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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781569769331 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Chicago Review Press, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 160 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Joumana Haddad is an award-winning poet, translator, magazine publisher, and journalist. Cultural editor for an Arab newspaper, in 2008 she launched the Arab world's first erotic cultural magazine, Jasad (Body), which made international headlines and caused her to be dubbed "the Carrie Bradshaw of Beirut." She lives in Lebanon.
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I Killed Scheherazade
Confessions of an Angry Arab Woman
By Joumana Haddad
Chicago Review Press Incorporated
Copyright © 2010 Joumana HaddadAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-56976-933-1
CHAPTER 1
An Arab Woman Reading the Marquis de Sade
Books are the only place in the world where two strangers can meet on very intimate terms.
May Ziade
Lebanese poet and essayist (1886–1941)
I have always been what you would call, whether sympathetically or disapprovingly, a 'bad girl'. In fact, my most vivid memory of myself growing up is of an unstoppably curious child waiting impatiently for her parents to get out of the house, so that she could place a chair in her father's immense library, climb it, and reach for whatever was hidden on the top shelves. In the earlier stages of my life, I used to think that only two things were worth doing whenever I had the chance of being alone: reading and masturbating. Both needed solitude in order to be fully enjoyed.
My mother likes to recall three things from my childhood that she believes to be of great significance as far as my character is concerned. First, a few hours after I was born, I already had my eyes wide open, she claims, greedily watching the world around me. The nurses assured her that they had rarely seen a newborn so alert to the outside world, and so famished for it.
Second, ever since I was nine months old, I fiercely resisted doing anything against my will: whether it was wearing the tight red coat that deprived me of free movement, or drinking milk when I wasn't really hungry. It is alleged that I scratched, bit and even spat when I had to, in order to fight back.
And third, my mother tells the strange story that, before I could even walk, and every time she needed to get out of the house to do some errands, but had nobody to watch over me, she used to place me in a tiny chair, then put the chair on top of a high table, and leave me there, alone in the house, being certain that I would not move, because she knew, that I knew, that if I did move, I would hurt myself badly. She'd come back and find me exactly as she had left me, sitting carefully on that small wooden chair, safe and sound, most probably dreaming my way to the world.
Insatiability, insubordination and awareness: three main features of my early personality which have stuck with me along the road of life – and I hope that I can assert this without sounding over-confident or self-indulgent. I do not know if these three reminiscences should be put down to the tendency of mothers to mystify their children, or to the actual truth, but what I do know is that the same greedy newborn with her green wide-open eyes; the same rebellious infant who fought back with her teeth and nails; the same perspicacious one-year-old who knew she'd better stay put if she wanted to avoid bruises and harm, is now the woman who has consistently opted, against the logic of time and place, to live an atypical life.
Yet even the most fertile of soils wouldn't grow a tree if a seed was not planted in it. What was my 'seed'? Who was, and still is, my major mentor throughout this ongoing journey?
An omnipotent accomplice called: Literature.
* * *
'It is what you read when you don't have to that determines what you will be when you can't help it' (Oscar Wilde). Since my early adolescence, I've never dreamed, like most of my girlfriends, of Tom Cruise or Bruce Springsteen or Al Pacino or Johnny Hallyday, or even, believe it or not, of Robert De Niro. Rather, I dreamed passionately of Mayakovsky, Pavese and Gibran. I dreamed of Dostoyevsky, Salinger and Éluard. Those were the strangers that I desired and fantasised about, not the movie stars and famous pop singers. My classmates were hungry for illusions; I was hungry for dreams.
Here I need to point out that – contrary to what my life, ideas and choices might suggest – I was raised by very traditional parents (despite the intellectual father and the rather modern mother); parents who didn't even allow me, among many other embargoes, to go to the movies with my friends as a teenager. On top of that, I went to an all-girls religious school for fourteen consecutive years. This traditional upbringing was not the result of religious fanaticism, nor an underestimation of my being a girl. It was rather the consequence of fear for me 'because' I was a girl. I used to object fiercely to that fear, as in my standards, it was equal to underestimation. 'I am a female thus I am vulnerable, weak, prone to danger ... etc.'
But neither my parents' conservatism nor my school environment – both of which I denounced and struggled against merely on principle – really annoyed me, because throughout my growing-up years, I was completely and utterly enraptured by the world of books and writing. So despite this traditional upbringing and the weight of fear, I grew up free on the inside, since my readings emancipated me – and freedom, as I learned later, begins in the mind, before moving on to one's expression and behaviour.
I was a bundle of contradictions: a calm and easygoing child on the outside, and a whirlwind of mental activity on the inside; sweet, gentle and caring, but turning into a snarling lioness if anyone hurt me or took what was mine; extremely sensitive, but simultaneously extremely strong. I cheated at Scrabble with my brother, because I could not take losing (I learned to deal with that later). I was fiery, passionate, stubborn, competitive, chafed against taboos and absolutely impatient (still am!). Precocious, I didn't play with toys (I mainly despised girls' games, especially the Barbie doll and its accessories), preferring to steal thick books that were inappropriate for my age, and devour them in secret.
