[Engaging Books is a returning series that features books by various publishers on a given theme, along with an excerpt from each volume. This installment involves a selection from Syracuse University Press on the theme of Women's Writing in the Arab World. Other publishers' books will follow on a monthly basis.]
Table of Contents
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings
By Hanadi al-Samman
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
The Book of Disappearance: A Novel
By Ibtisam Azem; translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media
Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora
By Mehraneh Ebrahimi
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
By Sahar Mandour; translated from Arabic by Nicole Fares
About the Book
About the Author
In the Media / Scholarly Praise
Additional Information
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
Call for Reviews
Anxiety of Erasure: Trauma, Authorship, and the Diaspora in Arab Women's Writings
By Hanadi al-Samman
About the Book
Far from offering another study that bemoans Arab women’s repression and veiling, Anxiety of Erasure looks at Arab women writers living in the diaspora who have translated their experiences into a productive and creative force. In this book, al-Samman articulates the therapeutic effects of revisiting forgotten histories and of activating two cultural tropes: that of the maw’udah (buried female infant) and that of Shahrazad in the process of revolutionary change. She asks what it means to develop a national, gendered consciousness from diasporic locals while staying committed to the homeland.
Al-Samman presents close readings of the fiction of six prominent authors whose works span over half a century and define the current status of Arab diaspora studies—Ghada al-Samman, Hanan al-Shaykh, Hamida al-Na‘na‘, Hoda Barakat, Samar Yazbek, and Salwa al-Neimi. Exploring the journeys in time and space undertaken by these women, Anxiety of Erasure shines a light on the ways in which writers remain participants in their homelands’ intellectual lives, asserting both the traumatic and the triumphant aspects of diaspora. The result is a nuanced Arab women’s poetic that celebrates rootlessness and rootedness, autonomy and belonging.
About the Author
Hanadi al-Samman is associate professor of Arabic language and literature in the Department of Middle Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Virginia.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Anxiety of Erasure
"A groundbreaking monograph on Arab fiction by women, intertwining issues of gender, trauma, politics, and war."—International Journal of Middle East Studies
"Al-Samman examines the writing of six women from the past fifty years to discover the threads that draws their work into communication with one another."—World Literature Today
"Anxiety of Erasure is the kind of book we need today--both because we need more studies that focus on women's texts and struggles and also because these must be linked together in order to actualize the political possibilities."—Review of Middle East Studies
“Anxiety of Erasure marks a step forward in feminist critique of Arab women's writings. In juxtaposing the traumas of wa'd, or pre-Islamic female infanticide, with the Lebanese Civil War, al-Samman has linked Arab women's erasure, and especially fear of literary erasure, across time. Her close readings of these novels and short stories are original and perceptive, suggesting a novel approach to Arab women writers and diaspora as a cosmopolitan site of literary production.”—Miriam Cooke, professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies, Duke University
“Al-Samman's analysis is lucid and textually rich. . . . A vital contribution to the understudied field of Arab women's narrative.”—Mushin al-Musawi, professor of comparative and Arabic studies, Columbia University
“An eye-opening read that addresses the depths of the angst of the Arab woman. Al-Samman has used a wide range of literature from a number of authors and pieced them together to bring to light the misjudged chronicle of the Arab woman's existence.”—Middle East Monitor
“An important, alert voice of literary criticism on Arab women's writing, with a scope that encompasses pre-modern not just contemporary work, and pays attention to roots and literary genealogy, giving it a depth that many who look only at modern Arab women's writing don't have, and her work matters to me, and to the research of my students.”—Mohja Kahf, author of The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf: A Novel
"A vital edition to the understudies field of Arab women's writing."—Al Jadid
"An important reading of contemporary Arab women writers in the diaspora, including Europe and the Americas, over the past half-century, contributing to the fields of Arabic literature, gender studies, and diaspora studies."—Journal of Arabic Literature
Additional Information
August 2019
312 Pages
$24.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780815634027
Paper ISBN: 9780815636625
Digital ISBN: 9780815653295
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From the Introduction:
During the uprisings that swept several Arab countries after Tunisia’s Mohamed Bouazizi first ignited the fires of people’s indignation at authoritarian regimes by his self-immolation on December 17, 2010, a common motto repeated by the rebellious masses in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria, and Yemen was “people want to topple the regime” (al-sha‘b yurid isqat al- nitham). Yet another less known motto went hand in hand with that first iconic one, particularly when peaceful demonstrations were faced with live ammunition in the case of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria: banners and social media demanded “Don’t bury our revolution” (la ta’idu thawratana). In the ensuing four-year reign of terror that engulfed the Syrian revolution after its inception on March 15, 2011, because of the Assad regime’s massacres and continued shelling of innocent civilians with tanks, mortars, scud missiles, and military bombers, the tropes of wa’d al-banat (female infant burial) and its traditional victim al-maw’udah (the buried infant girl) have become representative of the innocent children massacred by Assad’s ruthless militias, thereby uniting gender and politics in an insepa- rable bond. The Syrian revolution is the only revolution in the Arab Spring that was inspired by the thirteen-year-old children of Dar‘a whose nails were pulled by the regime’s security forces as a punishment for writing on their school walls “people want to topple the regime.” It was Hamza al-Khatib who would, three months later, be the iconic image of this revolution when his tortured body was returned to his parents lifeless, and emasculated.
