By HAIFA ABUALNADI
Translated by ADDIE LEAK
Deferred Migration
Amman is a city of deferred migration with no hope of arriving, depression with no hope of recovery, and the scam that is returnees’ dream of connection. Amman isn’t mine. Because I’m the daughter of parents who left for a time.
When I was just a girl in braids, my hair already settled into its center part, I would walk along the beaches of the Gulf near our house in Mina al-Zour, on the border between Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. The Kuwaiti desert stung my feet with its extreme heat and cold. I went to a primary school with only four grades. It had a small pen that held rabbits, two sheep, chickens, and a rooster. On the right side were “barracks” where we had art and vocational classes, and on the left were barracks housing a female nurse and doctor who rarely had office hours. “Home” meant both school and home, and the hugs followed me wherever I went; my mother was with me constantly, day and night. She was a supervisor at the school, and I was her pampered little girl. The other students watched me with envy. My friends were all teachers’ daughters, and we were spoiled: we were given small gifts and made members of the Library Committee, the Scouts, the gymnastics team, and more. The population of Mina al-Zour was scant, so there weren’t many girls at the school.
There was a constant struggle between the Kuwaitis and Saudis that flared up, then died down, over the name of the area. The Kuwaitis wanted it to be “Mina al-Zour,” and the Saudis wanted it to be “Mina Saud.” The sign at the end of the road had both names on it, and above them each “team” had modified the name in spray paint. I didn’t belong to either group, and the names didn’t mean much to me back then, but I loved crossing the border every weekend. We had residency permits in both Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, because my father worked as an architect in Khafji, Saudi Arabia, and my mother was an Arabic language supervisor in Mina al-Zour. Work filled our lives, and so did the trip back and forth, the road, the sea, and its beaches.
Then, in the late 1980s, before the Iraqi invasion, something happened, and we had to come back to Amman. We were already here by the time it sank in that we were moving. I’d told the sea I was the daughter of its heart, so how could I just leave like that, so suddenly, without any goodbyes or explanations? I didn’t realize what it meant to leave it behind until it had happened.
We flew back to Amman, and all our belongings—furniture, luggage, my books and Yamaha keyboard, Barbie and her house and the rest of her things—boarded a large truck that arrived a week after we did. I was in agony, and when I was able to pull myself out of it and come back to some kind of hope that I would find in this, my homeland, a home that would embrace me, I realized I was living in a kind of waystation where the word “temporary” was permanent, “safety” was a missing puzzle piece, and “distance” grew and shrank, its east and west, its reality and illusion, fluctuating. I was drowning. Yet I had to live this new life, whatever it held, without resentment or doubt or grumbling. Me, the one who’s constantly getting lost and is choked with anxiety anytime I’m forced to visit a new place.
Amman scares me: the density and overcrowding; the scarcity of water; the strange foreignness of the city and its heat; its changeable, artificial modernity; the disastrous parade of ongoing projects; and the city’s reroutes and false detours and proliferation of potholes, which leave indelible scars on my tires and my memory, the way back home gradually disappearing into their depths.
Pain a Street Long
All he had to do was stick his head back out the office window to find movement, to discover that the stillness inside him was just a delusional choice and that the denuded white walls were his slow suicide[1].
It wasn’t enough to stick my head out onto the balcony, so I went downstairs to observe part of the shopping street crowded with pedestrians and cars. It’s a long street that, these days, goes by the name Prince Rashed Street, stretching between what people call “the bottom of al-Hashmi hill” and passing by Naqawa Circle before reaching the Anabtawi traffic light in Jabal al-Hashmi al-Shamali. At first, it’s all electricians’ shops and auto mechanics lined up elbow to elbow, and then it continues with the abandoned Amir Cinema, which was built in the early seventies on an extension of the shopping street. I’ve always wanted to sneak inside and let my imagination run wild, spinning lighthearted stories about ghosts emerging from the Bollywood films once shown there and wandering among the seats, watching themselves and passersby and me from a small window in the cracked wall, happy because they are not me, not living in a city that strips the feathers from its inhabitants’ fledgling dreams.
Below this street, another old street branches off, leading to the al-Mahatta refugee camp. The camp was established after the Palestinian Nakba in 1948, when displaced people from abandoned Palestinian villages and cities settled there and built homes and shops that are still there today. It’s worth pointing out here that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has never acknowledged this camp.
The old Arab Bank building is still there on the shopping street; no one has rented it out yet. A few shops sell electrical appliances while others repair them, and from a bakery wafts the scent of my mother, who used to love buying bread there. Then there’s the post office, where I still remember our P.O. box number (230530) and postal code (11123), but two years before he died, my father went in and canceled our subscription to the box without giving a reason, as if he sensed his death approaching. Next to the post office, in a narrow street, is the driver’s ed school where I learned to drive. Beyond that, modernity has left its mark on a number of malls, one after the other, like Plaza Mall and al-Hashmi Mall, both of whose owners gave them up years ago, leaving them relatively abandoned. One now houses a Daraghmeh department store. There’s also Izmir Mall, the only one that retains any real commercial activity, because there’s a Carrefour inside. On the ground floors of these malls, and nearby, are gold shops and stores selling cell phones and “nouveautéhat,” which is the old name for clothing stores like the ones dotting the street, interspersed with others selling Islamic clothing, abayas, and jalabiyas. This is in addition to the many, and varied, restaurants selling shawarma, chicken (grilled or barbecued), muajanat and fatayer, or pastries (the bakeries are all named after fruits—apricot, apple, guava…), as well as the ubiquitous hummus, falafel, and ful restaurants.