I loved reading for many reasons: I read to breathe; I read to live (my life as much as that of others); I read to travel away; I read to escape a brutal reality; I read to smother the explosions of the Lebanese war; I read to ignore my parents' screams and their daily arguments and sufferings; I read to feed my greed; I read to accumulate strength; I read to caress my soul; I read to slap my soul; I read to learn; I read to forget; I read to remember; I read to understand; I read to hope; I read to plan; I read to believe; I read to love; I read to desire and yearn and lust ...
And I read, especially, to be able to honour the promise that I had made myself that one day my life would be different. A promise that I did, and still do, my best to keep, for the sake of that helpless, trapped little Joumana who, between the blasts of the militias' fights outside, and the shouts of her parents' fights inside, used to fly away in her dreams, from one of Beirut's filthy shelters ...
* * *
I don't remember the first book I read. I frequently ask my dad this question, since I inherited my passion for reading from him, and he was my main 'supplier', but he doesn't remember either. I do, however, vividly remember myself as a girl, maybe nine or ten years old, sitting at the kitchen table in our little house, reading and reading and then tirelessly writing out stories like the ones I had just read (often by candlelight, because of the frequent electricity cuts during wartime). My nickname at home was 'writer pasha', because I wrote until my middle finger swelled (this was before the computer age).
When I discovered (or should I rather say: when I was discovered by?) the Marquis de Sade, I was a mere twelve years old. My father's bookshelves, with all their delicious pleasures, were open to me throughout the summer holidays. I could take down whatever I pleased, in absolute freedom and without any consequences, mainly due to his absence from the house all day long, and his – misplaced – trust in me. My innocent features, which contrasted sharply with the imps in my head, were the best cover for the madness, hunger and delirium going on inside that little mind. Was he really duped, my penetratingly smart father, or did he need the illusion of that sham, like any traditional parent? I honestly don't know. But in truth my 'peaceful' features still trick many people, to this day, as to my real nature and thoughts, allowing them to build judgments based on appearances ('Oh she's such a sweet girl'), thus falling into the 'trap': my trap ('God help us, she's the devil!').
And I do not mind that involuntary scam. Not in the least.
* * *
That glorious Marquis de Sade day changed me irrevocably. Consider it a simple maths problem: two trains, A and B, continents and centuries apart, but which are travelling towards each other along the same track, are bound to meet at some point of time and space. The Marquis de Sade was train A, and boy, was I train B!
That hot morning, I had just finished Balzac's Lost Illusions and was searching for new prey. I stood in front of the high bookshelf and began skimming the titles. Then I heard a small, yellowed book on the sixth shelf call out to me. It was titled, Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue. I was intrigued. I took it down, and opened the first pages. It was a really old book, printed in 1955, published by Jean-Jacques Pauvert (of course: who else was perversely bold enough to publish such a book in France those days?!).
I skipped over Georges Bataille's great foreword, which I returned to many years later, moving straight onto the novel. I read that fantastic and awesome story in one go, in a mixture of panic and disbelief, both hypnotised and in a numb fright, like someone who is afraid, yet fatally attracted to the object of her fear. Like someone who can't stop watching a horror movie, or riding on a rollercoaster, despite the terror it causes. Adrenaline. That book pumped adrenaline through my nervous system. And I kept trying to relive this sensation with every volume I read after that, so that it became one of the literary standards by which I measured a book's success or failure. In fact, the search for adrenaline, and my addiction to it, also became one of the standards of my own personal life, and of my relations with the opposite sex. 'Books can be very dangerous. The best ones should be labelled: This could change your life' (Helen Exley). I don't know how a twelve-year-old girl can read a 'dangerous' book like Justine and come out of it 'safe'. I don't know how that girl can go straight from Balzac to de Sade without falling into the vast abyss in between them. I don't know, in simpler terms, how I emerged unscathed from that brutal encounter (have I?), but I know that it did indeed change my life. I like to refer to it as my 'baptism by subversion'.
One book at a time, one reading at a time, and one confrontation at a time, the Marquis de Sade took over my mind. He grabbed my shoulders, looked me straight in the eyes, and said, 'Your imagination is your kingdom. Everything is allowed in your mind. EVERYTHING is possible. Throw the windows open, and don't be afraid to infringe and hallucinate.'
Indeed, the Marquis released me on that day from some of my mental shackles. And after him so did other writers who wrote as beautifully, as defiantly and as insolently as he did. To cut a long story short: I became corrupt.
And there was no going back.
* * *
Reading 'adult' material like Justine, Lolita and Sexus when I was twelve, thirteen and fourteen years old did me a lot of good. I should note here that I read all of these books in French, and not in Arabic. In fact, even though I loved the Arabic language and many of its writers (especially Gibran Khalil Gibran and the modern novelists and poets), most of my reading while growing up was in French: either of French writers, or of international authors translated into French. And anyway, it's worth pointing out here the sheer impossibility of a work like Justine being widely available in Arabic, or taken seriously by many Arab intellectuals, either when I was growing up or today. This in spite of an Arab culture that, a thousand years ago, produced works that were far more erotic and subversive than anything being written in the West then (or even perhaps now). I will quote from the fifteenth-century work The Perfumed Garden by Sheikh Nefzawi to prove my argument:
If you desire coition, place the woman on the ground, cling closely to her bosom, with her lips close to yours; then clasp her to you, suck her breath, bite her; kiss her breasts, her stomach, her flanks, press her close in your arms, so as to make her faint with pleasure; when you see her so far gone, then push your member into her. If you have done as I said, the enjoyment will come to both of you simultaneously.
