Articles
Music & Arts, Pages 46-47
Daughters Tell their Mothers’ Stories
SPEAKING AT TUFTS University in Medford, MA on Sept. 17, Mariam Said and Lebanese writer Hanan al-Shaykh discussed two recently published books: Said’s mother Wadad’s memoir, A World I Loved: The Story of an Arab Woman, and al-Shaykh’s tale of her mother’s life, told in Kamila’s own voice, The Locust and the Bird: My Mother’s Story. Sponsored by the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies, the hour-long event seemed too brief a forum for pondering the histories of two remarkable women from 20th century Lebanon who shared a common desire to expand the boundaries of their circumscribed lives.
Their mothers’ lives were vastly different. Kamila was illiterate, an impoverished Shi’a from Lebanon’s rural south, forced to marry her brother-in-law at age 14. By contrast, the highly educated Wadad Makdisi Cortas was Christian and, at age 26, became the principal of her alma mater, Ahliah School for Girls in Beirut, where she spent 40 years educating youth from all walks of life. Had these two women met, they would have befriended each other, their daughters predicted, with desperate-to-read Kamila seeking refuge in Wadad, the tireless advocate of emancipation through education.
“[My mother] always believed there was a way for everyone to get educated,” explained Mariam Said, the eldest of Wadad’s four children and vice president of the Barenboim-Said Foundation, a charitable organization co-founded by her late husband, Edward Said, to promote Israeli-Arab understanding through music.
Wadad begins her memoir in 1917, when Arab lands were still under Ottoman rule and Beirut was a “small, unsophisticated” Syrian town. Palestine had yet to be partitioned, and Kuwait did not exist. Although war “hung heavy,” hers was a happy childhood, rich in literature and nature. One of the first women to graduate from the American University in Beirut, she taught at a girls school in Baghdad, then went to the U.S. to obtain her Ph.D.
Wadad tells her story primarily through the lens of historical events. The Great War, the French Mandate, World War II, the rise of Arab nationalism, the creation of Israel, the resulting trauma of Palestinians, and Lebanon’s civil war were, for her, catastrophes that contributed to the disintegration of the world she knew and loved.
“For as long as I have lived,” Wadad wrote in the spring of 1978, “powerful men have authored death and extermination or the means to threaten it, and have perverted science for this aim. They carved up the Middle East to satisfy their whims and their greed, and then watched as the forces they set in motion worked toward a seemingly inevitable disintegration....the nations they created by drawing lines on a map or issuing declarations have done the same but more modestly, with regional wars, civil wars, occupations. The Arab world is insecure. Despite its nuclear weapons, Israel is insecure. No border is ever secure without mutual trust and understanding.”
As the Arab world became more divided, Ahliah increased the diversity of its students. When Lebanon devolved into civil war, Wadad chastised her countrymen for referring to Palestinians as strangers: “We were not a people who had thought in terms of national barriers. How could we have ”˜strangers’ among us trampling our future when ”˜strangers’ were once the heart of our community?”
In completely different ways, Kamila’s stormy life was also a prolonged assertion of human dignity—her own. Poverty compelled the family to move from Nabatiyeh to the Beirut home of a half-sister. In the crowded patriarchal household Kamila’s pleas for an education were ignored. Instead, she was treated “like a stone-bearing donkey,” required to care for nephews, run errands, and endure beatings from her half-brother Ibrahim.
Most poignant was her struggle to liberate herself from the prison of illiteracy. Denied an education, Kamila made the cinema her classroom, memorized love songs, movie dialogues, and passages from classical Arabic. Her metaphors referenced the natural world, a “book” she knew and loved. As a result, this illiterate woman is exquisitely articulate.
The poor country girl who fled the brutish confines of domestic toil ultimately was vindicated. Repressive male relatives reconciled with her. Her Beirut apartment became a “heart hospital” for women seeking refuge from brothers, fathers, even mothers. Exiled by Lebanon’s civil war, she spent years abroad in the homes of her educated children.
When her daughter sat down to record her memories, Kamila opened with a line from classical Arabic that provides the book its title: “Wails and tales. My life story is one long revelation. Only the locust can capture the bird.”
“I wanted to give my mother a voice because my mother was voiceless,” said Al Shaykh, whose novels include The Story of Zahra; Beirut Blues; and Women of Sand and Myrrh. “She didn’t have a voice because she was illiterate...Can you imagine if you walk the streets and are not able to read the signs? Everything she told me, I would say, ”˜Mother, describe it, describe it.’”
Al-Shaykh hopes her biography will shed light on what is happening to Muslim women and challenge stereotypes—noting that Westerners who have read Kamila’s story have expressed surprise at its outcome. “The West needs to know there are [Muslim] women who fight,” Al-Shaykh said. “You cannot lump these women all together as if they were a cube of sugar. Each one has a life. Each one has a story. Each one has different aspects. Each one is an individual.”
These books will soon be available from the AET Book Club.
—Claire Schaeffer-Duffy
