My dearest of gardens,
I'm sorry that I have not yet been able to make you public the way you may have liked. We look for our constellations. We point at them. We tell stories. I know. I know you understand, though perhaps it's unfair of me to ask you to wait even longer. But the world outside has become harsher and harsher, and I cannot pretend I am not measuring my moves more than usual. I am still not ready to die at war. Most of my memories are in post-rationalized black and white. Static verses of a war I must have died for, digitized rolls of film that iconified choreographies of courtship, daily newspaper facades, apartheid walls protecting my father from my mother, and photo-aided narratives of a baroque grandmother I haven’t seen since I was sixteen. These memories—fabrications, one might say—still haunt me.
I hope, though, that you have been entertained by everything I have been doing to manipulate, and change the public, to make it hospitable for you. To prototype cultural practices that would care for you, and make you feel safe. You carry everyone I love ones, and it is my duty to carry you. We’re sitting in Omeia’s rooftop flat in Hamra street, right over the Piccadilly theater. We always gather there when we want to pretend it’s eid. We grill meat, sit on carpets on the floor, fill the vases with flowers and tell each other the stars are visible from Beirut. We look for our constellations. We point at them. We tell stories. When Omeia gets drunk, she always tells the same stories about her parents. I always enjoy hearing them.
I have churned so many of my memories into you that I no longer differentiate what happened and what didn’t. And what is yet to. You hold my truths and my fictions in equal measure, and sometimes, I wonder if you know the difference better than I do. Or if that there is no difference at all. Or even more. IF there is kindship. Synonymity. There are a few people that I enjoy hearing the same story from over and over again. Simultaneity. It reminds me of my grandmother. Serendipity. The night sky takes me to picnics on my grandmother’s balcony in Trablus at the beginning of every spring, when we would sit down on her precious Persian carpets that would be out for their seasonal cleaning. I haven’t seen my grandmother in years. I miss her. It starts raining from the side of my eye, and then it starts raining from the sky. Omeia drags the carpet and me on it inside the apartment. Ibrahim and Ziad move the food inside and sit next to each other on the couch. Safety.
Omeia blames me for the rain. She says that every time I remember my grandmother it starts raining. I think she’s drunk, but it’s true. Every time I think of my grandmother it rains. Even a little bit. I have known Ibrahim for ages, he can also testify. But Ziad. I don’t know Ziad. It would be the first time he sees the sky cry with me. These eid gatherings can sometimes get a little bit weird when they start featuring our loved ones’ ephemeral plus ones. Ibrahim met Ziad a few nights ago at a club, and fell temporarily in love. By the time we were grilling meat tonight, it was over, but Ziad stayed for dinner.
I wonder who Ziad is beyond this night, beyond this moment where he has slipped into the story. Is he a witness? A passerby? A fragment of someone else’s longing? Sometimes I have treated you like a documentary, letting people drift in and out of the background of our memories, waiting for them to come forward, say what they need to say, and then disappear again. One, it would be rude to ask him to leave after he did most of the grilling. Two, he was a painter. And three, he had good stories. He lied well. While skillfully cutting onions for the shish kabab—sticking his tongue out so he doesn’t tear up—Ziad told us that he’s conditioned to feel afraid when surrounded by a huge amount of men, except when they were all dancing. For some reason it felt safer for him then. That he hides in clubs, and every now and then would temporarily fall in love with a man that would feed him.
And maybe this is what I have done with you, my dearest of gardens. I have let the world enter you, speak, and leave. I have made space for those who needed to be heard, even when I did not know if they would stay. Or what they had to say. We need more space. Over the past decade, you and I have seen many people leave with the wind. Should I edit them out? The car stops under a set of orange trees. Should their traces stay with me? The only orange trees that seem to have survived the city, “Your grandmother refuses to believe that Trablus doesn’t smell like orange bloom anymore, so I planted a miniature orange grove under her balcony.” Do you think they remember how I smell after a brisk walk between Cairo and Rainbow Street? Hekmat stretches his arm and grabs the bouquet from the backseat and hands it to me, “She now thinks that it had been a phase, that the wind blew West instead of East for a decade. Now the wind is back to normal, and she had always been right, this city and the perfume of orange bloom are inseparable.” Do you think they want to remember?
Since you have been born, there have been many revolutions. Many of them documented within your pages. Every now and then, a march passes under my house. Maybe more than one needs to witness. If I don’t write a book about how the Arab youth are reclaiming their public spaces, I won’t get published, so I listen carefully, “Hey you on the bal-co-ny, come down your peo-ple-are-here!” Do they see me? “Hey you on the bal-co-ny, come down your peo-ple-are-here!” I take a few steps back and wrap a towel around my waist. Rice pours from the balconies and windows of my neighbors. Ululations. A wedding. A consummation for a new world.