A female friend who lives on Airport Road talks about this street like it’s a treasure she’s just discovered, as though it’s a must to visit and look for blessings in all its nooks and crannies. She’s raved about it so much that I wanted to go walk there (my favorite exercise), even though it’s so narrow that I can feel the protective bubble separating my heart from that of the city contracting around me. It’s a street whose character its inhabitants have helped shape since the early seventies. Back then, the only thing in the area around my house was Abu Jamal’s hummus and falafel restaurant, Ez Aldeen al-Harami’s produce store, and a few other shops scattered here and there. And, yes, “al-Harami”—we kids called Ez Aldeen “the Thief,” even though we bought things from him constantly, a contradiction that still makes no sense. When Ez Aldeen would get smart with us about the prices, we would pay him what he asked and leave his store grumbling and exasperated, swearing not to have anything to do with him ever again. But the next day we’d be back, carrying the contents of our carefully filled piggy banks, our shared memory already wiped clean.
These days, the street is even narrower, and the shops lining it are stacked high on all sides—shops on top of shops, under shops, squeezed in between other shops. Not to mention the stands on both sidewalks selling shoes or kids’ toys. One of the shoe stalls sits directly in front of the Islamic Bank. As soon as the bank closes, the stall owner hangs a long rope along the bank’s outer wall, securing it to a nail on each side. Then he starts hanging up his wares, to best show them off for passersby.
My friend watches planes take off and land from her kitchen window near the airport, and her face lights up and eyes widen as she tells me, “You have shops that sell everything for one dinar! Can you imagine?” Yes, my friend, I can imagine; I’ve lived in the area for a long time. Here, as elsewhere, there are even—can you imagine?—shops selling everything “for half a dinar!” My friend can’t imagine.
An upper-middle-class guy friend doesn’t believe me when I tell him that handsome West Ammani men insist on asking where I live to decide if I’m easy or hard to get, whether my flesh is cheap or pricey. He thinks a ringing doorbell in my neighborhood sends women running to don a long prayer covering, or that they hide beneath the garment when they go outside to examine the fruits and vegetables in the truck roaming their streets, its loudspeaker broadcasting its wares—“Potatoes… tomatoes… cucumbers… onions… come and get ’em!”—drawing out the u as it continues—“all on the truuuuuck!” His rule is null and void, though, if not even one woman opens her door in a prayer covering or puts it on to buy her veggies from the roving produce truck. Personally, I only wear it when I’m praying.
In my East Amman, a surreal scene occurs next to the main shopping area where it connects to my street: a shepherd on a donkey, followed by a flock of fat ewes and holding a fully functioning smartphone. The street is filled with bleating and baaing, droppings, and the barking of the sheepdog. Kids and their mothers gather around the flock, the mothers covered head-to-toe for prayer or wearing black abayas, all wanting to buy some good fresh milk straight from the source. I remember coming home from the university one day after work to find the street echoing with endless bleating and sheep strutting around aimlessly, swaggering into the ground-floor garden of my building and taking over my parking space. I looked around for the person responsible and then honked at the shepherd. He turned to me absentmindedly from astride his donkey, lost in some long, important conversation, and ignored me.
I waited for half an hour to be taken seriously as his sheep continued strolling about wherever they, or their owner, wished. His dog was stretched out on the sidewalk, playing with a stick one of the kids had left behind. It occurred to me that I could call the police; wasn’t that what they were there for, to serve the people? At least then I wouldn’t be stuck watching this surreal scene play out by myself. 911—the emergency number. I dialed it, and they picked up immediately. When I told the policeman what was happening, he burst into laughter. I could hear someone in the background guffawing, too. When I asked him what I should do, he stopped for a moment and asked for the address. I hurried to provide it and then hung up as the background laughter continued. I waited another fifteen minutes, but no one came to rescue me.
Then, suddenly, by some miracle, the shepherd’s hand, which held a long stick with a crook at the end, moved like a conductor’s baton, and the dog leapt to its feet to round up the sheep, which bunched together obediently. The shepherd glanced at me as he collected his family with his stick and made a series of indecipherable sounds—“Iss, ikhh, ishhh”—before leaving with his flock.