Not all women have the same conformation of vulva, and they also differ in their manner of making love, and in their love for and their aversion to things. A woman of plump form and with a shallow uterus will look out for a member which is both short and thick, which will completely fill her vagina, without touching the bottom of it; a long and large member would not suit her. A woman with a deep-lying uterus, and consequently a long vagina, only yearns for a member which is long and thick and of ample proportions, and thus fills her vagina in its whole extension; she will despise the man with a small and slender member for he could not satisfy her in coition.
It has been observed that under all circumstances small women love coitus more and evince a stronger affection for the virile member than women of a large size. Only long and vigorous members suit them; in them they find the delight of their existence and of their couch. There are also women who love the coitus only on their clitoris, and when a man lying upon them wants to get his member into the vagina, they take it out with the hand and place its gland between the lips of the vulva. I pray God to preserve us from such women!
How did we get from that early high point of liberty, of talking about sex so naturally, to our constipated present-day reality, I wonder? When did we start sliding down the hill of taboos? It is one of the questions that constantly haunts me.
So much for Justine. What about a book like Lolita, then? In an Arab world where there is an overwhelming focus on female chastity, and on girls' morally uncompromised manners and behaviour, such a book is considered, of course, outrageous. On the other hand, the Islamic practice of 'institutionalised' paedophilia is not seen as outrageous, and it is quite normal for men to marry fourteen-year-old girls. The International Centre for Research on Women now estimates that there are fifty-one million child brides in the world, and almost all of them are in Muslim countries. Consider the horrifying words of Ayatollah Khomeini, one of the most famous Islamic clerics of the twentieth century, taken from his book Tahrir al-Wasila:
A man is not to have sexual intercourse with his wife before she is nine years old, whether regularly or occasionally, but he can have sexual pleasure from her, whether by touching or holding her, or rubbing against her, even if she is as young as an infant. However, had he penetrated her without deflowering her, then he holds no responsibility towards her. But if a man penetrates and deflowers the infant [...], then he should be responsible for her subsistence all her life.
Talk about depravity!
Because of all these absurd double standards, I felt fortunate to have the French language as a window to the 'forbidden'. I honestly can't imagine how poor and deprived I would have been today without the cultural gifts and privileges that French has given me (and at this level and this level alone, I dare to speak about the 'luck' of being Lebanese, as Lebanon is an Arab francophone country). Aragon, Stendhal, Flaubert, Hugo, Sartre, Camus, de Beauvoir, Céline, de Musset, Sand, Colette, Genet ... And let's not forget Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Miller, Nabokov, Kafka, Yeats, Marquez, Pirandello, Poe, Rilke, Pessoa and Pavese ... I have devoured many works of these great writers in French.
* * *
The second positive effect of all this reading, after the liberation of my mind, was how it saved me from the mediocre romanticism of banal, sugary and inoffensive books, such as those that my classmates used to exchange in secret, blushing at the thought of committing the 'unspeakable'. While they got excited reading Barbara Cartland's ardent love stories that culminated, in the best-case scenario, with a 'passionate kiss' or a 'wild embrace', there I was, immersed in the impossible world of tireless orgies, priests sodomising virgins, young girls seducing fifty-year-old men, and so on and so forth. My childhood ended quite early, I suppose, if by childhood we mean an age sexually innocent and 'uncorrupted'.
It wasn't that odd, consequently, that I looked at my girlfriends in a rather condescending way. In return, they used to call me the 'shy one'. For there they were, talking about a man who smiled at them on their way to school, or describing how their acne-struck cousin held their hand under the table at the Easter family lunch, while I simply had nothing to say. I wasn't interested in 'real' boys. (I made up fervently for that initial apathy at a later stage of my life.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from I Killed Scheherazade by Joumana Haddad. Copyright © 2010 Joumana Haddad. Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Note to the Reader,Foreword by Etel Adnan,
To Start With ... On camels, belly dancing, schizophrenia and other pseudo-disasters,
I. An Arab Woman Reading the Marquis de Sade,
II. An Arab Woman Not Belonging Anywhere,
III. An Arab Woman Writing Erotic Poetry,
IV. An Arab Woman Creating a Magazine about the Body,
V. An Arab Woman Redefining Her Womanhood,
VI. An Arab Woman Unafraid of Provoking Allah,
VII. An Arab Woman Living and Saying No,
To Start Again ... Am I really an 'Arab woman'?,
Post-Partum: I Killed Scheherazade,
The Poet's Chapter: Attempt at an Autobiography,
Acknowledgments,