* * *
This idea of destiny obsessed me, and I felt great comfort that that mythical ship would carry me off to my fate. When our destiny is not in our control, there is nothing left but this suffocation I felt to be delicious. I pushed on more deeply into it, so I could surrender my will entirely. ‘I’m so tired, Mama, so tired,’ I said to myself. I imagined her sitting silently in front of me, smiling shyly as she skilfully cleaned a fish my father had caught and fried it for us before it went bad. My brothers and I hated fish; we constantly tried to escape from the rancid smell of my father’s hands. Hossam and I pretended to chew it like good children, but Humam ate it with a gluttony we found astonishing. I forgot to ask him about this on his first visit, when Omar brought him. I hugged Humam over-enthusiastically – I wanted to hide my astonishment at seeing him as a young man with a thin, timid moustache. He was the only presence in my life which didn’t require some sort of deceptive embellishment to give me a feeling of security, like calling Sulafa ‘my sister’, or Um Mamdouh ‘my mother’. He really was my brother; there was no illusion involved. I was allowed to keep a photo of him. The other prisoners passed it around, and I heard their comments with the glee of a sister who knew the truth about that handsome face whose narrow lips they craved.
In my eighth year, as my sentence neared its end, I thought how I would soon be leaving this place. ‘It will be difficult to go back to my room…’ I thought as I lay in bed, surrendering to the fear which grew inside me like ivy, just as they wanted. I remembered the rounds of torture in the Mukhabarat unit, and the pus, the ulcers, the lice which attacked us and which we were afraid of admitting were in our cells. I had had recurrent bouts of illness that scarred me and kept the others well away from me – but there was no time for reproaches here, just as there was no time for living. We had to keep our bodies intact, as we still might need them some day. We kept breathing to reassure ourselves of the soundness of our lungs and arteries, which still boomed with blood like the rush of a waterfall. There is nothing quite like a prisoner’s mindset; it made us perfectly capable of considering our limbs just as if they had come out of a dream.
Our craving for compassion made us praise those warders who overlooked little misdemeanours, such as dawdling on the way to the dormitories, or laughing too loudly. It made us tolerant of everything we used to condemn in our enemies, when we were on the outside. This enmity began to seem worthless; we remembered it, and thanked prison which made images of our old life beautiful. I looked for a sympathetic prisoner so I could tell her all about the dreams I had once drawn in the notebooks now taken from me, along with sheets of paper on which I had copied Prophetic ahadith and excerpts from books by Sayyid Qutb, Al Ghazali, and the fatwas of Ibn Baz; I had believed them all, just as I had believed the lie of hatred and praised it.
* * *
The daily inspections were the most futile acts in this forsaken place, given that we were surrounded by guards and iron doors. They counted us, sometimes making do with us calling out our numbers, at other times requiring us to stand up so they could confirm our presence. One by one we would slink to the other wall where we waited for the warders’ moods to be revealed – we never knew where they would lead us. The governor walked in front of us, proud of his virility and his carefully clipped moustache. He strutted in front of women whose desires had died and whose skins bloomed with poison. His deputy would spend hours ‘inspecting the inspection’, which was repeated as if they too were afraid of being alone and needed us to entertain them with what remained of the pertness of our breasts and our dishevelled hair. The deputy-deputy never wasted an opportunity to speak to us about morals, just like a preacher. He would curse us and then describe us as whores, all as if he were addressing crowds hanging on his every word. In a quiet voice, he praised himself, his leader, his Party and his Islam, and then began to give us advice, his words growing increasingly tender as he called us his sisters and daughters. He drew on examples of moral rectitude taken from his own respectable household and his method of bringing up his four daughters. We began to know their names and the names of their husbands, the colour of their hair, the smell of the perfume they loved. Once Sulafa kicked me to get my attention and whispered sarcastically, ‘Ask him about his daughter Mona.’ I just laughed inwardly as I stared at his paunch and his feeble attempts to hide his repulsive baldness.
How many of those men came to us in our cells without asking our leave, when it used to be so difficult for anyone to enter a woman’s bedroom without permission? We were so humiliated; repressed conscripts spied on us, and we could hear them masturbating on the other side of the doors to the cells. The fear of being raped made us cautious all the time, even when we were in the toilet. This fear clung to us for a long time; we wished that we could close up our vaginas and padlock them to keep the little that was still ours.
