within the mother & the mosque
“...a forgetting so profound that we have lost even the memory of what we have forgotten.”
–’Neoillusion: The Return of the Neoillusionist Sage’ by Niilartey De Osu
[Front Royal, Virginia]
Across the untamed acre, a wild figure moves against the ceremonial grass. It could be the urgency of this moment. Or it could be that she’s never known any other arrival but the one made in a hurry against death.
She raises her stained dress above her knees, moves with ease against the wet earth. She knows this land. She has pulled potatoes from its dirt, grabbed the necks of its conquering weeds. She’s run from its dogs and its snakes, gathered its rotting apples. On raw summer days, she has pleaded many times to leave.
Twenty years later, she lift her gaze towards the mosque at the top of the hill:
a white collapsing house receives her eye. A yellow dome answers her. One and the same whispered architecture merging on the paper of her mind..
At the end of a gravel road leading upwards, a farmer chews his death in a black bulk that travels between the last of his teeth. He tips his hat towards her. He has died many years ago. She stops at the slim blue that has watched her father pray many times under thick mountain eyelids that have closed over much. From what’s left of the water of his eyes, she drinks from the memory of the black-bearded Arab whose ghost has walked her.
The minaret is a hearth keeping alive a fire that anticipates her return. When she enters, the space is empty, but not bare. This .. religious silence is a fabric swaying with the memory of departure, extending towards the absence of a crowd rushing into a slim corridor of time where God was a memorized script and a slow body-dance. The floor echoes back the memory in the damp carpet reciting its history again and again. Once it was touched by the heels of many men begging for many things. Now, a singular exile carrying a singular desire walks delicately through a story she listens to and a story she has lived.
She lifts her thumb to touch the arch of a guard’s chin who has turned to stone, the one who has walked her again and again out of God. She offers her breath to his parted mouth. The stone trembles.
Revenge is the quiet work of a woman spilling her mother’s screams. Within the mosque. Through the daughter’s tongue. Elegantly. Wordlessly.
With the ink of her body, she begins to write — reconquering a language that had once conquered her. Her hands undo the occupation. She reclaims, without violence. Possesses, in rhythm with her salvaged breath.
[Damascus, Syria]
A male prophet blows immortality into his religion with the war he invites. The blood spilled preserves the memory of what was spoken. One man multiplies into a thousand verses carried in the wind of force across centuries.
A female prophet is more generous. She spills only herself, and only what she owns. In wanting her religion to belong to all, she leaves it unwritten, unrecorded. She refuses the visitors who come to her. She guards the sensuality of her solitude with the bread of only her touch. Her body, too, multiplies, but more like the way a sand dune reveals itself for the gathered form of sand that it is, and not like the mountain demanding to become what it is not.
***
I inherited my mother’s erotic tongue. Later I inherited my father’s god. I lived the civil war of a body fighting against its end and desiring its destruction. Each year taught me how the tray of language can serve both the poison and the cure. How the same words, reordered, can march you away or gently draw you into divine territory.
I lived by the last erotic sentence penned by my ancestor. I walked the last shameless sigh of a woman in my lineage spilling her love into a language preparing to spill all love away. I slept by the bed of a sheikh who drafted his erotic instructions on the same paper he wrote his sermons. I watched him sleep the untroubled sleep of a man who never questioned the twin-ship of body and prayer. Who lived without the prophecy of a time where prayer and semen will live in contradiction, in parallel —but never touching.
Above his body, I watch my mother, a tipped shadow on a Damascene balcony, circled by the untamed branches of watered jasmine and trees that drink from the sensual height of growing this far above the ground like little gods. She lights her cigarette under the clothesline where her father will take his life. The swaying fabric warns her, and like all of us, she prefers to leave the warning unread.
From her prison, she dreams of a woman dancing. From her freedom, she will dream of a man to save her from the terror of an answered prayer.
I watch the evening where that man arrives, and she drives me to another house, hands me a plastic bag, whispers tell them you will live here from now on.
Before I fall asleep, my mouth closes on the journey of a sentence that had just begun itself in the native territory of the mother gaze watching me walk the open road before me. In the ecotone where I was not yet an exile and not unaware of the coming exile, I was a little girl walking the holy migration of the body from earth to stage, from the shallow breathing of a child reading what is coming to the strong voice of a costumed body resisting its end. Resisting the amnesia of her mother’s tongue speaking her name for the final time.
