“She will be blind before she is fifteen years old,” Aunt Suha, my father’s sister, would tell my mother every time she came over and found me bent over a book. “You shouldn’t let her do this or no one will marry her.”

My mother would nod, appeasing Aunt Suha enough to let the subject rest until the next time she came over. She never discouraged me, though, and liked to hear about the books I was reading, and read them herself if she had not done so previously. My father didn’t approve of reading outside of school texts, and he used to take away my books when he came across them. Jalal was the only one beside my mother who encouraged me. He often countered my father’s attempts by bringing me books he thought I’d find interesting, usually about animals or folktales from other countries.

During the summer before I was to start high school, Uncle Hamdi wrote from America to say that I could live with him and Fay, and that I could go to high school there. My mother was excited, perhaps because she thought I’d have a chance to finish what she barely started, or perhaps because she thought I’d have a freer education. Regardless, I was terrified at the thought of being away from my family, even though the idea of going to America—the America my mother had only tasted—was exciting. I was so tired of being made fun of for reading, for being too headstrong, for speaking my mind. My father said there was not a chance in the world that he would let such a young girl go live in America with only a maternal uncle and his American wife. He would not even listen to my mother’s arguments and would leave the room when the discussion came up.

“Jalal has gone and come back and will stay to take care of the land. Tihani is married and away. Latifa is already old,” my mother would call after him. “If Hala stays here she will rot like me and like Latifa. Look at us. We have rotted. Let Hala grow and dream.”

At the time I didn’t know why my father finally agreed to allow me to go—a year had passed since Uncle Hamdi’s invitation, during which time I was enrolled at the American School in Amman—but he did and just as I started to grow and dream my mother died.

Even though my mother had lived in Jordan since she was nineteen, she was Palestinian and saw my father as something of a foreigner. In distance she was not so far from the home in which she grew up, but in reality, she was in another country—another household—with an entirely different way of thinking.