In Praise of Hatred

by Khaled Khalifa

  Those girls had taken turns in guarding her. Now, I guarded the illusion which we shared, just as we shared everything willingly. She bewildered me when she cheerfully told me about the moment of her birth and her mother’s joy at the arrival of a daughter after four sons. The umbilical cord had wrapped itself around Sulafa’s neck and had almost strangled her; the midwives managed to revive her only with great difficulty. After Sulafa as a toddler fell into the well and emerged from it without a scratch, her mother became still more convinced that she had been formed for life. I tried to picture my own birth, but was assailed by my mother’s dead, silent face.

  * * *

  The guards’ faces were no longer obscured, and they became a part of our daily life. We coveted these faces sometimes, just to feel that our lives would continue after our detention; we would meet them one day, and call them to account for their oppression. We would ask them, ‘Won’t you die like us?’ We would go out to them in their dreams; we would penetrate their memories, and corrupt moments of harmony as they tried to enjoy their peaceful old age by playing backgammon and giving piggybacks to their grandchildren who played contentedly with their beards. Sulafa and I imagined various court settings: we were wearing judicial robes and holding the gavel, and then we began to interrogate them. ‘Why do you find pleasure in masturbating over a woman when she is tied up and electrodes are burning her breasts?’ Someone, known to his associates as Abi Ali, answered, ‘I was serving my master and my homeland.’ The word ‘homeland’ made me laugh. Everyone used it with veneration and respect, from members of my group to the torturers.

  I was astonished at the breadth of scope contained within such a basic concept amidst the giddiness of all its various meanings. We wanted our ‘homeland’ to be Islamic. Sulafa and her group wanted it to be Marxist. The executioners wanted it to be their own private realm, where they could carry on masturbating and hanging on to power, heedless of anyone else as long as they still had armies and prisons. When I asked Sulafa, ‘How could the country be Marxist?’ she replied, with tepid enthusiasm, ‘Red and no other colour.’ To my own question I replied, ‘We want it green.’ Everyone wanted the country to be their own particular colour, like that of those three judicial robes in front of which I stood two years after first being imprisoned. My dreams of spices had grown trivial and pointless beside those of the others, who worried about their husbands, fathers and children.

  One day, after two years in prison, I, along with nine others from our organization, was taken from the cell in chains and thrown into a secure van. They didn’t allow us the briefest pause to look up at the overcast sky. The van crossed Damascus; we heard car horns; I exchanged long looks with Hajja Souad, whose fear I could sense, as if we were meeting for the last time. In front of the door to the court I tried to touch her hand to encourage her. The handcuffs prevented me, but she noticed my gesture and closed her eyes and murmured. I felt her contentment, which I needed along with the prayers of Um Mamdouh who had bid me goodbye like I was a child going to school with all her dreams in front of her. She kissed me and smoothed down the collar of my only shirt (which so long ago Maryam’s fingers had touched when she blessed me, aware of what it meant that I was leaving with all those strangers).

  The judges’ dais gleamed and the courtroom was warm. A picture of the president hung oppressively in every corner. The judges’ faces seemed bored as if they had had to leave unfinished their cups of coffee in order to come here and defend their many privileges, which ranged from luxury apartments and cars to foreign currency and shares. The organization’s girls had given in, having already lost hope. There was emptiness in their glances, their spirit extinguished as if they no longer cared about anything. We had forgotten the smell of clean sheets; we had surrendered to our squalid cells. We no longer dreamed of marriage and enjoying family tiffs over the breakfast table. Our files on the desk revealed that we were now a collection of pages written by informers and interrogators. We had responded in turn to their idiotic questions about particular secrets, in the face of their ready-made accusations, which began with our honour and progressed all the way to an attempted coup on the ruling regime.

  * * *

  The interrogators had all been infatuated with my cellmate Suhayr’s eyes. Her gaze was like an axe as she repeated to them violently, ‘Yes. I wanted to overthrow the regime and kill the other sect: they are my enemies.’ With a determination that infuriated them, she praised the virility of her ravishingly handsome husband, younger than her by three years and whose chest she had weighed down with charms to keep him from falling into the path of the evil eye. They were furious that she could praise him in this way in their presence. They couldn’t resist the appeal of her haggard body. Her passion tyrannized even the most senior of the interrogators. She knocked his coffee cup to the ground and spat in his face after he gleefully informed her that her husband had been executed in one the periodic purges of prisoners, who were led to the gallows in a courtyard of the desert prison. She returned to her cell and stood there like a queen lamenting her kingdom. Staring distractedly, she said curtly, ‘I am now the widow of a martyr, one of God’s beloveds; the father of my son who is growing in my belly. I am the widow of Sobhi Al Janadi.’ The bereaved queen went quiet and girls from our group rushed over with their condolences. They trilled and fired up my enthusiasm, but I discovered that I didn’t know how to complete the trill, which was shaking the entire country. I cried, as did Hajja Souad. Um Mamdouh joined her, along with all our girls in the cells, and the Marxists rushed to eulogize the beloved of this haughty woman.

