JOB SEEKING [ tr. by Katharine Halls]

Published by Moussemagazine.

https://www.moussemagazine.it/magazine/jobseeking-sara-abou-ghazal-2025/

My number flashes up on the large screen in the hall of the Employment Support Center and I make my way to door number 7. I try to imagine it’s a lucky number. “Ms. Olav” is wearing a special Christmas waistcoat because it will be Christmas in two weeks, reminding us of the Savior’s birth and marking, for me, the end of one year on state benefits as a recipient of humanitarian protection.

I was required to start taking language classes and looking for a job immediately after my status was granted, but it took me over six months to find a place to live, leaving me less than half a year to find work. So I find myself staring at the national employment listings directory each morning, skimming the page on the municipality website where they announce openings I could apply for. My CV has been sitting here on my computer desktop, open the whole time, regardless of whether I’m actually working on it. I’ve thought a couple of times about sending it to people I’ve met since arriving here, but I always chicken out at the last minute.

I tell myself that having the state and its institutions breathing down my neck is a good opportunity to work on my CV and should be embraced. My current CV was written for me thirteen years ago, back before we fell out of touch, by a friend of our next-door neighbor’s daughter who spoke and wrote excellent “English”—we used the English word for English, not the Arabic one—because she’d grown up in the Emirates.

And honestly, the CV was a blessing, opening doors wherever I knocked. Every time I left a job, whether I resigned or was fired, I’d add the new skills and experiences I’d acquired to the CV, attempting to imitate the masterful writing style of our next-door neighbor’s daughter’s friend. I’d had two jobs prior to this CV. The first, while I was at university studying for my BA in sociology, was as a retail assistant in a copy shop called Hawwa Fotocenter, where I learned that “Mr. Imad” did not like to be addressed as Ustaz, as he informed me on my second day on the job. Mr. Imad was a big fan of the USA and traveled there every summer to visit his siblings and friends and sometimes purchase various gadgets, which customers came all the way from other cities to see and buy.

It was Mr. Imad who introduced me to the concept of the “shift.” My workmates and I were in a perpetual hurry, running from lectures to the shop and back, noting down our break times and waiting impatiently for our shifts to end so we could clock out. We were expected to arrive fifteen minutes before the start of shift, and wait fifteen minutes after shift was over before leaving. My mother didn’t understand what a shift was, despite my attempts to explain. In the end I told her that working hours were divided into shifts just like days were divided into five prayer times. The word “shift” ended up getting paired in my mind with zuhr, ʿasr, maghrib,and ʿishaʾ.

I abandoned my job in photocopying, printing, and stationery retail after a year and a half, when Mr. Imad installed CCTV in the shop. He would watch the footage and then come to us and point out that we hadn’t, say, smiled at a particular customer, or that we’d spent too long chatting amongst ourselves at the American-style coffee machine, which emitted a lifelike birdie tweet when the pot was about to overflow. Knowing that the camera was there made me tense. I started to get a burning sensation in the back of my neck whenever I remembered I was being watched, and I’d have to consciously place a hand on my neck, chest, or cheek to be sure I wasn’t actually burning. I found it difficult to get my words out, too—all of a sudden I kept spitting inadvertently when I was trying to say something—and I felt like I was blinking in a weird way. When I informed Mr. Imad I was leaving, he didn’t give me a hard time or ask why, he just said I’d be paid three weeks’ wages for my final month because it would take him a week to find and train a new girl.

A few months later, by which point I’d graduated, my erstwhile Fotocenter colleague Salim found me a new job at the Ali Mahdum Bey Charitable Foundation. Working hours were eight a.m. to one p.m. I was part of a team that processed applications for support, which involved checking applicants’ ID documents and sometimes writing their applications. If they owned a flat, copies of the property deed and title number were also required, along with the usual personal and financial details. My main task was to photocopy these documents and put them all in a folder that bore the foundation’s logo. Sometimes I helped distribute boxes of food or cleaning products, or organize the meetings which Ali Bey himself held with locals from the neighborhood surrounding the foundation’s offices. On those occasions we’d be given tabards to wear, also printed with the foundation logo, even though we dressed formally, as per the instructions: for the girls, mid-heel shoes and natural-looking makeup (no bright colors), and for the boys, maroon shirts and black trousers.

