by Alia Mamdouh
The Loved Ones
Women Writing the Middle East
Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq
by Riverbend
Baghdad Burning II: More Girl Blog from Iraq
by Riverbend
Children of the New World
by Assia Djebar
Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist
by Huda Shaarawi
Naphtalene
by Alia Mamdouh
On Shifting Ground: Muslim Women in the Global Era
Edited by Fereshteh Nouraie-Simone
Touba and the Meaning of Night
by Shahrnush Parsipur
Women Without Men
by Shahrnush Parsipur
The Feminist Press at the City University of New York
The Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue, Suite 5406, New York, NY 10016
www.feministpress.org
English translation copyright © 2006 by Marilyn Booth
Foreword copyright © 2007 by Hélène Cixous
Afterword copyright © 2007 by Ferial J. Ghazoul
First published in Arabic as al-Mahbubat. Copyright © 2003 by Dar al-Saqi.
English translation originally published by The American University in Cairo Press.
Copyright © 2006 by The American University in Cairo Press.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or used, stored in any information retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of The Feminist Press at the City University of New York except in case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mamduh, ‘Aliyah.
[Mahbubat. English]
The loved ones / Alia Mamdouh; translated by Marilyn Booth.
p. cm.
Translated from Arabic.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55861-937-1
I. Booth, Marilyn. II. Title.
PJ7846.A543M3413 2007
892.7’36--dc22
2007021432
The translator gratefully acknowledges the assistance of the Banff International Literary Translation Centre at the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada.
This publication was made possible, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Designed by Lisa Force
121110090807654321
To Hélène Cixous
Contents
Foreword
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Diaries
Canada Diaries
Translator’s Notes and Acknowledgments
Afterword
Foreword
Alia Mamdouh is a great poet. Of course she tells a story; but as is true of every great literary work, the story serves first of all to set the stage for a stunning theatricalization of human subjectivity. Her characters are traversed by all the languages our senses speak. They hover on the banks of a yes or a no, about to die, about to be saved.
Who are these characters: Blanche, Caroline, Tessa, Suhaila, Nader? These are the names of the I, in other words all the first names in play of a giant Alia Mamdouh. Mother, son, man, woman, child, oriental, occidental, she is all of humanity--shaken, threatened, beaten down, sick from this century and yet triumphant, passionately attached to the intelligence of being. One who never hesitates, when he or she bursts into tears, to set about thinking the secret of tears. And then laughing about it. Everything in store for someone of our times, everything unexpected, all the meteorological, technological, genetic, psychic phenomena is changed into a warm flow of substitutions: life is enriched by literature, literature materializes, becomes flesh and blood. Incarnation. Alia, like no one else, celebrates the power of the concrete. The special fragrance of a new sort of fatherhood. The conversation and subtle wisdom of two hands meeting. She reminds us that we think in bodies and intuit with our noses, ears, and skin. Everything that seems mute speaks in other ways. The magic Alia Mamdouh transforms the human heart into a cosmos swept by the wind.
Hélène Cixous
Paris, France
May 30, 2007
One
I
In airports we are born and to airports we return.
I am certain that my mother, Suhaila, uttered this sentence, though I can’t pin down the day she said it. As she talked to herself, preparing for our departure, I heard it distinctly. Such things happen from time to time, when we are sleeping and she sits in the living room or when we are out and she moves around the kitchen slicing bread and assembling salad greens in a bowl. She bends forward slightly and then her short figure straightens, thrusting her slight body a step to the rear. She does her best work when she knows that none of us is watching her.
My intuition tells me—she would say—that they will come, like father and then son, one after the other they’ll come and they will talk with me, even though I’m only a mother who shortens the distances between everyone else.
She believed in the truth of her intuitions. Her premonitions came as if she were a prophetess—and one whose prophecies never erred. Her intuition remained her best friend among friends. She measured out time between those who were living and those who were dead. . . . But, I would ask her, what’s the dividing line between the two of them, Mother?
Nothing separates them, nothing.
But—
No buts.
