Amira Pierce | The Monster Swallows Itself

THE MONSTER SWALLOWS ITSELF

OR, THE DAY EVERYTHING CHANGED

AMIRA PIERCE

1.

I GREW UP here, there and everywhere —

But I spent my childhood summers on the other side of the planet, in the faraway land where my mother grew up. One or two hot months each year, she took my little sister and me there to stay in her family’s flat, in a building populated with cousins and uncles and aunts, in an overgrown village of similar flats and minarets and fruit trees abutting a slice of emerald sea. Life in that house had its slow and steady rhythm of visiting and returning, of praying and playing, of savory and sweet.

Lunchtimes, after clearing spattered spoons and greasy forks and half-eaten pieces of bread, after removing stacks of gristle and bone, the women would bring out the fruit. The rainbow array differed each day according to what the men had most recently carried up in crates from the orchards — spring-green grapes, yolk-orange tangerines, deeply bloody cherries, pale yet pungent pears, jewels of kumquats, rubied pomegranates, peaches golder than the sun.

My grandmother, my Teyta, was notorious for harboring the notion that human beings had a separate stomach especially for fruit, and we all agreed. No matter how full we were, we ate piles of the sweet stuff.

Every eater had their own way of dealing with each kernel, pip, and pit. Teyta kept her face close to her plate, putting fruit in, dribbling seeds out. My aunt would deseed gingerly with a small knife. As an experiment in velocity, my cousins liked to spit their seeds off the veranda. Haram alayk! Some of the adults would admonish them, others would smile. He’s planting the next crop! Me, I never spat like that. I couldn’t bring myself to spit at all.

With my dark hair and oily skin, I was just like the rest of them, but also I was different. I could pronounce the harsh syllables of their language with ease, but I dreamt in one that felt more like my own. Across my nose ran a smattering of freckles we can attribute to my faraway father, who had stayed behind at home, enjoying the air-conditioned quiet of an empty house in another hemisphere, while I was far away, shoveling fruit into my small mouth, scabbed knees showing under the skirt of my flowered dress.

A child, I was beginning to sense a divide between the things we dream about and the things we can be sure about. The stories of princesses saved by princes I read in words and pictures in my distant school, the tale my parents told me before sleep about the moon falling in love with the stars, the satirical drawings I found in the dusty French, English and Other Languages section at the back of summertime bookstores, the cartoons populated by colorful children I watched on television in any country — early on, I knew these visions were not like life. Life was the hard pavement beneath my sandaled feet as I walked the village lanes. Life was wondering if the word “village” was quite right for this overgrown and broken place, with bulleted memories scattered across its concrete walls, colorful trash strewn across its weedy ditches, the various camouflages of the various men from the various militias and armies and squadrons and guards at the checkpoints on the beach road. Life was being stuck in between and wanting only to be anywhere else. Life was the people I met in the faraway land asking if I knew what my name meant and the people wherever we were asking my name as a question, asking where it was from, what it meant, and I would roll my eyes. Amira means princess. Life was putting my hand on my heart in American classrooms reciting my Pledge of Allegiance and looking at images of President Reagan, Bush, Clinton, whoever. In the summer, back in the faraway land, strange men loomed on large posters, the carousel leaders of our many factions, parties, clans, families. Some wore turbans and dresses, some wore Western suits, most had moustaches, and their giant faces hung from buildings and across major intersections, were posted on the walls of mosques and churches. Life was lonely school lunches and airplanes that took me to cacophonous family lunches. Life was not knowing how to talk about one of my countries when I was in the other. The personal wasn’t at all political then; everything was personal, mine, and no one else could possibly understand it at all.

And the swallowing? The swallowing was my secret, something I could do in plain sight without being noticed. While my aunts fought over who would do the dishes, while my uncles sipped quickly at tiny steaming cups of thick cardamom-scented coffee, while they lovingly teased my grandmother and watched the world burn on the TV over her shoulder, while our ancestors hung from the walls and watched over all of us — framed, captured in black and white, frozen in another time we could only marvel at — while my mother promised a chocolate reward if my sister and I would agree to walk with her the three kilometers to the phone office to call my faraway father, I swallowed —

2.

