Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
"STOP WITH THAT WRETCHED KORAN!"
I don't know why I screamed. But I had to scream so that I wouldn't break the promise I had made to my father not to have the Koran read at his funeral.
My father died the day he knew that he had no further stories to tell me. I stand before his remains. In the middle of the large room he is naked beneath a simple white shroud. Lying on his back, his hands are folded over his genitals. I look at him. He looks so serene. It is the first time in my life that I feel he is at peace. I am not sorry he is dead. I've known for a long time that he was going to die because he had told me everything. Through the open window I see the houses of my village, Arnoun, which they used to call the Château de Beaufort. The bombed-out houses are still smoking. After a twenty-year occupation, the Israeli army has just evacuated southern Lebanon. I see the surrounding hills, dark with people. They have come from Tyr, Sidon, Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and Amman to attend my father's funeral. I caress his face: his skin is like a baby's, not even cold. It is January. It's raining. I can smell the rain as it surfaces from the red soil of southern Lebanon. In the distance I see the plains of Galilee, and high up there I watch the snow falling slowly on the peaks of Mount Hermon. The door opens. Women in black appear. They are weeping and moaning. They throw themselves on my father. They kiss his face. They kiss his hands. They kiss his feet so fervently! I whisper in my father's ear, "You bastard, one can always rely on you."
Suddenly I heard a strange voice that ripped through me. An intolerable cry that split my skull, pierced my skin: someone was wailing verses from the Koran. I flung open the door to the next room. It was filled with women in black weeping around a cassette player broadcasting prayers. I stepped over and on them, snatched the cassette player, and shut it off. The women shouted out in horror. My mother and my sisters tried to grab hold of me, shouting, "Stop that! You're mad! Come back, this is not the time ..."
I ran to hide in my father's room and double-locked the heavy oak door. I heard the men hollering, "You crazy woman, give back the Koran or we'll kill you. Open up, you bitch, open up! One doesn't cut off the voice of God. Open up, you bitch, if you so much as touch God's Book you're dead."
From behind the door I yelled back, "This God is not my father's God! My father never had a God. He made me swear, 'Daughter of mine, watch out that those dogs don't use the Koran the day I die. Daughter of mine, I beg you, I would like some jazz at my death, and even some hip-hop, but definitely no Koran.' I'll be glad to play Nina Simone for him, Miles Davis, Fairouz, and even Mireille Mathieu, but no Koran. Do you hear me, I'll play Last Tango in Paris for him instead of your prayers. He loved La Coupole and butter, Papa did. He always used slightly salted Fleurier. You won't bury him like this. You won't get it back. I'll never open up for you."
I took out the cassette of the Koran and replaced it with Nina Simone's "Save Me." The pounding on the door became even louder. And I was dancing, alone, in front of my father. I was speaking to him, loudly, as if I wanted to awaken him from his death, "Happy now? You got your Nina Simone, you got your jazz. I spared you from the Koran, didn't I? And now what am I going to do? Who will protect me from these monsters? You were the one who taught me, 'Watch out, my girl, all the men in this country are monstrous to women. They're obsessed with appearances, they're tethered to the customs, they're eroded by God, they're gobbled up by their mothers, they're agitated about money, they spend their lives offering their asses to God on a platter, they open their flies the way you arm a submachine gun, they turn their sex organs loose on women the way you turn a pit bull loose. They're dogs!'"
Just now, one of your former mistresses wanted to kiss your hands. I suggested that she kiss your cock instead. You never know, she might have been able to resuscitate you. She could have played Jesus to your Lazarus.
CHAPTER 2
AS A CHILD I USED TO BITE EVERYONE. MY sister Nayla still has my tooth marks on her body. I hated dressing like a girl. I wore my hair cut very short. I had the face of a little thug. The villagers called me "little Hassan," they were convinced I was a boy. I despised washing myself because it was so cold. I was dirty because I chased after grasshoppers that I'd put in matchboxes after first breaking their legs. I made them into salads that I served to the children of the village of Arnoun.
Our house was built of stones from the Château de Beaufort, an eleventh-century fortress constructed by the crusaders. It controlled the Palestine road. The house stood apart from the rest of the village, the road leading there lined with linden trees and weeping willows. The soil of the surrounding fields is bloodred, covered with huge sunflowers and chunks of white clay that look like sculptures of a mythical bestiary.
My father was an odd bird. He was born in 1933 in Salamiyeh, a town in northern Syria where poets, writers, and Communists lived. Most of its inhabitants are Ismailites, a Neoplatonic sect for whom reason takes precedence over faith. The Ismailites have a temple where they pray to Aristotle and Plato instead of Jesus and Mohammed.
