No Place to Belong

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Mohamed Morshed

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I was in one of those minibuses that looked like giant rats, sitting in the passenger seat, with the two back rows empty, speeding down one of Aden’s coastal roads toward a refugee camp. The Arabian Sea stretched far into the horizon cutting the glistening winter sun in half. A silhouette of a dhow danced from side to side in the middle of the water. A flock of seagulls flew above, calling for the day to be over. A thin layer of clouds hung above the nearby mountain, glowing like flame. Suddenly, the city exploded with adhans from every corner, calling worshipers to give up on their worldly pursuits and turn their souls to the sky.

“So what is it like in California?” Abu Ali asked, bending the word California into his Adani accent, omitting the R, and giving the last A a strange emphasis. It was the first time he spoke to me since we hired him to drive us earlier that day.

“I live in New York,” I said, wondering what he thought about my Arabic, which felt like trying to talk with a gummy bear in my mouth.

He turned and looked at me, one hand on the wheel, the other resting on the naked stick
shift. His eyes stole a glance at my lap, then shifted up. In my pocket was a bulging envelope
with a thousand dollars in new 100 dollar bills. The money wasn’t mine. I had to go back to the
hotel to bring it for Salem, the nonprofit director that hired me to film the relief work his
organization was doing in Yemen. Of course he blamed everyone for not reminding him, so I
volunteered to go back so I can take a break from holding the camera to people’s faces.

In the car, Abu Ali reached for the cigarette pack on the compartment above the broken
stereo, flicked the carton open, and bit one out. To light it, he pinned the wheel with his knee,
and covered his face with his arm like he was hiding a kiss. He took the first drag, squinted his eyes, hollowed his cheeks, then inhaled the already inhaled smoke further and further into the far depth of his sick lunges.

“What is it like?” He asked again, rubbing his untamed beard while looking at the road.

I didn’t know if he was angry or that was his normal tone.

“It’s like living anywhere else. Some days are better than others,” I said.

“Don’t lie,” he said.

It sounded like a threat.

I preferred the back seat to sitting shotgun, but this wasn’t an Uber. I was expected to sit next to the driver unless Salem or anyone older than me was riding with us.

Abu Ali was a big guy for a Yemeni. He wasn’t fat, or at least his fatness was neatly distributed. He was wide and thick boned, filling the driver seat in such a way that, from the side, he looked like he was floating in midair. He slowed down to drive over a bump, and took another drag. The cigarette between his index and middle fingers looked like one of those slim cigarettes women posed with in an 80s ad.

I was dying for a smoke. I was three months clean. One morning before my Advanced Filmology class my dad rushed me to the ER after he found me seizing on the bathroom floor. The doctor said my heartbeat was that of a 70 year old. Apparently I was born with a hole in my heart and smoking was making it bigger. After a long lecture from my dad about letting him down and my mom’s warning not to tell anyone about my habit or health condition—otherwise it would stop me from finding a wife—I decided to quit.

“What can you compare it to?” Abu Ali asked.

He didn’t want to hear about America being a normal place. He wouldn’t even want to know about the feeling of living in a place you don’t feel you belong to. He wanted to confirm if the dream is still alive. For the past week, young men around my age spoke to me of their plan to leave the country the same way kids in high school used to talk about playing in the NBA or NFL. It was naive, and pathetic. They didn’t care when I told them about the twelve-hour shifts Yemenis worked in corner stores, getting paid less than minimum wage, being cursed by nasty customers, the news media calling them terrorists, or politicians making fun of how their wives dressed.

“Aadi,” they would say, “it’s fine, as long as there is money.”

So now I just play along.

“It’s like living in heaven,” I said to Abu Ali, regretting it before I even finished. “ In a few clicks on your phone you can have them deliver anything that comes to your mind in two days. That’s all it takes, a want, and two days. Sometimes on the same day.”

“It also costs money, doesn’t it? They’re not delivering stuff for free?”

“Well, of course it costs money. I was talking about the ease of things.”

I didn’t know if it was my poor Arabic or my northern, broken, accent that he didn’t
understand.

He took another drag before coming down another speed bump, timing it perfectly.

