Fes Writes: Fes Regional Workshop Anthology

Tamri Doha Grateful for the Dark Some steps coming up the path at the far side. My heart beat strangely. I sat silent, and did not pretend to hear. He was walking more slowly than usual, with a firmer tread. He was coming. I heard the steps on the plateau, and a voice came: ―You are not normal! Something is wrong with your nerves‖I leaped to my feet with a feeling that was positively murderous. The old man had long since forgotten how he should destroy a girl‘s world without much damage. There stood my mom – pale, horrified, scared with red eyes full of grief, grief for my life, my being and my existence. Mom has always been the strongest one, but at one moment, she was a small girl sobbing silently, ashen, with wet eyes, her body stiff as a tree. I still sensed what an effort she was making to keep still, and to convince me that he is wrong, perhaps even joking with us, but it wasn‘t me, the eightyear- old girl who believed everything Mom said. No, at least not this time. He, on the other hand, with his continuous struggles to put a smile on his face, and to act as normal as possible while asking me gently to uncover the veil – my headscarf was the last bridge between me and my destiny. For me, crossing that bridge seemed the hardest duty that life had ever given me. I spent centuries taking off my hijab – my fingers were shaking and the palms of my hands were sweaty. I wiped them on my pants, and then grabbed the scarf with one hand while I was busy fidgeting my nails with the other hand. It seemed like the world stopped for a minute. The world was etched with pain. As I stare from the window next to me, the sky was raining as if it told me, I feel your pain. A strange, unruffled, brooding silence fell on the whole hospital. It was as if something hanging over our heads had fallen, it was noise exploding, then – silence again. ―Miss Doha, could you unfold your braids, we need to connect your brain to the neurological machine‖ said the old man with his shivered voice.

As the old man approached me, I clutched the Quran to my heart, and started reciting some Quranic verses, I wanted to escape everything and if death was meant to be my companion, then let it be. I closed my eyes, detached myself from this world, and plunged myself in a whole other world - my Utopic imaginative world. At a an April night evening, I was surrounded by Rumi and Shams of Tabriz in a Sufi cave, listening to their stories of faith and love, verses of life and death, quotes of hell and heaven, I was sitting between the two of them when the words were flowing from Shams‘ mouth like a river when he said: ―What does patience mean? It means to look at the thorn and see the rose, to look at the night and see the dawn. Impatience means to be shortsighted as to not be able to see the outcome. The lovers of God never run out of patience for they know that time is needed for the crescent moon to become full.‖ These words freed me from the unquenchable fires in my soul, and became a song to my ears, a smell of pure oud spread in all over the room made me dip into heavens of spirituality. ―Doha, Can you hear me?‖, ―Doha, Doha ―, repeated the old man endlessly. ―Yes, where am I?‖ ―Aleppo?‖