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=> Shameless Plug/What's To Come On "Square Moon; Diary Of Emil Keliane"

Shameless Plug/What's To Come On "Square Moon; Diary Of Emil Keliane"
Posted by Emil (Guest) squaremoon@emilsdiary.com - Tuesday, October 18 2005, 15:48:09 (CEST)
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Website: http://www.emilsdiary.com/
Website title: Square Moon Diary of Emil Keliane

January 1999
I was invited to a New Year’s Eve party about an hour away, at the home of a Lebanese-American woman named Heba. I arrived in the night with flowers and wine. Arabic music poured out of the little house in Mountain View as I was greeted and ushered in. Heba was delighted, kissed me on both cheeks, and smiled widely, warmly. She turned to Shammi, “You said he was cute but I didn’t imagine anyone could be this cute!” I must have blushed. She reached for my curls. I thought of my childhood in Iran just then. So much fanfare.
There was a lot of laughter and food, music and first-time introductions, English, Assyrian, and Arabic.
We cursed playfully in our languages not to be offensive but because the words sounded so quaint as we listened to them escape our lips.
Nadia, the lawyer, took us by the hand and tried to teach us traditional Assyrian line dances that wove through the small house, into the dining room, around furniture, snaking, trailing. The rugs gathered about our merry steps.
It was a powerful night for me to be ringing in the New Year with other queer middle easterners.
One particular young woman caught my attention and fascinated me the entire night. Her name was Amahl; some called her Amy. I was to learn later that she was the product of a Jordanian father and German mother. She had white milky skin and cropped blond hair. Light eyes. Pink lips. I would never have guessed that she was Arab. She spoke Arabic perfectly, beautifully.
When Amahl walked through Heba’s small home she took gigantic, long strides and seemed to traverse space with one gargantuan step.
Much later in the night she would pick up a guitar, sit on the hardwood floor and begin to play. She sang beautifully, hauntingly. Her voice quivering, lilting. But she would forget the words and stop abruptly as if no one else was in the room, and spasm with a very personal frustration, shake her head from side to side, wrinkle her nose with disdain, stomp the heavy heel of her boot, and whisper, “I can’t do this!”
I was mesmerized the entire time, sitting very near her on the edge of my chair, exploring the faces of the others in the room for a reason, a punctuation of sorts. Laura leaned in and spoke softly, “That’s okay. You’re doing well. You sound beautiful.”
And she did sound beautiful. Vulnerable. Inconceivable.
Shammi had told me earlier that Amahl was a very good poet. And now as I watched her on the floor and listened to her struggle with her demons on New Year’s Eve, so close to me, and so naked, I believed it that she must be a poet.
And although she was chaos in motion, her long limbs flailing through the party in a men’s gray suit, in singing she was not a serpent but a consummate angel. And I feared her. She absolutely terrified me. Would she break down, toss the guitar well across the room, and howl with despair and sorrow? Her intensity disarmed me. She was a combination, a contradiction, a sparrow, an undomesticated beast. She was a mute little girl leaping through the air, being born, screaming.
She reached for a nearby drum suddenly and placed it between her slender thighs. She beat her long white hands against the instrument, tilted her head like an animal to listen for the rhythm. Poet! Woman! Arab! German!
Although Amahl’s intensity and nakedness made me markedly uneasy her jerky eccentricity somehow reassured and welcomed me. Her entire being conveyed that it is indeed alright to be human, creative, bold, contradictory, wild, an animal in a woman’s restless body… Passionate. Fragile.
I know how dangerous it is to become stuck in life, to preach love, then place a thousand and one conditions and restrictions upon it. I struggle every day to steer clear from this. Even I can have a great and deep-seated tendency to be judgmental and traditional in my expectations of how a marriage should be conducted, and what love ought to look like. But I try to remember that there’s more to life than what I believe and what I think. That we as human beings are meant for so much more than our own cultures, customs, art, religion, history, and experience. And that we can always improve upon these.
Sometimes I daydream that my brother has come to visit us and we can actually converse maturely, evenly, about so many things, sharing ideas, soberly agreeing to disagree. But ours is a silent, broken family. Each of us lives separately. It’s as though we are completely unrelated. I wonder if even in my childhood we were each just automatic as father, mother, brothers, routinely living out our disparate roles through the endless days and nights of a loveless marriage in Iran. Never sitting down together to converse in depth about anything. The times I do recall my parents sitting in the same room together, just the two, were usually tense, the mood was always oppressive, their tone invariably jocular, sardonic, as each coolly listed the other’s domestic crimes, emotional shortcomings, teasing, taunting, shaking in their own skin as they calmly destroyed each other.
