Savage Tongues Read online

  I swallowed, trying to extinguish the fire that had, quite suddenly and against my will, ignited inside me. “No,” I managed to say, suppressing the tremor in my voice.

  Omar walked into the kitchen. He took a cold drink, an orange soda, out of the fridge, then leaning against the door, he tilted his head back and laughed with a boyish charm that excited me. “Never?” he asked.

  “Never,” I said, laughing along with him. Our combined laughter swirled through the room, a whirlpool of pleasure laced with danger and darkness. It had been months since I’d heard an adult laugh. Months since anyone had broken the silence of my life with an intimation of joy.

  Omar leaned away from the fridge and came toward me. “Feel here,” he said, gently lifting my hand to his chest. “I think my heart is exploding,” he said, rubbing my hand, squeezing it against his body. I felt the heat of his skin and the coarse hairs on his chest beneath his thin T-shirt, his heart pumping against my palm. “It’s a lot of adrenaline,” he said. “It feels great. I’m going to take you.”

  I removed my hand. He shrugged with what seemed to me feigned indifference, then finished his orange soda. Right before he left, we looked at each other with an intentionality and an intensity that had frightened and aroused me simultaneously. Our interlocked gaze pierced the silence; it was a form of communication unfamiliar to me, one that didn’t rely on words but was extremely clear nevertheless. This was how I would come to feel in his presence—unnerved, even petrified at times, but still excited, exhilarated by the electric response that his body elicited in mine, something I’d never before experienced, an energy I didn’t know how to control, didn’t know how to create for myself.

  “You,” he said to me weeks later, said to me habitually then, his head tilted back, his throat exposed, “are my lover.” He would draw me in and kiss me hungrily. I didn’t always like it, perhaps wasn’t even comfortable, but I let him. Maybe I even egged him on. I don’t know. I’ll never know. I was in acute pain, lonely in ways I was too young to grasp, and there was no one around to ask me to articulate my suffering, to help me fix it in language, so I raged on like a wounded animal who knows not what to do except soothe her pain with more pain, lust after the final blow of death that will put an end to it all. I became hooked on Omar. He was like a drug, a humiliation I craved, and I kept going back for more. I loved his voice, so deep, like a primordial cry ricocheting against the cold walls of a cave when he came.

  It took me years to realize that Omar had had other youthful lovers, that I had shared his body with others, though I would never have the occasion to know them myself. Once unleashed, this knowledge, a caged beast that had long lurked in the shadows, gnawed on my nerves; it minced my heart. I felt I had gone mad. I wanted to rip my flesh off my bones and feed the beast before it had a chance to devour me whole. I could not understand how I could have been naïve to the fact that I had been just one of a whole repertoire of girls who had satiated Omar’s appetites. But conscience can be slow to awaken. Especially when one is used to all manner of abuses.

  And now here I was again, approaching Marbella. I needed to lift myself out of the tyranny of silence, the silence that had informed my life before and after Omar, the very silence he had sensed in me, had taken advantage of for his own secret desires. I needed to search the shadows. I needed to shine the light of language onto the dark vaults of my life. I had become a writer. I had devoted my life to language, to mapping the banality of suffering, to exposing hidden truths in everyday realities. A salubrious exercise, I supposed, to confront one’s ghosts, but I had my doubts. There are things better put away in a box. That’s what my father used to say; that’s how he’d dealt with me.

  When I think about his other children, my half siblings, my brother, I realize there’s nothing unique about me. We’re all in our own boxes, his children. We don’t know one another, but we know of one another. We exist in silos just like Omar’s lovers did. It’s a carefully balanced economy, my father’s. I suppose it’s a lot for a man like him, a lot to give each of us our own box. We each get our own space; our own casket to grovel in, to pound against, to weep in. And now I’m standing at the cusp of reentering mine, the apartment he’d recently given me, that he’d purchased years ago with what little money he had as a way to pay back his wife for the financial sacrifices she’d made for him, to appease her; she had wanted to be closer to her twin sister, who lived in Marbella, and also, of course, to Omar, whom she’d helped care for during the bloodbath of the Lebanese civil war. He had been a teenager during the war, the same age I was when we met. They had lived together through raids and checkpoints, navigated alleyways severed by the rubble of fallen buildings, knowing every day could be their last. Their bond was unbreakable. They had survived death together, no small thing, and had come out the other end similarly selfish and cruel, with a scorching need to control others.

  Ever since they met, my father has followed my stepmother’s lead, her whims, her demands. He’s never stood up for himself, for his children. He’s the kind of man who exercises control by disappearing. When the pressure gets to be too much, he simply vanishes. No one knows where he goes. He’ll call his wife to let her know that he’s still alive, but that’s it. And then, when the moment has passed, as he says, he comes home and settles back into his life as if he never left it. He has a gift, my father, for denying the discontinuities of his life. Take, for example, this apartment in Marbella; he bought it but never lived there. It remains an unoccupied container, a home empty of the warmth of bodies, an unfulfilled promise.

