Bendari is five years old this year. Already she has decided that her wedding will be the high point of her life, the funnest and best thing there is. El-Bendari wants a wedding, not a Shetland pony or a career in finance.
I discovered this the first time I came to Qatar by myself. My uncle took me aside for a chitchat. Later I confronted my father. Was I really betrothed to my cousin? I sometimes imagined not without pleasure a King Kong—type scenario in which Godzilla clutched me in his chubby fist as I channeled Fay Ray in my black abaya. He squeezed me with his sausage claws as he swatted buzzing helicopters out of the Doha skyline. His father, my uncle, a powerful local imam, became impatient. I worried about them. Godzilla was clearly going to be a lot to handle. I had always liked him well enough, mostly because he was in possession of what seemed to be the only pirated, of course English copies of The Smurfs in all of Doha, or at least our tiny corner of it.
But his VHS collection did not stop with the Smurfs. I think it was called Gym Nasty , though perhaps I am making that up. But Godzilla definitely had a reputation as the town perv. I danced at their wedding with extra abandon, having dodged the fastest bullet of my young, eligible life. But everyone knew it was supposed to be me looking elated and nervous and miserable in a spumescent white dress. Only later did it occur to me that each dramatic swerve and hair-flip generated gossip about poor terrified Moza. Sure indications that a wedding is imminent are the squeals of pain ripping through the cement houses of the lucky bridal family.
The sweet is a golden glop of boiled sugar water the consistency of thick honey.
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The lucky lady comes first, though, and her waxing is extra-sweet: This takes place offstage, in a side room, with the door locked and the key hidden. But the screams make it exciting for everyone. As do the probing questions from the halawa lady, when it is your turn: Nowadays some girls do a certain amount of auto-depilation with razors, but this is still controversial. When I moved to Qatar I brought a pink Bic razor with me from Washington and promptly caused a scandal.
My grandmother made me take it out of the bathroom and hide it. Who was I doing this for, indeed. After the halawa, the bride has to get the henna. Usually the henna lady is different from the halawa lady. And there are different styles of henna. North African henna is geometrical and closely resembles fish bones. Indian henna is darker if you mix the henna paste with lemon, it gets dark and has feathery motifs, like peacocks.
Gulfi henna is more rounded and organic. There must be no hint of an image, so it tends to be more floral. For her wedding the bride gets the whole deal: Her sisters and cousins get hands and arms and sometimes, more recently, an American-style tramp stamp on the lower back. When we talk about our weddings, we are only barely talking about our marriages. It is essentially the signing of a contract, witnessed by family members, sometimes with an imam present but usually not.
Tea is served, and cookies. Sweetly he brought his bride a pair of lovebirds in a cage, but the poor little budgies died a week later. When we talk about our weddings, we are mostly talking about the parties. The dueling receptions, male and female. Usually there are two tents set up next to each other on one of the huge swatches of empty lot near where we live. Sometimes they take place at a wedding hall. My sisters dream of having theirs at the Sheraton or the Four Seasons, the men and women in separate air-conditioned ballrooms.
But we have never been to such a wedding. The best wedding I ever went to involved a whole baby lamb splayed out over a hill of rice. The lamb still had its eyes. Out of its back rose a tier of trays with condiments: The meat was buttery, butter soft; you tore pieces you wanted off with your hands. Usually the food at weddings is disgusting. Tasteless rice in hillocky clumps. Cellophane-wrapped wedding favors with shriveled pistachios and sugared almonds in nougat, which sometimes breed tiny worms.
But El-Bendari loves wedding food, especially the tarts. This is the main event: Black-robed mothers of marriageable sons move in close in anticipation. Each eligible girl clambers onto the stage and is announced by the wedding singers, who are always Sudanese. The singers are called daghagat , and they play drums and sing into battered microphones, feedback issuing from the cheap speakers.
All the songs sound kind of the same, and yet people have favorites. I have a favorite, but I have no idea what it says or how to ask for it, as the words are almost unintelligible through all the static. The serious matchmaking happens after dinner, after the bride has been whisked away by the groom and his family. When the groom comes everyone covers back up and the newly amalgamated family dances around together, the mother of the bride throwing riyals in the air, on her daughter, or on herself, depending on which way the wind is blowing.