I wonder why all the land, green and arid, in my city is being swallowed up, why concrete now occupies lands that used to be agricultural. All our lives combined wouldn’t give us the time we’d need to make my city as green as it once was, or as cultivated as UNESCO’s “Cities of Literature.” Twenty-eight cities, representing six continents and twenty-three countries, were chosen as its literary cities, but why? They met criteria that touched on the quality and diversity of their publishing industries; the quality and number of cultural programs focusing on literature; the role that literature, drama, and poetry played within them; how often they hosted literary events and festivals promoting literature; and how many bookstores, libraries, and cultural centers, public or private, they boasted. UNESCO also considered the ways in which these cities promoted both literary production and sales. Where does my city fit into all of this? Which half could even take on the task, the East or the West? They would need to be more attuned to each other, but how? Their inhabitants are as different as rival football fans: our cultural Wehdat and Faisaly.
I have to compose myself as I write this paragraph, because it makes me anxious to bare the secrets of my apartment’s stone walls in the east of my city. It’s in a crowded area where the noise never stops, day or night. My street runs parallel to the bustling main shopping street. We moved here when we got back from Kuwait, but I’ve never liked the area. I see it as a barren wasteland with no future. Its residents dream of leaving it whenever their hands get dirty with money (because “money makes for dirty hands,” as grandmothers like to say), so they stick to the proverb, “Hide a coin in every wrinkle.” But they know that no matter how many coins or bills they hide in their wrinkles, they won’t be able to escape. East Amman is a death trap; if you fall in, you never get back out.
Between East and West, when the fog clears, a secret class duality is revealed, showcasing, as they say, “two things no one bats an eyelash at: rich people fucking about and poor people dying.” East and West Amman are separated by a wall of tension and resentment and a huge disparity in services. Statistics show that, even in terms of waste, the amount produced by the East is greater than that produced by the West. Why? Is there a higher volume of consumption? I don’t know. I only know that there’s a huge gap between the two halves of this city that bears a single name. And when a resident of East Amman visits the other half, they feel like a social reject, while when a West Ammani visits the East, they feel like a tourist!
Movie Reel
I sit on the patio of a ground-floor apartment giving onto an intersection on al-Aqsa Street. The street, in all its noise and chaos, has infiltrated the apartment. It’s in the den, in the picture frames on the wall in the formal living room, in the handful of cracks striating the ceiling in my bedroom. It’s in the sliver of space separating my pajama top from the comforter on my bed, in the round of brown Arabic bread on the kitchen table, in the dirty laundry soaking in a bucket in the bathroom. It’s in the decorative plants I put in the corners of the sitting room—plastinated to make them stop asking for water when they get thirsty—and in the apartment’s mirrors, which watch me as I swallow hard, afraid I’ll look into them and see the shadow of the beast eating away at my heart.
I am in the apartment—on the patio, to be precise, where I observe all kinds of people. I see some in their cars, others on foot in the scorching heat of the sun. I see the headlines in a paper held out by a beggar who’s having a rough morning; no one but me buys from him. Images of people flash before me, overlapping. Here’s a man having a shouting match with his god, getting increasingly angry, cursing his shit luck and the fate his mother chose for him, one that nagged him half to death last night because he fell asleep before dinner and neglected his marital duties. Now he’s looking at himself in the rearview mirror, trying to save whatever face is left. I see cars with tinted windows plunging through the streets with horns blaring, their front windows open, the secret service ushering passersby and other cars out of the way for an “influential statesman” who believes he has the right to be first at the red light and then zoom straight through without so much as blinking. I see someone pouring tea from his silver pot into paper cups and hawking his wares, but no one even glances at him. I see sweat dripping down the forehead of a city worker sweeping up trash, the noise of the street blocked out by headphones. I see a cat meow and stretch, then trot over to a shadier patch of ground to lie on. I see a woman in the driver’s seat of a car putting on makeup, smoothing her eyebrows carefully. I see a man with a bald head who strokes it regretfully as he thinks of his lost youth, and three stray dogs running away from a gang of hoodlums. I see a cohort of newly minted graduates in cars that are driving slowly, all their lights blazing, people sitting in the window frames with their top halves sticking out of the cars, patriotic songs blaring from their speakers. I see a rhythm to the traffic that repeats itself every day in people’s faces, in their movement, the movement of their cars. I see a movie reel unspooling before my eyes, now at a sprint, now a plod, semi-frames of images that my mind speeds up.
[1] Hisham Bustani, “Boredom Lives on Gardens Street.” Story translated by Addie Leak. Beirut: The Arab Institute for Research and Publishing, 2023.
Haifa Abualnadi is a Jordanian short story writer, translator, editor, and academic with a master’s degree in English language and literature. She has published two short story collections and multiple books in translation, and was a 2018 fellow at the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. She loves reading and translating poetry and is passionate about listening to audiobooks, walking the city streets, and playing with and feeding Amman’s stray cats.
Addie Leak is a co-translator of Mostafa Nissabouri’s For an Ineffable Metrics of the Desert and Hisham Bustani’s Waking Up to My Distorted City, as well as the curator of a Words Without Borders feature on Jordanian literature. She is based in Amman, Jordan.
