An Unnecessary Woman Read Free

wizardry. Hear the rhythm, hear the poetry.”
    How could I hear anything when I was either in excruciating pain or fearing that I might soon be?
    “The language of the Quran is its miracle,” she used to say.
    Consider this: In order to elevate the Prophet Moses above all men, God granted him the miracle that would dazzle the people of his era. In those days, magicians were ubiquitous in Egypt, so all of Moses’s miracles involved the most imaginative of magic: rod into serpent, river into red blood, Red Sea into parting. During the Prophet Jesus’s time, medicine was king. Jesus healed lepers and raised the dead. During our Prophet’s time, poetry was admired, and God gifted Muhammad, an illiterate man, with the miracle of a matchless tongue.
    “This is our heritage, our inheritance—this is our magic.”
    I didn’t listen then. The teacher frightened faith out of my soul. I didn’t care that the Quran had dozens of words for various bodies of water, that it used rhythms and rhymes that hadn’t been heard before.
    Compared to the Quran’s language and its style, those of the other holy books seem childish. It is said that after one glance at the Bible, the Maréchale de Luxembourg exclaimed, “The tone is absolutely frightful! What a pity the Holy Spirit had such poor taste!”
    No, I might be able to poke fun at the Quran for its childishly imperious content, but not for its style.
    It was finally poetry that opened my eyes; poetry, and not the Quran, that seared itself into the back of my brain—poetry, the lapidary. I’m not sure that the discovery of love is necessarily more exquisite than the discovery of poetry, or more sensuous for that matter.
    I recall the poet who ignited the flame, Antara, the jet-black warrior-poet. I remember the shock of a doomed language being resuscitated.
And I remembered you as spears quenched their thirst
In me and white swords dripped with my blood
So I longed to kiss the blades that recalled
The gleam of your smiling mouth to my mind
    Then again, maybe it was Imru’ al-Qays. He and Antara are my preferred of the seven included in the legendary Suspended Odes.
But come, my friends, as we stand here mourning, do you see the lightning?
See its glittering, like the flash of two moving hands, amid the thick gathering clouds.
Its glory shines like the lamps of a monk when he has dipped their wicks thick in oil.
I sat down with my companions and watched the lightning and the coming storm.
    The language—we hear it all the time. News anchors speak classical Arabic, as do some politicians, definitely Arabic teachers, but what sputters out of their mouths sounds odd and displaced compared to our organic Lebanese tongue, our homemade, homegrown dialect. Television and radio announcers sound foreign to my ears. Those early poems, though, they are alchemy, something miraculous. They opened my ears, opened my mind, like flowers in water.
    Yet my first translation was not a poem but twenty dull pages. In the school I attended, the sciences were taught in French. Rarely was Arabic used for physics, chemistry, or mathematics in any of the schools of Beirut, whose main curriculum has always been community conformity. It seems that Arabic is not considered a language for logic. A joke that used to make the rounds when I was a child, probably still going strong: the definition of parallel lines in geometry textbooks in Saudi Arabia is two straight lines that never meet unless God in all His glory wills it.
    The twenty pages were a curiosity; I wished to see for myself. My first translation sounded odd and displaced as well.
    The translations that followed improved, I hope.
    By improved, I mean that I no longer felt as awkward about writing my name on what I translated as I did in the beginning.
    My father named me Aaliya, the high one, the above. He loved the name and, I was constantly told, loved me even more. I do not remember. He passed away when I was still a toddler, weeks before my