Summary

“The ostentatious cripples” opens with the narrator’s description of so-called “predators” (30) arriving among the community. Dressed like beggars, they quickly became “parasites” (30). They recruit locals called askaris, or soldiers, and grow strong by the community’s help and healing until they ultimately unleash “thirty days of unrelenting massacre” (31). The speaker notes the predators’ hypocrisy during Ramadan and identifies the predators as “Arab” two pages later. Reluctantly, the narrator agrees with the listener to name some of these predators.

The speaker describes a number of stories of these Arab “predators,” all men, and their relationships with women from the community; they are all murdered by the men and women they are sleeping with, deaths described in graphic detail. Hussein the “twin brother of Hassan the Syphilitic,” is killed while eating buttered dates by three women who, “in a gesture full of love...