Literature

Silence as a coping mechanism Occidentalism

"“A poem about identity(Darwish, name of poem not mentioned), he said it was inscribed in the breast of every Arab—whether they were, like him(Khalid), rooted in Palestine or not. Those roots, stretching back before the invention of time, before the blossoming of eras. Those lines, I could see them, blood red, as though Khalid were scratching them onto the wall of my mind or pressing them into the chambers of my heart.”"p23

".” I was studying English at university, linguistics, so I knew all about prefixes and suffixes and word roots. The origin of revolution, the base hidden there, is revolute. It means to roll backwards, to roll downwards, like a leaf curling in on itself. That is not what we envisaged for our country. Much better that it had been called a revolt. That they had all been called revolts, as though a great illness were convulsing across the region"p62

“There’s a copy of » The Da Vinci Code..on which we had a long, drawn-out argument about the role of pop culture in sparking deeper, theological discussions.”p70

"“Her eyes move over books by Orwell and Koestler, Fisk and Darwish and Said, fingers following to trail over the Steinems and Didions and Byatts. She pulls out a short story collection by Ghada al-Samman,”p95

". This one is a ripped and battered copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost that I rescued from the boxes outside the Ginger Giant’s bookshop. I haven't read it yet, but it’s a story everyone knows"96

". Baba valued education—he was the one who pushed me to study literature at university, sighing long and loud(page 110) when I settled on linguistics instead—and he always said the only way to truly be set free was to read…” p109

"“The Secret Garden, Oliver Twist, “Rip Van Winkle,” books filled with Aesop's fables or cautionary tales from the Orient”p110

"« I’m deep into Poe at the moment, and I think Josie is catching on. I’ve started peppering my emails with words like damnable and vengeance and a thousand injuries. In my pieces there are allusions to the “spirit of perverseness” and the “subterrene waters” that thrash and rush beneath our waking minds. »p114

"“Khalid and I used to argue about Poe. Though I was studying" linguistics, I continued to read those novels that took me out of my home and allowed me to venture beyond—to Bronté’s moors, to Forster or Kipling’s India, to Twain’s American South, or Poe's bleak tableaus. Khalid could never understand it. He could never relate to those stories that took place in such alien worlds. He said that to enjoy a piece of writing, he needed a way in, something familiar—if not necessarily comforting—to cling to. »p114

"“He said our literature was a fabric. Like Damask itself, a rich brocade, a tapestry stitched with all our many tragedies and triumphs. Our own culture, our history, our language, all across the region, from the cedars of Lebanon to the Atlas Mountains, were so replete with wonders that he thought it very near treason to abandon it for the stories of colonizers and imperialists. »p114

“No time for them, he spoke instead of the silence in the literature of home—our Kingdom of Silence. He spoke of the impossibility of producing anything at all in such a place. He spoke of how much more creative our poets and writers had to be, of the unending search for more obscure, more impenetrable metaphors with which to vaporize the unbearable truths around us, rendering them a hazy mist, released to float and drift between stark, black lines. ‘The silences were there, he said, in every poem and story.”p114

“Zakariya (page117), Kabbani and al-Maghut, Ulfat Idilbi. Gaps and lacunae in which the writer had tucked the sardonic and absurd, the uncanny and belligerent, the chillingly futile.”p114

“I said I found Poe’s brand of darkness appealing—the admissions of human frailty, the pulling apart of the sticky, gossamer threads that tether us to one another, the acknowledgments of how the mind can come undone and rattle about the skull like a billiard ball. His eyes would narrow when I told him how those writings all felt terribly intimate, like Poe was whispering the words in my ear, for my benefit alone. Whether it was Montresor speaking to his not-so-fortunate friend, or William Wilson and his paranoia, or all those unnamed narrators with their melancholia and murderous rage, I feel a kinship with them. They are speaking to me, about me, consoling and bolstering me. It is a confirmation that no matter how long it’s been since someone has touched me or looked me in the eye, Iam not alone. There is someone out there who has been gripped by fear and loathing as I have.”p117

“There’s a short piece, a fable called “Silence.” I’ve read it so many times, I’m well on my way to committing it to memory. Amassing Poe collections, I have vintage editions from the 80s and 90s with red and black covers depicting skulls and bloody knives, versions with plain green or black covers, editions with illustrations by Harry Clarke or Rackham or Doré. » p117

"“I imagine myself as his editor, imagine him there, (Poe).. “If you insist on reading my words,” he says, “you might do me the courtesy of reading them aloud. They are like the plays of Shakespeare, meant to be heard rather than read.”.. I start “Silence” from the top. I can almost feel his Demon (in my mind, he’s tall and thin and blue-pale as the moon) place his hands upon my head as he starts to describe that saffron river on that oozy Libyan shore…”p118

“Poe has no patience for me, grabs the book from my hands, and now I’m the one writhing. “You must shout the words to the heavens!” he cries, arms outstretched, pale face shining up at the ceiling. “Your voice must ring out each syllable and every beat of cadence. Otherwise, what is the damn point?” My legs twist on the bed, throat clamped shut like always. My mind wrings itself into pleas for forgiveness. His disappointment is a knife, a sharp blade skinning me as I jerk and convulse. I want to tell him I love the taste of his words” p118

“He can't hear the screaming in my head, or he doesn’t care. He reads the fable himself, his voice strong and smooth and animated as it bounces off the walls… “I read the fables of sorrow, and weariness, and disgust for mankind, and a longing after solitude...”p118

“In Allende’s The House of the Spirits, Clara goes mute and feels she is filled with the silence of the whole world. I too felt myself filled completely with silence, but it was not that of the world. You can say many things, but you cannot say that the world is silent. It is noise and chaos. A relentless assault on the senses.. It is bombs and gunfire and babies crying in trees and mothers wailing. and fathers shouting and rushing rivers and howling winds and crunching tires and and and. It is the furthest possible thing from silence. »”p172

“He chided me for not knowing the work of my people, for countering his verses of Negm with those of Yeats, As though he had anything at all to protest. So much pride in what he did not choose to be. »p187

« Yes, Josie, fiction is very liberating.”p211

."I told them my name was Mary Lennox, and I was from the north of England.. I spun out this whole story about a beloved uncle waiting for me, a cousin named Colin, and a pet bird called Craven. I told them we were farmers, cheesemongers, milkers of various livestock. I told them my dream was to one day run a bookshop in town and that I had a childhood sweetheart called Dickon who was waiting for me. »p244

“It was a good story, and for a while I felt like I could believe it, that I did believe it. And when Dr Thompson showed me the book, I cried for the first time in months. I wanted to remain Mary Lennox, I wasn’t hurting anyone with it, but she said you can’t live your life in a delusion. It’s easy to be someone else. It’s even easier to be no one at all.”p244