Songs for the Dead and the Living by Sara M Saleh

Author:Sara M Saleh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Affirm Press
Published: 2023-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

‘Where are you from?’ Mostafa asked, kicking the ball over to the new kid, Jad. The summer sun hung low as the neighbourhood children, gathered to play football, interrogated the newcomer. They were all intrigued by him and his accent.

Baba had encouraged Jamilah to get out of the shop that afternoon. He had been doing that a lot, ever since Teta Aishah’s passing.

‘Mama is from the Soviet Union, Ukrainian, and my dad is from here,’ Jad said, puffing his chest, signalling he was one of them despite the accent that singed his words. ‘We just moved to Beit Samra.’ Jamilah liked the way he elongated syllables as if kissing each one, animating the mole on his cheek.

But Jamilah knew that was not what Mostafa intended by asking the question. They weren’t investigating his European side: that was the part they loved. They wanted information about his Lebanese side to determine whether they could love that, too.

‘Ay, who cares?’ Jamilah said, flustered. These weren’t questions they were used to asking, or should ever get used to asking, but the war had changed everything. These days in Lebanon, it wasn’t values or actions that defined who someone was, but family name. ‘Where are you from?’ and ‘What is your family name?’ automatically came with a full report on which religious leader you followed and which political group you belonged to. That would determine whether someone would be welcomed in homes and on an improvised soccer field or tormented and turned away.

‘Cool.’ Mostafa shrugged nonchalantly, even though they couldn’t get the intel on whether Jad was Sunni, Shia, Maronite, Orthodox, Durzi, Alawi, or Something Else.

‘Well, before I decide whether you can be on my team,’ Mostafa said very seriously, wagging a finger at Jad, ‘I have one more question. Brazil or Germany, bro?’

‘Um, didn’t Brazil just lose the World Cup?’ Jamilah said flippantly.

‘Third. And they were robbed!’ Mostafa screeched. ‘Robbed, okay?!’

Jamilah rolled her eyes. ‘An-y-wa-yyyy, sorry you had to see that.’ She flashed a smile at Jad. ‘Oh, and I pick Zaki.’ Zaki was stocky and she was fast, so they always made a good defence together. Jamilah didn’t account for Jad’s athleticism then.

Jamilah wondered if that athletic build and his ambiguous family name would help or hinder him now – if they would make him more or less likely to be messed with at a checkpoint? Being Muslim was a liability. Would they rough him up? Scare him? Take him or shoot him?

Jamilah would be left grieving, not like her sister, who still had a thread of hope to hang on to, but like that woman, the wife of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president who was assassinated. During their first few weeks in Egypt, Jamilah had seen a story on the Egyptian news channel marking a year since his death.

‘He sold us out! For America!’ Baba had exclaimed at the TV. ‘How dare he make a deal with the devils on behalf of our people? Peace with Israel? There will never be peace as long as they keep killing us.

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