My mother spoke then in a hushed voice as if she were addressing a ghost. We used to say—we women—that weeping and talking were possible as long as we were all together. Those things that happened drove us to recollecting things: No one is treating us with the proper kindness—we would say—and yet being kind is one sort of treatment when you are ill. No, we did not exaggerate; we just had plenty of intuition about what was happening to us, and to those men, and about what would happen later on, too. At times when one of us was away, far from all of the others . . . well, those were moments when we believed there was no hope for us. But as soon as we came together, even if all we talked about was other people, because we felt like gossiping and working the rumors, still we’d discover that one of us, or a few—no, all of us—were in need of some help. We were not women alone. We were three women, four, sometimes more. Maybe two in franji clothes, looking like the trendiest Paris fashion, and a third in skintight blue jeans with all sorts of fancy stuff down the legs. And then there was me in a pleated skirt, a long one; it makes me look a bit taller. A skirt always paired with a loose blouse to conceal the size of my chest. Sometimes, joking, I would say to them, Just imagine, now—what if we had the moustaches, hair on our faces like theirs, what if we were to wear a husband’s hat and what if instead of those drivers we were the ones to drive them to work? But they don’t laugh at my laughable words as I am expecting them to do. That’s when I shift my body from one position to another, going over to sit on the floor and supporting my back, in my usual spot (you know the spot I mean). I move the pillow so that it is behind me—that pillow, the one covered in Indian cloth with the sequins and tiny mirrors and silver threads; it does make my back prickle slightly but I don’t pay any att
ention. Yet I cannot maneuver my legs and back quite as I should be able to move them. My women always figure that I am ill—well, that is what they assume before they come to know, for instance, that just the night before I got a beating worth its name. Knowing that is not simply a matter of intuition, not in this case, Nader, because just the fact that I am there in front of them scuttles their doubts and suspicions. I may be standing or sitting; my skin is tinted and my cheeks are rosy as usual with the bright rouge I use, my eyes—already large—made larger by the bluish gray eye shadow I put on my lids to camouflage their bruised swelling.
But not a single one of them gave me a word of advice on how to resolve things. We all seemed to be more or less in the same fix as we talked about some subject that, it was perfectly natural to discuss, all of those matters, call them whatever you like but don’t label them a tragedy. For it is laughable, yes, what a joke it all seemed! As if these things had happened to someone else, not to us, as if we were seeing them on a video and we had no feelings of anger about the events themselves, and no resentment toward them. For us it wasn’t a matter of losing respect, in the way that a person loses personal honor—that’s the least of it as far as I’m concerned. This might be what distinguishes us women from them. Of course it was a problem that upset and worried us, but it wasn’t one that could force us to say their names—not enough to drag those names from our lips! We would dredge up the name of so-and-so, and then we’d talk on and on about someone else, and move to a third and a fourth name and so on and so on. Even an intense thrashing didn’t dislodge me from my submissive state. As for those words—pride, dignity, and sobbing until a very late hour of the night—those words are meaningless. Our sense of hurt and vexation arose from our pity for them; that feeling wasn’t a consequence of anything else. What’s amazing is that we look to be women who have forgiven everything: the intense pain, those particularly humiliating slaps to the napes of our necks, and the army bats. Sometimes the pistol would be out of the drawer and aimed straight at one of us in a matter of seconds—after all, pleasure gripped them and would not let go whenever they saw us primed to escape from them. Those things we would tell each other, laughing together; but the horrific images of it all would come back to us to stun us all the more. How could we not have fled? How did we go back to them? How did we go back, smiling into their faces and concealing our anger behind the high walls? It wasn’t a matter of being just stupid or silly. After all, we would refuse to sleep on the very same bed or perhaps even in the very same room. We did not—at all!—stumble over our clothes when trying to escape, as they imagined. No! To the contrary, we were good and ready. We bore up under it and we mocked them until it tired them out and they stopped. We had to handle it by acknowledging that what happened to us in private rooms, concealed from all eyes—to be specific, from your eyes and then there were also the eyes of servants and drivers—was just some excessive and misplaced energy, and it was not something to boast about, of course. Granted, it was a mistake, but it was not a sin or even a scandalous social ill. Don’t try to apply labels—it all comes down to the same thing. From my point of view, being beaten granted me a license to sleep from pure exhaustion. It drugged me as my condition was getting worse, but there wasn’t a single day when you saw what was going on. I never let you see it. As women, we were all fenced in by barbed wire and very high walls; all of us lived in the same neighborhoods. We rode in late-model cars. We colluded with each other and covered for each other. But no one ever said in our presence that what we were going through was actually caused by our severe and remorseless husbands.
