Miroslav Tichý. Source: lempertz.com
*
My hunger for love exceeds me
Which has been a continuous annoyance
.
Although possibly a passe
But I do love both women
And the people who imagined God differently
It is a strange game
Tereza Zelenkova, from ” Snake That Disappeared Through a Hole in the Wall”, 2018. Source: 1000wordsmag.com
The shadows in that room always looked a bit hysterical. It may have had something to do with how tall the walls were. It only had one tiny, too high to reach, which made it look like it was there just to freak you out. Perhaps my brother was right; he said it looked like a prison cell. He wanted me to move into the room with better lighting, but it had two big windows. Windows made me uncomfortable; I was barely okay with one. I could never shake off the feeling of being watched. It’s a bit of an egotistical belief, to think that someone or something would leave everything behind to watch your every move. But, egotistical or not, the feeling never left me.
I’ve been lying in bed for three days straight, only leaving my room when absolutely necessary. A crippling numbness took over my body from time to time, and this was one of those times. What followed this inexplicable numbness was always the same repetitive scenario. Having been in bed for a couple of days, I’d get up after midnight with an urge to escape. I’d feel myself being pushed out of my bed and out the door. Every time, my brother would be waiting for me next to the front door, holding it open, and closing it behind me. I’d start walking; everything would go blank from then on.
A photograph of a photograph of Bernard Pivot (centre) at a family gathering in the 1980s. Source: Wikipedia
Back in the day,
three princes of the word
Mohammad Choukri, Charles Bukowski and Marc-Edouard Nabe
graced your show on three separate occasions.
Before a live audience, along with mediocrities
you collectively scorned and bullied Choukri,
whose magnificent retaliation framed your pettiness in a flash.
You disdained and pushed Bukowski out of your set
for legendarily being himself: a celestial drunk.
And with the help of half-witted guests you demonized the young and fresh Nabe
for being brilliantly talented, sharp-tongued, with tons of integrity.
Jonas Bendiksen, Nesoddtangen, Norway, March 29, 2020. Source: magnumphotos.com
We congregate like The Muppets at the theatre: a first tier, a second tier, a third tier. Depending on the age of the host, the “chat” feature is either silenced or not. It is the ideal medium for someone accustomed to exercising control in real life. Yet there is always the sliding into dms. The guy who will tell you: “Why so serious? Ahhh, that hand on your face adds another layer of seduction.” It is just like high school, the kids at the back of the classroom up to no good.
The real gems, though, are the what-a-pleasure-to-meet-you-in-Zoom, I-would-like-to-have-a-meeting-with-you-sometime-early-in-the-morning types. You know it is going to be business during a pandemic, when nobody you know is getting up voluntarily at 6.30 to start a meeting at 7.30 because EST… so when you oblige, and you barely have time to shower, dress and grab your coffee, you know you will rip him a new one. Except he does it first, of course.
Chinese ancestral worship postcard postmarked Shanghai 1908. Source: worthpoint.com
We all descend from someone ancient, and contrary to what is generally believed in the West, they never leave us. Whether you are mystical or logical in nature, the idea sticks. For the former, ancestors spiritually guide us from beyond the grave. For the latter, science now dictates that we genetically inherit their memories and phobias. Either way, an ancestor is someone who passes on information—be it through stories, values, behavior, DNA, or supernatural means—and what distinguishes a good ancestor from a bad one is the quality of this information: a good ancestor hands down wisdom, a bad one gifts us with their pain.
My mother is a bad ancestor and her mother was a bad ancestor too, and if I can’t be a good one, I’d at least like to be better. I come from a lineage of mothers who did not want children. Mean women, selfish women, indifferent women who resented where they came from and had no idea how to nurture what they’d created. Women who buried their aborted babies in the backyard. Women who abandoned their children to others. Women who raged without really knowing why. Absent women who felt unwanted and unloved and unconsciously groomed every last one of their descendants to experience the same.
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.
Alex Webb, Gonaives, Haiti, US invasion, 1994. Source: magnumphotos.com
Joy of my days, come
watch me run
I’ve bought white shoes
and see-through eagle’s wings
I am the clarinet’s mouth
and you the ransomed player
Kneel and guzzle me, set
the sea’s taste in my throat
and make my breast a wave
upon whose mane the sun
sows jewels
Istanbul by Ayhan Ton. Source: instagram.com/ayhanton
There is no escaping the fact. Since 2011, I haven’t been in downtown Cairo except twice, heavily sedated and only for as long as it took to run my unavoidable errand. With the help of medication, my condition had improved enough for me to go there frequently when the protests started in January that year, instead of being confined to Heliopolis as usual. After I was shot with a pellet gun and had to run away from hospital on the first day of protests, for a few weeks I returned to the hotspots of the revolution, but tear gas, shooting and all kinds of attacks often forced me (along with everyone else) to run for my life. This fucked it all up again, in time. Protest hotspots became indistinguishable from vast, crowded spaces too far from home. And, succumbing to my terror of both, I confined myself to Heliopolis.
Khusraw discovers Shirin bathing in a pool from a 16th-century Khamsa by Nizami. Source: Wikipedia
Y(i)
Distance, and desire ruins me. To meet
is no relief. Come or go, desire hardly cares.
Meeting him, unreckoned
things happen. In place of healing,
another ache of longing.
Because to meet him is to see
a person whose beauty grows
ever more abundant, proud.
All I can do is match my love’s ascent
To his loveliness on its measured scale.
Source: jgballard.ca
As an Arab you’re probably expecting me to lay into Nymphomaniac. It’s a film that must seem, if not offensive to my cultural sensibility, then irritatingly irrelevant to the poverty, underdevelopment, and upheaval that surround my life.
In most cases dropping the word “white” in the same paragraph as “Islam’s respect for women” is all it would take to slam Lars von Trier in this context. It would be a politically correct slur, too. I could even draw on Edward Said’s hallowed legacy to point out that the only time non-Europeans appear in over four hours of action, they’re portrayed as dumb sex tools. Not only self-indulgent and obscene but also Orientalist, etc..
But the truth is I actively delighted in Nymphomaniac, and I didn’t have to stop being an Arab for that to happen. To be accurate I should say I would’ve welcomed a von Trier film anyway, but this one showed up when it was needed—and it duly exploded on arrival.
Harry Gruyaert, Alexandria. On the ledge of San Stephano beach, 1993. Source: magnumphotos.com
Somehow
I was a teacher;
somehow
I considered that natural.
For this reason I began to bow
to words I did not say;
and to communicate my respects to my children.
I tried to make them understand that it was absolutely necessary
for someone to read,
to review with his parents—
while he hurls his shoe under the bed—
how exhausting and beautiful respect is:
that they have no future without words.
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