The Locust and the Bird

by Hanan al-Shaykh

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  The Story of Zahra

  Women of Sand and Myrrh

  Beirut Blues

  I Sweep the Sun off Rooftops

  Only in London

  To my sisters and brothers

  ONCE UPON A time, a king was taking a stroll in his garden when a locust flew into the wide sleeve of his robe. A bird, in hot pursuit, flew in after it. The king sewed up the sleeve, sat on his throne and asked his people, ‘What is up my sleeve?’

  No one knew the answer. But it so happened that a man named Bird, who was desperately in love with a woman called Locust, was standing in the crowd. He came forward, only the face of his beloved in his mind, and proclaimed to his king, ‘Wails and tales. My life story is one long revelation. Only the locust can capture the bird.’

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  Kamila my mother

  Kamil Kamila’s brother

  Hasan Kamila’s half-brother (the lute lover)

  Ibrahim Kamila’s half-brother (Mr Gloomy)

  Khadija Ibrahim’s wife

  Manija Kamila’s half-sister and first wife of Abu-

  Hussein. Mother of Hussein the Ideologue,

  Hasan and Ali, Kamila’s nephews and later

  stepsons

  Raoufa Kamila’s half-sister (married to the gambler)

  Abu-Hussein Kamila’s brother-in-law through his first

  marriage to Manifa and later her husband

  (the Haji)

  Maryam

  & Inaam Kamila’s nieces (Raoufa’s daughters)

  Fatme the seamstress

  Fatima

  & Hanan Kamila’s daughters to Abu-Hussein

  Fadila Kamila’s friend

  Muhammad Kamila’s second husband

  Miskiah Muhammad’s sister

  Ali one of Muhammad’s brothers

  Ahlam, Majida

  & Kadsuma Kamila’s three daughters to Muhammad

  Toufic &

  Muhammad

  Kamal Kamila’s two sons to Muhammad

  HANAN

  Prologue

  I AM IN ONE of three black limousines roaring through the streets of New York City, like barracudas on speed. I see the lights and hear the clamour. There are white roses in my daughter’s dark hair, and an ivory one in the buttonhole of her fiancé, whose hair I now see combed for the first time. Today is their wedding day.

  I had never imagined a wedding in the presence of hundreds of guests. Nor that my children would be choosing a theme for such an event, as has become the fashion with so many Arab weddings. (Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is one example I remember, where the bride rose from a vast shell as it opened electronically.) But I also hadn’t imagined that my daughter would marry just as I had thirty-two years earlier, with neither a wedding party nor a white dress.

  My daughter is not in the white-leather dress she imagined designing for her wedding, long before she fell in love and thought seriously of marriage. She is not wearing the veil of white lace, which, years before, she made her father buy for her for Halloween. That veil was eventually given to our Moroccan au pair, herself about to be married. (It may still be in Morocco, being handed on from one bride to another.) I used to smile, thinking of that veil, perhaps the only English one to cover the face of a shy Berber bride, waiting anxiously as the hands of her groom lift it to see her face for the first time.

  Instead, my daughter has chosen a suit for her wedding day: short jacket and knee-length skirt of soft blue, with traces of pink and beige. My own wedding dress was a plain ordinary blue, short and very sixties. It occurs to me that my mother wore a white gown on the day of her own wedding. My mother’s wedding day! No, I cannot call it that. It was the day on which she was sacrificed.

  I try not to think of Mother now. Yet I no longer see the lights of New York. I don’t hear its crash and roar. I see my mother being forced into a white wedding dress, a tiara of artificial flowers being placed on her head. She pulls it off, along with a chunk of her hair. She tears the dress off, grabbing a jute sack used to wipe the floor, wrapping her body in it, racing to the stove, blackening her face with soot, howling and howling as she tries to push away the hands that surround her. She is a tiny fish, netted.

  My daughter blows me a kiss. My son-in-law brings me back to this day of happiness with a kiss of his own. I banish my mother’s agony with sudden guilt. Why didn’t I tell her when I myself was getting married?

  But then, I didn’t really live with my mother. I can count the times I saw her as a child. When I did, it was as though she was a wild, chaotic neighbour. She had no authority over me. If she was upset about something I had done during my rare visits – like the time I played ‘La Poupée qui fait non’ on my portable gramophone for the tenth time – all she could do was wail.

  Is it right, though, for children to marry in secret, in the absence of those who gave them life? I married in secret. No party. My father learned of my marriage when a friend congratulated him. As the expression on his face changed from embarrassment to suspicion to confusion to panic, they showed him the newspaper I worked for and read out the news item. My father slapped his face with both hands and wept. He pounded his chest and wept again. When he got home, he found a telegram stuck to the door. He rushed to a neighbour and asked that they read it for him, because he read nothing but the Quran. ‘Dear Father STOP Married STOP My love STOP Hanan.’

  A devout Shia Muslim, my father had long since reconciled himself to the fact that I would not marry a man of faith, as he had once hoped before I revealed my true colours, as a rebel at heart. Nevertheless, to have chosen to marry a man from another faith – a Christian – was as unimaginable to him as a trip to the moon.

