“
You used to sit like this and tell me stories about my great-great-grandmother, the one who killed scorpions with her bare heels and slit the throats of the goats on Eid. You and Teta Badra before you and Teta's mother before her—my great-grandmother Wafaa, daughter of the scorpion-killer—you were the bearers of bravery in our family. You were the one who fought to save the neighborhood I'm now sneaking into to paint each night. But you failed to realize that America has only ever deemed certain heritages worth preserving.
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