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روي الجذور

تفتح هذه الإصدارة نقاش حول الهوية والأدب.  نبحث عن إمكانية وجود أدب نسوي، تحرري، كويري، قادر على كسر حالة هيمنة التصورات الأبوية والمعيارية الغيرية على أدبنا العربي. نتسائل عن ماهية هذا الأدب وكيف ترسى معاييره وترسم سياسات التمثيل به. لهذا السبيل، ندقق النظر في أعمال أدبية نرى فيها ملامح وجوه وأجساد مألوفة لنا، وانعكاسات حيوات ورغبات وروايات غالبًا ما تهمش وتمحى وتنكر علينا. نبحث عن جذور، عن تاريخ. أو نصنعهم بكتابات جديدة طازجة

(PDF) لتحميل وقراءة الإصدارة كاملة

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WHOM DO YOU WRITE FOR? A COLLAGE

 

WHOM DO YOU WRITE FOR? PDF 

First published in Sinister Wisdom 13 (spring 1980); © with individual authors. Sinister Wisdom is available online at www.SinisterWisdom.org.

 

I write for people who feel that they are alone with their feelings. I also write for my friends, lovers and strangers. Right now I am writing for myself

– Stephanie Byrd

My “audience” has been women, in most cases, women who identify themselves as feminists, but also women who respond to the Judaism or the suburban experience in my work. Finally, I write for myself, from a need to grapple with my sister, my friends, my lover, my job. Though I’m certain I want my work. to reach BEYOND my own typewriter.

-Robin Becker

Basically, I’ve always written for myself My lifetime attempt to make sense out of a situation that makes very little sense, i. e., life under white boy patriarchy. When I began my journals my first year of college, I was creating a voice that understood somewhat better than I did the destructive chaos around me. I write for other Black women who know first hand the chaos of which I speak and who are struggling in beautiful ways to change it. I also write for the Black women in my family who raised me and who did not have the chance to write themselves. Although I know that they would not necessarily agree with what I write, I am sure they would feel proud that I am a writer.

-Barbara Smith

I write for myself five years hence, as a critical guard against fine sounding images and impressive general statements that will make no sense to me later. My mother keeps saying plaintively, “I wish you’d write one book I could give my friends . .. I suspect my ideal reader is one who is already giving my books to her friends. I have no ambition to be socially acceptable or politically correct since the job of fiction is to deal with what is rather than what ought to be.

-Jane Rule

I write for anybody who elects to read my work. I do this with the hope that the message I am trying to impart, for there is always one, will come through clearly, and cause readers to think more perceptively, try to initiate changes, and learn to accept different races, as well as individuals within them.

-Ann Allen Shockley

“If God IS a curious green cat-then She shall see what She shall see “ I write for a curious green cat, I think. I write for a part of the self Since words can be received by different parts, I speak to a special part of the self-even when I am angry, remonstrating or some such- a self that is most pure, most honest, most sensuously aware or sensibly aware. An intermittent self; idealized perhaps but there somewhere in all us green cats. I’m pretty sure that in writing to this self I don’t write for women only. But if I write for men it is not to please them.

– Jane Gapen

I feel I know Renee Vivien deeply from her poetry and am obligated to try to translate her work as well as possible. This I do for Her and for Lesbians who do not read French, and for anyone else who enjoys beautiful poetry.

– Margaret A. Porter

A long time ago an English teacher warned my class that we shouldn’t think about going into writing seriously unless we craved it as much as we craved food and sleep. Hal I crave it as much as I crave vacuuming. I honestly never intended to become a writer, but then I never intended to become a lesbian either, so it’s interesting that one has followed from the other. I’m a writer because I’m a lesbian.

-Ruth Baetz

I write now for myself and for my sisters. If a few men can ·hear what I write, I am glad. Why do I still talk with men at all? (as in my book of dialogues, Remembering Who We Are). Because they sometimes put to me questions which I want to know my answers to. And because I do persist in believing that there is “a ghostly woman in every man” (as Adrienne Rich once wrote, though she now questions the term). It is a ghost unbelieved in by most men, of course. But when that ghost seems to me to put in an appearance, I talk with it.

-Barbara Deming

I write for other members of the various oppressed groups that I identify with .I write for women, primarily. Perhaps some of my writing is also for gay men. Among women, much of my writing is specifically for lesbians, some is specifically for black women, and some specifically for black lesbians. Sometimes I write a poem that is just for one other person. And of course I write for me,too. I don’t mind being read by people who are not members of the oppressed groups I am writing for, but they will have to make the effort. I’m not so concerned with trying to raise their consciousness as I am with providing material for us, for our culture, for our creation of a lesbian-feminist reality.

– Becky Birtha

I write for the woman who sent me a letter saying, “Your poems make me work so hard, but it’s always worth it. “

-Susan Wood-Thompson

I write for my daughter. I know no fiercer demand for truth than hers, and through hers, my students’ and all our children’s instinct and demand for it. I write for my responsibility to her: a strategy of words, that earth and life and differences continue.

– Joan Larkin

 Nourishing the roots 

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Untitled poems

Untitled poems PDF 

Written by : Fanny/Nour Blikaz

Translated by: Samah Gafar 

I’m an independent feminist activist from Algeria. I am 30 years old. I moved to Beirut 6 years ago. I started writing poems around two years ago, which came as a surprise to me, on all levels, including the linguistic. At the time, I hadn’t had a good grasp on the Arabic language or its use. My personal experiences and intimate relationships prompted me the most to write. I was inspired by them, and I wrote and expressed feelings and thoughts that stayed with me at certain times. Most of my poems are about love and the pain of love.

 

(1)

Short breath, white pages 

Short breath, dry pen 

Short breath, flux anger 

Short breath, companion soul

I’m obligated to write

About you, for you 

Many lines of love, hate.

Madness, illness

I don’t know 

I’m terrified to be called crazy 

And my sin is to be torn by a frantic love.

(2)

To the point of insanity

Stillness, quietness,

Stillness, quietness,

Wears me and covers my body,

A body that loves abstractness.

Emptiness stayed with me,

Dominating and abundant.

My existence is shaking in fear

Antipathy, forgetfulness,

Antipathy, forgetfulness,

Chasing me in my dreams

Punishing me in my past 

So, I whipped my imagination 

Repeatedly, arbitrarily,

To rest from my devastating torment.

Nourishing the roots

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 Shackles 

Shackles PDF

Written by : Hashem 

Translated from arabic by : Tamara Qiblawi

Hashem Hashem is a queer poet and performer based in Beirut, Lebanon. He has been part of feminist and queer organizing in Lebanon and the MENA region since 2009. Hashem holds a BA in Media Studies, and an MA in Gender & Sexuality Studies from SOAS, University of London. He has performed his poetry at different venues in Lebanon, Belfast, Mexico City and Kathmandu. In 2018, together with Baladi dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch, Hashem wrote and performed The Last Distance, a performance about queer embodiment and language. Currently, Hashem hosts a weekly poetry section, Bouyout, on Hammam Radio. His first poetry collection, Class Hatred, will be published in September 2020.

Blog: https://hashembeirut.wordpress.com 

Instagram: @hashem.beirut 

 

Don’t believe what they say 

Life doesn’t happen 

Inside neat minds 

And polite hearts 

When I strip myself 

Of my rings 

I strip myself 

Of elegant words 

Of coherent sentences 

I become 

The mouth of an Arab 

The mouth of a Barbarian 

That knows no knife nor spoon 

Hands that are free 

Hands that can’t write 

But with a hammer and nail 

I become 

A secret path 

A wild forest 

That won’t hide 

Its dark corners 

I become 

A rebellious snake 

That won’t apologize 

For its painful bites.

