Between Two Moons: A Novel - Softcover

Abdel Gawad, Aisha

 
9780593467824: Between Two Moons: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593467825 ISBN 13: 9780593467824
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2024 CAROL SHIELDS PRIZE FOR FICTION AND THE NEW AMERICAN VOICES AWARD • A BOOKLIST BEST BOOK OF 2023 • Set in the Arab immigrant enclave of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, following three siblings coming of age over the course of one Ramadan, "a moving look at family, survival, and celebration" (Hanif Abdurraqib, author of A Little Devil in America).

"A gorgeously written and profoundly intimate debut." —Etaf Rum, author of New York Times bestseller A Woman Is No Man

It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins' expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother's return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.

Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?

A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

AISHA ABDEL GAWAD has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the scholarly journal The Muslim World in a special issue on Anglophone Muslim women writers. She won a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story "Waking Luna." After graduating college, Aisha worked at the Arab American Association of New York, a community center and social services agency serving the immigrant community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She is currently a high school English teacher in Connecticut.

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A

We woke that morning, the first day of what would be a very hot Ramadan in June, to find the police raiding Abu Jamal’s café. A dozen men, dressed more like construction workers than cops, loaded boxes of Nescafé instant coffee and Lipton tea into vans. They carried away glass shisha pipes the size of small children, and dumped mismatched cups and saucers into a large bin of shattered porcelain. Some led dogs on leashes—­big majestic German shepherds and one runty beagle, who sniffed furiously around all the tables.

I might have slept through it. I might have woken up a few hours later to find Abu Jamal’s café closed, to be replaced a few months later with another Arab business—­a falafel stand or a travel agency specializing in trips to Mecca. But Baba woke me up.

“Wake up, ya binti,” he said as he pushed our bedroom window open, the one that led out onto the apartment’s fire escape. “Shoof! They arrest that stupid Libyan.”

He climbed out onto the fire escape in his ratty old galabiya with his black hair sticking straight up. In the bed across from mine, my twin sister, Lina, put a pillow over her face and groaned.

“Hurry up, Amira,” Baba called to me. “Come see.” He sounded gleeful. He leaned against the railing and peered down to the street below to get a closer look. Baba didn’t like Abu Jamal, not since they got into a big argument over whose dictator was worse, Egypt’s or Libya’s. It escalated until Abu Jamal accused Egyptians of turning everyone into religious nuts. “Look at your wife!” he’d said. And that’s when Baba slammed his hand down on one of the plastic folding tables, right in the middle of Abu Jamal’s café, and shattered a plate filled with discarded olive pits. “It was just a plate,” Baba said when he returned home later that night. But that didn’t matter—­ever since then, Baba had been banned. He was now forced to walk another three blocks to the next-­nearest shisha café, and for that, he just couldn’t find it in him to forgive the stupid Libyan.

I pulled on a sweatshirt of Lina’s that she’d left lying on the floor and flipped the hood over my head to cover my hair before I stepped out onto the fire escape next to Baba. The approaching dawn spread like a great purple bruise over New York, but the café was illuminated by a streetlight as if by an interrogator’s lamp. The men with their dogs were milling in and out, talking into radios, and taking photographs. They were moving so fast—­I wanted to call down to them, ask them to slow down, so that I could make sense of what I was seeing. Across the street, Imam Ghozzi, who volunteered as the custodian of the Islamic Center of Bay Ridge, swept dust and bits of trash off the sidewalk in front of the mosque as if nothing unusual were happening.

“What do you think he did?” I asked Baba.

“He probably steal money from little babies,” Baba said.

“It looks like they’re sniffing for bombs or drugs or something,” I said.

Baba blinked rapidly three times, like he does when he can’t hear. “Bombs? No, it’s nothing like that.” He took a step back from the fire escape.

I heard a rustling behind us and turned to find Mama standing at the window with her arms crossed. Her face was pink and glowing, and I could tell it was freshly scrubbed for prayer. She was wearing a long gray abaya and a white prayer veil.

“What’s going on out here?” she asked.

“Shoof, ya Maryam,” Baba said, “they are arresting the stupid Libyan! Come and see.”

“Shame on you, Kareem,” Mama said. “You want to bring bad luck on us like that?”

Mama’s God was a capricious one. He could turn on you on a dime. You had to be careful.

“No, no, Amira and me just out here praying that God forgive the stupid Libyan’s sins,” Baba said, grinning at me.

Mama snorted and then leaned down to wake Lina. She removed the pillow from over Lina’s face, and the lacy edges of her prayer veil brushed Lina’s cheek. Lina swatted it away like a fly. “Sabah al-­khair, ya gamila,” she said.

“Come and eat,” she told us. “It’s almost dawn.”

Bay Ridge was about to fast for a whole month of fifteen-­hour days. We would be one dry mouth, one rumbling belly, one pounding head. Mothers would wake at least an hour before dawn to make the suhoor meal, to scramble eggs and basturma in skillets. And when the children and the husbands finally woke up, usually with only a few minutes to spare, the mothers would stuff the mixture into pita halves so their families could eat more quickly, in time to perform wudu and pray with the sun. It was your last chance to eat and drink and smoke and fuck and curse and gossip and think unkind thoughts until the sun set again in the evening.

Baba shuffled after Mama like a bad dog. Lina stood up and yawned, letting out a long moan. Mama made us a breakfast of hard-­boiled eggs, mashed fava beans, and sliced tomatoes. We sat around the kitchen table, shoveling food sleepily into our mouths, letting bits of egg dribble down our chins. After we’d eaten, Mama stood sentry over us and watched as we each downed three full glasses of water.

“I’m going back to bed,” Lina said after she’d finished.

“Haram, ya binti,” Mama said and grabbed the collar of her Wu-­Tang T-­shirt.

The sun was creeping up the horizon and we still needed to pray Fajr. Mama dragged the coffee table to the corner of the living room to clear space for the four of us to pray all lined up. Then she brought us a basket of delicate white prayer scarves with edges like doilies. Lina and I each slipped one on, and then Mama pointed to the bathroom. We zombie-­shuffled over to it, purposefully knocking into each other as we went.

Lina and I stood side by side in front of the bathroom sink. Silently, we washed ourselves with cold New York City tap water. We were efficient and thorough. In the name of God, state your intent to perform wudu. Wash both hands up to the wrists. Rinse your mouth three times. Clean your nostrils, breathing in water and blowing it out three times. Rinse your face three times. Wash your arms up to the elbows three times. Slick your hair back like an Italian mobster, once. Wash your ears. Wash your feet. Do you feel cleansed? Are you ready?

After we had performed wudu, Mama wanted Baba, our patriarch, to stand in front and lead us in prayers, but he was annoyed about being late to the shop. Baba didn’t like to pray—­sometimes, when he was feeling nostalgic about the old days in the old country, he would tell me about the time he was eighteen and he stormed out of his village masjid back in Egypt.

“That stupid imam, he tell me man come from ball of clay and clot of blood, and I tell him, What, are you stupid? Man, he come from monkey, not clay! So I leave and I go home and I tell my mama, Mama, I’m not praying anymore. And ever since that day, I never pray again.”

Except, of course, he did pray again. Countless times. But I think I know what he meant. He meant that he never really felt it again, never again believed that it would help him ace a test or publish the poems he wrote in the margins of his school notebooks. He prayed now like a man following orders, like a man too tired to put up a fight.

The clock on the mantel chimed. It was like a cuckoo clock, except instead of birds it opened to reveal a tiny golden...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2024
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593467825
ISBN 13 
9780593467824
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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