Hassan Ammar (AFP), Beirut, 19 October, 2019. Source: off-guardian.org
after & for Ghassan Hage
The day is forecast as catastrophic. Heat
strangles the sky. It bulges, a rotten purple.
Earlier, an old Greek and a friend unexpected
slipped into my sleeping throat to see
why I bulged, rotting within: a history
believed in, threatens to become faith
in a future―didn’t anyone tell you
never to eat a seed? Oh it grows, it grows.
You must lose this weight to be at ease.
The empty lot gapes, yawns and quivers. It exhales dust and sucks the blue out of the sky. It draws her to it, an emptiness that calls out, that whispers and jeers. A wide mouth, that says, come, that dares her. She has no business with the empty plot. It is a nothing place, a no place, not a place but a gaping, an emptiness that is yet to be filled, something still to come.
It has no address at present, nothing that sets it apart in the neighbourhood. There are so many. Empty stretches of land cleared for some future construction never to come, suspended in the eternal yawning present of oblivion. Plots that have stood so long that they have become part of the landscape, vast parks where rubbish accumulates, some partially developed, deep holes sunk in the earth, now filled with murky water that collects debris, the pokes of steel foundations casting dancing shadows on the surface like the spines of poisonous fish; ruinous scaffold of catastrophic geometries that shade rows of empty buildings, concrete structures looming like theme park wreckage, dark and sullen, windows dust coated, shattered in places, doors padlocked against squatters that never come. The streets that hem them, nearly deserted, monuments to some moment of false hope, a future that dims with each day, grows wary, listless, the air dirty with stalled development.
Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar, The Lady Rider, early 1950s. Source: christies.com
We do not see the hut when the lights first come up, and then we see it. Its inhabitants are not interested in us, perhaps because their problems do not concern us. These women spend their days waiting for a man, and they know that one day he will come. Lights shine upstage from the front of the stage, illuminating a door in the back wall. Neither fully open nor quite shut, it swings gently on its hinges, creaking intermittently, as though the fitful wind outside the hut is knocking to make its presence known within. Then the light sweeps downstage and to the right: we see a flight of stairs rising to the princess’s room, mirrored by a flight on the left leading down to their larder. Centre stage is an old-fashioned, rectangular dining table—or rather, it is simply old: it has no identifiable fashion. Around this table there are four chairs, the back of one slightly higher than the rest. The chairs are not neatly arranged but are scattered about as though hastily vacated. Between them wend the backs of two women dressed in black, cleaning the shabby furnishings and complaining.
Illustration (made for the poem) by John Trefry
.
I went to New Orleans when I was young.
Spanish moss hung from trees like bodies in the still air.
.
I wore white linen because of the heat
and the only time I felt comfortable was at three in the morning.
.
Her shoulders were bare, her hips narrow like a boy’s,
her skin pale and soft as moth wings in the monochrome night.
.
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