The Loved Ones

by Alia Mamdouh

  I lowered the light by half as I made myself beautiful, applying makeup until my hand was dropping off, and as I began roaming around in my face and body, coming upon nothing but utter ruin. I was sad, of course, at the beginning—the start of my relationship with Faw. Time as something measurable, something in the here and now, or—according to the way physicists see it—time as something grand and all-encompassing, was, to put it exactly, swaggering along in front of me and taking pride in its qualities. When I saw Faw, in the dark, that darkness of Théâtre du Soleil, I was in need of a higher exuberance, a stronger self-abandon that would force itself out from my own internal self, something stronger than the number of years I have lived, stronger than speech and texts. Dance made the famine that was the years of my life show itself proud of gentleness and delicacy, these qualities in whose realms I was roving, to sweet rhythms, roving between my self and his body. Dance will never find its ultimate realization on the theater stage; and it will never end there. It is always beginning, even while I am embodying it as Tessa and Maria watch.

  I made mistakes. I would get up from the floor, and fall, and not know where to put my feet or in what order. The exercises I did on my own seemed to unearth the worst of it. Something is stronger and more beautiful when we don’t know its essence and we are unaware of what the next step is and what the reaction to that will be. Every step I took led me to him and allowed me to disembark from the train of culpability and fear that I had been endlessly riding. With his suggestive gestures and his movement and his touch, he gave me my adventure. Onstage—on that stage—I became weary of the lighting. I resisted those lights, so as not to allow him to see me at all. But I had the feeling that I had become merely a scrap of paper that he folded and jammed into his pocket: I was an identity card and he tossed me into his prison, the prison of his whole body. I would address Tessa inaudibly to get her to lower the lights; it seems that strong lights leave the veins bulging and pores open to their widest, and that’s where age makes its way inside of us, in whichever way it wishes. Age refuses but to enter; it doesn’t leave. It comes in and it does not come out again. I tried to let it come out even if just for a time, to delay, to be absent a little, as if it were napping or visiting someone while on its way to me, visiting Blanche, Narjis, Caroline, visiting Nur with her spreading fragrance, or even Wajd; or stopping on the way to rest a little. It goes over to tease a few lovers, those whom I see in the Metro and on the banks of the Seine and in side streets. They hug quietly, or violently, they kiss each other on the lips as if the kiss will return them to the time of their first flowering. Of the secrets of this cosmos they know only this succession of acts: swallowing your saliva, the click of teeth against teeth, and the tongue. That accursed being, age, packs them full of screams waiting to emerge. Life, age—it marches before them, ignores them, and appears not to be in any hurry. With me, though, I see it as very much in a hurry; but I changed the second mirror, too. I scrubbed my face with warm water and chemical-free soap, which is what the pharmacy manager prescribed. She is my French neighbor, and she said, This is soap that revives the skin—it’s perfect. When I washed my face it suddenly looked very attractive but a quarter of an hour later it puckered and shriveled. My face collapsed into wrinkles as if the whole cosmos had sat down on top of it and then abandoned all of me. As I left the pharmacy I asked myself, What is the use of reviving it? I want to see age, life, my age. I want to extend my hand out to it and give it a friendly handshake, and wish it enough time to remove itself from my presence. Whenever I change the mirror the state I’m in is more topsy-turvy than the day before. And Faw could care less, it seems. The minute we are together he says to me, I will disburse your age in my own special way, not on the bed of sleep nor by instinct. With it I shall open a charity bazaar. Warm water and soap didn’t do any good so I bought a washcloth in the shape of a hand and began to rub my face gently at first. That is what the lady told me to do. Then I doubled the motions of my hand over the temples and around the eyes, these areas I have always watched most closely. Here is where age had collected—reckless, out of control, fickle, desolate. Here is where the lies massed, along with boredom, and weariness, and bitterness, and decorous words and very faithful stupidities. What is this? I made myself into a laughing stock for I would wail and laugh and scream into the mirror’s face.

