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 Reflections On.....
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Reflections On……. i
Writing…. i
I. … In Bed i
Am writing this in bed… i
But before you start to explore the promises such a loaded English phrase, In Bed, might bring, I shall surrender to you, dear reader, some secrets about myself, the writer, which I hope will help you to see where these reflections might lead to: i
Writing in bed is one of my very personal habits; I have been practicing it ever since I gained the very basic skill of writing, in a primary school in a neighbourhood by the name of Korea in Burry, Khartoum, Sudan. I would stretch my body sideways, in the middle of the bed, propping my head with the hand of my stretched arm, leaving my other hand free to hold the sharpened pencil. And, in this iconic posture, I would religiously, but also merrily and excitedly, get on with the act of writing, in bed! i
Telling you about writing in bed in my childhood might suggest, especially when I'm writing this in English, a kind of a romantic notion about a happy childhood that I'm about to celebrate here, but this is not the case. I am not intending to write about happy childhoods; mine was indeed a very happy one, though this happiness is very dissimilar to anything that would be described in a UN publication titled Eradicating Children's Poverty in the Third World. The writers of such reports have no clue of the little happy moments I treasured and celebrated in my troubled yet exciting life as a young boy in Khartoum. i Under their rigorous terms and definitions, that life would have almost certainly failed any test those reporters might undertake, as it will not satisfy the so-called basic necessities a child should be provided with and, hence, be termed a happy child. i
 Furthermore, the "bed" I'm writing about here is not the "one's own personal bed" that I later came to know about and discover. In my family home, "bed" was just any bed that you could conveniently reach, and no one in my small family had the privilege of a personal bed, since the whole of our family home featured only 2 beds anyway. Here again, "family home" is equally misleading. Our home was just one of many similar houses: a rented part of a big house, in which we lived in one-bedroom, with and an extension of a bamboo roof, affectionately called "a veranda". We shared one toilet with two other families. I don't have the statistics (as you know, statistics is not exactly a Sudanese thing) but I believe this was the case with majority of Sudanese families in those days, and might still be the same even now. i
But before I drift with this very tempting memoir- style of writing (which had nearly convinced even me in believing that this is what I'm intending to do, writing a memoir) I should quickly tell you the next secret: i
When I started writing this, in bed, I was originally intending to write a letter to a lover. Yes, a love letter! So, you were at least partially right in those first thoughts that crossed your mind when you read "I 'm writing this, in bed"! There is indeed something very love-letter about this writing! But the reason why this unfortunate, private love letter somehow, unexpectedly, miraculously, ended up here, under your foreign gaze i (after many unreported metamorphosis, of course) i is something I might attempt to explain here, though I can not guarantee that I will satisfy your understandable curiosity: i
Well, a love letter has a life of its own; it somehow defies this need inside me to suppress it. So I frequently end up writing it again and again in many of the escapist forms we respectfully call creative writing, literature, poetry, etc…. every time I try to write back to G responding to her frequent electronic mailings, I end up writing pages and pages of pure reflections on anything from mathematics (or rather my incomprehension of it) to geography (this reads: vertigo), from nutrition to child poverty… anything but the classic love letter that struggles, I confess, to dodge the tricks of this self-appointed writer who chose to mould everything he encounters into one sad question of being… i
| Quote: To know that one does not write for the other, i
to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), i
to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, i
that it is precisely there where you are not—this is the beginning of writing
Roland Barthes in A lover's Discourse |
Ultimately, one writes a love letter not just to communicate with the subject of their love and affection (the other), but also to talk to your own self. So no wonder that all the love letters I wrote in my life somehow continued transforming themselves into the form of encrypted messages that I kept sending back to myself, again and again. What is surprising though is the metamorphosis they undergo: how do they end up here, panting like a thirsty animal, running through the arid space of this neat white paper; why they long so passionately to be wrapped up between the harsh enfolding of a book or the far unwelcoming sheets of a newspaper? i
Though I'm trying hard to resist the temptation of the memoir, I can't ignore
that voice from the past ringing in my ear now: "Talking to yourself, ha?" said the old
gypsy man whom we called the Halabi (we believed
those fair-skinned people came from the city of
Halab in Syria, God knows why Syria!) i
i "…it's a sign of being in love, boy!" he said knowingly i
Now, the last secret I shall tell you about, regarding my bed habits, dear reader, is that I snore! You will say that there can not be any conceivable reason whatsoever for a writer to tell his readers about such a very insignificant, absolutely irrelevant and indeed absurd piece of information. I agree. Even in the back-cover of a book or in a writer's short cv, such information will not be mentioned; it can not possibly illuminate any important aspect of his writing style or her take on aesthetics. The reason for this inclusion is rather simple, dear reader: this confession of sentence, "I snore", is the only sentence that remained from my love letter to G ! It just refused, point-blank, to be eliminated from the last draft of my now Essay on the Pleasures of Writing… As I said above, a love letter has a life of it is own… I now feel completely exposed and and there is nothing I can do about it. You can now fill all the missing gaps and reconstruct for yourself the love letter I wrote toG… you are able now, I'm sure, to read all the embarrassing bits that I helplessly tried to conceal from you… i
Writing….
