Translated by: Yasmine Haj

 

War preoccupies me. But I’m ashamed to write about it. I flagellate my metaphors then implore them. Pain makes me depict a bullet, after which I recede into depicting an emotional slap. I disembowel the words and the Harakiri victims awake, all of them, and disembowel me.

Do not believe me if I talked to you of war, because when I spoke of blood, I was drinking coffee, when I spoke of graves, I was picking yellow daisies in Marj Ibn Amer, when I described the murderers, I was listening to my friends’ giggles, and when I wrote about a burnt theatre in Aleppo, I was standing before you in an air-conditioned one.

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Do not believe me if I talked to you of war. Because each time I bombarded the city streets in a poem, the concrete would recline, the lamps would sway towards it, and the prophets would pass by in peace.

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Whenever I imagined my father’s skin flayed in it, I could still touch him afterwards, safe and sound, with an embrace. And whenever I heard my mother’s wailing, she would lull me to sleep with an old song, and I would sleep like a baby.

 

But dreams are open cheques

Signed by a Hourani woman whose features are unknown to me. Except that when my knife misses the lettuce leaf, I could smell the scent of the tribe of blood my grandfather had left in my body and hers.

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Dreams are an open cheque, signed by Qasioun’s sons who whispered them to me during a reverie, and I couldn’t tell whence the mountain’s name had sprung without googling it.

 

The first cheque:

In an obscure crowd, an obscene clarity dawns on me.

In the midst of exquisite engineering of geography’s tumult, a bullet quietly passes through me, at my lower back,

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The crowd’s mystery grows and my ears’ windows are shut from within. The hole is as fresh as a spring, the blood is as warm as my mother’s voice in a song, and as smooth as my father’s skin.

 

The second cheque:

I was besieged in the world’s holiest spot.. Bullets rained down on me as did God’s words on the prophets..

I seized a stone and it melted in my hands. I overtook the soldiers and time overtook me.

And like a scared kitten, I cowered where a young Christ slumbered before carrying us on his back.

 

The third cheque:

Fear in the Levant.

 

Do not believe me when I talk to you of war

Because I’ve never heard a bullet shot besides the one my father threw from his double barreled gun into Marj Ibn Amer’s doves. And I’ve never scented blood from a wound except for that which I smelled with my mother the first time I menstruated.

I do not have an account in the bank of wars, but a Hourani woman reassured me that my cheques are valid.