Verses of confession
“The fear of the truth which kills, the power of truth, as savage, and as simple, and as awesome as death, yet as simple and as gentle as the child that has not yet learnt to lie. And because the world was full of lies, she had to pay the price. ”
There will be a before and after.
That is how you know.
There is what we’ve taken the decision to compose, and what we stumble on. Of all our art, our music, our performances, it will be the one that is received by a wave of anger, disgust, exile — the one we thought no one would notice. Something created mindlessly, guided by the belly, spoken from someplace deeper than the heart. It’s not a landing, but a collapse into a calling. There is art, and there is this. This is something else. And it will replace art (as you’ve known it to be). In fact, it will come to replace most everything else in your life. And it will stun you — this answer, this truth — because it will arrive disguised in the appearance of everything you were taught about sin, and everything you were told to keep away from.
And when all settles, you will look out into the world and feel that you have lost everything. But beyond everything, as you will come to know, there is still much more to lose.
“Even when the truth isn’t helpful, the telling of it is.”
I’ve spilled many confessions, many truths. And still, all of it feels like a distraction from what it is I really mean to say. My fear is a perversion of self-love. It is protective — and in its protection, replicates the prison that birthed those first fears and holds me in the same patterns that offer me a deceiving feeling of safety.
Trust me, I still have said nothing.
And already I have passed through the consequences. I’ve been shown, more than once, how ephemeral, false, and conditional my place within the family is. Compose, behave, leave your pen outside the territory of this circle, and we welcome you. Speak, but not through your skin. Scream, but not against us.
Even our suicides are censored. When my grandfather took his life, in the most public way above the streets of old Damascus in the busy morning, the ones who had not witnessed and not heard were told he had died in his sleep from a heart attack. I was only 19 when it happened, and even then I could feel the rage that something was deeply wrong about this lie. It wasn’t an act of love, or protection. It belonged to the long thread of rejected truths, of a lie decided by one, and forced onto many. What exactly are we hiding when we hide? How do you live when your stability relies on the delicate stems of many untruths? And when those lies collapse, as all lies do, because the truth will always be the strongest life force, and remains loyal only to life itself, what happens then?
Have we ever considered that there are many who rise against the world’s injustice because they are powerless in rising against the injustice people within their own family? That much rage spills into this world under the label of social justice that bears the multiplied screams of those who have not been given the chance to rise against their own fathers, their own mothers? Enter this world with your swallowed screams and you’ll find many causes to spill it into. Of course, I’m relying deeply on my reader to understand what I mean. It is not that we carry no justified rage outside our personal history. It is that without resolution, our screams get tangled, and we lose the rage that belongs to our own. Adopted by a noble cause, we sacrifice the personal. And when we do that, we sacrifice the self too. It is safer, no? To scream in the streets among many, held in collective rage, in the anonymity, in the protection of the mass.. Try to stand in a room across from your father. Try to summon the same scream then.
“When you’re so intent on freeing others, you must be trying to free some part of yourself too.”
I speak this because I have lived it. I have found myself in the crowd, spilling screams to the streets that couldn’t rise within the walls of a home that withheld from me the safety to do the same. After a day of screaming in the streets, I could return to my apartment. I lose nothing.
But there is so much to lose when the scream is taken back to its original birthplace.
I know —now — that in yearning for Syria’s freedom through my art, I am also yearning for my own. In insisting on the truth spoken about what happened to her, I am asking for the same permission to speak the truth about what happened to me. In longing for her sovereignty, I am longing for my own. In attempting to rescue her from a false religion, I am also trying to rescue the woman in me from the same poison. In pulling her from the crowd of long beards and black robes in my writing, I am desperately searching for the little girl who lost herself to the same crowd, so long ago.
And who decided that the truth doesn’t enter through the front door of our own homes? That the same injustice, committed outside the circle of one’s tribe, is a worthy and noble cause to break one’s silence against, but, when committed within the tribe, among faces that resemble ours, it becomes the silence itself that is worthy and noble. The same confessional courage for one becomes a betrayal for the other. Among our own, the breaking of silence against the crime becomes the crime itself.
“It is dangerous to confront people with an image of themselves they do not wish to acknowledge.”
I beg you — allow her to scream.
Allow her to scream so that you may begin to heal.
So that the family may lose its lies and discover its salvation in the hard truth.
Allow her to scream and spare her an early death. Allow her the health of her rage, before you lose her to the poison of her silence.
Allow the truth to be something other than the betrayal you have always received as. Allow it to be something that can do to you what it does to the one who speaks it. I promise you, there is no deeper experience of freedom than watching a long silence crack open.
