*
Our dance performed in white nightgowns in honour of the opening of the Women Who Blow on Knots Dance School was cut short by a scream. The sound was a black bird whose wings were torn apart in flight. We got dressed and went outside. Women were screaming at a fleet of approaching jeeps; a cloud of dust marked their approach. As they pulled up in front of Saida’s house the headlights of the vehicles seemed to freeze the women who emerged from the house. Men pulled out a body wrapped in a blanket from one of the vehicles. They were in a hurry. They wanted to hand over the body as fast as possible, as they had no idea what to do with it. The women knew what to do. The men left the body on the ground. The corpse had been brought home and their work was done. The women moved as if under a silent accord. Some of them were crying, musically. Some of them were shouting. They must have been sisters of the deceased. Six young girls, the poet leader in the middle, slowly walked over to the men. The poet leader stopped when she saw the body in the light.
Four women help an old woman into the illuminated ring – the Mother. She wants to break free of the women holding her back and race over to him. They hold her tightly. Her legs give out but the women hold her upper body as she comes to the head of her son. She begins to ululate. No need for anyone to say anything. And no one does. She wraps her arms around her son. The dust rising in the headlights grows thicker and thicker.
The men are quiet. Lighting cigarettes one after the other. Smoke mingles with the dust. In the headlights and in the shadows they become frail, meaningless, dry scarecrows. Smoking scarecrows. A young man, who must be the brother of the deceased, just stands there. The father arrives. Kneels beside his fallen son: He wails, “God is great!”
Raising his head, he cries again, “God is great!”
His wail is like a bloody vow. An avenging scream before God. From a distance it seems that way. But when the headlights strike the man’s face… You see that the old man is screaming to hold back profanity.
“God is great!”
To say, ‘Come to mercy, oh merciless one,’ he screams, “God is great!”
To crush his rebellion he must suffer. There is no other way.
“God is great!”
The seated mother is swaying from side to side. She is the line on a horizon no caravan will ever cross. A desert without so much as a mirage. Everyone can see through their eyes; the mother fades and fades but she will break.
Head bowed, the poets support the head of their leader who is like stone, her expression blank. She whispers, “Let’s go back. To the house.”
The poet leader has not fully grasped the situation. Maybe she thinks this is a dream. She’s still young enough to think that anything bad that happens at night might be a dream. Together they are devastated. They walk to Saida’s house reading prayers in Amazigh, biting back their voices to stifle the screams. The leader isn’t crying, not a sound. She is only falling to pieces. Gathering up the pieces, the poets take their leader to Saida’s house. Bloody rags on the floor.
Standing in front of Saida’s house, the three of us are no longer seen: arms crossed, shrunken and with shoulders hunched. Madam Lilla arrives and stands over the deceased. As the men around her wither and slink away, she stands even taller. Saida is next to Madam Lilla, whose hand now and then falls on the father’s shoulder. Everyone is still.
Saida first takes the mother by the shoulders and when she falls she locks her arms around her waist. She holds her. Not one of the men is helping. Madam Lilla is standing beside them. Holding the face of the mother, Saida trembles every time the old woman trembles. She says something to the woman we can’t make out. Neither can the woman. She runs her fingers over the woman’s cheeks, again and again… Saida then takes her in her arms and sits her down. The woman lets out a scream once, twice, three times and then like a flag falling to the ground she crumples on the ground. Her husband isn’t holding her. Saida wraps herself around the woman. Smothering the pain with her own body. Standing there as if she isn’t even there, Madam Lilla gazes into the distance.
As the young men are at a loss for what to do they can only adjust the blanket covering the corpse: a musty, patterned blanket. Wrap anyone inside and the name is gone. This boy wrapped in the raggedy, old, patterned blanket would soon join the caravan travelling to the sky, like all the other boys wrapped in blankets just like that one. Maryam’s voice goes cold as she whispers in my ear, “Our kids always end up in blankets like that. God damn it, do they always use the same blanket?”
In countries where people carry a picture of death about in their inner pockets, like some kind of lover, why are they so unprepared when it comes to an actual funeral? Those foul and filthy embroidered blankets… All the blankets I’ve have seen with boys inside… Young men whom I can’t even bring myself to write about now…
“I’ve had enough,” I said. Maryam shushes me with an elbow. Amira has her hand on my back. We retreat inside.
