To Iblis, who loved
An evening journal written in my first week of landing ‘home’
““If I keep you [the devil] what will happen? You’ll have a difficult, different time. Is it worth it? That’s up to you. ””
I need to write. There’s nothing left to do. Yes I chose this, I did. My undoing was one last move, one final severance, waiting for me, daring me. It stood by the door, looking up the stairs, thinking I wouldn’t.
But I did. I put that last box in the van, handed a letter to the woman I’ve handed many things back to, who held everything I wouldn’t have to work for — all I had to do was bow. I couldn’t. In exchange for a very comfortable death I gave a letter, and my absence. I spared her from having to look at me. I left her to sit alone with her disgust, left her to see that disgust spill into dreams of me — dirty, naked, full of sin in an alley. Me, her granddaughter, appearing to her in a dream as a destitute woman. And isn’t that how Arab women are raised? To believe the world was the devil and that she could never possibly make it on her own. That her departure would mean her destruction. How else would a poisonous family endure? How else would the lie of marriage live?
We have the devil all wrong, except perhaps the sufists understand. They see him as god’s most loving servant, because for love of god, he refused to bow to Adam. The price was more than his life, it was eternity too. And we, without imagination, took this story and cursed the angel that chose the fire rather than betray his love for god. God’s first love story was bent into the first story of sin. The devil’s devotion was interpreted as arrogance. “He was too good to bow.” No.
No when Life who has loved us asks us to bow to anything that is not life, to be spared — in honor of our sacred love, we disobey. It is the test of our fidelity. And of course it is just that — a test.
So when my turn came and I was asked, I answered with my departure. (Many other times I had bowed. Of course I did, I was terrified. Until I realized the question would keep repeating itself, louder and more violently, until I disobeyed)
In loving I understood this head could only touch the ground for one. So life — for whose sake I refused— walked me to the fires of uncertainty, of loss, of solitude. I honor it. It is the privilege of being allowed to choose, and how lucky. How lucky that I saw a choice where many see none.
I need to write. There’s nothing left to do. Yes I chose this, I did. My undoing was one last move, one final severance, waiting for me, daring me. It stood by the door, looking up the stairs, thinking I wouldn’t.
But I did. I put that last box in the van, handed a letter to the woman I’ve handed many things back to, who held everything I wouldn’t have to work for — all I had to do was bow. I couldn’t. In exchange for a very comfortable death I gave a letter, and my absence. I spared her from having to look at me. I left her to sit alone with her disgust, left her to see that disgust spill into dreams of me — dirty, naked, full of sin in an alley. Me, her granddaughter, appearing to her in a dream as a destitute woman. And isn’t that how Arab women are raised? To believe the world was the devil and that she could never possibly make it on her own. That her departure would mean her destruction. How else would a poisonous family endure? How else would the lie of marriage live?
We have the devil all wrong, except perhaps the sufists understand. They see him as god’s most loving servant, because for love of god, he refused to bow to Adam. The price was more than his life, it was eternity too. And we, without imagination, took this story and cursed the angel that chose the fire rather than betray his love for god. God’s first love story was bent into the first story of sin. The devil’s devotion was interpreted as arrogance. “He was too good to bow.” No.
No when Life who has loved us asks us to bow to anything that is not life, to be spared — in honor of our sacred love, we disobey. It is the test of our fidelity. And of course it is just that — a test.
So when my turn came and I was asked, I answered with my departure. (Many other times I had bowed. Of course I did, I was terrified. Until I realized the question would keep repeating itself, louder and more violently, until I disobeyed)
In loving I understood this head could only touch the ground for one. So life — for whose sake I refused— walked me to the fires of uncertainty, of loss, of solitude. I honor it. It is the privilege of being allowed to choose, and how lucky. How lucky that I saw a choice where many see none.
II.
I think we are ‘caught’ because we were meant to face a reaction that would push us into a raft we aren’t prepared for, and would have never been if it were up to us. A woman gets caught making love to another woman when she’s always been so careful, an artist gets punished for her art that has always been safely ignored and is suddenly not. It is necessary, this eruption.
And isn’t the fall of water far more beautiful than the tame pool at the bottom?
Isn’t the loss of everything precisely what was needed to be birthed again between the legs of life?
And who but the midwife of pain is prepared to receive us, the other us, the one begging for erasure so that it can introduce itself again?
What place but the deep dark ground of loss feels kind enough to part for the madness that crumbles to dust every illusion that watered us?
The louder their anger, the closer I know myself to be. I used to spend my life searching for a gentle eye, to find me beneath an aging lid that half rises half falls into a gaze that feeds me with a knowingness, and a love. But those eyes have gone, and I’ve found no other. There is only the eyeless gaze of nature that receives me. In her I am rescued. In her the knowing returns. And without her silence to calm the growing sirens that rise with every piece of art I birth, without her chest, her breasts, her water, her legs, I am nothing.
Because what good is it know — to gather the rising scream of the nearing crowd into your body as confirmation — if there is no one to read what their war against you confirms?
“You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book... or you take a trip... and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating.The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death. Some never awaken. ”
III.
The time comes, after the long journey — not the end but a long pause, the longest you’ve had in a very long time. You unpack your bags, look around the bare room that waits for your love. But instead of love, you’ve come with your emptiness, to add to the bareness; the weightless air of you and this new room expands, but it is not nothing. It is holding so much. A whisper of a body daring to try again. The flutter of a heart rising for life again. The opening wings of a soul abandoning its memory of the last fall, again and again…
So we lay life like a naked body on the cold floor and we touch it with a trembling finger. We do it — for our wild want of it and for all our knowing that we can’t stand to hold what we want. So we touch it, barely, skin breathing over skin, our passage beside her like wind, not like rain. Her nakedness doesn’t make her shy and that scares us even more — how she harbors life without apology.
How do you speak to someone who doesn’t spill a sorry into every breath?
You ask for a chance and are given many. You work so hard to become free and you become that.
Then you learn — loss by loss — how delicate each chance is, how ephemeral each season of freedom. One morning you can be as careless as a woman who’s been loved, as open as your first desire. By evening you can become the woman who can’t sleep, studying every word she spoke in the last hour, wondering what went wrong. What didn’t she do right? Every question is a father robbing her of a freedom she took without permission. Every lowered gaze that follows is a jealous mother erasing for her daughter the chances she was never given. With every rise, there is a tribe, small but strong enough, prepared with its ropes of envy, its poison of lost chances, to take down one of its own.
The miracle is not the day I cut the rope and I no longer fall with every rise, but today — in that I choose to rise beside the certainty of the coming fall. That I know my curse, I know my darkness, I know how slim the parting of life’s corridor for this body, and still, I walk.
The miracle is not the thing I’ve waited for. It is what I’ve lived.