After the killing of ten thousand children, some in brutal massacres as in al-Hola (May 25, 2012), al-Qubair in Homs, Douma, and countless others in the infamous chemical attack on Ghouta (a suburb of Damascus) on August 21, 2013, another motto surfaced directly reflecting the female infant burial motif (wa’d). “Bi-ayyi dhanbin Qutilna?” (For what crime were we killed?) was and still remains a dominant motto in demonstrations and Syrian revolution Facebook pages. The activation of the pre-Islamic, jahiliyyah ritual of burying female infants alive in the sand (wa’d al-banat) in the context of the Arab Spring’s demands for freedom and justice denotes the survivability of wa’d as a cultural myth, in Roland Barthes’s sense, embodying the epitome of personal and political erasure. Barthes defines mythology as a mixture of semiology (formal science) and ideology (historical science) bent on studying what he calls “ideas-in-form” (Barthes 2012, 221). Mythology alerts us to the presence of cultural narratives, points out their repetitions as it explains their omnipresent imposition. However, mythological concepts do not resurface in the same fixed attire; rather they “alter, disintegrate, disappear completely . . . and can very easily [be] suppress[ed],” and then restored in a different fashion (Barthes 2012, 230). This explains the resurfacing of wa’d at this critical juncture during the Arab Spring’s demonstrations, for it alerts contemporary Arab citizens to the return of the unjust era of the jahiliyyah, and foregrounds the need to eradicate despotism. As a cultural trope, wa’d is utilized to access the political turmoil of the nation. It denotes the political erasure of the voices of the Arab masses just as its historical use came to represent the personal erasure of female selfhood. Just as “myth is speech stolen and restored,” in Barthes’s estimation, so when the restoration of the wa’d trope as myth enrolls the latter in the service of the political, its connotations and manifestations are never the same (Barthes 2012, 236).
However, this was not the only time the wa’d motif resurfaced in con- temporary Arab cultural history, for it appeared conspicuously in Syrian and Lebanese (mashriq) diaspora women writers’ literature, the subjects of this study. The experiences of these writers (Salwa al-Neimi [b. 195?], Hanan al-Shaykh [b. 1945], Hoda Barakat [b. 1952], Hamida Na‘na‘ [b. 194?], Ghada al-Samman [b. 1942], and Samar Yazbek [b. 1970]) with authoritarian regimes and the prolonged sixteen-year Lebanese Civil War, coupled with their diaspora experience, positioned them in a unique place to access the political traumas of the nation and the personal ones of its dispossessed, diasporic citizens. With these authors the wa’d trope is fabricated as a cultural myth, iconized, and deployed to interrogate cultural discourses pertinent to women’s bodies, identity, and subjectivity; to their role as literary women and voice; to nation as a woman; and to tradition as a woman. Along with wa’d, an equally poignant, though less threatening, cultural icon is invoked in their writings, that of the masterful narrator Shahrazad. Both icons activate the corporal (al-maw’udah) and the literary (Shahrazad), thereby reuniting body and voice to heal the nation. Just as wa’d’s incarnation moves the trope from the realm of feminine suffocation to that of the political suppression of freedoms, so does Shahrazad’s. At the hands of Arab diaspora women writers, Shahrazad’s trope moves from the purview of feminist and postmodernist context to that of the political. This is the unique contribution of these writers, and it is at this juncture that Shahrazad’s trope joins with the political engagement achieved through the activation of the wa’d trope in recent literary and political articulations. By reengaging these cultural myths and recurrent traumas, diaspora women writers defy conventional narratives of personal and national erasure.
