I don’t agree with her. Almost everyone goes to weddings and has a good time because they forget their problems, even my mother, who complained before and afterward, but managed to spend those three days dancing and laughing and cooking and chanting. All the old ladies dance and remember their youth, while the men sit around and feel good about their lives, even if they don’t at non-wedding times. Everyone dances and the kids eat sweets for days.

Weddings, especially the big ones, are for showing off: your gold, your clothes, your daughters. (The saddest is to see an older lady without much gold and know that she has been through financial hardship and had to sell it all.) Women like to wear their fanciest dresses—either traditional rozas soaked with clever embroidery or modern dresses of shiny black material with gold spray or satiny pink that wrinkles and makes them sweat, dancing in those closed rooms and everyone smelling like themselves. There is so much excitement. Even the old old women get up strength they do not seem to possess at any other time, and they dance and chant and sing and give their sharpest ululations for the bride.

I love to watch the dancing. Women show happiness and calm that they keep buried during other days. The best dancer from our village is my American cousin Soraya. My mother cannot say her name without pleading to God to help her soul, and praying that I never become the way she is. But even she agrees that instead of having magic fingers that can stitch the finest pattern on material, she has the magic directly in her hips and legs.

And everyday there is enough talk to fill the skies: about So-and-So who sold his land to the Israelis, may God curse him, about the checkpoints and the endless humiliation, but also about this person’s marriage and that person’s graduation and that one who had the most beautiful baby ever seen, and even that other one who has been gone so long that no one remembers what he looks like, yet he still sends money to the wife he divorced a generation ago.

Sometimes the skies that wander over Nawara are blue, other times they are gray and gloomy. They paint our days different colors, and sometimes they watch over our blossoming village like a child about to bury his nose in the whitest flower on the hillside.

3 SORAYA Fire

3SORAYAFire

I have fire.

Everyone knows it. They see it in my beautiful brown exotic eyes that I paint full of Maybelline kohl to turn my tears black.

“She’s Arabian,” they say at my high school as I pass by them. “In her country they don’t have furniture or dishwashers, only oil.”