The sun sets over Egypt and by morn' I will be gone

Go down melt

Into my belly
Into my soul
Red sun go down

My Pashmina

When I first arrived
you smelled of sweet love

Now
you smell of fire

From the sizzle of the hazy lava sunrise beyond the dunes

From the incense snaking through storytime air
illuminated by an oil lamp

From the campfire flames
of the orange veil tribal dance
and my bare feet on the cool-silk desert sand
and the Siwa drum
beneath the shooting star night sky

From the cigarette I smoked
not because I smoke
but because as we roared over the crests of sandy mountains
and plummeted into the earth and the dry
I felt I needed fire in my lungs

Now as I am about to leave
I long once again for the smell of sweet love
But also I pray
you never lose the fire.

My neckline

My neckline dips a little lower today than usual

It's the same shirt I always wear

One of the five I have deemed appropriate

To stand before you in

So I know it has nothing to do with my shirt

It is my breast, rather

That cannot breathe

And today swells upward

And outward

Towards the air

Seeking freedom

Happy Thanksgiving!

I always wondered what my first Thanksgiving where I actually had to cook a turkey would be like.  Well, I never imagined that it would be in Egypt; nor did I imagine that the turkey would be imported, cost $50 and be "slaughtered with a sharp knife according to Islamic rights;" that I would have to pull the turkey's heart out of its butt, or make stuffing from scratch.  Well, I've given my imagination the day off, because "my first Thanksgiving on my own" is no longer a figment of my imagination.  I am proud to say that it is a reality and (dare I venture so far as to say) was even a success!

My roomie and I cooked a turkey with no meat thermometer and no idea how much the turkey weighed.  We just sort of ballparked (and lived to tell about it!).  I should mention that this momentous occasion also marks the first time that either of us ever cooked meat!  We felt that Thanksgiving was an appropriate time to start.  We also cooked yummy veggies and mashed potatoes and stuffing!  After my letter to Pepperidge Farms in 4th grade, claiming that stuffing was my favorite food in the whole wide world, I somehow felt that this was my chance to really get to know stuffing and to make it myself.  I hadn't a clue how to make stuffing.  Luckily, my stuffing intuition guided me through the process of chopping bread into cubes, chopping onions and carrots, adding olive olive oil, butter a chicken bullion cube and spices and the stuffing somehow actually ended up tasting like stuffing!

We had some good friends over, made a poster of all the things we have to thankful for and just generally made merry. 

Egypt

Before you read: this is not a hate poem to Egypt.  It is simply in the style of Allen Ginsberg's "America."  It came out of me on the tram today and I figured it was better uncensored.  It captures a moment, and is not meant to be a culmination of my experience here...

Egypt, you shove past me, racing me to a seat I did not intend to occupy

(I’d rather stand on my own two feet).

In your seven layers of mascara and seventeen shades of eye shadow

I see your eyes watching me, staring at me

with my pen in my mouth

and songs about wine in my ears

and I know you are judging me

Well, guess what Egypt?

This time, I am judging you!

 

Egypt, your leather sandals are torn. 

Were they made in China? 

Of plastic? 

Can you hold a match to them to prove they are real?

 

Egypt, there are rotten cabbages in your streets,

the smell of fish,

and flies endlessly carousing,

buzzzzzzzing around your head

as though it were a fly brothel!

And taxis who swarm your foreigners

like stinging yellow jackets

hoping they are lost

or rich

or stupid

or if you’re lucky, all of the above.

 

Egypt, there is phlegm in your lungs

and dirt in your water.

Your air is the dirtiest in the world!

When will you take a bath, Egypt?

When will you take off your clothes?

 

Egypt, your head is covered

and your sidewalks are filled with cracks

and stray cats

and shit

from dogs, because they are against your religion

and they’ve got no place else to go.

What did the dogs every do to you, Egypt?

Other than feed your fleas

(which is more than you’ve done for your people!)?

 

Egypt, there is God in your land and in your people

But you are the land of a thousand horns

and beeps and yells

and business weddings

head-splittingly loud jewelry

and false prayers

so God runs for cover

(or earplugs, at least).

How will He hear when you pray for real?

Oh, conformity...

