Khaled Khalifa - In Praise of Hatred

Um Mamdouh’s faint signal reached us and we exchanged cautious smiles. Those three hours of Suhayr’s labour had seemed very long, filled with the hope we had lost. The male prisoners recited verses from Sura Maryam and sent congratulations we barely made out.

But the commander of the unit did not approve of the behaviour of the guards on duty. He spat in Rasha’s face and accused her of adhering to our sect and abandoning her own. He put her into solitary confinement after an orgy of torture in which Rasha screamed in pain, spat on her torturers and cursed them. Um Mamdouh wept; she kissed the officer’s shoes so he would allow her to sit next to Suhayr who was submerged in pain and joy at regaining her beloved’s face through our son, whom we passed around between us. We kissed him with relish after making space for Suhayr, who wasn’t allowed to remain outside the cell. We took turns in carrying the child so he stayed close to the small window which overlooked the narrow passage, saturated with the smell of rot and urine from the adjacent toilet. It was like we were begging him for some air to save us from suffocating.

It was difficult to describe the colour of our child’s eyes. He vanquished our boredom and the endless discussions, which the shadows of that depressing place made appear more like an exchange of curses heralding an escalation in hatred. We hadn’t expected that religious opponents and ideological enemies could ever share the same space, but we were forced to share that air and pain, and break dry bread together. We belonged to Suhayr’s child the moment we all felt the futility of words and the power of life. It took only a few moments to reconsider everything. I watched myself and the hatred I had loved; I remembered my father’s agitated face, his violent words in defence of the other sect as he asked me not to hold them responsible for the persecution of our sect. He quoted dozens of examples of torturers and corrupt statesmen who belonged to our sect and, in contrast, of men from the other sect who had defended our right to speak the truth. He wanted to save me, or save the country, for which he saw no future other than one dominant ideology, be it red or green, which would extend to include everyone.

I thought about my father suddenly. I wished I could see him, if only for a moment. I hadn’t understood the meaning of his move to Beirut, or when his voice got lost among our din and the flood of our emotions. Memories submerged me and distanced me from our child who began to grow day by day. The sound of his chirping and of his first hand clap transported us into ecstasies of adoration. We kissed his feet and abandoned everything just to watch him crawl and wave his hands. We waited for any new gesture from him, in order to reward it with inexhaustible love.

Rasha returned from solitary confinement a week after his birth. Weeping, she seized the child’s tiny hands and kissed them as if we weren’t there. They allowed Suhayr half an hour in the yard a day, which she spent under the guard of corrupt soldiers to whom we paid what little money we still had so that Suhayr would have a carton of milk, costing five times its original price. In addition, the few visits allowed to the ordinary criminals passing through the prison ensured a little extra food, which we surrendered to Suhayr so she could breastfeed. Our minds devised strange means of keeping death away from our beloved baby. Thana, a girl from our group, sang ‘The Heart Loves All Beauty’ for him in a surprisingly sweet voice. We repeated it after her, though fearful that the guards would drag us once again to that terrifying room where the whips would rain down on our naked bodies. Thana was revealed to us as a singer who had memorized odes from the Jahiliyya, and now she repeated the old songs of Mohammed Khairy, Najah Salam and Um Kulthoum with a sensitivity which made us believe, just for a few moments, that we were outside these repulsive walls. Intoxicated, we formed a ring around her — she had overcome her shyness all at once and was included as another sister; we were all Um Mamdouh’s daughters, and I continued to call myself one until my release. Um Mamdouh would relate to every transient criminal the story of Hama, the city which had been destroyed and whose corpses had been thrown in the streets to rot.

We needed our child to help us endure. We discovered how wonderful it was to watch a human being grow within a prison cell with joy and defiance. Our torturers couldn’t understand it — in his first days they willed him to die, but later they just regarded him as a strange creature. They couldn’t stay silent and revealed the secret to their wives during nights full of worry, and when they tried to describe him they found that they couldn’t. I told myself, ‘It’s wonderful that this baby now has twenty-two mothers.’

* * *

It occurred to me in my third year to be afraid of death; I was terrified when I was laid up with a high fever. The unit doctor confirmed it wasn’t infectious, but I could feel that my cellmates were afraid even to look at me in case I passed it on to them. I pleaded with the doctor to put me into quarantine, even if it meant I had to be parted from them. He kicked me and threw me a few pills, which I refused to take in an attempt to kill myself.

With the severity of a real mother, Um Mamdouh ordered me to pull myself together. Didn’t I want to return to the medical college and wear a white coat, and enjoy the streets of Aleppo once more? I saw them in front of me again. While I was in the grip of the fever all sorts of images mixed and overlapped in my mind. I discovered the glory of surrendering to long daydreams I didn’t want to end. I wanted a child like our child. I wanted to escape from the lie that he belonged to all of us. Our child wasn’t really our child. Um Mamdouh, the ‘mother’ who looked at us reprovingly to make us behave more decorously whenever Sulafa pinched me and we burst into loud peals of laughter, wasn’t our mother. Mudar, Sulafa’s lover, wasn’t standing crying under my window, begging me to open it and throw myself into his arms so he could press my lips to his with a force which drove me mad.

The hatred which I had defended as the only truth was shattered entirely. The early questions surrounding the truth of belonging and existence came back to me, as I swam in confusion. My life was a collection of allegories that belonged to others. How hard it is to spend all your time believing what others want you to believe; they choose a name for you which you then have to love and defend, just as they choose the God you will worship, killing whoever opposes their version of His beauty, the people you call ‘infidels’. Then a hail of bullets is released, which makes death into fact.

* * *

A slow, dilapidated train was travelling over the plains. Its wheels squeaking in pain, it advanced to pick up the dead who were awaiting burial with vacant eyes, looking up at the sky as if it were a dream. All along the train’s path the dead signalled to the blind driver to stop by using their stench. The train let out a powerful whistle to greet the transient beings. The driver descended through the meadows and searched among the flowers for the bodies, piled up like forgotten sacks of lentils which had rotted in the rain. The blind driver carried the corpses lightly and skilfully and lined them up inside the cold iron carriages; the dead don’t care about the niceties of the living. He climbed up to his cab and the invisible train moved off. The expanse of the driver’s smiling face was brushed by the cool breezes and his imagination blazed. He traced pictures of the corpses piled up in the last carriage. He inveigled himself into their dreams as if he were their only guarantee that they wouldn’t be left abandoned in a cold alley like empty paper bags.