Nourishing the roots 

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My Comrade, My Lover

 

My Comrade, My Lover PDF

Written by : Hashem 

Translated from arabic by : Tamara Qiblawi

Hashem Hashem is a queer poet and performer based in Beirut, Lebanon. He has been part of feminist and queer organizing in Lebanon and the MENA region since 2009. Hashem holds a BA in Media Studies, and an MA in Gender & Sexuality Studies from SOAS, University of London. He has performed his poetry at different venues in Lebanon, Belfast, Mexico City and Kathmandu. In 2018, together with Baladi dancer Alexandre Paulikevitch, Hashem wrote and performed The Last Distance, a performance about queer embodiment and language. Currently, Hashem hosts a weekly poetry section, Bouyout, on Hammam Radio. His first poetry collection, Class Hatred, will be published in September 2020.

Blog: https://hashembeirut.wordpress.com 

Instagram: @hashem.beirut 

 

My comrade, my lover

We practice love

We practice anger  

And I can’t decide which is more beautiful

You scream at me with love

You scream at them with anger

And I can’t decide

When you’re more beautiful 

 ***

My comrade, my lover

The day they beat us with sticks

And sprayed us with gas

Our tears streamed

Armed only with bitterness

And poverty,

We laughed together

And you wouldn’t let go of my hand

In the face of corrupt bullets

And it was all I needed

To know that we were one woman.

 ***

My comrade, my lover

Their banks fall

Their taxes fall

Their rifles fall

At your feet

As the heart falls

At the sight of your dimples

 ***

My comrade, my lover

I wish for a free country

I wish for a free body

So hold on to my senses

Hold on to my breath

And we’ll build a city

That mirrors the seasons

That resembles love

That does not apologize before being

 ***

My comrade, my lover

They wish to slaughter us

To hurt us

So be my blood

Be my flesh

Be my name

Let us bind 

A tender wound

A powerful wound

That opens to nothing but love

 ***

My comrade, my city

Insane and cursed

Buried in trash and rot

Baked in screams and sorrow

Falling on my neck like a guillotine

Like a tomb

But then it rises and rumbles

Like a throat

Enchanting

Like a jewel

 ***

My lover, my lover

To be a pervert is to accept

This reality

To abandon the streets

To accept this truth

To call you – after all we’ve been through – a friend.

Perversion is to write banners thanking those who slaughter us

To write romantic verses for those who oppress us

Perversion, my love,

Is the smell of a sea we can no longer see

The smell of a palace

That muzzles our mouths

The smell of poverty

On the ports of fishermen

In the houses of workers

In the tents of refugees

The smell of deceit

In the vaults of banks

In half-hearted stances

The smell of defeat

In the eyes of a woman

burned, crushed

well before the crime

The smell of a lifetime

Crumbling in front of us

Like Beirut’s old houses.

 ***

My companion, my lucky charm,

Would you heal my poetry that conquers me?

My people who ail me?

Would you become for me

A sun

A whisper, a cup, a dance,

That diffuses all bombs?

Become 

An axe

That brings down all temples

Be my memory

Be my enchantress

That burns all chains.

Be an earth that I can plant myself in

And rain, so I might grow into vines, and figs and roses.

Be a street I can chant in,

Revolt in

To be victorious

Or broken.

Be a tongue for me,

Rebellious and vagrant

It says everything

And apologizes for nothing.

Become home, become oil

My daily bread

Become a drop of water

That rewards my fast

Would you become those things?

Because I would be

Everything you want me to be.

 ***

My lover, my lover

If two roads were to lead to you

I would take the longer one,

Does patience not make things more beautiful?

***

My comrade, my lover

Let us stand at the edge of this world

And celebrate, celebrate, celebrate

A love that will certainly happen,

A sweet world that will one day come.

My lover, my lover

Stand on my shoulder,

Feed the world’s hungry

With the sweetness of your palm.

Nourishing the roots 

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We, the Interstices

 

We, the Interstices PDF 

written by : Farah Aridi

A researcher and writer from Lebanon, and a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research and creative interests and writings include the city in conflict, female and queer bodies in the city, socio-spatial justice, and techniques of power and social control. 

In a little quiet bar in one of Beirut’s old streets, I sit in seclusion, as is my habit, lost within my own white pages. With letters un-conforming, I try to trace the shape of tables and chairs, of conversations, of sounds of cutlery and plates being removed and moved, and of wafts of cigarette smoke and clouds of hot coffee. Today, I wanted to befriend my thoughts. I have always been consoled by my own solitude and words more so than any human presence in my life. 

You sit at a nearby table. You write. You contemplate the smoke of your cigarette rising. And you smile, as if in secret, as if in pleasure. The colour red lingers on your fingers. It deftly spreads itself a little bit more every time your hand draws nearer to your lips. Stealthily, my eyes steal their glances at you. As if reclaiming a denied right, I contemplate the eloquence your lips could move in red. I indulge in my contemplations and the imagined conversations occupying their space between us, all reigned by a redness, unrivalled. On the table with me sits my companion, an old book by Foucault. I sense your interest when you smile at him in intrigue. But at that moment, Foucault breaks his secret pact with you when you fail to light your cigarette anew. My time has come. With courage I never admitted I possessed, I offer you my lighter. You approach me. You thank me. Your hand is now at level with your mouth. A slim light casts itself on the details of your face. You catch me. You smile with gratitude and pleasure. But you do not move. I resist turning into a child in your eyes. I sedate my beating heart in feigned control as Foucault plunges in to the rescue of us both. You admit your interest in the French philosopher. And three hours wander across from us like a bat of an eyelid. Our conversations settle at the bottom of our shared bottle of wine, fusing with the remnants of the last few drops, competing for colour with your lips. You share your recent writings with me. We relinquish the reality of the bar around us so that the few hours we spend together pronounce themselves a world more real. Another hour passes before you suddenly rise. ‘Until we meet again’, you say. And you leave. 

I take my time watching you leave. I light my own cigarette, and I start waiting. 

The streets of this city resemble you; you are both worth waiting for – with every tread from my feet and with every line that I note down on pages which seem to have lost all structure upon meeting you. My words have become loosened, unfettered, undisciplined. I can safely say that today I write without any adherence to consequence. My father has always accused me of living in literature and through it. He has always been disdained by the fact that I do not seem to belong to the real world, that I dwell in between my lines, and imagery, and characters, and stories. So much so that they become my reality. So much so that I divorce the real, tangible world. I write what I cannot live. Or at least, that is what I had thought. I used to receive his comments with pleasure and derision that I would hide too well. Ever since I was a child, I would await my father’s diagnostic comments. He used to regard my poetry far off from what poetry should be, and my prose confused as it impinges on prose’s forms and structures. You see, my father, with the assiduousness of a devotee, reveres literature proper, its confines of elegant grammatics, structures, rhymes and rhythms. But I blaspheme every chance I get, breaking structures and forms that confine the literary content of a prose or poetic text, and constrict its movement and the flow of its imagery. 

Today I am certain of the extent to which my father is at fault. Today, after meeting you, after longing and waiting for you, I discover that I can live my life the way I do through books and novels, the way I experience poetry, and even the way I write it. Today, I discover that I am free when I write, and that I do not substitute life by transforming it into a literary text. On the contrary. Each morning when my words flow in their novelty on a new white page, I am birthed anew. I tidy random thoughts, I scatter others rhythmically, and I gather what the dreams and the nightmares of the night before have left behind. I discover that I am closer to myself every time I add a new line to my little black book. 

Today I discover how much you resemble my city and my poems, in the image best fitting to how I envision you: rebellious, free, beautiful. So I wait for you. 

