An Excerpt of Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s ‘No One Knows Their Blood Type’

What follows is an excerpt from Maya Abu al-Hayyat’s extraordinary No One Knows Their Blood Type, out now in Hazem Jamjoum’s excellent translation from CSU Poetry Center. You can read another excerpt in Full Stop with a third forthcoming in the Cleveland Review of Books. This excerpt, from the section titled “Amahl / Beirut, 1979–1982,” is from the point of view of the central character’s mother as she gets to know her new husband. In it, readers will find some of the brilliant defamiliarization of the human body, the novel’s ultra-closeups, and its sharp-eyed exploration of human relationships.

From ‘No One Knows Their Blood Type’

By Maya Abu al-Hayyat

Translated by Hazem Jamjoum

When we entered our marital home for the first time I knew something horrible was going to happen. I had been somewhat ceremoniously handed over to a ghoul. What masqueraded as our shared intimacy was less than ceremonious: an inexplicable twitch of his hand that grabbed at my face, his lips clasping onto mine, his exhaust pipe of a mouth slobbering its way around. My jaw could have broken, my teeth could have shattered, and I was terrified that he might bite me—but those were kisses, preludes to one body buffeting another, slammed into, jolted. Done.

One night followed another. It was hard labor that we had to perform around the clock until the coming of the heralded Saeed, who disgusted me before he was even conceived. Oh how I hated that son I never carried. I hated the idea of him, his walk, the look in his eyes, the way he ate, the very idea of his existence. Once, as my begetter-half devoured stuffed grape leaves my mother had made so he would appreciate her, I closed my eyes and made myself a secret vow. Saeed would never come to be. Not today. Not any day.

*

When I first found out that I was pregnant with Yara I knew she was a girl, even though he had forced me to prepare Saeed’s blue clothes. He came to accept it, maybe because everyone who saw her said she looked like him, and that the resemblance must be because of the intensity of my love for him. When I gave birth to her I couldn’t believe something so hideous could emerge from me: a mass of dark flesh that washed off day by day. He didn’t want her at first, but grew somewhat accepting of, almost happy about, her existence. He would return home laden with bags of vegetables, meat, and poultry, the sight of which sent electric shocks all over my body. I had to clean it all. He expected me to de-stem the mulukhiya he brought in by the tens of kilograms in the summer for me to clean and freeze so we could gorge on it all winter. He would dump this load at my feet, then lift Yara to his shoulders and carry her off to the toy store or to Salim’s shop, bringing her back with bundles of toys and sweets. When he was out, she waited for him to come home, and maybe she loved him as well.

I liked seeing her with him like that. For fleeting moments I’d feel that I was being unfair. I would list off the qualities of his that I considered good, though I could never quite get beyond what you could count on the fingers of one hand. And it never took long before he erased all of that with a single mood swing.

Born in 1980 in Lebanon, Maya Abu Al-Hayyat is an Arabic-language Palestinian novelist, poet, and children’s book author. She edited The Book of Ramallah, an anthology of short stories published by Comma Press in 2021. An English translation of her poetry appeared from Milkweed Editions under the title You Can Be the Last Leaf, translated by Fady Joudah and named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Hazem Jamjoum is a cultural historian completing his doctorate at NYU, and an audio curator and archivist at the British Library.