In Memory of May, by May Ziadé

In Memory of May

by May Ziadé

This text springs from a masochistic encounter with the sexist archive; though perennially provoked, I keep returning to it.

My name is (also) May Ziadé. I (also) write, gather, and, if it weren’t for the year I was born, I would certainly have been confined in “The First Hospital for the Insane in Bible Land”, later known as Asfuriyeh, where May was sent for fresh air in 1932. May has a function in my life: she is a spectral force against my uprooting from Lebanon, and knows how to return me, each time, to myself.

May offers reconnaissance; the document, the compulsion.

So I read it again:

I.
“Mayy was not a woman who could be called beautiful.”

This is the first thing Salama Musa tells us about May Ziadé.

II.
The document: a chapter titled “In Memory of Mayy”, published as part of Salama Musa’s autobiography. The chapter on May is approximately three thousand words long. It begins with his assessment of her face. It ends with his theory of why she died.

In between, he visits, praises, desires, manages his desire, watches her deteriorate, leaves Cairo for a month, returns, reads her obituary in the newspaper. Seven or eight lines in the death notices column.

He wrote three thousand words about her in a book about himself; she wrote for thirty years.

III.
An inventory of his adjectives:

a. Not beautiful. Extremely sweet. Well versed. Highly cultivated. Exquisite. Charming. Endearing. Light-hearted. Intelligent. Witty. Widely read. Positively charming. Good musician. Fine artistic sense. All feeling. Heedless. Brilliant hostess. Decoratively womanly. Elegant. Graceful. Twinkling. Fresh. Perfectly graceful.

b. Negligent. Miserable. Delusional. Lost. Unbalanced.

c. A mistake.

But I keep reading…

IV.
He met her in 1914. She was around twenty years old: “…her voice and gestures were endearing.”

Dr. Shibli Shumayyil, he notes, cared very much for her. Treated her as if she were a little girl. Had her sit on his knees. Composed graceful lines of poetry dedicated to her in a flirting manner.

Musa warns that he praised her so highly in an interview that readers may have inferred more than admiration in matters of literature only. He was her editor.

V.
May, circa 1914:

“The public observes us with a particular look, longing to examine the female self through her own self-description, not through the descriptions of male writers.”

VI.
May Ziadé is also a chapter in my autobiography. Often the name arrives before I do: recognition, or confusion, or “I did a double take when your name popped up in my inbox.” As if the name could now only belong to one woman. As if she used it up and left.

It served me. I needed a mirror that was also a window, someone to look at who would look back and show me something about myself that I could not otherwise see. This is what we ask of the dead when we write them: not only to be known, but to know us. To reflect the shape of what we are. I found my own outline in hers.

Collapsing identification into use, I have written her into and within my own work for years. I put words in her mouth. I invent her interiority for myself, mostly. I have decided, again and again, how she felt when she opened the door. I do this with others too, but to her specifically.

I tell myself this is different from what Salama Musa did. But Musa also wanted to be seen, as the man who recognised her, who managed his desire, who mourned her correctly. She was a surface on which he projected a flattering image of himself. I have done something adjacent. I have used her to see myself more clearly, which is a gentler violence but a use of nonetheless.

The enactment is not the same. He wrote from inside the structure that destroyed her. I write from inside a shortage: of lineage, of models, of proof, of women in the historical record who survived their own ambition. That is the love that comes before differentiation, before you know where you end and she begins. A different hunger. What I am less sure of is whether the difference in motive changes what she becomes in my hands: a figure; a mirror; a chapter.

Neither of us asked her permission. Neither of us could. Is that the part I should return to?

VII.
“We experienced solitude and thus we began to understand the meaning of life, to scrutinise scenes with a new regard, to listen with alerted ears, to yearn for freedom and independence with merry hearts, and to express our attitudes in sincere writing. (…) we are fashioning ourselves with our own hands, discovering paths in deserted forests”

vs.

“There is nothing in it suggesting a strong parti pris, no defence of any principle; it does not show any trace of struggle — it certainly does not belong to that kind of literature which exhausts its author.”

She was paving paths in deserted forests.

He found her twinkling.

VIII.
In my scripts:

A room. Tuesday evening. The chairs arranged, the topic chosen, the invitations sent and received. I have given May a particular lamp, a particular dress. I have decided what she serves and where she sits. Somewhere in Jerusalem, Katy Antonius also stands. I have given her a view from a window. In Aleppo, Maryana Marrash. In Cairo and Beirut, Huda El Shaarawi. In Damascus, Salon Sukaynah. I have written all of their expressions when they talk about one another to one another, and to other women. Always women.

