When I quote others to better express myself.
We all have our moments of madness. I venture out, guided only by my capacity to get into too many situations. I enjoy solitude, my own space- what Virginia Woolf termed a ‘room of one’s own’, but how wonderful to emerge from the depths of my inner self to the smiles of my father. There is something humbling in the love of family, something that rises you to lofty heights but keeps you grounded all the same. May it always be so.
I’m using too many Samuel Johnson quotables.
When we are harassed by sorrows or anxieties, or long oppressed by any powerful feelings which we must keep to ourselves, for which we can obtain and seek no sympathy from any living creature, and yet we cannot, or will not wholly crush, we often naturally seek relief in poetry- and often find it too- whether in the effusions of others, which seem to harmonise with our existing case, or in our own attempts to give utterance to those thoughts and feelings in strains less musical…
Anne Brontë in Agnes Grey
All the warm effusiveness with which the dawn of the month was greeted has faded against a reality of the inner struggle. The novelty has worn off, the promises made to self and the Divine asking that bit more to be seen through. Ramadan is a scenic detour from the humdrum of conventionality. In itself it is sublime, unchanged through the years, the first ten days of mercy, the second ten of forgiveness and the last of freedom of hell, asking the same, offering the same, the potential for inner peace the same. The difference in experience is within us. I’m trying to cut down on the quotation habit but I find Mandela’s words so relevant here, ‘There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered.’
Despite the sombre note in the overture above, I’m not particularly sorrowful or anxious. I’m just pensive. So in a prolonged moment of mental yoga I went digging though my archives for some conciliatory whispers from Christina Rossetti:
Daughter of Eve
A fool I was to sleep at noon,
And wake when night is chilly
Beneath the comfortless cold moon;
A fool to pluck my rose too soon,
A fool to snap my lily.
My garden-plot I have not kept;
Faded and all-forsaken,
I weep as I have never wept:
Oh it was summer when I slept,
It’s winter now I waken.
Talk what you please of future spring
And sun-warm’d sweet to-morrow:–
Stripp’d bare of hope and everything,
No more to laugh, no more to sing,
I sit alone with sorrow.
Christina Rossetti
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.