I dance. Attar just came and left, and I am still wet, dancing. Music plays in my head as if at a wedding with my family, or with the men who paid to watch me dance, then to touch and own me. Those men, I hated them all. Maybe I loved them too. I pitied them. Perhaps predators in particular deserve pity, if only for the spiritual sewage of them.

A journalist was here the last time Attar came on and my hair was clean. He asked about the lines I had drawn on the wall, not the ones marking days, those had already faded.

“The paths of ants,” I explained. “They roam in single file.”

He looked back at his questions and changed the subject to Iraq’s occupation. I wonder if there might be some being somewhere tracing the journey of my small life, as I do the ants’.

“Are you still with me?” the reporter asked, stretching his neck to my line of sight.

People think Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was some kind of massacre, but that isn’t true. The real horrors happened when Iraq left, and I suppose it hasn’t stopped. I tried to explain to the interviewer, but he wasn’t interested. He even argued: “But surely you understand why Kuwaitis would be upset with Palestinians? Yasser Arafat betrayed them by siding with Saddam Hussein.”

I find that reporters and writers who come here don’t actually want to listen to me or hear my thoughts, except where I might validate what they already believe.

SIX MONTHS

KUWAIT BEGAN AS a village in the Basra Province of the Ottoman Empire, which reigned for more than six hundred years. Realizing Kuwait’s potential for oil, the French and British carved it out as a small, independent country they could easily exploit. That’s what Jehad told me. He tried to explain the illegality and human rights aspects of Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, but I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t care if Iraq had a right to invade, whether Kuwait had been slant-drilling for oil under the border, or if Yasser Arafat was a son of a bitch for siding with Saddam. All I knew was that Saddam Hussein had saved my life that night, and for the duration of Iraq’s presence in Kuwait, I was a liberated, happy woman.

Kuwaitis used to look down on us foreigners. Whereas Kuwaiti policemen sometimes took liberties with female drivers they identified as non-Kuwaiti, Iraqi soldiers gave me a sense of camaraderie and empathy. They did not stare at my breasts and tilt their heads toward my ass upon seeing my ID card. It wasn’t because Iraqi soldiers were better men. Rather, because they didn’t want to be in Kuwait. They were a tired army that had just come off the battlefields against Iran, and the soldiers I met were simply homesick.

Still, I had not understood the extent of our subordination until I knew what it meant to be respected, not in spite of being Palestinian but precisely because of it. We all felt it, and it was hard not to revel in it. We simultaneously loved and resented Kuwait, just as Kuwait both loved and resented us.