The Angel of History Read Free Page B

the belly of their short maid from the deserts of Yemen, they tortured a confession out of my father, they went insane, the wrath of frothy-mouthed Hera boiled in their blood, but they did not bring the shotgun out of the rifle room. They were curious enough to ask how many times the sexual act was consummated—quite a few, it seemed, since my mother’s dark blood was insatiable—but didn’t think of asking where their son’s drone first found its Yemeni target, which was lucky for me because had they discovered that filthy bodily fluid had assuredly soiled their priceless chef d’oeuvre, they would have strung my mother from the balcony and Beirut’s bourgeoisie would have applauded in unison and I wouldn’t have been born.
    You, Doc, wait, I need someone to hear this, listen to me. My mother was kicked out of the palace, which meant I was unceremoniously exiled while still in utero. Think about that, an early immigrant, I learned to travel light, always just a carry-on, never checked my luggage. Do you know the difference between an expat and an immigrant? You’re an immigrant in a country you look up to, an expat in one you consider beneath you. I don’t know why I tell you all this about me, I need to, I guess, but with this need to tell comes the concomitant desire to forget everything, to bury it once more and forever, to remember my story into some microphone or digital thingamajig and then take the recording to a field in Sonoma or a cemetery in Colma and inter it along with my so-called poems that no one reads and no one should. I would walk to my burial ground, not ride the bus, no matter how long it took, because it would be a ritual of pilgrimage. My memories would blur with my poems, each image would meld with a clod of dirt, each word dissolve into the earth.
    I was forced to emigrate while I was still my mother, while I was within someone else’s flesh. You never emigrated, Doc, you were born and raised in this town, but I tell you, when you leave, a section of your heart withers on its vine, you start over again, over and over, you mispronounce your name once and once again, Ya’qub becomes Jacob and then, heaven forbid, Jake, you get on with your life, but each time you bid farewell to a place, voracious flesh-eating fish swim up from your depths, vultures circle your skies, and your city’s dead quiver with fury in their graves and bang on their coffins, but then your homeland feels too paltry, a canoe tied to a branch by your mother’s hair. A caisson of regrets, Doc, a caisson of regrets is all I have left.
    For a few years my mother Hagared the desert: from the Imamate to the Aden Protectorate, Abyan, Hadramawt, from one corner of the southern peninsula to the other, I in her arms, or so she told me, from a desiccated village at the border with Oman to an irriguous one across the strait from Djibouti, hoping to be taken in by one part of her family or another. They would feel sorry for her at first, adopt her for a brief period before someone felt horrifically offended by being in the presence of an adulteress and her offspring of sin. North and South Yemen may have waged wars against each other, roosters who cock-a-doodle-dooed at dawn from dunghill to dunghill, but the two cocks united in finding me repulsive. My mother hid behind her veil, I behind her skirt, and we kept on leaving, which might have been traumatic at the time, but it was a good thing because really, can you imagine this faggot growing up in some obscure hovel with no running water, let alone air-conditioning, and where would I have found products for this nappy hair? Every night as we wandered the desert among my mother’s tribes, golden jackals howled about the five million ways she missed my father, jackasses brayed urging her to move to the city, that’s what she used to tell me and I believed her. She told me she many a time considered discarding me. The moon when full and camels with gibbous humps whispered in her