Al Ab bil Jism— “The father is in the body”
“All your life, I watched you fight god, but you were always closer to his desires than I was.”
—Thorn Birds
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s poem, “Femme Futures” begins with an open-ended invitation:
“Where does the future live in your body?”
And where does the past live?
***
I’ve tried to find my way around this.
Sink into fantasies. Burn the farm with its billy goats and wild hens. Take its grey dirt and shove it into lovers I find on the long gravel road out of my prison. But I carry the eyes of a broken rooster, neck snapped in half, punishing my father with a death that will forever haunt him. I carry the same knowing gaze that spills inconvenient truths onto everything it comes across.
I am every haunted hen that drank from my father’s madness. The green pool of water holding his and all our doom. I walk through this world with the brown stains of an acre that claims me. I am its scarecrow and its soil, its daughter and its step-mother. Around me, fogged pupils smash like wild prisoners against the white cage of their eyes, unyielding in their desire to be freed, to live, to drink from another water, to taste another kind of milk. But every morning, a white pail slams against the kitchen counter, and again, the same poisoned milk from the same poisoned udder.
A wall stands between my father’s goat and his sleep. The wall of the house: his cage and theirs. When they pound their wall, they pound his too. When they drag themselves into trouble, they drag him too. And he wants to be dragged. He loves the war of it, the attention he starves for, the curse he looks for to prove something to all of us.
There are stories to tell, and I’ve no idea how to tell them. I have only this crow in front of me, gutting its tiny prey, this little life shivering in surrender, too wounded to run, too scared to release its final breath. I am angry that I have to write this.
I can see the blood on the crow mixing with the bloodless death of my father’s rooster.. together collapsing on the grounds of the past where black veils swirl in self-righteous circles around little prey girls, the fabric of their bodies as violent in its killing, as intentional in its desire to reach the deepest parts of our bellies, where, years later, we will place our hands and find their gods, spilling poison.
And I ask these black schools with their green flags, how many have you taken?
And you, daddy? How many?
In my sleep, the blood of the crow and the blood of syria find each other in my hair, and in my long walks it drips over the earth. All of it, the pains recorded and the ones coming, the ones I touched and the ones I witness, all falls over these footsteps shackled to a permanent migration.
Blood spills by the coast of Syria. My blood migrates to merge with it. That is my vein, my body. No matter how long the separation, a cut there is felt like a tear here, one Syrian scream multiplies into a thousand howls answering it here.
I read this world through the eyes of what has died in the hands of mad men with thick beards and stone hands, hands that cannot be resisted. The hands holding Syria in chock hold are the same hands approaching me in the night, beneath the bed covers, using god’s time as an excuse to end my sleep and conquer me awake. Those hands. Worse than a crow’s feet. Worse than the curved horns on a goat’s head. Worse than anything you’ve ever known. One nail rots blue and one breaks and never grows back. The other nails rest in a bed of permanent dirt, rising to meet’s god’s throat and the breasts of its vulnerable prey together. Syria, you are entangled in this war with the past and what is to come. Our doom intertwines and lands together by this coast and on that acre where life could have been but instead was not. Where there could have been crops and eggs and milk but instead lived a little girl who was taught about hell every week through touch.
“The tale begins with the...betrayal of the young feminine..It can be said that the father, who symbolizes the function of the psyche that is supposed to guide us in the outer world is, in fact, very ignorant about how the outer world and inner world work in tandem. When the fathering function of the psyche fails to have knowing about issues of soul, we are easily betrayed. The father does not realize one of the most basic things that mediates between the world of soul and the world of matter — that is, that many things that present themselves to us are not as they seem upon first contact.
So many tales ... begin with the father endangering the daughter.”
II.
Today I saw the other world.. / Her hand was my grandmother’s hand/ Her mouth belonged to the women who laugh./ She wore a black blazer. Carried an eye that didn’t move./ She received what passed in front of her./ The rest was nothing that mattered./ Her hunger was an easy kind, and she was answering it with a steak,/ A butcher’s knife and all her grace./ I tried to touch her./ But every half-step towards her was a confession./ I cannot have you./ I cannot have you./ Her skin carried the silence of a stainless morning./ Tea exiling coffee. Order exiling life./ The echoes of a keyboard answering the call of a sun rising./ Her land was an acre without animals./ Her wild birds, the kind that didn’t sing/ I could touch her, now./ She — this life — perfect in her ashtray./ Can one be an exile of a place they’ve never entered?
***
I could write about him, but I fear what I fight. I touch its borders without passing through; I challenge its edge but leave its center untouched.
Who could we have been without your god? Where could we have gone?
After that night, after a month of you running through the other world, of you teasing us with a sleep that almost never ended, you changed your mind and returned from the other side. You were given a second chance at life, but you walked yourself to the end, and in your loneliness, in your goatly-hunger for love, you took me with you. You exiled yourself from this world, and took me into exile with you. You surrendered your violin to the voice that fooled you in its false song from the pulpit. You let your piano gather dust while you dug yourself into the grey earth of your self-made hell. They taught you not to ask for much, didn’t they? Told you to keep quiet and wait until you crossed over again to the other side. And punish yourself, they said. Suffer enough now to lessen the suffering later. And you bowed your head and listened. You let this religion shrink your body. You gave inches of yourself to the god who lives and destroys you from your mind. Outside your body, he does not exist. Outside your home, I do not exist.
I tried to enter the world you exiled me from. I wanted her. All of it. Even the sins. Especially the sins. But what you had lived in and ran from I’ve never known. I tried to return to a country that has never had me. I tried to return the dirt, the eyes, the madness, all of it to you. I wanted to be nothing in order to enter her. I wanted to be emptied of you. But you followed me in your crushed bicycle, and again I watched the evening that landed you against the asphalt expand into a room that holds the two of us forever.
There are two gods. Mine has 99 names and yours has one. He is a monster. He lives in your hands, and will leave this earth in your hands. But as long as there is life in your body and your hands moves, I will always feel him.
I feel him shaking that little feathered body, emptying its life onto the ground like a piggy pink being emptied in the hands of a hungry child. Shaken as if your life depended on how much it carried inside. For a child, it will buy a chocolate and one less hour of hunger. For you, it will carry one of the many curses you’ve hunted for.
“The fathering element of the psyche is not mature, cannot hold its power against this intense predator, and so chops off his daughter’s hands.”
“I write for myself and against myself, against my tribe and my memory, against my grandfather and my father so that I can bury them and remember them well.
I write because I am free, and because I can never be free. ”
25 years later…
The two of us, before the accident that changed everything.
