There’s a young modern-day man in [THE HOMETOWN OF MY GRANDFATHER AND HIS ANCESTORS BEFORE HIM] who would like to unfreeze and pull my cultural references out of the 1940s, into the present. 

He’s youthful, like my grandfather was — one of the شباب - shabab - the dudes. I suppose they both had the privilege of being raised by young people. 

He’s reading a book I wrote called When We Were Arabs — a story of my Jewish Arab grandparents who raised me and a political theory emanating from and applied to their lives. He decided to reach out, and now in our chats, he is evidently trying to fill in the decades since we left, in the way kids in the [SETTLER COLONY], where I am now, fill out Mad Libs in the backseats of long, maddening road trips. 

The young man messages me the names of mossalsallat — Arabic telenovelas — that I should watch. And Spotify playlists with subversive, hipstery songs, much cooler than I could dream to be, here or there. 

He’s in his early 20s. I’m in my mid-30s. He tells me that as in my grandfather’s generation, the dudes still race their cars through the streets of [WEALTHY NEIGHBORHOOD OF OUR HOMETOWN]. Must be the wide streets, he says. 

Like my grandfather, he wants to be a doctor. Like my grandfather, he is slight and foppish. He was/ He is fond of dignity and will demand it from life, ya Rab. He loved/ he loves music and pretty women and found/ finds an enjoyment of life — joie de vivre — to be an act of religion, for to be ungrateful is a sin, in both of their faiths and in existentialism. 

I sent him, the younger man, my own Spotify playlist with Mon Laferte’s Pa’ dónde se fue. Hasta hoy me siento en soledad / Buscando en miles, buscando en gente / Buscando en hombres, en tantos hombres / Tu humanidad, tu paternidad.

At what point do I become a full-fledged person, for where we’re from? Am I a full-fledged person here? Or will I always be a child of our children, understanding only a faint tea of things. 

A young woman who taught me what it is to be an Arab American remarked, in a moment imprinted on the brain, that someone we encountered on our adventures “reeked of FOB.” I hope to reek of FOB. I should be so lucky to resemble my parents, since my life is spent looking for traces of their decaying carbon among the living. 

At moments, I imagine I’m still there. To call it nostalgia is willful blindness — These ideas on directionality are a political mandate. Just know, I’ve been once and left in haste. I had to leave, and I’ve felt I can’t go back to [THE TIME-BEFORE LAND]. 

—

My grandfather’s grandfather was from [AN ENCHANTED KINGDOM THAT COULD ALSO BECOME IMPOSSIBLE TO ME, THE MORE I FILL IN THE BLANKS]. 

One time, [IN THE KINGDOM, FAR REMOVED BY CIRCUMSTANCE AND THE WEST, TRY AS WE DID TO MOVE EASTWARD] — I was having a late-night snack with a group of troublemakers, my grandfather would’ve said, smiling, after a night on the town. We went to a chicken joint with large photos hanging overhead of [SAYIDNA] and a stock art rotisserie chicken. Tête-à-tête. 

We had driven up the coast, champagne-colored lights from old lighthouses, blasting music in our most indigenous and sacred language. From the darkness of the backseat, someone reached for my hand. In the shadows. 

Later, at the chicken joint, one musketeer in our boho posse looked at me over a large shared plate of chicken stuffed with rice and parsley, fries, and little [OUR REGIONAL] mezze, and asked, What’s wrong, ya 3ssal? Why the face? Like an oratory caress of the cheek. A kind of knowing-as-love. 

In the last scene of Fellinni’s Nights of Cabiria, a young woman, fallen from grace, walks down an empty avenue, and a flash-mob circus appears. The woman is crying — her mascara forms a tear like a sad clown. And another woman says an embracing, improbably Buona sera - good evening. And a smile overtakes the sad clown’s face. 

It had been some time since I felt human. 

T’inquiète — koulchi zwine, I said. 

—

A young woman wrote to me about my book on Arabness and my parents on Twitter — “The Zionist project destroyed the social fabric of the entire Arab world. Till this day.” 

To her I said/ say — “Take heart! The Arab peoples are rebuilding it!!” 

—

I never saw the house on [INSERT LOVELY, OLD-TIMEY ARABIC-LANGUAGE NAME] street, the house by [BODY OF WATER]. I tried. 

I’d been living China. I flew into [THE CAPITAL OF MY ANCESTRAL HOMELAND] and tried to head north. I had a dream that I’d find my father there. But I fell into the darkness of our [MONUMENTS TO MOURNING], and before that darkness could claim me forever, in haste I left [THE LAND].

I tried to see it, still, from afar. But Google Maps only shows a satellite view — tiny pixels of the place by the [BODY OF WATER], approximations of reality. 

And yet I knew it, in my bones. If we’re very good, when we die, our souls join to the whistling of the maritime wind through the buildings. Listen closely. It’s like we’re still there. 