I take comfort in absence. I indulge in waiting and I substitute you with writing through you, and at rare times in your name, and even more rare a time, about you. I search for beginnings to return to you, to find my way back to you. But by nearing you through writing, I get closer to the narrator and the writer in me simultaneously. The poetic I fuses with the creative process that engenders it so that all imagined possibilities become realised truths through articulation and transmutation. My eloquence conspires against me, so I transform my reticence and silence in waiting into interstices of speech, that my pen would no sooner infiltrate and tear apart and dissect. So I find us in the details. My journey begets no torment, but a pleasure of seeking what lies in between the lines and the stanzas, a pleasure in relishing the aesthetics of language, the eloquence of speech and meaning in hypothetical worlds. I write to strike out each line and start anew. Every beginning is potential for the discovery of an interstice, or an image, or a reflection. Every novelty is a meaning undressed and a contouring of the details of my becoming. My journey becomes transformative, a journey towards self-realisation and unsilencing, a journey towards writing over the secrecy that have always penned my thoughts and constricted it under pseudonyms and heteronyms and voices and a foreign tongue no one will understand should they find the drafts tucked in hiding under my bed. 

You once told me that you started writing after listening to me performing at a poetry reading. You said I had inspired you. But you have never once written to me. That did not sadden me. On the very contrary. I do not seek to hold the burden of those to whom or for whom your write. I have no ambition in being turned into a fictional character you can control whenever she in turn takes over your thoughts and feelings. It is enough for me that I be an incentive, and an inspiration of passion that will sketch the beginning of a new poem or a new story. I have no ambition in being a heroine of a single story, or its victim. I cannot accept to be reduced into a mere possibility, submissive under a single strike of pen, or a single blotch of ink. I refuse to write about you for the same reasons. You shall instead be the multitude that contains my passion for writing and my obsession with beginnings, for worlds that do not resemble one another in anything, for worlds that have nothing in common save the fact that it is I who created them. So I move across them as I please. I sink in beginnings and recreate them. I reorder their events, their history, and their dates, like you do your lipstick, each day in front of your mirror. I start anew each morning. I float around the first beginning which resembles you in its renewal, and my relationship with you. So that each time I see you, you resemble the first moment of creation, the first beginning: rebellious, fleeting, violent, soft, present, absent, eternally renewed, for you do not repeat yourself. A moment I wait for as I wait for you. Each morning is new. A thought that departed from the moment I first met you and branched out from there in multiple possibilities and along different paths – like the full redness of your lips when you speak, the wine streaks still stuck to our glasses intoxicating our conversations, and the voluminous drafts of poetry that we birth.  

Nourishing the roots 

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The Proof of Love

The Proof of Love  PDF 

written by : By Samah Gaafar 

translated by : Nermeen Hegazi

Samah Gaafar is a translator and art researcher at the Contemporary Image Collective (CIC). Her work appears in many print and electronic publications, in addition to independently published books. Some of her translations include, Rebel Music by Hisham Aidi, The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, On Hashish by Benjamin Walter, and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. She also consistently translates and publishes poems and letters and work in English on her blog Al-Harakat. 

 

 “I announce the great individual, fluid as Nature, chaste, affectionate, compassionate, fully armed; I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold, And I announce an end that shall lightly and joyfully meet its translation.” —Walt Whitman

When my friend asked me to write a piece for this issue, when she asked me with love if I would like to write about the letters I translate and post on my blog Al-Harakat 1—letters beloved for their directness, subtlety, nearness, and distance; letters I spent a long time reading, reading about, preparing to translate, and attempting to explore—I did not hesitate to accept. 

I wondered what I would write about, however. I wondered if what I would write would do the letters justice. Justice to how I felt about them, at least. Justice to the deep love that saturated them. Oh the pain and hell we go through when we find ourselves caught up in our desire to do justice to our love for something! 

I also realized that writing about what we love allows the world to share that love with us. I know that translating and publishing these letters to begin with is an invitation to the world to partake in this love, but to write about this love itself is a step further down the road of revelation and communion. 

In some of those letters, I found my siblings in ingenuity. We shared together the visible and veiled pitfalls of raging patriarchal societies. With them, I also experienced those premature lives, presented to us by the world on a plate of arrogance, questioning our intelligence, for the mere reason that we were born with a “flower” between our legs (because we have to trim and mold ourselves to suit the pious fantasies of honest porn consumers).

In a letter to Anaïs Nin 2,   Henry Miller wrote 3

 “I say this is a wild dream—but it is this dream I want to realize. Life and literature combined, love the dynamo, you with your chameleon’s soul giving me a thousand loves, being anchored always in no matter what storm, home wherever we are. In the mornings, continuing where we left off. Resurrection after resurrection. You asserting yourself, getting the rich varied life you desire; and the more you assert yourself the more you want me, need me. Your voice getting hoarser, deeper, your eyes blacker, your blood thicker, your body fuller. A voluptuous servility and tyrannical necessity. More cruel now than before—consciously, wilfully cruel. The insatiable delight of experience.” 

I believe that art is that wild dream; everything that results from it afflicts my soul with that abundant wildness. It makes me confront my fears and the fears of others, but at the same time it liberates me from those fears and forces my mind to think. In every one of its forms, I see our lives abstractedly.  The life of the lover and the beloved. The meeting of the similar and of contradictions. The accepted and rejected. What is prevalent and what has been dethroned.

It makes me think about my whole journey. The beginning. It started with the music my parents liked, with watching the joyful musician, with the unique essence, Khader Bashir 4, saying in a televised interview dating back to the seventies, “When I admire myself, I like to pretend I’m a bulbul. Why not? Aren’t they a lovely sight?” 

I feel like art is similar to that feeling: admiring one’s self and unleashing one’s imagination. Perhaps Emily Dickinson 5 said to herself: “I will be a bulbul. I will admire myself, and I will bestow upon you a lovely sight, unique writing, and complete abandon. And throughout all this, you will fear and despise my identity. You will strip my feelings of their causes. You will hand them over to the reader—the reader for whom you erased my life as I knew it. And you will do all this as I lie in my grave!” 

For a long time, I knew that I would see the world through the lens of art. Perhaps through a painting by Chaïm Soutine6,  spitting lovely torment into our faces, or through a haunting book by Gloria Anzaldúa 7exposing me to an eternal labyrinth, or through a story devoid of the violent, hypocritical motive of political correctness, or through a film that carries death as a message of welcome, farewell, and familiarity as in The Battle of Algiers8, or the night ritual9, Aicha Kandicha 10, Lalla Meera 11 and Sidi Moussa: the spirit of the sea12 , who inspired blues and jazz in a world with a craft that is devoid of the love of comrades … the eternal love of comrades, but it will never be complete without Walt Whitman13

I love all the arts. All forms and artists. From among them all, I chose translation as my profession. I translated everything I loved: poetry, fiction, hip hop, poems, boxing, philosophical and academic books, mysticism, photography, cinematography, and the great letters exchanged between lovers. My interest in these beautiful letters is multi-layered. Letters fascinate me, and I think letter writing is the most intimate form of writing. In letters, we find the purest of human emotions, such as in a letter by the American novelist Raymond Chandler14 in response to a letter of condolence that he received after the death of his wife,

 “I have received much sympathy and kindness and many letters, but yours is somehow unique in that it speaks of the beauty that is lost rather than condoling with the comparatively useless life that continues on. She was everything you say, and more. She was the beat of my heart for thirty years. She was the music heard faintly at the edge of sound.

Or in Patty Smith’s15letter to her late lover Robert Mapplethorpe16, in which she said,

 “The other afternoon, when you fell asleep on my shoulder, I drifted off, too. But before I did, it occurred to me, looking around at all of your things and your work and going through years of your work in my mind, that of all your work, you are still your most beautiful. The most beautiful work of all.”

I was able to see in the two letters what happens when human emotions are not forced. Someone lost his beloved and expressed that with the utmost simplicity, misery and appreciation possible, nothing more!

I love the queer messages that artists exchanged throughout the ages, and I always felt the need to translate them. Perhaps, because I realized that the world was never fair to feelings it did not understand and an identity that it could not refute or kill, but was often able to marginalize and disdain. The world is not merciful to any of them. It never understood them. Perhaps it is also because I belong to marginalized groups and I believe—though not completely—that I understand the struggle. I understand it because I am a black woman from a Third World country who has often been marginalized and scorned in various ways.

