Dear Alaa,
What a joy it was to read your letter and all the candour it carries.
You say: (I don’t know what I will write about now. Life is too much, and overflowing. I am trying to walk carefully along its banks. I did not take my own life like Virginia Woolf, though I did drown myself once, and there was a time when I was consumed by the thought of death. And I don’t claim to have come up from under the water as someone else. I did not die and then be given another chance only to find everything different and beautiful and good.)
There is something in me that resembles this, and something that stands against it. I decided, at some point, to walk carefully along the banks of life. Not to scramble for it alongside those who scramble. To rest my head on the pillow of contentment. And that gave me a kind of joy that made me capable of listening to nature and its creatures.
That made me capable, at times, of speaking to the tree and the stone.
As for writing, I do know what I will write about now. Perhaps I will not manage to write it, but I know it. Yet I feel that I no longer have enough time to write what I want to write. I have many projects, but time is not on my side. That is my greatest pain. And I do not see myself as a poet alone. I am far from accepting that. Poetry is the first and foremost master, of course, but there are times I go beyond it and serve other masters. Writing is the expansion of borders. I have always wanted to expand mine. To walk into the neighbours’ gardens as if they were my own. And I think this is part of what it means, for me, to walk carefully along the banks of life.
As for death, it reached me once. It passed close to me as I lay there, and set its wet snout against my hip, so that I felt the dampness of it. It passed like a dog or a fox, and sniffed me.
That was twenty years ago, when I was diagnosed with colon cancer. But I survived. And when I did, it seemed to me that God had granted me another chance, a chance to fulfill some task He wanted me to carry out. I believed that task was writing. So I wrote, and wrote. I accomplished far more than I ever had before the fox of death pressed its snout against my page. I moved from one project to another, from one field of writing to the next. Projects multiplied around me as the gazelles multiplied for Khirash al-Hudhali:
The gazelles multiplied for Khirash, until Khirash no longer knew what to hunt.
And truly, I no longer knew what I was hunting. After that experience, the world opened itself to me. Writing opened itself to me as well. And asceticism bloomed in my heart like a narcissus flower. I ask nothing of this world except a piece of bread, an olive, and the chance to write. I survived in order to write.
Of course, I have my pains. But when I think of them, they seem less than yours, and less than the pains of so many others. I can even say that, in some way, I am happy. Because happiness, once the basic needs of life are met, is a matter of will. And I chose to be happy. The fox’s snout against my hip reminded me that I had to be. But it is the happiness of bread and an olive. The happiness of causing no harm to any living thing. The happiness of treading lightly, as Abu al-Alaa al-Maarri once lightened his tread upon the body of the world. It is a strange kind of happiness, woven from two threads at once: the thread of despair, and the thread of hope.
With this happiness I have walked. With it I have let the great things fall from my head. Until, at one moment, I feared I might let poetry and writing fall with them.
“The problem with great things is that they fall like an egg and shatter: love, friendship, faith.
So it is better for a person to distance themselves as much as possible, from the very start, from great things. To accustom themselves to living without them. This is not easy, of course, but it is possible in the end. Smoking helps with this task. One sits on a chair or some stone and smokes, and the great things leave the head and become smoke.
Great things are blue smoke.
As for me, I had a large rock I would sit on and smoke. And for years I turned all the great things in my head, all the illusions, into smoke.
One great illusion remains, which I still cling to: poetry.
I do not know whether I will one day drive it from my mind with two drags of hashish on the rock.”
But I have removed writing from the list of great things that fall and shatter. I have placed it in the list of tasks. In the list of the light tread.
And now, time is my enemy, or it is the one that whips me with its lash. I have not managed to overcome the idea of time. I have not been able to stand in its way. O time: I want to write ten more books. I am asking for time in order to write. In order to complete my projects. Or say rather that I am asking to have my life extended on the pretext of writing. Same thing. But time makes me no promises. I must go on without promises. And perhaps that is best for me and for the writing.
Life is a jacaranda tree that blooms for a few days in spring. And I sit beneath it and write:
“The flowers of the blue jacaranda fell on my shoulder and on the table in front of me.
And I was doing nothing. I was watching its branches pour their rain down on me.
And I thought that this scene ought to be the final scene in the film of my life.
Come then, Amara, my brother, film me here under the jacaranda. Let the video be one minute long. One minute only. Then dig my grave afterwards with your own hands. But I want you to promise me that this video will play on the screen without stopping. It ends to begin again, then ends to begin again, and so on until eternity. For that is the immortality I wanted, Amara. My body will decompose in the earth, but my soul will open every day, forever, in the video under the jacaranda tree.
And do not grieve, Amara, do not grieve. For it is possible that one day I will return. Who knows? My bird is at my neck, and it will lead me to the garden and to the jacaranda tree.
It will lead me to you as well, Amara, my brother.”
And perhaps all my writing projects are designed for that one-minute video, and nothing more.
Zakaria -2021