Sahar Khalifeh’s ‘Free’

Sahar Khalifeh’s روايتي لروايتي  appeared in 2018, long after she was established as one of the great novelists of her generation, one who painted complex portraits of Palestinian society in novels that often focused on the lives of women. In a 2021 interview with ArabLit, Khalifeh said — of why she wanted to write this memoir — “Because I wanted to reveal secrets. I wanted to reveal my secrets as an oppressed Arab woman and the secret behind each novel. I wanted to teach and let others learn. I was nothing and became something. Others can learn from that, especially women. Is it worth trying? I think it is.”  Words Without Borders previously published an excerpt in Sawad Hussain’s translation. Here, Nada Hodali brings us some of the fast-paced, wild joy of Sahar finding her path.

From ‘A Novel for My Story’

By Sahar Khalifeh

Translated by Nada Hodali

Free

I came back from the sharia court at a run. Jumping over the stone steps, flying like a butterfly. I threw myself onto the weedy green grass that grew beneath the spectacular olive tree at our family home. I lifted my legs high into the air and practically screamed at the top of my lungs: I’m free, finally free!

I was thirty-two years old, yet I was still as young and naïve as any teenager who hadn’t yet reached the age of twenty. I had gotten married before I’d made it to eighteen. Become a mother before I’d turned twenty. After that, I was weighed down by nightmares and shortness of breath. Suffocated by life and the withering of art—the one thing that had safeguarded me and allowed me to live in a space away from reality and the borders of others. Now, as I threw myself onto the green grass and lifted my legs into the sky, this was my only thought: that I’m free, that I will always be free, from this moment on. Ever since, I have been free from that life of oppression.

I was still young, a teenager at thirty. My life at that point had been limited to fighting for my life with all of my being, in a marriage where I’d needed to maintain my self, my hopes and dreams, my artistic talents and abilities. All of that had been shelled down violently, like a flower stripped of its blooms and trapped in a sealed glass bottle only for it to slowly wither, die, and shrivel up, to the point that only a tiny insect remains: a black fly. Ideally, a brown bee would form, with neither color nor wings.

As if clothing would release me into a vast ocean full of waves that would lift me up, and on which I could stay brilliantly afloat, I changed out of my old dress and pulled on a pair of jeans. I wouldn’t drown. I would fight and master all waves; I would fight them until I reached the shore and walked on soft sand. There, I would leave permanent marks, unaffected by the incoming tide.

I entered the house, where my mother sat behind the sewing machine. In the tone of a TV news presenter, I hurried to tell her: That’s it, I’m done. She shook her head without looking up and said: Should’ve done it before this, idiot! She said it in a joking rather than a critical tone, but it carried the seed of a reprimand, reminding me that a long time had passed, and for nothing. That was what my mother meant. For all those years, she had nagged me, encouraging me to let go of this failure of a marriage, this failure of a husband. Every two or three days, she would impatiently mutter under her breath: “Don’t worry so much, just let him go, you’ll find someone better than him and his whole family.” I’d stand there, broken and humiliated, saying: “But my daughters! What will I do?” She’d simply repeat: “You’ll find someone better than him and his entire family.”

I think that’s what I feared most and was the reason for my hesitation and inability to make a decision: that I’d go back to the family house and wait on a second husband, who would screw me over just like the first one, wreck my life and the lives of my daughters, and snatch away what was left of my sanity and dreams. Hadn’t I been planning for all these years, deep down, to be free, to restart my life, to become everything I’d dreamed about, discovering what I had of poetry and colors and music? Hadn’t I shifted to books after he destroyed my paintings? He’d punched through them, right through the center of the canvas, ripping them apart: cracked colors, broken frames. Sometimes, in the best of times, the canvas would pop out of the frame, crumpled up, only to be discarded.

I switched to reading because books were easier and cheaper. They were easier to carry, easier to hide, and they cost less. I would go to the Municipal Library, clutching piles and piles of books in my arms so that they nearly covered my face, and you could see only my eyes through the piles, my eyes helping me watch my step as well as the looks people gave me, especially the men. They saw a young lady, tall and slim, with soft straight long hair—and oh, how I’d always heard AbdulHalim’s words as he sang about it. Passersby would echo: a wave of perfume, silky hair, covering the cheeks, and flying away! I would mutter under my breath with grave malice: “May this wave swallow you and your pea-sized brain, you son of a bitch, can’t you see the books?” Of course, he didn’t see the books. He’d be looking only at the silk and what was beneath it. That’s what I was back then: half a being, half a human.

