Rewayeh
What would happen if one woman told the truth about
her life?
The world would split open
“Kathe Kollwitz” by Muriel Rukeyser
I am 15 years old, sitting in a chair beside the religion teacher, veiled in black. She was urgent and un-sensual in the way she moved. Religiously silent while she sat, listening to us recite what we’d been assigned to memorize. I always wanted to get inside her head. She was beautiful. There were rumors that her sister had been killed in Texas while she was praying, that she was raising her son. Her husband had been taken to prison. There were rumors with him too, that he’d been falsely accused. She was liked, unlike the other two religion teachers, who were nasty and didn’t try to hide behind any other facade. She was calm, kind, and of course, beautiful. She was younger than the others, but not young enough to make any effort to understand me. She was too far along the other side. She was pure. When I was young, that pureness frightened me. The image of her made it seem like the idea of heaven was impossible — that I should go on and give up now. But as a grown women, her pureness feels stubborn to me, enraging, a not uncommon example of religion offering an avenue for those who want to rise above the common lot of us, who don’t bother searching for an alternative to who we are: humans, simply, chaotically, in all our faults and desires, each life rising from a puddle of various tragedies. There is something taunting about her pureness, now. Back then, when I was 15, wearing large earrings, a tight and precariously buttoned white shirt, looking away as I recited the verses I was having a harder and harder time memorizing, my eyes filled with makeup, avoiding her naked, beautiful, maddeningly shallow gaze…it was too much. The sin of me, the cleanliness of her. She could hardly look at me either. The older I grew, the less she looked at me, though she’d liked me once, when I was safely boyish and easier to take in as a wounded child. It must have helped her prophetic intentions, to lend her presence to a hurt child, then, to retreat with disgust as that child grew into the image of everything she had preached against. She couldn’t bare, wouldn’t even consider! The possibility of stepping across that clean line that marked her space and separated it from mine. To reach me in the antonym I occupied. Only once did she martyr her holiness to ask to meet with me after school. I was in soccer shorts, sitting in a chair, tucking at the fabric. She stepped down from her holiness to ask me where was the innocent Aiyah she used to know. I can’t remember anything else she had said, only that it was embarrassingly brief, and that she was letting me know this was my last chance for salvation. In her silent, calm way, I understood this would be the only time she tried. After that, it would be my own fault, my own choosing. She had heard a few guys from class, on the other side of that wall, that terrible wall that we were never allowed to cross, mentioning my name. And she must have thought, “I will save this girl by reminding her she was once innocent.”
That question has lived in my head in years. “Where is the innocent Aiyah?” I should have told her my father took her away. Maybe I could have turned the arrow of shame around on her.
Freedom and storytelling
I’ve wanted to write for so long now, of everything that’s happened, but there’s so much of the past I can’t remember. It’s always the same set of memories returning to me. I remember once complaining to someone I deeply admire of not being able to remember enough to write something linear and unfragmented, to gather enough details for life to cease feeling like an unshared and unrecorded burden, and he replied, You’ll remember when you are safe. When you land in a safe place, the past will return.
It was said to me years ago. I am away from home now, with a promise to never return that feels a lot firmer and more sure of itself than it ever was. And, now that I feel good and strong and safe and not alone, I can step towards the terrible, the hell, the darkest nights. Even the sweet, tender memories I avoided because they were too painful to recall in those dry days in the suburbs of Virginia, in that house with dead air and hardly any wind to move the dead, with everything so firmly set against the possibility of change, with no chance of finding a slit into which you could slip a little hope for the salvation of this broken and ruined family. I am free and gone, free because I am gone, and gone because I was freed... even those beautiful memories I can return to in the quiet hour before I leave bed or when I sit in the park. It feels like a prayer answered, an answer that arrives with a condition I have accepted: to begin an opening of all that was packaged in the silence and in the years of running and making sure I was never safe enough to have to surrender to this responsibility. Never not broke enough to accept with all my being the job I was meant to take on. It could be different now.
