Excerpt 1:
It is inevitable that mistakes occur in life. My people had taught me that this is what makes life intriguing. I know stories about how their mistakes turned out to be favorable, to the point where they’d laugh with delight at the vigor and vitality in taking downs up to ups, turning sadness into happiness by sheer choice and forgiveness. Forgiveness is the inner core of a privileged peaceful life, and also our biggest challenge as emotional beings. Whether you’re a Bahai like Berina, a Muslim like Babaim, Aban and Hetti, or a free spirit with no chosen organized religion like Suri, Mergim (as far as he knows) and sometimes me, the concept of forgiveness is one thing we all agree on. But self-forgiveness… I bet you’d probably have to delve to get to the seed of the core for that one. If I learned anything from all the wonderful religions I was exposed to, it is that Guilt and Religion always walk hand in hand. And to be honest, I don’t believe they like each other as much as people would like to think they do.
Excerpt 2:
That surely is one problem with choosing your family rather than just being born into them, as much as I love my chosen ones. Once you love people and let them into your life, you have to let them in all the way. You are under their mercy – as in their approval of you. The door is either all the way open, or locked shut. Attempting to find a middle ground is often problematic and draining; because it means you have to have a different opinion. And why should you be so argumentative towards people you want to belong with? Especially when they are people you owe thanks to for letting you into their lives at all.
Excerpt 3:
It was awkward waiting for him outside in the rain under one of the dripping table umbrellas, my palms were getting sweaty as if I was entering a stage with a crowd of people watching me perform some kind of act. I was thinking of how I would portray myself to him. Remember that at that time, I was studying from John Berger’s book Ways of Seeing. He wrote about how women observed themselves as male spectators, always aware and vigilant of the image they are portraying in reflection to the image they could hypothetically be portrayed as. I found that to be true. It was a sad truth, until a woman is aware of this observation of self. Then it’s just an interesting game that teaches the observer of self more about the self observed. And there’s a fine line between this game being introspective, and it being totally dangerous.
(Further on the same chapter – same character)
If the following doesn’t make any sense, forgive me, but I’ll try to describe it anyway. I sometimes surprise myself with newly found fragments of my character when I indulge in the purpose of impressing a man, or advising a friend, or influencing a loved one. We are nothing without our ability to connect to one another through different varieties of ourselves that most adequately fit or reflect the other’s version at that specific point in time. I was curious to become the onlooker if in case Aban would pull out a new design out of my being that I was previously invulnerable to, or if he would make shine a version of me that I already was acquainted with.
It sounds like I have a multiple personality disorder, I know. A justification is that I was raised to celebrate variety rather than conformity…. (she was raised with a Bahaii faith)
… I grew up deliberately unafraid to delve in my not-so-much multiple, but certainly in-the-making, personalities. ‘For my soul changeth not’.
With contradiction, however, that also made me unnecessarily mindful of how little I chose to spend time with other people. I had many friends, but no real friendships. I always felt I could never be whole or complete with anyone in my life. I was always just a part of myself with this person, another part with another person, and so on. This is how loneliness can be as dangerous as it can be an introspective means for self-growth.
Excerpt 4:
The lack of assigned time for romance brought even more romance between Aban and I. For the first two months of our marriage, our lovemaking was squeezed in between chapters of our studying at night, or minutes before our morning ritual of breakfast before hurrying off to fulfill the day’s tasks, or while taking a shower in the evening before we sat down for dinner to switch off and bring a close to the day. Bedtime was for sleeping, we had a few hours to do that and we did not want to miss a second of it.
While this may seem to you mundane and dull for a freshly wed couple, to me it was reviving. Aban throve to be a doctor and I flourished to be a painter in even these hastened brief moments of carnal lustful cohabitation. With each encounter, we learned something new about each other’s bodies and noted them to one another. A few times even standing by Aban’s small kitchen bar, discussing them in between hurried mouthfuls of the bland oatmeal I quickly prepared each morning. We were focused on becoming something else for the world, inside the world, by serving each other love and knowledge extracted from outside of our home. We were not becoming something exclusively for each other, outside of the world, constructing love out of raw materials inside of our home. And this way, we fed each other rather than off of each other.
