The Imagery of Home - “Monkey Business”
Joseph Geha elucidates, “Zizi looks away from them (bums), up to the top windows of the apartment building two streets beyond. A bedroom, affront room, a tiny kitchen, but when Samira was alive, it had been a home. It had been a place where Zizi rediscovered what he’d had once before in his own father’s house-the quite, child-like confidence that here things would always be clean, no matter what, he would be taken care of…Even now the memory of it remains, centered and epitomized in the one remembered image of a cup of coffee, Samira sitting at the kitchen table, drinking a cup of coffee.” This graphic imagery meritoriously stages the Home versus House binary. Samira’s sparkle augmented the dynamism of their guileless apartment. Comparatively, her departure transformed the home into a measly house with mere commemorations of her bygone existence. The imagery typifies the absolute gratification that Zizi derived from his unpretentious home when Samira was still thriving. Nonetheless, Samira’s haunting existence is incarnated in the apartment.
The Imagery of Straightness - “Through and Through”
The narrator simplifies, “ I spent some time in Damascus, Syria. There, not far from the house where my father grew up is a street called Straight. National Geographic says it’s the oldest continually inhabited street in the world-more than five thousand years old - and my uncle took a day off work to show it to me. He was a bricklayer, helping to put up the new (then, in 1933) church commemorating the spot where Saint Paul was supposedly knocked from his horse and blinded by the light of Jesus.” Straightness incarnates perpetuity of transitional human endurance due to the five thousand years that it has been colonized interminably. The imagery of Paul underwrites the transcendental disposition of the street which has, in all probability, a bearing on the narrator’s religiousness throughout his old age.