  I make a fist and raise it high so as not to see, as if I am putting on my age, like clothes. I impale it and I feel a soft slow twinge between my breasts which have sagged right and left and roamed unrestrained on the edges of streets and among houses and cities and rooms and sheets. Watching my mother, I used to say to Ferial, Yaa, how very old she is! But she was only forty at the time. Life, lived, itself sags onto itself, is made a laughingstock, begins to grow uneasy, to weary and get bored; age and life want something else. Age also has a life. Nader, where are you, ayni? Why don’t you answer me? Come, turn the pages of my face with me, one page after another, since . . . since. . . . And don’t leave me alone with my face. He would be afraid for me whenever he saw me in pain, whenever I would sing in a sad voice and go into the bathroom, whenever I remained absent for a long time. And when my silence would grow particularly heavy he would say to me, and I was certain that he was uncomfortable with my behavior, Mother, it is as if you have gone inside the mirror.

  If Nader leaves me I bring in Faw. I take little sips of his blood and invite him to the banquet of my lifetime. I pull back the curtain and run dancing across the top of the Towers of Eiffel and Babel. I said to Faw, Search with me for what is left of me that you can have. Search for the overflow of the Tigris and Euphrates, the flooding of the banks and the silt on the two sides of al-Faw, there in Iraq. Dance with me for one day, for one sentence. If only my dance were translated into the living and dead languages and those that are dying! I told him that there are no rules in dance. Maria is a little overbearing, like my mother, and Tessa comes to my dreams as they all do, and she brings everyone, and she says, Do not imitate anyone, man or woman.

  How can that be, Tessa? Don’t you see how crude I am? I become hooliganish and bad, I move toward death walking on tiptoe. I took Tessa by the hand and said to her, Come, dance with me, let’s dance, this is what the finest lineages of women do with the women who are still around. But Ferial was crossing the borders with sarcastic words; she was mocking me for having said: Acting and dancing are my birthplace: the very place where my head emerged to touch the world. No one really owns her own head, Ferial answers, so how could one possess the place where it touches the world? Who cares now about eulogizing themselves, their parents, and their ancient, first paradisiacal gardens? Suhaila, I love no paradises.

  My self-abasement worried Dr. Wajd, who said, Your image is turned inside out right now. Fine, don’t take this sleeping pill—I’ll take it instead of you. Be confident that I will not sell your secrets. I will not be forced to do that even if I have to die at your side. I am not your personal physician; I am your faithful friend. I will not defile my duty or my oath or my fealty. I will not betray you so don’t examine me like that, please. Don’t be swayed by what you hear and by what is said. I am by your side, so don’t be afraid. Only at a late hour did I understand her vague allusion. She began to play a tune for me and I had no help for it but to respond. I had never danced quite like this before or swayed with this simplicity. My features were in front of Faw, appearing composed so he would take me seriously and with due forbearance considering my age. I was afraid to say to him, Even the rhythm is a message. It is odd that Asma did not call with congratulations on Leon’s birth, but I saw her pregnant in her last month, more or less, and she is nearly my age. I will persuade Hammada not to slip out, she said, so that he can remain close to where my emotions are hidden and so that he will not be out of my sight. I will remain pregnant with him until his birth really becomes necessary.

  I think about my own death. I have thought about it a lot. My death does not cloud my serenity; it pleases me. It accedes to
my commands. I deceived them, bursting into laughter. My death is amphibious; I have taken it on professionally, from all sides since having been steeped in all the poisons but without dying. It has been bewildering: I noticed that my skin looked the color of the wine my heart adores as much as Blanche does. My eyes contain many layers; my nose is stately and my hair swirls round with the swiftness of a nuclear reactor. Someone, only one someone, flares up before me like soda. Faw. He was asleep like the two tributaries, the Tigris and the Euphrates, between my ribs. He drew me out of my sleep and my bed, out of my death and my forgetting. The tears ran down my cheeks as I heard Nader’s voice. Aah, it is him, and he is putting on one of my shawls that I love so much. He used to be the child, and the beautiful sad young man, and he looks straight into my eyes. I can remember his very first lines of poetry.

  I fear death

  I fear life continuing without me

  my friends forgetting me

  and my mother’s tears increasing twofold

  whenever her eyelids open

  Translator’s Notes and Acknowledgments

  As a multilingual text that draws on many cultural references, al-Mahbubat is a transnational text and I have tried to preserve the spirit of this traveling text linguistically, although the musicality of colloquial Arabic, as well as the significance of using dialect Arabic within the narrative, can only be suggested in translation.

  Every translation is a reader’s interpretation, and in the end, I am of course responsible for the many decisions that this entails. The very few and minor real alterations to the text that I have made have been done with the author’s agreement. Throughout, Alia Mamdouh has been a translator’s dream: respectful, trusting, warm, and always generous and prompt in answering questions. Most of all, working with Alia, from our first meeting in Cairo on, has been an opportunity to get to know a wonderful person, and I am deeply grateful to her.