In an excerpt from a letter to her sweetheart, Susie17,  Emily Dickinson wrote,

 “I need you more and more, and the great world grows wider, and dear ones fewer and fewer, every day that you stay away—I miss my biggest heart; my own goes wandering round, and calls for Susie—Friends are too dear to sunder, Oh they are far too few, and how soon they will go away where you and I cannot find them, don’t let us forget these things, for their remembrance now will save us many an anguish when it is too late to love them! Susie, forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me.”

In this letter, Emily did writing justice. She did love justice. She did our different feelings justice. She did our perseverance justice with her sincerity. She did our feminism justice with these sentences. I realize that outside these sentences we suffer on a daily basis and on many levels, but I have taught myself—among many other tricks of survival—to envelope myself in my feelings and not surrender myself to anything else until reality forces me to the contrary. I could say the same about Violet Travios’y18 letter to Vita Sackville-West19,

 “Be wicked, be brave, be drunk, be reckless, be dissolute, be despotic, be an anarchist, be a religious fanatic, be a suffragette, be anything you like, but for pity’s sake be it to the top of your bent— Live—live fully, live passionately, live disastrously if necessary. Live the gamut of human experiences, build, destroy, build up again! Live, let’s live, you and I—let’s live as none ever lived before, let’s explore and investigate, let’s tread fearlessly where even the most intrepid have faltered and held back!”

Is not love in its extreme form not normative? Is it not fanatic? Doesn’t it push us to challenge life as we know it, the world as it wants us? Doesn’t it introduce us to our bodies and their involvement in shaping how we feel about everything? Does it not satisfy that hunger in our souls? With every letter I read, a new door of love and a greater desire to understand the impact of that on every fragment of my body is opened within me. With every letter I relinquish moral accountability, a social pattern, a hierarchy, a distorted definition around me and others. With every letter I heal.

Translation protects me from the difficulties caused by writing: from feeling overwhelmed, from the fears that I have when I even think about it. I find solace in the writings that I read. For every feeling that I have, there is a poem, a letter, a short story, a novel or a song describing that feeling. My translation of these works is my way of expressing my gratitude with tremendous love. Despite all this, we need to start writing one way or another. We have to write, read, and share our stories. Perhaps writing is what we need to understand what is happening within our souls. 

Reading what has been written was my way of finding out what was happening within me. Translating what I read was my way of remembering what I had to remember. That despite what we face as women, despite the burdens that the world has placed on our shoulders, despite the marginalization of our identities, feelings, and differences, despite all the rejection we received and will continue to receive throughout our lives, we are still capable of writing, reading, expressing, rejecting, accepting, understanding, and overcoming our pain with bloodied, fighting hearts.

Nourishing the roots 

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Within us, against us : A reflective interpretation of the twenty-one love poems of Adrienne Rich

Within us, against us PDF 

Written by: Mai Abd El-Hafez 

Mai is an African feminist, passionate about spicy food and cats, and dislike writing a Bio about herself 

 

No one has imagined us. We want to live like trees,

sycamores blazing through the sulfuric air,

dappled with scars, still exuberantly budding,

our animal passion rooted in the 1city.

Every queer love story is inherently doomed; this is what we are taught. Every queer life is doomed, destined to remain in the shadows where nothing grows, to eventually disappear leaving no trace of our own history, queer kins, elders, or stories of life lived with multiple complexities. 

The end of the now and here was following us as we walked the dark streets of Cairo late at night, like Adrienne and her partner. Two small young bodies maneuvering the garbage, danger, and uneven pavement in a city that we’ve come to hate and love. Two young lovers concealing their femininity in similarly oversized hoodies. My bag contained  Adrienne Rich’s book, ‘The Dream of a Common Language’. I’ve come to know Adrienne through her essays as a lesbian feminist writer, which led me to her poetry. I was mesmerized, devouring every word as if spoken to me and by me through time and space. One of the works among the pages of the book is twenty-one love poems —  a collection of sonnets following a relationship like the one I came to find myself walking into. We paced the streets of Cairo, late at night, talking about a mutual love of literature, daring for the first time in our young lives to dream of a better future here, not somewhere else

The world is changing, shifting, and maybe, just maybe, we could then imagine a love like ours moving in the sun. 

I wake up in your bed. I know I have been dreaming.
Much earlier, the alarm broke us from each other,
you’ve been at your desk for hours. I know what I dreamed:
our friend the poet comes into my room
where I’ve been writing for days,
drafts, carbons, poems are scattered everywhere,
and I want to show her one poem
which is the poem of my life. But I hesitate,
and wake. You’ve kissed my hair
to wake me. I dreamed you were a poem,
I say, a poem I wanted to show someone

Non-queers love to ask, ‘when did you know?’ As if ‘knowing’ meant allowing ourselves  to imagine a life, a future, a love, an acceptance. To know, we need  to be able to imagine this sexuality, this feeling, and this desire in a city that won’t allow it, not even in words. 

I never dared to dream of poetry that would talk about us — not as fantasy, not as sub-text; poetry that was integrated in our ordinary, everyday lives. Messy rooms and alarms reminding us to collect ourselves back into the closet. 

Armed with new words, my goal changed from just existing or barely surviving, to following the trail in history looking for our roots. I searched between the lines of books written in my own language for similar experiences, refraining from the assumption that they didn’t exist before us, that they didn’t leave a history.  For us lonely queers out there, to imagine a future we need proof of past resistance. 

Poetry was never a central part of my library. My library was mostly fiction, where I’d be the many lives and protagonists of the writer’s mind, and nonfiction, where our lives would be mere theories. While reading Adrienne, I realized that I actually loved poetry but felt betrayed by it. And even when I’d come across a poem where queer women’s desires and love were present, they’d be masked by a metaphoric image or vague sub-text, or viewed from the gaze of men spying on our lives through voyeuristic keyholes.

Do whatever you can to survive.
You know, I think men love wars . . .
And my incurable anger, my unmendable wounds
break open further with tears, I am crying helplessly,
and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms

Gradually, our daily late-night walks became shorter. Our feet were already exhausted, protesting the effort of long daytime marches led by our collective hope, anger, and heartbreak. The book of poems was left behind on the bed we shared. I couldn’t risk losing it during the long shifts of standing alongside the women and men volunteering to come together and counter mass sexual assaults —  in response to the initial shock of finding out women were raped and attacked in a place that demanded freedom.  

Women among the crowds were betrayed by their ostensible femininity into the hands of mobs, enforcing the reality that was once dismissed in the modest hope that equality somehow applied to our femininity, that calls for freedom and security included us. While fighting back those vicious attacks, Adrienne would repeatedly visit me, reminding me of the beauty of love until the next call for help , as I ignored the intruders’ fingers sneaking their way into the most intimate of spaces and erasing the loving touch of ecstasy from the night before.  

I covered the screaming girl’s body.  I can’t recall anything but her screams and the complete lack of air. I tried to cover her without touching her. If she knew who I really was, if she saw in those hands embracing her the many other women embracing me back, would she pull away in disgust and horror? Would our shared femininity absolve me in her eyes? Those questions were left unanswered.

I wished for Adrienne to have been there with me so I could ask her, ‘How did you manage to survive all of those years without being consumed by bitterness?’ But she left us in 2012. I wished I were somewhere else, in our bed, reading, escaping this reality. I wanted my home. 

centuries of books unwritten piled behind these shelves;
and we still have to stare into absence
of men who would not, women who could not, speak
to our life—this still unexcavated hole
called civilization, this act of translation, this half-world.


The library has been my home since I was nine, reading the words of Oliver Twist asking for more soup. I learned to ask more of words and less of life. 

