Child’s Tears
By Yasmeen Hanoosh
Translated by Ali Issa
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrr… It’s so cold here!
They say my life in this fine crafted pot is a miracle, because I got to where I am now—North America—through cunning and disguise, after crossing more than one continent on foot. Not my feet, of course, but those of my companions, who carried me unknowingly on their final departure from the homeland. I rode in dark crates of death on more than one truck, smuggled across borders forbidden to my people.
I didn’t mean to hide, nor did I seek asylum in their safe haven. Through simple dumb luck, I got thrown in with the few things they hastily packed from their bedrooms. Whether we liked it or not, I became part of the heavy burden they bore across the harsh northern mountains, escaping tyranny and chasing the dream of a better life.
They call me Child’s Tears (soleirolia soleirolii) because of my small, clustered leaves. Kids bend them and they snap easily, releasing the sap that fills me. I cry quickly, but I heal just as fast, like a child’s tears and bruises.
If I had it my way, though, I would have called myself Mirror of the Soul, or Reflection of the Spirit, or Pain Incarnate, or something of that sort. That’s because one of my most striking qualities is this tendency to absorb and reflect the emotions that stir within the creatures around me. Having spent nearly all my life in the company of humans—and only humans—I’ve developed this uncanny ability to mirror their narrow, recurring feelings, day after day.
Most of these feelings are variations of fear.
I’d ask myself: what if humans didn’t think of death at all? Would they live their lives differently? Or would their reality produce another shadow of meaning to keep them quivering?
I don’t want to go on too long about all the fears that I’ve absorbed from my immigrant family. But I have this strong urge to tell you about Umm Sa’ad, who now spends most of her time at home with me, here, when the others are away.
Her son, Sa’ad, was born just before their exile, shortly after what people called “America’s first invasion” of the capital. At first, when she was pregnant with him, she feared the taint of depleted uranium, which had already disfigured so many unborn children. When he was born whole and healthy, they rejoiced, blessing life and praising God. Their relatives—those who hadn’t left the country yet—risked everything to come from all corners of the country to celebrate. It was the old human ritual of giving thanks for survival.
Sa’ad came down with the usual childhood illnesses. His mother would stay up for nights beside him, as all mothers do. But unlike them, she couldn’t find any of the medicines he needed. She would sit silently beside me, her tired eyes fixed on the bare wall across from her child’s bed. She felt—and I felt right along with her—the violence of that emptiness spreading through the room.
Everything in that country had run out: its beloved people, its children’s medicine, their toys, their innocence, their future.
One night, I sensed her resolve harden in the silence. She had vowed to save their son from the fate that had befallen them. They would not let it reach him, whatever the risk, whatever the cost. They soldeverything they owned, gave what remained to the poor who were now everywhere. He was only three years old when they packed a few bags and set out across the mountains.
They carried him with determination—and me by pure chance—all the way to this land of snow and endless asphalt roads.
Soon Sa’ad joined the neighborhood daycare. His mother had to take language classes, and then she got a job that had her stay long hours at the office. She would leave the house with him at six, before dawn, and not return until it was quite dark, carrying him asleep upon her shoulder. I was left alone during these long hours of their absence, recalling their emotions once they had gone beyond my reach, sensing the hush of loneliness that filled the house. I felt the same quiet sadness that settled over them on their weary weekends, which went by fast, full of pity and fatigue.
Even language began to fade. The family forgot the words for their old routines and couldn’t replace them with new ones fast enough.
Every morning, while she prepared a hurried breakfast, Umm Sa’ad felt her son slipping away—the child she now barely got to see. And I felt it with her. She swallowed the little meltdowns that overtook her. She wept in silence, and so did I. She saw him sliding from her grasp, and I saw it, too.
On a weekend soon after, she brought him near me and tried to teach him my name, Dam‘at Tifl. Child’s Tears. She asked him to repeat it, but he couldn’t pronounce the Arabic letters ع or ط, nor could he understand what the words meant. I felt her heart clench as she realized that her son was drifting out of the world of her words into a foreign one—a world she herself would never truly enter, in what was left of their life together.
Alongside that slow severing came the sorrow of watching him break free; an ache familiar to every refugee and migrant parent, as they went through the misery of intergenerational conflict for the first time. One feeling never left her: the gnawing fear for her son’s survival, fear of some unknown danger.
Every day she felt that a new life had been written for him, that he had again escaped the death that had stalked him since birth. Yet she’d conjure the darkest possibilities when he was in daycare, then elementary school, and when he got even older, in high school. She would imagine him deeply lonely, or sick, or injured, or run over by a car, or kidnapped—every minute of every day that he was not in her sight. When the phone rang at work, she rushed to answer, certain that someone was calling to tell her that her son had died.
“A mother’s heart,” she told herself, “knows these things.”
Sa’ad himself teased her about her never-ending worries, calling them “crazy town.” His father, though, sympathized with her, saying it was only the years of war and fear that haunted her still. But she knew her dread went deeper than that, deeper than the instinct of any mother. She was haunted by the conviction that she was right. It was a feeling that haunted me, too.
We could never really breathe a sigh of relief, not through all the years of her son’s safety and success, because she was dreading doomsday, certain it was creeping closer and closer with each passing year.
And then one day, she got the call she’d been dreading for years, the call I had absorbed, too.
After all those years of rehearsing grief, it was unbearable when it finally arrived.
For days she kept repeating the two words: hate crime. Sometimes she’d say it in disbelief, sometimes as a question, sometimes in rage or disgust, until she collapsed near me, weeping uncontrollably.
She sifted through her past, seeking out the sweetness or bitterness of their short life together, searching for any thread that might convince her that the chain of choices she had made—from the moment she chose to flee—had not caused her son’s death. But the logic of the past quickly fell apart, and she could find no reason, no redemption, for that awful journey that she thought would save him from a certain death.
2001, New York City
This story originally appeared in the collection The Land of Cursed Riches.
Ali Issa is a translator and the General Coordinator of the Cooperative Economics Alliance of NYC. Originally from Iowa, he holds a Master’s degree in Arabic Studies from the University of Texas at Austin, has most recently translated for the independent Iraq-based media project Jummar, and is the author of the book Against All Odds: Voices of Popular Struggle in Iraq. Ali is a committed fan of improvised music and lives in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. He can be reached at ali@gocoopnyc.org