i i
i 2. … Mother Tongue
Sometime in December 1998, I wrote a poem in Arabic, my mother-tongue, exploring the experience of living, everyday, inside a foreign language. I've always found the term, mother-tongue, slightly confusing. Is it called so because language as a word is gendered as feminine in most languages? still this doesn't explain why mother. The Oxford dictionary describe it as "the language you first learn to speak when you are a child", so why not a child-tongue. I know it sound weird, but mother tongue isn't completely natural either… if it is so called because you acquire it while toddling about by your mother's feet, picking up your first words and learning through her miraculous interaction with you, then the Oxford Dictionary should say so… and even then Arabic can not be accurately described as my mother-tongue; my mother can barely speak Arabic. She spoke to me in Nubian, the language she inherited from her own mother and grew up with. My father spoke another dialect of Nubian and the two of them interacted through a mixture of the two dialect, making it difficult for me and my brother to learn any of them in a satisfactory way. Here is the poem
To Be Continued… i
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-11-2004, 06:56 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-12-2004, 01:10 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 10:16 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 11:52 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 11:56 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-15-2004, 06:52 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-28-2004, 11:15 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-13-2005, 05:51 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-24-2005, 10:18 AM)
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Re: Reflections On..... (Re: farda)
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بحرفـَنَةِ الأصـابـِع ِ ، بشفـْتنةِ الـروحْ...
حافظ يا شفت الروح....
اين لنا بلد من الشفوت
تفاتيح العقل
و دردحة الخاطر
وين صعاليق البال... مجضمى الافكار... و ولعات الانس
نرندق شعرا... نجابد الدنيا معرفه... ونخاطها سياسه
ويننن
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Re: Reflections On..... (Re: farda)
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Dear Hafiz
I used to read in bed, putting the book on the floor, supporting the lower part of my face by a pillow. My little sister wasn’t happy and as result I damaged both the pillow and my eyesight alas, I failed to be a writer
Writing in bed, may be a part of your comfort your laziness?! who cares by end of the day it has produced an outstanding and gifted writer.
Keep writing, keep the bed warm
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Re: Writing in Bed (Re: farda)
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Dear Farda
Thank you for the creative piece.
I definitely enjoyed the author's sarcasm.
Landing in a "bed" at the end of a day colored with excitement, joy and a lot of discoveries was the utmost one could dream of
one day, one time, in one of those many places we serially
!"called "home
وصية صغيرة:
أكتب
دون
السوط
والقلم
أكتب
فقط
وتفضل
بمنحنا
متعة
أن
نقرأ!
�يمان
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� Copyright 2001-02
Sudanese
Online All rights
reserved.
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farda
haneena
these kind of writing… (but we can always talk about all this in the Jazz club next week!i
�يمان أحمد
الجندرية
Raja
Amin Elsayed
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست