Jehad’s second semester started at the end of January, and he tried to persuade us to go with him to Amman. But none of us wanted to leave. For my part, it was perhaps a false sense of security, an inability to truly fathom war at our doorstep. I also wasn’t keen on being in Jordan. Sabah had painted a bleak image of Amman as an economically depressed and corrupt place. But it was Sitti Wasfiyeh who persuaded my brother it was pointless to try to make us flee. She had been listening to us, uncharacteristically quiet, then she asserted, “I’m not going anywhere. I’m tired of being chased out of wherever I am in the world. Out of Haifa, then out of Ein el-Sultan, then Jordan, and now Kuwait? No. I’ll just die here instead of facing another exodus. I’m too old for this shit that these shit people keep doing to us. Shit. All of it—shit!”

My brother begged, but it was no use trying to persuade my grandmother. Jehad despised Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait, but he feared American intervention and decided to stay with us rather than leave. I was furious. “Mama and I work day and night to make it possible for you to study, and you think you can just decide not to go? As if your life is yours to do as you please without regard to your family?” I yelled.

Jehad stiffened. “I’m not leaving my family in this situation. So you can just stop, Nahr!”

Jehad’s insistence eventually brought Sitti Wasfiyeh and me around to leaving, but by then it was too late. The American invasion was already under way. We stayed put, waiting for our future to emerge from the blasts, news reports, and innuendo. I could feel the sun setting on our lives in Kuwait, and when the Americans arrived, the sun indeed was gone. For months it was blacked out by blankets of soot. From the Highway of Death, Iraqis had managed one last act of defiance. They set flame to oil wells, which heaved unstoppable plumes of smoke into the sky that not even the sun could penetrate. It looked and smelled like the end of days, an apocalypse sucking us into hell.

With Iraq out of Kuwait, the United States paraded its military through our streets. By then we had already heard enough of Kuwaiti rage against Palestinians to know that we were not welcome to join them in street celebrations—not that I wanted to welcome the Americans. But Mama did.