Ayse

“Amna taught me the proper way to pick olives. “Some of the lazy boys try to just shake and hit the branches to make the olives fall, but that’s wrong. My father says it’s wrong to beat a tree that’s giving you blessings.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“To wake up from a dream you have been dreaming since birth is powerful. But to wake up from a dream you have been dreaming from birth with almost a hundred million people, brothers and strangers alike, a collective nightmare, a nightmare we had been imbibing all our lives and passing around to one another, feeding innocently to our newborns—that we are worthless, that we deserve no better than the filth we live in …”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English

“The continuity of these traditions helped bridge the spaces between dislocation and the home I had forged in my birthright homeland, but I knew I could never again be complete in one place. This was what it meant to be exiled and disinherited—to straddle closed borders, never whole anywhere. To remain in one place meant tearing one’s limbs from another. I missed my mother. My brother and grandmother. I balled a bite of mansaf in my hand and looked around the room.”
― Susan Abulhawa, Against the Loveless World

“I just don’t want you to be frightened, he continued, and it was clear to any American girl that he wanted me to be frightened. I just don’t want you to be upset. I’d never let anyone upset you. I’d never let a woman that I—any woman that I know be humiliated like that, he said, and he was watching me earnestly in the elevator mirror, hoping I would be humiliated like that.”
― Noor Naga, If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English