They have taken off their headscarves. Hair is plastered to their brows. Faces strewn with hair they leave untouched. Swaying with thin black wounds, they are withering and growing old in Saida’s home. The poet leader is sitting in the middle and there isn’t a sound or even a poem ringing in the room. Suddenly she sits up. Unbuttoning her shirt, she digs through the layers of clothing covering her chest. Finally she reaches flesh, the point where her two breasts meet. Looking down she buries her chin deep between her collarbones. She looks at that point where her breasts meet. She runs her fingers over her flesh then she scratches with her nails, a little more… She is looking for her heart in the same way you would search for a welt. If she could only find her heart and pull it out she would crush that painful source and be done with it. The girls hold her hands. Stretching out her body from all four sides. Like a dead bat stretched out on a wall she opens up, she’s a tortured baby panther, she’s a mare that has to be put down, a gazelle on the spit, a stretched-out cobra left to die… One by one all her animals die: all the inner animals that recite her poems. One of the girls starts a song. It is the song they sing when they roll the sweets. But now they are rolling the girl. In the palms of their hands they are lightening her pain, giving shape to an emptying body, a body becoming dough, boneless, quivering with tears. From now on this girl will have new life, a new body. Shaped by the force of grief, she will continue to live in a different form on this earth. Like a sweet that has lost shape on its journey to the front line…
We join the women who are caressing the girl, and blowing and whistling. Amira is crying. Maryam wraps her head tightly and then prays. I remain there as an eye that cannot turn vision into words. Amira puts her head on Maryam’s shoulder and trembles. After some time the tears turn into yawning as if she is a child who has been placed in trustworthy arms and read the Nazar prayer. Amira can’t stop yawning. I help her up and take her to bed. Her eyes swollen, she seems to be fainting as she drifts off to sleep and says, “the groom. I never thought about him.” Closing the door behind me, I hope she will not remember the nightmare she is about to have.
I go to the kitchen. Always the perfect escape. Maryam comes in behind me. Raising the last words of her prayer she says ‘Amen,’ and, rubbing her hands over her face, she says Bismillahirrahmanirahim then she slips off her headscarf and opens the cupboard. She takes out a frying pan. Finds some flour, a little salt and oil. “Knead,” she says. I dip my hands in the warm flour. The oil licks my fingers. The salt crunches as I squeeze and the oil spurts. It must be because I’m thinking of all the other embroidered blankets I have seen that the dough is sticking to my fingers. Maryam is studying the funk I have fallen into. Rubbing her bald head, she pushes me aside. She scrapes the dough off my fingers and throws it back in the bowl. Then only a little more flour. It seems we are getting close to the perfect blend. The rise and fall of dough sticking to every part of the bottom of the aluminum pan. As Maryam pushes and shoves the dough, a steady rhythm comes from the pan. She speaks to the rhythm.
�
�I don’t know if the sum of a life is your breath… But if life isn’t as serious as I think it is well then…”
She takes her hands out of the dough, fingers draped with strips of dough. As she speaks she looks at them, clasping her sticky fingers together then pulling them apart. She holds her hands up at the morning sunlight streaming through the window and as she opens her fingers she looks at the thinning dough between her fingers. Her head looks even balder next to all that dough. “Did you know that I took it seriously?When they told me to cover myself I covered my heart. When they told me to believe, I believed right down to my bones.” A bitter smile takes shape on her lips. “When they said, ‘we’re having a revolution,’ I slept day and night in Tahrir, got lost, disappeared, became one…”
She paused for a moment, blew over the dough in the palm of her hand, threw it back in the pan, looked out the window and bowed her bald head over the bowl again…
“Friendship, politics, love, marriage, living… I mean I took it all so seriously.” Turning around, she checked to see if I was listening.
“I understand,” I said.
She pressed the palms of her hands down on the dough again, returning to that strong, steady rhythm.
“But later… It’s as if… People have two parallel lives. They actually don’t take anything seriously but they all seem to take everything more seriously than I do. Same goes for the revolution, for love, covering ourselves, God, death… It’s like… Do you know what I feel like?”
“Like you have been cheated?”
“But not the kind from above…”
“What then?”
“‘Getting shunned by the world,’ Madam Lilla said. Not from Egypt or from society, or anything like that … but really, getting thrown out of the world…”
She paused again, looked out the window and spoke as if she were speaking to God:
“Azizi, seeing that things are not all that serious, seeing that everything just happens on the sidelines… I mean then why choose me to deceive…?” She turned to me again with dough hanging from her fingers. “You get it?”
“How could I not, azizi. How could I not…”
“There’s a scene which I think explains it all perfectly… Could you roll up these sleeves?”
I touched her thin, feathery, dark-skinned arms with the tips of my fingers. If I roll up her sleeves they’ll just fall down. So I fold them one by one. Folding them just twice isn’t high enough so I undo them and I make three folds. For both arms. I stick my fingers under to see if it’s too tight. No. So I roll up them up just little higher and leave it there. Maryam continues:
“Thanks… So when I think of that scene I want to cry. I want to cry for my whole life. The superintendent is washing the apartment stairwell. And he told us – we’re kids, I’m around eight – he says, ‘Come over and help.’ And I’m wearing – you see we were going to visit someone – I’m wearing a white dress. But I get all carried away with the broom and I’m furiously sweeping the floors. Water is splashing up at me and I don’t even notice. I’m cleaning like crazy. I guess the other kids were with the super, like me. I don’t even look around. Then I guess everything is finished and I’m standing there out of breath. I’m a mess and drenched in sweat. Then I look up and I see the kids playing and the super puffing on a cigarette… The rest was always like that. Always like that. You get it? I mean if…”
She started to cry. One dough-covered hand went to her nose and the other held the counter.
“I mean if … if that guy was anything like me … if he’d been swept away like me, taking it more seriously than the others…”
She turned to me, her eyes bloodshot, the back of her hand over her mouth, her voice quivering.
“You get it?”