Can you imagine? One of those times your father tried to call the ambulance after I had fainted collapsing into his arms. When I awoke I was like a deranged woman. But what possessed me was my fear about what would happen to him if such-and-such should happen. He was the one who shoved it all aside. A day came when I was even able to tell myself that when and if he abandoned all of this foolish and illicit behavior I would go back to the folk dancing that I loved so much but which my very nature had come to despise for his sake, back when I was studying theater in the Fine Arts Academy. And now here I am and you are seeing me jiggle my body as I have fun with your little Leon. I bend and sway every which way; he is in my arms and I’m like a woman possessed. It used to be that I danced as a way to ward off this and that, packing into my body every new move, every added gesture and bit of imagination. I was ignorant of myself and my body: what I wanted was to look better than I’d looked the night before. Later—years later, during our time in Paris—I would tell Sarah, who was my Iraqi housemate and co-conspirator in life just then: It may be that dance is the dynamic energy that puts life into the world’s weak peoples. But your father, coming home at night from the military base, looked as though he had been far away, somewhere beyond the seas. He resembled one of those corsairs of long ago. He suffered; maybe he was more in pain than I was. I would look into his eyes ignorant of everything except that he was in another and unknown place, and that he was suffering from an ailment in his endocrine gland, or in his brain. Likely his suffering had to do with his inordinate sexual needs. In the beginning we didn’t touch each other, not really. No caresses. He did not look directly at me, didn’t look for my reactions. He was bashful to the point of being completely shamefaced, and too decent for words, so proper that it always seemed as if we were meeting each other for the first time—and I loved that way of his. He hovered over me, agitated and uncertain, like a wounded bird both stunned and thrashing, one wing sticking out at an awkward angle and the other held tightly against his body. His feet would get tangled up in the clothes which he’d shrugged out of so fast and tossed onto the floor, out of the way, he thought. He would all but fall and that would send him into a fit of very ugly cursing. He had this ridiculous way of moving his hands, clownish, and vulgar, too, which galled him but he couldn’t keep them still. I would be standing there in front of him watching in complete seriousness. He would jerk the coverlet up nervously and dive underneath and in seconds that irritating snoring of his would start as if the noise and its timing had been precisely calibrated by him. I’d stare at him as if he were on the brink of death. I would turn out the light and practically leap into bed beside him. His manner when asleep was extremely seductive and it had its own kind of power over me. But it was never long before I would again be my passive, weak self. When I was apart from him I would hear myself saying quietly as I shut the door, He is my Superman—strong and robust, certainly fertile, full of lust and always able to do it, again and again. Forgive me, Nader. But you must let me raise the curtain for you on those years of our life that are now over and gone. So that you can see us the way we were. It was always as if we were doing daily exercises, each of us with our own particular routine, in order to present to you—to you specifically—a particular image. We each wanted you to see the best possible image of our separate selves. As long as an exception was made for certain fairly vile parts of it, and for some of the stupid little stuff, I would imagine that we were deserving of at least your silence although probably not your sympathy.
Your father was in his mid-thirties and I was still a fresh young thing, twenty-four years old and from a middle-class family, with a father who was a recognized theater producer and a mother who’d been principal of an elementary school and had gotten early retirement for health reasons when she was no more than forty-eight years old. So there was enough time in the future for me to have a daughter by him. Or even two.
She rose to stand at the big window that overlooked a small garden and the neighbors’ homes. She took a deep breath and exhaled a forceful sigh. Some memory came into her mind: she spoke again, her voice fragile.
We didn’t turn into passionate lovers right away. It wasn’t like the love stories you read about or hear of. Later, though, Nader, he started calling me the Deadly Bullet and I called him the Hunting Rifle. We teased each other and joked around in that sort of way, making use of all those things of
the moment and devices and equipment that surrounded us, whatever we saw in the streets or on television. It was more than just a few flower vases and the public gardens. Our love letters were always dipping into the military dictionary. After all, he was a courageous and daring officer, an athlete who had graduated from the Military College, the prize product of his middle-class family. He was my mother’s relative, but a distant relative. The day he came to ask for my hand she was the one who refused; my father insisted, though, that he was the one for me.
He used to stick the letters we sent to each other during our engagement—we weren’t engaged very long—into his cartridge clip and so they smelled of gunpowder, and every time we extracted those little scraps of paper the traces of it sent us into spells of hysterical laughter.
She smiles and for the first time I catch sight of a satiric twist in the way she moves her lips. Her sarcasm has always been bitter but quiet. She turns but does not look at me. She walks over to the table calmly and goes back to work arranging the tablecloth. She straightens every edge, stoops and peers below to make sure that it isn’t crooked or hanging too low on one side. Suhaila prefers such details. She stands straight again to observe everything carefully from a distance.
It’s your turn, now, Nader, she says. Put out the forks and spoons, and the plates, and don’t forget to change the water in that vase. Don’t set it down right in front of us as if we’re at a farewell party. Put it over to the side—we still have plenty of time before going to the airport. Is Sonia done in the bathroom?
Two
I
In airports we are born. . . .
I repeated the words to myself again and again as if I were at Leon’s bedside, chanting the phrase to him in my usual singsong tones that would make him go quietly off to sleep. It was hard to come up with any other locution but the fact that there was no other phrase was even harder. When the French security policeman at Charles de Gaulle Airport started to study my temporary Canadian papers I was suddenly uneasy to the point of alarm. I was afraid, in fact, my fear acid-like, fully able to scorch my skin and then burn all the way to my heart without emitting the slightest telltale smoke. That fear has been with me all my life; I don’t know where it came from or when it will ever leave me alone. It has always been there for me to follow in its wake, winding through the cities and people and houses in which I have lived. We have stuck together; we’re twin-like. My mother says, No, it is not like that. My fear—she says—is arsenic-like: I put it away, stuff it into whichever pocket is handy, and it’s there to be sucked on and swallowed.
