The Chicken Queen
“The Spiced Chicken Queen of Mickaweaquah, Iowa” is one of those titles bound to misapprehended. The presumption of what the story is likely to be about is almost certainly going to be wrong. Of course, that is not to say that spiced chicken is entirely absent from the narrative:
“At the shelter, Mzayyan set a platter of spiced chicken, its juices dripping over heaps of steaming rice, on the common table, as if setting out a banquet. She wiped the thick black curls matted to her sweaty forehead in a gesture of triumph. Fragrances heretofore unknown in that corner of Mickaweaquah, Iowa, suffused the shelter. From the lonely rooms of the house, other residents gathered, ate, and praised her. Mzayyan did not need a translator to understand this.”
Manar Hates American Food
The opening paragraph of “Manar of Hama” is imagery that used to situate the mindset of the title character. She is a Syrian refugee and against all the internal logic as composed by American assimilation and conditioning, she actually finds her native country’s cuisine preferable to the great American music:
“The food here is terrible. The meat smells disgusting. There is no real bread, or coffee, or olives, or cheese. They have a nasty yellow kind of cheese and even the milk…is tasteless. Even the eggs are pale-yolked.”
Muslim Stereotype as Performance Art
“The Girl from Mecca” isn’t what she’s cracked up to be. Companions on a road trip have been suckered into giving a lift to the poor innocent immigrant, but it turns out she is far from any of those things. In order to raise money to fix the car (because she stole the money the other already had) she puts on a performance for the natives who, of course, do not realize they are watching a performance:
“Honor killing, check; arranged marriage, check; fanatical parents, evil brother, check; what else were they primed to believe? She might go with `The woman in Islam is chattel!` She loved performing that one; it turned her on (well, it made her like adding, `Say it to me wearing a leather mask, baby’).”
Sally Field
Arguably, the most creative uses of imagery in the short fiction of the author to date appears in a single paragraph in which one of the main characters is talking about the spiced chicken queen. That character is introduced with the first words of the story as a battered and abused Syrian immigrant whose grasp of English is so paltry that she needs a translator to convey her story to a counselor. In that respect, she is not too different from “The Girl from Mecca.” Imagery is subtly used to convey the idea of a sweetly underestimated girl who turns out to be much fiercer woman than suspected:
“Rana confided to a friend over coffee at Sister Bertille’s Hole-in-the-Wall. The waitresses wore nuns’ habits with aerodynamic wings. All the tables were decoupaged with stills from The Flying Nun and Gidget. The walls were papered with publicly posters from Smoky and the Bandit I, II, and III, and Not Without My Daughter.”