  My mother, on the other hand, was ecstatic when my sister told her I had eloped. She ululated and danced, breathing a sigh of relief, although I was only twenty-three years old. When we met, two months after my wedding, she took me in her arms and tried to lift me. Laughing, she told me how she had stretched out her hand and asked the statue of a poet who shared my husband’s name for some money. ‘We’re relatives now!’ she told it.

  My marriage was my mother’s victory. With it, she triumphed over everyone who had never failed to remind my older sister and me that we wouldn’t find good husbands – not only because of our humble background but because of what our mother had done. Like mother, like daughter … In Arabic the words are harsher: ‘Tip the jar on to its mouth [stand it upside down] and the daughter like the mother goes south.’

  My mother fell in love with a man who was not her husband. My mother left home.

  I wasn’t good marriage-material either. Too independent. Too liberated. At eighteen I went alone to Cairo to study. I caused a scandal there and in Lebanon – I had a love affair, of course, with a well-known, well-married Egyptian novelist twice my age.

  My mother couldn’t have cared less that I married a Christian. In fact, she may have believed that my reflected glory would improve her own social standing. I had married a man – the man who is still my husband – from a family famous enough to have its line charted by historians.

  So why didn’t I tell her? The truth is that it didn’t occur to me that she might want to share in my happiness. It had been years since my mother had entered my thoughts. When she left home, I tucked her out of sight, in a box in my head. I was seven years old. I decided that a voice had given birth to me.

  A voice kept me company. A voice whispered to me, described things and emotions, asked questions. A voice taught me how to take care of myself. My own hands dressed me, put my shoes on, braided my hair. I found myself detaching from my father, too. As loving as he was, he stayed much closer to God than to my sister and me. He prayed c
onstantly, his tearful eyes like red coals, his forehead imprinted from his prostrations, his arms and mind raised towards heaven. The more my father trembled before God, the bolder I became.

  But the voice understood only too well my mother’s absence from the house. It made me stare at the cupboard in the bedroom my sister shared with my father and his wife. I would look at my stepmother’s belongings. I would wonder how the tiles, with a pattern like a smiling Japanese face, could continue to smile when my stepmother’s only pair of shoes lay there, instead of my mother’s.

  The same voice put a pen in my hand, so that I could describe how my mother and the man she loved became one against me, my father, my maternal grandmother and my uncle’s family – but never against my sister. Somehow she remained joined to them, always excited, always anticipating when and where she might next see them.

  I used my mother’s absence to encourage people to take an interest in me. One of them was the music teacher who took me to see Never Say Goodbye, a film about a mother who abandons her daughter. I was terribly proud that, unlike the other children in my neighbourhood, my life was the stuff of movies.

  At that time Lebanese coins had a hole in the centre. I threaded some into a bracelet and, each time my hand brushed against a table, their jingling sound promised me maturity, control, freedom; promised me that I could cope with the neighbourhood children’s taunts about my absent mother. The voice helped me to seduce them. I was like a magician: I told stories and did funny imitations. I could make them laugh. I could show how little I cared about our mother’s desertion. But her absence was a kind of presence, like a photograph that fell down and shattered into a million pieces, leaving its dusty contours etched for ever on the wall where it had hung.

  I longed to escape. When finally my father’s prayer beads told him that I could go away to study, I left for school in Sidon. There I met and eventually shared a room with Leila Khaled, the Palestinian who, years later, in 1969, would become the first woman to hijack a plane. We became close, moving our beds into the room used for storage, away from the other girls. If I think now of what bound us two girls together and made us happy to occupy that damp storeroom which was inhabited by many snails, what comes back to me is a sense of alienation, of not belonging. Leila had grown up in a refugee camp; I was running away from my family.

  Two years later, at the age of eighteen, the voice challenged me to travel to Egypt. I had heard the song, ‘Take me back to Cairo … beside the River Nile …’ and when I met a Lebanese student who told me about a school in Cairo that didn’t insist on geometry and algebra, I began to hear that song, over and over.

  To raise money I persuaded the editors of literary magazines and newspapers to give me the chance to interview politicians about their first love, showing them the articles I’d written in the student pages of a newspaper. Two months later I’d managed many interviews, and I had some money. My father did not consult his prayer beads this time. I showed him the money and recited the Prophet’s Hadith: ‘Seek knowledge from the cradle to the grave; and seek knowledge even if you have to go to China.’

  Egypt was much closer than China. My father tried to convince me that there would be no stigma in arriving in Cairo with my things in a cardboard box, but I knocked at one neighbour’s door after another until someone lent me a suitcase. I went.

  Back in Beirut, four years later, the voice helped me to control my feelings of suffocation and to see life differently: my home as free lodging, my stepmother simply as an unpleasant, childless employee, my loving father as a Sufi living in his own shrine. His tears were tears of love – he couldn’t bear to think of me rotting in hell because of my refusal to pray, cover my hair, or wear long sleeves.

  As soon as I could afford it, I left home. I lived in a women’s hostel in a district by the sea. Mine was a fully independent life, away from family, from my neighbourhood, working long hours as a journalist and broadcaster. And the voice stayed with me until I turned twenty-three, fell in love, and decided to marry.