Liberation. Promises of Liberation. The Liberation of the Imagination. Ululation. I met Zalfa first at a wedding. Her hair was filled with rice, and she was screaming at me from the street, “Your peo-ple-are-here! Your peo-ple-are-here! Your peo-ple-are-here!” I met Zalfa second on the news. She was staring at me from the television, removing rice from her friend Iman’s hair as she was giving a testimony on police brutality. The reporter asked, “But would you say you provoked the police?” Third, I liked her status on Facebook denouncing biased media coverage. Four minutes later, she sends me a message, “I’m happy you’re still on the right side of this ☼” and a photo of me lighting a cigarette near the tents in downtown Beirut, “You’re that writer, aren’t you?” But my relationship with revolution has changed.
I'm at unease with the emerging trends and opportunism within even our closest communities. Audiences. Performances. Boos and applause. It feels like much work remains to host one another in each other’s hearts. Al-Taheyyat means the greetings, and the group’s name also references the greetings of the angels to the prophet Mohamad in his journey of Isra and Mi’raj. This group followed Islam as the ultimate queering fiction, “to be a Muslim, Dina explains, “is to surrender to creation.” To surrender to creativity. To deposite oneself in it. This act of surrender, to Al-Taheyyat, allows for an understanding, decoding and continuous adapting of the social contracts of any community. “We were able to reclaim some of the gardens that were stolen from our grandmother,” she continues, “and most of us decided not to go back to the way we used to live before the virus so we live here and run this neighborhood as a cooperative.” In your pages, you have invited me to hold conversations that the world outside may not yet want to be held.
It was the last of five prayers that day and everyone was getting ready for the Khutba, a short sermon referencing the two or three minute speech the prophet used to give before leading prayer. Everyone aligned themselves parallel to one of the sides of the building, facing the young Imam. That building must have been built facing Mecca, Omar thought. It was. They all went silent. The roof went silent. Cairo went silent. The sun went silent. The world, within the extents of their eyesight, went silent. The young Imam spoke.
“Dearly beloved, thank you for being here today. Thank you for the love in your eyes. Thank you for your lightness of heart. Thank you for your passion. Thank you for your happiness. Thank you for your sadness. Thank you for your contradictions. Thank you for your bad. Thank you for your good. Thank you for your silence. Thank you for your alignments. Thank you for your bodies. Thank you for your souls. I would like you to join me in thanking Jalal and Tawfiq for bringing us our newest friend. New friend, thank you for sharing this prayer with us. Men and women, please stand straight and align your shoulders with each other,” the men and women stood straight, aligning their shoulders with each other, and repeated after the young Imam, “Allah-u Akbar.”
And in that moment of alignment, of collective breath and stillness, I wonder what it would take for me to be comfortable to liberate you into the public the way I think you want to be. I stopped smoking so I have more breath for this. More breath for you. I stopped smoking, and am now a chain-drinker of tea. A man poured three tablespoons of sugar in his cup of tea. No sugar for me. Another took a puff of his shisha. Another made a joke about Arab unity. Another bragged about the size of his benis. Some laughed. Some started breathing heavily. A woman entered and took a seat on a plastic chair next to a small, tall table, took out her camera and aimed at Amira.
For 5 years, I've been editing you, allowing you to grow, teaching me endlessly about re-fictioning reality. Thank you. “This is my laboratory,” she says, “If manuscripts get to the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, it means that I don’t desire them.” My grandmother has never been this mad at me, and I’m still not sure if I deserve being ridiculed for not wanting to discuss life after her. “How do you want me to discard this?” I am speechless. Irrespective of the fact that I never knew all of this existed, I was speechless. “Every picture of me with everyone I know, and I know people. Every recording of every political speech that orgasmed a nation, and I know orgasms. Every theatrical script. Every manifesto. Every song written by your idols. Gifts from Mohamad. Letters from Nizar. Handkerchiefs from the mistress of the Arab world. All here.” She takes a sip of her Bourbon, “More. My legacy is spread all over this city. Pieces of me are in abandoned palaces in Cairo, fields in Trablus, theaters in Beirut, homes in Riyadh and streets in Amman. Ideas of mine are in manmade oases in Abu Dhabi, medressas in Tunis, and shelters in Dubai. I have been written about in hotels in Aleppo, performed as plays in theaters of Jerusalem and archived in Alexandria.” She paused for a quick deep breath, “And you, habibi, think it’s ridiculous if I want you to have a porcelain mug from Czechoslovakia and my naked body in a few paintings on the wall?” She stormed out of the apartment, and locked the door leaving me inside with her bottle of Bourbon, her pack of cigarettes and my navy-lined mug.