Anxiety of Erasure explores the transformation of these two iconic cultural motifs in diasporic, contemporary Arabic literature, the wa’d and Shahrazad, from the purely feminist signification to political engagement. The resurrection of these myths and traumatic memories is pivotal to the healing of both individuals and nations. This book articulates the therapeutic effects resulting from revisiting forgotten history(ies) as well as the collective, cultural memories of the maw’udah and of Shahrazad. The journeys in time and space undertaken by Muslim and Christian diaspora women writers take them beyond Shahrazad’s conventional fixed locale and into multiple locations from whence they assert the value of maintaining mobility, fluidity, and nonfixity of roots/routes, and of multiaxial sociopolitical critique. The result is a nuanced Arab women’s poetics that at once celebrates rootlessness and rootedness, autonomy and belonging.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
The Book of Disappearance: A Novel
By Ibtisam Azem; translated from Arabic by Sinan Antoon
About the Book
What if all the Palestinians in Israel simply disappeared one day? What would happen next? How would Israelis react? These unsettling questions are posed in Azem’s powerfully imaginative novel. Set in contemporary Tel Aviv forty-eight hours after Israelis discover all their Palestinian neighbors have vanished, the story unfolds through alternating narrators, Alaa, a young Palestinian man who converses with his dead grandmother in the journal he left behind when he disappeared, and his Jewish neighbor, Ariel, a journalist struggling to understand the traumatic event. Through these perspectives, the novel stages a confrontation between two memories. Ariel is a liberal Zionist who is critical of the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, but nevertheless believes in Israel’s project and its national myth. Alaa is haunted by his grandmother’s memories of being displaced from Jaffa and becoming a refugee in her homeland. Ariel’s search for clues to the secret of the collective disappearance and his reaction to it intimately reveal the fissures at the heart of the Palestinian question.
About the Author
Ibtisam Azem is a Palestinian short story writer, novelist, and journalist, based in New York. She is a senior correspondent for the Arabic daily al-Araby al-Jadeed. She has published two novels in Arabic. Some of her writings have been translated and published in French, German, and English in several anthologies and journals. She is working on her third novel and pursuing an MA in Social Work from NYU's Silver school.
In the Media
Featured on arablit.org
Reading and signing at McNally Jackson in New York City on 26 Sept 2019.
Praise for Book of Disappearance
"In this immensely readable novel, Ms. Azem does not resolve for us the calamity of Palestine's occupation by Israel. But stylishly and with jeweled virtuosity she makes us understand that acts of great and humane imagination will be required, and with this potent book points where and how we must all go."—Richard Ford
"Using a magical realism as cool and lacerating as that of Borges, Azem builds the story of a young Israeli journalist and his vanished Palestinian friend into a devastating exploration of the nakbah, betrayal, erasure, and love of home. For lovers of Palestinian literature, The Book of Disappearance has earned its place beside Saher Khalifa's Wild Thorns, and thanks to Sinan Antoon's masterful translation, Anglophone readers can now experience this thrilling, essential work."—Molly Crabapple, coauthor of Brothers of the Gun
"In Jaffa, the most lively presence is that of the dead. Ibtisam Azem has gifted us with a poignant, mysterious, lyrical, new novel."—Ahdaf Soueif, author of The Map of Love
"The conceit of disappearance shocks us. We remain silent before its ghostly presence. Fantasy pulsates with reality and gestures to it in a powerful metaphor."—Abbas Baydoun, author of Blood Test
"In The Book of Disappearance, Palestinian novelist Ibtisam Azem has crafted a masterpiece which immediately leads the reader to ponder the historical foundations of the 1948 Nakba, as well as the Zionist intentions and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the land where they belong."—Middle East Monitor
Additional Information
July 2019
256 Pages
$19.95 (list price)
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
“Jaffa Hasn’t Died”
The houses on Rothschild Street, where I live, line up like a column of soldiers. Since I was born, Tel Aviv’s houses have been washed up in the city’s whiteness, or vice versa. There are things that are born all at once. A building is memory. Cities and places without old buildings have no memory. Maybe I say this because I am from an old city. Bedouins will see memory in other places. What matters is that I am the son of an ill-fated city. Jaffa is my ill-fated city. But what about cities that are born all at once? Are there such cities?