I left the foundation after another year and a half, on the day Uncle Samir called my father to warn him that Ali Mahdum Bey had decided to venture beyond business and philanthropy into the world of politics and was running for the office of city governor, thereby challenging the incumbent, Hakim Bey, who had to have been around for fifty years or so and had turned the elections into a carnival that took over the entire city center. Each year, he marked his years in office by personally firing the corresponding number of shots from his pistol. Like most people, we used to stay at home, barbecue meat, and thereby enjoy the revelry from a safe distance.

After that, I found myself unemployed and at home for over a year. I helped my mother clean, do my brothers’ laundry—they were doing their military service—and haul the weekly meat and veg shopping back from the market. By two p.m., when my younger siblings arrived home, grumbling about school, I’d be worn out. I’d clean the bathroom to get away from their pestering and shouting, then finish up with a quick shower and pick out a fresh pair of pajamas to wear. My mother always advised me to wear something old and tatty for the housework rather than my usual pajamas, which would soon wear out if they were washed every day.

I began to doubt my chances of ever getting another job. I’d applied for plenty of state jobs and never been picked, not even for the municipal police force’s women’s section, which only required applicants to hold a junior school certificate. I became convinced I was a nobody, fit for nothing but housework.

 But the moment that girl placed her fingers on the keyboard and typed out my name in “English” letters, I felt like I was making my entry into the world of business. The feeling of being a nonentity melted away as I watched her place my year of graduation, degree title, and fields of experience into neatly formatted lines and columns; it was like meeting myself for the first time. She instructed me to list the tasks I’d performed at the Fotocenter and later at the foundation, then told me it was important for a CV to always include four hobbies. First, she wrote basketball, so the reader would know I was a good team player. Next, I proposed either horseback riding or swimming, so the reader would know I was capable of working independently. For my third hobby, she wrote drawing, to imply that I paid attention to detail, and for the fourth and last, in order to demonstrate my interest in the world around me, she put reading and writing. One of the neighbor’s daughter’s friend’s final touches was to add a section called “Community Service,” which she said was a chance for me to show the reader my human side and demonstrate a commitment to noble principles. Under this heading I wrote that I’d volunteered with the Red Cross while I was at university.

Whenever I glanced at the document on the computer screen, or at one of the A4 paper copies I’d printed out and placed in a plastic folder then packed into my rucksack, ready to be handed out at the first opportunity, the sight of my name at the top left, written in “English” in a large, wide-spaced font, followed by my mobile number, email, and address, filled me with the sense that I’d suddenly become a successful person. I began sending my CV out left right and left, whenever I came across an admin or retail job on a listings site or in the free paper. Friends often forwarded me announcements by email, too. After a month of this I received a phone call from Jad Khayr al-Din, head of HR at an NGO called Humanity Now, inviting me to interview for the position of research assistant, for which I’d recently applied.

I often thank the Lord that Mr. Imad taught us everything a person could wish to know about sending emails, printing, copying, and scanning. As soon as I put the phone down, I went back to the computer and looked back through my sent items for the application I’d submitted. Before we all fled the war that had by then reached our doorsteps, the old computer sat in the same spot in the living room where my mother, God rest her, had first put it after my father warned her against putting it in our bedroom, where we would be unsupervised. We kept using it even though it was slow and couldn’t keep up with the new internet speeds. My brother kept having to replace parts of it until I got my own laptop and stopped using the old PC, almost forgetting about the Gmail account I’d set up that at one point served as the household email address.

When I came out of the interview, I was confident I’d be hired, because Monsieur Jad—who was around my age, but whom I was nevertheless too embarrassed to address as simply “Jad”—had asked me several times if I’d mind coming into the office at seven thirty in the morning rather than eight, and if it was okay that I’d only be registered for social security once my probation year was over. He didn’t ask much about my experience and gave me no opportunity to repeat the points I’d prepared about the importance of humanity and protecting the human, and how I had a lot of sympathy for homeless people. He also didn’t ask for any references, which was good because I doubted that Muhammad, my team leader at the Ali Bey Foundation, or even Mr. Imad, would remember me well enough to say anything flattering. My confidence was proved correct when Monsieur Jad called to offer me the job. I’d receive minimum wage plus transport expenses; five days paid leave, including Labor Day, New Year’s Day, National Day, and two further dates according to my religion; two days paid sick leave; and social security after the first year. I accepted immediately.