I am sorry. I think of all the things I have inherited—stories, rituals, fears—and how they have shaped me into someone who both clings to you and hesitates to set you free. I have been asked who I am so many times, and I have found no answer that does not fracture in my mouth before it is spoken. She asked me where I was from. I answered with the same question. She told me I could decide. And that I seemed like a romantic, “aren’t we all,” She raised her head and kissed me as if I had said something important. As if my indecision was an invitation rather than a hesitation. But even when I am offered a place to belong, I do not trust that it is mine to claim.
The weight of what I carry is sometimes unbearable, and I wonder if it is fair to ask you to wait beneath it with me. Nowadays, I only feel when I’m asleep. The only discs that turn the motors of my inner senses are my dreams, and I wake up scared that a nightmare is now much more welcome in my bed than an extension of the numbness in my waking self. I feel absolutely nothing, and it hurts. It hurts as an idea, and it hurts with every possible tangible manifestation of that idea that I cannot feel. Maybe this is why I keep you hidden—so that at least one of us remains untouched by this exhaustion.
The Khan is thriving, blooming beautifully from its womb. The Institute for Worldmaking is now a reality, creating courses and publications that might eventually help make the public more hospitable to your truths. The Khan thrived in abandoned buildings that no one wanted or dared to enter. They were brilliant patches of prime land that people did not see or hear. No one outside the Khan even considered that abandoned buildings had anything to say anyways. There was too much noise already for one to try to listen to a building. Additionally, the current academic rationale of architecture is that buildings are completely manmade structures that are created to serve its creators. This is as flawed as believing that God created man to worship him. Even if that would be true, it would be a truth in need of editing. Isn’t that what you wanted? Like your pages, these spaces incubate possibility, quietly changing realities from within.
I find myself traveling through places that feel like echoes of our conversations, remnants of the worlds you hold inside you. Syria’s Baron Hotel connected to Amman’s living room, the Books café that stood as an informal settlement in a very formal city. I walk through these spaces, feeling their weight, their histories pressing into me like unfinished sentences.
I wonder if you would still recognize the cities that shaped you. Trablus’s geometric concrete gardens housed Tunis’s historic Medressa, the Mouradia. The gardens are still there, but the horizon is more distant now, the sky swallowed by more buildings, more blockades. What remains of our memories when the world rearranges itself beyond our grasp?
Even in the intimacy of a single room, I hear your echoes. A sound of amateur playing on an expensive piano found its way into Issam’s small apartment. One of the little girls that looked up to him as the grand master of love had decided to take her first piano lesson that night. She wanted to fall in love with her piano teacher. She wanted the first man in her life to be a musician, to be someone like Issam, aloof from the obligations of reality and invested in what made his heart beat. She was a little girl in a dress on a piano stool trying to impress her teacher like many girls before her did and many after her will. Her teacher may or may not take advantage of her soft legs. He may or may not fall in love with her and wait for her to grow old enough to be ripe for him. It was the beginning of her journey into love and heartbreak.
Playing the piano score to Issam’s catastrophe was the beginning of her journey into love and heartbreak, and the situation couldn’t have been more perfect for both of them. When the strangers had taken everything they needed and replaced every corner of Issam’s house with intricate replicas of his notes and creations, his handsome custodian dragged him out as the final step of his elimination. Someone learning to touch music for the first time, like we once learned to touch words, to shape them into something resembling truth.
And now I look for people that still look for the future. “Tomorrow, everything will be okay,” said one of the fisherman boarding men going to the sea. As if saying it enough times could make it real. As if floating was safer than returning to land. Legend has it that the fishermen maneuvered their men into an addictive momentum of floating that reminded them of their mothers’ wombs, and that never again they wanted to go back to land They floated along the shores watching their families grow older, fall in love and make more families that would sustain their names. The men grew older on their boats, having all the time in the world.
Continuously thinking, feeling and observing while afloat, the men recorded their wisdom in the most beautiful shells they could find in the sea and threw them back. These shells found their ways to the shores in due time and waited for people to pick them up. The roaring sounds in the shells when put close to one’s ear were called the, “Wisdoms of the Sea.” These wisdoms were not made for the mind, but the soul. The sounds told the heart what it needed to do, and it was customary to put a shell back after one’s questions were answered. The wisdom of the sea was for everyone on the earth to use. And perhaps, in that endless drift, they found a kind of liberation we are still searching for.
They forgot their bodies. They aged rapidly through replacing their own skins with ones that have already been approved of. They fought each other over ideas that have been fought over centuries before they were born. They fought over ideas that were not theirs. Even we are not immune to forgetting. Even you.
