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[align=left]I was born to a special land. I remember nothing of my parents or I choose to forget perhaps. In my head I see trees dancing with the breeze and dark rich soil that chooses to feed whatever seed you throw into it be it good or bad. People had names and vocations, there was the old shop keeper we used to pass by on our way to bread lines in the morning. We waded through a hazardous mix of mud and sewage waters left there by torrential rains that fell unexpectedly or perhaps just unstudied. The weather forecast came the day before within the little half hour in which power remained, a repetition of the day before professing varying temperatures across the country and rains as would the season promise. His suit was a dull grey a good three sizes bigger than him. No one wore any thing that remotely resembles their figure or represents it whether male or female. As if we were meant to stay unidentified and indefinable until the moment we exit from a big wooden door wrapped up in white and sins heading for dirt. Then you can see it; the figure, the bulging bellies and over fed thighs. It is safer this way, thou shall speak well of the dead; think unwell but by all means speak well. The woman who whispered "Is this what went around the village?" and the inevitable "M'chchche". Her hand got stuck on the inside of the thigh and would not be released. Speak well of them, or else. It's enough they lived. It's enough they lasted.
It hit with the first hours of the morning knocking our west side wall. We were violently shaken out of bed two hours later to sweep the water that was working so hard to drown the house. I had wet my bed and there was no time to change or at least I was made to think so by the unselective force of adult worry about material possessions. "Try to save the furniture" someone screamed. I was aware then that the fine pine wood that covered half of the walls in the downstairs lobby was not just pretentious but also utterly blasphemous of a place with such little predictability. The bakery was owned by a family of well-bread good looking Qopts even though I was never certain whether the infamous good looks were only so designated due to the lighter skin and longer finer hair. The bread was good no doubt and it had no religion or nationality, so I liked it and asked no questions and thought nothing more of it. We wanted to play around in the mud but bread was needed and we had to hurry back and forth. We stole the pleasure of being ourselves in the mud when our adults were not looking. They were worried about every thing; the still waters had mosquitoes, held germs and hugged nude electricity lines. The poor dark off-springs of gardners and gate keepers played undisturbed in our forbidden lakes. The fine little girl stood calmly to the side of a scary oven. Eva, they said. She had the air of a goddess, as if she was convinced my world will fall if I do not get that very loaf she secretly owned at conception. I was told at some point in my life that it was some kind of play on Hawaa'. I cannot describe the Arabic letter the name began with but I taught my Kenyan friends at university a hundred years afterwards that the letter was like when you put your hand on fire and scream "AAAH'". They still did not get it. First created and forever judged.
Despite the feuds invariably breaking the midst of idle housewives within very close proximity from each other, our neighborhood was perfect. It was clean and comparatively posh. Still, all sorts of people lived in it. Some more openly than others. Our own helper came from the Nuba Mountains, he and his mother before him were raised by my grandmother in a little big town on the banks of the White Nile. The gist of the story is that someone not far up the family tree was owned by "the big house". The big house is where my mother comes from. Her family reportedly arriving at the sacred White Nile seven generations ago from somewhere up North. Her uncles were hardly admitted into the army because they were branded "foreigners". The story is always relayed with so much pride as if to actually belong to this land is an unlivable shame. I loved the land, but the people… that was something else. I used to sit and watch him for hours while he swept the floors with a little bit of carelessness and a lot of vigor. He got married after we left the country and had a string of girls he named after the daughters of our neighbors who were of great beauty. The beautiful girls had a mother of Turkish roots and a father from the West. The combination was a killer just like the man who took the life of their own house help while we stayed abroad eaves-dropping on the action persistently happening on an already folded page. I was fascinated by the physique perhaps, which led me to thoughts of why we seemed so different yet so alike. I don't know whether that was the first awakening but something happened in university that made it relevant. I went out with the forbidden creed. He was called Is'haq and his mother Aisha. He had a bright smile and a confident walk although I liked none of the jeans he wore to school. They were too distinctive for my middle class conventional taste. We comment at some point or the other during our lives that "They are so slik with their proudly oiled ebony skins". The girl I saw sitting just outside our gate one late afternoon was very tall, graceful, bald-headed, big eyed and beautiful. She was from the South. I never knew her name. But because of this and more I knew there was no defining beauty. Not on such rich land. I grew up with strange ideas about it all and I hated almost all men especially the ones my friend calls "family policing squad" who got worked up over every thing beautiful; a good laugh, beautiful skin, intellectual conversation and love. I had an uncle fond of saying "Teach no woman and no slave". He is not dead. The big house swam over a hundred heart-break stories, some as they end in no marriages and others as they do. Every one knew every thing about every one else which made what goes on in one's mind more precious day in and day out. I reveled in my own imagination and taught myself about people including our own.