Yesterday in class we did a textbook reading on Feng Shui.  I told them I was no expert on the subject, but I at least tried to explain to them that, to the best of my knowledge, it had to do with being mindful of the relationship between people and the Earth and the ways in which the energies of all things interact.  The reading talked about businessmen, including Donald Trump, who consulted Feng Shui experts when building their businesses and how it helped their businesses succeed. 

When I asked for their opinion, one student said it was cheating and that whether your business succeeded or not was up to Allah and had nothing to do with the Earth.  I wasn’t about to bring up the question that if God created the Earth and its creatures, then wouldn’t God also be present in and work through the Earth, and shouldn’t we listen to and respect its messages? 

So, instead, I asked the student if he believed that Feng Shui worked, even if was unethical.  He said he didn’t believe in it because it was cheating.  I argued that if he thought it was cheating, then it must mean that he believes it works, otherwise the question of ethics wouldn’t matter.  He shook his head “no” and just said all things were up to Allah.  Of course, when I asked if anyone else in the class had an opinion, none of them did, because they all agreed with the first guy.  Oh, conformity.

I keep my religion in a jar

I keep my religion

In a jar on my dresser

I bought it at CVS

Whenever I go out

I make sure to put it on my face

Pale foundation to show I am pure

Blush for my innocence

I line my eyes so they appear big

And also God-fearing

Lastly red upon my lips

My love for God.

From the desert

Over a sea of sand we rode today, dunes poised like ocean waves in ever-ebbing prayer.  Rise and fall, the sand like water, in another time, to a rhythm so slow though our eyes watch they bear not witness to the change.  Their crests adorned in black shadows and yellow sun, seams run in smooth snaking patterns across painted vertices.  Frozen as slowly shifting statues in eternal dance, they await the changing winds as a dancer’s feet listen for a new beat from the drum.  Ancient waves erected by fossils of creatures seeking immortality, ghostly reminders of a long lost sea. 

And in the mist of golden dust, a lake, a single tear shed by the blue-eyed forest goddess the night her father told her the men in the desert had ne’r felt the shade of a tree.  From her sorrow sprouted a great oasis with lush springs and palms.  And so we bathed in sparkling tears and feasted upon dates and mint tea. 

Then onward we sailed through an imaginary squall as Ali Khaled, our driver, skillfully navigated the steep sand cliffs.  From crest to trough we dove, drunken dolphins on a joyride, tumbling blindly down the faces of dunes.

We returned to our senses just in time to bid farewell to the lava sun and ask it to remember us to our fellows from lives past who are living this time around on the other side of the Earth. 

Then off to the Million Stars Camp for dinner, dancing and a drum I could play only for a few trancelike moments before my mind realized what my hands were doing and stopped them short with its thought.  Thoughts thoughts thoughts, won’t you be silent thoughts?  How I long to lose myself in silence so that I may hear the beat of the drum… 

Pomegranates are holy!

There is something holy

about eating a pomegranate

Holy and yet cannibalistic

See all the creatures nestled

into the Earth

Each one glows

Each one bleeds

Each one has a seed

And somehow I can't help but feel

as the ruby juice trickles down my cheek

staining my teeth and my lips

wet glowing red

that I am feasting on humanity

I become wild and barbaric

as I plunge my hands into the juice

and smear it on my hair.

What happened one night while listening to Allen Ginsberg...

Couscous

First you laughed at the clothespin we used to shut the bag of couscous

Those are only for clothes! you cried.

Next you laughed at the way we cooked the couscous

It’s wrong! you shouted accusingly.

Then you laughed at our pronunciation of the word “couscous”

“Couscous!” you giggled uncontrollably, It means “vagina”!

You laughed at the word “butt” on the talcum powder in our bathroom

At the funny card on my wall (with the semi-nude photo on the front)

You laughed at my spelling in Arabic (you forget I graded your essay in English and you can’t spell for shit)

You hooted at the half-empty bottle of wine I forgot to hide from your virgin eyes

It’s such a funny game, isn’t it?  My life.  It’s hilarious.  Trust me, I know.

Well you know what I think of your Everlasting Love Story (as you call it)?

The one where your “fiancé” is 10 years your senior

Lives in America

Is married with 5 kids

And yet he tells you to lose weight, not to wear makeup so the men on the street don’t steal you from him, to be home every night before 10?