It may be awkward for someone to believe that a serious worry about the sovereignty of the Arab male identity would be behind the opening of a beauty parlor, but “Jamal Lil’Rijal,” was not just a beauty parlor. It was a place where men could reconcile with their love of beauty. To remember what was forgotten. I worry that this is what awaits us, that the fight to exist will cost us our ability to truly live.
And still, you pump life through all of us. What does it mean to truly live? Horeyya walked in a triangle, and Leila laughed nervously wondering why she was playing a game her father designed for her and her sister when they were little girls. Rifat camouflaged this constellation of Arab chapters as a children’s game. It was much more. “You walk from here to Yafa,” Leila screamed, “and tell her she’s beautiful!”
“You walk from Yafa to Damascus,” she continued, “and tell her she’s strong!”
Leila sat on the ledge of her balcony, and pointed at the Horeyya’s starting point, “Then you walk back to where you started, and remember that everything that starts has an end, and that every end is just the start of a new beginning! My father loved that one.”
Horeyya was counting her cycles as she walked the triangle connecting the gates of Yafa and Damascus. Leila was bored after watching her for the thirtieth time and laid backwards looking at the sky, but Horeyya would continue turning the number of years Palestine had been occupied.
After her last turn, Horeyya stopped at the gate of Yafa. She knelt down, positioning the circle between her legs. Horeyya wiped the dust off Yafa’s white dot, and removed the “alef” from the brooch. She put it in her mouth, and suckled the remnants of coke off the silver as she pulled it out of her loosely closed lips. She raised it in the air for the wind to dry, and then screamed “Zalzala!” from the top of her lungs. Horeyya inserted the “alef” in a crease in Yafa’s white dot and twisted it anticlockwise. The world shook, and the sea paused a few seconds in salutation before it went back to its rage. The blue sky turned black, and stars that were invisible before shone in proud glory, “al-Haq” they said through a new beautiful constellation. A few minutes later, the sun shone from the west, and all the stars were gone except for those speaking “al-Haq.”
We look for our constellations. We point at them. We tell stories. And she wasn’t playing. This was not a game. She was rewriting the script, refusing the turns we have turned, and the ends we’ve been given. The men had filled the broken mosaic pools of Paradise with seawater using empty rocket shells and unbranded arak bottles. If there were an honest postcard in this part of the world, this image would be printed on its sad face, “Wish you were here?” Glistening, oiled Mohamads are scattered, relaxed within leftovers of glamour stretching between two manmade bays. The rocky shore plunges into the decaying concrete platforms where they all sat, crowned by rusting handrails. Naked metallic structures that used to be trendy parasols surround the pools. At their peak, they were clothed in vibrant expensive fabric that still populates luxurious gray-scale fantasies through reruns of black and white Egyptian cinema from our golden age.
The men had filled the air with enough “Batwannes Beek” to last their aching hearts a lifetime, but what’s a lifetime in paradise? Convinced that was where they were, “More!” shout the glistening Mohamads whenever the music stopped until the heavens played it again. More! Their lives were assembled with building blocks of Tarab budded by the song’s Algerian mistress, Warda. More! The way they felt, the way they touched, and the way they thought about their women, men and countries was orchestrated by the vibrations within this woman’s vocal chords. More! Deep in her throat was the source of all good and evil. They had a very clear-cut sense of who their sources were. More! They never cared about a song by anyone else. Warda was for love, and love was for Warda. She was for the love of everything and nothing else mattered. They made a new sea where there was only ruin. A fragile kind of defiance. More! More! More!
I remember watching you in the mirror, wondering how much of myself I had left to give you. Omar took a tube of red lipstick and applied some on his mustache-topped lips, kissed the mirror next to him then wiped himself clean, “Now Maha will know you’re with me when she’s done,” he added. Omar stood up, turned around and started walking towards a red curtain at the end of the backstage dressing room. The Hajja followed. The curtain lead to a small room, in turn leading to a dimly lit set of stairs down. Omar filled the silence with stories about men and women that had worked for years on the hand-drawn wallpaper that dressed walls on both sides of the stairs. Two flights of stairs down, Omar switched on the lights. “Hamra, Jerusalem, Cairo, Tunis, Aleppo, Amman,” Omar listed while vaguely waving at different doors in the humid basement, “The Manara, Holiday Inn, Masrah Beirut, Cinema Hamra, The Dome, so on and so forth,” he continued, “Where would you like to go?”How much longer can we balance between the worlds we have created and the ones we are forced to live in?
I am scared, but I want you to know I know what is at stake. I want you to know that I will continue to hold you. Thank you for holding all of this with me. For reminding me of what is at stake. For waiting. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for being with me every day, shaping how I navigate this confusing world. Please continue to challenge me, change my mind. Please continue to build with me. Something new. Something magical. Together.
Forever yours,
R