Tel Aviv is full of Bauhaus architecture. Its memory is buildings and houses washed in whiteness. Memory is a choice. Memory is gray. That’s what Ariel says when we discuss this subject. Lies, I say. There is no gray memory. There are flashes that come in one burst and are as clear as a sword’s blade. Either black or white. There is no gray in between. But white and black come in shades. Gray is what is confusing, and we confuse what we want to confuse. Didn’t I say, time and again, that there is a fissure in my memory? Your memory, which inhabits mine, has a fissure. The fissure doesn’t mean obscurity. The fissure is pain.
Why do I always imagine Baron Rothschild cutting the ribbon at the street’s official inauguration? I don’t even remember seeing such a photograph. But he was here on some spot in this street. When I walk the city’s streets, I touch its houses with my looks. I hear myself screaming out loud. As if a clear glass separates me from the people around me. Glass that shields sounds. I rarely see it, but I know that it is there when I scream and no one hears me.
When evening creeps in, the lights of houses and cafes around me appear, and I wait. That’s not a dream. That is what I actually do as I sit on the benches that are surrounded with giant trees in the median. As if the buildings around me, from which lights and shadows appear, are also waiting for someone, or something. Everything is beautiful from the vantage point of the bench. As soon as night falls, I begin to wash the houses around me with black memory. I wipe the whiteness off the facades of buildings and paint everything black. I take black from the night’s kohl and draw the city black. As if I am afraid that the white memory will possess me, so I wipe it with the blackness of a moonless night. I love the color black because it resembles us. It is us.
Sometimes I leap out of the bench like a clock spring and walk in stammering steps to the sea. I see nothing around me, because I’ve colored all the houses with black. Even the moon is black. I often go through Shenkin Street. I greet the people sitting at coffee shops. They smile and call out, “Alaa! Come sit with us! Let’s chat and have a glass of wine...tell us about Jaffa and your Jaffan grandmother. Come on!” I imagine them being genuinely interested and asking what never crosses their mind...How do we feel? How do we live? But questions no longer have any meaning. I leave them without responding. I no longer care to tell them anything. Everyone welcomes me. They all want to hear my stories and yours. Yes, your stories! My stories are fissures of your stories. The ones you told me, and the ones you never did. What a big lie. I pay them no attention and go on. I leave Shenkin Street and pass through the small streets of al-Karmil Market until I reach the sea. This is not a dream. I do this time and again. I imagine and hear people saying what they say. I imagine that I paint everything around me black and see no other color. This black is beautiful.
I reach the sea to catch a glimpse of your city as it shimmers at night. But its lights are faint. Like a corpse cast on the seashore. You will say that Jaffa hasn’t died. I didn’t say it has. “Corpse” is used to describe a pulsating body in Arabic. Don’t we say, “He has a huge corpse”? The youth in Ajami say, “Man, his corpse is like that of a mule.”
Here, on Jaffa’s shores, the sea looks exhausted. Jaffa doesn’t scream the way I do. It stammers. But those who inhabit it don’t hear what it says. There is something in this corpse, Jaffa, that no one in the White City understands. Is this what you felt when you said that the city’s mornings were tired and had left “that year”? You didn’t say it exactly like that. But you said, “Our morning was like a widowed man. His beloved died and love disappeared.”
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora
By Mehraneh Ebrahimi
About the Book
Does the study of aesthetics have tangible effects in the real world? Does examining the work of diaspora writers and artists change our view of the Other? In this thoughtful book, Ebrahimi argues that an education in the humanities is as essential as one in politics and ethics, critically training the imagination toward greater empathy.
Despite the recent popularity in Iranian memoirs, their contributions to debunking an abstract idea of terror and their role in encouraging democratic thinking remain understudied. In examining creative work by women of Iranian descent, Ebrahimi argues that Shirin Neshat, Marjane Satrapi, and Parsua Bashi make the Other familiar and break a cycle of reactionary xenophobia. These authors, instead of relying on indignation, build imaginative bridges in their work that make it impossible to blame one evil, external enemy. Ebrahimi explores both classic and hybrid art forms, including graphic novels and photo-poetry, to advocate for the importance of aesthetics to inform and influence a global community. Drawing on the theories of Rancière, Butler, Arendt, and Levinas, Ebrahimi identifies the ways in which these works give a human face to the Other, creating the space and language to imagine a new political and ethical landscape.