As a child who lay on his stomach on the rug playing with his cheap plastic toys I could almost smell the acrid smell of the venom of lovelessness in our home.
Lovelessness.
My only model.
So, now, twenty-something I wonder if I can ever feel love in any adult relationship when in my upbringing love did not grow in our house, but remained merely a barter of sorts, a lousy deal, a perfunctory exchange of subtle insults. And will my rebellion against this kind of marriage take up so much space, so much energy, so much effort that my emotional growth will remain forever hindered?
I wander the streets like a runaway, a vagabond, an addict, loveless.
It is a busy brunch shift at Half Day. I am serving twelve tables. In the midst of all the noise and bustle of the morning I notice that the occupants of a newly seated table look Assyrian. The couple is in their sixties perhaps, have deep-set dark eyes, thick dark hair, the lines on their aging faces are distinct, familiar, telling. But I dismiss my hunch because this is Marin where it is unlikely to run into other Assyrians. They must be Italian!
Obviously they possess the same hunch about me. I feel their searching eyes penetrate my own signature features as I take down their order. They must notice my thick black eyebrows, the dark half moons under my eyes, the waves in my hair. I see recognition in their faces and chuckle inside.
The couple speaks perfect English without an accent. They can’t contain themselves anymore and smile, “Where are you from?”
I smile back, ‘I am Assyrian.’
Their dark eyes promptly light up. They seem to straighten in their chairs, sitting up with delight.
“We are Assyrian, too!”
Here we switch from English to Assyrian- our heart’s language. Nearby tables turn to us at the sound of this uncommon and strange language.
The couple tells me they were born in the States, that their parents came to America many years ago, long before it was fashionable to emigrate from the Middle East.
Apparently theirs was one of a handful of Assyrian families that settled in Turlock some seventy years ago.
The feeling that here in the States we have a tendency to live very much inside labels and categories suddenly overwhelms me. Although I know it can be comforting to pigeonhole oneself within one such community, to identify with a movement, and to be accepted by it while striving for a common goal, I also feel that amidst the manifold and discrete uprisings and bold self-promoting we forget the subtle subplots and nuances, the undeniably binding hues of humanity and sameness that attempt to daily and globally unite us.
I know in my heart that it is not blood and patriotism, sexuality and ethnicity that distinguishes and divides us; even deeper, even more profound, more integral and perhaps less concrete is our sentience that makes us so fragilely same. Fear, loneliness, indignation, need for sustenance, and birthright to an equal share of land and resources makes us same animal. We may look different. We may speak a different language. We may grow a different spice and wave a different flag. But we are, as billions of humans at large, a single entity. One animal. One being, but struggling in different directions.
I may be unjustly simplifying a very complex global dynamic, but what if our leaders and governments are in fact complicating an otherwise simple and straightforward, totally functioning condition set off by a greed for power? What if?
Jackie has an Assyrian admirer. He is flying back from Egypt where he is presently stationed by an American company. She comes into my room long after I have shut off the light, sits on the edge of my bed, and we proceed to have a long half-serious discussion about love, marriage, practicality. Although Jackie is not physically attracted to this particular suitor she is deeply drawn to his character and the idea of being married to “the right man”.
‘I always imagined you with someone more charming, less “adult”, someone with whom you may be silly,’ I say having sat up in my bed.
Jackie buries her face into my down comforter and giggles like a teenager. And although we talk for a long while, theoretically about the pitfalls and possibilities of love and romance within the Assyrian milieu, we arrive at no solid conclusion- perhaps because there is no such thing in life.
Ahimsa gave me two tangible presents: a moving quote by Nelson Mandela and “Mizna”, an Arab-American journal containing a published poem of his. (Mizna in Arabic means: the soothing cloud that shades the desert traveler.)
He asked if I knew of any contemporary published Assyrian writers. I said I didn’t, especially not queer Assyrian writers. We laughed excitedly about the possibility of me being the first!
Ahimsa said that he found only historical books by Assyrian academics, nothing fiction, nothing poetic, nothing erotic, nothing sensual…
Assyrians being erotic and sensual? Unheard of!
I sit on the floor, near my Grandmother who tells me delightful, dramatic stories about a past in a village in Iran. Sermons. Parables.
Nelson Mandela
1994 Inaugural Speech:
Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.



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