Category: Getting Personal

 

When Al Jazeera English was first founded, the champion of novelty that I am, eagerly signed up as a correspondent on the Riz Khan Show. In those early days, when Al Jazeera had yet to feature in the DSTV bouquet, I received an email almost daily from the Riz Khan team in DC, detailing future shows and asking my pithy contribution. I stayed glued to Arabsat just as often, waiting to see if my two-cents worth had made it to the screen. Sometimes I was rewarded, ‘Ha there’s mine! There! Mum come quick Look! Oh darn it it’s gone now.’ Most times, I just watched, and had lengthy interactions with the show’s guests all the same. A labour of love, if ever there was.

I don’t watch Riz Khan as much as I’d like anymore (I blame it on blogging) but I do still receive emails from the Riz Khan team, entreating me to give blogging a break and interact with them instead. Today’s email shook me: ‘With the loss of Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish who do you think will speak the Palestinian narrative?’ Yes, Darwish, the great poet had passed on, I knew, but suddenly I felt a dearth in the world that is for us to fill.

Darwish was a poet and a fine one at that. Just a few days ago I discussed with bint battuta the merits of Al Khansaa’s poetry, and how, even in translation it holds up well, belying the French who say, ‘Translating a great poem is like kissing another man’s bride through a veil.’ Reading and listening to Darwish in Arabic is a profound experience and listening to him today has left me aggrieved. But his words do live on, haunting those left behind. Here he is, in English:

Psalm Three

On the day when my words

were earth…

I was a friend to stalks of wheat.

***

On the day when my words

were wrath

I was a friend to chains.

***

On the day when my words

were stones

I was a friend to streams.

***

On the day when my words

were a rebellion

I was a friend to earthquakes.

***

On the day when my words

were bitter apples

I was a friend to the optimist.

***

But when my words became

honey…

flies covered

my lips!…

The poet Naomi Shihab Nye commenting on Darwish’s work,

“Darwish is the Essential Breath of the Palestinian people, the eloquent witness of exile and belonging…”

I have suddenly developed the urge to write fiction. I thought I was adverse to it. But I have this great idea running through my head. It’s so poignantly me and now. I have to write. I’m starting to think I can write. I blame it on blogging.

 

So my cousin’s been bursting with the news that her friend has been ‘fixed’. ‘She’s so lucky!’ exclaims Cousin Flighty, ‘Only in grade eleven and already she’s fixed!’ Our doyenne of sharp wit, eight year old Aamena, asks incredulously, ‘Was she broken?’

I dream of a fruitful life, Insha Allah Al Aziz, in which I can ultimately settle into a charming, little cottage, a truly ancient building, circa 1930, amid a lush English garden (that maintains itself), in Parktown North perhaps, or the midlands even, or perhaps further abroad… Allah A3lam! But the floor boards will sing of bygone times, and the windows, like a photograph, will take me back to halcyon days. Essentially, it will be a house in which I can surround myself with books, with unadulterated happiness. Yes, I’ve referenced that, it’s Vincent Starrett who said, “When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.”

 

I am rather chuffed with one of my most recent bookstore acquisitions, Fay Weldon’s What makes women happy. When I first came across the volume a few weeks back, on the literary criticism shelf incidentally… I really don’t venture near self-help, in all endeavours, requiring the prefix self, I know myself, quite confidently, to be helpless. Weldon’s writing, is the kind of writing to which I aspire, witty, insightful, purposeful, knowledgeable and female. I highly recommend the only other book of hers I’ve read, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, to anyone with even a remote interest in literature, literary theory or indeed, Jane Austen. Most memorable from there, ‘To believe a Mills and Boon novel reflects real life, is to live in perpetual disappointment’ and this, ‘The inner excitement when a writer realises for the first time that this whole new world of invention and meaning lies waiting to be explored, is intense and overwhelming and exhilarating. It is like falling in love. The feeling of being singled out, of suddenly discovering, that you are different from other people, and in some way special, is powerful.’ She really is good.