  I want to note that in the Arabic text there is no chapter twelve: this was accidental and I have altered the subsequent chapter numbers, with the result that chapter 12 in this rendering is chapter 13 in the Arabic, and so on. There are a few direct quotations rendered in Arabic in the original, which I was not able to locate in order to quote directly from English versions; in these cases I have translated them myself or paraphrased them. The rap lyrics are my composition based loosely on the Arabic in the text, which Alia Mamdouh in turn based on lyrics by the French-based rap group NTM but which I was unable to find. The Bob Marley quotation is a quoted statement of his rather than a song lyric; this quotation was the closest I found to the meaning given in the Arabic.

  “Neither spared nor left behind” in one passage of the translation (“Your theater will be a cosmic adventure that will be neither spared nor left behind, and it will cause a splitting and a rending”) originates from the Holy Qur’an (74:28). For another passage (“ever since her eating of the tree of knowledge led to her discovery of Adam as an other . . . and to her discovery of the principle of desire/pleasure entwined”), the author is indebted for these characterizations of the thought of Cixous to two essays by Sabry Hafiz published in the London daily al-‘Arab: “Mafhum al-kitaba al-mu’annatha ‘ind Cixous wa-l-riwaya al-misriya al-jadida,” al-‘Arab 29 October 2002, p. 14; “Ta’nith al-kitaba ‘ind Cixous wa tabi‘at al-ma‘na al-jadida,” al-‘Arab, 5 November 2002, p. 14.

  My rendering of al-Mahbubat into English has benefited from the generous help of several friends and colleagues as well as the fortunate yields of the internet. I am very grateful to my dear friend and sister translator, Sahar Tawfiq, for taking time out of her own work to answer questions, and also to another dear person, Ferial Ghazoul, for her willingness to help. I thank Iqbal al-Qazwini for her patient and careful help with last-minute clarifications, Carrie Cuno-Booth for checking cultural references on the internet, Nicole Côté for a felicitous French usage, Odile Cisneros for helping me think about titles, and Alex Giardino for recognizing that “Mother India” could be Amma rather than some other candidates for that appellation. Nicole, Alex, and Odile were among a magical, wonderful cohort of translators at the Banff International Literary Translation Centre, which is a program of the Banff Centre in Banff, Alberta, Canada. The chance to live and work in the company of literary translators—and among the beautiful mountains, rivers, and forests of Banff, where breathtaking walks helped me contour many a sentence herein—was, as we agreed at the time, utopian (and also real). The final version of this translation was largely accomplished at Banff. I am deeply grateful to the Centre and to its Director, Linda Gaboriau, for making this opportunity possible. Linda’s graceful, mesmeric, and always smart directorship set a wonderful tone, and I am also thankful for a most memorable climb above the Bow!

  Afterword

  Let us stand at the threshold of writing, which is also the threshold of all possibilities, allowing us to gain access to both the reader and that secret self who perhaps still crouches in the back row.—Alia Mamdouh

  Iraqi Women: Emancipation and Writing

  Women’s emancipation in Iraq went hand in hand with national liberation in the early twentieth century. Following centuries of Ottoman imperial rule, marked by relative decentralization, Iraq was conquered by British troops under General Maude in 1917. No sooner did the British occupy Iraq than resistance took place in the spectacular 1920 revolt, which was put down ruthlessly by the invaders. Its memory, however, continues to resonate in Iraqi culture.

  A longing for local autonomy, if not complete independence, has characterized Iraq since the early nineteenth century, as indeed it had characterized many regions that were under the rule of the Ottoman empire. However, the participation of women in the 1920 revolt was a departure. Indeed, as early as the 1920s women struggled for their rights. In 1923, Asma’ al-Zahawi established “The Society for Women’s Renaissance.” In that same year, Paulina Hassun started a magazine called Layla, a common women’s name also functions as a synecdoche for women in Arab culture. In 1923, Majida al-Haydari removed her veil openly. In 1934, Sabiha al-Shaykh Dawud enrolled in the Faculty of Law in Baghdad—a bastion of masculinity (Al-Musawi 2006, 139). Worth noting is that women’s progressive emancipation was closely linked to women’s writing for newspapers and magazines and publishing literary works. Also noteworthy is that these pioneer women were from the upper echelons of society, often supported by their male relations in taking untrodden paths. Sabiha al-Shaykh Dawwud documents the progress of Iraqi women in Awal al-tariq (The Beginning of the Road), which includes a chapter on women in the 1920 revolt (2000 [1958]). The book was dedicated “to the feminist revival in Iraq” and was introduced by the head of the Iraqi Academy of Science, Munir al-Qadi, a former minister of education. His introduction opens with the following sentence: “Woman is the twin of man” (5), thus abolishing the traditional gendered hierarchy. In a memoir, Saniha Amin Zaki—one of the first medical doctors in Iraq—also provides glimpses of life in Iraq in the 1930s and 1940s and describes the important contributions of women to modernization (2005). As the new Iraq was taking shape as a state, the woman question appeared more and more crucial. Political and social movements had on the top of their agendas women’s status.