Words were my shield against the adults trying to mold me into the box of what a ‘good girl’  should be. A good girl doesn’t read as much, maybe just enough to receive the kind of education  that would lead to a career, and certainly not one  that would  lead her to question the world she lived in. or as my mother used to say  “Indulging into words and literature will ruin you!” 

Queer women don’t have the luxury of ignorance; we can’t afford the comfort of ignoring the complexties of gender clashing with desire. Some of us like to pretend we’d be safe if we didn’t look down at the danger staring up at us, waiting to swallow us back into oblivion. Words like ‘oppression’ translate into a swift pull of the hand before touching another  in public. Meanwhile, the whole discourse of liberation is co-opted into the image of a yearly celebration, and rainbows have become a commodified symbol that lost its meaning, waved by corporates in the streets of New York and prosecuted in the streets of Cairo. They contain every color that reflects white bodies, leaving the black and brown ones —  the disposed and discarded — watching the parade pass them by and stomp its dancing feet on their oppressed, tortured, and murdered bodies. 

Your small hands, precisely equal to my own—
only the thumb is larger, longer—in these hands
I could trust the world, or in many hands like these

How can you love a body so similar to the one you are taught to hate, taught to feel ashamed of since birth? 

Sometimes love and trust seem like unnatural feelings to me, a language I’ve learned  through repeating love songs since I was a child passionately making out with my own reflection in the mirror, the same mirror where I learned to avoid my eyes looking back at me.

I read Adrianne thinking of hands I trust. Many come to mind, like the closed fist of a father crashing against the face of a mother; and hers, less strong, less angry, striking back, hitting nothing but air. Hands are nothing but a threat, a true reminder of the violence that the world likes to call ‘love’. I examine my own hands, a mix of my mother’s and father’s. No wonder I learned to punch walls early on in life. 

A queer love is a daily struggle not only towards accepting love, but also trusting that open palms head towards us to caress not slap, that those same hands won’t tear us from the inside out. I don’t trust hands out of the fear that a father of mine or hers might leap out, unleashing the same anger over and over. Similarities and parallelisms are aesthetically appealing, no doubt, but how can I stop projecting and feeding the same shame? 

when away from you I try to create you in words,
am I simply using you, like a river or a war?
And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death,
but the failure to want our own freedom passionately enough

One thing I’ve always trusted was words — dancing against the whiteness of pages that were once blank. Falling in love meant a deep desire to write about the beloved. I used words like I used bodies, until I mastered the art of hiding in plain sight, not between the lines, but among the words.

Once I dreamt of clear, powerful words like the many I used to come across, younger me would think a diary with a heart-shaped lock was enough to hide. It ended with a funny story of my mother reciting back my words and phrases in mockery, stopping me dead in my tracks as I headed back to where I kept my beloved journal, only to discover even locks betray secrets…with the right amount of force. 

I couldn’t stop writing, I just learned to hide better — until I met a woman who told me to write us. It sounded like I love you, many nights spent next to her sleeping body, shaking it awake so she could read me, and while she read, I would carefully study her features, expecting her face to betray her and show disappointment, and for my mother’s giggles to fill the room, ‘Who do you think you are? Naguib Mahfouz?’ Many drafts have been saved, but I still don’t trust locks or passwords…only the art of hiding in my own words. 

but I want to go on from here with you
fighting the temptation to make a career of pain.

When I read more stories similar to ours, they are a much-needed validation, but the more I read into them, the more I feel like there is no hope. The stories of queer bodies have become synonymous with trauma, and I can’t help but wonder if we could imagine anything beyond that  trauma, rejection, and fear. Are we so busy fighting reality to be able to imagine a future? 

What is queer without the trauma? Our trauma is our passport, as Yasmin Nair eloquently put it, and acceptance driven from pity is not equality. Being seen only in the light of our trauma does not allow us to be people with flaws. It’s a closet within a closet and I fear that in order to be accepted as queer women, we only exhibit our wounds but never our truth. 

The desire for acceptance follows me every time I try to write. I am truly afraid of writing. It’s easier getting angry at those men and women who aren’t courageous enough to write about themselves than demanding the same from myself. 

I am afraid of writing or sharing my drafts…of naming my own existence. I hope that someone else would do it instead of me.  Even my own tongue betrays me in this moment, speaking in a colonizer’s language, different from the one I dream and ache in. I keep repeating almost on a daily basis (to anyone who would listen) arguments in favor of the power of language and the importance of naming things, but at the same time, I lack the words to name us or even myself. What we have are words that can only represent a single layer at a time.

I’m waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.


Write us‘, the words echo through my mind among sisters, comrades, lovers, and women carrying the same fire of forbidden desire; with will to live bigger than the world and stronger than hate. Write us, say you were a witness; it was not all shame and broken dreams. Write love stories so strong they turn darkness into gentle shade, closets big enough to host parties ; the art of living in the belly of the beast. Write the good, bad, and ugly of a community so similar yet to different, the traces of the ones we lost to death, illness, and despair, and the ones who taught us we could only survive together.

Sometimes among the dancing bodies of women, I hear the music echoing through time and space: we are not the first and won’t be the last, as the world is trying hard to tell us.

As a queer women who has nothing but words, I still fear my own desire; my need to archive this history like a fire burning inside, consuming me, extinguishable only by accepting the longing and craving of the flesh, mind, and soul.  

I want to reach for your hand as we scale the path,
to feel you arteries glowing in my clasp

As for my late-night walk companion, our path separated, cracked into two by the weight of love and hate. When I am asked what happened, I usually reply, “time happened.” Sometimes I still follow our footsteps through the old streets at night, tracing the past  through lines of poetry in my growing collection by Adrienne, other poets, and writers; annotating my own lines in pencil where words cross paths with my life, drafting my own and hers, letters exchanged in times of ecstasy and heartbreak, and poems that were  once read out loud in bedrooms like incantations protecting a world of hope.  

The book is six years old now, the fortress built of books and poems is not strong enough to keep the outside world from seeping in names and faces of women dragged through the streets and into  prison cells for daring to dance, to be women; faces and names of the fallen queers, of a community, turn sour. When I think of my mother now, I think of the strength it took her during those times to stand in front of my young eyes and receive those  blows but never fall to her knees, the same strength that was easier for me to label as weakness. I saw only her weakness. In recognizing the similarity not only with my mother but also my myriad of lovers, I’ve come full circle. I’ve acknowledged that survival is an art, mastered by women in a country and world that keep hitting and calling them weak for not being able to hit back. 

And when I read Adrianne,I now dream I could read it to my mother, the first woman I learned to hate and love. I want to ask her, ‘Did you know the risk of words? Is that why you didn’t want me to write?’ 

As for this city, I think of six years that propelled me from  dreaming of the perfect text and writing love letters to drafting five goodbye letters delivered after leaving, because the world was too heavy and the only way out at the time was dreaming of voluntary, endless sleep rather than waiting for the worst end; one of a life without hope, normalizing all the ugliness and violence, and turning words into nothing more than ink on paper. 

this we were, this is how we tried to love,
and these are the forces they had ranged against us,
and these are the forces we had ranged within us
within us and against us, against us and within us.

I grew to understand Adrienne more to see her as a human and not only a poet; to appreciate the words hidden between lines rather than label it as cowardice, as if the risk were less real for those who whispered; as if their tongues were not cut off like mine for  reclaiming the nameless and faceless generations.

And so I wrote, thinking of many hands drafting words that won’t see the light of survived lives and hearts that dared to love until they could hear themselves shatter;  words travelling to the two young bodies walking the streets of a cold city that promises hope and a better future, validating the present.

Here I am, here we are; living, springing out from the concrete, following the scent of desire, marching to the drum of heartbeats that can’t be stopped. And wrote, guided by poetry of a woman who believed in radical vulnerability and tenderness. 

