Love Is an Ex-Country: A Memoir

ON EMPIRE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THIS PAPERBACK EDITION

I got my period at the Trotsky House Museum in Mexico City. The building is red. I had just seen the room in which he had been killed.

My friend TG was turning fifty and had invited her friends to stay with her in an Architectural-Digest-centerfold-type building in Cuauhtémoc in Mexico City. I arrived a few days late because only three weeks earlier, I had been discharged from the hospital for pneumonia.

I contracted pneumonia after days of bedridden illness with something called human metapneumovirus, which sounds like a Facebook app.

It’s possible I got the virus from a woman I had been seeing who had come over the day I moved to a new place in East Los Angeles. She told me she had a sore throat after we had already kissed.

I had moved because my landlord, a wealthy developer, had sold my rental in Rose Hill, a secret L.A. neighborhood just south of Debs Park in the northeast. The woman who bought it had never been to the area before. I watched from the indoor safety of my velvet couch as she stood on my balcony with her realtor, who said to her, while they both faced the view I had found daily comfort in for the past four years, You manifested this place! I giggled when I heard this, because white people always think they manifest things. The hills around us were the very last to be colonized in Los Angeles. The house itself had been built by Indigenous women who had given birth to other women who had given birth to sons. These sons drove by once a month to look at the house and pick up their mail. They didn’t all get along, so I became a kind of mediator from the balcony, and sometimes we picked lemons from the huge lemon tree in front of my bedroom. The lily that their grandmother had planted bore three flowers for the first time the month before I had to leave.

I had built a daily relationship with the crows of the neighborhood, who were constant companions to my mornings. There was always one crow who kept to himself, his song sometimes clipped and sometimes manic. I had read that crows have photographic memories, and I thought of the ways these birds had the map of the neighborhood programmed into their memories and their DNA. In addition to the crows were the mourning doves, who sang me to sleep, and the pigeons, who cooed in the attic.

The new buyer was concerned about the pigeons roosting in the rafters. She said she loved animals and wanted to make sure the renovations wouldn’t displace them.

In The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, the storyteller, Scheherazade, never finishes a story because each tale links with another one, endlessly. She designed her stories that way in order to survive. If she finished a story, her captor, a king, would behead her and find another wife, or prisoner, to rape and murder the next day. I like to think of this all as a metaphor for empire. If we tell the truth or remember history, or both, empire threatens our lives. Empire cannot survive if its history is told plainly and truthfully. I am always needing to give you background, history, because without it, the stories I tell in this book have no context. And context is Everything.

The hardcover of this book came out a month after the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack. We still hadn’t received covid-19 vaccines. Fat people I knew in Texas were the first to be vaccinated, along with the elderly. I thought briefly of driving there for a shot, but then I remembered how long it had taken me to leave Texas more than a decade earlier. One of my favorite lines about leaving Texas is from John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley: In Search of America. It goes: Once you are in Texas it seems to take forever to get out, and some people never make it.

The order of my history is messy and nonlinear. I have to constantly go backward, sideways, and forward to locate myself and my past and present. The timelines are enmeshed and crisscrossed and knotted up. That’s on empire, too.

1

THE LOUDEST WHISTLE

In the summer of 2016, my son now an adult and a sabbatical ahead of me, I decided to drive across the country alone.

I had read about the Egyptian dancer and actress Tahia Carioca doing a cross-country American trip once in Edward Said’s Reflections on Exile; he interviewed Carioca and she told him she’d been married at least a dozen times. When he asked her what she thought of America she had said, Liked the people, hate their government’s policies. She was born in Egypt in 1919. I was conceived in Egypt almost sixty years later, and here I was, an American who had never crossed her own country by car.

But the deeper I dug into Tahia Carioca’s trip, the less I found about it. She had indeed married more than a dozen times: I found the names of fourteen of her husbands. One of them was an American lieutenant she had met while she was dancing at the Cairo Officers’ Club during the Second World War. I whistled the loudest, he boasted to Associated Press reporters after they married. She was twenty-five or twenty-six, a young woman who had already been dancing for ten years. She loved to dance, she always said, but hated the stereotypes about dancers. Of these, she told an American newspaper in 1946, was the idea that dancers lead a life of exotic leisure. In the movies, she said, the dancers drink big goblets of wine, eat at rich banquets, and flirt with everybody. Actually, I . . . lead a rather simple life to keep my weight down and my muscles lithe. I found photos of her fifty years after this interview; in them, she is fuller, big bellied, with fat arms and a gorgeous round face. By then she was finally leading the rich life she had so fully earned.

