Raja Alem - The Dove's Necklace

“Pray for the soul of the one who is present in his absence.

“Muhammad, God bless you and keep you and reward you!” Voices resonated around the room, followed by fingers in the air; millions of prayers for the Prophet Muhammad.

Beads whispered, breaths muttered, as they floated between index finger and thumb, encircling the prayer niche of the assemblage.

You could see the hands raising the prayers they’ve harvested into the air: “a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand …” The leader of the birthday celebrations gathered five hundred thousand prayers and blessings before he bent time: bodies stood straight; hands locked together in a circle of energy, interlinking to form a large field.

Welcome, light of my eye,

Welcome, grandfather of Hussein,

Bless you, O Messenger of God

Bless you, O Prophet of God.

The circle enveloped those present. They all breathed in time as the drums beat their praise, welcoming the Purest One who had been summoned and had arrived.

As though fire were as wet as water

in its grief, as though water itself were aflame.

The demons wail, the lights flash, and truth

in both word and meaning is made plain.

Then the entire group, in the painful throes of passion, prayed in one explosive voice: “Give us strength!”

“Give us strength!” I walked, I slapped the air, I was engulfed in al-Busiri’s Mantle Ode. “Give us strength!” I rose from the ground. My face breached the surface of a cool inundation, but Mushabbab’s voice brought me back:

“Yusuf. Yusuf, give blessings to the Prophet,” he whispered in my ear before splashing me with the poetry-foamed water of Zamzam from a pan, and I snapped out of it.

“The boy’s got a tender heart.” I smelled butter and milk mixed with the scent of agarwood and mastic. When I opened my eyes, I saw three thousand pairs of hands eating from massive trays of rice cooked with butter and milk. Some of the hands were spotted with warts, others are smooth and blemish-free.

I watched one grease-glimmering hand with a variety of the grimes of toil beneath its fingernails, as it scooped and squeezed rice alongside and in time with another hand with painted fingernails, wet and shining from the juice.

Hands, which in the light of day keep to separate spheres, came together, all of us, in passion and yearning and delight.

When I left Mushabbab, who was dressed in embroidered robes for the birthday celebration that hung loosely and smelled of fragrant oil, which meant it had been blessed to rub against part of the Kaaba’s covering, a sense of ecstasy had softened the corners of his mouth. I shut the orchard gate behind me. Behind it was Mushabbab; I don’t know what he got back. His private life is a well-kept secret, which he only occasionally gives me a peek of.

Azza, I carry you like the froth of that Mantle Ode. I once heard Mushabbab, raving that “We become orphans if the poem dies; we become naked if we allow it to disintegrate in our neglect.”

People say that al-Busiri was paralyzed, and that he saw the Purest Prophet in a dream and recited this poem for him. The Prophet, they say, gave him his mantle and when al-Busiri woke from his dream, he was cured of his ailment. I give you this mantle, Azza, so that you’ll be wrapped in the sweet black smell of it, so you’ll be bundled up so I can carry you around the Kaaba. I wash you and purify you and absolve you as if you were a sip of briny Zamzam water. Even if we both dissolve, its verses will drip honey on your tongue. Even in your shadowless room, you can hide inside of it.

Nasser was exhausted by all Yusuf’s effort. He’d nearly reached the conclusion that Yusuf didn’t care about Azza as a person, but simply considered her one of the spirits of the letters that he made submit to his will. He litters them here and there in his histories of Mecca, but in poems, he sets them out deliberately. He enlists them for his paranoia, but when they disobey him he goes on a rampage with his pen, crossing them out of the neighborhood. Why not?

FROM: Aisha

SUBJECT: Message 11

“This novel, which Lawrence considered his best, tells the story of the lives and complicated relationships of two sisters, Gudrun and Ursula. Ursula falls in love with Birkin, a stand-in for Lawrence the author, while Gudrun pursues a tragic and macabre affair with Gerald. These conflicts: intellectual, emotional, and doctrinal epitomize the course of love in modern society.”

Good lord, how much more shameless could I be?

I was reading Women in Love on the steps by the front door, as if just waiting for my father to come home.

Gudrun brought out the spitfire in me. I know now that I always wanted to be normal , to be Ursula, not Gudrun the rebel.

The passion of those two women was more than I could handle. More than I could take. Even now that I’ve been married and divorced. Perhaps your presence inside of me would allow me to reach those roiled heights. I was surprised tonight to read Gudrun saying on page ten: “If one jumpsover the edge, one is bound to land somewhere.”

What if what we have to do now is to jump? Jump to make things change? Jump to detach the Lane’s many heads? To put them back in place? As a first step toward changing the fate of the land we live in.

If I were to throw myself from here to Bonn, I would still end up here. My passport is temporary, for one trip only: I need a close male relative or guardian to renew it for me. Not having any male relatives left, I won’t bother looking for a miracle if I’m going to be stopped by a piece of paper in the airport. Guardian’s consent: “I allow this woman to travel and vouch that she will return.” That form gets men’s blood pumping with visions of rulership and regalia. Try asking your father or husband or brother to sign that form and you’ll understand what’s meant by the phrase, “The sky shut in on itself.” Without it, I can’t even choose to jump.

Can words be thrown out after they’ve been used? Where does a word end up after it’s been read? There are two kinds of words: poisonous and not. Certain words make my mouth taste differently after I read them.

My skin changes colors. At the moment, I’m bluish. Poisoned by anger and these desires, which only grow the more I chew on toxic words.

I occasionally burst in on the passage at the end of the book when Halliday is reading Birkin’s letter about the union of darkness and multitudes of corruption: “There is a phase in every race […] when the desire for destruction overcomes every other desire. In the individual, this desire is ultimately a desire for destruction in the self […] a reducing back to the original, a return along the Flux of Corruption.”

What if the souls of the dead were to merge with our own souls and expose our thoughts? Will my desire for destruction poison my father?

P. S. I shut down my computer. I turned off all the lights in my cubby-hole. Darkness everywhere. I closed my eyes and when I re-opened them, I noticed that even in darkness the light streams and crowds.

It occurred to me that this is what the grave will be like. After they’ve shut you in and you know with full certainty that no artificial light can penetrate, light will come up out of the depths of darkness. It will illuminate for your eyes what lies beyond.

There is life in the darkness.

Aisha

Nasser didn’t pay any attention to what Aisha had written about “jumping” and “self-destruction.” He spent the entire evening thinking back on Aisha and what she’d said about “merging with the souls of the dead.” He knew deep down that the puzzle-master was using the pieces to move him, using Aisha’s emails to read him. He was laying bare Nasser’s inner thoughts, laying bare the end of his conversation that morning with Yabis the sewage cleaner. He still couldn’t get over the fact that he’d voiced those delusions of his after he’d sprung the question on Yabis.