The Woman From Tantoura by Radwa Ashour

Author:Radwa Ashour [Ashour, Radwa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Historical, Political
ISBN: 9789774166150
Google: 4Kd2AwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 9774166159
Publisher: The American University in Cairo Press
Published: 2014-04-29T16:00:00+00:00

28

A Letter to Hasan

Dear Hasan,

Why have you entangled me in this writing? What sense does it make for me to live through the details of the disaster twice? I stopped last week at the morning of Friday, September 17. The day was before me: I had to face it again, to retrieve it from a memory that struggles with me as I struggle with it, as if we were wrestling in a ring. The simile is not exact, Hasan, for it’s not a game and in the end there is no victor or vanquished, no audience applauding in admiration for the victory. It’s not a game. And if it is, then it’s a strange game, dangerous and lethal.

What do you want from me? To transmit my feelings then, or my feelings now, or what was recorded by people who know more than I do and are more capable, in articles and testimonies and books? Twenty years ago Sitt Bayan Nuwayhid, the wife of Shafiq al-Hout who was the director of the Lebanese chapter of the PLO, contacted me. She told me that she was gathering the testimony of those who escaped from the massacre, the people of Shatila and Sabra and the adjacent neighborhoods. She wanted me to bring her together with those I knew among them, and I did so. Sitt Bayan listened to Haniya here in my house, she listened to Abed and to other men and women whom I arranged for her to meet. Twenty years later Sitt Bayan called me and said that she had finished the book and it had come out. She took my address in Alexandria and sent it to me. The book arrived, and I opened the envelope. It was a hardback book, with a jacket that had a colored picture of three of those killed: a young man whose mustache had barely appeared, sprawled on the ground fully dressed, his head resting on the shoulder of another victim; on his left thigh were the feet of a third victim, of whom we could see only his running shoes and his legs in their jeans. (Running shoes exactly like the shoes your brother Abed used to wear in those days. Maybe if I had seen the picture at the time, before I saw Abed, I would have screamed that my son was gone.) On the upper left there was another, smaller picture, of two blackened corpses; it was hard to make out anything of their features. I could not bear the book jacket. I tore it off and hid it in one of the bedroom drawers. The huge book remained, with its sturdy, blue cover; that was bearable. I said I would read it. Two years have passed with the book on the small table next to the bed; I have not placed it upright among the rows of books in the bookshelf, nor have I opened it. Sitt Bayan must have spoken at length about what happened in Acre Hospital. She must have mentioned Intisar, whom I found charming, and whom they raped until she died.

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