Carioca’s dance style was unique: the L.A. Times once called her a belly-rina, but she despised the term belly dancer, and said she was an Eastern dancer. She was right; the term belly dance is Occidental, and in Arabic this kind of dance is called raqs sharqi, or Eastern dance. Belly dance, as it is known and practiced in the West, has its roots in, and a long history of, white appropriation of Eastern dance. As early as the 1890s in the U.S., white sideshow sheikhs managed dance troupes of white women, who performed belly dance at world’s fairs (fun trivia: Mark Twain made a short film of a belly dancer at the 1893 fair).

Carioca honored her practice and tradition’s roots in Egypt and believed they were beautiful and sacred, and when she danced, many commented that she moved in sharp yet languid movements and took up very little space, moving and contorting herself while grounded onstage.

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Her 1946 marriage ceremony made news all over the U.S.: she and Colonel Gilbert Levy wed ten years before the Lovings married, and twenty years before Loving v. Virginia, when the Supreme Court struck down the last laws of segregation banning interracial marriage. Carioca was very light-skinned and almost passed for white; in a black-and-white photo of her holding Kim Novak’s hand and standing near Ginger Rogers, I delight at the thickness and darkness of her Masry hair, notice how much larger and more unique her facial features are compared to the blondes. She is a North African woman charming Hollywood with her smile and her eyes, two of the things she once said were the true secret weapons of a dancer.

I finally found mention of the road trip in a New York Daily News article from June 1, 1946: it said that Carioca and Levy would be traveling to New York by motor after spending a honeymoon in Los Angeles, and that afterward, they would split their time between Cairo and L.A.

Twenty years earlier, in 1926, many of America’s highways, still only gravel roads, were completed—it wouldn’t be until the 1950s that proper highways were constructed. These early iterations offered the scenic route cross-country, meaning that the trip could take two weeks and often longer. When, in 1946, Carioca made the trip with her new white American husband, how much privilege did her skin color, her wealth, and her white husband afford her in the middle states?

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Inspired by Carioca’s boldness, I decided to go on a cross-country trip of my own. Unlike Carioca, I was not famous or wealthy or a professional dancer. But like her, I was fond of dancing, light-skinned and privileged, libidinous, divorced more than once, and ready to motor. In Fresno, California, I made a list of destinations.

But before I left for my trip, I flew to Washington State to say goodbye to my favorite lover fuckboi at the time, M. When I arrived, he gave me the worst news you want to hear from a fuckboi you’re trying to fuck on a fuckation for the last time: he was falling for a new boo, and he also (unrelated, he said) had chlamydia. So I pretended not to be sad and took a ferry to Vashon Island and stayed there, in a cabin, for a week. The cabin had a large claw-foot tub where I could cry, sink, and soak my entire body.

My friend T, who lived in Seattle, came to the island to check up on me. T has written books of poetry and worked in tech and is Egyptian. He was one of my Others. You recognize these people: siblings you have never met. The siblings you would choose if you could choose siblings. Friends without benefits, as T would say. We are both fat and beautiful.

•

T said Seattle’s dating scene was oppressive. When I asked how, he said everyone wanted to hike, or ride bikes, or camp, or canoe. He wanted to know why he couldn’t just watch a movie with someone and fuck. I told him Netflix-and-chill was a thing. He said it was not a thing in Seattle. T was older than me and the women he met were all fighting against wrinkles and death. T said it was easier being a Christian in Cairo than it was being a couch potato in Seattle.

T and I terrified everyone at a brunch place on the island. We were the only people of color and he kept saying the word suicide. He was talking about his depression, but the woman in fabric sandals and a crocheted tank top seated near us was shifting uncomfortably across from her salad. When we left, we saw two young Black men sitting in chairs outside a storefront and we greeted each other instantly, helping erase the memory of the uptight woman at brunch.

Afterward we walked to a marijuana clinic I’d driven past the day before and were told that we needed a prescription. I got angry and I asked T in Arabic if we should tip the woman or bribe her to give us weed. I was joking but he looked at me seriously and said, Maybe we should. I said no and we walked back to my rental car.