I had a chance to go back — cheap, direct flight from the Gulf. But I shouldn’t, my coworkers [AT A COMPANY BANNED BY MY LAND] said. Until now, I shouldn’t return, they say. Because even as a Jewish person, a random company I worked for in my 20s in a dying industry means I am not just an Islamist but a threat. I feel dizzy. The world is too sophisticated, my grandfather would’ve mused. 

Anyway, I’m one of so many people who can’t go home, to [THE NATION] and probably, for fault of my loose lips, [THE KINGDOM FROM BEFORE IT]. Not because of my faith, thirsty as some people are for that to be my reason for everything, but by a tragicomic twist of fate. At least I don’t have immediate family there to worry about, but then, I have no family. 

The irony is that my situation resembles our [IDENTITY, DEMONYM] humor, popularized by our ubiquitous films. I am an accidental threat — and like the film by [ICON OF OUR PEOPLE’S COMEDY], I demand kebab for all my hostages.  

—

I met the young man, because one day, in the DM’s, he said he was reading the book and had taken photos of [INSERT LOVELY, OLD-TIMEY ARABIC-LANGUAGE NAME OF MY GRANDFATHER’S STREET], of our space, now an apartment building, of the shops on the street that harken to its old, colonial-era name. 

The Almighty had been known in Arabic to some Jewish Arab communities as the رحمن

- Rahman — the Merciful. And I have known that to be true. 

For journalism, I’ve spoken with an incarcerated person who has never held his own grand babies. My longing is nothing. It is a fraction of the inmate’s longing, when he beholds on a smartphone screen what he longs to hold in hand. 

On our street, there’s an arch with a relief of some flowers and ribbons sitting atop Roman-inspired columns. I feel myself to have seen it in one of my dreams of [THIS FAMILIAR PLACE]. 

I posted about the young man’s heroic generosity online. Delete it, my mother says. We fear that he will [FEAR]. 

At the start of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, my grandfather was waiting for me on the other side of the door, when I returned home from a protest at the Los Angeles federal building. A cat-like sensibility. 

Are you insane? he said. Do you want to be blacklisted? 

What blacklist? I asked. 

That was the last protest, he insisted. 

I’ve similarly promised him that I would never eat pork again. Conflict-averse. 

—

We traded Spotify playlists, the young man and I. There is a Palestinian song of cops and kings. A few songs about an absence of hope and the indignation that won’t die. 

And I fear for a moment, in between my pride in the continued strength of our creative people, that I can’t recognize myself in these songs. 

And then there is Abdel Wahab’s لأ مش انا اللي أبكي - La moosh ana illy abaki — No, it is not I who is crying, and I don’t know if the young man threw this one in there so I wouldn’t feel cast out to [BODY OF WATER] again. 

Another old song, after it is — زي العسل - Zey el 3ssal - Like Honey, by Sabah — not to be confused with its descendant by the Jesus and Mary Chain. 

My grandfather taught me Arabic — including writing. But by the time I began to care, I could only make the shapes of my name with a pen, like a textual parakeet, motion memory of the hand. I had to re-teach myself the Arabic alphabet, for longing, in China, alone. 

And when I returned to Los Angeles, I found a cassette, recorded from a tape recorder held beside the TV during Arab American Music Television. صباح  - اجمل اغاني - Saba - agmal aghani - Sabah, best songs, my grandfather had written. 

I never knew you loved Sabah, I’d have told him, if he either magically lived forever or if I’d magically known to appreciate who he was/ we were, in my teens. 

And like one of the shabab, he’d have said her art was نار - Nar — Fire. 

Will you be with me forever, my father? 

Will you haunt me like this forever, oh possibilities laid waste and futures, decimated? 

—

Just come, the young man says. My mom will make you some fire ma7ashi. He says, in a way more modern than I am, in the U.S. too, in the style of Ramy’s cousin at the [CAPITAL CITY’S] airport. 

Have you ever written about [OUR PEOPLE]’s politics?  

I have no impression of [MY PEOPLE]’s political affairs. No opinion at all. My birthright as regards [MY PEOPLE] is love, alone. I sit and watch from the wings, as we have for decades. I have nothing to say on what happens there. 

[BEYOND MY UNDYING SUPPORT FOR OUR SACRED LIVES AND DIGNITY.] 

The young man says what my grandfather couldn’t say. That he accepts the special sort of prodigal son I became, even in the way I have found to live, breaking all the weld ilnass contracts from when my grandfather made clear that he would rather I live a quiet life of submission to certain expectations. 

—

I don’t dare fill in the names of these places, because the young man and my mother alike say — as if it’s a biological feature of [OUR PEOPLE]-ness — I’ve done enough to keep myself from [THE DIRECTION OF MY LONGING, CONSTITUTIONALLY INDIGNANT GAZE].

Maybe we will go back, someday, still, they say. If we do, when the functionary considering my visa Googles “Massoud Hayoun +[THE NATION],” he’ll find 

[NOTHING AT ALL].