Some said the Bedouin woman had come down with a mysterious disease that made parts of her beautiful body drop off, or that her limbs were rotting away, before she vanished. Others said she sold her house and camel and went to settle in Matrah in order to sell her Bedouin needlework. Still others said she had suddenly gone mad and so her friends carried her off to Ibn Sina Hospital. Word also went around that her neighbours, who had turned the satellite dish in their two-storey house into an enormous trough where their livestock ate clover, responded to her sarcastic words about them by training her mongoloid brother to shoot bullets and making him believe that his sister had brought shame upon all of them. They taught him how to use the pistol. They buried the corpse secretly one night beneath the biggest sand dune.
Khalid
Asma asked, Why do you draw, Khalid?
To free myself from existing only inside the narrow space of my father’s imagination, and then to re-invent my life in the space of my own. All the time I was a child, and all the way into my early twenties, my father’s view of me was defined by what he saw in his head. He had his own fancies and it was always very clear just how far they went – and no further. I was the fuel that fired his imagination and his whole image of me, forever, was based on his absolute certainty that I would be the living version of what was in his mind. He never questioned this! So, doing art became as necessary to me as drinking water and breathing air, and that began in the very moment I realised I couldn’t live this way, I couldn’t survive without following my own imagination. Art and imagination are alike in that way, Asma. They give some kind of worth to my existence. No matter how fine and pleasant reality may be, without imagination life becomes . . . well, unbearable.
Do you see the way people move through life – and I mean, just the little bits of their lives you can see? Most of their movement through life is invisible, it goes on inside of them, so for us it exists beneath the surface. Their own private worlds, their imaginations. When I liberated myself from living through my father’s head I created my own imagination with a paintbrush. I grew my hair long, and my beard, I wore jeans I’d ripped up deliberately, and I dropped out of the College of Engineering so I could enter the College of Fine Arts.
Sometimes I went on painting until I collapsed from exhaustion. If I was doing anything else, even just walking down the street or something simple like that, I felt like part of my hand was missing because it wasn’t holding a paintbrush. The brush was part of my hand, growing with it. My brush breathed the same way I did. I lived in my paintings, whatever was outside no longer concerned me, or touched me, really. All I needed was my imagination. The energy I had for sketching and painting was insane. It was as if I was suffering from a fever: I lived in a fog of sweat and delirium and feeling completely, absolutely one with my art.
My art saved me from acting out the image my father had made for me. Issa the Emigrant couldn’t forget for a moment that he was an emigrant. He carried his history like it was his destiny, and he was always working to make sure his firstborn son would carry his history too. This son of his would be his revenge, which he could wave in the face of defeat, frustration, and forced absence from the homeland that had betrayed him.
Every day, Issa the Emigrant closed his eyes to open them onto the truth of his identity. He would go out and mingle in the Cairo streets, he would spend evenings chatting with Egyptians, he put his children through Egyptian universities. But he didn’t forget for a second that he was Issa, son of Shaykh Ali, who carried the burden and the woes of Oman on his shoulders. Shaykh Ali was in the delegation that accompanied Shaykh Issa bin Salih, the Imam’s ambassador, on the day the famous Treaty of Sib was signed between the English and the Sultan, on one side, and the Imam and the tribes allied with him on the other. He never forgot how positively overjoyed his father was when this treaty was signed. It gave them freedom of movement in the interior, and influence on more tribes, and helped them spread their calls for unity and organization in preparation to go against the English. All the details of his history and identity kept Issa the Emigrant awake nights. Many times he made me listen to him talk about the spirits of his grandfathers that he believed he was now faithfully representing on earth. His great-grandfather Shaykh Mansur bin Nasir was among the cavalry who combated Mutlaq the Wahhabi in his repeated raids on Omanis. He was in the battle where the Omanis held on so fiercely to their swords that their hands were stiff and rigid around them by the time darkness fell. In their songs the women recount how women soaked the fighters’ hands in water until they softened enough for the swords to drop. Shaykh Mansur’s name itself was in more than one of those women’s songs, which they went on singing in their wedding parties long after the event. Songs that expressed the extraordinary courage of the shaykh whose white steed flew with him, his hands firm on his sword, putting terror in the men of Mutlaq al-Wahhabi. Issa the Emigrant carried on his back the souls of those forefathers. He fought at Jabal al-Akhdar at the side of the Imam Ghalib al-Hina’i. He buried their martyrs with his own hands and carried secret missives under cover of darkness. When they were defeated and scattered he fled. He emigrated, but it was only his body that went. His soul was too heavy to go.
What did he want to make me into? A fighter? A martyr? A young shaykh feeding the hungry and finding refuge for the weak? A shaykh of today who would stamp his approval on letters containing the demands of Bedouins and peasants? Some kind of opposition activist? What? When the revolution took fire in Dhofar he refused to even discuss it. He simply rejected the whole idea, and he was furious about the whole thing. Those Communists? he would shout. Out of the question! This will never suit Oman. Never.