Except we walked past the rental car and past the two young men again. They were sharing a joint back and forth. I noticed and T noticed, too. We had to turn around because we had walked past the car. We passed the young men again. They greeted us again. We got in the car and as soon as I started it, T said, We can’t ask those guys for weed.

And I said, Of course we can’t.

We can’t get those guys in trouble, he said.

I agreed with T. I told him that yes, it’s racist to ask the only two Black people we have seen today on the island for weed.

T said we should go to Seattle and score legal weed. This involved taking a ferry, which is beautiful and romantic, even in a friends-without-benefits kind of way, and I agreed, and we drove past the two guys as they continued to pass the joint between each other.

T wanted to know why I planned to drive cross-country. Since it was 2016, I told him that I wanted to commune with the land I lived on, to see America during that deeply troubled and troubling election year.

To look at the place that might elect a person like Trump.

I told him I loved the feeling of forward motion, that driving felt like home. And then I told him about Tahia Carioca.

She did the trip twice! I repeated to T. She didn’t even live here. She had a tendency to do things multiple times, I said.

T understood, and said yes, she was married more than a dozen times.

Every time she wanted to fuck someone, she had to marry them, I said. There was no privacy.

T agreed. Then he asked me to watch the road.

There were no squirrels on the island, but there were deer. In the five days I stayed there, I had to avoid three deer crossing the road. A deer crossed now, gorgeous and graceful.

Tahia? I yelled after the deer.

Tahia! T said, You are beautiful in this new form.

2

MAGIC

I guess most people newly freed from responsibilities take naps. But not me. What I did was, I drove fourteen hours to Arizona, which I realized was a huge mistake as soon as I arrived in Flagstaff. My dog and I slept in a motel room that inexplicably had four beds of varying sizes. We were Goldilocks. My dog, who has thick cataracts and is blind, sniffed at the walls. The next morning I tried to drive us to Sedona, but I realized halfway there that the terrain and view were replicas of Kings Canyon, which was forty minutes from my house in Fresno. But by then it was too late. I was behind a row of cars whose drivers were elderly, their feet fluttering constantly against their brakes. When we pulled into the resort area, I found a way to turn around and began making my way to New Mexico.

An hour in, I stopped at the gas station; my dog hates the car so I took her with me to the restroom after I pumped gas. We squeezed into the restroom, which was busy with a matriarch and her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, all Native women, all instantly kind to me and my dog. The stalls were full except one, and when I got out, the women were gone. Instead, a white woman in a uniform was washing her hands. I stood by her and washed my hands, too.

This place is a shithole, she said.

I think it’s rather nice, I said.

The bathrooms across the street are like a four-star hotel, but I can’t go there, she said, because I’m a truck driver, and we don’t get to decide where we stop.

She was wearing a pair of wraparound metallic blue trucker shades.

Some people just shit in their trucks and throw the bag out the window, she said.

They do? I said, amused.

Yes, well the people they got driving now, they’re not from here. They’re not American. They’re Syrians. Might as well hire monkeys to drive trucks now.

I’m glad they got out of Syria, I said, now that I understood that this woman had waited for all the Brown people to leave the bathroom, and that as soon as she saw me, a light-skinned person who she assumed was white, she was able to be comfortable and vocal in her racism.

Are ya? she said, vaguely disgusted.

Yes, I said. They’ve been through hell. I’m Palestinian, I said, and for the first time, I realized I was taller than her.

She walked away and said, Well, I hope you’re OK with spending your tax dollars on them.

I am, I said. My tax dollars pay for my son’s school, for the roads I drive on, and for bombs that kill Arabs, by the way.

She didn’t say anything. I could have left, but I went after her. She had hidden in the convenience store’s aisles. When I saw her, I said, I’m not a monkey. You’re a racist. You have no idea what it’s like to be a refugee.

It has happened before: a person thinks I’m cool with their racism, or, more confusingly, when they find out I’m queer, with their sexism.

I got back to the car and held my dog and shook.

•

Children get their first taste of invisibility before they can even remember. Then, they thrill in magic tricks. A parent can hide and then surprise them with their sudden return. Birthday clowns make coins disappear. Children watch cartoons where a mouse takes a dip in a paint pot that holds invisibility ink. Harry Potter wears a cloak,