Journey from the Land of No by Roya Hakakian

Author:Roya Hakakian [Hakakian, Roya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2007-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

On the way back from Grandmother’s home that night, Mother and Father talked about A.J.’s advice. Mother believed Father had to heed it and sell our house. Then their conversation became an argument. Her voice rose, and her posture spitefully turned the way the posture of arguing couples turn in a car: one hypnotically fixed on the road, the other on the passenger window—wistful for the passing opportunities. For the first time in my life I was seeing my parents fight and wondered whether I had been too young to recognize their fights before, or whether they had never fought. Perhaps my adoring brothers had shielded me from the dark side of our family. Whatever the reason, there I was in the backseat as Father sped down the road, trying to beat the curfew, while Mother called him a man who could not guide his family in a prosperous direction. Drowning Mother’s voice in his own, he repeated, “Woman! Hatati veti pashati!” Though I never understood what those words meant, they sounded frightening. Something about the way he clenched his jaw, steamed and hissed the t ’s, the v, and the p through his teeth, made him resemble a pressure cooker on the verge of bursting.

I wanted nothing more than to be on the streets walking barefoot, alone. Soon their escalating voices became a joint cry, a single text of acrimony, sounding more muffled to my drifting awareness as it got louder:

“Oh, your fancy brothers! . . . They are realists! . . . Sell! Poof! Like that. Like it’s a shoe . . . Dale Carnegie says, Taking risks and sound advice is the key to success . . . Taking advice from the village idiot is lunacy . . . Village? Village! Village is what you never left . . . Be sensible! . . . Be daring! . . . Be quiet! . . . Be a man! . . . Hatati veti pashati! Woman! . . . Think America, our children . . . Sure, we’ll have Shabbat dinners at Jimmy Carter’s . . . We’ll make friends . . . Speaking sign language like the deaf and dumb? . . . We’ll learn . . . We’re old . . . My other suitor . . . Uh, uh, uh, don’t go there, Helen . . . I’ll . . . You’d never . . . I? I . . . You, you . . . ou . . . ouu . . .oution! Revolution!”

That night in the car, like the two halves of my family, I split and jettisoned the happier half of myself over the wobbling heads of my parents and watched it leap weightlessly onto the sidewalk. Not to those screaming strangers in the car, but to the streets, to their rapturous cascade that beckoned me with undeniable clarity, I belonged. To the revolution I belonged. To the rage that unlike me had broken free. It would guide me as no one else could, raise me as no one else knew how.

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