Back to What makes women happy, knowing that it is available on amazon.com for under a dollar, which with postage, would still cost me less than what was expropriated from me, I had to have the book. If for nothing else than this endearingly insightful opening:

Women can be wonderfully happy. When they’re in love, when someone gives them flowers, when they’ve finally found the right pair of shoes and they even fit. I remember once, in love and properly loved, dancing round a room singing, ‘They can’t take this away from me.’ I remember holding the green shoes with the green satin ribbon (it was the sixties) to my bosom and rejoicing. I remember my joy when the midwife said, ‘But this is the most beautiful baby I’ve ever seen. Look at him, he’s golden!’

The wonderful happiness lasts for ten minutes or so. After that little niggles begin to arise. ‘Will he think I’m too fat?’ ‘Are the flowers his way of saying goodbye?’ ‘Do the shoes pinch?’ ‘Will his allegedly separated wife take this away from me?’ ‘Is solitary dancing a sign of insanity?’ ‘How come I’ve produced so wonderful a baby- did they get the name tags wrong?’

Anxiety and guilt come hot on the heels of happiness. So the brutal answer to what makes women happy is ‘Nothing, not for more than ten minutes at a time.’ But the perfect ten minutes are worth living for, and the almost perfect hours that circle them are worth fighting for, and examining, the better to prolong them.

So taking the cue from Aamena, I’m looking into the etymology of this fixedness. Certainly, it smacks of an arranged marriage and while the match in question isn’t, it speaks of a culture where it was once a norm, but as a concept isn’t it rather archaic? Why not get engaged? Or married? Why fixed? It does imply that we are indeed broken without the promise of a husband somewhere down the years.

Aamena, still troubled, asks, ‘You mean she’s engaged?’ ‘No…’ ‘So is she married then?’ ‘No…’

These are murky times.

 

 

The truth seems to be, … that when he casts his leaves forth upon the wind, the author addresses, not the many who will fling aside his volume, or never take it up, but the few who will understand him better than most of his schoolmates or life-mates.

Nataniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter

Blogging, for me, is like being granted immigrant status in a parallel universe but my permit, grudgingly granted, clearly stipulates temporary residence only. Xenophobia, I tell ya.

I’m not sure how lucid this post will be. I may wake up tomorrow morning, and while groggily sipping my morning dose of green tea, cringe at this drivel and dutifully reach for an elusive undo button… For now however, morning is a distant dream.

I had vowed, well not vowed exactly, but solemnly and earnestly promised the trees of this fair land that I would curb my book buying ways. I had to! My shelves, already groaning under the weight of my indulgence, had just last week tacitly informed me that they could not admit another book. Not even a second-hand poetry volume. Now for those with the luxury of a house of their own, some swanky, sturdy new shelves are the quick fix here, but hélas, for me, subordinate of my parent’s home, I must make do. I am an ardent follower of whoever it was that said, ‘When we are collecting books we are collecting happiness’. (Note to self, do reference this) I have lived these past years trying to emulate the New York author and bibliophile (he had books in his kitchen cupboards, his stair case, the floor… you get the picture…) who, when told by his mate of similar habits, that people, when seeing his books, ask if he had indeed read all of them, replied, ‘You obviously don’t have enough books’. Now I had been able to stay faithful to my promise to the trees through the lack of proximity to the Exclusive Books sale. Tonight however, I have broken my promise and the trees, I fear, will turn away from me hence. I thought I would just take a peek at the sale tables, and congratulate myself on my self-discipline. It was of course, not to be. Stacks upon stacks called out to me, begging for a home away from the din of the Greek music gratuitously forced upon them by the neighboring Papa’s restaurant. My wallet, the major victim in the state of gainful unemployment, could not support them all. So, I’ve brought home just one, a bargain at twenty odd rands, paid in coins, Roget’s Thesaurus. Pleased to announce the acquisition of a Roget’s.