RANDA JARRAR

Douglas Coupland writes about how he managed the painful memories of high school, in the Summer Issue of the Walrus:

The first two weeks in the abandoned school were Steven Kingy, but once the creepiness left it was like working inside my dreams at night, except it was real and I had control. I could literally, legally, artistically bash the crap out of anything that displeased me. At will I could mangle and trash lockers or AV equipment or uninspired textbooks. It was like being handed a superpower: the power to reconfigure the way I existed with my memories. Within a month, I was no longer having recurring dreams of trying to remember my locker combination or being late for a test in a class I didn’t even know I was enrolled in. Gone. Thank you, art.

Baby Halder is, according to the NYT, a literary sensation:

A single parent at 25, struggling to feed her three children by working as a maid for a series of exploitative employers, Ms. Halder had no time to devote to reading or to contemplating the harsh reality of her existence until she started work in the home of a sympathetic retired academic, who caught her browsing through his books when she was meant to be dusting the shelves. He discovered a latent interest in literature, gave her a notebook and pen, and encouraged her to start writing. “A Life Less Ordinary,” this season’s publishing sensation in India, is the result of her nighttime writing sessions, squeezed in after her housework duties were finished, when she poured raw memories of her early life into the lined exercise books.

Today marks the 16th anniversary of Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait. On that day, I woke up to fighter jets. My mom snuck into my room and took my boombox radio because TV wasn’t working and no one else in the house had a radio. We huddled and worried and cried. Weeks later, I wore my rockin’ fuschia pants, lime green hightops, and a black t-shirt, and we– my dad, mom, brother, sister, 2 cousins, uncle, aunt, and a woman, man, and their 20-year-old son, Canadians we were helping escape with forged documents– piled into a minivan and a sedan, and fled the country with our bare necessities. We went north, through Iraq, and stopped at various checkpoints. I had never seen Iraq before. It was beautiful and warm. Then we drove through Jordan, where my immediate family stayed for a night before we flew to Egypt.

I can’t believe it’s been 16 years. An exodus can expand in your memory so comfortably.

I’ve wondered so many times: who would I have become if I hadn’t experienced that? My family would have never moved to the US. I would have finished high school in Kuwait and gone to university in Lebanon. I would never have met my friends…or my son’s father. I would never have had my son. I would be so different.

So on the day they hang Saddam for all his sins, many will dance. Many will weep with pity, sadness, and relief. Many will turn their eyes. I will do all three.

I had the craziest dream last night…about Condi Rice of all people. She was going in and out of limos, and finally, it was revealed that she has a child and a wife. Her child was an adoptee from Africa, and her wife was a gorgeous, 200 pound BBW from Haiti. The wife wore a cute blue and green wrap and had her hair up in a scarf, the daughter was in british school girl clothes and actually looked more Lebanese than African, and Condi looked like Condi. And the kicker: It was a musical! And they were singing in rhyme and everything– about war, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and love.

I don’t know: should I write a musical about a black lesbian secretary of state and her family? It might be fun…

I am reading Sun Tzu’s Art of War. You can read it online here. I seriously wish to quote the whole thing, but I’ll just quote this:

If you know the enemy
and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a
hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy,
for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.
If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will
succumb in every battle.

I registered for my classes today: a workshop woth Michael Byers and a short story class with Peter Ho Davies. I also spent a lot of the day translating and meditating. I leave Austin soon. I’m literally taking it one day at a time, because it makes me feel peacuful, and happy.