When I see the name Humanity Now listed on the CV file that’s been open for months on my laptop screen, I reflect that I’ve always considered it the real starting point in my career in my field of study, even though my original aim in studying sociology had been to apply for a job as head teacher or deputy or even administrator in a state school. I didn’t want to teach because I’d taught my younger siblings and it left me physically and mentally demolished, especially when it came to Hadi, who would begin to whine and wail before even an hour was out, complaining that his head was hurting from so many numbers, even when we were working on a dictation, say, not realizing that I too could hear the inviting shrieks of the children who were out playing in the street instead of doing their homework.

My older brother and I had parted ways somewhere around the Polish border. My journey came to an end in a processing room on an upper floor of Charles de Gaulle airport with a door I couldn’t lock, and outside it, a toilet with a door that didn’t close properly and policemen popping up constantly in the corridors, come to disappear one of us or add another to our number.

I called my father from the Red Cross detention center, which people had nicknamed the Hotel. I’m sure everyone else who ends up there thinks, like I did, that they’ll spend their first night after applying for asylum in an actual hotel, and anticipate as I did a hot bath and the fragrance of clean bedsheets. And I’m sure everyone who slept on one of those beds like I did quickly lost their smile when they realized the Hotel was in fact a temporary detention center.

I’d relaxed slightly when they told me an Arabic-speaking lawyer would attend my screening session. I gathered from the Red Cross employee working at the Hotel that this screening session was where I was required to register my asylum claim in order to avoid being deported to my mother country. Feeling a little braver, I fished out the landline number that I’d carefully hidden in my rucksack and called my father. But before I could ask how he and my mother were doing and reassure him I was fine, he told me that they’d buried Hadi under the living room of the house in the village, and that they’d sent Shadi—the next brother up from Hadi—off on the journey and that he’d made it to Germany.

I put down the phone and walked back to my room. The Red Cross employee had closed the door. I could see through the pane of glass that he was sitting at his desk eating, behind a sign announcing that he was currently on a break. I reorganized the rucksack, which I’d correctly calculated would be all I’d manage to hang on to during the journey, and which held everything that was important and necessary. My other luggage had been dragged across borders, on and off buses and trains, but wasn’t fated to arrive with me at my final destination. I waited for the police officer who was to accompany me from the Hotel to the screening center in another part of the airport. As I was walking beside him through the sea of travelers, it dawned on me that they’d buried Hadi because he was dead. The policeman must have been distracted too, because I suddenly found myself without him, so I snuck away into the crowds, changed my clothes in a bathroom, and headed for the nearest exit. My father said they’d buried him in our village, which had been abandoned by its residents. Afraid that a body buried in the cemetery might be robbed, they dug a grave for him beneath the sitting-room floor—of course the house had been looted, too—so that he’d remain at home just like my father had asked him to before he’d been killed.

By the time I opened my CV, which I’d saved in my emails, in the library at the last asylum processing center, it had been roughly three years since my last job, and a year and a half of the war that consumed the cities and villages around us before my brother and I decided to try our luck with the crowds waiting at the port for a cargo ship to take them to one of the many reception camps that waited on neighboring shores. Sometimes the ships took fifty people; sometimes they took a thousand. Reaching the ships and getting aboard were the easiest parts of the process because the ships’ arrival was met with a ceasefire during which fighters loaded and unloaded goods.

The dangerous part was waiting for the ships. The United Nations declared years ago that our countries were no longer fit for human habitation, and after that, the ships began evacuating people when they departed. I recently read some statistic that the likelihood of death before boarding was 90 percent. My older brother and I were lucky: we managed to stick together, nobody noticed us huddling with our bags inside a ruined building to wait, and we hadn’t encountered any remote-controlled explosives on our way. Maybe the remote controller had gone out for a fag and missed their chance to blow us up.

My phone got lost in all the moving and walking and running away, but I’d written the password of my email account on a piece of paper, and I kept scans of my passport, ID, and certificates, as well as a few photos, as attachments in messages to Hadi. The piece of paper, which I’d laminated as Mr. Imad had taught me to do, remained folded in the pocket of a shirt that reminded me of myself before all of this. When HR asks me about the large gap in my CV, I’ll mention going abroad, settling in, and learning the language. That’s what the trainer at the last asylum processing center told us to do when we were having our mock job interviews.