In 1958, when he was twenty-five, my father went into exile in Lebanon where he taught literature and philosophy, first in Tyr, then in Beirut. During his lifetime he never lost his Salamiyeh accent. He always wore an abaya and open leather sandals that his mother sent him, together with a box of cakes, from Syria each year on the day of the Eid. He had met my mother in Beirut. Her pregnancy soon followed and they were forced to marry to avoid a scandal.
My mother was one of the great names in Lebanese radio. She came from a large family of well-educated landowners, with a father who was an officer in the gendarmerie. He had served in the army of Sharif Hussein of Jordan, who had entrusted his last flag to him. My grandfather kept it in the tall armoire in his room. On it the Sharif had written, "This flag will go to the one who will liberate Jerusalem one day." As children we believed that Palestine was a fairy tale.
Since my grandfather never finished anything he began, the bathroom had remained roofless. I took my showers in the sun or under the star-studded sky. In the fields there was a basin in which rainwater was collected. No one in the South had any running water.
My grandmother came from a family of landowners from Ghandouriyeh. She had property on the banks of the Litani, where we spent our vacations. She had never worn a veil. At that time there wasn't a woman anywhere in the South who wore one and no one celebrated Ramadan.
At dusk I would often visit the ruins of the Château de Beaufort with my father. He insisted that the place was haunted by a knight looking for his mistress, who was dressed in a voluminous blue gown. I believed him so completely that I could hear the lovers kiss in the dark.
At the time, my father had a blue Simca, worked at the newspaper Le Destour in Beirut, and taught at the orthodox school. He loved drinking, listening to music, and surrounding himself with women. He was extremely attached to Arnoun, which reminded him of Salamiyeh, the village where he was born. We used to get up early. Khadidja the housekeeper would knock on the door at dawn. She'd make pancakes with a fine batter, sugar, and butter. I'd take the pot to go get milk at the neighbor's house, and when I returned the table would be covered with olives, farmer cheese, tomatoes that smelled like summer, cucumbers, and above all baskets of prickly pears that used to give me incredible constipation.
We were three sisters but Rana, the eldest, was very distant from us from the start. She wrote poems and was very close to grandfather whose side she never left. I was too mean and my sister Nayla was too sweet. I used to stuff peas up her nostrils, and serve her fruit full of worms. She trusted me. She swallowed it all with her eyes closed.
Rather than lecturing me my father was delighted with my foolish actions. He had a barbaric enthusiasm for all my mischief. I think that from our childhood on he refused to play the father role, so he could be party to our mistakes, our transgressions, and our success. To teach us Arabic he would sing us songs from Salamiyeh at six o'clock in the morning; he loved for us to get up early. Even on the john he would respond to us in poetry. He had written one volume of poetry on cigarette packs during a stay in prison in Syria. He would recite lines from them when he wasn't turning up Maria Callas before launching loudly into Arabic drinking songs. He worshipped Mahmoud Darwich and loathed Adonis who had never criticized the dictatorship of the Alaouite regime of Damascus. He spent whole evenings evoking the glory of the Omeyyades or the Abassides before sporadically starting in on dialectical materialism. He assured us that Marx was born in Salamiyeh.
As the sun set my parents would settle down beneath a trellis that almost formed a tent and provided an amazing amount of shade. We had a wooden table covered with a yellow oilcloth. They'd play cards and drink arrack. My father smoked heavily, five packs of Gitanes a day. He'd drop his ashes everywhere and the carpets in our house were littered with them. My mother was very much in love with him. She knew he had many affairs but pretended not to know anything about them.
Our childhood was a constant feast. Our parents taught us the meaning of beauty. Poets, journalists, activists would knock on our door spontaneously at any hour of the day or night. My mother was always improvising. In a flash she'd have the table set for twenty people. Appetizers, grilled meats, stuffed vine leaves, kibbe, cheeses, chicken wings, and falafel would miraculously flood the table. Alcohol flowed freely. As children we'd often sleep under the table not to miss a single poem. My childhood was a perpetual clinking of arrack glasses and my father's laughter shaking the walls.
CHAPTER 3
BEIRUT WAS A FREE CITY, THE OASIS OF EVERY Arab intellectual who in his own country was forced into silence. It was also the capital of the PLO, the Palestinians made the laws, and Beirut was their republic. Beirut was a brothel, too, with the whores from Hamra and from the harbor who'd walk the streets in the area of Saint-Georges. My father spent his life between the Dolce Vita in Raouché and the Horse Shoe in Hamra. He taught in the morning, spent his early evenings editing the newspaper, and finished his nights by drinking and dancing at the Uncle Sam, the Cave des Rois, or the Whisky à Gogo. It was la dolce vita. He would always go out with my mother, and together they'd live it up. He never hid his wife the way most Arabs do. He wrote thirteen novels and all his poems on café terraces.