[Front Royal, Virginia]
An Arab man walks into a gas station at the first exit off the highway. He wears a kufi above an untrimmed beard. Overalls and dirt-caked hands. He buys a slurpee and donut.
At the valley, he walks the neglected acres of land and mind, one hand holds a rosary, the other holds a pick ax. The two speaking the same native language of erasure.
I follow him across the soil. He bends by the muddy creek, cups the water between his palms. It is almost real… this tenderness. It could almost be prayer — if it weren’t guilt. If it weren’t the same familiar war I read across my own skin.
The yellow mosque is a candle he prefers to the lamp, the wax of his solitude pouring testimony before the eyes of his daughter. Is every father a warning? Do they all reverse the mother’s work? Does every inherited rebellion collapse outside the womb?
My mother’s tongue in my father’s mouth is a bird separated from the tribe. Tormented by the memory of belonging, it delivers rage. It mutes its song, adopts the howl of breath severed from union. This Arabic, this thrifted coat above the shoulders of a man walking the narrow thread to the wrong god, this unwashed rag in the pocket stained with the blood of many unloved wounds, this lonely Arabic, so unpoetically alone, walking the long hill to the collapsing mosque, is it worth your hiding if it only offers you half a life?
[Syria]
Arabic is a lit cigarette and a girl searching for her mama in the ashtray.
It’s a severed tongue writhing against the crumbled sheets of a poem that couldn’t make a child no matter how much it loved.
It’s a bedouin trading her tent for a concrete slab in the city.
Perhaps Arabic is a woman running, but a scared woman is alive. Tell me, how is the world watered by a woman who has found her walls, and found her death?
Arabic was mama’s long brown hair — cut. The shock of finding her large eyes veiled by the glasses of the old woman she wasn’t, yet. I try her native tongue, to re-write myself back into her memory. But all the beds in her body are taken up by her own history, and there are no vacant rooms.
Arabic wore a white dress thirty years ago with a bow on the back and a baby in the stroller, watching. Arabic danced in the center of a room filled with ladies who crossed their legs and sipped their coffees. She begged with her hips for their eyes. But she was just somebody’s wife dancing, a poor Damascene girl who married above her, and there was nothing that could earn their silence.
Arabic watched her end coming and danced. She opened the warning and danced. She read her fate in her daughter’s gaze and danced.
And when the night ended, in a quiet Syrian farm, rocked by the lapping rhythm of an empty pool… a drying petal pushed the last dance into the pages of a holy book resting under the fruit trees, plucked from the layered rose it once belonged to. Plucked from the encyclopedia of love. Where there was once a forest of words to describe how the body loves, the birds can no longer find even a stem to name.
A wet mind wrung from its memory walks the sold land. Drying above the clean sink in another place far away, circled by the white walls of a kitchen that speaks to you in a civil language, she pauses to look over what she has become, what she has lived into… Does the tongue write or does it follow the gravity of what was written?
She reaches for a pot that has never been stained by the intensity of a fire speaking its mind, and she begins to boil the rice.
[unnamed country]
There is a land you weed, and land you burn.
In the warmed needle of the first fire, I carve the symbols of return. One day I will walk through the front door of my mother’s language. Today, I force my way through a broken window.
And with inked skin that speaks what can’t be spoken, I tend the fires clearing the territory of a language that grew beyond something that could be mended. I bend over the bodies of verses that lay dying under the wrong definition. Who were forced to live against divine intention. They welcome me with their stunned gaze. Again they learn the ancient folklore that it is the exile who returns with the medicine.
I rebuild my tent, and turn it towards the tribe that sent me away. I re-write the memory of visiting lovers, who read their time in the entrance of a door facing them and facing away. Marriage was a paperless movement towards, and apart. And love… love spoke many languages under one native tongue.
I rewrite the desert back into the glass-less territory it was. I watch the cube melt into a bottle of ink. I dip this reed into its black pool and write myself back into my body with the language of the one who spoke me out of it. On this temple-less earth, with the soil of our native tongues primed with a necessary burning, we become the mosque.