He was only a year or two older than me, but he carried himself like an old man with a midlife crisis. His beard was so thick, it was swallowing his face. It started below his bottom eyelids and ended somewhere under his shirt collar, stretching down to the middle of his chest. His long hair was hiding under a worn out Yemeni ghutra with white base and brown floral, geometric patterns. Even the way he dressed was different from Salem’s cousins, who wore jogger pants and shirts with the organization’s logo embroidered on their chests. Abu Ali wore a mawaz with a brown, pale button up shirt. He was also referred to as Abu Ali. Anyone who was referred to as the father of his son felt old to me.

He slowed down, we bounced over another speed bump, and he sneaked a drag.

I looked away as he blew the smoke out of the window. Aden had this peaceful rhyme to it during sunset. I couldn’t imagine the bombs Salem’s cousins talked about during our late night conversations in the hotel room. Everyday at sunset they had to stay away from crowded areas, and if they were home they opened the windows so the glass wouldn’t shatter on them. Asim, Salem’s youngest cousin, told me that the bombs, “came from your country.” When I told him that Americans were much nicer than the government. He laughed and said, “you elect those people, don’t you?”

It was during those conversations when I dreaded being in Yemen. They made me feel like a foreigner. I had thought living in Little Yemen back in the Bronx was going to help me here. It didn’t. There were too many things to learn, the different dialects they used at checkpoints and restaurants, the coded language they spoke to each other with, the jokes I didn’t understand even when they were about me. I had to even get used to them blaming everything on America. The bombs, the refugee camps, inflation, even dowries.

“When was the last time you visited Yemen?” Abu Ali asked.

I was embarrassed to answer him. He probably asked because of how child-like my Arabic was.

“It’s my first time,” I said.

He turned to look if I was joking.

I wasn’t.

“How is that even possible, how old are you?”

“24.”

“And you never thought you would visit your birthplace.”

“I was born there.”

“Ya walad, you are fresh, fresh.”

Him calling me boy annoyed the living out of me. It reminded me of how my older brother used to taunt me whenever my dad refused to take me to work with him at his corner store. Little boys stay home with their mothers.

I had come here because it was an opportunity that fell on my lap. But also I was in search of something deeper, something to make me feel whole. Even though I was born at Jacobi Hospital, growing up when my parents talked back home I felt nostalgic. One time my mother told me how she missed walking down the street and felt invisible with her hijab. I cried with her that day.

Back in the minibus, Abu Ali asked me, “You’re a photographer, right?”, pointing at the shoulder bag between my legs where I kept my camera and microphone.

“I’m a video taker,” I said, and it felt awkward in Arabic, “I shoot more videos, but I can do photos, but more videos.”

“How much do you make as,” he paused, “a musawir.”

There was no word for videographer in Arabic. I looked it up while waiting for my plane at JFK. So photographer is used for a person with a camera, and the next best word is hyphenated. I was a musawir-video. Even my profession was unwhole. I told this to Salem on the plane after we ran out of things to talk about and his response was, “Bro it’s not that deep.”

“Everything has its price,” I said to Abu Ali.

“How much do they pay to come here?”

This was the sort of question that got you in trouble, whether you answered it honestly or lied. I didn’t want him to think I was making too much money, or I was being ripped off. So I pretended that I didn’t hear the question. We were silent for a while.

“Do you have to pay taxes on what you make? I hear they’re strict about tax over there?”
he asked.

“Yeah, I pay taxes,” I said.

Suddenly, from the coastal road, he turned into a local neighborhood where the electricity was out. I couldn’t see much of the road with the sun mostly out, except for the four feet the headlights revealed. I kept turning left and right, and saw nothing but apartment buildings, a mosque, and a store or two lit by battery lights. I took the chance to touch my pocket. The envelope was still there.

I thought about the story that went viral on Facebook last year. A man returned to Yemen after two decades of living in America. He hired a driver to take him from Aden to Sanaa, a 12 hour journey around the highways the war destroyed. On the way, he told the driver his story, of his farming years in the village, buying a visa under his cousin’s name after his application was rejected, of the years it took before he started his own business, of the ease it became to expand, and the yearning he felt for the village mornings. Midway, the driver parked on the side, to buy some cigarettes from a shack. When he came back, he was holding a gun. He asked the Yemeni-American for his money. But how could the man give up the twelve-hour shifts he had worked for twenty years without vacations, the time he spent in jail for tax evasion, and the vision he had for building the tallest house in the village. The driver shot him, and took every dream the man packed in his suitcases.

A thousand dollars was probably Abu Ali’s yearly salary. He can feed his family, take them on vacation, give something to his relatives, or book a one way ticket out of the country.