My cousins, aunts, uncles, grandmother don’t exist as bodies now. But they do exist as memories, as disembodied voices and other kinds of ghosts, as human-shaped slips on shining screens cutting up at me through the dark. Now I am a teacher, a professor; one would say I am an adult, although whenever I say it to myself, it feels untrue — but you are an adult, Amira — and the faraway land — we call it Lubnan — is a memory, an emerald sea past-dream. Here, in Amerka, there is the silver-shining ocean, licking up at all sides of our crowded island metropolis, and one thing I do know adulthood to mean is that life no longer feels like a yearly cycle on repeat, stretching out in a straight line — that when I try to hold all my life at once inside my brain, it curls up on itself like a lock of my hair, like a tide pool, like a long, indigo snake.

Due to my dad’s career when I was a child and then my own adult proclivities, besides Lebanon, I have lived in, traveled to so many real places — Mexico and Richmond and Cairo and San Francisco and Falls Church and Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and Chiapas and Sudan and Shanghai — met so many real people in those particular places, learning and forgetting all their names, remembering their stories in pieces and putting them back together all wrong. I have friends I have lost, and friends that have stuck by me through all the coming and the going, friends that have come back, friends that still might —  

And I have felt so irrevocably alone, and it has frightened me so much, this loneliness, and — work, free work, drink, men, friends, social media, drugs, food, gossip, exercise, meditation, you name it — I have practiced so many ways to erase that feeling.

In the years since my visits to the faraway land have become less frequent, I have become unmistakably American, pulled into the ebb and flow of these four seasons, these entertainment trends, these media wars, the press conferences, the polls on polls on polls.

And I’ve dated men from other lands, men from this land, men who work behind a bar, under the sun, under the fluorescent lights of a lab, staring at a computer from behind a desk. Tall men, short men, hairy, hairless, sweet, dumb, intelligent as all hell and slyly mean. Sometimes when I am alone, I list them on the walls inside my mind — and the letters glow, the list comes to life, burning, and turns into a monster, a creature with scales, with bones, with guts and blood. This monster is dragon-like, snake-y, blue-ish, green. His shape shifts, his body snakes through me, for my pleasure, for my pain.

The monster writhes through my arteries and my veins, seeking out all the parts of me that are just too hard to know. To escape the pain, I think and think and think, telling myself stories about who I am and what I need to change in order to slay the monster once and for all. But before I’ve figured it out, the next man appears.

3.

There is man after man after man after man, and then there is the man that breaks you. We can imagine this man as the tail of the monster, or as his head, his shining eyes, his sharp teeth, his forked tongue, his fiery breath.

Those first few months with Max, I was fueled by the conversations we’d have late into the night about politics, religion, culture, history. I felt so blessed to be with someone so smart, so inquisitive, so careful. We talked until we were so tired with unlocking the universe’s secrets that we had no choice but to fall into bed in a tangle of limbs and kisses that slowly unfurled as we found a liquid rhythm together and swam in it and swam and swam, falling together into a slipstream of our cocreation.

Besides everything else, we shared the experience of being half-half. Like me, Max had primarily grown up tending towards the American part of himself, but the faraway part was undeniable. Pomegranate, cardamom, olive — we had the same flavors in our taste buds, we had the same dark thick hair and the same oily skin, we had parallel family stories. Max’s father met his mother in this country of countries after leaving his own faraway land, after its ruler was ripped from power. Kind of like my father met my mother in Damascus after she left Beirut. Without the political turmoil of the Middle East in the seventies and eighties, no us.

We were the political given birth to the personal.

One night, when things still felt new, I curled up next to Max on his big couch and opened a map of Eurasia across our legs and pointed to the place where my family was from and then across borders to the place where my great grandfather had died, a shrine he had made multiple pilgrimages to. And Max pointed to the place, a few centimeters away, where his family was from and where most of them still lived. He hoped to visit someday, he said, but — embargos and visas and all the paperwork and possibilities — it was hard.

Our minds stuffed with prayer calls listened to by ghosts, I looked into his Eastern eyes and, at that moment, it felt fated we’d go there together. We kissed, and it was like melting into each other, like we could have kept kissing forever, and, under my closed and fluttering lids, I hallucinated us as small children playing, running after each other in a large house full of Fertile Crescent light.

4.

Small feet slapping on marble, the cold splash of water from the washbasin in the hall, the marvel of grape leaves soaking in a dented aluminum cauldron, all our small hands and bodies clamoring around the plastic-covered dining table — these are the perennial images from my family’s flat in the faraway land, distinct images that each represent a moment repeated so many times that it has been etched into my DNA, my right brain, my bones and skin, swimming up and down my vessels and veins.