The last six months have changed everything; there’s this urgent and forceful return to what we could lose easily if not for our fight. In the survival of the Arab people, the art of our lives feels irrelevant, self-indulgent. But it is all we have. Far from Syria, in the belly of the country that has taken it all, this story is all I have. In this new safety, more memories may return, but first, what precedes it is an honest reckoning with the shame that clings to each confession. What comes before the return of memory is a total rejection of silence as a nest of safety. What will penetrate through in the willful loss of silence is all that I was preventing in the lie. And what will go is all that I kept, also with my lie. I am completely willing to lose it all, to pay the highest price, for the antonym of silence and self-deception.
But how does one start with the truth? In this little room overlooking the back alleys of DC, alone, with my bird asleep and my books beside me and all this sudden urgency and readiness to tell all, to be destructively honest, what is the first step a woman takes?
Where does the pain go when it goes away?
—Dr. Gloria Joseph
Revenge project: God&Women
In the war-like aftermath of deciding to no longer keep the other’s secret, to no longer lead two lives, to abandon the lie that kept you loved…what remains and what is lost? I think I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to figure out this question. For now, I’ve started by asking others I know who paid the highest price for their truth, who said “no”to the lie, after many years of having lived it. The loss is serious. It’s one thing to make films about it, it’s another to live it. the loneliness of truth is a different kind of loneliness. It’s the harshest exile, not only from this world, but the other one too, the one where God watches us from. Sitting across from someone who has chosen the truth, I ask them how their relationship with God has changed. Was it better when the lie was around? Does God prefer the veiled woman who sins in the dark, or the one, like Forugh, who does it all openly, in her poems, her clothes, her visits to lovers. I was taught God prefers the lie. I was taught that if I were to sin, god could forgive the sins done quietly. What he couldn’t forgive was the brazenness of it, the ones who are un-remorseful. Who sin and don’t say sorry. Who sin and don’t bother with the veil…
So, the question I will spend the rest of my life trying to answer is, how does your relationship to god change as you shed the performance and migrate wholly into your truth? What if the truth of you, the most authentic version of yourself, the life of no lies, is considered a sin? Do you earn god’s love by abandoning that truth, which happens to be a sinful one, for the falseness and lifelessness of purity? Who wins? The liar who doesn’t sin, or the honest one who does without apology?
There was a story I came across a few weeks ago, of a woman who was cornered by a mob of 300 people in a market because of a calligraphy dress she was wearing. Someone had seen it, someone incredibly ignorant, someone who was fed the meal of sheeps and took religion just as it came to him: as one brick of lifeless nothing, saw her passing, with what looked to him like something he’d seen before, maybe the only piece of literature he’d seen his whole life: the Quran. Because had this person, who saw the script on her dress, read anything else in his life, or, even knew how to read, he would have easily seen the large words printed in Arabic on her dress said hilweh, “beautiful.” Instead, all he knew was that it looked like the Quran he’d seen and so went after her for wearing God’s word on her body. Some called for her death. She could have been killed. Other women have been killed for even more minor misunderstandings. The police who came saved her life, but this story hasn’t left my mind for a day, not only because it proves that this incredibly ignorant and dangerous version of religion that I was taught (and wish to kill) lives on, and lives on strongly, but also, what if she were wearing god’s words! What if a woman carries something of god over her body? Where is the sin! Wouldn’t it be such a tender example of love? To wear the writings of someone who you carry in your heart? To kill her for it!
The worst of it is that they had to bring mullahs to read the dress, though any basic-level reader could have seen the words so clearly written! And even then, even with their confirmation that it wasn’t god’s verse, she had to apologize! We go mad when the world is silent about what is done to muslim people from external forces is left unaddressed, but what about what is done from within! When we kill our own, where is the rage then? Why the silence then?
The First Breaths of Spring
Literature
Adele by Laila Slimani
She wants only one thing: to be wanted.