I always dance early, to the consternation of my grandmother. The female hemisphere of the wedding party is always well lit and bustling long after the men say goodnight. Flesh bursts the seams of silk dresses; the party bursts the woolen tent. The goat-hair flaps can barely shield their glittering secret from the lazy male gazes that peer out from behind the headlights of idling Land Cruisers. If you were to whip out a camera in the middle of a wedding, the done-up dolls of Doha and their honor-obsessed mothers would gore you quite mercilessly.
Security would be called, your film torn out, your memory card burned with a hot incense coal. When I was little there were no photographs at all; the bride had to go to a photography studio, where a woman whose job it was to do so made sure that no one did anything funny with the negatives. These days there are official wedding photographers, usually Filipino ladies. There are no group photos. After the photographer has finished with the bride, unmarried girls swarm to get their picture taken, something to send to their secret cellphone boyfriends.
Sometimes the most perceptive girls would pull me behind the stage and ask to be photographed in awkward glamour-shot poses pinky finger under chin or head cocked into plastic rosebush. After all, my photographs were free, while the Filipino photographers charge five riyals a pop! But this time I felt an unfamiliar twinge of guilt as I aimed my Pentax camera lens out from under the arm of my abaya at a trio of unsuspecting second cousins. Each of them was resplendent in carefully chosen colors.
Afra swayed back and forth in a beaded tunic that quit mid-thigh and rained glass droplets down to her French pedicured toes. Abrar lounged in a golden tiger number, striped spandex stretched taut over her arms into fingerless gloves. Abtihal, who was turning out to be the belle of the ball, stood tall and slim, her torso and hair littered with crumpled purple ribbon rosettes, misted with lilac scent. All three were wearing colored contacts blue, yellow, purple and deep red henna all the way up their arms. I had to suppress an awe-filled sigh at their finery.
I photographed them as they commented sardonically on the young and unmarried unsheathing themselves for the delectation of the shrouded older women. As she stood between her sisters, I noticed that Abtihal had an unusual glow about her festooned head. We all used to laugh at the ugly girls who made such a fuss about the stray snapshots that sometimes circulated around the tribe. Now, suddenly, Abtihal stood there, petrified, stock-still as her sisters gesticulated around her.
Meanwhile, shameless in the tall grass, I poached the pristine reputation of my beautiful cousin with every snap. This news explained both her glow and the imperceptible twitching revealed by my photographs. Full to the brim with promises, Abtihal was too bright for me to capture. Lashed to her dignity by the braided ropes of fate, she had been petrified of being photographed and risking the honor of her new family. The official photos of my cousin Jameela and her sisters folded neatly into a pocket-sized memory book from the Al Saad Ladies Photography Company. Her daughter is unrecognizable behind layers of white foundation and raver-girl glitter.
In the cover photo, Jameela squints out of a heart-shaped cutout. My aunt dismisses the tears with a wave. I wonder briefly about my aunt, her marriage to my uncle. We flip through the rest of the photos. My aunt sighs again and mumbles something about the Allah-given gift of love. The first time I danced at a wedding I was fourteen years old and wearing a red Chinese dress with a shocking slit up the leg.
Thus restrained, I resorted to a mixture of Egyptian-style belly dance and Midwestern clod-hopping. Daughter of Mohamed,"or "Safya! Which in turn made me feel triumphant despite my humiliation. The bougainvillea-draped, marble-tiled, baked-stucco compound where I gave my first blow job. As I pulled up to the coppery gate, the tinted window of the security kiosk slid open. A familiar Indian guard with epaulettes on his short-sleeved shoulders leaned out the window, belly and all, to squint into my vehicle.
He looked exactly the same, except his thin mustache had gone gray. At sixteen, this was the guy I was most terrified of. I was in a fragile state of permanent alarm. And once, upon seeing a towel hanging out of my purse: I just knew that he knew my towel was actually intended for spreading out on a dusty back balcony in one of the unlocked vacancies and rolling around in various states of undress with my first and I thought only love.