And also there are the singular moments that flashed through the existent and were gone, but still, they changed everything. Still, they leave me utterly shook. Still, they burn in perpetuity. An example: that fateful afternoon in childhood Teyta and I were having lunch alone. When she noticed I had nothing on my plate after eating a small pyramid of cherries and grapes, she planted an image in my mind that would stay with me forever —

“What have you done? Where are the seeds? Are you the soil?” she asked, the flames in her eyes magnified by the thick Coke-bottle lenses of her plastic-rimmed glasses.

I shook my head solemnly.

“If you swallow too many seeds, Ms. Soil,” she went on, her voice sterner than I’d ever heard it, “you’ll have a big problem when they start to grow! You’ll be full of stems and leaves and roots, and then the day will come when cherries and grapes will start popping from your ears and nose.” She stretched her hand toward me, and I ejected a single seed into her palm. She pursed her lips, clenched her hand tight, and turned her soft, stooped hulk towards the kitchen.

On all of the mosquito-ridden nights I spent in that house thereafter, as I fell into sleep on the same small bed my mother had slept on when she was young, my thoughts were swarmed by branches and vines, creeping slowly through my insides. Half-conscious, I imagined roots coming out of the soles of my feet and planting me in a spot of moist earth, birds singing in my branches, and the sun shining its light, like butter, down on my skin of bark. But when I awoke, I knew if anything were to grow inside me, it would have to be weeds, it would have to be a deadly vine that strangled love, it would have to be a brown plant, thorny and vicious and afraid.

I kept swallowing — because I felt empty, I think, and trapped in my head, trapped in the hollow time and space between war and peace, between childhood and growing up, between continents and lives. Swallowing meant survival. Now, I see I must have learned it from others, although it really did feel like it was only mine, like I made it up myself. I learned it from those that fled and those that stayed and survived fifteen years of the puppet-masters’ so-called Lebanese Civil War, which hollowed out their country, divided their capital, drove millions from the motherland and across the planet, turned homes into piles carved through by gullies of shrapnel, turned gods into masters and friends into enemies.

After the war was officially over, despite the fact getting to the faraway land should have been easier, since the travel bans were lifted and there was less to fight about, as I became an adult my visits became less frequent. Two years, three years, five, between trips. And still, I kept swallowing.

5.

Swallowing seeds seemed like one thing, swallowing men another, and Max was the one who helped me realize it all came down to swallowing myself.

The first fight we had was about Palestine. This was in 2015, during the United States presidential election season. On my social media, Max posted a critical response to an article I’d posted criticizing Hilary Clinton’s stance on Israel.

As I anticipated seeing Max in real life, I wished to not say anything, but when I was in his presence, I found my body brimming with the need to speak. Quietly, I asked his intent. He looked away, his face reddened. His response was measured, with an undertow of anger, and he went on to talk at me for hours — about how Palestine was a broken cause, misguided, dangerous, poorly steered. Or maybe it was minutes. Anyway, I intervened only briefly, to explain that Palestine matters because it has to do Israel and, naturally, with Lebanon, and Lebanon is mine in a way that I can’t explain. After a pause, when he resumed talking, he said something like, “If you use this personal politics emotional nonsense tactic again, I can’t be with you.”

“Like, you’re saying you want to break up?” I gulped, the first time the possibility had crossed my mind.

A map of the Middle East flashed through me, as did the time when I was three and my mother had to leave Lebanon through Israel with only me and my newly born sister; the orchards flashed, the sea, the bright bright roof of our building where we’d collected bullets as children; everything flashed, including Max’s angry eyes. I wish I could tell you I turned around and walked out of his apartment, never to return. But in fact, I stayed right there and admitted that maybe he was right, that I barely understood the politics of the Middle East. I said I wanted to learn more. And over the months that followed, I did my best to please him. I read articles and watched videos and listened to him explain what he knew and how he saw the world. Sometimes I was fascinated, sometimes I was heartbroken, but I nodded, I asked questions. I wanted to show him I understood, to show him he was doing me a favor, filling me up with the truth.

Most of my other serious boyfriends had been really jealous types. I felt lucky with Max, because he just wasn’t. But now I see the intimate and violent thoughts I’ve swallowed again and again have taken a variety of forms — from jealousy over a guy I’ve kept in touch with to ideas about what’s right or true. Now, I know that the personal and the political aren’t so separate after all. In both ways, in all ways, I was a vessel, a wound, to be filled with vigor, to be dominated, changed by force.

