You know, when an emigrant needs something to hold on to, a spider web looks like a wooden beam. –Rafik Schami, Damascus Nights Hudood, the word for border, looms in her mind’s vocabulary like a passive voice, a noun for longing. Maybe the undulating line runs in water or in sand, splays on the imagined cover of a passport, map for a new home. She has vowed to cross it, daughter on her hip, two legs doggedly moving apace, two legs suspended, bare. She plans to learn the other side like a foreign language: first the stones as single utterances, then the houses and hills, sentences. The scenes will warm in the light of the sun. Now it’s dark and the little girl is ensconced in her arms, eyes closed, but a lulling breeze could spell betrayal if they aren’t careful. She reaches between her breasts for the pendant inscribed with amal, hope, rubs it like a magic lamp. The din of conversation starts to rise as light gathers at the horizon, where the singular message of true East has grounded her since childhood. Lay low, look west, wait for the boat. She understands the grammar for fleeing, unspoken rules that decide how the journey will end, when words like harb, war, and joo`, hunger, might ebb and not flow. Her toddler wakes asking for water while the sea responds with crashing waves.
Asfar she would say pointing at a yellow tulip. And the color of grass? Akhdar. My young daughter had mastered not only the colors but also the throaty KH, two letters in English that equal one in Arabic. I would tell her it’s the same sound as in khamseh, khubez, sabanekh— five, bread, spinach and my favorite name Khaled, Immortal. I once confessed to a friend wistfully that I would not name my son Khaled because Americans couldn’t pronounce it. Now I wonder about such wisdom: even my eight-year-old could constrict her throat muscles the right way to say Khaled— immortal like an ancient olive tree, a flame that never abates, a mother’s love. This spring, I saw a patch of double hybrid tulips, asfar tinged with akhdar, and thought of my daughter’s satisfied grin at learning those words thousands of miles away from her grandparents’ home in Palestine. Here we are, hybrid Americans living between two languages and speaking in colors, splendid flowers in a distant field.
Zeina Azzam is a Palestinian American poet, writer, editor, and community activist. Her poems appear in literary journals including Pleiades, Gyroscope, Passager, Mizna, Sukoon Magazine, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Split This Rock, Barzakh: A Literary Magazine, and Voice Male and in the edited volumes Tales from Six Feet Apart, Bettering American Poetry, Making Mirrors: Writing/Righting by and for Refugees, and Gaza Unsilenced. Zeina’s chapbook, Bayna Bayna, In-Between, was published by The Poetry Box in May 2021. She earned an M.A. in Arabic literature at Georgetown University.
L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first book in what became a fourteen-volume series. It sold nearly 15,000 copies within a month of its publication in September 1900 and remains the most popular of the Oz books — not least of all because it’s the only one illustrated by W. W. Denslow, whose depictions of Dorothy, Toto, and all the other creatures and landscapes of Oz have become so iconic as to be inseparable from Baum’s story. From Public Domain Review.