IX.
She wrote:

“It is difficult to give us a chance. Thus, we thank the tolerant critic for overlooking our shortcomings and for his recognition of our meagre literary heritage, just as we thank the astute critic for the mistakes he shows that are the result of a young woman’s weakness and her lack of experience. But it is unfair to charge all our work with weakness and for us to be condemned without research or comparison.”

X.
Musa records a cabbage scene in his memoir. He encountered May on the street after her return from Asfuriyeh. She was dressed, in his word, negligently. She was carrying a cabbage home, something she could have sent a servant to do, he notes: as if that were the point. He tried to relieve her of it. She refused. He walked her home, ashamed of the passers-by.

What he does not record: why she refused.

What he does not record: what she saw when she looked at everything.

What he does not record: that she is the woman who had written “we are fashioning ourselves with our own hands, discovering paths in deserted forests.”

XI.
Every French, British, Swiss psychiatry manual in 1932:

Mania: a state of pathological elation characterised by accelerated thought, grandiosity, and disconnection from social norms. In women, frequently presenting as disinhibition, inappropriate laughter, persecution ideation. Prognosis: guarded.

May Ziade, in the same years:

“Some intellectuals — especially those who think of themselves as intellectuals — have gone so far as to set women apart from humankind, which they almost confined to men. In reality, anything that affects women derives from the universal human soul, and any imperfection that vitiates them emanates from a common human weakness, and any trace of intelligence in her is only part of general human thought.”

XII.
The misogynist archive is always the first door. It is better indexed, better preserved, more certain of its own importance. Everything we know of May outside her own writing goes through that door.

When I read Musa on her breakdown I am reading a document about the territory I live in. I keep returning because I know this language. It is the language of love I grew up inside: the admiration, the management, the assessment of face, the restraint that mistakes itself for respect. The male members of my family have, in his way, written their own chapter in memory of me. With complete sincerity. With what they thought was love. That is the part that requires the returning. Contempt would be easier to leave behind. This I carry. This I recognize on every page.

The woman whose wit is the price of admission, whose brilliance is noted and whose instability is diagnosed, whose name becomes a question someone else gets to answer. I recognize the neighborhood. I fought hard to exit it. May didn’t leave. She was removed. History has not made that distinction for her.

I write against that door, and through it: fiction as the only protocol I have found toward her.

XIII.
His conclusion, in full:

“The attempt to become, from a beautiful woman, a great author. From the outset, the attempt failed.”

“When the brilliant lights illuminating her salon began to fade, she did not know what to do. So, she resigned to die.”

May Ziade died alone in her apartment. She did not eat for ten days. “At the end, there was no sanity left in her.” She had returned to Cairo with a head full of white hair. The literary world that had filled her salon every Tuesday for thirty years did not inquire after her. “She laughed and cried alternately.” Salama Musa left Cairo for a month.

XIV.
In my scripts:

At the Women’s Swiss Cottage, in the Neurosis Unit. My ruminations felt lighter last night. Not otherworldly, and none of the infinite loops… I’m proud of myself: early in the morning, I decided to take Esther’s words to heart and soaped all my gowns. They dried quickly, kissed by the high sun and the sere air. She knocks even though the door is open. I’m waiting for her. I’ve brushed my hair. She notices that. She takes my wrist. Counts. Holds on a little longer than she needs to. She lingers, breathing in the scent with quiet delight. It felt better than any words could ever have. I admit that I am awakened by the thought of her inhaling my scent. From now on, I will bathe twice a week.

XV.
“Are you related to *the* May Ziadeh?”

XVI.
“Do we, young girls of today, slaves to fashion, coquettishness, and passion, write? Yes, we have begun writing.”

May Ziadé is a French-Lebanese filmmaker and co-founder of Other People’s Films, a London-based filmmaker-led production company dedicated to artist moving image and ‘conventional’ cinema that plays with form. Her artistic practice focuses on the narratives that emerge from archival research, exploring marginalised histories while questioning the boundaries between fiction, non-fiction, and personal projection. Her films have screened at BFI Southbank & the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, Arsenal in Berlin, NiMAC in Nicosia, La Panera Art Centre in Lleida, the Arab Image Foundation in Beirut, Doshisha University in Kyoto, and Casa do Comum in Lisbon, as well as numerous independent screenings and alternative distribution contexts.

Photo by Marika Kochiashvili, on the set of Neo Nahda.

Translations from May’s Musings by Boutheina Khaldi.

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