Reflections On.....

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, 07:56 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-12-2004, 02:10 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 11:16 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 12:52 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-13-2004, 12:56 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-15-2004, 07:52 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 04-28-2004, 12:15 PM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-13-2005, 06:51 AM)
(عدل بواسطة farda on 01-24-2005, 11:18 AM)