LITMIR.BIZ

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heaven forbid, jeans, if you are in anything but a huge chadour or a burka, you will feel the eyes undressing you and unless you are seventy five you may as well turn around and walk right back out the door because nobody will serve you a coffee, not even a glass of water if you were dying of thirst.

      I am conscious of Benjamin’s physical presence as we move across the square towards one of the outdoor cafes, taller than me but not tall, bulkier but not really bulky, a comfortable size, not like so many Americans, not like the guys in Kansas who were huge as elephants. That’s the way it seemed when we arrived and it was the same when I left four years later, only by then their size made sense for it went along with the baked potatoes that were big as soccer balls and the steaks that looked as if someone had hurled half a cow onto your plate. My introduction to America, straight from the bomb shelters of Beirut, where everything was closed in and dark, and people scurried furtively between buildings during lulls in the fighting, and then you are on a plane, evacuated to Kansas, where the horizon goes on forever, corn fields stretch to the end of the earth and maybe to the stars, and the men, the overgrown boys with bellies already beginning to hang over their wide belts, want to talk about nothing but beer and the size of their farms, or if they are pretending to be Hippies, the secret places they grow dope, and everyone talks about whether the Jayhawks can beat the Sooners this year.

      He orders coffee for both of us, and something called churros, which are like thick bread sticks but made with soft donut dough, powdered with sugar, and very sweet on the tongue even if these are, or so he says, rather stale because you really have to eat them at breakfast, and best of all is to buy them from an outdoor vendor in a historic town like Granada, a vendor who cooks them while you wait, for the tastiest ones come from gypsies who carry on the heritage of the Moors. Sitting here in the twilight, couples at nearby tables touching hands, leaning heads close together, kissing on the cheek or lips, I look at him for the first time, see this man whose voice already speaks directly to something in me that I could confuse with my heart, his light summer jacket wrinkled, the white shirt without a collar showing off an elegant neck, not a young neck, to be sure, but one lined and beginning to go a touch scrawny with age. He must be close to fifty, twelve, fifteen years older than me, not young, not old, ripe maybe, old enough, but for what.

      It’s not just the sound of the voice but what he is saying. Benjamin has confessed to being a history professor and he is doing what all men do, trying to entertain his female companion, not by talking about himself as they usually do but about history, my least favorite subject at school, though I don’t say that, it would be so impolite, and anyway it sounds interesting now, his words not about dates and kings and battles but about poetry, science, and medicine, gardens and fountains and palaces, the landscape of a bountiful land of milk and honey, and all due to Islam, the fanatic Berbers from the Atlas mountains who led by Arabs stormed across the Straits of Gibralter and stayed here for seven hundred years and left a legacy in music and architecture. He wants to impress me, that’s clear enough, with all these words about what is my heritage not his, though he keeps inserting Jews into the culture, but I don’t mind at all because it’s so rare to find an American who knows anything about Islam or my part of the world though twenty years in America makes it seem less like mine and more like something half remembered from a movie I saw a long time ago.

      The interruption by the young Irani ruins my mood. Even here they can’t leave you alone, they close in on you and make demands as if you really were their sister. He starts out nice enough speaking Farsi with an accent that shows he has lived in Britain for most of his life, though I do find it a bit unnerving that he asks if I aren’t the Afghan director who has a film in the festival at the Filmoteca, but I fall into the oldest of my roles or should I say our roles, letting him intrude and forgetting about Benjamin and disappearing into fantasies about Islam and our world, weren’t we the greatest then but not mentioning a thing about the sorry state we are in now. It’s impossible to get over one’s upbringing, impossible to get over your training to always be the good girl and do the right thing even if in everyone’s eyes including my own I am at this moment the farthest thing from a good girl. Maybe that part of the world is still more with me than I know, for after all these years I still listen when a man starts to talk even if I don’t know him and know he is not really my brother and even if he is talking nonsense. Only when he gets nasty about my film, saying he’s heard it slanders my people, do I begin to feel annoyed and only when he asks why am I sitting with a kafir, how can I shame Islam by being with one of them, and only when he demands that I leave immediately, come with him, only then do I wake up to my current self and say It’s none of your business what I do and when he begins to insist Sister, think of our people, that’s when I tell him where to get off and go and he does, though not without the usual threats and curses on my family, past, present, and future.

      This encounter changes the feeling between Benjamin and I, though we do get around to my film and the festival and he seems interested in both. I let him walk me back to the hotel and just before we part he surprises me by explaining that he too is in Spain because of a film, not exactly his film, or only partly his, for it’s based on a book he wrote about some Americans who fought in a Spanish Civil War. Imagine that! Americans seem to fight everywhere but in America. It’s a big Hollywood production and the most exciting thing is that the director is that heart throb TJ, whose image is drooled over not just by my sisters and cousins but by most of the women in the world. I have already invited Benjamin to the screening of Far From Afghanistan the next night, and as we approach the hotel my mind is already on the evening’s reception and what I will wear. Outside the door he comes close to me, and I fear that he may try to kiss me, the way sophisticated Americans and Europeans always do, but instead he shakes my hand and says he’ll see me at the screening. Inshallah, I say. Suerte, he replies, then adds that it means Good Luck. I have two hours to get ready to look better than my best. My smashing black dress, jewels in my hair, a native lapis necklace, gold bracelets, and a French scarf passing for a chadour draped around my shoulders. It’s important to do the whole bit. I know that already. The image of the director these days is as important as the images she creates on the screen. Maybe more.

      3

      Benjamin

      I hope you don’t mind reading a memoir told in more than one voice. Alternate his and her chapters may make for some redundancy, but as we all learned from Rashomon decades ago, people participating in the same event never see precisely the same thing. Even moments shared with those closest to us, lovers, family, friends, are different once put into words. It’s important to recognize that we’re long past the time when a man can get away telling a story from a male point of view without having not just militant feminist scholars but all the women he knows and loves—mother, sisters, girl friends, daughters, wives—complain about how one sided, incomplete, and false is his vision, a product of the dread male gaze. That’s only one of many reasons I’ve asked Aisha to give you her version of what happened in Spain. Together we made the decision to ask some of the other participants to have their say as well, though it’s not clear how many will answer our invitation. So it’s best to think of this work as one suited to the age we call postmodern, a period when we no longer, as critics tell us, believe in a narrator whose words we can trust, nor in a single point of view. We have all become as large as Walt Whitman: each of us contains multitudes.

      My first self, the one I wanted to be, was a novelist, not a historian. Nobody really wants to be a historian, do they? It’s just something that happens when other things don’t work out. In a 10th grade English class I fell in love with the overwrought novels of Thomas Wolfe and decided to devote my life to producing similar enormously long works full of the mournful sound of railroad horns in the great and lonely American night. That I knew nothing about railroads and damn little about the American night did not deter me for an instant, but a C plus from my freshman English teacher on an essay arguing Wolfe was the greatest writer who ever lived helped to turn me in a new direction. A note in the margin saying it was time to begin reading Hemingway was my wakeup call. It helped that Hem, as we were told his friends called him, had recently made the cover of Life after breaking a few bones in the crash of a small airplane somewhere in Central Africa. There he was on the cover, bearded

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