Strong Verbs Are Just Better

I let the bitter currents flow, and fade. It’s not their fault that I am here, and they can’t know that I am haunted by past classrooms, like the after-school Arabic I used to attend as a boy with my brother and cousins. I remember watching one of the teachers, an old hijabi, screaming as she chased my brother out of the room with a broom, or maybe he was the one wailing, or they both were, as she beat him with it in the corridor. When my mum found out teachers hit us often, she took us out and, just like that, severed us from our homeland, ensuring we would forever be little Lebs at home in western Sydney and nowhere else, a thickened English in our mouths peppered with Arabic curses and prayers. If I seem less than appreciative of her bold action, it’s only because my mother beat us more often and more harshly, as did our aunties and uncles, so really it was less about the tenderness of our bodies and more about reasserting her dominance over them, her divine blood-right to do whatever she wanted to us.
As a consequence, I grew up in a household where languages both familiar and strange swished around my small body. I knew the sound of the azan as well as my own name, I could recite the Fatiha flawlessly, and I could operate within the home as a domestic drone, able to recognise a certain amount of commands—go to sleep, get up, shower, hurry up, bring us tea, walk, run, pray, come inside, get out, be quiet—and a certain number of insults such as idiot or donkey or dog, but I was never asked to speak; in fact, I was discouraged from it, and so even these fistfuls of words are like rough bricks in my mouth. It was never a problem until my teyta, a mountain who dwindled into a hill as we aged, tried to speak to me. Every failed conversation with her sank into my bones, the deep sadness that would come into her eyes when I couldn’t respond or had to look to an adult nearby to translate. She was the only one who wanted to hear what I had to say and she might as well still have been in Lebanon for all the good it did us. For her part, the only English words she knew were ‘I love you’, ‘Thank you’, ‘Excuse me, please’ and, randomly, ‘Friday’, which she called Freeday.

Climate refugees, in other words, don’t exist – at least, not from the perspective of the current legal apparatus.
They might have done nothing wrong (few people have smaller carbon footprints than the inhabitants of sub-Saharan Africa).
They might be the victims of processes set in train by others.
But that doesn’t matter.
As international law now stands, they’re not entitled to anything.

It was my mother who memorably washed my mouth out, after a particularly knock-down, drag-out screaming match between me and my older brother. There’s no denying that I had the fouler mouth in the argument, but because I was three years younger and no match for him physically, words were all I had to fight his uncanny ability to push my buttons. Language is often the most effective weapon against power, especially when those who use it to fight back—like women, like children—aren’t supposed to have any. My mother had always hated profanity and vulgarity, but hearing them issuing from her little princess’s mouth was an intolerable assault. And so the woman who not only refused to spank us but could barely execute a grounding that lasted longer than five minutes rubbed her hand against a bar of Dove soap that rested on the rim of the kitchen sink and shoved her lathered palm in my mouth.
In the moment, I’m sure she felt an incredible sense of alienation from her only daughter, whom she wanted to believe was sweet, beautiful, kind—all the things a girl should be. Perhaps it felt to her like she was bringing me back to the idyllic state in which I was born, when she looked into my infant eyes and said to my father, “If you could imagine the perfect little girl, this would be it.” To me, it felt like the words I’d conjured to defend myself from my brother’s taunts were being purged, redacted, stricken from the record—like my voice itself was being scrubbed from my mouth.

SR: I said ki-ki. K-I hyphen K-I. Ki-ki is the equivalent of, in the gay world, of a woman—she can’t make up her mind. One minute she’s a butch, another minute she’s a femme, you know? She can’t make up her mind. And it’s almost as bad, quote-quote, as being a bisexual between the two worlds.
EM: Uh-huh.
SR: That’s the ultimate low.
EM: Mm-hmm.
SR: I was in trouble. Definitely in trouble. Because, you know, well, you know, okay, what was it gonna mean if I was a ki-ki? Well, it was gonna mean that I was gonna be ostracized. And I was.
I was attracted to a woman more masculine than myself. But in that society, I was a dead duck. Because a, you know, a butch could not afford to make love to another obvious butch. I mean, there was something terribly wrong with this, you know?
And I may not have much masculinity. And I didn’t see myself as having a lot of masculinity. But I don’t think I would have survived without what I got. I don’t plan on any asshole butch confused person taking it away from me.
And so I just, you know, went, now hear this. I have cut myself in half to be part of this gay society, you know? I have this potential. Now, in order to belong to this group, I have to cut off my heterosexual potential. That leaves 50 percent of me. And if you think that I’m going to cut the 50 percent of me into 25 percent, you’ve got another think coming. Screw this. I am ki-ki. And I know that there’s plenty of people around here who probably are, because there’s nothing normal about this crap. It’s not normal.