Mama
It didn’t happen today.
His hand waited for what felt was its right, and I shook it back. I meant to say, ‘no, the hell with you.’ I wanted to be left alone. Instead I turned my head, focused on the shelf below me. He wouldn’t leave. He said, ‘You are beautiful.’ And when I didn’t reply, he answered with, ‘You’re welcome.’ He demanded to be heard, as men do. He said, ‘Did you hear what I said?’ And I let him know without looking that I did. And again, the same answer from beneath that monstrous mustache. ‘You’re welcome.’
It didn’t happen today. I didn’t step forward to look him in the eye. I turned my face, trying to protect myself with silence. But one day, the mama in me will wake up roaring with a big and timely ‘fuck you' to any man who dares make me or another woman feel unsafe, who dares expect a woman to answer him.
A moment like this would have shaken me for the rest of the day, but on the drive home, I began to imagine a little girl, in my place, faced with a similar monster. I imagined myself as her mom, grabbing her away and giving that man the wildest wolf glare I could find in me. Return to him the fear. Remove it from the tribe of silent women who carry it for them. I am ready, for next time, and for all the times there was no mama to grab me from the hands that came my way.
***
Give her to me. Give me the woman with a pain so neglected you have to touch her to read it. Lay her in this bed. Let me undress her. I want to see the hand prints of her father. I want to read from her skin the story of that evening. I want to find her mama in her belly, running, and drag her back by foot. Gather them all in bed. The line of men who have touched her. Her mama who left her vulnerable and easy. And on this bed, their stories end and hers remain. I carry her to the bathtub, run water over skin. Hand by hand, every betrayal falls to the water. Until it is only her. A woman without memory. Naked enough to ask, Who am I?
Because so long as they are our wounds, we are them. We are not the women who walked away, who cried and promised and wrote vengeful journals. We are their bruised prey. Far, but still prey. Until we are ready to undress. To look and look and not to turn our heads. To see the parts of them they left behind, as colonizers leave behind their memory in the land they lost. Liberation may take place with mountains and breasts still conquered. Free but unfree. Together, the amazigh and the women attempt to resume life after long battles, in nature, near a truer god only to find what they fought reappearing in the face of another man who speaks another language. From their own, but not theirs. He carries the hands of the ones who lost, prepared to launch another pain. The same pain. [watch Razzia by Nabil Ayouch]
And when does it end? When we can undress by the river and clean our eyes with its water. Perhaps not without memory, because it protects us, but without the wound, we build. We strengthen. We prepare. But we also live. And in living near the source, the very source we were severed from, we gather the kind of strength that freed prey can’t contain. Because strength is a scary thing to hold in a body that learned that gaping wounds (tears, a pitying gaze) lessen the severity of cruelness and begs attention from those who may save us. No, in this post-hell era, it is an anchored body, not a wounded one, that is able to face its vulture, and in its howl, gather its tribe.
“[She] who cannot howl cannot find [her] tribe”
Cutting
There’s a congregation of feeling that happens in a salon, in the cutting and coloring and coffee. Salons in the west don’t know this. They do not know they were meant to be so much more than chair and mirror, scissors and bills. [watch Caramel by Nadine Labaki] Salons are mosques. They are where real prayers happen. Where sorrows and desires come together, where the holy and naughty mix without contempt.
If only you knew the sacred work of a woman who holds scissors.
She can take a man between her knees. In this life or the one after, it makes little difference. Either way, you will all land in the lap of a woman with scissors. She will run her hand through your beard, and god by god, man by man, cut the lie of you away. She will remove your white dress — the costume of man being god on earth — she will answer your searching gaze for the 99 virgins you were promised with a kiss from a woman who is and never was one. She opens her legs to every man, cups their heads, and cuts. The longer the locks, the stronger the god they thought they held, the more impunity they believed in. Tenderly, she lifts their chins and cuts the beard so that she, and god, and the man himself, see his face. The real face. The one without the oil god and the desert god. The one with no god at all. Just the man, bare body, bare flesh.
When I was a little girl, my grandma would sometimes make my father go to the barber. There, and only under force, they’d trim his beard to the skin. And little Aiyah would stare at him. I couldn’t stop staring at him, because only then could I see his face. And I would think, so that is what he looks like! And it would be as if I was seeing him for the first time, not as the monster I knew, but as the tender man I didn’t know and would discover later. The captive to the monster. The one held down by the thick beard and indoctrinated mind. I would see dad before the accident, as if I were meeting him before everything changed, when there was no beard on his face that he hid behind. When there was no reason to hide at all. A voice in me would whisper daddy, and relieved of his costume, if only for a few days before the hair grew back, he was a different man. I had a father, a wounded one, but a father. Then the hair would return, and he would be gone again.
“If a woman has a collapsing mother, she must refuse to become one herself also...What shall we say for the woman who truly has had an experience of a destructive mothering in her own childhood? Of course that time cannot be erased, but it can be eased. It cannot be sweetened up, but it can be rebuilt, strongly, and properly, now. It is not the rebuilding of the internal mother that is so frightening to so many, but rather the feat that something essential died back there, something that can never be brought back to life, something that received no nourishment, for psychically one’s own mother was dead herself. For you, I say, be at peace, you are not dead, you are not lethally injured. ”
Not skin, but beneath it
I wanted the erotic. That invisible thing my mother tried to reclaim when she took off her veil and felt the sand on her bare thigh for the first time. I copied her. I too shed fabric when I left the same man she fled from. I was trying to recover something in the skin. Something lost, or hidden. That was, as the most hungriest parts of us are, without name.
We took off fabric, then more. And we waited. At first, the gaze of the sun and men was enough. We drank from the heat, and the attention. It was all so alive, and wild. Then, the same nagging feeling. Suddenly warm and touched skin wasn’t enough. Her and I, like wolves that lost scent, out of our minds knowing there was loss, but not knowing what had gone, and what needed searching for.
With time, the nagging feeling, left unanswered, grows quieter and leaves in its place a bitterness that claims the body. Rage comes into the womb, where otherwise a possibility waited to be birthed. Self-hated returns with fabric to cover the skin that no longer matters. But the body, that clever being, knowing there was a tribe after its wealth, had hidden its precious things in a part of the house that could never be touched or found. And when time came for us — liberated, prepared, desiring — to retrieve it, we could no longer remember where it was hidden, or, that there was anything of worth that had to be hidden. And seeing only empty rooms, we move out and search the skin, wondering where and how much needs to be undressed for us to find what it is that’s calling to us…
“The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed and unrecognized feeling. ”
How many mamas does a girl get in heaven?
She says, Since I’ve started praying, I’ve stopped feeling a pain in my heart.
And I responded, Since you started praying, you stopped feeling anything at all.
The shape of your silence
tells me you’re not coming
But the way out of you is long
won’t you walk it with me?
We are both sin, you and I
Bastard children of poetry
and writers. The part of you
that hung itself returns
to live in me. There is hell.
It’s one more missed prayer
away and the one praying
tells me we are both doomed.
I followed your veil in the ocean.
Outside the residence of fabric,
of my father and yours, of my husband
and yours, who are we?