Savage Tongues Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Books by Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi

  Dedication

  Epigraphs

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  About the Author

  Connect on Social Media

  Copyright © 2021 by Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhbooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Van der Vliet Oloomi, Azareen, author.

  Title: Savage tongues / Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi.

  Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2021.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020044796 (print) | LCCN 2020044797 (ebook) | ISBN 9780358315063 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780358316602 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Love stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3622.A58543 S28 2021 (print) | LCC PS3622.A58543 (ebook) DDC 813/.6—DC23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044796

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044797

  v1.0721

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously.

  Excerpt from “An Afternoon in Albaicín” by Najwan Darwish, translated from the Arabic language by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. Translation copyright © 2020 by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. First published in New Poetry in Translation. Reprinted by permission of the author and translator.

  To my queer family who lit the way all along

  Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.

  —James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone

  Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as in torture. While torture contains language, specific human words and sounds, it is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out.

  —Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World

  Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being.

  —Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power

  We were passing the time talking

  about East and West

  when death came to a peak of Albaicín.

  So death reaches Granada too

  with a message on the phone.

  It came on its black horse

  and took a friend

  while the hooves wounded the sunset

  over Alhambra, that summer palace.

  I did not try to stop it—

  we Arabs don’t stop death,

  we just want it to know the value

  of the hand that slackens the reins.

  —Najwan Darwish, “An Afternoon in Albaicín” (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)

  1

  TWENTY YEARS HAD PASSED since I’d been to Marbella. Twenty years, I repeated to myself as the plane descended through the sky toward Spain. I leaned my head against the plexiglass. The cool surface felt good against my forehead. I could see the mountains in the distance covered in a forbidding veil of mist. We’d flown through the night; now dawn was breaking. An uncertain yellow light was coming through the pillowy masses of clouds. Wrapped in fog, the ring of mountains looked muted and dull; only their peaks glowed in the hushed smoky tones of the sky. Below, I could see airplanes lined up on the black belt of the runway waiting to take off; closer to the gates, there were tourists deplaning, leaning into the wind, their hair blown back, the turbines on the regional planes still spinning. The drone of the slowing engines echoed in my ears. I had the uneasy feeling that time had come to a standstill. That all of Marbella had existed in a state of suspension since I had last been there at seventeen—raw, restless, with a savage temperament that had led me into Omar’s arms. Omar, my stepmother’s nephew. Omar: my lover, my torturer, my confidant and enemy.

  It had been one hell of a night. And now, here I was, returning to one of the ugliest episodes of my youth: that strange, wild summer I’d spent in this moonlit city of salt and gulls and palm trees, on this dark and playful coast, living in my father’s vacant and abandoned apartment, learning to ride Omar in the blazing afternoon heat. I was supposed to spend the summer with my father, though I’d known full well that he would fail to show up, or that he would show up late, and that even if he did show up it would be with that wife of his, that fussy demimonde from Beirut, a woman of the old world who was raised on French colonial patisseries and who, at sixteen, was shuffled from her father’s home to her first husband’s, a cousin two decades her senior who had left her widowed in middle age. She is as naïve as she is possessive, manipulative, calculating.

  I knew that my father would ignore me that summer, or that he would acknowledge my presence but deny his responsibility for me, his daughter, a human he’d created, whose health and happiness, if normal societal rules were applied, he should be tending to. But normal societal rules have never been a part of my life. They do not interest me. They provoke in me nothing but boredom.

  I am a half-formed thing, neither this nor that. My mother is Iranian. My father, British. I am a split child of the gutters, raised in the shadowy streets of Tehran, where a few lonely hooded faces murmur with trembling lips, “Death to America.” America, the country I moved to as an adolescent, a country that groans at the very thought of Iranians, calling us bloodthirsty tyrants, vowing to smoke us out of our holes, as if the whole Middle East were living under one big primordial rock, spinning the yarn of evil. I suppose from the white man’s view we are so evil that we deserve to be eviscerated. Just look, for example, at how quickly after we set foot on American soil that my brother was subjugated by a hate crime that damaged him beyond repair, a cruel attack that I witnessed and that infused my already fragmented life with an unfocused rage and despair. I wonder now: If we had never moved to America, would my life still have collided with Omar’s with such brutal force on the other side of the Atlantic in Spain? Would I still have been animated by self-loathing, self-immolation, a misdirected revenge? It never ceases to amaze and bewilder me how events that have germinated on one continent can be harvested in the shadows of another far, far away.

  Yes, I have lived an itinerant life. I’ve lived here and there: in the sun-bleached streets of Los Angeles; the dull roads of Reno; the moody, superior streets of New York; the gritty, pulsating avenues of Chicago. My father, too, is a nomad; as children, we are, after all, an invention of our parents. My father had worked for years at sea with the British India Steam Navigation Company until he got tuberculosis. He hadn’t been allowed to work on deck after that. That’s the only concrete fact about his life that he ever shared with me. The rest is conjecture. But I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was devastated by the disease, that it distorted his whole sense of self, that he survived, but that he would have preferred not to; he’d never learned to conduc
t himself on dry land.