I tried to convince myself that the stare had just been blank, and that his judgmental chin-set was merely an expression of terminal boredom.
The dudes had obviously left the apartment. Retrieved 7 March The following year QE2 undertook two chartered cruises through the Mediterranean to Israel in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the state's founding. They were poor, but you were well educated. There are no astronauts or doctors in my family. Black-robed mothers of marriageable sons move in close in anticipation.
In retrospect, the guard was probably more wary of my surly brother, with his heavy beard, than of my gawky teenage self. This time he waved me through with a respectful nod. My hosts were a married design team who had been living in the compound since before I was born. If you ever speak to a girl about dating in the Gulf, she can confirm that the process involves some, if not all, of the following tactics a few of which are international tricks of the sneak-around trade for those born into strict families.
Leave with her driver, cover your face, and voila! There is the dangerous but rewarding trunk-dunk, which involves smuggling a boy in the trunk of your car. Dressing down is an approved variation. If your boyfriend can pass for Indian, make him wear a T-shirt and dirty baseball hat. To anyone who asks, reply indignantly: The hypertension that leads up to every carefully arranged meeting, the glimpse of one another from across a crowded intersection, the gift delivered to your door by his clueless little sister, a kiss stolen behind a dumpster at the back entrance of a Fuddruckers… all are worth the risk, even if it means game over.
But so was every other girl in my class. The week before school let out, I conspired with the daughters of various ambassadors to smuggle our respective boyfriends into a safe house while their parents were away in Mecca. Their house was grand, with marble floors and mirrored windows and three stories of parlors and guest rooms, opening up onto a circular pool that was half indoors and half outdoors.
The pool was the only place in the house free of surveillance cameras and staff at 8pm on a Thursday night. Here they were, our ragtag bunch of beaus, looking terrified. These were very possibly the four young males our families would least like us to see, and they were valiantly risking their lives to make out with us. None of the boys had known each other before, and I rather doubt they stayed in contact. Each couple retired to an unsurveilled corner, getting comfortable on countertops and cardboard boxes and deck chairs. I rose from a squat from behind a stack of broken-down boxes.
I led the handyman over to a refrigerator in the stairwell and asked him to look inside for Fanta.
It was all very situation-comedy, in a very unfunny way. He scurried out just as the handyman gave up searching for the orange soda bottles. Of course, the cameras had been left on. The summer was approaching, and with it the broiling sun, making our usual hideaways on balconies and back patios impossibly hot. I had only to lay my bare buttocks on the glaring white cement for them to sear with a pitched hiss.
Salty sweat dripped into our eyes and mouths as we kissed. The silversmith rolled his eyes as we awkwardly exchanged them. Later that night I received a text while I sat weeping on my roof: I almost never left the female side of the dorm. After a few harrowing trips downtown, with a near-constant array of men making rude comments, I avoided the city as much as possible.
I reported every prank call I received to the reception desk and called the floor manager if the fat-assed Kuwaiti girls blasted their Gulf-pop past 1am on a school night. They clobbed back and forth in their heels both on my floor and on the floor above, coming home from dates at the Hard Rock Cafe, squealing into their cellphones. My weekdays were a simple trajectory from bed to desk to library to bed. I was afraid of liking someone a little too much and so spent my free time composing elaborate love letters to the ever-receding boy back home.
Every Friday night I lay in my twin bed, belly-down on my sheepskin, reading Isabel Allende novels. It was self-imposed mental and physical isolation. She was intimidating, gorgeous, with long black hair that she oiled regularly. She wore high-waisted mom pants in and somehow managed to pull it off. She had a pear-shaped body — like literally resembling a pear, her thin torso and tiny belly giving way to smooth, sloping, fleshy hips and thick thighs. She always covered her tight jeans and permanent camel-toe with long flowing tunics and the ends of her hijab. The prank callers I used to tattle on had started to call her room just to hear her husky, sophisticated, French-accented voice.