When I looked up, I caught his eyes looking at me. I smiled, but he didn’t.

“Isn’t the airport around here?” I asked, recognizing the crashed American fighter jet I saw on my first day in Aden. It stood perfectly on top of a brick fence, whole and unscathed. It’s like someone winched it there. I was told its engine failed before it fully took off.

Abu Ali didn’t say anything.

He lit another cigarette, and he took a long drag that illuminated his beard, and sinking, small eyes.

“You see,” he said, blowing the smoke towards me, “people like me lost it all, not because we made bad decisions, not because we couldn’t read or write, and not because we didn’t work hard. All of it, in its entirety, depends not on your education, family roots, or manners. It all depends on where you are born.”

“Look!” he told me with a new jolt of energy.

I was looking. Did I say something that offended him? I didn’t have time to think.

“I went to school. Can you believe it?” He said almost sarcastically, like he had told me the same thing numerous times and I didn’t listen.

My palms were cold. My attention was fixed on the distance between my arm resting on the door panel and the handle. The speedometer read 65. It didn’t make sense to jump out to save a thousand dollars, to risk my two thousand dollar camera, and perhaps a broken bone, in a country where hospitals were more deadly than prisons.

“Are you listening,” Abu Ali said.

“Yes, yes. What did you study?” I said. My voice was shaky, and the words bled into each other.

“It doesn’t matter… Actually, I studied electrical engineering. They had a good program, a competitive one. I graduated with the highest grade in the country. My name and picture were in the newspaper.”

I imagined a blown out picture on a newspaper first page with his hair combed to the back, and his beard covering most of the frame. I wanted to ask him if he shaved for that picture.

My phone rang and I took it out of my pocket. It was Salem. Before I could answer, Abu Ali snatched it from my hand.

He put my phone in the top of the compartment next to the cigarettes and said something I couldn’t understand. My heart began to race, and I could feel my ears turn red as they do when I’m anxious.

We got to a roundabout and took the first exit. We drove between two shaved mountain walls.
The digital clock next to the air vent tattered in green, 8:09 PM. We slowed down before a four
way intersection and that’s when I went for the door handle. I snapped it, pushed, and pulled,
then snapped it again with no hope.

“Calm down,” Abu Ali said, lighting another cigarette. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

I was in a state of disillusion. I convinced myself I was in a dream and if I forced my eyes to open hard enough I would wake up in the hotel room that smelled like disinfectant. But the more I opened my eyes the more I realized it was just another ordinary day in Aden. We were driving by a souk, cars and motorcycles filled the streets, honking came from every direction, restaurants were filled with conversations. The only thing I didn’t see yet was a checkpoint. For the past ten days that we were here, I don’t think we drove five miles before passing one.

“What do you want from me?” I finally asked.

“I want to show you something,” he said, taking the last drag from his third or fourth cigarette and flicked it out of his window.

I was ready to give him the money. I wasn’t going to risk my life for a thousand dollars, and if he wanted to keep my iPhone, that too I can give away. I was on a family plan and T-mobile would replace it for half the price.

I took out the envelope from my pocket, and handed it to him.

“Here,” I said, “you can keep it. Just drive me to the camp.”

“Put it away,” he said and continued driving.

I tucked the envelope back in my pocket, and we didn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.

We turned into a narrow, unpaved neighborhood. One and two story brick homes stood on either side. Slogans from the revolution days tatted the walls, calling for the downfall of the regime. Alshaeb Yurid Aisqat Alnizam, echoed in my ears from hearing it on TV shouted by protesters during the Arab spring. Pictures of young men filled electricity poles and doors. Martyr was written before their names like a title one earns from years in school.

We stopped in front of a brick house. There was nothing special about it, except for the metal, burgundy front door with painted leaves and branches on its edges. Abu Ali killed the motor, and stepped down. He opened my door, and waited. I regretted traveling here.

I followed him through the metal door. We walked through a corridor with an open ceiling before we reached a wooden door. He knocked, and a voice of a woman called out. He said, “It’s me, Ahmed. I have a friend with me.”

He looked at me and smiled. I didn’t smile back.

The door clicked open, and he waited for the woman to step aside before entering

“Come in.”