  He’d softened the blow by finding new ways to insert himself into the vast and distant lands to which he’d grown accustomed: India, and later Iran, Lebanon, the Emirates. “Oh, the women of the Middle East!” he would say. “They’re so sensual—dark and suggestive, loyal, obedient.” He attached himself to what he called the “mysteries of the Orient,” first through my mother, a girl from the upper echelons of Tehran society whose father had been killed during the revolution. When my father came along, she’d been confused, caught in the horrors of coups and confiscated property, of house-arrest orders and death executed in cold blood. My father would later abandon her for my stepmother, whom he’d married without finalizing his divorce to my mother; he’d converted to Islam purely to take advantage of its patriarchal leanings, which allowed him, a white British man, to be married to two Muslim women, one Shia, one Sunni, at the same time against their will. But as much as he fetishized them, he also echoed the words of violence so common in the West. He would often say, “I’m repulsed by how irrational your people are, their lack of logic, their bent toward murder, their self-destructiveness. It’s why the Middle East can’t survive without a benign dictator in place.” His gaze was always forbidding, his tone declarative. Oh, how little regard we have for the power words have to wound!

  A benign dictator, I’d thought to myself, examining the cruelty of my father’s sentences. And that pair of words, your people. As if I weren’t made of him, weren’t a part of him. I was, in his eyes, part of the enemy camp no matter that my veins run with equal parts oil and the brackish waters of western seas.

  My body—what an unlikely experiment. I’d always felt that I was fundamentally distorted, a reckless invention. That there was something deeply flawed about my being. Iranian American: victim and victimizer, colonized and colonizer. How I was meant to make my way through the world is beyond me. My own father, if someone so utterly absent from his children’s life can be called that, had read my people with the same air of superiority with which we’ve long been read by Britain, France, America, modern nations that have defined themselves in opposition to us, that have split the world in two—Occident, Orient—that have defined us as morally impure, uncivilized fools with an unquenchable thirst for violence, barbarians who would only benefit from the levelheaded beneficence of the West, the Occidental man’s even temper, his logician’s mind.

  And now, here I am: I’ve returned to Marbella, the only place where I’d ever tried to spend significant time with my father—a failed attempt, as he hadn’t shown up until it was too late, until the dreadful events of that summer had unfolded, impressed themselves upon my already misshapen life. Instead of spending time with my father, I’d spent time in the hollow corridors of a life that belonged to him, a life from which he was absent, in the rooms of his barren apartment, a symbol of what he could have been to me but never was: a father not just in name, a protector, an unconditional source of love.

  I’d come back to Marbella to examine the ways in which my own punishing destiny had intersected with Omar’s, a man who was more or less family. He was my stepmother’s favorite nephew. He’d been forty years old that summer, twenty-three years older than I was. Tall, handsome, seductive, he looked at me with big hungry eyes and a penetrating gaze, a gaze that—once it turned cruel, well into our affair, when I’d least expected it—had drained my body of its will to live.

  I suppose I have what some might refer to as an investigative nature, a relentless edge, a charge to understand how it was that the crooked path of my life—a life that I’d wrongly thought Omar could save me from, a life lived in the shadows of parental neglect and informed by historical annihilation—had led me right to Omar. It had taken me twenty years to understand that the lens through which Omar had seen me was so wretched, so disgraceful, so disenfranchising, it had robbed me of my ability to see in return: I had lost the power to look. And because I had lost my ability to look, I had lost the ability to see myself clearly. Where then would I speak from? How would I retell my story? I had lost my descriptive capacities. He had reshaped my identity in his image, with his gaze. Going forward from that summer, who I am would always be, in part, because of what he did to me. I couldn’t undo that. I no longer had any interest in denying myself the past. I needed to see and then unsee myself through Omar’s eyes. Then, I wondered, would I be able to look at the world as myself for the first time?

  I was returning to Marbella in order to face head-on the absolute pain and pleasure of our story. I needed to purge my body of his memory. To destroy all the sensual memories I had built up around him in my mind. To translate the bitterness and the heat of our relationship into a language of my own making. What, I wondered, had Omar asked me not to see, not to be? How had he both made and unmade me? I had no idea. He had worked my muscles with his tongue until his mouth had gone dry against my skin. He had left me raw and limp. That I was already wounded was clear from the lines on my face: at seventeen, my eyes shone with the heat of intense grief, my mouth curled downward, my nostrils flared easily. All Omar had to do was rework my bruises, expand their boundaries. And he did. He crafted an exquisite wound knowing full well that beneath that wound existed another, and beneath that, another still. My life had made his job easy.

