A golden shovel after Marwa Helal
Rationing cumin and sumac when

the last of summer’s reinforcements dwindle, you

offer us soup and unadorned fattoush at maghreb. Your hands move
with practiced grace, slicing radishes, stirring lentils around,

but the meal is mere facsimile, no trace of childhood or home, as

featureless as we felt on our first Ramadan here. Much
of what passes for memory is just hunger, taste buds posing as

spurned lovers. My body is revolting against what I

always assumed would feed me—I no longer have
a lexis for these transformations. What keeps you

loyal to your meticulous rituals? Is it too late to learn

to recite the words without translating them? Sometimes
my single prayer is for forgetting. Given the blade, I would excise the

verbs and the scar tissue that separate us—the emptiest

of all accomplishments is language mastery in the new world, a thing
of kaleidoscopic allure and little return on investment. It is

passport without passage. And do we ever pass in an

unaccustomed landscape? We’re given away by the overstuffed
filing cabinets, the crumbling certainties of ancestry, the ever-present suitcase.