Habibi

As a young boy growing up in Los Angeles, I am entered by The Exorcist late one night after all the adults in the house have fallen asleep. I watch the film kneeling on the thick, red carpet, my face inches from the screen: the screaming girl and dying priest, the spinning head and bloody mouth, the room so cold that everyone’s breath shows. The volume is just loud enough that I can feel the distorted bass of the devil’s voice in the bones of my throat.

As a young boy growing up in Cairo, my father watches exorcisms. His uncle drives him through the deserted countryside to nameless churches lit by chandeliers covered in generations of sand. One by one, the possessed lie on stone floors in front of altars as chanting priests circle and then hold them down.

Years after, my father tells me that some of the possessed were dragged through the desert for miles by their families. I imagine what it’s like to thrash under crucifixes, the nightmare of becoming undone. My father’s devil stories curl around my neck. They are a form of strangulation. I ask him once why his uncle would take him to exorcisms, and he says, “Back then, all we had to do for fun was the radio.”

During the course of such exorcisms, the priest tortures the devil, and the devil eventually leaves because he can’t take it anymore. My father explains that at an exorcism’s end, the devil wants to exit violently through the possessed person’s eyes, blinding them. The priest orders him (the devil, to me, is male) to leave through the possessed person’s toes instead, because the toes are no big deal. When the priest succeeds, red crosses bleed through the feet of the possessed and soak through their socks.

My father and his uncle would stay afterward and help wash the church floor. My grandmother stopped buying