  Perhaps I should begin at the beginning. Like I said, I am not alone in my wretchedness though I have not seen my brother in years. In a decade. I have other brothers and sisters, too, half siblings, but I don’t know them. I don’t know how many of us there are. I only know my own brother, the one with whom I share a mother. Not long before I’d left for Marbella, just weeks after my mother, brother, and I arrived in the United States from Tehran, to Reno, my brother had been beaten to a pulp by a skinhead. His face had been shattered, his disfigured body left on the sidewalk, his hair matted with his own blood. I’d found him; I’d stepped off the school bus and onto his lifeless body, into a pool of our shared blood. For a moment, I thought I’d gone mad, that I was in a nightmare. The pain of seeing my brother barely gulping for air, at the edge of death, deranged me. But then he moved. He must have felt me standing over him, looking down at his swollen eyes, as blue as the darkening sky above us, in disbelief. His school supplies were scattered around on the sidewalk, under the bushes, dirty with mud. He made a noise, let out a complaint, and I bent toward him; I kneeled on the ground beneath the trees and drew his head into my lap.

  Thinking about it now, I felt my hands tingle. I was sweating. My palms were wet. I reached up and twisted the overhead fan on and breathed in the recycled air of the airplane. Then I looked out the window at the tarmac, at the mountains in the distance, at the green fields dotted with palm trees and macchia mediterranea, its wild red and purple flowers already in bloom. As we approached the glistening tarmac wet from the morning’s rain, I saw my brother lying on the runway; there he was, his face still smashed, his bones shattered, his skin bruised and swollen and misshapen; he was looking up at me from the black ribbon of the runway, silently asking: What are you doing back here? I shut my eyes.

  At seventeen, I’d come to Marbella numb with a rage I hadn’t had the language to articulate. None of us—neither my mother, my brother, nor I—were able to speak to the others after his attack. We had always spoken to one another in Farsi, but now we heard the echo of his skull being shattered against concrete in every word of our mother tongue. And we couldn’t speak to one another in English. No. That was the language of our first defeat. So we lived in an ever-widening silence. Once his face had healed enough for him to travel, my brother left for London to stay with my father, my father who seemed only to have affection for us when we were in danger; he’d sweep in and try to rescue us, make a grand gesture of love, then dispose of us once the novelty had passed. Back then my father lived near Hyde Park, spending what he could of his wife’s money. My father who was always broke, who’d been raised as poor as a church mouse, kicking rocks around in the East End.

  My mother had begg
ed my brother not to go. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing him. “Without you,” she’d said to him, “it will be as if one-half of my life has disappeared. Each of you is like one of my lungs,” she’d said. “How will I breathe with just one lung?” But he’d left anyway. And my father had promptly used his wife’s money to send him away to a boarding school in the English countryside, I don’t remember where. I barely saw him after that. His suffering had broken us down. The only kinship left between us was pain.

  I became reckless, impulsive; I craved danger. I went to Marbella. My mother encouraged me to go. She was hopeful I would see my brother, that my father would bring him along for the summer. She wanted me to convince my brother to come back to her. He had stopped speaking to her. He had come to associate her with the beating he had taken. He’d said, “You didn’t teach me how to be a man” and “What kind of man is incapable of defending himself?” He spoke as though my mother had castrated him. It was my job to remind him of our father’s culpability, his cold, disaffected parenting, our mother’s eternal sacrifice. But none of that came to be. I didn’t see him in Marbella. I could never have anticipated what happened there. That summer will haunt me for the rest of my life.

  I’d spent the first half of the summer living alone, tanning at the beach, smoking my Gauloises, reading Lorca, masturbating, ignoring my mother’s phone calls. I couldn’t stand hearing the disappointment in her voice. I couldn’t stand her loneliness, the sense of disorientation that had weakened her resolve to live. Her pain seemed to tip me over the edge. The few times I’d picked up, I’d lied to her. I convinced her that my father was with me. She’d had no idea I’d been alone all along, alone until Omar showed up and declared himself my patron.

  I remember the first time Omar and I met. One evening, he’d come to the apartment with money my father had sent me through his bank account. When I opened the door to let him in, he said, “You ordered money?” He was holding a white envelope in his hand, looking at me with a friendly intensity, his mouth ajar. He was wearing a gray T-shirt and a pair of black leather motorcycle pants with knee armor and red stitching on the sides that drew my eyes down the full length of his muscular thighs. When I met his gaze, his eyes widened and his expression, which had been light, even jocular, turned serious, as if, having caught sight of my desire, of my youth and foolishness, he’d recalibrated his thoughts. His brow was laced with sweat and he wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. His sweat dripped on the envelope, softening the paper, rendering it transparent, exposing the pinks and greens of the bills within. “I was out riding,” he said, and stepped inside. He put the envelope on the console table where I kept my keys. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” he joked, sliding his fingers along the edge of the envelope, stroking it; I could have sworn that as his hand dropped to his side he let out a little moan. I remember that my heart was beating in a frightful way. I felt heat rising in my face. “Have you ever ridden a Ducati?” he said, turning to face me.