I think it’s fucking mad.

 

 

Everlasting Love Story

You tell me your love is Everlasting.

What movie did you get that from?

Or did you see it on one of those cheesy Engagement announcements on display in the one thousand windows of the one thousand photo studios on my street? The ones with the girl with seven thousand layers of foundation and another three thousand of blush, that’s ten thousand layers all together, ten thousand and a veil, between you and the outside world, afraid that someone might get a little too close to your soul without all that armor, that fortress wall between you and man, you and woman, you and me, you and the rest of us, you and God?  Under the fake-antiqued photo, the decorated virgin her eyes gazing in perfect pose at the flat-and-furniture-owning-dowry-endowing eyes of the man, should we, perhaps, put plastic grapes in her hair? Everlasting Love Story, scrawled in white lace under the photo.

Do you know what “everlasting” means?

Egypt is kind of like the Middlebury Health Center

So I went to the pharmacy looking for some sore throat tea and the pharmacist (yes, the same pharmacist who took a pair of scissors to my ingrown toenail and is always trying to get me to go to church with him) sold me some weird ginseng tablets.  When I got home and read the box, I found that it said it could be used for the treatment of constipation, old age and obesity.  My symptoms exactly!  I guess it's not much worse than the Middlebury Health Center, where they would've just given me and condom and told me to have a nice day!

The best way to make hot chocolate...

...is most definitely with fresh milk, a chocolate bar and a sprinkling of chili pepper, stovetop, by candlelight, stirred with a wooden spoon.

You Can't just be the Moon

For all the men in the streets who claim as you pass by that you are like the moon...

You can’t just be the moon

Pearly light on a warm summer’s eve

You must also be the dark of the night sky when a storm is brewing.

You can’t just be moon

Stagnant and weak, a sitting jewel on a mahogany dresser

You must also be the raging tides whose power moves the Earth.

 

You can’t just be the moon

Ephemeral reflection atop the calm ocean water

You must be the darkest depths and the strange creatures that dwell in trenches on the ocean floor.

 

 

You can’t just be the moon

Borrowing light from the sun

You are a warrior with a light of your own.

 

Everyone knows the smiling face of the Man in the Moon

You are the one they don’t see, the mystery and the secret within

The ruler of the seas and the spinning dancer in the sky

You are the Woman in the Moon.

The Magic in Teaching

I started this post back towards the end of September, and now, a month later, it feels like time to finish it…

Yesterday I got a glimpse into what must be something like the collective teachers’ psyche.  For all the times I’d heard teachers say it; and even though I had always believed them, I had never actually seen it myself: it is the magic of why teachers teach!  My classes have been going well; and overall teaching has been getting easier, but there’s only so much fun one can have and so much inspiration one can draw from teaching English grammar. Granted, I have been subjecting my classes on a regular basis to Billy Joel, Great Big Sea and Simon & Garfunkel, which always makes me smile.  But then there is always one student (usually a woman; I find many of the women to be more closed-minded than the men, perhaps because they are more accustomed to simply following orders.  This, of course, contributes heavily to the feminine angst that had been raging in me for the past month or so.  Many of you have watched me pass through a number of crazy stages on my journey towards the discovery of the female identity, but never has it been something so fierce!  I find here that maintaining my idea of what it is to be a woman is something that I can’t just parade around with in the streets.  It is something that I have to disguise and often even hide.  It is something subversive and something that often gets relegated to the privacy of my own home, in the company of my roommate who has been here a couple of weeks now.  It is morning yoga to Andean music (because it is the earthiest music we have found) just so that we can actually do the Lion’s Roar from our gut.  It is blasting Only the Good Die Young and head-banging to Green Day’s Minority (“I wanna be the minority, I don’t need your authority, so down with the moral majority ‘cause I wanna be the minority1”); GBS’s Consequence Free (“Wouldn't it be great, if no one ever got offended, Wouldn't it be great to say what's really on your mind, I have always said all the rules are made for bending, And if I let my hair down, would that be such a crime?”) and other various songs that recall the glorious angst of Friday afternoons in high school when “nonconformity” was more of a buzzword than anything else.  Now it is a way of life.  For anyone with our color skin, it is inevitable.  It is an anthem.   Why else would we play the angry Palestinian rock song on repeat just to shout the line “ANKLES ARE SEXY FOR YOUR BIG BEARD!” over and over again?  Why else would we dance scandalously to Madonna in the kitchen with the lights off and Tupperware containers for hats?  Why else would things that were once nothing more than a game for prepubescent boys --- shouting the word “vagina,” for example, --- suddenly become so liberating and occasionally even vital to our survival here?)