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All the answers are inside! Learn Russian right now! Units begin with dialogues and short texts. Only the new vocabulary is explained in each unit. The English-Russian vocabulary does not contain all the words used in the book. After the dialogue there are communicative and situation-based exercises, which give practice in using and understanding the new vocabulary: There are also vocabulary-bu ilding exercises. This section is particularly useful for students working towards GCSE, and teachers will find plenty of material for oral and group work.
You wi ll not find every single word and expression used in these extracts explained in the book. Only the minimum of key words is given. Learn Russian - Vocabulary - Russian-English Bilingual Visual Dictionary. Ines Marcella Nov 6, at 3: Each year, eight beautiful girls are chosen as Paper Girls to serve the king.
It's the highest honor they could hope for This year, there's a ninth. And instead of paper, she's made of fire. In this richly developed fantasy, Lei is a member of the Paper caste, the lowest and most persecuted class of people in Ikhara. She lives in a remote village with her father, where the decade-old trauma of watching her mother snatched by royal guards for an unknown fate still haunts her. Now, the guards are back and this time it's Lei they're after — the girl with the golden eyes whose rumored beauty has piqued the king's interest. Over weeks of training in the opulent but oppressive palace, Lei and eight other girls learns the skills and charm that befit a king's consort.
There, she does the unthinkable — she falls in love. Her forbidden romance becomes enmeshed with an explosive plot that threatens her world's entire way Girls of Paper and Fire - Natasha Ngan. Can you send me this book to myail? The link not found Manny thanks.
Ines Marcella Nov 6, at 1: Spensa's world has been under attack for decades. Now pilots are the heroes of what's left of the human race, and becoming one has always been Spensa's dream. Since she was a little girl, she has imagined soaring skyward and proving her bravery. But her fate is intertwined with her father's--a pilot himself who was killed years ago when he abruptly deserted his team, leaving Spensa's chances of attending flight school at slim to none. No one will let Spensa forget what her father did, yet fate works in mysterious ways. Flight school might be a long shot, but she is determined to fly.
And an accidental discovery in a long-forgotten cavern might just provide her with a way to claim the stars. Skyward - Brandon Sanderson. Ines Marcella Nov 6, at 4: The Renegades are a syndicate of prodigies—humans with extraordinary abilities—who emerged from the ruins of a crumbled society and established peace and order where chaos reigned. As champions of justice, they remain a symbol of hope and courage to everyone Nova has a reason to hate the Renegades, and she is on a mission for vengeance.
As she gets closer to her target, she meets Adrian, a Renegade boy who believes in justice—and in Nova. But Nova's allegiance is to a villain who has the power to end them both. Archenemies - Marissa Meyer. E-book Republic Oct 23, at 9: Drawn from five workbooks from the bestselling Practice Makes Perfect series, this powerhouse volume features all the knowledge and practice you need to master Spanish. With Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish All-in-One, you will build your Spanish vocabulary, straighten out your sentences, overcome your fear of verb tenses, master the intricacies of grammar, and much more.
This value-packed workbook covers all the facets of Spanish and offers thorough explanations that are reinforced by hundreds of hands-on practice exercises. You will, or course, get plenty of practice, practice, practice using all your new Spanish skills. Whether you are learning on your own or taking a beginning Spanish class, Practice Makes Perfect: Complete Spanish All-in-One will help you master Spanish in no time at all.
Rose Knightingale Oct 23, at Introduced in Heaven and Hell , readers learned, after a heartbreaking journey through grief, Luci was ready to take another chance at love. Especially when the stars align. The Favor , a short story — Deacon and Cassidy from Deacon of the Unfinished Hero series go back to their favorite cabin at Glacier Lily, and there, Cassie asks her husband a favor.
Maddox and Molly were all in with their commitment to their unconventional love triangle. But Diesel was letting the pressures and prejudice of family and society sink under his skin, making him hold himself distant from the man he loved. Can Maddox and Molly lead Diesel fully into their lives and give him more than everything? Loose Ends - Kristen Ashley. Does anyone have The boy i grew up with from Tijan? Nicole Collins Oct 22, at Omg its here omg guys!!!???!!!