The shirt caused a stir at Humanity Now. Monsieur Jad surprised me by moving to another organization during my first week in the job. I heard afterward from Imm Musa, who cleaned the building and served tea and coffee for the employees at reasonable prices, that he was the last of the old team to leave. A month in, I still hadn’t met the director, Madame Lina, who was at a major summit outside the country when I started work.

One day I was in the main lobby of the organization’s offices, where my desk—or, rather, my photocopier—was, drinking one of Imm Musa’s strong cups of tea, when Madame Lina walked in. I was scanning files to be digitally archived, and of course typing the information into the catalog so I didn’t forget it. I didn’t recognize her, so I assumed she had an appointment with one of the staff, and when she asked for Khaldun, the IT guy, I asked her to wait while I finished typing my sentence so I could hear her properly. At that point Khaldun came in, greeting her in a manner I hadn’t seen him use before, and when he addressed her as Madame Lina, I understood. Later on, Suhayla, the programs manager, introduced her to me as they were coming out of the conference room. I saw she was speaking English, not Arabic, so I held out a hand and said, “Welcome back, Miss Lina.”

Suhayla quickly corrected me: “Madame Lina.”

While I was trying to apologize for not having recognized her, she interrupted me to tell me the shirt I was wearing was inappropriate for work because it was a man’s shirt and I was a girl. I was extremely embarrassed, but she went on to welcome me to the team and asked me to accompany her to the top floor, where her office was, to collect the chocolate she’d bought at the airport for the staff on the lower floors. As we made our way to the lift, she asked me about my family, where I lived, and what I’d studied. After that there was a silence until she handed me the chocolate and asked me to clear away the plate of leftover delivery food sitting on her desk and put it in the bin on my way down.

Seven years I worked for Madame Lina. Who’d have imagined telling Imm Musa one day that the newest staff member would go on to become the oldest? Employees were perpetually coming and going; Suhayla, Khaldun, and I were the only constants. Suhayla was a close friend of Madame Lina and the only one who addressed her as “Lina,” without a title. The pair spent a lot of time in Madame Lina’s office, and sometimes had meetings and discussions with important people; occasionally, unsure of myself, I heard peals of laughter issuing from her office, especially after my desk and photocopying station were moved to the top floor, just next door to her. I say “unsure” because Madame Lina never laughed or smiled. She reminded me of a customer I’d once had at the Fotocenter. I’d given her 5 percent off because she’d waited three minutes in the speedy copying queue, and then she complained that I’d been rude. The shift manager told me afterward to keep in mind that the pricier speedy copying service was for customers who didn’t want to have to speak to the staff. Our job was to listen and deliver, and if speaking became necessary, we were to press the call button to summon the manager. Before finding out she’d complained, I’d smiled at her, and she’d responded with a tight-lipped smile of her own without taking her eyes off her phone screen. I gave her the discount because I thought she was pissed off at having to wait, not realizing it was the smile that had pissed her off.

Newcomers never made it through the first year. Some found another job and moved on without incident. Others found their relationships at the organization going rapidly downhill, making the office a hive of whispered side conversations and repeated emails from Miss Suhayla about working hours and punctuality, the code of conduct changing yearly as a result. I tried to stay out of all this as best I could. Khaldun and I were a happy pair who enjoyed good relations with everyone, and when we were witness to the staff and administrations’ problems, we tried to offer a place for reconciliation. A year in, Madame Lina requested that I move to her floor, and after that, I only saw Khaldun at lunchtimes in the lobby when he dropped Madame Lina’s lunch off, ready for me to heat it for her and check she had everything she needed.

That year, I had the feeling I might not last. I thought Madame Lina hated me because she was always sticking her head around the door to make comments about my clothes until I took to wearing the same black trousers and white shirt year-round. When she moved me to her floor, I bought an apron for washing the dishes she left after working late. I answered to Miss Suhayla, but while I continued to scan and copy books and photos, I also became responsible for attending to Madame Lina’s guests, ordering tea and coffee from Imm Musa, meeting Madame Lina’s son Sa’id off the bus and heating up his lunch. On occasion I’d help him with his homework or play with him until it was time for me to leave. But after a year of that, they gave me a 15 percent raise and extended my working hours so that I left with the rest of the staff, and it also became my task to hand the boy over to his father if Madame Lina was working late, or take him downstairs to be picked up by her sister, because Madame Lina didn’t like to be in the lift by herself.