  I could picture the building. Neutral. Forbidding. Austere. A beige block of medium height with rectangular windows and rows of terraces filled with plants and broken sun chairs. Over the course of the summer, the apartment had turned into a weapon, a trap, a dark and isolated enclosure that had witnessed and applauded my torture. I remembered the stale smell of its walls, their stained surfaces. I remembered the sleepless nights I’d spent walking its corridors. I felt exhausted at the thought of returning to that apartment, an exhaustion exacerbated by all the traveling I’d done in the past few months. I’d woken up at two that morning in a grim hotel room in Bristol to catch my flight to Marbella, having just finished the final leg of my book tour. I was spent. I was stiff from sitting on trains, buses, and airplanes after so many years hunched over my desk absorbed in the diabolical mania of writing. Before Bristol, I’d been in Oxford and London. I’d barely seen either place. I was moving through the world like a ghost, the ghost of literature, the ghost of my former book. I felt disembodied, as though I were floating across the rugged terrain of my life, which I had tried to come to terms with by writing. By the time I’d stood on the curb at three in the morning, the Bristol wind shearing my face, I felt like a fugitive, an old feeling that had, over the course of my itinerant life, built a home for itself in the center of my being.

  I’d watched the cab approach, watched it follow along the curve of the road, its headlights rolling over the city’s gray stone buildings. I got in and almost immediately caught my reflection in the window. I looked worn and a little lost. I didn’t like to see myself that way. I had seen my face glide across the mirror as I was leaving my hotel room: my dark hair, my thin lips, my eyes large and brown, two wounded blue semicircles beneath them. Every time I saw my face that way, drawn and tired, I thought about how shallow my energy reserves were. I knew that Omar had robbed me of my youth. I imagined that energy, once destined to circulate in my veins, was poisoning him now; it didn’t belong to him. It soothed me to think that way, to think of him diminishing as he aged, just as he had annihilated me in my youth. In reality, I didn’t know if he was dead or alive.

  I’d looked out the cab window, through my reflection, at the cold starless sky and watched my image dissolve into the impenetrable night. Soon we’d arrived at the airport parking lot, the whole structure flooded with bright lights. I got out and followed the crowd, a train of limbs advancing through the doors. We
all lined up at security, removed our belts and shoes, carefully set our electronics in the bins, watched them move through the X-ray machine. People were either half-asleep or half-drunk. I’d been standing behind a crowd of young women; they were all wearing the same black cotton sleeveless shirts, the words BRIDE TRIBE printed in gold across their breasts. The bride herself was young, no more than twenty. She was wearing a makeshift wedding dress with a long veil that trailed down past her ankles and a bright-pink crown with fake diamonds that spelled out LOVE. They were drunk, the whole lot, and they’d kept on drinking as the plane glided into the night sky. At one point, I heard the bride yell out: “Costa del Sol, here we come!”

  Throughout the flight, I’d turned to look at her through the gaps between the seats. Her veil was soiled. She’d removed it and bundled it up in her lap. Her head was tilted back, her mouth wide open, a single strand of her silky blond hair caught on her teeth. She looked like she had fangs. She looked as though her teeth had been allowed to grow—teeth, which allow us to feed and defend ourselves—at the expense of women like myself. I thought of my brother’s teeth that had been knocked out of his mouth. Of the Farsi that had been trapped inside me, of the years I’d been unable to chew or speak. This bride didn’t live in a state of skeptical inquiry, on guard, her ability to trust shattered by history, her sense of self ground to dust by the violence it had dispatched. She’d been left alone to thrive, to eat and drink and make love in peace.

  I turned back to the window and leaned my head against the plexiglass. I could see the ribbon of asphalt below ready to greet us. I felt again like a fugitive. But as we hit the ground, as we taxied down the runway, that feeling gave way to terror, then to pangs of bitter solitude. I remembered when I’d told my father about my relationship with Omar years after it had happened, the threat and overt violence of it, he’d just looked at me, eyes narrowed, and said, “How will I tell my wife? He’s her favorite nephew.”

  Until then, I’d kept the details of that summer to myself. It had seemed easier to pretend like nothing had happened. But over time, I’d grown quieter and more withdrawn, intensely secretive, private and mistrusting over the most basic things. It was as if the fact of my relationship with Omar was rotting inside of me. When I finally told my mother, almost a decade after that summer, she’d said, in a fit of exasperated panic, as if she had been seething over my silence all those years: “You think I don’t know what happened to you? I’m your mother!” Then she reached out and held my hand, and said, “I am a woman, too.” I understood by inference that my silence had kept her at bay, that I’d denied myself the companionship of a mother, who was also a survivor, at the time when I’d needed her most.

  And now my father had decided, in a solipsistic move, to gift me the very place where I’d incurred that pain, to put its cruel walls in my name—an apology, he’d claimed, for his absence from my life, which I’d interpreted as an implicit acknowledgment of the many ways he’d exposed me to Omar’s sadism through neglect. I’d shared this conjecture with my best friend, Ellie, who was meeting me in Marbella, adding that, in my view, parenting requires the constant exercise of foresight, something my father had opted out of entirely.