“And part of my anger is always libation for my fallen sisters. ”
The erasure. The next day it’s as if nothing at all had happened. He returns to the mosque, holy, guilt-less, disguised as a man of god. There is no severance between what he tried to do and the holy life he resumes. If prayer is erasure, it has erased many things for him. he could run away, but a woman’s silence is a dependable thing, isn’t it?
10 years later, I am here to tell you what he erased. With no preface, no apology, no defense, no disclaimer, It is the work of the reader to know I speak of one man, and that this man does not represent anything but himself. Enough with the censorship of muslim women under the excuse of how the world regards this religion. It is not the work of the woman who wishes to speak to protect her confession from your ignorance. It is not her work, and I say this to every woman. I give you permission. I give you what is withheld from you under many shaming excuses. Go on, turn your lens towards the faces that resemble your own. Turn your pens and brushes to examine our mosques and sheikhs the way artists have permission to challenge their churches and priests. And I spare you the need to preface your truth. Enough with that.
We are here to write what has been erased, and what hasn’t been said because we were unable to afford the price of what this confession would cost us. Our truth will be received as betrayal, there is no other way.
It is why we form our own tribes, in preparation of the one we are bound to lose in our confession. Never mind that truth is, for the artist, the highest form of love.
And with a painful love for the woman who raised me, who birthed this man, I write this —
He had been attempting for years. Sending me messages, visiting on the weekends I returned from college, asking for hugs in the evening. I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to shove the truth beneath the disguise he offered. He was holy, wouldn’t dare, I was misreading.
The family had already known. They knew something of him they had withheld from me. A betrayal disguised in the name of ‘family.’ Or perhaps, simple carelessness.
we see, and we undo what we see, we know, deeply, then question the certainty of our knowing.
Until one evening, I woke up suddenly to him standing by the bed, shirtless, staring at me. I don’t know for how long he’d been there. What was on his mind. He stuttered through that moment, not expecting me to wake up. He asked for a hug, and when I told him to get out, he left repeating, “Don’t tell, don’t tell…”
“We’ve been taught to respect fear more than our need for language. ”
Years later, I tried to recover myself. I landed in places that distorted my rage. They instructed me to breathe before I had the chance to scream. So many women are walked into a softer Islam before they’ve let out their screams against the one they were raised with.
The scream is the necessary transition, the half-dead crawl from hell to haven. Try to enter a new chapter with the divine before living in the intimacy of your rage and it’s like entering the grave before you’ve died. The dying is what is needed to cross to the other side. Otherwise the soil, like religion, becomes a suffocating layer, rather than a soft space to hold your transition.
Nizar Qabbani once said, “The woman is occupied territory” and so too, is god. Not god himself, but our earthly grasp of him. The territory of his words are occupied by the hands of few who decide its meaning for all. They have conquered the parts of him that live in ink among us and claimed dictatorship over his sovereign words. God is theirs. The prophets are theirs. The mosques, the minarets, our shared history, theirs.
Try to claim your artistic share of this religion, try to claim your right to touch as they touch, to interpret as they interpret and watch the crusade against that artist. Many brave women have attempted and succeeded, in claiming their share, but the price was heavy. We have no permission as Muslim artists to heal through the symbols of our religion, to use what has been used against us as passage into our healing. The tools of Islam are theirs alone, locked by masculine authority and decaying because of it.
So if no permission is granted, let us inherit it from the women who attempted this before us. Who paid a heavy price and perhaps, lessened on us our share of loss. Let us borrow, let us steal, let us force permission. There is no other way.
Let us recognize that the romantic and lyrical defense used to protect our region and religion from the cruel gaze of the west is precisely what is silencing our own. Let us abandon this toxic romanticization in exchange for a far more generous truth. That we deserve the right to live, we deserve our sovereignty, without the need to be without flaw.
The artist shouldn’t have to defend and confess at the same time. I refuse that burden. It’s not the people with bias I worry about receiving my art. It’s the one who claim to love so much the very thing I am trying to speak truthfully about that they can’t accept anything other than the story they hold. They use what it is out there as an excuse to protect themselves from receiving something they don’t want to hear.
We are a people with so much to repair and acknowledge, and that does not make us any less deserving of life. Disguising our faults doesn’t serve our freedom. And if our disguise, as you believe, protects us, what use would that protection serve if it leaves no space for the truth?
“I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. ”
“He had something to say, which he had not said, and he had gone, taking with him his secrets.”