* * *
Buthayna’s leg was broken twice, they plucked out an eye, and they cut off a finger, but still she didn’t reveal the hiding place of the printing press she ran for our Party. During the three years she spent in solitary confinement near to us, we could hear her voice raised in cursing them. Her presence so close to us was vital in making us feel, in the first days, that our pain was meaningless. We heard her moaning like a wounded lioness, screaming after the numbness went from her limbs and she regained consciousness after the torture sessions we couldn’t keep count of. They put her in with us after we’d been two years in the women’s prison; we welcomed her with kisses, trills and the song ‘The White Moon Rose Over Us’. She smiled, exhausted, grateful to the Marxists who cherished her courage and sang our hymns with us. We echoed the beauty of their compassion when we were joined by Helena, one of their girls, who had the slight build and face of a rabbit. The Mukhabarat unit let her be transferred only in the hope of breaking the knot in her tongue which wouldn’t stop screaming at them, ‘Dogs and traitors!’ The woman’s resilience oppressed the torturers, and they credited her with their own masculinity. They called Helena by a man’s name and avoided her, even though she was in a cage. The strength of the malevolence in her heart terrified them, and made them regret that they hadn’t included her in the earlier execution sprees which had harvested thousands of men and women. No one knew where these corpses had gone.
Helena and Buthayna were both sentenced to twenty years in prison. They relaxed when sitting together, and they chose a corner where they could sleep next to each other after fighting about God, Marx, Lenin, sex, children and songs. They celebrated their differences of opinion. Their long isolation in solitary confinement had made them hard, and they were dismissive of our transient pain; we didn’t defend ourselves against their attacks of ‘how spoiled’ we were, nor their derision at our wish to return to our homes, and our defence of those who couldn’t withstand the torture and revealed everything they knew. Isn’t cruelty measureless, when someone asks you to be heroic, but the only resource you have to draw on is deference to the opinion of other prisoners that you are, indeed, a heroine? At first I was close to Buthayna, but I grew to hate her. I couldn’t bear how she slandered Bakr and described him as a traitor. I respected her for tormenting our captors, but hated her overbearing behaviour, and the fact that Hajja Souad was afraid of her. I could hear Buthayna snoring in her troubled sleep as she tried to expel an insect from her nose. She tossed and turned like any worried woman. When she had been in solitary confinement, away from us, she was a legend. Myths grew up about her daring during battle; moving tributes circulated among members of our group who raised her to the status of a blessed female saint. But it is hard to come face to face with your heroine, breathing like any other woman, fighting for an additional slice of bread and a little of the bean soup brimming with dead flies. Insults created a being of hatred and let it out to play.
* * *
Ten days before my release, I celebrated my twenty-sixth birthday without much fuss. The girls who knew the date stayed close to me with the affection of friends
who were to bid me goodbye soon. They hastily prepared the candle hidden away for such occasions, which had fallen into their hands two years earlier, when Rasha insisted on it to mark our child’s fourth birthday. She had a cake smuggled in and we greedily gobbled small slices of it as we sang for him and helped him to blow out his candle; he looked at us, astonished at discovering that the act of blowing out a candle necessitated all this uproar. Rasha had since left but her candle stayed behind as a memory for us. We would light it for a few seconds so it could be blown out by a woman who needed to feel that she was a year older. We wished out loud for our freedom – what else would a prisoner wish for? I blew out the candle in turn and some of the girls clapped and kissed me. Um Mamdouh hugged me and cried: I was her daughter, who would no longer sit and eat with her after Buthayna and I had fought over whose turn it was for the bathroom. I kissed her hand and assured her that I wouldn’t leave her side during the remaining ten days, and I would return to being her daughter.