  It was the voice, not my father, not my mother, that gave me away, at the moment when the man I loved asked about my parents and I answered, ‘Don’t worry about them,’ and held his hand.

  Little did I know then that, many years later, my mother would convince me to reconsider that dismissive anger of mine, to surrender fully to the past, to meet her as if for the first time in my life. On one of my yearly trips to Lebanon, I sat with my mother on her balcony overlooking Nourwairi Street. Taxis were beeping at pedestrians. Cars were beeping at taxis. Through loudspeakers small-truck vendors were announcing to the world, ‘Best onions. Best potatoes.’

  On her balcony Mother had created a garden: potted plants were everywhere, alongside a frangipani apparently unchanged in forty years, still not fully grown. A family friend appeared, accompanied by a daughter who was about sixteen. My mother welcomed them as if she were surprised by their visit. Somehow I guessed this wasn’t the complete truth. My mother knew that I preferred to see her on her own, not in a sitting room filled with neighbours, relatives, friends and their friends.

  The guest came straight to the point. Could I talk to his daughter, give her some advice about being a writer? She wanted to become one. He snatched the exercise book that she had been clutching, along with her sunglasses, and handed it to me, confident that his mission was virtually complete. He then joked with my mother, shook me by the hand and left. I winked at my mother. I understood her ploy. We both smiled.

  I asked the girl when she had begun to write. She mumbled something and then, to my surprise, she asked me if I could remember the first thing I had written.

  I laughed and said, ‘Yes, I can. I wrote about a fruit fly that flew up Muhammad’s nose and drove him crazy.’

  Turning to my mother, I asked, ‘Do you remember, Mama, how as soon as he entered your father’s tent – wearing his beautiful suit even in the boiling heat – the fly went straight for Muhammad’s nostril. He sneezed and sneezed!’

  My mother laughed. I laughed too.

  She said, not unkindly, ‘A man like Muhammad, thinking of himself as so strong and mighty, so important, and then a fly no bigger than a mustard seed manages to throw him off balance.’

  I opened the girl’s exercise book. She had written the title of her story in red ink, the text in blue, and her signature at the end in a purple flourish. I couldn’t get past a few sentences. I turned the page and saw that she had copied someone’s drawing of the singer Madonna.

  ‘Do you also like drawing?’

  The girl was pink with anxiety.

  ‘I like to write, draw, act, sing, dance, but writing is what I like best.’

  I gave her exercise book back to her.

  ‘Writing will be your best friend.’

  I knew that my mother would want me to praise the girl’s writing, but I couldn’t. My mother shifted her gaze, looking at me now.

  ‘Have you written about Muhammad and the fly in one of your books?’

  ‘Maybe somewhere … I forget.’

  The girl stood up, kissed my mother and then me on both cheeks and left, clutching her exercise book.

  Still standing, my mother looked intently at me again.

  ‘What about my life story? When are you going to write that?’

  When I became a journalist, Mother would have family or friends read aloud what I had written. Illiterate, she couldn’t read for herself anything that I wrote. However, it was a series of articles about prominent women that got to her. The articles featured Lebanese society matriarchs and grandes dames who were politically active, both openly and behind the scenes. The articles had attracted a lot of attention and my mother was among the first to criticise them.

  ‘Those women were privileged. Maybe nobody encouraged them to do what they did, but at least they were not oppressed. But what about the women who are treated as less than human because they are born female? You don’t need to go out looking for such women. Here I am, right in front o
f you! Why don’t you interview me? I could tell you how my father sold me for ten gold coins. I could tell you how I was forced into marriage at the age of fourteen, how I was promised to your father when I was only eleven years old.’

  As she spoke to the young journalist I then was, her passionate words fell on me like drops of rain on to a waterproof coat, sliding away without trace.

  I grew accustomed to my mother’s pleas, each time a new novel or even a major short story of mine came out. ‘Why don’t you write my life story?’ she’d say. ‘It might be more beautiful or more magical than whatever you have just had published.’

  I was deaf. I believed I already knew everything about my mother. She was forced to marry my father, fell in love with another man, and left our home. That was it.

  In 2001 the Arabic edition of my novel Only in London was published in Beirut. I invited my mother to the book launch. She asked me what the novel was about and when I began to describe to her the book’s theme of Arab women negotiating contemporary London and things not being as they seemed, she cut me short.

  ‘Why are you still nibbling from other people’s dishes?’

  I rushed to my own defence.

  ‘Don’t I tell you often enough how you inspire me? Don’t I come to you to remember proverbs? Don’t I take your advice about the characters in my books?’

  Again she cut me short.

  ‘I don’t want you to be inspired. It only means that you see things from your perspective, not mine. Take that story of yours, “The Persian Carpet”. The mother in it is depicted as a thief. She steals the carpet not caring that suspicion lands on Elya, the blind cane-chair repairer. I loved Elya! I used to give him food and sing to him. No, you don’t say anything about the mother having given up everything to get away from an ascetic more than twice her age, a man she was forced to marry. You don’t say that the husband sold all of his wife’s jewellery to save his shop …’