 

And now for the new part of the post… 

This term, I was lucky enough to get a ridiculous Level 11 class that consists of seven “twentysomething” guys and one female.  Luckily, the female student is not veiled and quite liberal, or else I’m pretty certain that she would have dropped out of the class.  Hell, that much testosterone in one room was certainly enough to make me want to bolt at times.  Luckily, there have been many a day when I have actually felt that my personal level of pent-up Egypt-style estrogen has just about balanced the testosterone of seven young men.  Peace!  Anyways, to further expand upon the “magical moment” to which I alluded when I began this post a month ago, my Level 11 class is pretty bright, and due to an administrative decision to swap textbooks, my whole class already knew all of the grammar that I was supposed to teach for 2.5 hours 3 days a week for 5 weeks.  At first, I was petrified.  What was I going to do with this class???  It didn’t take me long to figure out that as long as I managed to keep them interested, I could teach anything I wanted!  So I left the grammar book at home to collect dust and began bringing in linguistics articles, music and poetry!  We studied historical linguistics, sociolinguistics (I taught them all about Labov’s “r”) and linguistic politics (they have all joined the army anti-prescriptivists!).  We read the play “Harvey” and watched the movie (Can you believe there are a couple of them who actually make a show of holding the door open for Harvey every time they enter the classroom?) and discussed the concept of health.  What is sick and what is healthy?  Is it black and white or is there a spectrum?  What is mental health?  I feel like I gave them all a crash course on liberal arts education in 5 weeks! 

 

There have actually been a series of magical moments throughout the course of the past 5 weeks.  Take yesterday, for example, when I made them get into groups and perform “The Farmer in the Dell,” “The Ants Go Marching one by one” and “I’ve been working on the Railroad.”  We had so much fun with this that I decided to teach them “Three Blind Mice” and got the whole class to sing it in a round!  I swear to you, I have never seen a group of university-aged men so excited!  And over nursery rhymes!  Yay! 

 

The first of the magical was, as you may have guessed if you know me well enough, thanks to Billy Joel!  I made it a habit of dedicating the last 45 minutes or so of class to listening to a song and making them fill in the blanks on lyrics sheets.  Then, we discussed the songs and what they meant.  They seemed to enjoy “Big Yellow Taxi” and “Feelin’ Groovy” (which we did the day I taught them about slang) enough, so I decided to give Billy’s “Goodnight Saigon” a go.  For those of you who aren’t familiar with the song, it’s about the soldiers in Vietnam.  It’s a beautiful piece and quite moving as well.  He talks first about the American soldiers and then about the Vietnamese, asking “Who was wrong?  And who was right?  It didn’t matter in the thick of the fight...” and weaves both stories together with the chorus, “We will all go down together…” This actually sparked quite an animated class discussion about enemies and how they’re envisioned as opposites really we’re all in the same boat, so what are we doing killing each other?  It turned into a beautiful deliberation on war and peace, and I left the class thinking, you know, why not just travel the world over teaching Billy Joel and peace? 

 

Since then, we have had some pretty cool discussion on some pretty awesome songs, including Boston’s “Peace of the Mind” and Don McLean’s “American Pie.”  For their final writing assignment, I printed out song lyrics to 9 different song and made them each pick one to analyze.  It was quite apparent that they’d never been asked to do anything even remotely like this, since they all freaked out a little bit.  I tried to explain that there was no correct answer, something I’m fairly certain they’ve never heard a teacher say.  Overall, they really got it, and I was so proud of them!  Tomorrow is their final exam (which I didn’t write and am obligated to give), so I played “We didn’t start the fire” for them; sent them home with the lyrics and said I’d give extra credit for any explanations they brought it about any of them events mentioned in the song.