In that time, I vowed to fast and perform fifteen ruk’at every day. The girls from my group were surprised at this humility, as I had left off praying three years earlier. Um Mamdouh defended me when Buthayna commented that God didn’t accept the prayers of infidels. ‘I can be silent for ten days,’ I thought, worried that they would change their minds and continue to hold me in the Mukhabarat unit, as had happened with many girls who had returned to hell and were still waiting for their release from day to day. I left it to God, and observed the prisoners who had accompanied me on this hellish journey. Hajja Souad had invented a unique way of keeping track of time. Every day, she sewed a stitch of black thread in her only shirt, which she only took off to wash every three months. She counted the stitches every day; the girls laughed when one of them tried to help her and reduced the total by two or three days. Hajja Souad recounted them as if she were mocking the time that hung on the edge of her blouse, a stitch of black thread acting as witness to her misery and the curtailment of her passion for beautiful fabrics. A woman who had loved elegance and cleanliness, her surrender to filthy clothes affected us; it gave us to understand that she had surrendered to death, and believed it inevitable.
However, two years after leaving prison, I knocked on Hajja Souad’s door in the Sabil district of Aleppo and I almost didn’t recognize her, she was so excessively elegant. She had covered her arms with real gold bracelets as Aleppans usually did when they wanted to boast of their wealth. She hugged me cheerfully and kissed Sulafa warmly. The daughters of the wali’s palace, as we still called the prison, moved feverishly and longed perpetually for fun and sumptuous banquets. I kissed them all as they arrived and registered their disturbance at the fact that my face was now unveiled, although they didn’t comment on it. It was the last time I saw the Hajja before I heard that she had surrounded herself with the pomp of a mujahida, and now used her story to strike advantageous bargains with trading families who were sympathetic to our group. (Some time later, I went to visit Um Mamdouh in Hama, who resented Hajja Souad’s standing.) That day, we laughed with joy at being free, delighted with the plates of kebab and other skilfully prepared food. My position as a medical student and my uncles’ ascendancy in the carpet trade had prevented the trial which I expected from Hajja Souad, who had nothing more than her past to protect her. I felt that I still loved her when I saw her prison clothes, sewn with tokens of her wretchedness, hanging in her living room: a sacred amulet, testimony that the executioners had left us alive, although they were beasts whom we would never forgive.
* * *
I spent the last ten days in prison in great anxiety. Fasting calmed me and made me seem lighter, as befitted a woman about to leave Hell for all the minutiae of the outside world she had waited for so ardently. I had a few odds and ends which I gave to whoever wanted them, and left Um Mamdouh the task of distributing the rest. I closed my eyes and dreamed of a never-ending flight; from above, I could see rivers and countries, and I climbed over mountains as lightly as a butterfly. I hovered around Marwa’s house so she would notice me, before revealing to her that I was that young girl she had known, who was now returning to her notebooks, and sitting Marwa’s son down beside her. I had kept his picture inside my clothes, but I gave it to Layla after seeing her rush over and kiss it as if he were her own child, whom she had left with an old, half-blind mother. They lived in a house which was partly destroyed by a mortar shell. Layla had just left the bedroom to make coffee for her new husband; she went back in, and saw him in pieces. Our child slept in Layla’s embrace. I told him stories and tried to recall the ones about a fox, even though he didn’t know what it looked like. He only liked Rasha’s stories, so we tried to copy the alluring way she narrated them, and failed. She would tell him how the fox Abu Ali spoke to the dog Abi Mandhar, and our child would laugh and imagine the story coming to life in front of him, including in it the warders, whom he knew as well as they knew him. I offered to take him with me, as had everyone else who had been released, but Suhayr never agreed. She wanted an additional witness to her story. These witnesses had now grown into a crowd which came every night to hear snippets of a myth where legend mingled with reality.
I didn’t sleep at all on the last night. I was terrified that my name would be overlooked. In the morning, I kissed everyone and we all cried as we had never cried before. We released trills, which we called our twenty-one-gun salute to a guest of this large palace. In the office, I signed papers I didn’t read; I didn’t shake hands with the captors whose gaze still assessed the magnitude of the hatred I had borne and hidden inside me. I went outside with the guards who had come to effect my transfer. I got into the Peugeot estate; I carefully put my hands into the cuffs which a member of the Mukhabarat held up. We drove out of the prison. Omar and Maryam had been stationed in front of the main gate since dawn, but the only thing they saw of me was my handcuffed hands, waving from the car. I saw Maryam through the haze of my tears, and she looked like a scarecrow. The Mukhabarat officer refused my plea to stop for a moment so I could take her hand and reassure her. I saw the sky and it made me dizzy. The car went through Bab Masalla on its way to the Mukhabarat building. Seeing life passing by this simply and easily made me feel faint. I wanted to throw up; I couldn’t understand this rush of feeling. I could see Omar’s car in the rear-view mirror, and Maryam was leaning out as if she wanted to say something to me and couldn’t wait any longer.