We were bookish lovers with nerdy discussions that sparked in us even more ideas to exist and excel at life ‘outside of our home’. He used medical terms to address the female anatomy. For example, how reproductive organs were shaped like aphrodisiac foods, how my facial bone structure would help the preservation of collagen that would otherwise noticeably decrease with age. He’d point out contradictions between what he learned in medical school about sexual bodily functions and what he experienced with me. I would respond by emphasizing how emotions and therefore, brain activity, was not accounted for in the medical books he worshipped. I would compare my discoveries in his body with famous paintings that subjectively and elaborately told us about such bodily functions before his scientists and doctors discovered them. He then closed the conversation by saying something like, well, that must mean that he had no brain activity before he met me, that I must be his first ever painting, for the bodily experience with me was explosively different than all the other three women he made love to before meeting me.
These amorous dorky discussions inspired me to delve into Aban’s Ayurveda books and make the precious time to paint a series of female bodies landscaped with the five elements of nature: space, air, fire, water, and earth. In each of the five paintings, one focused element bursts with color and motion from a certain sensitive bodily part that Aban discovered. It’s hard to believe that I had this much vital sensuality! These paintings mean a lot to me today than they did to me then. Now, I know that they were the last paintings I would paint to this day. They are the determinative culmination to the chapter of the monologue with my sexuality. They are hung in my vacant art studio in my house in Bahrain now, a still unfurnished and empty room for ‘the right time’ to be of use.
Excerpt 5:
I also realized then, with a sense of enlightenment, that when parents, or guides to complex growing souls, unintentionally replace the dictum of ‘let go of negativity’ with: ‘look away from the undesirable’, they start putting up barriers to every notion unknowingly, even one as boundless as the concept of Freedom. In this sense, being free and non-categorical also becomes a dogma in itself like being an atheist is a religion in itself. Because of our past experiences, we simply cannot be granted full freedom; we cannot be selfish and demand it from ourselves, for ourselves, without first owning up to our memorable and unmemorable past, notice that I say and, not, or.
Isn’t it well articulated between the lines of Mama’s medical diagnosis? That we can’t just disconnect certain experiences from our minds? Does today not mark the beginning of our journey to understand, collectively, why we were immorally and deceptively taught that forgiveness and letting go is the base of a happy compassionate life? And that according to the Bahaii faith, and the Muslim one too, the dichotomy of heart and mind is ultimately false?
Mama looked away from something, she never let it go. Or did it never let go of her?
Are we ever really as free as we were told?
Excerpt 6:
Don’t you sometimes sense that there is a dimmer gloom to the last few minutes of sunset than when all of darkness descends? I do. It’s kind of like how the process of a goodbye is worse than the finality after it. Or how the course of snatching a band-aid off, no matter how careful or how quick, is always more flinchingly painful than when the wound is bare and open.
Excerpt 7:
She did explain herself numerous times in many vague words, and they were like the stream of unsaid words in a piano piece. She’s like a twenty-eight year-old painting by an anonymous painter, open to interpretation. If paintings took on a human form, why they would be wise and they would know things within their own frame and not have to say them.
Excerpt 8:
Hidden under his daily apron were dreams larger than his sizeable muscles; I learned that Dado aspired to be a film producer one day. No wonder my mind bizarrely gripped on Fellini’s film theme music around his presence. He told me that if I haven’t watched Italian neorealism films, I did not have an inkling about cinema. Aside from Fellini, he wrote, on a gelato shop’s napkin, a list of other major figures in the cinema industry whose work I should check out, like Rossellini, Visconti, De Santis and Zavattini.
I encouraged him to watch films from the Iranian New Wave era too, as well as ones that fall under the British ‘Kitchen Sink Realism’ category. But dear Dado seemed uninterested in any stories other than the ones portraying the real people of his nation in particular. He said he had no time to learn and think about anywhere else’s real people; it was all the same anyway, they are all the same.
“Bellissima, nuffing is what it seems! Capito? If you know that, then you understand everyfing”, he said, cutting the space in front of him with one swiping arm that gestured definiteness.
(Later on the chapter, back in Milano from her trip from Como with Dado… smoking out the window of her hotel room)
In this last night in Milano, after a couple of days of smelling snow without its appearance, fluffy snowflakes are finally falling and melting on the synthetic surfaces of life and its objects and its subjects. The snow arrived just in time to let everything explosively real and eruptive with truth smolder and quench deep beneath these extravagant manmade facades. Here is another drag, there another puff- ‘nuffing is what it seems… If you know this’… well, yes, it looks like we do understand everyfing, Dado. I smiled to the polka-dotted sky, basking under the moonlight, smothered in the giddiness of knowing and pretending not to know.
Beisan A. Alshafei
Beisan's Burble 