I was born on February 25, 1968 in Beirut, but my father wasn't there the day I was born. He'd just gone underground to "liberate Palestine." I do remember his return. I was in my room, I had just turned three, I see a rather tall man, with large blue eyes, and a beginning baldness; he throws himself at me and I run off in tears. It was my father, and he would never forget this first encounter. We, my parents and my two sisters and I, lived in a large house in Ain-el-Roumaneh, right in the heart of the Christian quarter.
My father was a fervently secular man. Throughout his life he made sure to live only in Christian quarters and to have us educated only in Catholic schools. He admired Christ, compared him to Che Guevara. He thought he was handsome and said that a man who can change water into wine can't be all bad.
When I was five, my father registered me at the School of the Holy Family with the nuns in the Baabda quarter. He never told me whether I was Christian or Muslim. I loved going to the school chapel, the scent of incense intoxicated me, and I never missed the masses in classic Arabic and Latin. I loved the vision of the Christian Lebanese women when they entered a church: they would throw themselves so covetously on Christ's statue. They'd grasp his hips and cover him with noisy kisses from his knees to his chest. They'd lick his navel and glory in his thighs. I, in turn, learned how to grasp Christ by the waist and kiss his loincloth. I was becoming a true Maronite.
At school we were strictly forbidden to speak Arabic in class and at recess. During the first hour, the nuns would hand out sticks known as "signs." As soon as a child said one word in Arabic, an informer would slip one of those "signs" into that kid's pocket. At the end of the day, the nuns would count the number of infractions committed in our mother tongue and punish us. Being a disorderly pupil, I was forced to copy "I will never speak Arabic" hundreds of times each day.
I didn't like the French or math classes, but I was fanatic about catechism. I swallowed the Host by the handfuls and let myself be rocked like a baby by the stories of Mary Magdalene, Lazarus, Judas, and the miraculous draft of fishes. I was thrilled when Sister Marie told us the story of Jesus and the prostitute. Beirut was a city of hookers and I imagined them all kissing Christ for having spared them from being stoned.
I SUCKED MY THUMB ALL THE TIME AND PLAYED WITH my belly button. My mother tried everything but to no avail. One evening, she put a sheet over her head and burst into our room. I broke up with laughter but my older sister peed on herself. Rana was very authoritative. One day when she was on the swing I begged her to let me have a turn. She refused. I picked up a big stone. She looked at me threateningly and said, "Strike if you're a man!"
I struck her very hard. She ended up with five stitches on her forehead.
Nayla and I would sing all the time. My father used us as a jukebox when his friends were over in the evening. He very frequently took us out. It was with him that I discovered the theater, very early on, when we went to see the most popular actor of the time, Chouchou, play at the Grand Theater of Beirut. He had a very long mustache like Father Vassiliu. One night, I slipped into his box. I just wanted to pull at his mustache to see if it was real but the guards thwarted my plan.
One day at Holy Family, I made a stupid bet with my girlfriends that I would lift Sister Marie-Thérèse's blue dress at the moment that she'd bend over the altar in the chapel to light the candles. I did. To punish me she crushed cheese on my neck, face, hands, and legs before locking me up in a tiny unlit cell. She said, "You'll see, little heathen, the rats will come and devour you from head to toe."
I wasn't afraid. Strengthened by my catechism I told myself that if the rats should ever attack me, Jesus would come to stone them.
CHAPTER 4
IN 1975, MY GRANDPARENTS DECIDED TO MOVE into the same building where we had a large apartment that looked out over enormous orchards.
My paternal grandmother, who was Syrian, spent most of her time at our place. She had just turned seventy. She could spend hours on end rubbing her hair with olive oil. Her chest was unusually bountiful. All I wanted was to see her breasts. One summer afternoon she'd gone off to take her bath. It was now or never. I opened the door abruptly. She was naked, standing in the bathtub, her hair all black, her pubis all white, her skin rippling in endless rolls of fat. And her astonishing breasts, like filled goatskins, with aureolae as wide as oranges, came tumbling down to her waist. I shut the door and shrieked, "Grandma has cow's breasts, grandma has cow's breasts."
I was given the first spanking of my life.
OUR EVENINGS WERE SPENT BETWEEN HAMRA AND the coastal road, the beaches at Saint-Georges and those at Saint-Simon. We would eat ice cream at the Place des Canons and falafel at Sayoune, see movies at the Rivoli Theater and have chocolate at Wimpy's. In Hamra every poet, every writer had his own table and would be surrounded by his devotees. Some would lecture the others or offer them drinks. My father couldn't live without going out or having something festive on the program. He had to be continually creating an event, or fabricating some reason to invite his friends. The riskiest moments involved going home. He used to drink a lot and he insisted on being the only one driving.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing"
by .
Copyright © 2008 Actes Sud.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