The only ambition she ever had was to be looked at.
but to be an actress, mademoiselle, you must be able to let go…for a long time she stayed at home and waited for her destiny to reveal itself.
a love that has no time for itself.
She wants to feel a silent, animal presence. Her only ambition is to be wanted.
To talk down to people as thought you alone understand the mysteries of the world and we are just a bunch of moronic sheep. You know, you’re just as ordinary as we are, Adele. The day you finally accept that, you’ll be a lot happier.
The excitement she felt was all the greater because she was excited against her will. In other words, her soul did condone the proceedings, albeit covertly. But she also knew that if the feeling of excitement was to continue, her soul’s approval would have to keep mute. The moment it said its yes aloud, the moment it tried to take an active part in the love scene, the excitement would subside. For what made the soul so excited was that the body was acting against its will; the body was betraying it, and the soul was looking on.
Eroticism covered everything. It masked the banality and vanity of things. It gave a new depth to her adolescent afternoons, to birthday parties and even family reunions, where there was always an old uncle to ogle her breasts. The quest abolished all rules, all codes. Friendships, ambitions, schedules…it made them all impossible.
In the depths of her amnesia there exists the reassuring sensation of having existed a thousand times through the desire of others.
The very thing that, since no one else knows about it, represents her greatest act of defiance.
Day after day, she would bump into herself. While shopping for food, doing laundry, helping Lucien with his homework, she would have to find a reason to live. Something beyond the prosaic realities which, even as a child, suffocated her, made her think of family life as a dreadful punishment…Men rescued her from her childhood.
Talking makes things irreversible.
He imagined a new life for her, one where she would be protected from herself, from her urges.
But even alone, even in the middle of nowhere, she has not managed to express her rage. She has not managed to scream.
But there’s something terrible about being cured too. It means losing something. You understand?
she is afraid that she will say the wrong thing, cracking the shell and releasing thirty years of bitterness. She does not want to witness one of those hysterical fits that punctuated her childhood: her mother, face covered in scratches, hair disheveled, screaming abuse at the entire world.
He desires her, but he hears. The comings and goings of the men who have walked over her.
He will undress her. He will no longer hear in his wife’s vagina any other echoes but the blood that pulses there.
Interview:
“Adele wants to be an object. I think that is the most subversive part of her personality. She doesn’t want to be a subject, she doesn’t want to decide, to have power. She just wants to be a little doll, a toy.
(Emma Bovary, Therese desqueyroux)
It isn’t me, someone else is suffering. I couldn’t. Not like this. (Anna Akhmatova, Requiem)
Vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves…We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.(Milan Kundera, the unbearable lightness of being)
The Pleasant Light of Day by Philip O’ Ceallaigh
Aristotle defined pleasure as the release from pain
For a moment he saw himself from afar, cinematically, punished by the heavy rain, walking down the boulevard of broken dreams. Then he was just a wet man in bad weather, and he was glad when the rain stopped.
I’ll make the characters very distinct and significant to the story. I won’t have characters who turn up for no reason, the way they do in real life.
Fear of suffering is worse than suffering itself.
And she walks with her bicycle respectfully through a pedestrian street, her little satchel on her back, becoming a figure in a crowd.
He felt like holding something solid and imperfect, pulling himself back to earth from those sleepwalking days.
It was not the world of the dead that seemed strange to him, but the dead analytical impulse that had removed the objects from the living hands that had held and used them, from rooms where families had lived and children grown up, and put them in display cases as if they were extraordinary. They were not extraordinary. It was just that the people who had used them had been gone a long time.
It was very hard to be alone in that country.
She said the monks had turned their backs on experience out of fear of life.
The plan of our lives are lies..
it would be foolish for a man with time on his hands to overturn his objective through too much desire..
What mattered was the reason you performed these tasks. If you did not have a purpose you lost yourself in the details of daily existence.
If you judged the journey by setting the stretches of trouble and discomfort against those times when you could state you were happy, it would not make sense to have done any of it.