The stability that came with my permanent contract was wonderful. I would always encourage colleagues who were angry at the administration to compromise and abandon their odd views on work. I’d persuade them, for example, that washing dishes or other chores was just part of the job, and so what if they had to work an extra hour or five here and there? So what if they had to relieve Suhayla of a few tasks? She worked so hard for our organization; we ought to behave like a supportive family. And anyway, didn’t our salary always arrive in our accounts on the first of the month, without fail? My colleagues stopped talking to me about work, and now and then Miss Suhayla would ask me if such-and-such a person was in a bad mood. She never liked my answers. I came to be seen by the staff as part of the administration, while remaining just another employee in the eyes of the administration. Five years after I’d been made permanent, I applied for an ongoing professional development course in library management and cataloguing. We’d been sent a notice about the course, and it had ended up in the stack of unwanted letters and invitations Madame Lina placed my desk to be disposed of. But my hand refused to drop the flyer into the shredder. I asked Khaldun what he thought, and he was encouraging, sure that Miss Suhayla wouldn’t object to me leaving work a little early to attend the course.

One morning a month after the deadline, I received a letter of acceptance to the course. Before the day was out, Miss Suhayla had written to tell me they’d declined to provide a recommendation for me and were deeply shocked that I’d stolen private information from my place of work and used it for personal benefit. The next day, when I came into the lobby, put down my bag, and started to make a coffee before Madame Lina arrived, I found Khaldun sitting at my desk, tinkering with something, which was how I learned they were planning to copy the contents of my computer and find a pretext to fire me. I resigned and was given a month’s pay for each year I’d worked. By my last week, Madame Lina was putting her dirty dishes directly on my desk without smiling or even looking at me. I’d refused to apologize for applying for the course, and denied their accusations that I’d stolen information that had been placed on my desk for disposal. I’d genuinely been trying to pursue my professional development. As per office custom, on my last day in the office, Miss Suhayla bought a cake—the kind Madame Lina liked—and the staff gathered at lunchtime to wish me farewell, and we took a group photo to go on the wall bearing the words “Humanity Now big family.”

Some time after that, Khaldun sent me an ad for the position of office manager at Channel 7, a foreign station, where he himself had gotten a job after Madame Lina fired him for refusing to help her install internet at her home, which was in an area where fighters had begun to take control. It was around that time, after the economic collapse and with a farmers’ uprising gathering momentum in the provinces, that Humanity Now closed their offices in the city and relocated to a neighboring country. Mr. Jonathan, who was very keen on me as a candidate, told me he’d been sure I was the right person for the job from the moment I’d promised to take care of the office as if it were our home. The Channel 7 listing on my CV only shows one year instead of a start and end date, and looks insignificant next to my time at Humanity Now. By the end of that year, Jonathan had left both the channel and the country, and foreign broadcasters had switched to using drones. The farmers’ uprising became a full-fledged war, which took on sectarian dimensions in certain regions and familial dimensions in others, while in yet others it was a case of the army versus the militant groups we’d come to call the Accidentals, who wielded the most power and influence throughout the war.

When the team left, we didn’t hear from Channel 7 at all, not even a message telling us to stop work or a pay slip for the last sums we were owed. Our work email addresses simply stopped working, and the team vanished into thin air. The last time I saw him, Khaldun was in the office dismantling the computers so he could sell them and recoup many months’ of unpaid salary. He said he’d leave the fridge for me if I wanted, and Hadi could come and pick it up in his work van; he was working at the municipality then. We’d stuck a team photo on the fridge door after a couple of new correspondents were hired, along with notes about coffee and keeping the kitchen clean, and a printout of the names signed up for the night shift. I was wary of the fridge for the first few months, because whenever I put my packed lunch in there it disappeared, until I learned that Jonathan ate whatever he found in there. He had decided this was part of our culture, and I think we were too embarrassed to correct him. At Humanity Now, if I put my lunch in the fridge in a container from a shop or a restaurant, Madame Lina would tut in disgust, take it out, and drop it into the bin, so I bought my own Tupperware and started putting it in the veg drawer, out of her sight. Only when she found a basket of cherries, brought by my father from our orchards, at my request, would she smile. Seven years, and she’d only say thanks after checking they’d been washed.