We walked into a landing where we took off our shoes. There was a small, Captain America bike with training wheels turned upwards against the wall. I followed Abu Ali through another door after the landing. He flicked the light switch, and a fluorescent light tube blinked twice before revealing a low ceiling majlis for about seven people. He looked much bigger now, his head almost touching the ceiling. He stepped to the side and pointed for me to sit. I sat at the top of the majlis. The cushion under me felt too thin.

He said something I didn’t understand, and walked out. I instinctively checked for the envelope in my pocket. My heart was beating fast, and I tried inhaling a deep breath, followed by inhaling a shorter breath, and holding it for a second before exhaling slowly through my mouth. I heard about the technique on a podcast on anxiety.

A few minutes later, Abu Ali came back with a steel tray carrying two cups of tea. He sat next to me, and handed me a cup. I took a sip, and felt the sugar and heat biting my tongue. Then from under his arm he took out papers that I hadn’t noticed he was carrying. He handed them to me.

“What is this?” I asked.

“Read.”

At first I thought they were going to be medical bills he wanted me to pay off. But as soon as my eyes fell on the title, I was surprised. It was from the US Department of State. It was a US Student Visa Application.

I looked up from the papers, Abu Ali was watching me.

“All I need is a sponsor,” he said.

I skimmed through the application, but didn’t really understand the language.

“You’re 24, a graduate from university, and files taxes. I have been looking for someone to complete this application for the past two years. From the little connection I have, I found two that asked for more money than I have made in my entire life.”

He said those words with an unrecognizable voice. His tone was defeated, standing at the edge of tears. I never had to sponsor someone before. But growing up I heard of the process from my dad sponsoring a bunch of his family members until he received a letter that banned him from including his name in future applications. I also knew all it required was tax papers, and signing off on the application. Those that charged for sponsorships just wanted to make a few thousand dollars extra on the side from those who had no family overseas.

He reached into his front pocket and took out something covered in white cotton cloth and handed it to me. I took it, and it felt heavier than I expected. I uncovered it and saw three thick gold bracelets that had a protruding shape that made them look more like cuffs.

“This belonged to my mother, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother. You understand?” He said.

I nodded, holding up the bracelets with both hands.

Then he reached back into his pocket, and gave me my phone.

I had eight missed calls from Salem.

“We have to go back,” I said, and he nodded.

“Let’s go.”

Before we stepped out, I gave him back the bracelets and told him I didn’t feel safe carrying them.

On our way to the camp, we were quiet for a while. The coolness of Adan at night brought a sense of relief. I had fallen into the trap of seeing Yemen through foreign eyes. Abu Ali was the perfect stereotypical image photographers looked for to put on a front-page newspaper story to show what backwardness looks like. But how could I have seen the story of a desperate young man, living in a low ceiling home, playing with his son, thinking of his family’s future, flipping through an incomplete application that promised nothing but an opportunity to make a living in exchange for feeling whole?

“Can I have a cigarette,” I heard myself say.

“You smoke?” Abu Ali said, reaching for his pack on top of the stereo.

“I used to,” I said.

He reached for the compartment and flicked the old carton open towards me. There was only one left. I pulled it out, and he handed me the light after tossing the empty carton out of the window. I covered the tip with one hand and rolled the wheel on the lighter a few times before I got a flame going. I took a drag and coughed a little. The second hit made it worse, and by the third, I was coughing so much I had to hand him the cigarette back.

“You’re still a walad .”

I laughed between coughs, struggling to catch my breath.

At the camp, Salem took me to the side and yelled at me for taking so long. I blamed it on the driver, and he promised to fire him after he drove us back to the hotel that night.

While Salem was busy giving out the cash to the families, I sat next to Abue Ali in his minibus and told him he would be fired. He said a proverb or a line of poetry about Adan being a big city full of opportunity for those willing to sweat. After a moment of silence, he reached into his pocket and handed me the bracelets.

I pushed his hand back, and asked him for his phone number and email.

“You’re going to have to let go of the beard,” I said to him.

“You don’t think they’ll like it?” He said.

We both laughed.

I leaned back and watched Salem distribute money to refugees living in tents, surrounded by mountains that hid them from view, and an ocean that threatened to drown if they became ungrateful. Above us, a cloudy sky hid the glistening stars that waited for the wind to clear the way for them to be seen.

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Mohamed Morshed holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Hunter College, and his fiction has appeared in Phoebe Journal. His work centers on the Yemeni American experience, weaving history, language, and memory.

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