About the Author
Mehraneh Ebrahimi received a PhD in comparative literature from Western University in Canada. She is the recipient of numerous teaching awards.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for Women, Art, and Literature in the Iranian Diaspora
“This book makes an important contribution to cultural studies in that it steers us away from only making a paranoid critique of our world and instead reaches to the possibility of ethical democracy.”
—Dina Georgis, author of The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East
“Ebrahimi’s compelling analysis of graphic novels, photography, and film by diasporic Iranian women offers a refreshing perspective on how artistic expression disrupts the vilification and dehumanization of Iranians. At the intersection of the aesthetic, political, and ethical she locates new means of bonding across a seemingly unbridgeable divide.
—Nasrin Rahimieh, author of Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity
Additional Information
May 2019
224 pages
$24.95 (list price)
Cloth ISBN: 9780815636359
Paper ISBN: 9780815636557
Digital ISBN: 9780815654827
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
From the Preface:
The stock images of violence depicted in war movies have failed to capture and engage the collective imagination of the Western audience (Blackmore 2012). The news media’s dehumanizing bombardment of the public with generic, decontextualized violence has desensitized the audience regarding the pain of Others.
Iranian diasporic artists, having faced war, trauma, gender inequality, and racial stigma, can help break what appears to be homogeneity in an indifferent public mind-set. The confluence of poetry, politics, and the visual arts can rechannel compassion fatigue toward genuine curiosity about, and attention to, radical alterity. Whether aesthetics, politics, and ethics can instigate the creation of an aesthetic community, a sensus communis, has been tested in the works of several artists and authors who engage with the question of Otherness. Although their work has been produced in the context of Iran’s century-old struggle for democracy, their voice is a broader one, encompassing the whole region and beyond.
From the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 to the Islamic Revolution of 1979; from the internationally aided invasion by Saddam Hussein in the 1980s to the Green Movement of 2009, the struggle in the hearts and homes of the people, especially the women and the abject, have been envisaged in the works of these Iranian artists. Shirin Neshat’s photographic collections (such as Women of Allah), videographic installations (such as “Mahdokht”), and feature film Women without Men (based on a novel by Shahrnush Parsipur; inspired by Forough Farrokhzad’s poetry and her documentary film) are specifically in focus. Although Neshat uses orientalized Middle Eastern local colors, it is through political free play that her visual productions create a third space and herald a new under- standing of the stories of others.
Before I discuss Neshat’s work, I bring into the critical gaze two graphic novels by Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis I and Persepolis II, and another by Parsua Bashi, Nylon Road, especially regarding their treatment of the ultimate villain. Delimiting cartooning technology’s potency in fos- tering empathy, I then turn to the works’ ethical spectrum. I specifically look at the systematic manner in which these artists locate and visualize their enemies. Locating the enemy outside ourselves, with no complicity of the self in its creation, is a sure sign of purging and scapegoating in the literature produced by the diaspora.
This research reflects a process of weaving together and tearing apart several apparently disparate threads into Borromean knot-chains of aesthetics, politics, and ethics. Using the triple lens of aesthetics, politics, and ethics in analyzing these works of art allows me to visualize the fissures in the fabric of our torn democracy—not to cover the blind spots and the dead tangles, but to bring their porous texture to touch. I will first delineate the specific definitions of my key concepts: liberal democracy’s entanglement with terror and the break, litigation, and dissensus that real art can create. A strategic definition of democracy based on the power of dissensus or disagreement, as suggested by Jacques Rancière, is crucial in viewing aesthetics and politics multifocally. Aesthetic breaks can realize a third space where hierarchies of domination and subjugation are toppled, melted, and subverted.
Borrowing from the medical lexicon, Jacques Derrida refers to auto-immunity as the process whereby the body attacks its own cells for its own survival. Extreme securitarian regimes likewise start attacking their selves—activists, artists, dissidents, and civic liberties—in an attempt to curtail the evil, external enemy. Artistic productions with a fair approach
to demonized enemies challenge the axiomatic binary between the comfortable proximity of all who belong to self and the ominous alienness of the Other. A critic treading such a delicate tightrope should heed the polarities of appropriation, incorporation, and projection. Aesthetic revolt happens ethically, where regimes of art challenge regimes of policing. The moment of possibilities looms when a work of art engages in free aesthetic play, dares to say no, subverts and displaces established hierarchies, creates dissensual litigation, and thus aids in midwifing a democracy-to-come.
