Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

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My first days in secondary school made me depressed and irritable. Something bit into me and made me cry when it wouldn’t die; female desire, which I couldn’t run from, rose inside me and drove me almost to madness, and I began to understand the meaning of women’s lust for men. I sympathized with Safaa who was struck down by chronic migraines and long periods of distraction, during one of which she shattered a bowl and scattered its pieces as a reminder that they were all condemned to a fate Maryam had surrendered to, and from which Safaa tried to distance me by inciting me to wear pretty dresses, light and open-necked, when going to the markets. She would kick me affectionately, and she would explode with anger at the books Bakr brought for me, putting them on the table as he left us. Maryam would examine them and leave them for me, lying like dead bodies. Her eyes shone with pride at her ‘little scholar’, as she liked to call me, amidst Safaa’s sarcasm and Marwa’s rebukes — she reminded me constantly, ‘Women are not entitled to be muftis.’ She would follow this up by leaning towards me and saying, ‘Decree many marriages for me.’ We would all laugh. Maryam would be confused and ask us for a clue, then she would return to the Quran and leave me to the fatwas of Ibn Baz.

I was wearied by the yellow books but I couldn’t leave them alone. I devoured their pages to escape my anxiety and my fear of something I was ignorant of but which I could sense, squatting on my chest and trying to smother me. I would study each fatwa of Ibn Baz and feel the pleasure of renunciation. I would look pityingly at the girls around me, certain that they were going to Hell. I imagined how Fatima would broil before prostrating herself, weeping and regretful, seeking succour from our generous Prophet.

My journey to the secondary school was long, and it went through Jalloum to the copper market. I went on foot, and it became more familiar every morning. I would be brave and dawdle a little bit to look at the shop owners who lowered their gaze when I passed. I didn’t think what my passing at the same time each morning for three years might mean to them; that I, to the men yawning in their shops and drowning in the smell of cheese, was a black bag carrying a satchel: featureless, scentless, without even a single bump.

My otherness came to an end when I got close to the girls who were like me in many respects. Some of them removed their veils as soon as they arrived at school and took off their heavy outer coats to fit in with the other schoolgirls, who were frank about their hostility to us. They gave us nicknames such as the Penguin Club, or sometimes the Zuzu Club, an ironic reference to our refusal to see the film Beware of Zuzu . It starred Souad Hosny, who danced her famous dance. The girls at school imitated her by resting a finger on one cheek, pretending to be meditating on their conquests and famous lovers they regretted, and sighing for imaginary bridges to faraway cities which Hala described as if she were describing a brothel; she also said that everything here was nauseating, and that I would leave one day.

There was an unwritten pact between us and those girls. We openly exchanged spiteful glances and hatred as we sat in school like respectable classmates suffering the same oppression and burdened spirits in that depressing building. We also concurred tacitly in our hatred of the Mukhabarat sympathizers, who wrote reports for their branches expressing their loyalty to the Party and their pride in the word ‘comrade’, which the headmistress pronounced with the same deliberation, heavy meaning and veneration. We hated Nada who wore suits of commando camouflage and marched around, shouting in high-pitched masculine accents, the very image of the officer from the death squad who brought her to school with his car stereo turned up and the misbaha of wine-coloured amber beads clattering away. He sang along cheerfully to Fuad Ghazi, a singer famous for her frequent appearances on state radio and television. As the girls came out of school, the officer almost blocked the gate with his car door. We saw how handsome he was, while the headmistress averted her eyes as he stared shamelessly at our chests. Nada climbed in beside him with a military showmanship that made her terrifying. She would walk in halfway through a lesson and leave whenever she felt like it. The teachers all ignored her slam of the classroom door — with the exception of the chemistry teacher; on one occasion she wouldn’t allow Nada to leave and threatened to expel her. Nada left with a derisive glance, and we all waited for the next chemistry lesson with the ardency of someone desperate for the next instalment of an exciting TV serial. The chemistry teacher curtly asked Nada to leave. Nada laughed sardonically. The teacher came up to her and grabbed her by the hair and flung her out of the classroom. She closed the door and calmly returned to the blackboard, to the sound of Nada’s threats. The headmistress tried and failed to prevent the teacher’s transfer to Izaz, a small town north of Aleppo. Quietly, the chemistry teacher gathered up her papers, stood in front of us and said, ‘This is a pigsty. Not a school.’

With her taut brown face and strong features, Nada looked like a professional handball player. Her hair was long and curly, her breasts large, her movements swift, and she spoke authoritatively as if she came from a place we knew nothing of. The girls tried to curry favour with her, but she fled from them and went off on her own. She was candid about her lover, Abu Ramy. She revealed some of their secrets to impress some of the girls, who didn’t hide their pleasure in his bulging muscles when he drove off at excessive speed. They talked about his officer friends, discussing their names, their salaries, and the brands and colours of their cars. The girls asked her to take them to the restaurants and hotels in Aleppo where the death squad officers went, where they would place their guns on the tables and guffaw as they saw other patrons avoiding their gaze before leaving quickly. The girls accompanying the officers felt arrogant, and repeatedly changed their orders, enjoying the servility of the restaurant owners who complied with their requests and apologized for the bad service.

Hatred bewildered me, just as powerful love bewilders a lover. I would fumble for my salvation by sitting alone for hours at a time, reading my yellow books and ignoring Marwa and Safaa’s calls to join them in making stuffed vine leaves and listening to songs, and torturing Radwan with nonsensical requests. He would try to fulfil them, and then they would ignore the bags of ground bird bones and dove beaks which he had gone round several markets looking for.

‘I hate school,’ I told Hajja Radia, choking back my tears. I told her about the chemistry teacher and Nada, and Hala and her hatred for our veils and our lowered voices, and her sarcastic comments about the rulings of Islamic jurors. She listened so intently I almost told her about my friend Ghada who kept singing lewd Maha Abdel Wahhab songs quite audibly during our morning assemblies where we saluted the flag and sang the Party anthem. Then we would parade in front of Nada and the Al Futuwa leader, who would both review us as if we were a herd of donkeys.

Ghada suddenly shone in the school firmament like a star. She removed her veil and no longer shared our silent falafel sandwiches in the breaks. After the summer holiday she shook hands with us coldly; I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her dancing to Boney M, or linking arms with Nada, who had forced the teachers to disclose the answers to the exam so she would pass. The teachers were repulsed, but whenever they thought of protesting they remembered the chemistry teacher, and the skinny geography teacher who was taken from her house by a Mukhabarat patrol under the eyes of her neighbours. They tore at her clothes as her young children sobbed — all because she had given a zero to a student whose father worked as an interrogator for the military Mukhabarat. The father described the teacher as a whore and threatened her with torture and death in the darkness of the Mukhabarat detention cells. The geography teacher was silent, stupefied. Afterwards she lost the ability to look her students in the eye. Like a ghost, she drew on the blackboard and spoke distractedly about capital cities.