Every evening, I had to read passages from the book The Gem of Notable People in the History of the Folk of Oman by Shaykh al-Salmi out to him until I had the whole text by heart. He used to take me with him to the Nile River Corniche in the late afternoons and while we were walking he would ask me to recite the famous poem by Abu Muslim al-Bahlani, with its powerful memories of his early life. To recite it from the first line all the way to end. He explained to me – many times he explained to me! – that this nineteenth-century fellow, Abu Muslim, might be an Omani but he was no less a poet than was his famous Egyptian contemporary Ahmad Shawqi. You really must learn by heart every last poem he composed, he would exclaim. And not only the poem that everyone knows. But how he cried when I recited lines from it.
Stabs of lightning pierce me like the wail of the grieved cameleer
Why, sad one, are you somnolent and dull?
Its grim swords clove the heavens, in an army of clouds to rush onward
O homeland sorely missed, clouds and rain over all.
And then when I got to certain other lines he made me repeat them tens of times.
Those places in which I could not stay on and on
Yet in my hope-filled mind, still they reside
Far away have I gone but never have I left them:
But then, how many times is body torn from soul!
Then he would take over, reciting the next section of the poem himself, but only getting so far, always as far as the same line.
I departed them, overruled, and I could not prevail
No person can surmount what is decreed
With a heavy sigh, almost a moan, he would ask me to go on while he listened without another word. He was completely infatuated with Abu Muslim al-Bahlani and he told me all about the man. He was so many things: a reformer, a man of enlightenment, and it seems he had some kind of intuitive creativity. Early in the century, Abu Muslim founded the first Omani newspaper. He called it Success and published it from Zanzibar, where he was living then. And his poetry collection was the first volume of verse by an Omani ever published. He wrote many other books, like, on Islamic jurisprudence, and on morals. My father was always keen to get his hands on first editions of whatever Abu Muslim wrote. Abu Muslim supported the Imams and scholars in Oman heart and soul, even though fate never allowed him to
meet most of them. My father handled his affairs while he was in exile. He worked closely with some other supporters to print al-Bahlani’s poetry along with some other Omani books at the Aleppo Press in Cairo. We spent long hours stacking up the copies, organising them so customers could see them, but I have no idea, and I didn’t then, how my father planned to market them, or even distribute them. Who would read them, anyway?
My father enrolled me in the College of Engineering because, he said, the future in Oman was for engineers and lawyers. And time after time he hinted – very clearly! – that if I knew what was good for me I wouldn’t so much as glance at any Egyptian girl. In fact, he put it to me bluntly. We may live here but we’re not from here. We won’t leave anything of ourselves here. When we die our coffins will be carried to Oman. That’s where we’ll be buried.
This kept me awake at night – the attempt to imagine this place, which I barely had any childhood memories of, since I had been made to leave it so early. What particularly tormented me was the image of our coffins, black and gloomy, lined up next to each other. My father’s coffin, my mother’s, mine, my sister’s, my brother’s coffin – lying in the hold of an airplane taking off for the impossible journey that we would never make while alive, the journey from Cairo to Muscat. And the image of us as dead, us, lifted out of our boxes by relatives I would never have gotten to know, so we could be buried in her shrouds under the burning sun west of al-Awafi, in the graveyard where not a single tree grew, not even any scrubby little desert bushes. So many times I hoped my father would reverse his plan, that he would have us buried in one of Cairo’s cemeteries, so noisy with movement and life, with their vendors and Qur’an reciters – or that he would put us in an airplane, live bodies rather than corpses, headed for Muscat. That he wouldn’t already assign our coffins to the hold.
When I could finally shake myself loose, when I managed to no longer live inside the image of me he had in his head, I finally found out what freedom tastes like. It was such a good taste! People choose their own books, ones they actually want to read. And their own friends, and the cities they’re fond of. How liberated a person feels when it’s finally no longer a question of being just an extension or embodiment of someone else’s fancy, even if that someone else is your father. My chronic headaches ended and I lost my pathological fear of being inside a closed-in dark place. Suddenly I was addicted to spending all my hours in the streets of Cairo, my streets, I had not known any others – and with real friends, ones who yelled out slogans as they marched in the streets, who drew pictures and had dreams and could tease each other. People who weren’t simply the faded mental creations of their families or their elders, and whose blurred identities or boundaries made them seem more like ethereal angels whom I couldn’t actually see or touch. Issa the Emigrant went quiet. He didn’t come to my first exhibition, he didn’t read a single article on my art and he treated me with a coldness that was probably both disdain and despair. But just when I began to forget that there existed a place called Oman, my sister Ghaliya died.
I hadn’t ever had the feeling that our worlds were so linked, so frighteningly enmeshed, the worlds of me and my family, until Ghaliya died. Our worlds fell apart. We all found the world we inhabited collapsed around us, My father and mother, me, my brother. In front of the simple question of where to bury her, it suddenly became frighteningly clear to me – to me, the free, the liberated, artist – whose head was full of freedom – how deep the hidden ties between us went, how strong they were, and how my world could be destroyed in a moment if theirs caved in.