“What happened with the university, did they accept your application?” my mother asked. Filled with hope, I told her: “They said it’s possible.” She shook her head and kept silent, suspicious. Of course she would be—I was a 32-year-old woman with no high-school diploma who had barely passed the entrance exam with an average that barely reached 60%, since I had failed Mathematics, Algebra, Arabic Grammar, and Poetry. I’d gotten a zero in mathematics and a zero in algebra, and my scores in Arabic grammar and poetry were both under 50%, which did not save me from failing. Strangely, I received a 100% in architecture, and writing and English were both above 90%.

That’s how I was when I was younger, a moody student living in her own world. Dancing, singing, acting, playing piano without sheet music, imitating people. I would imitate this person and that, and my crowd—which was made up of the girls from boarding school—would laugh. So would the nuns, my sisters, and some of my cousins, too. They would say I was strong, devilish, and witty. In reality, when I was in prison, or my so-called marriage, I was neither strong, devilish, nor witty. My face turned pale, my mood sank, I walked slowly, doing housework was a chore, and my dreams were of death. Yet when I was courageous enough to make a decision, I became strong again, with a bit of wit, and I remain that way to this day.

When I returned from Libya, where I spent the last years of my stinker of a marriage, my mother said:

– What do you want to do with your life?

In my head, everything became as clear as the sky, and without thinking, I blurted:

– I want to be a novelist.

She was in the kitchen, cooking, and she froze in place, the spatula held up, and said in surprise:

– What!

And she continued holding up the spatula until I reiterated:

– I want to be an author, to write novels like Yousef Al-Siba’i and Ihsan Abdel Kouddous.

As she stared at my face, she went back to the same old lines she was so used to saying, lines of complaint I’d been hearing all my life, about my moods:

– For a second, I thought you’d grown up!

At that moment, I stole the spatula from her hand, voraciously licked its edges, and said: “Your cooking is delicious!”

Numbed by her impatience, she said:

– How are you going to make a living, smartass? You don’t have a certificate or a job, so who will take care of you and your girls?

She gestured toward my absent father, who at that point was doing well financially, or at least that’s what people said. He had left us the family house after abandoning my mother, sneaking away from my paralyzed, wheelchair-ridden brother and all of the family and relatives on my mother’s side. Amid a storm, he left us with nothing. I quickly said:

– I’ll study and earn a degree, followed by a job. And then I will write novels like Yousef Al-Siba’i and Ihsan Abdel Quddous.

When she turned around to check on the food, I gave her a synopsis of the novel I had written in secret and hidden from my husband: We Are No Longer Your Maids*. It had been accepted by the biggest publishing house in the Arab world at that time, Dar AlMa’aref AlMasriya, and by Hilmi Murad, a writer whose monthly column she followed passionately, in addition to the novels of Al-Siba’i and Abdel Quddous. Hilmi said that, in me, he’d discovered a writer with a bright future and great potential. To convince her that my project was feasible, I added some glamorous descriptions that had a good ring to them. She stayed silent, confused, her mind questioning everything, hoping something would open up a new vista. She had always been smart and alert, with a penchant for literature. With her generation’s circumstances, she couldn’t do more, but she had inherited some of these traits from me, or, more likely, I had inherited them from her. For that reason, she was strangely prescient and played a part in reinventing me.

*The original title, Where Does Sadness Come From, might have been influenced by the existential literature that I would delve into for hours on end. However, my publisher, Hilmi Murad, saw that we should change the title of the novel to one that fit a poor poem I wrote about women. It begins as follows: “Because I am a woman, because I am female, Ali married four…” The novel was released with the poem placed at the beginning as an entry point to attract readers!

Sahar Khalifeh is the author of eleven novels, translated into fifteen languages, and the recipient of numerous prizes, including the Naguib Mahfouz Medal, the Simone de Beauvoir Prize and the Cervantes Prize.