For a while, Max convinced me that Israel’s existence was entirely warranted and just. He convinced me that Islam was at its core a violent religion, that the Islamists, in fact, were taking over the hearts and minds of our great land. He convinced me that modern-day feminism was flawed, that decolonize was a metaphor irresponsibly deployed by the left, that all lives matter and Black on Black crime was a real reason.

And for the presidential election, he had me convinced that I should vote for Gary Johnson, and I did — which, at the time, was a very big deal. I am not telling you all this so you hate this character I have drawn of Max. I also hope you will not hate me. Time has passed since then, and I trust he has changed. I know I have. That’s what this essay is about. The thing I want to tell you is that it’s terrifyingly funny what I think I know when I’m scared, how much of the time I have been scared, how much subconscious energy I have used to separate myself from my own political life, from myself.

On the fateful first Tuesday in November, as we watched the numbers come in, Max had me convinced that Hilary would win anyway. We changed the channel to watch some show he liked before we went to bed.

I fell asleep with my head on Max’s broad chest. I am tall but he was taller and also big, and I really liked that, the feeling of being enveloped by him, the feeling of fitting over, under, beside, inside, around somebody else the way I did with him.

In the thickest part of night, Max got up to use the bathroom. I woke up, too, and crossed the room to check my phone. It’s impossible to fully explain how I felt when my screen cut up at me like a bright knife through the dark, showing me the other guy had won. My first reaction was it just had to be a joke. The Times’s front page looked like the Onion memes I saw all the time in those days. It looked like the crumpled MAD magazines my sister and I had found in those Lebanese bookstores when we were kids. One thing I can say for certain about that moment and all the images it evoked is they weren’t as distant as they seemed, and yet I pushed them down.

The toilet flushed and Max walked back in the room, his phone in his hand. He had somehow played a joke on me. It seemed so clear. The headlines were some Internet scheme. He had gotten in on it to fuck with the ambivalently hopeful girlfriends of the world.

I couldn’t see his face in the dark, but I heard his laugh.

“Wait, Trump won, for real?” I said.

“Yup.” He laughed some more.

“No,” I said, and he was still laughing.

We went back and forth like that for a frozen moment, him chuckling syllables through the stale shadows, me quiet and struggling to think, to breathe. It didn’t feel real, but Max didn’t stop. I played at anger, and before I knew it, I was on top of him in his bed, like so many times before, my legs straddling his chest, his stomach, but this time my hands weren’t stroking but holding, gripping his cheeks, then squeezing his neck.

Scant light from the alley came through the window and across the bed, highlighting the edges of his nose, his jaw, flecking his lovely eyes. He had a face like a classical statue, and as he laughed and I looked at him from above, he looked like one of those evil gods who takes pleasure in people’s suffering. I must have squeezed harder because he stopped laughing. “I can’t breathe,” he said.

Some part of me would like to tell you that I strangled him. Instead, I let go and he swallowed, laughed again, and maybe I finally laughed too.

We stayed together for half a year after that, and I guess that means I needed, wanted, needed more of Max and he of me. That was a dark and lonely time for all of us, and I know I can’t speak for everybody everybody, but can’t we agree that politically, personally, we’ve all gone through tough times? And the hardest thing for me to face is the possibility that I bring it on myself, that I ask for more and more.

Did Max and I have sex after we woke in the night to find out Trump would be our next president? I can’t be sure, but I think so, and, if we did, then it went like this —

I let the heart-stomach feeling pulse through my body. I wanted to say something to Max, but what could I say? I feel lonely when I’m with you? I miss the things I hardly remember? I forget where I’m from? My thoughts finally shut up when Max put on some music from the future — all blips and space sounds, all sonic chorus and synth beats. It felt like we were nowhere, the two of us, and when he reached for me, I reached back. Hands, lips, ears, tongues, skin and wet and moans and soft becoming wet and hard and all of it. The rhythm of our bodies took me away. And I closed my eyes and returned to my childhood kingdom, floating above the orchard, the trees like waves washing me out to the sapphire sea. Yes, and my grandmother’s prophecy came true two decades after it was delivered in the waves of a new kind of orgasm — I was floating, then crashing, an explosion from inside, until vines, leaves, thorns, roots shot from my eyes, my mouth, nostrils, ears.

