Spices
The opening lines of “Manar of Hama” situates the title character as someone for whom food is utmost importance. Not in the sense of being hungry or even of aesthetics, but of flavor and the texture and the distinction between that food which possesses those elements and that food which does not. The level of this significance will be shortly thereafter through the of metaphor:
“Yesterday I smelled allspice. I confess, I followed the girl. She smelled like incense from the mosque where the Mawlawi order holds their Circle of Remembrance. I was entranced, I was like a lunatic.”
Well, that’s Just Rude!
The titular character of the “The Girl from Mecca” is the wild card in a road trip saga, a seemingly needy Muslim in need of help from other Muslims. It doesn’t take long for the narrator to enter her mind and reveal the full extent of just far from realty she strays from the bill of goods the two traveling companions were sold:
“I really do have a grandfather in Phoenix,” she said to the kindly heifers in the car, after she’d let slip that she was California bound.
The Interrogation
“The Spiced Chicken Queen of Mickaweaquah, Iowa” dives right into the action with a victim of domestic abuse trying to describe the most recent incident. A caseworker is relying upon the Arabic-to-English translation skills of a third party to get to the truth of the hidden beneath accident of the Syrian American victim. It is not proving to be easy to the middleman (or woman, actually) in this transaction:
“Her sentences fell in thick unwieldy coils and Rana had to grab of the tail end while sorting them out in her mind.”
All Roads Lead to Hollywood
Forget Mecca; in America, all roads lead to Hollywood. The road trip is going as strangely as might be expected when the three travelers find themselves in need of quick cash to fix the car. So the girl from Mecca sets about putting on what she does best—the sweet pity act—and soon enough, money isn’t a problem. Her pride in herself is expressed in standard American simile form:
“She was going to be the next Keira Knightly, she just knew it.”
Dissing the One True Religion
Manar really—really—does not like America. Nothing is up to her standard. And it’s not just the food, it’s pretty much every aspect of American life. She even has the temerity to criticize the one bond which unifies the entire country…in a way that simultaneously pits them against each other:
“They have no idea that anyone in the world outside Sonora Falls, Illinois, exists. Except maybe the next town over where the rival school team lives against whom they compete that savage sport Americans play instead of soccer. The one where the object is for the players to ram each other like mad beasts.”