  We got no sleep that night. They dragged us one after another to that chair which we had begun to know the way to, and which allowed the torturer total freedom to toy with our skin, breasts and stomach, opening up our wounds again before they could heal properly. Terror haunted the guards when calls of ‘Allahu Akbar!’ were raised from the neighbouring cells, from the men whose breath we used to feel on our necks. There was a pact between us: whenever they called out to alert us that one of their number was being taken off to be tortured, we trilled out our support for him; they in turn released full-throated roars whenever one of the women was led away. Suhayr had joined us seven months earlier; in recent days the sight of her had become thrilling, and her face covered with freckles. Her pregnancy filled us with enthusiasm and occupied us all as if we were sharing the coming child. We picked bits of potato for her out of the bowls of squalid food and dried them out to pretend to her that they were slices of peach, in an attempt to calm her cravings.

  Rasha, the only one in our cell to receive visits, bossily ordered her family to bring enough balls of coloured wool to make blankets and other things for the baby. A battle ensued with the head of the Mukhabarat unit; he sometimes made allowances for Rasha in deference to the high status of her family, who were disheartened by their daughter’s Marxist dreams. More than once, they tried to convince her to abandon her stance so they could get her out of this hellhole, but she was obdurate and threatened to refuse their visits. They were ashamed of her hatred for the luxuries of her home. As a child, she’d come under the influence of a distant family member, who had once fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. He drew the hammer and sickle logo for her, and sang her the songs of the Brigade. Uncle Muti told her about imaginary battles and distant countries. She looked after him when she grew older, grateful to him for teaching her how to hate every religious sect and to sing the hymns of the International Brigade, which had gathered all humanity under its standard.

  Rasha’s mediation was successful. Her family brought us wool and knitting needles and we dedicated ourselves to our coming child, making clothes for an unborn baby known already by a variety of pet names. Rasha said to our cellmate Hoda what none of the rest of us dared: very simply, she told her that we knew she was informing on us, and that she didn’t deserve to have anything to do with our child, and Hajja Souad did the same with one of the girls from our organizatio
n. We pushed aside any qualms and isolated them so they became like two corpses wishing for escape; it didn’t take long until they were transferred to the central women’s prison. We were all waiting to be moved there in order to escape from the smell of our torturers’ shit; to humiliate us they would force us to clean it up after having smeared it liberally all over the walls and ceiling of the toilet.

  We all took turns with the knitting needles. We made two tops and a blanket for our imminent baby, which Suhayr obediently shared with us. We needed it to ease the pressure of our sentences and to keep some perspective on the dream of eventually leaving this place. I had become accustomed to my daily life, and I entered my third year without any illusions. I kissed Hajja Souad’s hand and head so she would forgive me for my cold glances, my closeness to Sulafa, and my lack of participation in the prayer and Quran sessions she convened every evening. Some of the girls rejected my apology and accused me of abandoning the dreams of our group, and of a lack of interest in the extreme punishments meted out to our men. Images of Hossam and my mother rose in front of me as I defended myself. I had an overwhelming longing to cry out for her embrace; to start everything again from its first innocence, from the colours which had once been clear. Hajja Souad smiled. She stopped the girls from harassing me whenever they made sure I could hear their whispers hinting at my relationship with the other sect, and cursing Marwa, her husband and all of my formerly respected family, of which only Bakr retained their admiration.

  I asked Sulafa, ‘Will our son come for a long or short time?’ She gave herself up to playing her role in the game. ‘Is it true that everything that has happened was an illusion, and everything that will happen will be an even bigger illusion?’ We watched Suhayr, whose labour pains had started. All the prisoners woke up, all twenty-two of us, and we began to bang on the door with all the strength we possessed, announcing our devotion to the life of our child. The guards’ fingers rushed to their triggers, ready to open fire. Um Mamdouh lay Suhayr down and ordered the girls to cover her with blankets. Rasha started to demand an ambulance. She babbled angrily and then left with the guards to negotiate. Suhayr resisted the contractions; she snatched a few gasps of air and did her best not to die. Rasha returned quickly and helped move Suhayr to a ground-floor guardroom, accompanied by four other women she ordered about. The voices of the prisoners in the adjoining cells were raised in a strange prayer we had never heard before. We needed their melodious voices to calm our worry and fear, as if their words had been extracted straight from the chants of the pilgrims during their circling of the Kaaba. A sweet voice recited lines and a chorus repeated them after him, defying the bemused guards as they stood in the corridor. Bewilderment reigned as if our child had overturned their rules, and the silence settling over them for a few moments was an indication of the compassion they very rarely liked to show in the absence of their master, who arrived later as our child’s screams filled the world. Um Mamdouh trilled as she took on the role of midwife, assisted by Layla and Tuhama the mute, with a skill she had mastered in a city whose women wouldn’t reveal their private parts to a male doctor.

  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.