by Sara Allam Shaltout
1: A Heavy Day
This is a heavy day of war, as if its burden were dropped like a mountain on my head and slept.
It marks its first year as the largest massacre in modern history; we witness it with our own eyes, recorded, photographed, alive in our hearts, eyes, tears, and memory.
It robs us of speech, yet gives us reasons to scream at all this oppression, so we choke our rage.
Every day, it wrestles me with conflicting desires and emotions, swinging between hope and defeat, optimism and despair, resentment and schadenfreude. It seems to ask us the greatest questions.
The war lives with me as a vast question, making me lose the ability to accomplish tasks with the efficiency and speed I know of myself.
Before my computer screen, open to windows of research and theory, appear children killed, starving women, scattered corpses, and moans stretching from there to here, posing the difficult question:
What is the worth of it all? The theories that no one believes, the science I have crossed oceans and rivers for, thinking it a way to explain the world and my place in it, or a path for dreamers,only to see their wounds blossom like flowers.
The words on the screen are mere paper compensation; they do not change a past that moves or does not, nor stop a volcano.
I vent my anger on Facebook, carefully threading my words so we pass the censorship, the words themselves chosen with the restraint required by British law, any excess emotion could cost me my residence, and with it this ink on paper I once considered a dream.
The war accumulates anger sleeping inside me like fire. I want to curse the world for a year of bleeding, and I want to hurl curses at those who watched the world turn around themselves like a bull producing new lies with every spin.
People ask me: why do you get so involved in the war?
I look, and I ask myself: how do we survive our own skins? How do we change our tongues? Have you seen a dog deny its master on Judgment Day?
2
A large part of the feeling of alienation is produced by language.
It’s as if you feel that someone else speaks through your mouth.
I wanted to draw anger in the air, but my tongue stuttered with words insufficient for sorrow and unfit for catastrophe.
“You sons of dogs!”
These letters scatter in the cold,
fall to the ground while I curse in my head.
I translate them into English, and they come out trembling and afraid:
This is unacceptable.
This psychological shift between the two phrases is exactly like life in Europe:
You are polite, ethical, proper , even your anger must be disciplined, like the footnotes of research.
My body gets angry often at the weather; its joints slowly unravel, and you hear them like the clicks of a woman’s heels walking hurriedly, noticed by passersby, alone.
I do not know what happens.
For a whole week, I felt a tingling in my ears, giving it many excuses: the swimming, the temperature, a mild pain — until I wake to a pain resembling bone rot or nails being hammered into the ear canal.
The doctor says: “Acute external ear infection — you need care and treatment.”
I leave, and the knocking in my left ear increases.
At home, I hear a carpenter hammering nails in my ear.
When the door opens, I hear a gust of wind I’ve become familiar with, and I see a chair that shared my loneliness enough for me to love it.
I realize that my ear is there, in a cold country, and my eyes are here, in a home that has never experienced the wind, yet designs a seat for intimacy in my mind.
3
We learned from migration to adapt, or the journey ends.
It’s like being a small sea fish who knows the saltwater currents, then finds herself in a river , no waves to dance with you, no salt to lift you to float.
Your mood changes, your habits shift, you may become calmer, quieter, or linger longer staring at the ceiling.
When you open the door and walk the streets, the question meets you:
Do I really live in this city? Or is this just a movie that ends in two hours?
You straighten your back and answer: This is my life; the ship has sailed me here, and I am just a bird landing where fate wills.
In this journey, you forget that your body is also a partner in the game of adaptation, like a polar bear left in a tropical forest.
In cold countries, frost stings you, and gradually the cold grows over your skin; your body learns, over time, to stop shivering to survive.
In my first year in Britain, I returned to Egypt in winter, and could not wear any of the clothes I had brought;
I needed to blow my nose, and it bled as if it were the nose of another woman who had never sniffed Cairo’s smog.
In summer, I suffered repeatedly from low blood pressure, a disorienting drop causing dizziness, drowsiness, and headaches.
The doctor said: “Thermal stress , the temperature differences are confusing; your body has learned cold.”
I left his clinic, telling myself:
My childhood in hot Upper Egypt, my twenties in Cairo’s burning summer, this body has experienced Europe; my God, this body betrays me, denies its sweat and long history with hot weather, and wraps itself in fur like a polar bear left in a tropical forest.
Sara Allam Shaltout is an Egyptian poet. She published three collections of poetry, participated in diverse poetry festivals in the US, Spain, Morocco , Egypt , Tunisia , Bahrain and Iraq. She is currently a doctoral student at the school of International Relations, St Andrews university, UK.
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