  I took comfort in the fact that Ellie was right behind me. Ellie who also had led an itinerant life, who had been homeless at times; her ties to the world in which she’d been raised were frayed. She had been raised in America in an Orthodox Jewish family but had been taken abruptly to Israel by her mother after her parents’ divorce. Her people’s survival had come to depend on their ability to lay claim to the lands of Palestine, to resurrect amid its soil and rocks and olive trees a language that had been muted by the violence of European pogroms, the Spanish Inquisition, the Holocaust. The land of Palestine and its people were used to absolve Europe of its guilt, to move bodies it had maimed and injured farther out of its line of sight.

  On long nights when neither one of us could sleep in Amherst, where our friendship first began, where we both had attended graduate school, Ellie would talk to me freely about how being transplanted to Israel as a young girl had injured her burgeoning sense of integrity. As a queer woman, she’d been treated as an obstruction, a person who’d refused to be incorporated into the community. This sense of rejection had shaped her political views. She saw how absurd it was that she could move to Israel as if it were her natural home port while Palestinians were denied freedom of movement on their own land. She’d wanted to be as far away from Israel as possible. In return, I would tell her that seeing my brother battered on the concrete pavement just after our own arrival in America had depleted any sense of self-respect I’d had at that point and replaced it with a stinging shame that had left me defenseless.

  We had, as all women in intense friendships do, fallen in love with each other. We were, we came to realize, most alike in our desire to question any master narrative’s claim to truth, to make visible the lies these narratives concealed through language. And we were both willing to sacrifice our lives for it, to keel over in pain however sentimental or ridiculous this shared impulse seemed to others. We would remind each other that breaking silence was never ineffectual even if at times it felt as though we were trying to shatter a block of ice with the tips of our fingers.

  Ellie’s acknowledgment of the suffering of Palestinians had led to accusations that she was an apologist for terrorists. She’d felt guilty all through her adolescence. Over time, though, she’d come to understand that it’s an impossible but necessary line to walk, to recognize that one is implicated in injustice even if one is not a direct perpetrator. When she spoke that way, I often detected a stale taste in my mouth, which I understood to be the death of my mother tongue. I still spoke Farsi, but my words had gone rigid, stiff from disuse through the years following my brother’s attack.

  Ellie and I were both born into such deranged whirlpools of geopolitical conflict, with so many contradictory voices swirling through our minds, that locating our own could be a laborious, exhausting task. We’d learned to mitigate this exhaustion by accompanying each other on what we referred to as recovery journeys; we’d physically return to the sites of our traumas to map our stories in words, to reverse the language-destroying effects of unbearable pain. I had been with her to Israel and occupied Palestine. I’d held Ellie’s hand when she was confronted by an onslaught of memories from her teenage years, when she’d struggled with the knowledge that the cost of her survival, the rehabilitation of her language and lifeworld, was the death and debilitation of others. She’d tried to mitigate Israel’s structures of exclusion. She’d learned to speak Arabic. She’d translated the work of Palestinian writers into Hebrew and English without denying the asymmetrical networks of power she was operating in. She recognized her immense privilege and saw all around her people who ignored theirs, who led their lives with a sense of carefree entitlement.

  Her open, inquisitive nature, combined with her anger at the political and religious constraints she was forced to operate in, had pushed her toward other forms of violence; she’d let herself be dominated by a string of angry men. The relationship between our political pain and our attraction to destructive men was not always clear; perhaps being with men who make us scream and gasp and moan takes us beyond the confines of language, back into our original pain; it allows us to explore and later confront the patriarchal and patriotic leanings of the colonial social project. “Arezu, I am not the main victim here,” Ellie would say when she was grappling with the systemic denial of Palestinian personhood. “But I am still a victim of violence. I did not give my consent; I have been made a perpetrator of violence against my will.”

  I would say to her then that I had, at times, suspected myself of perpetuating violence against my own body. My relationship with Omar had bloomed in a place where Muslim life existed as a concealed reality, visible only in traces, in the landscape, the architecture, the food, the tonal inflections of the Spanish south. Muslim and Jewish life, I told her, had been purposefully
suppressed by the Spanish national project. The very ground beneath my feet had been primed for centuries to annihilate my body. “That energy is real,” I said to her. “Our bodies detect its negative charge. If we’re not careful, it can overpower us, turn us against ourselves in a fit of rage.” I told her that for that reason and many others, not least among them my brother’s near death at the hands of a skinhead, I’d willingly participated in my own destruction.

  As my plane sat on the tarmac waiting for a gate to be assigned to us, as I breathed in the cabin’s stale air, I thought about the last conversation Ellie and I had had before I’d left home for England; we’d sat on opposite ends of the phone in silence, comforted only by the knowledge that we were on the line together, that we did not always need to speak to impart understanding to each other. And now she was accompanying me to Spain. She was catching a flight to Marbella that same morning from Oxford. We had spent a few days together there before I’d gone on to Bristol to finish my book tour. My Ellie. I pictured her understanding gaze. I thought of her easy laughter, how nimbly she guides conversation away from fear. My brilliant friend Ellie, the only woman in the world on the same wavelength as I was. She would have seen the bride’s fangs, too. She would have seen them, and we would have died together right there, laughing, laughing out all of our pain.