The unit’s guards, interrogators and officers were all three and a half years older, and I was three and a half centuries older. I saw that Abu Jamil was going very grey; he welcomed me mockingly, as if deriding my wish to leave prison. He used to openly state his sectarianism and praise the desert-prison massacre in front of us, concluding his speeches with expressions of revenge on our group. I had often remembered him when I was ordering my enemies in my head: he was the officer who had fallen in love with Suhayr. When we heard the news that he had lung cancer, we all set up a trill and Suhayr danced, carrying her child in her arms. He was now weak and feeble, and I looked at him pityingly. I almost kicked him, because I didn’t need anyone to lead me along the corridor to the cells. It was as if I were returning to a house I knew well. I waited in silence for four more months, sifting the gravel from a bowl of bulgur wheat with a skill we had all perfected, before they summoned me and led me to the commander’s office. His health had improved a little after the government dispatched him to a French hospital. He told me to sit, so I sat, and forgot my dream of leaving. He spoke at length about the good will of the compassionate leader, and I nodded. He concluded with a wish that the past few years had guided me on to the right path and convinced me that my group was criminal, and that they themselves were patriots who wanted nothing more than to safeguard the country. I didn’t open my mouth. When he got up and handed me the piece of paper which authorized my release, he reached out to shake my hand, so I reached out to transfer the poison of my hatred. I shook the hand of my enemy and looked into his eyes, and I knew that he was dead.
AFTERWORD
This novel’s main locus is Aleppo, a city surrounded by olive orchards and pistachio fields, ancient enough to vie with Damascus for the title of the oldest continuously inhabited city on Earth. The wider setting is the urban Levant, with its markets, mosques, caravanserais and luxury consumer goods, and the social networks and carefully guarded reputations of the traditional bourgeoisie.
Our nameless narrator is the youngest of a house of women who live suspended – like embalmed butterflies, to use one of the novel’s recurring motifs – waiting for men to act, and often suffering from their actions. Hers is an emotional, conflicted, self-contradicting voice, at once passionate, sensuous and austere. She is ‘the shy girl who used to stand on the doorsill afraid of loneliness and orphanhood’. She is also, by force of her context, capable of formulas like this: ‘We need hatred to give our lives meaning.’
Part of the problem is self-loathing and sexual repression. As she grows, the increasing weight of her breasts causes the narrator to talk less. She wears cruel bras. Her school friend Dalal tells her that women are ‘animated dirt’. And the narrator is trapped in this dirt: ‘I felt my body to be a dark vault, damp and crawling with spiders.’
In Praise of Hatred is full of images of vaults, cloisters, enclosures. This is because imprisonment – by ideology, by history, by hatred – is the novel’s most persistent theme.
The values in the narrator’s home are sometimes harsh and unforgiving, but they are real and true nevertheless. Wrapped up with them are perfumes and carpets, music and plays, a rich Islamic and poetic heritage, precious mystical experiences.
But beyond the walls there’s a non-conservative Aleppo, too: the dominant secular world. At school the uncovered girls call the veiled girls ‘the Penguin Club’. The mukhabarat (secret police) sympathizers write reports on the indiscretions of their peers. These students, like Mao’s cultural revolutionaries, are able to terrorize their teachers and trample on the moral code. A girl called Nada, in her ‘suits of commando camouflage’, is kept by a much older lover who works for ‘the death squad’. Political and sexual transgression are closely associated in the narrator’s mind, and she is outraged when her friend Ghada gives up modest dress to enjoy an affair with a regime figure. ‘Hatred bewildered me,’ she confides, ‘just as powerful love bewilders a lover.’
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