She was interested in my life in Kuwait and wanted to talk about my “sexuality.” They all want my pussy’s story. They presume so much, take liberties with words they’re not entitled to. She asked if it’s true I was a prostitute.

“You think prostitution has to do with sexuality?” I asked.

Fleeting confusion passed over her face. “No, of course not,” she finally replied. “Let’s move on.”

She was tall, her brown hair loosely tied at the back. She wore jeans and a simple cream blouse, a jacket, and comfortable black shoes. No makeup. I didn’t like her. I liked the interpreter, who was short and dark, like me, and wore red Converse shoes with fourteen black dots on the white rubber toe caps. One dot, then a group of nine dots, then four dots: 194, the code we used to evade Israeli surveillance. Hidden messages were thus assembled from every first, then ninth, then fourth word. That’s how I knew she was more than an interpreter. Her name, I remember, was Lena.

At first I was confused. The 194 method only works with written messages. We couldn’t count, listen, interpret, and speak at the same time. Then I realized Lena was tapping her pencil on certain words as she translated. She must have recognized the moment I figured it out because she smiled slightly. The words she kept tapping were variants of “eat the note,” “mouth the paper,” and “notepad food.”

The interviewer looked down, as if unsure about her next question. “What would you like to talk about?” she asked.

On this particular day, I had been roaming the shores, deserts, and malls of Kuwait in simpler times.

“Zeit-o-za’atar,” I blurted.

“Is that the Palestinian bread dip?” she asked Lena.

Lena nodded, and the woman jotted down some notes, though I could tell she wasn’t interested in the story. I told it anyway.

“When we lived in Kuwait, the Tawjihi scores of the graduating high school class were always published in the newspapers, and Palestinians dominated the top ten graduates every year. Kuwaitis were especially perturbed the year when the top five were all Palestinian, and rumors began circulating that Palestinians were smart because we ate so much zeit-o-za’atar. The whole country went on a zeit-o-za’atar eating binge. Stores could barely keep za’atar stocked on shelves.” I laughed.

The Western woman fidgeted as she listened to Lena translate. Ignoring her growing impatience, I continued: “I knew it wasn’t true, because I ate a lot of za’atar and never did well in school. I got held back in ninth grade for failing both religion and mathematics the same year my brother, Jehad, was invited to skip fourth grade.” Although those had been happier times, I recalled them now with a sense of tragedy and a desire to assure my younger self of her worth and intellect; of her capacity to learn, to believe she was not dumb, as the world had convinced her she was.

The Western woman tried to interrupt me, but I went on: “For a while, I tried to do better and let my little brother tutor me. But once a school believes you’re stupid, no amount of good work will convince them otherwise.”