I hugged her. Maryam was like dough, like a child: they both have the same beautiful smell. We breathe in through our noses a couple times. Look out the window.
After the body is taken out of the blanket they give it to his mother. Tonight she will sleep under it. God is great!
“This dough is no good,” says Maryam. “I suppose we shouldn’t be the ones making it.”
She wipes her snot on her sleeve.
All the women inside scream and the dough trembles. The poet leader throws herself outside. She falls to the ground. She looks at the earth, on her hands and her knees. As if she is seeing it for the first time. And then she took that handful and began to eat. Screaming, yellow dust flies out with her breath.
“Libyaaaa!”
Opening and closing her mouth, she crunches sand between her teeth.
“Libyaaaa! You wanted blood then? You wanted blood, eh?”
And with that her face begins to look like the faces of the other women. Her lips grow thin and lock. This oasis of women in the middle of the desert tightened around her. She was now a line on the horizon, and no caravan would pass. Dawn was breaking, but it still wasn’t morning.
Maryam and I stood at the door. We were like two freshly nibbled, freshly cooked loaves of bread. Two pieces of raw dough. If someone didn’t come along and throw us in the oven we would fall then swell and then rot. Clearly we were people who found suffering on the road and not in the bread that women made in times of mourning. Surely that was why we agreed to Madam Lilla’s strange, sudden, meaningless offer.
14
“Ladies! You must learn how to kill!”
On the threshold Madam Lilla turned to us in the semi-darkness and declaimed these words that echoed in the cave. The announcement might have chilled us to the bone if things hadn’t played out the way they had. Now we knew her words were driven by a deep concern. And the truth is we desperately needed the kind of compassion that slapped you right in the face.
*
Madam Lilla literally dragged Amira out of bed. “We need to go,” she said, “Now!”
I could see that in her sudden panic she was really struggling with herself and not us for being slow on the uptake. “We’re late,” she kept saying. “We need to hurry up!” Her concern was laced with a striking desperation.
“She’s gone crazy,” said Maryam.
“But she was so strong during the funeral,” I said.
“She’s not OK. She clearly wants to get out of here fast,” said Amira.
“Madam Lilla?” Maryam asked incredulously.
Shaking her head and rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Amira said, “She can’t take it anymore. Was it all the women crying? The boy’s death? If we don’t go with her she really might lose her mind!”
Saida was standing at the doorway. Lilla stormed out of the room without even acknowledging her. For the first time Saida looked at us as if we weren’t spoiled tourists, as if she understood our predicament. Leaning against the wall, she watched us put on our shoes. Maryam looked up at her as Saida gravely said, “Thirina never mourns. You’ll see. She can’t take the helplessness. Go with her and…”
She seemed about to add, “look after her” but she couldn’t and she went into an inner room where she slipped out of her headscarf. She stopped, took a breath and then stepped into the room where all the girls were crying.
While the women continued to fill Saida’s home with clouds of tears, Madam Lilla, our queen of salt, hurried out of the house opening her umbrella. The sun was high in the sky but this woman was determined. The plan was to go first to the old city, just three-hundred metres away, and from there to the holy cave. At a time when everyone was leaving Saida’s home to bury the young soldier we were on our way underground. Or rather we were stumbling after Madam Lilla who marched ahead under a black satin umbrella marked Hotel Ritz-Paris. Madam Lilla was continuously rattling out sharp, rapid notes.
“You can’t come all the way here and not visit Tanit. We must go in and give our respects to the Goddess Tanit. You can’t start a day like that. We aren’t just going to sit down and cry. Or suffocate in that house. We need to get out and walk. You can sleep later. Get some rest later. You might be tired but
that doesn’t matter. Now we have to walk. Yes, we have to walk. Yes, it’ll be good for you to see Tanit. Very good for you. Yes. Yes.”
Softly Maryam said to me, “We’re being rude to the other women. We should have stayed home.” Stones crunching under our boots, Madam Lilla turned to us and gave us a dark look from under her umbrella. She took three steps forward then stopped and peered into our faces.
“Ladies… You cannot stay home. Courtesy should be your last concern. We are pilgrims. So you can’t go home. If you go home you’ll suffocate and die. You aren’t like them. You have to keep walking.”
She started walking again, mumbling to herself: “The only thing you need now is Tanit.”
She was striding forward as if everyone in Saida’s home had rallied together and was coming after us. She was practically running. She was afraid of that suffering paste that stretched from hand to hand, infectious, thick, expanding. She was afraid that if it reached her she would be stuck. If that crying circle got her inside she was afraid she would fade away in the ring. To keep from falling or fading she was searching for something to hold onto. The best thing for her would be to go and see Tanit.
Even Maryam had toned down her usual sarcasm. As for Amira… She was the one among us that seemed most in need of a god. Someone she could pray to and ask forgiveness. I was looking at their faces as all of this raced through my mind but the expression on mine must have been blank because Maryam felt the need to share some of her encyclopedic knowledge:
“Tanit … a goddess, yes … Like Cybele or Artemis in your part of the word. For the Tuareg she’s Tin Hinan… You see a mother goddess. Tanit is just another stage name.”
Women Who Blow on Knots Page 16