"A House of My Own & A Cat" by Cullen Allard

I don’t want much in life, a house of my own and a cat. Recently I’ve become set on owning a bookstore, because I love books and my nana always told me that reading was important. Bookstores were very plentiful in Amman. I love the poems and stories of Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassan Kanafani and it was very easy to find their writings in Amman, but I also discovered a new love for Russian literature. Many of the same bookstores sold copies of famous Russian writers like Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. During the quarantine I was able to finish “The Cossacks and The Raid” by Tolstoy which I had bought during a trip to Madaba at the bookstore Kawon. I highly recommend a trip there if you ever get the chance. 

Tolstoy’s book felt close to home. It spoke to a new found passion for literature and art that I realized in Amman. This love had always been there, but it took me meeting new people to understand how rich these works can make life. 

I still remember reading “Return to Haifa” by Kanafani for the first time and crying. I could feel some sense of shared pain for a family who had lost so much. Later that year I was lent Mahmoud Darwish’s collection of poems titled “Murals”. I read it every night before bed and it was the first time in a long time where I felt like literature meant something to me. 

Unfortunately, I have yet to experience these stories in their original language, and so this is why I learn Arabic. I feel that my Arabic improved dramatically while studying in Amman and I could not have made the progress I did without the expert instructors I had. One day I want to be able to read “Men Under the Sun” and “Murals” in Arabic. If I’m able to do this, I’d love to start collecting other books in Arabic and then be able to provide them to whatever community I’m living in when I open a bookstore. Edward Said once talked in an interview about how he couldn’t understand why there wasn’t much attention given to the literary works of Arabic speakers. I would agree with Said in that it confuses me too. This same interview reminds me of what director Bong Joon-Ho said upon receiving Best Foreign Language film, “once you overcome the 1-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” Why limit myself to the stories of English speakers when there is so much more in this world? The purest reason for learning any language is to share stories. Whether they’re with a cab driver or by famous authors, our stories often reveal common struggles and desires.