If I could let you know—
two women together is a work

 

Nourishing the roots 

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When a Lonely Heart is Just a Queer One

When a Lonely Heart is Just a Queer One PDF

Written by : Nour Kamel

Nour Kamel is a writer and editor of things, and was shortlisted for the Brunel University International African Poetry Prize (2020). Their chapbook Noon is part of the New-Generation African Poets (Sita) series and their writing appears or is forthcoming in Asameena, Anomaly, Sukoon, Rusted Radishes, Khabar Keslan, and Voicemail Poems.

 

Dear Sue—

 Unable are the

Loved—to die—

For Love is immortality—

Nay—it is Deity— 

Emily. 1

 ***

 My kinship to Emily Dickinson extended only to her poetry and her as a poet. I never felt kinship with Emily Dickinson herself; I was told to feel pity. Told: here is a woman no one understood, a woman who didn’t want people to understand her, who shut herself off from the world, never loved or was loved and only ever pined for death. A gothic and romanticized fantasy in place of any person Emily could ever be allowed to be. When I thought of Emily, I thought of a lonely recluse, a forlorn, self-imposed shut-in who passioned deeply, yet waited for death rather than live. The world was too much. The world refused to contain all the parts of her it didn’t approve of. She shut herself in to keep herself. When she died, they took her anyway.

***

This is my letter to the World

That never wrote to Me

***2

 I live in Egypt, a vast geographical distance from where Emily lived and died. In a British highschool and British university, I was taught by others about her surrounding history, poetry, culture, and words. Later, I would learn about her on my own from a virtual web of information that is limited, still, despite its ability to connect and share knowledge because I hadn’t been given whole parts of her story. I will probably never see or place in my hands anything of hers that was physical: her poems, her remaining letters and papers. Anything actually Emily. I will only ever have things that have been shaped and rewritten by others, regurgitated back to me through them first.

 ***

To own a Susan of my own

Is of itself a Bliss—

Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,

Continue me in this! 3

 ***

 Through Wild Nights with Emily – a play-turned-movie by Madeleine Olnek – and the slew of articles it spawned, I discovered everything I was told about Emily was wrong. Emily had a long-standing and well-documented (yet subsequently erased) love affair with her childhood friend and future sister-in-law Susan Gilbert. Olnek, herself a lesbian woman, tears through the heteronormative framework that had trapped Emily for so long and redacted Susan entirely. The movie shows an Emily entirely human and relatable and queer. She was never anyone’s tragic romantic fantasy except those who decided to make her so to make her more palatable. Her relationship with Susan was never hidden, just ignored.

 *** 

Her breast is fit for pearls,

But I was not a “Diver”—

Her brow is fit for thrones

But I have not a crest,

Her heart is fit for home—

I – a Sparrow – build there

Sweet of twigs and twine

My perennial nest.4

 ***

 All her longing and energy and love, despite what I’d been taught, was not wholly directed in a heterosexual way. Her play with gender, her play with structure, her influence on modernists and what would become stream-of-consciousness style, were all things I felt kinship with in her writing, yet I felt distanced from her real-life life. I feel betrayed and misled by academics and the literary world (ruled by white people) who chose to paint her as a loveless recluse who never married and therefore never loved, never lived her full potential as ‘woman’ in a heteronormative world. But like Sappho, Emily’s poems were never geared towards just one sex, she always wrote to whoever she loved and longed for. a lot of the time, it was to Susan she wrote.

 ***

To miss you, Sue,

is power.5

 ***

Emily’s poetry was heavily edited after her death, and her love letters to women changed to address men instead or erased entirely. The majority of her poems were published after her death because no one would publish her when she was living, her writing not quite fitting the style of the times nor bending to the fancies of the men who decided what was and wasn’t worth publishing. Far too often across history has this happened to great women artists. How many have been made to live the lives others expect of them, their art and true lives never acknowledged fully? Their words taken, or erased, or changed to fit societal molds and expectations, only to then be profited off of by others?

 

Mabel Loomis Todd – her first editor to collate and publish Emily’s poems

Erased as much of Susan as she possibly could

A Susan who was wife to Austin Dickinson

Austin who was lover to Mabel, and Mabel who so loved

The recluse of Emily who refused to ever see Mabel—

 The Emily who loved Susan.

 Wild nights

And buried history

Of women – loving women

And not tearing each other – 

Up – everything tidy – 

Covered up.

 Someone who has a lover – 

A woman lover and loves her – 

Can never be hidden forever 

Or made to be ‘in love’ with any man

She just happened to write letters to.

***

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –6

***

 Emily was queer, in every historical sense of the word. The mythology around her was that she was misunderstood – and that was entirely by design, but it wasn’t Emily’s. She wanted to be known and understood, she wanted her words published and read. As Emily’s posthumous and self-appointed first editor and publisher Mabel Loomis Todd made Emily publishable by removing every trace of her queerness, thereby making her an unknown, a mystery in the process.

 The dead have nothing to fear. Neither did the living Emily. She sent out her words and yearned like every writer to be published. No one wanted her ‘queer’ words, her new style that didn’t rhyme, and her gendered name.

 Where is respect for the dead?

Why now – over a hundred and thirty 

Some years since she existed – 

And wrote words – Why 

Does it come to light – to consciousness

To queer poetics 

Being allowed – to be queer poetics?

Til the almost 21st century

Before a woman saw another woman, fully

And told us she loved – a woman?

 I guess – we all know why.

 To the women who erased, the women who ignored

And to the women who love women

And let Emily love them – too – 

In front of the whole world.

 None – will ever know her. 

 Who better to make a myth – indeed 

Then a silenced and unvoiced woman poet? 

To create from her words the narrative of a woman 

Love scorned – lusting for love, never fulfilling it? 

Whose words – cut up – put back together – 

Were made to support this?

***

Success is counted sweetest

By those who ne’er succeed.

To comprehend a nectar

Requires sorest 7

***

Historians knew. It is something 

– Apparently – hard to miss

Unless you’re really not looking for it – 

Unless you cannot imagine anything outside

What you want of Emily – her life to be

Like her family – like her obsessive documentarians 

And those who would fall in straight love – 

With a dead girl who wrote words of longing for love –  

But always had it. Just not the way 

her or Sue –

could have ever been – together.

***

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —

Success in Circuit lies

Too bright for our infirm Delight

The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightning to the Children eased

With explanation kind

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind —8

***

Death, the myth – and immortality. 

How would she want to be remembered? 

No one anticipates erasure, but it is a fact

A given of death. Posthumous infamy 

Is phenomenon unaccounted for, nor

Does its shape ever look the same.  

***

 Because I could not stop for Death –

He kindly stopped for me –

The Carriage held but just Ourselves –

And9 Immortality. 

***

 A lack-of-love, though love in many forms was there, became her pseudonym, her calling card. The queen of lonely hearts turned black from lack of love. She would become the goddess of unrequited love, of being ignored and lost and unloved because of some disadvantage in the shape of our society. Emily was never disadvantaged. Emily needed, alone, to unshape society for herself. Society and those around her saw this as an affront, specifically a female one. Who can unmake society alone?

 ***

Show me Eternity, and I will show you Memory—

Both in one package lain

And lifted back again—

Be Sue—while I am Emily—

Be next—what you have ever been—Infinity.10

***

I have reclaimed Emily as my own. If parts of her life that resonated with mine hadn’t been hidden for so long, would I have read her more deeply? Afforded her more of my time? I will now – I give her words more weight and seek them out, thirsty for what I may have read as queer in them but was told could not have possibly ever been there.

I was told that she could never be quite understood and that some of us should never try. But we persist, we shift, we take a hundred different looks and stick with our conviction – that we have always existed. Some of us will never stop looking for ourselves in history, because more often than not there we are – staring back out at ourselves, our kin, our kindred. Ancestors and descendants who survived, in spite of it all, and lived their lives as full as we try and find ways to live our lives now.