  In a country where the prime genre tapping the literary energy of the people has been poetry, major Iraqi poets between the two world wars wrote verse in support of women’s rights: “They [the major Iraqi poets] fought for women’s rights and social freedom as the early poems of [Ma‘ruf] al-Rusafi, [Muhammad Sudqi] al-Zahawi, and [Muhammad Mahdi] al-Basir demonstrate” (Al-Musawi 2006, 139). One of the earliest Iraqi novels, written in 1937 and entitled Dahaya (Victims), by Dhu al-Nun Ayyub, is dedicated to the “Woman who shakes the cradle with one arm and suffers whipping in the other” (quoted in Al-Musawi 2006, 139).

  After the death of Muhammad Sudqi al-Zahawi, known as an advocate for women, Salma al-Mala’ika (known as Umm Nizar) recited a poem in which she refers to him as “the supporter of Layla.” In another poem, she addr
esses women, encouraging them to resist “captivity” and reject “lowliness,” and to strive for a rebirth (Ghazoul 2004a, 12). Although her poetry was not published in her lifetime, her daughter, the renowned poet and critic Nazik al-Mala’ika, collected her mother’s poems and published them posthumously in 1968 under the name Umm Nizar al-Mala’ika. While women of all social classes composed poetry in both classical Arabic and colloquial Iraqi Arabic, much of it was lost because it was mainly recited orally for special occasions. Such occasions included the mourning of a lost relative or celebrating a family member. But there were also poems about political events. The 1920 revolt against British invasion stimulated the talents of women as well as men. Thanks to literary scholars, some of this material has been collected and published as, for example, in the case of Rabab al-Kazimi and that of the aforementioned Salma al-Mala’ika.

  Some women chose narrative forms to express themselves. They wrote short stories and novellas, but often used a pseudonym or a pen name as a way of protecting themselves from being known publicly. Women were writing novels around the time men started taking up this genre. Their themes stressed hopes for social justice and national progress. Both men and women, in the first half of the twentieth century, denounced the repression of women, all social oppression, and national dependency (Ghazoul 2004a, 9–30). One cannot overestimate the importance of magazines and cultural pages of newspapers, which published women’s writing and highlighted Iraqi women’s issues. These cultural reviews were not only published in Iraq, but also in Lebanon and Egypt, where movements for women’s emancipation were already present and active.

  By the 1940s women like Nazik al-Mala’ika and Lami‘a ‘Abbas ‘Ammara were studying at the university and writing poetry that has left its impact on Iraq and on the rest of the Arab world. Nazik al-Mala’ika, a pioneer in the new verse movement, did not only write daring poems about women’s rights but also modernized Arabic prosody to allow for a new way of writing. She, along with such male poets as Badr Shakir al-Sayyab, Buland al-Haidari, and Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, carried the banner of poetic revolution. Nazik al-Mala’ika also contributed to literary criticism and theorized the changes she espoused. For fourteen centuries, Arabic prosody had been fixed until Nazik al-Mala’ika loosened it. She advocated a more fluid and flexible prosody, allowing for modern attitudes to be expressed without the need to fit one’s writing within the restrictive and traditional two-hemistich verse lines with a single-rhyme scheme. Her critical contributions as well as her poems spearheaded a dramatic change in poetics. Nazik al-Mala’ika also wrote articles (which were later collected in a book) on social issues specifically related to women, exposing the double standards of gendered treatment in the Arab world. Her poem, “Washing Off Disgrace,” which denounced the so-called honor-killing of women and exposed patriarchal hypocrisy, became the battle cry of feminists.