From a Journey
By Lamya el Chidiac

You smile, a stranger to your own blood, a visitor in your own land. The checkpoints you are used to. Already, every day someone tells you if you are accepted or not and you wait for the validation of a smile or a nod. This time it’s the hand of a soldier that waves you forward after looking suspiciously at your passport or identity card. The soldier may ask you if you are a foreigner and you don’t have enough time to answer. You could say yes and no. Instead you are quiet, you let your cousin talk for you.

Some days the sky is a brilliant blue. The buildings are the color of dirt so earth meets sky from every angle. Laundry is hung over railings like quilts spread over time. That’s what it looks like from the window of a car speeding down the road. You think that the colors are different here, less invasive. Somehow the contradictions seem to fit, the ruins by the mall, the high rise near the buildings still wounded by gunfire or bombs. Do any of the teenagers remember the light shows? The fireworks?

Guitta said the rocket came through her house while she was pregnant with her oldest. She wondered how she lived through it, the baby too. The explosions were very loud as she held onto her belly.

You now becomes I. I say to the ground when I touch it, thank you and the ground answers back. I am in a daze on the drive back to the village, past the Virgin Mary, up the winding road into Hadath. I am not really here am I? A day before I was in Amerika, land of milk. Now I am in the land of honey. Who said “welcome home” first? I can’t remember who the first one was, but I do recall how it felt. I felt my tired spirit rise up for the first time in so long. I had been waiting my whole life to hear those words.

A young magician takes my hand and places a stone in it. He closes it and makes the stone disappear. I ask him if he can make the ocean disappear and he laughs. Really, I want to know if he can make things like ache disappear.

He is the too intelligent type-the intimidating genius. Don’t look at him too long or he’ll see right through you. His friend is crazy. His name sounds like a single letter. He drives too fast. I tell him I want to know where we are going, but he just says, “Somewhere.” I admit I do not like this, going somewhere with a loose canon. We drive to the beach and he takes a shortcut. “We are driving over minefields,” he says. “You’ve got to be careful how you drive here.”

The beach is the edge of a cliff looking over the Mediterranean. The alphabet boy wants to dance. He takes my cousin’s hand and plays music from his truck. I watch them dance by the sea and think about the mines below-somewhere at least one of them is waiting to greet us.

Somehow again I have become the conductor. Mohammed asks me to talk about life in Amerika. He tells me that he feels Lebanon suffocates him. I say that I feel the same way about Amerika. He tells me that he is interested in chemistry and biology but more specifically chemical gases and medicines. He tells me how he keeps trying and trying to get into schools in Amerika but they won’t accept him. His interests make him a terrorist. He asks me how can I live in fear all the time. I try to explain to him: that is the way everything is in Amerika. Everything is ruled by fear. Fear is bought and sold. He is quiet before he murmurs that he is sorry.

I am that gray area. That in-between type. A foot in a thousand worlds, maybe more. So many questions. Why does Amerika hunt us, hurt us?
Yes. I am the conductor. I have to answer these questions because I am the mutt. The mixed breed one. I have eyes just like them. They trust the dark in them. I stick out my head and kiss them three times. The electricity is always there between us while they wait for my answers.

How do you say “hate” in Arabic?

… What about “love”?

About Lamya el Chidiac

Lamya el-Chidiac is an "Arab"-ulous performance artist, poet and DJ currently trying to sleep in Portland, Oregon. Lamya believes that only art can begin to heal us from the wounds that the systems have imposed on us. “As a queer and transgendered Arab I am forced to constantly move through various checkpoints. I have many faces for the world that I use to survive. My writing explores and questions the idea of home and homeland- the insider outsider experience.”