I think it was only two days before my father’s hair turned white! We packed our cases. We returned, all of us, still alive. Not Ghaliya though. She was a shadow of my nightmarish imagination. In her coffin in the hold.
No longer was the voyage to Oman an impossible trip. It wasn’t just a round-trip ticket, either, a little space in which we would bury a beloved sister, and return in all simplicity to Cairo, to our home, our work, our friends. No. This unexpected trip itself bonded us in some hidden but really profound way. The trip was the strong rope that tied us together and would yank us out of the dream and the nightmare both, at the same time. It freed us from the idea that returning was impossible or unreal. It made returning into something you could actually do, something likely, and – we suspected it then – permanent, too. Ghaliya paid for our liberation with her death. There had to be an offering, a sacrifice. A bridge across which my father walked, and we followed, to Oman. Ghaliya’s dead body, her coffin, which was carried to the treeless cemetery in al-Awafi – the coffin of the daughter born in Cairo, the daughter who lived in Cairo – was our bridge.
Asma and the moon
Asma, still a bride, came to visit her father. Not long after her wedding he had suddenly come down with a fever no one could diagnose, and he was bedridden. His temperature wouldn’t come down. When Azzan saw her he leaned back against a cushion and asked her to recite some of al-Mutanabbi’s poetry. Asma’s voice was subdued at first but it started gathering fervour as she recited.
With the sedan-chairs’ departure my nights are long
For lovers’ nights stretch endless
They show me the full moon I have no craving for
And hide a moon to which there is no way
After the loved ones, I have not lived in solace
But ahh, the misfortunes—those still must I bear
Her father’s hand went up and Asma stopped. Staring at his hands, she noticed how pale and weak they looked, and how white the hair was at the roots, where it was parted. She felt confused. The room seemed very hot, radiating his fever. She was embarrassed at the traces of henna still visible on her hands. She wished she had the courage to use her hands, to press them against her father’s robe, to make him lie flat on his bed and then to smooth his hair. The air was so heavy. She had an odd urge to apologise to him but she didn’t know why.
The lotus-thorn tree had grown enough that its leaves now pressed against the window. The heat seemed to be getting worse. A vision of her future children crowding into the room to surround their grandfather’s bed forced itself on her but the image seemed to erase his pale face. She was confused into complete silence but his hand rescued her. His fingers were trying to grasp a barely visible tattered notebook tightly enough to tug it out from under his pillow. Asma studied the title: From the Sessions of the Brilliant Scholar Judge Yusuf bin Abd al-Rahman. When she cracked open the bound notebook, its pages fell open where a leaf had been stuck as a bookmark. Azzan nodded at her. She began to read.
Know that the stars of the firmament empty their gems into the moon, and the moon spills them into the water. The force of the water splits them into all the gems that exist in creation. The moon is the treasure house for what is on high and what lies below. The moon moves between high and low, between the sublime and the filth of creation. Of all the celestial bodies, the moon is closest to the matters of this lower world. And so it is a guide to all things. Contemplate the state of the moon until you know it well. Its soundness is the strength of all things, its ruin the corruption of all things. If the moon moves closer to another celestial body then it gives more force to whatever that body can tell us or give us. When the moon moves away from another body in the firmament it weakens that sphere’s power. When the moon’s light intensifies in its approach to Mercury, that is the best state of all. But if the moonlight is weak as it confronts Saturn, or moves closer to it, this is the worst of all worlds.
Abdallah’s mother
A woman as young and as strong as Fatima Umm Abdallah could not possibly die in a matter of two or three days unless she’d contracted a fever as she was giving birth. That’s what people in al-Awafi said. Ankabuta made certain that everyone knew she had carried the special childbirth food regularly to the jinn-woman Baqiia so that the jinni would not harm Fatima, or baby Abdallah. And Ankabuta swore that she hadn’t taken even one bite from the huge tray of food she carried on her head to Baqiia.
She always left the food, exactly as she had brought it, at the jinn-woman’s favourite rock. And then she left immediately without even once looking behind her. Not long before this, Zayd claimed, the young woman whose death was so puzzling had uprooted the basil bush herself rather than summoning him to do it. And that she told him the odour of basil attracts vipers and she was afraid for Abdallah. Even if he was a newborn, it wouldn’t be that long before he could sit up, and then soon after that he would be crawling.
Merchant Sulayman’s sister insisted that she had been very careful. She had supervised the food preparation herself. But somehow, within days, the poor woman changed colour. She turned blue. Zayd insisted she was the sort of woman who simply couldn’t escape being the target of someone’s sorcery. He was very sure of what he was saying, he told them, especially since he was the one who worked all night long at the canals outside town, and so he knew all the secrets of the night-folk. She was a good woman who minded her own business, Maneen said sadly, and she didn’t forget to send him sweets after the boy was born.
Shaykh Said’s mother said that every person in this world will be served in the afterlife what she served others in this life. God forbears. He does not neglect the good ones among us, she said.
People were startled by her words. What was she hinting at?
Zarifa kept quiet.
Cousin Marwan
Celestial Bodies Page 18