Read Online The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf by Mohja Kahf - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mohja Kahf
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putting pennies on the train tracks that ran behind the fence at one end of the apartment complex. Leaving their bikes in a heap in the high-grown weeds, they crawled through the tunnel made by thickets of wild raspberry bushes. They went down one as far as they could, to where it bent in the undergrowth. They scrabbled for sweet dark berries, getting stabbed by thorns in their fingertips, knuckles, knees, palms, feet, and smudged faces. The last sunlight filtered through the raspberry bushes as the children crawled through flickering light and shadow within.
I reckon-When I count at allFirst Poets-Then the SunThen Summer-Then the Heaven of GodAnd then-the List is done-
-Emily Dickinson
The four children Lewis and Clarked over a lush summer carpet of fallen berries. They emerged, mouths and knees berry-stained, at the edge of a cornfield bordered by shagbark hickory and silver wattle trees. There they forded a yard-wide creek. Its dark shimmering banks crawled with frogs and crawdads and other small rustling life, forms, fully deserving the total surrender of their attention. The mud that oozed between their toes soothed their feet. Upon crossing the creek, leaving their shoes behind, they found a dead possum. It was crawling with maggots. Hakim and Eyad wanted to dissect it. Hanifa and Khadra wanted to bury it. They didn't have the tools for either. Then Khadra yelped. She had stepped on a crawdad and its pincers grabbed her toe. "Get it off, get it OFF!" she screamed, hopping around, and Hanifa laughed, and kept going "Ew, ewww," but Hakim helped her get it off, and Eyad said now she would need a "tetmas" shot. It was only after the crisis passed that they began to notice that the darkness had thickened to a rich eggplant hue.
By the time they recrossed the creek, collected their shoes, crawled back through the raspberry tunnel, jumped the tracks, hopped on their bikes, and pedaled homeward, their parents had begun combing the streets and parking lots of the apartment complex. Having had no luck locating the children, Khadra's father was about to call the police.
Their father dragged Khadra and Eyad by their ears to the door, flung open by their mother, a cranky and tired baby Jihad straddling her hip. They were mudspattered, tufts of cobwebs and twigs clinging to their hair, covered very likely with impurities that would require washing seven times. Ebtehaj was trembling all over, her pale ivory face ashen.
She looked like she was about to cry, but what she did was scream. "Do you think we are Americans? Do you think we have no limits? Do you think we leave our children wandering in the streets? Is that what you think we are? Is it?" Then she burst into sobs.
She marched Khadra up the stairs and pushed her into the bathtub ("Don't go anywhere!" she yelled at Eyad, "You're next!"). With the water running hot and hard even though their father always said "The Prophet teaches us not to waste, even if we are taking water from a river," she scrubbed and scrubbed her daughter with an enormous loofah from Syria. "We are not Americans!" she sobbed, her face twisted in grief. "We are not Americans!"
Who were the Americans? The Americans were the white people who surrounded them, a crashing sea of unbelief in which the Dawah Center bobbed, a brave boat. (There were black people who were Americans, but that was different.) You had your nice Americans and your nasty Americans. And then there was the majority of Americans; the best that could be said about them was that they were ignorant.
White-haired Mrs. Moore was a nice American. She belonged to a church called the Friends and they invited the Muslims over for a pancake breakfast. Which was a very American thing to eat, and which was nice of them.
Nasty Americans: You had Orvil Hubbard and his cronies, Vaughn Lott, his sons Brian and Brent, and Mindy Oberholtzer and Curt Stephenson and all the other kids at school who tormented the Muslim kids daily while the teachers
I reckon-When I count at allFirst Poets-Then the SunThen Summer-Then the Heaven of GodAnd then-the List is done-
-Emily Dickinson
The four children Lewis and Clarked over a lush summer carpet of fallen berries. They emerged, mouths and knees berry-stained, at the edge of a cornfield bordered by shagbark hickory and silver wattle trees. There they forded a yard-wide creek. Its dark shimmering banks crawled with frogs and crawdads and other small rustling life, forms, fully deserving the total surrender of their attention. The mud that oozed between their toes soothed their feet. Upon crossing the creek, leaving their shoes behind, they found a dead possum. It was crawling with maggots. Hakim and Eyad wanted to dissect it. Hanifa and Khadra wanted to bury it. They didn't have the tools for either. Then Khadra yelped. She had stepped on a crawdad and its pincers grabbed her toe. "Get it off, get it OFF!" she screamed, hopping around, and Hanifa laughed, and kept going "Ew, ewww," but Hakim helped her get it off, and Eyad said now she would need a "tetmas" shot. It was only after the crisis passed that they began to notice that the darkness had thickened to a rich eggplant hue.
By the time they recrossed the creek, collected their shoes, crawled back through the raspberry tunnel, jumped the tracks, hopped on their bikes, and pedaled homeward, their parents had begun combing the streets and parking lots of the apartment complex. Having had no luck locating the children, Khadra's father was about to call the police.
Their father dragged Khadra and Eyad by their ears to the door, flung open by their mother, a cranky and tired baby Jihad straddling her hip. They were mudspattered, tufts of cobwebs and twigs clinging to their hair, covered very likely with impurities that would require washing seven times. Ebtehaj was trembling all over, her pale ivory face ashen.
She looked like she was about to cry, but what she did was scream. "Do you think we are Americans? Do you think we have no limits? Do you think we leave our children wandering in the streets? Is that what you think we are? Is it?" Then she burst into sobs.
She marched Khadra up the stairs and pushed her into the bathtub ("Don't go anywhere!" she yelled at Eyad, "You're next!"). With the water running hot and hard even though their father always said "The Prophet teaches us not to waste, even if we are taking water from a river," she scrubbed and scrubbed her daughter with an enormous loofah from Syria. "We are not Americans!" she sobbed, her face twisted in grief. "We are not Americans!"
Who were the Americans? The Americans were the white people who surrounded them, a crashing sea of unbelief in which the Dawah Center bobbed, a brave boat. (There were black people who were Americans, but that was different.) You had your nice Americans and your nasty Americans. And then there was the majority of Americans; the best that could be said about them was that they were ignorant.
White-haired Mrs. Moore was a nice American. She belonged to a church called the Friends and they invited the Muslims over for a pancake breakfast. Which was a very American thing to eat, and which was nice of them.
Nasty Americans: You had Orvil Hubbard and his cronies, Vaughn Lott, his sons Brian and Brent, and Mindy Oberholtzer and Curt Stephenson and all the other kids at school who tormented the Muslim kids daily while the teachers
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