We sent the fridge to the house in the village, and followed not far behind when the city came under siege. That was the last summer we all spent time together, just like when we were kids. In the early mornings we’d go walking in the valley to pick za’tar and dandelion greens and look for wild garlic and onion with my mother. After that, Shadi and Hadi would disappear and come back with rabbits or firewood to be set aside for winter. At harvest time, we’d pick cherries one by one, and my mother and I would sit by the side of the road to sell them, though we seldom found anyone to buy. The war and the blocked roads would remind us that the currency, which had lost most of its value after the mint was forced to close, electricity had been cut off, and the governor of the central bank fled abroad, was barely available. We told people we’d take a kilo of cheese, a dozen eggs, a strip of paracetamol, or a kilo of flour for one and a half kilos of cherries. We didn’t get any takers.

Meanwhile, I kept looking for a job. I was sure I’d find something in the public sector because people were fleeing in vast numbers, either across the land borders to neighboring countries, or by sea to the surrounding islands. That summer the ports were empty. There were no ships, no yachts, no vessels of any size, and the local boat-making industry burst into life once again. Shadi was considering taking over a section of a nature reserve that the municipality had established in the village—thereby eating up a chunk of the land, wooded with cypress, eucalyptus, pine, and cedar, that my father had announced was to be Shadi’s inheritance—so we suggested that he make us a boat, which we’d pay for by helping fell the trees, and then we could leave by sea. But as summer came to an end, we left the house and returned as quickly as we could to the city, because the Accidentals were tightening their grip. Everything got worse that autumn, and hopes of a peace deal gave way to more or less outright Accidental control. Weeks of alarm and fear alternated with weeks of relative normality, and I continued my search for a job, either one close to home or one that I could do from home. I didn’t have any luck.

Ms. Olav skims the printout of my CV, which I sent in advance, and notes down next to the year I was hired at Channel 7 that I ceased work in the same year. When she’s done, she puts it down on the table in front of her and looks at me. She checks she’s got the pronunciation of my name right, confirms my change of address, places a tick in the box next to “Has the applicant found independent accommodation?” and then asks me what kind of work I’m interested in.

“I’m looking—,” I begin, then hesitate. “I’m looking for a job.”

This piece originally appeared in Arabic under the title “Ana abhath ʿan ʿamal” in “Labor & Idleness,” special issue, Rusted Radishes: Beirut Literary and Art Journal,no. 11 (2024): 107–13, https://www.rustedradishes.com/أنا-أبحث-عن-عمل/

Originally published in Mousse #90 – The Fiction Issue

Sara Abou Ghazal is a Palestinian feminist writer from Beirut. Her debut novel, The Dreams of Ayn Ara (Khan Aljanub, 2022) was awarded a prestigious AFAC grant. Reflecting the author’s longstanding interest in feminist storytelling and oral history as strategies for processing the enormity of the Nakba, the polyphonic novel tells the story of the Abu Sukkar family, refugees from a fictional village in the Galilee who end up in Shatila, Lebanon. Abou Ghazal is currently at work on second novel, having received a special mention from the jury of the Qattan Prize for the unfinished manuscript, and also writes regularly in Arabic for news and comment outlets. She lives in Europe and is obsessed with fermentation and forests.

Katharine Halls is an Arabic-to-English translator from Cardiff, Wales. Her critically acclaimed translation of Ahmed Naji’s prison memoir Rotten Evidence (McSweeney’s, 2023) was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for autobiography, and she was awarded a 2021 PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant for her translation of Haytham El-Wardany’s Things That Can’t Be Fixed. Her work has appeared in Frieze, The Kenyon Review, The Believer, McSweeney’s, The Common, Asymptote, and others. She is one third of teneleven, an agency for contemporary Arabic literature. Her translation of Shady Lewis’s On The Greenwich Line is forthcoming from Peirene Press in 2025.