Diana Abu-Jaber

“Dad says that everyone invented baklava.” It occurs to me now to wonder what that means. Aunt Aya rolls her eyes.“Your father? He is the worst of the worst. He thinks he cooks and eats Arabic food but these walnuts were not grown from Jordanian earth and this butter was not made from Jordanian lambs. He is eating the shadow of a memory. He cooks to remember but the more he eats, the more he forgets.”

“Marry, don't marry,' Auntie Aya says as we unfold layers of dough to make an apple str”

“Who am I?" she snaps. "I am America, Israel, England! What am I doing?" She waits another long moment, her eyes shining. "I'm shutting up and listening." She draws the last word out so it hisses through the air. "I am the presidents, the kings, the prime ministers, the highs and the mighties—L-I-S-T-E-N!" She spells the word in the air. "The woman who made the baklava has something to say to you! Voilà! You see? Now what am I doing?" She picks up an imaginary plate, lifts something from it, and takes an invisible bite. Then she closes her eyes and says, "Mmm... That is such delicious Arabic-Jordanian-Lebanese-Palestinian baklawa. Thank you so much for sharing it with us! Please will you come to our home now and have some of our food?" She puts down the plate and brushes imaginary crumbs from her fingers. "So now what did I just do? "You ate some baklawa?" She curls her hand as if making a point so essential, it can be held only in the tips of the fingers. "I looked, I tasted, I spoke kindly and truthfully. I invited. You know what else? I keep doing it. I don't stop if it doesn't work on the first or the second or the third try. And like that!" She snaps the apron from the chair into the air, leaving a poof of flour like a wish. "There is your peace.”

“Let the beauty we love be what we do. There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground”

“Slavery has been outlawed in most arab countries for years now but there are villages in jordan made up entirely of descendants of runaway Saudi slaves. Abdulrahman knows he might be free, but hes still an arab. No one ever wants to be the arab - its too old and too tragic, too mysterious and too exasperating, and too lonely for anyone but an actual arab to put up with for very long. Essentially, its an image problem. Ask anyone, Persian, Turks, even Lebanese and Egyptians - none of them want to be the arab. They say things like, well, really we're indo-russian-asian european- chaldeans, so in the end the only one who gets to be the arab is the same little old bedouin with his goats and his sheep and his poetry about his goats and his sheep, because he doesnt know that he's the arab, and what he doesnt know wont hurt him.”