***

I have intended to

write you Emily to-day but the

quiet has not been mine  I send

you this, lest I should seem to

have turned away from a kiss –

If you have suffered this past

summer           I am sorry I

Emily bear a sorrow that I

never uncover — — If a nightingale

sings with her breast against

a thorn, why not we

when I can I shall write –

 Sue –11

Nourishing the roots 

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Torrid Love or Classist Violence? Complicity with Narratives of Discrimination in The Smell of Cinnamon

Torrid Love or Classist Violence? PDF 

Written by : Roula Seghaier

Translated by : Nermeen Hegazi

Roula works on issues related to labor, immigration, and gender. She dreams of one day dubbing children’s programs. She writes sometimes, and lives in a state of existential crisis always.

 

Writing could be a reductionist activity, as it revolves around the modelling of reality, desires, and individual and societal needs through a linguistic medium. Writing could also be an exercise of imagination and creation, through which we document lives and create legendary heroes out of ordinary people. Through writing, we could also seek revenge against enemies: shrink them and render them into nothing. We could strip them of their humanity or give them the gift of flying. Writing has the power to do all that. It could allow us to find traces of ourselves, pressed between the pages of history, or imagine ourselves in the future. It could also erase us completely, as if we have never existed: queer, rural, migrant women, sex workers, transwomen, domestic workers, women of color, brown, and black women. Except for a few texts, which never gained international fame, we have been ignored and erased. Until the day came, when politics of representation forced our inclusion; they sprinkled us into the stories, like spices on a dish, or like secondary characters that help fulfill the fate of the main protagonist in its incongruity with ours. For the ends justify the means, and there is no harm in including our incidental roles should they serve the purpose of developing the main character. Thus, non- normative characters made their way into the public sphere mostly narrated in the languages of the Global North. 

But we do not settle for these crumbs. As queer, trans, impoverished, racialized, migrant, refugee women and women from the  Global South, we look for our stories between library shelves and the lines of prose and poetry produced in our countries. We search for them to find ourselves, to know that we have a heritage and history archived in Arabic, tracing the stories of our regions replete with intimacy. We look for them in ink on paper, as the stories of our ancestors, or our oral history, is often not as valorized within the status quo as the written word is. Instead, oral history is dismissed as gossip, or “hens’ talk”. We search for legitimacy, for “evidence” or “proof”—something women have always been asked to present, as the burden of proof always falls on the shoulders of those who have the least amount of power, as if the absence of evidence is not enough evidence of historical disempowerment and silencing. While searching for ourselves in the faces of protagonists written  by pens held like magnifying glasses on our lives, we often find a stealthy and voyeuristic desire to “uncover the hidden” or to express “daring and boldness” of writers who self-Orientalize as a “saviors” when checking  all of the identity boxes for the sake of “diversity” in writing. Oftentimes, these identity boxes hold no importance to us. We then look for runaway images of characters that flee and defy the hegemonic norms, for they might, albeit barely, alleviate some of the representational injustice inflicted upon us. And we hope to find the said characters written by women. 

For the purpose of writing for this issue, I  searched for women who loved women, whether in public pronouncement or in secret, and who left written traces of their relationships. I found The Smell of Cinnamon by Samar Yazbik 1on every list of queer novels from the region, as if it was a classic. It was celebrated after publication for allowing readers into “closed worlds forbidden from publicity,” at least according to the blurb on its cover and the literary reviews that embraced its queerness and presumed non-conforming to norms. I picked up the book and read the words of the blurb more carefully: the novel was about “the relationship between a lady from Damascus and her maid” where “the relationship transforms into a game deftly played by the maid, as it  becomes her only way to recover her lost humanity.” I reread the sentence and it reeked of a smell: not that of cinnamon, but of nauseating rot. I was not hastily “judging a book by its cover.” Rather, the marketing blurb relied on the power narrative: a bourgeoise “lady” has sex with her “maid” and feels either proud or victimized that the latter has become imbued with presumed humanity. 

Sometimes writing that describes sex between women is crude and explicit, or “bold,” as some progressives like to call it, when, in reality, it is merely a shallow contribution to the objectification of women’s desires for male readers, who imagine our bodies and feelings as vessels for satisfying their voyeurism. And if these texts do not satisfy the gaze of the reader, then they would appal those deeming queer relationships as illegitimate, all while validating that these connections end in destruction, death, or insanity. It is as if the writer is declaring that  no space exists for queer women in novels’ pages, nor is there one for them in real life and in our societies. Exploitative queer relationships exist, and so does rape among women. Crude sex that entertains voyeurs more than it satisfies the women engaging in it exist, and so do  platonic ass-rubs. Sex among women can be corny, nauseating, desired but  unspoken or refrained from. Everything exists in queer relationships, for this review is not an attempt to revendicate them. What is unfair, however, is that it is only this sex that exists in the minds of writers, and nothing else.  

The Smell of Cinnamon is no different. Its fame stems from its main premise: a love story between a lady and her maid. The novel was acclaimed for its bravery of explicit portrayal of the events happening in the closeted lesbian world of Damascus. Reviews admire that the writer depicts this world “without shame.”. However, the shame, which lack the reviews celebrate, is imputed to the visibilizing of “lesbian love”  and the maid’s exploitation of her employer. It is not the shame of  trivializing sexual and economic violence by cloaking it in marketable lesbianism, a shame we need to feel. It is not the shame that we ought to feel towards  proposing ideas such as “reverse exploitation,” similar to “reverse racism,” misandry as opposed to misogyny, or other types of nonsense. “Who was Alia? Was she really her maid? Who was she? She knew who the lady of the house was, and she doesn’t remember when they exchanged roles.” The book pushes us to examine the wrong questions, because wrong questions do exist in spite of the efforts of political correctness. 

Samar Yazbik is undoubtedly a master of her craft. She is adept at depicting the most intricate voyeuristic moments in both low-income and bourgeois environments. Her knowledge of  the contextual details of the history of the neighborhoods in Damascus is enormous. She is, undoubtedly, a linguistic  titan. Her characters are also complex and multi-layered, and her writing is engaging. The only doubt there is in her ability to give each character their due when it comes to depicting relationships between women. The criticism here centers her depiction of an exploitative relationship between a woman-employer and her domestic worker  as queer love.

This delusional love takes place between Hanan el-Hashimi, a wealthy middle-aged woman from Damascus, and Alia, whose last name we never learn for she is a nobody whom Hanan purchases to put in her service. As if it isn’t appalling enough,  their presumed love is framed as one-sided, a love in which Hanan receives the shorter end of the stick. The novel, peripherally, notes that one of the two “lovers” bought the other from her father when she was a child, as if from a slave market or trafficking endeavor. The novel glosses over these events and tells the reader that Alia now exploits her mistress to obtain her “humanity”. It is made implicit, from the book and the blurb on its cover, that there is no way for Alia to obtain the said humanity except through having sex with her mistress. This implicit notion is purely classist. It is similar to the patriarchal premise that men who take part in “corrective rape” subscribe to, when they boast about curing lesbians through the magic powers of their dicks. Alia lacks humanity, apparently, and Hanan el-Hashmi’s body is a boat that carries her over to it or a vessel through which her humanity is shaped. 

There is an evident Bourgrois bias: the book endorses  the idea that ​​sex with the  rich(er) and high(er) classes is a form of class infiltration and social mobility toward a better life. If only such “better life” was translated into a bottomless bank account or a buldging wallet,  it would have been a clear transaction in which material–sexual toil would be exchanged for material–financial return. But the rich classes consider sex with them in and of itself to be an adequate reward, one that transports us from our marginalized existence to a place where we receive “emotional” sufficiency and pleasures that satisfy our lacking souls and characters. In this sense, we derive our “humanity” from the dicks and pussies of the bourgeoisie. 