Call for Reviews
If you would like to review the book for the Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya, please email info@jadaliyya.com
By Sahar Mandour; translated from Arabic by Nicole Fares
About the Book
In this finely observed novel, five young Lebanese women navigate their professional and social lives in a city interrupted by random explosions. It is not a war zone, but there is no peace either; Beirut stands at the edge of both. These women, much like their country, have been shaped by the events of a long civil war, their childhood spent in shelters, their adolescence in an unrecognizable city under rapid reconstruction. And here they are now, negotiating the details of their adult lives, fighting to protect their identities, voices, and relationships in a society constantly under questioning.
Talk of politics and gossip by the young and old animate the coffee shops. Heated debates and power dynamics unfold in bars and on the streets. Mandour’s funny and defiant style invites an intimacy, giving readers a glimpse into the absurdities and injustices of everyday life in Lebanon. With empathy and a deep honesty, Mandour narrates the lives of these women who struggle to create their own destiny while at the same time coming to terms with the identity of their Mediterranean city.
About the Author
Sahar Mandour is a Lebanese-Egyptian author who has written four novels. She is a television host and the editor of Shabab, the youth pages of Al Safir, Lebanon's left-wing newspaper.
In the Media / Scholarly Praise for 32
"Mandour's third novel, the first to be translated into English, presents an enjoyable slice of life in the Lebanese capital….On the whole it flows well and is often wryly funny."—Hurriyet Daily News
"Sahar Mandour conjures modern Beirut in all its frustrating and glorious complexity in this tale of five young women seeking to carve out their place in it."—World Literature Today
"A refreshingly modern, fast-paced novella that is as comfortable talking about female independence as it is a barroom brawl."—The National
"A fast- and quite well-paced slice-of-lives novel, shifting between fast, chatty dialogue and more introspective reflection, and covering a good amount of ground."—the Complete Review
Interview in The National (UAE) https://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/sahar-mandour-s-novel-32-offers-a-glimpse-into-the-reality-of-life-in-beirut-1.152827
Additional Information
March 2016
160 pages
$18.95 (list price)
Paper ISBN: 9780815610694
Digital ISBN: 9780815653707
Where to Purchase
Excerpt
“On my way home, I saw her.
Should I tell her story?
I’m going to tell her story.
A lady in her seventies who carries a metal bucket and wears a headscarf. She styles her hair in the summer, and gathers it under a cute colorful wool hat in winter.
She’s the lady who speaks slowly and faintly. The years of her age have bent her back. She sells roses to buy food to take back to her Cuban husband whose illness has confined him to his bed.
His illness is clear in his eyes.
Her name is Nadia. And beautiful flowers are called “Nadiy.”
Every time I see her from a distance, I run to her to buy roses with whatever money I have.
I feel guilt towards her.
And I feel helplessness.
I’m much better off than she is, and I’m much younger. Everything is working for me, and against her.
She spent a big chunk of her life with him in Cuba. His illness forced her to come back here, but no help or treatment was available in her country either, because he’s Cuban.
A Lebanese woman can’t give her nationality to her husband. A Lebanese woman can’t give her nationality to her children.
This Lebanese woman, Nadia, loves her husband. And there’s a unfathomable look in her eyes, as if the act of looking came from a place deep within the soul, one that rarely emerges from the body, so as to not run into something fearful. She worries that a restaurant owner, a security guard, or a waiter might ask her to leave this or that place, or that one, claiming that selling roses bothers their clients.
I’m a client, and I ache every time I see her. I get ashamed of the plates I own and their price, the glasses and their price, my laugh and how care-free it is, my straight back compared to hers, my expensive outfit compared to her clothes that lost their beauty the day she bought them long ago.
I`m ashamed of all of life’s privileges of which she is more worthy than me. She, who is old; I, who can still work.
And I feel guilty because I know that, if I had to choose, I wouldn’t trade places with her.
I hate myself each time I see her or feel sympathy and love toward her, because I smell the scent of my escape in the roses I buy. I escape the torture of my conscience with money. She asks for it and I give it to her. As if I’m buying her silence, or buying my peace of mind. Except that my mind is never at peace, but always stuck in a cycle of pain. I’m a client who is in pain every time she sees the fragile lady with red, white, and yellow roses.
