Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

Now it’s popping back up.

Good Lord, did you notice? That English writer’s name reveals your name, ^. Can these little voices, which lead us suddenly and unexpectedly to detours and forgotten secrets, really give us away like that?

My body has suddenly started to tremble. Does it seem logical that the mere sight of a book should be able to slough off our scales? This book is scrubbing the prints off of the tips of my fingers so that they’re ready to be replaced with others. The book is chopping time up into cycles that spin me round like a cement mixer.

I’m lost to the mystery — do you see what little sense any of this makes?

Are you bored yet?

One time I caught the Eunuchs’ Goat sneaking a mannequininto the backyard of his father’s kitchen. I was shocked. Not because of whatever he might be about to do with the mannequin, but because the plastic doll reminded me of me in my wedding dress. It reminded me of how Ahmad had carried me as if he were shouldering a bundle of firewood. If you ask me, these mannequins are invading the neighborhood, possessing our bodies, sowing tumors in men’s imaginations.

I know that you can’t decipher Arabic letters yet, ^. It all looks like a painting to you. You still write to me in a mixture of pictures and English words. I sit on my over-the-top bed and allow the Aisha beneath my skin to pop her head out and flirt with you in a way that surprises even me — but she doesn’t pay any attention to me. She just flows on automatically, ready for you to receive her on your screen. And when I make you lose your cool, and the German words sigh out of you, I receive them with my body. I let them crush my ribs in their embrace, bite my chin and the edge of my cheeks, bore into my skull to reach the pressing need inside …

I don’t know where all these violent temptations are coming from. I don’t want D. H. Lawrence’s loving women to steal your heart. I could become even blacker and more violent, because wherever I look in Lawrence’s analysis of love, I find the words blackness and black truth .

What’s with all this blackness? Is this me? On top of all these red lines which surround the black smear of my abaya?

I don’t know when they started coming to me in the alley with all these life-maps, demanding to bury them in my head as if I were a memory dumping-ground. Even I forget that they’ve come … And who were they anyway? Was it the anesthesia from the series of operations I had that left these sunspots in my memory? Who was just here? All I can hear is Mu’az singing in the corridor, and even that sounds like the echo of a memory someone left behind.

“They want to undo the collars of death around my neck with their tragedies.”

Release the weight against my neck and disappear. I can feel the cartilage in my neck weakening and snapping and pressing down on my spinal cord. Maybe I shouldn’t listen! I want to have fun with you, be entertaining. I want to tell light-hearted, trivial stories. You, on the other hand, want me to write long letters like my rigid old self used to do. My body’s my dictionary now, a dictionary of much more than language and phonetics: a dictionary of this delicious laziness, of all my new discoveries … With every movement I discover another forgottenpart of my body, with every action I shed another husk of fear and another layer of material …

The game of masks is over now.

P.S. Me too … I’m also as light as a ghost.

Piece by piece, we die after those we love.

P.P.S. I dreamt of a newborn baby, its umbilical cord still intact, with the following dedication written on its forehead:

To the tiny child who entered the world and left it in a violent termination…

It came and went quietly, no one heard the womb tearing or the umbilical cord being cut.

We neither repudiated it nor did we give it a name …

P.P.P.S:

‘Do I look ugly?’ she said.

And she blew her nose again.

A small smile came round his eyes.

‘No,’ he said, ‘fortunately.’

And he went across to her, and gathered her like a belonging in his arms. She was so tenderly beautiful, he could not bear to see her […] Now; washed all clean by her tears, she was new […] made perfect by inner light […]

But the passion of gratitude with which he received her into his soul, the extreme, unthinkable gladness of knowing himself living and fit to unite with her, he, who was so nearly dead, who was so near to being gone with the rest of his race down the slope of mechanical death, could never be understood by her. He worshipped her as age worships youth, he gloried in her, because, in his one grain of faith, he was young as she, he was her proper mate. […]

Even when he said, whispering with truth, ‘I love you, I love you,’ it was not the real truth. It was something beyond love, such a gladness of having surpassed oneself, of having transcended the old existence. How could he say “I” when he was something new and unknown, not himself at all? This I, this old formula of the age, was a dead letter. […]

[T]here was no I and you, there was only the […] consummation of my being and of her being in a new one, a new, paradisal unit regained from the duality.

(D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love )

I sit down to pray and my heart dives … into deepest sleep to re-emerge, reciting. I can hear you reading Lawrence’s words to me.

I return to bed, where I speak to God so that I don’t forget how to speak. Yesterday’s dream hovers around the edges of every word.

Between consciousness and dreaming, I’m rocked gently by your call, ^. If I lean a little too far, I’ll fall back into yesterday.

With the same sense of surprise.

As long as I don’t turn the lights on, the room will hold its breath and remain in yesterday’s labor pains. Only the clock tells me when it’s daybreak.

I leave my cubbyhole sunk in the delusion of night and savor Women in Love like the taste of coffee mixing with my saliva. Strong nicotine making my hands tremble.

I shine the intimate yellow light of my wobbly lamp on the page and drink the words along with their pallid background. It increases my thirst.

Do we cease to see when love calls on us to come out of ourselves? On the route between the I and the Other, is there some moment of blindness that you can occasionally pass through, but that occasionally stays with you, obliterating the whole universe around us?

One sees and the other is blind; is that how love is put together?

I speak out loud now to reassure the picture I took of myself with my cellphone: “I never said that Ahmad didn’t love me!”

The picture refuses to respond, however.

Maybe running away is love; even hate can be love … But I didn’t flee, I didn’t hate, did I?

I guess that means that my send and receive function is faulty when it comes to love.

When we renounce words, we shouldn’t complain that our interiors shatter into perplexing, repellent stutters.

Maybe we need to train our words to be tender, to flow like water and sink like perfume into the body of an idol; maybe we ought to be born equipped with a dictionary for the words of worship … I don’t know …

Attachment: A photo of the cubbyhole where I sleep.

My bedroom. We call it the cubbyhole because it’s between two floors, carved out like a tomb cut into the space of the dark room below. It weighs down on my chest. The house is just two rooms stacked one on top of the other, with my room in between. The upstairs room was where we slept as a family; downstairs was where my father sat and gave his private lessons.