We are a people who believe not in love but in family and so we remain forever hung up about love. So much so that men almost immediately fall in love with you when you say "good morning". The girls of my land have nothing special about them except their voices. They seem to breathe womanhood with their words and leave some song playing on your mind a hundred years afterwards. They have some sort of a haunting quality. A friend of ours chimed once that the best thing about Western women was their casualness when showing their own flesh and the best about Arab women was their captivating beauty while he claimed that there was no one like our own women. They are the little wife types. Not the lovers and friends but the little wife types. No matter how educated you get or how wide you bring your horizon to be, no matter how many times you promise yourself to become nothing like your mother and her friends and relatives, you find yourself at the end of the line becoming just that. Your whole existence melts so that the existence of some moron who put a ring on your finger under duress can have some meaning. Once the first child arrives you forget about the marriage and turn into a baby rearing machine. By the end of the marathon your baby becomes your best friend and takes care of you in ways your husband failed to, but the child goes on to marry a woman just like you who can keep a house and keep her mouth and eyes shut to all else around her. The friend of ours I dreamt of kissing said before that neither I nor my best friend were marriage materials. I took it as a straight up insult since we dressed provocatively, talked daringly and had a lot of character to go with our tight jeans and baggy trousers. I am too old now and wish the moment to come again so I can rejoice at his understanding that we indeed were not such material.
I had weird relationships with no symmetry between them. I attribute it to some faulty parenting and many a comment on my starkly different looks. They all fell in love with me, approached me and dated me under protest. I fell in love with all of them similarly and in so many different ways and I lost them all. My best friends are men because they are simpler and straightforward. I think they have no pressures under which they seek to expand horizontally into feuds with same gender companions like women. Instead they grow vertically and healthily with few hang ups apart from the Mother Thing. We are a nation of good mothers and bad children but that does not work out well. It is like saying one plus one equals twenty one. It flows well but is terribly illogical. Even generosity is abstract.
It becomes worse in politics when we do not know where the hell this big ball of a country is heading. The idea was to stack loyalty on grounds of some historical claim to fame clinging to off-springs of old forgotten engineered national heroes, super legends that seep into religion and religious figures who turn political and then there were the borrowed-ideology mongers, the local area grievance groups, the thieves and the fakers, the power thirsty and a hundred other factions and fictions. No one knew the answers and some even asked the wrong questions. Yet, I was still getting married tomorrow. I managed to survive thirty years of entangled circumstances and grew up to be a desirable young individual with vision and a selfish little dream which, like the calorie in one can of a diet Coke, can be shaken with a wink. I wanted to beat the odds, transcend the herds and be different. I want no boys for later on in life because with girls of the quality this land produces one cannot go wrong even if one tries. Three seems like a good maximum number in light of this scramble to live in the world. It got so bad that killing became an equivalent to the right to live, of course all by reference to "whose right to live?", defined as it were by the hierarchy of races equally adopted by the United Nations as by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association. I chose a limit to my patience which resembles the blackness of that soil on which every thing grew; rain or no rain. I wanted none of this little life I got promised on my first crib, laying there unsuspectingly. There seems nothing like the love of a good woman. Even though, I vow not to become another good woman without the good love of a man. So I learn to hold my breath for more than twenty one seconds and accept all the water that comes with these trials. A life other than this is worth as much as a death. One ought to be careful not to grow the bad… side by side with the good … despite all the good intention. A little bit of caution never hurts no body. I pick the phone and call the hotel to cancel the reservation. Tomorrow sometimes never comes except in our heads and I have principally no problem with today.
The rain falls in June and taps on the tip of my windowsill with delight. It never really rains in June. "Better than the call for prayer", I think to myself and head towards the washrooms. There is nothing like a moment of clarity and the good grace of having choice mercifully and subtly presented. I choose to do something about it. I kneel and pray and a smile opens up my heart and mind. I kick away the memory of that night when the west side wall fell so the little faces of black children playing in a mud that could have been ours disappear too. I sleep soundly and see three little pearls thrown down a rocky mountain towards the sea. I owned the pearls and the sea. Torrential rains roar beyond the window knocking the west side wall. Nothing comes out of my room for the rest of life except little bouts of light… they turn into birds and flee the open window. My partner whispers "Did you know incarnation was made-up to explain division of classes?" I whisper back "Am coming back as a man … there were all these sins." He laughs and kisses my cheek "You are crazy." I never argue with the truth despite rumors. There really is nothing like the love of a good man.[/align]
copy from luckyigess
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ما دام نسي العشرة
وبرقش براقيشي برقوش
خليتو في برقشتو
كان يتبرقش فيها برقوش
قت ليهو يا برقوش
كيف يهون عليك برقوش
قال لي في برقشتو
برقشة ما ليها لزوم
اتبرقشو الحبان
وراجي برقوشي يعود
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