There is a lot of exhaustion in the streets of my city. Numerous pictures of many heroes hang in the streets of my city. The poor live on the streets, glued to the asphalt, where some of them announce their many disabilities so those more fortunate would give them money. The more fortunate ones are divided into categories: Those who do little, those who do a lot, those who do nothing and own a lot, and those who choose insult and think it clever to shower ignorant beggars on the street with insults. That last category drives me crazy.
A car looks like it jumped straight out of the latest issue of a fashion magazine, high above the ground, with a driver overlooking life from the tip of his nose. He shuts his car window if a beggar clings to it. He shoves an elderly man if he asks him for what is rightfully his, and is disgusted by the exhaustion of people, so he refuses to interact with it.
I used to be one of those who gave money but refused to interact, before my friend, Shwikar, talked to me about my refusal. At times, I fell back on imagination to avoid the pain lurking in every corner that housed a wronged person. When seeing an old man with his hand out, I used to tell myself that he abused his wife when he was younger, or that that old woman mistreated those weaker than her, maybe. I tried to strip the innocence from those with their hands out.
Later, I started imagining that they were accustomed to their situation, one that I dreaded myself because I had never experienced it. If I were in their shoes, I would have gotten used to a life of sleeping on the sidewalk, maybe. The guilt cycle came back to trap me: I searched inside myself for reasons to justify their injustice, and I found comfort in them. I didn’t say a word to them, nor did I listen to them tell their stories. I didn’t give them that right.
Shwikar asked me: Why do you give the beggar what he asks for, but never stop to talk to him?
Because I don’t want to listen to what is not in my power to change. Shwikar told me that people aren’t just stories told to hurt me. That people crave communication and acknowledgment. A look or a smile, a word or a question, a greeting or a prayer, anything that would tell the beggar that I see him, as a person, not as an extended hand.
That was the day I first saw Nadia. Nadia’s career is that of the poor. Nadia sells roses. I ran to her. I asked her for roses, and resisted my itch to get away, to prevent communication. I stood still, so she raised her eyes at me. I smiled at her, and she smiled at me and thanked me in a French that alternated with Arabic on her lips. I asked her name, then asked how she was doing. She told me what I then told everyone. I told them that I knew her.
Before our meeting ended, I told her about myself. How could I not tell her about myself after she had told me about herself? Am I a judge who listens but doesn’t share? I had to tell her. So I told her my name, and what I did for a living. I told her that I was 32, and she said: “May you live longer” in a voice that told me that I still had a long way to go in life, after I had thought that I had already walked a long way on that road. I laughed at my young age and at my obsession with it. She told me that when she was my age, she was the queen of the world. She said that life is not just money, it’s the joy of living, and the ability to recognize that joy.
I smiled at her unrealistic but nice philosophy, and she smiled in turn at her unrealistic but comforting philosophy. An unspoken agreement between us stated that an emotional bond connected us both, and that her past is better than her present, and that my future is still ahead of me.
I felt like a child, said goodbye, and each of us went her way. Pain choked my heart then too. It choked it harder that time, but I knew why. Nadia had a story, and I knew it, and I’m going to tell it.
She loves him. She adores her husband. She wants him to be comfortable and never blames him for anything. She blames the government and bad luck and the world and exhaustion, and bar owners at times and restaurant staffs other times, and she blames the Cuban blockade, and releases Lebanon from its responsibilities. She blames the situation, the past, the present, the future, and war. She always finds someone or something to blame but him. And he, he loves to be kept out of blame. For he’s her Cuban husband with whom she spent years of happiness in Havana.
Komodo had mentioned, as we talked about her brother, that her husband in Sri Lanka didn’t live near her mother. She had married her current husband Prasanna, a month ago. Before him, she had been married to Mohammed, a Sri Lankan Muslim living in Lebanon. She herself is a Buddhist. She hadn’t told Prasanna that she had been Mohammed’s wife here. She told me that women who marry in Lebanon gain a “no-good reputation.” It also didn’t help that she had married a Muslim. She told Prasanna that she had lost her virginity in a fling. I asked her: so a fling is more socially acceptable in Sri Lanka than getting married in Lebanon? “Of course,” she answered me, “It’s like nature itself gave that union its legitimacy.”