Alia’s character is dressed up as Cinderella. The novel goes on to convince us that Alia magically transforms into a queen at night, only to turn back into a maid at the crack of dawn (p. 17). But this is not a fairytale in which the good fairy Hanan and the poor maid Alia, share a night of festivities and celebration before reality takes its course. So, “Who is Alia? Is she really her servant?” Hanan al-Hashmi asks many times, as if she is enlisting the help of the reader in thinking of a solution to this puzzling dilemma. The answer is clear, however: Alia really is her maid. An domestic worker forcefully trapped in illiteracy and the private sphere: a fate imposed on her by her employers as Alia was forbidden from leaving the house and from reading books (P. 29). The opposite would have been inappropriate for a maid. After years of working for Hanan, Alia realized that she only had service clothes: she “only had blue jeans and a white shirt. Other than that, all the clothes stuffed in her locker were for sleeping or working at home” (P. 30). This comes as no surprise because the employer confined Alia to domestic and sexual service.

When she was a child, Alia did not allow the boys in her impoverished neighborhood to “rub her ass.” She lived in Al-Raml neighborhood, where opportunities for the oppression of women and children were rife. She was aware of what sex and rape are, seeing as she stabbed the rapist her paralyzed older sister and her own rapist when she was 10 years old. I will not assume that she was a rash or clueless child when Hanan bought her. She was instead very sharp. Life has taught her all forms of self-defense, as escaped many sexual assaults as a child living in the dumpsters. However, she was not spared the evils of Hanan al-Hashimi and her husband Anwar, the “decadent crocodile.” I do not assume that Alia was blindly led toward sex, nor was she “fascinated by [the] magical worlds” hiding inside her employer’s vagina. Rather I believe she was led to all this knowingly. However, her knowledge did not necessarily help her survive nor wield power. For “knowledge is [not] power” if you do not possess power itself. This is what men, like Francis Bacon to whom the quote belongs, did not know. Nor did Friedrich Nietzsche know that as he  thought his existence derived from his thinking. These men lived their lives against historical materialist arguments, forgetting their privileges and believing they obtained them through their own merit; that their thinking is a product of their genius rather than our shared experiences and our different positionalities. They thought that their intellectual authority translates into matter, that their ideas precede matter. It escaped them that their own material privileges empowered them to spread their ideas. Knowledge is not power, then, in the absence of power itself, despite liberalism’s tireless effort to convince us to pull ourselves from our bootstraps. It tells us that our intelligence will enable us to ace capitalism and lead decent lives, and that our failure is the result of our inaction and stupidity, or that education will save us from sexual exploitation unlike illiterate girls, as per Taha Hussein’s morale in The Nightingale’s Prayer.

 Knowledge may help us anticipate the tragedies that will strike us. It may allow us an escape; seconds to close our eyes  to not see the catastrophes. It can help us absorb the bitterness and push through so we do not break. That is all. We do what we must do, what our context allows: we protect ourselves, our resources, or our families. We are abused, and we do not report it. Or we are raped, and we hold our silence. We are not to blame, and there should be no pretense that knowledge could protect us from all of this. The fact that Alia did not stab Hanan al-Hashimi when the latter led the maid‘s fingers “to where she wanted“, in the bathtub, and when she played with her body and forcibly kissed her, then kicked her out when she was done, is not evidence of Alia falling into a torrid and passionate love with her employer, which the novel tries hard to convince us of. 

It is possible that Alia is attracted to women. It is probable that she enjoys having sex with her employer, but that does not automatically make their sex consensual. Survivors often report that, in some cases, their bodies unwillingly respond to sexual stimulus when raped, which creates a dissonance between what and how they feel. They doubt their sanity and  feel ashamed to speak that what happened to them was not consensual. In Alia’s case, the power dynamic is not in her favor, and she knows very well that “all she has to do is simple: obey” (p. 44).

Consequently, it is insulting, at best, that this relationship is portrayed as a “game” that is being played by the young domestic worker. Worse, it legitimizes violence. Alia escaped the streets, but not the household, because the streets, despite their cruelty to women, queer, and impoverished people, is safer for her than the home of her employers. The private space in which we seek safety is oftentimes the most dangerous place for us.

Hanan al-Hashmi’s obsession with Alia is condescending and coming from a place of superiority. She thinks that Alia’s headscarf is attractive, for it makes her into the cliché of the unwrapped candy, un-feathered chicken, or an intact watermelon. Hanan unwraps her candy, however, because she is too progressive to want a veiled child maid. However,  Hanan herself appears to wear some sort of a head cover, but it holds different symbolism. Hanan finds Alia’s hijab to be  exotic, while her head cover is normal, not drool-inducing. Sometimes she tells us that Alia’s face is “sculpted more precisely and more beautifully than what is necessary for a maid.” She also tells the reader that she admires the look in her eyes, in its difference from the normal servants’ gaze: “ranging between dull sadness and patient grief.” Other times, she describes her as dark-skinned, skinny, a slut, and “an ugly beggar” (p. 14). In the end, she is a “servant with no name or family” (P. 21). All these comparisons are drawn between Alia and Hanan, the maid’s vessel towards a lost humanity.

 “The abrupt taste of betrayal” overwhelms Hanan al-Hashimi when she catches Alia red-handed giving a hand job to the “decadent crocodile.” She tries to persuade the reader, in her long monologues, that Alia betrayed her and their love. Fact of the matter being that Alia is “an ugly beggar,” both the knowledgeable narrator and Hanan believe that the domestic worker must have seduced the animal. If his tiny excuse of a cock does not erect out of a desire for his wife, then how would it for an ugly maid, except if she had exercised her cunning in every way possible in order to get the flaccid piece of meat of this old geezer to stand erect? 

The novel really does pose genius questions, as if there is no other possible explanation to the unfolding events, except for a passing mention of Alia mumbling an old adage her mother used to tell her as she was being fired: “Better any man than no man at all.” That man, Anwar, heavily hovered around her chest, like his wife, yet they both believed themselves to be innocent.

While the novel imbues Hanan and Alia’s relationship with contrived romance and alleged love, all lesbian sex/relationships, in the novel, fall under one of two categories: either “burning passion” if characters belong to the same socio-economic class, or ”disposable” if they do not. 

Hanan summarizes her relationship with Alia, after a vicious cycle of deluding the reader into believing there were romantic feelings between them, when she says to herself: “They are just fingers. I can replace them with others” (p. 22). With this she returns Alia to her realistic place, where the working class is exploited and reminded daily of its disposability. This story is not about women who love women, but women who take advantage of other women. Anwar is not the only “decadent crocodile” in this plot. Hanan could give him a run for his money.

In the act of writing fiction, writers often elude questioning, on the basis that they are often implicitly assumed to be neutral in relaying a story and therefore unaccountable of their literary choices because art does not require justifications. Art is hence assumed to convey a unique, singular experience of a person, and to not necessarily speak for everyone or make blanket statements. There are two reasons behind this assumption: creative writing as a leaway for a writer to impute the plot to a “muse” or an “inspiration” and realistic writing that delegates the responsibility of the writer’s words to their imputability to “the facts of life.” Both narratives of the freedom of inspiration or the confinement of realism are not only used to protect the writer from criticism, but they also disseminate political and societal values and force us into ready-made boxes, declaring one of two things: This is one unique experience, produced from the imagination of the writer, and they are not obliged to justify or represent the character in a non-normative manner, or this is a realistic experience that the author faithfully conveyed. So, “shush”. The problem with The Smell of Cinnamon is not that it deals with characters or relationships that may be queer. On the contrary, we are not obliged, as queer, improvrished people, or people of color, to produce innocent and sanitized love narratives that are palatable to the public taste and are free from violence, exploitation, and heroism. It is not only possible but necessary to write about exploitative queer relationships. The problem here is two-fold: the way The Smell of Cinnamon frames an exploitative relationship as a torrid love story, and that the novel is celebrated as a liberating book. What is worse is that it is considered a queer-friendly book depicting our worlds. The critique is simple: a text that does not liberate us is not liberating. 

Nourishing the roots 

 

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