Sada, remember our mother in Merowe?
An oppressive Levant?
Your aurora smile?
Behaira reclines with the air of a Sudanese Siddharta, and our other sisters and I enjoy mornings with thoughts of you, Sada. Preoccupied today with proximities between things, words, images, ideas, Canadian visas, residences, the cost of feminine honor, and other possibilities. We remember you. There is so much to tell. We are all resilient to a new country, amorous affairs of state and heart, beckoning for your exit visa, and re-assuring ourselves that the moon is for all our eyes (the stateless and non). This morning, the perfect universe greets us with the memory of Hina in her Italian garden, and Malika’s defamation with a green cross.
Ya Mahbuba…Sada…relax, an intense longing once Westward on Hassan Assem eventually subsides. It is there that Kamala’s pleasure garden was resurrected. It is there that you could not help but remember countless other women who chose the celebration of their sensuality and their nation states, for your pleasures endured, the country of your body, that same pleasure, same joy (Chebel describes the female body as a field that is to be cultivated. Yet I am haunted by a hadith, and an albino sheikh who deposited a sunflower at my door).
In the waiting room of the French Consulate in Downtown Cairo, I count my many aspirations. They are all confined to borders, and the impossibility of my passport. I wait. I would rather be collecting sheba eyes for my beloved. I would rather construct patterns of stars. I would rather think of whales. I have no choice but to wait in oppressive limbo.
But Sada, there is no country but your own. There is no state but my body, no flag but her skin. Practice caution, for your being will soon be reduced to this exist visa. This is my home, your city. A relentless Maurilia, Calvino’s city of memory.
Either you return to a land of origin that you believe backward
Or you absorb Rimbaldian dogma on the ephemerality of being
And you may also pretend to be a cosmopolitan, belonging to all world cities (but Kristeva, it is easy for you, holding an EU passport)
All this, Behaira, just because Sada wanted to be in Paris for a week.
Why is it that you are here, a notorious nymph-citizen? But she cannot help but feel that you are a stranger in the urban crowd. Made minimal effort. Believing your walls impregnable, that you country is a mere shadow. Your aspirations for a new home are ransacked by regulations. You thus consider regulations and lucid dreams, curious visas, progressive thought, and the advent of waves.
And so, I plot novel sensations. Select a chapter from Nefzawi’s Pleasure Garden. Prepare gabana in a pot, sprinkle rose petals, almond oil and musk, reflect on the psycho-geography of Cairo, the meaning of a land and other methods to nourish one’s identity. Beyond this body, the cliff beneath my eye, lies my eternal city of self. This apartment shall be my country. Forget about the visa. They have tried to convince you that you need it to have better opportunities in the world. Perhaps you don’t.