And like that, the world had changed.

6.

In fact, the world has never stopped changing, as long as I have been here and long before that. My ancestors might seem frozen in photographs, and yet they are the past alive in the present. They survived the surging and ebbing power of capitalism, self-righteous clashes of politics, confusion about love and beauty and lust, the chaotic and inevitable suffusion of puberty and belief. And the price of all that survival — this swallowing, this swimming and gulping and shifting in order to stay still — is a thing we have not really named, not even in our thoughts. Still, the thing, nameless, took some form (maybe a monster? a slippery snake? maybe vines and tendrils and leaves? maybe tide pools upon tide pools with no real possibility for stillness, for peace...). Stuffed inside our heads, our necks, our throats, our ears, it filled the spaces that yielded to it, muffling everything, everywhere. And yet it was so light. How could it even matter, really? (It did.) And how is it that it persists to this day? (It does.) And how do we breathe through it? Do we all grow up and break free together, or does it happen to us one by one?

7.

Do you remember the day after the election and all the days after that? Do you remember how social media suddenly felt a lot more meaningful and confusing? Do you remember all the calling campaigns and protests and posts where people tried to talk about their feelings of hopelessness and hope and devastation and everything else? All the speculating and crying and falling apart?

During the time of these questions, Max went more easily from stoic to suspicious, angry, easily excitable. Reliably, always, he’d get back to stoic. It was inconceivable how much we’d changed since we’d known each other, how much, in each other’s eyes, our reflections had changed. I can’t say for sure that I remember all this as it was. No, these are pieces of stories I’ve told myself and others so many times that I’ve made them all true. These are the many stories that I’ve birthed and married together, for you. For me.

Over the phone the evening after Trump’s inauguration, Max told me the pictures of the scant crowd gathered for the swearing-in all over the liberal media were fake fake news, and I told him I wanted to go to the Women’s March. I hoped he would come with me, but I also knew he wouldn’t.

As I pedaled my bike over the East River the next morning, I thought about calling him, but what would I say? I pushed and I pushed and the city skyline looked beautiful before me and I felt the same rush as I always do upon descending into Manhattan. My phone vibrated against my pelvis, and I knew it was him and left it in my pocket, wanting to make him wait. It vibrated again and again. I made myself wait to look at it until I was locking up. Not Max. It was my mother, my father, my brother-in-law, texting in chorus from D.C. My sister’s first baby was on her way. They were all at the hospital, waiting for her to join us in this world.

I was surprised, caught off-guard, suddenly frantic. I should be home with my family and not here, I thought as I entered the throng. Groups of people who seemed like friends were gathered together in small knots in the immense crowd, and families, children on shoulders, women holding hands, men standing by. Exuberant crowds with uterus signs and Trump masks clogged the streets. Police blockades disrupted traffic in every direction. I felt dizzy. Unsure. It was impossible to focus on any one thing. And as I found my way along the river of bodies, feeling both a part of them and also utterly alone, the new Amira was born. Do I mean me? Maybe. I want to tell you that I joined the protest wholeheartedly, that I screamed my lungs out against our new leader, screamed for our rights to be seen, noticed, understood, cherished, that my screams became a rainbow gushing out of me, a rainbow colored by all the anger and sadness and fear I had swallowed deep down inside me for years. But the truth is, I couldn’t feel anything and I could feel everything, all at once. Among the millions, I was tiny and defenseless, and I could tell the story of that day as the day I began to come into the world anew, my eyes not wanting the light.

But also, my sister called her daughter “Amira.” My reaction the first time she said it: That’s my name! Mine! Like a bolt, I let the feeling course through me; it was sharp, an electric trill, and I had to let it go — because it’s not just for me. Amira is also the name of my aunt, my great-grandmother, too, a name swimming through our female blood, a name that swam here from far away across the teeming seas, a name that will live on.

Before leaving the march, I chanted a little and danced some, and when I was ready to go, it was hard to leave. And as if life were a video game, I glided around, across, above the march, got a feel for the beautiful monster of a million bodies and voices it was, before heading back south, buoyed by a wave of what I had just experienced and letting go of all of it to slip into the stream of regular traffic, trusting I was powered forward by a new velocity that is carrying us over the edge into some version of reality we can’t imagine, the crest of a wave breaking open the way we live, love and make meaning.