She had her first date with Prasanna over the phone. They had one long talk and fell in love, especially after they exchanged pictures. She went to Sri Lanka and they got married. Then She left him there and came back to continue working here as a house cleaner. She still sends him new pictures every now and then. The first batch she sent was of their marriage day and of the day before, which she developed in Lebanon. I saw those pictures. In them, Koko was wearing magical dresses. Saris, colors, tight cloth wrapped around her belly, a stern look that rarely relaxed into a smile, and an expressive pose. One picture remained fixed in my mind: Koko with her girlfriends the day before her wedding. She was sitting slightly higher than the rest of them, her legs rigidly fixed on the ground, and her friends were sitting on the floor around her, all looking at the camera, including her, with her arms draped around them as though she were their mother or guardian. She was looking defiantly at the camera, like a protective Goddess. She doesn’t smile in photographs. Photographs are formal.
In one of the non-formal photographs that Koko had taken of her in a photography studio in Lebanon, she was wearing green contact lenses. Her eyes pierced through the photo, alien-like. I laugh every time I see it, and she laughs at my laugh and asks me what I think of her sex appeal, and I say: a queen! Then we laugh together.
When I asked her how far her husband lived from her family in Sri Lanka, she told me very far, which I found to be strange. I asked her: “Aren’t you worried he might cheat on you?” She waved her hands around anxiously, and her vocals peeked as if jumping for freedom, then she threw words around until she finally put a useful sentence together: “Listen to me, a man will step out on his woman if she is there, and he will step out on her if she’s no. He wants to step out? Let him do it! Am I right?”
A result of economic independence, I suppose.
Her ability to provide and put a roof over the heads of the men and women in her family, young and old, made her independent. “If he wants to come live with me here, he’s welcome. If not, then I’m going to live my life.” I was a little hurt to find out that in Sri Lanka her first husband took a second wife, a Muslim, to please his family, without telling her. She divorced him. She lived with him in the same house after the divorce for about a year, because the occupants of the building where he worked as a janitor were fond of her and refused to keep him if he was single. They wanted a family to guard their building. So she stayed with him platonically. She kept her divorce a secret until he brought his wife to Lebanon. And during that year, Koko didn’t fall for any of his attempts to wheedle her back. Nothing could change her mind, even though she loved him and knew he loved her. She made up her mind and stuck to it. “Enough.”
This independence, I think, is what drives the women of my generation away from marriage.
Add to that the many divorces we keep hearing about, and the “I’m satisfied with what I’ve got” types of marriages that are followed by constant nagging.
He smokes cigars, Dalal’s husband. Dalal told him over and over that she could not stand the smell of cigars. At first, in the first flush of their relationship, he used to put out his cigar whenever she got bothered by it, and assured her that he would never hesitate to please her even if it meant his having to fly to the moon for her. Yup yup yup. A parade for putting out a cigar. Then the days passed, and they turned, and the wedding ended, and they were no longer stars to their families and friends. Their glow faded, and they became just another normal couple… naturally. And that’s when he stopped putting out his cigar for her. That’s the main reason she’s so annoyed by him. He fills the air around her with cigar smoke early in the morning. She gets suffocated by the smell. And then the concept of the whole thing suffocates her even more. And her life becomes a cycle, circular like the body of a cigar. The cigar became the purpose for Saeed’s (her husband’s name is Saeed) existence. His life is meaningless without the thing he cherishes most: his cigar.
Then he would go on about the thighs of the Cuban women who rolled his cigar especially for him. The Cuban women whose beauty Lebanese women only dream of. Oh my, those Cubans.
Dalal would start making fun of him: “Beautiful, yeah, but they rolled that cigar for you? Just for you? Some Cuban girl rolled that cigar especially for you? Believe me, one look at you and she’d quit her job. God, if she met you, she’d set herself on fire.”
Dalal defends her feminism in the face of Saeed’s attacks. She is repulsed when he struts around the house like a peacock. But, where would he strut if not in his own house?
Their shared life became a living hell.
I am certain that the cigar is not the main reason for their marital troubles, even though I myself go crazy every time I get stuck in a bar or café with someone smoking a cigar. I do not understand this invasion of personal space! It’s the same with the sound of smacking gum. How can people invade other people’s personal space like that? Unhesitantly, carelessly, unaware that they are committing assault.
Nevertheless, I am sure that the problem between Dalal and Saeed is not the cigar. The problem is their coexistence. Such a life is no longer comfortable or possible, and the thought of marriage is no longer seductive. They both began to hate each other, and their lives turned into constant daily revenge upon one another. As if, now that she was his, he no longer needed to be mindful of her. And she felt as if she had lost her connection to her true self, and she could no longer tolerate his getting in the way.
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